From Slick.com

Jennifer  Rubin quotes John Bolton on why honoring Mary Robinson is rewarding an enemy:

‘Durban is not the only reason Ms. Robinson should not receive the Medal of Freedom. Over the years she has actively opposed “the security or national interests of the United States,” one of the categories of eligibility for the Medal. Those in the administration who recommended her either ignored her anti-Israel history, or missed it entirely, as they either ignored or overlooked her hostility toward America’s role in promoting international peace and security. Or perhaps they share Ms. Robinson’s views…

Ms. Robinson’s award shows Mr. Obama’s detachment from longstanding, mainstream, American public opinion on foreign policy. The administration’s tin ear to the furor over Ms. Robinson underlines how deep that detachment really is.’

And she comments:

And that really is the bottom line. It is not that Obama and his team “missed” her involvement at Durban or overlooked her record more generally at the UN. It is that they did not find it all that troubling, or perhaps they even considered it admirable. They did give her a prize for it after all. It is not that her views are anathema to them—just to mainstream opinion in the U.S. The Robinson award is important because it tells us whom we are dealing with—in the White House. We already know about Robinson and the UN. The lesson to be learned is that Robinson is the role model, the ideal international citizen, whom the Obama team admires. It is chilling. But that is the reality of what the America public, the West, and Israel must confront for the foreseeable future.

Some years ago the Marxist-Leninists councillors who ruled the London Borough of Islington came up with an idea for getting rid of the rats that infested alleys, sewers, yards, dustbins, and the darker corners of unmodernized houses: they would pay the sum of one pound  for every dead rat brought to a certain council address. In  the wink of an eye, thousands of basements, garages, garden-sheds and even corners of kitchens and living-rooms were turned into rat-farms. Barrow-loads, car-loads, truckloads of dead rats were delivered day after day to the collection point. It took the brilliant brains of the council chamber weeks to realize what was happening and withdraw the offer.  They had not suspected that the spirit of free enterprise was still alive in the red borough.

This weekend in the pleasant American town where we sit and blog, signs are appearing on the windshields of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of older cars parked in the streets, in driveways, and even in open garages. They are offers to buy the vehicles. If the owners haven’t had the sense to exchange them for $4,500 and a new car under the Democrats’ cash-for-clunkers scheme, there are those who will.

It’s fun to watch the left encouraging entrepreneurship out of sheer stupidity.

Robert Murphy, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, writes in Townhall on the cash-for-clunkers scheme:

Every dollar the government spends comes from either taxes, borrowing, or inflation. In all cases, the citizens are ultimately paying for it. You don’t make the country wealthier by taking money from some citizens and giving it to others so that they can buy a car that’s too expensive for their budget…

It is because of government meddling that this recession has been so long and so painful. It is no coincidence that the two periods of the biggest power grabs in Washington—the 1930s and right now—coincided with the worst economies in U.S. history. Having the feds borrow a few more billion, to pay people to buy cars, does nothing to alleviate the underlying problems. The economy can’t return to normal when every business decision needs to consider what politicians might announce next week…

The cash-for-clunkers plan is a giant waste of tax dollars. It further distorts the economy, making industry even more vulnerable to the changing whims of D.C. politicians. To add insult to injury, the alleged environmental benefits are minimal. The only virtue of the program is that it steers billions of dollars into the pockets of those with friends in high places.

Is this the lowest any president of the United States has ever sunk?  Obama is revealing himself to be even more base than Jimmy Carter! 

He’s sending in union heavies to use violence against citizens peacefully protesting against his health care swindle and other measures that will turn America into a vast socialist misery. The protestors are dubbed a ‘mob’ by the vicious lefties in power. By sending in their thugs they hope to make it seem that the protestors themselves are violent. 

From Power Line:

The Obama administration unveiled its strategy for dealing with the eruption of populist protest against the health care cramdown to Democratic Senators yesterday: It will punch back twice as hard. What does that mean? During the campaign, Obama invoked Jim Malone’s lecture to Elliot Ness in The Untouchables: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia. Obama omitted Malone’s gloss on the lesson: “That’s the Chicago way.”…

The mainstream media will dutifully report the emergence of Obama’s thugs as representing a lapse in civility on the part of those who are revolting against Obamacare. The truth is that it represents the imposition of “the Chicago way” on the resistance.

Follow the link to the article to view a shocking video of the Democrats’ organized mob on the attack.

And see the whole article from which this is taken in Investor’s Business Daily:

The president is familiar with the Alinsky way, the Chicago way, of organizing a group to act. Obama spent years prodding underprivileged Chicagoans to channel their political anger by orchestrating activist mob scenes designed to coerce businesses and public officials. A 2007 profile in the left-leaning New Republic was titled “The Agitator.” He’s still at it.

The community organizer is trying to organize America in his image, but the American people are more than scared bankers and groveling politicians. They are the descendants of the original tea partiers who threw the teas in Boston Harbor. That Tea Party protested taxation without representation. Their descendants are protesting the taxation they are getting with it.

Obama cut his political teeth as a community organizer with Acorn, the group that buses people all wearing the same red shirts and all carrying the same union-printed signs to the homes of AIG executives and their families and anyone else they want to intimidate. Brown shirts would be more appropriate.

The modern-day tea partiers and those opposing government-run health care carry kids on their shoulders and wave signs they’ve hand-painted on their living room floors to protest the mortgaging of their future and the bankrupting of their country. According to the Democrats, these people are dangerous and need to be watched… 

… I thirst for accusation. (W.B.Yeats)

The Abominable Obama, Cruella DeVille (aka Hillary Clinton), and the rest of the ‘America-should-be-ashamed-of-itself’ mob, now long for their country to be tried, judged and punished by envious enemies.

From Investor’s Business Daily: 

Right smack in the middle of the Declaration of Independence is a passionate case against judicial internationalism. Among the charges against King George is the complaint that he “has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.” The effects of that foreign jurisdiction included “transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

Though it’s now 233 years after the American people thought we had solved that injustice, this country’s highest-ranking Cabinet secretary, and its newest Supreme Court justice, have different ideas.

Secretary Clinton, speaking in Nairobi on Thursday, called it “a great regret” that the U.S. was not a member of the International Criminal Court, a body that adjudicates on genocide, war crimes and “crimes against humanity” (defined as including attacks “on human dignity”).

There are very good reasons the U.S. refused to join the so-called “war crimes court” when it was founded in Rome in 2002. Too often when America exercises its powers to defend itself and the rest of the free world against terrorism, the thanks we get from much of the rest of the free world comes in the form of ridicule and abuse — extending even to charges of war crimes.

John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, may have announced Thursday that we are no longer fighting a global “war on terrorism” against jihadists. But the fact is that virtually every U.S. military action in post-World War II leads to condemnation from some European political or intellectual quarter…

Read the whole article here.

Here’s more on the subject of how state interference in the economy kills innovation.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Here’s a stumper: In the Treasury financial reform proposal, who comes in for more regulatory retooling: Fannie Mae, or your average 14-man venture capital shop? If you said venture capital, you understand why one of America’s greatest competitive advantages is now at risk in Washington.

 As part of their regulatory redesign, Team Obama and Congress still don’t have a plan for reforming the giant taxpayer-backed institutions like Fannie that caused the credit crisis. Yet they’re moving to rewrite the rules for investing in tiny technology companies that had nothing to do with the meltdown. Under the proposed rules, venture firms will be declared systemic risks until they can prove themselves innocent. The typical venture capital (VC) firm has nine principals plus five support staff and doesn’t use leverage. Yet Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wants VCs to be regulated as investment advisers by the Securities and Exchange Commission…

Venture firms were invented in the 1960s to fund the California semiconductor companies that would change the world but needed investors willing and able to take a flying leap into the unknown. Under the Silicon Valley model that has since spread around the country, experienced technology executives at VC firms inject advice and cash into young businesses.

 Neither too big nor too interconnected to get a taxpayer bailout, VCs are nonetheless critical to America’s ability to stage an economic rebound. While early-stage venture investments are tiny by Wall Street standards—often $3 million or less—they are a big part of the reason the United States has for decades grown faster than other industrialized economies. Companies once backed with venture capital now generate more than 20% of U.S. gross domestic product. Looking forward, will America be better off if venture investors are justifying themselves to Washington regulators, or evaluating new software platforms?…

Treasury’s position is that if it doesn’t drag VC firms into the bureaucratic swamp, then high-rolling hedge funds playing with borrowed money will present themselves as venture funds to avoid regulation. Yet any firm calling itself a VC is already subject to the antifraud provisions of federal securities laws. VCs also have to describe the funds they raise in annual Form D filings with the SEC. Washington could let the SEC address any concerns simply by adding three questions to the form: Do you use leverage? Do you trade equities or debt? Do you trade derivatives? Anyone answering “no” to all three would be free to go find the next Microsoft.

 The reality is that the venture industry is already shrinking, for market and political reasons. Too many funds chasing too few ideas after the dot-com boom have limited returns. And thanks in part to earlier VC investments, cheap tech tools are allowing some Web entrepreneurs to bootstrap their businesses without having to sell pieces to VCs.

As for the politics, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs, Eliot Spitzer’s stock-analyst settlement and the economic downturn have created an historic drought in venture-backed companies going public. This week Dow Jones VentureWire warned readers not to expect more such companies going public “anytime soon.” It boggles the mind that Washington would enact new policies sure to prolong this drought and strike at the heart of American innovation.

More on the abasement – and decline – of the United States by former president Clinton’s groveling to Kim Jong Il on behalf of President Obama:

Bruce Thornton writes:

The great powers of history understood the truth of Virgil’s dictum that “they have power because they seem to have power.” As much as soldiers and weapons, prestige and perception are critical for a great power’s ability to pursue and defend its interests. Both allies and adversaries must show by their behavior that they respect and honor a dominant state, and understand that consequences will follow the failure to do so. And to reinforce the perception of its power, a major power must be willing to take actions that demonstrate that is worthy of this respect. To do otherwise is to create a perception of weakness and to invite encroachments on the state’s security and interests. The decline of great empires like that of Rome or of England is in part a consequence of the loss of this respect on the part of enemies and rivals, and the perception that they were weak rather than strong.

Unfortunately, this is a wisdom that the United States has forgotten, as evidenced by former President Bill Clinton’s recent trip to North Korea to rescue two reporters who had been imprisoned for “illegally” entering North Korean territory. Many will no doubt praise Clinton’s “diplomacy” and hope that it may jump-start the languishing efforts to pry loose North Korea’s nuclear arsenal from Kim Jong-il’s dying grip. In fact, the whole episode is another in a series of humiliations, whether petty or serious, that have damaged America’s prestige and convinced its enemies that for all our power, we are weak and vulnerable.

How else can one understand the sorry spectacle of the one-time leader of the world’s most powerful state flying cap in hand to a dysfunctional country ruled by a psychopathic thug? Does anybody think it shows strength for Clinton to apologize to said thug on behalf of two Americans who had been wrongly arrested and jailed? Doesn’t it rather redound to North Korea’s prestige that it has compelled a representative of American power to solicit a favor, pose for photos, and chit-chat with one of the most brutal dictators of recent history? And who knows what other concessions were promised or implied.

Legitimizing rogue regimes and dictators, and creating the perception of equality by summits, conferences, and photo-ops, does not advance our interests. The symbolic elevation of such regimes necessitates the degradation of the United States, for what we think of as a demonstration of strength––that we can resolve disputes just with talk–– our adversaries see as craven weakness…

Some may argue that our strength lies in our principles such as the rule of law and a preference for reasoned discussion over force. Indeed it does––but only when it is clear that our power lies behind our principles, that we believe in them ardently enough to use force not for territory or wealth, but to strengthen our principles and defend our security when we have determined they have been attacked. But to think that those principles and beliefs can stand on their own without being guaranteed by force is delusional, for the simple reason that most of our adversaries do not believe in the same principles. To our enemies, those principles are not self-evidently the best way to live, and so our adversaries must be compelled to respect these principles with deeds rather than words. The prestige of our principles depends on the prestige of our power.

Liberals, however, have a different view of foreign policy. They think that our adversaries are like us and believe in the same goods, such as the resolution of conflict through reasoned discussion, and so liberals take force off the table. They think that our example alone will be sufficient to convince our enemies to change their behavior. We see this approach in the current administration’s overtures to Iran. More discussion, more diplomacy, more offers of various material boons like increased trade supposedly will convince the mullahs to forgo the enormous boost in power and prestige they will enjoy by possessing nuclear arms.

Yet without the credible threat of force, all this diplomacy does not mean a thing to a regime that has nothing but contempt for us. Why else would they imprison three of our citizens? They know they will pay no price for dishonoring us in that way, that instead we will offer concessions, whether material or symbolic, the end result of which will be to further Iran’s prestige as a regime willing to stand up to the Great Satan and expose once again its weakness and corruption.

This decline in America’s prestige started after the debacle of Vietnam, where a military victory was squandered because of a massive failure of nerve on the part of both Congress and the people. Four years later, Iran confirmed the estimation of our weakness by seizing with impunity our citizens and embassy. In 1983, we failed to punish Iran for its part in helping Hezbollah blow up 241 of our soldiers. Ten years later, we ran from Mogadishu after 18 of our soldiers were killed, putting the QED to our enemies’ perception that we were through as a great power…

And now a new administration promises to repeat the same mistakes: avoiding the hard choices and tragic consequences a great power must accept in order to remain a great power, relying instead on words to pursue aims only deeds can achieve. If this policy persists, the perception of our weakness could very well in the end be more powerful than all our armies and weapons.

Read the whole of this good article here.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the journalists … were nabbed by Kim Jong Il’s security forces while on a reporting mission on the China border five months ago, and a government tribunal sentenced them to 12 years of hard labor. In North Korea, hard labor means hard labor. Had the sentences been carried out, one or both might have died in custody…

Make no mistake: They weren’t prisoners; they were hostages… By picking Clinton for this “private, humanitarian mission,” [of going to North Korea to rescue them]… the U.S. seemed to be sending a not-so-subtle signal to Kim that the U.S. is ready to appease him.

For in addition to being a former commander in chief, Clinton is the husband of the current secretary of state. And his own secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was the first to visit North Korea.

Far from private, this has White House fingerprints all over it. As the AP noted: “State media said Clinton apologized on behalf of the women and relayed President Barack Obama’s gratitude.”

Groveling, anyone? Kim now knows the current U.S. leader can be blackmailed — if he didn’t know it before. That’s what made President Clinton so appropriate for this mission. It was from Clinton that Kim first learned this lesson.

In 1994, recall, Clinton sent former President Carter — see a pattern? — to North Korea to negotiate that country’s denuclearization. Carter returned with a deal similar in its sycophancy and cynicism to the one Neville Chamberlain brought back from Munich.

In exchange for billions of dollars in food aid and even help for its “peaceful” nuclear power effort, North Korea vowed to behave and decommission its nuclear weapons program.

No sooner had the ink dried than North Korea began cheating. During the Clinton years, the U.S. and the U.N. signed three agreements with North Korea. North Korea broke its word each time.

Commander in chief? Clinton acted like appeaser in chief. We never learned. The deal making continued into the 2000s — culminating in the Six-Party Talks, which concluded in 2007.

Again, Pyongyang broke its word and bought more time with its outrageous behavior. Today it has a burgeoning missile program and nuclear weapons, plus has sold that technology to other rogue states, including Iran. Rather than being conciliatory, the U.S. should have been righteously angry. Instead, U.S. weakness with North Korea is tempting others.

In Iran, just this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s security forces arrested three young American journalists for an alleged border violation. Coincidence? Probably not. It follows the arrest earlier this year of U.S. journalist Roxana Saberi, who was released in May — just before Iran’s elections.

Clearly, Iran has learned the same valuable lesson as Kim — threaten captured Americans with harsh punishment, use them as pawns, then watch us grovel for the favor of their release.

Time to start spying on your friends, family, and neighbors, and reporting them to the state authorities if they show signs of dissenting from the Dear Leader’s declared orthodoxy. 

From the official White House website:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected].