The dishonesty of the Democrats in power is breathtaking.

Some examples: 

David Limbaugh writes:

When will Americans open their eyes? Everything about Obama’s plan is a lie. He says he wants to increase competition and choice, improve the quality of health care, reduce costs, and achieve universal coverage. But his plan would reduce competition, with mandatory government controls and mandates that would require uniformity of coverage. It would dramatically increase overall costs by artificially increasing demand. It would destroy the quality of health care, and it would crowd out and force out private insurers, through stacking the deck in favor of the euphemistically labeled “public option.” Congressional Budget Office projections indicate that for all the Draconian coverage mandates, the plan wouldn’t even solve the overarching problem of insurance coverage. Of course, the insurance coverage issue has been enormously distorted by this bunch, by their failure to disclose that millions of the uninsured are not American citizens, millions are young and healthy and choose not to buy insurance though they can afford it, and almost half of the uninsured only remain so for an average of four months…On top of all this… [is] the bureaucratic nightmare that awaits us if we adopt this plan … for what? Reduced health care quality, choice, costs and availability — in exchange for economy-destroying tax increases. Now is the time for all good Blue Dog Democrats to come to the aid of their country.

Nancy (‘Pythoness’) Pelosi claimed that the CIA lied to Congress and her grand ophidian self about its waterboarding of terrorists. It hadn’t. So she tried to find something that the CIA had lied about to justify her claim which was being challenged by Republicans in Congress. The best that Obama’s new man at the head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, could come up with to satisfy this slithery demand – after he’d ransacked the filing-cabinet and grilled the staff – was a discussion about whether there ought to be a program that would instruct CIA operatives to hunt down the leaders of al-Qaeda and other violent enemies of the US and kill them.  Scandalously, such a program was never put into effect. It was also, like all programs not put into effect, not reported to Congress. Pelosi wants this to be seen as proof of the CIA’s betrayal of its responsibilities, a deception if not an actual lie, in order to exonerate her, and, as a bonus, to allow her to blame it on Dick Cheney, the subject of her everlasting paranoia. In truth it is a giant Red Herring. 

The government is in great need of Red Herrings. As Jonah Goldberg says:   

 Democrats are clamoring yet again for an investigation into Bush-era policies at precisely the moment their agenda is starting to unravel. The stimulus is looking more like a dud every day, Obama’s health-care and cap-and-trade schemes are acquiring an increasingly bad odor politically, and suddenly Democrats, Panetta included, are looking to offer up a big, distracting spectacle by turning the CIA into a partisan cudgel.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states:

“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington’s coverage.

The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, “fizzle out altogether.”

What wasn’t known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.

With HSAs out of the way, a key obstacle to the left’s expansion of the welfare state will be removed.

The public option won’t be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.

Washington does not have the constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private markets in which parties voluntarily participate. It shouldn’t be killing business opportunities, or limiting choices, or legislating major changes in Americans’ lives.

It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It’s scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we’ll come across in the final 1,002.

From Front Page Magazine:

The number of czars is growing like weeds in a vacant field. A recent appointee was Lynn Rosenthal, a czar for domestic violence. (Have the country’s police all retired?). Rosenthal most recently focused on domestic violence in New Mexico in cases ranging from sexual assault to housing. The czars keep piling up: a U.S. border czar, an urban czar, a regulatory czar, a stimulus accountability czar (Wasn’t that supposed to be Joe Biden’s job?), a Middle East czar, a cyber-security czar. But the most disturbing czar appointment is Carol Browner, “Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change.” Browner was a “commissioner of the Socialist International, the umbrella group for 170 “social democratic and labor parties” in 55 countries. She is also equipped to deal with our politicians’ audacious attempt to control the earth’s climate, having worked for “global warming” fright monger Al Gore.

Insolence in leadership has been of deep concern going back to our earliest patriots. For instance, in “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine in 1776 wrote: “Men who look upon themselves as born to reign…soon grow insolent,..their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing of its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.” 

The US and Europe’s message to Israel: 

We’ll let you save us from a nuclear-armed Iran if you’ll promise to let yourself be put in existential jeopardy. 

Apparently, Israel may accept the offer!!!

From the Jerusalem Post:

A deal taking shape between Israel and Western leaders will facilitate international support for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in exchange for concessions in peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab neighbors,The Times reported Thursday.

According to one British official quoted by the paper, such an understanding could allow an Israeli attack “within the year.”

The report in the UK paper quoted unnamed diplomats as saying Israel was prepared to offer concessions on the formation of a Palestinian state as well as on its settlement policy and “issues” with Arab neighbors, in exchange for international backing for an Israeli operation in Iran.

The US has ample oil and gas waiting to be drilled for both on and off shore, and nuclear power plants could be built, but the governing Democrats will have none of that and prefer to provide the nation with energy from wind. 

James Delingpole writes in the Telegraph about wind turbines in Britain:

They don’t work when there’s no wind.

They don’t work when it’s too windy.

They produce so little power – and so unreliably and erratically – that even if you put one on every hill top in Britain you’d still need to rely on nuclear, coal and gas-generated electricity for your main source of energy.

They chew up flying wildlife and scare horses.

They produce a subsonic hum which drives you mad if you’re downwind of them.

They turn pristine landscape into Teletubby-style horror visions.

They destroy property values.

They steal light.

They’re visible for miles around so that just when you’re thinking you’ve got away from it all you’re reminded of man’s grim presence by the whirling white shapes on the horizon.

They’re environmentally damaging: their massive concrete bases alone requiring enough concrete to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools; then there’s the access roads that have to be built through the unspoilt landscape to put them up in the first place.

They’re twice as expensive as conventionally-produced electricity.

They make you feel a bit queasy, especially the three-bladed ones whose asymmetry is disturbing.

To supply the equivalent output of one nuclear power station you’d need a wind farm the size of Greater Manchester.

Sarah Palin wrote yesterday in The Washington Post (read the whole article): 

In Alaska, we are progressing on the largest private-sector energy project in history. Our 3,000-mile natural gas pipeline will transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of our clean natural gas to hungry markets across America. We can safely drill for U.S. oil offshore and in a tiny, 2,000-acre corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if ever given the go-ahead by Washington bureaucrats.

Of course, Alaska is not the sole source of American energy. Many states have abundant coal, whose technology is continuously making it into a cleaner energy source. Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas, and every state can consider the possibility of nuclear energy.

We have an important choice to make. Do we want to control our energy supply and its environmental impact? Or, do we want to outsource it to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia? Make no mistake: President Obama’s plan will result in the latter.

For so many reasons, we can’t afford to kill responsible domestic energy production or clobber every American consumer with higher prices.

Can America produce more of its own energy through strategic investments that protect the environment, revive our economy and secure our nation?

Yes, we can. Just not with Barack Obama’s energy cap-and-tax plan.

Cliff Kincaid examines what Obama’s ‘Science Czar’ is accused of advocating (see our post below, A czar is born), and the source (Zombietime) from which his reputed opinions have been received. He finds that Holdren has been in part misquoted or quoted out of context.   

However, the examination also shows that John Holdren’s views have not all been misrepresented, and those that have are not very different from the ones he seems genuinely to hold.

From The Volokh Conspiracy (find it here) yesterday:

On the Federalist Society Online Debate on the Sotomayor hearings, Mike Seidman–a cofounder and intellectual leader of the Critical Legal Studies movement in the 1980s–is brutally candid in his opinion of Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today:

Speaking only for myself (I guess that’s obvious), I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise—to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results—is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith. What does it say about our legal system that in order to get confirmed Judge Sotomayor must tell the lies that she told today? That judges and justices must live these lies throughout their professional careers?

Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth. Legal academics who defend what she did today have no such excuse. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Obama has appointed John Holdren as his ‘Science Czar’. (As we have said before these ‘Czars’ would be more accurately titled ‘Commissars’.)

What may we expect of him?

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.

The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — informally known as the United States’ Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;

• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;

• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;

• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.

• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

Read more here.

‘Bush derangement syndrome’ was irrational, demonstrating  how the political left is the side of the emotions. Such ‘reasons’ as were given for it – and still are – do not stand up to scrutiny.

Now there are those who accuse rational critics of Obama as manifesting a similar sickness, calling it ‘Obama derangement syndrome’. Some of these are conservatives and Republicans! Even that doughty warrior for freedom, David Horowitz, has made this accusation in Front Page Magazine.   

Well, there is an ‘Obama derangement syndrome’, but it is not in the heads of those who oppose him. We are sure of this because we are among them. True, the degree to which we are outraged and appalled by Obama’s mind-set and policies and the threat he constitutes to America and the world cannot be exaggerated. But we continually explain the very sound reasons why we think of him as we do.

So what is ‘Obama derangement syndrome’? It is the irrational adoration of him.

The mainstream media display it constantly. The editor of Newsweek, Evan Thomas, went so far as to declare recently on MSNBC: ‘Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.’

 And Chris Matthews’s comment on MSNBC on February 13, 2008, will long be remembered: ‘I have to tell you, you know, it’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people [!] get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.’

Okay then. If Obama is the Second Coming, prepare yourselves, ye worshipers, for the  Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.