Obama The Vacuous!

New Face, Yes, But With Ideas Dating To '30s

By THOMAS SOWELL
April 29, 2008

The following is the conclusion of Thomas Sowell’s article; the full article is referenced below:

Tried And Failed

Although Sen. Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things — using the mantra of "change" endlessly — the cold fact is that virtually everything he says about domestic policy comes straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.

Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing government spending, promoting a sense of envy and grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive and subsidizing those who are not — all this is a re-run of the 1960s.

We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. During the 1960s, ghettoes across the country were ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to this day.

The violence and destruction were concentrated not where the greatest poverty or injustice existed, but where there were the most liberal politicians, promoting grievances and hamstringing the police.

Internationally, the approach that Obama proposes — including the media magic of meetings between heads of state — was tried during the 1930s. That approach, in the name of peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human history.

Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it.

Read full article at:

http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=294360984335847

Pelosi: As Bad As It Gets!

Nancy Pelosi's Widening Power Grab

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
April 29, 2008

Congress: On the heels of a rules change that iced the Colombia free trade treaty, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is scrapping the appropriations process in a new war funding bill. Something new and anti-democratic is afoot.

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Read More: General Politics

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Whatever is driving her, Pelosi seems to be moving Congress toward a one-woman dictatorship, showing little or no concern for holding actual votes or building consensus on key issues as she manipulates Congress.

She's altering and contorting long-standing congressional rules to get her agenda through instead of trusting the voting process. This gives clout to special interests and makes her powerful as a political boss, but it undermines Congress as an institution, making voters the losers.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has bent Congress' rules almost beyond recognition in pursuing her pork-laden, special-interest House agenda.

Pelosi's latest move is to link a $108 billion supplemental bill for U.S. troops in Iraq to an extra $70 billion in pork spending in a tacked-on economic stimulus package. It's a bad idea, one that wouldn't make it through a congressional vote. So she's getting around that by changing the rules.

Instead of submitting the package to a subcommittee vote, moving it to a full committee, and allowing debate until consensus is reached, Pelosi's skipping the appropriations process altogether. This has been done only a few times in the last 20 years — mostly in times of national emergency, like 9/11 and Katrina.

Now, it's just business as usual with Pelosi in power.

Pelosi seems to have been emboldened by her success in halting Colombia's free-trade agreement this month — again, not through votes, but by changing house rules to end the 90-day requirement to schedule a vote.

This damages our alliance with Colombia. For what price? Like the Iraq bill, she's tying passage of Colombia free trade to the new pork spending she seeks. Winner: Big Labor. Loser: the private sector, which must pay $1 billion in tariffs.

This follows Pelosi's moves to halt development of new energy resources through drilling oil in Alaska and the outer continental shelf. She's engineered this through 13 obscuring maneuvers since 2005, which keep America's energy resources in the ground, while handing out subsidies to favored "alternative energy" programs, which she has cleverly packaged as resolving the energy shortage. Winners: environmental and alternative-energy lobbies. Losers: all of us, who must now pay more for energy and food.

Just as one thinks it couldn't get worse, it does. Pelosi has left America unprotected from terrorists by not permitting a vote on enhanced FISA rules that let federal officials listen in on terrorist phone calls. Winners: The trial lawyers, who benefit from lawsuits against communications companies. Losers: again, all of us, who are now more vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

Nothing new here — this has become Pelosi's style. Indeed, last year, she attempted to rewrite the House's 185-year-old rules to permit tax hikes without a vote. A pattern emerges of a person who no longer seems intent on observing the niceties of democracy.

But Americans should question a style of governing that eschews real democracy for endless pandering to special interests and power blocs. Democrats won Congress in 2006 promising to rid Congress of special interests in politics. But under Pelosi's string of rules changes, it's more beholden than ever.

Voters express a shocking cynicism about Congress, reflected in the 18% approval rating it gets in recent polls. There's little doubt Pelosi's move to keep Congress from voting on key issues so her special interest friends can rake in the cash is a part of the problem.

Voters may wonder: Just when will Pelosi start trusting the voters, Congress and the democratic process, and stop abusing her power?

Congress The Incompetent!

Congress Vs. You

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
April 29, 2008

Energy: President Bush let the Democrat-led Congress have it with both barrels Tuesday, lambasting lawmakers for fiddling while the energy crisis burns. It was a well-deserved takedown of do-nothing lawmakers.

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Read More: Energy

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We've said it before, but we'll say it again: This Congress is possibly the most irresponsible in modern history. This is especially true when it comes to America's dysfunctional energy policy.

The media won't call either the House or the Senate on its failures, for one very obvious reason: They mostly share an ideology with the Democrats that keeps them from understanding how free markets and supply and demand really work. Sad, but true.

So we were happy to hear the president do the job, calling out Congress for its inaction and ignorance in his wide-ranging press conference Tuesday.

"Many Americans are understandably anxious about issues affecting their pocketbook, from gas and food prices to mortgage and tuition bills," Bush said. "They're looking to their elected leaders in Congress for action. Unfortunately, on many of these issues, all they're getting is delay."

Best of all, Bush didn't let the issue sit with just generalities. He reeled off a bill of particulars of congressional energy inaction, including:

• Failing to allow drilling in ANWR. We have, as Bush noted, estimated capacity of a million barrels of oil a day from this source alone — enough for 27 million gallons of gas and diesel. But Congress won't touch it, fearful of the clout of the environmental lobby. As a result, you pay at the pump so your representative can raise campaign cash.

• Refusing to build new refineries. The U.S. hasn't built one since 1976, yet sanctions at least 15 unique "boutique" fuel blends around the nation. So even the slightest problem at a refinery causes enormous supply problems and price spikes. Congress has done nothing about this.

• Turning its back on nuclear power. It's safe and, with advances in nuclear reprocessing technology, waste problems have been minimized. Still, we have just 104 nuclear plants — the same as a decade ago — producing just 19% of our total energy. (Many European nations produce 40% or more of their power with nuclear.) Granted, nuclear power plants are expensive — about $3 billion each. But they produce energy at $1.72/kilowatt-hour vs. $2.37 for coal and $6.35 for natural gas.

• Raising taxes on energy producers. This is where a basic understanding of economics would help: Higher taxes and needless regulation lead to less production of a commodity. So by proposing "windfall" and other taxes on energy companies plus tough new rules, Congress makes our energy situation worse.

These are just a few of Congress' sins of omission — all while India, China, Eastern Europe and the Middle East add more than a million barrels of new demand each and every year. New Energy Department forecasts see world oil demand growing 40% by 2030, including a 28% increase in the U.S.

Americans who are worried about the direction of their country, including runaway energy and food prices, should keep in mind the upcoming election isn't just about choosing a new president. We'll also pick a new Congress.

The current Congress, led on the House side by a speaker who promised a "common sense plan" to cut energy prices two years ago, has shown itself to be incompetent and irresponsible. It doesn't deserve re-election.

Pictures From The London Of Today!

These pictures are of Muslims marching through the streets of London during their recent "Religion of Peace Demonstration."

NOTE: A picture is worth a 1,000 words!

You'll never see this on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS or any other hard-left, main-stream news media! Why not?

McCain on Taxes

Tax Cutter McCain

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
April 15, 2008

Election 2008: Surprising many, John McCain has presented a fiscal plan that prominently features big tax cuts and pro-business tax reform. That means the choice this November may just be the starkest ever.

Read More: Election 2008 | Budget & Tax Policy

It's been said time and again that the GOP nominee-in-waiting has a lot of fence-mending to do with his party's conservative base. But in the economic speech he gave at Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday, the Arizona senator may just have produced the political equivalent of the Hoover Dam.

McCain is proposing to double tax credits for families, extend the Bush tax cuts on income and investment that he originally opposed and even offer taxpayers a choice between the current tax code and a "simpler," "flatter" and "fair" system.

Referring to his Democratic opponents, McCain noted that in financing their big government proposals "they would like you to think that only the very wealthy will pay more in taxes, but the reality is quite different."

Invoking Barack Obama's best-selling memoir, "The Audacity of Hope," McCain quipped: "They're going to raise your taxes by thousands of dollars per year — and they have the audacity to hope you don't mind."

McCain's alternative to bigger spending and higher taxes is a vow to block any and all earmarks from Congress.

"I will veto every bill with earmarks until the Congress stops sending bills with earmarks," he vowed. "I will seek a constitutionally valid line-item veto to end the practice once and for all."

On the dependent-child exemption, McCain proposes "doubling it from $3,500 to $7,000 for every dependent, in every family in America."

He'd also ban Internet and new cell-phone taxes, let taxpayers opt for "a vastly less-complicated system with two tax rates and a generous standard deduction" — the kind of tax code for which many supply-side economists and their supporters have been pining for many years.

The new tax-cutting McCain was paired in the speech with his familiar persona as a spending hawk in the form of a one-year suspension of increases in discretionary expenditures (not including defense and veterans programs), plus a "thorough review of the budgets of every federal program, department and agency."

Notably, the senator is putting forward this kind of low-tax, tight-fisted economic plan while at the same time serving up some of the same kind of class-warfare rhetoric he was known for during his opposition to the tax cuts of Bush's first term.

Americans are "right to be offended when the extravagant salaries and severance deals of CEOs — in some cases, the very same CEOs who helped to bring on these market troubles — bear no relation to the success of the company or the wishes of shareholders," McCain remarked.

"Something is seriously wrong," he added, "when the American people are left to bear the consequences of reckless corporate conduct, while Mr. (James) Cayne of Bear Stearns, Mr. (Angelo) Mozilo of Countrywide, and others are packed off with another 40 or 50 million for the road."

That populism went beyond words, with McCain calling not only for a summertime suspension of the gas tax and a halt to filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (see below).

He also used the recent credit crisis as an opportunity to propose that "the Department of Education work with the governors to make sure that each state's guarantee agency has the means and manpower to meet its obligation as a lender-of-last-resort for student loans."

McCain's differences with the Democratic candidates on national security always have been clear and unequivocal. But now, with the National Taxpayers Union recently estimating that Hillary Clinton's campaign platform would cost more than $226 billion a year, while Sen. Obama's would cost more than $307 billion, McCain's plan means this year's presidential contest may not end up being Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum on economic policy.

Nuclear Iran Brings the Next Holocaust

To Keep Iran Free Of Nukes, Try Deterrence

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
April 10, 2008

On Tuesday, Iran announced it was installing 6,000 more centrifuges — they produce enriched uranium, the key ingredient of a nuclear weapon — in addition to the 3,000 already operating. The world yawned.

It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration's attempt to halt Iran's nuclear program has failed. Utterly. The latest round of U.N. Security Council sanctions, which took a year to achieve, is comically weak. It represents the end of the sanctions road.

The president is going to hand over to his successor an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. This will deeply destabilize the Middle East, threaten the moderate Arabs with Iranian hegemony and leave Israel on hair-trigger alert.

This failure can, however, be mitigated. Since there will apparently be no disarming of Iran by pre-emption or by sanctions, we shall have to rely on deterrence to prevent the mullahs, some of whom are apocalyptic and messianic, from using nuclear weapons.

During the Cold War, we prevented an attack not only on the U.S. but also on America's allies by extending the American nuclear umbrella — i.e., declaring that any attack on our allies would be considered an attack on the United States.

Such a threat is never 100% credible. Nonetheless, it made the Soviets think twice about attacking our European allies. It kept the peace.

We should do the same to keep nuclear peace in the Middle East. It would be infinitely less dangerous (and therefore more credible) than Cold War deterrence because there will be no threat from Iran of the annihilation of the United States. Iran, unlike the Soviet Union, would have a relatively tiny arsenal incapable of reaching the U.S.

How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush should issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy's language while changing the names of the miscreants:

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran.

This should be followed with a simple explanation: "As a beacon of tolerance and as leader of the free world, the United States will not permit a second Holocaust to be perpetrated upon the Jewish people."

This policy — the Holocaust Declaration — would establish a firm benchmark that would outlive this administration. Every future president — and every serious presidential candidate — would have to publicly state whether or not he supports the Holocaust Declaration.

It is an important question to ask because it will not be uncontroversial. It will be argued that the Holocaust Declaration is either redundant or, at the other extreme, provocative. Redundant, it will be said, because Israel could retaliate on its own.

The problem is that Israel is a very small country with a small nuclear arsenal that could be destroyed in a first strike. During the Cold War, both the U.S. and the USSR created vast and invulnerable submarine fleets to ensure a retaliatory strike and, thus, deterrence. The invulnerability and unimaginably massive size of this American nuclear arsenal would make a U.S. deterrent far more potent and reliable than any Israeli facsimile — and thus far more likely to keep the peace.

Would such a declaration be provocative? On the contrary. Deterrence is the least provocative of all policies. That is why it is the favored alternative of those who oppose a pre-emptive attack on Iran. What the Holocaust Declaration does is turn deterrence from a slogan into a policy.

It is, of course, hardly certain that deterrence would work on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other jihadists.

But deterrence would encourage rational Iranian actors, of whom there are many, to restrain or even depose leaders like Ahmadinejad who might sacrifice Iran's existence as a nation in order to vindicate their divine obligation to exterminate the "filthy bacteria" of the Jewish state, "this disgraceful stain (on) the Islamic world."

For the first time since the time of Jesus, Israel is the home of the world's largest Jewish community.

An implacable enemy has openly declared genocidal intentions against it — in clear violation of the U.N. charter — and is pursuing the means to carry out that intent.

The world does nothing. Some, like the Russians, literally are providing fuel for the fire.

For those who believe that America stands for something in the world, that the nation that has liberated more peoples than any other has even the most minimal moral vocation, there can be no more pressing cause than preventing the nuclear annihilation of an allied democracy, the last refuge and hope of an ancient people openly threatened with the final Final Solution.

© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group

Minnesota Tax Payers Support al-Qaida Front Group and Muslim Madrassa

Minnesota Madrassa

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
April 10, 2008

Islamofascism: As school officials and secularists turn a blind eye, Muslim radicals in Minneapolis take a publicly funded charter school and turn it into a madrassa.

Read More: Religion | Education

Flagrantly violating the constitutional ban on state promotion of religion, the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, or TIZA, herds children into bathrooms to perform ritual Islamic cleansing before leading them into the school gym to pray to Allah each day.

In three visits to the K-8 school, the Minnesota Department of Education never noticed a problem, even though the tax-funded school is located at a mosque. And the ACLU didn't bother until a Minneapolis columnist exposed the madrassa earlier this week.

"It appears the school may be impermissibly blurring the line between providing a secular education and endorsing and promoting religion and religious activities," said Charles Samuelson, who heads the group's Minnesota office.

Blurring the line? It has erased it. There's overwhelming evidence the public school's endorsing the Islamic faith, including:

• Daily scheduled prayer led by an imam.

• Classroom instruction in the Quran.

• Compulsory "after-school" Islamic Studies classes (buses don't leave the school until after Islamic Studies is over).

• Halal cafeteria food.

• Observance of Islamic holidays.

• Early release for Friday mosque.

Forced conversion is a genuine concern at TIZA. How many of its 300 students have recited the shahada, or Islamic profession of faith, without their parents' consent? Radicalization also is a worry. Are Muslim boys being indoctrinated into violent jihad?

The school, named after an 8th century jihadist who invaded Spain, shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society (MAS) of Minnesota, whose mission is "establishing Islam in Minnesota." The FBI says MAS, based in Washington, D.C., was founded by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent-organization that supports multiple Muslim terrorist organizations around the world!

What's more, the school is sponsored by Islamic Relief, a Muslim charity identified by the U.S. Treasury as an al-Qaida front group.

If this school instead had been found with so much as a copy of the Ten Commandments in its dumpster, lawsuits would have already flown, and it would be out of business.

But TIZA merges mosque and state, using tax dollars since 2003, when its Islamist sponsor took advantage of new charter-school rules. Last year it took in nearly $3 million in government grants.

The ACLU also was slow to respond to complaints from parents about similar Shariah creep at a public school in San Diego. Carver Elementary carved out a school within a school for Somali Muslims to bow and pray to Mecca, eat special meals and speak Arabic.

The disease of Islamofascism continues to spread across America, and liberal multiculturalists are its vector.

Pelosi Supports Chavez, Terrorism, and War

Pelosi's War

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
April 10, 2008

Congress: The cowardly start more wars than the courageous. Nancy Pelosi's craven altering of House rules to kill off Colombia's trade pact brings that danger to the Andes. If war breaks out, her name will be on it.

Read More: Latin America & Caribbean | Business & Regulation

April 10 may end up as a date which will live in infamy. The Speaker of the House not only refused to step forward and be counted on approving the vital Colombia free-trade agreement, she ran away from letting anyone else vote on it.

After President Bush submitted the pact to a vote under fast-track rules, she changed them to ensure it wouldn't go anywhere anytime soon. By a 224-195 House vote, the voting timeline rule on trade pacts was changed from 90 days to whenever. Pelosi now can hold up Colombia's treaty however long her caprice dictates.

"The message Democrats sent today," a bitter Bush warned after Thursday's vote, "is that no matter how steadfastly you stand with us, we will turn our backs on you when it is politically convenient."

Pelosi's move leaves Colombia, an ally, in limbo and uncertainty. She may think her clever maneuver was done in a vacuum, but it wasn't. In Venezuela's capital of Caracas, where Hugo Chavez holds forth, and in the jungles of Colombia, where drug terrorists hide out, Pelosi's move was watched closely.

Indeed, within hours of the vote, Latin American media already were calling Pelosi's maneuver the "Chavez Rule."

The Venezuelan dictator is no doubt fascinated at how Pelosi could do this to America's best ally in Latin America, punishing a vibrant democracy by isolating it from all the other nations that have sought and won free trade.

Unlike, say, military aid, this deal costs the U.S. nothing, is too small to have much impact on the U.S. economy and is mainly about ending tariffs on U.S. goods sold in Colombia, matching the no-tariff trade that Colombian firms already get here.

Free trade was what Chavez's enemy, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, considered his best weapon. And Pelosi knocked it right out of his hand, just to placate her party's union supporters.

Only a month ago, Chavez sent 10 tank divisions to the Colombian border after Colombia's army blew away a FARC terrorist kingpin. He warned he would bring war inside Colombia.

Encircled by tanks not only in the East by Venezuela but also in the South by Chavez's cat's paw, Ecuador, Colombia asked the U.S. for just one thing: to pass the free-trade agreement. No tanks. No jets. Just free trade.

Now without it, Chavez might be emboldened to strike. After all, he'll hear from congressional sources that Pelosi probably won't bring up a vote on the trade pact for at least several months. He'll use that time to pick fights with its now-forsaken neighbor. The fact that Colombia can't get even a trade pact tells him all he needs to know about American commitment.

So even though the pact was not rejected outright, its absence will be inherently destabilizing. There's nothing Chavez or his FARC allies dread more than Colombia armed with trade rights that will boost its economy beyond the allure of Chavista populist promises.

At Argentina's 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Chavez made his enmity toward free trade known by hurling insults at the president of Mexico and vowing to "bury" free trade.

Now, thanks to Pelosi's bid to shunt Colombia off to trade limbo, the potential for war in a tinderbox Andean region — over any border incident or FARC terrorist attack — has been heightened.

The world and its dictators don't sleep. The cowardly number that Pelosi did on Colombia likely will prevent the soft power of free trade from working, instead opening the gates to the hard power of war — and pulling in the U.S. whether Pelosi likes it or not. If so, we'll have her to thank.