By Thomas Sowell

Someone once said that, for every rookie you have on your starting team in the National Football League, you will lose a game. Somewhere, at some time during the season, a rookie will make a mistake that will cost you a game.

We now have a rookie President of the United States and, in the dangerous world we live in, with terrorist nations going nuclear, just one rookie mistake can bring disaster down on this generation and generations yet to come.

Barack Obama is a rookie in a sense that few other Presidents in American history have ever been. It is not just that he has never been President before. He has never had any position of major executive responsibility in any kind of organization where he was personally responsible for the outcome.

Other first-term Presidents have been governors, generals, cabinet members or others in positions of personal responsibility. A few have been senators, like Barack Obama, but usually for longer than Obama, and had not spent half their few years in the senate running for President.

What is even worse than making mistakes is having sycophants telling you that you are doing fine when you are not. In addition to all the usual hangers-on and supplicants for government favors that every President has, Barack Obama has a media that will see no evil, hear no evil and certainly speak no evil.

They will cheer him on, no matter what he does, short of first-degree murder– and they would make excuses for that. Even former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan has gushed over President Obama and even crusty Bill O’Reilly has been impressed by Obama’s demeanor.

There is no sign that President Obama has impressed the Russians, the Iranians or the North Koreans, except by his rookie mistakes– and that is a dangerous way to impress dangerous people.

What did his televised overture to the Iranians accomplish, except to reassure them that he was not going to do a damn thing to stop them from getting a nuclear bomb? It is a mistake that can go ringing down the corridors of history.

Future generations who live in the shadow of that nuclear threat may wonder what we were thinking about, putting our lives– and theirs– in the hands of a rookie because we liked his style and symbolism?

In the name of “change,” Barack Obama is following policies so old that this generation has never heard of them– certainly not in most of our educational institutions, where history has been replaced by “social studies” or other politically correct courses.

Seeking deals with our adversaries, behind the backs of our allies? France did that at Munich back in 1938. They threw Czechoslovakia to the wolves and, less than two years later, Hitler gobbled up France anyway.

This year, President Obama’s attempt to make a backdoor deal with the Russians, behind the backs of the NATO countries, was not only rejected but made public by the Russians– a sign of contempt and a warning to our allies not to put too much trust in the United States.

Barack Obama is following a long practice among those on the left of being hard on our allies and soft on our enemies. One of our few allies in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, was a whipping boy for many in the American media, who vented their indignation at his regime– which now, in retrospect, seems almost benign compared to the hate-filled fanatics and international terrorism sponsors who now rule that country.

However much Barack Obama has proclaimed his support for Israel, his first phone call as President of the United States was to Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority.

Our oldest and staunchest ally, Britain, has been downgraded by President Obama’s visibly less impressive reception of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, compared to the way that previous Presidents over the past two generations have received British Prime Ministers. President Obama’s sending the bust of Winston Churchill in the White House back to the British embassy at about the same time was either a rookie mistake or another snub.

We can lose some very big games with this rookie.

By Mark Harvey Tuesday, March 31, 2009

It never ceases to amaze me that when anyone dares disagree with your basic and average liberal democrat, whether they be and R, a D or some flavor of an Independent, the ones daring to disagree are classified as “radicals.”

Nothing could be further from the Truth. As in Islam, the only “radical” Muslim is the Muslim not practicing Islam. Those that are practicing Islam are the ones advocating rape, murder, torture, death to the infidels, etc, etc, etc. The same applies to the criminal elements in America that have convinced a great many people that the United States Constitution doesn’t go far enough in granting absolute power over the serfs.

The United States Constitution is explicit - the federal government is pretty much toothless with the internal affairs of the nation, plain and simple. I know that is an over simplification but that’s how it is. What we have currently, built upon past usurpations of the constitution by unconstitutional federal statutes and those that wear their black nightgowns to work (calling themselves judges), is an unconstitutional federal government. The United States Government has already been overthrown. That much is obvious.

Why else would it be that when anyone asks about the constitutionality of a certain law or policy, the person asking the question is attacked as being a radical or must be sniffing glue? It would be ideal if the ones asking the questions were given chapter and verse of the constitution where the authority of the law or policy is reconciled with. Seeing that this isn’t going to happen, we must take our country back from the usurpers of the USG and our beloved constitution.

All of the Neo Marxists must be rounded up, placed in prison or deported to the socialist nation of their choice. If I wanted to live in a socialist nation, I would have moved to France decades ago. Why do the socialists always come to a thriving nation and try to rebuild the failed policies of socialism and communism of which, their ideologies and principles and practices have been dismal failures everywhere they have been tried?

Death to the ideologies of Neo Marxism and may it rot in hell where it belongs.

No, the radicals are the Neo Marxists, socialists and communists in our nation because not one single tenet of either can be reconciled with our United States Constitution. Not one. Prove us wrong - it isn’t possible but do try.

Palin: We Won’t ‘Sell Our Birthright’ for Federal $

Monday, March 30, 2009 1:15 PM

By: David A. Patten Article Font Size

Warning that anyone accepting federal stimulus funds from Washington should “read the fine print,” Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is urging her fellow Alaskans not to “sell our birthright for short-term gain.”

Palin’s comments came in an opinion column defending her decision to reject close to a third of the $930 million in stimulus funds allocated for her state in the $787 million bill signed into law by President Obama.

Critics charge she is turning down the money to reinforce her conservative credentials and bolster a presumed 2012 presidential run – an accusation Palin’s representatives staunchly deny. In addition to Palin, GOP governors rejecting at least some federal stimulus funds include: Texas Gov. Rick Perry, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindahl.

“Shovel ready or digging a hole?” is the title of the Palin opinion piece published this weekend’s Anchorage Daily News.

Palin acknowledges federal stimulus dollars are “tempting,” but also says she “must consider whether they create sustainability, help develop our resources, reduce dependency on Washington, and all without mortgaging our kids’ futures.”

Accepting the federal largesse, Palin says, would hurt Alaska’s long-term future. She adds that as governor she is required to certify that the federal dollars would boost the economy.

“Unfortunately,” she writes, “a disproportionate percentage of the federal package available to Alaska would increase government operations. It’s a stretch to certify that more spending on more bureaucracy actually grows an economy.”

Palin says accepting temporary federal dollars would just make the state’s finances worse in the long run.

“When stimulus money runs out in two years, who will pay for the expanded government programs, when Alaska currently has a budget shortfall of over a billion dollars? My administration will not willingly and knowingly dig a hole for Alaskans to fill under this enormous, debt-ridden, Washington spending plan,” she writes.

With the national debt already over $11 trillion, Palin says it’s a mistake to view the federal funds as “free money.”

Palin also provided several examples of what she called “federal intrusion” associated with the stimulus plan:

# Alaska communities, she says, would have to adopt international energy codes. “These standards should be locally determined, not federally mandated,” she writes.

# If Alaska were to accept additional money for unemployment benefits, it would have to extend the eligibility period. “This federal involvement locks us into government dependency for longer periods,” she states.

# Matching funds are required for some federal programs, she states. “Alaskans must read the fine print on these federal mandates, because certain allocations also require state-matching funds.”

Palin concludes, “When Alaska was granted statehood, it was with the expectation that our independent, innovative spirit and rich resources would largely sustain us, rather than depending on federal government. Creating more dependence on Washington steers us away from Alaska’s magnificent potential and destiny, and that, to me, is a problem.

“My job is to help Alaskans count the cost for the long term, not sell our birthright for short-term gain. Alaskans must acknowledge that if we dig a fiscal hole, it will be filled by our families and businesses. Reliance on Washington is not our only option. We could exercise fiscal responsibility and prudent planning, develop our resources, energize Alaskans, and revitalize our spirit. We are up to the challenge. This is the best lesson we can teach our children.”

Palin added, however, that she won’t block attempts to obtain federal dollars by circumventing her office.

“I’m approaching federal funds and mandates with caution, but won’t stand in the way of organizations or communities applying to the feds for funding their own expansions,” she wrote.

Electing a Child to be President

By Alan Caruba Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The last time America elected a young President it was John F. Kennedy, age 44 when he took office.

The result was the Bay of Pigs fiasco involving an ill-fated invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro and the decision to step in for the defeated French in Vietnam. Other comparable decisions were cut short by his assassination. We remember him mostl y for his stirring inaugural speech, but his choice of Lyndon Johnson as his Vice President gave us the escalation of the Vietnam War and Great Society social spending that proved to be a waste of billions.

Now we have a President who is 47, a very young age to be running the greatest economic and military power in the world. He had, on taking office, already written two autobiographical memoirs, but people are slowly becoming aware of the fact that there is virtually no paper trail by which to measure him. His birth certificate and legal standing to be President are in dispute. Records from his college days are hidden from view.

His record as a one-term Illinois legislator is replete with “present” votes that revealed little about his political positions. He did not even wait to complete a full term as a U.S. Senator before almost immediately beginning to run for the highest office in the land.

In term s of political leadership, he is a child among grownups and a petulant one at that.

His first months in office have demonstrated an astonishing lack of judgment regarding those who he appointed to office, many of whom were revealed to be tax cheats and others who have since demonstrated a distinct lack of competence or preparation for positions of critical importance. Why, for example, would he appoint a longtime political operative like Leon Panetta to be the Director of the CIA?

His initial policy decisions and statements panicked Wall Street and were it not for grownups like Ben Bernacke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the steps taken by President Bush prior to his taking office, the economy might have suffered even greater damage. His decisions in office, however, are widely decried as a repetition of all the errors made by the FDR administration that prolonged the Great Depression.

While babbling endlessly about “energy independence” he has again banned any offshore exploration an d drilling for oil and natural gas. His preferences for solar and wind energy ignore the fact that, while heavily subsidized by taxpayer funding, these two “clean” energies provide barely one percent of the electricity the nation requires and are the two least efficient and impractical means of generating power.

While deploring “earmarks” he signed an “imperfect” stimulus bill that contained nine thousand of them.

Foreign policy under President Obama has been characterized by ignoring the human rights and security needs of nations like Poland, Tibet, and Israel. Despite more than a half century of resisting the communist domination of Cuba, he has softened that and is likely to abandon it.

He has insisted on a swift withdrawal of troops from Iraq despite t he obvious need to provide vital protection against the forces that would undermine its newly minted democracy. He insists on transferring troops to Afghanistan in a war that few regard as anything other than a prolonged insurgency with little prospect of a successful outcome.

Obama may be our first President with Attention Deficit Disorder. He went from declaring we faced an economic “catastrophe” to saying the economy was still strong in just over a month. Maybe that accounts for his dependence on the TelePrompter which, we’re told, goes everywhere he does.

We’re watching an already long list of fatally flawed decisions and I suggest that we are looking at a combination of his socialist ideology, his youth and inexperience, and a narcissi sm that cannot tolerate criticism no matter its source.

His greatest support comes from a younger generation of Americans with virtually no knowledge of the nation’s history, no grasp of the economic issues affecting it, and no more political insight than to rely on “hope and change” without understanding that these are not, nor ever were sufficient to the task of being in charge of a great nation with great challenges.

Politically, emotionally, and intellectually, Barack Hussein Obama is a child. This has become increasingly evident with every passing day.

It is not too soon to demand those hidden documents. It is not too soon for the Democrats in Congress to realize that supporti ng his policies represents a grave danger to the nation and their reelection. It is not too soon to begin working to neutralize him by electing a Republican controlled Congress in 2010.

The military’s meritocracy is based on experience that comes with age and proven leadership. We require that our police act in a disciplined and mature way when dealing with law-breakers. We don’t put children in charge of our schools.

We don’t believe or support people who regard carbon dioxide—vital to all life on Earth—to be a “pollutant” that must be regulated and used to raise billions for a profligate government while wrecking its economy.

“The secret of eternal youth is arrested development,” said Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a keen observer of life and the politics of the nation’s capitol. She passed away in 1980, but she would reaffirm the truth of that opinion if she was watching the Obama administration at work.

This version: Introduced in House. This is the original text of the bill as it was written by its sponsor and submitted to the House for consideration. This is the latest version of the bill available on this website.

HJ 5 IH

111th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. J. RES. 5

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

January 6, 2009

Mr. SERRANO introduced the following joint resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

JOINT RESOLUTION

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:

‘Article–

‘The twenty-second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.’.

The article below outlines the sleazy attempts by Obama’s Puppet Master George Soros, and the Socialist organizations he sponsors to use distortions and outright lies to try to strong arm advertisers
into pulling advertising from the Bill O’Reilly show on FOX news. From my experience with chatting with liberals, and the comments they leave on my posts, and in e-mails, they think only they should have freedom of speech.

The indoctrination of the densely populated areas of northeastern, northern, and western states into accepting Socialist ideology and that someone or something else is responsible for their situation. This demoralization process is complete in the areas mentioned above, creating a mentally immature “victim” mentality that must have a NANNY to care for them, because they are no longer able to think or do for themselves. This type of “group think” has been harder to push in the rural areas, and in the heartland of the country, because people in these areas are used to thinking for themselves, looking out for themselves and their neighbors.

“To educate a man in mind and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society.”
(Theodore Roosevelt)

Hopefully more of the Silent Majority will speak up and take action to stop this slide into Global Socialist/Marxist Domination, which is shredding our Constitution, bankrupting our country, and enslaving our future generations with debt that can never be repaid.

“That to secure these rights Governments are Instituted among men. Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute new Government.”
(quote from the Declaration of Independence)

“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” (Abraham Lincoln)

By Matthew Vadum Sunday, March 29, 2009

An affiliate of the George Soros-funded think tank and pressure group, Center for American Progress (CAP), has emulated the sleazy Media Matters for America by becoming a media critic.

Claiming to be outraged at the aggressive news-gathering techniques of Bill O’Reilly’s team, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization that grew out of CAP, rejoiced Friday after getting UPS to stop advertising on “The O’Reilly Factor.” The Fund released this statement on its Think Progress website:

In response to our Stop Supporting The O’Reilly Harassment Machine campaign, UPS told us yesterday that it was investigating whether to continue supporting O’Reilly’s show. “We are sensitive to the type of television programming where our messages and presence are associated and continually review choices to affect future decisions,” spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg told us.

Today UPS announced it will stop advertising on O’Reilly’s show. Here is the statement UPS emailed out just moments ago:

Thank you for sending an e-mail expressing concern about UPS advertising during the Bill O’Reilly show on FOX News. We do consider such comments as we review ad placement decisions which involve a variety of news, entertainment and sports programming. At this time, we have no plans to continue advertising during this show. [emphasis in thinkprogress.org post]

I regret I missed this anti-Bill O’Reilly campaign until it struck gold. The campaign also claims to have elicited responses from Capital One, AT&T, and Ford.

I’ve never been a fan of ambush-style interviews but sometimes in the news-gathering process the approach is justified as a last resort. Surely nothing the O’Reilly team has done is any worse than anything done by myriad leftist commentators such as Michael Moore and journalists such as Geraldo Rivera and the team at “60 Minutes.”

The whole campaign by the CAP Action Fund seems like a cheap publicity stunt that has the added benefit of hurting the revenues of a prominent right-leaning TV commentator perhaps with the ultimate goal of removing him from the airwaves.

Incidentally, both CAP and Media Matters are funded by Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a billionaire’s club that is funding a drive to turn America into a European-style socialist country.

CAP is a well-funded machine that has aspirations of becoming a “Heritage Foundation” of the left. It has an approximately $25 million annual budget and took in $64,681,960 in donations from 2003 through 2006, according to its tax returns.

The CAP Action Fund, 501(c)(4), may be legally separate from CAP, a 501(c)(3), but both have roughly the same goals: pushing liberal, Big Government
policies.

CAP funds the CAP Action Fund directly. It gave $1,796,235 in “grants” to the CAP Action Fund in 2007 alone, according to the CAP 2007 tax return.

Barack Obama was always going to disappoint. When you promise almost everything to almost everybody—I’ll stop the fighting in Iraq but I’ll also keep going after al Qaeda there; I’ll make the economy grow more but I’ll spread the wealth around, and so on—you will inevitably let many people down. Human beings, even those who read fluently from teleprompters, simply cannot walk on water.

But few expected the wheels to come off the new administration so quickly. Just weeks into its existence, the Obama White House is in trouble. The US stock market has lost a quarter of its value since Obama’s election. While a Rasmussen poll in early March had his approval rating at 56 per cent, his net approval (the number of people who strongly approve of what he’s doing subtracted from the number who strongly disapprove) had contracted from 28 per cent the day after his inauguration to around 6 per cent for March—worse than Bush at the same time in his first term. The administration is in a fully fledged staffing crisis: having lost a record ten high-profile picks, it has scores of senior executive jobs unfilled—including every single treasury position below the department’s top job. The head of Britain’s civil service, Gus O’Donnell, has complained about the trouble he’s had finding key administration personnel ahead of the G20 conference in April. “There is nobody there,” he said. “You cannot believe how difficult it is.” Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner looks terrified before executives and television cameras alike. Five months after the election he has yet to deliver a plan for the banking system, much less restructure a single financial asset.

Even the sympathetic press is starting to speak of an “incompetence” crisis. Abroad, North Korea, Russia, China and Iran have all turned up the heat, as have Hamas and Chavez. At home, Obama’s Trojan horse agenda—using the economic crisis as an excuse to advance radical social change in areas unrelated to returning growth to the economy—threatens to pull his government into ideological quicksand when all the public really want are jobs. Centrist Democrats are deeply concerned about what Obama’s poor start means for the long-term, moderate Democratic majority whose possibility was glimpsed in the Clinton years.

A president with historic ambitions was never going to be content with tackling a mere recession. Thus in his televised address before both houses of congress in February he delivered a special history lesson: “Our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank.” The current recession and housing and financial problems have deeper causes, he said. What are these underlying maladies that so badly need the shaman’s touch? The president named four: energy, healthcare, education and debt. The “day of reckoning” for ignoring these issues—and for exacerbating this failure with excessive borrowing—has arrived, he said.

Americans who concentrated on the president’s words rather than on their characteristically sonorous delivery found the diagnosis baffling. Education, energy and healthcare policy in the US, as almost anywhere, all need help. But are America’s flaws in these areas really the causes of the housing bust and the paralysed banking system? What about the cyclical contractions that follow all economic booms? What about a decade and more of absurdly cheap money? How about all that Fannie and Freddie-fuelled lending to inappropriate borrowers? What happened to lax oversight? What about greed, that comforting straw man? No, according to Obama, we are losing our jobs and being kicked out of our excessively mortgaged houses because America lacks universal healthcare, federally sponsored nursery school, university for all, and a progressive emissions-oriented energy policy.

Two days after the congressional speech the president submitted a 150-page outline of his budget, which at $3.6 trillion already represents the largest and most ambitious expansion of the US state since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It is likely to become even bigger as it clears a spending-crazed congress managed from the left by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And despite promises to the contrary, it calls for a deficit that—at 12.7 per cent of GDP—is four times greater than any of the huge deficits under George W Bush.

Driven by mammoth commitments to Obama’s three social priority areas, his budget proposes to take the federal government’s spending from 21 per cent of the economy in 2008 to 28 per cent in 2009. Added to spending at state and local level, this would take the total government share of the US economy to about 45 per cent, roughly the same level as in Britain. Obama’s budget outline presents the additional $634bn for healthcare as a down payment on the full cost of universal healthcare, which he estimates to be double the sum that he is providing; the rest of the money, he says, congress must find. Publicly Obama does not want to admit that state healthcare is his aim, but his system is designed to price the current private insurance-dominated market out of business. He would pay much of the extra cost by cutting tax breaks for charitable giving and mortgage borrowing. (Yes, the same mortgage borrowing that is at the heart of the housing and banking crises.)

Education in the US is a matter for the individual states, not the federal government. The constitution is clear on this, but Washington, especially under the Bush regime, has inexorably encroached. And now Obama has made an unprecedented grab on behalf of central government, calling for universal standards in schools, for Washington-sponsored higher learning for every single American and for a federal role in education that starts, in his words, “at birth” and continues “from the cradle up through a career.” The numbers for this are not yet public, but they will be huge.

Regarding energy, it is expected that Obama will raise $600bn by selling tradable rights to emit carbon. This is in essence a large additional tax on all private sector activity —$800 per annum in new taxes for every American. The president also plans to spend $15bn a year picking winners in the alternative energy field, despite every indication that no advances on any known front can generate anything like an economically compelling alternative to fossil fuels. Steven Chu, the new energy secretary, has called energy prices in America “anomalously low.” The new carbon tax is designed to make the traditional energy economy so expensive that the alternatives become viable.

Even if you like Obama’s liberal direction, this is the exact opposite of a policy designed to deal with the crisis at hand, which is very simply that Americans need jobs. Overall he intends to increase the size of the federal government by a third, financed with an additional trillion dollars of deficit spending. He wants to increase the role of the state in the US economy to levels not seen since 1945.

Obama’s call for federal spending to fall to a still high 22 per cent of GDP by 2011 is illusory. The entitlement nature of most of the programmes, including $1 trillion on healthcare; the risibly rosy 4 per cent GDP growth projections for those distant years; the aggrandising nature of Washington itself; and the statist inclinations revealed in the current spending plans, render such projections hopelessly dishonest. Particularly egregious—in size and disingenuousness—is the $1.6 trillion “saving” until 2019 that Obama claims for not continuing Bush’s surge in Iraq. 2019? The surge ended in 2008 and Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government calling for combat troop withdrawal by 2010.

The president’s hasty and undebated $800bn “stimulus” bill, 1,073 pages long and passed with only a few hours for review as both parties admitted that not a single congressman or senator had even tried to read it, was the largest single spending measure in the history of the US government. At 5.8 per cent of GDP, it was three times larger than any European package. It has little to do with fixing today’s economy, and everything to do with a big state social agenda: 80 per cent of the bill’s spending comes after this year, by which time even Obama’s office is predicting healthy 3 per cent GDP growth. Over ten years, the total cost of the expanded welfare spending will amount to $127,000 for every income tax-paying household, according to estimates from the Heritage Foundation. Joe the Plumber is one person Obama did not lie to during the campaign: this administration is spreading the wealth around. It is no wonder that, despite two weeks of courting Republican congressmen, Obama was unable to attract a single one of them to his “stiulus,” rendering his campaign promises of bipartisanship hollow.

Since the budget was announced, the annualised rate of economic contraction for the last quarter of 2008 has been revised from 3.8 per cent to 6.2 per cent: this year’s unprecedented trillion dollar deficit is thus likely to be closer to two trillion dollars. With two salivating houses of congress, and the president’s proud personal commitment to aggressive Keynesian spending, these deficits will stretch deep into the future until a Gingrich or Reagan swings the pendulum back.

***

President Obama’s plan, then, represents a radical realignment of America’s political economy. His challenge today is to sell this big debt, big government revolution to a public that thought—or rather hoped—that it was electing a post-partisan centrist. To make his programme acceptable to what remains a majority centre-right nation, Obama makes aggressive use of comparisons with the great depression. The comparison is false.

Today’s recession is in severity and duration (only three or four quarters of negative growth) a normal economic contraction by historical standards. With economic growth predicted by all sides to be returning in the second half of this year, the US economy is doing substantially better than it did in the 1981-82 recession, when unemployment, currently 8.1 per cent, reached 10.8 per cent. The 1990-91 and 2001 recessions were unusually brief and mild. The slowdown, 15 months old in March and with the end visibly in sight, will be slightly longer than the 16-month downturns of 1975-76 and 1980-81, similar in terms of GDP contraction (GDP actually rose in 2008, despite the bad final quarter), and substantially less severe than both where it really matters: unemployment.

So despite the president’s constant invocations, today’s situation does not remotely compare to the great depression. Automobile production fell 90 per cent in 1932 compared to 25 per cent in 2008 (with no foreign competition in the 1930s), over 10,000 banks failed in 1931-32 compared to a few score in 2008-09 (and 3,000 in 1987-88), and unemployment exceeded 25 per cent in 1932. The only way America will find itself anywhere near a great depression today is if the president’s assault on business and investment and his rush towards national insolvency continue long enough to make his auguries come true.

The American economy might not be as bad as Obama says it is, or as bad as it would have been without his history-making debt binge, but it is indeed in pain. He certainly should be doing something about it; that is what he was elected to do. Instead, however, he is using it as an opportunity to advance what is (by US standards) a massively ambitious and ideological agenda. From the New York Times on the left to the Wall Street Journal on the right, Obama’s budget has been called the biggest change in US politics since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Bill Clinton’s signature piece of economic policy was a contraction of the welfare state, making him an heir to Reagan much as Blair was to Thatcher. Obama’s revolution completely overturns the Clinton settlement, both on the micro level by specifically reversing Clinton’s epochal welfare reforms, and on the macro level by rejecting outright the fiscal discipline and growth-oriented private sector philosophy of the last Democratic White House.

Obama did signal some of these huge policy initiatives during the 2008 campaign. But he promised so many contradictory and impossible things—green energy and fiscal responsibility, for example—that it would be hard to find a position in mainstream politics that was not covered by his words in one speech or another. But the greatest moment of candour to emerge from this administration to date came when chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief handler within the Chicago political machine that groomed this brilliant political phenomenon, said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Hillary Clinton, the other great power in the administration, made the same point in Brussels recently: “Never waste a good crisis… Don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security.”

This is breathtaking stuff. Obama’s top people are publicly (if inadvertently) confessing to precisely the sort of cabalistic secret agenda that was most loathed about the Bush administration. Imagine the apoplexy of Obama’s political base if Dick Cheney had called 9/11 a “good crisis” because it provided cover for a long-intended invasion of Iraq.
The administration’s Trojan horse agenda—using a standard, near-finished recession as an excuse for radical social interventions and a fundamental expansion of the state—hurts the economy and markets in a crucial area: trust. Combined with the prospect of high inflation and high taxes, this means that money is put on ice.

Obama’s alarmist rhetoric is very different from the tone of his economic hero, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR). Washington’s challenges today are small compared to those faced by FDR. The nature of the American state has changed; in 2008, after huge fiscal expansion under Bush, the federal government accounted for 20 per cent of the economy. In 1930 it was 3 per cent. And unlike Roosevelt, Obama has had the benefit of 80 years of history, and knows something that FDR could not have known. With the Keynesian multiplier (the effect on economic growth of $1 of government spending) proven over time to be well below $1, the spectacular borrowing required to pay for his spending places a huge burden on our children, making the debt binge unethical as well as unaffordable.

Obama has promised to try to tax his way out of the spending hole he is creating with increased levies on those making more than $250,000 a year. This cannot work. Quite apart from the damage to investment and small businesses of such disincentives, Obama-style soak-the-rich taxes simply don’t raise enough money to pay for Obama-style spending. According to Brian Riedl at the Heritage Foundation, under the president’s plans those paying no income tax will reach 50 per cent—the infamous “tax tipping point” at which democracy becomes a mechanism for the majority to live off the property and work of various minorities. Unable to plug the hole with taxes, Uncle Sam will be forced to print money on a scale not seen since Jimmy Carter.

***

Obama invokes Reagan almost as often as he invokes FDR, but if we want an appropriate comparison for the situation America faces to today, it is not the great depression or the Reagan revolution but rather the Carter malaise: appalling weakness and gloom both at home and abroad. Obama, returning to the mindset of the brief (1931-39) New Deal experiment that was itself an anomaly in the 240 years of the republic, is reversing the philosophical direction of the American state. This is the opposite of what moderate Americans thought they were getting when they voted for him.

A post-partisan centrist: it was the lie of the century. It did not matter that Obama’s opponent, John McCain, was one of the most bipartisan national leaders of the last 20 years or that Obama was the single most partisan Democrat in the US senate. It did not matter that upon declaring his run for the presidency after only 142 days in Washington, Obama was only months removed from a career in the infamously corrupt Chicago Democratic political machine. Through aspiration or guilt, the backstory of this grandson of a Kenyan goatherd flattered many Americans, who, presented with a visibly aged and handicapped alternative in McCain, knew exactly what Joe Biden had meant when he called Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Messianic scenarios are deeply symbiotic. They are based on a compact with the believer. Obama’s believer compact went like this: “You wash away my historic sins and I’ll wash away yours.”

Now the real Obama has stood up. The moderate and sustainable version of the Democratic party personified by Presidents Kennedy and Clinton, based on personal responsibility and low tax, high growth economics, is under the bus with Reverend Wright, Obama’s 20-year religious mentor. Ideology is back. Coming from the most radical presidential candidate in the history of either party, this is no surprise. But to practical Democrats in a politically moderate country that is still based on a philosophy of robust individual freedom, this revolutionary expansion of the federal government is very worrying. Obama’s seizure of so much money and so much decision making in such basic areas of everyday life implies too much debt, too much inefficiency and too much control for a corrupt and distant political class. This is not the change that we sought.

***

Thus the big question in Democratic circles today: “What does Hillary do about this?” Her supporters still feel that the election was stolen from her. With capital on strike, states rebelling against the president’s dependency agenda, the treasury secretary probably soon to be replaced, many top jobs still unfilled, the liberal press anxious and poll numbers plummeting, Hillary Clinton’s departure could sink an administration that already feels like a listing ship, leaving her a clear path to the Democratic nomination for 2012.

Her relationship with the president, inherently unstable personally, erodes every day that he takes his swinging axe to the remarkable bipartisan achievements of the Clinton presidency, especially welfare reform and fiscal discipline. While the biggest shocks of this presidency to date have been at home, in the foreign sphere Hillary’s job as secretary of state is made more difficult by a distracted and inexperienced president.

Serious people do not like being associated with a White House that, eight weeks after the inauguration and four months after the election, in a time of genuine economic distress, did not have one single nominee for the various treasury jobs, much less a single actual appointee sitting behind a single desk. Paul Volcker, the head of Obama’s economic advisory council, recently called the situation at treasury “shameful.” This staffing fiasco is repeated across defence, state and many other departments. Nothing like it has ever been seen in Washington.

Also severely impinging on Hillary’s credibility and ability to do her job is the cession of a huge part of her responsibilities to Richard Holbrooke, who is seen on all sides in Washington as an empire-building elephant whom no secretary of state wants in his or her backyard. If Holbrooke succeeds with the poisoned chalice of “AfPak,” Obama gives him Clinton’s job; but if Holbrooke fails, she fails. She is too big a force in America to be bullied into the box she’s in.

And the president’s sour relationship with a military with which Hillary enjoys mutual respect is well known. Obama repeatedly denied that General Petraeus’s surge was working while it was proceeding, and continued to do so long after it had succeeded. The president’s cynical warmongering in Afghanistan to compensate for his perceived softness on Iraq is alarming many people. Meanwhile, at a time of gigantic new federal spending in every other arena, the military is being promised the largest spending cuts since the late 1940s.

Obama’s constant signals of weakness abroad—from the embarrassing hope that adversaries like Putin and Ayatollah Khamenei will change behaviour as a result of friendly overtures, to big reductions in defence spending, to schizophrenia over Palestine—are already inviting a frightening range of challenges and rebuffs around the globe. Chinese vessels never used to bully the US Navy as they did the USNS Impeccable in March. North Korea had never before ripped up its agreement with the south or offered the calculated challenge as publicly pre-announcing the date of an illegal ballistic missile test. Not since Jimmy Carter has the world seen Russia laugh at Washington as it did over the recent request to swap eastern European missile defence for co-operation in Iran, or the cheap ($2.1bn) Russian buyout of America’s base in Kyrghizstan (forcing vital Nato supplies for Afghanistan overland through Russia and Iran, and giving Putin and the mullahs huge leverage). And even worse than the tragic Vietnam that Obama is digging in Afghanistan is the fact that, in two years, Iran will probably have a nuclear weapon. This would be one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history. Obama has time to do something about it but will not.

The Republican party is in such disarray that it is letting Obama’s crisis go to waste. The 37-year-old Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a rising Republican star, delivered a wooden speech in response to the president’s congressional address. The new head of the Republican national committee, Michael Steele, recently had a public spat with conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are dividing the working class and religious right between them and Mitt Romney is staying quiet for now. A few congressmen, senators and governors have begun to make hay out of the natural antipathy of their constituents towards huge increases in welfare, debt, and state interference, but none has so far managed to stand out from the crowd. General Petraeus, perhaps the brightest star on the Republican horizon, is speaking in Iowa, the first stop in the party nomination process, later this spring. In the long term, an Obama administration might be rescued by a Newt Gingrich figure bringing growth-oriented economic policies back to Washington from the right. In such an event, many Democratic senators and congressmen would be voted out of office. For the moment, though, the president’s real threat is from within his own increasingly restive party.

Obama’s dismantling of President Clinton’s economic legacy is injurious. For moderate Democrats who recognise the national mainstream as the party’s best hope of a long-term majority, it is highly dangerous to be associated with such an ideological presidency. It is even worse when the ideology is the one least likely to work. Weakness and inexperience abroad is already causing a dangerous escalation in tensions. At home, the president’s policies represent a history-making, debt-fuelled arrogation of vast territories of private life and the economy. More war and less growth is bad leadership and bad politics.

The key to Russia’s transition from democracy under Yeltsin to tyranny under Putin was to exploit a crisis, and use a dedicated corps to take control of branch after branch of government at all levels of authority, proceeding then to eliminate independent media outlets and political opposition.

The crisis was twofold, first Russia’s economic disaster that was blamed on an excessively deregulated free market and the heads of various corporations. Secondly the disastrous war against Islamic terrorists in Chechnya, and an attempt to intervene in Yugoslavia to prevent the rise of a Muslim Albanian state in Kosovo.

An economic crisis blamed on deregulation and two wars against Muslim terrorists. Sound familiar yet?

Widely blamed for economic corruption and military failures, Yeltsin resigned turning over the government to Ex-KGB man Putin. Putin’s solution to Russia’s economic problems was nationalization.

Putin’s regime forcibly and fraudulently seized a number of corporations, most prominently Gazprom, while conducting a smear campaign against their executives. Some were jailed, when they attempted to appeal, their lawyers were jailed too. He removed local representation, appointing State Governors personally. Power was centralized through him.

For this Putin was hailed as a reformer fighting for the people, who had brought stability to Russia. Using the seized loot of nationalized corporations, he created a network composed of KGB and ex-KGB personnel who now control most of Russia’s political and business infrastructure. Much of Russia’s wealth was siphoned away as bribes to them.

The press was not openly nationalized, but it was ruthlessly winnowed. The media ceaselessly chant praise of Putin. Opposition outlets have been taken over or shut down. Journalists who dissent are beaten and eventually killed, if they don’t get the message. The media speaks in one voice.

Putin’s advisors created Nashi “Ours”, officially the “Youth Democratic Anti-Fascist Movement”, a youth corps personally loyal to Putin and his agenda. With the passage of HR 1388, the (GIVE) Act, or as one subtitle is labeled with no trace of irony, (Learn and Serve America) ,only the comma before America is missing– it’s worth taking a look at how the Russian version works.

It’s official. To be patriotic in Russia is to be a fan of Putin, specifically a Putin Youth.

“The idea was to create an ideology based on a total devotion to the president and his course,” says a Kremlin adviser, Sergei Markov.

While their methods are still mostly street theater, it’s probably only a matter of time before they graduate to more serious violence. Indeed, their recruiting boot camps feature paramilitary training to fight against fascists

Another deeply disturbing government initiative is labeling critics “extremists” and criminals, another tactic of all serious totalitarian states. When you can criminalize criticism of the government, there is nothing you can’t get away with, and all remaining freedoms are hanging by a thread.

Now officially Nashi looks almost benevolent, a service corps of youth volunteers that aids the sick and disabled, provides information, aids the birth rate and meets with political leaders. In return its “volunteers” receive college educations followed by careers in politics and the Russian bureaucracy. It looks a lot like the vision for a youth service corps embedded in HR 1388.

Of course the real purpose of Nashi is a national corps of volunteers combating “fascism”. Fascists being anyone who criticizes Putin. Their guiding principle is an obsessive devotion to Putin. Their ultimate purpose is to form the next government party, one composed of men and women completely obedient to Putin, membership in which is compulsory for government service.

It is fascinating to see this reverse engineered version of the Communist and Nazi parties. It’s also horrifying because the ingredients are in place for the same process to be applied to the United States.

Obama rose to power to power based on an economic crisis and two wars. His response to the crisis is to push nationalization and centralization, backed by a cult of personality. His advisors are determined to leverage this crisis to transform him into a savior, to be given credit for ending an economic depression, followed by giving him virtually unlimited power.

Obama already has widespread media worship, but his paranoid control over the press makes it clear that he isn’t satisfied with anything but total power. Hence the early campaign against Rush Limbaugh and then CNBC figures who criticized him. Like Putin, you can’t support Obama 75 percent of the time. You must support him 100 percent of the time, or keep your mouth shut.

If Obama’s plans come to pass, the casualties will be independent businesses which will be given the choice between serving as Obama supporters, their CEO’s serving a role similar to that of Putin’s pet oligarchs, and state governments, which will become unable to meet their debts and expenses, and will be taken over by Federally appointed caretakers that will become Governors in all but name.

The youth corps would serve as the final element. HR 1388 calls for integrating them into every academic and learning environment, including private schools. It calls for treating “service based learning” as a fundamental part of every curriculum, from cradle to university. It lays out specific guidelines and the bare bones of a far larger plan with campuses and superintendents, with a 6 billion dollar price tag, over Obama’s first term.

Will this really happen here? It might. The future isn’t set and there are many variables, but we are moving along a similar road and it behooves us to take a look at what happened in Russia, because contrary to what many believe, it can happen here.

Throughout the 20th century, power has increasingly moved out of the hands of the American people and into the hands of local and national bureaucracies. Tax rates have climbed in order to fund the constant expansion of government, which in turn has placed more and more government demands on the average person.

The problem is not the left’s phantom military-industrial complex, but the very real balance beam between corporations and government, that are likely to end the same way they did in Europe or Russia. With the bureaucracy co-opting corporations into government rule.

Law enforcement has gained more authority over a general public that now reflexively defers to their power, and feels inept and unable to engage in any form of self-defense. Answering to authority, a reflex once described as foreign to Americans by Lafayette, is now a commonplace part of daily life.

Independent thought has become increasingly absent, people get their opinions from the corporate media and from the wider celebrity oriented discourse, that helped push Obama to the top. People have stopped listening and they have stopped thinking. Many have also stopped believing. Values have become degraded, religion has become entertainment with celebrity preachers and rabbis mixing pop culture populism with feel good advice. The difference between right and wrong, propriety and impropriety, selflessness and selfishness is no longer apparent to most people.

All the conditions are there for implementing authoritarian rule. And all the conditions are also there for the people to wake and restore America as a government of the people and by the people, that governs the people least. Which way the pendulum will swing, may determine where a decade from now former top American political figures are giving testimony somewhere abroad about how America ceased to be a free nation.

I try to post information here that you will not find in the Main Stream media.

Many articles are written by others than myself, though there are a few posts that I have written.

A well informed people have liberty, A people indoctrinated by false information are already slaves, but are unaware of their captivity.

The old Russian KGB called the Indoctrination of a people to accept an ideology, “demoralization.” Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent who escaped in 1970, and gave an interview in 1984, said “The demoralization of America has Been accomplished.”