Just caught this in a Washington Examiner editorial on Nancy Pelosi’s determination to stay on as House Democratic Leader:

Just look at Pelosi’s record as speaker. When she first took the gavel on Jan. 3, 2007, the federal government was on track to spend just $2.7 trillion that year. The federal deficit was a mere $160 billion, and the cumulative national debt was $8.7 trillion. Only 7 million Americans were unemployed, and the nation’s unemployment rate was just 4.6 percent.

Four short years later, when Pelosi handed the gavel back to the Republicans, the country looked a bit different. Spending had soared to $3.6 trillion. The federal deficit was $1.3 trillion, and the national debt was $14 trillion. Fourteen million Americans were unemployed, and the unemployment rate had almost doubled to 9.1 percent.

Wonder why Democrats don’t hold this politician to account for her record.

On its website, The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) bills itself as “the official campaign arm of the Democrats in the House.”  And last night via a friend’s Facebook link, I learned that this outfit was garnering signatures in support of the president’s new stand on gay marriage:

That takes some cheek. Since a Republican Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, Democrats have controlled the House for four years, from January 3, 2007 until January 5, 2011.  Not once did then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) hold a vote on repealing that legislation.  Not once did she hold a vote on giving benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees.

These Democrats now praise Obama’s support of same-sex marriage, yet, when they had a chance to act on the issue they did nothing.

Something tells me that once the DCCC gets your name, they’re going to be hitting you up for campaign contributions.  Maybe this thing is all about fundraising after all.

Just caught this on Instapundit:

WHO OWNS THE DEBT-CEILING ISSUE AGAIN? “Of the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling we have now, $4.5 trillion got added by Democrat-controlled Congresses since taking control in 2007. That corresponds exactly with the expansion in spending by Democratic Congresses over the same period.”

Three days ago, Ed Morrissey joined Time’s Jay Newton-Small in asking if the House Speaker responsible for the greatest accumulation of debt in U.S. History had been marginalized:

Despite losing the midterm elections on the issue of spending and deficits, Pelosi wondered aloud in a White House strategy meeting why debt-ceiling negotiations had to involve spending cuts at all, surprising everyone else in the room . . . .

As the leader of a House caucus in a clear minority, Pelosi has already become largely irrelevant, especially after losing the midterms in such spectacular fashion.  Now Newton-Small says that Barack Obama might make her even more obsolete by directly dealing with her lieutenant, Steny Hoyer, to get the moderate Democrats on board any deal . . .

Do wonder if Mrs. Pelosi has taken a gander at the figures and charts showing an explosion in deficit spending under her watch.  The resourceful Jim Hoft has the charts, one of which I reproduce to show that the deficit decreasing under the Republican Congresses of the middle George W. Bush years, skyrocketed when Mrs. Pelosi took the gavel in the House of Representatives in 2007:

The arrow points to the deficit of the first budget passed by a House helmed by the San Francisco Democrat.

Has she been that removed from the politics of the last two-and-and-half years to remain so clueless about growing public concerns about excessive government spending?

Welcome Instapundit Readers!!

Back in the George W. Bush era, Barney Frank, either in his role as a senior member or Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was one of the Congress’s biggest cheerleaders for Fannie Mae, the Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) at the heart of the financial meltdown of 2008.  The Massachusetts Democrat repeatedly opposed Republican proposals for greater oversight of the GSEs, famously saying in 2003, “I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. . . .“

In 2008, we learned that Mr. Frank had a conflict of interest:

While Frank served on the House Banking Committee in the 1990s [as what is now the Financial Services was then called], his partner, Herb Moses, worked at Fannie Mae as assistant director of product initiatives from 1991 to 1998. The two lived together at that time, breaking up in 1998, “a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae.”

I later wrote my Congressman asking Henry Waxman to refer this matter to the House Ethics Committee.  Today, we learn that Mr. Frank’s conflict of interest was far greater than we had initially reported.  In the Boston Herald, Howie Carr reports that in a new book, Reckless Endangerment, New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson reveals that Barney got his partner a job:

“Frank actually called up the company (Fannie Mae) and asked them to hire his companion, who had just gotten an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business (at Dartmouth). . . . Of course the company was happy to provide a job for his companion and rolled out the red carpet in a series of interviews with a variety of executives, and it ultimately did hire the man.”

Wonder how the media would react if a journalist reported that a Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee got her husband a job at the Pentagon. (more…)

In his speech last week on the budget, President Obama blamed his predecessor for creating the massive deficits which plague us today:

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed.  We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -– but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending.  Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -– tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this:  In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

But that’s not what happened.  And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place.  When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion.

What he didn’t mention is that when he took office, his party had had majorities in both houses of Congress for the preceding two years, with him serving in the upper chamber.  Under Democratic leadership, the annual increase in federal spending jumped considerably. The federal deficit which had been declining for three straight years when Republicans controlled the executive and legislative branches, skyrocketed.

Nor did the president mention that while “the debt during Bush’s eight years in office increased from $5.7 trillion to $10.6 trillion, or $4.9 trillion over eight years“, it has increased at an even greater rate since the Democrat replaced the much maligned Republican in the White House:

. . . in the less than three years Obama has been in office, the debt has increased from $10.6 trillion to $14.2 trillion, a $3.6 trillion increase in about 27 months.  In other words, Obama is increasing the debt by $1.6 trillion per year, three times as fast as Bush.

This is not to excuse Bush and the 108th and 109th Republican Congresses.  After all, as we said repeatedly on this blog at that time, they didn’t do enough to rein in out-of-control federal spending, but to remind you that while “Bush’s record on increasing the national debt is bad . . . Obama’s is worse.“

While we here in Los Angeles are focused on the downpour and our news media on the attacks on Libya, we still need bear in mind that the current divided Congress has yet to finish the work the 111th (i.e., the Pelosi-Reid Congress) left undone.  They still haven’t passed a 2012 budget.

You see, the Democratic Senate has rejected the budget the Republican House has passed.

As we think about matters budgetary, a thought occurs.

Recall how many Democrats (and their allies in the media and in the blogosphere) criticized the immediate past president for his failure to hold the line on spending.  But, wouldn’t these folks have cried bloody murder had that good man tried to make the type of cuts passed by the Republican House.  I mean, heck, the Washington Post characterized ”the $6 billion cut in the most recent continuing resolution as ‘slashing’ the federal budget“.

Wonder what kind of cuts these folks proposed.

So, now, we’ve got the president proposing yet another “stimulus,” calling “for Congress to approve major upgrades to the nation’s roads, rail lines and runways — part of a six-year plan that would cost tens of billions of dollars and create a government-run bank to finance innovative transportation projects.”  Um, weren’t such “infrastructure investments” part of the original stimulus*?

Meanwhile, Obama keeps attacking Republicans.  And over on our blog, one of his most diligent defenders laughs

. . . at the absurd idea that the state of the economy is even partly President Obama’s fault. Republicans did this and their prescriptions to ‘fix’ it will only make it worse. Did Republicans control the Presidency and the Congress for the bulk of the last decade or am I remembering that wrong?

Not even partly Obama’s fault, huh?  He’s been president for nearly 20 months and got nearly his entire economic agenda passed by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.  And before he took office as chief executive of this great nation, he had served for nearly four full years in the United States Senate, the latter half of his term as part of the majority.

So, my question to the president’s defenders is this:  while he was in Congress, what legislation did Obama write, promote or otherwise support which would have forestalled the economic crisis he is currently trying to fix with increased government spending.

Please respond not by attacking Republicans, but by identifying specific pieces of legislation — as well as quotes from then-Senator Obama promoting said legislation or links to articles about or synopses of his efforts to secure the passage of said legislation.

*UPDATE:  Yep, indeedy.  Jim Geraghty reminds us how much the president touted those “infrastructure investments in his 2009 “stimulus.”

Last week in a piece for the Advocate, Drew Sweetwater wrote:

In California from 1999 to 2003, Democrats controlled the state legislature, and there was a Democratic governor, Gray Davis. During this time marriage equality (sic) legislation was not made law and upheld in California.

To the present time, many gay rights activists are comfortable dumping millions of dollars into the campaign war chests of Democrats running for office — Equality California, the Human Rights Campaign, and other so-called nonpartisan gay organizations — and they have nothing to show for it. Talk about a bad, fraudulent investment.

He notes a well that at the national level, neither the 110th nor the 111th Congress, both controlled by Democrats, have moved forward on repeal of DOMA.

But, Calfornia is a special case.  The leading gay advocacy group, “Equality California,” while, little more than a (gay) front group for the California Democratic Party has great sway in a state capital dominated by Democrats.  And they wear their partisanship on their sleeve.  Stroll down the street in the city where Drew and I live and you’ll see their storefront headquarters decorated with Boxer and (Jerry) Brown signs.

They’ve long had influence in Sacramento, but never use that influence to put forward innovative solutions to address their concerns.  Instead, they constantly lobby for measure upon measure, assuming that whatever they want, they can get through the legislature.

Well, that’s not always the case.  In the wake of the passage of Prop 22 in 2000, a measure which codified the traditional definition of marriage as one man and one woman into state law, they stomped their feet and gnashed their teeth and hoped and prayed some nice, kind judge would spare them the hard work of making the case for state recognition of same-sex marriage. (more…)

Over at Commentary Contentions, Peter Wehner references House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “pathetic and pitiful” response “to the dismal new unemployment numbers”.   Always on the attack, Ms. Nancy would rather blame Republicans than accept the responsibility for her own party’s failures:

Today’s report shows our teachers, police officers, firefighters, and nurses are still feeling the worst of the Bush recession — while Republican leaders demean them as ‘special interests’ and try to block legislation that will grow our economy,

Bush recession?  Huh?  That good man has been out of office for 18 months, with Ms. Pelosi’s party has having since held all the levers of power in our nation’s capitol.

So, if she’s going to blame the current recession on the immediate past Administration, it’s only fair to also blame the immediate past Congress, given that the legislature has the power to enact laws to help deal with our economic woes — and has the power of the purse.  So, let’s see, the 111th is the current Congress, so the previous Congress must have been the 110th.  Let’s see who was Speaker then.

Googling 110th Congress.  Why a Ms. Nancy Pelosi was speaker of that Congress!  Omigosh, the very same Nancy who’s blaming all our nation’s problems on that evil Republican Bush.  That Congress first met on January 3, 2007, nearly a full year before the recession began (in December 2007).

So, there you have it, by Ms. Nancy’s logic, she gets her name on the current recession.  If W is responsible for the current recession, then she is too.  My friends, we’re in the 33rd month of the Bush-Pelosi recession.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Kurt offers:

Or the Bush-Pelosi-Reid recession as we might say here in Nevada. I think we ought to start comparing the so-called Bush deficits (which run from fiscal 2001 through fiscal 2007) with the Reid and Pelosi deficits (which begin in fiscal 2008). The enormity of the Reid and Pelosi deficits dwarfs the previous years.

He’s got a point.  From now on, when Democrats call it the Bush recession, we’ll remind them that their party had controlled Congress for nearly a full year when the economy started going south.

Long before Barack Obama took office last January, critics (and haters) of the GOP have acted as if the party of Lincoln and Reagan had no new ideas.   And to be sure, given the record of the immediate past Republican president, on domestic issues, one could forgive their ignorance.

But, outside the Bush Administration, in many Republican congressional offices, think tanks and other right-of-center “policy shops,” a great variety of conservatives, including many who dubbed themselves Republicans, were busy crafting reform packages that relied on reducing regulation and cutting government in order to keep our economy humming and improve our health care system.

Yet, with Democrats putting forward far more sweeping reforms, further increasing federal involvement in our lives, our businesses and our health care decisions, they behave as if those plans for cutting government aren’t plans at all–as if to favor doing something, you have to favor the government doing acting more aggressively.  

The latest to join his voice to this cacophonous chorus is a 36-year veteran of the United States Senate, Vice President Joe Biden:

I know what the Republicans are against. I have no notion of what they’re for. Now, I’m not being facetious now. I don’t know what their answer is, when they talk about taking down health care. Well, what are they for? I’ve gone into almost 70 races so far to campaign for Democrats — governor, Senate, Congress etc.

Via Washington Examiner.  Now, I mention Biden’s thirty-six years in the Senate for a reason.  For roughly half of his tenure, he was part of the minority with Republicans in charge and using their majority to push ideas for reform, many of which Biden’s caucus worked double-time (and often successfully) to obstruct.

As to health care, if the Vice President paid any attention to legislation introduced in both houses, ideas discussed on conservative editorial pages and blogs as well as the work of the various think tanks in Washington, he would be aware of the great variety of answers (to borrow his term) Republicans (and conservatives) have been proposing to reform health care.

His response indicates either his ignorance of or indifference to ideas not increasing the government role in health care.  Or his just plain obliviousness to the reforms his political opponents have been proposing.

* (more…)

Alright, two quick things first:

Point One: James Bunning is a 7-time All-Star, Hall of Fame pitcher who retired with a 3.27 ERA (albeit in the National League). He kicks ass.

Point Two: He’s not handled his interactions with the press very well. Perfect example is his confrontation with ABC’s Jonathan Karl we’ve all seen a million times by now. Okay, Karl was asking a very stupid question that Bunning had answered a million times already (see more below) and was just goading him for dramatic effect. But Bunning, someone who’s been in Washington since 1987, should be better at such things.

Okay, now on with the post:

THANK GOD FOR JIM BUNNING
(more…)

Andy McCarthy, over at The Corner on NRO sheds light on disturbing language snuck into an intellgence bill last night. Please read the whole thing, it will chill you. Here are a few snippits from his post:

The proposal says the conduct reached by the statute “includes but is not limited to” the itemized conduct. (My italics.) That means any interrogation tactic that a prosecutor subjectively believes is “degrading” (e.g., subjecting a Muslim detainee to interrogation by a female CIA officer) could be the basis for indicting a CIA interrogator.

Waterboarding is not all. The Democrats’ bill would prohibit — with a penalty of 15 years’ imprisonment — the following tactics, among others:

- “Exploiting the phobias of the individual”
- Stress positions and the threatened use of force to maintain stress positions
- “Depriving the individual of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care”
- Forced nudity
- Using military working dogs (i.e., any use of them — not having them attack or menace the individual; just the mere presence of the dog if it might unnerve the detainee and, of course, “exploit his phobias”)
- Coercing the individual to blaspheme or violate his religious beliefs (I wonder if Democrats understand the breadth of seemingly innocuous matters that jihadists take to be violations of their religious beliefs)
- Exposure to “excessive” cold, heat or “cramped confinement” (excessive and cramped are not defined)
- “Prolonged isolation”
- “Placing hoods or sacks over the head of the individual”

Naturally, all of these tactics are interspersed with such acts as forcing the performance of sexual acts, beatings, electric shock, burns, inducing hypothermia or heat injury — as if all these acts were functionally equivalent.

Andy sums up with something we have known pretty much all along:

Here is the fact: Democrats are saying they would prefer to see tens of thousands of Americans die than to see a KSM subjected to sleep-deprivation or to have his “phobias exploited.” I doubt that this reflects the values of most Americans.

As I said, please read the whole thing. Then call your Congressman.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

UPDATE: Good news… The bill has been pulled.

Just over a year ago, California’s junior Senator praised herself and her Democratic colleagues in the Senate for passing the “stimulus,” “In the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Congress has acted today to save or create jobs in California and across the nation.” Her office noted that, “The White House predicts that the legislation will save or create approximately 400,000 jobs in California.”

Well, today, no one really believes her or the White House.  According to Jim Hoft:

Just 6% of Americans believe the $787 “stimulus” boondoggle created any jobs according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll.

Over at the Washington Examiner, they expose the Administration’s doctoring the data on job creation:

Thousands of jobs were claimed to have been saved or created in phantom congressional districts and ZIP codes. Thousands of raises given to public employees were counted as jobs saved or created. The Examiner‘s David Freddoso and Mark Hemingway examined media investigations and found nearly 100,000 phony positions. In other words, the claim that 2 million jobs were saved or created by the Obama economic stimulus program was exposed as being about as trustworthy as the used car salesman’s assurance that the clunker on his lot was owned by a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sunday.

No wonder Americans are so dubious about the success of the Administration’s signature “stimulus.”

Wonder if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will ever take responsibility for her own mistakes.  The “so-called stimulus” isn’t creating the jobs she and her fellow Democrats promised so she vows to spend even more of our money on similar government schemes.

It’s like hiring a guy to do magic incantations to cure your recurrent headaches, then when his supposedly healing words don’t work and the headaches return with even greater force, tossing the Tylenol and renewing his contract.

Now, with the Democrats having been in charge for ten full months (and then some), after having promised us that should Congress pass that aforementioned “stimulus,” unemployment would peak at 8%, Mrs. Pelosi, wait for it, blames her party’s all-purpose bad a guy, a Mr. George W. Bush:

Though jobs numbers released this morning were better than expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want anyone to forget that the economic crisis started under the Bush administration.

The Department of Labor estimated today that just 11,000 jobs were lost in November. . . . Pelosi took the opportunity to take a few shots at the last administration.

(H/t Gateway Pundit.)  Hey, Nancy, you know when that recession began, you’d been Speaker for nearly a full year.

Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress.  Wonder then how your party’s victories impacted the economy.  And what you and your fellow partisans were doing to forestall an economic decline.

So, here’s a story about an extramarital liaison which should have legs.  It has more relevance to our public discourse than any tale of a golf player’s indiscretions.  And reveals more about corruption in our nation’s capital than the irresponsible actions of a junior Senator who carried on with a staffer.

Here we’ve got a committee chairman, playing a key role in drafting health care legislation, not merely carrying on with a staffer, but doing so while nominating her for a position of power and authority:

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ office confirmed late Friday night that the Montana Democrat was carrying on an extramarital affair with his state office director, Melodee Hanes, when he nominated her to be U.S. attorney in Montana. According to a source familiar with their relationship, Hanes and Baucus began their relationship in the summer of 2008 – nearly a year before Baucus and his wife, Wanda, formally separated in April. The Senator has since divorced his wife.

Glenn Reynolds, whose post alerted me to the story quips, “At least the former Mrs. Baucus didn’t attack him with a golf club.”

For some reason, I don’t think the MSM will give this story the same coverage they gave to that featuring another Western Senator, but from the other side of the aisle.

Let’s see, 69 (of 258) House Democrats “have expressed opposition to the Speaker’s health care bill.”  The party’s leadership may delay the vote slated for tomorrow on the bill as they struggle to find enough votes to pass it.  No wonder they’re doing what they always do when they’re in a jam:  blame Republicans.

Yeah, but if Republicans are so divided, um, how come they’re unified in opposing this big-government boondoggle?

As a further sign of discontent on the right, er, left, let’s not forget that

left-wing activist group MoveOn.org began sending out emails seeking contributions to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who does not fully support “health care reform with a public option.” Now there’s an update: MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben says the group has raised $3,578,117 for the project and is thinking of new ways to punish errant Democratic lawmakers.

They need to find a way to get those moderates to toe the Pelosi party line.  Wonder if CNN plans to run any articles on the divided Democrats.  ’Cause when it comes to partisan unrest, that’s the real story this week.

Shortly after Bob Dornan lost his Orange County congressional seat by fewer than 1,000 votes (many of which turned out to be cast illegally), I was talking with a Republican political consultant who said that a number of his associates (in the political consultancy world) had warned the right-wing firebrand that he was in danger of losing to his Democratic opponent because he was neglecting the district.

But, the man who began the year by launching a quixotic quest for the White House, preferred to address his conservative fans across the country than to tend to his constituents in Southern California.  He saw himself first and foremost as the leader  of a conservative movement and not a representative of California’s 46th House District.  And that’s why he no longer represents a district that narrowly went for George H.W. Bush in 1992 and overwhelmingly rejected Barbara Boxer the same year.

With that history in mind, we can perhaps better see another reason Doug Hoffman narrowly lost a congressional seat earlier this week in a district that while historically Republican, went for Barack Obama last fall.

Jim Geraghty echoed a point made by a number of bloggers when he wondered yesterday if anyone asked upstate New Yorkers if they wanted their race nationalized?

Well, perhaps Hoffman’s botching of an interview with the Watertown Daily Times editorial board should have been a red flag.

We junkies of national politics overlook local issues way too easily.

No one ever really asked the voters of this district whether they wanted their House race to be a national fight. I’m slated to appear on Fred Thompson’s radio program today, and I’m a fan of him, and Sarah Palin, and all of the other big-name conservatives who jumped in to beat the drum for Hoffman. But maybe the locals wanted more than criticism of Obama and Pelosi and spending. Maybe the fact that he lived on the other side of the district line rankled with them.

Writing in a similar vein, Ann Althouse studied pictures of the two leading contenders in the race and observed

Owens, by contrast [to Hoffman], is big and rugged-looking. He’s an Air Force veteran and he has that military solidity, calm and self-possession. (more…)

Back in 2006, Democrats were able to recapture the congressional majorities they had lost in 1994 by putting themselves forward as the “not-Republicans.”  In 2008, they built on those majorities and their presidential nominee captured 53% of the popular vote, the highest percentage a non-incumbent Democrat had received in over three-quarters of a century by campaigning against an unpopular Republican incumbent and offering vague promises of “hope” and “change.”

Yet, this year, as Chris Christie’s campaign in New Jersey shows, while people are beginning to sour on the Democrats, particularly the incumbent Democratic Governor he seeks to replace, many are still not ready to pull the lever for the Republican.

In 2009 (and possibly 2010), it may not be enough to simply be the “not-Democratic” party (as it was in ’06 and ’08 to be the “not-Republican” party).  Perhaps, the GOP’s difficulty stems from the freshness of people’s memories of the last time the Republicans controlled all the levers of political power in our nation’s capital.  From 2003-2007, successive Republican congresses did little to control domestic spending, even with a Republican in the White House.

But, in ’06 and ’08, memories of the last Democratic Congress has long since faded (save for political junkies).   Few could remember what had sparked the 1994 Republican rout.

Perhaps many who did believed the Democrats had since learned their lesson and had changed their wayward (read:  spendthrift) ways.  On the campaign trail, they, particularly their party’s 2008 presidential nominee, certainly sounded like it.

Now that people can see that Democrats have returned to their free-spending ways, Republicans need show that we’ve learned from out recent setbacks.  Perhaps a GOP leaders need acknowledge that they lost their majorities, in large measure, because legislators failed to rein in federal domestic spending.

In that acknowledgement, they could remind Americans of the words of the document which, back in 1994, helped Republicans regain congressional majorities for the first time in forty years, the Contract with America: (more…)

In a previous post, I linked Mickey Kaus’s observation, “If an ‘astroturfing’ campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn’t it … community organizing?“  Now that conservatives are organizing communities of concerned citizens in much the same manner Barack Obama did when once a recent transplant to the Windy City, well, the Democrats (and their allies in the MSM) just can’t fathom the notion of their ideological adversaries expressing their grievances in much as they have done for the better part of the last eight years.

“The activist Left,” as Michlle Malkin puts it, “can’t stand competition.“  It’s as if one may only legitimately agitate against Republicans, “corporate interests,” the military, Western nations and the allies and defenders of said groups.  And the object of their protest must be the end to a robust US defense policy and an increase in the size and scope of government at all levels, with appropriate tax increases on productive individuals coupled with a concomitant redistribution of wealth to favored classes and ideologies.

When the President “summons his army” to fight for his proposed health care reform, this is a legitimate, “grassroots” expression of popular will, but when citizens (some working with conservative groups) send out e-mails to their fellows urging them to rally in public against that health care reform, that is astroturf, ginned up by corporate special interests.

The man, who tells us he’s trying to “break pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame,” constantly blaming his predecessor (and that predecessor’s political party) for the wrongs he must clean up.  (Indeed, in the same speech that he contends, “All we do is just then bicker and point fingers,” he points fingers.)  The man who claims he seeks a bipartisan approach to policy-making, listening to all sides, tells the other side to shut up.

But, that’s contradictory statements show Obama only warming up his Orwellian approach. It’s when he tries to say his policies have prevented an even higher deficit that he uses words to mean their exact opposite, attempting to change reality with his rhetoric: (more…)