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AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.
Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?
Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.
As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all 13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles, wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather than the state legislatures.
No sooner was the Constitution in place than our leaders began ignoring it. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Thomas Jefferson thought every constitution should expire after a single generation.
He believed the most consequential act of his presidency — the purchase of the Louisiana Territory — exceeded his constitutional powers.
Before the Civil War, abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison conceded that the Constitution protected slavery, but denounced it as a pact with the devil that should be ignored. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — 150 years ago tomorrow — he justified it as a military necessity under his power as commander in chief. Eventually, though, he embraced the freeing of slaves as a central war aim, though nearly everyone conceded that the federal government lacked the constitutional power to disrupt slavery where it already existed. Moreover, when the law finally caught up with the facts on the ground through passage of the 13th Amendment, ratification was achieved in a manner at odds with constitutional requirements. (The Southern states were denied representation in Congress on the theory that they had left the Union, yet their reconstructed legislatures later provided the crucial votes to ratify the amendment.)
In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation. In 1954, when the court decided Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Robert H. Jackson said he was voting for it as a moral and political necessity although he thought it had no basis in the Constitution. The list goes on and on.
The fact that dissenting justices regularly, publicly and vociferously assert that their colleagues have ignored the Constitution — in landmark cases from Miranda v. Arizona to Roe v. Wade to Romer v. Evans to Bush v. Gore — should give us pause. The two main rival interpretive methods, “originalism” (divining the framers’ intent) and “living constitutionalism” (reinterpreting the text in light of modern demands), cannot be reconciled. Some decisions have been grounded in one school of thought, and some in the other. Whichever your philosophy, many of the results — by definition — must be wrong.
IN the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.
This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.
Nor should we have a debate about, for instance, how long the president’s term should last or whether Congress should consist of two houses. Some matters are better left settled, even if not in exactly the way we favor. Nor, finally, should we have an all-powerful president free to do whatever he wants. Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states. There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country.
What would change is not the existence of these institutions, but the basis on which they claim legitimacy. The president would have to justify military action against Iran solely on the merits, without shutting down the debate with a claim of unchallengeable constitutional power as commander in chief. Congress might well retain the power of the purse, but this power would have to be defended on contemporary policy grounds, not abstruse constitutional doctrine. The Supreme Court could stop pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.
The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity. And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.
What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit.
If we acknowledged what should be obvious — that much constitutional language is broad enough to encompass an almost infinitely wide range of positions — we might have a very different attitude about the obligation to obey. It would become apparent that people who disagree with us about the Constitution are not violating a sacred text or our core commitments. Instead, we are all invoking a common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone can embrace. Of course, that does not mean that people agree at the ground level.
If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.
If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.
January 28th, 2013, 15:58
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
Kyle Bass, who knows a thing or two about economics and finance, recently spoke to a senior member of the Obama administration about their planned solutions for fixing the U.S. economy and trade deficit.
The answer shouldn’t surprise you.
When I asked a senior member of the Obama administration last week, ‘How are we going to grow exports if we won’t allow nominal wage deflation?’
He says, ‘we’re just going to kill the dollar.’
That worried me.
So, that the only answer.
It’s a dead answer.
But, that’s where we’re headed.
January 28th, 2013, 16:01
American Patriot
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
"kill the dollar"?
WTF does that actually mean? Really... seriously? I don't get it.
January 28th, 2013, 16:05
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.
Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:
The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.
In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?
Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.
Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.
To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.
Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.
How does any of this improve our lot?
Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?
You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.
Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?
Why?
When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.
I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!
There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]
January 28th, 2013, 16:11
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
to give you a hard concept to get your arms around: It's the concept that there are people in this country who want to intentionally collapse our economic system. How could it be that any American would or would want to do such a thing? Well, those involved sleep just fine at night because they tell themselves that they're not collapsing, they're transforming — transforming — America into something better.
The progressive movement in which these people are involved started around the turn of last century. These are the same people who gave us the Federal Reserve. They brought America the concept of redistribution of wealth through the progressive income tax, telling Americans at first that only the rich would be affected. They are the same people who felt that they knew better about your health than you did that they needed to force you to stop drinking alcohol-through Prohibition. They brought us the League of Nations, then the United Nations. And their biggest contribution of all: They brought the understanding that our Constitution was a flawed, living, breathing document and that our Founding Fathers were a group of rich racists.
Now, today's group of progressives do not speak the same language as you and I do: Economic justice is taking from haves and giving to the have nots; social justice, to quote Mark Lloyd, is when someone needs to step down so someone else can have turn, and transforming America means collapsing the state as we know it and rebooting it as a progressive utopia.
None of the language is the same. What I would call socialist, they call social justice. That's critical to understand; they really believe they're making things better and they're about to finish the process.
They learned from their earlier failed attempts to transform America and the world, like the League of Nations.
First, there can't be a debate. They simply declare the debate over and that they have consensus already.
Second, they can't conduct their transformation in the open.
And third, they can never let a good crisis go to waste.
Now, as we discuss this, keep in mind that you're watching all of this through your eyes; you see this as trying to collapse our economy. But progressives see this as a fundamental transformation — something better than we've ever had — as promised by Barack Obama: (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, OCT. 30, 2008)
THEN-PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE BARACK OBAMA: We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. (END VIDEO CLIP)
So, let me introduce you to the people you would say are fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system: Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy. Something else to remember is that this isn't some conspiracy theory that we're tossing out; they wrote about collapsing the economy and how they planned to do it in the article they co-authored in the '60s called, "Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done." Six months later, it was published in The Nation, under the title "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."
So, just what is Cloward-Piven? Well, remember the tree:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GLENN BECK: The roots of the tree of radicalism and revolution: It's Saul Alinsky. It's Woodrow Wilson, that's how it's all made legitimate, it's progressive ...
BECK: Here are the roots. Here's SDS — this is for that "Democratic Society." Cloward and Piven come in and say, wait a minute, what we should do is collapse the system on its own weight ...
BECK: Cloward and Piven — they're using the same tactics: fear and intimidation of SDS. Cloward and Piven — overwhelm the system. And look who the president has: Wade Rathke right up the tree, Dale right up the tree, Bill Ayers right up the tree, Jeff Jones right up the tree ... (END VIDEO CLIP)
Simply put: Cloward and Piven were radical Columbia professors in the 1960s who believed in "change" and "social justice." Inspired by the riots in Los Angeles in 1965, they wrote and published their article which outlined the best way to bring the kind of Saul Alinsky-type social change to America. In their estimation, it was to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse.
Cloward and Piven instructed activists that if a crisis did not exist, promote or manufacture one by exaggerating some unthreatening predicament. (Global warming anyone? And to an extent, health care?)
Their methods worked ... for a while. From 1965 through 1974, due to the strategy and efforts of Cloward and Piven and their followers, the total recipients on welfare rocketed from 4.3 million to 10.8 million. In 1975, there were nearly 1 million welfare recipients in New York City alone. That year, New York City declared bankruptcy. The whole state nearly went down with them.
In 1998, as he was still trying to deal with some of the fallout 20 years later, Mayor Rudy Giuliani referred to the Cloward and Piven strategy, describing the economic sabotage:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, JULY 20, 1998)
RUDY GIULIANI, NEW YORK CITY MAYOR: This wasn't an accident; it wasn't an atmospheric thing; it wasn't supernatural. It was the result of policies, choices and a philosophy that was embraced in the 1960s and then enthusiastically endorsed in the City of New York. (END VIDEO CLIP)
He went on to say: "This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare."
In the end, it didn't work because Americans became horrified with the welfare-state situation. As a result, Cloward and Piven and their devotees learned that they needed to be in the system — we've shown you how they've done that.
The stimulus bill was written in large part by the Apollo Alliance, whose alumni include Van Jones. In New York, the Apollo Alliance is headed by Weather Underground co-founder, Jeff Jones, partner to Bill Ayers in the radical terrorist group and in whose living room Barack Obama launched his political career in Chicago.
We've shown you that George Soros is the source of funding for so many of these radical groups and that Soros and Jeff Jones went into one of the poorest sections of New York and gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of our stimulus money.
We've shown you the ACORN connections. These "community organizers" are receiving untold billions in taxpayer money, despite massive voter registration fraud and corruption. Still, Congress won't turn off the spicket.
Does it sound like someone is trying to overload the system yet?
Throw in TARP — a massive, inexplicable bailout that America didn't want for people Obama himself described as "fat cats". And, by the way, you have the progressives in the Republican as well as the Democratic Party to thank for that.
A trillion and a half dollar health care overhaul that less than 36 percent of the American people want, but Obama along with House and Senate Democrats are forcing on us. They say it will only cost us a trillion dollars because of the savings they'll get by making cuts to Medicare at the same time they're expanding Medicare and Medicaid.
Medicare is a program with a $74 trillion liability already. Again, the idea is: Get as many people on government assistance as possible. Does it sound like that's what's going on here?
This latest class of progressives have taken Cloward-Piven to a whole new level. TARP money to people who don't deserve it; if you're a bank and you can't figure out that some of these people you're handing out loans to shouldn't have the money, you don't deserve to continue to exist. But Barney Frank and others threatened the banks to give out risky loans to people who couldn't afford them. Even the guy who signed off on TARP — a progressive himself — George Bush, warned that tighter restrictions and regulations were needed for Fannie and Freddie … not once or twice, but 17 times. The stimulus package with millions going to fund non-existent projects in districts that don't exist.
Frank and Dodd learned the Cloward-Piven lesson in the '70s: You have to be a part of the system to make it happen — they certainly are part of it.
Now, I suppose you could say this is all nothing but conspiracy nonsense. Well, again, here's Rudy Giuliani saying it back in 1998 — long before I'd ever heard of Cloward-Piven:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, JULY 20, 1998)
GIULIANI: This wasn't an accident; it wasn't an atmospheric thing; it wasn't supernatural. It was the result of policies, choices and a philosophy that was embraced in the 1960s and then enthusiastically endorsed in the City of New York.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
After the nation tired of able-bodied welfare recipients taking money from hard-working taxpayers, Cloward and Piven turned to other methods to overwhelm the system. They formed voter registration groups, like Human Serve, and worked with Project Vote, a group tied to ACORN, in their efforts.
And John Fund reports that Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer are about to introduce universal voter registration: If you're on any federal roll, you're automatically a voter. Receiving welfare, food stamps, if you own a home or are unemployed, you're automatically I — we'll talk about that more later this week. But make sure to ponder that: If ACORN can automatically register everyone, that just might explain why members of Congress don't care about their poll numbers. This is the same ACORN already indicted for voter fraud all over the country.
Cloward and Piven lobbied heavily for the "Motor-Voter" law, which is widely blamed for getting so much deadwood fraud onto our voter rolls: Invalid registrations signed by the dead, ineligible or non-existent.
In 1993, when Bill Clinton signed the Motor Voter Bill into law and guess who was there as the invited guests of the president? Richard Cloward and his wife, Frances Fox Piven — who is currently an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Then, three years later, they also supported the Clinton signing of the welfare reform bill in 1996. After working so hard to create an entire class of permanent welfare recipients in America, why would they publicly support the signing of a bill that put new restrictions on welfare recipients? Was it just a signal to the far left, saying, hey, don't worry, they won this battle, but we have the godparents of welfare excess right behind me. Don't worry, we'll win the war.
This was the same kind of signal to the far left that Senator Tom Harkin sent when he said the Senate health care bill was just a "starter home" — we'll put on the additions and do the remodeling later. It was the same signal Obama sent to the left when he announced he was committing more troops to Afghanistan and then in the next breath, said he was also bringing them home in 2011.
Just because you and I had never heard of this motley pair until recently, don't think for a minute that they haven't been heroes to the left for years. Bill Clinton knew exactly who they were in back in 1993 and, no doubt, long before.
You may not have even heard much about Saul Alinsky until recently, but Hillary Clinton wrote her college thesis on him. And even if you had heard of him, you may have just assumed that all Americans felt the same way about him as you did — repulsed?
You'd be wrong again.
Here's a statement, made just a couple days before Christmas from Chris Matthews, that shows us that we're not all on the same page: (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, DEc. 22, 2009)
CHRIS MATHEWS, MSNBC ANCHOR: Back to one of our heroes from the past, from the '60s, Saul Alinsky (END VIDEO CLIP)
So, as for the case for progressives overloading the system — on purpose — to bring about what I would call systematic failure and catastrophic collapse, but what they would call "fundamental transformation" of America?
Case closed.
January 29th, 2013, 02:25
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
A WARNING from ex-KGB communist defector Yuri Bezmenov from *29 YEARS AGO*, detailing the 4 stages of a Marxist-Leninist revolution and taking over a nation. Watch this at your own risk, as your bones will literally begin to freeze as you start to realize he is describing EXACTLY what is happening today almost to the letter.
Thank you Yuri, and sorry for not listening!
Checkmate.
February 4th, 2013, 19:36
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate. He is the author or co-author of 13 books, including his latest, "The Tea Party Manifesto," and his classic, "Taking America Back," now in its third edition and 14th printing. Farah is the former editor of the legendary Sacramento Union and other major-market dailies.More ↓
Is the U.S. government getting ready for a war we don’t know about?
And, if that’s why Washington is stockpiling massive amounts of ammunition (hollow points, by the way), why is Homeland Security doing the buying instead of the Defense Department?
Here’s what he actually said at a campaign stop in Colorado July 2, 2008: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
We’ve learned more about Obama’s vision since then. Maybe it’s time for a review:
He made the campaign promise to build this $439 billion domestic army, but all references to the initiative were inexplicably deleted from the copy of his speech posted on his website while others mysteriously disappeared from transcripts of the speech distributed by the campaign. That was strange – and ominous.
At the time, I had never heard anyone use the phrase “civilian national security force” before. But I did a little homework and found out where it originated. It was first proposed by then Bush administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates. On that basis alone, I accurately predicted that, if elected, Obama would name Gates as his own defense secretary. Needless to say, when that appointment came to pass, no media outlet bothered to interview me about my foresight.
We never heard another mention of Obama’s “civilian national security force” again. Not in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 or 2012.
But that brings us up to 2013 and the highly unusual stockpiling of firearms and ammo by Homeland Security – firearms and ammo that Obama would like to deny to ordinary citizens who are not members of his domestic army.
Well, I hate to say it, but I may have predicted this, too.
I wasn’t joking. I was deadly serious – so serious, in fact, that I did something I pledged I would never do:
Vote for Mitt Romney. It was a matter of self-defense and self-preservation. I said then that a second term of Obama might mean we would never see another free and fair election in America. (I’m not even sure we saw one in 2012.) I suggested due process would go the way of the horse and buggy. I said I expected Obama would move to shut down or destroy all independent media. I even speculated that his biggest critics would eventually be rounded up in the name of national security.
Think about it.
Why does the civilian Department of Homeland Security need billions of rounds of ammunition?
This is the agency that is responsible for policing the border. But it doesn’t.
This is the agency that is responsible for catching terrorists. But it doesn’t.
So why does Homeland Security need so many weapons and enough hollow-point rounds to plug every American six times?
Maybe this is the “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the Defense Department.
These words – “civilian national security force” – have haunted me ever since I first read them.
Obama has never explained what he meant.
He’s never been called to account for that remark.
Doesn’t this sound like police-state talk to you?
The U.S. Army alone has nearly 500,000 troops. That doesn’t count reserves or National Guard. In 2007, the U.S. defense budget was $439 billion. No one knows what the budget is today because Congress stopped passing budgets when Obama took office.
Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? Is this part of his second-term agenda?
I think it’s worth recalling here that just over a year ago both houses of Congress unwisely passed the defense reauthorization bill that killed the concept of habeas corpus – legislation that authorized the president to use the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or trial.
That legislation would empower a lame-duck Obama to use all of the power of the federal government – constitutional and unconstitutional – to target his political enemies.
If any Republican, conservative, independent journalist, pro-life activist, returning veteran, gun-rights activist, constitutionalist, Bible believer or critic of Obama thinks they will be safe in a second term under this would-be despot, they had better think again – real fast.
The “civilian national security force” is not here to protect any of them. It’s here to destroy the opposition. It’s here to destroy liberty. It’s here to destroy the Constitution.
February 18th, 2013, 20:52
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
There is also this naive belief that America can be saved and that hope, along with a lot of prayer and public action at the local level, will prevent the country we all know from declining into darkness. History has a bad habit of judging good men for taking bad stands on issue after issue. Let’s review a few select examples to determine if the ideal of working within the system is still viable, and those bad positions on various issues are still tenable.
1. Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War
The issues which created the basis for the Civil War are too complicated and too numerous to discuss in one short paragraph. However, if President Lincoln had indeed worked with the Southern states as he took office and considered the example of the British with their Slavery Abolition Bill of 1833 whereas slave owners received compensation for the release of their slave labor, it has been postulated numerous times (throughout history I might add) that one of the major issues which prompted the War of Northern Aggression could have been averted. Lincoln recognized this mistake after one year of bloody warfare where both sides suffered horrendous losses and the ferocity of the conflict shocked the leadership in Washington and Richmond. In a letter sent to Illinois Senator James A. McDougall on March 14, 1862, Lincoln postulated about providing a gradual emancipation by paying slave owners $400 per slave over a period of time. This idea was to shorten the war, lower the cost of the conflict immediately, and to seek the basis for peace with the Confederacy. This idea was rejected by the Senator and the conflict continued until 1865 killing tens of thousands of Americans and living a division which lasted almost a century, and in some parts of the nation to this very day, between the North and South.
The only circumstance under which I felt [abortion] could be justified was self-defense, a concept deeply rooted in our laws and traditions. If a mother’s life is endangered by her own unborn child, she has a right to protect her life. I do not believe, however, that abortion of a less-than-perfect child, or abortion for convenience sake or abortion because “a mistake” has been made can be justified.
To his death he regretted the decision to sign the act into law and as a result of which, helped his conversion into a conservative political figure for the decades which followed.
The blunder which has impacted American political reality until this day is his other blunder. What was that? The IRCA, or Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The perspective as best stated from the website Conservativenews.com by Mike Scruggs:
According to Ronald Reagan himself, as told to his trusted long-time friend and U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, the biggest mistake of his presidency was signing the l986 amnesty for what turned out to be more than half the five million illegal immigrants in the country. Reagan was uncomfortable with the amnesty but was persuaded by some of the leaders of his own party (still living) that it would only affect a small number of illegal immigrants and would assure that Congress would follow through with more vigorous enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. The misnamed Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 was touted by its supporters as “comprehensive immigration reform” that would grant amnesty only to a few long-settled immigrants and strengthen border security and internal immigration enforcement against employers who were hiring illegal immigrants.
These blunders have impacted American to this day, and unfortunately created a permanent distrust of both parties to do what is right for America, and most importantly, to protect the Constitution.
3. American’s Faith in the honesty of the Political Elites
Americans are by and large, a trusting and obedient people as a mass.
We believe that our political elites will obey the law, the Constitution, and the faith “we the people” put into their perceived duty to do what is best for the nation.
JFK’s betrayal of the Cuban insurrection.
LBJ’s destruction of the American military in Vietnam by willingly slaughtering those young men without giving them a chance to succeed.
Watergate.
Jimmy Carter’s surrender of the Panama Canal.
Reagan’s trust in the Democratic Party as an honest partner in governance.
George H.W. Bush’s betrayal of the Iraqi people and refusal to end the war on terror before it started.
William Jefferson Clinton’s services for sale White House.
George W. Bush’s incompetence and evil betrayal from Day 1 of his administration.
Barrack Hussein Obama’s reversion to despotic rule.
All of the above are indications and documented historical evidence of our foolishness in trusting these evil, vile souls. Yet we praise them in passing forgetting the lessons of history.
And here we are today.
In what I call a fascinating recognition of the coming storm and an impassioned plea for rationality in the face of a fascist tsunami about to wash on to America’s shores, Glenn Beck said the following on his January 14th BlazeTV program:
An honorable and logical approach if we still lived in the United States of American that he and I grew up in. Glenn is not alone however in his ideals which espouse the belief that the system of Constitutional Law of our nation is still somewhat functioning. Mr. Beck, among many others, proclaim that ‘we the people” should once again follow the examples of Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King in our future course of action, yet fails to answer a critical question.
Suppose we abide by his wishes.
Suppose we surrender our weapons and gamble on the court system.
The same judicial system which stole the rights to physical property and 4th Amendment protections when Chrysler and General Motors were stolen from the bondholders.
The same judicial system which has yet to seriously investigate nor arrest one top executive of MF Global, especially John Corzine, for crimes which wiped out farmers and investors throughout the United States despite blatant violations of securities laws.
Glenn, God love you man, but here is the question:
Suppose you surrender your laws, loving Gandhi and MLK, and march into the courtroom as you say we should do?
I’ve spent the last month or so praying and considering your dilemma and reached my own conclusion:
If I were you, I would pray on it.
Because once the average person is defenseless, you are dead as is your family. Thus why our Founding Fathers created the 2nd Amendment to protect ourselves from the corruption and imperial leadership of a government out of control; as we are experiencing now.
Sleep on it.
Pray on it.
Get back to me on the choice to defend one’s family on their feet or to watch them perish while on your knees.
February 20th, 2013, 23:12
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
If your church's new pastor had a long and well-known history of atheism, contradicting church doctrine, or fire-bombing churches, would you trust him to serve the church community in good faith, and to do everything in his power to uphold the church's principles and practices? More to the point, would you continue to attend that church, and to take your children there?
If people dedicated to the complete destruction of the United States as a constitutional republic became power-players in the public school establishment, would you expect them to build an education system that fostered and preserved the tenets of republican citizenship as understood by America's founders? Would you continue to support the public schools, and send your children there?
For a hundred years, the main intellectual force behind America's educational establishment has been John Dewey, a socialist and open critic of the Enlightenment, American individualism, and American constitutional government. What kind of education system should people have expected Dewey and his admirers to promote? Should anyone be surprised that the public school establishment built largely according to his theories has become an anti-American cesspool of collectivism, irrationalism, and immorality?
Today, the educational insanity has reached new heights. The public school establishment has devolved from following the wisdom of men who hoped to remodel America in a Marxist image to following men who have actively sought to instigate violent revolution. The church leadership, as it were, has devolved from atheists to fire-bombers.
Bill Ayers, a leader of the Weather Underground terrorist organization, became a "respected" professor of education -- a teacher of teachers -- and a leading theorist on early childhood education. If you are one of those who wish to remain blissfully in the fog about this fact or its implications, you had better stop reading now.
Larry Grathwohl is the military veteran who volunteered to infiltrate the Weather Underground as an FBI operative in 1969. He is probably best-known for his firsthand account of a Weatherman meeting at which the organization's leadership, including the future Professor Ayers, discussed the logistics of how, after the communist revolution they were trying to spearhead, they would murder the ten percent of the American population that would likely remain resistant to the communists' re-education program.
Grathwohl has often been interviewed about that meeting and about his days among the Weather Underground (WU). The focus of those interviews used to be on the radicals and their terrorist operations. More recently, interviewers have turned to Grathwohl to help them highlight Barack Obama's own radicalism, by reminding people of the true nature of the "guy in Obama's neighborhood."
Rather than retrace these (important) angles, I chose to tie Grathwohl's knowledge of Ayers and the rest of the WU leadership to the issue of public education. Alarming as it is that the president of the United States has, and has carefully concealed, a personal association with a lifelong revolutionary communist, I believe that even that pales in comparison with the mainstream influence and respectability that Ayers, and some of his old cohorts, have come to enjoy in the field of childhood education. A president with Marxist inclinations and attitudes is a great threat. Entire generations of children receiving their first years of moral and intellectual education at de facto Marxist re-education camps -- that is a societal catastrophe.
Recently, I have been urging anyone who will listen to stop making excuses for allowing the government to continue controlling the education of their children, and to get any child under their influence out of the public education system now. Stop rationalizing inaction: modern public education, as the few intelligent, noble, suffering teachers in the system can tell you, is a Dewey-rigged atrocity, a forced-retardation machine. In America, that machine is now, increasingly, being reprogrammed as a direct socialist indoctrination system. One of the leading programmers is Bill Ayers.
From my own interview experiences, I know that one often feels dissatisfied with one's answers after the fact and wishes one could go back and refine one's statements. With this in mind, I conducted my interview with Larry Grathwohl in writing. I sent him my questions, in the order presented here, and he answered at his leisure. I trust that you will find his responses as bracing and thought-provoking as I do.
Daren Jonescu: From your time among the WU, what was your understanding of the relationship between the group's members and the Cuban DGI? Were they just basically admirers of Castro, or did the WU have some kind of genuine operational relationship with the DGI, KGB, or any such organization?
Larry Grathwohl: In my knowledge of the connections the WU maintained with the Cuban DGI and with other communist-bloc countries, it was extensive. The WU created an organization called the Venceremos Brigade with the sole purpose of sending members of their underground cells to Cuba for training in the administrative functions of organizing a revolution, as well as being trained in the creation and the use of explosives. The Venceremos Brigade itself was composed of young students who were sent to Cuba under the guise of being there to help harvest sugarcane, but included were members of the WU whose reason for being there was to receive this specialized training from the DGI.
Additionally, these trips to Cuba were utilized in order to maintain contacts with the North Vietnamese and other communist-bloc countries. As an example, Kathy Boudin traveled extensively through the Eastern Bloc countries of that time frame and also attended the University of Moscow.
At one time it was intended for me to travel to Cuba for this indoctrination and training; however, I was able to convince the WU leadership that I didn't require this kind of training, being that I had been in the U.S. military.
Therefore, my name was taken off the list, and someone else was sent in my place. I did have the opportunity to meet and discuss their experiences in Cuba with some of the individuals who were part of the first Venceremos Brigade. This connection between the Cubans and the WU was so extensive that in the event that an individual lost contact, they could go to a Cuban Embassy in Canada and simply tell them that they were (the first name didn't matter) Delgado, which was a codename to be used to re-establish contact with the WU. I also know of at least one incident where Bill Ayers and Naomi Jaffe traveled to Canada to make contact with the Cubans in the Québec Liberation Front in order to obtain funds in the amount of at least seven to ten thousand dollars. They returned to Buffalo, New York, after having been gone for a day and a half, with this money.
I have no direct knowledge of how involved the KGB was in directing the DGI and therefore the effect it may have had on the WU. However, it is my understanding from intelligence sources I have since come in contact with that the DGI was essentially run by the KGB. Again, I have no direct knowledge of this, but it seems apparent from other information that I have seen and developed through the years that this was the relationship that existed between the Soviet Union and the Cubans.
DJ: Why exactly did the WU want to overthrow the U.S. government? In favor of what?
LG: Specifically, the WU intended, as their ultimate goal, the total destruction of U.S. imperialism and of course our government. They intended to replace our current government with what they referred to as "democratic centralism." They claimed that this was the current form of government of the Cuban islands, and this was what they intended to establish here in the United States. Additionally, they felt that certain portions of the United States would be occupied by third-world countries after our destruction. They estimated that 100 million citizens of the United States would have to be re-educated after the revolution had succeeded.
DJ: How would you answer people who say, "Oh, back then all the young people talked that way. Kids do all kinds of crazy things that they regret later."
LG: Yes, it is true that many people during that time spoke in extremely radical terms, especially regarding their government and what needed to take place in order to change what they saw as the evils of U.S. imperialism. Most of these groups, however, believed in a nonviolent means of achieving these goals, and it was only the WU who felt that the only possible way of achieving this change was through violent revolution. There are many who were part of this movement during this period of time who feel that the WU had undermined their activities and ultimately destroyed any possibility of their success. This is one of the great criticisms that exists of the WU and their tactics during that period. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, among others, claim today that they were merely an antiwar group, but this is not the truth. In all of their writings and all of their political manifestoes, they made it very clear that they were a violent revolutionary organization inside the belly of the beast, as they called it, and that their purpose was the destruction of the U.S. and what they called U.S. imperialism.
DJ: For many people, the hardest part about accepting the true motives of subversives like the WU is that when we see them on TV, or read their later writings, they often just seem relatively "normal." It's hard for people who think of "bad guys" in movie terms to accept that evil people really are "normal" for much of the day -- they are human beings, after all, and therefore they do many of the same things we all do.
Please give me some insight into this issue: did the WU, even during those violent early days, sometimes seem like relatively normal people? Could someone meeting them in a non-WU context see Bill Ayers or Mark Rudd as ordinary, or even likable?
LG: While there were some members of the WU that I took a personal liking to, I cannot say that of the individuals that I knew as members of the leadership collective. This would have included people like Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and others. These people were absolutely vicious in their dedication to overthrow the government by any means necessary, including the use of bombs and shrapnel in order to create the greatest injury and death to people they deemed enemies. There were some whom I knew as part of the operational personnel who were more to my liking, and the difficulty surrounding these individuals was knowing that I was betraying them and their friendship as I continued to pass information to the FBI. So the answer to this question is yes, there were some who were relatively normal and therefore likable, but this did not include the leadership, which was extremely focused and intent upon destroying every remnant of democracy, including innocent bystanders who might unfortunately be in the way.
DJ: The quote for which you are probably best-known is your account of the WU leadership's discussions of post-revolutionary "re-education camps in the southwest," and of the likelihood that ten percent of the U.S. population, the "diehard capitalists," would have to be killed. I would like to focus on the "re-education camps." To the best of your knowledge, how did the WU conceive of these camps?
LG: [T]his conversation took place in Cleveland, Ohio, at a meeting for the organization to begin its underground activities, which included what they referred to as strategic sabotage. Of course this meant bombing symbols of our government as well as individuals whose positions were meant to protect and defend. The conversation involving the re-education camps and the elimination of approximately 25 million people began as a result of my inquiring as to what we (the WU) would do when and if our revolution succeeded and we were forced to deal with the everyday operations and logistics of running a country. There was very little interest in what would need to be done in order to feed, house, clothe, and otherwise provide for the population. The main focus was what had to be done in order to protect themselves from what they construed as the counterrevolution, which they expected to occur shortly after they had seized power. Because of this it would be necessary to establish re-education centers in the Southwest with the purpose of indoctrinating people into the new order and beliefs of their revolution. They estimated that 25% [of the camps' 100 million occupants], or 25 million people, would not be able to assimilate or accommodate this re-education and therefore would have to be eliminated. [T]hese individuals could be worked to death, starved to death, or shot, depending upon what works best for the revolution.
While I cannot remember everyone who attended this meeting, I do remember that Mark Rudd, Cathy Wilkerson, Bill Ayers, Linda Evans, and other members of the leadership were present. The most remarkable thing that affected me at that time was the amount of education that these people had in comparison to myself and to the general population. Many had graduated with postgraduate degrees from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, and here they sat in a room on a cloudy afternoon, seriously discussing not only the need, but the means to eliminate 25 million people, with absolutely no pangs of conscience or hesitation.
Author's Note: I conclude Part 1 by emphasizing one aspect of Grathwohl's last point here. In noting their level of education, Grathwohl is reminding us of the WU leadership's ages. Ayers and Gilbert turned 25 the year Weatherman was formed; Dohrn was 27, Boudin and Jaffe 26. In 1980, when Ayers and Dohrn finally surrendered to police -- without apologies for their "underground" activities -- they turned 36 and 38. The following year, Boudin and Gilbert, aged 38 and 37, participated in a murderous Brinks armored car robbery with members of the Black Liberation Army.
The haze of distance is a convenience for those inclined to dismiss any relation between the WU's "youthful" radicalism and their "mature" work in education and social justice -- a convenient lie, that is.
(To be continued)
February 26th, 2013, 15:23
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
Not a single one of us expected to find any humor in President Obama’s stupid jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but the sheer level of cocky arrogance he displayed is frightening.
And the sheer level of liberal media, politically correct bias in selective journalistic editing was in full display over at the Huffington Post Saturday night.
The president swaggered up to the microphone Saturday night to the rap song, “All I Do is Win,” and told the roomful of mostly liberal journalists and movie stars this was what Rush Limbaugh had warned them about – “Second term, baby,” Obama boasted. He then proceeded to joke (was it a joke?) about his radical second-term agenda.
Obama took jabs at the media, at himself, at host Conan O’Brien, and he mocked many of the stories about himself in the news, including the speculation his skeet-shooting picture was photo-shopped.
“In lieu of a library, he’s going to build another ‘edifice’ next to the George W. Bush presidential library. A giant billboard pointing to it saying, ‘His Fault,’ the Blaze reported.
These days I look in the mirror and I have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be.
And even more alarming than what he said is how the Huffington Post printed its version of the Associated Press report of that comment – can you spot the difference?
I’d ask if you can even believe such a thing, but of course you can.
On and on the painful jokes went at America and Americans expense by the President of the United States.
And in case you forgot folks, here is what Obama thinks of himself and you:
My job is to be president. Your job is to keep me humble. Frankly, I think I’m doing my job better.
This article was written by Paul Rosenberg and originally published at Free-Man's Perspective
A lot of Americans know that the US government is out of control. Anyone who has cared enough to study the US Constitution even a little knows this. Still, very few of these people are taking any significant action, and largely because of one error: They are waiting for “the good guys” to show up and fix things.
Some think that certain groups of politicians will pull it together and fix things, or that one magnificent politician will ride in to fix things. Others think that certain members of the military will step in and slap the politicians back into line. And, I’m sure there are other variations.
There are several problems with this. I’ll start with the small issues:
It doesn’t happen. A lot of good people have latched on to one grand possibility after another, waiting for a good guy to save the day, and it just doesn’t happen. Thousands of hours of reading, writing and waiting are burned with each new “great light” who comes along with a promise to run the system in the “right” way, and give us liberty and truth. (Or whatever.) Lots of decent folks grab on to one pleasant dream after another, only to end up right back where they started… but poorer in time, energy and finances.
Hope is a scam. It’s a dream of someday, somehow, getting something for nothing. People who hope do not act – they wait for other people to act. Hope is a tool to neuter a natural opposition: they sit and hope, and never act against you. Even the biblical meaning of hope is something more like expectation (or sometimes waiting) than the modern use of hope.
Petitioning an abuser for compassion. The “good guys” are considered to be a few people inside the abusive government. But if the good guys were really good, wouldn’t they have dissociated themselves with an abuser some time ago? By pleading for the good guys to rise up, people are asking one sub-group of the abusers to save them from the rest of the abusers. However, they all work for the same operation; they all get paid out of the same offices; according to the same rulebook. And if the good guys are so willing to turn against their employers, why would they have waited until now?
Movies. We all grew up in the company of movie heroes who rode in at the last minute to save the noble victims. From John Wayne to Star Trek to Bruce Willis, the story line differs little. These are pleasant stories, of course, but cinema is not reality, and hoping for it to become reality is something that we should get over prior to adulthood.
But, as I say, those are the smaller issues. Let’s move on to the serious ones.
The Magic System
A lot of Americans believe that the American “Founders” created a system that automatically fixes itself. They talk about the “balance of powers,” and think that it will always save them from a tyrant. The balanced powers of the US Constitution, however, were trashed within fifteen years and doubly-trashed just a century ago.
In the Constitution, the states balanced the power of the national government (the one now in Washington, DC.) Not only did the states control half of the legislature, but they decided if and how they would implement the edicts of the national government. And that included deciding whether a law was constitutional or not.
This changed in 1803 with the Marbury v. Madison ruling. This ruling – taught as a work of genius in American schools – was a fraud against the US Constitution. In it, the Supreme Court held that they understood the Constitution better than James Madison, the man who wrote it!
But worse than even this, they held – with absolutely no basis – that it was they who would decide what was constitutional or not. The states were tossed aside. Even the sitting President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, called it “a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
Marbury’s Judicial review (the Supremes ruling on constitutionality) merely involves one branch of the national government providing a check on the other branches of the national government. After Marbury, no one could check the national government.
Washington DC was unleashed with Marbury v. Madison. What made it almighty was the 17th Amendment of 1913, which took the powers of the states and transferred them to Washington, by mandating the popular election of senators.
With senators being elected directly by the populace, the states were cut-out of the equation. In their place, political parties gained massive power, and nearly all power was consolidated in the city of Washington.
And so it is today. Washington is an unfettered beast. The system will NOT fix itself; the mechanisms to do that were lost a long time ago.
The Easy Way Out
Standing up against a beast like Washington DC is scary, to be sure. Understandably, not many people want to do such a thing. But if the beast is abusing you, what other choice do you have? You can certainly avoid or evade the beast, but we all know that the beast hurts people it catches avoiding it, so the risk of doing this isn’t zero either.
So, what’s a person to do? They hate their abuse, but outright disobedience would be scary. Unfortunately, many people have come up with a third option: Get someone else to do it for you.
Lots of writers have done this, for example: Write flamboyantly about the abuses people face and stir them to “rise up against the power.” Fairly seldom does the writer take big risks himself – he just stirs up others to do the scary stuff.
Something very similar happens to basically moral people who don’t want to risk pain and suffering: they imagine good guys riding in to save them.
But, as I say, these are genuinely decent people, and they are willing to take smaller risks to help the good guys: They will spend time and money promoting them, and they will even accept name-calling in many cases. They just don’t want to become full-blown rebels and outcasts.
The result of this is predictable: abuse by the political class. If the politicians show them a viable possibility every election cycle, they’ll keep voting their way forever… and the hero never really has to show up.
The Sad Truth
Let’s just say it: No one is going to ride in and save you.
Appearing on MSNBC, singer and former civil rights icon Harry Belafonte told President Barack Obama how he should take control of the political debate.
His answer? Jail opponents. “That there should be this lingering infestation of really corrupt people who sit trying to dismantle the wishes of the people, the mandate that has been given to Barack Obama, and I don’t know what more they want,” Belafonte told race hustler Al Sharpton.
“The only thing left for Barack Obama to do is to work like a third world dictator and just put all these guys in jail.”
Belafonte added that Republicans were “violating the American desire,” and described Republicans as an “infestation.”
This is the true language of the Hollywood left unmasked. The great lie of Hollywood is that leftists may not agree with you, but they’ll die for your right to say it. The truth is somewhat less glorious: they’ll fire you for your right to say it. The same sort of totalitarianism evidenced by Belafonte here runs rampant throughout Hollywood. It doesn’t matter what the issue is: if you take the wrong side, the Hollywood left wants you shut down completely and utterly. If they had the power of the prisons, they’d use it.
When Miss California, Carrie Prejean, told the Miss USA contest in 2009 that she was for traditional marriage, that prompted this little gem of liberal tyranny from rumormonger Perez Hilton, a judge in that contest: “She’s a dumb bitch! And a hypocrite too!” He later said he voted against her because “Miss USA should represent everyone. Her answer alienated millions of gay and lesbian Americans, their families and their supporters.” Forget the fact that there are far more millions of religious people who disapprove of homosexuality. Where Hilton comes from, those who disagree are shut down.
That’s the rule, not the exception. When it came out that Mormon artistic director of the California Musical Theater Scott Eckern had backed Proposition 8, upholding same-sex marriage, the Hollywood community came out of the closet to try to destroy his career. Marc Shaiman, composer of Hairspray, said that he wouldn’t let his musical be performed at the Theater unless Eckern was fired. “I was uncomfortable with money made off my work being used to put discrimination in the Constitution,” said Shaiman. Jeffrey Seller, producer of Avenue Q, joined the anti-Eckern jihad. “That a man who makes his living exclusively through the musical theater could do something so hurtful to the community that forms his livelihood is a punch in the stomach,” he said. Eckern was forced to quit. Shaiman’s take: “It felt fantastic.”
This isn’t rare. Hollywood kook Bette Midler supported the IRS’s crusade against conservative non-profits: “I love the IRS!” she cheered on Twitter. Hollywoodites revel in the new blacklist that allows them to keep conservative creators unemployed. “I hope so,” Nicholas Meyer, director of Star Trek II, told me about discrimination against conservatives in Hollywood.
It’s not relegated to Hollywood, of course. The environmentalist movement has suggested for years that those who do not buy into anthropogenic global warming be shipped to a desert island. “Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay,” says environmentalist Steve Zwick. “Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.”
Inside leftists, the totalitarian impulse lurks: the impulse to control, and the simultaneous impulse to follow a great leader. And in places like Hollywood, where one party control is the rule rather than the exception, such impulses find fruition in industrywide discrimination.
June 6th, 2013, 13:32
American Patriot
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Communist fuck.
June 6th, 2013, 15:21
Malsua
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
Jail the opposition? I guess ole Harry is ready to start a war. Harry, just in case you might read this...when the bullets stop flying after millions are dead, if you're still around, you're going to be among the first against the wall. You see, people will wonder "Why did the president do this?" Questions will lead to answers and instead of sorting out each detail, the people who will be in charge(it ain't going to be your team), will purge all you fuckers that thought this was a great idea.
June 6th, 2013, 15:39
American Patriot
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
Funny Mal, you seem to be opposed to our President acting like a dictator and people Belafonte trying to convince him to do so.
I don't understand.....
LOL!
(PS I'm right there with you...)
June 6th, 2013, 16:18
Malsua
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
If turd world dictators are so wonderful, why doesn't Harry Belefonte head over to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and enjoy the paradise?
June 6th, 2013, 19:26
vector7
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
June 6, 2013 | 1:06 pm | Modified: June 6, 2013 at 1:45 pm http://cdn.washingtonexaminer.biz/ca...8e902c88d1.jpg During an interview with Huffington Post Live, President Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett pushed back against the idea that Eric Holder might step down as attorney general.
“That’s definitely not the case. I think that one of the things you learn in this business is, don’t listen to rumors,” Jarrett said bluntly. “You can take it from me — obviously I know the president pretty well, I know the attorney general pretty well, and he will be in his position for quite a while.”
Jarrett added that Holder had the “full confidence and respect” of the president.
According to a former Obama official, Jarrett has always been Holder’s “protector” inside the White House as the two are close friends.
June 6th, 2013, 19:30
American Patriot
Re: Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term
"Valerie Jarrett: Take it from me, Eric Holder will be attorney general for quite a while"
FINALLY, the REAL President of the United States has spoken up!!!!!!!!!
Now you all KNOW we weren't kidding when we said she was the Puppeteer!
