Phi Beta Cons

JasonFertig

I don’t understand why the NCAA did not cancel the Penn State football program for the foreseeable future (i.e. give it the “death penalty”), perhaps for several decades. That seems like a logical way to move forward after the heinous and disgusting events. Penn State football games should be out of the public eye for a long time.

Instead, the punishment is spiteful, confusing, and Orwellian. Fines, lost scholarships — fine. Forcing the school to vacate wins? What exactly does that entail? The AP ran a Q&A on this issue that does not clarify much. If the school cannot claim the wins in the record books, what about Larry Johnson’s rushing yards or LaVar Arrington’s tackles? Did they still happen?

In thinking of an analogy to NCAA’s punishment tactics — I don’t want to draw a parallel to the horrific acts committed by the coach who does not deserve his name mentioned anywhere — consider this scenario:

A high-school-football running back is caught cheating. The principal investigates, and learns that the student has been cheating since he came to the school, but no teacher ever reported him aside from in-class discipline. In wanting to put this kid in his place, the school hands down the following punishment:

1. He receives detention for the rest of his school career

2. If he wants to graduate, he must retake every class in which he cheated

3. He will still be eligible to play football, but he is not allowed to practice — he will be unprepared for each game

4. All of his past stats are removed from the school’s records, but the results of the games still stand.

Why not kick the guy off the team and expel him from school, but let the statistics stand? Sports is secondary to morality, but bad people can win games. Some athletes enshrined in the various sports halls of fame were not choir boys. O. J. is still is a Heisman Trophy winner.

Scrubbing sports record books sounds like the old Soviet joke — “the future is known; it’s the past that keeps changing.” Penn State needed the hammer dropped, but thanks to the NCAA, we now have a new way to debate the death penalty.

Is Perestroika Coming In California?

Forbes

When Jerry Brown was elected governor for a third time in 2010, there was widespread hope that he would repair the state’s crumbling and dysfunctional political edifice. But instead of becoming a Californian Mikhail Gorbachev, he has turned out to be something more resembling Konstantin Chernenko or Yuri Andropov, an aged hegemon desperately trying to save a dying system.

As with the old party bosses in Russia, Brown’s distinct lack of courage has only worsened California’s lurch toward fiscal and economic disaster. Yet as the budget woes worsen, other Californians, including some Democrats, are beginning to recognize the need for perestroika in the Golden State. This was most evident in the overwhelming vote last week in two key cities, San Diego and San Jose, to reform public employee pensions, a huge reversal after decades of ever more expansive public union power in the state.

California’s “progressive” approach has been enshrined in what is essentially a one-party state that is almost Soviet in its rigidity and inability to adapt to changing conditions. With conservatives, most businesses and taxpayer advocates marginalized, California politics has become the plaything of three powerful interest groups: public-sector unions, the Bay Area/Silicon Valley elite and the greens. Their agendas, largely unrestrained by serious opposition, have brought this great state to its knees.

California’s ruling troika has been melded by a combination of self-interest and a common ideology. Their ruling tenets center on support for an ever more intrusive, and expensive, state apparatus; the need to turn California into an Ecotopian green state; and a shared belief that the “genius” of Silicon Valley can pay for all of this.

Now this world view is foundering on the rocks of economic reality. The Soviet Union armed itself to the teeth and sent cosmonauts into space while the public waited on line for toothpaste and sausages. Similarly, Californians suffer from a combination of high taxes and intrusive regulation coupled with a miserable education system — the state’s students now rank 47^th in science achievement — and a rapidly deteriorating infrastructure.

The current recession has been particularly severe, continuing at a more acute level than in most states, including places like Florida and Arizona, which also suffered greatly from the housing bust. California now has the third highest unemployment rate in the U.S., beating out only its co-dependent evil twin Nevada and Rhode Island. At the same time, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California study, inequality in the devoutly “progressive” state has been growing much faster than in the rest of the country.

The most auspicious sign of grassroots support for perestroika was last week’s smack down of public employee unions in San Jose and San Diego. For the first time in recent memory, the unions suffered a humiliating defeat — the measures passed by a margin greater than two to one — as voters endorsed deep reform of the pension burdens bringing these cities to the brink of bankruptcy. Backed by its Democratic mayor, Chuck Reed, San Jose’s measure B aims to reduce pension benefits for both future and current hires. Unsurprisingly, the public employee have threatened to sue.

This may precipitate what could become the California equivalent of a prairie fire. Like San Jose and San Diego, many other California cities are on the verge of bankruptcy. Union-dominated Los Angeles could be the next big domino to fall, according to the city’s own chief administrative office, and has been forced to boost its bonded indebtedness and cut back on critical infrastructure spending to stave off the inevitable.

As services drop and taxes rise — California’s already are among the nation’s highest — voters increasingly realize that one of the main problems is over-generous pensions for public sector workers. This is reflected in the sad reality that the state consistently competes with Illinois for the worst bond rating in the country. Most recently, the state upped its deficit estimate to $16 billion from a $9.2 billion estimate made just in January.

Brown could have used this mounting crisis to reveal his inner Gorbachev. But instead, he has so far chosen a classic Chernenko-Andropov muddle. He proposed a mild pension reform but could not persuade his own party — aware that vengeful the unions will be around long after the old man is gone — to consider it.

More recently, the governor showed his own inner Stalinist by jettisoning his original more modest tax increase proposal for a more radical teachers’ union measure that would raise California’s income tax to the highest in the nation.

Brown’s “millionaire’s” tax, as it is being marketed, starts with individuals making $250,000 or more. Right now it is still ahead in the polls but seems to be losing ground. Joel Fox, a longtime anti- tax activist, senses that people in the state — as evidenced by the San Jose and San Diego votes — are beginning to realize that the tax increases are designed primarily not to improve the schools, keep the parks open or pave the roads but simply to bolster public-sector pay and pensions.

This collective turning on of the civic light bulb comes at the same time that the primary economic delusion that has dominated progressive politics — the myth of the high-tech savior — has fallen into disrepute. Under Brown and his monumentally incompetent predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, state officials maintained a belief that Silicon Valley’s money machine would be able to bail the state out of its budgetary morass.

In this context, the underwhelming performance of Facebook’s IPO last month takes on major political significance. Not only will there be fewer puerile billionaires to inflate the Valley real estate market and bankroll “progressive” candidates and causes, scores of hip wannabe start-ups suddenly may find themselves no longer the darlings of venture capital investors or the stock market. Like California’s budget itself, the social media boom is now looking like something of a fraud.

Another potential casualty of the weak economy could be the green drive to remake the state into a kind of Ecotopian paradise. This is evident in growing opposition to some of Brown’s most beloved initiatives, notably a fantastically expensive high-speed rail system. Sold in the euphoric progressive atmosphere of 2008, support has collapsed as the price tag has soared and the state’s grievous fiscal problems have worsened. The most recent LA Times poll currently finds nearly three in five California voters would like to see the project scrapped.

Once unassailable politically, the environmental community is fracturing between those thoroughly allied to rent-seeking capitalists and the Democratic Party and those still primarily concerned with preserving nature. The Sierra Club, for example, objects to Brown’s attempt to exempt the high-speed line from environmental review. Some Greens also object to Brown-supported projects like the massive tortoise-roasting solar farm planned for the Mojave Desert.

Both Brown and the Greens also have failed to deliver many of the much ballyhooed “green jobs” that they insisted their policies would produce. Instead they may soon have to confront an electorate increasingly skeptical about green fantasies and more concerned with a persistently under-performing economy.

Clearly, the conditions for a California perestroika are coming into place. Still missing is a coherent vision — from either Independents, centrist Democrats or Republicans — that can unite business, private-sector workers and taxpayers around a fiscally prudent, pro-economic growth agenda. Yet it’s clearly good news that , for the first time in a decade, there’s hope that the whole corrupt, failing California political edifice could come crashing down, providing a renewed hope for recovering the state’s former greatness.

Obama’s suck-up to Russia continues, but Putin snubs Camp David invite

InvestorsDaily

According to the White House, President Obama has telephoned Russia’s new President Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on that country’s Victory in Europe Day.

Seriously.

Old people will recall that Russia (then the Soviet Union) began World War II as an ally of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, becoming a sudden Western pal only when Hitler turned on Russia.

Three years ago in one of his trademark extended-hand gestures Obama sought to reset drifting relations with Russia by summarily canceling the U.S. missile defense shield system set for Eastern Europe. The Russians didn’t like it next door and said they didn’t believe the defensive system was really aimed at Iran’s future ICBMs.

Obama didn’t inform Eastern Europe first. He was counting on Russian gratitude to restrain Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Of course, that didn’t come to pass and Obama’s international sanctions on Iran haven’t done the trick either.

A year ago on the mere threat of Libya’s Gadhafi killing rebellious civilians, Obama instigated his military ouster via NATO. Now that Syria has actually slaughtered thousands of rebellious citizens, Obama doesn’t match those firm actions. Just words. Russia is a Syrian ally and arms its military.

Earlier this year Obama phoned Putin to congratulate him on his questionable election win. Then, back in March Obama was caught on tape pleading with then Russian President Dmitri Medvedev (see photo above) to tell Putin to give Obama some space during the U.S. reelection campaign because after his last election Obama would have much more “flexibility” in terms of further missile defense concessions.

Those whispers produced the now iconic quote: “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Of course, Obama’s countrymen were not supposed to hear those shared whispers, which came on an open mic in Seoul. Clearly, Obama has something in mind he’d rather American voters not know until after they perhaps give him four more years of unfettered political rule.

We also don’t know what else Obama and Putin discussed in Tuesday’s conversation, ostensibly prompted by marking a 67-year-old victory day that occurred years before either man was born.

The sanitized White House readout is below in full. In it we learn that Putin declined to meet Obama at Camp David this month. The purported reason: He’s busy assembling a cabinet, for which he’s only had four years advance planning. Also, without cellphones a traveling Putin would no doubt be forced to use a cumbersome semaphore communications system.

“Collateral damage.” How the DEA defines your business, your freedom, and your life

ClassicalValues

In a story that would be touching in the ordinary context, an 88 year old man and his 85 year old girlfriend built a portable water purification business from a dream to a reality. Nothing wrong there; such things are supposed to be part of the American Dream.

But now, their business is being ruined by one of the most unaccountable and tyrannical bureaucracies in the history of government, the DEA:

88-year-old Bob Wallace, and his 85-year-old girlfriend, Marjorie Ottenberg fell in love 35 years ago backpacking to the tops of the highest peaks in the world.

Wallace is a Stanford educated engineer and Ottenberg is a former chemist and decades ago they came up with a water purification product for backpackers like themselves called Polar Pure out of their garage in Saratoga, Calif.

“For an old guy with nothing else to do, this is something that keeps us occupied,” says Wallace.

Today, Wallace and Ottenberg are fighting the Drug Enforcement Administration and state officials to continue to operate their business. Why? The DEA says that drug dealers are using their product to make methamphetamine.

The DEA says meth heads are interested in Polar Pure’s key ingredient, iodine crystals.

Too lazy to go after the meth heads, they have to go after perfectly legitimate business, destroying the dream of two honest elderly Americans. You don’t have to be opposed to the Drug War to be opposed to such tyranny.

Wallace and Ottenberg’s business will of course be ruined, because they cannot possibly comply with the laws demands that they pay huge regulatory fees, plus “register with the state and feds, report any suspicious activity and keep track of each and ever person who bought a bottle of their product.”  Nor can their customers, which included camping stores and online outlets that stocked their product. They are being wiped out, and the DEA dismissively calls this “collateral damage”:

Instead of dealing with the new regulations they just dropped the product, effectively killing Wallace and Ottenberg’s business.

“Any time you deal with a government it’s a hassle,” says Ottenberg.

A spokeswoman for the DEA told the San Jose Mercury News that Wallace was “collateral damage.”

I suppose I could ask just what provision of the Constitution gives the DEA the power to shut down dealers in iodine. After all, I ask these questions all the time.

To no avail. We are no longer governed, but we are ruled. This government is monstrous. It no longer resembles what the founders envisioned, and very few people care. Those who do are ridiculed as cranks.

OK, so I’m a crank. I admit it. But that does not make me wrong. The DEA is operating outside of constitutional parameters so routinely that it has become a law unto itself.

And I don’t just mean asserting the power to regulate anything it wants. One of the hallmarks of tyranny is the detention of citizens without a hearing.

And more.

Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) sent a letter to DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart asking the agency to comply with an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the detention of 23-year-old Daniel Chong. The UC San Diego engineering student was arrested during a drug raid, interrogated for four hours, then locked in a holding cell and left there for five days without food, water, or access to a toilet.

During those five days, Chong was forced to drink his own urine. Fearing that he would die in the cell, he broke the lens of his glasses and attempted to carve a message to his mother on his arm using a shard. Chong then tried to commit suicide by swallowing the broken pieces of his eye glasses. He was discovered unconscious and covered in feces, and admitted to a San Diego hospital suffering from dehydration, kidney failure, and a punctured esophagus.

Got that? The DEA held a suspect for five days and nearly tortured him to death. This is the United States?

And how about the severely injured woman who, after surgery for a shattered knee cap, went to the drug store to fill a perfectly legitimate pain killer prescription, and found herself hauled away:

The pharmacy called Lenhart to ask her exactly what time she would be in pick up her prescription. She thought it was odd, but told the pharmacy what time she would be there.

Still on crutches and unable to drive, a friend of Lenhart’s, drove her to a CVS Pharmacy in Oak Cliff.

She wasn’t able to pick up her prescription because a police officer arrived to pick her up.

“He was like ‘we need to go outside,’” she said. “I was on crutches and I had a permanent IV line in my arm. I had a big leg brace. I asked him if it was necessary and he said yes and he rather policingly escorted me out the front door and into the back of a waiting patrol car.”

Never mind that it was another bureaucratic mistake. This severely injured woman spent the night in jail.  After she was finally released on bond, she was charged with a felony.

The DEA, of course, is behind this racket too. They have unconstitutionally delegated to themselves authority to regulate every prescription for every controlled substance sold in every pharmacy in the United States, and as Radley Balko explains in his analysis of the case, pharmacists and doctors live in terror of them:

These idiots couldn’t even bother to call the woman’s doctor before tossing her in a jail cell.

Lenhart’s story has been making its way around the web the past few days, and has been generating the appropriate outrage. But it shouldn’t be all that surprising. This is the perfectly predictable outcome of all this painkiller hysteria of late. It’s bad enough coming from the usual drug warriors. But because there’s a big evil pharmaceutical corporation to play the villain, we now get progressive outlets like ProPublica, and Alternet and Salon spitting out the government’s hype without the least bit of skepticism—or concern for pain patients.

You can’t really blame the pharmacist, here. She risks arrest and criminal prosecution if some overeager prosecutor looking to make a name for himself decides she hasn’t been sufficiently suspicious of her customers. Think about that. The government will now throw you in jail for failing to be suspicious enough of your fellow citizens. (And not just with painkillers — remember this monstrous injustice?)

Don’t blame her employer, either. The DEA recently shut down two CVS stores in Florida because federal drug cops thought the stores should have been turning away more people who came to fill pain medication prescriptions. Not only that, the agencies also attempted to shut down the wholesaler who supplies those stores for not being sufficiently suspicious of them, a move that would have left thousands of patients in several states without access to the medication they need.

The government has created a poisonous, paranoid atmosphere in which every player in the painkiller process from manufacturer to patient has been deputized to police every other player, to the point where anyone who doesn’t continually question the motives and actions of everyone else risks losing his livelihood, or even his freedom.

Yes, and that includes 88 year old water purifiers.

Collateral damage? How far does it go?

All Fall Down

VictorDavisHanson

The temple of postmodern liberalism was rocked these last few weeks, as a number of supporting columns and buttresses simply crashed, leaving the entire edifice wobbling.

Fake but Accurate Identities?

The trivial Elizabeth Warren “high cheekbones” fraud nonetheless offered a draw-back-the-curtain look into the gears and levers of our national race industry. The real story is not that the multimillionaire liberal (and one-percenter) Warren fabricated a Cherokee identity for over a decade (to the delight of her quota-thirsty universities), but rather the notion that if a pink blond at Harvard can get away with faking a career-enhancing minority identity, then anyone, anywhere, can—or rather often has.

Give Ward Churchill his due: he worked at it—unlike Warren, who junked her supposed great, great, great grandparent once she got tenure and being “Indian” was a drag at Cambridge cocktail parties. At least, like the proverbial chameleon on the leaf, Churchill tried to alter his appearance with buckskin, beads, and braids to find an edge his otherwise mediocre talents and white male status would not supply. In contrast, Warren simply by fiat claimed high cheekbones—no beads, no trips to the reservation, no buckskin, no Churchillian effort. Note the connivance of Harvard, which hand-in-glove used Warren’s pseudo-identity to pad its “diversity” goals, which enable a mostly white yuppie left-wing faculty to, well, not feel too guilty about remaining a mostly white yuppie left-wing faculty.

Anyone who has taught in a university has come across the “Cherokee” con, especially given the Oklahoma diaspora in California. By the time I retired from CSU, I was exhausted with “1/16th” Cherokee students, who claimed success with their gambits. This was a world of Provost Liz Smith-Lopezes, José Beckers, Simba Bavuals, and all the other attempts to traffic in victimized identities.

Still, Warren, as no other recent examples, reminds us of the bald fakery in America these days. “Van” Jones was not born Van Jones. Louis (note the Jehmu Greene bowtie) Farrakhan was not born Farrakhan (yet just try to be a cool black racist as the Caribbean Louie Wolcott, aka Calypso Gene). In his twenties, Barry Dunham Obama went from Barry (a not very useful preppie suburbanite-sounding name) to Barack Obama. In the La La lands of academia, high journalism, and big government (though not in the landscaping business, farming, or short-order cookery), we sometimes wear identities in America as we do clothes, a different outfit as the occasion demands, given that our present-day Jim Crow racialists are busy figuring out to what degree pigment, ethnic ancestry, nomenclature, or assumed identity “counts.”

Cross the border and you in theory can go from an impoverished Mexican national that lived a wretched material existence thanks to grandees in Mexico City to a “minority” with vicarious claims against the American system who is suddenly eligible for oppression-based, affirmative action recompense. But if your family came from Egypt in 1950, you apparently qualify for very little reparations, even if you are darker than the recent Jalisco arrival. Yet again, score 1600 on the SAT and achieve a 4.5 GPA in high school, and if both Asian and wanting to go to Berkeley or Stanford, well then, who cares about the Japanese interment, the Chinese coolie labor of the 1850s, or the exclusionary acts of the 1920s? Too many Asians doing too well is not diversity at all, so we go into the reverse quota mode of exclusion. Warren reminded us that we will soon need DNA badges to certify the exploding ethnic, racial, and gender claims against society. And just as there are too few young these days to support the retiring Baby Boom generation on Social Security, so too we have too few oppressors left to pay out subsidies and recompense for the growing legion of Warren-like victims.

Isn’t It the Economy, Stupid?

We have had 38 months of 8% plus unemployment. We are setting records in the numbers of Americans not working and the percentage of the adult population not employed. GDP growth was a pathetic 1.7%. The borrowing hit $5 trillion under Obama, who between golf outings and campaign hit-ups of wealthy people, adds $1 trillion plus each year in more debt. To question how to pay it back is to pollute the air or abandon the children. In 2005, Paul Krugman was writing why Bush’s spending was going to crash the economy; in 2012, Paul Krugman is writing why Obama’s far greater deficit spending, on top of Bush’s debts, is not going to crash the economy, given that we need to borrow far more than our paltry $3 or $4 billion a day.

In 2004, the media’s “jobless recovery” was the description of George W. Bush’s 5.4% unemployment rate. “It’s the economy, stupid” referred to George H.W. Bush’s 1992 annual 3.3-4% GDP growth rate. “Unpatriotic” was W’s $4 trillion in borrowing in eight years, not $5 trillion in three. If Obama right now had 5.4% unemployment, 3.4% economic growth, and a budget deficit of about $400 billion, what would the media call it—a job-full recovery, “it’s not the economy, smarty,” or patriotic borrowing?

Those with capital—slurred as one-percenters, fat cats, and corporate jet owners unless hit up for Obama campaign donations—are not hiring or buying. Maybe they think oncoming Obamacare will smash them. Maybe they see on the Obama horizon rampant inflation, debt cancellation, or higher taxes as planned liberal remedies for our endless borrowing. Maybe these shrugging Atlases see that fossil fuel energy is not pursued on federal lands, but needless new regulations are implemented.

Whatever the reason, they hesitate—only sorta buying here, kinda hiring there. And the result of millions of these collective hesitancies is an ossified Europeanized economy, run by technocrats without private sector experience and exempt from the sacrifice they demand of others, as they desperately try to borrow and grow the government to ensure a permanent lease on power through the creation of a vast angry dependent constituency. Not near-zero interest rates, not nearly a trillion dollars in “stimulus,” not four years of chronic deficits, not “quantitative easing,” not any classical priming seems able to shock the unwilling and hesitant back into action.

And Then There Is Our Survival

For about three years I have been monotonously suggesting that we were once again in a 1977-1979 Carteresque era, as Obama systematically trashed his predecessor’s policies, denounced “exceptionalism” and “unilateralism,” gave soaring narcissistic sermons on his/our new morality abroad, redefined both allies and enemies as morally equivalent neutrals, and generally suggested that if you were a China, Russia, Middle East, or Latin America, you had justifiable grievances against the pre-Obama U.S., at least during the era when the president was just “three years old.” Last time we did this, after three years of Carter’s sermonizing, calculating nations in 1979-1980 saw that it was time to get up from the table and cash in their chips. So we saw Russia in Afghanistan, China in Vietnam, Iranians in the U.S. embassy, communist insurgencies in Latin America, and radical Islam on the rise, culminating in the annus terribilis 1980. I’m afraid 2012 may be our 1980. For the Carter Doctrine will we get a Johnny-come-lately “Obama Doctrine”?

A “reset” Russia now threatens unilaterally to preempt and take out proposed U.S. anti-missile sites in Eastern Europe (Poland and the Czech Republic should enjoy that, even though it is mere bluster). The Chen case reminds of China’s growing contempt for the indebted U.S. (They did not get the message that a community organizer and Chicago part-time lecturer is a postnational, postracial healer.) The Arab Spring is turning into an Islamist Winter. What the media forgot to tell us about the spike-the-ball presidential trip to Afghanistan is the president’s promise to end Predator drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan—the liberal favorite tool of foreign policy (no prisoners in Guantanamo, no tribunals, no trials, no media videos of the explosions, no reports of the kids and granny blown up along with the suspect, little dollar costs, no U.S. lives endangered, no downside really other than we sometimes are not quite sure whom we blew up below).

The more we praised and emulated the EU, the more it unraveled and the more its leaders distrust the “lead from behind” America (Obama never quite got it that, when Europeans trashed us for leading and being capitalist, the whining was a psychological mechanism for being happy that someone other than themselves was still leading and somewhere outside Europe was still capitalist). Or alternatively, just as Obama is our Nemesis, so too he is Europe’s: be careful what you pine away for.

If I were a state or clique up to no good, and if I thought Obama might not be reelected, in my final window of opportunity, perhaps around September, I might flex my muscles in the former Soviet republics, send another missile over Japan or South Korea, cruise into Taiwanese waters, put some Argentine Marines on the “Malvinas,” seek readjustment in Cyprus and the Aegean, send some rockets into Tel Aviv, dispatch some suicide bombers from Gaza, and let off more missiles from Iran. Not just to make a statement, or to gain more “please don’t” concessions, but because it was my pleasure to do it—if only for the hell of it.

Ministry of Truth

Around January 2009, deficits became “stimulus.” “Jobless recovery” vanished from the vocabulary. Guantanamo, renditions, and preventative detention virtually ended. And Obama’s successful surge paved the way out of Iraq. Predator assassinations of hundreds of suspected terrorists and anyone nearby when the explosives went off were liberal improvements over waterboarding three confessed terrorists.

The good war in Afghanistan turned bad, and the bad one in Iraq turned good. The Obama “surge” brought peace to Iraq. We were told that we could not just sit by and watch Libyan thugs kill the innocent, but could do just that in oil-scant Syria. Obtaining UN and Arab League approval to go to war without the U.S. Congress was “leading from behind.”

Those who made over $200,000 never paid their “fair share,” but could—and not by paying more in taxes, but by buying a $40,000 a person ticket to an Obama fundraiser. Golf was now longer an aristocratic indulgence, but fresh-air, healthy downtime for an overworked president. Mangling words and abject ignorance—whether “corpse-man” or Maldives/Malvinas—were evident only to nit-picking partisans. A downright mean country redeemed itself with free jet service to Costa del Sol, Aspen, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard.

Yes, after January 2009, Al Gore lives in a tiny green home. “Two Americas” John Edwards did not really build a 30,000 square foot mansion, with a 4,000 square foot “John’s Lounge.” “Punish our enemies” was the new civility.

What Does It All Mean?

In short, liberalism does not work, contrary as it is to human nature. I wish I could just say that about every thirty years or so, forgetful Americans take an allergy shot of it, suffer the reaction, and then get another three decades of Carter/Obama immunity. But instead statist redistribution and intrusion are an insidious process, no longer specific just to Democrats, but bound up in the growing affluence and leisure of the West—both serving its various needs of alleviating guilt to the masses, subsidizing half the nation, and providing much envied power and lucre to a highly educated and technocratic elite who have little talent for acquiring either in the private sector. That it is not sustainable does not mean that it will not cause havoc as it totters and collapses. Look at Russia and Eastern Europe circa 1989, or the present-day EU, or Greece proper, or California or Illinois today.

Obama Unplugged

WashingtonFreeBeacon

President Obama told outgoing Russian President Dmitri Medvedev he would have “more flexibility” after the 2012 election to deal with issues including missile defense, in an exchange picked up by microphones in Seoul Monday.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

PRESIDENT MEDVEDEV: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

OBAMA: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

MEDVEDEV: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

As of 9:40 a.m., video of the exchange has only aired twice on television.

UPDATE: A senior GOP adviser on Capitol Hill called Obama’s remarks distressing.

“If there was any doubt how dangerous Barack Obama would be for America’s security in a second term, the president put all uncertainty to rest today,” said the source, who closely tracks foreign policy matters. “The president just told us that he is itching to hand over America’s most secret missile defense data to a country that is arming Syria and fueling Iran’s Bushehr reactor—and he would do it today but for his re-election concerns. With no political constraints in a second term, who knows what Obama will do.”

The adviser also said Obama’s remarks should cause concern among pro-Israel forces in America.

“If this is what the president’s promising the Russians on missile defense, God only knows what he’s promising Arab leaders about Israel,” noted the souce. “If you think Barack Obama was bad for Israel in term one, put your seatbelt on and get ready for term two.”

Obama to Putin: I’ll Surrender America After Re-election

Breitbart

Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that an open microphone caught President Barack Obama telling outgoing Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that he would be prepared to yield to Russian demands on missile defense after his re-election, but needed more “space” until then.

The two leaders were meeting in Seoul, South Korea, and Medvedev immediately promised to relay Obama’s message to incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin:

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

President Obama has repeatedly backed down on missile defense in the face of Russian demands, most famously abandoning American promises of cooperation with Poland and the Czech Republic in 2009. 

Republican opponents warn that Obama will follow an even more radical course in his second term than his first, because he will no longer face the same electoral pressures that saw his party lose control of the House of Representatives in 2010.

Savage: Here’s what America will look like if Obama wins

WND

If Barack Obama wins in 2012, America is headed for something worse than a failing European-style socialist state, top-rated radio host Michael Savage said on his nationally syndicated show today.

“I have to tell you that if this man, God forbid, is the next president of the United States, we’re going to be living in something along the lines of – people say Europe. I don’t believe it’s going to be like Europe – I think it will be closer to Chavez’s South American dictatorship,” he told his “Savage Nation” audience.

Recalling his background as the son of an immigrant from Russia, who has been around awhile and seen a number of administrations, Savage said that if he had one message to leave, it would be a warning about what he fears is on the horizon.

“This is the most corrupt, incompetent, dangerous tyrannical administration in American history,” he declared.

“It’s not politics as usual. It’s not just Democrats versus Republicans,” Savage said.

Obama, he said, is “not a Democrat,” noting the president’s history of ties to Marxists and other radicals documented in his book “Trickle Up Poverty.”

 

“Obama has a long history of being at odds with American values and with America itself and the core principles of this country.” Savage said.

 

Savage pointed to media as one of the areas in which “step by step, degree by degree, we’re losing our freedom.”

He cited a WND story by Aaron Klein about a non-profit journalism group funded by supporters of MoveOn.org and the ACLU that will supply news to NBC television affiliates.

“They don’t want government-sponsored opinions,” he said, “They only want government-sponsored “Pravda.’”

“Pravda,” which ironically means “truth” in Russian, he noted, was the official Communist Party newspaper in the old Soviet Union.

“That’s exactly what the government-media complex tells you on a daily basis – nothing but the government-media complex party line,” he said.

“Pay attention,” Savage concluded. “Your freedom may be at stake.”

Obama to Share Missile Defense Secrets With Russia?

BigPeace

Let’s cut the military – Check, Go play 2089 rounds of gold – Check, Give over secrets to the Russians – Check, Bow in obeisance to Al Qaida – Check….

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reports that President Barack Obama has indicated he is prepared to convey information about secret American missile defense technology to Russia:

In the president’s signing statement issued Saturday in passing into law the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill, Mr. Obama said restrictions aimed at protecting top-secret technical data on U.S. Standard Missile-3 velocity burnout parameters might impinge on his constitutional foreign policy authority.

As first disclosed in this space several weeks ago, U.S. officials are planning to provide Moscow with the SM-3 data, despite reservations from security officials who say that doing so could compromise the effectiveness of the system by allowing Russian weapons technicians to counter the missile. The weapons are considered some of the most effective high-speed interceptors in the U.S. missile defense arsenal.

There are also concerns that Russia could share the secret data with China and rogue states such as Iran and North Korea to help their missile programs defeat U.S. missile defenses.

Even before this latest revelation, the entire enterprise of President Obama’s disarmament policy–from “reset” with Russia to selling out our European allies–had been a colossal failure, an exercise in cowardice and appeasement that placed the security of the United States at risk.

In the pursuit of a thirty-year-old leftist grudge against President Ronald Reagan’s policy of “peace through strength,” Obama has now apparently suggested his willingness to give away a technological edge eagerly coveted by Russia and especially by China.

There can be no stronger case for replacing Barack Obama in November.

Russian billionaire, NBA owner, challenges Putin

Run Mikhail, Run!

“The society is waking up,” Prokhorov said at the news conference he held in Moscow to announce his candidacy. “Those authorities who will fail to establish a dialogue with the society will have to go.”