The Telegraph looks scathingly at the "extravagance and arrogance on display among the White House elites..."

What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and Democracy in America would be less than impressed with the extravagance and arrogance on display among the White House elites that rule America as though they had been handed some divine right to govern with impunity.

It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.

The timing of this lavish European vacation could not have come at a worse moment, when unemployment in America stands at 10 percent, and large numbers of Americans are fighting to survive financially in the wake of the global economic downturn. It sends a message of indifference, even contempt, for the millions of Americans who are struggling just to feed their families on a daily basis and pay the mortgage, while the size of the national debt balloons to Greek-style proportions.

While the liberal-dominated US mainstream media have largely ignored the story, it is all over the blogosphere and talk radio, and will undoubtedly add to the President’s free falling poll ratings. As much as the media establishment turn a blind eye to stories like this, which are major news in the international media, the American public is increasingly turning to alternative news sources, including the British press, which has a far less deferential approach towards the White House.

The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Marbella and the complete disregard for public opinion and concerns over excessive government spending is symbolic of a far wider problem with the Obama presidency – the overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.

It is epitomised above all by the President’s relentless drive towards big government against the will of the American people, and the dramatic increases in government spending and borrowing, which threaten to leave the US hugely in debt for generations. It is also showcased by Barack Obama’s drive towards a socialised health care system, which, as I’ve noted before, is “a thinly disguised vanity project for a president who is committed to transforming the United States from the world’s most successful large-scale free enterprise economy, to a highly interventionist society with a massive role for centralized government.”

There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.

Breaking news: Congress, White House outdumb Goldman Sachs, which easily side-steps new restrictions on trading

Goldman Sachs  has figured out a novel approach to getting around the Volcker Rule’s restrictions on trading: it’s remaking its risk-taking traders into asset managers, and the rest of Wall Street may soon follow, FOX Business Network has learned.

The big Wall Street firm has moved about half of its “proprietary” stock-trading operations — which had made market bets using the firm’s own capital — into its asset management division, where these traders can talk to Goldman clients and then place their market bets.

The move is designed to exploit a loophole in the Volker Rule, part of the recently signed financial-reform legislation named after presidential economic adviser and former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker. The Volcker Rule is supposed to scale back on Wall Street risk taking by ending what’s known as proprietary trading, where firms use their own ideas and capital to make market bets.

But by having the traders work in asset management, where they will take market positions while dealing with clients, Goldman believes it can meet the rule’s mandates, avoid large-scale layoffs and preserve some of the same risk taking that has earned it enormous profits, people close to the firm say.

Obama's loan modifiers are asking applicants to send proof of death; why isn't the ACLU protesting this unfogiveable snooping

Sarah Larson had been trying for months to get a break on her mortgage payments when a letter from her bank arrived in March. Sitting at the dining-room table of her Minneapolis house, the 33-year-old acupuncturist ripped open the envelope and pulled out a list of important documents demanded by Bank of America Corp.

Bank statements. A utility bill. Her death certificate.

Ms. Larson, who was struggling to make her $1,055-a-month mortgage after client appointments dropped off by half, is in good health. So she replied to the nation's largest bank in assets with a letter.

Sarah Larson was asked for a copy of her death certificate as she tried to modify the mortgage of her Minneapolis home.

."I am not sending a death certificate because I am not deceased," she wrote. "I am currently still living."

Turns out the bank had erroneously asked for proof of her demise—the sort of paperwork snafu that has roiled applicants since the Obama administration's foreclosure-prevention plan was announced in February 2009.

(snip)
 
So far, the 17-month-old effort has delivered a permanent fix to less than 15% of the borrowers the administration said it could ultimately help.

In the guise of stimulating recovery, Obama is building "secular socialist machine" patterned after Roosevelt's New Deal

Students of history will recognize the method to President Obama's madness. The parallels in both policy and politics to the Roosevelt Administration are too striking not to be deliberate. President Obama is consciously modeling his Administration on the Roosevelt Administration. But just as the liberals of the 1930s graduated to the New Left of the 1960s, President Obama's policies and politics transcend the liberalism of the 1930s. He is building what Newt Gingrich rightly calls a secular socialist machine in his new book To Save America.

Roosevelt's Keynesian economics was left for dead in the 1980s with President Reagan's supply-side revolution miraculously ending the stagflation of the 1970s with a 25-year economic boom. But President Obama came into office talking as if that never happened, casting it down the memory hole. While Reagan's early 1981 budget cuts slashed the federal budget by about 5%, Obama rammed through an almost $1 trillion stimulus package of nearly all Keynesian economics from the 1930s, laughing at his astounded critics with the question, "What do you think a stimulus is?"

Economically, it didn't work, just as it didn't in the 1930s or the 1970s. Now 29 months after the recession officially started in December, 2007, unemployment is 10% and rising, and the stock market is again stumbling, with the Dow still 4000 points off its last highs. The recovery was overdue a year ago, and even now economic growth is not half what it should be.

But note how the stimulus spending was structured so that more is spent this year than last. Was the goal to reduce unemployment as quickly as possible, or to use the guise of Keynesian stimulus spending for a political slush fund to buy as many votes as possible in this political year? Note also that about half of the direct "stimulus" spending went to state and local governments to prop up the employment of public employees, the most reliable supporters of liberal Democrat candidates. The only thing President Obama's stimulus is stimulating is a left-wing Democrat political machine.

As Congress mulls new financial firm regulations, Wall Street bails out a green Chicago bank with ties to Obama; why?

The Central Illinois 9/12 Project became one of the first to expose — beginning this past March on BigGovernment.com – Shorebank’s extensive green and microfinancing agendas, in anticipation of that bank’s impending bailout. Shorebank, a Chicago-based, community-based investment bank, is focused on domestic and foreign microfinancing, is heavily engaged in the financing of “green” projects and “green” jobs, and has a host of ties to the Obama and Clinton administrations. Most recently, we wrote in April about Shorebank seeking a “bailout” from larger financial firms that have previously received bailout money from the federal government. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky had previously proposed that the bank receive funds from the State of Illinois to help cover its loss of capital since the beginning of the nation’s economic downturn in 2008.

As we previously wrote, Shorebank would potentially be eligible for TARP funds if it were to be recognized as a “Community Development Financial Institution.” In order to to receive needed federal TARP money and prevent seizure by the FDIC, Shorebank needed to receive appropriate matching funds from private sources. News stories have been released over the past several days indicating that Shorebank has potentially received such funding.

Shorebank has reportedly received $20 million from General Electric, $20 million from Goldman Sachs, and $20 million from Citigroup – with additional large funds being promised by J.P.Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Shorebank also has received funds from the Northern Trust Corporation, State Farm, and Harris N.A. It has been reported that the bank could also receive funds from Wells-Fargo and PNC Financial Services. Assistance from these financial institutions puts Shorebank’s raised capital from private sources within the range needed to make it eligible for TARP funds.

As we reported previously, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Chase all received tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money from TARP. Does this then mean that Shorebank is being bailed out by bailout money?

Where professors rule, life is cruel...

Where professors rule, life is cruel.

That is the bottom line for the average American in this, the transformative age of the president the New York Times and Washington Post has called "Professor" Obama, who "schools" the ignorant at home and abroad. Never before have so many with so little humility gathered together in our government, each believing he "is the smartest guy in the room."

This is an administration stuffed with academics. And not just any academic: These are educators from elite universities, the kind of experts prized by a political and media elite seeking confirmation of a worldview that expects, notes the Washington Examiner, "the rest of us ... to shut up and do as we are told."

Inside the Beltway, "Harvard know-it-allness" is a prized commodity; outside, its practitioners are largely regarded as "obnoxious and arrogant" in the classroom and "jaw-droppingly incompetent" out of it. Small wonder trust in government has hit a fifty-year low.

Welcome to government by professor.

My take: As William F. Buckley said in 1963, "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

For this White House nothing beats "a blank slate - loyal, seemingly principle-free...careerist" for the Supreme Court

“Nothing is a better fit for this administration than a blank slate… loyal, seemingly principle-free, (a) careerist who… as the Obama Administration’s lawyer vigorously defending every one of his assertions of extremely broad executive authority.” That heads-up comes from Glenn Greenwald, a hard-left blogger on none other than Salon.com, who happens to a constitutional lawyer.

While more cautious, conservative blogger William Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor warns “because this is a lifetime appointment you want to know what you are getting. She does not have a long history of writing (and) that’s a big problem… there are more unknowns about her than most nominees.”

The she in all this is Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Given the Obama Administration is far from conservative or American-traditional, and has been very left in its approach to federal governance, that suggests Greenwald’s statement about Kagan, Obama’s latest nominee, may be a bulls-eye.

How did Elena Kagan get into her current White House assignment and with that close proximity gain his nomination?

Here too another constitutional law professor spills the beans.

Boston College’s Kent Greenfield said about Kagan “… she is far from an outsider… she is in the mainstream of the Democratic establishment.” Let’s be clear. That’s party – not philosophy.

All of which prompts me, and perhaps you too, to pause and go back above to reread the flag warnings of both liberal and conservative bloggers.

On reread, one can more likely conclude that President Obama has indeed sent a stealth nominee to the U. S. Senate. And, he has done so while his party still controls the hearings and process.

Obama runs away from ACORN at home but helps ACORN spread its radical message and techniques overseas

While the Obama administration runs away from ACORN here in the United States it is quietly embracing ACORN overseas.

The Obama administration is using U.S. government resources to help the embattled radical advocacy organization spread the gospel of left-wing community organizing in India.

President Obama’s ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer, recently lent his name and the prestige of the U.S. government to ACORN India’s efforts to organize rag-pickers in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay). Roemer is a former Democratic congressman who represented an Indiana district.

The website of the U.S. embassy in India displays a photograph from May 11 in which Ambassador Roemer is shown meeting with rag pickers in Dharavi, a slum in the suburbs of Mumbai. The official caption accompanying the picture indicates Roemer was discussing “ACORN India’s local waste management and recycling program.”

The Indo-Asian News Service confirmed in a report that day that Roemer spent time at the ACORN facility and met with ACORN India representative Vikram Adige.

The U.S. consulate in Mumbai, headed by Consul General Paul A. Flombsee, also co-sponsored a water conservation event on March 22 with ACORN India. Flomsbee is listed as the expected guest of honor at the event on ACORN India’s website.

ACORN India reports to ACORN International, which now goes by the name Community Organizations International. ACORN International serves as an umbrella organization for the various national organizations conducting ACORN’s business outside the U.S. ACORN International’s Facebook page describes the group’s mission as “building community groups in low income communities across the world to organize for power.”

ACORN International is active in Argentina, Canada, Dominican Republic, Honduras, India, Kenya, Mexico, and Peru.

One of the reasons the group was created was to allow ACORN to apply its corporate shakedown techniques against Western corporations as they expand into rapidly developing markets such as India.

ACORN India’s website declares that the group was created to help defend the “socialist legacy” of Jawaharlal Nehru, a leftist who was prime minister of India from 1947 to 1964. That “legacy” is “now in danger from the onslaught of the march of global corporatism,” according to the website.

“Countries like India are the next frontiers of significant market expansion for multi-national corporations; and these corporations are now starting to apply extreme pressure on the government of India for unfettered access,” according to ACORN India. “[The] Indian market is facing an onslaught of both foreign and domestic corporate retailers, the most notable of which is Wal-mart.”

Inquiring minds know what White House says, but what does it mean?

It's time for the Obama administration to bite the bullet and hire a platoon of translators. While claiming to cut health care costs, it raises them. While paying lip service to traditional American values, it runs roughshod over them by thuggishly increasingly the intrusiveness and authority of Washington, with IRS agents assigned to new levels of snooping. When Arizona enacts a meaningful law to curtail illegal immigration, the White House blasts the action.

Now, we have Peter Orszag, President Obama's budget director, expressing concern about the fast-rising deficits with words that stand out only because of their impenetrability..

Out-of-control deficits could "require increased borrowing abroad which will mortgage our future income to foreign creditors," Orszag told the first meeting of the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Reining in the deficit, which was $1.4 trillion in 2009, would "require significant changes in policy that build on what we have done," Orszag said.

Exactly how does a government change a policy and still "build on what we have done?"

What the Obama administration has done is grow government by seizing the health care industry, which, as part of the private sector, accounted for 13 percent of the national economy. How is building on that going to cut costs, given the obvious fact that government employees make more than comparable workers in the private sector?

Along the same line, how is the Obama administration's new love letter to Wall Street, in the form of a promise of future bailouts for troubled enterprises, going to cut costs? Isn't that love letter more likely to raise costs by encouraging recklessness now that a permanent safety net is being erected?

Goldman Sachs helped to blow up a 33-year-old social engineering project; now it must pay

Why is the Obama administration pursuing Goldman Sachs for enabling financial transactions between sophisticated, consenting adults?

Because the financial instruments at issue blew up a 33-year-old social engineering project that destroyed markets in pursuit of an unreachable liberal objective: universal home ownership.
Goldman Sachs devised those complex investments.

The campaign for universal home ownership began in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter secured enactment of the Community Reinvestment Act, which prohibited lenders from red-lining, a practice that denied home mortgages to residents of high-risk neighborhoods.

Over time, the CRA movement spilled out of its original constituency, the conspicuously compassionate, as radicals from ACORN and other activist organizations joined the fray, gaining legal sanction to browbeat bankers and picket lenders who refused to confirm to the growing demands for mortgage accomodation.

Still, the CRA remained a modest effort by federal government standards, From 1977 through 1991, only $8.8 billion was committed under the CRA. Then Democrat Bill Clilnton became president and business picked up. From 1992 through 2005, the first year of George Bush's second term, $4.2 trillion in CRA loans went out the door.

The concept of risk apparently had been erased from the mortgage industry. Local lenders could bend to pressure for loans and then wash their hands of risk by immediately selling those loans to Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, which were backed by the federal treasury and supported by the political class. That was the first step in the process of bundling mortgages as securities, a process that resulted in mortgages from Pequot Lakes and Tuscaloosa finding eager buyers in Madrid.

The U.S. housing market sizzled.

But one savvy investor, a hedge fund operator in New York, wasn't buying it. John Paulson studied records of the bundled mortgages and made a list of the ones he considered most likely to go bad through default. Then he persuaded Goldman Sachs to craft securities based on the suspect mortgages and bet against the market by selling them short. That is, he sold securities without first buying them.

Paulson's trading was prophetic. When the housing market collapsed, Paulson earned billions of dollars, closing out his transactions by buying back the Goldman Sachs securities for pennies on the dollar. He sold high, then bought low, reversing the usual process.

What troubles sophisticated observers is this. The securities that Paulson shorted were bought by sophisticated, willing investors. Neophytes don't participate in short sale transactions. So what's the problem? Why did the Securities and Exchange Commission vote, 3 to 2, in favor of legal action  against Goldman?

Here's a thought. In essence, the CRA was a colossal social engineering project. When it was enacted, and for many years thereafter, a high-risk borrower could get a loan only by paying a higher-than-average interest rates. In recent years, however, the CRA and subsequent legislation, court decisions and rabble rousing tactics reduced the reliance on interest rates as compensation for high risk.

During the Bush administration the Federal Reserve kept interest rates so low that more and more high-risk borrowers could get loans. As social engineering, the CRA was a success story.

Now, the Obama agenda is largely made up of social engineering projects designed to overcome market forces and make scarce resources available to all, whether they want them or not, whether they can afford them or not. Obamacare, for instance, would force the young and healthy to buy health care insurance even though many would prefer to take their chances and spend their money on something else. One result will be more generational theft, with the young forced to buy insurance they will not need.

Coming soon: cap and trade, which will require consumers to alter preferences and manufacturers to bear increased costs, even though the science behind global warming theory has been thoroughly discredited. In recent years, global warming has become the most powerful social engineering project of our time.

But that project runs counter to market forces, which require least cost solutions. Cap and trade would raise costs, and prices, for many of the things people buy and use. To secure enactment, the Obama administration will have to use thuggish tactics, as it did to pass Obamacare, bribing members of congress to vote against the desires of their constituents.

The SEC's lawsuit against Goldman Sachs may cause opponents to think twice about going up against the White House.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Saturday the U.S. would delay a report to Congress on the currency policies of major trading partners, including China, citing a spate of high-level meetings between China and the U.S. The meetings, he said, "are the best avenue for advancing U.S. interests at this time."

In a carefully worded and direct statement, Mr. Geithner said the Asian giant was relying on "currency intervention" and must move to a "more market-oriented exchange rate."

How hypocritical is this? The Obama administration, presiding over a nation founded on the market system, routinely disdains market solutions to domestic issues, such as costly health insurance premiums, but wants to foist markets on China.

Lecturing China is the right thing to do in this case. The administration could solve the hypocrisy problem by applying the market system to a wide range of issues at home. One thing it could do is tell its Democrat friends in Congress to stop demonizing AT&T and other corporations for publicly revealing that they are writing off their additional costs brought about by Obamacare.

This administration and its allies have a breathtaking tendency to say one thing and do another. 

The most revealing explanation so far of Obamination