"Obama has followed the fascist line"

"The real policy of Obama -- to have his image as ubiquitous in America as Stalin's in Russia or Mao's in China -- is working, but people still seem to question his infinite wisdom. It was clever to sit quietly while political thugs in Iran beat, arrested, tortured, and raped women. It was prudent to support a Leftist brute's effort to hold onto power in Honduras, despite his unsavory gang of allies or the constitutional decision by that nation's supreme court that he was breaking the law. It is smart thinking to sit down with Medvedev, presidential hand-puppet of Putin (Obama does read history -- right? -- does he know that the particular office in Russia means much less than who the strong man is? Of course he does! He's The Leader!)

Obama has followed the Fascist line, or, if you will, the Alinksy line, all the way: Action! Constant motion! Each day a new program! Each week a new Czar of something! He and Benito, who like him was a family loving pragmatist demagogue, see that everything must be brought in line. All must serve the state, and the state will care for them.

Our president has essentially given up on the rule of law and ordered liberty. He is no Hitler, no Stalin, and no Mao. He is, instead, very much a Mussolini. He will push business, labor, local governments, and other social institutions into the vague directions which seem best to him. He will make business do what it should (and he knows best) and he will create a bewildering array of grand and petite officers to watch this and regulate that.

We are almost there -- we have come so far! -- when members of Congress can vote on legislation which could be called the "Blank Check Bill" and when even the failures of his own party can be blamed, retroactively, on the failures of the party out of power, then we are close to that fairly tame totalitarianism, Fascism. When Obama can almost dictate the questions he will be asked in any forum, then we are near to having our Duce."

Sen. Inhofe: EPA hiding skeptical paper on warming

"A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency's alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

"He came out with the truth. They don't want the truth at the EPA," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he's ordered an investigation. "We're going to expose it."

The controversy comes after the House of Representatives passed a landmark bill to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, one that Inhofe said will be "dead on arrival" in the Senate despite President Obama's energy adviser voicing confidence in the measure."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/29/gop-senator-calls-
inquiry-supressed-climate-change-report/?test=latestnews

Will the Senate play undertaker for cap and trade?

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy for the Competetive Enterprise Institute, made this comment on the House's passage of the Cap and Trade bill:

"Vote first, find out what's in the bill later.

House Democratic leaders have managed to squeeze a 1510-page energy-rationing bill through the House on a 219 to 212 vote by filling it full of payoffs to special interests, not releasing the full text until 3 AM the night before the vote, and restricting debate to three hours.

The process should be an embarrassment to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), but once people find out what's in it, the bill will become an embarrassment to everyone who voted for it.

Waxman-Markey has no future in the Senate, and with any luck this first victory for energy-rationing legislation will be the last. I congratulate Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) for their magnificent leadership against the bill.

On the other hand, the eight Republicans who voted for this monstrosity provided the margin of victory, which suggests that the Republicans in Congress are still in disarray."

Distinction between U.S. political and corporate cultures recedes, as in Italy and Germany in 1930s

"General Electric, a top-20 source of funds for Obama in 2008, and owner of the Obama-friendly MSNBC, already has strong ties to Democrats, but the company has bolstered that relationship, according to recently filed federal lobbying registrations.

GE's transportation business has hired as a lobbyist Linda Hall Daschle, wife of Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic Leader and Obama's first pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Mrs. Daschle will lobby on issues including Amtrak, high-speed rail, and freight rail, the lobbying form says. Obama has declared support for added federal funding for high-speed rail.

GE is also a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which lobbies for restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions."

(snip)

A commenter: "GE has become the perfect example of a so called capitalistic company engaging in pure rent seeking. They want Congressional subsidies for things like wind mills and others of their product lines. You mention MSNBC as being heavily skewed left, but we also see John Harwood at NBC who needs to get a room every time he talks about Obama. Then, there is the censoring at CNBC. Dylan Rattigan is gone after a rant on the government funded payouts by AIG to the the likes of Goldman and foreign banks. Santelli has been muzzled after his rant suggesting tea parties. GE is a prime example of a rent seeking company that should not be allowed to own media companies to pursue its rent seeking."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/
beltway-confidential/GE-hires-Linda-Daschles--lobbying-firm-48798437.html

The climate "crisis," the key to a fascist America

"Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” is the “most up-to-date, authoritative, comprehensive” analysis ever done on how human-caused warming affects the United States, deadpans Obama “science advisor” John Holdren.

Actually, it’s the most flagrant attempted con-job and propaganda campaign in US history.

If it helps Congress enact cap-and-tax legislation, it will give activists, courts and bureaucrats control over virtually every aspect of our lives. It will enable them to confiscate hard-earned dollars, convert them to payoffs for activists and companies that get on the climate-crisis bandwagon, consign uncooperative companies and scientists to the ash heap of history, and conceal the exorbitant costs of restrictive energy policies – on families, industries, jobs and transportation – until long after the bill becomes law.

The bogus “report” conflates and confuses human activities and emissions with the powerful natural forces that have caused major and minor climate changes and weather anomalies since the dawn of time – from the Carboniferous Period to the Age of Dinosaurs, from the Big Ice Ages and interglacial periods to the Little Ice Age, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, Dust Bowl and countless others. It relies on conjecture, conformist thinking and conspicuous elimination of contrary, skeptical, realist scientists and studies that do not support climate cataclysm conjecture and ideology."

http://townhall.com/columnists/PaulDriessen/2009/
06/20/us_governments_climate_con-job

Coming soon to Fox News: a news host who drinks coffee and makes faces...Oh, wait!

"News Corp. is forming an external diversity council in response to pressure over a New York Post cartoon that critics said compared President Barack Obama to a dead chimpanzee.

The cartoon appeared in February. News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch published an apology in the Post, but civil rights and community organizations demanded further action.

NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said Wednesday that News Corp. had agreed to form a "diversity community council" that will meet semiannually with company executives.

The council will include members of the NAACP, 100 Black Men of America, the National Action Network and the National Urban League."

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D98NTN484&show_article=1

George Will: We didn't heed the warnings

"In 1937, columnist Walter Lippmann, deploring the rise of "authoritarian collectivism," lamented that in order to be taken seriously a politician or theorist had to have "proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs." Paul A. Rahe, a historian and political philosopher at Hillsdale College, in his new book "Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift," notes that, long before 1937, we were warned.

In "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated people being governed by "an immense, tutelary power" determined to take "sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate." It would be a power "absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident and gentle," aiming for our happiness but wanting "to be the only agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness." It would, Tocqueville said, provide people security, anticipate their needs, direct their industries and divide their inheritances. It would envelop society in "a network of petty regulations -- complicated, minute and uniform." But softly: "It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them" until people resemble "a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

So what today seems as modern as Matisse once seemed was actually foreseen 17 decades ago."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/10/upsdie-down_economy_96411.html

A preening fascist sets out to destroy capitalism, finds willing allies among failed MI politicians

"Our story begins with the slow downfall of Chrysler, which succumbed to bankruptcy after experiencing a steep sales decline of 48 percent in one year. During its slide, Chrysler borrowed money from lenders and in return signed a contract promising that as so-called senior creditors, they'd get paid before anyone else if the company went under.

These creditors, by the way, represent something of a cross-section of America: the University of Kentucky, Kraft Foods' retirement fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pension funds, teachers' credit unions, and so on.

A normal bankruptcy filing would be straightforward. Senior creditors get paid 100 cents on the dollar. Everyone else gets in line.

But President Obama and his allies don't want that to happen. So they interfered on behalf of unions (the junior creditors) and publicly upbraided the senior creditors who were asserting their contractual rights and threatening to head to bankruptcy court.

Last week Mr. Obama lambasted them as "a small group of speculators" who "endanger Chrysler's future by refusing to sacrifice like everyone else."

Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, sent reporters a statement calling the creditors "vultures" and "rouge hedge funds." Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm piled on, taking aim during her radio address at a 'few greedy hedge funds that didn't care how much pain the company's failure would have inflicted on families and communities everywhere.'"

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/07/politics/
otherpeoplesmoney/main4997900.shtml

Government may soon own bailed out banks

Call it "creeping fascism."

By transforming carbon dioxide from a harmless gas essential to plant life into a dangerous gas that must be controlled to avoid widespread disaster, the Environmental Protection Agency is inviting the Obama administration to exercise unprecedented power over the natural resource and industrial sectors of the American economy.

Next up: lasting control of banks and other financial institutions.

The New York Times reported Monday that the White House is considering a conversion of hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money to common stock in the banks that received it. By doing so, the Times reported, the administration "can shore up the nation’s banking system without having to ask Congress for more money any time soon," according to officials.

"In a significant shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout fund further than they had expected a few months ago, simply by converting the government’s existing loans to the nation’s 19 biggest banks into common stock.

Converting those loans to common shares would turn the federal aid into available capital for a bank — and give the government a large ownership stake in return."

The proposed move raises again a question that first came up when the Bush administration proposed the bank bailouts last year. Why doesn't the government take preferred stock in the recipient banks in exchange for the bailouts?

This would have kept the government out of direct management of the banks.

By proposing a payback in common stock, the Obama administration is demonstrating that it wants power over the banks commensurate with its stock holdings.

"...some critics would consider it a back door to nationalization, since the government could become the largest shareholder in several banks," the Times acknowledges.

"The Treasury has already negotiated this kind of conversion with Citigroup and has said it would consider doing the same with other banks, as needed. But now the administration seems convinced that this maneuver can be used to make up for any shortfall in capital that the big banks confront in the near term."

Treasury has about $135 billion left from the $700 billion commited to bank bailouts, but the Times reports that "the nation’s banks are believed to need far more than that to maintain enough capital to absorb all their losses from soured mortgages and other loan defaults."