John Curran, Associated Press.com

 

FAIRFIELD, Vt. — Finding the "birthplace" of President Chester A. Arthur is easy: Turn left at Town Hall and its Chester A. Arthur Conference Room, go past Chester's Bakery and turn right on Chester A. Arthur Road.

 

Nearly five miles up the winding two-lane country road, past rolling hills and dairy farms, is the tiny Chester A. Arthur Historic Site, proclaiming the spot where the nation's 21st president was born in a cottage.

 

Or was he?

 

Nearly 123 years after his death, doubts about his U.S. citizenship linger, thanks to lack of documentation and a political foe's claim that Arthur was really born in Canada — and was therefore ineligible for the White House, where he served from 1881 to 1885.

 

Long before "birthers" began questioning the citizenship of President Barack Obama, similar questions were raised about the early years of Arthur, an accidental president who ascended to the job after President James Garfield was assassinated.

 

"It's an old rumor that won't die, political slander," said John Dumville, who runs Vermont's historic sites and knows well the legend. "It's a fun story, and it comes up every year. People latch on to it and they've read about it somewhere and they want to know more." Read article.

 

David Limbaugh.com

 

President Barack Obama has run into a brick wall: the American people, who cherish their liberty and revere their nation and do not want it remade in Obama's socialist image.

 

Obama's free-falling poll numbers are not the result of a misinformation campaign from a small sliver of unruly conservative opponents, as the administration wants you to believe. They are a reflection of the public's reaction to Obama's policies and his own comprehensive misinformation campaign to dupe the people into believing America is unsalvageable without fundamental change.

 

When Obama promised to bring fundamental change to America, most Americans, fortunately for him, did not take him literally. He offered them "hope" at a time when the economy was going south; political partisanship had reached new levels of acrimony, and people were weary of a protracted, albeit successful, war in Iraq. But most voters had no idea just how much change Obama had in mind.

 

But Obama was dead serious. If it wasn't obvious to trusting people then, it is abundantly so now. He doesn't share the majority's vision of America as the most wonderful experiment in constitutional governance in history. He sees it as a land of plenty, all right -- plenteous inequities, with maldistribution of resources, oppression and imperialism.

 

Surely people can now see that it is no accident that he sat at the feet of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, that his mother was a leftist activist and cultural Marxist, that his main early mentor was radical Frank Marshall Davis, that he was a member of the far-left New Party in Chicago, that his main vocation in life has been street organizing and agitation and that he didn't think the revolutionarily, transformative Warren court was liberal enough.

 

Since assuming office, Obama has been on a mission to fundamentally alter the social compact between the government and a once powerfully sovereign people. Read article.

 

Monica Crowley, Washington Times.com

 

President Obama, once considered as politically agile and deft as a gazelle, is now looking increasingly like a deer caught in the headlights.

 

His poll numbers on everything from job approval to his handling of the economy, health care, taxes and bailouts are dropping faster than a cement shoe in the Hudson River. Perhaps even more worrisome, Rasmussen Reports shows that fewer Americans consider him "trustworthy."

His popular support is hemorrhaging because all of his major initiatives are either failing in execution or in the legislative process. According to a new USA Today/Gallup Poll, 57 percent of Americans say the $787 billion economic stimulus is having no effect on the economy or is making it worse.

 

An even higher percentage -- 60 percent -- doubt the stimulus will improve the economy in the years ahead. A new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll shows a whopping 72 percent of Democrats, Republicans and independents would like to see the balance of the unspent stimulus money -- about $600 billion -- returned to taxpayers.

 

The cap-and-trade legislation cleared the House (barely) but looks to die a timely death in the Senate. A majority of Americans now reject this scheme as they have learned it would be tantamount to the largest tax increase in the history of the world.

 

And now, Mr. Obama's Orwellian health care vision is going down in a ball of flames, with Americans of every ideological stripe in revolt over some part of what's being proposed, conceded and debated. Read article.

James Simpson, American Thinker.com

 

These are perilous times. Last November's election of Barack Obama and a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats in both houses allowed a virulent cabal to capture our nation's seat of power. As with the Democrat takeover of Congress in 2006, it was a disaster of epic proportions. With one shocking, enormous, blatantly partisan, self-serving and destructive proposal following on the heels of another, the sheer enormity of their power grab defies description. But as each new proposal moves forward, the hand of the Crisis Strategy becomes clear.

 

If there were ever any doubt that Barack Obama personifies the Crisis Strategy, it should long since have been removed for anyone with a mind. Since so many Americans seem to have lost theirs, I address this to the rest of you. For with God's help, it is you and I, not our gutless, hapless, corrupt politicians, nor our sleeping populus that will save this country or allow it to fall.

 

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Crisis Strategy was the brainchild of two radical socialist college professors, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The idea was to overwhelm government with demands for services to the point where the system would collapse and provide an opening for the socialists to take over. Their strategy was behind creation of the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1960s and 1970s which dramatically increased the welfare roles and caused the near bankruptcy of New York City in 1975; creation of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), prime instigators of the mortgage meltdown; the national Motor Voter law signed by President Clinton in 1993, which opened the floodgates to vote fraud by ACORN and similar groups; and the illegal immigrant amnesty movement. As we all should know by now, Barack Obama worked with and trained ACORN workers for many years, and is known and supported by all the major players in this movement.

 

The Dems won't cut benefits to the poor just yet though, because they still need their votes. Later on they will need them as hired muscle. But once they secure unchallengeable power, do you think they'll care? They have willfully worked to destroy every beneficial thing in our society. These are vicious, selfish, utterly corrupt parasites. They have spent a lifetime abandoned to a philosophy that makes excuses for everything and anything in the service of one ultimate goal: absolute power.

 

These people have to be stopped. That we are no longer being fooled is becoming more and more apparent. The Dems control both houses of Congress so this remains an uphill battle, but if enough get the message that their careers are on the line, these utterly self-serving pols may actually come around to our point of view, simply for sheer survival purposes.

 

We cannot let up. Not for a minute. Read article.

 

Ross Mackenzie, Townhall.com

 

Domestically, it's a heart beating hotly for throttling American industry in the name of a cleaner environment. For "energy independence" without expanded nuclear power. For a "stimulus package" (etc.) causing (in for instance the fiscal year ending this fall) record-setting $2 trillion annual deficits. And for the government running "reformed" banks, insurance companies, automobile manufacturers, and the nation's health delivery system with all the efficiency of Amtrak and the Postal Service.

 

In the words of Eliot Cohen, a Bush II administration State Department counselor now teaching at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International studies:

 

Brimming with confidence in his abilities and certain of the rightness of his views, (President Obama) has undertaken a wildly ambitious agenda at home and abroad. He will bring peace between Arab and Israeli, wean Iran from its nuclear ambitions, restructure the international financial system, set us on the path to abolition of nuclear weapons, reconcile Islam and Christendom, and end global warming, while introducing universal health care at home and bringing the country out of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

 

So...what's Obamamania? Unbridled enthusiasm for all those dubious developments, initiatives, comments, and programs. That's "change we can believe in" - yes oh yes we can! Read article.

 

Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com

 

One is not supposed to associate corruption, incompetence, and embarrassment with the Obama administration.

 

But David Axelrod in various ways, from his son's current employment, to contracts in which he is owed money, is still in part connected with the very Obama 2008 campaign lobbying firms that now have morphed into receiving lucrative contracts to push administration health-care reform. From a variety of news reports, the multi-million-dollar income of these firms seems to be in large part predicated on contracts in which administration recommendations are critical, and the direct subsequent beneficiaries of their profits include Axelrod's friends, family — and himself, given that his ex-firm's profitability is critical to paying Axelrod his final contractual cash-out sums. One cannot work for the president of the United States, and then be associated with policies and guidance that result in one's former firm being able to pay one millions still owed. The conflict of interest is just too great.

 

Robert Gibbs has done the impossible and trumped Scott McClellan as the most embarrassing press secretary in recent memory. He does not come equipped with the facts and seems unserious about the need to be accurate; his answers are neither reasoned nor logical; he insults his questioners. He is tongue-tied and, in McClellan fashion, flares up at others apparently in exasperation at his own incoherence. Gibbs bears in small part responsibility for the growing belief that the Obama administration is unprepared, often confused, and petulant when called on it. Read article.

 

Denis Boyles, NRO.com

 

August, and golden oldies. Serious thought is forbidden this month, which is why every middle-aged pop critic in America is still waxing on Woodstock and talking about how Janis changed the world and Arlo shut down the New York State Thruway, man. The vacuousness of August might explain why the White House thought it was the perfect month to go Kerouacing with Obamacare — ending up in Montana, no less.

 

I wonder how it would play in Paris? After all, this is the month that marks what must surely be one of the most important anniversaries in the history of government-run medicine. But so far, there’s been scant mention of the August 2003 heatwave that descended on France and left the nation’s oldest and weakest citizens to the mercy of a state-run health-care system. Read article.

 

Noemie Emery, Weekly Standard.com

 

Dear Mr. President, How nice to know you will summer on Martha's Vineyard at Blue Heron Farm, where the amenities are said to be fabulous. "The 28-acre estate, $20 million enclave is located in Chilmark," CBS told us. "The farm suits Obama to a tee with golf facilities, a pool, basketball court, private beach, and a rental price tag of up to $50,000 a week."

 

What happened? Versailles and The Breakers were rented already?

 

Is this how you empathize with the suffering masses, whose pain you feel so at town meetings? What is it with real estate and you liberal Democrats? There's John Kerry, who has five mansions, including a ski chalet whose every last stone was brought over from England; and John Edwards, whose "house" looks like five of them strung together, and which has not one, but two, stages, and its own private gym. Perhaps you could use "John's Lounge," if John isn't in it, off making one of his speeches on poverty or the unsustainable gaps between the lives of rich and poor people. There really are Two Americas. No one knows it better than do you and Kerry and Edwards, and you know which one you belong to. As will the swing voters, as they stay at home nursing their shrunken portfolios, and watching you splash on the beach on TV.

 

And then there's the matter of the Vineyard itself, whose place in the history of presidential vacations has not been terribly good. "The enemy of economic populism is wealth and privilege," writes Dick Morris, the guru who helped Bill Clinton return from the political dead after having been poleaxed in the 1994 midterm elections. "The enemy of social populism is the intellectual and cultural elite." Put it this way, and the Vineyard turns into the ultimate twofer when it comes to being a jinx on political fortunes.

 

 It is the place where the intellectual and cultural elite wallow not only in self-satisfaction but in privilege beyond all belief. The Clintons pioneered the presidential use of the Vineyard for summer vacations, and for them, these vacations came in two kinds: the pride-goeth-before-a-fall-pre-Republican Congress vacations of 1993-94, and the post-confession Remorse Vacation of the impeachment summer, than which no worse First Vacation has ever occurred. Read article.

 

Michael Barone, Washington Examiner.com

 

Dear Young Obama Voter,

 

 

You voted, as your candidate and our president said, for hope and change. But I ask you to consider whether the policies, which the president has proposed and in some cases pushed through really amount to that.

 

I ask you to examine them through the prism of a book published in 1999, when most of you were too young to vote: “The Future and Its Enemies,” by Virginia Postrel (an Obama voter, too, by the way). Postrel assesses policies based not on whether they are liberal or conservative but on whether they are dynamist — promoting or leaving room for change — or stasist — tending to freeze institutions and people in place.

 

By my reckoning, the Obama policies are more stasist than dynamist. The unions’ card check bill that he backs would effectively abolish the secret ballot in union elections and impose mandatory federal setting of wages and work rules after 120 days of union-management negotiations. Centralized mediators would determine your pay and work rules, modeled perhaps after those between the United Auto Workers and what we used to call the Big Three automakers. They have 5,000 pages of work rules. Don’t change that lightbulb; you have to wait for the right union guy to do it. Is this the way to enable you to exercise creativity and initiative in your work? Read article.

 

Wesley Pruden, Washington Times.com

 

The congressional entitlement to privilege, wrought not by talent or inheritance but by legislation, explains the typical congressman's blindness to tint and deafness to tone, revealed in the angry "town hall" confrontations over health care legislation. Instead of reassuring frightened constituents, Democratic congressmen (and women) denounce the voters who sent them to Washington as Nazis, Brown Shirts and the "un-American." Harry Reid, the leader of the Senate Democrats, calls the critics "evil-mongers." Congress is dead to anything outside the bubble it has created for itself.

 

Sens. Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, for scandalous example, are under investigation by ethics committees for taking sweetheart mortgages from Countrywide Financial Corp., the sort of sweetheart deals mere citizens could never get. To hear the senators tell it, the deals were merely rewards for their charm and enchanting ways. The fact that Mr. Conrad is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and Mr. Dodd is chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee had nothing to do with anything.

 

"I thought this was like a frequent-flier program," Mr. Conrad says. "I thought nothing of it." No doubt. Mr. Dodd says he was told by an official of Countrywide that his VIP status was "nothing more than courtesy stuff."

 

If you're an account executive at a large banking and financial corporation, you learn quickly to extend "courtesy stuff" to senators who influence make-or-break banking legislation. If senators want frequent-flier miles, you make sure they get them, even if they travel by streetcar.

 

But it's not just Messrs Conrad or Dodd, who only seem uniquely clueless to the reality of the world the rest of us live in. Congress has established a system of frequent automatic pay raises so members never even have to vote for them, enjoys a platinum-plated health care program designed by congressmen just for congressmen. Read article.

 

J.J. Jackson, Alain's Newsletter.com

 

The Republicans have made far too many deals with the devil by allowing the likes of Olympia Snowe and former Republican, but never really a Republican, Arlen Specter to hang around and gum up the works.

 

In the 1980s the United States Department of Transportation decided that somewhere in the Constitution they had the power to use tax payer dollars to fund PSAs featuring two crash test dummies, Vince and Larry, with the purpose of convincing American to buckle up while in their cars. The campaigns slogan was, “You can learn a lot from a Dummy.” Well, it is true, you can learn a lot from a Dummy be they plastic or a member of Congress.

 

Exhibit A is Maxine Waters, moonbat extraordinaire, who has rarely seen a gross and unconstitutional overreach of federal power she did not like. Ms. Waters is frustrated. She is frustrated because her party, the Democratic Party, is technically in power in Washington. They control both houses of Congress, the White House and have just replaced one left wing loon with another left wing loon on the Supreme Court. All is seemingly right, erI mean left, with the world.

 

Well, except for one teensy weensy little problem. While the Democrats have the numbers based on party affiliation, actually getting those numbers to march in goose-stepping lockstep with the Party’s left wing agenda has proven a little more difficult. There are plenty of D’s running around Washington but some of those D’s are not the sort of D’s that are helpful to the cause of Waters and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate. These D's are not quite as left wing, anti-liberty and anti-American as those that are sitting on high and smiling that all is good.

 

While the Democrats have the numbers based on party affiliation, actually getting those numbers to march in goose-stepping lockstep with the Party’s left wing agenda has proven a little more difficult. There are plenty of D’s running around Washington but some of those D’s are not the sort of D’s that are helpful to the cause of Waters and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate. These D's are not quite as left wing, anti-liberty and anti-American as those that are sitting on high and smiling that all is good. Read article.

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