John Fund, Online WSJ.com

 

Only one of the five television networks that interviewed President Obama for their Sunday shows bothered to ask him about Acorn, the left-wing community organizing group whose federal funding was cut off last week by an overwhelming vote in Congress.

 

"Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," Mr. Obama claimed, adding he wasn't even aware the group had been the recipient of significant federal funding. "This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to," he said.

 

Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.

 

Mr. Obama's success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn's Chicago conferences. Read article.

Frank Luntz, NY Daily News.com

 

Obama's popularity hasn't tumbled because he's black. It's tumbled because he has come to represent Washington instead of those who sent him there.

 

I know this because of a 6,400-person interview survey I conducted for my new book "What Americans Really Want ... Really." I sat down to write this book, conduct the poll and insisted that the second "really" be included in the title because I was fed up with opinion elites who ascribe opinions to Americans that simply do not exist.

 

The latest flareup over supposed racism is only the most recent example. America certainly isn't perfect, but as a society, we are intolerant of intolerance, and we'll immediately demonize anyone, anywhere who tries to play the race card. Just ask Bill Clinton.

 

The real reason why 72% of the people I interviewed say that they're "mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore" has nothing to do with racism. No, their rage is about a lack of accountability, a lack of respect, and a lack of progress in the nation's capital.

 

Let's start with the absence of accountability, because that ranks No. 1 in the hearts and guts of the average American. Read article.

NewZeal.Blogspot.com

 

Ron Bloom was named the Manufacturing Czar for the United States by President Barack Obama on September 8, 2009-two days after communist "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones resigned under pressure.

 

To understand Ron Bloom's assigned role, it helps to know the environment he comes from.

 

The Obama administration has emphasized Bloom's investment banking and business background.

 

But Bloom has spent far longer in the labor and socialist movements than he has on Wall Street. There is even some evidence that Bloom specifically went into banking, in order to better serve organized labor.

 

Like Obama himself, Bloom has moved in circles close to Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-an organization far more "socialist" than "democratic".

 

To illustrate DSA's radicalism I cite their journal Democratic Left, Spring 2007. The article by Detroit DSA chair and National Political Committee member David Green supports the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)-or "card check".

 

What distinguishes socialists from other progressives is the theory of surplus value. According to Marx, the secret of surplus value is that workers are a source of more value than they receive in wages. The capitalist is able to capture surplus value through his ownership of the means of production, his right to purchase labor as a commodity, his control over the production process, and his ownership of the final product. Surplus value is the measure of capital’s exploitation of labor

 

Our goal as socialists is to abolish private ownership of the means of production. Our immediate task is to limit the capitalist class’s prerogatives in the workplace...

 

David Green explained how DSA could play a role in getting the Act passed through the Senate after the 2008 elections.... Read article.

 

Herb London, Pajamas Media.com

 

Whether it is the socialism espoused by the Nazis or the socialism of the former Soviet Union or the socialism that is emerging in the United States, there is one overarching sentiment, however different socialism in these three societies may be. Socialism everywhere expresses envy of excellence by treating the contributions and wealth of the successful as the wages of sin.

 

The Nazis saw the sin as a Jewish conspiracy, the Soviets saw sin as exploitation by the bourgeoisie, and what is emerging in the United States is the sin of the wealthy.

 

In the Obama administration greed is considered the sin that must be opposed. But greed, whatever its deficiencies, is, as Adam Smith pointed out, an incentive for the promotion of capitalism which, in the aggregate, has a salutary influence on the economy. To combat greed, the socialists emphasize envy. Since equality is the goal, even trivial differences in income are exaggerated and the progressivity in the tax system is employed as a blunt instrument to impose equality.

 

Lincoln said “you can’t make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.” But President Obama seems to believe that wealth is invariably related to the wages of sin and must be controlled or, to use his language, “spread around.” To make sure this happens, government must expand and, in so doing, the private sector will inevitably contract. That explains why socialism, which purports to represent the interests of the average person, ends in overwhelming government control or outright tyranny. Read article.

 

Paul Kengor, American Thinker.com

 

As more and more audio and video emerge on Barack Obama's desire to redistribute wealth, not to mention his views on the housing crisis that has torpedoed the U.S. economy, I keep returning to two columns I've read by Frank Marshall Davis, the communist journalist-agitator who mentored Obama in Hawaii. While much attention has been paid to Obama's relationship with communist-terrorist Bill Ayers -- and rightly so -- much less attention has been devoted to Davis. That's a mistake, since Obama was influenced more by Davis than Ayers.

 

Davis, who is now deceased, was an African American from the Midwest who had worked as a columnist for the Chicago Star, the communist newspaper of Chicago, a city that had one of the largest CPUSA affiliates, and, in fact, hosted the September 1919 convention that launched the American Communist Party. Though Davis always tried to conceal any communist associations -- ironically, Obama supporters have picked up that torch -- there's no question that Davis was a communist, as is immediately evident upon reading his columns, examining his background, or consulting with people in the party (to this day) who confirm he was a communist.

 

The fact that he was at least a lower case "c" "communist" is obvious. It takes a little more digging to find evidence of his membership in CPUSA -- but not much. Among the sources that reveal his membership are Davis himself, notably in a letter he wrote to a friend, published posthumously by his biographer, Professor John Edgar Tidwell. "I have recently joined the Communist party," wrote Davis. Read article.

 

Chelsea Schilling, WND.com

 

While ACORN remains riddled in scandal, lawmakers have voted to cut off federal funding to the group, the U.S. Census Bureau has severed ties to the organization – and the White House has blasted its behavior as "unnacceptable."

 

But just how extensive are President Obama's personal ties to ACORN?

 

The following is a timeline outlining some of the purported connections between the president and ACORN through the years:

 

 

ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, first noticed Obama when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. A March 2, 2008, Los Angeles Times article by Letta Tayler and Keith Herbert, titled "Obama Forged Path As Chicago Community Organizer," explored Obama's pre-law school days as a community organizer in Chicago and his efforts to build a partnership with Chicago's "Friends of the Parks."

 

"Obama's task was to help far South Side residents press for improvement," the Times article explained.

 

National Review Online noted, "Part of Obama's work, it would appear, was to organize demonstrations, much in the mold of radical groups like ACORN." Read article.

 

Richard M. Reinsch, NRO.com

 

Those who were desperately confused, if not enraged, by candidate Barack Obama’s contention that the ideal federal judge should fashion his opinion in empathy with the more downtrodden and oppressed party in a case should consult Bradley Watson’s Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence to understand how the man who has become president could assert the primacy of personal opinion over law.

 

Watson’s book daringly asks what social Darwinism and pragmatism have to do with the progressivist evolution in American politics and jurisprudence during the 20th and 21st centuries. Together they were, Watson argues, akin to an intellectual tsunami that shaped, developed, and still informs, albeit in evolved modalities, the dominant understanding of the American constitutional order (or lack thereof) held by the judicial, academic, and political classes. Strange as it might seem, Watson convincingly shows how these philosophical schools flowed into the main currents of American political and judicial thinking. Read article.

Margaret Goodwin, NWV.com

 

The United States rose up from a handful of rebellious colonies to become the richest and most powerful nation in the world. Why? Because we led the world in production. For 200 years, America delivered the goods.

 

But, in the 1970’s, all that suddenly changed. For the first time in history, the U.S. started having trade deficits. That means our net consumption exceeded our net production. And, every single year since 1975, our nation has consistently consumed more than it produced. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that’s not sustainable.

 

The depressing truth is America is no longer a world leader in production. We are trailing the pack. We are now a debtor nation, and our biggest creditor is China. -- What the hell happened? And how will we ever recover? And, the more disturbing question is, what will happen to America if we don’t?

 

If we ever want to restore America to its proper place in the world, the first thing we need to understand is why we no longer have a productive economy. It’s pretty simple, really. -- Because we no longer produce. Why not? – If we take a good hard look at the nature of production, maybe we can figure that out. The three key elements of production are capital, labor, and raw materials. Read article.

 

Timothy P. Carney, DC Examiner.com

 

Reuters reports an interesting nugget in the wake of President Barack Obama's decision to grant Vladimir Putin his wish and kill the Eastern European missile shield:

 

 

GE CEO Jeff Immelt sits on Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and GE owns MSNBC, the network famously friendly to Obama. Read article.

 

Paul Hsieh, Pajamas Media.com

 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard professor Martin Feldstein noted that the government’s eventual goal is to use this research to cut costs and ration medical care by “implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt” and by “directly targeting individual providers … (and other) high-end outliers.”

 

In other words, your doctor would be rewarded if he practiced according to federal guidelines and punished if he strayed too far from them. Such guidelines must necessarily be based on statistical averages that cannot take into account specific facts of individual patients. But good physicians must consider precisely these specifics when treating their patients.

 

If you have abdominal pain due to gallstones, who should decide whether medication or surgery would be “most effective” for you? The doctor who felt your abdomen, heard your heart murmur, saw your ultrasound, and knows your drug allergies? Or the bureaucrat who got his job by telling the right joke to the right person at the right Washington cocktail party?

 

Most physicians I know aren’t in the field primarily for the money, although they do expect to be fairly compensated for a job that requires four years of college, four years of medical school, three to seven years of internship and residency, and often one (or more) years of additional specialty fellowship training.

 

They do it because they love their work, including the ability to apply those years of training to benefit their patients. They passionately want to use their skills according to their best medical conscience. To practice good medicine, a doctor must therefore be left free to use his reason, his experience, and his judgment — i.e., his mind. ObamaCare would destroy your physician’s willingness and ability to use his mind for your benefit. If ObamaCare passes, some doctors will grit their teeth and still try to do their best for their patients. But they will have to waste hours arguing with bureaucrats, while their less conscientious colleagues can just punch a clock and go home. How long will the better doctors continue working under a system that constantly punishes them for their virtues? And when the good doctors finally retire or quit in frustration, what kind of doctors will remain?

 

If ObamaCare passes, some doctors will grit their teeth and still try to do their best for their patients. But they will have to waste hours arguing with bureaucrats, while their less conscientious colleagues can just punch a clock and go home. How long will the better doctors continue working under a system that constantly punishes them for their virtues? And when the good doctors finally retire or quit in frustration, what kind of doctors will remain? Read article.

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