Matthew Vadum, Spectator.org

 

ACORN and other left-wing advocacy groups could be eligible for up to $3.99 billion in federal funding included in the $3.83 trillion fiscal 2011 budget blueprint that President Obama unveiled yesterday.

 

The $3.99 billion comes from a congressional slush fund known as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) $48.5 billion fiscal 2011 budget. CDBG grants, which are awarded to states and localities, pass indirectly to ACORN.

 

How is more funding of ACORN possible when Congress passed a ban on funding the group and its affiliates just last year?

 

Congress has already hinted it might vote to restore funding to ACORN. On Dec. 8 the House Appropriations Committee rejected on a party line vote of 9 to 5 an amendment offered by Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa) that would have blocked federal funding of ACORN.

And in December federal Judge Nina Gershon restored federal funding of ACORN by issuing a temporary injunction against the congressional funding ban. Read article.

Constancio Asumen, Jr., NMJ.us

 

“In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment...But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order...” -- Randy Barnett (emphasis added)

 

To the best of my reckoning of history, the degree of contempt towards the American people that President Obama showcased in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, was extraordinarily comparable in repugnance to that painstakingly postulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in “The German Ideology,” when they referred to the German public’s mentality as (my emphasis),

 

“...the putrescence of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this caput mortuum [dead head] began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances...“

 

The seventy-minute pedantic spectacle, punctuated by more than 100 partisan standing ovations, and several lamely disguised derisive sniggering of some in the crowd, should dispel any iota of a doubt that the POTUS is a certifiable agent of the patently destructive hubris of communist ideology. Only an ideologue, categorically convinced of the superiority and righteousness of his cause, can be so unabashedly angry that his agenda has been decisively, if temporarily, thwarted by the will of the people.

 

The self-proclaimed transformational President proceeded to transform a traditional ritual of governance in the hallowed halls of Congress into a locker-room pep talk on his expectations of how the nation ought to behave and think, and how his party and the opposition should conduct themselves in order to live up to his standards of decorum and accomplishments. He admonished the nation for not appreciating his unique genius in governance. He rebuked Congress for excessive partisanship. He falsely vilified the Supreme Court Justices for doing their duty with a majority finding to declare McCain-Feingold unconstitutional, because there is “no basis for allowing the government to limit corporate independent expenditures.”

 

Admittedly, we had a preview of this elitist mean spirited streak of Obama’s during the campaign when he derided the rural folks of Pennsylvania as people who would “...cling to guns or religion or antipathy...as a way to explain their frustrations." At that time I just mentally noted that the remark was eerily reminiscent of Marx and Engels’ blatant characterization of the lumpenproletariat as the social class composed of “beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements...”

 

Both the atmospherics and rhetoric at the State of the Union ritual merely confirmed the bona fides of Barack Hussein Obama as a hardcore ideologue and rendered it unwise for this country to seek a compromise with any of his policies. Fortunately there are encouraging indications of his bungling incompetence lending a glimmer of hope that America may yet prevail. Unfortunately, retrenchment is one of the principal instinctive reflexes, integral to the arsenal of survival strategies for a hardcore ideologue “sympathetic toward the general aims of Marxian socialism.” The contempt for “we the people” which he amply exhibited and articulated during the campaign and validated at the State of the Union can propel him to let his ideology determine the vector of his policies regardless of the consequences to the nation.

 

Bereft of Effectiveness, Replete with Excuses

 

To keep matters in perspective, it behooves to revisit a few items in the catalogue of scenarios of policy formulation and execution to count some of the most recent ways. Read article.

 

David Solway, Pajamas Media.com

 

PJM readers will be fully aware by now that I harbor deep suspicions about Barack Obama. I began following his career when he was still the junior senator from Illinois, regarding him not as an interesting human being but as a fascinating political specimen, a phenomenon of sorts. I didn’t trust him from the start. His dubious voting record in the Senate only exacerbated my suspicions, as did the thickening dossier of files and reports I compiled on his speeches, declarations, political antecedents, friends, and mentors, past activities as a “community organizer,” business deals, conjoint nepotism, and, most crucially, his deliberate suppression of much of his curriculum vitae. Despite the magic spell that he cast on a majority of the electorate, I considered him as a man who was all wrong for America and whose ideas were simply not a fit. He was, it seemed evident to me, out of step with the tenor of American history and the general orientation of the American heartland.

 

By the time he entered the Democratic nomination race I knew three things for a certainty: that he would trounce Hillary, that he would win the presidency, and that he would be an unmitigated disaster for the nation he purports to govern. It didn’t take extraordinary prescience to arrive at these conclusions, merely an immunity to populist hype, a degree of paying attention, and a bit of common sense. And had I any lingering doubts, they would have been quickly put to rest by Michelle Malkin’s meticulous exposé, Culture of Corruption. Read article.

 

Fouad Ajami, WSJ.com

 

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

 

The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

 

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune. Read article.

 

The Foundry, Heritage.org

 

Last week, Obama showed himself once again to be out of touch with both Americans and with the current debt situation in the United States. He called on the determination, optimism, and fundamental decency of all Americans, but then seemed to suggest that Americans should focus that determination on passing his health care bill. If Obama wants his presidency to be a success and for our economy to turn around, he will need to learn the lessons of the recent elections. To regain his footing with the American people, he will have to do more than institute a delayed, short-term, token spending freeze and acknowledge that the key to pulling us out of this recession lies with the innovation and motivation of the American people—not with yet another expensive program.

 

In his speech, he promised that he wouldn’t do what was popular, but would do what was necessary. Unfortunately, it seems he has done neither. Over the past year he has pushed and shoved a tremendously unpopular health care agenda, and attempted to buy off the last Senate vote with $100 million of our tax dollars. His tax and regulatory policies, in one year, have dropped us, according to the Heritage Foundation’s 2010 edition of the Index of Economic Freedom, for the first time ever, from being the land of the free, to the land of the “mostly free.”

 

And even as he promised yet another “jobs” bill, he is 7 million jobs short of where he promised we would be right now. He promised a growth of 3.5 million in the last year and instead lost over 3.5 million. Last year, federal spending reached the highest level in American history outside WWII, and under his leadership, the public debt is projected by the CBO to triple to $22.1 trillion by 2020. And his crumb that he tossed to Americans was a paltry $447 billion spending freeze which won’t even take effect until a year from now and is only a tiny sliver of our $3.5 trillion budget and only a portion of his own $862 billion stimulus plan – which has failed. His mission of change has brought Americans into a dangerous situation. Read article.

Jonathan Martin, Politico.com

 

As buoyant Republicans devise their game plan for the 2010 campaign, party officials are counting on a boost from an unlikely source – President Obama.

 

A tactic that would have seemed far-fetched a year ago, when the new president was sworn in with a 67 percent job approval rating, is now emerging as a key component of the GOP strategy: Tie Democratic opponents to Obama and make them answer for some of the unpopular policies associated with the chief executive.

 

GOP strategists gathered here for the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting believe that now that he's fallen below 50 percent in the venerable Gallup poll, Obama will be an asset to GOP candidates, particularly in conservative or swing states.

 

The challenge will be to link Democrats with the administration on such issues as spending, bailouts, healthcare and cap-and-trade while not personally attacking Obama, who remains personally well-liked even as his standing erodes. So, at least in purple states or districts, don’t expect to see an ad where the faces of Democratic candidates are morphed into that of the president—a time-honored approach from past campaigns.

 

But Republicans are unmistakably enthusiastic – and downright giddy in some cases – about the prospect of Democrats stumping with the president in their states, a vivid reminder about how starkly different the political landscape seems now than when Obama took office.

 

It’s in conservative states, of course, where they’re especially pining for a presidential visit.

 

“We encourage him to come,” said Louisiana GOP Chairman Roger Villere. “We encourage him to come early and often!” Read article.

 

Andrew McCarthy, NRO.com

 

It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.

 

The president seems more poised to move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases. 

 

No such luck. Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on civilian due process. Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game. Read article.

 

 

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