What Shoes Are You Wearing Today?
Look down at your shoes. Could you break into a run in those if you needed to?Twelve years ago, the men and women getting ready to go to work at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon didn’t know they would be running that day.
For many New Yorkers, the shoes they picked up off the closet floor that morning would later carry them down flights of stairs and through the streets of the city. They would become worn, covered with dust, and perhaps broken in a matter of minutes.
Some would become pieces of history.
Finance executive Michele Martocci was one of the New York survivors. The shoes she wore on September 11, 2001, will be in the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which is slated to open next Spring.
So will Mickey Kross’s helmet. Parade magazine reports:
At 10:28 a.m., FDNY lieutenant Mickey Kross was in the third-floor stairwell of the north tower when he heard a “tremendous roar,” and the building began to crumble. Kross crouched down in a corner. (“I tried to crawl into my fire helmet … to protect myself,” he recalled.) Hours later, Kross and 15 others climbed out of the rubble—among the few survivors of the collapse.That day will forever serve as a generation’s reminder of the fragility of life. Today, we give thanks for those who survived. We remember those who were lost in the horrific terrorist attacks. And we salute all the heroes who set aside their own safety in the chaos of that day to help their fellow Americans—whether firefighters, police, emergency responders, or strangers in the crowd.
We will never forget.
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/09/11/september-11-what-shoes-are-you-wearing-today/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=&utm_content=&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
"They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors -- the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself." ~ Tom Junod-Esquire Magazine 2003
9/11: America's Unfinished Business
By Michelle MalkinBefore we head to Syria to avenge the mass murder of their kids, how about we finish avenging ours?
When I say "finish," of course I really mean "start." A dozen years after the 9/11 attacks, the trials against the jihadist plotters who incinerated pregnant women, firefighters, grandparents, newlyweds, toddlers and schoolkids on their first-ever plane rides have yet to begin.
Justice not only has been delayed and denied. Justice has been demoted, disowned and deserted. Justice for the 9/11 victims and families isn't blindfolded. She's gagged and hogtied.
The terror-coddling Obama White House squandered precious years trying to shut down Gitmo to appease the peaceniks, transnationalists and Muslim grievance-mongers. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder arrogantly attempted to shove civilian trials of terrorists -- which would have been held a stone's throw from Ground Zero -- down New Yorkers' throats. Ever since, Team Obama has dragged its feet on military tribunals for the al-Qaida crew.
If we're lucky -- that's a big if -- the death penalty war crimes trials for KSM and his co-conspirators may begin in the fall of 2014. Maybe. Thanks to cunning delays, made-for-media theatrics and stomach-turning whining by the Gitmo detainees, the journey to hold the 9/11 plotters accountable has become a vulgar joke.
The last time pretrial hearings were held, defendants used their international platform to complain about bathroom breaks and Navy food, which one accused terrorist equated to "torture." Despite being supplied with fresh halal meals that comport with their Muslim dietary requirements, one member of KSM's posse complained that his lunches did not include extra condiments such as olives and honey.
Back at Club Gitmo, other jihadi suspects continue to enjoy taxpayer-subsidized movie nights, art and English classes, and Nintendos and PlayStations. And if the clogged wheels of justice for 9/11 victims weren't bad enough, don't forget: In 2009, the Obama administration dropped the charges against 2000 U.S.S. Cole bombing suspect, Gitmo detainee and former Persian Gulf Operations Chief for al-Qaida Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri -- and has made no progress on bringing him to justice since reinstating the charges (only under public pressure) in 2011.
How is it that America is poised to use our military -- the American people's, not Obama's -- for a humanitarian intervention that may very well aid and abet the same barbaric forces that brought unprecedented death and destruction to New York City, Shanksville, Pa., and Washington, D.C., just 12 short unavenged years ago?
How is it that we prosecuted 2009 Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Hasan quicker than his bloodthirsty Islamist brethren who orchestrated the 2001 terror plot that killed more than 2,700 innocent men, women and children?
Remember: The Bush administration first brought military charges of conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, hijacking aircraft and terrorism against KSM and his Koran-inspired killing crew in 2008. Obama recklessly aborted those military tribunals in his bleeding-heart social justice bid to provide full U.S. constitutional protections for the foreign soldiers of Allah.
It took the united stand of 9/11 families, veterans, anti-jihad watchdogs and first responders in Manhattan in late 2009 to force Obama and Holder to retreat. They raised their voices to keep 9/11 war crimes trials out of civilian courts, foreign terrorists off of U.S. soil and America from returning to pre-9/11 days when the feds responded to deadly terrorist attacks with arrest warrants. The 9/11 Never Forget Coalition refused to stand on the sidelines while Obama's soft-on-jihad lawyers moved to grant war criminals the same rights as American citizens while endangering the safety of New Yorkers.
Debra Burlingame, founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America and sister of American Airlines Flight 77 pilot Charles Frank "Chic" Burlingame III (the flight the jihadists crashed into the Pentagon) sounded the alarm and warned the Obama/Holder brigade: "We will fight you all the way."
That's the unapologetic vigilance America was supposed to have adopted after the towers fell, the planes crashed and the ashes choked the air. Instead, America's leaders have allowed jihadists to make a mockery of justice. Muslim Brotherhood radicals waltz freely in and out of the nation's capital. Border security remains a joke. A functioning entry-exit program for foreign visa-holders is still nonexistent. There still is no systemic, coherent and unapologetic plan to keep Islamic radicals from spreading their hate and endangering Americans in our military, prisons and schools.
I'm sick of 9/11 anniversary ceremonies by politicians who pay lip service to peace and justice for our country, but refuse to secure them all the way, every day. Remembrance is worthless without resolve. Resolve is useless without action.
Want to honor the 9/11 dead? Take care of unfinished business here at home. Put America first.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/09/11/911-americas-unfinished-business-n1696842/page/full
PK'S NOTE: Coverage of the Two Million Biker March
'2 Million Bikers' roll into DC to counter Muslim march...
GRIDLOCK: Without permit, '1- or 2-hour ride will be all-day event'...
VIDEOS: 'As far as the eye can see'...
Video: Motorcycles Rumble Through on the Way to D.C. for 9/11 Rally
‘2 Million Bikers’ roar into D.C. to honor 9/11, protest Muslim rally
Thousands of bikers from around the country roared into the D.C. area
on Wednesday in a show of support for Sept. 11 victims and in
solidarity against a controversial Muslim rally on the Mall.
The 2
Million Bikers to DC ride might have fallen short of 2 million strong,
but the numbers were impressive. A line of shining chrome and steel
bikes stretched about a third of a mile from the starting point at the Harley Davidson of Washington store just outside the District in Prince George’s County.
The
bikers began departing from the store at about 10:30 in staggered
groups of 50, stopped for traffic lights and taking an hour or so to get
on the road.
The ride was complicated by the fact that federal
and local authorities denied a permit that would have offered the riders
a police escort through traffic — a sore spot with organizers who
thought the denial was for political purposes.
“We’re here for 9-11,” said national ride coordinator Belinda Bee.
“We are going to have a peaceful ride. … But there are people who are
sick and tired of their rights and liberties being taken away.”
The National Park Service has denied any political motivation for refusing the permit, which ride organizers sought last month. The Park Service earlier this year granted a permit to a Muslim group planning a rally Wednesday to call attention to social justice issues.
The
American Muslim Political Action Committee has scheduled a rally to
draw attention to what they call unfair fear of Muslims after the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks.
Ms. Bee said the ride was originally set up to counter the rally and show respect for the victims of that day.
Dan O’Brien, 54,
of Mansfield, Ohio, said he had been “looking for a ride like this” to
honor the Sept. 11 victims, but the rally also spurred him to join.
“This is very disgraceful,” he said. “They picked a day precious to the United States and its citizens.”
Looks Like the ‘Million Muslim March’ May Only Attract a Few Hundred Participants
It looks as though the controversial
“Million Muslim March” set for the September 11 anniversary in
Washington, D.C. may fall well short of a crowd numbering in the seven
figure range.
Even the Huffington Post has all but written it off: “‘Million Muslim March’ Shaping Up To Be More Like A Few Hundred People Walking Down The Street.”
Turns out a memo delivered to tenants
of a downtown D.C. office building said to expect “somewhere in the
hundreds, not thousands, of participants,” according to police
estimates, the Weekly Standard reports.
The rally also has been renamed “Million American March Against Fear” and is set to commence at noon Wednesday.
(Credit: March Against Fear site)
The American Muslim Political Action
Committee (AMPAC) which organized the rally is led by M.D. Rabbi Alam, a
9/11 truther who has propagated anti-Semitic causes related to the
terrorist attacks 12 years ago.
In addition, the Huffington Post notes,
the DC Area 9/11 Truth Movement and Architects and Engineers for 9/11
Truth Movement are currently listed as partners of the event — all of which, in addition to the chosen date of the march, has reportedly upset many observers.
Organizers have defended the timing,
however, noting that “Muslim[s] and Non Muslim[s] alike were
traumatized” on Sept. 11, 2001. AMPAC adds that the march is about civil
rights, indefinite detention and countering inaccurate depictions of
Islam and Muslims.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/11/looks-like-the-million-muslim-march-may-only-attract-a-few-hundred-participants/
Three-and-a-half More Years of Obama!
So the Syria "crisis" is reaching its culmination. Syria's WMD's are likely to be placed under the control of its patron, Russia, perhaps even with the cooperation of other disinterested, responsible states such as Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. The world's only superpower, for its part, will loiter on the curb outside, asking hurried questions while the big boys come and go, stepping aside quickly to avoid being shoved into the gutter by their bodyguards.
This
situation is the sole handiwork of Mr. Barack H. Obama, successor in
office to Washington, Lincoln, Truman, and Reagan. Pondering the better
part of a day, I can think of no previous episode to compare it with.
It has similarities to the isolationism of the 1920s, with the United
States reduced to irrelevance on the global fringes, but that was a
deliberate result of policy, while this... this product of ineptness
coupled with ideology, is something you can scarcely put a name to.
There are three-and-a-half years of agony lying ahead. It won't be pleasant, but there is a saving grace. Barack Obama and his childishness, incompetence, and fanatical fixation on dead political ideas constitute the apotheosis of a longer-term conundrum, that of a liberal/left that has infiltrated this country's institutions to a point that state power and interference with individual liberties increases steadily no matter who is in office.
Obama offers us a chance to reject all that decisively. I want every single train of events set in motion by Obama, his administration, and his supporters, down to the last halfwit college undergrad, to play out in full. I want every disaster that fool and his parade of twitches have triggered to blossom in bleak completion. I want to see all their trains collide, all their ships sink, all their airships burnt to cinders.
We're talking tragedy and retribution, in the absolute Greek sense -- the Furies howling at midnight. Maybe that's what it takes to cleanse this nation of this doctrinal pestilence. I want to see every Row A voter reduced to remorse. I want to see their noses rubbed in it. I want to hear each victim of this regime cry out to heaven for vengeance. If all this comes to pass, we may even see Democrats, fearful for their own political hides, wanting to be rid of him.
But if Obama were impeached, none of this would happen. Instead the focus would shift to Congress and the GOP, who then would be blamed for everything that occurs, no matter who -- likely Smilin' Joe Biden -- inhabits the Oval Office. When the disasters come -- and they will (most of them are on track at this moment and can't be turned around except through drastic action which Obama and all other visible Democrats are incapable of) -- they will be dumped into the laps of the Republicans. No other group in modern history has proven more adept at shifting blame than the liberal left, just as no other political party has proven more apt to stumble into the spotlight at the worst possible moment than the GOP.
Looking back from our fine vantage point here at the edge of the Abyss, we can trace the path clearly. Despite popular belief, the New Deal solved nothing. There was a second crash -- one that makes none of the history textbooks -- in October 1937 that wiped out all gains made in the previous four years and left unemployment higher than it had been when FDR entered office. By January 1938, Roosevelt was reduced to pleading with his advisors "Can no one tell me what to do?" Nobody could, and the country continued its downward spiral.
It was saved by Adolf Hitler, who in March annexed Austria, rolling into Vienna behind a spearhead of Panzers. This wakeup call revealed that war was inevitable, and the tariff barriers that had prevented international economic recovery fell as the nations of Europe scrambled to purchase weaponry and supplies. In the U.S., plants reopened (despite an insane attempt -- by the GOP, no less -- to stifle this using the Neutrality Act), industry began to gain ground, and by 1940 the U.S. was back on its feet.
Roosevelt found his sweet spot in leading the Allied coalition to victory, something nobody would have believed him capable of even ten years earlier. The success of FDR the Warlord covered the failure of his economic policies. The New Deal became a retroactive success due to WW II. By this means, the legend of liberal triumph entered American consciousness.
Skipping over Harry Truman, the last practical Democratic president, and John F. Kennedy, the last conservative Democratic president, we come to Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a pure ideologue, a product of the New Deal who believed its dogma (which, not coincidentally, fitted his paternalistic, controlling persona to near perfection) implicitly. Amid the reaction to JFK's murder, LBJ was able to pass a barge load of ultraliberal programs that would never have seen a vote under ordinary circumstances.: Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, all comprising what he called his "Great Society". Thanks to Keynesian financing, LBJ managed to suck the life out of the 1960s boom in little more than four years, leaving the nation headed for economic ruin. Along with the Vietnam War and his fumbling of the racial question, this left him as one of the most despised presidents of the century. He abdicated office in 1968, having served only one and a third terms.
But Richard M. Nixon effectively extended Johnson's term in office, continuing his disastrous economic policies ("We are all Keynesians now."), and putting into effect whatever wild-eyed liberal programs Johnson had missed, including affirmative action and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. (Tom Wicker, ultraliberal New York Times reporter, later wrote a book examining Nixon's record under the title One of Us).
Elected as a reform candidate in the wake of Watergate, Jimmy Carter proved so incompetent that his ideology scarcely mattered (though he was nearly as much as New Deal liberal as LBJ).
Reagan, of course, turned the country around in short order with his commonsense conservative reforms carried out in the teeth of opposition from both liberals and his own party. This set the stage for Bush the Elder, whose liberal tendencies were strong enough to nearly derail the Reagan reforms ("I guess I f***** up in 1980," Reagan responded). Bush allowed himself to be pressured into raising taxes just as the economy hit a soft patch following the dramatic 1980s expansion. The resulting shallow recession wrecked his reelection effort despite his personal popularity.
As for Bill Clinton, he began his first term as a typical New Left clown, out to "tame" Wall Street, and inevitably throw the country back onto the skids. (It was none other than Al Gore who put a stop to this, to give credit where it's due). At the end of that term, Clinton shifted right under pressure from Newt Gingrich's GOP Congress along with the guidance of political operative Dick Morris. This bought him a second term, which he spent chasing women, eating cheeseburgers, and paying the consequences. The country went its own way regardless.
Despite distinct signs of the family liberalism, George W. Bush governed well enough to restore prosperity after a brief recession bequeathed to him by Clinton. His quick action in 2008 was instrumental in saving the economy from complete collapse (the Obama administration added nothing but far huger piles of cash). Then came Obama.
What we see clearly from this record is that American liberals have always managed to avoid responsibility. Global war saved Roosevelt and established the myth of triumphant New Deal liberalism. None of the liberal presidents thereafter -- excepting Clinton -- served two full terms, leaving the consequences of their actions - and the blame -- to be borne by their Republican successors. Clinton avoided this only by shifting to the right. Add to this the fact that several GOP presidents -- Nixon and the Bushes -- stumbled along in a "center" that was actually far to the left, muddying the political record considerably, and it's evident how the narrative has been tilted leftward.
Liberals have never had to pay the piper. They have never had to face their failures or come up with explanations for what went wrong. Neither Johnson nor Carter served second terms in which their errors would have become manifest. Instead, Nixon and Reagan had to bear the responsibility. And of course, the GOP has never made a point of this.
But now we have Obama. The first true progressive to achieve a second term since FDR. There's no "triangulation" needed by the man who knows everything, and no war, it seems, to pull him out of this swamp. Obama will have to take full responsibility for his policies. He will have to stand in the dock, and with him, for the first time in seventy years, liberalism as a whole.
Obama is less lucky than FDR, less competent than Jimmy Carter, and less flexible than Bill Clinton. With Obama, all the failures of liberalism are coming to a head. He has put more liberal policies into effect in a shorter period than any other president, but thanks to his unique combination of ineptness, ignorance, inexperience, and arrogance, every last one of them is doomed. All of them are failing as we watch. His economic policies have repeated the failures of FDR's New Deal, with worse to come. His health care "reform" is in a state of collapse before it has even started. His stewardship of race relations has returned the country to a state of nearly open hostility and panic not seen since 1968. His Hallmark card foreign policy has killed tens of thousands overseas and will almost inevitably lead to the deaths of millions, as did the policies of Jimmy Carter in countries as unrelated as Nicaragua, Iran, Ethiopia, and Cambodia.
Do we really want to give him an out? Do we want to release him to a well-paying sinecure position to become the black Jimmy Carter, an international pest and embarrassment? Do we want to allow the liberal left to slide one more time? To scamper out of the line of fire only to return to mock and sabotage the efforts of better men to clean up the heartbreaking mess they left behind, as they did in the early 1970s, the Reagan 80s, the Bush Oughts? Do we want to see them pop back up in 2020 or 24 with the same nonsense programs given different names and the same insults and attacks for their opponents exhausted and in despair at attempting to repair what can no longer be repaired?
I say no. I prefer that we drink this cup to the dregs, take this road to its lonely end. The liberals need to undergo the whipping that they have dodged for over seven decades. The voters of this country, who have treated politics like a reality series, need to be backhanded by the world as it exists. We require a rude awakening. This country's pols, both left and right, need to be overwhelmed with worry as to what the next day will bring. The people of this country need to be buried up to their necks in the results of their own infantilism. All the fantasy castles need to be demolished to the last stone. Liberalism must be discredited and humiliated, its adherents defeated and dispersed. The leader of the whole circus must be tormented to the human limit and beyond, forced to break down in front of the cameras as he begs for help that will not come.
I am not talking about apocalypse. I am talking about shock therapy. There are dreadful days to come, and they are locked in. We have another recession on its way, perhaps even a stagflation on the 1970s model, which swallowed the entire decade. Having taken in Obama's disgraceful performance as regards Syria, our enemies will now make a move: Russia, China, and Iran, and possibly all three at once. We will not win this round. We have a national security system that is run by wannabe trannies and later-day beatniks. We are operating under the delusion that major military units can be led in battle by gays, transvestites, and what have you. We have convinced ourselves that the 21st-century world can be mastered by weapons purchased in the 1980s. We have sown the wind. We will reap the whirlwind.
We have got it coming. But at the same time, the seeds of resurrection are evident. As I have said elsewhere, I am a disciple of Adam Smith - "There is a lot of ruin in a nation." But we cannot recover in any meaningful sense as long as the same processes are allowed to continue; as long as any cheap demagogue can trot around mouthing the same old slogans and be taken seriously.
Liberalism has outlived its time. Obama is in the process of destroying it. Let it come down.
Incompetency at Home
There are three-and-a-half years of agony lying ahead. It won't be pleasant, but there is a saving grace. Barack Obama and his childishness, incompetence, and fanatical fixation on dead political ideas constitute the apotheosis of a longer-term conundrum, that of a liberal/left that has infiltrated this country's institutions to a point that state power and interference with individual liberties increases steadily no matter who is in office.
Obama offers us a chance to reject all that decisively. I want every single train of events set in motion by Obama, his administration, and his supporters, down to the last halfwit college undergrad, to play out in full. I want every disaster that fool and his parade of twitches have triggered to blossom in bleak completion. I want to see all their trains collide, all their ships sink, all their airships burnt to cinders.
We're talking tragedy and retribution, in the absolute Greek sense -- the Furies howling at midnight. Maybe that's what it takes to cleanse this nation of this doctrinal pestilence. I want to see every Row A voter reduced to remorse. I want to see their noses rubbed in it. I want to hear each victim of this regime cry out to heaven for vengeance. If all this comes to pass, we may even see Democrats, fearful for their own political hides, wanting to be rid of him.
But if Obama were impeached, none of this would happen. Instead the focus would shift to Congress and the GOP, who then would be blamed for everything that occurs, no matter who -- likely Smilin' Joe Biden -- inhabits the Oval Office. When the disasters come -- and they will (most of them are on track at this moment and can't be turned around except through drastic action which Obama and all other visible Democrats are incapable of) -- they will be dumped into the laps of the Republicans. No other group in modern history has proven more adept at shifting blame than the liberal left, just as no other political party has proven more apt to stumble into the spotlight at the worst possible moment than the GOP.
Looking back from our fine vantage point here at the edge of the Abyss, we can trace the path clearly. Despite popular belief, the New Deal solved nothing. There was a second crash -- one that makes none of the history textbooks -- in October 1937 that wiped out all gains made in the previous four years and left unemployment higher than it had been when FDR entered office. By January 1938, Roosevelt was reduced to pleading with his advisors "Can no one tell me what to do?" Nobody could, and the country continued its downward spiral.
It was saved by Adolf Hitler, who in March annexed Austria, rolling into Vienna behind a spearhead of Panzers. This wakeup call revealed that war was inevitable, and the tariff barriers that had prevented international economic recovery fell as the nations of Europe scrambled to purchase weaponry and supplies. In the U.S., plants reopened (despite an insane attempt -- by the GOP, no less -- to stifle this using the Neutrality Act), industry began to gain ground, and by 1940 the U.S. was back on its feet.
Roosevelt found his sweet spot in leading the Allied coalition to victory, something nobody would have believed him capable of even ten years earlier. The success of FDR the Warlord covered the failure of his economic policies. The New Deal became a retroactive success due to WW II. By this means, the legend of liberal triumph entered American consciousness.
Skipping over Harry Truman, the last practical Democratic president, and John F. Kennedy, the last conservative Democratic president, we come to Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a pure ideologue, a product of the New Deal who believed its dogma (which, not coincidentally, fitted his paternalistic, controlling persona to near perfection) implicitly. Amid the reaction to JFK's murder, LBJ was able to pass a barge load of ultraliberal programs that would never have seen a vote under ordinary circumstances.: Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, all comprising what he called his "Great Society". Thanks to Keynesian financing, LBJ managed to suck the life out of the 1960s boom in little more than four years, leaving the nation headed for economic ruin. Along with the Vietnam War and his fumbling of the racial question, this left him as one of the most despised presidents of the century. He abdicated office in 1968, having served only one and a third terms.
But Richard M. Nixon effectively extended Johnson's term in office, continuing his disastrous economic policies ("We are all Keynesians now."), and putting into effect whatever wild-eyed liberal programs Johnson had missed, including affirmative action and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. (Tom Wicker, ultraliberal New York Times reporter, later wrote a book examining Nixon's record under the title One of Us).
Elected as a reform candidate in the wake of Watergate, Jimmy Carter proved so incompetent that his ideology scarcely mattered (though he was nearly as much as New Deal liberal as LBJ).
Reagan, of course, turned the country around in short order with his commonsense conservative reforms carried out in the teeth of opposition from both liberals and his own party. This set the stage for Bush the Elder, whose liberal tendencies were strong enough to nearly derail the Reagan reforms ("I guess I f***** up in 1980," Reagan responded). Bush allowed himself to be pressured into raising taxes just as the economy hit a soft patch following the dramatic 1980s expansion. The resulting shallow recession wrecked his reelection effort despite his personal popularity.
As for Bill Clinton, he began his first term as a typical New Left clown, out to "tame" Wall Street, and inevitably throw the country back onto the skids. (It was none other than Al Gore who put a stop to this, to give credit where it's due). At the end of that term, Clinton shifted right under pressure from Newt Gingrich's GOP Congress along with the guidance of political operative Dick Morris. This bought him a second term, which he spent chasing women, eating cheeseburgers, and paying the consequences. The country went its own way regardless.
Despite distinct signs of the family liberalism, George W. Bush governed well enough to restore prosperity after a brief recession bequeathed to him by Clinton. His quick action in 2008 was instrumental in saving the economy from complete collapse (the Obama administration added nothing but far huger piles of cash). Then came Obama.
What we see clearly from this record is that American liberals have always managed to avoid responsibility. Global war saved Roosevelt and established the myth of triumphant New Deal liberalism. None of the liberal presidents thereafter -- excepting Clinton -- served two full terms, leaving the consequences of their actions - and the blame -- to be borne by their Republican successors. Clinton avoided this only by shifting to the right. Add to this the fact that several GOP presidents -- Nixon and the Bushes -- stumbled along in a "center" that was actually far to the left, muddying the political record considerably, and it's evident how the narrative has been tilted leftward.
Liberals have never had to pay the piper. They have never had to face their failures or come up with explanations for what went wrong. Neither Johnson nor Carter served second terms in which their errors would have become manifest. Instead, Nixon and Reagan had to bear the responsibility. And of course, the GOP has never made a point of this.
But now we have Obama. The first true progressive to achieve a second term since FDR. There's no "triangulation" needed by the man who knows everything, and no war, it seems, to pull him out of this swamp. Obama will have to take full responsibility for his policies. He will have to stand in the dock, and with him, for the first time in seventy years, liberalism as a whole.
Obama is less lucky than FDR, less competent than Jimmy Carter, and less flexible than Bill Clinton. With Obama, all the failures of liberalism are coming to a head. He has put more liberal policies into effect in a shorter period than any other president, but thanks to his unique combination of ineptness, ignorance, inexperience, and arrogance, every last one of them is doomed. All of them are failing as we watch. His economic policies have repeated the failures of FDR's New Deal, with worse to come. His health care "reform" is in a state of collapse before it has even started. His stewardship of race relations has returned the country to a state of nearly open hostility and panic not seen since 1968. His Hallmark card foreign policy has killed tens of thousands overseas and will almost inevitably lead to the deaths of millions, as did the policies of Jimmy Carter in countries as unrelated as Nicaragua, Iran, Ethiopia, and Cambodia.
Do we really want to give him an out? Do we want to release him to a well-paying sinecure position to become the black Jimmy Carter, an international pest and embarrassment? Do we want to allow the liberal left to slide one more time? To scamper out of the line of fire only to return to mock and sabotage the efforts of better men to clean up the heartbreaking mess they left behind, as they did in the early 1970s, the Reagan 80s, the Bush Oughts? Do we want to see them pop back up in 2020 or 24 with the same nonsense programs given different names and the same insults and attacks for their opponents exhausted and in despair at attempting to repair what can no longer be repaired?
I say no. I prefer that we drink this cup to the dregs, take this road to its lonely end. The liberals need to undergo the whipping that they have dodged for over seven decades. The voters of this country, who have treated politics like a reality series, need to be backhanded by the world as it exists. We require a rude awakening. This country's pols, both left and right, need to be overwhelmed with worry as to what the next day will bring. The people of this country need to be buried up to their necks in the results of their own infantilism. All the fantasy castles need to be demolished to the last stone. Liberalism must be discredited and humiliated, its adherents defeated and dispersed. The leader of the whole circus must be tormented to the human limit and beyond, forced to break down in front of the cameras as he begs for help that will not come.
I am not talking about apocalypse. I am talking about shock therapy. There are dreadful days to come, and they are locked in. We have another recession on its way, perhaps even a stagflation on the 1970s model, which swallowed the entire decade. Having taken in Obama's disgraceful performance as regards Syria, our enemies will now make a move: Russia, China, and Iran, and possibly all three at once. We will not win this round. We have a national security system that is run by wannabe trannies and later-day beatniks. We are operating under the delusion that major military units can be led in battle by gays, transvestites, and what have you. We have convinced ourselves that the 21st-century world can be mastered by weapons purchased in the 1980s. We have sown the wind. We will reap the whirlwind.
We have got it coming. But at the same time, the seeds of resurrection are evident. As I have said elsewhere, I am a disciple of Adam Smith - "There is a lot of ruin in a nation." But we cannot recover in any meaningful sense as long as the same processes are allowed to continue; as long as any cheap demagogue can trot around mouthing the same old slogans and be taken seriously.
Liberalism has outlived its time. Obama is in the process of destroying it. Let it come down.
Obama’s foreign policy may be bad, but the GOP’s strategy at home is pathetic, too.
While everyone’s attention has been justifiably focused on whether or not we will be going to war in Syria, a pair of important fiscal deadlines has been quietly sneaking up on us. On September 30, the continuing resolution (CR) currently funding the government will expire, and by the middle of October, the federal government will once again reach its legal borrowing limit.Word from the Hill suggests that Republican leaders will offer a short-term CR that funds the government through December 15 at a cost of $988 billion. This resolution would keep most of the sequester intact, but would still increase appropriations by roughly $21 billion relative to the previous CR. Still, it is roughly $70 billion less than President Obama requested. That’s what counts as fiscal discipline these days.
And, in an exceptionally cynical maneuver, the leadership plans to use a parliamentary vehicle to allow House members to take yet another symbolic vote to defund Obamacare. The maneuver, last used in 2011, would have the House vote on two items, the continuing resolution to fund the government and a separate “enrollment correction” that would defund Obamacare. The Senate would have to vote on both items, but if it passes the CR while rejecting the Obamacare addendum, as it almost certainly will, the CR would go on to the president with funding for the health-care law intact. That is exactly what happened in 2011. The Senate rejected the resolution to defund Obamacare, 53–47, and then went on to pass the “clean” CR, 81–19.
The House vote to defund Obamacare would be as meaningless as any of the 40 previous such votes. In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s dishonest — an attempt to fool voters into believing that the House has voted to defund the law, when it really has done no such thing. If congressional Republicans lack the courage to actually do something about Obamacare, they should just go ahead and pass a CR without the subterfuge.
Then again, simply maintaining the sequester can be counted as a victory of sorts. After all, some Republicans, such as Representatives Buck McKeon (Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) have reportedly offered to trade support for President Obama’s Syrian intervention for eliminating the sequester cuts to defense. Now that’s a winning formula — more spending and a war.
On the debt ceiling, Majority Leader Eric Cantor suggested Tuesday that the House might tie an increase to a one-year delay in Obamacare, but the GOP’s exact plans remain unclear. House Speaker John Boehner has spoken vaguely about demanding further budget cuts in exchange for agreeing to raise the debt limit. In the past he has called for a dollar in cuts in exchange for each dollar in additional debt.
Regardless, President Obama is insisting that he will not negotiate on the issue. Given Republican fecklessness on the CR question, it is hard to see them winning a confrontation over the debt limit. At the very least one would expect to see them coalescing around specific proposals for, say, entitlement reform. So far, one looks in vain.
In the short run, no issue is as important as war and peace. Lives as well as treasure hang in the balance. But for the long-term future of this country, preventing the looming fiscal crisis may matter even more.
True, the budget deficit has fallen significantly this year. The economic recovery, anemic as it is, has nonetheless generated additional revenue, and the sequester actually did hold down the growth in spending. As a result, the deficit so far this fiscal year is roughly $750 billion. That’s $411 billion less than last year, but still represents 23 cents out of every dollar we spend.
Moreover, declining deficits are just a temporary phenomenon. According to the Congressional Budget Office, by 2016, deficits will be rising again. By 2022, they will approach $900 billion annually. Our national debt remains above 100 percent of GDP. The unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare heap between $67 and $112 trillion on top of that.
Nearly everyone has remarked on the incomprehensibility of the Obama administration’s Syria policy. Yet, on the equally important issue of our fiscal future, the GOP is looking every bit as inept.
That is a failure we may one day rue even more than Syria.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/358212/incompetency-home-michael-tanner
Obama Rescues Assad
The President lets Putin outmaneuver him on Syrian chemical arms.
What could be worse for America's standing in the world than a Congress refusing to support a President's proposal for military action against a rogue regime that used WMD? Here's one idea: A U.S. President letting that rogue be rescued from military punishment by the country that has protected the rogue all along.That's where President Obama now finds himself on Syria after he embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin's offer to take custody of Bashar Assad's chemical weapons. The move may rescue Mr. Obama and Congress from the political agony of a vote on a resolution to authorize a military strike on Syria. But the diplomatic souk is now open, and Mr. Obama has turned himself into one of the junior camel traders.
What a fiasco. Secretary of State John Kerry, of all people, first floated this escape route for Assad on Monday in Europe where he was supposed to be rallying diplomatic support for a strike. The remark appeared to be off-the-cuff, but with Mr. Kerry and this Administration you never know. In any case before Mr. Kerry's plane had landed in the U.S., Russia's foreign minister had leapt on the idea and proposed to take custody of Assad's chemical arsenal to forestall U.S. military action.
France will press for a U.N. Security Council resolution supposedly for U.N. inspectors to supervise the dismantling of Syria's stockpiles, though Russia will no doubt try to put itself in the lead inspecting role. On Tuesday Russia was even objecting to a French draft that would blame the Syrian government for using chemical weapons. Mr. Putin also insisted the U.S. must first disavow any military action in Syria, even as he and Iran make no such pledge.
On second thought, fiasco is too kind for this spectacle. Russia has publicly supported Assad's denials that he used sarin gas, but we are now supposed to believe it will thoroughly scrub Syria of those weapons. We are also supposed to believe Assad will come clean about the weapons he has long denied having and still denies using.
Oh, and we can be confident of this because U.N. or Russian inspectors or someone will be able to locate the entire chemical arsenal, pack up arms that require enormous care in transport, and then monitor future compliance in the continuing war zone that is Syria.
Even if you believe this will happen, or is even possible, Assad will emerge without punishment for having used chemical weapons. He can also be confident that there will be no future Western military action against him. Mr. Obama won't risk another ramp-up to war given the opposition at home and abroad to this effort.
Assad will also know he can unleash his conventional forces anew against the rebels, and Iran and Russia will know they can arm him with impunity. The rebels had better brace themselves for a renewed assault. At the very least, Mr. Obama should compensate for his diplomatic surrender by finally following through on his June promise to arm and train the moderate Free Syrian Army. Otherwise he runs the risk of facilitating an Assad-Iran-Russian triumph.
The alacrity with which Mr. Obama embraced Russia's offer suggests a President who was looking for his own political escape route. His campaign to win congressional support has lost ground in the week since he needlessly blundered into proposing it. His effort to rally international support foundered last week at the G-20, where Mr. Putin looked dominant, and Mr. Obama's approval rating has been falling at home.
In his Tuesday speech, Mr. Obama tried to put his best face on all of this. He took credit for it by claiming that his threat of "unbelievably small" military force, as Mr. Kerry advertised it, induced Assad to see the light. He claimed that he had personally floated the idea of international monitoring of Syria's weapons. But this admission merely underscores how eager Mr. Obama is to find a Syria exit short of having to follow through on his military threats. His speech amounted to a call to support a military strike that his actions suggest he desperately wants to avoid.
The world will see through this spin. A British commentator in the Telegraph on Monday called this "the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began," and that's only a mild exaggeration. A weak and inconstant U.S. President has been maneuvered by America's enemies into claiming that a defeat for his Syria policy is really a triumph.
The Iranians will take it as a signal that they can similarly trap Mr. Obama in a diplomatic morass that claims to have stopped their nuclear program. Israel will conclude the same and will now have to decide if it must risk a solo strike on Tehran. America's friends and foes around the world will recalculate the risks ahead in the 40 dangerous months left of this unserious Presidency.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324094704579066774128762480.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Pro-rebel Syria researcher fired for false doctoral claim
Elizabeth O’Bagy has been cited by the Obama administration, Senator John McCain, and John Kerry as a key resource for their claim that the Syrian rebel forces are mostly moderates and not Sunni extremists affiliated with al-Qaeda. They’re going to have to find another source for that argument after the think tank that employs O’Bagy abruptly fired her today for faking her doctorate:A young researcher whose opinions on Syria were cited by both Senator McCain and Secretary of State John Kerry in congressional testimony last week has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for allegedly faking her academic credentials.
The institute issued a statement on its website concerning the researcher, Elizabeth O’Bagy:
The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University. ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.
O’Bagy and her op-ed drew scrutiny last week when the Wall Street Journal failed to disclose O’Bagy’s ties to an advocacy group backing the Syrian opposition and lobbying the US government to intervene in Syria. The Journal was forced to post a clarification that “in addition to her role at the Institute for the Study of War, Ms. O’Bagy is affiliated with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit operating as a 501(c)(3) pending IRS approval that subcontracts with the U.S. and British governments to provide aid to the Syrian opposition.”O’Bagy also was reluctant to disclose her affiliation with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which is an advocacy group for the rebels. She later claimed her research for ISW was separate from the SETF, but her abrupt dismissal is liable to raise a lot more questions about the quality of analysis that’s driving the Obama administration’s push to arm and support the rebels.
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2013/09/11/pro-rebel-syria-researcher-fired-for-false-doctoral-claim/
Syria vs. North Korea: The Calculus of Mass Atrocities
The news of U.S. policy on Syria is, at this stage, moving in such loops and spirals that Russia — major arms supplier and supporter of the Assad regime — seems to be calling the shots. Suddenly the neutered United Nations is back in the ring, and for the average guy in Topeka, the whole thing by now probably makes about as much sense as the federal budget.
But if we might focus for a moment on the underlying issue: President Obama has been arguing that Syria’s use of chemical weapons is “a serious threat to our national security.”
There’s a good case for that, but the president and his top officials have yet to make it in a way that fits into any coherent global strategy — and yes, we live in a world of interconnected threats. Syria’s closest ally is Iran; both are clients of North Korea’s emporium of both conventional weapons and more exotic approaches to mass murder. Much entwined with their alarming ventures — doing business with them, and running diplomatic interference for them — are Russia and China. Add to that such matters as al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups, state-sponsored or otherwise, organizing the next plot to kill Americans.
Amid the president’s talk of red lines, credibility, international norms, and changing calculus, Americans have been left wondering what the commander-in-Chief actually means when he says those words.
What equations does his math include? What variables will he factor in? How does this calculus apply to other threats, red lines, rogue regimes, and violations of norms?
The White House has accused Syria’s Assad regime of a chemical weapons attack on August 21 that killed at least 1,429 people, including at least 426 children. Citing that, the president told the nation he wanted to take action against Syrian military targets: “We cannot and must not turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus.”
Okay — but how do we then explain turning a blind eye for years to atrocities on far larger scales, inflicted not in war but as a routine matter of state policy, because that’s how the ruler stays on top?
What about a regime that, according to multiple accounts from defectors, has tested chemical weapons on its own women and children? What about a regime responsible for the deaths by politically targeted famine of an estimated million or more? What about a regime operating a gulag to which three generations of a family can be exiled for the suspected political disloyalty of a single member? What about a regime that routinely tortures, starves, and works to death those in its prison camps?
And what if that regime, while starving, torturing, and killing its own people, happens to sustain itself by selling chemical weapons, missiles, and nuclear technology (including an entire clandestine nuclear reactor, a.k.a. a plutonium factory) to the Middle East, including Syria’s regime in Damascus?
What if that regime were testing long-range missiles, and had already conducted three nuclear tests — the most recent just this past February?
Would we target them with … Dennis Rodman?
Obviously, this is not hypothetical. I’m talking about North Korea, where the totalitarian Kim dynasty ought to qualify for a world prize in crossing red lines and violating all civilized norms. Just this spring, following its most successful long-range missile test and in tandem with its latest nuclear test, Kim Jong Un’s regime was threatening nuclear strikes on Washington, South Korea, and U.S. bases in the Far East.
As for monstrous abuse of human beings, including children: just this month — while all eyes were on Syria — the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, which tracks North Korea’s gulag by trying to tally witness accounts with satellite photos, released a report on changes in these prison camps. The report includes an account of the disappearance since 2010 of tens of thousands of prisoners held in a prison camp known as Camp No. 22.
These were people “severely deprived of their liberties and subjected to a lifetime of forced labor under extraordinarily inhuman conditions.” These were not people the Pyongyang regime was likely to release from the gulag. HRNK cites a report from Radio Free Asia that “following a food shortage,” the prisoner population “dwindled rapidly from 30,000 to 3,000.”
What happened to all those people?
The HRNK report concludes: “If even remotely accurate, this is an atrocity requiring much closer investigation.”
If a likely case of starving to death tens of thousands of forced laborers — effectively, the horribly abused slaves of the North Korean state — does not sound colorful enough to grab the world’s attention, what about the accounts over the years of North Korea conducting chemical and biological weapons experiments on its own people?
Here’s a 2004 BBC report on the gas chambers of North Korea, by this account tested on the families of political prisoners.
Here’s a report from 2009 on North Korea testing chemical and biological weapons on handicapped children.
Yes, confirming these accounts is a tall order. But in the grand corridors of the global powers, who has really been trying?
The point is not that atrocities in Syria don’t matter. They do. Syria is part of a highly dangerous network of tyrannies and terrorists, and it would be a terrible mistake to send the message that chemical weapons may with impunity be wielded in this mix, or anywhere.
But it appears that in the current calculus, some atrocities are more equal than others.
Far more dangerous than Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons are Iran’s global terror network and hegemonic ambitions, coupled with its advancing program for building nuclear bombs. Add to that both North Korea’s WMD projects and accompanying shopping catalogue, and the inference that other rogue states might reasonably draw from the North Korean example is: if you create a credible threat that you are willing to slaughter your democratic neighbors wholesale, and build nuclear weapons to back it up, the U.S. will avert its gaze and content itself with rounds of sanctions punctuated by bribes of appeasement.
As the furor of the U.S. political debate has just richly highlighted, Americans are puzzled over the national security priorities of this presidency.
Why was Qaddafi’s threat to slaughter rebels in Libya treated as so much more urgent that the visible carnage for more than two years in Syria?
In deciding which atrocities might warrant military intervention and which do not, what are the guiding principles of this administration? What is the calculus, not just for Syria, not solely for choosing which atrocities to call out and which to ignore, but for defending American interests in an increasingly dangerous world?
This is what the president needs to explain.
http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/syria-vs-north-korea-the-calculus-of-mass-atrocities/?singlepage=true
Total recall: Gun-control advocates get booted from CO office
Voters in Colorado sent a big message yesterday to progressives who thought they’d taken ownership of the interior West in recent election cycles. Legalizing pot and even raising a few taxes might be fine and dandy, but take away the guns and the state — and the electorate — start seeing red (via The Week):Two Colorado Democrats who provided crucial support for a slate of tough new gun-control laws were voted out of office on Tuesday in a recall vote widely seen as a test of popular support for gun restrictions after mass shootings in a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school.
The election, which came five months after the United States Senate defeated several gun restrictions, handed another loss to gun-control supporters. It also gave moderate lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.
The recall elections ousted two Democratic state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, and replaced them with Republicans. Both defeats were painful for Democrats – Mr. Morse’s because he had been Senate president, and Ms. Giron’s because she represented a heavily Democratic, working-class slice of southern Colorado.
Michael Bloomberg tried to swing the election
back to Morse and Giron by dropping $350,000 into the race, and
progressive groups raised a total of $3 million to protect the two
gun-control advocates. It made no difference in the end — and that’s a big deal for the gun-rights movement, writes Sean Sullivan at the Washington Post:
It’s not every day that you see an incumbent recalled from office, let alone someone as high-profile as a state Senate president. The message the defeat of Morse and Giron sends to legislators all across the country is unmistakable: If you are thinking about pushing for new gun-control laws, you could face swift consequences.
“You could almost call it the bellwether state as far as what’s going to happen down the road as far as gun-control and Second Amendment rights,” Republican George Rivera, who will fill Giron’s seat, told The Fix late last month.
The particulars of Tuesday’s elections prompted some gun-control advocates to argue that the results shouldn’t be over-read. For one thing, voters didn’t receive mail ballots automatically, a substantial change of protocol in a state where the majority of voters cast their votes via mail. For another, the losses don’t mean Republicans will control the Senate; nor do they mean the gun laws that Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) signed into law will be repealed. …
But it shouldn’t go overlooked that the two districts where voters cast ballots tilt more Democratic than Republican. And the anti-recall side easily outraised the pro-recall interests. The Democratic losses are a reflection of the fact that enthusiasm was squarely on the opposite side of Morse and Giron. …
While the long-term significance of the election will assuredly be be debated, it’s hard to argue against the proposition that lawmakers in other states will have Colorado somewhere in their minds the next time a push to tighten gun laws begins ramping up.It probably didn’t help the two Democrats that the effort to rescue them came most publicly from New York City, and not their own constituents. In fact, as Alec MacGillis points out in The New Republic, the anti-recall side had far more money than the pro-recall side, perhaps as much as 6:1 in favor of Morse and Giron. They got more help from GOTV groups that tried to turn out voters for the cause. In the end, even with all of these advantages, Coloradans told the gun grabbers to pound sand.
The Boss Emeritus, a Coloradan herself, wrote that the “bright red line” had now been drawn:
The significance of this historic and unprecedented battle cannot be overstated. As I’ve reported over the past several months, the effort was an astonishing grass-roots effort in which ordinary citizens gathered more than 16,000 signatures for a recall petition in Colorado Springs over a matter of weeks. The role of women (Coloradans Laura Carno, Kelly Maher, Kim Weeks were among the leading lights) in pushing back against false gun-grabbing narratives and smears was invaluable. The birth control fear-mongering failed. The use of social media to organize echoes other successful Tea Party efforts. …
But the message has been sent and the bright red line has been drawn. Other Democratic state legislators across the country posing as “moderates” cannot carry water for the Bloomberg conglomerate and think they can escape without electoral consequences.Indeed. And so too should other politicians who think that Bloomberg’s money and name carry some sort of cachet among their electorate.
And Colorado’s “moderate” Democrat Gov. John Hickenlooper better watch out.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/11/total-recall-gun-control-advocates-get-booted-from-co-office/
Sequestration nation: DoD doles out $7 billion in wind-energy contracts
Remember, earlier this year, when the Obama administration was transforming each and every sequestration budget cut into some nightmarishly dire prediction about how each and every major department wouldn’t be able to perform the full extent of their absolutely and irrevocably essential duties? It would seem that, even as there are Defense Department employees being furloughed and Secretary Hagel warns of more layoffs and our military slims down on equipment, training programs, and etcetera, the Pentagon evidently continues to prioritize the forceful implementation of so-called “green” and “renewable” sources into their energy repertoire. Via Reuters:The U.S. Army has picked 17 companies that will be eligible to receive orders for wind energy under an umbrella contract valued at up to $7 billion, the Pentagon said on Monday.
The companies include many large energy producers including Dominion Energy, a unit of Dominion Resources Inc ; the U.S. unit of Spain’s Acciona SA ; Duke Energy Corp ; the U.S. unit of France’s EDF Energies Nouvelles; and the U.S. unit of Spain’s Iberdrola SA.
All the companies were awarded potential “indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity” contracts that have a cumulative value of up to $7 billion, the Pentagon said in its daily digest of major contracts.Why the Obama administration insists upon using the military as a sponsor of what they, rather than the free market, have arbitrarily and falsely deemed to be practical and cost-effective sources of energy, it pains me to think on — but the point is that the U.S. military is currently choosing to spend big money on energy sources that do not offer them the biggest bang for their buck.
Even better, the Pentagon dished out a similarly sized set of contracts for solar energy companies last month; and this is all on top the Navy’s push to outfit a number of cruisers, destroyers, and fighter jets with biofuel-blended gas. While proponents of using the military as a renewable-energy guinea pig often point to the completely bogus argument that these initiatives will enhance the military’s energy security, the fact is that this is yet another way for the Obama administration to brag about their green-energy commitments and prop up the technologies on which they’ve already spent so much taxpayer money in the form of subsidies and handouts, all for political and ideological purposes — and in the long run, it’s a disservice to actual opportunities for renewable energy.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/10/sequestration-nation-dod-doles-out-7-billion-in-wind-energy-contracts/
The President’s Utility: Crony capitalism in Chicago turns “green” into greenbacks
By Ed LaskySummary: Exelon has made countless millions off its political connections and stands to make a fortune off Obama administration energy policies. Its story brings together the President’s former campaign director, his former chief of staff, and others who operate “the Chicago way.”
“We are proud to be the President’s utility.” — Elizabeth Moler
Those ties include Obama’s campaign chief David Axelrod, who worked for Exelon, and the President’s first chief of staff at the White House, Rahm Emanuel, who negotiated the merger that created the company. An Exelon board member, John W. Rogers, was described by the New York Times as “a friend of the president’s and one of his top fund-raisers.” The President’s mentor in the Illinois State Senate, Emil Jones, was described by the Washington Examiner as “wrapped around [Exelon’s] finger.”
Even the late Thomas G. Ayers, who served as Exelon’s president and CEO, plays a role in this story. (Ayers, you may recall, was the father of terrorist Bill Ayers and the father-in-law of terrorist Bernardine Dohrn. See the sidebar by Steven J. Allen below.)
The Chicago way
Axelrod and Emanuel, like Obama, are veterans of the famously amoral politics of Chicago. Axelrod, a former writer for the Chicago Tribune, is a political consultant whose clients have included Chicago Mayors Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley. Emanuel was a member of Congress and head of the Democratic Party’s congressional campaign committee, and succeeded Daley as mayor of the Windy City.
As journalist John Fund explains, the political machine once headed by Richard M. Daley’s father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, “evolved over 60 years from a patronage-rich army of worker bees into a corporate state in which political pull and public-employee unions dominate.” To get the flavor of Chicago politics, consider that Emanuel’s predecessors in his congressional seat, save for a single-term Republican, were Dan Rostenkowski and Rod Blagojevich, both of whom went to jail. (When Blagojevich ran for governor, one of his “key advisors,” according to Politico, was State Senator Barack Obama.) Counting Blagojevich, four of the past seven governors of Illinois went to jail. A University of Illinois study concluded that almost a third of Chicago’s aldermen (city council members) during the period 1973-2012 were convicted of corruption, and that, across Illinois between 1976 and 2012, corruption convictions came at a rate of about one a week.
Axelrod, Emanuel, and Obama are practitioners of a kind of politics that combines extremist ideology with old-style influence peddling in a way that many see as Saul Alinsky crossed with Al Capone. “We have a sick political culture, and that’s the environment Barack Obama came from,” warned Jay Stewart, the executive director of the Better Government Association, in 2008. BGA has fought corruption in Chicago since Prohibition.
Movie buffs remember a line from 1987’s The Untouchables: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” Mr. Obama echoed that line while campaigning in 2008, when he said of Republicans, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” He suggested in comments aimed at Latinos that politics is a way to “punish our enemies” and “reward our friends.”
Today, most Americans suffer under heavy burdens of taxation and regulation, but crony capitalists are thriving. The poster-child for Chicago-style crony capitalism is a company that is poised to greatly benefit as a result of Barack Obama’s policies: Exelon.
Colossus
Exelon is America’s largest power generator, with a long pedigree. It was created through a merger in 2000 of Peco Energy Company and Unicom. Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), based in Chicago, was owned by Unicom. In 2012, Exelon merged with Constellation Energy to grow even larger and now operates in 47 states.
Tracing the company back through generations of mergers and acquisitions to its beginnings as Commonwealth Edison, the ultimate founder of Exelon is Samuel Insull, who served as an aide to Thomas Edison and was a founder of General Electric. Insull, one of the real-life moguls on whom Citizen Kane was based, used his political connections to create the model of a regulated, monopoly utility—a business that accepts (and eventually co-opts) government regulation and that receives a government-guaranteed profit and protection from competition. It’s a model used frequently over the past century in such fields as telephone service and electricity generation. Under the President’s healthcare rationing scheme, Obamacare, the model is now being applied to health insurance providers.
Commonwealth Edison was created in 1907 as the result of a crony capitalist deal: The city council decided to sell the city’s 50-year franchise to the highest bidder, but only after Insull had secured the rights to the equipment of every major U.S. electricity manufacturer, thus making himself the only person in a position to bid. For his $50,000 bid, he got control of the Chicago market. Later, he engineered the creation of the Illinois Commerce Commission, to regulate utilities (and prevent the rise of any competition).
Insull’s ComEd is the core of the company today known as Exelon. After the mergers that created the new company, Chicago was Exelon’s headquarters, Chicago executives ran the company, and ComEd’s agenda became Exelon’s agenda.
That agenda included the expansion of nuclear power in America. Commonwealth Edison had for years focused on building and operating nuclear power plants. The company is renowned for its ability to extend the life of its reactors. And it has many of them. If Illinois were a country it would have the 12th-largest number of nuclear reactors (with 11), behind China but ahead of Sweden. Exelon owns all those nuclear reactors and six more scattered about other states.
In 1979, Forbes magazine noted that ComEd’s commitment to nuclear power had brought the company to its “worst financial crisis” in the 41-year career of its then-chairman, Thomas G. Ayers. That’s because nuclear power was seen at the time as a losing proposition, in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident that effectively shut down the expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. “Some of these days,” Forbes reported in 1979, “Tom Ayers must almost find himself hoping for another Arab oil embargo to make his customers aware how fortunate they are to be living in an area that has all that nuclear power to fall back on.” Ayers and ComEd/Exelon never got their wish for another oil embargo, but—well, if a crisis in carbon-based fuels is necessary to restore the company’s fortunes, perhaps such a crisis can be created.
To paraphrase a line from Citizen Kane: You supply the nuclear power, and I’ll supply the energy crisis.
Axelrod’s Astroturf
Utilities are not popular among consumers. Usually monopolies, they charge what are perceived to be high prices. They are regulated by various levels of government, which obliges company executives to curry favor with politicians. Exelon has played the political game skillfully, as skillfully as the company runs its reactors, but with a different type of juice.
This is where David Axelrod enters the picture—or doesn’t, given that he operates invisibly most of the time.
Axelrod was the chief campaign strategist for Obama’s 2004 senatorial campaign as well as Obama’s presidential runs in 2008 and 2012. When the new president moved into the White House in 2009, Axelrod became his senior advisor. Axelrod received media attention for his political work, but few members of the public were aware that, when he wasn’t on the public payroll, the former newspaperman also worked his magic for corporations such as ComEd/Exelon.
In 2006, ComEd wanted a big rate hike and needed the support of state legislators. Its strategy was to create a new organization, Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity (CORE). CORE ran ads warning of an impending “California-style energy crisis” if the rate hikes were not approved. Higher prices were justified as a way to improve the creation and distribution of electricity in Illinois.
CORE was presented to the public as a grassroots group—according to its website, just “a coalition of individuals, businesses and organizations” working together for a better Illinois. In fact, it was what political observers call “Astroturf” (fake grassroots). Created for ComEd’s benefit by ASK Public Strategies, Axelrod’s “consulting/lobbying” firm, its entire $15 million budget came from ComEd.
When CORE was exposed as phony, the work of Axelrod and his associates, the public reacted with outrage at CORE’s creators and at the legislators who supported the rate hike. Michael Isikoff reported in a 2008 Daily Beast column that ASK was located in the same office as Axelrod’s political firm and that it was later hired by Cablevision, owner of Madison Square Garden, to create a similar Astroturf group to block a proposed stadium in New York City for the New York Jets.
BusinessWeek reported in 2008: “The Obama campaign’s chief strategist is a master of ‘Astroturfing’ and has a second firm that shapes public opinion for corporations. . . . ASK’s predilection for operating in the shadows shows up in its work. On behalf of ComEd and Comcast, the firm helped set up front organizations that were listed as sponsors of public-issue ads.” A Chicago politician called ASK “the gold standard in Astroturf organizing. This is an emerging industry, and ASK has made a name for itself in shaping public opinion and manufacturing public support.”
At one point, Mayor Richard M. Daley, a longtime Axelrod client, was pushing for the construction of a new Children’s Museum in Grant Park. BusinessWeek noted:
ASK is counseling the museum, which reports annual revenue of more than $11 million, including government grants, on its message strategy. It is also writing ads, including a 60-second radio spot that stresses how the new quarters would blend into Grant Park and be more accessible. [The ASK spokesman] won’t say how much ASK is receiving, joking that it’s “about 30¢ per hour.” Consultants at other PR firms say corporate clients pay monthly retainers of up to $25,000, though nonprofit groups usually pay less. In addition, firms typically get 15% of whatever clients spend on advertising.
By March 2008, the Obama presidential campaign had received roughly $182,000 from ComEd/Exelon, more money than from any other company in the candidate’s home state.
When President Obama appointed Axelrod to be his senior advisor, with an office very close to the Oval Office, he took a payout of $3 million from his political and media consulting firms, after making $1.5 million in salary and partnership income for his work in 2008.
In connection with his new appointment, Axelrod was compelled by law to identify other clients. As Lynn Sweet reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, the disclosures “revealed for the first time ASK Public strategies clients including the Chicago 2016 Committee, vice chaired by Valerie Jarrett, now a top White House advisor; the University of Chicago Medical Center, where First Lady Michelle Obama worked as a vice president, and the Chicago Children’s Museum, promoted by Mayor Daley. Obama sponsored a $1 million earmark in 2007 to help build the Children’s Museum in Grant Park, a project facing opposition over the question of whether it was appropriate use of downtown park land.”
Your tax dollars at work.
Rahm’s reward
Rahm Emanuel began his political career as a fundraiser for politicians, a master of shaking the money tree. He was chief fundraiser for Richard M. Daley’s 1989 mayoral race and director of the finance committee for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Upon Clinton’s election, he moved over to the White House, where he served as the Assistant to the President for Political Affairs and as the Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Strategy. In 1998, he resigned to work for the investment bank Wasserstein Perella & Company. He got the job at Wasserstein Perella despite having no previous education in finance, no MBA or law degree, and no experience in investment banking. What he did have was a long list of names of friends in Washington.
According to the Times, “Confidants of Mr. Emanuel’s said he decided to try his hand at business because he wanted financial security for his family, before eventually returning to public service. ‘He had a number in his head to make enough for the family,’ said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, one of Rahm’s two brothers and a prominent bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health.” (Ezekiel Emanuel later became famous for his support of Obamacare and his advocacy of a healthcare rationing scheme that would target older people and infants for denial of care.)
In a manner typical of well-connected members of the political elite, Rahm Emanuel quickly achieved his goal of financial independence; he obtained the riches necessary to let him spend the rest of his life seeking political power, freed of the money concerns that burden regular people. Putting his list of contacts to good use, he made more than $18 million in two and a half years.
A large part of Emanuel’s big haul was funded by Exelon. As Michael Luo wrote in the New York Times:
Mr. Emanuel’s biggest transaction came in late 1999 when he landed an advisory role for Wasserstein in the $8.2 billion merger of two utility companies, Unicom, the parent company of Commonwealth Edison, and Peco Energy, to create Exelon, now one of the nation’s largest power companies.
John W. Rowe, the former chief executive of Unicom who now holds the same position at Exelon, sought out Mr. Emanuel after he went to Wasserstein. Mr. Rowe said he believed Mr. Emanuel would offer a different dimension, providing wisdom on what might pass muster at the governmental level.
“You can’t understand utility transactions without thinking about whether they’ll play or not play in legal and political circles,” said Mr. Rowe, who was first introduced to Mr. Emanuel by Lester Crown, the billionaire scion of Chicago’s influential Crown family.
The Times also noted that “One of Mr. Emanuel’s major deals was the purchase in 2001 of a home alarm business, SecurityLink, from SBC Communications, the telecommunications company that was run by William M. Daley, the former secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and the brother of Chicago’s mayor.” Daley, former president of the union-owned Amalgamated Bank (see our sister publication Labor Watch, June 2013), succeeded Emanuel as White House chief of staff and is now running for governor of Illinois.
Another source of income for Emanuel was his service on the board of the government-sponsored Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, the infamous “Freddie Mac,” where well-connected politicians made fortunes without regard to their level of expertise in the mortgage business. As reported in 2009 by Brian Ross of ABC News:
President-elect Barack Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot “red flags,” according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.
According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac …
misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.
During his brief time on the board (2001-2002), Emanuel made $260,000. When he left the board to run for Congress, Freddie Mac’s Political Action Committee gave his campaign $25,000. Later, during the financial crisis, Freddie Mac and its sister organization, Fannie Mae, were bailed out by taxpayers at a cost that works out to approximately $4,000 for each family of four in the U.S.
In 2002, Emanuel was elected to Congress, quickly rising to a key position, head of Democrats’ efforts to take control of the U.S. House. Emanuel’s strategy was to recruit seemingly moderate candidates, presenting them as evidence of the Democratic Party’s return to the center. The plan helped Democrats win the House in 2006, making leftist Nancy Pelosi the Speaker.
A tony townhouse
During his time in the House, Emanuel was involved in a controversy involving a famous energy company.
Washington, D.C. has some of the highest rents in the country. Today, it’s estimated that a person has to make $62,000 a year to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the city, and rents on Capitol Hill are much higher than average for the city. A tiny 252-square-foot house on Capitol Hill was recently offered for rent at $1,200 a month.
In Congress, Emanuel avoided the burden of paying rent by staying at the tony Capitol Hill townhouse of a fellow member, Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). Emanuel didn’t even have to report his rent-free residence as a gift because House rules allowed one member of Congress to make such a gift to another member without public disclosure. (“Hospitality between colleagues,” it’s called.) If Emanuel had been forced to report the transaction, someone might have noticed that the co-owner of the home, DeLauro’s husband, was Stanley Greenberg, the pollster who worked for Emanuel’s congressional campaign and for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (which Emanuel headed). The DCCC alone paid Greenberg’s firm approximately $240,000 in 2006 and $318,000 in 2008.
Another Greenberg client: the oil company known as BP. In fact, Greenberg’s firm was a major architect of the company’s public relations strategy under which it dissociated itself from its history as British Petroleum, shortened its name to BP, and characterized itself as a “green” company that had moved “Beyond Petroleum.” BP strongly supported environmentalist causes, spending at least $200 million on a campaign that some observers ridiculed as “greenwashing.” The company was also a major contributor to the 2008 Obama campaign; Obama was the PAC’s largest money recipient in 20 years. It made enormous research grants to a project headed by Stephen Chu, who became Obama’s first energy secretary. Indeed, some believe that the company’s political connections helped it get away with a long string of safety violations leading up to the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil spill. ABC News, for instance, found that before the spill BP had “one of the worst safety track records of any major oil company operating in the United States.”
Emanuel left Congress in 2009 to become White House chief of staff, then left that job to pursue what he described as his “dream job,” mayor of Chicago. Despite serious questions about his apparent lack of legal residency in the city, a court allowed Emanuel to run for mayor in 2011, and he won easily (55% to 24% for his top opponent). “You sure know how to make a guy feel at home,” he told supporters on election night, mocking the legal challenge to his candidacy.
As mayor, he appointed Exelon officials to key positions in government, such as two Exelon board members to the city’s seven-member school board; one of them is now the board’s vice president.
And he forced Chicago’s two coal-fired power plants to shut down. Who benefits from the deal? The plants’ competitor, Exelon.
Exelon and Obama
The relationship between Exelon and Barack Obama deepened as Obama began his political ascent. Eric Lipton in the New York Times noted this history last year:
Exelon’s top executives were early and frequent supporters of Mr. Obama as he rose from the Illinois State Senate to the White House. John W. Rogers Jr., a friend of the president’s and one of his top fund-raisers, is an Exelon board member.
. . . [T]he relationship between Mr. Obama and Exelon has been mutually beneficial.
The ties go back at least to Mr. Obama’s tenure in the Illinois State Senate, when he befriended an Exelon lobbyist named Frank M. Clark. Exelon’s employees, including Mr. Clark, were among the biggest financial supporters of Mr. Obama’s United States Senate campaign, with donations also from [John] Rowe, then the company’s chief executive, and others in the executive suite, campaign finance records show.
Exelon’s employees have contributed at least $395,000 to Mr. Obama’s federal campaigns. By far the strongest link is with Mr. Rogers, the Exelon board member and family friend. A college classmate of Michelle Obama’s brother, he was co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s inauguration committee and still occasionally plays basketball with Mr. Obama. He is one of Mr. Obama’s biggest campaign donation bundlers, having raised more than $500,000, and has co-hosted several fund-raisers, including one in March [2012] that featured a performance by the Grammy-winning musician John Legend.
John Rogers was a co-chair of Obama’s 2008 Illinois finance committee and a bundler, and served in the same roles in the 2012 campaign. For 2012, he raised more than $1.5 million for Obama’s re-election campaign, making him the second largest fundraiser. (By the way, Rogers’ ex-wife, Desiree Rogers, was social secretary at the Obama White House until she got caught up in an incident involving gate-crashers at a state dinner.)
Another Exelon bundler was William A. Von Hoene Jr., who oversaw Exelon’s legal and lobbying efforts. He has been a generous supporter of Barack Obama for years, according to the contribution monitor Open Secrets. The Center for Responsive Politics reported that Exelon employees were Obama’s sixth-largest corporate donor group in 2008.
Exelon and the War on Coal
Politics as an investment, as a path to profits, with the skids greased by campaign donations and other forms of support for politicians and their allies—this is the foundation of crony capitalism.
John Rowe, Exelon’s CEO, not only masterminded the mergers that created his company, but figured out how to use the company’s political connections to give Exelon a bright future. Rowe was one of the first utility executives to jump on the “climate change” bandwagon. His company was to become less and less reliant on burning carbon fuels to generate electricity (he sold most of the company’s coal plants after the merger in 2000 with Peco Energy) and has instead focused on boosting its nuclear energy capacity. These were deft moves considering who was elected President in 2008.
Exelon has been an advocate for harsher regulation and higher taxes on carbon-based energy. Those regs and taxes, of course, force competitors to raise their electricity prices as coal-generation costs increase. The market price for electricity rises, while Exelon’s costs, based on its heavy investment in nuclear power, remain relatively stable. Forbes magazine characterized this as “Exelon’s Carbon Advantage.”
Jonathan Fahey of Forbes wrote that the company views its spending on lobbying for such regulation “almost like a capital expense.” The aforementioned Obama bundler William Von Hoene described carbon legislation as Exelon’s big growth opportunity: “It’s an investment we are making that will result in substantial shareholder value.” Never mind the lay-offs, bankruptcies, higher utility prices, possible brownouts and blackouts, and other effects of efforts to make carbon-based energy too expensive to use!
In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama agreed that, under his energy plan, “electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket,” and “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” Thwarted in his effort to impose a cap-and-trade scheme, the President now uses the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies to accomplish the same goals.
For instance, the President has used his executive power to seal off vast areas of federal land from coal mining. As for coal-fired plants, which produce about half the nation’s electricity, new EPA rules will force more than 280 generating units across 32 states to shut down.
Even prior to the expansion of EPA rules to include existing coal power plants as well as new ones, consumers were in trouble. The Chicago Tribune reported in 2011:
Consumers could see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40 to 60 percent in the next few years.
The reason: Pending environmental regulations will make coal-fired generating plants, which produce about half the nation’s electricity, more expensive to operate. Many are expected to be shuttered.
The increases are expected to begin to appear in 2014, and policymakers already are scrambling to find cheap and reliable alternative power sources.…
One company that expects to benefit from the changes is Chicago-based Exelon Corp., which has a large fleet of nuclear power plants that have low emissions and are cheap to run compared with coal plants.
“The upside to Exelon is unmistakable,” CEO John Rowe said last year. “Every $50 per megawatt-day as a change in capacity prices, translates to almost $350 million of additional capacity revenue for Exelon in 2014 and subsequent years.”
Rowe said energy prices are also expected to rise if coal plants are retired and replaced with other energy sources, like natural gas. “These changes add up quickly,” he said. “A $5 per megawatt-hour increase in energy prices would be $700 million to $800 million of incremental annual revenue to Exelon on an open basis. We expect that at least some of that upside will be realized in the next two to four years.”
Again, Eric Lipton in the New York Times last August:
White House records show that Exelon executives were able to secure an unusually large number of meetings with top administration officials at key moments in the consideration of environmental regulations that have been drafted in a way that hurt Exelon’s competitors, but curb the high cost of compliance for Exelon and its industry allies.
In addition, Exelon, which provides power to more than 6.6 million customers in at least 16 states and the District of Columbia, was chosen as one of only six electric utilities nationwide for the maximum $200 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department. And when the Treasury Department granted loans for renewable energy projects, Exelon landed a commitment for up to $646 million allowing it, on extremely generous financial terms, to finance one of the world’s largest photovoltaic solar projects….
“I would like to get some treatment in Washington like that,” said Ken Anderson, general manager at Tri-State G&T, a Colorado-based power supplier that has been at odds with Exelon over environmental regulations. “But Exelon seems to get deference that I can’t get.”
Earlier this year, Exelon counseled shareholders to be patient for higher returns to come as coal-fired plants shut down rather than make costly, federally mandated environmental upgrades. In May, Exelon released a statement that the company was “positioned for unparalleled upside from improving [i.e., more expensive] power markets, coal plan retirements and other factors.”
In June, President Obama proposed sweeping steps to limit emissions from coal-fired plants. Previously, the Obama administration had only proposed controls on new plants. The EPA has now been ordered to “work expeditiously” to create carbon emission standards for both new and existing plants.
Many people seem mystified by the President’s support for nuclear power, which is anathema to many of his environmentalist supporters. Yet when much of the world panicked after the earthquake and tsunami that crippled a Japanese nuclear plant, when many countries announced plans to shut down or limit nuclear power, Obama called nuclear power an “important part” of his energy agenda.
His 2012 budget called for an additional $36 billion in U.S. loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, disproportionally benefiting Exelon.
Obama’s support for the Exelon agenda is of a piece with the rest of his “green energy” program—loans, loan guarantees, grants, special tax breaks, and mandates designed to benefit wind, solar, and battery projects that include a long string of failures such as Solyndra and Fisker.
According to Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer, four out of five “renewable” energy companies backed by the Department of Energy were “run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers.” In his 2011 book Throw Them All Out, Schweizer wrote about the department’s Section 1705 program:
In the 1705 government-backed-loan program [alone], for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.
Once upon a time, Exelon executives invested in a politician with great promise at an early stage in his career. That politician then dedicated himself to bankrupting industries based on coal, including mining and coal-based utilities, and one company above all stands to benefit greatly from his agenda: Exelon.
That is how Barack Obama rewards his friends.
Ed Lasky is co-founder and news editor of The American Thinker. GW
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By Steven J. Allen
A key link between Exelon and the Obama circle involves Thomas G. Ayers, who was president (1964-80) and CEO and chairman (1973-80) of Commonwealth Edison. Ayers was one of the most powerful civic leaders in the history of Chicago. He served as vice president of the city’s school board; as board chairman of the city’s symphony, its Urban League, and its Community Trust; and on the board of Sears, G.D. Searle, General Dynamics, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Cubs.
There’s a stereotype of radical children rebelling against their “establishment” fathers, but it doesn’t apply to Tom Ayers and his radical son, Bill. “Our father always stood by us,” said Bill’s brother John. He was an establishment guy. But he believed in us. He believed in change.”
Bill Ayers was the leader and co-founder of the Weather Underground organization (WUO), which terrorized America during the 1960s and ’70s. A Marxist counterpart to the Ku Klux Klan, WUO was closely allied with the violent, racist Black Panther Party and strongly supported the Vietnam War—not the U.S. side; the North Vietnamese side. Ayers called on young people to “kill the rich people” and “kill your parents.”
The WUO conducted a bombing campaign that hit more than two dozen targets, including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and New York City police headquarters. According to Ayers, the group also “cased the White House.” Some 50 police officers were injured, and three officers and a security guard were killed.
After his girlfriend and two other WUO members were killed in the premature explosion of a nail bomb intended for soldiers at Fort Dix, Bill Ayers became a fugitive along with fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn. At a 1969 meeting, Dohrn had praised the followers of Charles Manson, who committed nine murders in an effort to spark a race war; she gave a three-fingered salute to the Manson Family in reference to a fork that was stuck into the stomach of one of their victims.
During their time on the lam, Dohrn issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States and spent three years on the FBI Most Wanted list.
The couple eventually married, had two children of their own, and raised the child of two other members who were in jail for murder. They eventually turned themselves in, but due to legal technicalities, Ayers served no jail time, and Dohrn served only a few months for refusing to cooperate with a murder investigation. Incidentally, one of Dohrn’s lawyers was general counsel of the Chicago Tribune, where Tom Ayers was a board member, and another was counsel to a Tribune subsidiary, the New York Daily News.
With the presumed intervention of Tom Ayers—a member and, for a decade, chairman of the board of trustees at Northwestern University—Dohrn joined the faculty of Northwestern’s law school. Despite an 18-year gap in her legal career and the fact that she was denied admission to the bar in New York, Dohrn was hired by the Sidley Austin firm to work at its Manhattan office. (Eventually, she moved to the Chicago office, where she met a young associate, the future Michelle Obama.) Sidley Austin was the longtime outside counsel to ComEd. Howard Trienens, the firm’s managing partner in 1984, said in 2008 that he arranged the job for Dohrn as a favor to Tom Ayers.
As for Bill Ayers, he became a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. (When he retired in 2010, Ayers was denied “professor emeritus” status. The reason: Ayers once co-wrote a book that was dedicated to a group of supposed “political prisoners” that included Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, and the school’s board of trustees was headed by RFK’s son Christopher.)
It was a measure of the moral sickness of high society in Chicago that Ayers and Dohrn became respected members of the community without ever being brought to justice or even renouncing their crimes. Prior to Timothy McVeigh, Dohrn was the most famous terrorist in America, yet the Ayers-Dohrn residence became a key location for political gatherings, including a 1995 event at which State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her hand-picked successor, Barack Obama, and a 1996 fund-raiser for the Democratic Party’s first Internet-based organization, “Democrats Online.”
Obama served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, appeared on academic panels with the terrorist, wrote a blurb for a book by Ayers, and was a summer associate at the law firm that hired Dohrn. Most importantly, Obama distributed money from a $100 million charitable fund that Ayers had put together. That connection allowed the rising politician, who was not personally wealthy, to paint himself as “philanthropist Barack Obama,” as a local newspaper called him at that time.
Astonishingly, liberal commentator Michael Kinsley defended the embrace by Chicago high society of the monstrous Ayers and Dohrn on the ground that, well, everybody does it: “If Obama’s relationship with Ayers, however tangential, exposes Obama as a radical himself, or at least as a man with terrible judgment, he shares that radicalism or terrible judgment with a comically respectable list of Chicagoans and others—including Republicans and conservatives—who have embraced Ayers and Dohrn as good company, good citizens, even experts on children’s issues.” Thus is evil normalized and made banal.
A bit of irony: Obama came to Chicago as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project, with his salary paid by a grant from the Woods Fund, and Obama and Bill Ayers later served together on the Woods Fund board. The Woods Fund was founded by the family that owned the Illinois-based Sahara Coal Company, which provided coal to Commonwealth Edison.
http://capitalresearch.org/2013/09/14995/
Social Media and Activism Build Tea Party 2.0
As the Tea Party descends on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., again on Tuesday for Tea Party Patriots’ Exempt America rally, it is becoming clear that the movement as a whole has evolved into an activist powerhouse. It is empowering a new class of populist political heroes. Those who would by previous political conventional standards be considered "back-benchers," are now exercising power in Washington and in statehouses nationwide.Through a series of interviews with local, state and national leaders, Breitbart News has learned of a variety of new tactics the Tea Party movement has used to transform itself into a grassroots network holding politicians of both parties accountable.
ForAmerica chairman Brent Bozell, a longtime conservative activist at the national level, notices what he called a “seismic shift” in the conservative movement “at a number of levels.”
“One, there is a new generation of organizations emerging,” Bozell said in a phone interview. “This is cyclical. Organizations come and organizations go. And there have been new organizations emerging on the scene in recent years, whether it’s Tea Party Patriots or FreedomWorks or AFP or ForAmerica. You also have new communications vehicles like Breitbart, CNS News, things that weren’t there a few years ago. And then you’ve got new platforms that have emerged. And that’s where ForAmerica comes in because we have made a very serious investment in developing a new social media platform for the movement and I think it’s quite successful. We now have millions of members as a result. I think the movement is being transformed and it’s a positive thing.”
Internal ForAmerica statistics provided to Breitbart News show that its social media network has generated more than 40,000 phone calls to U.S. Senators and Congressmen on just the Defund Obamacare campaign. That is just phone calls tracked with special 800-numbers that ForAmerica created to see how many Tea Partiers nationwide were getting involved in this campaign. Organic calls and emails from grassroots activists pushing for the defunding of Obamacare range much higher than that, to the point where the most powerful people in the country in both the Republican Party and Democratic Party are being forced to respond to the grassroots pressure.
“If you work in somebody’s senate office and you get 15 phone calls on an issue in a day, that’s considered a lot,” Bozell said. “We’re delivering thousands and thousands of phone calls to Senate offices from people all over the country. These senators are being hit right between the eyes and they’re realizing they can’t take their constituents for granted anymore.”
Bozell said while instrumental to the movement, the hundreds of thousands of people descending on the national mall for a rally against President Barack Obama’s policies are not necessary anymore. “The rallies were the original manifestation of muscle-flexing but as movements go along they don’t do that anymore,” Bozell said. “They grow in other ways. MoveOn.org doesn’t have massive rallies but organizations like that are very prominent on the Democratic side; it didn’t go away. If you define Tea Party movement as ‘grassroots,’ just look at the polls and they tell you a story. When Ronald Reagan was president, 30 percent of America called itself ‘conservative.’ Today, 44 percent of America calls itself ‘conservative.’”
The rallies are not where the politicians are actually held accountable; they send a message to them to let them know thousands of people are watching their actions. That is largely what Tuesday’s rally on Capitol Hill is: a capstone to a month marked by sweeping successes from the conservative base as they have held their members of Congress accountable, and seek to continue doing so moving forward into the latter months of 2013 ahead of the crucial 2014 midterm elections.
Tanya Robertson, a mom and Tea Party activist from the Houston, Texas, area who will be speaking at Tuesday’s rally knows that. Robertson is one of the Tea Party leaders around the country who might not make national headlines every day, but she is in the trenches setting up events to hold her local members of the Congress accountable on Obamacare, Syria,amnesty and guns. She works to coordinate town halls, panels with members and works with national political activists to keep her local members of Congress as conservative as possible. “It is not only essential to voice your opinions, and your wishes, as a constituent to your representatives, it is vital that their answers to your questions are on record,” she told Breitbart News. “Whether you acquire a video recording at a Town Hall meeting, a recording from your phone of a one on one Q & A, or keeping a correspondence that was sent in a response to your question. Then, most importantly, make sure it goes public! Push it out via any means possible: Twitter, Facebook, letters to the editor in your local newspaper, email to connections, and any media source you may have.”
Robertson’s and her fellow activists’ work has paid off: Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), one Congressmen from her area, is one of the few members of the House to come out in public opposition to any conference committee between the House and Senate on the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration bill. He did so during a town hall event when another local Tea Party activist pressured him to answer whether he would.
Robertson is one of thousands of examples of unsung Tea Party heroes nationwide that Breitbart News has spoken with over the course of August. In South Carolina, local activists are organizing events, passing resolutions and vetting and preparing candidates aimed at taking out Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Myrtle Beach Tea Party president Joe Dugan, a victim of political targeting from President Obama’s IRS, made the hour-long drive to Columbia last week to join Tea Party Patriots national co-founder Jenny Beth Martin and ForAmerica’s Bozell, among others, for a press conference targeted at Graham for his failure to fight against Obamacare and actually defund it. “If you don’t file a tax return, you’re exempt [from Obamacare],” Dugan stated from the steps of the South Carolina state capitol. “If you’re an illegal alien, you’re exempt. If you’re in jail, you’re exempt. If you’re a member or staff in Congress, you’re exempt. For every exemption, it adds to the burden on the many wage-earners and taxpayers.”
Dugan and his fellow South Carolina Tea Partiers have been organizing for months in an effort to hold Graham accountable, and educate the public about his abandonment of not just conservative but mainstream GOP principles.
Down in Tennessee, a similar phenomenon is emerging. Loria Medina, the co-founder of BEAT LAMAR, a grassroots conservative group aimed at replacing Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) with a conservative, told Breitbart News her group is working on new forms of technology to help get out the vote on election day, and is holding candidate forums to test out potential primary challengers to Alexander. The first, and thus far only, candidate, state Rep. Joe Carr, has risen to the front of the pack there and Medina said the grassroots plans to unite behind him. Medina notes Tea Partiers, heading into year five of the movement, are “more experienced.”
“We know the RNC is never going to step up to where we really need to compete at the level the Democrats are,” Medina said in a phone interview. “And we are doing it without them. They can join us, but we’re not waiting on them any longer.”
The movement can just as easily take away power from those who gain it. In Arizona, Tea Party activists have targeted Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for his support of President Obama’s desire to militarily strike Syria and his push for amnesty, among other things. They have gone into his town hall events and criticized him for the positions he has taken in Congress. Perhaps more significantly, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)--who was elected over Charlie Crist in 2010 with massive Tea Party support--is not scheduled to speak at Tuesday's "Exempt America" rally, according to its website. While Rubio publicly says he supports efforts to defund Obamacare in the upcoming Continuing Resolution (CR) that funds the government, his pro-amnesty work on immigration has severely damaged his reputation throughout the GOP base.
Leaders in congress like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) know how influential this organic grassroots network is in the political world. Cruz has literally called for a “grassroots army” to rise up to help him beat Obamacare. Lee told Breitbart News that Tea Partiers “have played a critical role is shaping the push to defund Obamacare.”
“They played the same type of role in protecting our Second Amendment rights earlier this year, as well as uncovering the truth about the 'Gang of 8' immigration bill,” Lee added in an email to Breitbart News. “Using tools like email and social media allow small and local communities to impact the debate in ways that are faster and more effective than ever before. Their support has been crucial to fighting and winning many of these important debates in recent months."
In his interview with Breitbart News, Bozell points to Cruz as the shining example of what this new form of activism from the Tea Party movement can develop. “Ted Cruz came out of nowhere and won the Senate race in Texas because he employed social media,” Bozell said, adding that there is “no question” more examples of people like Cruz will emerge around the country in the coming months and years. “What has happened is that the old guard, whether it is in the media or whether it is the Washington Republican establishment, they’re going to scratch their heads and just not understand it. These people are going to keep coming out of nowhere.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/09/Exclusive-Tea-Party-2-0-How-social-media-and-new-activism-empower-movement-five-years-deep
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