Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seems to be removing his foot from his big mouth much of the time and is publicly ungrateful to the United States and the US Military for freeing his country of Saddam Hussein and the terrorists who followed.

While Barack Hussein Obama’s “magical mystery tour” of the Middle East the erstwhile Prime Minister told the German magazine, Der Spiegel, when asked was asked why Iraq has become more peaceful that “many factors,” including “the political rapprochement we have managed to achieve,” “the progress being made by our security forces,” “the deep sense of abhorrence with which the population has reacted to the atrocities of al-Qaida and the militias,” and “the economic recovery.”

The Prime Minister never mentioned the surge or the US Military and never supported the idea that the United States has saved him from death literally and politically.

An anonymous Iraqi official told the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, “Maliki thinks that Obama is most likely to win in the presidential election” and that “he’s got to take preemptive steps before Obama gets to the White House, writes Max Boot.

“Giving the Iraqi prime minister an added motive to posture about troop withdrawals, even while he explicitly eschews binding timelines, is that he is engaged in contentious status-of-forces negotiations with the United States. He may figure that threatening to boot us out gives him more leverage over our troops. Beyond the negotiations, there is the imperative of Iraq’s provincial elections, supposed to take place this year. Maliki no doubt expects that his Dawa party will reap political benefits from appearing to stand up to the Americans.”

Maliki has never publicly supported US involvement in Iraq but has been fast to give credit in other places. This is a man who spent much of his life in exile in Syria and Iran.

• May 2006, shortly after becoming prime minister, he claimed, “Our forces are capable of taking over the security in all Iraqi provinces within a year and a half.”
• October 2006, when violence was spinning out of control, Maliki declared that it would be “only a matter of months” before his security forces could “take over the security portfolio entirely and keep some multinational forces only in a supporting role.”
• On Dec. 15, 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has flatly told Gen. George Casey, the top American military commander in Iraq, that he doesn’t want more U.S. personnel deployed to the country, according to U.S. military officials.”
• January 2007, with the surge just starting, Maliki predicted “that within three to six months our need for the American troops will dramatically go down.”
• April 2007, when most of Baghdad was still out of control, the prime minister said that Iraqi forces would assume control of security in every province by the end of the year.

The Washington Post recently quoted Brig. Gen. Bilal al-Dayni, commander of Iraqi troops in Basra, as saying of the Americans:

“We hope they will stay until 2020.”

Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Qadir, says his forces cannot assume full responsibility for internal security until 2012 and for external security until 2018.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff describes what would happen if a “President Obama” has his way here.

The situation in Iraq is fragile by all accounts and a military presence is necessary to keep the country secure and to provide Democracy a chance to take hold over the months and years.

Iraq is a work-in-progress and foolish assessments by a former community organizer with zero leadership qualities or military experience will only hand Iraq to the extremists who remain in neighboring countries.

Continued foot and mouth disease by Iraq’s top leader is very disappointing despite his “political posturing.” Indeed!

Presumptive Democrat candidate for President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama said:

“We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there.”

Mr. Obama didn’t support the surge in Iraq, claims the surge in Iraq didn’t work but now believes increasing troop levels in Afghanistan, based on a short visit and couple of meals there, he has the answer.

A real eyewitness in Afghanistan is Ann Marlowe who has completed her 10th trip to Afghanistan and her third embed with U.S. forces there.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal Ms. Marlowe notes:

“In Afghanistan, the situation can differ radically in provinces just a half-hour helicopter ride away. There has been much recent hysteria about an incident on July 13 when nine American soldiers were killed in an insurgent assault on a combat outpost in Want, in Nuristan (mistakenly reported as taking place in Wanat in neighboring Kunar Province). This was the deadliest attack on American soldiers since 16 troops were killed in Kunar in 2005. It was a tragic event, but does not demonstrate that the American effort in Afghanistan is on the brink of disaster, as some commentators have risibly argued.”

As we are seeing during the recent Obama trip to the Middle East the mainstream media is falling over themselves attempting to interview the “wunderkind” who would be President. The press is also doing it’s best to ignore John McCain, play down success in Iraq and exaggerate problems in Afghanistan according to Obama.

Afghanistan Is Not Iraq - Ms. Marlowe continues:

“RC-East has pushed up to new areas and the bad guys are pushing back there,” a serving U.S. government official who requested anonymity told me. Regional Command East has been applying a standard formula in 14 Afghan provinces, usually with great success. Even privates can tell you that it’s about living among the people, building projects for them, and, in the Pashtun belt, getting the tribes on your side. This won’t do the trick unless the governor and sub-governors are decent and respected by the tribal leaders, and the tribes themselves are cohesive.

“But there is no such thing as tribe in Nuristan,” the official continued. “There is no unit above the corporate community.” The last governor was fired, but it’s not clear how much even a brilliant, honest governor could do in a place so unaccustomed to authority above the village level.

So how do we bring security to Nuristan? Is bringing in thousands of American troops the answer?

“No!” the official said. “It’s using Special Forces to get the bad guys who are infiltrating from Pakistan. Our enemy only attacks when they expect to win. If we have to go after them, we need the capacity to hunt them with stealth over trackless mountainsides for which our infantry, cavalry and airborne soldiers are not trained or equipped to operate.” Defeating the enemy is best accomplished by highly trained fighters who travel light.

“Counterinsurgency is not one-size-fits-all. While there are best practices, they must be applied in a nuanced way. In poorly governed countries where insurgencies are likely to arise, the solution may vary from valley to valley”, concludes Ms. Marlowe.

Adding men, helicopters or projects is not always the solution. A “would-be commander in chief” like Barack Hussein Obama announces his prescription for Afghanistan before discussing the situation with military commanders there has a lot to learn about America’s top job.

Mr. Obama has a lot to learn and he can’t do it running for President of the United States after short stints in the Illinois legislature and US Senate with only vast experience as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side. Indeed!

Last week in Washington, DC, at an Alliance for Climate Protection event, the former Vice-President, Al Gore, spoke. 

“I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate at every level to accept this challenge for America to be run on 100% zero carbon electricity in ten years. It’s time for us to move beyond empty rhetoric.  We need to act now and we need to act boldly.”

Mr. Gore believes he is the “Prophet of Planet Earth” and suggests earth’s inhabitants should prepare for the end.

Gore claims he is out of politics but he doesn’t mind slipping in his political rhetoric when speaking to a crowd of admirers.

“Am I the only one that finds it strange that our country is so often fooled into picking a remedy for a problem that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem that is being talked about?  Proposing to get a slight increase in oil drilling for fuel to be sold to China 10 to 15 years from now, as a solution to our rising gasoline prices makes about as much sense as responding to an attack from Afghanistan by invading some other country that had absolutely nothing to do with attacking us,” exclaims Mr. Gore.

We would agree that Mr. Gore is consistent with his false claims and hysteria. Providing facts to back up his gibberish might take some work but hypocrite Gore avoids debate therefore avoiding a public thrashing.

“The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Gore says.

“And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.”

Gore, known to himself as “Father of the Internet” continues to act like a mad scientist rolling out his next great propaganda piece disguised as a monster.

“It is true that it would be healthier for us as individuals and healthier for the planet if we consumed less meat and I acknowledge that, and there’s an undercurrent in the question, you didn’t say it, but I understand that part of the question is, How come that hasn’t been a more prominent part of this, uh, effort so far?” 

“An-and — I — I guess I will plead guilty to the idea that we can only do so much at once.  I myself am a meat eater, and maybe that has had an impact on my definition of the problem, but I want to forthrightly acknowledge that this is, uh, a significant part, uh, uh, uh, uh, of what needs to be done.  We’ve gotta walk before we run, and, you know, none of us are perfect,” Mr. Gore confesses.

Meat eater, one of the largest individual consumers of electric power and prominent carbon user on planet Earth.

“We may have less than ten years in order to make dramatic changes, lest we lose the chance to avoid catastrophic results from the climate crisis.  We’re building up CO2 so rapidly that we’re seeing the consequences scientists have long predicted, and the only way to take responsible action is to get at the heart of the problem, which is the burning of fossil fuels.  And the quickest and easiest way to back out the coal, which is the worst of the problem, and oil, is to look at electricity generation”, Gore explained to Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press.

Al Gore will not debate climate change or global warming but the debate has begun without him.

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.  The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.  The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling.   A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”

In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says:

“I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ‘climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.”

According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, “in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low.”

“Mr. Gore’s argument would be helped if he were also willing to propose huge investments in nuclear power, which emits no carbon dioxide and currently supplies about one-fifth of U.S. electricity needs, and about three-quarters of France’s. Britain has just approved eight new nuclear plants, and the German government of Angela Merkel is working to do away with a plan by the previous government to go nuclear-free”, points out Bret Stephens.

Mr. Gore makes no mention of nuclear power in his speech, nor of the equally carbon-free hydroelectric power. Gore believes a transition to carbon-free electricity generation in a decade is “achievable, affordable and transformative.” He believes that the goal can be achieved almost entirely through the use of “renewables” alone, meaning solar, geothermal, wind power and biofuels.

T. Boone Pickens agrees with Al Gore on wind energy but neither is putting up their own money to invest in renewable energy.

In his book Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence, Robert Bryce notes that “in July 2006, wind turbines in California produced power at only about 10% of their capacity; in Texas, one of the most promising states for wind energy, the windmills produced electricity at about 17% of their rated capacity.”

Like wind power, solar power also suffers from the problem of intermittency, which means that it has to be backed up by conventional sources in order to avoid disruptions. This is especially true of hot summers when the wind doesn’t blow and cold winters when the sun doesn’t shine.

Mr. Stephens asks why Mr. Gore remains believable and then offers that Gore plays Cassandra to unbelieving mortals and offers the following:

“The readiness for self-sacrifice,” wrote Eric Hoffer in “The True Believer,” “is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life. . . . All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. . . . To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”

Indeed!

The North American jet that flew Obama and his traveling crew around for much of the primary season was refurbished with new seats and power for each passenger a must on the campaign trail. And the plane that once had an American flag on its tail now sports the Obama “O.” “Change We Can Believe In” and the candidate’s website are splayed across both sides of the fuselage, making this 757 anything but inconspicuous, reports Bonnie Kapp.

“This means, of course, that the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Germany, and other countries will see a plane without an American flag — a plane on which the sole symbol is all about one man. Barack: Afghans and Iraqis won’t be voting for you in November. But they will notice that you failed to represent yourself as a proud American citizen while you are abroad. We’ve noticed too”, comments Larry Johnson at No Quarter.

The New York Times censors one presumptive Presidential candidate while another one censors the American Flag, again!

The airplane boasts Obama’s anthem, “Change We Can Believe In” but Barack Hussein Obama finds it beneath him to hold his hand over his heart during America’s National Anthem.

Change we don’t wish to believe in. Indeed!

An editorial written by Republican presidential hopeful McCain has been rejected by the New York Times — less than a week after the paper published an essay written by Barack Hussein Obama.

The paper’s decision to refuse McCain’s direct rebuttal to Obama’s ‘My Plan for Iraq’ has ignited explosive charges of media bias. At the New York Times, bastion for Left-Wing propaganda and leaking classified information? NO!

“I’d be very eager to publish the senator on the op-ed page. However, I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written. I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft. Let me suggest an approach,” Times op-ed editor David Shipley wrote the campaign via an e-mail later distributed by McCain’s team.

Let the editors at the New York Times “suggest an approach” to an op-ed by a US Senator and Presidential nominee?

“It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory — with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the Senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan,” Shipley wrote.

It sounds like the Times is demonstrating how it telegraphs military and intelligence secrets to the enemy. But let’s now look at Mr. Shipley’s expert background in these matters.

Shipley, who was named deputy editor in January 2003, served in the Clinton administration as a senior presidential speechwriter and special assistant to the president from 1995 to 1997.

He may be more qualified to run for President than Obama but of course neither individuals has a clue about security and military strategy unless you call it cut and run or surrender.

“We have elections in this country, not coronations and it’s unfortunate that The New York Times wouldn’t allow their readers to hear from John McCain and make their own judgment,” Hazelbaker told FOX News.

Only if the Times could edit the piece or possibly write it for Mr. McCain. Shipley, who is explained his decision not to run the editorial.

“The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information; while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.”

A top McCain source claims the paper simply does not agree with the senator’s Iraq policy, and wants him to change it, not “re-work the draft.”

McCain writes in the rejected essay: (Find McCain editorial here towards bottom_

“Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. ‘I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,’ he said on January 10, 2007. ‘In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

“I deplore… the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them… These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our funtionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief… This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit.” –Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, 1814. ME 14:46

Indeed!

WASHINGTON - A fixed timetable for withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq could jeopardize political and economic progress, the Pentagon top military officer said Sunday.

IMAGINE THAT!

Adm. Mike Mullen said the agreement between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to set a “general time horizon” for bringing more troops home from the war was a sign of “healthy negotiations for a burgeoning democracy.”

“I think the strategic goals of having time horizons are ones that we all seek because eventually we would like to see U.S. forces draw down and eventually all come home,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman said.

“This right now doesn’t speak to either time lines or timetables, based on my understanding of where we are.”

As far as we know Admiral Mullen was speaking without a teleprompter but expertise in his field, which is the military. Also, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama has not consulted with Admiral Mullen. Mr. Obama was unavailable for comment as he is taking his “Cliffs Notes” course on foreign affairs in the Middle East.

“Should that mission change, and we get a new president, and should those conditions be conditions that get generated or required in order to advise a future president, I would do so accordingly,” Mullen said.

“Based on my time in and out of Iraq in recent months, I think the conditions-based assessments are the way to go and they’re very solid. We’re making progress and we can move forward accordingly based on those conditions.”

Mr. Obama says he will consult “commanders on the ground” but has repeatedly telegraphed his intentions to “terrorists on the ground”.

“We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal,” claims Senator Obama. (For more watch video in our header above this post.)

Adm. Mullen, asked about the possibility of withdrawing all combat troops within two years, said, “I think the consequences could be very dangerous.”

“It hard to say exactly what would happen. I’d worry about any kind of rapid movement out and creating instability where we have stability. We’re engaged very much right now with the Iraqi people. The Iraqi leadership is starting to generate the kind of political progress that we need to make. The economy is starting to move in the right direction. So all those things are moving in the right direction,” Mullen said.

Obama says the surge would not work, the surge was not working once implemented and we’re losing in Afghanistan.

“But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.”

Adm. Mullen disagrees and cited “mixed progress” in Afghanistan, but added,

“I would not say in any way, shape or form that we’re losing in Afghanistan.“

Barack Hussein Obama is on a photo-op, doing lunch with leaders and a few handpicked troops pretending to be “presidential.”

We trust the commanders on the ground, too bad Barack Hussein Obama only pretends to. Indeed!

John Fund, writing in the Political Diary (subscription), discusses how living politicians are using taxpayer-funded projects to name “monuments” after themselves and spouses.

Charles Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, is intent on raising $30 million for a new academic center in his New York district — a center with his name on it. After securing an earmark and two other federal grants totaling some $2.6 million for the project, the Democratic congressman wrote letters on his congressional stationery to businesses with interests before his committee. They sought meetings to help him fulfill his “personal dream” of seeing the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service completed.

This is the tip of the political scam iceberg:

• There’s a navigation lock in Pennsylvania named after Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young (R-FL), the former GOP chair of the House Appropriations Committee. He represents St. Petersburg, Fla. — his only connection to Pennsylvania is that he happened to be born there.

• The C.W. Young Center for Bio-Defense and Emerging Infectious Disease was dedicated at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., last year.

• The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. also “honors” Mark Hatfield (R-OR), Louis Stokes (D-OH) and Lowell Weicker (R-CN).

The real “It’s All About Me” self-honor may go to Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). John Stossel of ABC News found the Democrat’s name attached to three-dozen taxpayer-funded entities in his state, including a highway interchange, education and technology centers and even a telescope.

• Erma Ora Byrd Hall, a 37,000 square foot facility at Shepherd University (Shepherdstown, W. Va.) named after Mr. Byrd’s late wife?

• Joyce Murtha Breast Cancer Center in Wendber, Pa., named after the wife of House Appropriations honcho John Murtha (D-PA)?

• Murtha already has the matching John P. Murtha Regional Cancer Center named after himself in Johnstown, PA.

• In Arkansas, former Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee and his wife Janet have a lake named after themselves. There is also the Janet Huckabee Nature Center.

It was the constant naming of projects like that that stirred Arkansas state Rep. Dan Greenberg to action. Last year, he introduced the “Edifice Complex Prevention Bill” to put limits on the practice in the state.

“I discovered a local park had been named after me and other legislators without my knowledge,” he told Mr. Fund.

 ”But that wasn’t enough for one legislator who complained that the sign with her name on it wasn’t in her campaign colors.”

Mr. Greenberg’s fellow legislators treated him like the proverbial skunk at the picnic. His bill was killed in committee on an 11-3 vote, with one legislator pulling him aside and bluntly asking him “Now tell me the truth, wouldn’t you like a building named after you?” Mr. Greenberg says he would if he paid for it, but the practice of “using taxpayer money to build temples to ourselves as public servants is dangerous.”

• After Rep. Robert Ney, an Ohio Republican, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2006, the athletic center named after him at Ohio University was quietly “rebranded.”

• In 2000, Georgia renamed its old Memorial Drive in Atlanta after Democrat Rep. Cynthia McKinney. She promptly proceeded to accuse the Bush administration of knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and then assaulted a Capitol Hill police officer, incidents which led to the Democrat’s eventual defeat. Attempts to remove her name from the parkway have nonetheless failed.

Former Tennessee Republican Sen. Fred Thompson asked that a stretch of highway back home not be named “Fred Thompson Boulevard.”

“It is entirely appropriate that it remain Highway 43, the way I remember it was when I was a boy,” he wrote state legislators trying to confer the honor.

•  Attempts in 2006 to have the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta name its “Global Communications Center” after Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and its operations center after Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) were blocked at the last minute by Congressional Conservatives such as Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and John Campbell (R-CA).

Unfortunately some ego’s are bigger that others.

Mr. Rangel, who has been in office since 1971, dismissed Mr. Campbell’s objection:

“I would have a problem if you did it, because I don’t think that you’ve been around long enough . . . to inspire a building like this.”

We thought it was called “public service” by choice, not memorial building and “invincibility”.

Indeed, Mr. Byrd is unrepentant, telling Congress in 2001:

“Pork has been a good investment in West Virginia, if you look around and see what I have done.”

Taxpayers for Common Sense notes it’s easy for him to say that when he’s spending other people’s money, and asks what’s next: rechristening the state “West ‘Byrd’ginia?”

Chair a committee and get a “Monument to Me” while sending the tab to Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer. Indeed!

David Horsey

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A cartoon of Obama inspires fury and outrage. A cartoon of McCain leads everyone to shrug.

The New Yorker’s cover, featuring a cartoon that depicts a turban-clad Obama fist-bumping his wife, Michelle, who wears an afro, cammies and a machine gun, making her look like a 1960s black-power radical. The pair appear to be in the Oval Office, where an American flag burns in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs on the wall. It’s a wicked satire of Obama’s Islamophobia.

The New Yorker’s story did go well with Obama or his campaign although the actual story was anti-GOP and how they view the Obama’s

However, our Moonbat, Mr. Horsey may have won the Pulitzer Prize twice but his anti-Right cartoons are pathetic even if the Lefties find them amusing. Of course, many on the Left were glad to see Tony Snow pass away this week and celebrated.

Horsey’s image shows a drooling, wheelchair-bound McCain, singing “Bomb bomb bomb–bomb bomb Iran,” as wife Cindy pours dozens of pills from a vial and suggest to her husband, “Take some of my meds to get through the inaugural parade!”

If anyone can show us media print or video imploring the Horsey cartoon of Mr. McCain we’d like to see it. The fact is, nobody paid much attention or was upset. Imagine that!

Mr. Horsey, a Moonbat for sure, a “Horses Arse”, indeed!

Moonbat is a special feature of Liberally Conservative and posted each Saturday. For previous awards visit Moonbat Awards.

Sen. Barack Obama has a new ad up on battleground state TV this morning — to run in the same 18 states Team Obama is targeting, a group that still includes Alaska.)

Here’s the ad with transcript below, which focuses on his work with Senator Lugar (R-IN) on nuclear weapons:

Obama at town hall: We are a beacon of light around the world.  At least that’s what we can be again.  That’s what we should be again

Obama in interview: The single most important national security threat that we face

Obama VO:…is nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists

Obama VO: What I did was reach out to Senator [Richard] Lugar, a Republican, to help lock down loose nuclear weapons

Obama in interview: We have to lead the entire world to reduce that threat

Obama at town hall: We can restore America’s leadership in the world

Obama VO: I’m Barack Obama, and I approve this message.

However, did Sen. Lugar approve this message and advertisement? A call to Sen. Lugar’s office and Mike Duncan of the GOP provided nothing in protest. Basically I was told it’s not up to Sen. Lugar to appear or not appear in the ad. This is only partly true and it would be nice if Mr. Lugar was formally denouncing the ad and protesting this on talk shows.

Now, in an election year, Lugar describes the assertions in Obama’s commercial as “accurate” — rather than taking the opportunity to blast Obama’s naive foreign-policy radicalism.

“I’m pleased we had the association Sen. Obama describes” was how Lugar reacted to being used in the national campaign of the opposing party.

Let’s not hold our collective breath waiting for a Lugar denouncement of the ad. Mr. Lugar seems to basking in the limelight and has his staff making excuses for him. Indeed!

Spend a dime, write and protest:

U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar
306 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-1401
(202) 224-4814 phone
(202) 228-0360 fax
senator_lugar@lugar.senate.gov

Writing to the New York Times editors in 2005 Mimi Barron of Fredericksburg, VA stated some facts about Amtrak:

The problems found on Amtrak trains are not specific to Amtrak or to passenger rail systems. They are simply the byproduct of our government contracting mess.

Yes, Amtrak has toilets that don’t work, cost overruns and trains that are too wide to make a turn. But you could write 50 columns about the misuse, waste, errors and total failures in military contracting.

The problem is that our federal government is ”managed” by a morass of bureaucrats who have no bottom-line accountability. They are appointed as political favors and motivated by what they can make when they leave government. There is no continuity.

Until politics is removed from the process, any government contract with private industry will invite problems.

How true and the government managed mess does not stop there. It’s been all about George W. Bush the past 7.5 years but Congress approval ratings are now in single digits so Liberals should look into their vast mirror and quit finger pointing towards the White House.

Forget the polls and approval ratings however, let’s deal in facts and those facts are that government run institutions are failures. How many times have politicians bankrupted Social Security? Can you rely on Medicare and Medicaid for assistance?

Now Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, privately owned but government subsidized, are receiving a potentially unlimited line of credit from the Treasury department.

Holman Jenkins writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Opening up the Fed’s discount window was likewise redundant—at least up until the point where Uncle Sam’s own credit is shot and the Fed starts printing money to make good on its commitments. We’re not there yet—but that’s where all this may be heading: to the Federal Reserve “monetizing” all kinds of bad public and private debt, from mortgages to student loans to the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare.

The government is moving America to Socialism by constantly tinkering with private enterprises and forming larger government run bureaucracies. Liberals are shouting from the rooftops that the public is becoming disenchanted with free markets.

Spurred by the continued housing crisis, turmoil in financial markets, spiking oil prices, disappearing jobs and shrinking retirement savings, the nation and its political leaders have begun to sour on the notion that the current market system is the key to a fair, stable and efficient society, writes Peter Gosselin in the L.A Times.

The average consumer doesn’t know the difference from free markets and Socialism, they just believe what Liberals in the press and politicians tell them.

“We’re at a hinge point,” said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who helped craft President Clinton’s market-friendly agenda during the 1990s.

“The strong presumption in favor of markets, which has dominated public policy since the late 1970s, has been thrown very much into question.”

Mr. Galston would have you believe the Clinton’s invented capitalism but he probably never studied Milton Friedman or read Adam Smith.

“There may be a backlash against markets at the moment,” acknowledged Kevin A. Hassett, economic studies director at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and an advisor to Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

“But the backlash doesn’t seem to be informed by any alternative view of how the world works.”

Barack Hussein Obama would like to grow government at rate never before seen in America; he would like to topple free trade agreements and put the politicians in charge of oil, banks and increase regulation to historical highs. Mr. Obama would scrap free markets for Socialism and he would “organize” the American community into a village run by the idiots in Washington D.C.

Yelling fire in a crowded theatre and creating panic is illegal but this week we can call Chuck Schumer (D-NY), “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

The federal takeover of IndyMac Bank over the weekend could cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. between $4 billion and $8 billion. Senator Schumer helped to precipitate the collapse by publicizing a letter to the bank’s regulator last month, and he has no remorse.

The Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), whose job it actually was to regulate IndyMac, took a different view.

“The immediate cause of the closing,” the OTS wrote in a press release, “was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York.”

 The OTS added: “In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts.”

Mainstream media pundits are only publicizing the “collapse” as in “world ends” but fail to advertise the “Schumer Folly”, which set in panic. Mr. Schumer now argues that OTS was asleep at the switch, and that blaming him is like blaming “the fire on the guy who called 911.”

Actually Mr. Schumer was the guy who shouted “fire” in a crowded bank than dialing 911. IndyMac was in trouble but was openly seeking new private capital to shore up its balance sheet. Mr. Schumer was playing election year politics and shoring up governments role to regulate and “demonstrate” his vision of how politicians are needed to manage business and private lives.

This weekend the Treasury Department suggested that it might use taxpayer money to inject new equity into Fannie and Freddie.

Mr. Jenkins suggests:

Sell off their regional underwriting offices to private investors. Don’t heed any guff about how Fannie and Freddie are “vital to the functioning of the U.S. housing market.” Houses would still need to be financed, and the private sector would jump at a chance to get the solid, triple-A business that Fannie and Freddie now monopolize.

With Fannie and Freddie on the ropes politically, let’s put them on a path to privatization and liquidation. Treasury’s Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke are still talking as if restoring the status quo is desirable, with tweaks. But putting the Fed in the job of helping to regulate them, one of Treasury’s ideas, would just be to put monetary policy at the service of propping up yet more financial services companies. This is not a policy for financial stability—but for finally prostituting the dollar to the massive liabilities of the federal government.

Ms. Barron said, “Yes, Amtrak has toilets that don’t work” and it might be added that the one’s in Congress are overflowing too. Indeed!

The Democratic strategy of blaming everyone from industry executives to “speculators” and ”the oilman in the White House,” for the energy crunch leaves the Liberals as the last snag in exploring and extracting billions of barrels of domestic oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.

House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI) recently shut down the annual budget process rather than allow Republicans to offer drilling amendments.

A recent IBD/TIPP Poll reveals that 73% of American’s think “fuel prices at the pump” are a bigger problem for the country than climate change, the new term for global warming. Only 23% say climate change is more important. Apparently a few hysterical Sierra Club members were questioned.

Support for offshore drilling and oil shale development is also broad-based, with the former favored by 64% of respondents and the latter by 65%.

Speaker Pelosi’s fellow California Democrats said she would be “all about socializing” and “taking over” the oil companies. Just two weeks ago, another senior House Democrat said the “government should own the refineries.”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) shocked many observers when she admitted to oil company executives during a House committee hearing, “This liberal will be all about socializing, uh, uh . . . would be about . . . basically taking over and the government running all of your companies.”

Pennsylvania’s 11th district, Rep. Paul Kanjorski, is proposing a federal “Reasonable Profits Board.” Its members would be charged with determining when oil and gas companies’ “profits are in excess.”

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), also a member of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the most-ardent opponents of off-shore drilling has said:

“We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.”

Don’t like the price of gasoline? Don’t like the size of your utility bill? Blame a politician and blame a Liberal. Indeed!

T. Boone Pickens made his fortune in oil. Now in his 80s the oil baron is looking for more days in the sun but unlike Ross Perot he isn’t seeking it in a Presidential campaign. No, Mr. Pickens is jumping on the energy bandwagon promoting wind energy and suddenly denouncing oil.

If oil is such a bad thing why do countries continue to drill for it and sell it? Is Mr. Pickens selling off his share of the oil industry and putting his fortune where his mouth is?

Of course not, Mr. Pickens is simply looking at a new opportunity to grow his money similar to the way Al Gore has promoted carbon credits. While Gore has helped created a small “panic” in his “world ends” promotions Mr. Pickens is attempting to convince the public that someone as successful as himself couldn’t be wrong.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal:

“I’ve drilled more dry holes and also found more oil than just about anyone in the industry. With all my experience, I’ve never been as worried about our energy security as I am now. Like many of us, I ignored what was happening. Now our country faces what I believe is the most serious situation since World War II”, says Mr. Pickens.

Pickens says America’s energy dilemma can’t be solved by drilling alone but by alternative energy such as solar and wind. He has launched a TV ad blitz in which wind farms are prominently featured. I also recently heard a radio ad touting wind energy with Pickens speaking; I’m not convinced.

The fact is that if we tripled our current output from wind, solar and geothermal, they would produce just 2.2% of our current energy needs after decades of subsidies amounting to billions of dollars.

Writing in Environment and Climate News (2002) Michael Heberling notes:

“Wind power is intermittent. It is simply not available on those hot, humid dog days of summer when energy demand peaks. The same is true for those quiet bone-chilling days and nights of winter.”

Wind power technology is improving but it takes vast amounts of land and is not always as safe as the “experts” would have us believe.

The wind huffed, and it puffed, and it nearly caused major problems in the Northwest’s electrical grid…

A surge of wind jumped far beyond levels forecast by operators of Oregon’s burgeoning wind-farm industry, sending more power into the regional grid than it could handle.

It realized by evening that it could no longer handle the surge without increasing spills of water through hydroelectric dams to levels dangerous to fish. Spilling the water keeps it from the hydropower generators.

A Reuters story on Feb. 27 reported, “Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency.”

“Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said a decline in wind energy production in west Texas occurred at the same time evening electric demand was building as colder temperatures moved into the state.”

“In addition, ERCOT said multiple power suppliers fell below the amount of power they were scheduled to produce on Tuesday. That, coupled with the loss of wind generated in West Texas, created problems moving power to the west from North Texas.”

Pickens says the “stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada is called the ‘Saudi Arabia of the Wind’ . . . we have the greatest wind reserves in the world.”

The operator of a portion of that grid in West Texas generating electricity had to shut down when that part of the Saudi Arabia of the Wind died.  

The New York Times pointed out a few years ago:

“The coal in the ground in Illinois alone has more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia.”

“The technology to turn that coal into fuel for cars, homes and factories is proven. And at current prices, that process could be at the vanguard of a big, new industry.”

Pickens says his “Pickens Plan” to increase natural gas and wind power’s role as energy sources is not a play for personal gain. The big argument is wind energy is clean and carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels would be unacceptable. However, technology is improving to provide cleaner burning of fossil fuel.

With today’s worries about the price and long-term availability of oil, experts like Bill Reinert, national manager for advanced technologies at Toyota, say that turning coal into transportation fuel could offer a bright future. “It’s a huge deal,” he said.

Another massive domestic energy reserve Pickens does not mention is shale oil. Another Energy Department report says the Green River formation underlying parts of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, deep inside Pickens’ wind tunnel, contains as many as 2 trillion barrels of oil trapped in porous rock close to the surface. Two trillion barrels is seven times the Saudi reserves.

If Mr. Pickens would like to use his money and take the risk of wind energy investment then he should go for it. If he is so confident in his plan then he should be willing to risk his money and reap the benefits of his confidence.

However, the US is sitting on billions of energy deposits, which are off limits and Congress is to blame. Nancy Pelosi would like the President to use the strategic reserve and a short-term band-aid to lower prices in this election year. Ms. Pelosi continues her incompetence and fuel prices soar.

It’s long-term planning that will eventual provide energy independence. Long-term planning and execution of reasonable plans in all areas of energy will not lower prices today or tomorrow but they will provide the safety net for the future and the future is now.

Waiting around for a solution is irresponsible and no one is more irresponsible then the politicians fighting offshore, in Alaska and ANWR exploration and drilling.

In the mean time, Mr. Pickens should start investing in his plan with his fortune or quit blowing hot air. Indeed!

“The Palestinian Authority has asked Israel to hand over the remains of Dalal Mughrabi, the Palestinian woman who led the March 11, 1978 coastal road attack in which 36 people were murdered and 71 wounded,” the Jerusalem Post reports:

Israel is planning to deliver Mughrabi’s remains, together with those of scores of Palestinians and Lebanese, to Hizbullah in the context of the new prisoner exchange between the two sides.

The PA said in its request that it wanted to “honor” Mughrabi by holding a big funeral for her in Ramallah.

Azzam al-Ahmed, a senior Fatah official closely associated with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, described Mughrabi, whose family originally came from Jaffa, as a “the first Palestinian woman to carry out one of the most courageous operations in Israel.” He claimed that in her will, Mughrabi, who belonged to Fatah, had asked her family to see to it that she was buried in “Palestine.”

“We want to turn Dalal’s funeral into a national wedding, a major celebration,” the Fatah official said. “The operation she carried out off the shores of her hometown of Jaffa was heroic and exemplary. She will always be remembered as a symbol for the Palestinian women’s struggle.”

The March 20, 1978, issue of Time described Dalal’s “operation”:

Their orders were to kill until they themselves were killed. And thus last week a Palestinian suicide mission left a grisly trail of carnage along Israel’s main coastal highway from Haifa to Tel Aviv. Slipping ashore from the Mediterranean on the afternoon of the Sabbath, the terrorists hijacked two buses filled with tourists and sightseers, took them on a wild ride down the road toward Tel Aviv, shooting along the way at everyone in sight, and finally destroyed one bus in an orgy of fire and death. Official statistics put the dead at 37 (all but a few of them civilians, among them at least 10 children) and 76 wounded–a toll that exceeded the 1972 Munich massacre (11 dead) and the slaughter at a Ma’alot school in 1974 (26). It was the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.

The Sabbath massacre came on the eve of Israeli Premier Menachem Begin’s scheduled departure for Washington, where he was to confer with President Carter this week on the derailed Middle East peace talks. . . .

The timing of the attack left no doubt about the terrorists’ purpose: to sabotage any attempt by Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to move toward a peace that would ignore or bypass Palestinian interests.

Calling for this “celebration” and willing to “negotiate” with Israel is Fatah, the moderate politcal entity in Palestine. Indeed!

Source: OpinionJournal

Barack Hussein Obama is now explaining himself in the newsprint Liberal bastion known as The New York Times. The op-ed story is Iraq and as much as Mr. Obama would like to move center the beating he is taking from the Left on his shifting positions has left him with no choice but to appease the Left-Wing Nut House.

“The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States,” writes Senator Obama. (LC Emphasis)

Mr. Obama has recently said he would talk to his commanders on the ground in Iraq and make an assessment. So much for that big lie, he hasn’t been to Iraq in over 900-days and counting. Obama has always refused to meet with General Petraeus who has led the successful surge in Iraq that Mr. Obama was against.

“But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.”

Obama doesn’t even know what the purpose of the surge was; defeating insurgents, militants and al-Qaeda was the purpose. The military combat troops were not going to march in and force Iraqi politicians to reach and consensus within the government.

Obama continues to show his inexperience and ignorance in the next paragraph.

“Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country.”

What military and strategic fact does Mr. Obama place “redeploying our troops” as a guarantee for success when it would most likely provide the enemy an opportunity to reconstitute terrorist activities.

“But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.”

For Obama and his Leftist ilk it’s not about success in Iraq, it’s about surrender and caving in while ignoring the reality of the current success and solidifying Democrats in the center of the Middle East.

The American “experiment” in Democracy is just over 200 years old and its beginning did not occur in a few short years, it did not occur with instant political cooperation and it did not occur without sacrifice.

“We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.”

Protecting American service members? Why don’t we redeploy to Alaska? And using the New York Times term for Iraq, Mr. Obama invokes Mesopotamia into his language. Is it Iraq he wishes to remove troops from or Mesopotamia? Could Obama ever get current events or historical facts correct, he seems unable to get any facts straight or to keep is positions constant.

Obama is using comments from Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki as an opening for his surrender plan but has either missed the fine points or is completing ignoring Mr. al-Maliki’s words.

Mr. Maliki’s comments were largely designed for domestic Iraqi political consumption – another sign of that country’s robust democratic debate. With elections scheduled for the autumn, Mr. Maliki wants to show he’s nobody’s pawn, especially not America’s.

The Sadrists continue to play the nationalist card, even as they are themselves pawns of Iran. The rise of Iraqi nationalism is inevitable and largely welcome as a unifying national force. Remember all of those who said an Iraqi Shiite government would merely be a tool of Iran?

The significant question now is the pace and extent of any U.S. withdrawal, and the nature of any long-term U.S. military presence. Despite Mr. Maliki’s comments, Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie was quick to add that the call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal was “conditioned on the ability of Iraqi forces to provide security,” according to the Associated Press.

In other words, Mr. Maliki is not endorsing the Barack Obama agenda of immediate U.S. withdrawal starting on January 20.

Inside Iraq, a significant long-term US presence would also increase the confidence of Iraq’s various factions to make political compromises. And outside, it would improve regional stability by giving the U.S. a presence in the heart of the Middle East that would deter foreign adventurism. This is the kind of strategic benefit that the next Administration should try to consolidate in Iraq after the hard-earned progress of the last year.

With the exception of the Sadrists, all of Iraq’s main political factions want the US to remain in some significant force. Iraq is now a democracy, however, and perhaps as their confidence grows the Maliki government and Iraq public opinion will think differently.

A withdrawal timetable should be mutual – and not imposed by a new US President acting as if the Iraq he’ll inherit in 2009 is the same as the Iraq of 2006. That would mean US forces could be withdrawn with honor, and in victory, not an Obama surrender. Indeed!

Leftist Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) wants it both ways and some of his colleagues are playing along. The new mantra on oil prices from Liberals is “speculators.”

Obama and McCain have chimed in about “speculating” on the oil market and have come up as dunces themselves.

Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal writes:

On Mr. Durbin’s right is that financial engine of Chicago, the futures industry. Among Washington’s least-kept secrets is that no Chicago politician — right, left or agnostic — would knowingly let anything harm that hometown gravy. And towering over the futures industry is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which, incidentally, is bidding $9 billion to buy Nymex — the world’s largest oil futures market and home to all of those nasty “speculators.”

While Liberals are crying foul and attempting to make people believe Wall Street and “speculators” are the cause for high oil prices Mr. Durbin has done his best to satisfy the same industry his Leftist pals are falsely whining about.

It’s a “carnival of speculation,” howled North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, who introduced a bill to “shut down casino-like betting.”

Maria Cantwell decried the “dark” market and demanded “rules.”

“We are putting oil speculators on notice,” intoned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who wants to “investigate all energy contracts.”

 Ms. Strassel continues:

Give Mr. Durbin credit: He’s a main reason the Chicago futures markets have continued to thrive. It was Mr. Durbin who only recently helped ensure the CME-Nymex deal passed antitrust muster. It was Mr. Durbin — along with Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Chicagoan, former CME board member and House Democratic Caucus Chair — who in February sent a public screed to both Treasury and Justice, incensed that Justice would even suggest changes in the structure of the futures markets. It was Mr. Durbin who at that time praised the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for its “vigorous oversight” of the futures markets. That would be the same CFTC that his colleagues are now bashing as an ineffective regulator.

Mr. Durbin in June introduced his own legislation to “reform oil market regulation”. Durbin’s bill calls on the CFTC to do more “investigation” of the market, and offers to supply that agency with the funds to hire a whole 100 new employees.

As one Republican told Ms. Strassel:

“It’s fabulous. We call it the ‘Just Keep Doing Exactly What You’re Doing But With A Little More Money Act.’”

We’re are not Dick Durbin fans, in fact, this guy not only lies in the gutter of politics, he is nothing more than a bottom dwelling parasite. Chicago politics. Indeed.

Barack Hussein Obama the “community organizer” has never traveled far from the local tree he fell from.

While he is a skilled candidate, Barack Obama’s ability to surprise, stun and sweep over the vaunted Clinton Machine to capture the Democratic nomination was rooted in his background as a community organizer. He’s now turning those skills to the general election, writes John Fund at the Political Diary.

Should Mr. Obama be elected, he would become not just the head of the Democratic Party but also the inspiration for a large number of liberal groups. Some of them would no doubt lobby him to hand out taxpayer grants and contracts for their nonpolitical “community” efforts.

Mr. Obama has extensive connections with the granddaddy of activist groups, Acorn (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which has gotten millions in government grants for its low-income housing programs. In 1992, Acorn hired Mr. Obama to run a voter registration effort. He later became a trainer for the group, as well as its lawyer in election law cases.

Acorn’s political arm has endorsed Mr. Obama while its “voter education” arm has pledged to spend $35 million to register people this fall — despite a history of vote fraud scandals that have led to guilty pleas by many Acorn employees.

The housing bill now before Congress would set up a slush fund for community organizations such as Acorn. But Acorn has gone quiet in its lobbying for the bill this week with the news that one of its employees — the brother of Acorn founder Wade Rathke — had stolen nearly $1 million from the group. Mr. Rathke decided not to alert law enforcement or the organization’s board, and kept his brother employed at Acorn until last month.

“Is this the kind of group we want getting taxpayer money?” asks Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA)

“What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along?” asks Stanley Kurtz at National Review.

Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America.

Sol Stern at City Journal writes:

Community organizing among the urban poor has been an honorable American tradition since Jane Addams’s famous Hull House dramatically uplifted the late-nineteenth-century Chicago slums, but ACORN and Addams are on different planets philosophically.

Hull House and its many successors emphasized self-empowerment: the poor, they thought, could take control of their lives and communities through education, hard work, and personal responsibility. Not ACORN. It promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor. As a result, not only does it harm the poor it claims to serve; it is also a serious threat to the urban future. (LC Emphasis)

ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism.

“We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform,” whose prose Orwell would have derided as pure commissar-speak. “We will continue our fight . . . until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom. (LC Emphasis)

The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

In August 2006 Steven Malanga wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

The movement is not always what it appears to be. Though Acorn touts living-wage laws as a way to lift the working poor into the middle class, the vast body of academic work on wage laws shows that they end up hurting the poor by forcing businesses to eliminate some low-wage jobs. Acorn’s own leadership understands this principle perfectly. When California regulators sued Acorn for not paying its own workers the minimum wage, Acorn argued that this would endanger its mission—because it would have to hire fewer workers. (LC Emphasis)

According to ACORN, Obama trained its Chicago members in leadership seminars, in turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his campaigns. Obama also sat on the boards of the Woods Fund and Joyce Foundation, both of which poured money into ACORN’s coffers.

ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who “best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about” — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.

St. Louis County Election officials claim hundreds of fraudulent voter address changes have been turned in by ACORN, a group that’s been criticized for its voter sign-up work in Missouri. Election Board employees estimate hundreds of fraudulent address changes were submitted.

The address changes included forged signatures and are among questionable or fraudulent voter registration cards submitted to the county within the past couple of months.

County officials told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that most of the suspicious registrations and address changes were submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Similar fraudulent voter registration cards have turned up this month in St. Louis city and this week in Kansas City, as well as other states, including Ohio.

The cases are often similar. Voter registration cards were forged for a dead person, had false signatures and change of addresses or incorrect and missing personal information, Goeke said.

Eight workers for a get-out-the-vote effort in St. Louis city and county have pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election, authorities said today.

The workers were employed by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), gathering voter registrations. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said they submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.

D.C. Dateline writes:

But back in Chicago, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is more important than Iraq or Washington. ACORN and its associated Midwest Academy, both founded in the 1970s, continue to train and mobilize activists throughout the country, often using them to manipulate public opinion through “direct action.” It’s sometimes a code for illegal activities