Muslim Peace, Love and Kindness at Orlando, Florida Mosque

Peace, love, and kindness occuring at an Orlando, Florida mosque should be remindful to all about why thinking people view Islam as practiced by its evangelists in 2010 is the enemy of all societies interested in freedom to pursue their life, liberty, and happiness.

Please click on the following video to check out their brotherhood oriented activities:

http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=florida8.30.10.htm

Our current president, the Marxist Obama is funding mosques with American taxpayer dollars.

U.N. Climate Panel Damaged by Independent Report

The following article is published at Telegraph.co.uk:

“Couched though it is in the most measured language, yesterday’s report by the Inter-Academy Council (IAC) into errors contained in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is extremely damaging. Not only does it conclude that fundamental reforms are needed in its methodology but it also targets (albeit obliquely) its controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, saying that his term of office is too long.

The investigation was prompted by the IPCC’s bogus assertion that glaciers in the Himalayas were melting so fast that they would disappear by 2035. The erroneous claim was based on a single quote in a science journal news story, never repeated in peer-reviewed literature. The IPCC quickly admitted the error but dismissed it as an aberration carried on just one page of a report thousands of pages long. The IAC is unimpressed and calls for stronger enforcement of the panel’s scientific review procedures to minimise future mistakes. It also says that “qualitative probabilities should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence”. In other words, it is telling the IPCC not to stray into what outside observers might regard as scaremongering and policy advocacy.

The rap across the knuckles is deserved. It should have triggered the resignation of Dr Pachauri but he insists he wants to stay on to implement any necessary changes in procedure. Yet his – and the IPCC’s – credibility have been tarnished by this affair. We have argued that a conservative case for preserving the planet’s scarce resources should support much of the action demanded by concerned scientists, regardless of whether the case for man-made global warming can be proved. But it becomes difficult to keep an open mind on such issues if the findings of a purportedly scientific document cannot be trusted.”

Comment:  Such information doesn’t seem to reach the White House.  The Obama mind  is still going to find some way to cripple U.S. industry, big and small, to force  some kind of Cap and Trade tax  legislation on the country.

Ohio Public Pension Records Kept Secret

Public Pension Records Release Denied

Information needed to assess Ohio’s pension systems and its cost to private citizens is being denied to news organizations, says the Buckeye Institute. 

The Ohio News Organization requested the service time, pay and benefits of Ohio’s five state pension fund’s 400,000 recipients in early July.  Eight Ohio newspapers requested the information jointly as part of an examination of Ohio’s pension systems and its cost to private citizens.  Attorney General Richard Cordray advised Ohio’s five state pension funds not to disclose any parts of their records, even though names and addresses were not to be included. 

According to the Institute: 

• Two of the pension funds, the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) and the Ohio Police & Fire Pension Fund (OPFPF), are asking for millions more from taxpayers through the legislature.
• The STRS would like to increase the taxpayers’ contribution from 14 percent to 16.5 percent of teacher salaries.
• The OPFPF is asking for the taxpayers’ contribution for police officers to be increased from 19.5 percent to 25 percent of their salaries, and the taxpayers’ contribution for firefighters to increase from 24 percent to 25 percent of their salaries. 

Democratic state Reps. Stephen Dyer (Dist. 43) and Matt Lundy (Dist. 57) said that they were troubled the pension funds rejected this request for information in a budget year while the legislature is preparing to solve the state’s deficit.  “We need appropriate information to make important decisions,” says Lundy. 

Source: Julie Robison, “Public Pension Records Release Denied,” Buckeye Institute, August 23, 2010. 

The above reporting came from the National Council for Policy Analysis.

Dennis Prager Visits the Patriot Booth at the Minnesota State Fair

I went to the Minnesota State Fair today.   Not for the long walks, or the ferris wheel, or chocolate covered hot dogs…..but to see Dennis Prager return to the Fair after a two-year hiatus.

Welcome back, Dennis!  

I had trouble finding the Patriot location, for it has been moved to a location where the audience area is even smaller that in years past.  Nevertheless, the area was packed with fans.

If State Republican officials  had any brains….and I believe most of them have occasional impulses which suggest occasional activity, (but I can’t be sure)  they would secure funding for the Patriot to have a location where 40-50 people could sit for three hours as Dennis does his Dennis thing. 

In addition this punditless organization  should invite Dennis to present his basic Prager University curriculum to state conservative candidates to broaden and deepen their understandings of the battle America presently is suffering with the Obama Marxism invasion into American politics.  Then there might become stronger, more confident candidates motivated by  Prager’s better America  messages which would elect more conservatives to  build for America’s better future.

As it was today, about that number of people lingered around for a half-hour or more being replaced by about the same number throughout  Dennis’ three-hour  radio program.  Most stood.

The best of the many important Dennis messages of the day was Dennis’ review of the  mass media, meaning LEFTWING reporting, in otherwords America’s city papers, news agencies, and television “news” programs, coverage of the Glenn Beck event at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC over the weekend.

“Race” was the theme common to nearly all of these sources.   And the race was a bad one…WHITE.  The reportings emphasized uniformly as if written by a single person, that the 200,000 or so crowd was overwhelmingly, or predominantly white.

To the Lefties  any group where conservatives congregate is a racist crowd doing racist things…….and are to be thought of as criminals and troublemakers worthy of nothing but disgust and dismissal…….and to some, of arrest.

And Dennis is so right in reminding the public, Americans learn this hate and bigotry in college.   The American university, including the system here in our state,  teaches a lesson to be memorized and forever remembered,  that society is to be judged by its gender, class, and racial mix.  If it isn’t at least 1-1-1 equal female, equal pay, and equally black, it is an uncivilized society and must be reformed.    Ideally their Marxist paradise should be a society dominated by females, union workers, and blacks because that is the heart of the Democrat gang of victimhoods.

Dennis mentioned that there are a number of crowds which are overwhelmingly white, that these lefty mainstream reporters seem to miss in their race count judgments.

Al Franken’s  political booth not far from the Patriot booth had whites only  attending (only three of them……and they were definitely white).  Would the press note that as a staple in their racism agenda?

Never.  Al  isn’t a conservative!  (Thank God!)

What about the Minnesota Orchestra presenting  Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto?  Its audiences are overwhelmingly white…..does the Strib ever refer  to the all white crowd in attendance as a slur to the event and those attending?  Would the New York Times?

I contend that racism is a fundamental tenet of the present Democrat Party dogma.   It makes these Marxists and Liberals  feel good…..and thus they  do their harm to America.

Dennis Prager is a great teacher.   Perhaps the greatest teacher  clarifying America’s values wars, and the history and nature of these conflicts. 

America’s best thinkers and writers today are conservative.  It is a good time to be an American when Dennis Prager is on your side.

More Obama Handouts To Muslims

Scott W. Johnson at Powerline offerst this article about Muslims after special Obama funding:

Over at Big Peace, Christine Brim reports that the Muslim Brotherhood-associated Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations will bring 25-30 Muslim leaders of 20 national Muslim groups to attend a special workshop presented by the White House and assorted government agencies tomorrow. The workshop is to provide the groups “funding, government assistance and resources.”

Working from an Islamic Society of North America email newsletter, Ms. Brim notes that the workshop will apparently afford special access for the organizations in attendance. The organizers pledge to provide “direct access” and “cut through red tape.” Readers with long memories may recall that the ISNA is perhaps best known as one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation prosecution. More good news: an iftar dinner will be held after the workshop.

Ms. Brim speculates on the likely participants in the event and offers some ideas on what is to be done. It would be nice in the meantime if we could learn what is happening here.

UPDATE: Via Lucianne, I see that Josh Gerstein has an excellent report on the appeal pursued by the North American Islamic Trust over the designation of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation prosecution. I wrote about the designation of CAIR as an undicted co-conspirator three years ago in “Coming clean about CAIR.”

“A Mensch Like Christie Could Never Have Emerged” Without “Super-slick Obama”

Kevin Hassett at Bloomberg writes about the shocking event that a real MAN has arrived on the American political stage, the Governor of the state of New Jersey:

“With all the crazy talk of President Barack Obama being the antichrist, it’s sort of amusing that the anti-Obama is a guy named Christie.

To understand the political force sweeping our country, one need only search the words “Chris Christie” on YouTube. The New Jersey governor’s town hall appearances have received hundreds of thousands of hits and glowing comments because the man, like Ronald Reagan before him, has an uncanny ear for what troubles Americans.

The truth is, a mensch like Christie could never have emerged in American politics if super-slick Obama had not enraged so many Americans first. If Jimmy Carter created Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama created Chris Christie.

Americans put their faith in a cocky Obama who wowed “The View” crowd in a bathing suit. But he gave us a government that didn’t know its own boundaries, defied common sense and fueled anxieties in post-financial crash America. Now the people of New Jersey have put their faith in a man who looks like the rest of us in a bathing suit.

Democrats might like to believe that the backlash embodied in the Tea Party movement is nothing more than a carnival of fools, headed for nowhere. But Christie is in touch with the national sense of unease that animates the Tea Party movement, and at town hall-type gatherings he has shown a grittiness that as drama surpasses the best reality TV shows.

Small Town

On June 15th, Christie appeared at a town hall meeting in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The crowd assembled was hardly a stereotypical BMW-driving Republican audience, looking like a group that could represent any small town in America

One senses that these Americans rarely gather all in one place, and that when they do, the gravity of the moment is palpable to them. And then Christie says, “our way of life is being challenged by an economy where we have too much debt, too big a government, too much spending and taxes being too high. We all know it in our hearts…we all understand that the day of reckoning is here.” And while he speaks, the people gather — even Wilda Diaz, the Democratic mayor, seem to nod in agreement.

As Christie concludes that the people in that room have a chance, that “we are going to be the people who fixed New Jersey’s problems,” the audience members have the same look on their faces that the troops have in the old war movies, just as Sarge tells them that they probably will not succeed, but they are going to charge up the hill and attack the machine gun nest anyway.

Angry Teachers

And attack he does. One of Christie’s most popular YouTube moments is a confrontation with an angry teacher, who upbraids him for not paying her enough. When Christie replies that if she doesn’t like the pay package “then you don’t have to do it,” the crowd cheers like the Giants just scored a touchdown.

Whether the New Jersey governor becomes a genuine national political phenomenon will depend on his fixing at least some of what ails the state. The task is a big one. After defeating Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine, Christie inherited a budget deficit of $2.2 billion, which was projected to expand to $10.7 billion next year — 28 percent of the budget.

But Christie seems to be on the right path. Following the Reagan playbook, Christie has shunned higher taxes, which are already stratospheric in New Jersey, and has attacked the state’s expenditures. In the first six months of his tenure, he has eliminated roughly $13 billion in planned spending by enacting a wide range of freezes and cuts. These included reducing aid to schools and municipalities by $820 million and $466 million respectively, and forgoing a $3 billion contribution to state pensions.

Funding Cuts

Christie’s cuts to school funding have earned him the enmity of the state teachers’ union, with 200,000 members. The governor asked teachers to agree to a one-year salary freeze and to kick in 1.5 percent of their pay to help fund their health care insurance — most of the state’s teachers don’t contribute to their plans.

Teachers in many school districts refused. As he had threatened during discussions with the unions, Christie called on constituents to vote down local school board budgets that didn’t conform to his requests. Christie won the public fight. A surprising 58 percent of proposed budgets were defeated, making it the largest number of rejections on state record.

Just as Reagan did in 1981, when he faced off with the air traffic controllers union, Christie called the bluff and seems to have won.

Reagan became on overwhelming political force because of his ability to appeal to audiences beyond his natural constituency, as Christie did at that Perth Amboy gathering. Christie clearly has the same knack, and will become an irresistible political force if New Jersey can recover.

It is an open question whether it will, but if it does, then the Republican Party may have found a real star.

(Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Comment:  The opinions expressed are not Kevin Hassett’s alone.  They are mine as well, but were well written by Mr. Hassett, except I root for the Giants to lose.  

I am not sure the playbook Mr. Christie is following is anyone’s  but his own.   This is an attorney who has a conservative core….at least thus far.   He seems to know intrinsically right from wrong.

How rare these days, especially among politicians, especially the president.  Click on to Christie: http://judicialnetwork.com/news/meet-latest-youtube-sensation-governor-chris-christie

Click on for another Christie: http://hotair.com/archives/2010/05/13/video-chris-christie-destroys-reporter-for-calling-him-confrontational/

How about yet another click on to Christie?

http://www.verumserum.com/?p=16836

Perhaps the best click on to Christie yet:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1I7GGIE_en&q=youtube+chris+christie+not+about+teachers+video&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Why Do Folks Believe Obama Is A Marxist?

Is Obama a Marxist?    Is Obama America’s first anti-American president? 

The following is a list of claims which may explain why so many Americans will answer “YES” to both of these questions:

 

“The Fundamental Transformation of America.

When Obama wrote a book and said he was mentored as a youth by Frank, (Frank Marshall Davis) an avowed Communist, people said it didn’t matter.

When it was discovered that his grandparents, were strong socialists who sent Obama’s mother to a socialist school where she was introduced to Frank Marshall Davis. He was later introduced to young Barrack Hussein Obama. People said it didn’t matter.

When people found out that Barrack Hussein Obama was enrolled as a Muslim child in school and his father and stepfather were both Muslims, people said it didn’t matter.

When he wrote in another book he authored “I will stand with them (Muslims) should the political winds shift in an ugly direction” people said it didn’t matter.

When he admittedly, in his book, said he chose Marxist friends and professors in college– people said it didn’t matter.

When he traveled to Pakistan , after college on an unknown national passport, peopl e said it didn’t matter.

When he sought the endorsement of the Marxist Party in 1996 as he ran for the Illinois Senate, people said it didn’t matter.

When he sat in a Chicago Church for twenty years and listened to a preacher spew hatred for America and preach black liberation theology, people said it didn’t matter.

When an independent Washington organization, that tracks Senate voting records, gave him the distinctive title as the “most liberal senator,” people said it didn’t matter.

When the Palestinians in Gaza set up a fund raising telethon to raise money for his election campaign, people said it didn’t matter.

When his voting record supported gun control, people said it didn’t matter.

When he refused to disclose who donated money to his election campaign, as other candidates had done, people said it didn’t matter.

When he received endorsements from people like Louis Farrakhan and Mummar Kadaffi and Hugo Chavez, people said it didn’t matter.

When it was pointed out that he was a total newcomer and had absolutely no experience at anything except community organizing, people said it didn’t matter.

When he chose friends and acquaintances such as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who were revolutionary radicals, people said it didn’t matter.

When his voting record in the Illinois senate and in the U.S. Senate came into question, people said it didn’t matter.

When he refused to wear a flag, lapel pin, and did so only after a public outcry, people said it didn’t matter.

When people started treating him as a Messiah and children in schools were taught to sing his praises, people said it didn’t matter.

When he stood with his hands over his groin area for the playing of the National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance, people said it didn’t matter.

When he surrounded himself in the White house with advisors who were pro-gun control, pro- abortion, pro-homosexual marriage and wanting to curtail freedom of speech to silence the opposition people said it didn’t matter.

When he aired his views on abortion, homosexuality and a host of other issues, people said it didn’t matter.

When he said he favors sex education in Kindergarten, including homosexual indoctrination, people said it didn’t matter.

When his personal background was either scrubbed or hidden and nothing could be found about him, people said it didn’t matter.

When the place of his birth was called into question, and he refused to produce a birth certificate, people said it didn’t matter.

When he had an association in Chicago with Tony Rezco–a man of questionable character and who is now in prison and had helped Obama to a sweet deal on the purchase of his home– people said it didn’t matter.

When it became known that George Soros, a multi-billionaire Marxist, spent a ton of money to get him elected, people said it didn’t matter.

When he started appointing White House Czars that were radicals, revolutionaries, and even avowed  Marxist / Communist,people said it didn’t matter.

When he stood before the Nation and told us that his intentions were to “fundamentally transform this Nation” into something else, people said it didn’t matter.

When it became known that he had trained ACORN workers in Chicago and served as an attorney for ACORN, people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed cabinet members and several advisors who were tax cheats and socialists, people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed a Science Czar, John Holdren, who believes in forced abortions, mass sterilizations and seizing babies from teen mothers, people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Cass Sunstein as Regulatory Czar who believes in “Explicit Consent,” harvesting human organs without family consent, and allowing animals to be represented in court, while banning all hunting, people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Kevin Jennings, a homosexual, and organizer of a group called gay, lesbian, straight, education network as Safe School Czar and it became known that he had a history of bad advice to teenagers, people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Mark Lloyd, as Diversity Czar, who believes in curtailing free speech; taking from one and giving to another to spread the wealth; who supports Hugo Chavez, people said it didn’t matter.

When Valerie Jarrett was selected as Obama’s Senior White House Advisor and she is an avowed Socialist, people said it didn’t matter.

When Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director said Mao Tse Tung was her favorite philosopher– and the person she turned to most for inspiration, people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Carol Browner as Global Warming Czar, and her being a well known socialist working on Cap and trade as the nations largest tax, people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Van Jones, an ex-con and avowed Communist as Green Energy Czar, who since had to resign when this was made known, people said it didn’t matter.

When Tom Daschle, Obama’s pick for health and human services secretary could not be confirmed, because he was a tax cheat, people said it didn’t matter..

When as President of the United States , he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, people said it didn’t matter.

When he traveled around the world criticizing America and never once talking of her greatness, people said it didn’t matter.

 
When his actions concerning the Middle-East seemed to support the Palestinians over Israel , our long time ally, people said it didn’t matter.

When he took American tax dollars to resettle thousands of Palestinians from Gaza to the United States , people said it didn’t matter.

When he upset the Europeans by removing plans for a missile defense system against the Russians, people said it didn’t matter.

When he played politics in Afghanistan by not sending troops early-on when the Field Commanders said they were necessary to win, people said it didn’t matter.

When he started spending us into a debt that was so big we could not pay it off, people said it didn’t matter.

When he took a huge spending bill under the guise of stimulus and used it to pay off organizations, unions, and individuals that got him elected, people said it didn’t matter.

When he took over insurance companies, car companies, banks, etc., people said it didn’t matter.

When he took away student loans from the banks and put it through the government, people said it didn’t matter.

When he designed plans to take over the health care system and put it under government control, people said it didn’t matter.

When he claimed he was a Christian during the election and tapes were later made public that showed Obama speaking to a Muslim group and ‘stating’ that he was raised a Muslim; was educated as a Muslim; and that he is still a Muslim– people said it didn’t matter.

When he set into motion a plan to take over the control of all energy in the United States through Cap and Trade, people said it didn’t matter.”

Prager fan, Jean Schlueter sent me this list of things people said didn’t matter regarding Mr. Obama.   Many more could be added to the list.  Had the author of the list forgotten about Eric  Holder and his Attorney General activities?  Obama’s stand against Honduras’s struggling democracy facing a Hugo Chavez style Marxist takeover a bit over a year ago…………and Obama’s support of building a mosque adjacent to the site of the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans at the hands of MUSLIM extremists, is traitorous to his country as well as to those who were murdered there. 

Obama was sold to the American public as one sells a new fad.   People said it didn’t matter.

 

Listing Complaints About Illegal Immigrants and How to Handle Them

MEXICO IS ANGRY!

Three cheers for Arizona

The shoe is on the other foot and Mexicans from the State of Sonora, 
Mexico don’t like it.

The State of Sonora is angry at the influx of Mexicans into Mexico . Nine 
state legislators from the Mexican State of Sonora traveled to Tucson to 
complain about Arizona ‘s new employer crackdown on illegal’s from Mexico ..

It seems that many Mexican illegal’s are returning to their hometowns and the 
officials  in the Sonora state government are ticked off. A delegation of 
nine state legislators from Sonora was in Tucson on Tuesday to state that 
Arizona ‘s new Employer Sanctions Law will have a devastating effect on the 
Mexican state.

At a news conference, the legislators said that Sonora — Arizona ‘s southern 
neighbor, made up of mostly small towns–cannot handle the demand for 
housing, jobs and schools that it will face as Mexican workers return to 
their hometowns from the USA without jobs or money. The Arizona law, which 
took effect Jan. 1, punishes Arizona employers who knowingly hire 
individuals without valid legal documents to work in the United States ..

Penalties include suspension of, or loss of, their business licenses. The 
Mexican legislators are angry because their own citizens are returning to 
their hometowns, placing a burden on THEIR state government.

“How can Arizona pass a law like this?’ asked Mexican Rep Leticia 
Amparano-Gamez, who represents Nogales .”

“There is not one person living in Sonora who does not have a friend or 
relative working in Arizona ,” she said, speaking in Spanish.

” Mexico is not prepared for this–for the tremendous problems it will face 
as more and more Mexicans working in Arizona and who were sending money to 
their families, return to their home-towns in Sonora without jobs,” she said. 
“We are one family, socially and economically,” she said, referring to the people of 
Sonora and Arizona . Wrong!

The United States is a sovereign nation, not a subsidiary of Mexico , and 
its taxpayers are not responsible for the welfare of Mexico ‘s citizens. It’s time for the Mexican

 Government to stop feeding parasitically off the United States and start taking care of its/ 
their own needs.
 
New Immigration Laws: Read to the bottom or you will miss the message. . . 

• 1. There will be no special bilingual programs in the schools.  * * * * * *
• * *
• 2. All ballots will be in this nation’s language. * * * * * * * *
• 3. All government business will be conducted in our language.  * * * * * * *
• 4. Non-residents will NOT have the right to vote no matter how long they are
• here.  * * * * * * * *
• 5. Non-citizens will NEVER be able to hold political office. * * * * * * * *
• 6.  Foreigners will not be a burden to the taxpayers. No welfare, no food
• stamps, no health care, or other government assistance programs.
• Any burden will be deported.  * * * * * * * *
• 7. Foreigners can invest in this country, but it must be an amount at least
• equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage.  * * * * * * * *
• 8. If foreigners come here and buy land… options will be restricted.
• Certain parcels including waterfront property are reserved for citizens
• naturally born into this country. * * * * * * * *
• 9. Foreigners may have no protests; no demonstrations, no waving of a
• foreign flag, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his
• policies. These will lead to deportation. * * * * * * * *
• 10. If you do come to this country illegally, you will be actively hunted &,
• when caught, sent to jail until your deportation can be arranged. All assets will be taken from you. * * * * * * * * *

Too strict? The above laws are current immigration laws of MEXICO !

These sound fine to me. NOW, how can we get these laws to be America ‘s 
Immigration Laws?

(I received the above from Prager fan, Regina Reed, but she did not pass the source on to me.  I believe the information declared in the above to be accurate.)

Read Frank Rich……The Times Leftist Whom Dennis Prager Called “A Liar”

Read the following words of Frank Rich, long time Leftwing opinion man for the vaunted New York Times. Those of you who know Dennis well know  how cautious Dennis Prager himself is regarding the use of language especially how it is used to characterize people.  

Last week Frank Rich of the Times Op-Ed page railed against conservatives attacking them  as bigots;  racists, conspiring against president Obama and his administration, using underlined backups for his claims of proof which were misleading and false. 

Dennis gave examples from his article and openly exposed Frank Rich as a liar.

Please read this article by “liar” Frank Rich.  BE CERTAIN…..extra CERTAIN…to click on to the claims of proof underlined in blue, to review Mr. Rich’s veracity this time around for his leftwing propaganda. 

Is Mr. Rich still a lying scoundrel?     MR. RICH WRITES THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, ENTITLED:      

“The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party”…..

“ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Comment:   Charles Krauthammer wrote a terrific article reviewing the intellectual levels of the Leftists, the clan which includes this Mr. Rich, which was given the profoundly appropriate title, “Liberalism Under Siege I An Ugly Sight”.  

Ugly sights mean ugly people made ugly by their behavior.

How did Frank Rich do this time regarding offering proof for his attacks?

Andrew McCarthy Review of “Liberty and Tyranny” by Mark R. Levin

Andrew McCarthy offers this review of Mark R. Levin’s new book, “Liberty and Tyranny:  A Conservative Manifesto”.  It was found at The New Criterion.

“It is a rarity that an important book arrives at its perfect moment. Such is the case with Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto.[1] We are in the high tide of America’s Leftist ascendancy: the Obama evisceration of individual freedom and installation of authoritarian collectivism—at warp speed, driven by an ambition that would have made Woodrow Wilson and FDR blush. Against this tidal wave, Mark Levin offers not so much a defense as a plan of attack, a clarion call to roll back the seas of Change.

His answer is a restoration of civil society: the Burkean paradigm of ordered liberty in which the citizen and his society thrive, in all their ineradicable imperfection. Individual freedom is tempered by a moral order that is the heritage of each new generation, and its bequest to the next, in the “chain and continuity of the commonwealth.” In the three-quarters of a century between the New Deal and the new New Deal, civil society has gradually evaporated while the means of its preservation have become ever more remote and elusive. Like Dorothy, though, we’ve always had it in our power to return home. In our case, the ruby red slippers are the principles of the Founding—the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that elevates liberty by sharply limiting government and, further, divides powers among competing departments, ingeniously suppressing any tyrannical tendencies.

The plan, however, is not self-actuating. To be the land of the free, Levin insists that we must also be the home of the brave. Invoking Ronald Reagan, he admonishes: “Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” That is so, as Levin sharply demonstrates throughout this fast-paced book, because the values and core of “the Conservative” are forever under assault by “the Statist.”

There is no gainsaying Levin’s fighting spirit: a Reagan administration official who served as chief-of-staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese III, he is an accomplished litigator. In recent years, he has been among the nation’s most successful talk-radio hosts, notable for the verve he brings to a nightly dilation of conservatism and his skill— richly on display in Liberty and Tyranny—rendering legal and historical complexity accessibly, but not condescendingly, to the layman. Like Russell Kirk, Levin is a conservative because he is a liberal, in the classical, freedom-loving sense. Hence the choice of “the Statist” to describe his nemesis: he refuses to cede the term “liberal” or to deem “progressive” that which regresses civil society.

To trace the dynamic struggle between liberty and tyranny, Levin must both locate conservatism and frame the attributes of statism. The latter is easier to do, and not merely because statism is today engulfing us. It owes to the fact that the statist has an agenda.

He seeks the agglomeration of power in government for the purpose of wielding it to impose his preferences, though the goal is pursued under the seemingly noble auspices of enforcing “equality”—the statist’s primary organizing principle. Self-determining individuals are the impediment to this vision, so the statist must eviscerate the bedrock of civil society that enables them to thrive. He accomplishes this by relentlessly attacking bourgeois values; abrading American exceptionalism with multi-culti relativism; and inculcating a resentment-driven class consciousness that sets tribe against tribe along racial, ethnic, and economic lines—exploiting the divisions beneath the banner of “economic justice,” through such toxins as the “progressive income tax.” In every sense, the statist’s project is a conscious, Fabian one, with coconspirators and useful idiots throughout the international community (with its global governance aspirations), the academy, Hollywood, and the media.

By contrast, the conservative’s objective is simply life: faith, family, community, and country. His imperative is to preserve. The conservative does not have a project; for him, the personal is not the political—which is why the statist finds him an easy foil. The conservative resists change, but is open to reform, for the latter addresses meritorious grievances by improving civil society’s time-tested institutions without radically altering their character. Contrary to conventional (i.e. statist) lore, the conservative cannot be dogmatically wedded to the status quo; as Levin points out, the status quo “may well be a condition created by the statist and destructive of the civil society—such as 1960s cultural degradations.” The conservative accepts that inequality is the natural condition of mankind because each individual is uniquely endowed by our Creator. For the conservative, equality means enjoying the same opportunity as the next person to live free and flourish, coupled with impartial treatment before a just law. The conservative is alert to injustice but does not see it in each and every iniquity.

Tyranny is the suppression of liberty. In the United States, it is a soft but increasingly suffocating and arbitrary state power. The Obama moment is not “the iron fist of absolute despotism”—the only dire condition, the Founders explained, which could justify the last resort of revolution. But it is an alarming nadir for liberty. How did we get here, and how do we get back?

Levin answers these questions in a well-conceived, exquisitely executed format. He first addresses the ways in which we have veered far from our founding principles: the centrality of faith, the primacy of the Constitution, federalism, free-market capitalism, the welfare state, the role of science, legal immigration, and national defense. Having diagnosed the pathology and its major symptoms, Levin finally offers his prescription, the “Conservative Manifesto”—a series of practical albeit hugely hard-to-implement remedies.

The author is especially trenchant on the animating role of faith in the American founding, and, consequently, its place atop the statist hit-list. The Framers understood “that liberty and religious liberty are inseparable.” But Christianity, unapologetically, was and is America’s dominant religion and it is undeniable that Judeo-Christian values heavily influenced our founding law. The point of religious liberty was to forfend the establishment of a theocracy of the type Tocqueville discerned in the Islamic world, where the Qur’an imposed not merely religious tenets but control over every aspect of life. The Supreme Court’s fabrication of a “wall of separation” in its 1947 Everson decision (authored by one-time Klansman Hugo Black, the first justice appointed by FDR), installing official hostility to religion, was “a wretched betrayal of America’s founding.” As a result, “American courts sit today as supreme secular councils, which, like Islam’s supreme religious councils, dictate all manner of approved behavior respecting religion.”

A strong proponent of constitutional originalism, Levin particularly laments FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights,” the initiative Obama has thrown into high gear. These “positive rights”—economic and social welfare benefits, not rights but redistributions—are “tyranny’s disguise”: the statist’s “false promises of utopianism … to justify all trespasses on the individual’s private property.” Like freedom of conscience, property is part of liberty’s irreducible core, and is thus exalted in our founding law. So, like religion, it is forever in the statist’s cross-hairs as he seeks to micromanage every vestige of autonomy from employment to healthcare to the type of cars we drive.

To carry out such intrusions requires two essential ingredients. The first is a welfare state, the ever more staggering dimensions of which play to the strength of the technocrat. With Ponzi math and junk science swaddled in the rhetoric of good intentions, the expert cons bewildered citizens about what government can do (the public hears “world peace” and “ending poverty” but never seems to think “post office”), while the statist converts them into irrational dependents—such that demands resulting in tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities for schemes like Social Security and Medicare would inevitably demolish the economy even if there were no credit default swaps.

The second is the statist’s infiltration of government’s faceless bureaucratic sprawl. Levin recounts story upon jaw-dropping story of radicals at the helm: the Social Security Administration’s adoption of Henry Rogers Seager’s socialist rant against the “creed of individualism,” calling for “an aggressive program of governmental control and regulation” to enforce “the common welfare”; the National Park Service ecologist David M. Graber’s declaration that the human beings are a “plague upon the earth” engaged in an “orgy of fossil-energy consumption” which caused him to conclude that “until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along”; and so on. The utopia they promise is a conveyor belt of misery, rolling out millions of deaths when enviro-statists banned the use of DDT, and thousands more (to say nothing of an industry destroyed), when mandated fuel-economy standards made American cars less safe.

Levin is not a dewy-eyed dreamer. His blueprint of solutions is ambitious not because it is instantly achievable but because our condition is dire. Among other things, he recommends ending the progressive income tax; a legislative veto over Supreme Court decisions; a yearly sunset of all federal agencies subject to congressional reauthorization; breaking government’s ruinous education monopoly; repealing chain immigration and multiculturalism in public institutions; slowly reforming entitlement programs by reversing the education system’s proselytism on their behalf; rejecting treaties and other international arrangements that encroach on U.S. sovereignty; a revitalization of the Constitution’s original limits of government power; and a restoration of faith’s rightful place as the source of rights the citizen cannot be denied. Like conservatism itself, it is the work of generations. And taking its lead from Mark Levin, it is not for the faint of heart.”