Obamafolks Applaud Extremist Erdogan’s Referendum Win

Radio Free Europe presents its following news:

“The United States and the European Union have hailed the results from Turkey’s referendum on a package of changes to the country’s military-era constitution.

The High Election Board is expected to announce the official results later today. With nearly all votes from the September 12 referendum counted, some 58 percent of Turks voted in favor of the 26 proposed amendments, which would curb the military’s power and reshape the judiciary. Turnout was 77 percent.

Hailing the results, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkish democracy was the “winner.”

“The ‘yes’ vote which came out of the referendum today is the result of the public’s aspiration for democracy,” he said. “On behalf of the AK Party, I see this as a nationwide support for a change and democratization processes.”

However, opposition parties say Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) are trying to secure a further hold on power and steer the country away from its traditional secularism.

The White House said President Barack Obama called Erdogan to congratulate him and “acknowledged the vibrancy of Turkey’s democracy as reflected in the turnout” for the referendum.

European Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele said in a statement that the reforms were “a step in the right direction as they address a number of long-standing priorities in Turkey’s efforts towards fully complying with the accession criteria.”

But he added that the vote “needs to be followed by other much-needed reforms to address the remaining priorities in the area of fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and freedom of religion.”

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle welcomed the success of the referendum and said constitutional reform was critical for Turkey’s bid for EU membership.

‘Turning Point In Democracy’

The present constitution was drawn up by a military junta that seized power in a coup 30 years ago, on September 12, 1980. From now on, Erdogan said, that date will be remembered for something more positive.

“September 12 will go down in history as a turning point in Turkish democracy. You will always be remembered for this. We will always be remembered for this,” Erdogan said. “This date, September 12, which was tainted with the constitution of a coup, has turned into a bright page, with this referendum, and a milestone for democracy.”

The changes are aimed at bringing Turkey more in line with the European Union, which the government wants to join.

At the heart of the package is an attempt to reform the judiciary, long seen as one of the twin pillars of Turkey’s secular political settlement. The proposed changes also further reduce the status of the armed forces, the traditional guarantors of Turkey’s secular state.

Meanwhile, Turkish shares hit a record high on opening today, with the Istanbul Stock Exchange’s IMKB-100 index opening at 61,905 points.

Investors see the strong support for the AKP as a sign that the party is on track toward a fresh victory in the 2011 general elections. The party has reigned over strong economic growth since it shot to power in 2002.”

written by Antoine Blua, with agency reports

Comment:  Why is the Obama administration applauding the expansion of fanatical Islam in Turkey?      

When you hear more hate spewing from Istanbul against America and Israel in the next couple of years, that Turkish women will be reduced to shuffling  around in black tents, and an increase of Turkish young bombing in the Balkans, please remember whose administration applauded for these “democratic” improvements in the Turkish judicial system.

Ron Radosh Describes the New York Times Soft Touch for Communist Irwin Silber

Most Americans no long know anything about the world’s biggest of all atrocities, the Soviet “experiment” which from Lenin through Stalin and Mao designed or caused the murder of around 150,000,000 souls.  Marxism was their cause.  Countless Liberals played tootsie with them.  Some even disappeared “period” or disappeared in a gulag.  Others worked for the cause in the West.  One won a Pulitzer Prize lying for the New York Times in the 1930s advertising peaches and cream, Comrade Stalin in that newspaper which says it covers all of the news that is fit to print….whether it is true or not……

Or maybe just half true, as in this case in an obit about Irwin Silber.  (I just remember him as a Communist in New York City whom I thought had died decades ago.

This article, “An American Communist Dies”, was written by Ron Radosh and can be found at Pajamas Media (where other good stuff can frequently be found).

“Every time an American Communist or leftist dies, you can count on one thing: the New York Times will run a major obituary, and it will be misleading, incomplete, or very favorable to their life and record. The latest example of the paper’s favoritism to deceased men of the far Left is Saturday’s obituary of Irwin Silber, the first editor of the folk music magazine Sing Out! and a secret rather than open member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. I happen to know a great deal about Silber. My very first published article appeared in that magazine in 1955, and through the years, I had many run-ins with him and could have shed a great light on what he thought and believed.

The current editor of the magazine, who did not really know him, calls Silber “one of the architects of the folk revival.” That is, in my judgment, more than inaccurate.  Rather, Silber’s role was to direct a growing interest in the music into very narrow Stalinist channels. As the well known folk-singer and guitar picker Happy Traum told me at the time Silber took over as editor, “It’s a coup.” Traum too was a leftist, but a rather moderate one and non-political, far more interested in the music and its art than narrow politics.

At the time, Silber was one of the most hard-nosed Stalinists in the American CP. The obituary tells readers that Silber left the Party “in the late 1950s.” (I doubt that too. In 1957, a friend and I visited Silber at The Daily Worker, where he was an editor and writer. The CPUSA did not let non-Party members write for and edit its official paper.) Other obituaries say that he left after the famous Khrushchev Report of 1956, the first indication of a power struggle among the Soviet leadership, in which Khrushchev shocked the world Communist community with his limited and incomplete account of Stalin’s crimes. The indication is that Silber, shocked at the truth of Stalin’s record, left when he realized the enormity  of Stalin’s crimes.

What the paper does not say, nor do most of the other testimonials one can find if you Google his name, is that Silber left the Party because he believed Khrushchev had sold out Communism, and he longed for the return of the kind of staunch Marxist-Leninist leadership and system that  Stalin had built and presided over. Years later, as Wikipedia’s account of his life gets correct (and evidently the obit writer, William Grimes, did not consult), Silber became editor of what had become a far left paper The Guardian, and used his work there to make it the spokesmen of what Silber called a “new Communist movement,” based on a favorable reevaluation of Stalin and strict Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist principles. As Wikipedia describes that movement Silber led, “these new organizations rejected the post-1956 Communist Party USA as revisionist, or anti-revolutionary, and also rejected Trotskyism and the Socialist Workers Party for its theoretical opposition to Maoism.”

Silber in fact gave a keynote speech that was printed in The Guardian, which ended by echoing Stalin and actually saying something like “let the bourgeoisie tremble, as we build a new Marxist Leninist party that will crush capitalism.” ( I am writing from vacation without access to my notes and files, so this is from memory.) The ruling class, much to Silber’s dismay, ignored his blustering.

One other example of his outlook. When the once Communist actor and singer Yves Montand appeared in a French movie that depicted the torture of those falsely arrested as traitors during the purges in post-war Communist Czechoslovakia, based on the memoir of one of the few found guilty who was not hanged, Silber lambasted it in a review, arguing that even if it was true, it would hurt the movement if revealed.

The obit writer does not ignore Silber’s one famous article: his condemnation of Bob Dylan for moving away from “protest songs” to more introspective and literary songs. Wrote Silber: “Your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self- conscious — maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion. And it’s happening on stage, too. You seem to be relating to a handful of cronies behind the scenes now — rather than to the rest of us out front. Now, that’s all okay — if that’s the way you want it, Bob. But then you’re a different Bob Dylan from the one we knew. The old one never wasted our precious time.”

Dylan of course ignored Silber’s put down, and Johnny Cash wrote a letter to the magazine asking them to leave Dylan alone and to let him write as he wanted. Obit writer Grimes gets another major thing wrong. He writes that “Mr. Dylan was not amused. Mr. Silber is often proposed as a possible target of the Dylan song ‘Positively Fourth Street.’ One line in that song goes: ‘You say I let you down. You know it’s not like that/If you’re so hurt, why then don’t you show it?’”

Did Grimes even read his own article? That line could not have been written about Silber, since Silber clearly showed Dylan how he felt.  In her recent memoir about her years when she was Dylan’s girlfriend, Suze Rotolo writes that “Positively Fourth Street” was about her and her sister Carla, and their hostile attitude towards him.

The song that does accurately reflect Dylan’s attitude towards Silber is “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which contains the following verse.

With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard
But you don’t understand
Just what you’ll say
When you get home

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Nor does the obit write about Silber’s less well-known attack on Pete Seeger and The Weavers, in which he condemned the group for singing African-American songs when the group was made up of all white singers! Silber’s attack was akin to those coming decades later when black scholars argued that whites could not teach black history.  His column was resented greatly at the time by Seeger and The Weavers, the preeminent left-wing group that had climbed to the top of the Hit Parade, until the blacklist hit.

Silber’s attack came in this latter period, after their famous 1955 revival concert at Carnegie Hall. At the time, I was taking banjo lessons from Seeger, and I asked him how he felt about it. He responded: “Irwin isn’t a musician or a folk-singer. He’s a purely literary person, who has nothing else to do but write such junk.” What he meant essentially is that Silber was a party apparatchik, not a true man of music and art.

Silber then produced a series of concerts for an ersatz Weavers imitation group, The Gateway Singers, that included one black woman along with three white male members. The group was virtually laughed out of Carnegie Hall by its audience, who was familiar with the real thing, and was incensed at this poor Weavers imitation. When I asked Silber about this, he told me: “Of course they’re crap. I couldn’t care less. I’m going to make a lot of money out of them.” Such was Irwin Silber’s ethics.

Finally, as editor of Sing Out!, he launched a crude attack on the folksinger Oscar Brand, who for decades has presided over WNYC’s weekly folk music program, “Folksong Festival,” still on the air after 65 years. Silber penned an article called “Oscar Brand Joins the Witch-Hunters,” in which he condemned Brand for purportedly naming names before HUAC, which Brand never did. What Brand had done, however, was to sing what today we would call politically incorrect songs; i.e., Confederate songs from the Civil War, songs supporting America during the Cold War, etc. Brand had been a member of People’s Songs, but unlike Seeger and company, was more of a Norman Thomas Socialist than a Communist. In Silber’s eyes this made him a traitor. To this day, one comes across people who think Brand was an “informer” because of Silber’s misleading article. Brand’s reputation and employability in folk circles suffered as a result of the article.

Silber, then, had one role: the enforcer of the Communist Party line in music. One of the last articles Silber wrote for the current incarnation of the magazine he once edited, was on what would have been Paul Robeson’s 100^th birthday. Called “Legendary People’s Artist,” Silber’s 1998 article reiterated every false myth about Robeson that his Stalinist brethren ever dreamed up.

Silber eulogized Robeson in a way that reads as if we were back in the late 1940s during Robeson’s heyday, when the great baritone represented not only the struggle for racial equality in America, but the hopes of the Communist Left that America would follow the Soviet path to Communism. His article said less about Robeson than it revealed how little Silber had learned and the fact that he was still an unreconstructed Communist.

Just don’t expect to learn any of this in the newspaper of record.”

Comment:  My how all those Soviet believers remind me of today’s Jihadist Muslims!  Thank God they weren’t so foul as to attach bombs  onto children to murder innocent people in crowded places.    I wonder how Imam Rauf describes the middle road dealing with these fanatics as he pretends he is doing in erecting his mosque near Ground Zero.

Although many Marxists gave their lives to the Communist cause, nearly all of them perferred to live!

Gerard Alexander on Equating Conservatives with “Racists”

Gerard Alexander writes this outstanding piece in today’s Washington Post, about Liberals equating conservatives with racists.   (Dennis Prager would include a number of other bigotries  attached to many Liberal messages and writings  whether by mouth or in print……”homophobe”, “sexist”, “Islamaphobe”, “xenophobe”, inferred among them.)

“From an immigration law in Arizona to a planned mosque near Ground Zero to Glenn Beck emoting at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the controversies roiling American politics in recent weeks and months have featured an ugly undertone, suggesting meanness, prejudice and, in the eyes of some, outright racism. And it is conservatives — whether Republican politicians, Fox News commentators or members of the “tea party” movement — who are invariably painted with that brush.

There is power in the accusation of racism against conservatives, one that liberals understand well. In an April 2008 post on Journolist, a private online community for liberal journalists, academics and activists, one writer proposed a way to distract conservatives from the campaign controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor. “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us,” Spencer Ackerman wrote. “Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

No doubt, such accusations stick to conservatives more than to liberals. It was then-Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, after all, who described presidential candidate Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” If a conservative politician had offered such an opinion, his or her career might have ended; Biden was rewarded with a spot on Obama’s ticket. Liberal missteps on race and ethnicity are explained away, forgiven and often forgotten; conservative ones are cast as part of a sinister, decades-long story of intolerance and political calculation, in which conservative ideology and strategy are conflated with bigotry.

That larger story is well-known and oft-repeated — and, I would argue, vastly oversimplified and simply wrong in its key underlying assumptions. But its endurance explains why the party of Lincoln is so easily dubbed the party of Strom Thurmond or Jefferson Davis, and why many critics believe that an identity politics of white America now tilts conservatives against not just blacks but also Hispanics, Muslims and anyone else outside a nostalgic and monochromatic description of the American way of life.

The narrative usually begins with Barry Goldwater opposing provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and with Richard Nixon scheming to win the presidency through a “Southern strategy” — appealing to the racial prejudice of working-class whites in the South to pry them away from the Democratic coalition assembled by Franklin Roosevelt. In this telling, bigoted Southerners were the electoral mountain to which the Republican Moses had to come, the key to the GOP winning the White House. Wooing them entailed much more than shifting the party slightly away from Democrats on racial issues; in return for political power, Republicans had to move their politics and policies to where bigots wanted them to be. This alliance supposedly laid the foundation for a new American politics.

As Dan Carter, George Wallace’s biographer, put it, “The Wallace music played on” in “Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon’s subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan’s genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush’s use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich’s demonization of welfare mothers.” More recently, it continues through inflammatory campaign ads (“Harold, call me!”), offensive tea party signs, Rand Paul’s unusual-because-explicit skepticism about the Civil Rights Act — all the way to calls to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants and to keep Muslim worship well away from the nation’s hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan. In this interpretation, core conservative principles — limited government, tax cuts, welfare reform and toughness on crime — actually have race at their heart.

This reading of the conservative movement presents problems of logic and history, relying on assumptions that fall apart on close examination. First, it assumes that Republicans depended on white Southerners to become politically competitive in the 1960s. Second, it assumes that Republican presidents from Nixon forward swayed these voters by giving them the policies they wanted. Third, it assumes that the modern conservative policy agenda is best seen as racially motivated. Finally, it assumes that conservative positions on recent controversies are just new forms of that same white-heartland bigotry.

These assumptions are badly flawed.

First, Republicans did not decisively depend on white Southerners to create their modern presidential majorities when the race issue was at its most polarizing. The conventional wisdom is that the GOP had little choice in the 1960s but to seek out Southern white voters and tacked hard to the right on civil rights to do it. But Republican presidential candidates pried apart the New Deal coalition in the 1950s, with the performance of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and Nixon in 1960. This chronology has big implications. From 1952 through the 1980s, GOP presidential candidates consistently beat or nearly matched their Democratic opponents, with the clear exceptions only of 1964 and 1976. Republicans did this mostly by crafting majority coalitions in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states, in the industrial Midwest and mid-Atlantic, and ultimately in California — and only partially by realigning several Southern states. Moreover, these were the least “Southern” states, such as Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

This means that the GOP presidential majority and much of the party’s modern policy agenda were forged not in the racial heat of the 1960s South, but first in the 1950s and across the country.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) recently argued that race did not play a central role in the partisan shift in the South, saying the transformation was led by a younger generation of Southerners in the post-segregation 1970s. But the best evidence that things other than race mattered most in the shift was that it was an even older generation that moved to the GOP in the peripheral South. By the time Lyndon Johnson reportedly remarked that the Civil Rights Act would deliver the South to the Republicans for a generation, the GOP had already won nearly half the region’s Electoral College votes three times in a row.

The remainder of the region — the race-obsessed Deep South — repeatedly tried to be a presidential kingmaker in the 1960s but failed. Instead of reforming the GOP in its image, the Deep South’s white electorate was among the last to join an already-winning Republican presidential coalition in the early 1970s. Wallace voters ended up supporting Nixon, Reagan and other Republicans, but much more on the national GOP’s terms than their own. The Republican Party proved to be the mountain to which the Deep South had to come, not the other way around.

This explains why the second assumption is also wrong. Nixon made more symbolic than substantive accommodations to white Southerners. He enforced the Civil Rights Act and extended the Voting Rights Act. On school desegregation, he had to be prodded by the courts in some ways but went further than them in others: He supervised a desegregation of Deep South schools that had eluded his predecessors and then denied tax-exempt status to many private “desegregation academies” to which white Southerners tried to flee. Nixon also institutionalized affirmative action and set-asides for minorities in federal contracting.

Not surprisingly, white Southern leaders such as Strom Thurmond grew bitterly frustrated with Nixon. This explains what Gallup polls detected in 1971-72: A large number of white Southern voters preferred Wallace to Nixon. Only when the Alabaman was shot in May 1972 did Nixon inherit Wallace’s voters — not because of Nixon’s policies on race but despite them.

After the mid-1970s, school desegregation and enforcement of the Civil Rights Act faded as the most decisive — or divisive — racial issues in the country. In the decades that followed, the conservative policy platform became the new focus of liberal cries of racism. Critics such as Thomas and Mary Edsall interpreted the Reagan agenda’s major elements as indirect attempts to maintain white privilege: Tax cuts denied resources to a government that could be an agent of social change and lift up the underprivileged. Calls to limit government, especially federal power, stood to do the same. Reagan’s attacks on “welfare queens” emphasized negative images of minorities and ultimately helped end an entitlement for the neediest. Campaigns against crime refreshed stereotypes of threatening African Americans and imprisoned millions along the way. Criticism of affirmative action assaulted a major mechanism of workplace advancement for minorities and women.

These policy positions remain central to the conservative domestic agenda, but calling them racist, the third assumption, presumes something very strange: that conservatives do not mean what they say about them. Welfare reform is deliberately anti-black (or anti-minority or anti-poor) only if conservatives secretly believe that welfare actually does help its beneficiaries and are being deceitful when they argue that long-term dependency devastates inner-city communities. Tax cuts are part of a racist agenda only if conservatives do not believe that lower taxes will enhance economic growth and social mobility for all. Conservative opposition to raising the minimum wage is anti-poor only if free-marketeers are feigning concern that increases will price less-skilled people out of the workforce (as when Milton Friedman called the minimum wage “one of the most . . . anti-black laws on the statute books”) and secretly agree with liberals that increases will benefit the working poor over the long term.

By such reasoning, conservatives should oppose all government programs that they believe help minority groups. But at least one expansive policy area defies this expectation: education. Most conservatives, even as they turned against busing and welfare, continued to support large public education budgets. Many conservatives may support issuing school vouchers and shutting down the federal Education Department, but those positions concern which level of government should control schools — not whether government should pay for education for all. Overwhelming majorities of Republicans joined Democrats in 2007 to reauthorize Head Start, the early-education program in which well over half the students are from minority groups. And substantial majorities of whites (conservatives as well as liberals) have voiced support for what sociologist William Julius Wilson calls “opportunity-enhancing affirmative action,” policies that would unofficially but inevitably direct disproportionate benefits to minorities.

All these programs aim to give beneficiaries not guaranteed incomes but better chances to succeed by boosting their skills. (It was George W. Bush, after all, who insisted that academic achievement by minority students had to factor into measures of school performance.)

Finally, there is reason to be skeptical of the latest assumptions of conservative prejudice. Conservatives have taken the lead in two major recent controversies: opposition to a planned Islamic center near Ground Zero and support for Arizona’s law requiring immigrants to carry their papers and requiring police to question those they suspect of being here illegally. Liberal critics swiftly labeled both positions bigotry: Islamophobia and prejudice against immigrants from Latin America. To these critics, the racial resentment of past decades has simply been expanded into a more generalized prejudice against racial and religious minorities.

Of course, conservatives don’t see it that way. A long-held conservative belief holds that a minimal amount of shared cultural content is required for a healthy American society. This content includes an understanding of the nation’s history and virtues, including the opportunity and social mobility it has offered so many. This helps explain, for instance, why conservatives were long skeptical of bilingual education, suspecting that it slowed assimilation. They have logically been concerned about large numbers of immigrants whose presence in the United States is often transitory and whose relationship with the country is purely economic. And they have been cautious about high levels of even legal immigration when it involves people who arrive in large enough numbers and in a concentrated enough time and place to create zones in which pressures to assimilate are mitigated.

Most conservatives do not understand how Arizona’s move to enforce federal immigration laws can be deemed bigoted — especially considering that they have long supported crackdowns on lawbreakers of all types. The planned Islamic center near Ground Zero raises alarms, in part, because the insensitivity of its architects to 9/11′s emotional legacy suggests their deeper distance from American sensibilities. Lest that position seem anti-Muslim, conservatives of every stripe, including those who have led the charge against the center, roundly condemned the planned burning of the Koran by a Florida pastor. They did so on the same grounds: Just because someone has a legal right to do something (build a center, burn a book) does not mean it is a wise, desirable or respectful thing to do.

There is no doubt that the contemporary Republican electorate contains some out-and-out bigots, just as the Democratic electorate contains people who hate others on the basis of class. These very real prejudices occasionally erupt into public expression, whether in remarks about Jews over the years by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton or in shocking signs at tea party rallies.

But most conservatives have been less concerned with the “hardware” of people’s race or ethnicity and more concerned with the “software” of their values or culture. This is why the white Protestant core of the modern conservative movement has not merely integrated Catholic “ethnics” but also rallied behind the Irish American William F. Buckley and the Italian American Antonin Scalia. Jews, women and Hispanics have been similarly integrated into both its ranks and leadership; indeed, many white conservatives swoon when members of minority groups proudly share their values. This explains why, in the 2008 campaign, conservatives were at least as roused by Obama’s ties to the white former radical William Ayers as the black Jeremiah Wright, both of whom seemed to make a living out of damning America.

Liberal interpretations that portray modern conservatism as standing athwart the “rights revolution” of the 1960s are hard pressed to explain the growing number of minority and female candidates favored by the conservative rank and file. Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Susana Martinez, Brian Sandoval, Tim Scott, Ryan Frazier, Raul Labrador and Jaime Herrera are GOP nominees for the Senate, governorships and the House because Republican voters preferred them over their white opponents. Allen West in Florida and Jon Barela in New Mexico were the consensus GOP choices to run for competitive House seats. Many of these candidates are well-positioned to win their races and help change the public face of modern conservatism.

The old conservatism-as-racism story has outlived all usefulness and accuracy. November might be a good time to start a rethink.”

Comment:  Amen!!

The Marxist Coup Begins with Controlling the News and What Cannot Be Said

And Barack Hussein Obama has escorted Marxism into the American door!!

Michael Barone at the Examiner, wrote the following article, “Gangster Government Stifles Criticism of Obama”:

“There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.”

That sounds like a stern headmistress dressing down some sophomores who have been misbehaving. But it’s actually from a letter sent Thursday from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans — the chief lobbyist for private health insurance companies.

Sebelius objects to claims by health insurers that they are raising premiums because of increased costs imposed by the Obamacare law passed by Congress last March.

She acknowledges that many of the law’s “key protections” take effect later this month and does not deny that these impose additional costs on insurers. But she says that “according to our analysis and those of some industry and academic experts, any potential premium impact … will be minimal.”

Well, that’s reassuring. Er, except that if that’s the conclusion of “some” industry and academic experts, it’s presumably not the conclusion of all industry and academic experts, or the secretary would have said so.

Sebelius also argues that “any premium increases will be moderated by out-of-pocket savings resulting from the law.” But she’s pretty vague about the numbers — “up to $1 billion in 2013.” Anyone who watches TV ads knows that “up to” can mean zero.

As Time magazine’s Karen Pickert points out, Sebelius ignores the fact that individual insurance plans cover different types of populations. So that government and “some” industry and academic experts think the new law will justify increases averaging 1 percent or 2 percent, they could justify much larger increases for certain plans.

Or as Ignagni, the recipient of the letter, says, “It’s a basic law of economics that additional benefits incur additional costs.”

But Sebelius has “zero tolerance” for that kind of thing. She promises to issue regulations to require “state or federal review of all potentially unreasonable rate increases” (which would presumably mean all rate increases).

And there’s a threat. “We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.”

That’s a significant date, the first year in which state insurance exchanges are slated to get a monopoly on the issuance of individual health insurance policies. Sebelius is threatening to put health insurers out of business in a substantial portion of the market if they state that Obamacare is boosting their costs.

“Congress shall make no law,” reads the First Amendment, “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Sebelius’ approach is different: “zero tolerance” for dissent.

The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone’s business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration’s transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government.

“The rule of law, or the rule of men (women)?” economist Tyler Cowen asks on his marginalrevolution.com blog. As he notes, “Nowhere is it stated that these rate hikes are against the law (even if you think they should be), nor can this ‘misinformation’ be against the law.”

According to Politico, not a single Democratic candidate for Congress has run an ad since last April that makes any positive reference to Obamacare. The First Amendment gives candidates the right to talk — or not talk — about any issue they want.

But that is not enough for Sebelius and the Obama administration. They want to stamp out negative speech about Obamacare. “Zero tolerance” means they are ready to use the powers of government to threaten economic harm on those who dissent.

The closing paragraph of Sebelius’s letter to AHIP’s Karen Ignagni gives the game away. “We worked hard to change the system to help consumers.” This is a reminder that the administration alternatively collaborated with and criticized Ignagni’s organization. We roughed you up a little, but we eventually made a deal.

The secretary goes on: “It is my hope we can work together to stop misinformation and misleading marketing from the start.” In other words, shut your members up and play team ball — or my guys with the baseball bats and Tommy guns are going to get busy. As Cowen puts it, “worse than I had been expecting.”

Comment:  “Gangsterism”…..”Thuggery” in government accurately describe actions and rule by tyrants.  Stalin, Castro, Mao, Batista, whether self serving despots or devoted servants of Marxism where laws, tolerance, truth are never allowed outside the center of power. 

Hugo Chavez is also a despot.  It should never be forgotten that among Mr. Obama’s Marxist moves, this  president allied himself with Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez in their efforts to topple the  government of Honduras during its Chavez-organized Manuel Zelaya coup attempt only last year.  Thug  Chavez is a Marxist, but has not yet collected the requirements for a final blow to the Venezuelan democratic opposition. 

Mr. Obama is not a thug.  He is more discreet in his aims.  He west to Princeton and studied Saul Alinsky.

The Chic Lefties at the New Yorker Blame America for “Intolerance”

It is vital for the American voter to understand the goings on in American political, economic, and educational life.  There is a battle going on in America.  The Left, led by Marxist sympathizer, Barack Hussein Obama, has allied itself with the woes of the children of Prophet Mohammed, solidifying his animosity against the land over which he presides.  Lawrence Wright writes on behalf of this alliance in his article, “INTOLERANCE”, in the New Yorker, a publication where the elite meet to fete.

These “elite” are university trained.   They are Lefties.  It is important to know what the Lefties  write about America these days, and every day.

“INTOLERANCE”, by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker:

“When a dozen cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammed appeared in the conservative Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, in September, 2005, there was only a muted outcry from the small Danish Muslim community, and little reaction in the rest of the Muslim world. Six months later, however, riots broke out and Danish embassies were burned; more than a hundred people died. Assassination threats were made, and continue to this day.

Last year, when plans were announced for Cordoba House, an Islamic community center to be built two blocks north of Ground Zero, few opposed them. The project was designed to promote moderate Islam and provide a bridge to other faiths. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Sufi cleric leading the effort, told the Times, in December, “We want to push back against the extremists.” In August, the Landmarks Preservation Commission granted Park51, as the center is now known, unanimous approval. A month later, it is the focus of a bitter quarrel about the place of Islam in our society.

The lessons of the Danish cartoon controversy serve as an ominous template for the current debate. One reason for the initial lack of reaction to the cartoons was that they were, essentially, innocuous. There is a prohibition on depictions of the Prophet in Islam, but that taboo has ebbed and flowed over time, and only two of the twelve published cartoons could really be construed as offensive in themselves: one portrayed the Prophet as a barbarian with a drawn sword, which played into a racial stereotype; the other showed him wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb. Newspapers in several Muslim countries published the cartoons to demonstrate that they were tasteless, rather than vicious. The cartoons, in other words, did not cause the trouble.

So what happened? A group of radical imams in Denmark, led by Ahmed Abu Laban, an associate of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian terrorist organization, decided to use the cartoons to inflate their own importance. They showed the cartoons to various Muslim leaders in other countries, and included three illustrations that had not appeared in the Danish papers. One was a photograph of a man supposedly wearing a prayer cap and a pig mask, and imitating the Prophet. (He turned out to be a contestant in a French hog-calling competition). Another depicted a dog mounting a Muslim in prayer. The third was a drawing of the Prophet as a maddened pedophile gripping helpless children like dolls in either hand. The imams later claimed that these illustrations had been e-mailed to them as threats—although they never produced any proof that they hadn’t made the drawings themselves—and so were fair representations of European anti-Muslim sentiment. The leaders saw them and were inflamed. The Sunni scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi demanded a Day of Rage. So far, we have had five years of rage.

In the dispute over Park51, the role of the radical imams has been taken by bloggers and right-wing commentators. In this parable, Pamela Geller, who writes a blog called Atlas Shrugs and runs a group called Stop Islamization of America, plays the part of Ahmed Abu Laban. Geller has already contributed to the phony claim that President Obama is a Muslim (which twenty per cent of the American public now believe is true), by promoting a theory that he is the bastard son of Malcolm X. Because of Park51’s location, Geller compares the community center (or the “9/11 Monster Mosque,” as she terms it) to Al Aqsa, the ancient mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—a flash point for Jewish extremists in Israel.

Geller framed the argument for the New York Post, which added the false information that Park51 was going to open on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Deliberate misrepresentations of Imam Abdul Rauf as a supporter of terror further distorted the story, as it moved on to the Fox News commentariat and from there to political figures, such as Newt Gingrich, who compared Abdul Rauf and his supporters to Nazis desecrating the Holocaust Memorial Museum by their presence. These strident falsehoods have undoubtedly influenced the two-thirds of Americans who now oppose Park51. The cynicism of this rhetorical journey can be traced in the remarks of Laura Ingraham, who interviewed Daisy Khan, Abdul Rauf’s wife and partner in the project, in December. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” Ingraham told Khan then. “I like what you’re trying to do.” Ingraham has since been brought into line. “I say the terrorists have won with the way this has gone down,” she said last month, on “Good Morning America.” “Six hundred feet from where thousands of our fellow-Americans were incinerated in the name of political Islam, and we’re supposed to be considered intolerant if we’re not cheering this?”

Culture wars are currently being waged against Muslim Americans across the country. In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where Muslims have been worshipping for thirty years, a construction vehicle was burned at the site of a new Islamic center. Pat Robertson, the fundamentalist Christian leader, warned his followers on the “700 Club” that, if the center brings “thousands and thousands” of Muslims into the area, “the next thing you know, they’re going to be taking over the city council. They’re going to have an ordinance that calls for public prayer five times a day.” As in the Park51 controversy, fearmongering and slander serve as the basis of an argument that cannot rely on facts to make its case.

The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations. Until recently, America had been largely immune to the extremism that has placed some European nations in peril. America’s Muslim community is more ethnically diverse than that of any other major religion in the country. Its members hold more college and graduate degrees than the national average. They also have a higher employment rate and more jobs in the professional sector. (Compare that with England and France, where education and employment rates among Muslims fall below the national averages.) These factors have allowed American Muslims and non-Muslims to live together with a degree of harmony that any other Western nation would envy.

The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam. The unfounded attacks on the backers of Park51 and others, along with such sideshows as a pastor calling for the burning of Korans, give substance to the Al Qaeda argument that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam, rather than against the terrorists’ misshapen effigy of that religion. Those stirring the pot in this debate are casting a spell that is far more dangerous than they may imagine.”

Comment:  I am old enough to remember World War II.  At college I was made well educated of the development of this greatest of all man made disasters.   I was fascinated by the Soviets and their assault on human matters which both predated the second world war, and continues to this day, at least in the abstract as well as a dream among  many leftwing Americans.   Writers like Lawrence Wright reminds me of both apologists for Hitler as well as Stalin.  

Fortunately, Americans were intolerant of both Nazism and the Soviet version of George Orwell’s  ”1984″.  What would moderate Naziism be?    Was the  Soviet Union  a moderate version of “1984″?  

Where are the world leaders of moderate Islam?  Where are they spreading their versions?

There is a new version of “1984″ on the American horizon…..a threat to all of us….It is the Union of the Soviet leftover Lefties, such as Mr. Wright, and the Imam-led Muslim fanatics. 

Americans have a lot to be intolerant about regarding modern Islam.  Most importantly, we must know intelligently what the ”Kommisars” of Islam say and what they do and have done throughout its primitive past of the last 400 years.

Fellow Americans!  Know thy enemies!  Be intolerant of those who want to kill freedom for the sake of  enslavement!  But know, as a free person, tolerance must be at the center of our democratic community and honestyand knowledge  must guide our understandings of the intent of our enemies.

Your Vote In November: Which Is It America? A Government Run Autocracy or Citizen Enterprise?

For decades and decades the American voter has been bribed and tricked into ceding to the Federal Government many  personal liberties and much in our American personal life.  Rule over the masses tends to increase as the masses increase their numbers.

Where will the limit be?  Does the American citizen really want to cede to an army of bureaucrats, trained to be Marxists to do their Marxist thing, running Big Government and Big Courts and Big Business and Big Labor to imprison the individual into Soviet style cell block living?

In 2008 Barack Hussein Obama advertised, Marxist style, “Change you’ve been waiting for”.  He opened the door much wider for  Marxism to run the American show.   His CZARS, are advancing an army of bureaucrats to engorge government to dictate  equality into our American life, both public and personal.  George Orwell called this monstrosity, “Big Brother”, created to releave every citizen of all burdens of life except existing within the strictures of “Big Brother”.

Never have Americans face more imprisonment from the government which is supposed to serve its people!!

Your choice is clear this November!   Please read the following review of the coming midyear elections, a very clearly written article about our choices, “The Size of Government and the Choice This Fall”, written by Arthur C. Brooks and Paul Ryan:

“As we move into this election season, Americans are being asked to choose between candidates and political parties. But the true decision we will be making—now and in the years to come—is this: Do we still want our traditional American free enterprise system, or do we prefer a European-style social democracy? This is a choice between free markets and managed capitalism; between limited government and an ever-expanding state; between rewarding entrepreneurs and equalizing economic rewards.

We must decide. Or must we?

In response to what each of us has written in the preceding months, we have heard again and again that the choice we pose is too stark. New York Times columnist David Brooks (no relation) finds our approach too Manichaean, and the Schumpeter columnist in The Economist objected that, “You can have a big state with a well-functioning free market.”

Data support the proposition that Americans like generous government programs and don’t want to lose them. So while 70% of Americans told pollsters at the Pew Research Center in 2009 they agreed that “people are better off in a free market economy, even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time,” large majorities favor keeping our social insurance programs intact. This leads conventional thinkers to claim that a welfare state is what we truly want, regardless of whether or not we mouth platitudes about “freedom” and “entrepreneurship.”

But these claims miss the point. What we must choose is our aspiration, not whether we want to zero out the state. Nobody wants to privatize the Army or take away Grandma’s Social Security check. Even Friedrich Hayek in his famous book, “The Road to Serfdom,” reminded us that the state has legitimate—and critical—functions, from rectifying market failures to securing some minimum standard of living.

However, finding the right level of government for Americans is simply impossible unless we decide which ideal we prefer: a free enterprise society with a solid but limited safety net, or a cradle-to-grave, redistributive welfare state. Most Americans believe in assisting those temporarily down on their luck and those who cannot help themselves, as well as a public-private system of pensions for a secure retirement. But a clear majority believes that income redistribution and government care should be the exception and not the rule.

This is made abundantly clear in surveys such as the one conducted by the Ayers-McHenry polling firm in 2009, which asked a large group of Americans, “Overall, would you prefer larger government with more services and higher taxes, or smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes?” To this question, 21% favored the former, while 69% preferred the latter.

Unfortunately, many political leaders from both parties in recent years have purposively obscured the fundamental choice we must make by focusing on individual spending issues and programs while ignoring the big picture of America’s free enterprise culture. In this way, redistribution and statism always win out over limited government and private markets.

Why not lift the safety net a few rungs higher up the income ladder? Go ahead, slap a little tariff on some Chinese goods in the name of protecting a favored industry. More generous pensions for teachers? Hey, it’s only a few million tax dollars—and think of the kids, after all.

Individually, these things might sound fine. Multiply them and add them all up, though, and you have a system that most Americans manifestly oppose—one that creates a crushing burden of debt and teaches our children and grandchildren that government is the solution to all our problems. Seventy percent of us want stronger free enterprise, but the other 30% keep moving us closer toward an unacceptably statist America—one acceptable government program at a time.

This process has led to a visceral type of dissatisfaction with the current direction of our country. The president’s job approval has fallen almost linearly since he took office (standing today at 45%, according to Gallup; 41%, according to Rasmussen) despite the fact that his policies are precisely what he promised when he handily won the 2008 election. Rasmussen finds that only 29% believe we are headed in the right direction as a nation and two-thirds say they are angry about current policies of the federal government. Majorities believe that “big government” poses the greatest threat to our country, according to Gallup.

Millions of Americans instinctively look to our leaders for a defense of our culture of free enterprise. Instead, we get more and more publicly funded gewgaws and shiny government novelties to distract us. For example, the administration stills touts the success of programs such as “Cash for Clunkers” in handing out borrowed money to citizens while propping up a favored industry. Yet Rasmussen found 54% of Americans opposed the program (only 35% favored it). Plenty of people may have availed themselves of that notorious boondoggle, but a large majority understand we were basically just asking our children (who will have to pay the $3 billion back) to buy us new cars—and that’s not right.

More and more Americans are catching on to the scam. Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America’s enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.

As this reality dawns, and the implications become clear to millions of Americans, we believe we can see the brightest future in decades. But we must choose it.

This is made abundantly clear in surveys such as the one conducted by the Ayers-McHenry polling firm in 2009, which asked a large group of Americans, “Overall, would you prefer larger government with more services and higher taxes, or smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes?” To this question, 21% favored the former, while 69% preferred the latter.

Unfortunately, many political leaders from both parties in recent years have purposively obscured the fundamental choice we must make by focusing on individual spending issues and programs while ignoring the big picture of America’s free enterprise culture. In this way, redistribution and statism always win out over limited government and private markets.

Why not lift the safety net a few rungs higher up the income ladder? Go ahead, slap a little tariff on some Chinese goods in the name of protecting a favored industry. More generous pensions for teachers? Hey, it’s only a few million tax dollars—and think of the kids, after all.

Individually, these things might sound fine. Multiply them and add them all up, though, and you have a system that most Americans manifestly oppose—one that creates a crushing burden of debt and teaches our children and grandchildren that government is the solution to all our problems. Seventy percent of us want stronger free enterprise, but the other 30% keep moving us closer toward an unacceptably statist America—one acceptable government program at a time.

This process has led to a visceral type of dissatisfaction with the current direction of our country. The president’s job approval has fallen almost linearly since he took office (standing today at 45%, according to Gallup; 41%, according to Rasmussen) despite the fact that his policies are precisely what he promised when he handily won the 2008 election. Rasmussen finds that only 29% believe we are headed in the right direction as a nation and two-thirds say they are angry about current policies of the federal government. Majorities believe that “big government” poses the greatest threat to our country, according to Gallup.

Millions of Americans instinctively look to our leaders for a defense of our culture of free enterprise. Instead, we get more and more publicly funded gewgaws and shiny government novelties to distract us. For example, the administration stills touts the success of programs such as “Cash for Clunkers” in handing out borrowed money to citizens while propping up a favored industry. Yet Rasmussen found 54% of Americans opposed the program (only 35% favored it). Plenty of people may have availed themselves of that notorious boondoggle, but a large majority understand we were basically just asking our children (who will have to pay the $3 billion back) to buy us new cars—and that’s not right.

More and more Americans are catching on to the scam. Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America’s enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.

As this reality dawns, and the implications become clear to millions of Americans, we believe we can see the brightest future in decades. But we must choose it.”

Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future” (Basic Books, 2010). Mr. Ryan is a Republican congressman from Wisconsin and the author of “A Roadmap for America’s Future” (www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov).