The House Republican Conference released this chart:

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Some public school teachers have been seizing the opportunity to hail Barack Obama as the virtual second coming, something we haven’t seen for any president in recent memory, if ever.

ABCnews.com, among others, reported on the snappy, stubbornly catchy tune, “Mmm mmm mmm…Barack Hussein Obama,” filmed last school year in New Jersey.

BigHollywood.com has posted 11 new videos of young children singing the praises of Obama.  In one video, the 5^th and 6^th graders call Obama, “a modern Martin Luther.”  “He’s known around the world – come on, let’s celebrate.”  Yippee.

In another, 5^th graders sing, “You know we gotta get Barack and all of his crew/ In the White House so they can prove that.”  “Change that we can believe in” is what they’re referring to.  No advocacy or indoctrination there…

Another, of kids ranging from pre-school to 3^rd grade: “Barack Obama there is none higher/ Other politicians should call me sire … We’re the baddest of the bad/ The cool of the cool/ I’m Barack/ I rock and rule.”

To me, it’s not disturbing that it’s for a Democrat.  It’s disturbing that it’s the elevation of an elected official to a kind of mythical, god-like status – a place where no sitting president belongs.

The American left would have been outraged if such a thing had been happening in America’s schools to honor George W. Bush, and rightly so.  And I would have been right there with them, demanding it be stopped.

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Yesterday, Pastor Himes provided powerful, and courageous, witness to the union violence he and his wife saw in St. Louis on August 6th.  They provided strong testament to the union attack on Kenneth Gladney. But, his comments only dealt with the events of that day. Evidence is emerging that the events of that day went far beyond St. Louis and may have been part of a nationally orchestrated campaign to intimidate and silence dissent.

When Congress went into its summer recess at the end of July, an organic movement erupted to protest Congressional proposals to inject government deeper into our health care system. The ferocity of citizen’s reactions caught most congressmen off-guard. The citizen’s spontaneous protests against Congress dominated the news coverage. It was only a matter of time until the left struck back,.

On the morning of August 6th, Sam Stein reported at the Huffington Post that labor unions had released a comprehensive memo, detailing tactics to counter what were called “town hall protestors”. That same day, a White House official said to reporters, “If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.”

Those both happened the morning of the assault on Kenneth Gladney. Is it any surprise that on the specific day that Big Labor and the White House signaled a commitment to ‘punch back’ at the town hall protests, an innocent bystander, Kenneth Gladney, was brutally beaten?

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Nancy Pelosi is pulling out all the stops to pass her government takeover of health care tomorrow. At 2,000+ pages, the bill is the longest political suicide note in history. Let’s pray we get a recorded vote in the House on this bill…and, then, let’s remember it in 2010.

And, it is Friday. Please tip your waitress…

Special to Big Government from Helen Rittelmeyer, The Daily Caller:

Capitol Police arrested ten people on the second floor of the Cannon House Office Building at a sit-in this afternoon.  The demonstrators had crowded into the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a print-out of the health care bill, intending to tear up the bill in protest.

“It was a mess.  There was paper all over the hallway,” said Jeanette Beam, who traveled from Georgia to join the protest.  “They took a little old lady away in plastic handcuffs.”

The arrests, which happened a little before three o’clock, prompted plenty of chatter but little surprise.  Earlier in the day, an organizer with a megaphone had explained the plan for the sit-in.  “The police know we’re coming,” he announced.  “No one has to get arrested if they don’t want to.”

The protesters were part of a crowd of 10,000 that gathered on Capitol Hill to protest the Democratic health care bill.  The “emergency house call” was initiated by Rep. Michele Bachmann and organized by Americans for Prosperity.

Bachmann greeted the crowd from the Capitol steps: “You came.  You came to your House.”  When her remarks were interrupted by a chant of “Kill the bill,” Bachmann joked, “Oh, don’t hold back.  Tell them how you really feel!”  She continued, “Kill the bill – that’s exactly what you’re going to tell them.”

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Citigroup executive Eric Eve (pictured below) has resigned from ACORN’s phony, allegedly independent panel of inquiry, a move that removes one of the few people on the panel who could even remotely claim to actually be independent.

If you read between the lines, it also seems to mean Citigroup agrees the panel is a sham.

Eve, senior vice president of Global Consumer Group, Community Relations, at Citigroup, quit after the National Legal and Policy Center pressed Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit to cut ties with ACORN.

In a letter to NLPC president Peter Flaherty, Citigroup announced Eve’s resignation from the panel.

“We too are deeply concerned about the recent media reports regarding ACORN and, because of those reports, have suspended our charitable financial support and program relationships with ACORN, and we are awaiting the results of the independent audit of ACORN activities now underway,” wrote Natalie Abatemarco, Citigroup’s vice president, Global Community Relations.

“On a related topic, please be advised that Eric Eve has resigned his position on the ACORN Advisory Council,” she added.

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Is the Obama administration worried about the political ramifications of its push for net neutrality?  That’s a question being asked by opponents of the policy in the wake of news that White House senior adviser Susan Crawford resigned last week.

Crawford, an adviser to Obama on technology and communications policy, is a strong proponent of net neutrality, which critics have charged would amount to a government takeover of the internet.  The policy has been the focus of widespread, bipartisan opposition in recent weeks, emanating from everyone from internet service providers to liberal-aligned groups and elected Democrats at the state and federal level.

Crawford’s resignation attracted little attention when the American Spectator noted it on Monday, the day before the 2009 election.  The results of the election have had the virtually the entirety of the U.S. media focused on Republican wins in gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, and what has been described as a “rejection” of the Obama agenda.  But observers say that Crawford’s exit may be part of that story, too: According to the Spectator, Crawford ran afoul of White House economic adviser Larry Summers, who sources say may be concerned about the political impact of net neutrality.  In its write-up, the Spectator noted that:

“[Summers] and other senior Obama officials were unaware of how radical the draft Net Neutrality regulations were when they were initially internally circulated to Obama administration officials several weeks ago.  ‘All of sudden Larry is getting calls from CEOs, Wall Street folks he talks to, Republicans and Democrats, asking him what the Administration is doing with the policies, and he isn’t sure what they’re talking about,’ says one White House aide. ‘He felt blind-sided, and Susan was one of those people who heard about it.’”

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My wife, Sandra, and I attended St. Louis Congressman Russ Carnahan’s panel on aging. The tactic was clear. They let in about two hundred of us but had about 120 seats set aside, marked “RSVP,” and these were for Carnahan supporters. These people were let in by a side door for the “handicapped.” Many had purple t-shirts with “Organizing for America” in white letters on the back and large “SEIU,” smaller “Service Employees International Union” on the front. [Ed Note: The events described were on August 6, 2009]

They shut the doors on about 1000 people around 6:30 pm for the 7:00 pm event. After being introduced, Carnahan spoke but was booed frequently while the supporters stood and applauded. It was announced that there would be a question and answer period at the end, so “be respectful.” Then a regional director of AARP spoke to many boo’s, followed by about five other speakers. The dissenters waited somewhat patiently, waiting to pounce on the Congressman during the Q&A.

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Today, the Washington Post reported that a painting by artist Alma Thomas entitled “Watusi (Hard Edge)” was being removed from the White House’s East Wing.  For those who don’t remember, Thomas’ painting is a plagiaristic copy of Henri Matisse’s “The Snail” rotated 90 degrees – see my piece, and the paintings side by side here.  According to Semonti Stephens, Michelle Obama’s deputy press secretary, the painting was moved “because it didn’t fit the space right.”

The White House explicitly denied that the painting was being removed because of its obvious similarity to the Matisse piece.  And the Washington Post writers cover for the White House in typical press lackey fashion:

Stephens’s explanation makes sense because it is inconceivable that the White House’s art experts would imagine Thomas’s painting was fraudulent or a copy … Elaborations on earlier artists’ work, even full appropriation, have been common practice in art for hundreds of years.

Right.  And Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services because Obama didn’t like his red glasses.  It had nothing to do with his tax cheating.  (more at Big Hollywood…)

Having purchased, rented, or placed a down payment on all the political influence up for sale in America, leftist troublemaker George Soros now plans to ramp up his war on markets worldwide by creating an “Institute for New Economic Thinking” (INET).

“The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” Soros told the Financial Times last month.

Soros said he wants Communist China to run this new financial system. “You really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, a financial world order,” Soros said.

If that doesn’t send a chill down the spines of freedom lovers in America and elsewhere, nothing will.

In an interview with Der Spiegel last year Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society.”

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From CNSnews.com:

Buried in the thousands of pages of the health care bills drafted by Democrats in the House and Senate is a provision to protect insurance companies from legal accountability for benefit decisions that cause injury or death to patients, Republicans warned on Wednesday.

“You can sue your doctor for malpractice if he makes a mistake practicing medicine, but you cannot sue your insurance company when it makes a medical decision,” Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) said at the press conference near the steps of the Capitol. “That’s just wrong.

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Today, tea party and other conservative activists are holding rallies in Washington, DC as part of the “House Calls on Congress” event. Big Government has a reporter covering the events and will have a report later today. Earlier this week, Washington News Observer sat down with South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson to discuss the current landscape for health care legislation.

The 2009 elections have come and gone.  New Jersey elected a Republican governor.  That is more of a surprise than the fact that Virginia now has a Republican governor (for the first time in 8 years) and less of a surprise than the Democrats winning House seats in New York and in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mixed results you say?  If so, is there anything to be learned from these elections?  The answer is no, because we should have learned these lessons already.   In case they have been forgotten, however, here they are:

5.   Off year Elections Are Hard on the President’s Party.  The President’s party loses 20 seats, on average, in the House in the mid-term elections.  When President’s approval rating is below 50%, that number doubles.  So it can be of little surprise that voters dealt the Democrats losses this November.

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Earlier this year the federal government sent $3 billion tax dollars to the state of Illinois to provide financial support for education as part of the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, a.k.a. “the stimulus,”.  Not for building schools, mind you.  There is money for that elsewhere in the $787 billion spend-a-thon.  This is for good old-fashioned reading, writing and arithmetic.  Of course, there are many reasons this is antithetical to the temporary economic jump-start concept behind the stimulus, but that is not the point here.

The State of Illinois dutifully began doling out this newfound largess to boost funding for low income schools under the Title 1 program, and to fund special education under the IDEA Part A program.  One can see the rationalization to increase funding for schools in poor areas in a recession, but it’s a bit of a stretch to see how the economic downturn has increased demand for special education.  But, again, that is not the subject of this piece.

As the Obama Administration has ramped up its efforts to portray the stimulus as an unqualified success that has rescued us from certain doom, they have resorted to the kinds of shoddy claims that smack of political desperation.

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The radical left took a couple of hits on the chin yesterday, losing two significant governorships in Virgina and New Jersey. Add to this the embarrassing outing of one of their WFP endorsed RINO’s in NY-23, and this was not a banner cycle for the President Obama’s ACORN movement.

The Democratic Socialists and Marxists did score one important win in Staten Island yesterday, with the election of their WFP candidate for City Council, Debi Rose.

This is the same Debi Rose who recently exercised her 5th amendment right to avoid incriminating herself in an ACORN-WFP campaign finance related scandal.

There are two reasons this very local election is important beyond Staten Island.

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Congratulations to the New York Yankees.

In my last column titled “The Cost of Delay,” I highlighted that one of the primary second order effects of the Obama administration’s stalling on the Afghanistan decision was that the Afghan runoff election would necessarily be a repeat of the general election, complete with allegations of fraud and intimidation.

Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and Afghan President Hamid Karzai Meet With then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

The issues surrounding the general election in Afghanistan were basically that it was poorly administered and security concerns were rampant as the Taliban tried to disrupt and influence the voting. Afghanistan with its 100,000 NATO forces does not have sufficient combat power to secure all of the provinces. It’s that simple. We had twice that amount to secure elections in Iraq, a country 1/3 smaller than Afghanistan, with 8,000,000 fewer citizens, and with far more infrastructure. For the Afghan runoff, there would have been no measurable difference in troop levels or international assistance from the first election, and so Abdullah Abdullah, the only viable contender to Karzai, pulled out believing the fix was in. Allegations of corruption and intimidation are just that, allegations, but should have been addressed. They weren’t.

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In this first clip, Mike Flynn and Glenn Beck connect the dots between the White House, the NEA conference calls, and the beating of tea party-goer Kenneth Gladney by SEIU thugs.

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After the jump, Flynn talks with Larry Kudlow about the 2009 elections, the tea party movement, and the possible rebirth of the Reagan coalition.  (more…)