In earlier posts – here, here, and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least two of the reasons for his pre-eminence are still pertinent today. There is at least one other such reason, and it, too, deserves careful consideration.

In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu pays exceedingly close attention to the political psychology regnant within the various forms of government that he examines. Republics have as their psychological principle, he tells us, virtue or love of the fatherland and its laws; and, when this fails, they collapse. As we have just seen, monarchies have as their principle the love of honor; and, when monarchs make holding public office degrading and demeaning, they subvert their own authority. And by the same token, despotisms have as their principle fear, and they are corrupt through and through. In The Spirit of Laws, all of this is made crystal clear.

But when it comes time for Montesquieu to specify the principle or passion that sets in motion “the republic concealed as a monarchy” that he discovered when he visited England, he is ostentatiously silent. Eventually, however, in oblique fashion, he will tiptoe around the question.

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The Hill is reporting that Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, stated that negotiators from the White House, Senate and House reached a final deal on healthcare reform days before Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts.

From the article:

Labor leaders had announced an agreement with White House and congressional representatives over an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans on the Thursday before the special election.

Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15.

Harkin made clear that negotiators had reached a final deal on the entire bill, not just the excise plans, which had been reported the previous day, Jan. 14.

Harkin said the deal covered the prescription-drug “donut hole,” the level of federal insurance subsidies, national insurance exchanges and federal Medicaid assistance to states.

This cannot be right.

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On Friday, January 29th, 2010, Lech Walesa, former President of Poland, traveled to Chicago to endorse Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate, Adam Andrzejewski.

We were fortunate enough to have an opportunity to sit down with the President and Mr. Andrzejewski. Our video from that visit is below.

Items that stand out:  1) Lech Walesa tells his American Audience that the United States no longer leads the world politically or morally 2) At least one of your Founding Bloggers asks President Walesa if he thinks America is slipping toward Socialism. His Answer? Yes! 3) Andrzejewski is running on a platform of forensically auditing Illinois’ books and exposing corruption by making the details of the audit available to the public.

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Today, in 1968, the Viet Cong launched what came to be known as the Tet Offensive. It was a military disaster for the Viet Cong, but a smashing PR victory.

Building on Real Clear Politics observation by Tom Bevan:

There’s been a remarkable amount of coverage of President Obama’s appearance at the House Republican retreat today, but I haven’t seen anyone focus on the President’s rather stunning admission about the Democrats’ health care legislation:

President Obama stated at the GOP retreat in Baltimore:

“The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.”

Bevan continues his analysis of Obama’s statements:

If we take this statement at face value, President Obama is admitting the the health care bills passed by either the House or Senate (or both) contained provisions which were “snuck in” – presumably by Democratic members and perhaps on behalf of certain lobbyists – that would have in fact prevented people from keeping their current insurance and/or choosing the doctor they want.

Let’s re-read Obama’s statement:

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Pollster Frank Luntz has confirmed what conservatives, Tea Party activists and, well, every other American not affiliated with Wall Street banks have known all along — voting for bailouts is a political death sentence.

Big Government has obtained a copy of a new poll conducted by The Word Doctors that should send shivers down the spine of proponents of the Financial Reform bill that passed the House of Representatives in December.  The legislation created a $150 billion bailout fund for future bailouts for banks and corporations and authorizes the Fed to spend up to another $4 Trillion.

Luntz’s poll asked whether “you would be more or less likely to vote for your member of Congress if they voted for a Financial Reform bill that contained a fund to bail out banks and Wall Street?”  The results:  5% more likely.  79% Less Likely.  An incredible 52% of respondents said that they would be “much more likely” to vote against bailout supporters.  A copy of the Luntz poll can be found here:

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Every time I hear a politician say he’s going to end tax breaks for companies that export jobs overseas, I just laugh.  It’s transparent pandering to the UAW and other labor unions and a great talking point, but the Democrats have just never gotten around to enacting it.  President Obama trotted out that old horse again in Wednesday’s State of the Union speech:

We should put more Americans to work building clean energy facilities and give rebates to Americans who make their homes more energy efficient, which supports clean energy jobs. And to encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders, it’s time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs in the United States of America.

But as a Michigander, it’s even more humorous knowing that the federal government has bailed out a Michigan-based company, General Motors, that has increasingly been “shipping jobs overseas.”  According to a May 2009 Washington Post article, GM has been doing that with a vengeance.

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Today, in 1649, British King Charles I was beheaded. On the same day, in 1661, his usurper, Oliver Cromwell, was executed. In 1835, an assassin tried to kill President Andrew Jackson. In 1948, Gandi was assassinated. And, in 1968, today, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam began.

In his State of the Union Address Wednesday night, President Obama called on folks to let him know if there are better health care solutions he and congress should be considering:

As temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we’ve proposed…

…But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.

He echoed this sentiment at today’s House GOP retreat.  Some might say he was being sarcastic, reminding us of how hard it is to govern (especially in light of all he has inherited from you-know-who.)  But that would be cynical, particularly in this post-partisan era.

Just before Christmas my colleague Peter Fotos and I penned a “wish list” of simple policy proposals that constitute substantive health care reform – and it didn’t even take 1,000 pages! The health care snitch line was disabled, so we’ll give the President the benefit of the doubt that it ended up in his spam folder.

President Obama and his Congressional allies talk a lot about the need to control health care costs and avoid pressure from special interests.  Unfortunately, neither the House nor the Senate versions of “ObamaCare” that he called upon congress to reconsider withstand either litmus test.

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On January 21, the U.S. Supreme Court empowered ordinary Americans to speak out on an equal footing with millionaires and the media in U.S. elections. Threatened by people being able to freely speak their minds, the president of the United States deceived the American people when discussing this court decision in the State of the Union.

In Citizens United v. FEC, the Court held that Americans acting together through a corporation or other type of group enjoy the same free speech rights that they enjoy individually. Noting that wealthy individuals can spend unlimited money on election ads for radio and television, the Court held that ordinary individuals could likewise pool their money together to engage in the same type of speech, striking down a federal law that made such corporate action a felony.

Writing the majority opinion, moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy declared that in our free country, the First Amendment provides that, “more speech, not less, is the governing rule.” The Court wrote that this case involved a domestic corporation, funded and run by U.S. citizens, seeking to distribute a documentary on a presidential candidate to inform voters’ choices. The Court noted that the Constitution allows combating corruption, but that no one alleged any corruption or quid pro quo here, and so all this amounted to was people joining together in an organization to express their views during the election.

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In his State of the Union speech, the president puffed up his chest, fixed his Mr. Scornful face, and once again pulled out the populist’s handbook to bash those evil, monstrous lobbyists.

Obama mentioned lobbyists seven times in his address and in every case they were used as a scapegoat to explain away Washington’s inability to get one thing or another done.

Obama promised — again and for the thousandth time — to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” in Washington. He then praised himself for excluding lobbyists from jobs in his administration and he proposed even more limits on them.

This attack on lobbyists is cathartic and makes for great populist boilerplate, of course, but there isn’t much truth in Obama’s attack on them because the fact is K Street — the D.C. street where many lobbying firms are located — has made more money off the Obama Administration than from any previous president.

And Obama has been pretty blatant about ignoring the obvious disconnect between his populist harangues against lobbyists and his coddling and sidling up to them. Obama’s big paydays to lobbyists at nearly every level has been nothing short of breathtaking. It has been like this since day one.

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Rahm Emanuel: "We were involved in the legislation all the way through."

Video by Real Clear Politics

Hours before his embattled boss gave his first State of the Union address, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel contradicted President Barack Obama’s claim made just two days before that he had nothing to do with the much maligned deal to get the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) for the Senate’s healthcare bill just before Christmas.

Speaking to ABC News’ World News Tonight anchor Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview on Monday, Obama denied being involved in what has come to be known as the “Cornhusker Kickback”

SAWYER: A lot of people think you must say at the end of the day, this is not who I was in 2008, these deals with Nebraska, with Florida…

OBAMA: Let’s hold on a second, Diane. I mean, I think that this gets into a big mush. So let’s just clarify. I didn’t make a bunch of deals. There is a legislative process that is taking place in Congress and I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked. So that’s point number one.

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One of the most talked about lines from the State of the Union came not from Obama but from a comment the MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews made after the President’s address: “He is post-racial by all appearances,” Matthews observed. “You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two.”

I am prepared to take this comment seriously. No doubt Matthews meant it as a compliment. A cheerleader for the President, Matthews once famously remarked that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” following another Obama speech. But the observation of a “post-racial” President spells trouble for Obama. For one, judging by Matthews’s backtracking, the comment has inadvertently exposed the subject of Obama’s race to be a continuing taboo for any meaningful discussion. Why is it taboo? Because race remains the key issue through which one can unlock and understand the power that brought Obama to office, and Obama’s defenders do not want to give that key away. Harry Reid’s recently reported comments about Obama being a “light-skinned Negro” raised hackles for similar reasons.

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Some elected leaders in California are coming up on a tough decision: do they do what’s right for taxpayers, or take from the poor and give to rich union officials?

The story: Working Americans — taxpayers — have taken it on the chin in a tough economy. And now union are increasingly pushing special-interest laws known as “project labor agreements” that ensure that taxpayer-funded projects cost more because they can only use union labor. (watch video for a good explanation of the issue)

Now officials in Riverside, California are looking to slap a costly project labor agreement (see here) on $350 million of construction efforts at the community college district. This after they have have already raised tuition by 30 percent this year passed a major tax increase. Not to load you down with math but PLA’s add about 20 percent in costs — meaning that tuition goes up, taxes go up to pay for the construction bond, and unions skim about $50 million in added costs.

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So the Washington Post reports that bin Laden is still furious about the U.S. causing global warming.

Al Jazeera, which originally broke the communiqué story, did so with a headline drawn from the Tiger Beat school of style: “Obama deplores climate change”.  AJ writes, “In an audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera, bin Laden criticised George Bush, the former US president, for rejecting the Kyoto pact and condemned global corporations.”

Oh, dear. We’re still on that kick again, one I think even the Post has dropped.

In 2002 Obama similarly parroted the Western media rant fashionable at the time that we “refuse[d] to sign the Kyoto agreement “, four years after Clinton signed it. Even the New York Times issued a correction, in November 2006.

Indeed the Post notes that “Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic.” OK. So he’s losing it. At least he didn’t invoke Haiti.

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When ACORN was caught stacking voter rolls with fake names leading up to the 2008 election, we stood up and took notice. Maybe an aberration, maybe part of a plan to undermine our system of elections. On Election Day, Black Panthers were inside a Pennsylvania polling station intimidating voters. They ultimately got off and the prosecutor who went after them was “reassigned”. Still, maybe it is simply coincidence. What if a high-profile state Attorney General argued that voters have no right to vote in secret?

I’m not talking about Card Check, I’m talking about the voting all of us do in every election. Consider the following words argued in Champaign County Court in Illinois by the Illinois Attorney General’s office headed by Lisa Madigan:

While plaintiff attempts to suggest to the Court that there is a fundamental right to a secret ballot, no such right exists. (bottom of Page 11 of pleading)

The Attorney General’s office argues that the United States Constitution, nor any fundamental right, protect a voter from being able to vote in secret. In effect, this means that it is only out of mere courtesy that the government doesn’t simply sit in the voting booth with you making sure you are making “fully informed decisions”.

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Related Links:

Yousefzadeh: A State of the Union in Contradiction

Domenech: The Speech Obama Didn’t Give

Morrissey: Ryan Reintroducing Health Care Reform

Samuelson: Bernanke Must Rebuild Confidence

The government has now confirmed what has always been clear:  No one tried to wiretap or bug Senator Landrieu’s office.  Nor did we try to cut or shut down her phone lines.  Reports to this effect over the past 48 hours are inaccurate and false.

As an investigative journalist, my goal is to expose corruption and lack of concern for citizens by government and other institutions, as I did last year when our investigations revealed the massive corruption and fraud perpetrated by ACORN.  For decades, investigative journalists have used a variety of tactics to try to dig out and reveal the truth.

I learned from a number of sources that many of Senator Landrieu’s constituents were having trouble getting through to her office to tell her that they didn’t want her taking millions of federal dollars in exchange for her vote on the healthcare bill.  When asked about this, Senator Landrieu’s explanation was that, “Our lines have been jammed for weeks.”  I decided to investigate why a representative of the people would be out of touch with her constituents for “weeks” because her phones were broken.  In investigating this matter, we decided to visit Senator Landrieu’s district office – the people’s office – to ask the staff if their phones were working. (more…)