In their recent Politico article, “Constitution is inherently progressive,” John Podesta (former chief of staff to President Clinton and current president of the Center for American Progress) and John Halpin argue that the “values” of the Constitution are progressive, not conservative, and that conservatives should stop claiming that progressivism is at odds with the Constitution. “Since our nation’s founding,” the authors claim, “progressives have drawn on the Declaration of Independence’s inspirational values of human liberty and equality in their own search for social justice and freedom.”  The progressive “framework” of public-private cooperation, they continue, is “the essence of the constitutional promise of a never-ending search for ‘a more perfect union.’”  In short, the progressive “vision” of the Constitution best represents the American tradition. This argument, which is part of recent progressive efforts to rehabilitate their constitutional bona fides, might come as a surprise to the real founders of progressivism, for while some contemporary progressives might preach a Declaration-based faith and try to get right with the Constitution, early progressives had little use for either document.

According to Woodrow Wilson, what he called the “preface” of the Declaration of Independence—the part about “self-evident truths,” “unalienable rights” given to human beings by the Creator, and the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—was not the “real Declaration of Independence.”  If you want to understand that, Wilson said, “do not repeat the preface.”  For Wilson, the point of the Declaration—and the Constitution, too—was not the permanence of any principles.  “No doubt,” he wrote, “we are meant to have liberty, but each generation must form its own conception of what liberty is.”  The Founders, early progressives held, wrote for their own time in our first documents, but not for future generations. For Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, Frank Goodnow and other founding fathers of progressivism, the Constitution of the American Founding was an obstacle to be overcome.  Insisting that the Constitution must be interpreted in view of the new but increasingly dominant Darwinian model of constant change, progressives pronounced our Constitution a “living” document.  The Constitution, they believed, is as malleable as human nature itself.  The Founders’ old ideas about separation of powers could be discarded in favor of new and improved notions of “enlightened administration.”

Podesta and Halpin allege that conservatives “often mask social Darwinism . . . in a cloak of liberty,” but in fact it is progressivism whose roots run deepest in the political ideology of Darwinism.  The fittest among us, it turns out, are the bureaucrats, empowered by a Constitution whose original restraints, like federalism and the limitations imposed by enumerated powers, have been stripped by progressives in favor of a more “dynamic” model.

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President Obama and his re-election strategists seem like moths circling the glow and heat of a candle as they cozy up to the Occupy Wall Street crowd. This just might be a grassroots movement we can call our own, they must be thinking.  Bad idea.

Occupy Wall Street was planned last summer in Vancouver, Canada by the anti-capitalist group AdBusters, and, in early October, the SEIU unveiled its plans to have the protesters march on the homes of wealthy New Yorkers.

Occupy Wall Street has turned out to be less of a movement and more of a place to be for those who simply long for a place to be or for others who harbor a wide variety of grievances–some legitimate, some simply far-left tropes, and some downright malevolent.  Terribly disturbing is the repetition of language railing against the rich paying less taxes than the middle class (which, of course, is simply not true), tax breaks for private jet owners and the evil millionaires and billionaires. These are all populist and divisive themes eerily similar to those crafted by Team Obama strategists.

According to a Washington Post report, “President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.”   Vice President Biden ‘s inference that those who oppose the President’s proposed tax on millionaires and billionaires will be responsible for increased rape and murder are the coming attractions for the campaign theater that is about to open. (more…)

Everything is relative:

Earlier this month, while South Korean President Lee Myung Bak was visiting the United States, his military commanders were back home watching out for ammunition boxes.

North Korea’s military had moved combat aircraft, mobile ground-to-air missiles and missile launchers to attack positions near the border with the South. Had those ammo boxes – the final step in preparations for an attack – appeared, whether for war-making or simply for live-fire exercises, it might well have triggered a resumption of the shooting war that began in the 1950s and never truly has ended.

Elsewhere recently, a North Korean diplomat at low-level talks at the University of Georgia said war on the peninsula seems closer now than it has in decades, and Iran was linked to a clumsy attempt to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in Washington. The Iranians also are “playing” in hot spots throughout the Middle East – from Syria to Yemen to Egypt and even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and working feverishly to overcome a cyber attack on its nuclear weapons development program.

Clearly, this is no time for the United States to let down its guard on missile defense. Congress – which is under pressure to cut defense spending but maintain capabilities – must show resolve to ensure our nation, troops and allies are protected.

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“Someone has to do something for Guatemala. The government doesn’t do anything,” says a Guatemalan resident Reason.tv calls “Miguel.”

In the past few years, the drug war has resulted in more than 40,000 deaths in Mexico and the situation in Guatemala is just as bleak. Last year alone, 5,000 people died in drug-war-related incidents.

Corrupt police do little to protect Guatemalans, and Guatemala’s corrupt court system convicts only 5 percent of arrested criminals.

In Guatemala City, private security guards outnumber police officers five-to-one, and robberies at gunpoint are common. For the impoverished people who live in Guatemala’s biggest city, life has become extremely dangerous.

Not all crime in Guatemala is committed by drug gangs, but there is no aspect of life in the country that has not been made far worse by prohibition and the black markets and violence such a policy inevitably creates.

This past May, Reason.tv’s Paul Feine spoke with “Miguel” about what it’s like to live in a city controlled by drug gangs and corrupt cops.

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UPDATED.

From Politico:

Less than 24 hours after Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government posted a video of New York Times freelancer (and former POLITICO/occasional On Media blogger) Natasha Lennard speaking on a panel about Occupy Wall Street, the Times defended her reporting, but says it has “no plans” to use her on future stories on the protests.

Lennard became one of the first journalistic stars of the growing protest movement when she was arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in the course of covering the protests for the Times – an experience she blogged about on the Times’ City Room blog under the title, “Covering the March, on Foot and in Handcuffs.”

Last night, Big Government’s Lee Stranahan posted a video from an Oct. 14th panel discussion on the protests at Bluestockings bookstore, organized by Jacobin magazine.

[...]

The New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy responded to questions about Lennard’s status and the Times’s policies on freelancers with a statement:

This freelancer, Natasha Lennard, has not been involved in our coverage of Occupy Wall Street in recent days, and we have no plans to use her for future coverage. We have reviewed the past stories to which she contributed and have not found any reasons for concern over that reporting.

All our journalists, staff or freelance, are expected to adhere to our ethical rules and journalistic standards, and to avoid doing anything that could call into question the impartiality of their work for The Times.

Lennard defended herself on Twitter this morning, quipping, “ugh. last time i offer a post-structuralist critique in public!” (more…)

From Politico:

John Podesta will step down as president of the Center for American Progress, an official at the organization said today.

Podesta, who served as Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff from 1998 to 2001, founded the center in 2003 with a core of wealthy liberal supporters and transformed it into the Democratic Party’s key policy and politics shop.

Podesta, 62, will remain the center’s chairman, and will also serve Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a day-a-week volunteer, the CAP official said, but is not immediately expected to take on any other public role.

“He will continue to provide long-term strategic advice,” said his successor, former Clinton and Obama policy aide Neera Tanden. (more…)

Unsurprisingly, one of the few interest groups advocating for the “American Jobs Act” is the American Federation of Teachers. Despite claims that “the money is not for us as teachers,” everyone knows that’s a farce. Nobody suggests teachers shouldn’t be paid, but they shouldn’t patronize taxpayers by suggesting that increased spending on government schools isn’t for the teachers.

The unions and Obama administration have been running the full-court press to gin up enough pressure on Congress to act on the bill. Despite the speeches, advertising campaigns and photo ops, they can’t even get enough Democrats in the Senate to kick it out of that chamber.

Joe Biden has been carrying the water for the administration. In a recent conference call with union leaders, he claimed students in a Baltimore school are “dodging falling ceiling tiles” during their school day.

More recently, AFT President Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten visited a Yonkers school and decried the conditions those students are in. A photo published by the union shows students sitting in a basement with paint peeling off the walls and a large air conditioning system looms directly over head.

“We can hear the rats when they run” through the ventilation system, the union quoted a student as saying.

Across the country, unionists infer that the money for public education has simply vanished. It’s absurd. The reality is America is continuing to spend more per student on education than at any other time in history. So where is it all going? Are the rats carrying bags of money away?

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One of Occupy Wall Street’s early planners and activists has given public credit to Glenn Beck for correctly analyzing the ultimate goal of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement: a violent revolution in which the wealthy are dragged into the streets and killed.

Malcolm Harris, an editor and activist who “has been active in OWS since the first planning meetings,” confirmed Beck’s analysis in his comments at a panel discussion on October 14th in New York–the same panel discussion that featured New York Times freelancer Natasha Lennard.

Transcript (emphasis added):

Well, and I think that’s–that’s one side of what people want, right, ’cause that’s not the only thing people want, they also want to take the banker out of his, you know, fucking tower and string him up in the public square, right? [Applause] That’s not–that’s not, like, just the crazy left. That’s everyday folks talking about their experiences.

And, like, this is America, right? We want to talk about “we’re the 99%” as if we’re also not the 99% that loves Transformers 4, right? [Laughter] As if this is the 99% that doesn’t also, like, feel passionate anger. “All we want is, like, you know, our little appropriate piece of the pie and we just want to be friendly.“

And the capitalists know that’s not the case, right? If you want to read what the capitalists think about this you can go look at what Glenn Beck says, right? He’s got a better analysis than most people on the left about where this could go, how threatening this…—

(There’s a cut here in the original video. It seems to continue about Beck.)

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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is already under fire for its unprecedented lawsuit trying to stop the Boeing Corporation from opening a non-union manufacturing line in South Carolina for its new Dreamliner plane. You read here two weeks ago about documents we obtained showing the NRLB’s stonewalling of Congress and the agency’s inappropriate pro-union bias.

Now the chairman of a powerful congressional House committee is steaming mad about what we found.

According to an October 17, 2011, letter from Rep. Issa, Chairman of the Committee to Lafe E. Solomon, the NLRB’s Acting General Counsel:

As you are aware, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been attempting to investigate the National Labor Relation Board’s (NLRB) complaint against The Boeing Company (Boeing) since May 12, 2011. Since then you have continuously obstructed the Committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight, and you have broken the law by effectively ignoring a congressional subpoena.

Specifically, Rep. Issa takes issue with documents obtained by Judicial Watch that the NLRB apparently withheld from his committee even though they were responsive to his committee’s subpoena. These documents, which we obtained on October 5, included internal correspondence between NLRB attorneys discussing the Boeing lawsuit. By way of review, here are the highlights from the documents we uncovered, which are available at www.judicialwatch.org: (more…)

As the opposition to CSPAR (Cross-state Air Pollution Regulations) spreads across state lines and various groups, there have been over 30 lawsuits filed to challenge the rule. The groups include power companies, cities, states, industry groups, as well as labor organizations. Meanwhile, Luminant continues to push the Administration to carefully consider the inevitable job loss that will result from this rule.

The opposition continues to grow and crosses party lines. In fact, the Austin American-Statesman recently published an op-ed by the Texas Chapter of the AFL-CIO. The piece, entitled, “Cross-State Air Pollution delay would help Texas workers,” emphasized the tough times that workers are facing in Texas and criticized the timeline of CSPAR. Becky Moeller, Texas AFL-CIO President, chastised the EPA for failing to provide an adequate public comment period.

It is important to remember that most parties involved, including Luminant, have made significant efforts to meet Clean Air standards and are willing to work together to ensure that future generations of Texans will have clean air to breathe. In fact, as Ms. Moeller points out, AFL-CIO and Luminant have worked closely together to do just that. This is not an all-out attack on the EPA or environmental standards, but the fact is that the specifics of CSPAR simply do not provide Luminant with the appropriate timeframe to meet the new standards. It’s not just a matter of making changes to equipment – people’s jobs and livelihoods are at stake. Anywhere between 500 and 1000 jobs will be lost. Texans cannot afford this, and the AFL-CIO has spoken out in support of working families who have the most to lose from this unreasonable restriction.

While Luminant continues to push for a stay to the regulation in order to allow the proper time and resources to make the adjustments, last week the Administration asked a federal appeals court to dismiss Luminant’s petition to curb CSPAR. Politico’s Darren Goode recently featured a story that highlighted the ongoing battle between the EPA and Luminant. The Administration’s appeal claims that the EPA “provided detailed and extensive notice and opportunity to comment on the methodology, assumptions and data it used to determine which states would be included in the rule.” The fact is that the updated rule that included Texas was not released until July, thus allowing less than six months for Luminant to comply with CSPAR when the changes required will take years to put in place.

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From Entrepreneur:

The Occupy Wall Street movement has very different objectives from most small-business owners. Doug Schoen, a political pollster and Fox News analyst, recently surveyed 200 protesters and concluded that the majority of the movement’s members want higher taxes to redistribute wealth and heavier regulation on the private sector. But most small-business owners have been calling for less regulation and lower taxes to get the economy going again.

Moreover, most small-business owners believe in the capitalist system, while Occupy Wall Street expresses some anti-capitalist views. Take a look at some statements made in the movement’s first official release. “Corporations … have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions…. have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ health care and pay…. [and] have spent millions of dollars … to get … out of contracts in regards to health insurance.”

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss earnings season, Google and Microsoft bidding for Yahoo, and the $1 trillion in student loans that me be the next bubble to burst.

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As the Occupy Wall Street protesters started to gather in various cities across the country, it was soon learned that the American Nazi Party endorsed the movement and called for its members to “…JOIN IN the attack on Judeo-Capitalism.” Even the left wing media is conceding that the OWS crowd is a manifestation of left wing anger intended to counter the Tea Party. Timothy McVeigh was a neo-Nazi. His favorite book was a novel entitled The Turner Diaries, which was written by William L. Pierce, an official with the American Nazi Party; even the far left group Southern Poverty Law Center acknowledges this. We are left to conclude that since the American Nazi Party endorses the OWS protests, so would Mr. McVeigh.

So why would the Nazi Party get behind a left wing movement if the Tea Party is the group that is supposed to be filled with racists and Nazis? Nancy Pelosi said the swastika was the symbol of the Tea Party. Yet, the group whose logo is the swastika has endorsed OWS. Instances of Nazi references at Tea Parties have often involved left wing hijinks. Posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache that appeared at some Tea Party rallies were actually the brainchild of the far left’s LaRouche PAC.

Let’s also not forget the short-lived ‘Crash the Tea Party’ movement that called for left wing activists to infiltrate Tea Parties and behave in ways that would help portray the group as racist. True Tea Party conservatives actively policed themselves when aptly named infiltrators attempted to tar the movement. One of the more blatant examples came courtesy of the Sharp Elbows website. When a man sporting Nazi garb milled around within the group, he was confronted and weeded out. Recently, while defending the OWS protesters, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert posted a photo of two youths, one holding a sign with a swastika on it that said “No Repeats” and the other with a photo portraying Barack Obama in a Mao suit, at what appeared to be a Tea Party rally. Such behavior is not advisable to be sure but in addition to the protesters in the example Boehlert provided being rather young, those signs were intended to convey a rejection of, not support for, Nazism.

There are other examples of white supremacists infiltrating Tea Parties but such instances are typically strategic attempts at piggy-backing and not the result of a common cause. Consider the case of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), a neo-Nazi group that uses deceptive means and tactics to infiltrate Tea Parties. In fact, one of Arizona’s Neo-Nazi leaders – JT Ready – deceptively donned partriotic American garb and posed for a photo with Arizona State Senator Russel Pearce, who was responsible for crafting his state’s tough immigration law, SB 1070. Had Pearce known Ready was a Neo-Nazi, he most assuredly would not have granted him a photo-op.

The American Nazi Party is not using deceptive means to graft itself into the Occupy Wall Street protests. Increasingly, it doesn’t seem necessary as a large number of OWS protesters are seen referring to their targets as Jewish Bankers.

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From ProPublica:

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist – even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal – part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice – would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

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The Barack Obama Administration has been absolutely atrocious in signing off on terrible legislation and policy prescriptions.

ObamaCare.  The $878 billion alleged “stimulus.” The $30 billion bump (to $50 billion) of the General Motors bailout.  Cash for Clunkers.  Cash for Caulkers.  Dodd-Frank.  Lilly Ledbetter.  And on, and on, and on…

Then there’s the stuff the Obama Administration tried–and failed–to rush through the Donkey Congress (2009-2011).  But because these things were also so heinous and because the Administration and Congressional Democrats had already reached their Heinous Maximus quotient, they were unable to pile them on We the People. There was Cap and Trade.  And Card Check.  And Net Neutrality.  And…

Being stopped in Congress didn’t stop the Administration.  It didn’t even slow them down.  As President Obama said, there’s more than one way to skin these cats. These ways aren’t Constitutional.  They are, in fact, dictatorial.  But this from all appearances doesn’t bother Obama a whit. He is using his every Department, Commission, Agency and Board to jam through these terrible ideas–and more–via executive branch regulatory fiat. All of this goes a very long way towards explaining why we remain mired in plus-9% unemployment and less-than-1% economic growth.

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From The Hill:

More than two-thirds of voters say the United States is declining, and a clear majority think the next generation will be worse off than this one, according to the results of a new poll commissioned by The Hill.

A resounding 69 percent of respondents said the country is “in decline,” the survey found, while 57 percent predict today’s kids won’t live better lives than their parents. Additionally, 83 percent of voters indicated they’re either very or somewhat worried about the future of the nation, with 49 percent saying they’re “very worried.”

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From The Chicago Tribune:

Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small window opened by lawmakers a few months earlier.

The legislation enabled union officials to get into the state teachers pension fund and count their previous years as union employees after quickly obtaining teaching certificates and working in a classroom. They just had to do it before the bill was signed into law.

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First the smell.

One doesn’t require an Orwell-like preoccupation (“the working class smells”) with the olfactory sense to be fixated on the stench issuing forth from ground zero of the Wall Street protests. The familiar dog-urine smell of the subways mixes with the body odor issuing forth from the unshaven armpits of the female placard-wavers and the eye-watering effluvia of defecated-upon cop cars.

Then the appearance. There are those who follow the current fad of deliberate dorkiness–Clark Kent glasses, baggy clothes, carefully torn sweaters. Mingling with them are cigarette-wavers in mobster leather coats and the aged with their wire-like hair and the pitted, sallow complexions of the old crones by the guillotines of Revolutionary France. They are all dressed warmer than the weather warrants, as if they are in another, colder city like say, St. Petersburg. For a group so worried about what Wall Street is doing to their America, they exhibit no worry lines on their foreheads; instead they have snarl ones.

I came to New York after a ten year absence (I left in August 2001), expecting that Sept. 11th had made the city into more of a police state, especially with the anti-libertarian Bloomberg in charge. The violations I left the city over were still there: tickets were still issued if you ran out of gas, sat on a crate, smoked a cigarette in a restaurant. To me the establishment of New York was a mix of corporate types and screaming lefties, all united in the sentiment of money as the measurement of everything (once in a grad school seminar, I heard a self-described Trotskyite insult a conservative opponent by showing that she owned a better quality backpack than him).

That kind of fashion snottiness is still there among the protestors. Anyone staring at or questioning them receive a bellow about their terrible haircuts or bad ties. But there is a palpable fear in the air among segments of the establishment. There are cops who seem to want to lash out, but there are others who seem to hide behind their plexi-glass shields. The favored gesture of the New Yorker is holstered among the corporate types attempting a day at the office.

They seem aware that the Left no longer owns the media.

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