John Podesta, Center for American Progress

The Washington Post has just published an article reporting that the Center for American Progress, the left-wing think tank whose policies and personnel have close ties to the Obama White House, has been “accused of anti-Semitic language.”

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank closely aligned with the White House, is embroiled in a dispute with several major Jewish organizations over statements on Israel and charges that some center staffers have used anti-Semitic language to attack pro-Israel Americans.

The controversy reflects growing divisions among important allies of President Obama over Middle East policy that could complicate the president’s reelection outreach to some Jewish voters, just as he is seeking to assure them of his commitment to Israel’s security amid fears of an Iran nuclear threat.

Among the points of contention are several Twitter posts by one CAP writer referring to “Israel-firsters.” Some experts say the phrase has its roots in the anti-Semitic charge that American Jews are more loyal to a foreign country. In another case, a second staffer described a U.S. senator [Mark Kirk of Illinois] as showing more fealty to Israel and the prime U.S. pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, than to his own constituents, replacing a standard identifier of party affiliation and state with “R-AIPAC” on Twitter….

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Accusations of antisemitism are building against the Center for American Progress (CAP), the left-wing umbrella organization that serves as a “brain trust” for Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the Obama administration.

The latest to weigh in are the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, two leading American Jewish organizations, which have joined the Simon Wiesenthal Center in criticizing CAP and its offshoot, Media Matters for America, for attacks on Israel that go beyond legitimate criticism and may cross the line into antisemitism.

Last month, Politico reported that CAP and MMfA have both taken anti-Israel positions that “are challenging a bipartisan consensus on Israel and Palestine that has dominated American foreign policy for more than a decade.” These stances include downplaying the threat of a nuclear Iran, and suggesting that pro-Israel groups have pushed the U.S. into confrontations in the Middle East.

In addition, Politico cited extreme and inflammatory comments about Israel made by CAP employees at the Middle East Progress and ThinkProgress blogs, as well as by senior MMfA staff on Twitter and elsewhere. MMfA Senior Fellow M.J. Rosenberg, for example, has railed against pro-Israel Americans whom he calls “Israel firsters,” echoing old antisemitic tropes of “dual loyalty.”

In 2010, Rosenberg spoke at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC on a panel discussion with Stephen Walt, who co-wrote The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with John Mearsheimer–a book widely panned for its inaccuracy and its use of conspiracy theory to attribute malevolent influence to pro-Israel groups and individuals. Rosenberg was even less careful with his language than Walt and Mearsheimer, referring repeatedly to “the Jewish lobby”:

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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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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…)

I give all but one of the GOP candidates an “F” for last night’s performance.

The very premise of the Republican presidential debate, hosted by NBC/Politico and broadcast by corporate welfare queen MSNBC proves that conservatives don’t understand the power the media is trying to exert over the next election.

It is an insult to the house of Reagan that MSNBC would try to pass itself off as a fair news organization with the eight Republican candidates giving the sneering, snobby and snide enemy a certain imprimatur of legitimacy.

The only reason the GOP is in a fighting stance in the 2012 presidential election is the Tea Party. The alternative narrative-drivers at MSNBC have spent much of the last two-plus years trying to frame millions and millions of patriotic and concerned Americans as violent, racist knuckle-draggers.

To dignify those habitual and unaccountable slanderers by appearing on that stage shows that apparently these Republicans and daily MSNBC punching bags don’t comprehend the scope of the media problem.

Barack Obama was elected due to the work of the media in 2008. Barack Obama will not cross the finish line in 2012 without the help of that same media–with MSNBC leaning forward as it pushes their wildly unpopular President from behind. (more…)

He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

The big-government advocates at the Center for American Progress recently released a series of charts designed to prove America is a low-tax nation. I wish this was the case.

The United States does have a lower overall tax burden than Europe, which is shown in one of the CAP charts, but that doesn’t exactly demonstrate that taxes are low in America. Unless, of course, you think weighing less than an offensive lineman in the NFL is proof of being skinny.

But the one chart that jumped out at me was the one showing that the United States collects less corporate tax revenue than other developed nations. The CAP document states, with obvious disapproval, that “Corporate income tax revenue in the United States is about 25 percent below the OECD average.”

The obvious implication, at least for the uninformed reader, is that the United States should increase the corporate tax burden.

But here’s some information that CAP didn’t bother to include in the study. The U.S. corporate tax rate is more than 39 percent and the average corporate tax rate in Europe is less than 25 percent.

So let’s ponder these interesting facts. CAP is right that the U.S. collects less tax revenue from corporations, but even they would be forced to admit (though they omit the info from their report) that the U.S. corporate tax rate is much higher. Let’s see…higher tax rate-lower revenue…lower tax rate-higher revenue…this seems vaguely familiar.

Could this possibly be an example of that “crazy” concept of (gasp!) a Laffer Curve? To be sure, it is only in rare cases, when tax rates get very high, that researchers find that high tax rates lose revenue. In most cases, the Laffer Curve simply implies that higher tax rates won’t raise as much money as politicians want.

But have our friends at CAP inadvertently identified one of those cases where a tax cut (i.e., a lower corporate tax rate) would “pay for itself”?

There certainly is strong evidence for this proposition. In a 2007 study, Alex Brill and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute found that the revenue-maximizing corporate tax rate is about 25 percent (click chart to enlarge).

Somehow, I suspect this wasn’t their intention, but I want to thank the statists at CAP for reminding us about the self-destructive impact of high tax rates.

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(continued from Part 1)

Amazingly, ACORN’s 40 years of lawlessness have been heavily subsidized by taxpayers. From the federal government alone, the ACORN network has received at least $79 million in federal taxpayer funding. No one knows how many millions of dollars ACORN has taken in from states and localities. Yet as of November 2009, ACORN was a tax deadbeat, owing more than $2.3 million in back taxes to all levels of government.

Bertha Lewis

You don’t have to take my word that ACORN will soon arise from the ashes. Nathan Henderson-James, longtime director of the group’s online campaigns, confirmed in a leaked February 2010 e-mail that ACORN plans to come back. America’s most notorious nonprofit felt it needed to perform this trick because its employees were caught red-handed repeatedly counseling a fake pimp and prostitute on the finer points of establishing a brothel for pedophiles. ACORN calculated that people would forget the transgressions of the taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit best known for its voter fraud efforts.

In the e-mail that came five months after conservative activist-journalists James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles punked ACORN with their “pimp and pro” routine, Henderson-James explained the group’s ongoing hoax that consists of its state chapters separately incorporating under new, innocuous-sounding names. “It is definitely true that over the next week or so we should see a dozen or more organizations launched on the state level by staff who used to work for ACORN and leaders who developed their skills as ACORN members,” he wrote. “These are not just simple name changes, but reimaginings of how best to organize” low and moderate income constituencies “without any of the legal problems and funding issues dogging ACORN, not to mention the brand damage.” Stepping out of the spotlight for a while is a “tactically smart … reaction to the global situation that helps the work of building power for poor people to continue,” he wrote.

The secret operation was already underway when Henderson-James bragged about the effort to his radical and liberal friends on Townhouse, an invitation only left-wingers’ online discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, who was senior policy adviser to colorful former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla. In late 2009 and early 2010, ACORN staffers across America created a plethora of separate organizations aimed at carrying on ACORN’s corrupt affairs.

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David Kreutzer of Heritage has a great item up on The Foundry, on WaPo’s remarkable (it was WaPo!) exposé of the miracle Chinese bullet trains actually leaving a trail of, well, leaving fiscal and other wreckage in their wake. He concludes, “Well, the Chinese finally have a green-energy idea worth stealing: arrest government officials who foist overpriced, underperforming, debt-ballooning, money-losing projects on taxpayers.”

In case you missed the WaPo piece, the man in charge of China’s model train set:

“is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. … his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.

Faced with a financial and public relations disaster, China put the brakes on Liu’s program. On April 13, the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability. The Railway Ministry’s tangled finances are being audited. Construction plans, too, are being reviewed.

Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.”

In short, it’s an awful lot like Spain’s wind- and solar program President Obama also longs to impose here.

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Will 9/11 cheerleader Anthony “Van” K. Jones soon be sitting on the boards of respectable American corporations? That is his plan, according to a series of posts Jones made on Twitter this week.

Photo collage by New Zeal blog

Jones, an anti-American communist radical who has rebranded his image as a “patriot” after being adopted by the leftist elite, has come a long way from being a 9/11 cheerleader and record producer for cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal to striding the halls of power in Washington, D.C. and Princeton while traveling the country as a motivational speaker serving heaping helpings of eco-pablum to crowds of adoring liberals.

Jones was appointed in the Spring of 2009 by President Barack Obama to be his ‘green jobs czar’ but resigned his position several months later after hints of his radical past were exposed. At the time, Jones said he was a victim of a “vicious smear campaign” of “lies and distortions.”

Jones stated on Twitter his belief that the passage of time (but apparently not repentance) will make it harder to hold him accountable for his actions as a thirty-something Yale Law grad.

The older I get, the harder it will be for the Right to throw my past views in my face. Or mock my contributions. – 29 Mar (2011)

In the same conversation on Twitter, Jones spoke of his plans to join corporate boards.

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Over the last several months, as attention has been focused elsewhere, the Obama Administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been waging a quiet war against for-profit schools and universities – educational institutions that offer  job training and degrees in in-demand fields to students looking for an alternative to four-year non-profit schools, or a more accessible price tag.

The Administration has fired a number of rounds at the industry, but recently unveiled it’s secret weapon: a “gainful employment” restriction on federal loan money available to students at for-profit schools. While for-profit schools have had their difficulties, their deficiencies aren’t that dissimilar to those of their not-for-profit counterparts, but this weapon could kill off for-profits as a viable option to not-for-profit education. Essentially, students at for-profit schools that have either a low graduation rate or an unacceptably high number of unemployed, graduated students would be denied federal student loan and grants. As Forbes points out, these schools serve primarily lower-income and minority communities who depend so heavily on student loans, such a restriction could put the whole industry in jeopardy.

Which, of course, is exactly what the Obama Administration would like to see happen. And, from recent news, it seems that they and their network of associates will do just about anything to make sure it happens.

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The woman known as the “Queen of Labor” is living up to her promise to focus on “building a sustaining progressive infrastructure.”  Anna Burger, former SEIU Secretary-Treasurer, has just joined the board of directors at the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action).

CAP Action is a sister organization to the liberal think tank, Center for American Progress.  While the Center for American Progress focuses on developing new policy ideas and on “critiquing the policy that stems from conservative values,”  CAP Action focuses on how to put those policies into action – by organizing liberal grassroots groups, labor unions and other progressive partners as advocates.

John Podesta, Chairman of the Board of Directors for CAP Action, offered the following statement in the organization’s December 9th press release:

“The Center for American Progress Action Fund is pleased to welcome Anna Burger to our Board of Directors. She has been a longtime friend of the Center for American Progress and CAP Action and we’re very happy that she has agreed to help us advance our mission by serving in this new capacity.

Anna Burger has been fighting hard for progressive ideas and policies for nearly 40 years, including the visionary leadership she has provided for the progressive movement over the past decade. We face numerous opportunities and many challenges over the next two years and look forward to Anna’s help in charting our course. As we continue to push for an economy built on a strong middle class that works for all Americans, Anna’s continued leadership and experience could not come at a more important time.”

In addition to her previous post at SEIU, Burger has held many prominent positions that have played significant roles in advancing the progressive movement, including:

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In 1983, Ronald Reagan infuriated liberals worldwide by accurately labeling the Soviet Union as the evil empire. George W. Bush received a similar reaction following his “axis of evil” speech in which he used the politically incorrect term, evil, to describe the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Although most Americans found it refreshing to hear a politician speak so directly and honestly, the media and the rest of the liberal elites went berserk. Imagine that. It was not that the Kim Jong-il regime kept the people of North Korea in a state of poverty and near starvation that got liberals in a tizzy. Rather, it was that Bush had the audacity to use the word evil to describe it.

The nearly two years of corruption, plunder, and economic destruction—combined with the mockery of the American people and vilification of the private sector—has crystallized for many a realization of a home grown threat more destructive and imminently dangerous to America than any of the substantial external threats we faced over the last century. It’s a threat that has been building quietly for many years but has come to the fore since President Obama was elected. Have you wondered how the radical left managed to capture the reins of power and govern in direct opposition to the will of two thirds of the population?  The answer is the New Axis of Evil. It is the power base of the left (and the Democratic Party).

No doubt, the list can be debated and expanded, but here, at least is a starting point—the dirty dozen if you will, with a few prime examples included.

1. Old Media (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, NY Times)
2. Engorged Public Unions (SEIU, NEA, AFSCME)
3. Global Socialist Elites (Robert McChesney, Andy Stern, George Soros)
4. Liberal “Think” Tanks (Media Matters, Center for American Progress, ThinkProgress)
5. America Hating Academics (Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman )
6. Professional Victims Groups (La Raza, CAIR, NAACP, NOW)
7. Community Disorganizers & Activists (ACORN, Code Pink, ACLU)
8. Environmental Redistributionists (Greenpeace, EDF)
9. Social Justice Preachers (Jeremiah Wright, Reverend Jim Wallis)
10. Progressive Hollywood Elites (Oliver Stone, Sean Penn)
11. Bloated Federal Bureaucracy (DOE, DOA, TSA)
12. Public/Private Colluders (AARP, Government Motors, Goldman Sachs)

It almost goes without saying (but here I’ll say it anyway)—there are many good people scattered among these institutions.

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The New York Times has just published another in a series of establishment press missives seeking to marginalize — from the perspective of establishment press-types — tea party activists and politicians who embrace or are embraced by them.

This latest entry is an embarrassment, if a rather typical one as I detail on Chapter 1 of Red Hot Lies, “Media on a Mission.” Here are some problems with the article:

“Climate change is real, and man is causing it,” [Dem. Congressman and pro-cap-and-trade voter Baron] Hill said, echoing most climate scientists.

The author does not point to any survey of “most climate scientists,” challenge or even inquire about the source for or other evidence to support that claim. That is because there is no such survey or collective assertion by the critical masses of “climate scientists.” Period. It’s a talking point. But he’s a reporter. If he wanted to be straight about the issue he would at the very least turn to the very inconvenient statement by the Association of State Climatologists. But, again, it’s inconvenient.

When pressed, those who scribble or utter this shibboleth generally expand the universe of “climate scientist” to include anyone who is willing to go on record agreeing in return for being called one of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even if they are anthropology teaching assistants. Read on.

That is, they revert to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of (as its name indicates) representatives appointed by governments, which itself appoints anthropology TAs, instructors in “the human dimension of environmental change” (bring own incense, please) and transport policy instructors, for example, to achieve great if still exaggerated (why is that necessary?) numbers of supporters who supposedly (but didn’t) write its proclamations? The IPCC’s “chief climate scientist” and chief “climatologist,” according to outlets like the New York Times and USA Today is, just for the record, actually a… railway engineer.

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President Obama’s baseless attack on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce underscores the routine hyper-partisan attacks his administration has become known for. Obama’s allegation was that the Chamber has been using money from foreign members to influence this election.

Karl Rove, another target of the agitator/community-organizer-turned President of the United States, strongly refuted the accusations on Fox News Sunday yesterday.

If the president and the Center for American Progress, which initially leveled the “foreign money” charge, were serious, they’d investigate the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a brass knuckles, take-no-prisoners pro-Obama union that admitted in 2008 that it had an avenue to accept funds from “foreign nationals,” allowing them to have a voice in the American political process.

During the 2008 campaign, SEIU, the Obama campaign and other left-wing organizations created a “Fight the Smears” website, from which the following was taken:

What about foreign nationals who want to be involved but can’t give to COPE [Committee on Political Education]?

There are a large number of fully lawful immigrant members of SEIU who wish to participate through their union in the critical policy debates going on in the country, yet cannot fund or participate in SEIU COPE because they are foreign nationals.

For those immigrant members, as a lawful alternative to participation in SEIU COPE, SEIU has established a program encouraging its immigrant members to participate in policy advocacy outside of the electoral realm on issues such as immigration reform.

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In Washington, DC, talking about the Bill of Rights can land you in jail for 90 days.

Our nation’s capital has a licensing scheme in place that makes it illegal for anyone to “guide or escort” anyone else for hire without first getting the government’s permission. To get the license, which the Washington Post editorial board labeled a Tour de farce, eager entrepreneurs must first pay hundreds of dollars in fees, fill out a bunch of forms and pass an arbitrary test.

That is, they need to jump through all sorts of needless hoops before they’re allowed to speak.

[Please help promote this video by voting it up and commenting on reddit here.]

The bottom line is that the Constitution protects your right to communicate for a living, whether you are a journalist, a stand-up comedian, a musician, or a tour guide.  The government cannot be in the business of deciding who may speak and who may not.

That is why two Washington, DC, tour guides—Tonia Edwards and Bill Main, who run a company called Segs in the City—joined forces with the Institute for Justice to file a major federal lawsuit challenging DC’s tour-guide licensing scheme as a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights. Video and photos of the press conference are online.

Nearly every day, Tonia and Bill teach a group of people how to ride Segways and then take them around Washington, DC, on a tour of the city.  Their business is located near the National Archives, so one of the things they tell their customers is where the Bill of Rights is located.  For this, the city government could throw them in prison for three months.

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Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a front page article that claimed, “an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.”  The thesis of the article was that oil companies are the benefactors of enormous subsides, primarily through complicated maneuvering of offshore assets, “tax breaks,” and “loopholes.”

Unfortunately, the copy of the American tax code that The Times used to conduct their careful analysis appears to have been heavily edited by a cadre of left leaning groups, including ACORN President Maude Hurd, Citizens for Tax Justice, Center for American Progress and the Clean Energy Works campaign.

The smoking gun comes in the form of a leaked memo from CEW communications advisor and former Democratic congressional staffer David Di Martino just days after The New York Times ran it’s wildly misguided assessment of U.S. tax policy.

In the memo, Di Martino outlines a strategy to change America’s perception of increased taxes on energy producers as a tax on consumers by arguing “the American people already have a national energy tax — The Big Oil Welfare Tax — in the form of billions of dollars in subsidies to the wildly profitable big oil companies.”  The same day that Di Martino released his memo, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) released their own defective and dishonest hit piece, titled “What Oil and Gas Companies Extract from the American Public.”   The tax breaks referred to by Di Martino and the CTJ memo, in reality, are the same credits that every American company receives for taxes paid overseas to foreign governments on income earned abroad.

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Yesterday’s announcements of slitting our own throat of domestic energy production gives cause to revisit who the man is and where he wants to take us.

Rahm Emanuel among others in the Obama administration are on record asserting their philosophy that no “crisis” should ever go to waste. This mentality, of course, carries the moral hazard of promoting “crises” in the news cycle, and as an operating mentality. We have seen this among green activists (including Obama appointees) for decades.

With crises being your strategic plan for hooks to impose an unpopular and radical agenda, you might even allow crises to develop where they could have been nipped into mere incidents. Who knows.

We do know that Obama has a record of words and now deeds declaring war on all sources of energy that work, including their domestic production: shale gas, coal, oil shale, and petroleum.

Barack Obama and his gloomy band seek to force you out of your lifestyle, meaning your freedoms, all of which they find intolerable and that you cannot be trusted with. Obama even noted in a speech that, in a world where he is president, we can’t eat what we want, drive what we want, or put our thermostat where we want (other than that, you are perfectly free to do what you wish…until further notice).

His “energy czar” later added policy meat to these very strange rhetorical bones when she told U.S. News that you shouldn’t even have the right to control your own energy use. But changing that, she comforted readers, will be a savings to you. They’re saving a fortune in India and other poor countries right now, for example.

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“Where were you when George Bush was President?”   You know that question well.  It’s been asked of each of us more times than any of us would care to count.  Do you know how I usually answer it?

I was home, enjoying my life.  I went to work every day and focused on doing the best job that I could do.  When I wasn’t working, I hung out with family and friends.  I went to baseball games, and barbecues, and obscure little hole-in-the-wall joints to hear some of my favorite live music over a couple of Guinnesses.  Yum.

Why?  Because while George Bush was president, we had a media establishment that was challenging our government, not our citizens.

I wasn’t necessarily happy with the direction of the country in those days.  But I could sleep at night, knowing that we had media that pressed George Bush and our Congress on every single issue.  I could know at any given moment what the “death count” was in Iraq because just about every channel splashed a persistent counter in the bottom corner of the television screen.  When bills like the Patriot Act were first introduced in Congress, I never lacked for any detail on the dangers of the legislation.  There was barely a single detail that went uncovered in the daily political grind.  When there was a scandal to research and report, I certainly never had to do that myself.  There were reporters who did all that.

Yep, I’m actually missing the Bush days now.  I had so much more free time.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always done my homework and researched issues on my own anyway.  I recognize that all media is biased to some degree (and has been for quite some time).  But I could always count on the media to challenge the government in the days of George Bush.  I wrote my fair share of letters, I called and complained about the spending, even attended a few protests, but I can’t say that I ever felt there just wasn’t anyone challenging the president in the mainstream media.  Quite the contrary, there was never any lack of DC pushback from the collective press in those days.

But we live in extraordinary times today.  There now exists this giant, open cavity where that healthy pushback against government used to be.  And when the mainstream media stepped away from that opening in 2008, two things happened:

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The ultimate in Obama’s Big Government schemes that still await us is the “global warming” agenda, a necessary component of which is the “green jobs” boondoggle. “Green jobs” is certain to be a central part of the Senate’s stab at cramming down “cap-and-trade”, commencing with introduction of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman legislation now moved back to a week from tomorrow (to divorce itself from the originally intended association with the loopiness of Earth Day).

Deconstructing the Big Lie of “Green Jobs” is the focus of a key chapter in my new book just out today, “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.” Go grab it.

Legislating “green jobs” programs means incurring massive debt to pay for make-work as part of a campaign mandating enormous inefficiencies on the economy. It therefore also ultimately means concomitant taxes. It kills real jobs in a trade off for far fewer temporary jobs, largely make-work and at enormous per-job subsidies. This creates a “bubble” that must be constantly pumped full of taxpayer cash simply to maintain it, also ensuring a bust to go with any putative boom.

Read the below excerpt from Power Grab expanding a bit on this appealing sounding (“jobs”!) sales pitch for statutorily mandating enormous inefficiencies on the economy — heck, read the whole book — and you will have a substantially better idea why Barack Obama surrounded himself with Greek columns at his DNC coronation in Denver. That’s the sort of debt we’re talking about. The fella’s prescient, I’ll give him that much. Now, from Power Grab Chapter 5, “Green Jobs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’”:

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