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.

Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu espoused in an interview last year the position that “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe”.

Obama’s erstwhile “green economy” czar, the avowed communist radical Van Jones — now advising the administration from its outside advocacy group, the Soros-funded Center for American Progress — famously said “The green economy will start off as a small subset and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society”.

To this crowd everything, including seizing crises, does seem to come down to that imperative of fundamentally transforming what they see as a deeply flawed America. Meaning, a deeply flawed you.

As I detailed in “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America”, he and his administration are engaged in a series of efforts designed to impose artificial physical scarcity, and otherwise price scarcity, through new laws, and extending and expanding the application of existing ones.

Yesterday he jammed the accelerator ever harder to cram down his anti-energy freedom agenda by using the latest BP disaster (they’ve had numerous in recent years; offshore drilling has not).

He extended its moratorium on deep water drilling permits six more months, suspended scheduled lease sales in the Gulf and indefinitely put off 33 deep water exploratory wells as well as a hard-won drilling program in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort seas that had finally been set to kick off next month. As the Journal notes in an editorial this morning, “The green lobby has been obsessed with the last item for years; a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Ignore, only for the moment, the obvious economic hit to the various states’ economies, and the larger U.S. economy, the national security implications, and the absurdity of moving more oil onto riskier tankers as a result. Obama is also using this crisis, however illogically, as his rhetorical excuse as a rationale to pass the Senate’s cap-and-trade global warming bill. As the public is buying neither cap-and-trade nor global warming, they are calling this legislation an energy bill. This is preposterous, of course, but it is also the result of polling and a memo done by Stanley Greenberg (as I also detail in “Power Grab”).

Greenberg told them to rebrand the agenda as “green jobs” and “clean energy”. Sound familiar?

The spokesman for a cynical coalition of labor and green groups has let slip that the cap-and-trade-cum-”green economy” legislation  “an economic restructuring bill for the global economy. We should not pretend that it isn’t.” OK. It is surely past time to stop such pretense.

As an aside, I predict Obama will give back some portion of that which was just taken away yesterday as the “get” to bring gullible or frivolous senators on board to pass this wretched power grab. And surely a small number will be just politically opportunistic enough to try and take the bait. Unless you stop them.

We saw this coming. Heck, I wrote a book laying it all out. Events in the Gulf and public disgust threatening the Left’s majorities have accelerated their timetable. But with yesterday’s announcement the dots are now connected for you.

Do not let them get away with this. The only firewall you have is your Senate representation. Learn the truth about the issues, the impact on you, your family and country, and tell each and every current or aspiring representative that you are watching, and you will not be fooled by slothful rhetoric that has gotten the political by on these issues as we have slouched toward (real) disaster. It’s now closer than you think.

They were not going to report this blockbuster unless they were forced to. And they were. What’s more, it ain’t over yet. Not every hint I dropped in that piece about what was to come has played itself out yet.Stay tuned.

When filmmaker and provocateur James O’Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN – the nation’s foremost “community organizers” – dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for – and getting – help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice. In the past, Mr. O’Keefe created brilliant social satire that rocked his college campus and even made its way on to the talk-radio and cable-news shows, but the magnitude of his latest adventure had the potential to rock the political establishment.

I was awed by Mr. O’Keefe’s guts and amazed by the footage, but explained that the mainstream media would try to kill this important and illuminating expose about a corrupt and criminal political racket, and that the well-funded political left would go into “war room” mode, with 25-year-old Mr. O’Keefe and 20-year-old cohort Miss Giles in the cross hairs. I felt I had a moral obligation to protect these young muckrakers from the left and from the media, and to devise a strategy that would force the media’s hand.

Once the American public saw with its own eyes the grotesque, common practices of ACORN’s housing offices, Mr. O’Keefe and Miss Giles could no longer be a legitimate focus of media scrutiny. Kill the messenger doesn’t work with the American people when they realize that the message is so devastating and honest. I think the video exposed the misuse of public funds and systemic manipulation of the tax code in the name of “helping the poor.”

If Mr. O’Keefe dumped the videos on YouTube, the political powers would have killed the expose before it got traction. I half-joked that he should secretly tape pitching the major television networks exclusive use of his videos for their nightly news broadcasts. But a simpler, less controversial method proved as fruitful.

I told him that in addition to launching his compelling and stylized Web videos, we needed to offer the full transcripts and audio to the public in the name of transparency, and to offer Fox News the full footage of each video before each was released.We had to devise a plan that would force the media to see the evidence before they had enough time to destroy these two idealistic 20-something truth seekers. Mr. O’Keefe agreed to post the full audio and full transcript of his video experiences at BigGovernment.com.

Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

Videos of five different ACORN offices in five separate cities would be released on five consecutive weekdays over a full week – Baltimore, Washington, New York, San Bernardino and San Diego. By dripping the videos out, we exposed to anyone paying attention that ACORN was lying through its teeth and that the media would look imbecilic continuing to trot out their hapless spokespeople.

Read the full article at the Washington Times.