The President Has a Hit List

Donations (Photo credit: Matthew Burpee)

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. His campaign brands you a Romney donor, shames you for "betting against America," and accuses you of having a "less-than-reputable" record. The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Are you worried?

Richard Nixon's "enemies list" appalled the country for the simple reason that presidents hold a unique trust. Unlike senators or congressmen, presidents alone represent all Americans. Their powers—to jail, to fine, to bankrupt—are also so vast as to require restraint. Any president who targets a private citizen for his politics is de facto engaged in government intimidation and threats. This is why presidents since Nixon have carefully avoided the practice.

Save Mr. Obama, who acknowledges no rules. This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled "Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney's donors." In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having "less-than-reputable records," the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that "quite a few" have also been "on the wrong side of the law" and profiting at "the expense of so many Americans."

These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having "outsourced" jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a "lobbyist") and Thomas O'Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a "bitter foe of the gay rights movement."

These are wealthy individuals, to be sure, but private citizens nonetheless. Not one holds elected office. Not one is a criminal. Not one has the barest fraction of the position or the power of the U.S. leader who is publicly assaulting them.

"We don't tolerate presidents or people of high power to do these things," says Theodore Olson, the former U.S. solicitor general. "When you have the power of the presidency—the power of the IRS, the INS, the Justice Department, the DEA, the SEC—what you have effectively done is put these guys' names up on 'Wanted' posters in government offices." Mr. Olson knows these tactics, having demanded that the 44th president cease publicly targeting Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, which he represents. He's been ignored.

The real crime of the men, as the website tacitly acknowledges, is that they have given money to Mr. Romney. This fundraiser of a president has shown an acute appreciation for the power of money to win elections, and a cutthroat approach to intimidating those who might give to his opponents.

He's targeted insurers, oil firms and Wall Street—letting it be known that those who oppose his policies might face political or legislative retribution. He lectured the Supreme Court for giving companies more free speech and (falsely) accused the Chamber of Commerce of using foreign money to bankroll U.S. elections. The White House even ginned up an executive order (yet to be released) to require companies to list political donations as a condition of bidding for government contracts. Companies could bid but lose out for donating to Republicans. Or they could quit donating to the GOP—Mr. Obama's real aim.

The White House has couched its attacks in the language of "disclosure" and the argument that corporations should not have the same speech rights as individuals. But now, says Rory Cooper of the Heritage Foundation, "he's doing the same at the individual level, for anyone who opposes his policies." Any giver, at any level, risks reprisal from the president of the United States.

It's getting worse because the money game is not going as Team Obama wants. Super PACs are helping the GOP to level the playing field against Democratic super-spenders. Prominent financial players are backing Mr. Romney. The White House's new strategy is thus to delegitimize Mr. Romney (by attacking his donors) as it seeks to frighten others out of giving.

The Obama campaign has justified any action on the grounds that it has a right to "hold the eventual Republican nominee accountable," but this is a dodge. Politics is rough, but a president has obligations that transcend those of a candidate. He swore an oath to protect and defend a Constitution that gives every American the right to partake in democracy, free of fear of government intimidation or disfavored treatment. If Mr. Obama isn't going to act like a president, he bolsters the argument that he doesn't deserve to be one.

A version of this article appeared April 27, 2012, on page A13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The President Has a List.

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A Little Sleight of Hand

OBAMA: THE SOCIALIST/MARXIST/COMMUNIST -- UNMASKED FOR ALL TO SEE (Photo credit: SS&SS)

An excerpt from The Baehr Essentials 4/24/2012:

It is pretty apparent that the Obama Administration will do pretty much anything to get Obama re-elected. But this takes the cake: $8 billion of federal money from the Department of Health and Human Services that is available for experiments, will instead be used to extend the Medicare Advantage program that ObamaCare would have curtailed. Medicare Advantage is a program very popular with seniors,  and the  money shuffling will extend the program   through the date of the elections. An experiment to judge a program that is already in effect? huh?  The cuts in Medicare Advantage  were part of the "funding package" to supposedly help pay for ObamaCare. When the GOP argued that the new program was being funded in large part (about half) by cuts to Medicare, the Administration cried foul.  In fact, the Administration has used the Medicare cuts twice -- once to supposedly extend the life of the Medicare Trust fund, and the second to pay for ObamaCare. Of course, it only be used for one or the other, but who is counting, when you are talking about double counting $500 billion over ten years. So far, the national networks have totally ignored the $8 billion ploy, for which the non-partisan Government Accounting Office is very critical.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/the_baehr_essentials_5.html#ixzz1t2mOoube

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Man Bites Dog…Likes the Taste

by Derek Hunter
Derek Hunter is Washington, DC based writer, radio host and political strategist.

The theater of the absurd that is our presidential election keeps chugging along with all the vigor our economy doesn’t. One can’t blame Democrats for attempting distraction upon distraction, given the alternative of talking about President Obama’s record.

After all, if it is indeed about the economy, stupid, the only votes there for Democrats are mindless drones who don’t care that nary an economic indicator has improved since Barack Obama took office $5 trillion in new debt ago.

Those of us with eyes open and an IQ above that of our shoe size can’t help but notice. The spin of the last 3 ½ years has left people so dizzy distraction is all that’s left.

So what do we get from the Obama White House? That government should pay for everyone’s contraception – a non-issue that Democrats flat-out lied about and whose only “accomplishment” was to give MSNBC something to put in their chyron rotation alongside “war on the poor,” “war on the elderly” and “war on the middle class. That’s about it.

We also get Ted Nugent. The Motor City Madman said of the President and his fellow Democrats, “We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November! Any questions?”

The outrage from Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media was quick and desperate. It’s a violent threat, and it’s Mitt Romney’s fault … because Terrible Ted endorsed him. They hadn’t cranked the high-dudgeon machine that high since they tried to deny the connection between President Obama and endorser Jimmy Hoffa Jr., after Hoffa, the Teamsters president, called on a crowd at a Labor Day rally to “take these son-of-a-bitches out.”

Only it’s somewhat more difficult to deny the connection when the president was at the rally and spoke after Hoffa and thus had every opportunity to discuss his friend’s “over the top” rhetoric – but didn’t. But you know how it is. If it weren’t for double standards, Democrats and the media would have no standards at all.

MSNBC spent the better part of two days highlighting Nugent’s remarks. The outrage and indignation applied to this non-story would lead one to believe Mitt Romney had launched his political career in the home of a domestic terrorist or something.

But again … we can’t expect much from a media that serves as a lapdog for the president and his extreme ideology.

And speaking of dogs…

Thirty years ago Mitt Romney took a family vacation and put his dog in a crate on top of the car. Anyone who has seen a dog in the back of a pick-up truck or sticking their head out a car window wouldn’t think much of this because a.) dogs like the wind, and b.) it’s a dog.

But the media reaction to this story would lead you to believe Romney pulled a “Clark Griswold” and chained the dog to the bumper, dragging it to its death. Or beat it mercilessly. Or worse, ate it.

I mention that last one because that’s what a young Barack Obama did to dogs during his time in Indonesia. Yes, we have a president who ate dogs.

Now, I don’t care Barack Obama ate dogs. Neither does he given he wrote openly about it in his book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. But the hypocrisy over the outrage of the Romney dog story necessitates looking into it.

The lapdog media immediately snapped to attention to protect their master. PolitiFact decided not to “fact check” it because it is, in fact, a fact. Instead, they oddly felt the need to put it “in context.” Not to be outdone, Buzzfeed, a new breed of lapdog bred from the bowels of former Politico “journalists” took their defense a step further. They posted a story about the practice of eating dog meat, along with graphic photos, and equated it to eating chicken. Yes, you read that right, eating chicken, complete with pictures of both President Obama and Mitt Romney eating chicken.

PETA, the radical left-wing animal rights group, wasn’t going to waste time trying to create a distraction, they simply gave Obama a pass on his culinary experiment.

Given the poverty from which many of our past presidents have risen, he may well not be the first to have eaten dogs. But that’s hardly the point.

But PETA has no such understanding for Mitt Romney. Its website features a post about the trip entitled, “Mitt Romney’s Cruel Vacation.”

Romney’s dog, delicious as it might have been, lived through the vacation and lived out the rest of his life naturally. And the entire episode would be a non-story if, again, the president and his people felt comfortable talking about the economy, unemployment, gas prices, the explosion of federal spending, etc.

David Axelrod, the head of President Obama’s reelection campaign, couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. Hetweeted a photo of the president in the car with his dog “Bo” with the caption, “How loving owners transport their dogs.”

It was then it hit why Democrats had become so outraged about how Romney treated his dog. It’s not the dog so much as that the Romneys were in their own car – not a government-issue sedan. And they were paying for the trip themselves – another concept big-government liberals can’t seem to master.

But you won’t hear any of this in the lapdog media. What you will hear is more nitpicking of non-issues as they pertain to Mitt Romney. You’ll hear more about the Mormon Church, into which Romney was born, than you ever heard about the radical racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, into whose church an adult Barack Obama willingly walked and stayed for 20 years. You’ll hear more “truth” about Mitt Romney’s record than you’ll hear about the millions of Americans who don’t count in Barack Obama’s unemployment numbers because they’ve given up looking for work. You’ll hear more about how rich Mitt Romney made himself legally than you even will about how rich Barack Obama made his big donors with our money.

The lapdog media never will cover this president honestly. They will spin for him and obstruct his failed record as long as they can because they support his left-wing agenda and they think, based on their occupations, that they know what is best for America. Well, that and they know how he has the potential to treats dogs.

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Karl Marx Preached "Fairness" Too

Seal of the United States Internal Revenue Service.

By Alan Caruba at Warning Signs

My father was a Certified Public Accountant and dinner time throughout my youth was filled with horror stories about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as he struggled to keep up with a tax code that just kept growing. 

According to Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate for the IRS who heads a staff of 2,000, the American tax system is “a huge convoluted mess.” Despite efforts to determine its length, it is variously estimated to be between 65,000 and 70,000 pages. “We looked at how many changes in the tax law (that) had occurred in the last year alone,” said Olsen, “it was something like 579 changes.” No one can keep up with that volume of changes, not even Ms. Olsen’s office.

As this is being written, President Obama is dominating the news cycle with his message of tax “fairness”, attacking men like Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate, for being wealthy and citing men like Warren Buffett and other millionaires and multi-millionaires who say they should pay more. It is a longtime populist, progressive message and it is a false message.

Chris Edwards who studies tax policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says, “What happens when you raise taxes for higher-income people; they reduce their productive activities—like working and investing and starting businesses—and they increase their unproductive activities—like tax avoidance and tax evasion. So governments really shoot themselves in the foot if they raise rates too much.”

If it were not for “taxation without representation” Americans might still be “subjects” of the British Empire because, as any school child can tell you, the Revolution was fought over this issue and was kicked off in earnest by the Boston Tea Party when a tax on tea enraged the citizens of that time. There were, in fact, some ten other tea parties in the colonies.

The United States has the dubious honor of having the highest tax rate on corporations in the world. And some people still cannot understand why U.S. corporations are shipping jobs overseas and foreign corporations are reluctant to set up U.S. headquarters here. 

In a recent opinion in The Wall Street Journal, Amity Shales, a former WSJ reporter and now the director of a George W. Bush Institute project on national economic growth, wrote that “The trouble is that lawmakers (especially at the federal level) insist on discussing fax reform in terms of fairness. Tax competition earns a mention from time to time, but only a mention.” She pointed out, as have others, that “states with no income tax grow faster than those with high income taxes.” 

By framing the tax debate in terms of fairness and attacking Mitt Romney’s wealth, President Obama is pandering to his greatest constituency—the stupid among us. He was elected on the basis of a lot of gauzy, vague promises of hope and change, and with the adoring support of the mainstream media. 

Obama’s problem is not about fairness or taxes. His problem is 13.9 million unemployed Americans, not counting those who are not looking for work or those working part-time jobs just to make ends meet. As a recent commentary on EconomicCollapse.compointed out, “The number of unemployed Americans is larger than the entire population of Greece.”

The onerous, insane growth of the regulation industry at all levels of government is crushing the economy. “The U.S. national debt has increased by more than four trillion dollars since Barack Obama took office” and, with the aid of a Democrat-controlled Congress for the first two years of his term, he increased the national debt more than all the presidents combined from Washington to Clinton. 

Believing that taxing rich people will close the gap is unbelievably stupid. As a Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out on April 10th, “The Obama Treasury’s own numbers confirm that the tax (on the wealthy) would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45-43 trillion the federal government will spend.”

There is an alternative. It’s called the “Fair Tax” and you can learn more about it by visiting the website of the National Taxpayers Union. 

By bleeding jobs through an insane tax system, a federal tax code filled with loopholes that even the IRS cannot keep up with, the highest corporate tax in the world, an idiotic immigration policy toward illegal aliens, and a burden on the fortunate few that still have jobs the United States is digging itself into financial collapse. 

The federal government is broke. The states are broke. And with the advent of $4 and $5 gas pump prices—thanks to Obama’s anti-energy policies—the rest of us are getting more broke. 

President Obama’s blather about “fairness” is straight out of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and the Communist Manifesto with their emphasis the redistribution of wealth and the end of private property. 

© Alan Caruba, 2012.

Another Downgrade. Where is the Media Coverage?

Credit rating agency Egan Jones downgraded the United States Thursday on concern over the sustainability of public debt. Egan Jones is one of the most important ratings firms in the world; they lowered our credit level from AA+ to AA. The firm reduced America from AAA to AA+ in July 2011, just before Standard & Poor's did the same.

Egan Jones warned. "Without some structural changes soon, restoring credit quality will become increasingly difficult . . . without some structural changes soon, restoring credit quality will become increasingly difficult." They added that there was a 1.2% probability of U.S  default in the next 12 months.  The company cited the fact that the US’s total debt, which now equals its total GDP, is rising and soon will eclipse the national GDP; the company sees the debt rising to 112% of the GDP by 2014.

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