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Here's a video from Glenn Beck which seems to show interim White House communications director Anita Dunn listing two of her "favorite political philosophers" in a speech: Mother Teresa and... Mao Tse Tung.

Several years ago, I discovered a curious phenomenon among the diverse freshmen in the developmental English classes I teach. These are students who fail the placement exam and are forced to take a reading and writing refresher course before moving on to basic composition. In one of their grammar exercises, the name Charles Lindbergh appears. What I discovered was that roughly 90% of the developmental students didn't know who he was. That in itself would be unremarkable. More remarkable was the fact that when I mentioned the name to my honors students, roughly 90% knew that Lindbergh was a pilot,...

Meanness-Tested Program August 18, 2009 Jay D. Homnick [EXCERPT] The Republicans in Congress are within an ace of winning a huge victory on the issue of health care, a spectacular triumph which can resonate across the countryside. If handled correctly, this success could resound clearly even above the media din. But it would require their doing the one thing they have always held back from, playing the trump card from the inside pocket. That is, to call the Democrats what they are: mean-spirited.... Now is their chance to strike back in kind, to teach a truth in an arena where...

My sister nailed it many years ago when she said, "Your basic human is not such a hot item." Keep that filed in your head as I tell my little tale. About five or six years ago, roughly, I was solicited to write a column every two weeks for the Sunday New York Times Business Section. I was really thrilled. I have written for the Washington Post (when I was a teenager), for the Wall Street Journal edit page under the legendary Bob Bartley, for Barron's, under the really great Alan Abelson and Jim Meagher, for my beloved American Spectator,...

The Obama Adminstration -- is it just President Obama -- seems to delight in provoking the Jewish people by either honoring or appointing individuals who have done one or more of the following: 1. Sided with Israel's enemies in diplomatic or military theaters, thereby giving them both political and strategic support. 2. Provided Israel's enemies with a forum for advancing anti-Semitic or anti-Israel propaganda or have willfully engaged in propagandizing themselves. 3. Singled out Jews and Israel as the primary obstacle peace in the Middle East and have advanced the argument that a Jewish or Israel lobby has created that...

A new congressional report accuses the radical activist group ACORN of organized criminal activities. I will have a full article here on the American Spectator website in the morning about it. The report, called "Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?" comes from minority staff on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The ranking member on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), is appearing on the "Glenn Beck Program" on Fox News today to discuss the report. The report, available here, contains information about the ACORN network's interlocking directorates, various unethical and possibly unlawful activities, and the shocking...

Rathke is a pioneer of the so-called welfare rights movement that aims to get Americans on welfare. He devotes an entire chapter of his book to what he calls "The 'Maximum Eligible Participation' Solution." It is a strategy for orchestrated crisis that savvy leftist groups across America are likely to embrace. Rathke confirms ... that he is pursuing this strategy that calls for all Americans eligible for welfare payments to pursue every penny the law "entitles" them to. He urges people to "make sure that other people in the community" are actually getting their due from the government. The Maximum...

What follows is a column adducing still more evidence of the trivial nature of the contemporary American news media. The other morning, I was lying in bed recovering from minor surgery, my body heaving off the residual effects of a powerful anesthetic, Proposal. Believe me; it is a powerful anesthetic. It thrust me into the utmost darkness for 40 minutes, according to my doctor. It could have been for eternity. I would have had no idea. I cannot imagine why people abuse such charmless drugs. Why not just pull the trigger as Hemingway pulled the trigger and enter the darkness...

The Mayo Clinic, which President Obama has touted as a model for the rest of the health care system, has delivered a blistering critique of the House Democratic health care bill: "Although there are some positive provisions in the current House Tri-Committee bill – including insurance for all and payment reform demonstration projects – the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite."

A warning to President Obama from John F. Kennedy. President Obama has denounced the actions taken by the Honduran Congress, Supreme Court and military, all actions taken under the rule of law -- Honduran law -- in the nonviolent arrest and removal from office of strongman (caudillo) Manuel Zelaya. President Obama's denunciation was based, using Jay D. Homnick's apt phrase, on "standard collegiate peacenik rhetoric." Joining in this shame are the UN General Assembly that approved a resolution by consensus without a formal vote on June 30 (p The General Secretary of the OAS is José Miguel Insulza. He is...

In a rare moment of candor, President Obama explained to an audience how government-run healthcare would work in America....Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don't stand to gain from the extra care.

ACORN may be about to embark on a huge rebranding effort in order to reinvent itself...disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke has renamed ACORN International, which is ACORN's international consultancy....Rathke is trying to dissociate the ACORN affiliate from the oceans of bad ink ACORN has received in the U.S. over the last year. The new name for the international affiliate is Community Organizations International.

No, I don't think Obama is another OJ Simpson. The two men could not be more different. It's a common marketing strategy that links them. White guilt and that ache for black vindication were a huge part of OJ's celebrity campaign. That's also what got Obama elected over Hillary and then McCain. David Axelrod as a PR maven had obviously studied the opinion polls about black celebrities. They knew that a black man who looked and sounded good on TV could roll over the opposition; the media wouldn't dare to examine his background. OJ had demonstrated it, along with Oprah...

Thursday's Washington Post contained comprehensive coverage, three stories no less, of Barack Obama's presidential memorandum that decrees in these dark days of recession new "benefits to partners of federal workers." But don't worry, your scarce hard-earned tax dollars won't go to all domestic lovers. Just homosexual ones. The memorandum "does not cover domestic heterosexual partners," reports the Post. And who largely drafted the memorandum? John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, who is "the highest-ranking openly gay person in the administration." Heterosexual sinners need to hire better lobbyists, or hope that Obama soon finds in his impressively massive...

After yesterday's news that the Finance Committe would be delaying its health care legislation while they try to slash $600 billion from a draft of the bill that was priced at $1.6 trillion by the Congressional Budget Office, liberal journalists are getting nervous.

On its current course, the Middle East is headed for nuclear war. The only question is whether someone will act to take history off that course. That won't be the left wing extremist/narcissist we now have in the White House, who is lost in his own dream world. Like Adolf Hitler, the theocrats who run Iran have told us exactly what they plan to do. They plan to build nuclear weapons, and use them to "wipe Israel off the map." They have said this plan is rooted in their fundamental religious beliefs and doctrines regarding the return of their God...

President Obama is demanding dangerous, sweeping new powers to seize financial services companies. [T]he proposal expected to be unveiled tomorrow will be "the most significant new regulation of the financial industry since the Great Depression, including a new watchdog agency to look out for consumers' interests." The plan would give the government "new powers to seize key companies -- such as insurance giant American International Group Inc. -- whose failure jeopardizes the financial system." The news report notes that "[c]urrently, the government's authority to seize companies is mostly limited to banks."

... For conservative commentators Mr. Obama’s election and the turmoil of the opposition present a changed environment, not only from the past eight years when Republicans held the White House, but from the previous three decades, when conservative ideas dominated the national political agenda. Since the financial meltdown, though, many Americans have sought government action, prompting conservative magazines to refocus on first principles and refight battles they assumed had already been won. “We’re seeing free-market capitalism trampled in some new way every 12 hours,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the magazine William F. Buckley started in 1955, which...

By next week, we'll learn more about GM's hideous bankruptcy "restructuring" plan -- which the government expects to have in its lap by early June. One thing, though, is pretty clear: Performance cars are on the "euthanize" list. No rumor -- a sad fact. GM has confirmed that there will be no more SS Impala over at Chevrolet -- and the supercharged Cobalt SS will be gradually faded out, beginning with the sedan version later this year followed by total extinction (coupes too) the next. Cobalt will return to being exclusively an econo-box and GM will quit trying to compete...

<p>President Obama's radical new nominee to replace Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, used to serve on the board of LatinoJustice PRLDEF (White House backgrounder), one of the racial grievance groups that helped to sink the judicial nomination of Honduran-born Miguel Estrada in 2003.</p>

Based on hints, feints, public pronouncements, and off the record commentary, the administration's stance toward Iran is coming into focus. Without any question, military action against Iran is off the agenda. The Obama administration will do nothing to prevent the further enrichment of uranium by Iran's mullahs, notwithstanding who is elected in that nation's upcoming vote. The negotiations with Iran are based on the premise that Iran can produce as much enriched uranium as it wants as long as a nuclear bomb isn't manufactured. In other words, Obama seeks a "Japanese solution," the conditions for a bomb without actually making...

Back in the 1970s, William F. Buckley Jr. was invited to debate feminist author Germaine Greer at the Oxford Union, but found that he and Greer were unable to agree on the wording of the resolution to be debated. After a long exchange of trans-Atlantic telegrams, Buckley in exasperation cabled his final proposal: "Resolved: Give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile." In that simple phrase, Buckley summed up a basic truth about the conservative instinct. Over and over, we find ourselves fighting what is essentially a defensive battle against the forces of organized radicalism who insist that "social justice"...

....That noble form of humanism has its roots in the Enlightenment, in Kant's defense of the moral law, and in the progressivism of well-meaning Victorian sages. And the memory of it leads me to take an interest in something that calls itself "humanism," and is now beginning to announce itself in Britain. This humanism is self-consciously "new," like New Labour; it has its own journal, the New Humanist, and its own sages, the most prominent of whom is Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and vice-president of the British Humanist Association. It runs advertising campaigns and letter-writing campaigns and...

Did the fact that Canada has a socialist, government-run healthcare system --similar to the kind that President Obama wants to ram down the throats of Americans-- kill acclaimed actress Natasha Richardson? The short answer is yes, it may very well have done so. Regarding the case of the actress who fell on a ski slope at Mont Tremblant resort in Quebec, AP reports: As a steady stream of celebrities pay their last respects to Natasha Richardson, questions are arising over whether a medical helicopter might have been able to save the ailing actress. The province of Quebec lacks a medical...

WASHINGTON -- Thank God winter is almost over. It has been another cold one. I hope Al Gore wore his hat and brought along his galoshes whenever he made an appearance against global warming. Better yet, I hope he scheduled his jeremiads in warmer climes, say, Miami Beach or Antigua. As I reported a while back, scientists have not been able to measure any increase in global warming since the end of 1998. That, despite their lunkheaded computers forecasting the opposite. During the past two years, temperatures have actually dropped by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. Button up! I mention...

Newsmax TV’s Ashley Martella noted that in a recent column Tyrrell pointed to Obama’s massive federal spending package and his plans to raise taxes and cut the military, and asked Tyrrell what that tells him about Obama. “It tells me that he is the most ill-prepared man to be president of the United States since Lincoln’s vice president Andrew Johnson abruptly became president,” Tyrrell responded. “And Johnson had the excuse of being an alcoholic. “Obama simply is a man without any executive experience. He has spent his time as a community organizer or agitator. He has spent some time as...

A good indicator of how Palin's buck-the-establishment bent informs her approach to family-oriented policy issues can be found in her recent push to open up Alaska's health care market to greater transparency and competition.

[T]he entire decision to go after Rush Limbaugh was cooked up by supposedly clever White House aides and outside advisors. David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager last year and a member of his inner circle still, will publish an op-ed in Wednesday's Washington Post chiding Republicans for being "paralyzed with fear of crossing their leader.” [But now Rush] has challenged Obama to a one-on-one debate on his radio show, no teleprompters please. With an ineptness that leaves one breathless, the Obama team has now effectively labeled Obama himself as "paralyzed with fear" if in fact the President doesn't have the guts...

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/02/16/in-all-fairness

"Let's hear it for the children. We're here for the children," said Nancy Pelosi moments after becoming America's first female Speaker of the House. The date was January 4, 2007. Two months earlier, the Democrats had swept the mid-term elections and ended the Republicans' 12-year control of Congress. It was a momentous occasion for Democrats, sweetened by Pelosi's ascendancy to the top congressional job. She had "broken the marble ceiling," to quote her own words. She was the uber-feminist, free from the constraints of motherhood and the female proclivity for nurturing children. Or was she? Much to the amusement of...

Two narratives seem to be forming to describe the underlying causes of the financial crisis. One, as outlined in a New York Times front-page story on Sunday, December 21, is that President Bush excessively promoted growth in home ownership without sufficiently regulating the banks and other mortgage lenders that made the bad loans. The result was a banking system suffused with junk mortgages, the continuing losses on which are dragging down the banks and the economy. The other narrative is that government policy over many years--particularly the use of the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to...

With a new president ensconced in the White House, it's time to roll out the goodies for loyal supporters in left-of-center political advocacy groups such as ACORN. The latest economic stimulus bill promises to do just that by providing a huge bailout --up to $5.2 billion in taxpayer funds -- for some of the same liberal groups that helped get Barack Obama elected. The three relevant fiscal provisions are buried deep in the $825 billion monstrosity known as the proposed "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009." Title XII of the spending legislation backed by the Democratic congressional leadership and...

Barack Obama's choice of Leon Panetta, the former congressman who went on to serve as chief of staff for President Clinton, to head the Central Intelligence Agency has members of the intelligence community scratching their heads. To defenders of the choice, Panetta's reputation as a competent manager and loyalty to Obama may help to shake up the agency and keep it from undermining the White House. But several ex-CIA officials contacted by TAS greeted the pick with trepidation.

As we close out a disastrous 2008, a year in which Western Civilization essentially suffered a nervous breakdown, conservatives now must turn to two fundamental goals. First, we must stop the destructive policy initiatives of the Obama Administration and the liberal left now ruling in Washington (first prediction for 2009: the loony, far left Congress will consistently make the ultraliberal Obama Administration look moderate by comparison). Secondly, we must lay the foundation for our political comeback. Here is what we must do to achieve these goals: Return to the Grassroots First and most important is to build up mighty, grassroots...

A policy report published last month on the Office of the President-Elect's website puts a hole right through the fanciful notion, believed by some evangelicals, that Barack Obama will save a place at the table for pro-lifers. Titled "Advancing Reproductive Rights and Health in a New Administration," the report suggests a radical abortion agenda for the first 100 days of Obama's term. The recommendations carry quite a price tag. In an era of ballooning national debt and unprecedented government expansion, the abortion industry (and it is an industry -- Planned Parenthood made $115 million in profits for the 2006-2007 fiscal...

How long will the media continue its gushing adoration of Barack Obama? This is the question raised by the adulatory prose of The Washington Post's Eli Saslow: Between workouts during his Hawaii vacation this week, he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games. Such "reporting" ought to make Saslow a laughingstock among the hard-bitten cynics of the Washington press...

So John McCain again says he intends to run for re-election in two years. Is there anybody else out there who wishes he would just go away? He ran a campaign that was both utterly inept and in many ways dishonorable, and he's been in Congress since 1982, and he'll be 74 years old in 2010, and he holds bizarre grudges and is temperamentally difficult, to say the least. I know he was a Navy guy, not a soldier, but methinks he should take McArthur's advice for old soldiers and just.....fade....awa...... PLEASE!

To listen to some Republicans, not to mention, the braying of media outlets such as MSNBC, and even, here and there, a few economic libertarians, you would think that traditional conservatives, the defenders of the unborn and the integrity of marriage as a venerable and ancient institution, were responsible for two wars gone sour, over-spending at a level to embarrass Lyndon Johnson, the largest expansion of entitlement spending since the Great Society, numerous cases of GOP corruption and betrayal of the public trust centering around earmarks and political favors and the miserable results in the presidential and congressional elections just...

I don't think anyone who looks at the platforms of Republicans running in the Northeast or even the Pacific West can say that the GOP generally refuses to run candidates who deviate from the party line on certain issues. In some respects, Rahm Emanuel is doing for Democrats what his party used to do and the Republicans have done for years in recognizing geographical and ideological diversity. Throughout the 1990s, Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and Bill Weld won in Democratic areas taking center-right positions on taxes, spending, welfare, and crime but reflecting the region's liberalism on abortion, gay rights, and...

I subscribe to an Internet newsletter called Energy Central and the news is getting more depressing every week. Every time I scan the headlines I realize I'm looking at another piece of a gathering energy debacle. Take last Thursday's edition. Right at the top of the page was the story, "Xcel Energy, eXco Join in Major Wind Farm Developments in Minnesota, North Dakota." It's like this every day. Wind farms of sprouting up all over the country like 65-story mushrooms. The North American Reliability Council estimates we will have 175,000 megawatts of new capacity by 2017 (that's the equivalent of...

Tim Shipman's secondhand reporting twists a nothing of a story into a scary headline: Sarah Palin blamed by the US Secret Service over death threats against Barack Obama But you read down into the story and there's nothing to support the lede except:

ACORN, the organization whose foot soldiers faked voter registration applications in Missouri in 2004 and Seattle in 2006, has been in full battle mode this fall, signing up thousands of previously unregistered voters. Included were Mickey Mouse and, in Nevada, the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys. In Cleveland one young man was approached by ACORN registrars 73 times and signed up each time for a simple reward of a cigarette or a dollar bill.

The contrast between, on the one hand, the huge amount of material about Obama’s radical associations that has been published in on-line journals and in a few brave newspapers, and on the other the refusal by big media to address it and to vilify those who do, becomes more astounding by the day. The Obamaniacs are spinning the relationship between Obama and William Ayers, former of Weather Undergound Terrorism Inc, as of no consequence because this was supposedly a chance acquaintance and because the educational project they worked on, the Annenberg Challenge, was a worthy one. Stanley Kurtz now nails...

Republicans have started sounding the alarm about the presidential race now that John McCain is trailing Barack Obama by anywhere from two to 11 percentage points. The battleground states aren't looking much better, with Obama leading in the polling averages for even Florida, Virginia, and Missouri. Understandable that Republicans would be worried. But have they taken a look at the Senate races? For the last two years, your humble servant has been saying to anyone who will listen: The more Democratic next year's Senate, the more liberal the next two years' legislation will be no matter who wins the White...

As an example of the deranged reaction to Sarah Palin and the astounding hatred and bile she has provoked, this article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone is hard to beat. All the Palin smears are gathered together in one foam-flecked scream of rage – not just at Palin, mark you, but most significantly at John Public who supports her, because she appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning. What respect for Taibbi's fellow human beings! Showing zero...

....I was walking out of the library and spotted George Soros's new book on the "Just Arrived" shelf. Why not give it a try? I grind my teeth over Soros just as much as any other conservative. ... Still, Soros has made billions playing the international currency markets. He must know something. Soros, it turns out, has a very good perspective on the current meltdown. He says it's a system-wide overextension of credit, mainly through novel financial instruments and the housing market. Conservatives may fret that it all comes down to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their subprime mortgages...

This might be the single most irresponsible piece the Associated Press has EVER run. Not only does it badly misstate the level of Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, but it goes to phenomenally bizarre lengths to claim that Sarah Palin's repeated references to Ayers -- who is white -- somehow "carry a racially tinged subtext." This is sick. Literally sick. Have things really reached the point where ANY criticism of Obama is racist? Next thing you know, criticism of Obama for having the most liberal voting record in the Senate will be called racist. Criticism of Obama for being against...

Of late, at least in conservative quarters, reports have made clear how much of the current financial crisis may be laid at the feet of Democrats and their social engineering policies. Jeff Jacoby, the lone conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, wrote Sunday, "Barney Frank's talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn't wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so -- or else."...

[Second section...after the eye-popping Obama fund raising story] FAN, FRED, AND FRANK House Democrats are concerned that it wasn't just Rep. Barney Frank who was having extracurricular relations with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives, and that those relationships will come to light before the election a month from now. According to a former Democrat staffer working for the House Committee on Financial Services, there were a number of stories involving Democrat members of the committee, as well as staffers for those Democrats, participating in retreats and getaway weekends paid for by Fan and Fred executives and lobbyists. "Republicans were...

As soon as someone tells me that one particular political measure or decision is the right or moral choice and the alternatives to it are irresponsible and immoral, I start to feel an almost irresistible urge to do the immoral, the forbidden thing. It's not that I am a willful reprobate. Or not just that, anyway. I simply don't believe it. This assertion looks way too much like moral blackmail to me, and hence it is itself at least as likely to be immoral as the thing it deprecates. American politics for reasons that I go into in detail in...