Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her congressional
lieutenants were burning the midnight oil last evening, preparing for a
whirlwind few days in order to get her trillion-dollar health reform bill to
the House floor. To the pure political observers, it’s her best strategy. She
can’t afford to wait a day longer. As each hour passes, red-state Democrats are
waking up and realizing, “What happened on Tuesday night could happen to me
next year.”
Keeping her flock in town over the weekend is not by
accident. Pelosi’s henchmen know that if they release the rank and file back to
their districts following Tuesday’s shellacking at every level of government,
they will certainly get an earful as to why they are stubbornly ignoring the
will of the electorate and moving forward.
I was reading Karl Marx recently. Marx wrote about how to turn a country from a capitalist nation into a socialist state. Step 1: destroy its economy. Step 2: make the people dependent on government. Step 3: maintain an atmosphere of class warfare. Once that happens, the government has inexorable control over the masses and can manipulate them as they please.
I wonder how much Marx’s writings have influenced the Obama administration. I don’t think I’m being paranoid when I say that it seems as if the Obama administration is pulling plays directly from the Karl Marx playbook.
The GOP’s sweep of gubernatorial elections in Virginia and
New Jersey yesterday sent clear signs of fermenting discontent with the Obama
administration.
In New Jersey, the Republicans recaptured a seat that has
been Democratic for over a decade. The GOP sweep of statewide races in Virginia
represented a sharp departure from a year ago when the state voted for a
Democratic president for the first time since 1964.
Forget the Democrats for a moment. Today presents an important litmus test for the Republicans.
Several major cities are electing mayors, two states are electing governors, and special elections are being conducted in Northern California and upstate New York. Yes, some voters will be traveling to the polls today as a mini-referendum on the current Obama administration. But not many.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi came to power with a pledge to “drain
the swamp” of what she called the Republican “culture of corruption.”
Yet Pelosi has been shockingly silent when it comes to the
current House ethics committee investigations of several lawmakers — mostly
Democrats — who allegedly steered hundreds of millions of dollars in federal
earmarks to clients of an influential lobbying group, which in turn lined the
legislators’ coffers with millions of dollars in campaign contributions.
Obama's national healthcare plan would seemingly include
abortions. Moreover, the administration has sent signals that private insurers
who want to participate will have to provide abortion coverage.
This is an outrage. This plan would force Americans — many
of whom vehemently disagree with snuffing out embryonic life — to subsidize
abortions. This is no different than if Obama levied an abortion tax on the
public.
What a wild ride this week for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). His moments of glory boldly pledging to include a public option in President Barack Obama’s health reform plan may well be Reid’s political Waterloo. Americans remain deeply divided on the issue overall, and adamantly against the notion of their healthcare being run like the Postal Service or DMV.
Give credit to the man, however. In the face of withering opposition, and when it seemed he had locked down at least one moderate Republican in his camp based on the Baucus proposal, Reid turns an about-face and came out earlier this week squarely behind the public option. That kind of “courage” could cost you your Senate seat — forget the leadership post.
House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) recently summed up his sanguine attitude when he wrote, "Republicans lost our way on fiscal responsibility when we held the majority in Congress. Since then, we have held firm to our commitment to show the American people we learned our lesson by offering better solutions to hold the line on spending, rein in red ink and get the nation's fiscal house in order."
It has famously been said that America is a nation of laws, not people.
Not the case when it comes to applying the laws of this country to its elected leaders.
Amazingly, Congress is not covered by many of the statutes that it applies to the rest of the country. Exhibit A: President Barack Obama’s healthcare proposal.
As questions intensify about what President Barack Obama has actually accomplished, the administration has taken to the offensive by attacking Fox News.
On Thursday, the administration announced that White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg would give interviews to all of the members of the White House TV pool — CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS — except Fox News. The attempted strong-arm tactic follows a series of critical remarks by White House officials aimed at discrediting Fox News. Appearing on CNN, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said that the administration is essentially blacklisting Fox News because the president doesn't want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] be led in following Fox." Emanuel later added that Fox News “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective." Translation: The American president is attempting to co-opt the national dialogue by censuring an entire news organization.