KUHNER: President’s socialist takeover must be stopped
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more must be done: Mr. Obama should be impeached.

He is slowly - piece by painful piece - erecting a socialist dictatorship. We are not there - yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism. Like Venezuela’s leftist strongman, Hugo Chavez, Mr. Obama is bent on imposing a revolution from above - one that is polarizing America along racial, political and ideological lines. Mr. Obama is the most divisive president since Richard Nixon. His policies are Balkanizing the country. It’s time for him to go.

He has abused his office and violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. His health care overhaul was rammed through Congress. It was - and remains - opposed by a majority of the people. It could only be passed through bribery and political intimidation. The Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, the $5 billion Medicaid set-aside for Florida Sen. Bill Nelson - taxpayer money was used as a virtual slush fund to buy swing votes. Moreover, the law is blatantly unconstitutional: The federal government does not have the right to coerce every citizen to purchase a good or service. This is not in the Constitution, and it represents an unprecedented expansion of power.

Yet Obamacare’s most pernicious aspect is its federal funding of abortion. Pro-lifers are now compelled to have their tax dollars used to subsidize insurance plans that allow for the murder of unborn children. This is more than state-sanctioned infanticide. It violates the conscience rights of religious citizens. Traditionalists - evangelicals, Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Orthodox Jews - have been made complicit in an abomination that goes against their deepest religious values. As the law is implemented (as in Pennsylvania) the consequences of the abortion provisions will become increasingly apparent. The result will be a cultural civil war. Pro-lifers will become deeply alienated from society; among many, a secession of the heart is taking place.

Mr. Obama is waging a frontal assault on property rights. The BP oil spill is a case in point. BP clearly is responsible for the spill and its massive economic and environmental damage to the Gulf. There is a legal process for claims to be adjudicated, but Mr. Obama has behaved more like Mr. Chavez or Russia’s Vladimir Putin: He has bullied BP into setting up a $20 billion compensation fund administered by an Obama appointee. In other words, the assets of a private company are to be raided to serve a political agenda. Billions will be dispensed arbitrarily in compensation to oil-spill victims - much of it to Democratic constituents. This is cronyism and creeping authoritarianism.

Mr. Obama’s multicultural socialism seeks to eradicate traditional America. He has created a command-and-control health care system. He has essentially nationalized the big banks, the financial sector, the automakers and the student loan industry. He next wants to pass “cap-and-trade,” which would bring industry and manufacturing under the heel of big government. The state is intervening in every aspect of American life - beyond its constitutionally delegated bounds. Under Mr. Obama, the Constitution has become a meaningless scrap of paper.

To provide the shock troops for his socialist takeover, Mr. Obama calls for “comprehensive immigration reform” - granting amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens. This would forge a permanent Democratic electoral majority. It would sound the death knell for our national sovereignty. Amnesty rewards lawlessness and criminal behavior; it signifies the surrender of our porous southern border to a massive illegal invasion. It means the death of American nationhood. We will no longer be a country, but the colony of a global socialist empire.

Rather than defending our homeland, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has sued Arizona for its immigration law. He is siding with criminals against his fellow Americans. His actions desecrate his constitutional oath to protect U.S. citizens from enemies foreign and domestic. He is thus encouraging more illegal immigration as Washington refuses to protect our borders. Mr. Obama’s decision on this case is treasonous.

As president, he is supposed to respect the rule of law. Instead, his administration has dropped charges of voter intimidation against members of the New Black Panther Party. This was done even though their menacing behavior was caught on tape: men in military garb brandishing clubs and threatening whites at a polling site. A Justice Department lawyer intimately involved in the case, J. Christian Adams, resigned in protest. Mr. Adams says that under Mr. Obama, there is a new policy: Cases involving black defendants and white victims - no matter how much they cry for justice - are not to be prosecuted. This is more than institutionalized racism. It is an abrogation of civil rights laws. The Justice Department’s behavior is illegal. It poses a direct threat to the integrity of our democracy and the sanctity of our electoral process.

Corruption in the administration is rampant. Washington no longer has a government; rather, it has a gangster regime. The Chicago way has become the Washington way. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a political hit man. He is an amoral, ruthless operator. It was Mr. Emanuel who reached out to Rep. Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania Democrat, offering a high-ranking job in the hopes of persuading Mr. Sestak to pull out of the primary against Sen. Arlen Specter. It was Mr. Emanuel who offered another government position to Andrew Romanoff to do the same in the Colorado Democratic Senate primary. And it was Mr. Emanuel - as the trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has revealed - who acted as the go-between to try to have Valerie Jarrett parachuted into Mr. Obama’s former Senate seat. The only question was: What did Mr. Blagojevich want in exchange?

This is not simply sleazy Chicago machine politics. It is the systematic breaking of the law - bribery, attempt to interfere (and manipulate) elections using taxpayer-funded jobs, influence peddling and abuse of power.

The common misperception on the right is that Mr. Obama is another Jimmy Carter: an incompetent liberal whose presidency is being reduced to rubble under the onslaught of repeated failures. The very opposite, however, is true. He is the most consequential president in our lifetime, transforming America into something our Founding Fathers would find not only unrecognizable, but repugnant. Like all radical revolutionaries, he is consumed by the pursuit of power - attaining it, wielding it and maximizing it. Mr. Obama’s fledgling thug state must be stopped.

If Republicans win back Congress in November, they should - and likely will - launch formal investigations into this criminal, scandal-ridden administration. Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican and ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has promised as much. Mr. Obama has betrayed the American people. Impeachment is the only answer. This usurper must fall.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington think tank. He is the host of “The Kuhner Show” on WTNT 570-AM (www.talk570.com) from 5 to 7 p.m.

 “Fathom the odd hypocrisy that Obama wants every citizen to prove

they are insured, but people don’t have to prove they are citizens.”

  ~ Ben Stein

Things go better when politicians do nothing
By: Thomas Sowell
Examiner Columnist
September 6, 2010

When people learn that you are an economist, they often want you to predict which way the economy is going. There seem to be more than the usual number of calls for such predictions lately. But an economist should be more aware than others how hazardous such predictions can be.

One reason is that what happens in the economy is affected by what politicians do in Washington — and who can predict what politicians will do?

However, let me go out on a limb and try to predict what politicians will not do.

What would probably get the economy recovering fastest and most completely would be for the President of the United States and congressional leaders to shut up and stop meddling with the economy. But it is virtually impossible that they will do that.

Think about telling all the millions of people who have lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses: “I really messed you up, but hey, nobody’s perfect. So I’m going to leave things alone now.” In fact, that would be hard even to tell yourself.

If the stimulus isn’t working, the true believers have to believe it is only because it hasn’t been tried long enough or with enough money being spent.

There are always calls for the government to “do something” when things are going bad. Those who make such calls have almost never bothered to check out what actually happens when the government does something, as compared with what happens when the government does nothing.

It is not just free market economists who think the government can make a mess bigger with its interventions. It was none other than Karl Marx who wrote to his colleague Friedrich Engels that “crackbrained meddling by the authorities” can “aggravate an existing crisis.”

The history of the United States is full of evidence on the negative effects of government intervention. For the first 150 years of this country’s existence, the federal government did not think it was its business to intervene when the economy turned down.

All of those downturns ended faster than the first downturn in which the federal government intervened big time, the Great Depression of the 1930s.

There are two conflicting assumptions about what happened during the Great Depression. The most popular assumption, especially among politicians, is that the market failed and the government had to intervene to save the economy.

Another assumption is that the market went down and was on its way back up when federal intervention sent it down again and led to massive unemployment. If you don’t let facts get in the way, you can just pick whichever assumption you like, and the first assumption wins that popularity contest, hands down.

But if you look at the facts, they go like this: Unemployment never hit double digits in any of the 12 months following the big stock market crash of 1929 that is often blamed for the massive unemployment of the 1930s. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent two months after the October 1929 crash and then began drifting downward.

Unemployment was down to 6.3 percent by June 1930, when the first big federal intervention occurred. Within six months, the downward trend in unemployment reversed and hit double digits for the first time in December 1930.

What were politicians to do? Say “We messed up”? Or keep trying one huge intervention after another? The record shows what they did: President Hoover’s interventions were followed by President Roosevelt’s bigger interventions, and unemployment remained in double digits every month for the remainder of the decade.

There is another set of facts: The record that was set in 1929 for the biggest stock market decline in one day was broken in 1987. But Ronald Reagan did nothing, and the media clobbered him for it.

Then the economy rebounded, and there were 20 years of sustained economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment.

Can you imagine Barack Obama doing another Ronald Reagan? I certainly wouldn’t predict that.

Examiner columnist Thomas Sowell is nationally syndicated by Creator Syndicate.

Morning Bell: The Obama Tax and Spend Hikes

Posted By Conn Carroll On September 7, 2010

According to the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll  released today, only 26% of voters think the economy is going to be better in the next year, and 61% think the country is on the wrong track. Desperate to show Americans he’s fighting “every single day, every single hour, every single minute ” to turn the economy around, President Barack Obama unveiled yet another economic stimulus spending plan yesterday. This time the President is promising to spend $50 billion over six-years on a “Race to the Top”-style  transportation pork plan that will fund pet leftist projects like high-speed rail . The President promised: “this will not only create jobs immediately, it’s also going to make our economy hum over the long haul.”

But even the President’s own officials aren’t believing the hype. Politico  reports: “Under the best-case scenario, however, jobs would be created in 2011, the official said. ‘This is not an … immediate jobs plan. This is a six-year reauthorization that’s front-loaded,’ according to the senior administration official.” This Obama aide is half right: the President’s infrastructure plan will not create any jobs any time soon. As we have thoroughly documented before environmental regulations like the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) make it impossible for infrastructure spending to be implemented quickly. And even in the long run, as Heritage Foundation economist Ronald Utt has documented , the vast majority of independent academic and federal government studies show that the relationship between infrastructure spending and eco­nomic activity is close to zero.

But spending is just one side of President Obama’s economic prescription for the country. Not only is he advocating another $50 billion in spending on top of the $814 billion in economic stimulus spending he has wasted so far, he is also advocating for a $921 billion tax hike  set to take effect this January 1, 2011. The administration wants us to believe that this massive tax hike will have no effect on our economic recovery. But that is just not so. Raising taxes on work and investment would mean less work and less investment and can be regarded only as an overtly hostile anti-jobs policy. That is just one of the myths exposed by Heritage analyst JD Fosters’ new paper: Obama Tax Hikes Defended by Myths and Straw Man Arguments . Foster also details:

•Myth: Small businesses would be only marginally impacted by higher taxes rates.
Fact: Successful, growing, hiring small businesses are especially targeted by higher tax rates. Many Americans report business income from hobbies, sideline businesses, etc., thus inflating the number of so-called “small businesses.” True small businesses have employees and machinery, offer goods and services widely, and are far fewer in number. Yet they earn most of the small business income that would be subject to the higher rates.
•Myth: Tax rates matter little in the long run.
Fact: Tax rates have their most powerful effects on long-run growth and wages. The effects of tax changes take time to manifest fully because major business investments typically require extended evaluation, planning, and implementation. Similarly, while workers respond quickly to changes in tax rates, a full response takes time as they adjust their spending and budgets accordingly.
•Myth: The country cannot afford not to raise taxes.
Fact: The problem is spending, not revenues. The country cannot afford to let current spending levels continue. Taxes as a share of the economy will soon exceed the historical average. The current and projected unsustainable deficits are due to Obama’s spending surge, not a shortage of revenue.
Our economy is not on the wrong track because we spent too little. According to Keynesian theory, a $1.4 trillion budget deficit should have already stimulated our economy into full recovery. Our economy is struggling because of uncertainty caused by the tax and spend policies in Washington. The President’s $921 billion tax hike is not helping matters. A sound, responsible budget policy absent tax hikes does not demand radically lower levels of spending but only reversing Obama’s radical spending. Congress should make current tax policy permanent and then get about the business of paring government spending to sustainable levels.