Obama Hates Prayer

President Obama Addresses CIA & FBI Employees - I've got your back...

from Investor's Business Daily
by Michael Ramirez

The Right Needs to Play as Dirty as the Left

"Attack rapidly, ruthlessly, viciously, without rest. However tired and hungry you may be, the enemy will be more tired, more hungry. Keep punching." - General George S. Patton

It's time to give them a taste of their own medicine.

May 1, 2009
by John Hawkins
from Pajamas Media

When I was in college, I studied Southern Long Fist Kung Fu for more than a year and my teacher told me something that I never forgot. He said that when you’re being attacked, the aggressor sets the rules and if you want to survive, you have to play by those rules. In other words, if your opponent is trying to cut your head off with a sword while you’re trying not to hurt him, chances are that you’re going to end up dead. This is a lesson that conservatives can and should apply to politics.

Too often today, liberals are using below-the-belt tactics against conservatives and paying no price whatsoever. Meanwhile, those on the right like to pat themselves on the back for being above it all. This is like a boxer priding himself on never taking off his gloves while his opponent nearly beats him to death with his bare firsts. But in the end, there’s not much to be said for lovable losers. Conservatives should realize that fair play isn’t going to pay any dividends.

While we conservatives don’t have to stoop quite as low as the left has, we do need to start giving them a taste of their own medicine, if only to make them think twice about the way they’re treating our side.

For example, look at the media jihad that was shamelessly launched against Sarah Palin’s family. There was a not-so-subtle message being sent: if you’re a Republican woman, you better stay in the shadows or we’re going to destroy your family to get you. The left gave the same kind of intrusive, public scrutiny to “Joe the Plumber,” a private citizen who merely asked an inconvenient question to Barack Obama. While conservatives defended both Sarah and Joe as we complained incessantly about the way they were treated, the reality is that the Democrats paid no price whatsoever for the out-of-bounds attacks.

Instead of continuing to complain, here’s a better idea. Why don’t conservatives do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber? Have they ever been arrested? Whom do they own property with? Have they ever been paid to do a speech for someone and then run a favorable news story about him? Certainly Keith Olbermann’s personal life is just as newsworthy as Joe the Plumber’s, and the details of Maureen Dowd’s life are just as noteworthy as those of Bristol Palin — are they not?

Here’s another example. On college campuses, conservative speakers often need bodyguards to give a speech. Conservatives are shouted down and attacked — and nothing serious ever seems to happen to the fascists who engage in these thuggish tactics. So why shouldn’t conservative groups do the exact same thing to every liberal speaker who comes to the college? Go on stage, lock arms, and shout him down — then sue the university if they’re given so much as an hour’s detention more than the protesting liberal students.

Along those same lines, how is it that we have public universities using taxpayer dollars to discriminate against conservatives, indoctrinate kids into liberalism, and hire faculty like Bill Ayers? Why are Republican state legislators allowing this? How about standing up and saying, “If you want to continue to receive taxpayer money, you’re going to act like a university should, not an indoctrination center”?

If you are tired of being called a racist by race-hustling poverty pimps like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the NAACP, how about using their own tactics against them by boycotting organizations that work with them or support them financially?

Are you sick of feeling like you need to familiarize yourself with porn terms just to understand what they’re saying about the tea parties on MSNBC or CNN? Then start filing obscenity complaints with the FCC. The left has never hesitated to use the government and the court system against its political opponents, so why should we?

Obviously, we don’t have to become liars — in fact, even setting aside the ethics of it, it’s better for our credibility if we don’t. But conservatives do need to stop playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules and futilely hoping that the public will finally start to notice that we’re actually nice guys, even as we are smeared as Nazis, homophobes, and racists every day.

How much credit did John McCain get for refusing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama’s lack of patriotism? How many times was George Bush — a moderate on domestic issues who bent over backwards to create a “new tone” — accused of being Hitler? How many times has Fox News, which makes more of an effort to be balanced than any of the other networks and all the biggest newspapers in America, been accused of being as biased as Rush Limbaugh?

Complaining bitterly about the Democrats’ “politics of personal destruction” or bellyaching that the media doesn’t treat us fairly ultimately accomplishes nothing. The public doesn’t care.

Using the exact same tactics against the left that it uses against the right may very well be effective.

Even if it isn’t, it may at least convince them that such tactics ought to be off limits on both sides. We can say, “Gee, what if Bush had done this” or “That’s a cheap shot” all day long, but until our political opponents feel the brunt of the same savage incivility that it dishes out on a regular basis, nothing is going to change.
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Obama Outsources His Presidency

He may come to regret letting Congress write his major legislation.
from The Wall Street Journal
By KARL ROVE
May 1, 2009

While officials in the Obama White House dismissed yesterday's "100 Days" anniversary as a "Hallmark Holiday," they understood it was what sociologist Daniel J. Boorstin called a "pseudo-event." By that, Boorstin meant an occasion that is not spontaneous but planned for the purpose of being reported -- an event that is important because someone says so, not because it is.

What happens in a president's first 100 days rarely characterizes the arc of the 1,361 that follow. Jimmy Carter had a very good first 100 days. Bill Clinton did not.

Still, a president would rather start well than poorly -- and Mr. Obama has a job approval of 63%. That leaves him tied with Mr. Carter, one point ahead of George W. Bush, and behind only Ronald Reagan's 67%. Four of the past six presidents had approval ratings that ranged between 62% and 67%, a statistically insignificant spread.

Mr. Obama is popular because he is a historic figure, has an attractive personality, has passed key legislation, and receives adoring press coverage.

However, there are cautionary signs. Mr. Obama's policies are less popular than his personality, the pace of polarization with Republicans has proceeded faster than ever in history, and independents are thinking more like Republicans on the issues and less like Democrats.

The first 100 days can reveal a pattern of behavior that comes to characterize a presidency. In this respect, there are two emerging habits of Team Obama worth watching.

One is the gap between what Mr. Obama said he would do and what he is doing. His administration is emphasizing in its official 100 days talking points steps he has taken to "deliver on the change he promised." During the campaign, Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush's watch as "deficits as far as the eye can see." But Mr. Obama's budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?

From Mr. Obama's Denver acceptance speech through the campaign, Mr. Obama did not publicly utter the phrase "universal health care." Instead, his campaign ran ads attacking "government-run health care" as "extreme." Now Mr. Obama is asking, as he did at a townhall meeting last month, "Why not do a universal health care system like the European countries?" Maybe because he was elected by intimating that would be "extreme"?

Another emphasis in the Obama 100 days talking points is that the president is a decisive leader. However, Mr. Obama is enormously deferential to Democrats in Congress and has outsourced formulation of key policies to them. He appears largely ambivalent about the contents of important legislation, satisfied to simply sign someone else's bill.

On the $787 billion stimulus package, he specified less than a quarter of the bill's spending and let House Appropriations Chairman Dave Obey decide the rest. On cap and trade, Mr. Obama is comfortable to let Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman and Edward Markey write that legislation with virtually no White House guidance. On health care, the White House is providing very little detail. Mr. Obama tees up an issue, but leaves its execution to congressional Democrats.

This leadership style may be a carryover from his Senate years, when he was unusually detached from the substance of legislation. Mr. Obama's focus on broad descriptions of a goal will produce laws, but handing over control of the process may produce deeply flawed products.

The stimulus bill turned into a liberal spending wish list that will retard, not hasten, recovery. Already, with mounting job losses the gap between the 3.675 million jobs he said he would create or protect in his first two years and the number of actual jobs in the economy has risen to nearly five million. Reaching his job target now requires creating 249,400 new jobs a month for the next 20 months. Democrats will not fare well in next year's elections if there is a yawning Obama "job gap."

Democratic congressional leaders are ecstatic about Mr. Obama's willingness to outsource major legislation to them. They thrive on sausage making and, with the president's popularity high, they appreciate that his strengths are not their strengths. Yet Mr. Obama clearly did not gain their respect for his legislative abilities during his Senate years.

Mr. Obama is a great face for the Democratic Party. He is its best salesman and most persuasive advocate. But he is beginning to leave the impression that he is more concerned with the aesthetics of policy rather than its contents. In the long run, substance and consequences define a presidency more than signing ceremonies and photo-ops. In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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The Biggest Threat To America

by Michael Ramirez
from Investor's Business Daily

FACT CHECK: Obama disowns deficit he helped shape - He is so incredibly intellectually dishonest!!!

from myway.com
Apr 29, 5:55 PM
CALVIN WOODWARD

WASHINGTON (AP) - "That wasn't me," President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One.

It actually was him - and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years - who shaped a budget so out of balance.

And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.

Obama met citizens at an Arnold, Mo., high school Wednesday in advance of his prime-time news conference. Both forums were a platform to review his progress at the 100-day mark and look ahead.

At various times, he brought an air of certainty to ambitions that are far from cast in stone.

His assertion that his proposed budget "will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term" is an eyeball-roller among many economists, given the uncharted terrain of trillion-dollar deficits and economic calamity that the government is negotiating.

He promised vast savings from increased spending on preventive health care in the face of doubts that such an effort, however laudable it might be for public welfare, can pay for itself, let alone yield huge savings.

A look at some of his claims Wednesday:

OBAMA: "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.... That wasn't me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you've got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they're big, and they'll make our deficits go up over the next two years." - in Missouri.

THE FACTS:

Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator. Obama supported the emergency bailout package in President George W. Bush's final months - a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.

To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq war, a drain on federal coffers for six years before he became president. But with one major exception, he voted in support of Iraq war spending.

The economy has worsened under Obama, though from forces surely in play before he became president, and he can credibly claim to have inherited a grim situation.

Still, his response to the crisis goes well beyond "one-time charges."

He's persuaded Congress to expand children's health insurance, education spending, health information technology and more. He's moving ahead on a variety of big-ticket items on health care, the environment, energy and transportation that, if achieved, will be more enduring than bank bailouts and aid for homeowners.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated his policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years, even accounting for his spending reduction goals. Now, the deficit is nearly quadrupling to $1.75 trillion.

---

OBAMA: "I think one basic principle that we know is that the more we do on the (disease) prevention side, the more we can obtain serious savings down the road. ... If we're making those investments, we will save huge amounts of money in the long term." - in Missouri.

THE FACTS: It sounds believable that preventing illness should be cheaper than treating it, and indeed that's the case with steps like preventing smoking and improving diets and exercise. But during the 2008 campaign, when Obama and other presidential candidates were touting a focus on preventive care, the New England Journal of Medicine cautioned that "sweeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention, however, are overreaching." It said that "although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not."

And a study released in December by the Congressional Budget Office found that increasing preventive care "could improve people's health but would probably generate either modest reductions in the overall costs of health care or increases in such spending within a 10-year budgetary time frame."

---

OBAMA: "You could cut (Social Security) benefits. You could raise the tax on everybody so everybody's payroll tax goes up a little bit. Or you can do what I think is probably the best solution, which is you can raise the cap on the payroll tax." - in Missouri.

THE FACTS: Obama's proposal would reduce the Social Security trust fund's deficit by less than half, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

That means he would still have to cut benefits, raise the payroll tax rate, raise the retirement age or some combination to deal with the program's long-term imbalance.

Workers currently pay 6.2 percent and their employers pay an equal rate - for a total of 12.4 percent - on annual wages of up to $106,800, after which no more payroll tax is collected.

Obama wants workers making more than $250,000 to pay payroll tax on their income over that amount. That would still protect workers making under $250,000 from an additional burden. But it would raise much less money than removing the cap completely.

Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
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Fox Program "Lie to Me" beat President Obama's press conference - Obama lost half his audience from previous one - OUCH!

Fox beats President Obama

TV Newser: The fictional “Lie To Me” beat the presidential version in the TV ratings.

Tee hee hee.

Fox went with regular programming at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, while the other 3 networks carried the presidential press conference.

Citing early Nielsen numbers, TV Newser declared Fox the winner.

Fox drew 7.9 million viewers in the time slot. NBC was second at 6.7 million.

“Overall, Obama’s news conference was seen by nearly 19 million viewers across NBC, ABC, CBS according to the early numbers,” TV Newser said.

That is about half the people who watched his last prime-time press conference.

To be fair, the fictional “Lie To Me” also drew 7.9 million viewers in the same timeslot a week earlier.

Still, I think the shelf-life on these prime-time press conferences has passed.

Interestingly, the peevish president took no questions from Fox. Again.
TV Newser’s report is here.
Robert Seidman has more.
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Daily Gut: Schoolgirls In Love - The Media slobber fest nauseatingly continues

from Breitbart.com
by Greg Gutfeld
April 30, 2009

So after weeks of delving deeper and deeper into Miss California’s thoughts on social issues, we now turn to last night’s press conference, where one reporter preferred to serve up a question suited more for a pageant than a President.

Check it out, check it outers.

(ROLL FOUR PART QUESTION FROM TIMES DUDE)

Well, someone definitely is enchanted - beguiled and bewitched by a wizard whose spell renders anyone not immune to “The More You Know” commercials to the emotional state of a fawning school girl.

It’s a credit to Obama that even he had to openly acknowledge the convoluted question from Jeff Zeleny, the New York Times reporter - for it was something Barbara Walters would have posed to Barbara Streisand in 1979, right after asking her what kind of tree she would be, if she could be a tree.

(I think she said “spruce”)

So how do you get to a point where a reporter actually feels compelled to ask such a question? It takes two things.

-one: obsession. Remember the Sandra Bernhard character in King of Comedy? Well, that’s the press personified, and Obama is Jerry Langford. I`m beginning to think that many in the press have collages of Obama hanging inside their lockers. Chris Matthews, I hear, has created an Obama love doll in his garage. For a magical thrill, it’s hooked up to a car battery.

-two, acquiescence. The press completely buys into Obama’s worldview, because it`s theirs too. So it’s not really media bias. It’s “me” bias. He is them. Them is…he, if you pardon my grammar. Fact is, the press has always believed the world needs a healthy dose of fairness - meaning other people deserve your money. And that fits nicely with Obama’s main goal - to create a world where all of us are truly equal - by talking up dreams, but leveling achievement.

It’s a surprise that Zeleny didn’t ask Obama to sign his dream journal, which later, he could decorate with hearts. Pink hearts, with arrows in them!

That`s what I would do. But I`m different.
Tonight we have Dr. Michael Baden, S.E. Cupp, Ron Geraci, and Anna Gilligan!!
Fun, fun, fun.

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CURL: Obama looks back in anger

Places blame on the GOP
from The Washington Times
By Joseph Curl
Thursday, April 30, 2009

President Obama said his prime-time press conference on Day 100 of his presidency was intended as a "look forward to ... all of the hundreds of days to follow," but it turned into more of a look back in anger, complete with finger-pointing.

Throughout his hourlong session in the White House East Room on Wednesday, the candidate who vowed a new post-partisan Washington, free from the rancorous bickering that often grinds the city to gridlock, ripped Republicans as the members of a do-nothing party of no.

He began at the top, calling his predecessor, the former head of the Republican Party, a torturer.

"Waterboarding was torture," he said, making no exception for post-Sept. 11 circumstances and giving no credence to claims that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" authorized by George W. Bush saved Americans lives.

"We could have gotten this information in other ways," Mr. Obama said, without adding that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was waterboarded 183 times before he divulged plans of a massive attack planned against Los Angeles.

The cerebral president, who most recently shook hands with America-hater Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and plans talks with nuke-happy Iranian leaders, was content to muse philosophically: "Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?"

(Still, he did steal Mr. Bush's daily mantra that his first obligation is to keep the American people safe: "That's the responsibility I wake up with and it's the responsibility I go to sleep with.)

But on the arbitrary day of presidential measurement, Mr. Obama often appeared to still be running for office. In one breath, he said: "I do think that, to my Republican friends, I want them to realize that me reaching out to them has been genuine."

In another: "There is still a certain quotient of political posturing and bickering that takes place even when we're in the middle of really big crises," with "political posturing" targeted at Republicans who apparently do not believe their jobs are to rubber-stamp each expensive Obama initiative.
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Dear President Obama: Your partisan arrogance makes me sick.

from the blog Dear President Obama
Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Mr. President, as unfortunate for us as it is that you were elected president (God help us) the fact is that you were elected president of ALL of us... including those of us "waving tea bags around."

Your insistence on once again playing the race card is yet another in the many sickening chapters you're writing as you destroy our economy and enslave my children to pay for your socialism. Let me make this clear enough that even a high functioning moron can understand it:

The fact that half of your genetic make up comes from the continent of Africa means nothing to me. It is you incompetence, your fringe-leftist partisanship, your total cluelessness on both domestic and foreign polciy and your massive, unrelenting arrogance that makes you such a colassal waste of skin as our President.

If you were a green lepricon, my distain for you and the damage that you and your minions are causing would be precisely the same. You've made the idiotic mistake of surrounding yourself with yes men and women; you've politicized issues that should not be politicized; you've shown a massive level of disdain for those of us wise enough to oppose your rank stupidity and you've done absoluitely nothing to bring us together except to insult, belittle and punish us with trillions of dollars of debt.

As we wise up to the truth of your perfidy, your popularity will shrink at a rate that even your media leg-humpers will not be able to fix.

And then what?

Idiot.
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Obama’s Liberal Arrogance Will Be His Undoing

"nothing in politics breeds corrective antibodies more quickly than overreaching arrogance" - Jonah Goldberg

American politics didn’t come to an end with Obama’s election.
from The National Review
By Jonah Goldberg
April 29, 2009

The most remarkable, or certainly the least remarked on, aspect of Barack Obama’s first 100 days has been the infectious arrogance of his presidency.

There’s no denying that this is liberalism’s greatest opportunity for wish fulfillment since at least 1964. But to listen to Democrats, the only check on their ambition is the limit of their imaginations.

“The world has changed,” Sen. Charles Schumer of New York proclaimed on MSNBC. “The old Reagan philosophy that served them well politically from 1980 to about 2004 and 2006 is over. But the hard right, which still believes . . . [in] traditional-values kind of arguments and strong foreign policy, all that is over.”

Right. “Family values” and “strong foreign policy” belong next to the “free silver” movement in the lexicon of dead political causes.

No doubt Schumer was employing the kind of simplified shorthand one uses when everyone in the room already agrees with you. He can be forgiven for mistaking an MSNBC studio for such a milieu, but it seemed not to dawn on him that anybody watching might see it differently.

When George W. Bush was in office, we heard constantly about the poisonous nature of American polarization. For example, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg came out with a book arguing that “our nation’s political landscape is now divided more deeply and more evenly than perhaps ever before.” One can charitably say this was abject nonsense. Evenly divided? Maybe. But more deeply? Feh.

During the Civil War, the political landscape was so deeply divided that 600,000 Americans died. During the 1930s, labor strife and revolutionary ardor threatened the stability of the republic. In the 1960s, political assassinations, riots, and bombings punctuated our political discourse.

It says something about the relationship of liberals to political power that they can overlook domestic dissent when they’re at the wheel. When the GOP is in office, America is seen as hopelessly divided because dissent is the highest form of patriotism. When Democrats are in charge, the Frank Riches suddenly declare the culture war over and dismiss dissent as the scary work of the sort of cranks Obama’s Department of Homeland Security needs to monitor.

If liberals thought so fondly of social peace and consensus, they would look more favorably on the 1920s and 1950s. Instead, their political idylls are the tumultuous ’30s and ’60s, when liberalism, if not necessarily liberals, rode high in the saddle.

Sure, America was divided under Bush. And it’s still divided under Obama (just look at the recent Minnesota Senate race and the New York congressional special election). According to the polls, America is a bit less divided under Obama than it was at the end of Bush’s first 100 days. But not as much less as you would expect, given Obama’s victory margin and the rally-around-the-president effect of the financial crisis (not to mention the disarray of the GOP).

Meanwhile, circulation for the conservative National Review (where I work) is soaring. More people watch Fox News (where I am a contributor) in primetime than watch CNN and MSNBC combined. The “tea parties” may not have been as big as your typical union-organized “spontaneous” demonstration, but they were far more significant than any protests this early in Bush’s tenure.

And yet, according to Democrats and liberal pundits, America is enjoying unprecedented unity, and conservatives are going the way of the dodo.

Obama has surely helped set the tone for the unfolding riot of liberal hubris. In his effort to reprise the sort of expansion of liberal power we saw in the ’30s and ’60s, Obama has — without a whiff of self-doubt — committed America to $6.5 trillion in extra debt, $65 billion for each of his first 100 days, and that’s based on an impossibly rosy forecast of the economy. No wonder congressional Democrats clamor to take over corporations, tax the air we breathe, and set wages for everybody.

On social issues such as abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, Obama has proved to be, if anything, more of a left-wing culture warrior than Bush was a right-wing one. All the while, Obama transmogrifies his principled opponents into straw-man ideologues while preening about his own humble pragmatism. For him, bipartisanship is defined as shutting up and getting in line.

I’m not arguing that conservatives are poised to make some miraculous comeback. They’re not. But American politics didn’t come to an end with Obama’s election, and nothing in politics breeds corrective antibodies more quickly than overreaching arrogance. And by that measure, Obama’s first 100 days have been a huge down payment on the inevitable correction to come.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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Arlen Specter is a switch hitter!

Arlen Specter Watch Out! - Darn, too late...that door hit you right in the butt

Arlen Specter makes it official; Flashback: Specter’s denial

from Michelle Malkin.com
By Michelle Malkin
April 28, 2009 12:00 PM

Well, it appears that the head of the Turncoat Caucus is finally making it official. Arlen Specter, we have just 10 words for you:

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter will switch his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, according to sources informed on the decision.

Specter’s decision would give Democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate assuming Democrat Al Franken is eventually sworn in as the next Senator from Minnesota. (Former Sen. Norm Coleman is appealing Franken’s victory in the state Supreme Court.)

“I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary,” said Specter in a statement. “I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election.”

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

The readers at Human Events give Specter a nice send-off.
***

The Hill reminds us of the value of Specter’s word: Worthless:

In a March 17th interview with The Hill, Specter said he absolutely would not switch parties:

[Democrats] are trying very hard for the 60th vote. Got to give them credit for trying. But the answer is no.

I’m not going to discuss private talks I had with other people who may or may not be considered influential. But since those three people are in the public domain, I think it is appropriative to respond to those questions.

I am staying a Republican because I think I have an important role, a more important role, to play there. The United States very desperately needs a two-party system. That’s the basis of politics in America. I’m afraid we are becoming a one-party system, with Republicans becoming just a regional party with so little representation of the northeast or in the middle atlantic. I think as a governmental matter, it is very important to have a check and balance. That’s a very important principle in the operation of our government. In the constitution on Separation of powers.

Specter says today he won’t change his opposition to Big Labor’s Card Check bill.

Snort.
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Harold Koh nomination hearing today - If he is confirmed, the President and every Senator voting yes for him should be impeached

Koh Fails the Democracy Test
Consent of the governed? Or rule by international wisemen?

from The National Review
By John Fonte
April 28, 2009

Advocates of global governance advance their agenda through the “transnational legal process.” Harold Koh, former dean of the Yale Law School, who has been nominated by President Obama to be the legal adviser to the State Department, is a leading advocate of this “transnational legal process.” His confirmation hearing is today, Tuesday, April 28.

Dean Koh has written extensively — sometimes clearly, sometimes obtusely — on transnational law and the “transnational legal process.” In a rather clear paragraph in The American Prospect (September 20, 2004), Koh explains how the system works:

Transnational legal process encompasses the interactions of public and private actors — nation states, corporations, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations — in a variety of forums, to make, interpret, enforce, and ultimately internalize rules of international law. In my view, it is the key to understanding why nations obey international law. Under this view, those seeking to create and embed certain human rights principles into international and domestic law should trigger transnational interactions, which generate legal interpretations, which can in turn be internalized into the domestic law of even resistant nation-states.

Koh says much the same thing in the Penn State International Law Journal (2006) — more abstractly, to be sure, but it is worth listening to his voice to begin to appreciate the tone of the global-governance debate in legal circles:

To understand how transnational law works, one must understand “Transnational Legal Process,” the transubstantive process in each of these issues areas [business, crime, immigration, refugees, human rights, environment, trade, terrorism] whereby [nation] states and other transnational private actors use the blend of domestic and international legal process to internalize international legal norms into domestic law. As I have argued elsewhere, key agents in promoting this process of internalization include transnational norm entrepreneurs, governmental norm sponsors, transnational issue networks, and interpretive communities. In this story, one of these agents triggers an interaction at the international level, works together with other agents of internalization to force an interpretation of the international legal norm in an interpretive forum, and then continues to work with those agents to persuade a resisting nation-state to internalize that interpretation into domestic law.

Koh notes that the crucial mechanism for incorporating these global norms that are “created” and “interpreted” in transnational forums into American constitutional law is the American judiciary. As Koh declares, “domestic courts must play a key role in coordinating U.S. domestic constitutional rules with rules of foreign and international law.”

The global norms that are to be “internalized” into American law cover a wide range of policy areas, including matters of foreign policy, terrorism, internal security, commerce, environment, human rights, free speech, and social issues such as feminism, abortion, gay rights, and the status of children.

To ask the crucial questions of democratic theory: Who governs? Who decides?

For the advocates of global governance, the policy issues listed above are typically global problems that require global solutions. In this view, international judges, NGO activists, international lawyers, and the like operating in transnational forums such as the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and various U.N. agencies are the appropriate decision-makers.

For the advocates of liberal democracy, these issues should be decided through the democratic political process. In the United States, this would mean the elected representatives of the people: the Congress and president at the national level, state legislatures and governors at the state level, and city councils and mayors at the local level.

To be sure, the American judiciary should perform its constitutional role of interpreting the laws made by the political branches of American democracy. However, it is not appropriate for American courts to impose or “internalize” global norms, rules, or laws “created” at transnational forums by transnational actors who have no direct accountability to “We the People of the United States”; actors who not only are not elected by the American people, but who are, for the most part, not even citizens of the United States. It is not appropriate, that is, if one believes in liberal democracy.

But, of course, the “transnational legal process” articulated by Harold Koh and the politics of transnationalism generally are not democratic. They represent a new form of governance that I call “post-democratic.” To “make, interpret, [and] enforce” international law, “which can in turn be internalized into the domestic law of even resistant nation-states” (as Koh describes it), is to exercise governance. But do these transnational governors have the consent of the governed?

The transnational legal process fails the “government by the consent of the governed” test in two ways. First, the democratic branches of government, the elected representatives of the people, have no direct input either in writing the global laws in the first place, or even in consenting to their domestic internalization, as, for example, happens when the Senate ratifies a treaty or the Congress passes enabling legislation for a non-self-executing treaty.

Second, there is no democratic mechanism to repeal or change these international rules that are incorporated into U.S. law by this process. What if the American people decide that they object to these global norms and transnational laws that were imposed upon them without their consent (on, for example, the death penalty, internal security, immigration, family law, etc.)?

What if the American people at first approved, but later changed their minds on, some of these rules: How can these global norms, now part of international law and U.S. constitutional law, be repealed? Legislation to repeal the global norms could be deemed “unconstitutional.” In short, there are no democratic answers to these questions consistent with the transnational legal process, because it is not a democratic process.

At the end of the day, the argument over the transnational legal process is one part of a larger argument that will come to dominate the 21st century: Who governs?

Will Americans continue to decide for themselves public policies related to national security, human rights, immigration, free speech, terrorism, the environment, trade, commercial regulation, abortion, gay rights, and family issues — or will questions be decided by “transnational issue networks” working with “transnational norm entrepreneurs,” “governmental norm sponsors,” and “interpretive communities,” with the complicity of American judges?

— John Fonte is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His book Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? will be published by Encounter Books in 2010.
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