What Else Would You Like To Know?

AMENDMENT IV: 

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. " 

Last Thursday the 6th we woke up to the news that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting almost every electronic communication in America - Facebook postings, Twitter feeds, text messages, cell phone calls, credit card purchases, etc. - to compile a massive computer database, in order to detect and hopefully disrupt terrorist attacks against the United States. The operation had been leaked to a British newspaper and the leaker, a guy named Edward Snowden, a contract employee of NSA in Hawaii, announced in a television interview that he felt that the scope of the operation vastly exceeded the spirit and the letter of the Constitution and that he felt compelled to expose it - after he had abandoned his job and his girlfriend in Hawaii for a five-star hotel in Hong Kong, of course, so he's no Jefferson Smith - so the American public would be aware of the government's activities. Now you would think that after years of bitterly criticizing President Bush's use of the Patriot Act and authorizations from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to conduct electronic monitoring of terrorist cells, while he was a permanent campaigner,er, Senator from Illinois, Priest-King would be the last person to defend this sort of wide-ranging drift net snooping, let alone actively use it, but once again, Priest-King defies conventional wisdom. After all, his Department of Justice obtained private telephone records of over 100 Associated Press employees, named Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible "co-conspirator" in a national security leak investigation and obtained the private telephone records of Mr. Rosen's parents, and the IRS conducted a sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation of conservative advocacy groups during which they demanded volumes of detailed personal information which they then shared with liberal advocacy groups: What a guy!


SIDEBAR: ...and this is going on while the Priest-King administration leaked information about the Flame virus, the Predator "kill list," the Osama bin Laden raid, and stonewalls Congress about Benghazi. The theme: Information belongs to Priest-King alone. He can do whatever he wants with it. He wants to know everything about us, who we are, where we live, with whom we associate, what we say, what we eat, where we worship, what we believe, everything. He wants this information so he can control us, he may dispose of this information as he sees fit and anyone who thinks otherwise will be crushed.

SIDEBAR REDUX: The Attorney-General may sign a request to subpoena telephone records, accuse a reporter as a co-conspirator in leaking national security information, shop the request to three different judges until he found a judge who would approve it, lie to Congress that he'd never been involved in such a program, claim that he never intended to prosecute Mr. Rosen so he didn't actually perjure himself, and keep his job. This is a great country, isn't it?

Now coming back to this latest scandal, we are finally hearing the term "probable cause." The Constitution insists that if the government thinks I'm involved with a crime, they must obtain a search warrant based upon a reasonable suspicion and specify what they're searching for and where. That is the essence of that particular protection, that the government is NOT entitled to conduct general searches just to find out as much as they can and they are NOT entitled to keep whatever information they find. After 9/11, President Bush was deeply concerned about preventing future terrorist attacks and used electronic monitoring, authorized by the FISA court, to detect, identify and track communications between terrorists working overseas and their accomplices here in the United States. The Left, including Priest-King, slammed Dubya consistently for this focused, limited monitoring program but now we've gone miles beyond that. The government is sweeping up massive amounts of information on ordinary Americans, not because we are suspected of any crime or because we belong to a terrorist organization but to know as much as they can. I have not been charged with a crime, I have not been arrested, I have not been suspected, I live a fairly dull, ordinary, unexciting life but nonetheless the government wants to know everything about me. We can agree that we need to do everything we can to prevent future terrorist attacks like 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing, we can agree that nobody but the terrorists wants Americans to die and that government at all levels has to aggressively detect, pursue and deter terrorist threats, but within the bounds of the Constitution. Mr. Edward Snowden, like PFC Manning of WikiLeaks infamy, signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with the U.S. Government promising to protect the information to which he was granted access. (I'm sure that we'll find out more but it stinks to high Heaven that a) He was only in his job for three months before he leaked this information; b) He fled to China, our arch-rival in the Pacific; and c) He leaked this information the day before Priest-King's summit with new Chinese President Xi Jinping, seriously undercutting our negotiating position as we confront China over their hacking activities and their domestic surveillance program.) If he is extradited, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because the information he leaked did not belong to him, but now that it's out, it's time for a robust public debate about what the American people want and what they're willing to accept. A small, limited, tightly-controlled program focused on telephone calls from overseas to terror suspects in the United States is one thing, sweeping up every electron in America is quite another. The American people are justifiably suspicious of their government for the reasons I provided above as well as Priest-King's failure to enforce immigration law and the Defense of Marriage Act, allowing known Mexican drug traffickers to buy guns in the United States and use them to commit crimes in Mexico and, in Bill Clinton's day, sifting through hundreds of confidential FBI files to compile a White House enemies list. And let's not forget that under Obamacare, the medical records of every person in the United States are to be digitized and stored in a massive government database - the government will know which doctor you see, what medical conditions you have and which medications you take to treat them (and how much they cost), are you overweight, do you have a family history of heart disease or diabetes - so the government will be able to control your behavior. For God's sake, Eric Holder refused to deny, under oath, that the Executive Branch was spying on Members of Congress, so yes, the people have probable cause themselves to mistrust their government and to insist that it be restrained.

Case in point: In Katz v. United States, the U.S. Government suspected Mr. Charles Katz of running an illegal gambling operation across state lines and was using a public telephone to communicate with his confederates. The FBI placed a wiretap on the phone booth in question (they had things like that in 1967) without first obtaining a warrant, reasoning that because it was a public utility, Mr. Katz' conversations weren't protected by the Fourth Amendment. They obtained the evidence they needed, arrested and subsequently prosecuted Mr. Katz but in a 7-1 ruling, the Supreme Court overturned Mr. Katz' conviction on the ground that the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to people, not places, and reminded the government they must operate within the law, especially where information is concerned.

The Federal government may think that because they own the Internet and the airwaves and the telephone lines, they can necessarily monitor - and archive, and exploit - whatever goes over them, but they can't. The Founding Fathers knew that a government that knows everything about everyone can bend the people to its will, and they had just fought a revolution against that kind of tyranny. Let's have this debate, let's vigorously protect against further terror attacks but if the government lacks probable cause, leave me alone.

If It Walks Like a Duck...

FROM THE CRIME DESK: Dr. Kermit Gosnell has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in

prison without parole. A jury found him guilty of killing a poor Bhutanese immigrant woman and three infants who were born alive at his Philadelphia abortion mill, which as I have noted in this space, hadn't been inspected for seventeen years and was operated more like a butcher shop than anything else. (The judge dropped three other counts of murdering infants because nobody actually witnessed those particular crimes, so apparently physical evidence - the dead children - wasn't enough.) We are told that the jury agonized over the case for eight days before rendering their verdict, which we might expect after forty years of liberal indoctrination, but they eventually came to the right and natural conclusion: Murdering helpless children is wrong. I guess there's still hope for you, America.

IRS USED TO ATTACK HIS POLITICAL ENEMIES, PRIEST-KING SHOCKED: The Internal Revenue Service has targeted dozens of conservative groups applying for 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, requiring especially burdensome paperwork and detailed, intrusive information to which the agency is not entitled, and extending the approval of such status from weeks to years. We've also been informed that the IRS lied to Congress last year when they stated that no such program was underway, that the effort was not the work of low-level employees in one office (Cincinnati) but was created and managed from Washington, that the IRS was goaded by Democrat politicians on Capitol Hill to target conservative groups, that even Billy Graham Ministries received special scrutiny because of their opposition to gay marriage, that the information the IRS obtained was shared with the left-wing advocacy group ProPublica, and that aside from the acting Commissioner who was pressured to resign Wednesday, absolutely nobody has been disciplined for this criminal activity. Priest-King, for his part, hem-hawed on the subject at his press conference on Monday, trying to acknowledge the severity of the scandal without taking responsibility for it, but let's get real: The guy who fired the CEO of General Motors when he had no authority to do so wouldn't blink at using the IRS to bludgeon his political enemies. THIS IS SERIOUS, PEOPLE. An agency of the Federal government was directing its fearsome powers against American citizens because of their political and religious beliefs, denying them equal protection, collecting extremely private and detailed information to which it had no right, which it then shared with Priest-King's left-wing allies, lying to Congress and the public as to the existence and scope of its efforts, and breaking the law. The Left usually associates this sort of conduct with its favorite bogeyman, Richard Nixon, but they shouldn't be surprised that a man weaned on bare-knuckle Chicago politics would resort to it. For the sake of the American people, Darrell Issa should climb into the IRS with a proctoscope, find everyone involved with this mess and show them what it feels like.

NEWS SERVICE TELEPHONE RECORDS SEIZED, PRIEST-KING SAYS THEY DESERVED IT: We are informed that the Justice Department has obtained telephone records of at least a hundred Associated Press employees in an effort to find out the source of a national security leak that was reported last year (a plot to blow up an American airliner from Yemen to New York that was foiled). Although the intent of the DOJ's investigation was laudable and routine methods had failed, DOJ went waay over the line by casting such a wide net, especially against a news agency so friendly to the Left. Agitating the press, treating them like an enemy, is another hallmark of the Nixon administration but also of authoritarian regimes generally, and this scandal reminds us that Priest-King is an authoritarian of the first order. He demands absolute obedience, permits no disagreement or dissent and will go after anyone who gets in his way. (Remember how Obama refused to appear on Fox News for such a long time, how he demonized conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, and urged his supporters during the campaign last year to take "revenge" on his opponents?) Pursuing national security leaks is a worthy goal but in this case, Priest-King is trying to freeze the American press, terrorize it and bend it to his will. The Left went ape over W.'s Patriot Act and FISA wiretaps when terrorists were the quarry; let's see how far when their outrage extends when their ox is being gored.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE: The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee heard testimony from three witnesses, all experienced State Department diplomats, who directly refuted the Priest-King Administration's account of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, last year and their characterization of it as a public protest gone terribly wrong. These three men - Gregory Hicks, Eric Nordstrom and Mark Thompson - risked their careers by naming names, times, and specific events that exposed Priest-King's
efforts to suppress the truth and mislead the American people as to the dea~hs of our consular personnel in Libya, as well as the threats they have received from their superiors in an attempt to intimidate them from testifying. The Priest-King Administration will smear these men as disgruntled hacks motivated by the desire for fame, fortune and the opportunity to humiliate their bosses, abetted by the Republicans in the House, but that will fall flat. What we have to remember is that we have four dead Americans, left to die in a lonely outpost in a dangerous part of the world, abandoned to their fate for no other reason than Priest-King's political fortune. For months leading up to the election, he had repeated the mantra, "Al Qaeda is on the run," had trumpeted the deaths of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, had waved his campaign of Predator drone attacks and the retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan as trophies of his inspired leadership. To admit that the attack on Benghazi was a coordinated, sustained, deliberate terrorist attack would contradict everything he had been saying, would call into question his strategy of disengagement and jeopardize his re-election, so Ambassador Chris Stevens and his brave colleagues were abandoned to a storm of fire and bullets not from an Al Qaeda affiliate but from a protest gone haywire. Nothing was done to help them. The consulate was physically relocated to an unstable part of an unstable country. Every request for extra security was denied. After the attack began, fighters weren't scrambled and the DoD ready team in Croatia wasn't deployed. (They would have arrived too late to save Ambassador Stevens but in time to save his embattled comrades in the consulate annex, which was attacked later.) The State Department's own counterterrorism bureau was excluded from the case and every reference to Al Qaeda and terrorism was deleted from official communications. Susan Rice parroted the Administration's phony version on every Sunday talk show, to the point of contradicting the Libyan President who immediately preceded her on CBS' Face the Nation. (The President was so insulted that he refused to cooperate with the FBI investigation, delaying the truth yet again.)

Taking all of these scandals together, we have an administration that is paranoid, obsessed with itself, out of control. Priest-King will resort to anything to protect himself, advance his socialist agenda and destroy his enemies, leaving our consular personnel to die, covering up his role therein, attacking American citizens for their political and religious beliefs and digging into the private communications of a free press. He and his cronies lie, steal, cheat and break the law, they deserve to be turned out into the snow and I pray that my fellow Americans snap out of whatever spell they've been under: If he walks like a crook, talks like a crook and acts like a crook, he's probably a crook.

The News of the Day

Jason Collins of the Boston Celtics comes out of the closet as the first openly homosexual active player in a major U.S. team sport and is congratulated by the President of the United States. Another nail is driven in our national coffin.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for murder in Philadelphia, accused of deliberately killing a woman and seven infants who somehow survived his clumsy attempts to abort them. Apparently, the horror chamber he operated as an abortion mill hadn't been inspected for seventeen years and he regularly overdosed his "patients" before butchering their helpless children, so he may have killed thousands of babies before the death of an adult forced the D.A.' s hand. As benumbed as our country may be to the routine slaughter of our most helpless citizens, the legacy media is only too aware of the effect diligent reporting of this disgusting episode would have on the general public, so they have consciously avoided the story, hoping it would just go away. But I'd like to point out something that Dr. Gosnell, the left-wing media and my fellow Americans would do well to understand: The Lord God of the universe, the Maker of everything that ever was and everything that ever will be, sees and hears and understands everything. He will not hold guiltless those who murder innocent children. As the great orator said, their " ...hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption. " The blood of two generations of American children, murdered on the altar of radical feminism, slaughtered because they were inconvenient, cries out from the earth and the Lord hears. Dr. Gosnell, repent while you can.

A study released by Careerbuilder.com indicates that 82% of health care workers would leave their jobs right now if the right opportunity were available, due to the increased pressure of Obamacare. Coupled with the statement of Senator Max Baucus (who ironically drafted the bill) two weeks ago that implementing Obamacare was going to be a train wreck, the mounting number of companies dumping their private health insurance because of rising costs, and Democrat pals like the unions and AARP desperately seeking exemptions from the law (the Dems on the Hill were sniffing for a way to avoid using Obamacare to cover themselves and their staffs), we are watching unfold the most accurately predicted, easily avoided financial disaster in our history. Conservatives like me warned and warned against this hot mess of a law but the American people, in a drunken stupor, lusted for universal health care, it was a civil right, it would help the poor and create jobs and lower costs and it was just the right thing to do, and even though nobody knew what was in the law or what would really happen after it was passed or how it would work or how much it would cost, we passed it anyway, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. And like Wile E. Coyote, lighting the fuse for a bomb he's sitting on, we're about to be blown up by our own hand. I would've thought that the home mortgage meltdown, also caused by well-meaning but comically inept Democrats - ahem, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd - would've inoculated the American people to falling for such nonsense again, but obviously I was wrong. So we'll go through the agony of higher unemployment, fewer options, longer waiting times, epic waste, massive taxes and spending and impenetrable bureaucracy until Obamacare dies of its own inertia, we'll wonder how it all happened and then we'll build a massive Presidential library for Priest-King somewhere in Chicago, because if there's one thing we like more than celebrating success in America, it's celebrating failure.

Noo, It Can't Be THAT...

It's been nine days since the bombings at the Boston Marathon and with one perpetrator dead and the other

wounded and in custody, I thought I would jot down a few thoughts about this whole sorry episode:

1. Overall, excellent police work. The suspects were identified, located and neutralized in four days with no additional loss of civilian life. (One MIT campus police officer was killed, sadly, and a Boston PD officer was critically wounded in the pursuit.) You can't really expect more than that.

2. The placement and timing of the bombs coupled with no claim of responsibility initially suggested a crafty, well-trained adversary but now we know that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were probably just partly-trained amateurs. Dzhokhar was clearly identifiable in multiple photos at the scene, he blabbed on his Twitter account the day after the bombings and both perpetrators remained in the Boston area, so if they had a plan to remain anonymous and quietly escape, it was poorly executed.

3. On the day of the attack, the legacy media like David Sirota and Dina Temple-Raston were practically wetting themselves in excitement, hoping against hope that the bombers were angry white guys like Timothy McVeigh, but five days after the Tsarnaev brothers were neutralized, I've seen nobody on the Left who made these accusations retract their statements. It's OK, then, to impulsively blame the NRA in particular and angry white guys in general for the worst terror attack since 9/11 because the Left just knows that's what the Right really wanted to do. That's not journalism.

4. Conversely, I've noticed the Left is disappointed that the Tsarnaev brothers were Muslims. No matter how many times Muslim terrorists attack us and our allies, no matter how many people they kill, no matter how many times they announce their outright hatred for America and democracy and Christianity, the Left is surprised when they follow through on their threats. As smart as liberals claim to be, ignoring piles of empirical data in favor of a political agenda is stupid, and deadly.

5. Since Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended last Friday, a parade of liberal commentators like Juan Williams, Chris Matthews and Dianne Feinstein are suddenly concerned about his civil rights. Jay Carney has defended the Justice Department's decision to try him in criminal court rather than remand him to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation as an enemy combatant, even though he repudiated his citizenship by taking up arms against his country and there's plenty of justification and precedent for doing so. This handwringing over civil rights is in line with liberal ideology, that treating terrorism as a crime and not an act of war demonstrates to the rest of the world that the United States is not a vengeful tyrant. The libs crave the approval of the international community, they want other countries to love us, they'll fall all over each other to protect the rights of half-baked bombers but simultaneously defend Priest-King's authority to kill American citizens with Predator drones on just the suspicion of terrorism, which only enflames Muslim sentiment against us. This fundamental contradiction in liberal philosophy - more concern for the rights of the murderer than his victims, advancing policies that cancel each other out - is what drives conservatives like me crazy.


6. As much as the Left doesn't want to admit this, it was Muslim ideology that drove the Tsarnaev brothers to commit this heinous crime. Maybe Tamerlan felt disconnected and isolated in his adopted country but that wasn't because he was mistreated. If he was radicalized by Anwar al-Awlaki, now dead at Priest-King's hands, and Feiz Muhammad of Australia, it was because violent jihad appealed to him, not because he was neglected and ignored and pushed aside. He was granted political asylum and various government benefits after he arrived in the United States, he became a promising Golden Gloves boxer with hopes of making the US Olympic team and his brother Dzhokhar attended a prestigious Boston area high school and earned a $2500 college scholarship, and despite their attaining UScitizenship, they never really assimilated into American culture and that is at the heart of the issue. Muslims have been attacking us for forty years because their ideology drives them to it. We are the enemy, we are the Great Satan, we protect Israel, we persecute the Palestinians, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and killed the great Muslim heroes Saddam Hussein, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the sheikh of sheikhs Usama bin Ladin. We represent all that has gone wrong with the umma. The Tsarnaev brothers detonated their bombs at the Boston Marathon, murdered a police officer and wounded another because we had it coming as far as they were concerned, regardless of how much the United States had done for them: If your adopted country gave you every benefit, then you still blow them up. That is what we are dealing with, and as long as the Left clings to their irrational belief that all human beings are good and reasonable and that tolerance and dialogue can overcome intractable cultural differences, then Americans will continue to die, for absolutely nothing.

American Gulag

There are three major obstacles to the establishment of pure, unadulterated socialism in America:

• Christian and Jewish conservatives
• The Republican Party
• The National Rifle Association

The Christian Church and conservative Jews oppose homosexual marriage and abortion, both elements of the socialist agenda, on religious grounds. To force them to accept homosexual marriage, the Left decouples marriage from its religious origins, characterizes marriage as a purely secular contract and frames gay marriage as a civil rights issue, such that religious conservatives who oppose changing the law are perceived as bigots. To protect and advance abortion, the Left compels those institutions managed by religious groups - schools, universities, homeless shelters, food banks and the like - to provide insurance coverage for contraception and abortion to their female employees free of charge, reasoning that by engaging those institutions and not the churches and synagogues themselves, liberals are respecting their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The Left purposely places conservative religious groups in a dilemma: Obey the law and violate their deepest religious principles, or defy the law and risk prosecution and the closure of the institutions that serve so many.

To break the Republican Party, the Left employs a multi-pronged approach. They begin by offering special benefits to favored constituencies: Free abortion and contraception coverage to feminists, amnesty to illegal immigrants, "stimulus" spending to labor unions, forgiveness or lenient repayment terms to people who have defaulted on their mortgage or student loans, aggressive regulation of financial institutions to the Occupy Wall Street crowd, and so forth. They characterize Republican opposition to massive deficit spending as favoritism to the rich, they gerrymander Congressional districts to eliminate Republican seats, they demonize Republican candidates - even Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, men of impeccable character - as hopelessly corrupt, selfish patricians. They play Republicans against each other, courting moderates like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Chris Christie with lavish dinners and favorable press coverage while attacking conservatives like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. If the Left cannot split the GOP into conservative and moderate halves, neither strong enough to challenge socialist hegemony, they'll settle for a weakened and emaciated whole.

For most Americans, guns are the ultimate guarantor of personal safety and the ultimate expression of their Constitutional rights. Private gun ownership has restrained tyrannical governments here and abroad, putting a brake on dictatorship, which explains why authoritarian regimes usually begin by banning and confiscating private firearms. The Left doesn't want any restraints or brakes on the advance of socialism and they're not above exploiting human tragedy for political advantage, so attacking the NRA as uncouth beasts insensitive to the massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut, and breaking their political influence, is the third major effort for liberals. Universal background checks (even if a father wanted to bequeath a favorite deer rifle to his son, a background check would be required) will lead to national gun registration which will lead to national gun confiscation. (Recall what happened in New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.) For the Left, the unfettered march of socialism is worth the cost of a citizen unable to defend himself against criminals, or ten citizens, or ten million. The people's ability to practically resist their government must be eliminated and so must the NRA.

The epic failures of socialism across the globe do not dampen the enthusiasm of the American Left for its full implementation here. The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Central America, South America, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, have all tried their hand at socialism and had every tool of state coercion to make it work and they all failed. Even China abandoned pure socialism in favor of market capitalism because not to do so would have resulted in ruin. During this seventy-five year experiment, however, hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people suffered poverty, unemployment, seizure of their private property, starvation, false arrest and imprisonment, torture and death - North Korea is a model society to the Left, if they would only admit it - all to prove the proposition that common misery is preferable to common opportunity. The fervor with which the Left worships mediocrity, the vigor they apply to achieving it in the face of overwhelming proof of socialism's disaster, is simply irrational, and to succumb to their efforts will condemn us all to the largest and worst gulag of all.

Another War They're Willing to Lose

Forty-nine years have elapsed since President Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty. In that time, government at all levels in the United States has spent nearly twenty trillion dollars on means-tested welfare (we'll leave Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for another time) or, in other terms, roughly three times the cost of all the real wars we've fought in our history. Between Fiscal Years 1989-2008, spending on means-tested welfare increased 292%, more than Social Security, Medicare and education, and more than double what was spent on national defense. In 2010 alone, U.S. outlays for means-tested welfare amounted to $881.2 billion; if simply converted to cash and distributed, it was more than twice what was required to bring every poor person in America out of poverty, so with such gargantuan sums having been spent, why is even one person still collecting welfare? Having denuded the national treasury for the purpose of eliminating poverty, why does poverty still exist? Indeed, why is it getting worse?

It is an article of religious faith among the Left that every human problem can be solved with a sufficient amount of money. Drought, famine, floods, hunger, disease, crime, war and yes, poverty, can all be overcome and thrown into the dumpster of history if we only write a big-enough check, and the fact that we have already spent Brobdingnagian heaps of treasure and failed in our task does not invalidate this article or deter the Left from pursuing it. Usually, we would describe such behavior as irrational but irrationality runs into other Leftist principles like a) The nobility of the goal outweighs failing to achieve it; and b) The inherent intellectual and moral superiority of liberals. They believe in their souls that if they spend just a little bit more, Utopia will descend from the heavens (New Jerusalem is just for Christians so that can't do) and a new Golden Age will ensue. The fact that poverty in America expands as welfare spending rises is blithely ignored as a statistical anomaly, not as an effect, as is the naked fact that after forty-nine years, seventy-nine Federal programs and trillions of dollars, poverty still exists: Welfare spending has increased 50% since Bill Clinton announced that we were "ending welfare as we know it." So why can't we try something else?

- ...because we know it will work. The Republican-led reforms enacted in the Nineties at the state and Federal levels grossly reduced the welfare rolls, boosted employment and the standard of living for those affected, increased home ownership and tax revenues and most importantly, freed hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people from the grip of government dependency. That makes welfare reform anathema to the Left, that explains why Priest-King arbitrarily weakened the provision in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 for welfare recipients to work, that is why he plans to increase means-tested welfare spending to 6% of GDP by 2022, or $1.57 trillion per year. Beyond the public displays of compassion, the appeals to our common humanity, the emotional handwringing over the poor and the weak, the Left desires control. The Left will tolerate all manner of vice at a personal level as long as they can control everything else. Medical care, housing, education, transportation, employment, capital, Internet access, the size of your soft drink and when you will die are all legitimate objects of control for the Left. If millions of people depend on government for their very existence, then they will more easily submit to the government yoke and the proof is found in Priest-King's victories in 2008 and 2012. This is the state for which the Left has labored these past eighty years, the exchange of American drive and self-reliance for a breadline, but is this really the best we can expect? With the ascendance of the welfare state, our inner cities and the families who live there have been destroyed. Two generations of children have grown up without fathers or have been shot during gang violence, single mothers have struggled to live on food stamps, public schools have crumbled, illiteracy, drug addiction, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, homelessness, STD's and unemployment have climbed as a mammoth government swallows everything in its path, including hope. Is this really the new American Dream?

Of course not. We're better than this. Self-reliant, independent people don't need big government or the Democrat Party so I would encourage my fellow citizens, now deluded by Leftist propaganda, to throw off their chains, vote the bums out in 2014 and pass a better legacy to their children than a soup spoon.

Barack Obama Goes to the Bank

It is a typical early Spring day in the nation’s capital when President Barack Hussein Obama, Priest-King of the Imperial Temple and Guardian of the Sacred Fire, walks into his neighborhood bank.

Neighborhood Bank Guy: Good morning, Barack! How very nice of you to stop by to see us.  We trust that Michelle and the girls are well?

Priest-King: They’re fine, thanks for asking, and thanks for seeing me, too, but I do have to insist that you not call me Barack.  I’ve won two Presidential elections and the Nobel Peace Prize and I just can’t have ordinary people getting so familiar with me.  I’m sure you understand.

Neighborhood Bank Guy (somewhat chagrined): Uh, I don’t think I do.  You’ve been coming here regularly for over four years and we’ve loaned you a colossal amount of money, so I would think that a certain amount of familiarity would be expected, but I don’t want to upset you.  What if I called you ‘Mr. President’ instead?  How would that sound?

Priest-King: Very pedestrian.  You may call me Your Supreme Loftiness, Your Imperial Majesty or, if you must, simply Your Majesty.  Any of those would be fine.

Neighborhood Bank Guy: Well, all right, ahem, Your Majesty, what can we do for you today?

Priest-King: I wanted to come in because there’s something wrong with my credit card again.  I tried to use it last night to buy food stamps for 21 million illegal immigrants and it was declined.  It was very embarrassing.  Michelle was appalled.

Neighborhood Bank Guy (typing on his computer): I can see how awkward that would be.  Let’s have a look at your account and see what the problem is.  Okay, here we are, Barack Hussein Obama, currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., married, two children, employed in your current position since 2009, etc.  Oh.  Oh my, there’s our problem.  Oh, goodness.

Priest-King: What is it?  What’s the problem?  Is it a Republican plot?

Neighborhood Bank Guy (turning the computer monitor so Priest-King can see it): You see here, Barack, er, Your Majesty, the problem is that you’ve reached your credit limit.  That’s whay your card was declined.  You’re out of money, basically.

Priest-King: That’s impossible.  I had income of over $2.2 trillion last year and I run the richest country on the face of the earth.  How could I be out of money?  That’s preposterous.

Neighborhood Bank Guy:  I know I’ve explained this to you before but I’m still not sure you understand how banking works.  You keep referring to the Federal government’s income as well as the wealth of the entire nation as if it were your own and it’s not.

Priest-King (blinking his eyes in mild disbelief): Get out!

Neighborhood Bank Guy: No, I’m serious.  Your friends and neighbors work hard, pay their bills and buy groceries and if they have any money left over, they save their money here at the bank and we protect it for them.  We also loan their money at interest to folks who want to buy a house or a car or to go to college or in your case, to buy food stamps for 21 million people who are living here illegally.  You may have had a very high income last year but when you spend it all and you want to spend more, we have to borrow money from your neighbors to give to you, to increase your credit limit and that increases the risk to their money.  That’s why we have to put limits on your card, otherwise you’d spend all your money and theirs, too, and we wouldn’t be doing our job as good, professional bankers, diligently protecting our customers’ interests.

Priest-King: Blah, blah, blah, more pinstriped Wall Street doubletalk.  I’ve heard it all before and it still doesn’t make any sense to me.  Just give me some more money and I’ll be on my way.  I have a golf date with Tiger Woods in Florida this afternoon and I don’t want to keep him waiting.

Neighborhood Bank Guy: Your Majesty, I want to help you but it’s essential that we understand each other.  You may believe that all of your expenses are legitimate but every time you ask for a loan, you are putting your neighbors at very high financial risk.  Your account indicates that you’ve borrowed over $6 trillion in only four years and haven’t paid one penny of that back.  That money represents your neighbors’ life savings, their security for retirement, maybe college education for their grandkids and if they lose it, they could be ruined.  Do you have any plan for repaying the money we’ve loaned you?  We have to know how you’re going to do that before we loan you any more.

Priest-King: This is really beneath me.  You want me to explain how I’m going to pay back the money I’ve so graciously taken off your hands?  Don’t you know already?  I’m using it to grow the economy!  By taking money out of the private sector and channeling it through the government, I’m building an economic juggernaut.  When my policies really kick in, the economy will take off like a blowtorch and then I’ll be able to pay back every dollar.  Paul Krugman says so, and for God’s sake, any college professor in any faculty lounge on any campus in America could tell you the same thing.  I can tell you never went to Harvard.

Neighborhood Bank Guy (shifting in his seat, clearly insulted): Your Majesty, no, I didn’t go to Harvard, I went to a state university after twenty years in the Army because that’s what I could afford, so you’ll have to explain how this whole thing works to a simple guy like me.  Lay it out for me.

Priest-King: Do you have a teleprompter handy?

Neighborhood Bank Guy:  No, I don’t.

Priest-King: Damn.  I do better when I have a teleprompter.  Maybe I can buy you one before I have to go meet Tiger.  Anyway, I’ll try to explain what I’m doing so a guy at your level can understand it.

Neighborhood Bank Guy (sarcastically):  How kind of you.

Priest-King: Don’t mention it.  I’m always doing things for other people, even greedy, selfish, poorly-educated bloodsuckers like yourself.  So, my plan is actually elegantly simple:  I pay back the money I’ve borrowed and spent by borrowing and spending more money.  It’s ingenious.

Neighborhood Bank Guy:  Uh, it’s something but it’s not ingenious.  How exactly does your borrowing money from private citizens and spending it grow the economy?  All you’re doing is creating more debt and so far, you’ve been a very poor judge of how you’ve spent the money we’ve given you.

Priest-King (offended):  How dare you insult the imperial dignity!  You question my judgment?  Name one expense that you think was illegitimate, if you can.  Go ahead, name one!

Neighborhood Bank Guy:  Well, for starters, you spent $787 billion on a stimulus plan in 2009 that you said would jump-start the economy, that was for “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, and that was just money thrown to the winds.

Priest-King (crossing his legs and folding his hands in his lap): You talk about that like it was a bad thing.  I saved hundreds of thousands of blue collar union workers who just happen to donate to my campaign and vote Democrat in every election.  That was a big, big positive.

Neighborhood Bank Guy: It was a disaster.  Then you spent money on so-called “green energy” projects that was wasted, billions of dollars just gone.

Priest-King: Oh, come on!  You’re saying that investing in America’s clean energy future was a waste?  What about a terrific company like Solyndra?  What about them?

Neighborhood Bank Guy: Bankrupt.

Priest-King: Solar Trust?

Neighborhood Bank Guy: Bankrupt.

Priest-King:  What about great electric cars like the Chevy Volt and the Fiskar Tesla?

Neighborhood Bank Guy: Dealers can’t move the Volt off their lots and the Tesla turns into a brick when the battery drains.  They’re junk.

Priest-King:  You continue to insult me.  You make it sound like all I do is blow other people’s money on pet projects and my union buddies and I have no intention of paying it back.

Neighborhood Bank Guy:  It sounds like that because it is like that.  You’ve been borrowing over $100 billion a month for over four years and have made zero progress on repaying any of it.  Your business plan is a crackpot scheme cooked up by Ivy League pinheads and beyond having no intention of paying back the money you’ve borrowed, you haven’t the slightest clue of how to do it.  You’ve placed your neighbors in acute financial jeopardy and your only answer is to keep doing what you’ve been doing.

Priest-King (gathering himself but clearly upset):  I appreciate your concern for your fellow members of the proletariat, er, middle class, but you still have not provided the funds I need to reward the illegal immigrants for undermining our sovereignty and my limousine is waiting outside, so if you could do whatever you underlings do to make that happen, I’ll be on my way and we can continue this discussion at a later date.

Neighborhood Bank Guy:  Very well, then.  Please give me your credit card.

Priest-King:  Thank you.  Finally, we’re getting somewhere.  Here it is.

Neighborhood Bank Guy (takes Priest-King’s credit card and reaches into his desk for a pair of scissors):  Thank you very much.  This will only take a moment.

Priest-King (shocked): Stop! What are you doing?  I need that!  Think about the illegals!

Neighborhood Bank Guy:  I’m doing what should have been done a long time ago.  Barack, my customers don’t have the luxury of burning through other people’s money when they’ve burned through their own.  They have to live within their means and it’s high time that you did, too.  No more raising your credit limit, no more raising taxes, no more borrowing from your neighbors and mortgaging their children’s future so you can pay off your political friends, no more living like there’s no tomorrow.  You’re going to live on what you have and you’re going to pay back every nickel you’ve borrowed starting today.  Any questions?

Priest-King (stunned):  Yes.  Where do I go to apply for a credit card?