Gangster Government

[philunderwood]

Gangster government's solution: Let's kill the (financial) messenger

By Jack Kelly

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

There were few jobs in ancient Greece more fraught with peril than that of messenger, because if a king was unhappy with the content of a message, he often took out his displeasure on the person who carried it.

The custom of killing the messenger was so widespread that in his play Antigone, Sophocles used it as a metaphor for lashing out at the innocent. After Shakespeare used it twice (in Henry IV and Antony and Cleopatra), the metaphor became entrenched in the English language.

It's been ages since a ruler actually killed a messenger, but Democrats seem to want to revive the practice.

The ceiling on the national debt had to be raised, President Barack Obama said, to prevent a downgrade in America's credit rating. He and Senate Democrats negotiated a deal with House Republicans to raise it in exchange for $2.4 trillion in spending cuts over ten years.

A few days after it passed, the bond rating agency Standard & Poors downgraded America's credit.

S&P's reasoning was straightforward. The bond rating agency thinks deficits need to be reduced by at least $4 trillion over the next ten years.

S&P wasn't alone in bearing this message. Egan-Jones, a much smaller bond rating agency, lowered our credit rating in July because our debt is too high. Moody's, the other big bond rating agency, also thinks the deficit must be cut by at least $4 trillion.

The administration responded with what a British newspaper described as "an unprecedented attack on the credibility and integrity" of S&P.

The communications director for the Democratic National Committee urged his Twitter followers to attack the bond rating agency.

Liberal bloggers said the downgrade was motivated by politics. Unlikely, since most of the political contributions from senior executives at S&P in recent years have gone to Democrats.

The Senate Banking Committee may probe S&P's decision to downgrade debt, a Democratic staffer said.

The Justice Department has begun an investigation of Standard & Poors, the New York Times reported Aug. 17. Allegedly, Justice is trying to find out why S&P gave high ratings to subprime mortgage bonds virtually up until the time they crashed in 2008, taking the economy with them. But other bond rating agencies gave this trash high ratings too, so some find it odd Justice is investigating only S&P

Within days of the downgrade, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of S&P for insider trading, even though the SEC has no evidence anyone there has done anything improper.

"The SEC's actions against S&P look like petulant reaction by the Obama administration against the messenger of bad news," said the Charleston (SC) Post and Courier.

Frantic Democrats attack the messenger to divert attention from why our credit was downgraded, and who is responsible for it. House Republicans passed a bill that would have trimmed spending by nearly $6 trillion -- more than enough to keep our credit good. Democrats rejected it. If Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, there may have been no spending cuts at all.

The unwillingness of Democrats to trim either spending or Mr. Obama's orgy of job killing regulations leaves them only with stunts and intimidation with which to win votes.

And the stunts aren't working. Before leaving for his vacation at Martha's Vineyard, Mr. Obama toured three states in a $1.1 million Canadian-built bus.

Before it began, the "Magical Misery Tour" was fodder for late night comedians. Jay Leno said the states the president would visit are "Confusion, Delusion and Desperation." (They were Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.)

To justify sticking taxpayers with the bill, Mr. Obama termed this a "listening tour." But he expected his audiences to listen to him, not he to them. He brushed off criticisms with factually untrue statements. For those concerned about the economy, he promised only to deliver a "major speech" on it after his vacation ends.

Mr. Obama has blamed our economic woes on Europe, the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, former President Bush, the Tea Party, Congress -- everything except his own policies. Parents of teenagers are familiar with this behavior, but it is unsettling to see it in a president.

Americans don't buy the excuses. In a Gallup poll Aug. 18, 71 percent disapproved of Mr. Obama's handling of the economy.

So all that's left for the left is intimidation. Expect "gangster government" on steroids between now and the election.

[philunderwood]

Obama and Occupy Wall Street Are One

By David Limbaugh

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

President Obama acts as though he merely sympathizes with the Wall Street occupiers' "broad-based frustration" about how America's financial system works, but he's doing a lot more than sympathizing. He's fanning their flames.

Perhaps we should take a look at what, exactly, Obama is supporting and contrast it with the tea party movement he so roundly condemns.

In May 2010, when a White House dinner guest suggested to Obama that racism was a motivating force behind the tea party opposition to him, he raised nary a finger of objection and even affirmed that there was a racially biased "subterranean agenda" afoot in the anti-Obama movement. About that same time, the administration had lumped the tea party protesters into a group to be monitored as "domestic terrorists."

Ever since this authentic, grass-roots movement spontaneously erupted throughout the nation, Obama and the leftist establishment have engaged in a systematic effort to demonize and discredit tea party protesters as extremist, racist and violent. Nancy Pelosi predicted the protests would lead to a climate of violence. In a recent interview, Obama portrayed tea party ideas as extreme positions that are rejected by "a vast majority of Americans."

Those of us who identify with the movement and have attended some of the rallies know that in their false characterizations, Obama and his supporters are either lying or projecting. The protests have been remarkably peaceful, respectful and lawful. We are talking about Americana here, folks — people who believe in American ideals and who object to the government's bankrupting us and destroying our liberties.

There has been no tea party-instigated violence at these rallies, and there has been no racism. Bearing false witness is egregious; doing so in exploitation of the race issue is worse.

Why do we believe that in defaming tea partyers, Obama is projecting? Simply because he is a community organizer at heart with an ends-justify-the-means ethic. He has been engaged in political street agitation his entire adult life, so it is natural for him to assume his political opponents would engage in the same tactics. But they don't.

We see in the Occupy Wall Street protests — and some of the Service Employees International Union protests that have preceded it — the attitudes and atmosphere that prevail among leftist activists, whose aimless angst is directed at everyone but those most responsible for causing the damage they are decrying: their fellow leftists.

For a bird's-eye view of the type of protest Obama and his fellow leftists pretended to fear in the tea party events, we need look no further than the Wall Street occupier dust-ups. Here hateful and violent rhetoric abound, just as the ugly specter of racism, particularly against Jews, is in full relief, all of which are as verifiable in the YouTube videos of these protests as their absence has been in the tea party videos.

On her blog, Michelle Malkin cites a Denver protester saying, "There's a lot of stuff that needs to change, and it if doesn't, violent revolution will come."

He continues, "If you get the thirteen families that own the world, including George Bush and his administration, get them in front of the White House and hang them and shoot them, because they deserve that." And if that doesn't impress you, how about the protesters "calling for the beheading of 'white kids,' the 'hanging' of capitalists, and the murder of parents," as reported by the blog "Pundit Press"?

This, my friends, is representative of the type of protest our community organizer in chief claims to be "monitoring" and nevertheless supports — the type that has led to more than 750 arrests throughout the country, compared with only one arrest in all the tea party protests.

Hindsight vindicates our early assurances that the tea party protests were not going to lead to violence because they were populated by people who honor the rule of law. Indeed, the tea partyers' lawful behavior is an outworking of their substantive ideals, just as the occupiers' lawlessness is reflective of their underlying anarchy. The former respect proper constitutional restraints; the latter more closely resemble a mob.

With Obama, it's all smoke and mirrors; nothing is as he would have you believe. Every negative thing he says about the tea partyers is false, including that they don't represent the sentiment of the American majority, which is bursting with outrage at Obama's reckless agenda.

And whereas he pretended to fear violence from the tea partyers, he is actually trying to foment unrest among the occupiers. Their lifeblood is class warfare, and he is stoking its flames every single day.

With no ideas left on his plate that a long suffering American public is willing to further indulge, much less embrace, Obama is reduced to what he knows best: stirring public discontentment and unrest, hoping that this will somehow serve his political interests.