Obama's nativist tactics may backfire, given his record of sending jobs overseas

Obama has made the baseless claim that the Chamber of Commerce is spending foreign money on political campaigns. This claim was widely disseminated to the general public through a hysterical ad campaign by the Democratic National Committee accusing the Chamber of Commerce of "stealing our democracy" and featuring an "ominous shot of Chinese currency," suggesting that Chinese people are trying to take over America. Not only was this claim false, but stoking nativism may backfire on Obama politically, since liberal interest groups that back Obama, like unions, receive large amounts of foreign money, and Obama himself has used regulations and subsidies to ship American jobs overseas.

As one writer notes in the Washington Post, "Labor unions are spending millions to tar Republican candidates -- and they take in far more foreign cash than the Chamber." "The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is spending lavishly to elect Democrats. . . takes in nearly $9.2 million per year from foreign nationals, compared to the mere "$100,000," none of it used for political campaigns, that the Chamber "receives from its affiliates abroad" -- less than 1/20th of 1 percent of the Chamber's budget. Moreover, most foreign PAC money is going to Democrats, not Republicans.

And Obama's policies have shipped American jobs overseas. 79 percent of the green-jobs funding contained in the $800 billion stimulus package went to foreign firms, aggravating the nation's trade deficit. Meanwhile, the Administration has paid $150 million a year to Brazilian cotton farmers, and supported a cap-and-trade global warming bill that would drive hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas. (Although Obama and other backers of this “cap-and-trade” concept claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them by driving industry abroad to countries with fewer environmental regulations, resulting in dirtier air, and damage to forests and water supplies). Stoking anti-foreign sentiment may further increase public outrage over administration policies that help foreigners at the expense of Americans -- like its backdoor bailouts of foreign banks, and the $6 billion Obama spent on bailing out socialist Greece.

Obama's attacks on foreign money may also remind Americans of Obama's own 2008 receipt of foreign campaign contributions, which resulted from his campaign's deliberate disabling of computer software that would have thwarted such contributions, as the Wall Street Journal's John Fund and others have pointed out: "As the Washington Post reported, the Obama campaign had turned off its Address Verification System, or AVS, at its Web site. That program should have stopped contributions coming in from citizens of foreign countries -- a violation of federal law. Clearly, the Obama campaign's decision to abandon filters had consequences -- the campaign was forced to refund $33,000 to two Palestinian brothers in the Gaza Strip."

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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The Statist, Ruling Class's New Hero -- Bill Buckley?

It's always amusing when the Left try to tell conservatives how to be conservative

By Richard A. Viguerie

It's easy to use the deceased to claim support for one's positions. The dead aren't around to deny, rebut, and refute false or misleading statements.

William F. Buckley, Jr., intellectual giant and "maker" of the conservative movement, has of late become a crutch for statists and ruling-class elites to denigrate the Tea Parties and the surge of the constitutional, small-government conservative movement.

Liberals trying to smear the Tea Party cause and constitutional, small-government conservative candidates by referring to Buckley are, however, attempting to rewrite history to suit their own agendas and ideology.

For example, E.J. Dionne writes in Monday's Washington Post, "[W]hereas responsible conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. denounced the [John] Birchers and the rest of the lunatic fringe back then, Republicans this time are riding the radical wave."

Steve Benen of the liberal Washington Monthly recently shed crocodile tears in a post entitled, "Where have you gone, William F. Buckley, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you," claiming that "the conservative movement appears to have gone berserk." Benen laid charges of "an unprecedented mainstreaming of once fringe far-right ideas."

In my appearance on CNN's Parker Spitzer show last week, co-host Kathleen Parker tried that gambit with me. Here's a part from the exchange reported by Newsbusters of the Media Research Center:

PARKER: First of all, you started in 1961, here in New York City, with William F. Buckley, and I'm wondering if you think that today's Republican Party is William F. Buckley's party?

VIGUERIE: The Republican Party is not the party that Bill Buckley would want today, but it's moving in that direction.

What was left on CNN's editing room floor was my longer explanation of how Bill Buckley spent the better part of sixty years working against the Kathleen Parkers in the Republican Party.

From his book, God and Man at Yale, through opposing Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, reluctantly supporting Richard Nixon, and helping co-found the Conservative Party of New York because the NY GOP had been captured by liberal Republicans to running for New York City mayor against big-government Republican John Lindsay, Buckley was tirelessly consistent in his opposition to big-government Republicans.

Buckley was for freedom over statism, and he often found members of the Republican Party offering no real alternative to statism. Buckley even was a sometime critic of Ronald Reagan.

Buckley was many things, but two of his most underappreciated qualities were that he was a populist and a constitutionalist. He once famously said, "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

Any large movement has its share of miscreants, and Buckley did spend about one or two percent of his time ostracizing certain people on the right whose outrageous comments distracted from the mission of the conservative movement.

If the liberal intelligentsia were honest brokers, they could spend most of their time berating the extremists, kooks, and flakes on the left, beginning within the Democratic Congressional Caucus or the Obama White House and working outward to many of the left-wing coalitions, organizations, and even media members who are their support network.

Why, for example, are E.J. Dionne and other liberals silent about House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers' October 2010 appearance before a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, a Marxist organization, or the Communist Party's participation in and support for the October 2 One Nation rally, including this post at Barack Obama's Organizing for America website by the National Chairman of the Communist Party USA?

And where were the so-called "reasonable" liberals when other liberals protested Bill Buckley's speeches on college campuses, when liberal Gore Vidal called him a "crypto-Nazi," or when, more contemporarily, another liberal wrote, "Bill Buckley, sniveling racist, dies."

The maturing but still nascent, populist-driven Tea Party and the resurgence of the constitutional small-government conservative movement are very much consistent with Buckley's views. Marxists, Dionne, Benen, Parker, and other statist, ruling-class elites would prefer Republicans who offer little resistance to them. However, they cannot, try as they may, credibly paint the free-market, deficit-reduction, constitutional principles of the Tea Party or the everyday Americans rising in protest as radically fringe.

In my last conversation with Buckley twenty months before he died, he told me that George W. Bush was conservative, but not a conservative. Buckley would have assuredly been driven to his chastising and majestically acerbic pen by the revelation after his death that Bush himself denigrated the conservative movement while in the White House.

I wish he were around to see this movement, especially emerging out of the disastrous past decade of big-government Republicanism, and to refute the statists and ruling class members who have misused his name for their own ideological purposes.

And since they are engaging in speculative talk, allow me to do the same: If Bill Buckley were alive today, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Gadsden flag flying on his yacht.

For those who want to learn more about what Bill Buckley really thought and did, read Buckley himself, such as God and Man at Yale and Up from Liberalism. Also, I highly recommend Lee Edwards' new magnificent biography of Buckley, The Maker of the Movement.

SOURCE

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Troops Will Vote With Their Feet

The last word regarding the proposed repeal of the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military homosexual exclusion law won’t come from the President, Congress, or the courts. The all-volunteer military will have the last word if the homosexual law is repealed; that is, many will vote with their feet to the nation’s peril.

The confluence of efforts by the three branches of government to lift the homosexual ban is unprecedented but so is their failure to consider unfettered service member voices. Ignoring their views potentially places the nation at risk if our volunteers who are already overstretched by nine years of war decide that lifting the homosexual ban is the last straw and then leave. And lifting the ban could also keep qualified candidates with a proclivity to serve from enlisting but no one knows just how many are in either category.

What we do know is the pool of potential volunteers is shrinking with only 25% of the nation’s 17- to 24-year-olds eligible for military service and a fraction of that group demonstrate a proclivity to volunteer. That shrinking pool is drawn from a small segment of the population mostly opposed to open homosexuality in the military such as conservative and religious families with histories of military service.

This pool of eligible volunteers won’t be easily replaced by “eligible” homosexuals who as a category make up only a few percentage points of the total population and, in general, steer clear of military service. Yet gay activists and liberal apologists with no military service would have the American public believe homosexuals are anxious to fill the military’s ranks.

The President, Congress, and the courts disregard the unfettered opinions of our all-volunteer military at great risk, and if Obama and his allies succeed in lifting the ban they have no back-up pool of eligible recruits. That is why Congress had better listen to our troops and their chiefs or get ready to justify conscription for everyone’s sons and daughters.

More HERE

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Public-Sector Unions Choke Taxpayers

John Stossel

"I thought unions were great -- until at Chrysler, the union steward started screaming at me. Working at an unhurried pace, I'd exceeded 'production' for that job."

That comment, left on my blog by a viewer who watched my Fox Business Network show about unions, matches my experience. No one ordered me to slow down, but union rules and union culture at ABC and CBS slowed the work. Sometimes a camera crew took five minutes just to get out of the car.

Now unions conspire with politicians to rip off taxpayers.

Steve Melanga of the Manhattan Institute complains that politicians get union political support by granting government workers generous pensions and health benefits. After those politicians leave office, taxpayers are liable for trillions in unfunded promises.

"It's squeezing out all other spending," Melanga says. "Where are we going to get this $3 trillion dollars? ... When they're (government workers) allowed to retire at 58 and the rest of us are retiring at 60 and 67 -- and by the way we're living to 80 -- it's crazy. The public sector is the version of the European welfare state which, by the way, in Europe, they're actually rolling back."

Jakob wrote: "Are you really this stupid? Do you really want to lower American workers' standards to that of Honduras and China, where democratic unions do not exist? Would you like for us to go back to a time in America before we had unions? When children worked in factories for 14-hour days and health and safety standards simply did not exist?"

These are popular views. But they are wrong. Factories are safer because of free markets. Companies want better workers and must compete to get them. Free markets create wealth that permits parents to send their kids to schools instead of factories. Unions once helped to advance working conditions, but now union work rules mostly retard growth and progress.

Many workers understand that, and that's why only 8 percent of private-sector workers still belong to unions. In the private sector, wage and pension demands are tempered by competition. If one company pays too much, a competitor takes his business.

But governments are monopolies. They face no competition and get their money by force. So they can conspire with public-sector unions to milk taxpayers. That explains the fix we're in today. Something's got to give.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

US military starting to accept homosexuals: "Openly gay recruits can now join the military as a result of a federal court ruling striking down the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law, but they are being warned that they can still be discharged if the ruling is overturned. Cynthia Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the suspension of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is in response to the Sept. 9 decision of a central California federal judge that ruled the law implemented under President Clinton in 1993 was unconstitutional.”

The crime of living: "The new term ‘overcriminalization’ describes the last few decades’ legislative orgy of criminalizing trivial or harmless behavior. Under ‘zero tolerance’ the legal system has shifted ever closer to a vast police state. From 2000 to 2007 Congress added 452 new federal crimes to the 4,450 already in effect and the roughly 300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally. ‘Get tough’ punishments and innovative new crimes have brought career-making headlines to politicians, who encountered little resistance.”

Would you like a union with that, comrade?: "Workers at some of America’s fast food restaurants could be in for some interesting times soon. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is attempting to unionize several Jimmy John’s sandwich stores in the Minneapolis area. The IWW’s campaign against Jimmy John’s could be the start of organizing efforts at several other restaurant chains. (Today, only 1.3 percent of workers in the food service industry are union members.) This should concern not only restaurateurs, but also consumers and young workers.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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