There’s an interesting discussion going on right now about the possibility and desirability of Sarah making her way to Arizona next year to campaign for John McCain. It’s all speculation at this point because the challenger hasn’t announced.

I mean…just look at her.

But seriously, is there anything more fun than speculating about what Sarah might do? Not for my money…

The reason it came up is because Rasmussen has McCain and potential challenger J.D. Hayworth in a statistical dead heat at 45-43 Maverick.

Bill Kristol at the Standard thinks Sarah will ride to the rescue in the event McCain is about to fall.

I couldn’t disagree more. I can’t see Sarah Palin sticking it to her base by going back on her word to only back Conservatives. No way. That doesn’t happen.

What’s more though…? I don’t think Sarah owes McCain anything. Listen to me, Sarah Palin would have been where she is now one way or another. Look at her. If it wasn’t Maverick, it would have been someone else.

But more likely than that it would have been Sarah Palin herself. I knew who Sarah Palin was before McCain picked her. In fact, I’m pretty sure I posted something to the effect that I hoped he would pick her during the run-up last year. Can anyone tell me with a straight face that Sarah Palin would never have wound up on the big stage without John McCain?

Ludicrous I tell you. Ludicrous.

Justice McNamara said here a little while ago that “Sarah Palin is going to be President one day. It’s inevitable so accept it and live with it. Its star power…and she has it.” This is true. I think there’s more to it than just star power, but it’s true nonetheless.

But it’s true whether John McCain ever picked her for V.P. Some people are stars. Sarah Palin is one of them. She doesn’t owe John McCain anything anymore except maybe a polite thank you and a nice bottle of scotch for his retirement. All John McCain did was accelerate the inevitable.

Incidentally, I just wanted to highlight one of the funniest lines I’ve ever read in a blog post. Allahpundit:

Remember, Reid and The One are itching to revive amnesty in the Senate next year as part of their grand “piss off every last independent in America” strategy.

I literally almost fell off my chair laughing when I read that. I’m still laughing.

But, if that’s true, and I for one happen to believe it is, it’s just another reason that Sarah has to run, if at all, for the Conservative. This is assuming that Hayworth is not an amnesty guy, of course.

In the end, it’s probably most palatable for everyone if Sarah just declines to get involved with Arizona at all. But there’s no way she campaigns for McCain against a viable Conservative candidate.

She’s too right for that.

Interesting article from, of all places, the New York Times today regarding the “double-edged sword” of regular screening for breast and cervical cancer in women. Basically, the argument is that sometimes increased or too frequent testing can have harmful effects on women while too infrequent screenings may lead to missed indications of the onset of malignancy.

This is the point dear readers. Information is good. Ordinarily, the more information at our disposal the better. The more data we have on the pros and cons of any medical procedure or test the better.

That’s not the issue though and, not surprisingly, the NYT misses or simply ignores the point as they so often do. The relevant question is, who is the proper decision maker concerning whether women should or should not undergo a given test? The answer tothat question is, quite frankly, more important in the long run than whether more tests or less tests are the better option:

The challenge of persuading patients and doctors to accept such standards requires a transformational shift in thinking, particularly when the disease involved is as prevalent, as deadly, and as potentially curable as cancer. How do you convince them that it is in their best interest to play the odds when they have been conditioned for so long to not gamble on health? After all, for the one in 1,904 women in their 40s whose life would be saved by early detection of breast cancer, taking the risk would in retrospect seem a bad choice.

“This represents a broader understanding that the efforts to detect cancer early can be a two-edged sword,” said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth who is among the pioneers of research into the negative effects of early detection. “Yes, it helps some people, but it harms others.”

Dr. Welch said this week’s recommendations could mark a turning point in public acceptance of that notion. “Now we’re trying to negotiate that balance,” he said. “There’s no right answer, but I can tell you that the right answer is not always to start earlier, look harder and look more frequently.”

That concept is proving easier to swallow in the halls of Dartmouth Medical School than in the halls of Congress. Coming as they did at the height of debate over a sweeping health care overhaul, the recommendations have provided fresh ammunition for those who warn that greater government involvement in medical decision-making would lead to rationing of health care. It has not mattered that the breast cancer screening recommendation is only advisory, and that the federal government, the American Cancer Society, and numerous private insurers have said they will not adopt it.

Of course it doesn’t matter. Just because the NYT is confident that the Government won’t ration care doesn’t mean they won’t. In fact, based on the NYT track record in predicting what Government will or will not do, you’ve got pretty damn good odds betting against them on any given issue.

Why does anyone need the Government to advise on this issue anyway? Rapid dissemination of information isn’t an issue anymore and hasn’t been for half a century. If Dartmouth Medical School, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists or anyone else has data or research they think is important let them publish it and subject to review. This is the way it’s been done since time immemorial.

The problem arises when Government, who always has an agenda, gets involved and starts issuing “advisories” from on high. Who cares if the task force’s recommendations aren’t binding now? The fact that a Government agency took a position on this issue is enough to make any rational person stop and ask why. And when no less an authority than the American Cancer Society comes back and says the Government is backing the wrong horse, it makes it even less likely that the Government made the right decision.

For a decade now we’ve gone through this charade with the “global warming” idiots who have been proven unequivocally wrong after several phony IPCC studies were debunked in their entirety. The Obama administration, through the Preventive Services Task Force, has now picked a side in a debate over when women should have mammograms performed before anyone has had a chance to put one sides analysis through the proper peer review ringer. Couple that with the fact that Government run health care will lead to rationing and Kay Bailey Hutchinson is right:

One life out of 1,904 to be saved,” Ms. Hutchison said, “but the choice is not going to be yours. It’s going to be someone else that has never met you, that does not know family history.” She added, “This is not the American way of looking at our health care coverage.”

If the Obama administration was ever serious about returning science to its rightful place, they should immediately retract the task force’s recommendations and let science, real science, hammer this out the way it was meant to be. Put your findings out there for the world and let science have at it.

Otherwise we may just find out that, like there’s no such thing as anthropogenic global warming, Dartmouth and the Federal Government were wrong.

George Will has a good one today at WaPo talking about how States might potentially head-off any Federal incursion into their own health care systems.

It’s not easy, but basically the plan would be for the State’s to enact Amendments to their own Constitutions guaranteeing that private choice in medical care shall not be infringed nor penalties imposed for failing to obtain coverage. Will recounts an Arizona initiative to do just that:

In 2006, long before there was an Obama administration determined to impose a command-and-control federal health-care system, a young orthopedic surgeon walked into the Goldwater Institute here with an idea. The institute, America’s most potent advocate of limited government, embraced Eric Novack’s idea for protecting Arizonans from health-care coercion. In 2008, Arizonans voted on Novack’s proposed amendment to the state’s Constitution:

“No law shall be passed that restricts a person’s freedom of choice of private health care systems or private plans of any type. No law shall interfere with a person’s or entity’s right to pay directly for lawful medical services, nor shall any law impose a penalty or fine, of any type, for choosing to obtain or decline health care coverage or for participation in any particular health care system or plan.”

Read the article for Will’s Constitutionality analysis, which effectively boils down to ‘it very well might be found Constitutional’. The only thing I’ll add to it is that the question, I think, will ultimately come down first to whether Congress intended to completely “occupy the field” and second, more importantly, whether Congress even has the right to do so with an issue such as Health Care.

So who goes first? Oklahoma? Texas? Will notes that despite being outspent 5 to 1 by opponents of the initiative, the measure lost by less than 9,000 votes out of 2.1 million cast. That’s good news for State’s that want to get a jump on throwing up as many roadblocks to ObamaCare as possible.

So be the first to call your Governor and suggest it. Hell I may even do so with Jersey’s newly-minted Republican, if only for shits and giggles.

Russ

Who needs that?

Surely not us.

One connection that’s not talked about often enough is that between economic superiority and military superiority. They obviously go hand in hand. Your two most prominent examples being how we marshaled our resources in the 40’s to defeat the Socialist Nazis and how we did so again in the 80’s to defeat the Communist Soviets. One involved bloodshed and the other, excluding for this exercise the proxy wars, did not, but the fact remains that both were won as much because free enterprise will always defeat collectivist economies as they were won because free people have more for which to fight.

A devastating consequence of Obama’s systematic deconstruction of our economic engine will inevitably be that our military dominance will suffer:

The new dynamic - in which the U.S. remains a world force, but does not hold the pre-eminent position it attained after World War II - is the result of global financial centers shifting to Asia, said Stephen Daggett, a defense policy and budget specialist for the Congressional Research Service.

“The days of the American Century were really in the last 50 years of the 20th century,” told members of the House Armed Services Committee.

This is bad news. For all of the liberals whining about our military for the last century, nobody can even plausibly contend that we’ve ever had aspirations of expansion and conquest beyond our present borders. We may set up shop in most corners of the globe, but those outposts are and have always been defensive in nature. The trouble arises when the balance of military power shifts to collectivist nations who do have expansionist tendencies. Give those nations an opening and they will take advantage.

Still, military spending as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product has remained relatively slight at 1 percent currently, compared with a post-World War II peak of 14 percent during the Korean War, Mr. Donnelly said.

“It seems this administration finds massive amounts of money for bailout and [stimulus spending] but not enough to fund the basic money needed for defensive hardware and personnel,” said Rep. Trent Franks, Arizona Republican.

While information from behind the Silk Curtain is, as usual, notoriously difficult to analyze accurately, China by comparison is and has been spending close to 5% of their GDP on their military. The double edged sword of our own shifting priorities under Democratic rule and China’s economic juggernaut with their clear desire to challenge the U.S. for global dominance does not bode well for stability in the not too distant future.

Like so many other issues, why liberals refuse to learn unmistakable lessons from history is truly baffling. Try as you may, but at the end of the day the only rational conclusion to which one can come is that liberalism is indeed a sickness of the mind whereby all analytic faculties are consumed and neutralized by an overwhelming lust for the power to control man’s destiny.

I don’t think China will make a direct move on us anytime soon. But based on the bluster from other hostile nations over the past 11 months, don’t be surprised if they do. Joe Biden told us that the world will challenge Barack Obama.

In possibly his only prescient moment, Biden was absolutely correct.

Russ

Dude, Nancy’s not F’ing around.

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2]

“Criminal penalties

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses.  Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

These people literally have never cracked the seal on a copy of the Constitution. In fact, I’m so confident that this would be declared unconstitutional that I am pledging that if I’m ever in a position to do so, I will do whatever it takes to commit “felony willful evasion” and let the chips fall where they may.

In response to the JCT letter, [ranking member of the House Ways & Means Committee Dave] Camp (R-MI) said:  “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

Sometimes I post the things I write over at Open Salon just to get a reaction from more left-leaning type of folk. Just today, in response to an assertion I made that liberals are never in their right mind, I was treated to a comment giving me the dictionary definition of “liberal”, part of which is “favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.”

I have to wonder how this provision, a near absolute in Pelosi’s mind, squares with that commenter’s perception of what it means to be “liberal”. My guess is that it’s perfectly OK to toss Conservatives in jail; we ain’t people like they are.

Of course it does. Every liberal policy has unintended consequences. That’s why it’s a law.

The other headline I was contemplating for this post was “WaPo: Hey, those individual mandate fines are way too low bro.” That would have been somewhat misleading, as the article is written by Martin Feldstein and he doesn’t actually suggest the need for higher fines. But the unavoidable conclusion from the facts he posits in the article is that once people figure out how best to avoid the higher premiums inevitably caused by ObamaCare, one of the 111 new bureaucracies invented under ObamaCare will have to consistently raise the fines for failing to insure until they’re at a level that makes it a real penalty for not insuring.

The higher premium level would cause others who are currently insured to drop coverage, pushing premiums even higher. The result would be a spiral of rising premiums and shrinking numbers of insured.

In an attempt to prevent this, the draft legislation provides penalties for individuals who choose not to buy insurance and for employers that do not offer health insurance. But the levels of these fines are generally too low to cause a rational individual to insure.

Feldstein goes on to explain how families and individuals in most situations will find it far more financially sound to forego insurance coverage and pay the fine than do the reverse. How long do you think it will take before Congress realizes this and starts making the penalties really hurt?

Consider: 27 million people are covered by health insurance purchased directly, i.e. outside employer-based plans. The average cost of an insurance policy with family coverage in 2009 is $13,375. A married couple with a median family income of $75,000 who choose not to insure would be subject to a fine of 2.5 percent of that $75,000, or $1,875. So the family would save a net $11,500 by not insuring. If a serious illness occurs — a chronic condition or a condition that requires surgery — they could then buy insurance. Since fewer than one family in four has annual health-care costs that exceed $10,000, the decision to drop coverage looks like a good bet. For a lower-income family, the fine is smaller, and the incentive to be uninsured is even greater.

So, ObamaCare will cause untold numbers of individuals and families to drop their insurance and pay the fine in order to put the money back in their pockets. Less insured and higher insurance premiums; this will inevitably be the legacy of ObamaCare, at least until we start seeing people go to jail for refusing to buy coverage, which we will.

Couple this with the Examiner editorial today:

That American citizens should be fined or even put in federal prison for refusing to purchase government-approved health insurance is as un-American as any idea we can imagine. But such a mandate is the very heart of the bill written behind closed doors by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her privileged pals. If their bill is approved by the House tomorrow, we will be a big step closer to the day when everybody gets their health care insurance through the government or from an approved insurer offering policies that meet meticulously detailed specifications contained in thousands of pages of federal regulations.

The Law of Unintended Consequences is as consistent as gravity. The reason is because supply and demand and the laws of human nature are also as consistent as gravity. Who in their right mind would buy insurance at 10 grand a year knowing that they can buy insurance in the event a catastrophic event occurs when they can save the 10 grand and pay a thousand dollar fine? Nobody.

But liberals, as we know, are never in their right mind.

And don’t you forget it.

Chris Stirewalt at the Examiner draws a great parallel between the Obama/Clinton primary last year and why a Conservative/Republican streetfight will be a boon for our chances in 2010 and 2012, rather than the detriment Democrats so desperately wish it to be.

Obama beat Clinton for the same reason that Hoffman may win in upstate New York. He offered an authentic, passionate vision of his party’s core principles and did it in a way that didn’t make moderates uncomfortable.

I’m not sure exactly what makes “modeates uncomfortable”. Is it that Doug Hoffman just looks comfortable? Is it that he’s relatively soft-spoken? I don’t know, but I wonder whether making moderates uncomfortable is what Frum/Noonan are really worried about. Hmmm…

Anyway, aside from that question, Stirewalt is right. It is the republican establishment that drives conservatives away, rather than the reverse. We are the base here, not them. Picking Dede was exactly the reason the tea parties happened this summer and why they culminated in D.C. on 9/12, with an overwhelming presence of signs demanding an end to legacy politics. The fact that Doug Hoffman not only has a chance but is leading considerably only proves that that sentiment is far more widespread than Democrats and liberals would have you believe.

The question becomes then whether my prediction that for every one moderate/independent we lose because of a Doug Hoffman, two Independent/Conservatives will take their place because of a Doug Hoffman, is accurate. There’s no real way to quantify my theory, but the polls certainly seem to have borne out this approach.

Complaining about the pressure from conservatives, James Ellis, one of the party chairmen who picked Scozzafava, told the New York Times, “It’s a detriment to democracy.” Since when did democracy consist of 11 party hacks meeting at Sergi’s Italian Restaurant in Potsdam?

Yeh, since when the hell did that happen? Another action alert of sorts that was brought to my attention by a gentleman who commented on one of my earlier pieces, is that Conservatives need to crash the party chairmen regime and crash it hard. Go here for information on his plan to make Conservatives the nominators in local parties nationwide. The “Precinct Project” is a wonderful idea and something in which many of us can participate without having to commit the time needed for actually running for office.

Republicans such as Ellis and Gingrich think the Obama team is right that Hoffman’s success spells trouble for next year. They think conservatives will take over the party and drive out moderates.

But the lesson of the Obama ascendancy is that an enthusiastic base coupled with a reasonable-sounding candidate can win elections.

That is indeed the lesson to be learned from all of this. David Frum won’t learn it, but I am confident that millions more of us will. I happen to think “reasonable-sounding” is perhaps a bit too elitist itself, (I wonder whether Stirewalt thinks a Sarah Palin is “reasonable-souding”), but at least it gets the point that it is Conservatism that drives the GOP and that the sooner the establishment learns that the better.

On the other hand, I’m fully prepared to go to war with the GOP in 2010 and let the chips fall where they may. I for one think that the Obama ascendancy lesson will play out on a grand scale and we will reclaim the party and the Country in truly spectacular numbers.

In PURR we Trust.

Dennis Prager over at FrontPageMag does a great job explaining what I was trying to say here about how the vast majority of the Left are simply parishioners in the pew desperately seeking meaning from the 10% or so doing the preaching from the pulpit.

It’s alliteration Wednesday!

How is one to rationally explain the Democrats’ belief that the government taking over another one-sixth of the American economy is a good thing?

The answer is religion.

Given the huge economic failures that the left itself attributes to Medicare and Medicaid and given the economic collapse or near collapse of these systems in other countries, the left’s prescriptions can only be explained in one way: The left has made its views a form of religion.

Most individuals on the left are not religious, but virtually all people, secular and religious, liberal and conservative, yearn to believe in dogma, i.e., absolute beliefs that transcend reason. For people on the left in Europe, the United States and elsewhere, belief in the state — the notion that the state can do a better job at helping people and making a good society — is one such dogma. This applies especially to educating the young and to health care.

That’s exactly right. I think this is the dogma. The State, for those on the Left, substitutes for God. Somebody has to be in charge but individuals doing so for themselves is anathema to a secular dogma. Since there is no God, the State will do nicely.

The problem, of course, is simply that doing so elevates mortals to deity status and instills in those mortals deity-esque responsibility for and control over matters of life, death and liberty. Apparently a Harvard Law degree and a soothing baritone suffice for conferring on the chosen one power over the rest of mankind.

One cannot understand the left if one does not appreciate the world of dogmas in which most left-wing thinkers live. What the monastery is to monks, the university and the mainstream media are to the left.

That is the only way to explain the left’s belief that government-run health care, having the government take over so much more of society, raising taxes yet again, expanding government even more and increasing the number of people employed by the government will all be good for America.

That’s spot-on as well. We’ve said over and over here how there is not a single, rational argument for ObamaCare anywhere on the Left. The argument can’t exist. So in order to sell it, the 90% of parishoner liberals must simply accept the Word of the 10% as law handed down from on high. Again, two minutes of thought is all it takes to dismantle any alleged benefit from government-run health care. But to a believer in the Church of PURR, thought need not exist because the answers are provided to them by the apostles in Congress, the ivory tower and the legacy media.

(G’head, make my day by telling me the same argument can be used to disprove the existence of God. I dare you.)

Dogma explains why it is useless to point out to the left how the left has economically crippled California, once the most prosperous, most adventurous, most successful “country” in the world (it has an economy that would make it about the seventh largest country in the world). Likewise, it does not matter to blacks what Democrats have done to their cities. As they watch their cities crumble, they will once again vote overwhelmingly for the party that oversaw this destruction.

“Facts”, being relative to the preachers on the Left, are literally irrelevant to the parishioners. Almost every single social ill in this Country can be traced directly to a policy instituted and administered by the Left. All of them are inevitable consequences of the entitlement ethos and all of them are preventable and correctable with liberty and capitalism. It’s that simple. Really.

I don’t think it’s “useless” to point these things out to the Left. To the contrary, I think we need to do it more often and more forcefully. Not doing so plays into the nonsensical concept that bi-partisanship, consensus and collegiality are effective to solving problems. Not enough of us have said point blank to every liberal we meet that they’re wrong, and here’s why. Another reason the David Frum school of building a majority won’t work is because much of that which he suggests Republicans adopt as a platform are wrong. You can’t build a bridge with quicksand. Doing so to appease the Quicksandocrats is going to land a whole hell of a lot of us in the river. Same thing goes for building ‘consensus’ and fostering ‘bi-partisanship’ with ideas and policies that can’t work.

In my experience, people very rarely come out of personal belief scriptures on their own. There’s just no reason to do so. It’s comfortable in the pew. The only way that process can even begin is for them to hear the truth. If they don’t want to hear it, that’s their business, but it’s nonetheless my business to tell it and to keep on telling it. We have a better chance of breaking through to people if we speak from a position of unabashed confidence in the rightness of our ideas. We have history, logic, reason and comon sense on our side. What are we afraid of?

Frankly, I don’t yearn for what is unseen. Rather, having a realistic understanding of the limitations of human beings, I am in awe of what I already see — the unique American achievement of affluence, liberty, decency, opportunity and medical innovations.

While I happen to believe in God, neither do I. “The unique American achievement of affluence, liberty, decency, opportunity and medical innovations” didn’t happen because the Founders saw discrimination, racism, sexism, injustice and every other imaginary exploitation of individuals on which the Left bases its ideology, lurking behind every corner. It happened because they saw the glory of individual potential when unleashed from the shackles of serfdom. It happened because they recognized that the State’s only legitimate functions are to provide security from tyrants and demigods who would impede that potential. It happened because they understood that man is endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

The Left is looking for those rights and that glory from the Church of PURR. They will never, ever find it.

Russ

Can any sane person argue that that is an apt description for every victim of the 9/11 attacks?

No, so we’ll leave it to the insane council members in Kent, Connecticut to do it for us.

Peter Gadiel, whose son James was murdered on 9/11, wants to inscribe those words on a memorial plaque for his son.

Now, I guess insofar as it seems to be a plaque hung by the town hall and not his son’s actual headstone, I don’t really have much of an argument. On the other hand, I would certainly say that Mr. Gadiel has every right to prohibit such a plaque honoring his son if the words are not on it.

I can’t see this resolving in Mr. Gadiel’s favor, but this story is important to highlight the larger problem of Dhimmitude.

For those who don’t know, “dhimmitude” is essentially the relationship of non-Muslim people to Islam under Islamic rule. I and others use it colloquially to describe people who give undue or unreasonable favor to all things Islam. In this case, the idiot councilwoman who is offended by Mr. Gadiel’s insistence that an historical fact be included on his son’s memorial plaque is a “Dhimmi”; she is a person who will bend over backwards so as not to offend Islam, regardless of the facts of the situation.

(For more on Dhimmitude, go here and here)

James Gadiel and nearly 3,000 other people were murdered by Muslim terrorists. That is a fact. James’ Father merely wants that to be part of the historical record as it applies to a memorial to honor his son’s death at the hands of those Muslim terrorists. For no other reason than to appease Muslim terrorists, the council in his hometown would rather not erect the memorial to placate Islam than honor a murdered American in a proper, factual way.

Despicable. And be sure and read about the EU getting ready to make it a crime to oppose Islam in any way. It is Dhimmis like Ruth Epstein who will pave the way for laws like that in the United States.

We wish Mr. Gadiel all the best in his fight.

Stand up or bow down, there is no third option.

…it really does sound bad.

Thomas Sowell has been on fire recently, probably because few people understand the depth of the threat Obama poses to the American experiment as well as he does.

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers– that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Did you?

Sometimes we get so lost in the details, be they of ObamaCare or Cap and Trade or this Czar or that Czar, that we forget to take a step back and look at the totality of the circumstances. Look at what this man has done and is trying to do to this Country in just nine months?

It continues:

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.

“Does any of this sound like America?”

No, it doesn’t. None of it does. This is the hope and change so many people voted for in November. Obama wasn’t exactly coy about his intentions either. He was more or less unabashed in his desire to remake America, to transform it into something in his own image. Many of us tried to warn our fellow Americans. We failed. These are the repercussions.

Given what’s transpired in less than a year, can anyone imagine where we’ll be in 4 years? Does anyone want to imagine? I’ve always tried to be as diplomatic as I could in these pages when discussing Obama’s foibles. Sure I’ve called him an idiot and a moron, because he is, but I’ve tried not to ascribe nefarious intentions to his actions.

I said yesterday and I’ll say it again, it’s becoming harder and harder each day for me to do so. Collectively these are not the actions of a sane man honoring a sacred oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. These are the actions of a dictator silencing opposition and implementing a radical totalitarian regime. Sorry, there’s just no other way to say it without rationalizing.

Mr. Sowell:

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama’s own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year– each bill more than a thousand pages long– too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question– and the biggest question for this generation.

Contempt. That epitomizes Obama’s feelings toward this Country. If the adage “actions speak louder than words” is still applicable in today’s world, there is no other way to interpret Obama’s ideas about America. He hates America as it was originally founded. He hates the concepts of individual liberty and enumerated, decentralized power.

I challenge you, how else can you possibly interpret his actions? Is there another rational explanation for his moves thus far? I’ve tried, believe me. I’ve tried to give him the benefit of stupidity. I’ve tried to give him the benefit of naivety. I’ve tried to give him the benefit of his being unprepared for the job.

None of them explains his administration. Taken individually or collectively, stupidity, naivety and lack of preparedness simply cannot explain the explicit actions taken by this administration thus far.

Mr. Sowell is right. WWII was the defining event of my grandparents generation. Whether enough Americans wake up and realize what is happening to the greatest country ever conceived on earth before their very eyes in time to stop it, is the defining question of mine.