Barack Obama's Rules for Revolution

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Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution
The Alinsky Model

“We are five days away from fundamentally
transforming the United States of America.”

- Barack Obama, election eve, 2008

     Barack Obama is an enigma. He won the 2008 presidential election claiming to be a moderate and wanting to bring Americans together and govern from the center. But since he took office, his actions have been far from moderate. He has apologized to foreign dictators abroad for sins he alleges his own country committed and appointed a self-described communist (Van Jones) and an admirer of Mao Zedong to top White House posts. He has used the economic crisis to take over whole industries and has attempted to nationalize the health care system. In his first nine months in office, these actions had already made his presidency one of the most polarizing in history.

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     Many Americans have gone from hopefulness, through unease, to a state of alarm as the President shows a radical side that was only partially visible during his campaign. To understand Obama’s presidency, Americans need to know more about the man and the nature of his political ideas. In particular, they need to become familiar with a Chicago organizer named Saul Alinsky and the strategy of deception he devised to promote social change. 

     Of no other occupant of the White House can it be said that he owed his understanding of the political process to a man and a philosophy so outside the American mainstream, or so explicitly dedicated to opposing it. The pages that follow provide an analysis of the political manual that Saul Alinsky wrote, which outlines his method for advancing radical agendas. The manual was originally titled “Rules for Revolution” which is an accurate description of its content. Later, Alinsky changed the title to Rules for Radicals. After familiarizing themselves with its ideas, readers may want to reconsider what Obama may have meant on election eve 2008 when he told his followers: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”1

1   Barak Obama You Tube Speech

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Alinsky and Obama

     Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and died in California in 1972. His preferred selfdescription was “rebel” and his entire life was devoted to organizing a revolution in America to destroy a system he regarded as oppressive and unjust. By profession he was a “community organizer,” the same term employed by his most famous disciple, Barack Obama, to describe himself. 

     Alinsky came of age in the 1930s and was drawn to the world of Chicago gangsters, whom he had encountered professionally as a sociologist. He sought out and became a social intimate of the Al Capone mob and of Capone enforcer Frank Nitti who took the reins when Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion in 1931. Later Alinsky said, “[Nitti] took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student.”2 While Alinsky was not oblivious to the fact that criminals were dangerous, like a good leftist he held “society” - and capitalist society in particular - responsible for creating them.  In his view, criminality was not a character problem but a result of the social environment, in particular the system of private property and individual rights,  which radicals like him were determined to change.

2  Sanford Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel, 1992, p. 20

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      Alinsky’s career as an organizer spanned the period in which the Communist Party was the major political force on the American left. Although he was never formally a Communist and did not share their tactical views on how to organize a revolution, his attitude towards the Communists was fraternal, and he saw them as political allies. In the 1969 “Afterword” to his book Reveille for Radicals he explained his attitude in these words: “Communism itself is irrelevant. The issue is whether they are on our side….”3  Alinsky’s unwillingness to condemn Communists extended to the Soviet empire - a regime which murdered more leftists than all their political opponents put together.  This failure to condemn communism (his biographer describes him as an “anti-anti communist”) contrasts dramatically with the extreme terms in which he was willing to condemn his own country as a system worth “burning.”4 

     Communists played a formative role in the creation of the CIO - the “progressive” coalition of industrial unions - led by John L. Lewis and then Walter Reuther. In the late 1940s, Reuther purged the Communists from the CIO. Reuther was a socialist

3 Reveille for Radicals, Vintage edition 1969, p. 227
4 Rules for Radicals, p. xiii

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but, unlike Alinsky, an anti-Communist and an American patriot. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky, a deracinated Jew, refers to the ferreting out of Communists who were in practice Soviet agents as a “holocaust,” even though in the McCarthy era only a handful of Communists ever went to jail. 

     By his own account, Alinsky was too independent to join the Communist Party but instead became a forerunner of the left that emerged in the wake of the Communist fall. Like leftists who came of age after the Soviet collapse, Alinsky understood that there was something flawed in the Communist outlook. But, also like them, he never really examined what those flaws might be. In particular he never questioned the Marxist view of society and human nature, or its goal of a utopian future, and never examined its connection to the epic crimes that Marxists had committed.  He never asked himself whether the vision of a society which would be socially equal was itself the source of the totalitarian state.

     Instead, Alinsky identified the problem posed by Communism as inflexibility and  “dogmatism” and proposed as a solution that radicals should be “political relativists,” that they should take an agnostic view of means and ends. For Alinsky, the revolutionary’s purpose is to undermine the system

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and then see what happens. The Alinsky radical has a single principle - to take power from the Haves and give it to the Have-nots. What this amounts to in practice is a political nihilism - a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the “people” (who, in the fashion common to dictators, are designated as such by the revolutionary elite).  This is the classic revolutionary formula in which the goal is power for the political vanguard who get to feel good about themselves in the process. 

     Alinsky created several organizations, and inspired others, including his training institute for organizers, which he called the Industrial Areas Foundation. But his real influence was as the Lenin of the post-Communist left. Alinsky was the practical theorist for progressives who had supported the Communist cause to regroup after the fall of the Berlin Wall and mount a new assault on the capitalist system. It was Alinsky who wove the inchoate relativism of the post-Communist left into a coherent whole, and helped to form the coalition of communists, anarchists, liberals, Democrats, black racialists, and social justice activists who spearheaded the anti-globalization movement just before 9/11, and then created the anti-Iraq War movement, and finally positioned one of their own to enter the

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White House. As Barack Obama summarized these developments at the height of his campaign: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”5 

     Infiltrating the institutions of American society and government - something the “counter-cultural” radicals of the 1960s were reluctant to do - was Alinsky’s modus operandi. While Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were confronting Lyndon Johnson’s Pentagon and creating riots at the Democratic convention, Alinsky’s organizers were insinuating themselves into Johnson’s War on Poverty program and directing federal funds into their own organizations and causes. 

     The sixties left had no connection to the labor movement. But Alinsky did. The most important radical labor organizer of the time, Cesar Chavez, who was the leader of the United Farmworkers Union, was trained by Alinsky, and worked for him for ten years. Alinsky also shaped the future of the civil rights movement after the death of Martin Luther King. When racial unrest erupted in Rochester, New York, Alinsky was called in by activists to  pressure Eastman-Kodak to hire more blacks, a form of racial extortion that became a standard of the civil  rights movement under the leadership of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

5 Obama's 2nd you Tube Speech

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     Alinsky also pioneered the alliance of radicals with the Democratic Party, which ended two decades of confrontation climaxing in the convention riot of 1968. Through Chavez, Alinsky had met Robert Kennedy who supported his muscling of Kodak executives. But the Kennedys were only one of the avenues through which Alinsky organizers now made their way into the inner circles of the Democratic Party. 

     In 1969, the year that publishers reissued Alinsky’s first book, Reveille for Radicals, a Wellesley undergraduate named Hillary Rodham submitted her 92-page senior thesis on Alinsky’s theories (she interviewed him personally for the project).6  In her conclusion Hillary compared Alinsky to Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King. 

     The title of Hillary’s thesis was “There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” In this title she had singled out the single most important Alinsky contribution to the radical cause - his embrace of political nihilism. An SDS radical once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the  revolution.” In other words the cause - whether inner city blacks or women - is never the

6 MSNBC Article

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real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals. 

    Guided by Alinsky principles,  post-Communist radicals are not idealists but Machiavellians. Their focus is on means rather than ends, and therefore they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies in the way their admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agenda, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is resources and power.

     The following anecdote about Alinsky’s teachings as recounted by The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza nicely illustrates the focus of Alinsky radicalism: “When Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: ‘You want to organize for power!’7 

     In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: “From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives,

7 Ryan Lizza, “The Agitator,” The New Republic 3/9/07. http://www. pickensdemocrats.org/info /TheAgitator_070319.htm. The source of the anecdote is Horwitt, op., cit.

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dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.”8  The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.

     Unlike the Communists who  identified their goal as a Soviet state - and thereby generated opposition to their schemes - Alinsky and his followers organize their power bases without naming the end game, without declaring a specific future they want to achieve - socialism, communism, a dictatorship of the proletariat, or anarchy. Without committing themselves to concrete principles or a specific future, they organize exclusively to build a power base which they can use to destroy the existing society and its economic system. By refusing to commit to principles or to identify their goal, they have been able to organize a coalition of all the elements of the left who were previously divided by disagreements over means and ends.

     The demagogic standard of the revolution is “democracy” - a democracy which upends all social hierarchies, including those based on merit. This is why Alinsky built his initial power base among the underclass and the urban poor. The call to make the last ones first is a powerful religious imperative.   

8 Rules for Radicals, p. 113

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But in politics it functions as a lever to upset every social structure and foundation. For Alinsky radicals, policies are not important in themselves; they are instrumental - means to expanding the political base.

     To Alinsky radicals, “democracy” means getting those who are in, out. Their goal is to mobilize the poor and “oppressed” as a battering ram to bring down the system. Hillary concludes her thesis with these words: “Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared - just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths - democracy.” But democracy as understood by the American founders is not “the most radical of all political faiths” or, if it is, they regarded it as dangerous enough to put checks and balances in its way to restrain it. 

     When Hillary graduated from Wellesley in 1969, she was offered a job with Alinsky’s new training institute in Chicago. She opted instead to enroll at Yale Law School, where she met her husband, and future president, Bill Clinton. In March 2007, the Washington Post  reported that she had kept her connections even in the White House and gave Alinsky’s army support: “As  first lady, Clinton

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occasionally lent her name to projects endorsed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Alinsky group that had offered her a job in 1968. She raised money and attended two events organized by the Washington Interfaith Network, an IAF affiliate.”9 

     Unlike Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama never personally met Saul Alinsky. But as a young man, he became an adept practitioner of Alinsky’s methods. In 1986, at the age of 23 and only three years out of Columbia University, Obama was hired by the Alinsky team to organize residents on the South Side [of Chicago] “while learning and applying Alinsky’s philosophy of street-level democracy.”10  The group that Obama joined was part of a network that included the Gamaliel Foundation, a religious group that operated on Alinsky principles. Obama became director of the Developing Communities Project, an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, where he worked for the next three years on initiatives that ranged from job training to school reform to hazardous waste cleanup. A reporter who researched the projects sums them in these words: “the proposed solution to every problem on the South Side was a distribution of government funds ...”11 

9    Washington Post.com 1
10  Washington Post.com 2
11 David Freddoso, The Case Against Barack Obama, 2008, cited in Discover the Networks

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     Three of Obama’s mentors in Chicago were trained at the Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation,12  and for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.13  One of the three, Gregory Galluzo, shared with Ryan Lizza the actual manual for training new organizers, which he said was little different from the version he used to train Obama in the 1980s.  According to Lizza, “It is filled with workshops and chapter headings on understanding power: ‘power analysis,’ ‘elements of a power organization,’ ‘the path to power.’ Galluzzo told me that many new trainees have an aversion to Alinsky’s gritty approach because they come to organizing as idealists rather than realists. The Alinsky manual instructs them to get over these hang-ups. ‘We are not virtuous by not wanting power,’ it says. ‘We are really cowards for not wanting power,’ because ‘power is good’ and ‘powerlessness is evil.’”14  

     According to Lizza, who interviewed both Galluzo and Obama, “the other fundamental lesson Obama was taught was Alinsky’s maxim that self- 
 
12 Ryan Lizza, “The Agitator,” The New Republic, 3/9/07
13 Discover the Networks
14 Ibid.

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interest is the only principle around which to organize people. (Galluzzo’s manual goes so far as to advise trainees in block letters: ‘Get rid of do-gooders in your church and your organization.’) Obama was a fan of Alinsky’s realistic streak. ‘The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people’s self-interest was met,’ he told me, ‘and not just basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were some basic  principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in.’” On Barack Obama’s presidential campaign website, one could see a photo of Obama in a classroom “teaching students Alinskyan methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written, ‘Power Analysis’ and ‘Relationships Built on Self  Interest,…’”15 

     Until he became a full-time elected legislator in 1996, the focus of Obama’s political  activities was the largest radical organization in the United States, Acorn, which was built on the Alinksy  model of community organizing. A summary of his Acorn activities was compiled by the Wall Street Journal:

     In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered  

15 Ibid.

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     135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.  Mr. Obama’s success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago  conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law’s loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names. In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list).16 

     After Obama became a U.S. Senator, his wife, Michelle, told a reporter,  “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to  make change.”  Her husband commented: “I take that observation as a compliment.”17

16 Wall Street Journal article
17 Lizza, op., cit.

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Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals 

     Alinsky is the Sun-Tzu for today’s radicals, his book a manual for their political war. As early as its dedicatory page, Alinsky provides revealing insight into the radical mind by praising Lucifer as the first rebel: “Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer.” 

     Thus Alinsky begins his text by telling readers exactly what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. In his own mind the radical is building his own kingdom, which to him is a kingdom of heaven on earth. Since a kingdom of heaven built by human beings is a fantasy - an impossible dream - the radical’s only real world efforts are those which are aimed at subverting the society he lives in.  He is a nihilist.

     This is something that conservatives generally have a hard time understanding. As a former radical, I 

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am constantly asked how radicals could hate America and why they would want to destroy a society that compared to others is tolerant, inclusive and open, and treats all people with a dignity and respect that is the envy of the world. The answer to this question is that radicals are not comparing America to other real world societies. They are comparing America to the heaven on earth - the kingdom of social justice and freedom - they think they are building. And compared to this heaven even America is hell.

     In my experience conservatives are generally too decent and too civilized to match up adequately with their radical adversaries, at least in the initial stages of the battle. They are too prone to give them the benefit of the doubt, to believe there is goodness and good sense in them which will outweigh their determination to change the world. Radicals talk of justice and democracy and equality. They can’t really want to destroy a society that is democratic and liberal, and more equal than others, and that has brought  wealth and prosperity to so many people. Oh yes they can. There is no goodness that trumps the dream of a heaven on earth. And because America is a real world society, managed by real and problematic human beings, it will never be equal, or liberal, or democratic enough to satisfy radical fantasies - to 

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compensate them for their longing for a perfect world, and for their unhappiness in this one. 

     In The 18th  Brumaire, Marx himself summed up the radical’s passion by invoking a comment of Goethe’s Mephistopheles: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” The essence of what it means to be a radical is thus summed up in Alinsky’s praise for Satan: to be willing to destroy the values, structures and institutions that sustain the society in which we live.

     The many names of Satan are also a model for the way radicals camouflage their agendas by calling themselves at different times Communists, socialists, new leftists, liberals, social justice activists and most  consistently progressives. My parents, who were card-carrying Communists, never referred to themselves as  Communists but always as “progressives,” as did their friends and political comrades. The “Progressive Party”  was created by the Communist Party to challenge Harry Truman in the 1948 election because he  opposed the spread of Stalin’s empire. The Progressive Party was led by Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry  Wallace, and was the vehicle chosen by the Communists to lead their followers out of the Democratic Party, which they had joined during the “popular front” of the 1930s.

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The progressives rejoined the Democrats during the McGovern campaign of 1972 and with the formation of a hundred-plus member Progressive Caucus in the congressional party and the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency have become its most important political force.

     Alinsky’s tribute to Satan as the first radical is further instructive because it reminds us that the radical illusion is an ancient one and has not changed though the millennia. Recall how Satan tempted Adam and Eve to destroy their paradise: If you will rebel against God’s command then “You shall be as gods.” This is the radical hubris: We can create a new world. Through our political power we can make a new race of men and women who will live in harmony and peace and according to the principles of social justice. We can be as gods.

     And let us not forget that the kingdom the first radical “won,” as Alinsky so thoughtlessly puts it, was hell. Typical of radicals not to notice the ruin they leave behind.

     This, in a nutshell, is why conservatives are conservative and why radicals are dangerous. Because conservatives pay attention to the consequences of actions, including their own, and radicals don’t. 

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     One kind of hell or another is what radicalism has in fact achieved since the beginning of the modern age when it conducted the first modern genocide during the French Revolution. The Jacobins who led the revolution changed the name of the cathedral of Notre Dame to the “Temple of Reason” and then, in the name of Reason, proceeded to slaughter every Catholic man, woman and child in the Vendee region to purge  religious “superstition” from the planet. The Jacobin attempt to liquidate Catholics and their faith was the precursor of Lenin’s destruction of 100,000 churches in the Soviet Union to purge Russia of reactionary ideas. The “Temple of Reason” was replicated by the Bolsheviks’ creation of a “People’s Church” whose mission was to usher in the “worker’s paradise.” This mission led to the murder not of 40,000 as in the Vendee, but 40 million before its merciful collapse - with progressives cheering its progress and mourning its demise.

     The radical fantasy of an earthly redemption takes many forms, with similar results:
                 • The chimera of “sexual liberation” caused leftists to condemn and ban the proven public health   methods for combating AIDS - testing and contact tracing - as “homophobic,”

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leading directly to the preventable deaths of more than 300,000 gay men in the prime of life.18

• The crusade to rid mankind of the scourge of DDT, which was launched in the 1960s by the American environmentalist Rachel Carson, led to a global ban on the use of DDT and the return of malaria. This has resulted in the deaths of 100 million children, mainly black Africans under the age of five.19

• The left’s campaign to build a welfare utopia under the umbrella of the “Great Society” destroyed the inner city black family, spawned millions of fatherless black children, and created intractable poverty and a violent underclass which is still with us today.20

18 Discover the Networks Article
19 Disvoer the Networks Individual Profile
20 Discover the Networks Profile on Poverty

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The Alinsky Strategy: Boring From Within

     Conservatives think of war as a metaphor when applied to politics. For radicals, the war is real. That is why when partisans of the left go into battle, they set out to destroy their opponents by stigmatizing them as  “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes” and “Islamophobes.” It is also why they so often pretend to be what they are not (“liberals” for example) and rarely say what they mean. Deception for them is a military tactic in a  war that is designed to eliminate the enemy.

     Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is first of all a comradely critique of the sixties’ New Left. What bothers Alinsky about these radicals is their honesty - which may have been their only redeeming feature. While the Communist Left pretended to be Jeffersonian Democrats and “progressives” and formed “popular fronts” with liberals, the New Left radicals disdained these deceptions, regarding them as a display of weakness. To distinguish themselves from such popular front politics, sixties radicals said they were revolutionaries and proud of it.

     New Left radicals despised and attacked liberals and created riots at Democratic Party conventions.

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     Their typical slogans were “Up against the wall motherf-ker” and “Off the pig”, telegraphing exactly how they felt about those who opposed them. The most basic principle of Alinsky’s advice to radicals is to lie to their opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates and liberals.

     Deception is the radical’s most important weapon, and it has been a prominent one since the end of the sixties. Racial arsonists such as Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright pose as civil rights activists; anti-American radicals such as Bill Ayers pose as patriotic progressives; socialists pose as liberals. The mark of their success is reflected in the fact that conservatives collude in the deception and call them liberals as well.

     Alinsky writes of the “revolutionary force” of the 1960s that its activists were “one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians yet they also urge violence and cry ‘Burn the system down.!’ They have no  illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book.”21  I once had a Trotskyist mentor named Isaac

21 Rules for Radicals, p. xiii

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     Deutscher who was critical of the New Left in the same way Alinsky is. He said that American radicals such as Stokely Carmichael were “radical” in form and “moderate” in content; they spoke loudly but carried a small stick. Instead, he said, they should be moderate in form and radical in content. In the same vein, Alinsky chides New Leftists for being “rhetorical radicals” rather than “realistic.” New Leftists scared people but didn’t have the power to back up their threats. The most important thing for radicals, according to Alinsky, is to deal with the world as it is, and not as they might want it to be.

As an organizer I start from the world as it is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - it is  necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.22

     This is the passage from which Michelle Obama selected lines to sum up her husband’s vision at the Democratic convention that nominated him for president in August 2008. Referring to a visit he made to Chicago neighborhoods, she said, “And Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the

22 Rules for Radicals, p. xix

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world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be.’ And he said that, all too often, we accept the distance between the two and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations.” She concluded: “All of us are driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do - that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.”23

     When he became president, Barack Obama named an Alinsky disciple named Van Jones to be his “special assistant” for “green jobs,” a key position in the administration’s plans for America’s future.  According to his own account, Van Jones became a “communist” during a prison term he served after being arrested  during the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. For the next ten years, Jones was an activist in the Maoist organization STORM, whose acronym means “Stand Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.” When STORM disintegrated, Jones joined the Apollo Alliance, an environmental coalition organized by Alinsky radicals. He also joined the Center for American Progress, run by John Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff in the Clinton Administration and co-chair of Obama’s transition team.

23 New York Times Article

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     In a 2005 interview, Van Jones explained to the East Bay Express that he still considered himself a “revolutionary, but just a more effective one.” “Before,” he told the Express, “we would fight anybody, any time. No concession was good enough;… Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I’ll work with anybody, I’ll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward.... I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”24 The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution. It was the Alinsky doctrine perfectly expressed.

     “These rules,” writes Alinsky, “make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police ‘pig’ or ‘white fascist racist’ or ‘motherf-ker and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, ‘Oh, he’s one of those, and then promptly turn off.’”25 Instead, advance your radical goals by camouflaging them; change your style to appear to be working within the system.

     Alinsky’s agenda is the same as that of the radicals who called for “Revolution Now” in the 1960s.
24 The New Face of Environmentalism
25 Rules for Radicals, p. xviii

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He just has a more clever way of achieving it. There’s nothing new about radicals camouflaging their agendas as moderate in order to disarm their opposition. That was exactly what the 1930s “popular front” was designed to accomplish. It was devised by Communists, who pretended to be democrats in order to form alliances with liberals which would help them to acquire the power to shut the democracy down. It was Lenin’s idea too, from whom Alinsky appropriated it in the first place.

Lenin is one of Alinsky’s heroes (Castro is another). Alinsky invokes Lenin in the course of chiding the rhetorical radicals over a famous sixties slogan, which originated with the Chinese Communist dictator Mao Zedong. The slogan was “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and during the 1960s it was a  favorite cry of the Black Panthers and other radical groups. Regarding this, Alinsky comments: “‘Power comes out of the barrel of a gun’ is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for  getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns.”26

26 Rules for Radicals, p. 37

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     In other words, vote for us now, but when we become the government it will be a different story.  One man, one vote, one time. This is the political credo of all modern totalitarians, including Hitler, who was elected Chancellor and then made himself Fuhrer and shut down the voting booths forever.

     Despite Alinsky’s description, Lenin was a pragmatist only within the revolutionary framework. As a revolutionary, he was a dogmatist in theory and a Machiavellian monster in practice. He was engaged in a total war which he used to justify every means he thought necessary to achieve his goals - including summary executions, concentration camps (which provided the model for Hitler) and the physical “liquidation” of entire social classes.

     “[The] failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous,” writes Alinsky. What he really means is their honesty is disastrous, their failure to understand the art of  mis-communication. This is the precise art that he teaches radicals who are trying impose socialism on a country whose people understand that socialism destroys freedom: Don’t sell it as socialism; sell it as as “progressivism,” “economic democracy” and “social justice.”

In case you blinked last week and missed it, Cap and Trade was introduced, amended, voted and passed, in a stunning new demonstration of just how ridiculously illogical our political system has become
Here's how it went down:

• The original cap and trade bill, HR 2454, was introduced to congress May 15th
• June 23rd, the thousand-page bill was replaced by a whole new bill - HR 2998 - weighing in at 1200 pages
• At 3:09 am on June 26th, a 300 page amendment was filed
• 16 hours later, the house voted and passed the bill none of them had read

Our government was designed to move slowly, for a reason. When massive new bills are rammed through like this, it's a deliberate attempt to cut the public out of the process.
Here's an example of what happens when they sneak in these last minute amendments - we as taxpayers get saddled with things like the $2.7 billion in tax rebates approved under TARP for a British rum producer. That's right - thanks to TARP, you're now subsidizing the production of Captain Morgan rum, and they're not even a US owned company!
All of these massive "emergency" bills prove one thing: Our representatives' incentives revolve around corporate welfare and special interest favors, and the only weapon we have that can trump their money and resources is our sheer numbers - it's time to make a ruckus.
Start calling your reps to let them know you're voting them out for negligence - they have an obligation to read and understand what they are voting into law, and if the process doesn't allow them sufficient time to do so, they need to change the process. If they don't agree, they're out. It's as simple as that.
Seriously. The gloves are coming off. Who's with me?

FORMER THATCHER ADVISER ON COPENHAGEN TREATY

BY Administrator, ON NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Obama Climate Initiatives Have Far-Reaching Ramifications

Thought you might find the below video interesting.  It is an excerpt from a speech by former Thatcher adviser Lord Christopher Monckton about the climate change treaty that will be negotiated next month in December.
http://www.globalclimatescam.com/2009/10/obama-poised-to-cede-us-sovereignty-claims-british-lord/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40

CAPE AND TRADE PLAYS FAVORITES

CAPE AND TRADE PLAYS FAVORITES

BY Administrator, ON NOVEMBER 23, 2009

Cap And Trade Is A New Payoff Machine For Democrats

Under a strict cap and trade program all of the above allowances (meaning 100%) would be auctioned off to find the "true"Market price for carbon. However, as can be expected with any government program where the government is looking to curry favor with one group or another, a number of allowances are being doled out for free - to win votes. It is a true game of the government picking the winners and losers before the game ever even starts.
Waxman-Markey (the cap and trade bill) doled out its allowances along the lines of the chart above.  A in that chart you will see that 16.5 % will be truly auctioned.  The remainin 84.5% are given away for free over a limited period of time that ratchets down.
What was the refining industry's portion of these free allowances under Waxman-Markey? Under Waxman-Markey refiners have two categories of GHG emissions that they became obligors for, process emissions and consumer emissions.

Your New Proposed Obamacare plan - HR3590

I ask you respectfully and as a patriotic American to look at the following troubling lines that I have read in the bill. You cannot possibly believe that these proposals are in the best interests of the country and our fellow citizens.

I ask, How is this directly related to Health Care!! What has this to do with Health Care..
the following item alone which is the very first statement in the bill, [HR3590] makes me strongly question just how many of the Democratic members have even read this tome of rhetoric..

> To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify
> the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members
> of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees,
> and for other purposes.


Page 22 of the HC Bill: Mandates that the Govt will audit books of all employers that self-insure!!

Page 30 Sec 123 of HC bill: THERE WILL BE A GOVT COMMITTEE that decides what treatments/benefits you get.

Page 29 lines 4-16 in the HC bill: YOUR HEALTH CARE IS RATIONED!!!

Page 42 of HC Bill: The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your HC benefits for you. You have no choice!

Page 50 Section 152 in HC bill: HC will be provided to ALL non-US citizens, illegal or otherwise.

Page 58 HC Bill: Govt will have real-time access to individuals' finances & a 'National ID Health card' will be issued!

Page 59 HC Bill lines 21-24: Govt will have direct access to your bank accounts for elective funds transfer.

Page 65 Sec 164:Is a payoff subsidized plan for retirees and their families in unions & community organizations: (ACORN).

Page 84 Sec 203 HC bill: Govt mandates ALL benefit packages for private HC plans in the 'Exchange.'

Page 85 Line 7 HC Bill: Specifications of Benefit Levels for Plans--The Govt will ration your health care!

Page 91 Lines 4-7 HC Bill: Govt mandates linguistic appropriate services. (Translation: illegal aliens.)

Page 95 HC Bill Lines 8-18:The Govt will use groups (i.e. ACORN & AmeriCorps to sign up individuals for Govt HC plan.

Page 85 Line 7 HC Bill: Specifications of Benefit Levels for Plans. (AARP members - your health care WILL be rationed!)
Page 102 Lines 12-18 HC Bill: Medicaid eligible individuals will be automatically enrolled in Medicaid. (Nochoice.)

Page114 Line 22 EXEMPTS THE PRESIDENT, SENATE, CONGRESS AND FAMLIIES FROM THIS ACT!!

Page 124 lines 24-25 HC: No company can sue GOVT on price fixing. No "judicial review" against Govt monopoly.

Page 127 Lines 1-16 HC Bill:Doctors / American Medical Association - The Govt will tell YOU what salary you can make.

Page 145 Line 15-17:An Employer MUST auto-enroll employees into public option plan.(NO choice!)

Page 126 Lines 22-25:Employers MUST pay for HC for part-time employees AND their families. (Employees shouldn't get excited about this as employers will be forced to reduce its work force, benefits, and wages/salaries to cover such a huge expense.)

Page 149 Lines 16-24:ANY Employer with payroll 401k & above who does not provide public option will pay 8% tax on all payroll! (See the last comment in parenthesis.)
Page 150 Lines 9-13:A business with payroll between $251K & $401K who doesn't provide public option will pay 2-6% tax on all payroll.

Page 167 Lines 18-23:ANY individual who doesn't have acceptable HC according to Govt will be taxed 2.5% of income.

Page 170 Lines 1-3 HC Bill:Any NONRESIDENT Alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay.)

Page 195 HC Bill:Officers & employees of the GOVT HC Admin.. will have access to ALL Americans' finances and personal records.

Page 203 Line 14-15 HC:"The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax." (Yes, it really says that!)
Page 239 Line 14-24 HC Bill:Govt will reduce physician services for Medicaid Seniors. (Low-income and the poor are affected.)

Page 241 Line 6-8 HC Bill: Doctors:It doesn't matter what specialty you have trained yourself in -- you will all be paid the same! (Just TRY to tell me that's not Socialism!)

Page 253 Line 10-18:The Govt sets the value of a doctor's time, profession, judgment, etc. (Literally-- the value of humans.)

Page 265 Sec 1131: The Govt mandates and controls productivity for "private" HC industries.

Page 268 Sec 1141: The federal Govt regulates the rental and purchase of power driven wheelchairs.

Page 272 SEC. 1145: TREATMENT OF CERTAIN CANCER HOSPITALS - Cancer patients - welcome to rationing!

Page 280 Sec 1151: The Govt will penalize hospitals for whatever the Govt deems preventable (i.e...re-admissions).

Page 298 Lines 9-11: Doctors: If you treat a patient during initial admission that results in a re-admission -- the Govt will penalize you.

Page 317 L 13-20: PROHIBITION on ownership/investment. (The Govt tells doctors what and how much they can own!)

Page 317-318 lines 21-25, 1-3: PROHIBITION on expansion. (The Govt is mandating that hospitals cannot expand.)
Page 321 2-13: Hospitals have the opportunity to apply for exception BUT community input is required. (Can you say ACORN?)

Page 335 L 16-25 Pg 336-339: The Govt mandates establishment of outcome-based measures. (HC the way they want -- rationing.)
Page 341 Lines 3-9: The Govt has authority to disqualify Medicare Advance Plans, HMOs, etc. (Forcing people into the Govt plan)

Page 354 Sec 1177: The Govt will RESTRICT enrollment of 'special needs people!' Unbelievable!

Page 379 Sec 1191: The Govt creates more bureaucracy via a "Tele-Health Advisory Committee." (Can you say HC by phone?)

Page 425 Lines 4-12: The Govt mandates "Advance-Care Planning Consult." (Think senior citizens end-of-life patients.)

Page 425 Lines 17-19: The Govt will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc. (And it'smandatory!)
Page 425 Lines 22-25, 426 Lines 1-3: The Govt provides an "approved" list of end-of-life resources; & nbsp;guiding you in death. (Also called 'assisted suicide.')

Page 427 Lines 15-24: The Govt mandates a program for orders on "end-of-life." (The Govt has a say in how your life ends!)

Page 429 Lines 1-9: An "advanced-care planning consultant" will be used frequently as a patient's health deteriorates.

Page 429 Lines 10-12: An "advanced care consultation" may include an ORDER for end-of-life plans. (AN ORDER TO DIE FROM THE GOVERNMENT?!?)

Page 429 Lines 13-25: The GOVT will specify which doctors can write an end-of-life order. (I wouldn't want to stand before God after getting paid for THAT job!)

Page 430 Lines 11-15: The Govt will decide what level of treatment you will have at end-of-life! (Again -- no choice!)

Page 469: Community-Based Home Medical Services = Non-Profit Organizations. (Hello? ACORN Medical Services here!?!)

Page 489 Sec 1308: The Govt will cover marriage and family therapy. (Which means Govt will insert itself into your marriage even.)

Page 494-498: Govt will cover Mental Health Services including defining, creating, and rationing those services.



Even those who have bought into this Marxist Socialistic takeover of our lives, need to take off the blinders and read this with an open mind... even they will be SHOCKED!! at the lies being perpetuated on the American citizen..

Government is needed to restrain excesses, to regulate, to provide the framework within which States are to function, not to become the complete control factor of every aspect of the citizenry's lives... this is communism at it's worst.. look at what the Soviet Union was and the reasons for it's downfall.. socialism is unsustainable... what is happening to us is EXACTLY how it started with Nazi Germany.. a process that took about twenty years to come to fruition.. what were the consequences of such actions??..

PLEASE!! BE A LEADER FOR COMMON SENSE CHANGE FOR IT IS EVIDENT THAT TRUE REFORM IS NEEDED NOT GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER...
do not allow this insurgence into our closely held tenets of personal freedom to become law..

WE NEED STRONGER REGULATORY REFORM DIRECTED AT THE FOUNDATION OF THE EXCESSES .. not a massive new entitlement program that will bankrupt an already fragile economy,.. usurp personal freedom of choice a cornerstone of our very basic tenets, COST JOBS!!, impose new taxes on companies that can ill afford this action:
the American people are smart enough to make informed choices without the government telling them what to do and what choice to make by limiting such choices..

If my information is accurate, some very basic changes is regulations will have a dramatic impact on the cost of health care cost,
Please work with the GOP moderates to affect COMMON SENSE CHANGE, SCRAP THIS PIECE OF INSANITY!! AND START OVER... LISTEN TO THE ECONOMISTS NOT THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP AND WISHFUL THINKING..
THIS BILL DOES NOT ACHIEVE WHAT THEY ARE WISHING IT TO ACHIEVE.. JUST THE OPPOSITE..

With strong hopes I have reached you with this plea for reflection, common sense and preservation of what all Patriotic Citizens hold dear..

Jean McClellan-Chambers
Niece of the Late Sen. John L. McClellan

[Cuts Medicare, cuts Vets Admin HC budget, cuts to Tricare, HC is being built on backs of those who can ill afford the reductions.. all for History? this is not history but Saul Alinsky style takeover of our social system, which is social communism, read the page on the following link Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution, The Alinsky Model


Do not let us be sold into slavery.. vote out the traitors of Democracy and repeal laws they have passed..

Memo from Rep. Pete Sessions, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee

Memo from Rep. Pete Sessions, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee:

Saturday night's [Nov 7, 2009] 220-215 vote in favor of the government's takeover of American health care will be extraordinarily unpopular across the country.
Converting not just three but a dozen or more Democrats from the "yeas" to "nays" when the bill returns for a final vote later this year or early next will require sending an unmistakable message of certain defeat in 2010 to the bill's most vulnerable supporters, and the NRCC has the opportunity to do just that.
The NRCC should announce a special, segregated fund, and name as its targets the 20 Democrats of the 220 who are from the most competitive districts based on the 2008 election.
We have heard again and again of the scores of Democratic Congressmen who won in districts that John McCain carried in last year's presidential election. Now is the time to narrow that list down to the 20 who supported the massive cuts to Medicare, the enormous tax hikes, and the laundry list of other horrors in the Speaker Nancy Pelosi version of Obamacare.
Stapling Saturday's vote to these 20 congressmen will not only give them reason to reverse their positions next time, it will also give the country an opportunity to vote with their wallets. The NRCC's "reverse the vote" fund should make some iron-clad guarantees:
»  That all money raised for the special fund will be spent only in races against these 20 supporters of Obamacare;
»  That all the money raised will be divided equally among the GOP nominees in those 20 districts, and will be turned over to them to spend as they see fit the day after they secure the party nominations;
»  The NRCC will establish a Web site devoted to tracking the news and polling out of those 20 districts and will brand these 20 Democrats as the key and real sponsors of Obamacare -- the 20 Democrats who made it happen.
If Obamacare is to be stopped, it is necessary to make very specific Democrats own their votes. If this week these 20 Democrats see the top of the Obamacare-driven target list and the funds begin to roll in, they will have to rethink what they have done.
Appeal to voters for $1 a race (a $20 contribution), or $5 a race ($100), or $50 ($1,000) or $100 ($2,000)and watch the money roll in as anger with the vote translates into activism.
As it does, the 20 Democrats who embraced Obamacare will hear the proverbial political footsteps.So will every Democrat who voted no, and this group will grow in their resolve not to be wooed no matter what changes are made by the conference committee.
Your counterpart in the Senate, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (NRSC), should be doing the same thing right now - running a special campaign to raise funds specifically for the eventual challengers of the three most vulnerable Democrats who vote for cloture so that the bill can be taken up -- a "Stop Cloture" fund.
I expect those will be Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Sen. Michael Bennett, D-Colo., and Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., but we won't know until the first cloture vote, though the appeal for funding can begin immediately.
The key is to use fund-raising to highlight a vote, and to use the vote to drive fundraising and organization.
Tens of thousands are sufficiently motivated to come to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate. Hundreds of thousands will vote with their wallets against those truly responsible for Obamacare in the House and the Senate if they can be assured that their money really will go to defeat the Democrats who should have known better -- who should have represented their districts and states, not the demands of the president, Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid.
If the NRCC and the NRSC start such targeted funds this week, they will be overwhelmed with response. If they don't, some other group ought to fill the void and run the same sort of campaign.
The grass roots are extraordinarily motivated and want only to be given a chance to be heard.Nothing makes as loud a noise on Capitol Hill as the rush of money to your opponents' coffers. It is time to turn up that volume on Obamacare.

Hugh Hewitt: The red tide of 2010

Hugh Hewitt: The red tide of 2010
By: Hugh Hewitt
Examiner Columnist
November 23, 2009 Bob Dylan has a Christmas album, "Christmas in the Heart."

Which must mean that 1.) all things are possible and 2.) strange things are certain.

Excellent reminders as the real debate on Obamacare gets under way.

Saturday night's vote to allow opening arguments in the Senate was great news for Gilbert Baker, front-running GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Arkansas. Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln can only survive the inevitable red tide of 2010 if she is on the right side of the "Stop Obamacare" debate, but she whiffed in her first at-bat.

She missed the chance to declare her genuine moderation to an Arkansas electorate that wants no part of the Reid-Schumer-Boxer leadership elite that has served up Obamacare and cap and tax.

When Sen. Lincoln voted with every other Democrat against every other Republican, she wrote the opening line in every Baker speech from now until November 2010: "I am running because when it came down to a choice between Chicago and Arkansas, Blanche Lincoln chose Chicago."

Lincoln can still rewrite the script, and some shrewd observers see her setting up a dramatic break with the majority in early 2010 when, after the holidays have passed and the attention of the country is focused on the Senate, she will refuse to allow Obamacare to proceed and fix in her electorate's mind a sharply defined portrait of courage and independence.

Perhaps, but in the meantime, Baker will be certain to be campaigning on Saturday night's vote.

As will GOP Senate candidates in California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and of course Nevada. Obamacare is poison for the country's medical delivery system, but it is reviving the GOP's fortunes faster than any magic brew. So determined are the Democratic congressional majorities to wreck themselves on the deeply unpopular power grab that Republican fundraising is taking off like a rocket.

Rep. Pete Sessions of the National Republican Congressional Committee unveiled ReversetheVote.org on Tuesday afternoon, and by Sunday thousands of small donors had contributed more than $100,000 to the effort to defeat the 24 most vulnerable House Democrats who voted for Obamacare on Nov. 7.

If Obamacare survives the Senate and returns for one more vote in the House, those 24 will have to think long and hard about what sort of political suicide note they are being asked to sign. The more momentum such an outreach gains, and similar ones such as that run by TalkPac.com targeting vulnerable Democratic senators up next November, the more fertilized are the "green shoots" of the Republican revival by the massive tax increases and deep Medicare cuts embedded in Obamacare.

The proposed massive cuts and embedded rationing being moved along on pork-greased tracks are profoundly rebranding the new president and his congressional allies as not just from the hard-Left edge of the American political spectrum, but as untrustworthy as well, given the scores of promises broken to get this far.

Another worrying sign for Democrats is in the new grass-roots organization Docs4PatientCare.org. This past weekend, hundreds of doctors and health care professionals, supported by thousands of their patients, rallied in cities from Atlanta to Los Angeles to publicize the awful consequences for the doctor-patient relationship if Obamacare passes.

The American Medical Association has joined AARP as the most discredited organizations of 2009, and in the wake of their collapse of credibility, new and improved substitute organizations dedicated to their original but now abandoned missions are self-organizing.

The news of the proposed rewrite of the rules of American medicine is still very much in the delivery stage. Seniors especially are only beginning to grasp what a half-trillion dollars in cuts will mean over the balance of what they had thought would be their golden years but which, if Obamacare passes, will instead be the "give-us-your-gold" years.

Side deals like Sen. Mary Landrieu's, D-La., yes vote in exchange for $300 million -- the new "Louisiana Purchase" -- are the sort of squalid Beltway exchanges that will not be forgotten. Democrats who tell themselves that the worst is over are deluding themselves.

Though Obamacare's fate is still very much up in the air, the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., have guaranteed that its effect will already be profound and lasting. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether it leads to a historic and completely unexpected anti-Obama/Democrat realignment in 49 weeks.

A year ago, that seemed as unlikely as a Dylan Christmas album.

Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.

McCLELLAN FAMILY MEMBER JOINS MEEKS CAMPAIGN

McCLELLAN FAMILY MEMBER JOINS MEEKS CAMPAIGN

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: JASON DAVIS (501) 580-3308
communications@whoisdavidmeeks.com

McCLELLAN FAMILY MEMBER JOINS MEEKS CAMPAIGN

CONWAY– Republican second congressional district candidate, David Meeks, announced today that Jean McClellan-Chambers has joined his campaign committee.

Ms. McClellan-Chambers is the niece of the late Senator John McClellan who served the state of Arkansas in the United States Senate from 1943-1977 – Arkansas’s longest serving Senator.

“My uncle, much like David Meeks, was a man of principle and ethics. He strongly believed that his obligation to his constituents was more important than his party affiliation and often voted against New Deal policies when he knew it would hurt the citizens of Arkansas.” McClellan-Chambers said.

“I, like my uncle, was a Democratic Party follower; however, I do not feel that the Democratic Party represents the principles and ethic values so dear to me and this country. It is no longer the party that I identified with, nor is it the party that Senator John McClellan was a member of.”

A Vietnam era veteran and former military wife, Ms. McClellan-Chambers will head up:
Veteran’s For Meeks Coalition (veterans@davidmeeksforcongress.com)
and will sit on the campaign committee helping to advise the campaign and organize events.

You can follow Ms. McClellan-Chambers at www.twitter.com/AR2ndDistVets.

About David Meeks

David is a common man running for the United States House of Representatives for the Second Congressional District of Arkansas. A Christian, husband, veteran and Arkansan, David believes it is time to elect a true representative of the Arkansas Second Congressional District.
David, and his wife Naomi, live in Conway where he drives a truck for Ferrellgas and is actively involved in his church.

For more information visit www.DavidMeeksForCongress.com or follow David on twitter www.twitter.com/Meeks4Congress

Off Shore Drilling

Off Shore Drilling

Monday, October 19, 2009 9:53:05 AM

Fox was the only news to report this (20 Aug 2009).

"Today, even though President Obama is against
off shore drilling for oil for this country, He signed
an executive order to loan 2 Billion of our taxpayers
dollars to a Brazilian Oil Exploration Company (which
is the 8th largest company in the entire world) to
drill for oil off the coast of Brazil . The oil that
comes from this operation is for the sole purpose and
use of China and not the USA . The Chinese government is
under contract to purchase all the oil that this oil
field will produce, which is hundreds of millions of
barrels of
oil". We have absolutely no gain from
this transaction whatsoever.

Wait it gets more interesting.

Guess who is the largest individual stockholder of this
Brazilian Oil Company and who would benefit most from
this? It is American Billionaire, George Soros, Liberal
businessman who is a radical left wing supporter, finances
MoveOn.org as well as other liberal programs and was
President Obama's largest and most generous
supporter during his campaign. If you are able to
connect the dots and follow the money, you are probably
as upset as I am. Not a word of this transaction was on
any of the other news networks.

To All Followers, one of our veteran brothers needs our help

To All Followers.. pls assist me in getting one of our own elected to Congress,.  he needs financial help .. donations of any size are needed to carry on the fight.. these can be made online.. DavidMeeksforCongress.com
We also need Vets and families to put "boots on the ground" contact me to volunteer

Gilbert Baker Calls out Lincoln for Announcing Her “Yes” Vote on Cloture

NEWS RELEASE

Gilbert Baker Calls out Lincoln for Announcing Her “Yes” Vote on Cloture

 Baker: “A vote for cloture is a vote for government-run health care”

 Conway, Ark. – Sen. Gilbert Baker issued the following statement in response to Blanche Lincoln’s announcement that she will vote for cloture which paves the way for government-run health care:

“The people of Arkansas now know that Blanche Lincoln is more beholden to the Washington establishment than to the people who elected her to office.  A vote for cloture is a vote for government-run health care.  Lincoln is selling out to the Obama-Reid, government-run health care plan.  I will never be a ‘yes’ vote for a health care plan that would hurt families, small businesses and our seniors.  I do want health care reform, but this budget- busting plan is not the answer.”

The Unsustainable Public Option in the "HarryCare" Bill

The Unsustainable Public Option in the "HarryCare" Bill

by ALG News: The Harry Reid-Senate version of ObamaCare will start operating at massive budget-busting deficits starting in 2015, according to an Americans for Limited Government analysis of Congressional Budget Office data. By 2019, the “public option” will have spent some $361 billion more than it took in via new taxes.

So, how then does the bill earn the moniker, “deficit-neutral”? The same way the Pelosi-House version does: by rationing health care away from the nation’s elderly—cutting Medicare by some $436 billion. But that will not pay for this new entitlement—the so-called “public option”—in the long run. Cutting Medicare has its political limits—which is a nice way of saying that cutting it too drastically is a good way for Congressmen to get thrown out on their tails.

Seniors might support entitlement reform where the federal government attempted to figure out a way to fix the broken Medicare entitlement. Under the worst-case scenario, the Medicare Board of Trustees reports that after 2012, the program will lose about $433 billion through 2019. After that, it could be broke as early as 2028.

Economists here is much that could be done to help the situation, including breaking Medicare up into smaller, privatized companies and allowing insurance competition across state lines. But that is not the case being made to the American people in the “HarryCare” bill.  Instead, Congress is attempting to expand health care spending to an additional 36 to 45 million people in an open-ended, taxpayer-financed, government-run takeover. The House version of the legislation goes even further than the Senate, proposing over $890 billion in new spending.

The fact is increasingly clear that Congressional Democrats can only hide the costs in the “public option,” which is what they have done in both versions. But between the numbers, the cover-up comes apart. It took Medicare more than 40 years to run into deficits based on revenue shortfalls. The “public option” will lose hundreds of billions within 5 to 7 years.

As the Independent Institute notes, Florida has tried a similar approach to hurricane property insurance, creating a “public option” to “compete” with private insurers. The proposal also capped how much private insurance companies could charge. This had two predictable results: private insurers fled the state, and the so-called Citizens Property Insurance Corporation “still doesn’t have sufficient reserves to weather a major hurricane. When one comes, Florida taxpayers will be on the hook for the bill.”

In other words, like “public option” health insurance, Florida’s state-run hurricane “solution” proved to be unsustainable and drove Floridians off of private insurance. In the end, it simply created an unfunded liability.
On Saturday at 8PM, the Senate legislation will face an important test vote—on whether or not to proceed to the bill. Reid now admits he is not certain he has the 60 votes necessary to continue pushing the unpopular measure. And if the majority of Americans have their way, by 9PM, the “HarryCare” will have been toe-tagged for the dead room.

Labels: deficit, Harry Reid, HarryCare, health care

The Republican Alternative

The Republican Alternative

By Peter Ferrara on 11.18.09 @ 6:08AM

Democrats have been telling us all year that the Republicans have no health reform alternative. They are just the party of no! So we must have all been hallucinating when, lo and behold, just before the recent House vote on the Pelosi/Obama government health care takeover bill, there was a vote on…the Republican alternative.

Exactly the opposite of the House Democrat health plan, the Republican alternative would actually reduce the cost of health insurance and care. It would also expand coverage and provide a safety net ensuring that no one would be excluded from essential health coverage or care. It would also expand consumer choice and control over health care.

At the same time, the Republican plan involves no tax increases, no Medicare cuts, no rationing, and no increased deficits now or in the future. Exactly how all this is accomplished is fully explained below.

Lower Costs

The Republican plan allows insurers to sell health insurance across state lines. This would greatly expand competition, enabling the more than 1,000 private insurance companies to each compete nationally. That vastly increased competition would reduce health insurance premiums and costs. It would also greatly expand consumer freedom of choice.

We hear liberal complaints about areas within some states that only have a couple of insurance companies competing. That is entirely due to government regulation. We see ads for car insurance, and every other type of insurance, competing nationally all the time. There is no reason why we can't enjoy the same for health insurance.

The Republican plan, of course, includes medical liability tort reform modeled after successful reforms in California and Texas. This would sharply reduce costly junk lawsuits and the resulting costly defensive medicine pursued just to protect against frivolous claims. Democrats crassly oppose this because of the enormous contributions they receive from Plaintiffs' attorneys, which has been openly admitted.

The Republican plan would further reduce costs by enhancing Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), which are themselves a Republican reform fundamentally changing health care by introducing market incentives to reduce costs. Individuals with HSAs keep most of their money for health care in a savings account, earning tax-free interest, with the rest going to purchase a high-deductible, catastrophic insurance policy. The premium cost for such catastrophic coverage, with deductibles generally ranging from $2,000 to $6,000 a year, is much lower than for standard, low-deductible health insurance, allowing the savings in the account to grow quickly to cover the entire deductible. Patients with HSAs are free to use the money in their accounts for any health care, including preventive care, check-ups, prescriptions, dental care, eye care, and the full range of alternative medicine. Nothing could do more to increase consumer freedom of choice and to put patients in control of their own health care.

Money kept in HSAs can be used for health care in later years, or for anything in retirement. So patients are effectively using their own money for non-catastrophic care. That provides powerful incentives to avoid overly costly or unnecessary care and to look for doctors and hospitals that can provide quality care at lower cost, creating real market competition to reduce costs.

The Republican House alternative would allow consumers to use funds saved in HSAs to pay for the catastrophic insurance covering costs above the deductible. Broadly expanding HSAs across the entire health system, including Medicare and Medicaid, would essentially solve the health cost problem.

CBO confirms that this Republican alternative plan would reduce health insurance costs, exactly the opposite of the Pelosi/Obama plan that CBO confirms would increase health insurance costs. The CBO analysis shows that for millions of families health insurance premiums would be almost $5,000 per year less under this GOP plan than the cheapest health insurance under the Pelosi bill.

Expanded Coverage and a Safety Net

The GOP alternative also includes several provisions to expand health insurance coverage. Most important are the Universal Access Programs that would expand uninsurable risk pools to ensure that all Americans would be able to obtain coverage for any pre-existing condition. The uninsured who become too sick to buy private health insurance covering their condition can turn to their state's risk pool for coverage. They are charged premiums for such coverage based on their ability to pay. Each state then subsidizes its uninsurable risk pool to ensure that it could cover all costs.

Few people become truly uninsurable because of their health condition, so the risk pools are a low cost solution. But trying to force these people into the same market risk pools as everyone else through such policies as guaranteed issue (requiring insurers to accept all applicants for coverage regardless of health condition) and community rating (requiring insurers to charge everyone the same regardless of health condition) just ruins health insurance for the general public, making it too expensive and sharply increasing the uninsured as a result. Providing for the uninsurable separately through their own pool is consequently a much better policy.

The GOP plan would also enable small businesses to pool together to offer health insurance at lower prices, like big corporations and labor unions, which would further increase coverage. The proposal would also allow and encourage coverage for young adults on their parents' insurance through age 25. And though this has already been the law for many years, the Republican plan would also expressly prohibit insurers from canceling health insurance policies as long as payments continue, unless the insured commits fraud or conceals a material fact about a health condition.

The lower costs from the provisions above would also expand health coverage, as lower insurance costs reduce the number of uninsured. Wider availability of low cost HSA insurance would also expand coverage.

Blue Dog Fraud

Again, exactly the opposite of the House Democrat health care scheme, this Republican plan includes no tax increases, no Medicare cuts, and no health care rationing. In sharp contrast, the latest numbers from CBO show the costs of the Pelosi plan already exploding. Once that plan is fully phased in, over the first 10 years (2014-2023) total government spending would increase by over $3 trillion, not the $1 trillion that has been so widely reported. Total Medicare cuts over those 10 years would be over $1 trillion, and total tax increases would run over $1 trillion as well.

Yet, not one of the supposedly fiscal conservative Blue Dog Democrats voted for this Republican plan. Every single Democrat in the House voted against it. The so-called Blue Dog Democrat phenomenon is a scam. These Democrats were elected to the House in conservative districts on the promise that they were, honest to God, real conservatives. But once elected, they play a game with the left-wing House Democrat leadership providing just enough votes to pass Pelosi/Obama socialism every time, with the rest free to vote against it to keep the scam going back home. Whenever the leadership needs their vote, however, they are there.

It is these Blue Dog Democrats that keep the ultraleft House Democrat leadership in power, from Speaker Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco, to Banking Committee Chairman Barney Frank from Boston, to Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman from Hollywood, to Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charley Rangel from Harlem, to Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers from Detroit. If this is not the kind of leadership you want for America, then the so-called Blue Dog Democrats all need to be replaced.

The Democrats' Death Panel for Grandma

Whether they vote for any of the Obamacare bills or not, the so-called Blue Dogs in both the House and the Senate are enabling the ultraleft Democrat Congressional leadership in the passage of legislation that imposes government health care rationing on seniors under Medicare, which will deny them essential health care, and begins the implementation of such rationing for everyone else.

Included in these Democrat health bills is a new, unelected, Medicare "Commission" which would implement a new "global budget" for Medicare each year. That global budget would set an arbitrary limit on how much would be spent on health care for seniors every year. The Commission is to enforce that budget by deciding what health care treatments, procedures, surgeries, drugs, etc. would be covered under Medicare and paid for, and which would not. If the Commission decides that the expensive surgery or treatment that Grandma needs to stay alive is just not worth the cost, then the doctors will just come to tell you they are sorry, but there is nothing they can do.

The Wall Street Journal explained the result on Monday by quoting prominent health economist Alain Enthoven, who "has likened a global budget to ‘bombing from 35,000 feet, where you don't see the faces of the people you kill.'" The Journal explained further:

"The hard budget cap means there is only so much money to be divvied up for care, with no account for demographic changes, such as longer life spans, or for the increasing incidence of diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic conditions. Worse, it makes little room for medical innovations. The commission is mandated to go after "sources of excessive cost growth" meaning treatments that are too expensive or whose coverage will boost spending. If researchers find a pricey treatment for Alzheimer's in 2020, that might be banned because it would add new costs and bust the global budget. Or it might decide that "Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the pain-killer," as President Obama put it in June."

No true liberal would support allowing the government to play God in this way, deciding who will live and who will die. But today's so-called liberals are so fiercely partisan now that they have become mentally disengaged. They refuse to even consider any conservative or Republican arguments on any issue, from global warming, to tax policy, to economic policy, to the budget. As a result, they have become dangerous people. What they are supporting is an outright assault on the health care of America's seniors. But they don't have a clue.

The House Republican health bill alternative not only includes no such rationing or Medicare cuts. It actually tries to roll back rationing provisions that have already been adopted. The Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness is a new bureaucracy created in the so-called stimulus bill. President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors explained the role of "comparative effectiveness" in controlling health costs in a report it issued in June, "The Economic Case for Health Reform." The government bureaucracy in Washington would decide what health care works and what doesn't for everybody. It would then enforce its decisions through the payment system for doctors and hospitals. Those doctors and hospitals that don't follow the received wisdom of the wise and all-knowing federal bureaucrats would be penalized in their payments for your care, if they get paid at all.

The Journal again further explained this policy on Monday, saying:

"The reason that physician discretion -- not Washington's cost minded judgments -- is at the core of medicine is that usually there are no "right" answers. The data from large clinical trials produce generic conclusions that rarely apply to individual patients, who have vastly different biologies, response rates to treatments, and often multiple conditions. A breakthrough drug like Herceptin, which is designed for a certain genetic subset of breast cancer patients, might well be ruled out under such a standardized approach."

You might think that your doctor who knows you and your illness would know what will work for you and what won't far better than faraway government bureaucrats that don't know you at all. But don't tell that to today's Washington Democrats, who know everything about everything, and don't need to hear anything from anybody.

This health care rationing involves a radical decline in America's standard of living. Today, Americans enjoy the best, most advanced, high tech, patient-centered health care in the world, devoted to improving and saving their lives. But after the Democrats get through imposing their throwback socialized medicine philosophy, this will all be gone, and we will suffer with the same third rate health care as in other socialized medicine systems around the world. This suits President Obama, whose "moral" vision is that America is just another country, and that it is embarrassingly immoral for America to have more prosperity or power than anyone else. That is why all of his policies are leading to this same dead end for America.

Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Sen, Robert C. Byrd's-Eye View

 

THANKING GOD FOR OUR BLESSINGS

                                   

Thanksgiving is one of America's most beloved holidays.  It is a day devoted to turkey, family gatherings, football games, parades, and the beginning of the Christmas-holiday season.  But it also should be a day devoted to giving thanks to God for our many blessings.  It always has been.

Most of us learned about the Pilgrims conducting the first Thanksgiving in 1621 in Plymouth Colony.  To the Pilgrims, Thanksgiving was intended as a religious celebration to give thanks to God for helping them survive that first brutal year in the new world.

But before Thanksgiving became an annual tradition in 1863, and an official federal holiday in 1941, it was celebrated on a number of other occasions – and always as a day of giving thanks to God. 

During the American Revolution, following the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777 that marked a turning point in the war, the Continental Congress approved a resolution proclaiming a day of “Thanksgiving and praise.”  In his personal notes on the war, General George Washington wrote: “Tomorrow being the day set apart by the honorable Congress for Public Thanksgiving and praise, ... duty call[s] us devoutly to express our grateful acknowledgments to God for the manifold blessings he has granted us.”

Following the establishment of the new government of the United States in 1789, President George Washington issued a “Thanksgiving Proclamation” designating a “day of public thanks-giving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”  At President Washington's request, Americans assembled in churches to thank God for his blessings.

During the American Civil War, following the Battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln asked the people of the United States to set aside the last Thursday of November “as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father.” “In the midst of a Civil War of unequal magnitude and severity,” President Lincoln proclaimed, the country should take a day to acknowledge the “gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”

On this Thanksgiving, I would like to thank God for the young American men and women who will spend this holiday in harm's way protecting our country and the values we hold dear.  And I thank God for the privilege of representing our beloved State and our great people in the U.S. Senate.

 

November 18, 2009

DOD Statement on Fort Hood Independent Review

DOD Statement on Fort Hood Independent Review

The Department of Defense today released a statement by Togo West and retired Adm. Vern Clark, co-chairs of the DoD independent review related to Fort Hood.

 

"In light of the shooting at Fort Hood, Secretary Gates has asked us to lead a department-wide review to ensure the safety and health of DOD employees and their families.

 

"The secretary has given extensive guidance on areas to be examined – areas that cover a broad range of issues, programs, policies, and procedures. Considering the scope of this review, its short deadline, and its importance to the Department of Defense, we will be focused intently on our work during this time. At the end of this process, we will be more than willing to discuss our findings. 

 

"This task is a solemn responsibility, and one that we undertake with humility and a firm commitment to fulfill the department's – and the nation's – obligation to keep our troops, their families, and all DoD employees safe."

 

For additional information, media may contact OSD Public Affairs, Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington at 703-697-5131.