The Left Is Astroturfing Again! -UPDATED-

UPDATE 9/1: The page indicated below has been taken off the mybarackobama.com website. However, the folks at Heritage managed to capture a screen shot of it, which you can see here. It is good that it was taken down, however, it is still shameful that it got posted in the first place. Like a ship’s captain is in some sense responsible for what all members of his crew do, so is Barack Obama responsible for this, even if he wasn’t the one personally posting it.

This time, it’s by phone, and on 9/11, of all days. Straight off mybarackobama.com, here’s the explicit and detailed instructions:

PHONE CALLS ON 9/11 – Illinois! (Health Care Organizing Event)
STAY HOME FOR THIS EVENT! DO NOT GO ANYWHERE!
Stay HOME:
—-* The Event consists of ALL OF US Making Two Phone Calls on one particular, single day.
—-* We call each of our State Senators (phone numbers are below) on that day.

What day? Our US Senators return to DC the Tues after Labor Day. That next FRIDAY, Sep 11, is Patriot Day, designated in memory of the nearly three thousand who died in the 9/11 attacks.

All 50 States are coordinating in this – as we fight back against our own Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process, whipped to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for their treacherous leaders.

DO YOU WANT to ensure passage of the Public Plan? Since 75% of Americans support it, I guess it’s time for us Seventy-Five Percenters to be heard. Why Public Plan? = Because It’s American To Take Care Of Our Own!

And, according to a White House Advisor to the President with whom I spoke ten days ago at a DNC Panel, he said, “ON ONE DAY you ‘burn-up’ the Senate Switchboards – THE NEXT DAY you’ve got the Senator’s attention”. We will achieve that effect, on Friday, Patriot Day 9/11.

Auto-generated emails will remind you about our Armchair Public Plan Slam-Dunk Two-Phone-Call Call-A-Thon. Plus I will email you that day, too. And, if you’re proud you joined-in, then email me (the Host) back, when you’ve made your calls. I will be honored to report our massive numbers to OFA for them to brag on the web.

2 PHONE CALLS ON 9/11 – BE A TRUE PATRIOT –

DEFEAT ANTI-DEMOCRATIC FORCES OF HATE WHO CONSPIRE TO REMAIN HEALTHY + WEALTHY WHILE THE PUBLIC LANGUISHES UNDER THE BURDEN OF OUR PRESENT HEALTH CARE SYSTEM –

—-* TELL THEM: “I’m calling from the city of [xxx] – and I AM mad as Hell – and I AM NOT going to take it anymore, If You Don’t Mind!”…
—-* TELL THEM: “Please make the Public Plan the Law of the Land –
—-* TELL THEM: “Because IT’S AMERICAN TO TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN.”
—-* TELL THEM: “Tell that to my Senator – Thank you, Good-bye.”

That’s it – simple – all you need is a calendar, an armchair and a phone, for us to have a good strong voice.

Ask your friends if they want to join our Public Plan Call-A-Thon on 9/11: Patriot’s Day –

Another Hero

I know we’ve all been busy eulogizing people named Kennedy and Jackson, but personally I think a little-known man named Freeman is more worthy of our praise:

Marine Capt. Matthew Freeman made his last trip across the U.S. Naval Academy in the company of friends the other day.

Yes, there were admirals and generals, colonels and majors, captains of the Navy and the Marines among the hundreds who joined him. But there are moments when the strictures of rank are loosened by the greater bond of brotherhood. This was one of them.

Four thousand and seventy-four days had passed since Matt arrived here as a kid, had his head shaved and was sworn in as a Navy midshipman. Two thousand six hundred and fifty-one days had gone by since he hurled his hat into the air at graduation and became a Marine. It had been 47 days since he married Theresa, his high school sweetheart, and 34 days since he headed to Afghanistan.

And it was just 19 days after he led his men onto a rooftop that provided the only high ground in a nasty firefight with the Taliban in a hamlet in a rugged, desolate northeastern province.

The morning he came back to the Naval Academy was a Wednesday, but it will stick in your memory as the day you heard that Ted Kennedy had died and the week when you learned that someone might have killed Michael Jackson. The politician and the entertainer of their generations, they were lionized by many and scorned by some. One pleaded guilty, the other was found innocent. But they each died with an indelible asterisk, a footnote to their legacies that time will not erase.

Matt Freeman died clean.

[snip]

There were a dozen Marine captains in dress blue in the overflowing pews of the chapel. Marines may blink hard a few times, but they don’t cry. Their mothers and widows cry for them.

In the week when they laid a young Marine captain to rest, the news was dominated by the death of a politician and the echo from an entertainer’s death. The flag-draped coffin on the front page was not his, but if you look carefully in the paper this week you will see a small picture of Matt Freeman among the faces of those who have fallen recently in battle.

He did not live long enough to become an the icon of Kennedy or Jackson, but he died the greater hero.

Sounds to me like this Captain embodied the Marine motto of “Semper Fidelis.”

Newspaper vs. Reid

Ouch! That’s gotta hurt!

On Wednesday, before he addressed a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Reid joined the chamber’s board members for a meet-‘n’-greet and a photo. One of the last in line was the Review-Journal’s director of advertising, Bob Brown, a hard-working Nevadan who toils every day on behalf of advertisers. He has nothing to do with news coverage or the opinion pages of the Review-Journal.

Yet, as Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: “I hope you go out of business.”

[snip]

You could call Reid’s remark ugly and be right. It certainly was boorish. Asinine? That goes without saying.

But to fully capture the magnitude of Reid’s remark (and to stop him from doing the same thing to others) it must be called what it was — a full-on threat perpetrated by a bully who has forgotten that he was elected to office to protect Nevadans, not sound like he’s shaking them down.

No citizen should expect this kind of behavior from a U.S. senator. It is certainly not becoming of a man who is the majority leader in the U.S. Senate. And it absolutely is not what anyone would expect from a man who now asks Nevadans to send him back to the Senate for a fifth term.

If he thinks he can push the state’s largest newspaper around by exacting some kind of economic punishment in retaliation for not seeing eye to eye with him on matters of politics, I can only imagine how he pressures businesses and individuals who don’t have the wherewithal of the Review-Journal.

For the sake of all who live and work in Nevada, we can’t let this bully behavior pass without calling out Sen. Reid. If he’ll try it with the Review-Journal, you can bet that he’s tried it with others. So today, we serve notice on Sen. Reid that this creepy tactic will not be tolerated.

It would appear that Harry has decided he represents the Democratic Party more than the state that sent him to the Senate… and it also appears that, if the Las Vegas Review-Journal has anything to say about it, Reid will soon be looking for another job.

This is part and parcel of one of the causes of the town-hall revolts that we’ve been seeing across the country. Far too many elected officials have become disconnected from the folks back in their home district or state. The voters, having seen that far too often, have decided to remind the elected official who the real bosses are… meaning, the people who can choose not to send the official back for another term in office.

Another Senate Democrat Opposing The “Public Option”

This time it’s Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu:

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu told a relatively friendly overflow Monroe Chamber of Commerce crowd that she would likely oppose any government insurance option in health care reform and lobby against a proposed energy tax known as Cap and Trade.

Landrieu, D-La., who spoke during a chamber luncheon today, also met with local doctors earlier and briefly addressed about 15 demonstrators opposing a public insurance option and Cap and Trade.

When asked after her speech if the senator would support a public option under any circumstances, she said, “Very few, if any. I’d prefer a private market-based approach to any health care reform that would extend coverage.”

“I’d like to cover everyone — that would be the moral thing to do — but it would be immoral to bankrupt the country while doing so,” Landrieu said.

Okay, so it’s not an absolute no… she probably doesn’t wanna break with the party platform quite that blatantly. But clearly, she’s not gonna be a rubber-stamp for single-payer either.

If single-payer keeps losing support among Democratic Senators, it really won’t matter what Speaker Pelosi does over in the other chamber, it’ll die in the Senate.

As for the sometimes-mentioned “reconciliation” maneuver to pass it… I admit that His Obamaness and the Obamacrats has been really politically tone-deaf from time to time (calling town-hall participants “un-American,” for example), I think it’s likely that they realize that if they push the bill through using a back-door trick like that will really cause a political firestorm (note, I said a political, not a literal, firestorm–so misconstrue it at your own peril) that could permanently damage the “Democrat brand.” And I doubt they’d want to do that.

Feingold: ObamaCare Vote Unlikely This Year

When Democrats (the article doesn’t specify, but Russ Feingold is indeed a Democrat) start talking like this about a Democratic holy grail like a government takeover of healthcare, you might as well stick a fork in it.

U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold told a large crowd gathered for a listening session in Iron County last week there would likely be no health care bill before the end of the year – and perhaps not at all.

It was an assessment Feingold said he didn’t like, but the prospect of no health care legislation brought a burst of applause from a packed house of nearly 150 citizens at the Mercer Community Center.

“Nobody is going to bring a bill before Christmas, and maybe not even then, if this ever happens,” Feingold said. “The divisions are so deep. I never seen anything like that.”

Feingold reiterated his appraisal a bit later.

“We’re headed in the direction of doing absolutely nothing, and I think that’s unfortunate,” he said when asked about the plight of uninsured Americans.

Before anyone accuses my headline of being inaccurate, let me remind you that Congress traditionally takes a recess after Christmas, and doesn’t meet again till the next “session” which typically starts on 3 January… therefore, if it ain’t voted on before Christmas, it’ll be next year.

And if it comes up in an election year, you can bet your bottom dollar that vulnerable Democrats in conservative districts are going to be even less enthusiastic about voting for it.

In short, if Feingold is right, ObamaCare is pretty much defeated, unless the Democrats keep control of both houses of Congress after 2010, and as of the time of this writing, that looks highly unlikely.

Democrats and the Culture of Corruption, Part Eleven

That was so much fun, let’s do two! (Hey, as a baseball fan, I enjoy a double-header).

Looks like some Democrats still don’t wanna pay their fair share of taxes…

House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel , already beset by a series of ethics investigations, has disclosed more than $500,000 in previously unreported assets.

Among the new items on Rangel’s amended 2007 financial disclosure report were an account at the Congressional Federal Credit Union worth at least $250,000, an investment account with at least $250,000, land in southern New Jersey and stock in PepsiCo and fast food conglomerate Yum! Brands. None of those investments appeared on the original report, which was filled out by hand and filed in May 2008.

Of course, if you don’t report investments, you don’t pay taxes on them.

The best take on this, however, comes from the aptly-named Sunlight Foundation:

Obviously, the 28 occasions we tallied of Rangel omitting information from his financial disclosures is inaccurate–it’s too low.

Democrats and the Culture of Corruption, Part ten

And now, back to this series highlighting what the self-anointed elite think they can get away with…

Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) — Hassan Nemazee, chairman of Nemazee Capital Corp. and a fundraiser for President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, was arrested on charges he used phony documents to trick Citigroup Inc. into lending him as much as $74 million.

But wait, it’s not just the Clintons and Obamas that this guy worked for.

Nemazee is one of the leading fundraisers for the Democratic Party. He served as national finance chairman for the Senate committee that works to elect Democrats when it was run by New York Senator Charles Schumer.

And that’s still not all…

Nemazee also served as New York finance chairman for Massachusetts Senator John Kerry during his 2004 run for the presidency.

Ya know, I didn’t see any Republican names in there… did you?

A Miraculous Recovery

Have a hanky ready when you watch this CBS News report.

Obama Losing “Progressives”?

When you lose Paul Krugman, you’ve probably gone a long way to losing the so-called “progressives,” especially when he writes something like this:

According to news reports, the Obama administration — which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives. Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise. A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach.

[snip]

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line . . . It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled . . . So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

The amazing thing is that many conservatives (including yours truly) felt the same way about George W. Bush, though the issues and policies differed. If you look at how those sort of feelings hurt the GOP in the last two elections, it’s not too hard to see very rough sailing for the Democrats in the not-too-distant future.

Who’s Astroturfing Town Halls? Part II

Hmmm… people being bussed nearly 150 miles to attend a town hall and support ObamaCare?

Organizing for America, which is the successor organization to Obama for America, held a pro-Obamacare rally last week in front of U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer’s district office in Jackson, Michigan.
The Obama Administration and their SEIU supporters bussed in protesters from as far away as Muskegon and Detroit.

Detroit to Jackson is 78 miles.
Muskegon to Jackson is 146 miles.

See the link above for a map.

Now, tell me again, who’s Astroturfing? The right or the left?

“Blue Dogs Not Barking On Health-Care Reform”

In case anyone was still wondering why the lefty leadership of the Democrats sounds so scared and desperate, it’s probably because the Blue Dogs are really not sounding like they support the “public option” backdoor way of getting to single-payer healthcare:

The 52 members of the House Blue Dog Caucus of moderate to conservative Democrats are, like most other members of Congress, back in their home districts.

Members of this group — targeted by House Democratic leadership, the White House, and special interest groups — has largely been non-committal in public statements about whether or not they will vote for the health care reform legislation that ends of up on the floor of the House.

But despite efforts by Congressional leaders and the White House to make the legislation more palatable to them — by, perhaps, eliminating, the public health care option, or imposing more Medicare cuts — many of these members of Congress have sounded more skeptical of the bill as of late, according to local media reports.

Without the Blue Dogs, there is almost certainly no ObamaCare bill coming out of the house, and Her Speakership Pelosi knows that.

That’s why they are lashing out. Unfortunately (for them; fortunately for us conservatives), lashing out like they have been is very recognizable for what it is, and it doesn’t exactly help one’s case to do so.

Honesty From The Left On The “Public Option”

From the lefty (they like to call themselves “progressive,” but I call ’em as I see ’em) American Prospect comes this article on the “public option.” Here’s a sample (bold emphasis in original, red emphasis mine):

Following Edwards‘ lead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton picked up on the public option compromise. So what we have is Jacob Hacker’s policy idea, but largely Hickey and Health Care for America Now’s political strategy. It was a real high-wire act — to convince the single-payer advocates, who were the only engaged health care constituency on the left, that they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer, thus transferring their energy and enthusiasm to this alternative. It had a very positive political effect: It got all the candidates except Kucinich onto basically the same health reform structure, unlike in 1992, when every Democrat had his or her own gimmick. And the public option/insurance exchange structure was ambitious.

Read the whole thing. Really.

Another Reason ObamaCare Is Floundering

This is one I hadn’t really thought of, but it makes a lot of sense:

In our individual lives, we usually solve problems one at a time, as they arise and as we have resources and need. This works really well, but offers little opportunity for heroes to declare themselves and take credit for “historic change,” or the next “moon shot” or “Manhattan Project.” Practical, focused solutions are so… for the little people. Plus they present almost no opportunity to name a building, park, bill, or scholarship after yourself.

So instead, Washington does nothing for years and allows all sorts of individual problems to accumulate until either a) they think that the Gordian knot is complex enough to deserve their televised sword; or b) they think they can use the crush of problems as an excuse to do something that people wouldn’t normally accept.

People smell both these motives at work in the Comprehensive and Universal Grand Master Plan for Health Care that Congress is still designing by committee and Obama is pushing with heavy hands — without his even knowing which version is relevant.

[snip]

So as onerous as the details of Obamacare may be, much of the opposition is based on the fact that people understand that the details cannot even be fully known in such an unnecessarily large plan. Only a fool thinks he can solve every problem at once. Clearly, Washington, D.C., has become a City of Fools — the permanent home of the Too Big Idea. People no longer trust leaders whose ego and ambition habitually outstrip not only their own judgment, but also our diminishing resources.

I’d just add a couple of things: our resources are diminishing in large part because Obama took the admittedly large deficit Dubya handed him and proceeded to expand it outrageously in a thinly-disguised payoff to the lefty groups that helped get him elected.

And, funny thing, those bills–both of them–had to be passed in a “hurry up” fashion, just like His Obamaness wanted to do with ObamaCare.

Maybe people are also saying, “Hold it, we’ve tried your ‘do something immediately’ solutions and they haven’t solved the problem. We want to study this one for a while.”

Be Wary Of Health Care Co-Ops

There’s been some buzz about the possibility of dropping the “public option” in favor of health care “cooperatives” or “co-ops.” However, it’s quite possible that this is another Obama bait-and-switch tactic, designed to slip single-payer in through the back door by using language that seems less “scary.” Therefore, one should scrutinize the details carefully, including (but not limited to) the following:

Who appoints/elects the board members and/or chairman? If the government has control, is it really a “cooperative,” which is supposed to be something run by the members? Even if the government appoints the chairman but lets the members elect the rest of the board, that’s a powerful government voice in the co-op, and a potential red flag.

Who decides the requirements for health plans to offer coverage to the co-op members? If it’s the members that decide on their own, well and good. But if Uncle Sam is going to say that plans have to offer coverage for a, b, and c before they can market their plans to co-op members, that’s not much different from the “healthcare marketplace” in HR 3200, where only plans that the government approves can be part of the marketplace.

Who decides how much the insurers are able to charge for coverage? In a truly free-market co-op, there’d be no price controls at all; if, say the Acme plan charges more than people think the plan is worth, they won’t get many customers; but some co-ops might want to set an upper limit on what insurers can charge. If that decision is made by the members, it’s probably not all that bad (though it could turn problematic in the future), but again, if the government is able to set the price caps, that’s just another way of getting government control over your health care.

There are lots of other things to look at, but checking these three should let most intelligent people determine if what they’re being offered is a real cooperative or just another attempt by the lefties to impose government control on health care.

Caveat emptor, neighbors. Check the fine print very carefully!

No More Snitch-On-Your-Neighbor Email Box At The White House

Hmmm… wonder if MS-National-Barack-Channel will cover this:

Following a furor over how the data would be used, the White House has shut down an electronic tip box — flag@whitehouse.gov — that was set up to receive information on “fishy” claims about President Barack Obama’s health plan.

Once again, His Obamaness has to back off from one of his plans. I think by now he’s probably second only to Snidely Whiplash in how many times he has had to do that.

Democrat Cancels Town Hall; GOP Challenger Has One In Her Place

This one sort of speaks for itself:

Rep. [Gabrielle] Giffords (D) canceled her town hall in Sahuarita/Green Valley, AZ and Jesse Kelly, her Republican challenger, scheduled an appearance in the same venue at the same time and place.

Well, the room wasn’t booked anymore!

Looks like things went pretty well, too.

In all fairness, Rep. Giffords did do another town hall later, on an Air Force base, but it seems she might have been trying to duck the ObamaCare question.

Giffords’ spokesman C.J. Karamargin said the decision was made in order to consolidate two separate meetings covering military issues.

If it’s “covering military issues,” then she can just refuse to answer any ObamaCare questions as off-topic.

Anti-ObamaCare Protest in… SAN FRANCISCO?

Yep, you got it. Pelosi’s own district. I grew up about an hour’s drive on the 280 or 101 south of there, in the Silicon Valley area… the building in the background is the ferry building, I know it well.

As the original poster of the clip says, “If you can get a few 300-500 anti-liberal protesters onto the streets of San Francisco, well, it can only mean there must be a disturbance in the Force.”

(a tip of the Wanderer’s hat to the one and only Instapundit, who has links to more coverage)

ObamaCare Is Losing Ground

The big push (or would that be putsch?) to install single-payer, a/k/a socialized medicine in this country is really starting to lose ground.

To start with, Investors’ Business Daily went–as one might expect–to the numbers, and they found big problems:

There are 256 Democrats in the House, 52 of whom are Blue Dogs.

Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama, who’s not a member of the pack, has said he won’t support HR 3200 in its present form. That means Democrats need the support of at least 15 Blue Dogs to reach the 218 votes required to pass the health care bill. So far, no Republicans have come out in favor of the measure.

An IBD survey, combined with news reports, of all the Blue Dogs reveals only four definite supporters: John Salazar of Colorado, Ohio’s Zack Space, and Mike Thompson and Adam Schiff, both from California.

Based on the survey and previous press reports, at least 13 Blue Dogs are opposed to the bill as it now stands.

Many of those who are undecided or did not respond have expressed reservations about various aspects of the bill, including the public plan option, the cost and tax increases.

So, we have 13 of the 52 already probably opposed. That leaves 39, and only 4 of them are clearly on-board with ObamaCare.

However, the problem becomes even more thorny when non-Blue Dogs among the Democrats start expressing their own opposition, as Kent Conrad (D-ND) has recently:

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. presented his cooperative health care proposal here Thursday and told an audience of 100 that he would not vote for a government-run health care program…

[snip]

President Barack Obama had originally set an August deadline for the House and Senate to pass health care reform. That target is too rushed, Conrad said.

[snip]

Conrad said he would not vote for any health care reform that funded abortions, care for illegal immigrants or a plan that mandates end-of-life counseling.

Since HR 3200 has all three of the things Conrad says he will not vote for, it seems clear that–unless he intends to flip-flop, which would be utter idiocy on this topic at this time–he simply can’t vote for it if it or a similar bill reaches the Senate.

All in all, conservatives (not necessarily the GOP) are winning this fight, and we need to keep doing what we’ve been doing; specifically, putting lots of pressure on those Democrats that aren’t completely in the tank for His Obamaness and socialized medicine. They may want to help their party, and they may have some desire to install a single-payer system, but my reading is that they value their seats in Congress more, and if it comes down to ObamaCare or their seats, they’ll keep their seats, if for no other reason than because then they can try to push this through later.

Stimulus: If It Was Good For Nazi Germany, It Is Good For Us

With all of the accusations flying from leftist Democrats, media outlets, etc. about anti-government health care town hall protestors, conservative media pundits and conservative talk radio hosts being Nazis, the vast hypocrisy of the left becomes even more exposed and abundantly clear. According to left-wingers, TEA party protestors and others like them are doing much to emulate “right-wing” Nazism.

A few months back, the New York Times published an article about the Obama “stimu-less”, entitled Stimulus Thinking, and Nuance.

I couldn’t find anything on this subject from any other media outlets, including Fox News. Although The New York Times has not established a record of being a conservative news source, are we to conclude that the article by David Leonhardt was written with a right-wing point-of-view? Since the left has attributed conservative and/or right-wing beliefs and causes (erroneously so) to those of Nazism, are we to assume that Nazi Germany’s stimulus plan was a conservative and/or right-wing success story [Article – Hitler’s Economics]?

National Review Online has an article entitled Nazis for Me, but Not for Thee, explaining the previously-cited New York Times article. The NRO article does not denounce the NYT for publishing the article and I happen to agree with NRO. The NYT should not be denounced for several reasons.

First, the article does not endorse all or even most of the policies of Nazi Germany, just Hitler’s economic reforms that started in 1933. Second, a comparison between Nazi Germany’s economic policies were compared to those of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration and the Japanese stimulus of the 1990s, from which an opinion was extrapolated from that comparison. Third, the article was written to give more credence to President Obama’s stimulus plan and to prove that stimulus has worked in the past. Surely the examples that history has on record of the “successes” of stimulus are not limited to only those of Nazi Germany and Japan in the early 1990s. There have to be better examples to glean experiences from, right? How about from the era of FDR? No, the author of the NYT article wrote:

“When governments have taken aggressive steps to soften an economic decline, they have succeeded. The Germans did it in the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt did so more haltingly, and had more halting results.”

Apparently, the economic policies of FDR were not as aggressive as the economic policies of Adolf Hitler. Of course, history points out that FDR’s economic policies did not pull the country out of the depression, but that it was in fact the advent of World War II that did. Since the NYT article was written by an objective “right-winger”, let’s ignore history on that fact (sarc-off).

Pertaining to the NYT article, the previously-mentioned NRO article hits the nail right on the head:

“Nazi Germany is a useful historical example of socialism run amok. The genocide and terrorism ultimately practiced by the Nazis were horrible — that goes without saying. But National Socialism went on for a dozen years, it was the last stage in a progressive nationalization of German society, and there was a lot more to it than genocide and terrorism. It cannot be that because there was genocide and terrorism, the socialist aspects of National Socialism are outside the lines of acceptable political discourse.”

The NRO article further states:

“The wisdom vel non of policies adopted during over a decade of Nazi socialism cannot be off the table simply because, in the end, the Nazis were monsters. We may find the seeds of their monstrousness in those policies, or we may not. But the thought that we should not talk about them is absurd. Notably, Leonhardt’s piece ran without any teeth-gnashing from Mort Kondracke and our other Beltway chaperones.”

History shows that Germany’s economic policy became a “means to an end” economic policy. They used their economic restructuring for the good of the few, not the many. They used their economy to build a deadly military juggernaut and to murder millions on innocents. Germany’s economy became fraught with widespread corruption, fraud, favoritism and theft. The people of Germany became the creators of their own demise. They were gradually transformed into wards of the state, no longer entrusted with the ability of individual thought, freedom and responsibility. In the end, the policies of Adolf Hitler and his various reichsministers or “czars”, led to the destruction of the country of Germany and a large number of its populace.

A history lesson for all of us because history has the uncanny ability of repeating itself.

Americans Against Government-Run Health Care: Expect A Major Offensive Of Intimidation And Suppression

To be sure, leftist organizations are preparing a major offensive of intimidation, confrontation, rights violations and suppression of dissent against American citizens who dare to speak out against those currently in power who are rapidly stripping this country of freedom and liberty and ushering in an era of near if not outright, totalitarianism.

Marxists and their socialist partners will not give up their version of health care reform without a fight. That fight is set to escalate. They will purposely try to goad people who are against a government takeover of our health care system into violence through either verbal and/or physical confrontations. That is what they want. They need ammunition to direct public opinion. That’s the ChicagObama, Emanuel, leftist, Marxist way. One has to wonder why they would want to do that, until you look into Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”, which is the handbook used by Obama, his army of “community organizers”, state-run media outlets, leftist politicians, labor unions and left-wing activist organizations.

According to Alinsky, you “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”. This is done in an effort to divert attention away from the real issue(s) or fact(s) at hand by focusing the point of attack on a particular individual or group by assigning stereotypical labels and/or broad generalizations to them through slander,  libel or any other method of attack. Once public opinion has been swayed to portray the opposition as nothing more than stupid, insane, violent, anti-government and hate-fomenting anarchist “astroturf” Nazis who are encouraging civil discontent and disobedience, that individual or group of individuals can then be more easily targeted for dismantling and destruction.

We got a taste of the “Alinsky way” in the case of “Joe the plumber” and more recently with a woman who dared approach Senator Arlen Specter.