Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin
The New Authoritarianism

A firm hand for a “nation of dodos”
6 January 2012

“I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer,” said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that “where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This “go it alone” philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.

The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.

Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.

The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.

The tension between self-government and “good” government has existed since the origins of modern liberalism. Thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Randolph Bourne staked a claim to a priestly wisdom far greater than that possessed by the ordinary mortal. As Croly explained, “any increase in centralized power and responsibility . . . is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition” and the fact that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”

During the first two years of the Obama administration, the progressives persuaded themselves that favorable demographics and the consequences of the George W. Bush years would assure the consent of the electorate. They drew parallels with how growing urbanization and Herbert Hoover’s legacy worked for FDR in the 1930s. But FDR enhanced his majority in his first midterm election in 1934; the current progressive agenda, by contrast, was roundly thrashed in 2010. Obama may compare himself to Roosevelt and even to Lincoln, but the electorate does not appear to share this assessment.

After the 2010 thrashing, progressives seemed uninterested in moderating their agenda. Left-wing standard bearers Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies went so far as to argue that Obama should bypass Congress whenever necessary and govern using his executive authority over the government’s regulatory agencies. This autocratic agenda of enhanced executive authority has strong support with people close to White House, such as John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, a left-liberal think tank. “The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy,” Podesta has written. “These authorities can be used to ensure positive progress on many of the key issues facing the country.”

Podesta has proposed what amounts to a national, more ideological variant of what in Obama’s home state is known as “The Chicago Way.” Under that system, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune explains, “citizens, even Republicans, are expected to take what big government gives them. If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss’ little brother, you write the check.” But the American clerisy isn’t merely a bunch of corrupt politicians and bureaucratic lifers, and the United States isn’t one-party Chicago. The clerisy are more like an ideological vanguard, one based largely in academe and the media as well as part of the high-tech community.

Their authoritarian progressivism—at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism—tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell’s telling phrase, “the priests of the machine.” Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in “progressive legal theory,” which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin—a kind of secular notion of original sin. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people. The clerisy may see in Obama “reason incarnate,” as George Packer of The New Yorker put it, but the majority of the population remains more concerned about long-term unemployment and a struggling economy than about rising sea levels or the need to maintain racial quotas.

Despite the president’s clear political weaknesses—his job-approval ratings remain below 50 percent—he retains a reasonable shot at reelection. In the coming months, he will likely avoid pushing too hard on such things as overregulating business, particularly on the environmental front, which would undermine the nascent recovery and stir too much opposition from corporate donors. American voters may also be less than enthusiastic about the Republican alternatives topping the ticket. And one should never underestimate the power of even a less-than-popular president. Obama can count on a strong chorus of support from the media and many of the top high-tech firms, which have enjoyed lavish subsidies and government loans for “green” projects.

If Obama does win, 2013 could possibly bring something approaching a constitutional crisis. With the House and perhaps the Senate in Republican hands, Obama’s clerisy may be tempted to use the full range of executive power. The logic for running the country from the executive has been laid out already. Republican control of just the House, argues Chicago congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has made America ungovernable. Obama, he said during the fight over the debt limit, needed to bypass the Constitution because, as in 1861, the South (in this case, the Southern Republicans) was “in a state of rebellion” against lawful authority. Beverley Perdue, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, concurred: she wanted to have elections suspended for a stretch. (Perdue’s office later insisted this was a joke, but most jokes aren’t told deadpan or punctuated with “I really hope someone can agree with me on that.” Also: Nobody laughed.)

The Left’s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin’s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals. Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The “reasonably enlightened group” running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China’s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself “staunchly optimistic” about the future of that country’s Communist Party dictatorship. And it’s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for “the trash heap of history.” The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.

A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries—notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector—and drag whole regions into recession. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed “cap and trade,” would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.

This future can already been seen in fiscally challenged California. The state should be leading a recovery, not lagging behind the rest of the country. But in a place where Obama-style progressives rule without effective opposition, the clerisy has already enacted a score of regulatory mandates that are chasing businesses, particularly in manufacturing, out of the state. It has also passed land-use policies designed to enforce density, in effect eliminating the dream of single-family homes for all but the very rich in much of the state.

A nightmare scenario would be a constitutional crisis pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership. Over time, the new authoritarians would elicit even more opposition from the “dodos” who make up the majority of Americans residing in the great landmass outside the coastal strips and Chicago. The legacy of the Obama years—once so breathlessly associated with hope and reconciliation—may instead be growing pessimism and polarization.

Fred Siegel, a contributing editor of City Journal, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Joel Kotkin is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University.

The Circus is back in town.  Or maybe it never left.  The names remain the same, the form of the cause evolves slightly, but the theme persists.  Shut down growth.  Keep the country in the county.  Save us.

Locally it started with the Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse, a creature near and dear to our hearts that was uniquely threatened by evil developer bulldozers.  We awoke to find one day that this rodent species owns a whole basket of usurped property rights.  Based on this novel discovery, hundreds of green and left warriors combined with sympathetic government regulators to form the Circus and bring into existence, by mere presumption, thousands of pages of growth-stopping regulations.  They empowered the federal Environmental Protection Agency and all subordinate levels of government to save that mouse, and by their curious chain of cause and effect, us too.  The economic clout now wielded on behalf of that mouse makes it one of the most powerful rodents in the history of the universe, probably second only to Mickey.  And we were not saved.

The Circus rested for a bit and recharged its batteries.  Then along came an evil developer intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for a super highway complete with utility corridors and railroad tracks.  Imagine the environmental impacts–pretty much the worst things possible–the smog all that transportation would cause, the ancient trees to be felled, the noise, the light.  Don’t go toward the light!  Imagine the poor mice that would have to be relocated and provided similar habitat—if it could even be found—outside of the right of way.  The damages would surely be irreparable.  The Circus shifted into high gear and put the pedal to the metal.  They rented busses to carry occupants to the State capitol.  They saturated planning and commissioner meetings.  They filled the internet with a relentless onslaught of do or die hyperbolic predictions about the end of the world that this road would precipitate.  The end of the world was serious stuff.  No one wanted that.  The laws were passed, the court cases came in.  The Circus rested.  And still we were not saved.

One day an evil developer came along, intent on bringing water commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for long distance water transportation to quench the thirst of citizens in a sub-development in Colorado Springs.  The Circus double clutched their well-oiled machine and slipped it into gear.  Hundreds of loud clamorers filled auditoriums,  government meetings and state house offices with a new flag of presumed entitlement, “our water.”  The fact that not a drop of it actually belonged to them gave them no pause.  “Our water” was not actually “their water” but the mob has never been one to quibble about details like legal property rights.  They were all about momentum, sound bites and the persuasion of pure force.  Demonstrators and occupyers don’t wait for the subtleties of legal technicalities, unless of course a legal technicality can be found to put wind into their sails, that’s another matter.  The evil developer was persuaded to recede into the tapestry of the world, and the Circus rested once again.  And still we were not saved.

Then along came the evil energy developers, intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision of energy independence from the beneficial use of dormant oil and gas supplies lying ten thousand feet down in the ground.  The Circus kicked their machine into overdrive.  To save us once again, the green and left warriors sallied forth and wrote hundreds of pages of zoning laws incorporating every growth stopping agency and device ever conceived by statist man.  They employed lawyers to tune their language so those laws could only be challenged—never repealed—by endless years of impossibly expensive litigation.

The Roman government gave bread and circuses to the people to distract them from the messy details of their oppressive governors.  Today’s Circus combines the clamoring class of green and leftist warriors with a sympathetic regulatory class of unelected bureaucrats, to form the government itself.  Gone are those halcyon times when the mob could be placated by mere food and entertainment.  Perhaps conditioned by reality TV, the mob now insists on being part of the action.  They want a hand in actually creating the government fascism that will turn around and oppress them.  So long as they can applaud a victory, it matters not that the beast they create intends to dine on them.

For all their efforts put in to save our quality of life, our environment, and our property values, you’d think real estate around here would be getting more expensive.

The Jews have their Talmud, the Muslims their Hadiths, exhaustive rules of religious law and taboo to define every nuance of permissible human action.  Secular Americans have City, County, State and Federal regulations in a great fascist web waiting to entrap citizens, pending the whim of an invisible unelected bureaucratic shaman somewhere who may notice a non-compliant act, and who then brings down the wrath of government upon the citizen, er, applicant.

The applause is always deafening.

“Why bother with an environmental impact assessment if the decision was always going to be made for political reasons?” WSJ, 1/19/2012, pg. A14.

Excellent question, and it points squarely to the agenda motivating Elbert County greens in pushing through impossibly complex local oil and gas zoning. This zoning putsch masquerades under saving property values, sparing the environment, and smart growth, but those are just platitudes for the rubes.

This zoning would create a matrix of imponderable and unchallengeable laws administered by a czar, who would conduct numerous public planning circuses for green activists to attend and applaud, for the sole purpose of displaying oil and gas development blasphemers for the greens to ridicule.

The political decision has already been made by these people. Please, save us all a lot of time and money. We’re not stupid. We don’t need your sacrificial rituals to the green gods. Just ban it for the taboo that you’ve already decided it is.

And I want to see the Community and Development Services director wear a witch doctor’s headdress at future BOCC meetings, you know, something befitting a smartly dressed shaman.

“Every year regulatory compliance costs U.S. businesses $1.75 Trillion. That would be enough to hire 43 Million workers.”

See this short youtube video at Episode Two: Economic Freedom in America Today.

Regulation is not only a Federal problem.  Regulation is pernicious, at every level of government.  Today Elbert County has a clear choice whether or not to greatly expand our county’s regulatory reach into energy development matters it knows next to nothing about.

At the county level the force of regulation is imposed through zoning law.  Our county’s Community and Development Services department works every day to write, refine, expand, detail and enforce their ubiquitous vision of a perfectable society.  They want to save this land and this county from its people because, essentially, they don’t trust the people.

They think they are wise stewards who, with a third-party steward’s interest, have a more valuable right to forecefully impose their vision about a sound local economy, than the stakeholders and property holders in the county have in doing so for themselves.

Zoning regulators think that by stopping people from the pursuit of economic activity, they serve a higher purpose of preservation of our local world.  This of course begs questions of preservation for what?  For who?  For when?  And for why?

Of course they have answers for all of these questions.  The answers are myths — myths consisting of more tenuous myths in a great pyramid of “smart,” sustainable, no-growth, enviro-jihad mythology.

The future beneficiaries of county zoning and regulation don’t exist.  They are a myth–not real–and unless you’re a believer, not even foreseeable.  The great probability is they will never come to exist because future unforseen circumstances will change everything long before these present day socio and eco myths can ever be tested, long after they are forgotten in favor of some future mythology as yet unkown.

Man took matters that used to be in God’s domain and invested them in Gaia, the environment and universe-trekking aliens. That’s what humans do at the margins of their knowledge where observation ends and speculation begins–we create mythologies–myths that we love.   And then we create the legalities to enforce those mythologies.

Regulatory zealots consider this sort of talk heresy.  They believe that the forced perfectibility of man and the environment is actually possible.  Just as the power that was - the Church - once defended Ptolemy’s geocentric universe against the heresy of Copernicus, so too the regulatory powers of today know, without a shadow of doubt, that they know best, and that they can sufficiently describe, legislate, and enforce a set of rules to govern our behavior, for our own best interest.

To even imagine they could succeed at such a task is a pinnacle of hubris.  When has an authoritarian process ever led to a best outcome for its subjects?  When have a small minority of minds ever created the economic output of a diverse population acting in their own interests?  The regulatory model cannot succeed.

Regulation makes inevitable change much more costly.  The regulatory parties in government who do this to us have no personal skin in the game–only myths and the iron fist–a deadly combination.  Ironically, the regulatory mission of governing progressives is about the most regressive thing they could do.

If we can’t stop creating mythologies, at least we should learn to stop legalizing them.

~

Democrats Use Fiscal Crisis As Weapon To Bash GOP
Investors Business Daily Posted 12/27/2011 07:09 PM ET

Debt: Wasn’t it just last summer Republicans and Democrats nearly came to blows over raising the debt ceiling? Well, guess what — President Obama is back, asking for another $1.2 trillion. Are we being gamed here? (more…)

From the ACLU 50-State Survey for January of 2012:

• Access to abortion and birth control. [Must keep killing babies.]
• Equal treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered. [Must treat those who display sexual preference the same as those who do not.]
• Protection against racial profiling and discrimination by law enforcement. [Must not profile those most likely to commit terrorism.]
• Equal access for eligible residents to vote. [As opposed to citizens.]
• Non-preferential treatment of any one religion by the government. [Except Islam.]
• Preventing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design from interfering with the teaching of evolution in public school science classes. [When government sanctions a theory it must be protected.  See global warming.]

Let’s see: infant death and dismemberment, sexual obsession, terrorism, illegal aliens, Sharia, spurious government science.  That’s an impressive series of harmful policies to rack up by one organization in one fund-raising mailer.  How did I get on this nutjob mailing list?  Yeah I’m going to send them a check, where’s my pen?

Thank you American law schools.

Landmark Speeches of National Socialism, Edited by Randall L. Bytwerk

• “National Socialism was the most prolific rhetorical movement of the twentieth century.”
• “…[R]hetoric moved a civilized nation to support Nazism, and to close its eyes to the crimes that were not difficult to see.”
• “Everything that Nazism intended was revealed in its rhetoric.”
• “[Hitler] thought that the average person is uninterested in complex arguments, being ruled more by emotion than intellect.  Nazi rhetoric therefore avoided presenting detailed solutions to complex problems.”
• “Propaganda also needed to be one-sided.  Since the masses did not understand complex issues, presenting balanced arguments would only shake their confidence in the rightness of a cause.”
• “A speaker, Hitler thought, should stand before an audience with the fervor of an evangelist preaching a religious faith.”
• “Just as a religion or a church can never stop preaching and explaining the faith in a thousand ways from the pulpit, no more can National Socialism surrender the direct and powerful effect of the speech, which ever and against strengthens the faith of the movement and provides new power for the never-ending struggle.”
• “To maintain power required unceasing efforts to persuade Germans that National Socialism deserved their unconditional allegiance.”
• “Germans did not support Hitler because they expected him to lead them into a ruinous war, but rather because he and his party drew upon deeply rooted values and beliefs.”
• “…Nazism presented itself not as a political party, but as a movement that encompassed everything Germans held to be true and just.”
• “What propaganda avoids saying is at least as important as what it does say.  The Nazis realized that blatant lying often fails, and that people accept some things in general that they reject if they know the details.”

The number of speeches Obama has given since taking office roughly equals the number of days he has been in office.

The editors and columnists at Investor’s Business Daily [Investors.com] regularly provide sound analysis of the Obama administration, however, they may be missing the real nature of Obama.

He’s not just campaigning.  He’s relentlessly propagandizing a dangerous mythology with himself at the center.

The Beasts of Buchenwald by Flint Whitlock

• “The persecutions did not come all at once; they gradually grew more onerous once the Nazis saw that the open harassment of Jews and the imposition of unreasonable restrictions on them were not being objected to by the great bulk of non-Jewish German society. There was, of course, no way for the Jews to know if the Nazi’s threats were substantive or merely idle. There was no way for the Jews of Germany (and, later, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc., too) to realize that concentration camps, death camps, gas chambers, mass graves, and ovens were in their future.”
• “By the time they comprehended the enormity of the danger, it was too late.”

Awad vs. Oklahoma State Board of Elections

Islam is a religion, a political system, and a legal system.  These three Muslim domains are intertwined and inseparable.

Plaintiffs repeatedly argue that Muslims require a Sharia legal system in order to practice their religion.  American law cannot incorporate a Sharia legal system into its jurisprudence since doing so would also incorporate Islamic political and religious tenants into its constitutional common law.  This would plainly violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

Therefore this claim pleads for an unconstitutional remedy on its face and should be denied.

Hickenlooper: Colorado’s ‘Backwards Thinking in Rural, Western Areas’

Maes: ‘This is about me….’

Magellan Poll: “If trends continue it would not be surprising to find the final vote totals showing Dan Maes at 5% or less, and Tom Tancredo surging past John Hickenlooper.” Oct 22, 2010.

 RE:

Call For The Immediate Resignation of All Republican Officials Openly Supporting 3rd Party ACP Candidate Tancredo
by Cindy Lyons on Sunday, October 3, 2010 at 7:54pm

I am calling for the immediate resignation of ALL Republican elected officials and party people who are caught openly defying state GOP party by-laws. It is shameful for a liberal reporter to expose so well what was lying under neath all along. When a Republican supports a party not their own they are called RINO: Republican In Name Only under the truest of circumstances. I call for all GOP Party Chairs to enforce this rule.

Cindy Lyons
Patriot
9-12 member
Republican Conservative

It took a systemic failure of the Republican caucus system for a public call to go out to purge the party of its RINO’s.  But RINO’s have been comfortably ensconced in Republican Central Committees for years.  Why must they suddenly be purged?

Because Maes zealots need someone to blame for the failure of the caucus system that they perpetrated.  They abused the caucus apparatus, they screwed it up royally, and now they have bogeyman in the form of Tancredo supporters to blame.

The caucus system was never a good solution; it’s thoroughly corrupt and has been for a long time.  But Republicans have an opportunity to really fix something if they have the courage that their professed patriotism and allegiance to conservatism implies.

Expelling RINO’s, even if they could do it which they can’t, will only further cement the caucus problem in place.  So, do Republicans have the courage of introspection to analyze themselves and the conduct of their caucus process?  Can they admit that the caucus system is the product of a small minority of self-appointed apparatchiks who convince themselves over time that they are representatives of the people at large, and that this bunch blew it big time?

This would be a great opportunity for Republicans to man up, take responsibility for their mistakes, and fix this broken corrupt caucus process.

The tenor of the Elbert County Tea Party however, full of self-righteous indignation, seems to be running away from these real growth opportunities as fast as they can.  Electing the leftist opposition will be their legacy, they’ll never admit it, and they’ll go on nursing their coffee clatch political club for the rest of their days.

The Closing Of The Muslim Mind by Robert R. Reilly

Foreword by Roger Scruton

“The roots of Western civilization lie in the religion of Israel, the culture of Greece, and the law of Rome, and the resulting synthesis has flourished and decayed in a thousand ways during the two millennia that have followed the death of Christ. Whether expanding into new territories or retreating into cities, Western civilization has continually experimented with new institutions, new laws, new forms of political order, new scientific beliefs, and new practices in the arts. And this tradition of experiment led, in time, to the Enlightenment, to democracy, and to forms of social order in which free opinion and freedom of religion are guaranteed by the state.

Why did not something similar happen in the Islamic world? (more…)

Matthew Broderick played a hacker kid in the movie War Games who dialed into a government computer named WOPR, and triggered a global thermonuclear war game simulation with it.  In the movie, WOPR was located at the NORAD complex inside Cheyenne Mountain and it controlled our nuclear arsenal.  No one at NORAD realized there was a simulation going on and the military mobilized as if the threat was real.  The plot brings the world to the brink of nuclear war as the game between the hacker and the machine plays out.  Things eventually resolve and at the end the WOPR computer concludes the moral of the story–in a suitably robotic voice, “The only way to win is not to play the game.”

There you have the answer to Saul Alinsky and his Rules For Radicals.

msnbc.com news services
updated 9/18/2010 10:15:40 PM ET

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama came out swinging against Republicans in a fiery campaign-season speech to black lawmakers Saturday night, urging them to “guard the change” he was delivering with the kind of organizing that propelled the civil rights movement.

“I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods, and your workplaces, to your churches, and barbershops, and beauty shops. Tell them we have more work to do. Tell them we can’t wait to organize. Tell them that the time for action is now,” Obama said in his remarks.

Members of “the other side,” Obama said, “want to take us backward. We want to move America forward. In fact, they’re betting that you’ll come down with a case of amnesia. That you’ll forget about what their agenda did to this country when they were in charge. Remember, these are the folks who spent almost a decade driving the economy into a ditch. And now they’re asking for the keys back.”

“What made the civil rights movement possible were foot soldiers like so many of you, sitting down at lunch counters and standing up for freedom. What made it possible for me to be here today are Americans throughout our history making our union more equal, making our union more just, making our union more perfect,” Obama said. “That’s what we need again.”

The effort began Monday with a White House reception for black college officials. It included speeches by the president on Wednesday to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and by first lady Michelle Obama to a black caucus legislative conference that same day.

The president told the Hispanic group he is committed to an immigration overhaul, even though it has stalled in Congress. He blamed GOP opposition and said Hispanic voters should keep that in mind.

“You have every right to keep the heat on me and keep the heat on the Democrats,” he said. “But don’t forget who is standing with you, and who is standing against you. … Your voice can make the difference.”

Looking at this latest push from Obama, it’s obvious he’s dealing race cards, class envy cards, illegal immigration cards, culture cards, xenophobia cards, and probably a handful of others–pretty much red meat for everyone, whether you are for or against his hope and change.

If you’re for Obama’s change, he means to inspire you to action.  But even more importantly, if you’re against Obama’s change he means to inspire you to reaction.  It is in the reaction of the majority that his real power to control events lies.

Without conservative reaction to Obama’s racism, victimization and division, all he has is an echo chamber within the minority.  The real play, the big fish he’s trying to reel in, is the resonance from the majority, because their reaction makes the playing field on which to continue the game.

The main goal of community organizing is to provide a continuing provocation to the majority to get them to react irrationally, emotionally, to lose control, and to thereby become subject to manipulation.

Conservatives need to stop reacting to all of the dividing philosophies promulgated by the Left.  The basket full of plainly harmful and emotionally supercharged red-meat ideas that the left uses to cause division in America all deserve to be ignored.  There’s nothing new there, nothing to be learned, nothing to be gained, and conservatives know this on an intellectual level.

Conservatives need to stop allowing themselves to be jerked around by their emotions.  The left will carry on as they will.  No one can reasonably expect to change members of a brainwashed cult.  Conservatives should take themselves off the playing field and out of that game and allow the left’s ideas, such as they are, to just resonate among themselves.

If conservatives disempower the left’s harmful ideas by ceasing to react to them, I expect their politics of division will lose relevance and gradually die out.  And one day we’ll be able to put Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into the ground where they belong with him.

“Why not a 9/10 movement?’ asks Ed Quillen.

Because:

• We live in a universe where time moves forward, and
• The Islamic cult who attacked America on 9/11 is still at war with us, and
• The war will continue until they stop fighting us, and
• They are command by their god to fight us to the death, and
• Many who sympathize with the Islamic cult currently at war with America freely live among us, and
• America has become an armed camp because would-be terrorists living among us seek opportunities to spread terror, and
• etc.

Quillen’s Pollyanna lament is a nice bit of nostalgia, and it’s completely unhelpful, like much of what comes out of his brand of politics.  If the left really wanted things to be as they were on 9/10, they would fight the long war and its Islamic philosophy as if they meant to end it.  They would stop enabling it in America.

RE:

Quillen: Confessions of a 9/10 American

By Ed Quillen
The Denver Post
Posted: 09/12/2010 01:00:00 AM MDT

As memorable dates go, Sept. 12 is not high on the list. (more…)

The man who knows nothing about business and wealth creation would guarantee a job, an education, health care, a home, and a comfortable retirement to everyone.  The man above who produces nothing would use the power of the state to guarantee the appropriation of wealth from producers to consumers.  No one calls it Communism or Socialism, however, “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” and Obama’s policy stated recently in Cleveland have a distinction without a difference.

Who is going to provide all of the outcomes that Obama effortlessly promises?  Who will provision the beneficiaries?  Not the government.  The government doesn’t create any of those things.  The government is just an intermediary that consumes some overhead to manage the transfer of all this guaranteed value from one group of citizens to another. Wealth producers fund Obama’s guarantees–his wealth transfers–to consumers, and they also fund the government overhead that operates the transfer system.

Obama and Congress are free riders in this system.  They get paid by wealth producers, and they keep their jobs by buying off the goodwill of government beneficiaries who receive the guaranteed outcomes they promise.

Obama, Congress, and the Executive Branch containing thousands of federal regulators with enforcement powers, have no personal skin in the game.  They produce nothing while they wield power, yet the wielding of power actually prolongs and enhances their positions–gets them more power.  The reality feedback loop for this system is stacked against producers, it’s disconnected from real cause and effect, it doesn’t respond to real economics, and it cannot produce economic outcomes.  Every outcome the government wealth transfer and regulatory system produces is in fact a dislocation from what would occur naturally.

And what would occur naturally, according to Leftist mythology, is a dangerous, racist, hurtful, unjust, mean, nasty, insensitive, polluting, deadly, evil, devastating Republican disaster that must be avoided at any and all cost.  Leftist mythology covers a lot to hate, and that’s why they’re so practiced at expressing hatred.  You are what you eat.

But the Left thinks this system is just wonderful because they see themselves as saviors from all the squalor that would otherwise exist.  Obama and those who uphold his beliefs have no clue about the essential injustice, unworkability, and seriously harmful consequences that their guaranteed outcomes have caused wherever they’ve been previously tried.  They zealously believe in a system of thought that prevents them from realizing these truths.  Blissfully unaware of the harm their policies cause, with brains washed clean of introspection and critical thought, they think themselves brilliant.  The role of savior, the messianic complex, is so captivating to them that it crowds out reality feedback.  They never even see their own negative effects.

Our Constitution gave us the tools to prevent this sort of monstrosity from developing.  Over two centuries of Supreme Court decisions have largely eviscerated the constitutional protections created by the Founders, and there now exists a very wealthy and self-perpetuating industry of lawyers and courts who are vested in the daily effort to transfer wealth and political empowerment to beneficiaries, and away from producers.

America may have already passed the tipping point where the incentive to produce is so diluted, and the avarice of beneficiaries and their empowering bureaucracy is so ravaging, that the American dream has become a memory.

These folks (see below) liberally refer to we the people and, more troubling, they believe they personally channel the will of the people, and this has me concerned.  There’s no statesmanship here, no discussion of governing principles or economic philosophies, no insights into the constitutional battles raging all around us–none of that–just undiluted US vs. THEM populism glossed over with a few we the people’s to give themselves a constitutional veneer of legitimacy.  Bullfeathers.  If your best reason to be governor is that you’re not one of the blue meanies, you really should get out.

To be sure, party trumps person, however, should pure populism trump party?  After all, pure populism is the mess we’re already in.  More of the same, albeit of a different color, hardly seems like a remedy.

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Smoke Filled Back Rooms banned
by Robert Rowland on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 1:22pm

As in all campaigns and movements there are those moments when we all start having doubts, we all grow tired from the seemingly constant barrage of bias media or we grow discouraged when we hear things like how much money the other side has compared to ours.   We begin to question our own belief systems and ask, “can the people or the will of the people really prevail”?    Prevail against a powerful machine that will do almost anything to maintain the status quo.  A machine so focused on their own power and influence that they think they can circumvent the will of the American people.  People who because they have wealth think they can intimidate the people’s candidate into quitting to make room for their choice.  One who will serve their plans, not ours.

Now I get this message from Karen Maes, Dan’s wife.   She’s one of us, just like us, a mom, a spouse and having met her several times, just a down to earth genuine, no pretense person.   Listen to her passion, listen to her commitment not just to her husband and family but to the cause, our cause.   I can’t imagine the sacrifices and pressure this type of endeavor puts on a family, especially with young children still in the house, but they’re doing it, and they’re representing each one of us in doing so.

We are grassroots, regular folks who know the system is broke, we know if we don’t hold our ground now to these “smoke filled, lost in time” good ole’ boys (gender neutral), will win again, and we may never get another chance to set things right.

PLEASE READ THIS LETTER AND THINK ABOUT YOUR ROLE IN THIS HISTORIC MOMENT IN COLORADO POLITICS.      THE TIME TO GET INVOLVED IS NOW, NOT TOMORROW, TODAY!   I refuse to let these folks stop the moment we’ve been waiting for all these years, to get a people’s candidate elected, not someone conjured up in one of their smoke filled rooms.  I know what I want to be able to say I did when the time comes years from now, do you?

Robert Rowland, Elbert Tea Party/912 Chairman

The View of A Smoke Filled Room by Karen Maes

Most of you have never met me, so let me introduce myself: I’m Karen, Dan’s wife of soon to be 20 years and, as Dan’s wife, I tend to stay in the background.  I have found my role in the campaign to be one of support for my husband in this race, no matter what.  I try to stay out of the “politics” of it so I can stay positive and thus maintain a home where our children can live happy and content.  I do support my husband fully in this campaign, which has never been about him, but about YOU the people.  Why am I now writing to you?  Because the events of the last few weeks have me angry!
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Over the last few weeks, Dan has been approached by many “political insiders” (let me clarify, this is not GOP party representatives) who have asked my husband to drop out of the race.  WHY?  I believe they are afraid of him because he’s the outsider.  I believe they are afraid because he can’t be controlled by them.  When did politics become this way?!?!  Let me tell you this: I WILL NOT ALLOW DAN TO DROP OUT OF THIS RACE!  YOU elected him to be the Republican nominee, how dare someone try to take that away from you!  You must stand by me and not allow it either!  Dan is here to represent YOU.  He has become YOUR voice!  I call him your megaphone, because now you have someone who is listening to what is important to YOU!

Since Dan’s historic victory in the state primary you would think all those people who preached the importance of backing the winner, no matter who it would be, would be practicing what they preached.  In some cases, they have and I appreciate them so much.  They are an encouragement to Dan.  What makes me (and Dan) sick are the people who are not.  Not only do they not support him but they are what actually make up the “smoke filled room”.  This room does not have four walls.  It can be a phone call from someone who thinks they have more power than they have.  It can be a meeting at a restaurant with someone who asked for a meeting “to help” Dan and that person attempts to pressure Dan to leave.  It can be a potential fundraising event with a few wealthy people who attempt to hijack the meeting and appeal to Dan’s integrity and honor to “do what is right” and step aside for their candidate.

I was stunned to hear Dan relay this message from a meeting: a wealthy man advised Dan that Dan should use his great sales skills to influence the grass roots to understand that Dan stepping aside was in the best interest of the state.  Can you believe the arrogance!  He actually thought that you work for Dan rather than Dan working for YOU!  Dan told them they had no clue what was really happening and that they “just don’t get it”!  Dan told them that THE PEOPLE WILL NOT TOLERATE political games like this any longer.  He told them you are not going to fall in line.

Another thing that I found arrogant was that Dan relayed that these men were watching some of their business associates say they would go to Hickenlooper because, “they might be able to influence HIM”.  Is this what THE PEOPLE want?  They saw this movement of what might be 50-100 people toward Hickenlooper.  Can you imagine that they thought this was more important than the hundreds of thousands of people who voted in the primary, and the almost two hundred thousand who voted for Dan earlier this month!

I am so grateful for all of the hard work, dedication, and sacrifice that our volunteers have provided to date but you must know that Dan needs you more than ever.  He has told me how so many of you committed to stand behind him when he stands up to the politics as usual and the potential corruption.  I am asking you all to do so now with strong voices and courage.

Don’t buy into the lies and corruption that you have pledged to fight and beat in 2010!  DON’T LISTEN TO THEM!  Dan has spoken the truth to you everywhere.
I know Dan to have stood up to corruption as a young police officer, this stance of integrity cost him his job.
I have watched him compete against the big guys in the business world for over 20 years, and always provide our children and me with an honorable lifestyle based in his faith.
Now I see him coming home exhausted but determined to be your voice.

He is like YOUR megaphone!  By himself he is silent, but with your voices behind him he will make them louder and heard!!!

WE MUST NOT LET CORRUPTION WIN!  It won’t be easy, but please STAY STRONG!  Do not allow these “politial-insiders” in their ’smoke-filled rooms” to dictate to THE PEOPLE who to vote for!  You’ve made your voices be heard at the state assembly and again at the primary!  We CANNOT ALLOW power hungry individuals to dictate to our candidates and elected officails!

I’m sorry, but I do have to mention it:  we’ve run the campaign on a shoe string, and you have told us that you appreciate it!  I’ve heard many comments along the line of “if Dan can win the primary election on only $200,000, imagine what he can do for our state!”  We do need funds to compete against Hickenlooper, against the people out there that think they are all-powerful because they have money.  Please contribute so we can continue to help Dan megaphone YOUR voice!!  Just go to www.danmaes.com and click on the contributions tab, or mail your contribution to Friends of Dan Maes for Governor
11 W Hampden Ave
Englewood, CO 80013

THANK YOU all again for all of your hard work!  This campaign won because of good old fashioned hard work by volunteers!
THANK YOU to all of you who have not even met Dan but are fighting for a return to our conservative values!
THANK YOU for the emails and cards of encouragement!  They lift his spirit when he might have just been under attack.  Please don’t forget to also encourage and pray for all our volunteers, staff, and Tambor as they are being attacked too!
STAY STRONG in these final weeks, and let YOUR voice be heard!  DO NOT TOLERATE THE SMOKE FILLED ROOM CORRUPTION!  Please forward this email plea on… We need to unite!
God Bless,
Karen Maes