Americans need jobs. Democrats are running scared after voters in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts rejected their wild spending and ill-timed health care reform detour. So, look for Obama to play the populist tonight, shifting blame to Wall Street and the Bush administration for our economic woes. But the President should suck it up. He’s been in office for a year and his party has controlled all of Congress since 2007.

If Obama is serious about fostering job growth he will abandon his party’s plans for passing amnesty and cap and trade. Amnesty for illegal immigrants would ensure that those who shouldn’t even be in our country are drawing paychecks that could be going to actual citizens. Cap and trade–a nanny state scheme if there ever was one–would raise energy costs for households by thousands and dollars and kill even more jobs. These two initiatives combined would serve as a lethal cocktail to the American economy, so they are probably exactly what the power-drunk politicians of the Democratic Party will prescribe.

He’s come a long way since then, hasn’t he? A recent Politico piece highlighted his administration’s penchant for describing his every signature, speech, and executive move as “unprecedented” despite the fact that most of it has been done before. In truth, the only unprecedented thing about Obama’s reign is its current trajectory and how quickly it sped past the “Washington-as-usual” sign. Lobbyists? Check. Closed-door meetings? Check. Wasteful spending? Double check.

How about divisive demonization of opponents? The White House’s rhetoric aimed at insurance companies, Fox News, tea party attendees, “stupid” cops, and the Chamber of Commerce is a giant check. Fear mongering? You got it:

“The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”

“Right now, if a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they are taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But, if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that’s thirty thousand, forty, fifty thousand dollars immediately the surgeon is reimbursed.”

“Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing. Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it the most. And more will die as a result.”

The hope is gone, no question. But the more striking yet subtle implication in Obama’s expressed “feed them” belief, however, is the assumption that the public can be fed and grown, cultivated and pruned and programmed. Obama described his formula for effective leadership and it resembles a light switch. “Feed them X, and they will be X,” he said. Is there a simpler or more degrading way to view the American people? Is there a more least-effective method of leadership?

The Left criticized George W. Bush for being immoveable and uncompromising, for having a tin ear and being fatally steadfast. They characterized his confidence in his own opinion, his going with his gut, as a type of “cowboy diplomacy.” Now they have their own president who takes this attitude, albeit towards his own constituents and with more whining.

What Obama revealed in 2007 is directly reflected in his presidential swagger today. His administration has the President, feeding the American public a truly unprecedented number of interviews and speeches. Spoonful after spoonful, the message is inflexible, unchanging, and repetitive. It’s a Mary Poppins administration: if those being fed start to gag, add some sugar. Obama is the sugar, and as we all know that’s what makes the medicine go down.

But more exposure has not helped the public swallow the President’s agenda. Support for his health reform has continued its freefall. Obama has truly lost his magical qualities. The sugar is no longer sweet. If something is repeated often enough, it does not become true.

The administration that believes it can simply talk and have people believe is a dangerous one. It’s the same one that believes it can bow and have foreign leaders capitulate or simply spend money and have jobs created.

Effective leadership is more than the sum of its parts. So far, when this administration has fallen short, its panicked reaction is to increase the parts.

What’s missing is the reasoning and fair-mindedness that Obama exulted as a candidate. It is the luster that accompanies every candidate for office and promptly dissipates once he assumes it. Nothing draws out a politician’s true character and demands the ideal of leadership more than a legislative dogfight, and the tendency for the high-minded rhetoric to devolve into the petty not only has precedent, it is the definition of Washington as usual.

So …  CNN pushes the meme that the angry right is purging the Republican party … and then turns around and purges its newsroom?

Yeah, right.

The Associated Press reports:

PHOENIX —  A young Iraqi woman whose father allegedly hit her with his car because she had become too Westernized died from her injuries Monday after laying in a coma for nearly two weeks.

Noor Faleh Almaleki, 20, underwent spinal surgery and had been in a hospital since Oct. 20, when police say her father ran down her and her boyfriend’s mother with his Jeep as the women were walking across a parking lot in the west Phoenix suburb of Peoria.

The other woman, Amal Khalaf, is expected to survive.

Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, fled after the attack but was arrested Thursday when he arrived at Atlanta’s airport, where he was sent from the United Kingdom after authorities denied him entrance.

Peoria police interviewed him and brought him back to Arizona over the weekend, but have declined to release what Almaleki said to them.

At a court hearing over the weekend in Phoenix, county prosecutor Stephanie Low told a judge that Almaleki admitted to committing the crime.

“By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family,” Low said. “This was an attempt at an honor killing.”

Family members had told police that Almaleki attacked his daughter because he believed she had become too Westernized and was not living according to his traditional Iraqi values.

I didn’t know it was a specific country’s practice to murder family members when they don’t respect the country’s values. How much would you like to bet the weak knees at the AP substituted “Iraqi” for “Islamic”?

“[Obama] has good intentions,” Hugo Chavez winked recently. “We have to help him.”

American foreign policy has always been marked by resolved opposition to freedom’s enemies. We’ve stood strong for human dignity against those who debase it in pursuit of utopian experiments and iron political grips.

Until now.

Financier of Colombian terrorist guerrillas and supporter of all things socialist, Chavez is pushing for Manuel Zelaya’s reinstatement as president of Honduras. Zelaya was constitutionally deposed by the Honduran supreme court, a ruling his own party backed after he attempted to hold an illegal, fixed referendum giving him the green light to rule for life. Also standing with Zelaya is the Castro regime and Nicaragua’s little tyrant, Daniel Ortega. And the new regulator of a few state-owned industries himself, Barack Obama.

It gets worse. Chavez is allied with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. No doubt their play dates include exchanging election-rigging techniques and discussing the finer points of beating and imprisoning political competitors. At the United Nations, Cuba and uranium-rich Venezuela are reliable votes for Iran.

Obama’s administration recently relaxed restrictions with Cuba that had stood for nearly fifty years. On the same day, it suspended financial aid to democratic Honduras in retaliation for its refusal to ignore its own constitution. At Zelaya’s request, the State Department revoked the diplomatic visas of certain Honduran officials.

When Obama becomes the first American president to chair the United Nations’ Security Council later this month, he’ll most likely share the table with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, himself only a month removed from his warm embrace of the freed Lockerbie bomber. Gaddafi held a celebratory welcome party on the tarmac for the murderer of 270 people, many of them Americans.

Obama’s fundamentally changed America now palls around with and takes cues from criminals and terrorist-supporters posing as heads of state. This week, Obama encouraged students to defy peer pressure, do the right thing, and not let their country down. The President should heed his own advice.

Baloney.

There are four reasons why Representative Joe Wilson’s comment was right and justified.

Obama is lying outright and hiding the truth. Everyone from conservative bloggers to members of Congress to independent fact checkers agree that Democrats and Obama are lying when they say non-citizens accessing government-run health care will not happen. Sure, the bill says it won’t, but the truth is that Democrats voted down more than one measure that would have closed the loophole that still exists–no enforcement mechanism is provided in the bill. What Obama said last night (“There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants.  This, too, is false.  The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”) is utterly false. It’s a lie. Obama said that these “bogus claims” are being spread by “those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost.” The President thus implied that conservative bloggers, members of Congress, and independent fact checkers themselves are purposefully being dishonest. He accused them of being malicious in their actions. It’s utterly Orwellian, and the arrogance of it all is staggering.

What’s more, conservatives’ and Republicans’ central reason for opposing Obama’s brand of health care reform is because of how disastrous it is for the country. It’s irreversible. It will hand control of a large sector of our economy over to government bureaucrats. It will decrease the supply of care. It will lead to a single payer system. It will increase costs. It will swell already-catastrophic deficits to new, mind-boggling proportions. It will cover abortions. It will bankrupt our country. It will require a permanent tax increase. If all these things are true and the consequences of Obamacare really are that bad, how is breaching a little decorum not justified? If we really believe we lose our country if this bill passes, why worry about how civil our legislative chambers will be in the new Socialist States of America? Is this one of freedom’s last stands or not?

The Democrats have done far worse, and the respect due the office of the President–a valid principle–does not and should not apply here. In 2005, Democrats shouted down President George W. Bush during the State of the Union address when he was citing statistics on the insolvency of Social Security. Let me be clear: they grossly violated the standard they are demanding Wilson be held to now simply because they didn’t like the facts Bush related in his speech. Then they rejoiced when he was assaulted with flying shoes.

As a candidate, Obama ordered his minions to “argue with [neighbors], get in their face.” Last night, minutes after being called out by Wilson, the President threatened those who “misrepresent what’s in this plan,” saying, “we will call you out.” Over the summer, Democrat leaders demonized ordinary Americans who attended town halls as racists, evil-mongers, Nazis, mobsters, terrorists, and the like.

Respect is due the highest office in the land, just as it was when Bush was in office and dissent became the highest form of patriotism in Democrat minds. But when the President has lowered himself already, telling political opponents to shut up and get out of the way and is now trying to blatantly lie a bill through Congress, the madness must stop. If our criticisms of this president are actually true, having the courage to point out that the emporer has no clothes in the middle of his speech is the bare minimum that Republican voters should be requiring of their candidates in 2010.

This created political firestorm helps Republicans, no matter what kind of garbage NBC spits out. Senator Jim DeMint’s Waterloo comment was an essential turning point for Republicans this summer. It brought the true nature of the health care debate to light, exposing Obama’s hurry-up offense and empty rhetoric for what it was. It thrust one of the strongest defenders of conservative health care solutions in the Senate into the national spotlight and it got people talking. Without that comment, it is much more likely that Obamacare would have made it through Congress before recess as this administration originally intended it to. It would not have been studied, picked apart, or even read. August’s town halls would have never happened. Obama’s approval numbers would have remained healthy. And he would be looking to sign cap-and-trade legislation by December.

Joe Wilson is now at the top of the Drudge Report. He is in a relatively safe seat, and he only said what millions of Americans were already shouting at their televisions. The country isn’t buying his voodoo economics, that we can increase the quality and quantity of care, have the government administer it, and still cut costs any more than they believe the president who wants to grant amnesty in 2010 won’t hand out health care in 2009. Wilson has singlehandedly positioned the GOP to capitalize on the illegal alien issue. It’s one of the most politically solid things to stand on, and there are so many ways we can win with it. Americans will find it curious that the President is claiming his plan won’t cover illegals while his party is voting that very measure down repeatedly.

What did Wilson gain by apologizing? Not much. The Left is still in a tizzy and Democrats in Congress will still push for censure. They may even get it, the way Republicans have been tripping over themselves to hang Wilson out to dry since last night. They did the same to DeMint in July. Obamacare isn’t dead yet, but if Wilson is willing to wage war like his fellow South Carolinian did earlier this summer, conservatives stand a better chance of driving a stake through this nightmare of a proposal for good.

HAMSHER: …Michelle Bachman and others have tried to suggest that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. I mean, that’s rediculous and it’s crazy that [the Obama administration] should back down to something that was actually not that bad.

[...]

SCHUSTER: If [the petition that Van Jones signed said that] President Bush knew about the attacks, didn’t do anything to stop it, it was part of some conspiracy, then [Philip Klein's] right, he should have been fired. But do you know exactly [what the petition said]?

KLEIN: The petition called for an investigation into whether government officials had prior knowledge of 9/11…

HAMSHER: It asked a question! Is that OK? Is it acceptable to ask a question?…

I think both conspiracy theories are equally credible. Both of them are lunacy. It’s fun to recognize Hamsher’s double standards as the empty-headed knee-jerks they are.

The Pelosi-Reid Congress is consumed by a corrupt agenda that spends our grandchildren’s paychecks to ensure our own comfort. If each American household “got patriotic” and pitched in five dollars a month to pay off the national debt (assuming we froze it immediately and began requiring half the country to start paying anything at all), we wouldn’t finish contributing our fair share until after the year 3740. The amended Obama budget predictions, unfortunately, have the nearly $12 trillion debt doubling by 2020. Redeploy that debt-free target date back another 1,731 years, stat.

This August saw the most casualties of the 106 months American soldiers have fought in Afghanistan. Cindy Sheehan may be crashing Obama’s vacation, but his party let nuisances like “exit strategies” and photos of flag-draped caskets slip their collective mind in Chicago’s Grant Park last November 4th. And that little promise about ending our addiction to enemy-produced oil? Eh, let’s let the Russians, Norwegians, Spanish, Indians, Chinese, and Brazilians drill off our coast instead and call it day. They could probably use the new jobs in this global limp of an economy anyway.

Sadly, transcending race apparently means interpreting everything in its shadow. Whites are acting so stupidly these days even black town hall attendees are getting into the racist spirit and joining armed mobs. MSNBC anchors are so scared of black men legally carrying guns they’ve resorted to manipulating footage of conservative rallies. To be considered Caucasian, simply oppose the largest, fastest expansion of the federal government in history. If you aren’t non-white and swallowing whole the community organizer-in-chief’s change, you are a specter of America’s dark past and a physical threat to America’s first dark president.

Grandma might just have the best ticket out of this mess after all.

…the Sunday front page story [in the Washington Post] on the thesis … sends the culturally liberal voters of Northern Virginia in the Post’s local circulation area a pretty clear message: you better not vote for this guy. He went to an “evangelical” school (Regent University Law School), described feminists as “detrimental” and “said government policy should favor married couples over ‘cohabitors, homosexuals or fornicators.’”

With the total number of stories the Washington Post has run on this subject this week preparing to break into the double digits, the answer to Barone’s question is clear.

WaPo having a liberal agenda is no surprise. Liberals having conniptions over traditional conservative beliefs, however phrased, isn’t new either. Neglecting to locate a radical liberal president’s important college work is par for the course. What’s interesting, though, is that the Post is a member of the gang of media outlets who have enforced a gag order on the Van Jones firestorm, as Byron York noted today.

From a Nexis search a few moments ago:

Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.

Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.

Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.

Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.

Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.

This means that if your range of news consumption is limited within these five sources, and if Van Jones is actually fired this afternoon, a high-level government official will have been removed amid immense controversy and you wouldn’t have heard a lick about it, if the Washington Post had any say in the matter. But you can’t turn a page in the Post without reading about how Bob McDonnell wants to chain our mothers and sisters up in the basement and make them do laundry for the rest of their lives.

Van Jones called Republicans “assholes” and laughed about it. He’s a self-avowed communist. He admitted that he signed a 9/11 Truther petition, indicating he believes the Bush administration allowed or encouraged the attacks of September 11, 2001 to occur. He was a presenter of a 2002 war protest in California  alongside other 9/11 Truthers. Jake Tapper reveals that he was on the organization committee of a tabloid newspaper that promoted 9/11 Truther protests, which Van Jones also worked to organize.

His excuse that he didn’t read the petition carefully enough before signing it is ludicrous. And his apology that explained away his partisan words and radical activity as things he did before he joined Barack Obama’s elite team of advisory czars doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Apparently, the Washington Post disagrees.

The 1989 thesis paper of a then-private citizen deserves wall-to-wall coverage. A communist Truther in the White House? Covering that wouldn’t result in a Republican losing an election, now would it?

UPDATE: Information is coming out so quickly on this creep it’s hard to keep up. I forgot to list the fact that Van Jones organized a 1999 protest in support of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He also is fond of t-shirts that read “Kanye was right,” presumably meaning he agrees that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Didn’t someone recently get in hot water with Van Jones’ ColorOfChange.org  for claiming the president is racist?

Fellow countrymen and women,

You may have heard about the black conservative, Kenneth Gladney, who was passing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags outside of a town hall meeting in St. Louis. Kenneth was attacked by union members and called a “nigger” for his opposition to Obama’s push for a government takeover of health care. He is now in a wheelchair, albeit temporarily (I assume).

I’m standing up for Kenneth because he can’t at the moment. The likes of MSNBC and those in the government protection agencies formally known as the free press aren’t reporting his story. If he had been an Obama supporter, we all know he’d be more famous than Rodney King right now.

So pass on this article by Andrew Breitbart and change your facebook status to “I am Kenneth Gladney.” Twitter it (#iamkg). Post it on Facebook. Email your friends. Let’s make it clear to the world that a majority of Americans stand against the tide of tyranny and won’t allow the Obama Chicago-style propaganda machine to paint us as a well-dressed, manufactured mob of Nazis.

We are real Americans.

___

Kenneth, now in a wheelchair

I am Kenneth Gladney, by Andrew Breitbart

Video from the St. Louis town hall beating

Now the elegant blond courtesan, whom we’ll continue to call “Annie,” is talking about three “dates” she allegedly had with another state’s chief executive, who we’ll call Gov. X.

Though Annie’s former boss, ex-madam Kristin Davis, corroborates that Gov. X was a client, his spokesman flatly denies that the married politician has ever hired hookers…

“He was a very standard client. He didn’t take the full hour. There was no exchange of money. Michael handled the payment.

“I had two more dates with the governor. Never in public. Always for just an hour, around dinner time. He’d arrive at the apartment in a suit. I never had a problem with him, like I did with Spitzer. He was always nice. There wasn’t a lot of conversation. It wasn’t a girlfriend experience, but he was relaxed. He was very appreciative, like I was giving him a sort of affection he wasn’t getting elsewhere. Later I found out he was married. His wife is quite prominent in her own right.” (Annie and Davis say Gov. X is free to say he didn’t pay for sex, since “Michael” took care of the bills.)

I went through all U.S. governors and left out females, those who aren’t married (Corzine in NJ), those who were not governor in 2006, those who were not married in 2006 (Crist in FL), and Sanford in SC for obvious reasons.

The criteria set by the NYC call girl was that the male was governor in 2006, married, and his wife was “quite prominent in her own right.” She also strongly implies that he is still a sitting governor.

So I read the NGA bios of all 25 first ladies whose governor-husbands meet that criteria. Only six or so first ladies can be considered “quite prominent”:

CA – Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver
MN – Gov Tim Pawlenty’s wife, Mary (district court judge from 1994-2007)
PA – Gov Ed Rendell’s wife, Marjorie (3rd Circuit US Court of Appeals judge)
VA – Gov Tim Kaine’s wife, Anne Holton (district court judge in Richmond)

Less prominent, but still more so than others:

NH – Gov John Lynch’s wife, Susan
TN – Gov Phil Bredesen’s wife, Andrea Conte
WV – Gov Joe Manchin’s wife, Gayle

The call girl would have known instantly that Arnold is married to Shriver. He’s by far the most recognizeable of the seven listed above and his marriage to her is very well known, so she wouldn’t have found out later that he was married, as she said she did.

The last three governors listed have less prominent wives than the first tier, who are all federal judges.

Obviously, out of those three, VA and PA are the closest to NYC (although we know the initial meeting happened outside of New York).

Lot’s of circumstantial evidence here, true, but still interesting nonetheless. I wasn’t going to post any of this just yet, until Rush said this today:

There’s also some news that another governor has been tagged as a client of the same hooker that Eliot Spitzer used. Well, I know who it is. I know who it’s being reported, but I don’t have a source that’s firm enough. Yes, it’s a blue state, a lot of eagles in this state. Not an inordinate amount of eagles. What, Snerdley? Well, what do you think? I’m not going to mention any names. It’s a blue state, lots of eagles. These birds don’t fly, but there’s still lots of eagles.

Rush also linked to Deus Ex Malcontent:

Well, during the interview [with Opie and Anthony], she admitted that someone she called “Governor X” employed her services at least ten times during a year-and-a-half period. She apparently wrote his name down on a piece of paper and showed it to Opie and Anthony, who then proceeded to spend the next ten minutes dropping hints that a 4-year-old could’ve deciphered.

Between my research, Rush, and the hints on this radio interview, I’d say the good money is on Ed Rendell, the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania.