By Dr. Jack Wheeler

It’s starting to look like 1948 all over again.

Mark Twain observed that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes. The 2012 presidential campaign is now rhyming with that of 1948 in iambic trimeter – the poetic form tragedians of Ancient Greece such as Aeschylus and Sophocles used to best express portending doom.

So let’s revisit that extraordinary yesteryear of 1948, resulting in the most famous upset in American politics – Democrat Harry Truman defeating Republican Tom Dewey – and see how we can avoid a similar outcome by using it to our advantage.

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By Dagny D’Anconia

The evidence is mounting that the Fast and Furious gun giveaway was orchestrated and/or initiated from the top of the Obama administration. Forbes Magazine is calling it “Obama’s Watergate.” Are we to believe that they gave away enough guns to equip a small army of narcoterrorists out of a simple error? We would have to be pretty gullible to believe that.

We have to ask just what they intended to achieve by doing this. It was a truly extravagant gift to the Sinaloa Federation Cartel. It was not just expensive in tax dollars; it was expensive in political capital, and it was so close to the 2012 election.

People don’t give such expensive things away for nothing. The Obama people must have expected something in return.

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By John Whitehead

The transition to a police state will not come about with a dramatic coup d’etat, with battering rams and marauding militia. As we have experienced first-hand in recent years, it will creep in softly, one violation at a time, until suddenly you find yourself being subjected to random patdowns and security sweeps during your morning commute to work or quick trip to the shopping mall.

Perhaps you have yet to experience the particular thrill, and I use that word loosely, of being manhandled by government agents, having your personal possessions pawed through, and your activities and associations scrutinized. If so, not to worry. It’s only a matter of time before more and more Americans will experience such a military task force knocking at their door. Only, chances are that it won’t be a knock, and they might not even be at home when government agents decide to “investigate” them. Indeed, as increasing numbers of Americans are discovering, these so-called “soft target” security inspections are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat. Worse, not only is this happening with the blessing of the Obama administration but at its urging.

What I’m describing–something that was once limited to authoritarian regimes–is only possible thanks to an unofficial rewriting of the Fourth Amendment by the courts that essentially does away with any distinctions over what is “reasonable” when it comes to searches and seizures by government agents. The rationale, of course, is that anything is “reasonable” in the war on terrorism. What the powers-that-be understand–and Americans remain oblivious to–is the fact that by constantly pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what Americans will tolerate, the government is thus able to ratchet up the level of intrusiveness that Americans consider reasonable.

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By Rep. Steve King

As the government edged closer and closer to a shutdown last week, administrators in congressional offices and federal agencies were tasked with determining whether they and their employees provided “essential” or “nonessential” services.

Those employees deemed to be essential are allowed to continue working during a shutdown; those deemed to be nonessential are sent home.

This determination of essential versus nonessential probably sent a ripple of fear through employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In my opinion, the IRS is one of the least essential agencies in the federal government. If I had my way, we would shut down the non-essential IRS forever.

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By Dr. Chuck Baldwin

On March 14, 2011, federal police agencies raided scores of marijuana-related businesses in a number of states–including my home State of Montana. Hundreds of people were detained, put in handcuffs, and their property seized. To my knowledge, however, only a handful has actually been arrested (at least in Montana).

Montana is one of several states in the union that has legalized marijuana for medical purposes. This was accomplished with overwhelming support from the Montana citizenry via a ballot initiative back in 2004. However, the feds view marijuana as an illegal drug, and seem hell-bent in forcing states such as Montana to submit to its dictation–regardless of what the will of the people within the states might be.

Ever since Appomattox Court House, states have been bullied into believing that their authority is subordinate, and, yes, inferior, to federal law. Big Government lawyers cite the US Constitution, Article. VI. Paragraph. 2. to justify their despotism. It reads, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

This paragraph of the Constitution has been construed to mean that the federal government may dictate any law to the states and the states have no right to resist. THIS IS NOT TRUE! Notice carefully what the Constitution says: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States WHICH SHALL BE MADE IN PURSUANCE THEREOF . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” (Emphasis added)

This means that any federal law that is NOT “made in Pursuance thereof” or otherwise does not comport with the Constitution is NOT the “supreme Law of the Land.” Furthermore, it is the states that are the final authority over what is and is not lawful within their respective borders!

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The House of Representatives on Thursday voted 228-192 on a bill to defund National Public Radio, the vast public radio network whose leadership has been questioned after a series of executive decisions about programming, staffing and reporting bias.

Seven Republicans broke with House leadership and voted against the package. One GOP member, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, voted present.

Though Republicans have been targeting NPR for months, in earnest after the firing last October of Fox News contributor Juan Williams, the charge to stop taxpayer cash from reaching NPR coffers was recently refueled by James O’Keefe. O’Keefe, the investigative reporter whose hidden camera expose led to the defunding of ACORN, recently captured on tape an ex-NPR executive calling Tea Party members gun-toting, racist, religious fanatics and saying the network doesn’t really need federal money.

Opponents of government spending for NPR said the O’Keefe video was the last straw.

“Of all the data that we’ve seen, we still have not absorbed the culture of NPR until we saw the video” of that meeting, said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.

NPR currently receives millions in indirect and direct funding to supply programming to hundreds of radio stations. But if the bill debated Thursday were to become law, the federal government would be prohibited from direct federal funding of NPR — valued at $5 million in fiscal year 2010 — and stations would be prohibited from using federal funds to pay NPR dues.

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By Conn Carroll

While Obamacare is rightly notorious as a fiscal nightmare, less well known is just how massively it transferred power from Congress to the executive branch. In fact, the full scope of Congress’s abdication is still unknown. What is now known, however, is that deeply buried within Obamacare was a $105 billion slush fund that assures its implementation into the future, no matter what future voters think or want.

This makes then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comment to the Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties about Obamacare, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” made a year ago tomorrow, ironically prescient. Just this past month, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) updated an October 2010 report titled “Appropriations and Fund Transfers in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).” The new report found that, unbeknownst to almost every Member of Congress, Obamacare contains $105 billion in direct implementation spending that bypasses Congress’s normal appropriations process.

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Last Friday, the House tacked defunding of the anti-gun ObamaCare law onto the “continuing resolution,” which is required to fund the federal government through September 30.

In a series of four votes, the House approved:

* An amendment offered by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) to defund ObamaCare for the next six months;

* Two amendments sponsored by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) to defund previously appropriated provisions of ObamaCare; and,

* An amendment offered by Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) to defund IRS implementation of the “individual mandate,” which is the ObamaCare requirement that forces Americans to cough up their medical information which could later be used by the FBI to block gun purchases (and forces them to buy government-approved insurance).

In addition, the House, by a sizable majority, adopted the Boren-Rehberg amendment to defund ATF’s efforts to create a new gun registry for many multiple gun sales. (Rep. Dan Boren is a Democrat from Oklahoma.)

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By Conn Carroll

The Washington Post reports today that “the daunting tower of national, state and local debt in the United States will reach a level this year unmatched just after World War II and already exceeds the size of the entire economy, according to government estimates.” But there are a number of big differences between our national debt now and the debt in 1946. The Post reports: “State and municipal governments from Sacramento to Madison to Harrisburg have racked up about $2.4 trillion in debt, or more than 15 percent of GDP.”

And even this total is understating the problem. Recent studies show that state and local governments are severely underestimating their pension and benefit promises, including a $574 billion shortfall for the nation’s top major cities and a possible $3.4 trillion shortfall for the states. The cause of these crippling pension and benefit obligations is no secret. The Post explains: “Public employees often enjoy more generous pension and health-care benefits, and these are at the root of the long-term budget problems confronting many states.”

How did this happen? Why did so many state and local governments not only spend too much today but promise future spending far beyond the means of taxpayers to pay for it? Government unions. And across the country, legislators and governors are beginning to fight back.

The professional left (including the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the NEA, AFSCME and President Barack Obama) is trying to portray these budget battles as an assault against all unions. But as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R), who is pushing legislation to curtail government union bargaining power, explained last night, this is just plain false:

The bill I put forward isn’t aimed at state workers, and it certainly isn’t a battle with unions. If it was, we would have eliminated collective bargaining entirely or we would have gone after the private-sector unions. But, we did not because they are our partners in economic development. We need them to help us put 250,000 people to work in the private sector over the next four years.

Walker is right: Government unions are inherently different from private-sector unions. The purpose of private-sector unions is to get workers a larger share of the profits they helped create. But government is a monopoly and earns no profits. All government unions do is redistribute more tax dollars from taxpayers to unions.

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By Robin Bravender

The House voted Thursday to dethrone nine White House “czars.”

Republicans successfully added an amendment to the continuing resolution that would leave President Barack Obama’s senior advisers on policy issues including health care, energy and others out of a job.

The vote was 249-179.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) offered the amendment that blocks funding for various policy advisers to combat what he called “a very disturbing proliferation of czars” under Obama.

“These unappointed, unaccountable people who are literally running a shadow government, heading up these little fiefdoms that nobody can really seem to identify where they are or what they’re doing,” Scalise said Thursday. “But we do know that they’re wielding vast amounts of power.”

The jobs on the chopping block: White House-appointed advisers on health care, energy and climate, green jobs, urban affairs, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, oversight of TARP executive compensation, diversity at the Federal Communications Commission and the auto industry manufacturing policy.

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By Juliana Gruenwald

The House passed an amendment Thursday that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from using any funding to implement the network-neutrality order it approved in December.

The amendment, approved on a 244-181 vote, was offered by Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., to legislation that would fund government agencies for the rest of fiscal year 2011.

Walden and other critics of the FCC’s net-neutrality order argue it will stifle innovation and investment in broadband. The order aims to bar broadband providers from discriminating against Internet content, services, or applications.

“If left unchallenged, this claim of authority would allow the FCC to regulate any matter it discussed in the national broadband plan,” Walden said.

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By Mark Alexander

There’s currently a lot of talk about deficits and debt among the new House Republican majority; much of it is contentious intraparty debate about whether to raise the “debt ceiling.”

For the purpose of clarity, let me reiterate a few definitions.

The national budget deficit is the difference between the total spending budget (including interest on debt) authorized by Congress for each year, and total tax receipts. For this fiscal year alone (October 1, 2010, to September 30, 2011), the shortfall is projected to be 1.15 trillion dollars.

The national debt is the total of all outstanding U.S. Treasury obligations held by domestic and foreign individuals, institutions and governments, and is currently 14.05 trillion dollars.

The debt ceiling is the self-imposed limit Congress sets for what it can legally borrow to pay for all the government services that it can’t afford. A year ago, Congress increased that limit to 14.29 trillion dollars. But since Congress has authorized spending almost five billion dollars a day more than it takes in, that debt ceiling will be hit sometime between the end of March and mid-May.

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By Rep. Steve King

Tomorrow (1/19), as one of the first acts of this 112th Congress, the House is due to pass language I introduced to repeal Obamacare: “as if such Act had not been enacted.”

This legislation would validate the strategy for repeal that I have been advancing since the day the law was signed. It will also set the stage for the next component of my repeal strategy: the inclusion of language in every appropriations bill to prevent federal funds from being used to implement or enforce any of Obamacare’s provisions.

When Obamacare passed last March, I immediately introduced a bill to repeal this unconstitutional law. My bill offered a “clean” repeal – not weighed down by any replacement language.

I knew that repeal supporters would need strength in numbers to succeed. I saw no merit in adopting a strategy that would be diminished by disagreements over specific aspects of replacement policy and, therefore, artificially reduce our totals.

Last summer, I began working on the second phase of my repeal strategy. I began gathering signatures on a discharge petition – to force a vote on my repeal bill. Not only did the discharge petition exceed expectations by attracting a bipartisan group of 173 signatures, but every member of the House Republican leadership signed it.

With such strong support, it was clear that my strategy was working. It also set the stage for the inclusion of my repeal language in H.R. 2, the repeal legislation that the leadership brought to the floor and that the House is set to pass.

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By Dr. Jack Wheeler

So how is John Boehner going to do make his bones? Hold on to those undies now… he plans to get Zero to sign, not veto, a bill to repeal ObamaCare.

Yes, repeal, repeal the whole damn thing, Zero’s pride and joy. Here’s the strategy.

First, the fallback remains: defund it, refuse to appropriate any money to implement any of it. But to go for the jugular means repeal. Of course, any stand-alone repeal bill such as HR 2 passed by the House will be blocked in the Senate, or if passed faces a certain presidential veto that cannot possibly be overridden.

HR 2, the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act,” takes 36 words to eliminate 2,000 pages of ObamaCare legislation: “Effective as of the enactment of Public Law 111-148, such Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.”

It will be voted on and passed by the House next week. It is only a warning shot. For its destiny is not to be a stand-alone bill, but an amendment to two other bills.

These two bills form the sides of a vise in which Dem cojones are inextricably trapped. They are: the CR (Continuing Resolution) to fund the government past March 4 when the current CR ends; and the bill to raise the debt ceiling (call it the DR, the debt raise).

These bills are “must pass” bills – for if they don’t pass, the government shuts down, no checks go out to pay for anybody or anything, and government debt gets defaulted on.

Thus the repeal strategy: HR 2 will be appended to the next CR and the DR by the House. That’s step one. Step two is for McConnell and DeMint to block any passage of either in the Senate unless HR 2 is appended.

And to keep those Dem cojones in an ever-tightening vise, both the CR and DR will be very short term – say 60 days for the former and $100 billion instead of a trillion for the latter, maybe less. This forces the Dems to fight the battle for more spending over and over again.

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Click below to watch Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) introduce legislation to defund Planned Parenthood.

“According to their own annual report, Planned Parenthood received more than $363 million in government funding in 2009 alone. During that time, they performed an unprecedented 324,008 abortions.”

“The largest abortion provider in America should not also be the largest recipient of federal funding under Title X.”

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[Be sure to watch the embedded video interview with Rep. King. -Ed.]

By Terrence Jeffrey

Rep. Steve King (R.-Iowa) says that House Republicans should include language that prohibits any funding for implementation of Obamacare in literally every appropriations bill that passes the House of Representatives this year, thus forcing a showdown on the issue with the Democratic majority Senate and President Barack Obama.

“Somebody’s going to blink,” King told CNSNews.com. “It’ll be President Obama or it’ll be House Republicans.

“If House Republicans refuse to blink, we will succeed,” said King in videotaped interview. “ObamaCare will never become the effective law of the land and we’ll be able to leave a legacy of liberty for the future generations.”

Under King’s plan, congressional Republicans would first force a straight up-or-down vote on repealing Obamacare in the House and Senate, but then follow that up by inserting language into all appropriations bills saying that no money from the bill can be used to implement the federal health-care program President Obama signed last year.

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[It is safe to say that when Reuters runs a story about defunding financial reform, we have succeeded in putting "defunding" on the political map. - Ed.]

By Dave Clark & Roberta Rampton

Republicans in the new Congress could put the budget squeeze on two powerful regulatory agencies to slow President Barack Obama’s crackdown on Wall Street.

A Democratic-controlled Congress pushed through the Dodd-Frank bank reform laws last year and regulators were counting on a big budget boost to police the $600 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market — blamed for much of the excess behind the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

But the last Congress failed to deliver on the funding, and that will be even harder to obtain with Republicans vowing to cut spending as they take control of the House of Representatives and boost their rolls in the Senate.

Republican say they want to review the expansion plans of regulators. “Once you turn the money loose, it’s a little harder to stop that train,” said Representative Randy Neugebauer of Texas, who will head the House Financial Services oversight subcommittee.

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By Dr. Jack Wheeler

Ah… you may think this is about Barry Soetoro’s dream to ruin America. Nope, this is about another Barry, who once upon a time was also a US Senator who ran for president. His dream was to rescue America.

Americans were disastrously bamboozled into electing one Barry and just as disastrously not the other.

Fifty years ago, the other Barry wrote down his dream. Just think of how much greater, how much safer, how much richer, and how much freer we would all be today if Americans had the brains and courage back then to put him in the White House instead of his precise opposite. Here is Barry’s Dream:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom.

My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution … or have failed their purpose … or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden.

I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible.

And if I should be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty, and in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

This was the dream, the pledge to America, of Barry Goldwater (1909-1998). You’ll find these words on page 15 of his book, written in 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative.

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By Bryan Preston

Maybe! There’s another of those studies out there, that purports to show a biological difference between liberals and conservatives.

People normally respond to “gaze cues,” or the direction that another person is looking, by glancing to see what caught that person’s attention. The new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, finds that liberals respond much more strongly to such cues than conservatives. The finding is the latest in a series of clues that liberals and conservatives may be subtly different on a biological level, said study researcher Michael Dodd, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Liberals will probably take this as a sign of increased empathy and niceness among their kind. But there’s another way to look — see what I did there — I did it again! — at all this. Liberals are liberals because they’re more prone to take stands and state their beliefs as a way of seeking others’ approval, without basing them on any bedrock principles, whereas conservatives tend not to give a rip if their politics make them popular. I’ve certainly seen this in action when I lived up in deep blue Maryland.

“Across a variety of tasks, we are beginning to find a consistent pattern where conservatives are more responsive to threat/disgust, more responsive to angry faces, and less sensitive to gaze cues than liberals,” Dodd wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience. “Liberals, on the other hand, are proving to be more responsive to positive/appetitive stimuli, more responsive to happy faces, and more sensitive to gazes.”

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By Roger L. Simon

When I was a kid, I thought the United Nations was the most righteous and positively idealistic organization in the world. It was the hope of humanity and I worshipped it. (My father — a doctor — volunteered for WHO and I would accompany him to the New York headquarters about once a month, gawking at the colorful Third World costumes and wishing I could speak French, la langue diplomatique.)

Man, times have changed. I now regard the UN as a kind of global racket with three principal, often related, areas of, in Mafia style, special interest: propaganda for totalitarian countries, massive corruption (e.g. Oil-for-Food) and spying.

Enough already. When the new Congress comes in in January, they should move to defund the UN if they persist in promoting these proto-fascistic conferences that have more to do with Wansee than they do with human rights. We elected them to cut the budget. They should start with the UN.

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