Presidential Abuse Of Power

Obama's Enemies List

By THEODORE B. OLSON

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president's re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president's surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president's party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?

Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president's re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president's or anyone else's office.

What Messrs. Koch do, in fact, is manage businesses that provide employment to more than 50,000 people in North America in legitimate, productive industries. They also give millions of dollars to medical researchers, hospitals and cultural institutions. Their biggest offense, apparently, is that they also contribute generously to nonprofit organizations that promote personal liberty and free enterprise, and some of those organizations oppose policies advocated by the president.

Richard Nixon maintained an"enemies list" that singled out private citizens for investigation and abuse by agencies of government, including the Internal Revenue Service. When that was revealed, the press and public were outraged. That conduct will forever remain one of the indelible stains on Nixon's presidency and legacy.

When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace."McCarthyism," defined by Webster's as the "use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition," will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency?" are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him.

In this country, we regard the use of official power to oppress or intimidate private citizens as a despicable abuse of authority and entirely alien to our system of a government of laws. The architects of our Constitution meticulously erected a system of separated powers, and checks and balances, precisely in order to inhibit the exercise of tyrannical power by governmental officials.

Our Constitution even explicitly prohibits bills of attainder so that Congress may not single out individual citizens or groups for disfavored treatment or unequal application of the force of government. Prosecutorial power is rigidly constrained and judicially supervised so that government may not accuse private citizens of crimes or investigate them without good cause.

Whoever may be the victim of such abuse of governmental authority, the press and public almost invariably unify with indignation against it. If a journalist, labor-union leader or community organizer on the left can be targeted today, an academic or business person on the right can be the target tomorrow. If we fail to stand up against oppression from one direction, we abdicate the moral authority to challenge it when it comes from another.

This is why it is exceedingly important for all Americans to respond with outrage to what the president and his allies are doing to demonize and stigmatize David and Charles Koch. They have been the targets of the multiyear, carefully orchestrated campaign of vituperation and assault described above—and much more. It has been choreographed from the very top. When the president personally takes leadership, his political surrogates and army of allies in the press and Congress quickly and surely follow the direction and tone he sets.

The misuse of government power to damage or demean one's political enemies is abhorrent and the very antithesis of a free society and a government of laws, not men. It is time for the public to ask those engaged in these practices, "Have you no sense of decency?"


Commentary

Where is the lame stream media on this with Obama? Had this been the previous administration there would be hell to pay or else.I would expect this kind of thing from a third world dictator Oh wait we are talking about Obama here thats right.

NYT Uses Supreme Court To Pummel Conservatives

Opinion/Editorial

  Todays lead oped in this mornings New York Times is an interesting one."Politics and the Supreme Court" is the title.The main point that this oped tries to make is how Conservatives try to use the law to bully their way to get laws passed and a court ruling in their favor.
  It begins "The Supreme Court underscored its power to shape American life when it took major cases about the health care reform law, Arizona’s anti-immigrant law and the Voting Rights Act in an election year. But this is not simply a case of the court thrusting itself into politics.The way these cases developed and made their way to the highest court also illustrates the reverse — how politics shape the court. Each case grows out of a struggle between left and right where politics have pushed the law: between a quest for universal coverage and the defense of big health care providers; between an emphasis on openness and hostility toward immigrants; and between a promise of access to the voting booth made nearly 50 years ago and the unyielding opposition to keeping that promise."
  Let me see universal health care coverage that hardly no American wants which is unconstitutional (for you idiotic leftists Article I Section 8 clause 3) a.k.a "Commerce clause."On Arizona's anti-immigration law it was passed in that state to show the federal government that it was not enforcing the federal law on the books pertaining to immigration and Voting rights act now today all we ask is that people that have an ID to vote can and should have that right as an American.
  Just about half of the way through the oped the NYT starts its whining thus going into attack mode "But the conservative legal battles of our modern times are being waged by the most powerful, often against the weak and oppressed. They began with a carefully planned and successful effort to reshape the courts to be sympathetic to conservative causes. They are largely aimed at narrowing rights, not expanding them — except where property and guns are concerned. And beginning with the Reagan administration, conservatives became impatient with the pace of change brought about from within the mainstream. They sought to remake law into a weapon of aggressive action."
  Talk about being a hypocrite in the worst way ok NYT you want to talk about conservatives going after the weak and oppressed ok what do you call abortion the legal killing of a unborn baby that is the lowest form of power being waged against the weak and oppressed.How about your buddy Obama he's just not trying to fundamentally reshape the court with his two lame brained appointments to the high court but the country as well towards a European style socialist dictatorship.And you have the nerve to mention about a weapon of aggressive action spre me please.
 The oped ends like this "In 2009, the Supreme Court ducked ruling on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. that nonetheless laid out arguments for its unconstitutionality. The opinion is widely read as a warning that the law is vulnerable to being struck down by the conservative court.

The political influences on these major cases are important by themselves, but also as a reminder that the makeup of the court for the next generation, and thus the law’s direction, are likely to be determined by the 2012 election."

 Excuse me conservative court in what world NYT? Certainly not the US Supreme Court if I remember there are nine justices on the highest court in the land 4 who are to the left including the two alleged according to the NYT and the rest of the left wing media establishment as main stream jurists 4 of them that correctly interpret the US Constitution and one which is called "the swinger" being Justice Anthony Kennedy.So can somebody please tell me how this is a Conservative court? I didn't think so

 

CNN Could Not Wait To Put This Out

Good news on jobs is bad news for GOP

By Alan Silverleib, CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- That loud noise you heard Friday morning? Cheers from the White House and President Barack Obama's campaign headquarters in Chicago.
Employers created 243,000 jobs in January, according to Friday's Labor Department report. The unemployment rate dropped from 8.5% to 8.3% -- the lowest level since February 2009. Unemployment has now dropped for five months in a row.
The news was far better than most economists expected. Politically, it's gold for an incumbent running in a year when the economy is by far the top concern.
"There are still far too many Americans who need a job ... (but) the economy is growing stronger. The recovery is speeding up," Obama told a crowd in Virginia after the news broke. "I want to send a clear message to Congress. Do not slow the recovery we are on. Don't muck it up. Keep it moving in the right direction."
Alan Kreuger, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the "employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression."
He added that it "is critical that we continue the economic policies that are helping us to dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the recession that began at the end of 2007."
Translation: We're cleaning up George W. Bush's mess. Give us a second term to finish the job.
This being an election year, Republicans put the worst possible spin on the report.
"We welcome the fact that jobs were created and unemployment declined. Unfortunately, these numbers cannot hide the fact that President Obama's policies have prevented a true economic recovery," GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney said in a written statement.
"Long-term unemployment remains at record levels," he said, noting that economic growth in 2011 was the slowest for any non-recession year since the end of World War II. "We can do better."
Fellow candidate Rick Santorum declared that "it only took four years to overcome the horrible policies of this administration."
The economy, GOP House Speaker John Boehner said, "still isn't creating jobs the way it should be and that's why we need a new approach."
Translation: Republicans need to clean up Barack Obama's mess. Give us the White House and we'll do the job.
Whatever Democrats or Republicans say -- depending on who's in office and when -- there's a strong correlation between economic performance and an incumbent's reelection chances. And over the past few weeks, the number of Americans who approve of Obama's handling of the economy has been steadily increasing.
In December's NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 39% of Americans approved of Obama's handling of the economy while 57% disapproved. In January, 45% approved while 50% disapproved. Obama remains underwater, but he's headed in the right direction.
What happens economically over the next few critical months is anyone's guess. The job situation could continue to brighten, though Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has described the recovery as "frustratingly slow." The economy still needs to add 5.6 million jobs to return to 2008 employment levels, and no incumbent since Franklin Roosevelt has won reelection with an unemployment rate higher than 7.2%.
And if the bottom falls out in Europe or China -- or any other number of catastrophic scenarios come to pass -- administration talk of a recovery will ring hollow, to say the least.
Stay tuned.

Commentary

Funny no where in the story does it mention just a few years ago unemployment was at 5% but that was way to high for the media at that time.Just more of blame Bush BS.While I am no Bush defender after all he spent alot on TARP which at the time Obama was in the US Senate he voted for it as well.

I Should Have Put This Out Earlier My Fault

To all my political friends and readers on facebook there is a great awesome web site that I should have been yelling through the streets about for everyone to follow and read and an importany reasearch tool to expose the far left agenda of the establishment media complex.

 It is Times watch from the Media Research Center.

Since 1987 way back to the Reagan administration they have been uncovering media biases



So please check out this cool web site

Sarah Is Right On!

Palin: "Imperative That Voters Do Not Become Lazy In Primary Process"

"You know that brutality, say, for instance, what we just witnessed in Florida that brutality via $17 million in negative ads in a 65 to 1 negative ad ratio that was mounted against Newt Gingrich, which I think did result in him falling there in the polls and in that primary. That brutality will help Obama only if Americans can concede Obama's point that he recently made and that is that America has gotten lazy. It is imperative that voters do not become lazy in this primary process and we aggressively and ambitiously do our own homework. We vet the candidates ourselves because we cannot rely on the media, the establishment, the Super PACs and candidates who hide behind the Super PACs to tell us what the truth is about these candidates," Fmr. Gov. Sarah Palin said on FOX News.

Commentary

This is where the Tea party can play a vital role in educating those Americans that have indeed become lazy and through that process show the American people that the candidate that we as Constitutional Conservatives support via the education can show them which candidate stands the closest or for our great Constitutional principals

A Perfect Illustration Of Liberal Doctrine

Obama Announces 2012 Launch Of African-Americans For Obama

Commentary

Its too bad that you Mr.Obama don't believe in the principals of the founders but as most liberals you talk the talk but dont walk the walk.Also those folks in the rally holding up the picture of the late great Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. have no concept or idea about what he stood for EQUAL RIGHTS not civil rights.Remember what he said so eloquently "One should be judged upon the context of ones character not one's skin color.but the race baiters like the so called revs.Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will never understand.Oh and one more point Mr.Obama its not all about you by the way.

These Are The Headlines After Establishment Victory In Sunshine State

In Romney's Victories, Low GOP Turnout - Mike Smithson, Daily Telegraph
Final: Romney 46, Gingrich 32, Santorum 13, Paul 7 last poll numbers from realclearpolitics.com
Romney Leaves Gingrich in His Rearview Mirror - Rich Lowry, FOX News
Inevitability Restored to GOP Frontrunner - John Dickerson, Slate
Is this what we want for America another gutless RINO as a nominee like John McCain was so that Obama can be President for another four years and head closer to our demise.
Romney has the deer in the headlights look about him at every debate it seems like watch him closely he has no record and with the record he has he cannot say that he is one of us God fearing Constitutional Conservatives he is a fraud FRAUD period there is no more tto be said at this point ROMNEY IS A FRAUD and no conservative

David R.Beaupre