In April or May 2011, the federal government will bump up against its statutory authority to borrow more money. The current debt ceiling is $14.294 trillion, and when you borrow $4 billion every day you tend to reach your credit card limit in a hurry.

House Republicans should demand that President Barack Hussein Obama and Senate Democrats agree to repeal Obamacare and cut other federal spending as the price for an agreement to raise the national debt ceiling and for passing a continuing resolution (CR).

The March 14, 2011 Rasmussen Poll shows that 62% of likely voters favor repeal of Obamacare, 61% believe Obamacare will cause healthcare costs to rise, 59% believe it will increase the federal deficit, and 54% think it will be bad for the country.

The American people elected eighty-seven freshmen Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2010 to give the G.O.P. majority control for two purposes: 1) To repeal Obamacare, and 2) To cut federal spending.

The house passed a bill to repeal Obamacare, but the Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to go along. House Republicans can force them to go along by refusing to raise the debt ceiling if they don’t.

There is no other way to repeal Obamacare.

The back-up plan is to hope Obama gets defeated in 2012 so that the new president would sign a repeal bill. That’s a foolish strategy.

First, the chances of defeating Obama are 50-50 at best. Second, even if he’s defeated and the Republicans retain majority control of the House, they would still have to get sixty votes in the Senate to pass a repeal bill. They now hold only 47 seats in the Senate.

What are the odds that they’ll have a net gain of 13 seats in November 2012? Answer: 20% at most.

Waiting for the Supreme Court to rule Obamacare unconstitutional is also foolish. It’s never possible to predict with certainty how the Supremes will rule. This is a complex law and there are complex constitutional issues to consider. Additionally, it could take the Court two years from now to issue a final ruling.

The Republican plan to defund Obamacare can’t work either.

The Heritage Foundation recently discovered that when Obamacare was passed, the Democrats snuck into it a provision that provides $105 billion in taxpayer funds to keep it going for the next seven years, whether or not Congress votes to cancel the money. Normally, Congress would authorize spending and then pass separate appropriations bills each year so that new Congresses could reflect the will of the people as to ongoing government spending.

In this case, however, Obama, Pelosi and Reid knew that Democrats were likely to lose their majority because 60% of the American people were opposed to Obamacare from the start, so they rigged the system with advanced appropriations to keep Obamacare funded forever.

In other words, it’s a self-propelled Frankenstein which Congress is powerless to stop, unless Obamacare is completely repealed.

Guess what the $105 billion is being used for. Section 4002 gives late-term abortion lover H.H.S. Secretary Kathleen Sebelius $15 billion to use at her discretion through fiscal year 2019, and then $2 billion per year thereafter in perpetuity. Under the clever guise of “sustained national investment in prevention and public health programs”, she can use it to fund Planned Parenthood, homosexual indoctrination of your kindergarten children in “health class”, end-of-life “counseling” to convince your grandmother to commit suicide, or to make contributions to the public employees’ pension funds in Wisconsin.

To make sure the kids are indoctrinated early into believing that healthcare should be provided to them from cradle to grave at public expense, the Secretary of HHS is authorized to spend over $200 million from 2010-2014 to establish “school-based health clinics” for “underserved populations”.

That’s Obamacare at work with your tax dollars.

The debt ceiling will be reached at some point in April or May, and Mr. Obama and the Democrats want the Republicans to agree to raise it.

Forget it.

The House freshmen should refuse the Democrats’ bullying and the Republican leaders’ “appeals to reason” and simply do that for which they were elected: repeal Obamacare and cut federal spending.

Mr. Obama says that Republicans should not use the budgetary process to achieve policy objectives, but that’s exactly what he and the Democrats did when they used advanced appropriations to make it impossible to defund Obamacare.

The Democrats and Wall Street claim that failure to raise the debt ceiling would have serious, negative long-term consequences for the country. They’re absolutely right, which is why Obama will cave if the House Republicans hold firm.

If he shuts down the government, they should refuse to budge until he agrees to repeal the healthcare law.

As the Rasmussen Poll indicates, 54% of likely voters think that Obamacare will be bad for the country. It is an unconstitutional, unworkable monstrosity. To date, over 1,000 waivers of its onerous provisions have been granted to Mr. Obama’s union thugs and to the corporations that sent him campaign contributions and give him political cover. The rest of us have to live with it.

The G.O.P. freshmen claimed that they were going to Washington not to start careers, but to represent their constituents and do the right thing.

Now is their chance to prove it.

This is one of those rare times in Washington when the power and the opportunity to do the right thing coincide.

If the Republicans refuse to use their power to force repeal of Obamacare by holding the national debt ceiling and the CR hostage, then they are of no use whatsoever and should go back home.

Repeal Obamacare now or shut down the government.

With that and similarly deceptive rhetoric, Obama convinced 54% of American Catholics that electing him President of the United States would lead to worldwide ‘social justice’.

Jesus said: “Love one another as I have loved you”.

The Catholic Church has a long, distinguished history of acting on this commandment through social service (charity, or direct help for those in need).

On occasion it has engaged in social action (an attempt to change institutions perceived as perpetuating privation and/or oppression).

The Church considers vast disparities in wealth among individuals as a lack of social justice and has advocated policies which it believes would narrow those gaps.

In the past, it has recognized that Communism and socialism expand poverty and create oppression, but has expressed also its view that free-market Capitalism has limitations and that some regulation of it is a requisite for social justice.

Pope John Paul II was a formidable opponent of Communism and played a significant role in its overthrow in his native Poland, but spoke disapprovingly of the accumulation of wealth without regard for the suffering of those who fail to provide for their own needs.

More recently, the Church has advocated the concept of healthcare as a right worthy of enforcement by the federal government, and has pushed aggressively for immigration “reform” that would grant amnesty to illegal aliens and create another wave of immigration in pursuit of the ‘social justice’ of family reunification.

Obama played the social justice card skillfully in 2008. He trotted out heartbreaking stories of mothers desperately seeking healthcare for their uninsured children and spoke of his own mother’s problems with her health insurance company in the final months of her vain struggle against cancer.

Few Americans would have denied the imperative of access to medical care, and most had had experience with recalcitrant insurance companies. Obama’s pitch struck a responsive chord with Catholics intent on working for their concept of social justice, and he won the Catholic vote over John McCain by 54%-45%.

In practice, however, Obama’s stint as an Illinois state legislator bore little resemblance to the teachings or beliefs of the Catholic Church.

His concept of “making healthcare a right for all Americans” didn’t extend to the most vulnerable among us, the babies who survive botched abortions.

On the floor of the legislature in 2001, Obama said: “Number one, whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a — a child, a nine-month-old — child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it — it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.”

That doesn’t quite square with “I’ve tried to apply the precepts of compassion and care for the vulnerable that are so central to Catholic teachings to my work…”, does it.

Fast forward to the passage of Obamacare in the United States Congress on March 21st, and the carnival atmosphere at The White House yesterday when Obama signed it into law, and consider whether the abortion and euthanasia provisions in the law resemble in any way the tenets of the Catholic Church.

Obamacare requires everyone to buy health insurance and subsidizes with federal money those who can’t afford the premiums. Insurance policies will pay for abortions, and the subsidies will pay for the insurance. While the law requires “segregation” of federal funds, that provision is an exercise in accounting semantics.

Before he caved and voted for passage, Congressman Bart Stupak made a show of winning a meaningless executive order from the President which would bar the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.

It’s meaningless because the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the pro late-term abortion Kathleen Sebelius, will simply declare that the federal funding of abortions which Obamacare compels does not in fact constitute federal funding for abortions.

If you’ve read “The Gulag Obama”, you’ve seen the citations to Obamacare, beginning on page 693, that empower Ms. Sebelius to determine who gets medical care and who doesn’t, which conditions get treated and which don’t, and which elderly people and special needs people will be denied life-saving medical care based upon the remaining ‘usefulness’ of their lives.

In ObamaWorld these two classes of vulnerable people aren’t worthy of “compassion and care” and the government is empowered to deny medical treatment to them.

Or, as Obama said on ABC, “Maybe you’re (grandma) better off not having the (life-saving) surgery, but taking the pain pill”.

In fairness, 50 Catholic bishops urged Catholics not to vote for Obama, and Catholics who attend mass every week voted for McCain 55%-43%.

The Church’s pursuit of social justice via the avenue of government compulsion, however, led directly to the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, a pro-abortion Democrat Congress, and the enactment of a law which commands the government to prey upon the least of us.

Over one million American babies are killed in the name of “choice” every year. Obamacare now compels taxpayers for the first time in our history to pay for some of those abortions, and it is an unhappy fact that the Catholic Church will be complicit in the deaths of those children.

Social justice is best pursued through fidelity to the Constitution of the United States, which was written by brilliant men who designed it as a restraint on government and a guarantee of individual liberty and responsibility.

The Catholic Church doesn’t have a monopoly on virtue, and before it again pursues ‘social justice’ and ‘change’ at the expense of our institutions and traditions, it would be wise for it to remember that the road to perdition is paved with good intentions.

Whatever their level of intelligence, these stars weren’t recruited to play at Houston for their IQs, or even for their basketball ‘fundamentals’, but for their ability to slam dunk the ball into the basket and in the faces of their opponents.

They featured a free-wheeling style, disdained traditionalism, and were notoriously poor free-throw shooters.

Although they advanced to the NCAA Final Four all three years, they never won a championship.

Now comes President Barack Hussein Obama, or ‘Bama, as the New York and Chicago press are fond of calling him.

In the face of overwhelming opposition from the American people, whom he’s supposed to represent, he wants to nationalize, effectively, the U.S. healthcare system.

By his own admission, his plan would:

1. Cut $500 billion from Medicare, the insurance plan for the elderly, into which they have paid
   premiums for the past forty years;
2. Force fifteen million people out of their health insurance plans and into Medicaid, the government- run program for the poor;
3. Increase health insurance premiums for everyone else, because Medicaid reimburses doctors and
   hospitals at only sixty per cent of their normal rates, which means they’ll have to shift their
   costs to paying patients (premiums have already risen in Massachusetts, which has state-run
   healthcare);
4. Set up a government-run ‘Working Group’ which would, by law, be required to ration medical care by
   determining which medical procedures could be performed on which patients and the amount that would
   be paid to doctors and hospitals. The Working Group would consist of community organizers and unions
   such as ACORN and SEIU, who would be empowered also to shift medical resources from one community to
   another. Under this system, the doctor/patient relationship would be replaced by the
   government/doctor relationship, and patients would lose control of their own medical care;
5. Provide federal funding for abortion;
6. Provide federally-funded health insurance to illegal aliens;
7. Tax workers for health insurance provided by their employers;
8. Levy a Medicare tax on capital gains. Although the taxes would be implemented immediately upon
   passage, the healthcare benefits would not commence until four years later;
9. Add several trillion dollars to the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s plan is unpopular to the extent that the Democrat-controlled Congress has tried but failed to pass it for the past twelve months. The House has passed one version, the Senate another.

Senate rules require sixty votes to pass the House bill, but the Democrats have only fifty-nine.

House Democrats hate the Senate bill and refuse to pass it.

Public opinion polls indicate that Americans want the Democrats to start over from scratch and develop a bipartisan bill with the Republicans.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats refuse.

Instead, they plan on resorting to legislative tricks to circumvent the will of the American people and the rules of the U.S. Senate.

They’ll offer marginal concessions to the GOP in hopes of providing bipartisan ‘cover’ to House Democrats, but the central government control of the healthcare system will remain in their legislation.

As of this date, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s plan is to get the House to approve the Senate version with the promise that the Senate would then ‘reconcile’ its bill to the House version.

Pelosi has told her caucus that they should vote for Obamacare and trust the Senate to make the desired changes, even if it would cause them to lose their reelection bids in November. She’s an effective infighter and she may prevail.

The reconciliation process requires only fifty-one Senate votes, but is not designed for non-budgetary measures such as this bill.

The allegedly non-partisan Senate parliamentarian would have to rule on any attempts to circumvent the rules.

Vice President Joe Biden, in his role as President of the Senate, stands ready to overrule the parliamentarian on any decisions that counter the will of the Democrats.

The bottom line is that if Nancy Pelosi can twist enough arms and if Joe Biden is willing to flaunt Senate tradition and rules, Obama will get his healthcare bill.

In that event, America would unleash its fury on the Democrats at the polls in November, and the Republicans would take control of at least one house of Congress.

That’s a prospect that Mr. Obama might wish to contemplate.

The fact that one can do something doesn’t mean that one should do it.

As Mr. Obama’s doctors have told him, inhaling nicotine, tar and formaldehyde into his lungs several times per day is unwise and a form of slow-motion suicide.

Republican control of the House and/or the Senate would give control of Congressional committees to the GOP.

With committee control comes the power to investigate the Administration.

Democrats currently are stonewalling Republican attempts to investigate Obama’s bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. GOP control would crumble the stone wall and lead to a comprehensive investigation of former Fannie Mae CEO and Obama friend and fund raiser Franklin Raines, and the role he played in Fannie Mae’s collapse.

ACORN played a significant part in the near meltdown of the financial institutions, and they too would be targeted for investigation. Mr. Obama is a long-time supporter of ACORN and, in fact, trained their personnel on bank intimidation tactics.

Another area of investigation would be the financing activities of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Republicans suspect that foreigners contributed large sums of money, which is a violation of federal law.

Once the investigation goes down that path, it gets into the activities of Mr. Obama’s wealthy and powerful allies.

It’s amazing what happens when one’s ‘friends’ are called to testify under oath to a Congressional committee and suddenly are faced with the prospect of an independent counsel investigation and potential federal charges of fraud, conspiracy, market manipulation and selling technology to the enemy.

And then there’s the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

CIA is seething, literally seething about Mr. Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Ms. Pelosi and her liberal House colleagues tried recently to enact a law targeting for prosecution CIA agents for interrogation tactics such as offending the religious sensibilities of Islamic terrorists. We’re not exaggerating. That was one of the proposed illegal activities.

Mr. Holder, with Mr. Obama’s assent, has been investigating several highly-regarded CIA agents for the use of enhanced interrogation methods during the administration of President George W. Bush.

The lives and careers of these patriots have been ruined by Obama’s witch hunt, even though their activities were legal and specifically pre-approved in writing by senior government officials.

You may think you’ve read the facts of these interrogations in the New York Times or elsewhere.

You haven’t.

For a factual account, we highly recommend “Courting Disaster”, by Marc A. Thiessen, who was there and knows what happened.

CIA, despite several highly-publicized failures, has a long record of success and superb timing.

They also have a vast intelligence network that may have information of interest to Congressional committees.

It might be information pertinent to the ‘past’ of high-ranking government officials, and of the financial dealings of their friends and allies.

One never knows where or when the information would surface.

It could happen during the public testimony of witnesses, immediately after they’ve perjured themselves.

One needn’t rely anymore on the New York Times.

Web sites are live and up-to-the minute. Information on them gets transmitted around the world (and the halls of Congress) via Facebook and Twitter in nanoseconds.

Imagine a Congressional committee lawyer receiving a CIA-leaked ‘tweet’ on his Blackberry while he’s questioning a witness.

It almost sounds like a book.

Perhaps we’ll ask our readers to suggest titles for it.

“All the President’s Men Part II” has a certain ring to it.

Mr. Obama was not a member of Phi Beta Kappa, but the liberal elite regale us constantly with tales of his brilliance.

Apparently, he’d like to be an honorary member of Phi Slama Jama.

Go ahead and slam dunk your healthcare bill, Einstein.

Watch what happens next.

It’s a one syllable word that rhymes with ‘cream’.

Merriam-Webster, the dictionary that was briefly banned from a California school this week, defines meme as an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. It’s derived from a Greek word which means something copied, imitated or replicated.

Replicate means to duplicate or repeat.

Genes replicate, and sometimes, mutate, as they pass biologically from generation to generation.

Memes replicate as they pass by word of mouth.

They also replicate electronically, and in our social media-driven society, memes spread much more rapidly than genes. The gestation period for a human being is nine months, whereas memes replicate in nanoseconds.

The Barack Hussein Obama meme, created circa 2007, was spread by television, telephone, text message, Facebook, Twitter, and doctrinaire Marxist college professors.

The meme postulated that Mr. Obama, if elected President of the United States, would repair our supposedly tarnished image abroad, provide quality health care for all, educate the illiterate, lift millions out of poverty, create jobs, stop global warming, end torture, and sweet talk al Qaeda and other Islamo-Fascists into loving us.

He would also heal racial divisions in America and be a ‘transformative’ figure as we progressed to a post-racial period.

Like an electronic tulip bulb craze, it inspired madness throughout the U.S. body politic, and spread to Latin America and Europe as well.

(The Asians seemed immune to the Obama meme, however, perhaps as a consequence of having a far more advanced telecommunications system than the rest of the world. That’s a little geek humor.)

One year into his presidency, Mr. Obama has achieved none of the predicted results other than the cessation of ‘torture’.

Italy and France sneered at us for sending troops, doctors, clothing, food and water to an earthquake-destroyed Haiti.

The developing world hates us because we won’t pay ‘reparations’ for the imagined damage caused by now-discredited global warming.

Al Qaeda still wants to kill us and has launched three terrorist attacks on U.S. territory, of which two were successful.

Iran continues apace with its pursuit of nuclear weapons and mocks Obama’s entreaties.

Russia snickers at his surrender of the Eastern European missile shield, while our allies there shudder.

China plunders our economy while using the profits to build a fearsome military force, capable of electronic warfare against our most sophisticated weapons.

Mr. Obama tried to nationalize, rather than reform, our health care system and Americans woke up just in time to stop him, we think.

Four and one-half million more jobs have been lost, and Mr. Obama has added $1.5 trillion to our national debt, and promises, promises to add more.

The unemployment rate among young African-Americans approaches thirty per cent in some parts of the country, and we ponder the consequences.

He has kept his promise to end enhanced interrogations, and as a consequence, people walk onto our airplanes without showing their passports and with high-explosives hidden in their underwear. So that’s progress.

Independent voters provided the margin of victory for Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

With his words, he portrayed himself as a moderate person, a capable manager, and a protector of the middle class, and they bought it.

By November of 2009 they had begun to regret their decision, and elected Republican Governors in Virginia and New Jersey, two states which Obama had won in 2008.

On January 19, 2010, Massachusetts voters hit Mr. Obama over the head with a two-by- four when they elected Republican Scott Brown to fill the U.S. Senate seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy, the iconic Democrat who had held it for forty-seven years.

The President’s response is that he’ll change his image and try to convince us with his words, again, that he’s a fiscal conservative.

During his State of the Union speech, scheduled for tonight, reportedly he’ll advocate a spending freeze on ‘discretionary spending’. The freeze is designed to ‘save’ $250 billion over ten years, or about $25 billion annually.

That seems reasonable unless you’re aware of the fact that yesterday the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office declared that the President’s 2009 Stimulus Plan is now predicted to cost $75 billion more than the originally estimated $787 billion.

In other words, thirty per cent of the President’s proposed ‘savings’ from the spending freeze evaporated in one day.

During his first year he increased discretionary spending by twenty-five per cent, which means that the ‘freeze’ is at a much higher level of spending than existed when he took the oath of office.

As Mr. Obama’s approval ratings plummet into the mid-forties, we’re told by Democrats that Ronald Reagan had a difficult first year too, because of the recession he inherited from Jimmy Carter, and that like Reagan, Obama can rally.

It’s an inapt analogy.

Ronald Reagan was of, by, and for America.

He had an innate love of, and trust in, the American people.

He didn’t believe there was something wrong with Americans. He believed that the government needed to leave them alone to pursue their own dreams.

Reagan trusted that if freed from excessive government and taxes the American people would unleash their entrepreneurial spirit, revive the economy, and create millions of new jobs.

That’s exactly what happened.

Barack Obama seems disconnected and aloof from the Middle Class. It’s as though he scorns them and disdains their religion, guns, dreams and aspirations.

His economic illiteracy is such that he thinks he can command economic behavior with laws, regulations and taxpayer funds.

He fears that, left to their own devices, Americans will pursue what he deems an incorrect path.

Americans have come to suspect that underneath the GQ looks and the Harvard mouth is an inveterate hustler who talks about fairness, economic justice, environmental protection, education reform, and American ideals of jurisprudence while he steals your grandmother’s Medicare, ships your job to China, cuts off water supplies to farmers in California, appoints a pedophile as his Safe School Czar, and grants civilian trials to terrorists while persecuting the Navy SEALS and C.I.A. agents who pursue them.

As a consequence, his words no longer resonate with Independents, and his presidency is in an unrecoverable flat spin.

The Obama meme is headed for extinction.

The voters of Massachusetts schooled President Barack Hussein Obama today when they elected Republican Scott Brown to fill the United States Senate seat which had been held by the late Edward M. Kennedy for forty-seven years prior to his death in August 2009.

In a stinging rebuke to the Commonwealth’s Democrat machine, national Democrats, the president’s agenda, and Mr. Obama himself, voters gave Brown a 52%-47% victory, with 1% going to an independent.

Brown, who defeated State Attorney General Martha Coakley, ran against Obama’s healthcare plan, deficit spending, and one-party rule.

A few months ago, polls showed Coakley with a 30-point lead in the state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by three to one, and where no Republican has been elected to the U.S. Senate since November 1972.

Significantly, the registration profile of the Bay State’s voters is 12% Republican, 36% Democrat, and 52% Independent, and according to a Politico Insider Advantage Poll released yesterday, Independents favored Brown by a staggering 41%.

Independents, of course, are the electoral segment that gave Obama his improbable victory in 2008, and they appear to have turned against his agenda and governing style, if not him personally.

Democrats blame Coakley for having run a poor campaign, and they blame the Democrat National Senatorial Campaign Committee for failing to recognize that the race was turning against her.

While the Democrats are busy pointing fingers at each other, however, they might take a look at the Rasmussen Poll released on January 18th, which indicates that nationally voters preferred Brown over Coakley by a 49%-34% margin.

Nationally.

Voters nationally wouldn’t know Martha Coakley from Martha Stewart.

They are familiar with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and Tim Geithner, however.

They have heard of what’s now cynically referred to as the Louisiana Purchase, in which Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu’s healthcare vote was purchased for a $300 million guarantee to Louisiana.

They have heard of the Cornhusker Kickback, in which Democrat Senator Ben Nelson’s healthcare vote was purchased for a $100 million guarantee to Nebraska.

They have heard of the $60 billion union bribe, in which union members would be exempt from the president’s 40% tax on every one else’s healthcare insurance.

They have heard of the Islamic bomber who, despite a $50 billion annual Department of Homeland Security budget, managed to smuggle an explosive device onto a U.S. airliner and nearly killed three hundred passengers.

Independent voters have heard of the nationalization of GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they’ve heard of the president’s $1.4 trillion budget deficit.

Independent voters know of the president’s attempt to tax their heating, electricity, and gasoline in the name of the bogus “science” of global warming.

Independents are part of the 56% of the national electorate who oppose Obamacare and have witnessed the president’s efforts to cram it down the throats of the American people.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that in a state in which Independents are the majority, the president spoke there on Sunday to a crowd that was half the size of the crowd to whom Brown spoke at the same time.

Democrats now speak in terms of refusing to seat Brown prior to the healthcare vote, or of forcing the House to swallow whole the Senate version of the bill.

For these elected representatives we have a word of advice: Cram down this healthcare bill and you’ll discover what it means to be on the receiving end of a firestorm.

Our brothers who served in the Vietnam War used a more colorful term, but we’re sure you get the picture.

If ‘moderate Democrat’ is not an oxymoron and there are any of you in Congress, you should understand this; the magical mystery tour of 2008 is over.

Obama is not the Messiah.

He’s more like the hula hoop; a flash in the pan.

He has been revealed to the American center as too far out on the left wing.

Force him back to the middle or suffer the consequences in November.

He was referring, of course, to his proposed legislation to impose a ten-year, $90 billion tax on the top fifty financial institutions for the ostensible purpose of recovering Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds.

With his typical sleight of hand, he ignored the fact that many of the banks already have paid back the TARP in full, with interest, and that the taxpayers have earned a profit on those loans.

More significantly, he neglected to point out that his financial institutions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together received $110.6 billion when the federal government took them over, and which will continue to receive untold billions to stay afloat, will never pay back those funds.

Why do we refer to them as his financial institutions?

Because throughout his political and ‘community organizing’ career, not only did he protect them from government-imposed sound financial management, but he demanded that they provide risky loans to sub-prime lenders.

As a community organizer he taught ACORN thugs to picket the homes of Wall Street CEOs to shame them into making sub-prime loans.

When Obama was in the United States Senate he and Chris Dodd (D-CT) filibustered President Bush’s attempt to stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from continuing to expand the lending practices which led ultimately to the financial collapse of 2008.

Mr. Obama, Mr. Dodd, and Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) are still pushing banks to extend credit to unworthy borrowers.

Wall Street firms are guilty of serious excess, but if Mr. Obama thinks their transgressions will provide cover for his, and that a compliant media will aid and abet him in that slick maneuver, we have a hot news flash for him:

Mainstream America is learning to use social media such as Twitter and Facebook, which Mr. Obama used to stunning effect in the 2008 presidential race.

When we were in college, approximately one hundred years ago, we had a professor who taught us that weapons systems provide only a temporary advantage to the first adopters. Eventually, other nations acquire and learn to use them.

Mr. Obama is rushing off to Massachusetts tomorrow in a desperate attempt to save the sinking campaign of Martha Coakley to retain for Democrats the U.S. Senate seat once occupied by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Ms. Coakley’s opponent, Republican State Senator Scott Brown, reportedly has raised over $1 million per day in the past week through efforts coordinated on Twitter. Contributions have poured in from around the country.

He has made opposition to Obamacare the centerpiece of his campaign, and the working men and women of Massachusetts, and the rest of America, are flocking to him.

Mr. Brown also has opposed Mr. Obama’s economic policies, which include the massive bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler.

Americans understand that the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) choked those companies to death with ever-increasing demands for higher wages and benefits.

When they went broke, Mr. Obama used taxpayer dollars to bail out his union pals.

In his new healthcare bill he proposes to tax the health insurance policies of working Americans who aren’t union members.

Union members won’t pay the tax; everyone else will.

Americans are beginning to see, with help from non-traditional media, that Mr. Obama’s concept of fairness is that if you’re one of his politically powerful supporters, benefits and protection flow in your direction.

If you’re not, you pay the price for largesse to his pals.

We’re not going to let Congress take the money and run.

Mr. Obama’s little shtick might work one more time in Massachusetts this weekend when he tries to convince the voters there that he and Martha Coakley are the last, best hope for humanity, and when ACORN and SEIU try to bludgeon the rest of them into line.

In Florida, Arkansas, Nebraska, Indiana, North Dakota, Ohio, and perhaps California, however, voters are getting wise to his slick propaganda, which may indicate that one year from now many of his fellow travelers in Congress will have to find a new gig.

In January of 2013, if Allah is in his heaven, so will Mr. Obama.

God bless America.

The terrorist failed in his attempt to explode the plane in the air over Detroit, and murder its nearly three hundred passengers, only because the detonator failed and a passenger tackled him.

As we indicated in Obama’s Inexcusable Failure To Protect America From Terrorist Attack and Welcome To Obamaworld: No Passport? No Problem!, the President and his advisors were quick to deny that this was an organized terrorist attack, quick to claim that “the system worked”, and slow to comprehend the colossal and near-catastrophic failure of the national security apparatus.

Had the operation succeeded, the tragedy to the passengers and their families would have been compounded by an immediate loss of confidence in our airline industry and a serious blow to our economy, as occurred after September 11, 2001.

Although this attack failed, Al Qaeda, which launched it through its affiliate Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen), views it as a major victory and a propaganda tool in its recruiting efforts.

Weaknesses in the security system for U.S. aviation have been exposed not only by the Christmas incident, but by the infamous ‘kisser’ affair which shut down a terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport for six hours on January 3rd, delaying travel for thousands of passengers and snarling airline traffic worldwide.

At Newark, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employee left his post to have a conversation on his cell phone, and left a restricted area unguarded while Haisong Jiang, 28, of Piscataway, N.J., lifted a “restraining rope”, crossed into the restricted area without a boarding pass and without having first gone through the security screening line, and kissed his girlfriend goodbye.

Parenthetically, although TSA guards are not represented by unions, the American Federation of Government Employees is representing the TSA guard, and intends “…to fully represent him to make sure this whole investigation is handled correctly and that he’s not made a scapegoat for all that’s been going wrong with security at the airports.”

Isn’t that precious?

Don’t they shoot people in the Army for leaving their guard posts during war?

“We are at war. We are at war against al Qaeda…”, the President said.

By the way, Mr. Obama’s nominee to head the TSA, Erroll Southers, wants to allow TSA employees to unionize. This would be the same former F.B.I. agent Erroll Southers who twice used a government criminal database to spy on his estranged wife’s boyfriend, and then lied about it to the United States Senate.

Unionized airport guards. We can hear it now: “It’s not my job. It’s not my fault. It’s time for my break. Stop harassing me based on my race, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, age or disability”.

Despite Mr. Obama’s nascent interest in airline security and the show he made of taking his intelligence chiefs to the woodshed, his new security measures are insufficient to prevent a successful terrorist attack, and there will be one.

As the Newark ‘kisser’ incident demonstrates, rent-a-cop TSA security guards lack the ability to stop a determined attack by a virulent, dedicated enemy.

Law-abiding passengers dutifully line up, produce their IDs and boarding passes, remove their shoes, belts, keys, and wallets, and carefully place their toiletries in plastic bags for the scanners to scrutinize.

Scofflaws like Haisong Jiang, a biology student from China, wait for the highly-dedicated TSA guard to abandon his post, then cross over undetected, while the malfunctioning security cameras capture grainy, blurred images.

So here’s a question for Mr. Obama. Suppose that five, heavily armed Islamic terrorists wearing suicide vests had been waiting for our TSA Einstein to leave his post. What then?

At most major airports in America one can walk into the unsecured areas with a gun, a bomb or a lollypop without anyone so much as saying “boo”. The distance from the curb to the planes is in some cases as little as fifty yards.

Five dedicated Islamists, or even just one, could evade or shoot the guard, lift the “restraining rope”, sprint to the passenger boarding area, detonate the suicide vest, and kill hundreds of people.

At some airports, which we won’t name, the planes are separated from the boarding area by windows only. The right explosive could penetrate the glass and a plane’s fuel tanks, perhaps triggering explosions of refueling vehicles and the adjacent planes.

Seventy-two virgins for each of the boys; $50,000 for each of their families.

It wouldn’t be quite as spectacular as jumbo jets flying into buildings against the backdrop of a blue, Manhattan sky, but Al Qaeda will warm to the idea if we’re ever able to stop them from actually boarding our aircraft.

Will we be able to keep Al Qaeda operatives off of our airplanes?

Rafi Ron, the top security consultant at Logan International Airport in Boston, who also once headed security at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, said the following to the Associated Press on January 7th:

“We think that if we just add more and more machines, we, at some point, we will create a situation that will be impossible for the terrorists to act. Obviously, this is doomed to fail,” Ron said. “There are so many ways to use the loopholes left by technology.”

He advocates behavioral profiling based on an interview of each passenger at the ID checkpoint.

“Right now, that component of a full-scale interview at the checkpoint is completely nonexistent. Period,” Ron said. “And as long as we don’t have it, we are giving up one of the most powerful tools that we have available, because terrorists are so bad in preparing their cover stories and their ability to even hold their cover story when they prepare one.”

Would Mr. Obama order such interviews? Don’t count on it.

He’s a slave to his ideology and political correctness.

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and anywhere from 1 million to 7 million in America, depending upon whose estimates one chooses to believe.

“And we know that the vast majority of Muslims reject al Qaeda”, the President said.

Really? Do we know that?

A majority is more than half. Have we heard more than 600 million Muslims lift their voices to condemn the Sept. 11th attacks, or the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, or the attempted bombing of the Detroit plane?

Have we heard more than 500,000 Muslims in America raise their voices in full-throated condemnation of Osama bin Laden?

On the contrary, polls indicate that most Muslims believe jihad against America is sanctioned by the Koran and is their duty.

Let’s grant the President his point, however. Suppose that 95% of all Muslims reject Al Qaeda and would never in their wildest dreams engage in a terror plot.

That would leave 60 million who would, 50,000 of whom already live in the United States.

One of them is a U.S. Army Major. Remember him? We mentioned him in “Muslim Jurors for 9/11 Islamic Terrorists”.

“…Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan‘s loyalty was to Islam and Sharia law, not to the United States or the Constitution he took an oath to defend and protect.” On November 5, 2009 he “jump[ed] up on a desk at Ft. Hood, yell[ed] the battle cry of all Islamic Fascists, Allahu Akbar, and gun[ned] down more than thirty of his fellow U.S. citizens and soldiers”.

The politically correct U.S. Army and intelligence agencies knew of his radical views months before the attack, but did nothing.

In Malaysia last week, Muslims firebombed several Christian Churches because Christians are using the word “Allah” to describe the Christian God. “Allah” has been used by Christians for centuries in Malaysia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Indonesia as the equivalent for the English word “God”.

“Allah is only for us“, said the Muslim firebombers.

“And that’s why we must communicate clearly to Muslims around the world”, said the President, “that al Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death-including the murder of fellow Muslims-while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress.”

They’re not buying what the President is selling.

Two of the top four Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen were released from Gitmo after they promised not to attack us anymore.

Mr. Obama insisted on their release when he was running for President.

In England, Muslims demand Sharia law for themselves and claim that they need not comply with English law.

“We will define the character of our country”, Obama said, “not some band of small men intent on killing innocent men, women and children.”

The only problem with that lofty statement is that we don’t know who “we” are anymore. We no longer are the ones defining the character of our country, which has now been invaded by millions of illegal aliens (Muslim and otherwise) who are ignorant and uncaring of our Constitution, history and language.

In America, Muslims demand special privileges at our universities; privileges which exclude non-Muslims from university facilities during designated times.

Muslims don’t view us as “innocent”, but rather as infidels and apostates who are legitimate targets for killings sanctioned by Allah.

Muslims in America have murdered their own daughters in the name of family honor, indicating a wholesale rejection of our laws, values, and customs.

Our prisons are becoming fertile recruiting ground for radical Muslims who prize American converts for terror missions, and feckless federal judges grant voting rights to those same inmates.

While the wholesale stereotyping and stigmatization of Muslims would be un-American, unjust, morally reprehensible, and counterproductive, we must recognize a clear threat to our country, our society and our way of life from millions of Muslims who seek our destruction.

No amount of tinkering with airport security or our intelligence agencies will protect us from that.

We must abandon political correctness, demand that those living in our country fully integrate into our society, and remove those who don’t. And we must deny entry into our country, via airplanes or otherwise, to those intent on our destruction, either through terrorist attacks or the slow insinuation of their laws and values into our lives.

President Obama seems unable or unwilling to recognize these stark facts.

If he were serious about airport security he wouldn’t advocate unionization of TSA employees.

If he were serious about destroying Al Qaeda, he would stop sending recruits to them from Gitmo, and he certainly would not send the 9/11 masterminds to America for trial in civilian courts.

If Mr. Obama truly wanted to eliminate Al Qaeda, he wouldn’t demand that Americans endure full-body scans at airports while he refuses to wiretap terrorists’ phone calls to America.

If he were serious about winning the war against terrorism, he’d stop diverting spy satellites for global warming studies.

Most importantly, Barack Obama needs to realize that Al Qaeda is part and parcel of the Islamic world. It gets its money and sustenance from Islamic society, and no amount of appeasement and happy talk is going to convince Muslims to abandon Al Qaeda in favor of America.

The President claims that “At the Amsterdam airport, Abdulmutallab (the Detroit bomber)…was required to show his documents-including a valid U.S. visa”.

The President wasn’t at the airport with Mr. Abdulmutallab, but fellow passenger and American citizen Kurt Haskell was, and he tells a different story.

According to Mr. Haskell, Abdulmutallab was walked up to the ticket agent by a man in a suit who told the agent that the Al Qaeda terrorist didn’t have a passport, but to let him board the plane because “we do this all the time”.

Mr. Haskell claims that our government is lying to us about this matter.

So Mr. President, prove to us that an airport official in Amsterdam didn’t conspire with Al Qaeda to bomb this plane.

Show us Abdulmutallab’s original passport and visa.

In February 1903, the U.S. leased the property as a fueling station from Cuba. In December 1903, both countries signed the Cuban-American Treaty which confirmed the lease. A treaty reaffirming the lease was signed in 1934 and remains in force unless both countries disavow it or unless the U.S. abandons the base.

In the late 1950s Communist Revolution, Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba and has since then objected to the lease. The U.S. maintains that the lease is valid under international law and that the Castro government confirmed that when it cashed one of the rent checks.

U.S. Marines guard the base and face off daily against Cuban soldiers over a 17-mile fence line. The 1992 movie “A Few Good Men“, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, and Demi Moore, is director Rob Reiner‘s masterful depiction of the base and scurrilous defamation of the Marine Corps.

In 2002, President George W. Bush established a detention facility at Gitmo to imprison dangerous international terrorists who possess no legal, moral, ethical, humanitarian or U.S. Constitutional rights to due process in U.S. courts.

On October 12, 2000, long before the Gitmo detention facility was opened, Al Qaeda-recruited Muslim suicide bombers blew a hole in the U.S.S. Cole and killed seventeen U.S. Sailors.

On September 11, 2001, long before the Gitmo detention facility was opened, nineteen Al Qaeda-recruited Muslim terrorists hijacked four U.S. airliners, flew them into buildings and killed 3,000 innocent people.

On December 22, 2001, long before the Gitmo detention facility was opened, Al Qaeda-recruited Muslim terrorist Richard Reid tried to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean using a bomb hidden in his shoe.

President Obama reportedly continues to insist on closing the facility and sending more than 80 Guantanamo Yemeni terrorists home, even though previously released Gitmo detainees have returned to the ‘battlefield’ to attack the United States (see “Obama’s Inexcusable Failure To Protect America From Terrorist Attack” and “Welcome To Obamaworld: No Passport? No Problem!”).

According to Fox News, one administration official described Obama’s rationale this way: “The detention facility at Guantanamo has been used by Al Qaeda as a rallying cry and recruiting tool — including its affiliate Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As our military leaders have recognized, closing the detention facility at Guantanamo is a national security imperative”.

Another recruiting tool used by Al Qaeda has been Hollywood movies which, according to the Muslim line, portray the corruption and moral depravity of America.

Should we close Hollywood?

Victoria’s Secret televises a show each year of attractive, scantily clad females whom Osama bin Laden and his merry band of Neanderthals find scandalous and hold out as an example of American evil.

Should we close Victoria’s secret?

Al Qaeda and the Taliban have closed schools that educate girls and have used the Western practice of educating females as a recruiting tool for young men who are then turned into terrorists and sent on missions to kill Americans and other Westerners.

Should we close our schools to females and force them to wear the burka?

Al Qaeda refers to all Christians and Jews as ‘infidels’ and ‘apostates’ and recruits Muslims to kill them.

Should we close our churches, temples, and synagogues?

Islam does not recognize the provision of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that government shall neither establish a religion nor prevent the free exercise of religion, and uses that to recruit young men to attack the United States.

Should we shred our Constitution and close our government?

The aforementioned shoe bomber, Richard Reid, was recruited by Al Qaeda in prison and justified his attempted shoe bombing of the airliner by referring to the immorality and self-fulfillment of Western society as a threat to Islam.

Should we close Western society?

On January 14, 2009 Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden called for a holy war against Israel in which he urged the “Muslim Nation” to defeat the “Zionist entity” and assured Palestinians that Al Qaeda’s “…fate is tied to yours in fighting the crusader-Zionist coalition, in fighting until victory or martyrdom”, and further stated that “…the duty is to urge people to jihad (holy war) and to enlist the youth into jihad brigades”.

He did not mention Gitmo. He only mentioned Israel.

Should we close Israel?

They didn’t want to interrupt his golf game during his Hawaiian vacation. He’s only going to be there for ten days, after all, and the guy has got to be worn down. Shoving a $2.6 trillion nationalization of healthcare down the unwilling throats of the American people is hard work.

Perhaps they were afraid to admit to him that his Islamo-centric foreign policy isn’t working.

He has flown to Saudi Arabia to kiss the ring of the Muslim Saudi King.

He has stood on foreign soil and excoriated America for freeing 25 million people in Iraq.

He has promoted a Muslim terrorist to the rank of Major and then admonished Americans to not stigmatize the man after he shot dead thirteen fellow soldiers in cold blood.

He has agreed to send eighty Yemeni Muslim terrorists home from Guantanamo Bay.

His diplomats have even tried to run down an Israeli boarder guard while trying to smuggle a Palestinian.

Yet despite all of these accommodations to Medieval Islam, Muslims still want to attack America. In fact, according to ABC News, two of the top four Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen were released from Gitmo after they promised not to attack us anymore.

That’s so unfair!

Maybe the President’s security team were embarrassed to tell him that the $50 billion Department of Homeland Security budget failed to prevent a known terrorist sympathizer, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding an American airliner.

He was on a list of 500,000 dangerous characters, but it’s so difficult to sort through all of those names. Perhaps with another $50 billion someone at Homeland Security could ask around about a relational database.

A relational database…that 20th Century invention which allows us to retrieve names and classify them as “Good” or “Bad” so that a bureaucrat with a clipboard in Amsterdam might, for instance, deny a visa to a man whose father has warned the American Embassy in Lagos that his son is a dangerous religious fanatic.

After finally hearing about the attack, the president waited three days before leaving the beach to grace the American people with a six minute statement, which included the immortal gem that all Americans must remain vigilant.

No questions were allowed from reporters who, let’s face it, are much happier vacationing with this president in Hawaii than they were with that other guy in Waco. Not a peep of protest from them.

Three days with no statement. W contemplated for seven minutes and they made a documentary about it.

Obama did trot out Janet though. That would be Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who said that the system worked “just fine” after the attack, but that before the attack there might have been a problem. She was certain, however, that it wasn’t part of a larger conspiracy.

Yet somehow that beacon of intelligence, The Sun of London, reported that this terrorist and twenty-five others have been training for months in Yemen to attack Western airliners.

Within hours, other newspapers discovered that Abdulmutallab had been barred from Britain because of his terrorist background (see also our editorial “Obama’s Inexcusable Failure To Protect America From Terrorist Attack”).

And then this bombshell…According to Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich, who was a passenger on the flight from Amsterdam, Abdulmutallab didn’t even have a passport! He was escorted to the gate by a man wearing a suit, who introduced him to the ticket agent as a refugee from Sudan and convinced the officials to let him on the plane.

Today, the foreign minister of Yemen announced that there are two hundred to three hundred trained terrorists in his country poised to attack western targets.

The Times reports that Abdulmutallab was recruited by Al Qaeda in London while he was in school there and that he organized a conference entitled “War On Terror Week” which advertised speakers who were former detainees at Gitmo.

No conspiracy here, right Janet?

If your wife wants to take her lipstick on an airplane with her, six security guards want to frisk her.

If your grandmother is in a wheelchair, they have to pat her down.

If you’re a U.S. Navy Seal who roughs up a known Islamic killer, they want to court marshal you.

If you’re a known fascist, Islamic thug, they’re afraid to ask for your passport.

That Janet Napolitano is Secretary of Homeland Security is a joke.

That Barack Hussein Obama is President of the United States is a clear and present danger.

The Nigerian son of privilege trained with Al Qaeda in Yemen, took a plane there for Amsterdam, and connected with a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day. As the plane approached the airport for landing, he spent twenty minutes in the restroom preparing the bomb, went back to his seat, covered himself with a blanket and lit the fuse.

If not for his bumbling incompetence, the failure of the detonator, and the heroism of Dutchman Jasper Schuringa, who subdued Abdulmutallab, Northwest Airlines flight 253 and its passengers would have been blown out of the sky.

It was not an unforeseeable or random act, and it was not coincidental that Islamists perpetrated it on Christmas.

According to multiple news outlets, Abdulmutallab has been known to U.S. and British Intelligence as a person with terrorist ties. The U.K. banned his entry into that country six months ago, yet he was issued a multi-entry U.S. visa which allowed him to come and go as he pleased.

His father, a wealthy Nigerian banker, claims to have warned U.S. officials of his son’s “fanatical religious views” six months ago.

Along with the Islamic terrorist attack on Ft. Hood on November 5, 2009, and Obama’s insistence on releasing dangerous terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this case demonstrates the President’s indifference to the security of the American people.

The Ft. Hood shooter was a Major in the U.S. Army, known by his superiors to have expressed vehemently anti-American sentiments. He is a Muslim, and political correctness combined with Obama’s pro-Islam world view dictated that he not be questioned or removed from duty.

There are more than eighty Islamic terrorists scheduled for release from Gitmo and repatriation to Yemen. Yemen, the country that allowed Islamic thugs to blow up the U.S.S. Cole and then sheltered them from the F.B.I. The country with a history of allowing the escape of dangerous international terrorists.

Obama today sent Attorney General Eric Holder to pledge a vigorous investigation of the “alleged attack” on the airliner.

The terrorists are not intimidated, Mr. President, when you send a lawyer to do the work of the U.S. Marines.

Obama has a pre-9/11 approach to the defense of America. Rather than an aggressive, worldwide, military pursuit of terrorists and the regimes that support them, he relies on defensive law enforcement measures and meaningless diplomacy.

While Obama primps and preens for the international press, our friends in Europe, and his friends on the lunatic left, Islamic fascists are on the march. They will not relent in their pursuit of America’s destruction, and their biggest ally in that goal is the President of The United States.

There will be more attacks, and, sadly, one of them will succeed. When it does, the fault will rest squarely with Barack Hussein Obama.