On a previous episode of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Conservatism, Babe and I interview the delightful Leon Weinstein, Russian immigrant and capitalist booster.

Leon has made a few YouTube videos that are well worth the time to watch as they teach a good lesson on why the socialist/communist direction that Barack Obama is trying to drag this country toward is NOT the right way to go.

Here is a sample video:

Leon has also written a great book called the “Capitalist Guidebook.”

Here is a video introduction to the book:

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Last night at midnight, we left 2009 behind. Not one to carelessly wish away time, I nevertheless am ready to move into 2010. I’m anticipating a year of some hope and some change. To make that change come about, there are some things about 2009 that no serious conservative will ever forgive or forget.

Here’s my list of the 10 Unforgivable and Unforgettable in 2009. I have purposefully left out the Stimulus and the bailouts, as well as the amnesty for illegals coming our way. Amnesty is the single biggest and most dangerous issue facing America, and compared to it, all else pales. I hope you’ll add to this list in comments. Mine list is in no particular order of importance.

(1) The buying of Senate votes to pass Health Care on Christmas Eve, which Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) characterized as “corruption, not compromise.” Unforgivable and Unforgettable.

(2) The 111th Congress in general, and specifically for allowing unread legislation to pass. Unforgivable. Senator Tom Coburn summed-it-up: “This Congress will be remembered for its arrogance, corruption and stupidity.” Unforgettable.

(3) Attorney General Eric Holder drops charges of voter intimidation in Philadelphia against the New Black Panthers. After the Black Panthers simply refused to show up in court, the government won a default judgment – which Holder promptly nullified. Unforgettable and Unforgivable.

(4) Obama stands behind Kevin Jennings as his Safe Schools Czar. Unforgettable and Unforgivable.

(5) The administration’s refusal to call the Ft. Hood murders, terrorism and specifically Islamic terrorism, and actually withhold information on the murders from the investigative body of Congress. Unforgettable and Unforgivable.

(6) The constant and completely unsubstantiated charge from Democrats that Republicans “have no ideas.”

(7) The continued, and shameful, support of ACORN from the White House

(8) The illegal firing of Inspector General, Gerald Walpin, by the White House, and then the ordering of related document shredding, also by the White House. This firing came about because Walpin’s report showed that AmeriCorp has fraudulently misused $75 million in government funds, and also showed that Obama’s close friend and donor, Kevin Johnson, former NBA star and currently Sacramento Mayor, was involved. Walpin was cleared of all wrong doing and wants his job back. Unforgettable and Unforgivable.

(9) Coming legislation to bailout newspapers.

(10) The confiscating of our personal health care records by the government, under the guise of providing more accuracy and safety for the patient. We all know that to the government, nothing is sacred. We will rue the day this happens.

None of the above would have been possible with even moderate media scrutiny. The ongoing media blackout, as outlined below, has left this country reeling. We can no longer depend on the ballot box to make our voices heard, UNLESS we vote in much bigger numbers than ‘they’ vote. The press will encourage and use ACORN to bring about the Leftist agenda. We must be ‘gutterally’ smarter than they.

(a) The War on Terror, including the indecent silence on radical Islam;

(b) The unread legislation, including the Stimulus Bill and Health Care

(c) The subverting of private industry jobs to newly created government jobs giving the Obama administration massive growth in…government

(d) The refusal to explore both sides of climate change and global warming, and then finally, the refusal to report the ClimateGate scandal.

(e) The refusal to report on Barack Obama’s unknown life: his college records, the name used on applications, the passport he traveled with as a college student, and of course, the refusal to force his birth certificate, or the lack of one, up and out of the abyss.

(f) The lack of a truthful look at Henry Paulson’s role in the economic meltdown in September 2008. Remember the “emergency meeting” between Paulson, Bernake and top Congressional members, when Paulson told Congress without passing the $700 billion bailout “tomorrow, we won’t have an economy on Monday.”

Remember President Bush standing, with Paulson looming over him, addressing the Nation about the coming economic disaster? We know now that a bailout was inherently wrong. Most of us knew it at the time, but coming in September 2008, Paulson single-handedly gave the Oval Office to Barack Obama. In my opinion, it was a conspiracy – and it worked.

Had the media done it’s job, and simply reported what was widely-known and questioned, regardless of the end result, and let the readers make the judgment, Barack Obama would not be in office today.

Graphic courtesy of AdventurePostOffice

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Across the country, trial lawyers and green pressure groups — if that’s not redundant — are teaming up to sue electric utilities for carbon emissions under “nuisance” laws.

A group of 12 Gulf Coast residents whose homes were damaged by Katrina are suing 33 energy companies for greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly contributed to the global warming that allegedly made the hurricane worse.

This is the equivalent of suing the owner of a black cat that walked across your path before you got in an accident. It isn’t just dumb to think local power companies caused Katrina; it’s insane. But the inmates are running the asylum now.

There’s more:

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and seven state AG allies plus New York City are suing American Electric Power and other utilities for a host of supposed eco-maladies. A native village in Alaska is suing Exxon and 23 oil and energy companies for coastal erosion.

What unites these cases is the creativity of their legal chain of causation and their naked attempts at political intimidation. “My hope is that the court case will provide a powerful incentive for polluters to be reasonable and come to the table and seek affordable and reasonable reductions,” Mr. Blumenthal told the trade publication Carbon Control News. “We’re trying to compel measures that will stem global warming regardless of what happens in the legislature.”

Liberals don’t even hide the fact that they are using our infamously irresponsible left-wing courts to circumvent the democratic process and impose their deranged antihuman ideology.

Don’t imagine the judicial branch will pass up this opportunity to expand its already alarming power:

U.S. appeals courts seem more than ready to arrogate to themselves this power. In September, the Second Circuit allowed Mr. Blumenthal’s suit to proceed, while a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed a lower court’s dismissal of the Katrina case in October. An en banc hearing is now under consideration.

The beauty of the greedy totalitarian left’s new strategy is that it allows them to sue absolutely anyone they don’t like and/or has money to be looted. According to attorney David Rivkin:

There is no logical reason to draw the line at 30 defendants as opposed to 150, or 500, or even 10,000 defendants. These plaintiffs — and any others alleging injury by climatic phenomena — would have standing to assert a damages claim against virtually every entity and individual on the planet, since each ‘contributes’ to global concentrations of carbon dioxide.

This is why the Supreme Court’s psychotic ruling that the CO2 we exhale is a pollutant signed the death warrant for our economy and our liberty. On top of the massive looting spree by slimy trial lawyers, power-drunk judges will engage in what the WSJ calls “ad hoc command-and-control regulation against any industries that happen to catch the green lobby’s eye.”

In the short term, we will see energy prices follow the same trajectory as the price of cigarettes. In the medium term, the economy will be too gummed up by avaricious lawsuits and whimsical judicial decrees to function at all. Unless we take our country back from liberals soon, there won’t be any long term.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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They know there will be zero bipartisan support. They know the public overwhelmingly rejects ObamaCare. They know the bill will cost more than we can conceivably afford. They know it will not improve healthcare. But they also know they can burn our country down in less time than it will take to get them out of office.

When the smoke clears, the framework will be in place for the sort of authoritarian socialist regime where elections don’t much matter.

A few highlights from an excellent piece in today’s Wall Street Journal:

And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world’s greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new “manager’s amendment” that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what’s in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. …

The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that “reform” has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state.

One of the many reasons no one but our rulers want ObamaCare is the extravagant cost, which will literally bankrupt our already double-mortgaged country:

The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on. … The truth is that no one really knows how much ObamaCare will cost because its assumptions on paper are so unrealistic.

Another reason: we will lose both quality and choice:

Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so “substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance” that companies like WellPoint might need to “be considered part of the federal budget.”

Innovation will effectively end, once medical technology has been frozen in bureaucratic amber:

Ultimately, “our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all,” as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax — rising to $3 billion in 2018 — that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries. Democrats believe that more advanced health technologies like MRI machines and drug-coated stents are driving costs too high, though patients and their physicians might disagree.

Our rulers are deliberately suppressing innovation, because from their point of view, it raises costs by allowing us to live for too long past our productive taxpaying years.

Government is coercion. Anything run by government will in the end be run by thugs. Here, the thuggery is evident from the beginning:

For no other reason than ideological animus, doctor-owned hospitals will face harsh new limits on their growth and who they’re allowed to treat. Physician Hospitals of America says that ObamaCare will “destroy over 200 of America’s best and safest hospitals.”

Like literally everything that Democrats have put their muscle behind, this will drive up taxes, as well as our 10+% unemployment rate:

[M]ost of the taxes start in 2010. That includes the payroll tax increase for individuals earning more than $200,000 that rose to 0.9 from 0.5 percentage points in Mr. Reid’s final machinations. Job creation, here we come.

How does Big Government get anyone to go along with such an obvious disaster? Bribery and intimidation.

Those parts of the health-care industry that couldn’t be bribed outright, like Big Pharma, were coerced into acceding to this agenda. The White House was able to, er, persuade the likes of the AMA and the hospital lobbies because the federal government will control 55% of total U.S. health spending under ObamaCare, according to the Administration’s own Medicare actuaries.

Others got hush money, namely Nebraska’s Ben Nelson. Even liberal Governors have been howling for months about ObamaCare’s unfunded spending mandates: Other budget priorities like education will be crowded out when about 21% of the U.S. population is on Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended for the poor. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman calculates that ObamaCare will result in $2.5 billion in new costs for his state that “will be passed on to citizens through direct or indirect taxes and fees,” as he put it in a letter to his state’s junior Senator.

So in addition to abortion restrictions, Mr. Nelson won the concession that Congress will pay for 100% of Nebraska Medicaid expansions into perpetuity. His capitulation ought to cost him his political career, but more to the point, what about the other states that don’t have a Senator who’s the 60th vote for ObamaCare?

WSJ sums up by aptly describing ObamaCare as a “vast expansion of federal control,” which is the sole point of the bill, as it most certainly will not improve healthcare.

Never in our memory has so unpopular a bill been on the verge of passing Congress, never has social and economic legislation of this magnitude been forced through on a purely partisan vote, and never has a party exhibited more sheer political willfulness that is reckless even for Washington or had more warning about the consequences of its actions.

These 60 Democrats are creating a future of epic increases in spending, taxes and command-and-control regulation, in which bureaucracy trumps innovation and transfer payments are more important than private investment and individual decisions. In short, the Obama Democrats have chosen change nobody believes in — outside of themselves — and when it passes America will be paying for it for decades to come.

Or forever. Given a choice between government seizure of the healthcare industry and the Chinese Red Army invading the country, I’d prefer the ChiComs. They would be much easier to get rid of than socialized medicine. If Democrats didn’t know this, they wouldn’t be so willing to enrage voters to shove it through.

Our liberal rulers don’t care if we like what they’re doing to us or not, so long as we can’t stop them before the damage is done.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Not all scientists are willing to sell out scientific principles in exchange for job security and government grants — only the ones the media listens to.

On a tip from Bergbikr. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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The headline is a quote from a Democratic strategist that asked Byron York at Washington Examiner not to name him.

…..Even if there’s a strategic rationale for doing it, why are Democrats dead-set on hurting themselves?

“Because they think they know what’s best for the public,” the strategist said. “They think the facts are being distorted and the public’s being told a story that is not entirely true, and that they are in Congress to be leaders. And they are going to make the decision because Godd@mmit, it’s good for the public.”

That was the bottom line. Now to go back a little into the article, York mentions Real Clear Politics healthcare averages in the polls which shows that the public, according to the latest polls from different organizations, is against the current forms of Obamacare by 53.3 percent against to 38 percent for.

Using the latest polls from Gallup, Rasmussen, Fox, CNN, Quinnipiac and Ipsos/McClatchy, they take the numbers and average them.

The Breakdown

Gallup- 48 percent Opposed to Obamacare/ 46 percent for.

Rasmussen- 56 percent Opposed to Obamacare/ 40 percent for.

Fox News- 57 percent Opposed to Obamacare/ 34 percent for.

CNN- 61 percent Opposed to Obamacare/ 36 percent for.

Quinnipiac- 52 percent Opposed to Obamacare/ 38 percent for.

Ipsos/McClatchy- 46 percent Opposed to Obamacare/ 34 percent for.

Each and every one of them shows the public opposed to the Democrats many Obamacare plans.

So, Byron York wanted to know why, with such an overwhelming oppositional rating from the American people, are Democrats willing to risk their majorities and in some cases, their careers, on such an unpopular plan?

He spoke to a Democratic strategist to get the answer.

Three different answers and three different assumed points of view, depending on whether it is the Senate Democrats, the House Democrats or the White House.

You have to look at the issue from three different Democratic perspectives: the House of Representatives, the White House and the Senate.

“In the House, the view of [California Rep. Henry] Waxman and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi is that we’ve waited two generations to get health care passed, and the 20 or 40 members of Congress who are going to lose their seats as a result are transitional players at best,” he said. “This is something the party has wanted since Franklin Roosevelt.” In this view, losses are just the price of doing something great and historic. (The strategist also noted that it’s easy for Waxman and Pelosi to say that, since they come from safely liberal districts.)

“At the White House, the picture is slightly different,” he continued. “Their view is, ‘We’re all in on this, totally committed, and we don’t have to run for re-election next year. There will never be a better time to do it than now.’”

“And in the Senate, they look at the most vulnerable Democrats — like [Christopher] Dodd and [Majority Leader Harry] Reid — and say those vulnerabilities will probably not change whether health care reform passes or fails. So in that view, if they pass reform, Democrats will lose the same number of seats they were going to lose before.”

The conclusion and final parting shot from the Democratic strategist is the best analogy I have seen for Democrats willing to sacrifice their jobs and their majorities for a bill the public is overwhelmingly opposed to.

At that point — Republicans will love this — he compared congressional Democrats with robbers who have passed the point of no return in deciding to hold up a bank. Whatever they do, they’re guilty of something. “They’re in the bank, they’ve got their guns out. They can run outside with no money, or they can stick it out, go through the gunfight, and get away with the money.”

That’s it. Democrats are all in. They’re going through with it. Even if it kills them.

They are determined to pass something, anything, no matter how bad a bill it is, because they know what is best for you even if the majority of you do not agree.

Update by Jay: Rightwing Sparkle is on the same page:

What’s important now is to be able to say they did it. They can say they finally passed “comprehensive healthcare reform,” which will cost nearly $1 trillion over a decade. We still have the tax hikes and Medicare cuts in the bill, but no matter. They will jaw for weeks about how historic and important it is. Never mind that the majority of the American people are against it. That doesn’t matter to the Democrats, because they have always believed that they know best. They believe they know what the American people need more than the American people know themselves. At the very core of the Democrat’s belief system is their certainty that the American people are ignorant. They will never say it of course, but they feel it is their duty to provide for the masses, who can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves.

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A group of 28 Republican lawmakers from Western states is fighting efforts by Democrats in the House and Senate to quietly expand the scope of the Clean Water Act, the federal government’s main tool for regulating the quality of the nation’s waterways.

The lawmakers sent a letter Tuesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada opposing efforts to rush through Congress the Clean Water Restoration Act, a bill that would allow the federal government to protect all waters of the U.S. from pollution, not just the “navigable” waters covered in current law.

Reportedly Dems are planning to ram it through quickly and surreptitiously, by attaching it to more popular legislation, such as the defense bill, and passing it at the last minute before Congress flies away for vacation.

Why do they need to sneak? Everybody wants clean water, right? But not everybody wants the federal leviathan to grant itself totalitarian control over your property because there’s a puddle in your backyard.

Republican lawmakers say they were spurred to act in part because of complaints they heard back in their states and districts.

“The concern we hear back home is that this legislation would grant virtually unlimited regulatory control over all wet areas within a state. This bill attempts to trump state’s rights and preempts state and local governments from making local land- and water-use decisions,” the letter says.

Specialists say the legislation would extend government regulation to 20 million acres of the nation’s so-called “isolated” wetlands and 59 percent of the nation’s streams that do not flow year-round.

“This legislation will hurt states and communities across America. The consequences and impacts of the Clean Water Restoration Act deserve a thorough and open debate in Congress,” the lawmakers wrote.

But a “thorough and open debate in Congress” would hardly be characteristic of our era of Obamunist “transparency,” in which bills altering the nature of our country are shoved through before anyone can even read them.

Once liberal bureaucrats have established that the air, the water, and the weather fall under their jurisdiction, the food supply will be next on the agenda. This is the reason for disturbing claims that agriculture causes the imaginary global warming bugaboo.

On a tip from Byron. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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PET owners could be punished for not walking their dogs, under radical new laws being proposed by the RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals]. …

If the proposal becomes law, dog and cat owners across Australia would face prosecution, fines of up to $12,000 fines for animal cruelty and magistrates could consider jail in extreme circumstances.

An extreme circumstance must be when you don’t walk your dog for so long that it lets loose in the backyard. The option of jail time for a first offense has been kept open.

Dr Hugh Wirth, head of RSPCA Victoria, is one of four experts the Federal Department of Agriculture’s welfare division has appointed to draft national animal welfare guidelines.

“The draft will tell people what they have to do rather than what they want to do,” Dr Wirth said.

That’s Big Government’s job, for which it pays itself lavishly with our money.

No doubt future legislation will cover precisely how many fire hydrants must be visited on each walk. But first, new government agencies must be established to track the dog-walking habits of all pet owners.

On a tip from Dean and Judy. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Almost 40% of William Howard Taft’s cabinet officials were from the private sector. Ike had nearly 60% of his appointees sporting private sector experience. Reagan had about 55% and George W. Bush about 53%. Even FDR and Truman had half their cabinet officials with private sector experience.

And Obama?

Less than 10%.

That means that only about 7% of Barack Hussein Obama’s cabinet appointees ever worked in the private sector. So is it any wonder that Barack Obama has become the president responsible for an unprecedented bloating of the federal government and a take over of power on a scale never before seen?

Nick Schulz published a great graph revealing the private sector experience of the appointees of every president since 1901. (Also heard Jerry Agar talking about this over the weekend on Chicago’s WGN)

Remembering that Barack Obama himself never held a real job his whole life, the fact that he surrounds himself with government hacks, placemen, and hangerson yet is expected to be the one to fix the private sector economy and, well, we can see why he is failing so miserably. He has no life experiences to draw on and neither does anyone he’s asked to advise him.

No wonder America is on the fast track to socialism.

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Parents are being banned from playing with their children in council recreation areas because they have not been vetted by police.

Mothers and fathers are being forced to watch their children from outside perimeter fences because of fears they could be paedophiles.

Watford Council was branded a ‘disgrace’ yesterday after excluding parents from two fenced-off adventure playgrounds unless they first undergo criminal record checks.

Children as young as five will instead be supervised by council ‘play rangers’ who have been cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau. …

Parents already have to ‘register’ their child on arrival so staff have their contact details in the event of an accident. But now only those who have been selected for CRB vetting by the council can enter the sites.

Meanwhile, a story from Lithuania reminds us who is more likely to have children’s best interests at heart, their parents or The State:

A dad who shot dead a judge and a senior politician because they molested his three-year old daughter has become a national hero after going on the run in Lithuania.

Horrified Drasius Keyds, 37, gunned down the perverted pair on Monday after police turned a deaf ear to his pleas for justice for his tortured tot.

Now in hiding, Keyds has become a hero on YouTube and Facebook with hundreds of thousands of fans from all over the world pledging support. …

Keyds’ nightmare began a year ago when daughter Deimantela told him about a meeting set up by his then fiancee with judge Jonas Furmanavicziusa and the Speaker of Lithuania’s parliament, Andrius Us.

The pair allegedly raped and abused the youngster who reported her ordeal to her father.

But a year long campaign for a police investigation failed when detectives told Keyds there was not enough evidence to proceed with a case.

Too bad Keyds didn’t check to see if the bigwig bureaucrats were certified “play rangers” before he let them near his daughter.

On tips from mega and Janet. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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