America's Two-Front War -- By Victor Davis Hanson, PJ Media

America Has the Slows

Sometime about mid-2009 America began changing psychologically. True, to the naked eye, America retained the old hustle and bustle, but in an insidious fashion it began to think a bit differently. And that change in mentality explains in part why a year-and-a-half recession that officially ended in summer 2009 seems never to have ended at all.

In short, a sizable fraction of the upper-incomes is hesitant, defensive, unsure — and to such a degree that for a while longer it is not hiring, buying, or investing in the old way. It believes not only that there is no certainty in the tax code, the cost of new entitlements, or our national finance, but that even if there were their own successes would be suspect and earn antipathy rather than praise.

In mirror-image fashion, those of the lower incomes are likewise hesitant to take risks — unsure that the rewards of work in the private sector are all that much better than what government can offer through subsidies. The former group fears government will grow; the latter that it will not. The one suspects that Obama will confiscate more earnings; the other hopes that it will. Either way, there are fewer enterprising employers and fewer self-motivated galvanized workers.

The result of this two-front war is that America has been slowing down.

Or in crudely reductionist terms: the one asks “why hire another worker, when it is not worth it to pay out more in new health care costs and taxes down the road?” while the other answers “why get off unemployment or food stamps when it is more likely that they will be extended than curtailed?”

We now accept the notion of the peasant mentality — that all wealth is finite and more for someone means less for another. In this new them/us atmosphere, Barack Obama took the natural tensions between the classes and exploited them as few other presidents dared. Suddenly, there really were two Americas: the suspect top who made over $200,000 and the more noble majority below who made less. Lost in that cheap division was any notion of the value to others from those who did well, or the reasons why some prospered, or the fragility of their brief good fortune.

If the upper 5% paid nearly 60% of the income taxes, then the problem was more fundamental: how had they been so well compensated in the first place to have the wherewithal to pay such taxes? It did no good to remind Obama that confiscating all the wealth of the 1% would not end the debt, or that steep new income tax on the 5% in and of itself will do little to balance the annual budget. His war was not about finding a remedy to his own profligate borrowing, but in retaining power through revving up anger at the better-off.

In the last three years, we have become so numb to Obama’s monotonous invective that it is now part of the national DNA: spread the wealth, fair share, fat cat, punish enemies, corporate jet owners, Super Bowl and Vegas junketeers, 1%, raise the bar, Grinch, millionaires and billionaires, at some point you’ve made enough money, no time for profit, and on and on. The subtext is always the same: the reason why, say, an orthodontist makes more than a Wal-Mart clerk is due to some sort of race, class, or gender discrimination, unfair advantage, or fatal flaw in the capitalist system, and only a technocratic elite in government retains the wisdom and morality to rectify that resulting inequality. One’s salary, then, is not quite his own, but more the collective’s — given that the professional’s good fortune results from an insidious system of exploitation from the moment he was born to the last bill he sent out for services rendered.

Republicans have no answer for all this, and the most recent polls reflect that fact. The more we watch Ron Paul talk about American culpability for 9/11, the more Newt Gingrich talks about hauling in federal judges for inquisitions, the more we hear that Romney is an opportunistic flip-flopper, the more a Cain, Perry, or Bachmann melts down, the more Obama plays cool — emerging from Hawaii or the golf links to sermonize on fairness while hoping that a Joe Biden, Eric Holder, or Steven Chu keeps his mouth shut for a little longer. In comparison to whom is to blame, it is as if near 9% unemployment, $16 billion in aggregate debt, pathetic GDP growth, a dead housing market, and a $1 trillion-plus steady annual deficit are no more than “whatever.”

Note here, however, that the president’s social sermonizing is predictably selective. On the top end, we hear about the horrors of the anonymous millionaire and billionaire, never of the real Jon Corzine who bankrupted MF Global, gave over $70,000 to the Obama campaign, and cannot remember what he did with over $1 billion of someone else’s money. In the world of Obama, human greed is not endemic, but of a particular conservative and grasping sort; in contrast, liberal conniving is always one of carelessness or can be recompensed by liberal activism.

So what I most resent in Obama’s pop socialism is not just its proven impracticality and moral pretensions, but its utter hypocrisy.

And the rub is not just that he sees no contradiction between railing at the 1%, while keeping utterly silent about a George Soros’s past, or a John Kerry’s tax evasion, or a John Edwards’ palatial digs, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s $75 million a year in recompense, or his own preferences for elite getaway spots and golf links. Rather, he seems to think that redistributionist rhetoric provides a sort of penance for the high life, as if we are all to go for a stint in reeducation camp — and in the Buffett manner express remorse over the system that enriched us, or in the Soros fashion to fund organizations devoted to stopping what we had ourselves helped foster and perpetuate, or more mundanely, to vote for an organizer like Obama, a sort of 3-5% tax-increase mordida that is the cost of doing business.

On the lower end, in the them/us war of Barack Obama, the president never stops to contemplate the impulses in flash-mobs that target high-end stores, or why the poorer off still have the capital to buy $190 sneakers, and will fight savagely to get them. Or why shopping days around Thanksgiving and Christmas have turned into bare-knuckles free-for-alls in a nation that apparently is ill-housed and ill-fed. For Obama, the massive importation of cheap consumer goods, the revolution in technology, the vast expansion of federal entitlements, off-the-books cash income, the redistributive help from relatives and friends, all these considerations simply do not factor and therefore cannot nuance his picture of a vast underclass without access to basic necessities, at once victimized by the well off and in need of far more borrowed federal redress.

In the last three years, we have also developed a different idea about collective national wealth. In material terms, America has never had so vast a supply of natural gas and oil, so many minerals, timber, and prime agricultural land. Yet now there is something deemed wrong in carefully tapping such riches, whether in Alaska, offshore, in the Gulf, or throughout the American West. There is no logic to this strange attitude. After all, the Obama creed is to use fossil fuels abundantly. He likes arugula. Hardwood floors and lithium batteries are nice. The administration hardly cares that the exporters of much of our imported oil are politically illiberal and environmentally reckless. Instead, there is a deep sense of pessimism that there is something inherently wrong with profiting from our own oil, gas, trees, minerals in the ground, or soil. Is it the idea that a few will do too well from the exploitation of national wealth that will so enrich the many? Or is the idea that our culture is too affluent, too crass? Will solar, wind, and biofuel energy along with forced reductions in resources alone make Americans live the lifestyle that is more in accord with nature?

For Obama, the great tragedy of a Solyndra was not the corruption of old-style fast-buck artists masking their greed through insider green lobbying with members of his administration, but rather that such scandals (along with Climategate and the implosion of Al Gore) have sidetracked the entire green philosophy that mandated more government unionized employees, government technocrats, and government tax collectors to reorder society itself.

The result of all this is a sort of unending but rarely expressed war. The business man does not know what his taxes are, only that they should go up, given his privilege. He is judged not by the good that he does but by the excessive money he makes. The corporation does not know what the rules of the game are, whether his energy is too polluting, his workers not unionized enough, or his product not regulated enough. None believe Obamacare, as promised, will reduce costs. None believe that government borrowing and massive new entitlements are reducing unemployment and raising GDP. None believe that wealth can be created by record deficits and aggregate debt. None believe that printing ever more money will not lead to inflation.

What we have, then, is a war on two ends: the better off are hesitant to work more, given their fears that additional profits will either be more difficult to come by or not remain their own; the poor are hesitant to work more, given their expectations that entitlements will be extended and will be easier to come by. They both expect more government and they both as a result are not so eager to take risks and seek greater income in the private sector.

The result of Obama’s war is the current three-year slowdown. Obama in response counts on two strategies to nevertheless be reelected: either at some point the private sector will conclude that it is not going to get any better, and thus it is preferable to shrug, take its medicine, and get back to work, and so the economy picks up a little in 2012; or, to the degree that Obama can blame the lengthy pause solely on the minority of the undeserving rich, he believes that an angry and fearful bare majority may agree.

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Nothing to see here. Just an analysis showing health care cost trends in three states whose governors are running for President -- by Bryan Preston, PJ Media

Why did you click on the headline? I told you there was nothing to see here.

No matter how the figures are sliced and diced, it is clear that health spending, relative to the national average, rose more quickly during the Romney administration than during either the administrations of Governor Rick Perry or Governor Jon Huntsman. For example, ambulatory healthcare spending per capita was declining relative to the national average when Governor Romney first took office, but has steadily increased every year since then, climbing from 19 percent above the national average in 2003 to 29 percent above the national average by 2007 (figure 12.6c).
In contrast, ambulatory health spending in Texas was steadily declining prior to the arrival of Governor Rick Perry and continued to do so for the first four years of his term. Subsequently, it has risen only slightly, from a low point of 8.8 percent below the U.S. average in 2006 to being 6.3 percent below the average by 2009. Jon Huntsman inherited a somewhat similar situation except that relative spending already had begun to rise slightly before he took office and continued to rise for his first two years, followed by a noticeable relative decline.
—
Governor Rick Perry inherited relatively stable health facilities expenditures (i.e., rising at about the same rate as the rest of the nation). Relative spending has declined in subsequent years. Governor Huntsman inherited a stable pattern of health facilities expenditures which continued throughout his tenure.

I’m not suggesting that anyone click on the link above, but they do have some graphs and more data to back up this non-story that’s clearly totally irrelevant to the GOP primary. Figure 12.6c is the one you should most avoid looking at. It doesn’t suggest that doing nothing is preferable to doing something the big government way.

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Farewell 2011, You Will Not Be Missed -- By Jay Cost, The Weekly Standard

Clouds so swift, rain won't lift.Gates won't close, railings froze.Get your mind off winter time.You ain't going nowhere.

And so begins “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” the opening track of the Byrds’ classic album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and an apt description of the year that was 2011. 

What a waste of a year. What a year for doing nothing and going nowhere. 

Expectations for 2011 were extremely bullish last December. Buoyed by the tax cut deal and the second round of quantitative easing, the forecasters were in a jaunty mood one year ago: The consensus forecast from the Wall Street Journal called for economic growth in the third quarter of this year to be a healthy 3.1 percent. It printed at a sick 1.8 percent. And that was the story for the whole year, with macro performance coming in well behind what the experts had expected.

An economy growing at such a weak rate meant, in turn, that the recession effectively continued for the average American. To appreciate this, consider the following chart. We might say that there are three major sources of wealth for the typical family: the purchasing power of the money in their pocket, the value of their home, and the performance of their 401(k). All of these were flat over the last year, as the following demonstrates by taking an indexed version of all three (100 = the level of each in December 2007, i.e. right before the start of the current depression).

This graph merely illustrates what we have all felt, which is that the economic recovery – such as it was – lost steam more than a year ago. The average American’s position has been flat for about the last 18 months, especially throughout 2011.

The next graph really drills this down by looking at income, the S&P, and housing over the last year, with the index reset so that 100 equals the value in January 2011.

If Webster’s Dictionary was looking for a picture to illustrate “stagnation,” they might consider this one.

This is why I was so bemused by some liberals high-fiving over Obama’s “victory” on the payroll tax holiday. Talk about rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic! This was a political battle over a two-month extension for a payroll tax cut that obviously did not work in the first place and that will produce no marginal benefit for 2012. Woopty-doo.

For me, the payroll tax battle is yet another indication of just how dysfunctional our political process remains. Let’s keep in mind, of course, that this year’s economic stagnation was bankrolled by a $1.3 trillion budget deficit, the continuation of the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest policy, as well as a Fed balance sheet that now amounts to an incredible $2.3 trillion. (As a point of comparison, non-residential, private sector investment as measured by gross domestic product will print at roughly $1.9 trillion this year.) Put simply, our political class still lacks the capacity to do anything about the structural problems in our economy, beyond the same old stuff that has not worked so far.

This is why I say: Good for President Obama that his job approval numbers have ticked up from just-plain-awful to not-awful-but-still-pretty-bad, but this does not change the fact that, if more politicians are going to lose their jobs because of this mess, he will be the next one kicked off the island. That’s just the way these things go. You don’t run a huge deficit, produce nothing for it, and get to keep your job.

This year also suggested that President Obama suffers from a lack of what George H.W. Bush once called, “the vision thing.” This is the president, after all, who was reduced to astro-turfing Twitter outrage over the tax payroll impasse – not exactly what Teddy Roosevelt had in mind when he coined the phrase, “the bully pulpit.”

Beyond these sorts of pathetic PR stunts by the commander in chief, there were actual bipartisan solutions suggested to solve our problems – the Simpson-Bowles plan and the Wyden-Ryan proposal – but they went nowhere because this president refused to get behind them. Most precious to him is the fiction that the Republican party is now so extreme that he cannot work with it, despite his promises during the campaign of 2008 to do just that. Obama's bottom line: crafting some grand entitlement/deficit/tax bargain just will not help his reelection; accordingly, there was no grand bargain in 2011, and there will not be one in 2012.

In fact, I think I have been a little unjust on this page over the last year. In previous entries, I had noted that Obama was re-running the Harry Truman ’48 campaign, but that is not very fair to President Truman. After all, while Truman was demagoguing the Republicans on domestic policies, he was hammering out a bipartisan, anti-Communist/internationalist foreign policy that would hold more or less for the next half century. Obama clearly lacks the ingenuity to craft such a nuanced position. 

Thanks to 2011, we can now paint a fairly clear picture of what a second Obama term would look like. If the country should grant him a Democratic majority, akin to the 2009-2010 Congress, we can expect the old Obama-Pelosi-Reid gang to reunite for another round of liberal policymaking, replete with generous payoffs to key Democratic clients, onerous new regulations, and crippling new taxes – economic stagnation be damned! If, on the other hand, Obama receives a Republican Congress, we should expect 2013 to be a repeat of 2011 – nothing gets done, the partisan demagoguery ratchets up, and the economy is left to limp along on its own. "Strap yourself to a tree with roots / you ain't going nowhere..."

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$1,200,000,000,000 -- By Daniel Halper, The Weekly Standard

The New York Times reports that "President Obama will ask Congress this week for $1.2 trillion in additional borrowing authority, which would raise the federal debt limit to $16.4 trillion and avoid the need for further increases before the 2012 elections, administration officials said Tuesday."

This would be the final increase allowed under the budget agreement reached in August after the government came close to default. Since signing legislation to codify that agreement on Aug. 2, Mr. Obama has obtained two increases totaling $900 billion.

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It Is the Policies -- by Daniel Halper, The Weekly Standard

As Allison Hoffman details in Tablet, the Obama administration seems to believe folks don't think it's pro-Israel because of a concentrated campaign from a small group of conservatives:

Ask anyone in Obamaland about what is now commonly referred to as the president’s Jewish problem, and the same answer will inevitably follow: “It’s not us, it’s you.” Or, more typically, “it’s them” — the vocal cadres of the Emergency Committee for Israel, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and similarly hawkish groups that, in the administration’s view, have turned Israel into an emotional wedge issue for Jewish voters, in much the same way right-wing groups used abortion to pull Catholics and evangelical Christians away from the Democratic Party in the 1980s. “To the extent we have a problem,” [Rep. Debbie] Wasserman Schultz told me last week, “it’s being created by individuals who know that Republicans can’t appeal to Jews on their domestic issues and are attempting to mischaracterize, distort, and lie about the president’s record to create enough distrust in the community to shave off a little bit of support here and there.”

It's no conspiracy, it's the policies. Jen Rubin offers this sharp response:

My word, you can’t buy PR that good. Is it true? Do ECI co-founders Bill Kristol, Rachel Abrams and Gary Bauer have the ability to hypnotize the masses? I guess all those voters in the NY-9 special election must be pretty stupid, huh? This is akin to blaming Politico for Herman Cain’s problem with women.

It was not ECI, of course, that “condemned” settlement building in Jerusalem. It wasn’t ECI that refused to embrace the Bush-Sharon exchange of letters, which was ratified by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress. Nor did ECI shelter Ambassador Howard Gutman after his widely denounced comments on Israel. You get the idea. Hoffman, Wasserman Schultz and the rest of the Obama spin squad either honestly believe (or think voters are silly enough to believe) that there is no basis for the widespread antipathy toward Obama’s stance on Israel. (That Wasserman Schultz does not actually list any examples to back up her allegation that the ECI folks “mischaracterize, distort, and lie” is sort of a tip-off.)

The assertion, by the way, is quickly contradicted in Hoffman’s piece by the admission that there is, after all,“the seemingly endless series of diplomatic and rhetorical faux pas that has reinforced an anxiety among many Jewish voters—including lifelong Democrats—that Obama is somehow not on their side.” But it’s all lies from ECI, anyway, you see. (No, the whole thing really doesn’t hang together.)

Read Rubin's response to Hoffman's piece here.
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DOL To Enforce Illegal Immigrants' Federal "Rights" -- by Corruption Chronicles, Judicial Watch

The U.S. Secretary of Labor has warned local governments that try to crack down in illegal immigration that they cannot deny undocumented workers minimum wage, which is guaranteed under a federal law that establishes pay in both the private and public sector. 

Obama Labor Secretary Hilda Solis singled out Alabama this month, reminding state officials that their new law to curb illegal immigration invalidates employment contracts for undocumented aliens who are guaranteed the federal minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Alabama’s law took effect earlier this year and requires everyone to prove legal residency to get a job, enroll in school, register a car or rent housing. 

Shortly after the measure took effect, the Department of Justice (DOJ) challenged it in court, claiming that it conflicts with federal immigration law and undermines the federal government’s “careful balance of immigration enforcement priorities and objectives.”  The DOJ also hates that the law is designed to affect virtually every aspect of an “unauthorized immigrant’s daily life” and that it criminalizes their “mere unlawful presence.” 

Solis, a former California congresswoman with close ties to the influential open borders movement, has vowed to help all illegal immigrants who have worked in Alabama and “whose right to the federal minimum wage or overtime pay has been violated.” In a DOL blog post this month she assures that the Obama Administration is fighting the state’s immigration control law but until the “courts strike it down” it is “critical that all workers in Alabama know their federal rights.” 

Here is another interesting excerpt from Solis’s article: “Our federal government—under both Republican and Democratic presidents—has long held that all people working in this country have the right to the federal minimum wage, regardless of immigration status…Farm workers must have their wages paid on time. Employers must provide their terms of employment in writing. And, if an employer provides housing or transportation, it must be safe.”

The nation’s Labor Secretary goes on to criticize the Alabama measure for making it a crime for an illegal immigrant to enter into a business transaction, such as signing an apartment lease or getting utility service. “Imprisoning those who seek shelter and basic sustenance runs counter to the universal rights of all free people. It’s beneath the dignity of this great nation,” she wrote. 

Solis ends the piece with a tear-jerker, quoting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a Geneva speech where she reminds the world that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Governments cannot confer these rights because they are the “birthright of all people,” according to the Clinton speech quoted by Solis. “These basic rights extend to immigrants living in Alabama,” Solis concludes.  

Since Obama appointed her to run the DOL Solis has launched a number of costly initiatives to help illegal immigrants and her agency has given the open borders most powerful group, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), more than $5 million to promote its leftist agenda via a network of community organizations dedicated to serving Latinos.  

Under Solis the DOL launched a special program with 1,000 investigators dedicated to enforcing labor and wage laws in industries that typically hire lots of illegal aliens without reporting anyone to federal immigration authorities. The agency has also dedicated nearly $11 million to foreign-language programs that help workers with “low literacy or limited English proficiency” and entered formal agreements with Central American countries vowing to preserve the rights of their migrants working in the U.S.  

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Another $845 Million for Fraud-Infested Welfare Program -- By Corruption Chronicles, Judicial Watch

The Obama Administration’s manic spending spree to help “low-income” populations isn’t taking a break for the holidays, this month allocating an additional $845 million to a fraud-infested welfare program that’s already received billions from U.S. taxpayers this year.

Incredibly, this particular initiative—known as Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)—is rife with corruption that’s routinely exposed in congressional probes and the media. This hasn’t stopped the Obama Administration from pouring huge sums of money into it, however.

Every year the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provides “needy” residents around the nation billions of dollars to pay for heating and cooling bills. That’s because the agency considers home energy a public health issue and therefore LIHEAP could help keep families safe and healthy. In fact, the agency encourages people to apply for funds by saying: “If you can’t afford to pay your home energy bill, your home may not be safe and you may be at risk of serious illness or injury,”

In late October HHS gave LIHEAP a whopping $1.7 billion to “ensure low-income families are able to meet their heating cost expenses this winter.” When that chunk of change was doled out, the agency said it was for “immediate needs” and that states could also access an “additional $136 million, if needed.”

Last week the agency distributed an additional $845 million to help low-income households with energy costs. The goal is to assure that “vulnerable families and seniors” can pay their heating bills and “stay warm during the holiday season and into early 2012,” according to an HHS assistant secretary. The same official says that, even as the economy shows signs of improvement, many Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

Under this welfare program the government has actually paid the air conditioning bills for thousands of dead people, convicted felons and federal employees whose salary exceeds the maximum income to qualify for the handouts. In fact, one federal employee admitted requesting “free money” after seeing the “long lines” of applicants. You can’t make this stuff up. The details are included in a congressional report documenting fraud in LIHEAP. Investigators blame lack of oversight for the problems. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

Obama is correct: $35,800 is not "one dime" -- By Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner

"We don't take a dime from D.C. lobbyists or special-interest PACs—never have and never will." That's from Obama's latest fundraising email. And it's also grossly misleading.

What would be true is this: We have a policy of refusing donations from individuals currently registered as federal lobbyists.

When Obama says he doesn't accept money from "D.C. lobbyists," the normal person would conclude that he doesn't accept money from the CEOs of lobbying firms, or from VPs for Government Affairs, or from company executives that petition administration officials to change policy so as to help their company. But all of these types have given generously to Obama.

For instance, as I wrote in July:

Antoinette Bush is an alumnus of the Senate Commerce Committee, and today she works on "legislative matters" for legendary law-and-lobbying firm Skadden Arps. She's not registered, and she's a $35,800 Obama donor.

Some examples I blogged on back in October:

• He accepts donations from people who run lobbying firms, like Lawrence Rasky and Joseph Baerlein, of the lobbying firm Rasky Baerlein and Eugene Ludwig, who founded Promontory Financial Group.
•  
• He accepts donations from individuals who lobby the administration on behalf of their company, but are not registered to lobby, such as Vint Cerf of Google.
•  
• He accepts donations from recently deregistered lobbyists like Adam Golodner of Cisco.
•  
• He accepts donations from corporate "public affairs managers" like Ginny Hunt of Google, or VPs for public affairs like Tom Epstein of Blue Shield of California, and from Senior VPs for "public policy development and corporate responsibility" like Kathy Brown of Verizon.
•  
• He accepts donations from the spouses of registered lobbyists (who presumably share the same funds with the lobbyists) such as the spouses of lobbyists Susan Brophy and Andy Manatos.
•  
• His bundlers include Sally Susman who runs the lobbying operation at drugmaker Pfizer, which benefitted handsomely from Obamacare.

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Republican Voters' Choices -- By Thomas Sowell, Human Events

No one seems to be really happy with this year's field of Republican candidates for that party's presidential nomination -- except perhaps the Democrats.

The sudden rise, and equally sudden fall, of a succession of Republican front-runners is just one sign of the dissatisfaction of the Republican voters with this field of candidates.

In this, as in many other aspects of life, we can only make our choice among the options actually available. So Republican voters who want to be realistic need to understand that they are going to end up with qualms and nagging doubts about whomever they pick this time.

Not all voters want to be realistic, of course. Some voters, whether Democrats, Republicans or independents, treat elections as occasions to vent their emotions, rather than as a process to pick someone into whose hands to place the fate of the nation.

People who think this way tend to vote for someone they just happen to like, whether for personal or ideological reasons, and regardless of whether that candidate has any realistic chance of being elected.

The surprising support in the polls for Congressman Ron Paul seems to be of this sort. But does anyone seriously want to put the fate of this nation in the hands of a man who can casually brush aside the danger of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism?

Barring some astonishing surprise, the contest for the Republican nomination for president boils down to Mitt Romney versus Newt Gingrich.  It is doubtful whether either of them is anyone's idea of an ideal candidate or a model of consistency.

The fact that each of the short-lived front-runners in the Republican field gained that position by presenting themselves as staunch conservatives suggests that Republican voters may have been trying to avoid having to accept Mitt Romney, whose record as governor of Massachusetts produced nothing that would be regarded as a serious conservative achievement.

Romney's own talking point that he has been a successful businessman is no reason to put him into a political office, however much it may be a reason for him to become a successful businessman again.

Perhaps the strongest reason for some voters to support Governor Romney is that the smart money says he is more "electable" than the other candidates in general and Newt Gingrich in particular. But there was a time when even some conservative smart money types were saying that Ronald Reagan was too old to run for president, and that he should step aside for someone younger.

Washington Post editor Meg Greenfield said that the people in the Carter White House were "ecstatic" when the Republicans nominated Reagan, because they were convinced that they could clobber him.

Today, it is said that the Obama administration fears Romney, but would relish the opportunity to clobber Gingrich because of his "baggage." CNN has already started digging into Gingrich's most recent divorce.

Much depends on whether you think the voting public is going to be more interested in Newt Gingrich's personal past than in the country's future. Most of the things for which Gingrich has been criticized are things he did either in his personal life or when he was out of office. But, if we are serious, we are more concerned with his ability to perform when in office.

Even some of those who believe that Gingrich would devastate Obama in head-to-head debates on substantive issues nevertheless claim that all Obama has to do is come back with questions about Newt's work for failed mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac.

But, even at the personal, point-scoring level, Barack Obama can open up a can of worms by going that route, since Freddie Mac at least never planted bombs in public places, like some of Obama's political allies.

There are no guarantees, no matter whom the Republicans vote for in the primaries. Why not vote for the candidate who has shown the best track record of accomplishments, both in office and in the debates? That is Newt Gingrich. With all his shortcomings, his record shows that he knows how to get the job done in Washington. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

The Year in Obama Scandals -- and Scandal Deniers -- by Michelle Malkin, Human Events

With 2011 drawing to a close, it is time to account. As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama's snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.

Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May -- while Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill -- that "one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals." Conveniently, he defines scandal as a "widespread elite perception of wrongdoing."

So as long as left-wing Ivy League scribes refuse to perceive something to be a scandal -- never mind the actual suffering endured by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death came at the hands of a Mexican cartel thug wielding a Fast and Furious gun walked across the southern border under Attorney General Eric Holder's watch -- there is no scandal!

Self-serving much?

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum likewise proclaimed: "Obama's presidency has so far been almost completely free of scandal."

This after the year kicked off in January with the departure of lying eco-radical czar Carol Browner. In backroom negotiations, she infamously bullied auto execs to "put nothing in writing, ever." The previous fall, the White House's own oil spill panel had singled out Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the administration's Draconian drilling moratorium and "contributing to the perception that the government's findings were more exact than they actually were."

The Interior Department​ inspector general and federal judges likewise blasted drilling ban book-cooking by Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to doctor the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.

In February, federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana excoriated the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration's culture of contempt and "determined disregard" for the law.

This spring saw rising public anger over the preferential Obamacare waiver process (which I first reported on in September 2010). Some 2,000 lucky golden ticket winners were freed from the costly federal mandates -- including a handful of fancy restaurants in Aloha Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district, the entire state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's Nevada, and scores of local, state and national Big Labor organizations, from the Service Employees International Union and Teamsters on down. Meanwhile, as The Hill newspaper reported last month, other not-so-lucky Republican-led states seeking waivers, such as Indiana and Louisiana, were rejected.

But it wasn't just Republicans objecting to the president's arbitrary Obamacare fiats. In July, congressional Democrats turned on the monstrous federal health bureaucracy known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The constitutionally suspect panel -- freed from normal public notice, public comment and public review rules -- would have unprecedented authority over health care spending and an expanding jurisdiction of private health care payment rates.

Obama's health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, faced separate legal questions over her overseer role in a hair-raising document-shredding case when she served as governor of Kansas. In October, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. Bombshell court filings showed that Kansas health officials "shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces" and failed to disclose it for six years.

That same month, Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Alter gushed: "There is zero evidence ... of corruption. Where is it?"

Alter's declaration of the "Obama Miracle" came just weeks after the politically driven half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus "investment" went bankrupt, prompting an FBI raid and ongoing criminal and congressional probes of the solar company funded by top White House bundler and visitor George Kaiser.

As Solyndra and an avalanche of other ongoing green subsidy scams erupted, so did the LightSquared debacle -- a federal broadband boondoggle involving billionaire hedge fund managers and Obama donors Philip Falcone and George Soros.  In September, two high-ranking witnesses -- William Shelton, the four-star general who heads the Air Force Space Command, and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Director Anthony Russo -- exposed how the White House had pressured them to alter their congressional testimony and play down concerns about LightSquared's interference threat to military communications.

The White House continues to block efforts to gain information about the Federal Communications Commission's approval of a special waiver for the company, even as new government tests this month showed that the company's "signals caused harmful interference to the majority of ... general purpose GPS receivers."

The Obama White House closed out the year with Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri demanding a probe of the smelly $443 million no-bid smallpox antiviral pill contract with Siga Technologies -- controlled by big lefty donor Ron Perelman.  Then there was the small matter of massive voter fraud in Indiana, where a Democratic official resigned amid allegations that "dozens, if not hundreds," of signatures were faked to get Obama on the state primary ballot in 2008. And while Americans busied themselves with the holidays, White House and Democratic campaign officials were dumping more than $70,000 in contributions from another deep-pocketed contributor -- scandal-plagued pal and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who oversaw the collapse of MF Global.

All this -- and so much more -- yet erstwhile "conservative" journalist Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/The Daily Beast scoffed, "Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin?"

There's none so blind as those who will not see. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

2012: A Year of Media Savagery -- By L. Brent Bozell III, Human Events

For those Republican presidential candidates who eventually conclude there is no path to the nomination, there is consolation in the notion that they won't be the ones to face the brutal onslaught being prepared for the GOP king-of-the-mountain by team Obama and its army of "objective" media allies.

This time around, the Obama machine cannot run on the fairy dust of hope and change. It cannot suggest after four years of dreadful executive-branch performance, that the promised one is on the horizon.

Its only path to victory is the one that finds its opponents even more disliked. So it can be guaranteed that whoever wins the Republican contest will face one of the most scorching personal assaults the country has ever witnessed.

Occasionally, the old style, thrill-up-my-leg over Obama quote still emerges. The Media Research Center's 2011 winners of "Best of Notable Quotables" provide examples. Stephen Marche of Esquire magazine won over judges of the "Obamagasm Award" by energetically asking "Can we just take a month or two to contemplate him (Obama) the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-'70s Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement?" At least when people said this in 2008, it hadn't been completely disproved. Marche reminds us of Baghdad Bob, the ridiculous propagandist for Saddam, proclaiming the defeat of allied troops while they emerged around the corner.

Marche actually claimed we will look back decades from now and see "a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph."    Someone hearing Marche declare this might rush him to an emergency room for signs of dementia.

The winner of MRCs "Media Hero Award" came forward as the congressional career of Anthony Weiner was about to end after having demonstrated his contempt for his wife by showing off his body parts all over Twitter (and actually exchanging tweets with high school girls).

ABCs Barbara Walters urged Weiner not to resign, citing as her role model the most shameless, brazen sex offender to ever darken the White House door. "And we had a President named Bill Clinton​ who went through a great deal of trouble, weathered the storm and is now not only respected, but he's beloved by many people with a very good marriage. So, I think Anthony Weiner should hang in there." Bad word choice -- hang.

ABC is chock full of nonsense like this. Diane Sawyer​, their evening news anchor, won the "Occupy My Heart and Soul Award" for lathering praise on the anti-capitalist park squatters. "We thought we'd bring you up to date on those protesters, the Occupy Wall Street movement," she panted. "As of tonight, it has spread to more than 250 American cities, more than a thousand countries -- every continent but Antarctica." There are some 190 countries on Earth, but Sawyer earned points on the left for enthusiastic baloney. Days later, Sawyer restrained her hype to "more than a thousand cities around the world." Anywhere two hippies lifted a sheet of tagboard, they were counted as a part of the burgeoning global "reform" movement.

Katie Couric​ finally conceded her utter failure as anchor of the "CBS Evening News​" in May, but she won the "Audacity of Dopes Award for the Wackiest Analysis" by concluding America was so deeply bigoted and consumed by "seething hatred" toward the world's Muslims that we need a sitcom to straighten ourselves out. "Maybe we need a Muslim version of 'The Cosby Show.' ... I know that sounds crazy. But 'The Cosby Show' did so much to change attitudes about African-Americans in this country, and I think sometimes people are afraid of things they don't understand."

Loathing of Obama was still classified daily as transparent racism. Sean Penn won the "Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award for Celebrity Vapidity" by reading Tea Party minds on CNN and projecting murder fantasies: "You have what I call the 'Get the N-word out of the White House party,' the Tea Party.... At the end of the day, there's a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, you know, 'Can we just lynch him?'"

The transition from Obama adoration to Republican defenestration was exemplified by Chris Matthews on MSNBC. He earned the "Mean-Spirited, Nutty, Blathering Chris Award" for just blurting out against Newt Gingrich​, "But he looks like a car bomber. He looks like a car bomber, Clarence. He looks like a car bomber. He's got that crazy Mephistophelian grin of his. He looks like he loves torturing. Look at the guy! I mean this is not the face of a president."

But the real award-winning quote (for denying liberal bias) was this delusional Matthews gem captured by Politico: "Hardball is absolutely non-partisan."

2012, here we go. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

Voter ID and The Diluted Franchise -- Why does a cybernetic info-society tolerate ridiculous amounts off voter fraud? -- By John Hayward, Human Events

Last Friday, the Justice Department shot down South Carolina’s voter ID law.  Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requires that certain states obtain pre-clearance from either DOJ or U.S. District Court for changes to voting qualification, a measure designed to prevent scurrilous attempts to disenfranchise black voters.  Long after this presumption of bad faith on the part of South Carolinans went from insulting to ridiculous, the Justice Department decided that requiring black voters to present photo IDs would unfairly keep them away from the polls. 

This decision was not based on the slightest hint of discriminatory intent, but rather the sheer number of minority voters who would presumably be affected by the new law, measured against what Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perez deemed an insufficiently urgent need to prevent voter fraud.  South Carolina must now either take the matter to court, or persuade the Justice Department to reconsider.

South Carolina’s law, duly passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Nikki Haley, was extremely lenient – even more so than voter-ID laws already on the books in some other states.  A driver’s license, passport, military ID, or photographic voter registration card was good enough to pass muster.  According to the South Carolina Election Commission’s  filing with the Justice Department, voters could “obtain an Identification Card from DMV, or may obtain a Voter Registration Card with a photo from his county voter registration office, both free of charge.”  Nothing more than a trip to the county voter registration and elections office was necessary to obtain the photo ID.

If a voter turned up at the polls without the proper photo ID card, they could still cast a provisional ballot, with plenty of time to pick up the proper identification and show it to election officials before the ballot results were certified.  Even conscientious objections to photo identification, which have cropped up here and there, were covered by merely asking for an affidavit from the objector.

This was, nonetheless, deemed unacceptable because “minority registered voters were nearly 20% more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised,” according to Perez.  In other words, 20% more non-whites lack driver’s licenses, so the minimal imposition of asking for them to obtain free photo ID cards to validate their identities on Election Day was tantamount to barricading them from the polls. 

Even at that, an Associated Press report notes that, out of the 240,000 ostensibly registered voters who currently suffer without appropriate photo ID in South Carolina, the DMV executive director says “207,000 of those voters live in other states, allowed their ID cards to expire, probably have licenses with names that didn’t match their voter records, or were dead.”  The latter categories could include up to 60,000 “deceased people and individuals whose names didn’t match DMV records.”

Governor Haley was angry about the Justice Department decision, which she saw as politically motivated.  “The president and his bullish administration are fighting us every step of the way,” she said in a statement.  “It is outrageous, and we plan to look at every possible option to get this terrible, clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process and our 10th amendment rights.” 

On the other hand, South Carolina ACLU executive director Victoria Middleton said South Carolina’s voter ID law would have been “a dramatic setback to voting rights in our state, and we are pleased to see it stopped in its tracks.”  Given the facts outlined above, which of those statements sounds more in touch with reality?

While we’re talking about “disenfranchisement,” what about the legitimate voters, of every race, disenfranchised by voter fraud?  Every phony ballot cancels out a real one.  Should we do some racial bean-counting in the areas most prone to electoral irregularities, and draw some conclusions about the “discriminatory” effects of failure to require accurate voter identification?

For all the talk of liberal “progressiveness,” the voter-ID wars are a ridiculously antique sideshow for a high-tech society that processes terabytes of data every hour.  Besides offering soapbox time to obsolete organizations that require improbable racist conspiracies and theoretical civil-rights hobgoblins to keep their fundraising letters lively, the war against voter ID is fought to keep voter fraud alive.  A few suspicious ballots can come in mighty handy for turning close elections, the risk of effective prosecution is relatively modest, and it’s highly unlikely that dubious elections will be overturned.  Talking about “documented” cases of voter fraud is somewhat misleading.  How many of them are never caught?

It’s increasingly difficult to bamboozle voters into tolerating ballot-box hijinks, in a world where millions of humdrum transactions requiring accurate identification are completed without fuss, every single day.  The Left deserves a measure of grudging admiration for convincing Information Age America to hold its elections in 1965, even as they conduct their daily affairs with 21^st-century speed and accuracy… especially since those elections are, increasingly, the only real control we have over vast swathes of our nationalized, hyper-regulated lives.

CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

Hostages to Insolvency -- Don't loan the government anything you aren't prepared to lose -- by John Hayward, Human Events

The New York Times published a melancholy article Monday on the disintegrating Greek health care system:

Greece used to have an extensive public health care system that pretty much ensured that everybody was covered for everything. But in the last two years, the nation’s creditors have pushed hard for dramatic cost savings to cut back the deficit. These measures are taking a brutal toll on the system and on the country’s growing numbers of poor and unemployed who cannot afford the new fees and co-payments instituted at public hospitals as part of the far-reaching austerity drive.

At public hospitals, doctors report shortages of all kinds of supplies, from toilet paper to catheters to syringes. Computerized equipment has gone unrepaired and is no longer in use. Nurses are handling four times the patients they should, and wait times for operations — even cancer surgeries — have grown longer.

Access to drugs has also been affected, as some drug manufacturers, owed tens of millions of dollars, are no longer willing to supply Greek hospitals. At the same time pharmacists, afraid that the government might not reimburse them, are asking for cash payments, even from those with insurance.

This cautionary tale comes to us from a nation further down the insolvency slide than America, but it’s an open question exactly how much farther, once allowances are made for scale.  One of the consistent threads running through stories about Greece is how the speed of their fiscal collapse took so many Greek citizens by surprise, even though it was quite obvious to outside observers for many years, and not all that difficult to predict with a spreadsheet. 

Don’t laugh at the Greeks.  We’ve got doomsday spreadsheets all over the place in America, and plenty of people who refuse to look at them.  The same people will spend the next decade complaining about how sudden American fiscal collapse was, and bitterly protesting the brutal unfairness of the austerity measures, after they become unavoidable.

The sad tale of Greek health care teaches us an important lesson: Don’t “loan” the government anything you aren’t prepared to lose.

As we bump and skitter along our debt ceiling, we should take careful notice of how eagerly the government puts vital services on the chopping block.  As soon as there is serious talk of spending restraint, Big Government sighs and throws some cops and firefighters at the budget cutters.  A vast army of bureaucrats works in Washington.  Their immense compensation has made the nation’s capital the richest city in America.  But when the debt limit approaches, nobody talks about cleaning out the second assistants to the third deputies of the Associate Under-Secretary of Whatever.  No one speaks of the money wasted on summits to plan meetings in advance of conferences.  The caretakers of the leviathan State speak often of their passionate desire to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) never has any trouble finding a few billion dollars of ridiculous crap to chronicle in his annual “Wastebook.”

Big Government exposes its jugular to every swing of the budget-cutting axe.  Knowing this makes it exceptionally foolish to place even more vital aspects of our lives, such as health care, under its control… because we can be absolutely certain that those vital affairs will be taken hostage the next time Americans balk at handing over another trillion dollars of tax money or debt.

Those ObamaCare “public exchanges” are guillotines in which countless necks will be laid.  The blades will begin quivering at the first mention of fiscal restraint.  Today’s tragedies from the Greek health care system will become dire prophecies of what waits for Americans if the next trillion dollars of debt is not swiftly approved. 

“Of course we can significantly reduce the rate of government growth!” the people of 2014 will be told.  “That is, assuming you don’t mind having the streets clogged with the corpses of the poor and their children.”

Every time we increase our dependency upon government, the power of the political class grows.  Even if politicians weren’t inclined to exploit the tethers of dependency for electoral gain, it’s risky to wire everything into a single budgetary power plant that could melt down at any moment.  Centralization brings vulnerability, not only because everything might fail at once… but because programs the greatest number of people are most deeply dependent upon are just about guaranteed to fail first. 

CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

California GOP Leaders Say 'Probe More' Into Democratic Meddling With 'Non-Partisan' Redistricting -- by John Gizzi, Human Events

Earlier this year, some California Republicans—notably House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy—made it clear they were content to go along with an ostensibly “nonpartisan” redistricting plan that would cost the GOP five of the 19 U.S. House districts it now holds in the Golden State. But recent revelations of a scheme by state Democrats to influence the citizens commission on the shape and population of California’s new congressional district lines has now put that plan into legal question and begun to rally state Republicans to shout: “Scrap the plan and investigate further!”

“Everyone needs to take a second look at this plan and get to the bottom of just how much Democrats influenced the commission that drew it,” State GOP Chairman Tom DelBeccaro told HUMAN EVENTS last week, “The report by ProPublica commands anyone who reads it not only to take a second look at the plan, but also to get to the bottom of just how far the Democrats went in gaming the system.”

DelBeccaro was referring to a sensational expose earlier this month by the non-profit Pro Publica, whose investigative journalism won it a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. According to Pro Publica, after a private meeting (without staff) of Democrats in the state legislature, they began “[w]orking with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee” to begin “strategizing about potential future district lines” which were being drawn up by a non-partisan commission of private citizens empowered to do so under a statewide initiative.

To get around the commission’s vow not to base the new U.S. House and state legislative district lines on testimony from political actors, Pro Publica reported, “Democrats surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with the party’s interests. When they appeared before the commission, those groups identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did not disclose their ties to the party. One woman who purported to represent the Asian community of the San Gabriel Valley was actually a lobbyist who grew up in rural Idaho, and lives in Sacramento.

“In one instance, party operatives invented a local group to advocate for the Democrats’ map.”

The final plan created two instances in which two Republican U.S. representatives would be in the same district (Representatives Ed Royce and Gary Miller in Orange County and Representatives Elton Gallegly and Buck McKeon in Los Angeles County), made the marginal district of one Republican lawmaker (Rep. Dan Lungren in the Sacramento area)more difficult for him to retain and eliminated outright the district of another (House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier).

An effort to upend the plan through an initiative fizzled out when supporters could not raise the money or secure the support of the National Republican Congressional Committee. As HUMAN EVENTS reported earlier this year, Rep. McCarthy, the No.3 official in the House GOP hierarchy, was a key player in turning off the money spigot for the proposed initiative. Under the plan, McCarthy’s district became substantially more Republican.

GOP Hopes Rest on Voting Rights Act

At this point, the lone hope of stopping the gerrymandered plan created by a clearly tainted commission is a suit in U.S. District Court charging that the new district lines are in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Although many Republicans have long criticized the Voting Rights Act for creating “majority-minority districts,” the California lawsuit was begun by conservative former Rep. George Radanovich (R.-Calif.) and its chief proponent in court is Steve Baric, vice chairman of the California Republican Party.

Reached by HUMAN EVENTS while he was on Christmas family visit to British Columbia, Baric explained to us that the commission plan “created two historically African-American districts in which the African-American population will be strongly watered down and this was done in order to maintain a third, predominately African-American district in South Central Los Angeles.” (He was referring to the two districts of Democratic Representatives Maxine Waters and Karen Bass, both of whose districts lost significant pockets of black voters, and that of Democratic Rep. Laura Richardson. All three lawmakers are African-American and all of their districts have had major drops in population over the past ten years.).

The suit, Baric explained, will argue that the plan violates the Voting Rights Act not only for creating districts that affect blacks negatively, but also violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

Baric said he fully expects the case will go “all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Whatever the last chapter in the whole saga of California redistricting, it is clear that the idea of a “non partisan” citizens commission was severely tainted in a very big way. As Baric put it, “The story coming out showed that the process we all hoped would be truly non-partisan turned out to be a case of partisan politics at its worst.” CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content

Russia: Back to the Future -- By Robert Maginnis, Human Events

Last weekend’s massive protest in Moscow’s Prospekt Sakharova will result in a new Soviet-style Russia not an Arab Spring-like revolution. The West had better beware because the Russian bear is coming out of hibernation.

Twenty years ago this month the Soviet Union crumbled and from those ashes rose a promising Russian democratic republic. But Soviet-era corruption reared its ugly head in Russia’s December 4th parliamentary elections. That corruption sparked numerous protests, calls for new elections and earned Russia’s prime minister an accusatory message from a U.S. senator.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) tweeted Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin a satirical message. “Dear Vlad,” tweeted McCain, “the #Arabspring is coming to a neighborhood near you.”1 That tweet linked a news article about allegations of fraud in Russia’s parliamentary elections.

Predictably Putin dismissed McCain’s ribbing as dunce naivety. Yes, Russia’s elections were likely corrupt, but they were also a gauge of the country’s mood for change which Putin intends to leverage to earn another term as president.

Putin’s political party, United Russia, lost State Duma seats in the elections in spite of widespread corruption but nationalist parties which also support Putin for president gained those same seats. On balance the election confirms Putin’s political support for a back-to-the- future Russia propelled by growing nationalism.

Putin intends to ride the nationalist sentiment to rebuild Russia where his former Soviet masters failed 20 years ago. Putin memorably described the Soviet Union’s demise as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Then two weeks ago Putin, in full campaign mode, expressed a similar sentiment on Russian television. The Soviet Union “should have started timely economic reforms and changes,” Putin said, instead the regime collapsed.

Putin, a former KGB – Soviet-era secret police - lieutenant colonel, sees himself as Russia’s savior, the man destined to bring about “reforms” and “changes.” But first he must win back the presidency this March, a virtual certainty. Then Putin intends to restore Russia’s grandeur using Soviet-style politics, building a new Warsaw Pact-like geopolitical alliance, growing the military, and implementing a popular anti-West foreign policy.

Putin’s politics are right out of a Soviet-era playbook. In September Putin and outgoing President Dmitriy Medvedev confirmed their intent at the United Russia congress to extend the Putin dynasty, which started in 1999, ran through two terms as president and recently four years as prime minister.

Medvedev told the congress that Putin will stand for the presidency in 2012 and he [Medvedev] is to replace him as prime minister. The party rubber stamped the Putin nomination and the prime minister accepted the unanimous endorsement “with gratitude.” Putin said between chants of “Putin, Putin” that he would build “a strong and happy Russia,” translated financial benefits for his supporters.

Putin’s critics saw in that congress visions of the Soviet era. Liberal-democratic party leader Vladimir Zhirinovskiy​ compared the United Russia’s “Putin, Putin” congress to ones held by the Soviet Communist Party.  “The same milkmaids, officers, and steel workers" with "hired hands shouting all the slogans," Zhirinovskiy said, according to RIA Novosti.

Putin played to Soviet-era nostalgia when he called for building a Eurasian Union. On October 4, Putin published an article in Izvetiia announcing his Eurasia Union initiative that will have an economic focus similar to the euro zone, though led by Russia politically and bears a suspicious resemblance to that of the former Soviet Union.

The objective is not to rebuild a unified state dependent financially on Moscow, but create a supranational political and economic structure that gives Moscow strategic oversight of countries on its periphery. Russia already has a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan has indicated it intends to join. That union integrates their economies and reduces restrictions on movement of goods across their borders.

A Russian-led Eurasia Union will attract former Warsaw Pact countries especially now that Europe is collapsing. It also suggests a reorientation of Russian foreign policy strategy under soon-to-be-president Putin that de-emphasizes Europe and puts Moscow in the catbird seat.

Keep in mind even though the proposed Eurasia Union starts as a political and economic association it could become a defense alliance. The former Warsaw Pact was the military compliment to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the regional economic organization for the former communist states of Eastern Europe.

Putin is modernizing Russia’s military already armed with the world’s largest atomic weapons arsenal. Last month Putin declared, according to Interfax, the Russian armed forces will be brought up “to a new level in the next five to 10 years” so that both the army and the military-industrial complex “are capable of guaranteeing Russia stable peace without undermining the national economy.”

Moscow is aggressively rebuilding its atomic strike capability, doctrinally the nation’s primary means of defense. For example, just last week Russia’s Northern Fleet successfully carried out the salvo launch of two Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles from the Yuriy Dolgorukiy​, a submersed nuclear submarine in the White Sea. Such strategic modernization of its nuclear forces does not contravene the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the U.S., but it is leaving the U.S. in the dust because America stopped atomic weapon modernization projects.

Moscow is also aggressively building conventional expeditionary platforms. It is constructing over 100 naval ships, over 1,000 helicopters and 600 military aircraft including the fifth generation Sukhoi PAK-FA fighter.4 Meanwhile, Russian ships and aircraft are returning to distant seas and air space to challenge the U.S.

Putin promises an anti-U.S. foreign policy. He told the United Russia congress he “will continue to pursue an active foreign policy” while “straightforwardly and honestly” defending Russia’s interests. He cautioned that dialogue with Russia is "possible only on an equal footing" and that "nothing can be imposed on Russia from outside."

These comments are aimed at the U.S., which Putin considers Russia’s primary adversary. His concern is with NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and America’s European-based ballistic missile defense (BMD), which he claims threatens Russia’s sovereignty.

Putin is especially weary of America’s BMD which he says is intended to neutralize Russia’s nuclear deterrent and is a pretext to station American forces in Eastern Europe. Washington argues the BMD is to counter the emerging Iranian missile threat.

But President Medvedev and by assoication Putin threaten that if the U.S. continues to refuse cooperation with Russia regarding the BMD, Moscow will deploy its Iskander mobile ballistic missiles and early warning system on its border with Poland and Lithuania. He will target the American BMD and fit the Iskanders with advanced maneuverable re-entry vehicles and penetration aids.

On other fronts Moscow is re-engaging the Middle East, such as building a military port in Syria to re-establish a Mediterranean presence. It is playing an active and unhelpful role in the ongoing nuclear crisis with Iran, leveraging its control of the Northern Distribution Network into Afghanistan, contesting arctic region claims, and moving back into areas that haven’t seen Russians for two decades.

The election protests express genuine discontent with Russian corruption. But the real story is the Putin dynasty is strong and soon will shed any pretense of reform. It will tap into the growing Russian nationalism to rebuild Moscow’s stature Soviet-style with a back-to-the-future agenda which means the Russian bear is back with a vengence. CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE Sphere: Related Content