The Obama international charm offensive seems to be wearing thin.  As the first U.S. President to ever lobby to win an Olympic Games, President Obama failed in his effort as Chicago was eliminated in the first round.  The Olympic ideal was to divorce sports and politics and by doing so, promote peace by having athletes from around the world meet on a one-to-one basis and see each other as individuals rather than as the countries they represented.

Although Hitler used the 1936 Olympic Games to showcase the revitalized Germany, it was Jimmy Carter who was the first to directly use the Games for political purposes when he pulled the U.S. team from competing in Moscow in 1980, to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.  There’s nothing like punishing your own young athletes who perhaps worked a lifetime for the opportunity to compete in an Olympic Games and perhaps never get another chance.  The Soviet’s returned the favor four years later by boycotting the Games in Los Angeles in 1984.

Let’s go back to the ideal of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who help found the modern Olympic Games:

May joy and good fellowship reign, and in this manner, may the Olympic Torch pursue its way through ages, increasing friendly understanding among nations, for the good of a humanity always more enthusiastic, more courageous and more pure.

So let’s leave the Olympic Games to the athletes and perhaps now, President Obama can get back to work.

When Ronald Reagan left office it was more than “Morning in America.”  The Cold War was on its death bed.  The economy was booming, and there was optimism everywhere.  Why?  Because Ronald Reagan didn’t see the government as the solution but part of the problem.

There is a story from World War II where the Germans successfully attacked an airfield wiping out many American planes on the ground.  When they came back to do a reconnaissance check, they saw that all the planes had been replaced.  They knew at that point they could never win the war when the American economy, not just the military was lined up against them.

How did Reagan win the Cold War without firing a shot?  Not by negotiating for more arms reductions, but by building up our military.  He understood that the planned economy of the Soviets could not possibly keep up with the free market American economy.  They were broke and an arms race was not possible to win.

Then and Now

Where are we today?  President Obama and his administration are piling more debt on us than at any time in history.  His is attacking the most productive in our society as the means to pay for all his plans.  How long will they put up with it?  He is trying to expand government to unprecedented size.  Meanwhile the Chinese Communists are instituting free market reforms and buying up our debt.  It is not hard to see at some future date the Chinese Communists doing to us what Reagan did to the Soviets.  The Chinese economy is growing strongly, and the Obama Administration is crippling our ability to respond to a Chinese threat of an arms race, with overwhelming debt.  His focus may look like it’s domestic, but it carries a dangerous national security component.  National security is explicit in the Constitution.  Everything that Obama is reaching for is under the cloudy authorization of “the General Welfare” under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.  We need to get back to the explicit responsibilities of the federal government enumerated in the Constitution and leave everything else to the states and the people as the Tenth Amendment tells us.

From being the foregone conclusion as the first woman President of the United States in 2008 to a marginalized, snarky misrepresentative of the United States, it time for her to realize, the band stopped playing and everyone has gone home but her.  It’s time to call it a day and resign.

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer

Proving, once again, he is the master of hardball politics, Barack Obama dangled the Secretary of State job in front of his vanquished rival.  She took the bait.  No more would she be a force in the Senate able to challenge Obama at the first stumble.  She was now part of the problem, not a potential solution.  Once ensconced at Foggy Bottom, she thought she enhance her image by holding the most prestigious post in the Cabinet.  But she again underestimated Barack Obama.

He proceeded to divvy up foreign policy among many advisers, undercutting Hillary every step of the way.  She’s no fool, she can see it and it is eating away at her, to the point where she is becoming a gaffe machine to rival Joe Biden.

She’s No Condoleezza Rice

Upstaged by her husband in North Korea, negotiating the release of the journalist hostages, she was asked what her husband thought about another matter while in Africa.  In a similar situation, Condoleezza Rice, would have handled that with aplomb and not become rattled. But here is Hillary’s response.  Hillary Snaps.  Smacking down a questioner on the world stage?  Well that will surely “correct” our image as the Ugly Americans.

The Apology Tour Continues

She goes on to make a speech in Nigeria and wants to emphasize that there is no place in the world for corrupt elections.  A very good point to make, that few could argue with.  But what does she use as an analogy?  She openly suggests that Jeb Bush fixed the 2000 Presidential election for his brother.  Of all the analogies of corrupt elections that she could have used, let’s see, Iran?  Cuba?  the old Soviet Union? she points to the oldest democracy in history and suggest that we are as corrupt as any third world dictator.  Hillary Compares U.S. Elections to Third World Corruption.  Disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who endorsed Hillary to take his Senate seat, must be turning over in his grave.  He used to staunchly defend the United States at the UN and here his protege is saying we are no better than the worst of them.

In Honduras, the rule of law is being followed to prevent a Chavez style dictator from taking over that country, and who does Hillary and the Obama administration support?  The Chavez puppet.  What about standing up for democracy in our Hemisphere?  It is time for her to go.

The Gore Thing in 2000

Let’s get this straight one more time.  On election night 2000, Gore lost Florida.  He lost the recount.  He lost the re-recount.  He lost the re-re-recount.  He lost the official recount.  He lost the private recount sponsored by newspapers.

Their count showed that Bush’s razor-thin margin of 537 votes — certified in December by the Florida Secretary of State’s office — would have tripled to 1,665 votes if counted according to standards advocated by his Democratic rival, former Vice President Al Gore.

“In the end, I think we probably confirmed that President Bush should have been president of the United States,” said Mark Seibel, the paper’s managing editor. “I think that it was worthwhile because so many people had questions about how the ballots had been handled and how the process had worked.” — CNN

If Democrats and their radical supporters want to salve their wounds with this myth, live the fantasy.  But don’t smear this country with these lies while acting as our chief diplomat.

Just when you thought this administration had gone about as far as it could go in turning America into the old Soviet Union another subtle clue is revealed.  When you craft legislation that is over a thousand pages long and you try to slam it through before anyone can read it, all kinds of creepy things come crawling out when you turn the lights on.  This is from the White House’s blog:

“There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”

Turn in your neighbor?  Does this not sound like Cuban block watchers in Castro’s worker’s paradise?  Is your name in their database?  If you apply for a government job, do you think you might run into a “problem”?  Will the IRS come knocking on your door to audit you?  If this doesn’t send chills up your spine, you are made of sterner stuff than me.

What’s really Fishy?

To be fair, everything this administration has said about health care, or is it health insurance, seems fishy?  So should all Americans be writing to the White House to complain?  Be careful, I am sure they are taking the names on both sides of the e-mail.  This Administration wants the First Amendment only to apply to the titan of the teleprompter.  But if you criticize the state, you are Astroturf, an unruly mob, crazed right-wing plants.  When do they send the goons in to break up the crowd and beat a few participants to send them a lesson.

Be Careful Before You Take a Bite Out of that Apple

The administration is touting the Cash for Clunkers program as a great success.  But as the auto dealers file for the rebates they are faced with this {emphasis added}:

“This application provides access to the DoT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the U.S. Government. Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized CARS, Dot, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.”

This was widely reported by Glenn Beck and immediately the statists came forth to attack him as a right wing fanatic.  I also saw some insipid posts saying, “well how are they going to be able to do that?  I’ll smack anyone who tries to touch my laptop; that web site is only for the dealers, not for consumers, etc., etc.”  To that I say, read it for yourself and decide.  Perhaps, as some suggest, it was some overly aggressive government lawyer who was trying to protect…  Protect what?  Rebates?

The pattern is shocking and the pattern is clear.  If the government gives you TARP money, the government sets your salary.  If the government bails out and then takes over the car companies, the government will decide what kind of cars it will build and if it loses money for years (Amtrak, the Postal Service), the government can decide to keep them afloat to achieve their agenda.  Keeping all those UAW members on the government teat, will keep their votes in the Democratic column.  Now if you want a rebate, the government owns your computer.  Let’s see, is there any disparaging information about the Obama administration on there?  No rebates for your dealership and we’ll fire off an e-mail to flag@whitehouse.gov to boot.  And what about that reference to foreign agencies?

Barack Obama is a disciple of Saul Alinsky and he knows a thing or two organizing and defeating his opponents, not by logic or reason, but by attack and disinformation.  That is how dictators grab power.  Will we be able to do as our Founding Fathers did and stop the spread of this tyranny?  The recent town hall meetings with our legislators give me reason to hope that Americans are paying close attention and do not like what they see.

The press is sleepwalking.  As I have been reading the press reports concerning the crisis in Honduras, I have been struck by the lack of interest by the press in the full picture.  Other than Mary Anastasia O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal, no journalist seems to care about the facts in Honduras and whether this is truly a coup or following the rule of law and thwarting a dictatorial takeover of the government.

It seems like Honduras is lined up on one side and all the world on the other, and the uncontested facts on the ground tilt in Honduras’ favor.  Castro, Chavez, and their leftist brethren, the OAS, and the Obama administration all seem to be backing the dictator wannabe Zalaya.  It is quite a contrast to how the Obama administration dragged it’s feet in supporting Iran and now it is standing shoulder to shoulder with Hugo Chavez.  And the main stream media lazily goes along.

With Fidel Castro at the end of his life perhaps some thought the leftest threat to the hemisphere coming to a close.  However there is a new threat in Hugo Chavez.  The difference is that Castro’s Cuba was a ward of the Soviet Union and once they could no longer afford to support him, Castro’s relevance began to wane.  But Chavez has oil and does not need handouts and so is much more dangerous.

“This is a moment when the U.S. ought to be on the side of the rule of law, which the Honduran court and Congress upheld. If Washington does not reverse course, it will be one more act of appeasement toward an ambitious and increasingly dangerous dictator.” – O’Grady, WSJ, 07/06/2009

The World is Watching

The world is watching and taking the measure of Obama, and when push comes to shove they will choose where their best interests lie.  If we will not stand behind democracy in our hemisphere, then other countries will try to cut the best deal they can with Chavez.  North Korea gets bolder by the day.  Iran kills its citizens and Obama wants to keep the door open to dialog.  Weakness abounds and everyone can see it.

Did you ever watch a historical movie about how some fringe group ominously takes over the government and leaves everyone scratching their head wondering how it happened?  At the end of the movie you say, “Whew, I’m so glad that could never happen in the good ol’ USA.”  Then you watch the news and see things that are eerily familiar to the movie and you say, “Nah, that’s just my imagination running away with me.”  Until the next piece of news drips on your head.

A news story this morning gave me that uneasy, pit of the stomach feeling again.  It probably shouldn’t have since it was about Venezuela.  Hugo Chavez got the term limit restriction lifted in his country that will allow him to be president for life.  That measure had previously failed but now it passed by a wide margin.  So why am I feeling uneasy about our liberties and what is going on in this country?  Here are some of my concerns.

Bipartisanship

After all the talk of bipartisanship by candidate Obama and the need to change the tone in Washington, the reality was something completely different.  In a so called “stimulus package” that will triple the budget deficit and was rammed through the Congress with no one, and I repeat no one, reading it, one party was virtually shut out of the legislative process.  At the same time 44% of the American people, in a Rasmussen poll, said names picked at random out of the phone book could do a better job on the economy than this Congress.  This package is chock full of 40 years of liberal programs that could not pass muster on their own, but as Rahm Emmanuel says, “You never want a serious crisis go to waste.”  When  Republicans protested about being shut out of the process, the response from the other side was, “We won.”

Fairness Doctrine

In the movie there will come a scene when the incoming powers break into the newspaper offices and smash the printing press, overturn the typesetting table, dump papers on the floor and set them ablaze.  The message is clear, there will be no opposition press.  There is only one message and that is of the new dictator and the new news will be his indoctrination.

Today, there is more and more talk about reviving the Fairness Doctrine.  Here is what former President Bill Clinton said:

“Well, you either ought to have the Fairness Doctrine or we ought to have more balance on the other side,” Clinton said, “because essentially there’s always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows and let face it, you know, Rush Limbaugh is fairly entertaining even when he is saying things that I think are ridiculous….”

Liberals tried to bring balance to the discussion with Air America and it failed dismally.  Why?  People didn’t want to listen to left wing rants all day.  But face it, the main stream media overwhelmingly votes liberal.  So although no one will be smashing printing presses and torching newsrooms, the objective is to stifle the conservative point of view.  Once you do that the only voice that is heard is reinforcing the new ruler.

What the First Amendment says is:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for the redress of grievances.”

Congress shall make no law…so what are they doing? The line between news and opinion has long been crossed.  It used to be you couldn’t tell what Walter Cronkite’s politics were, because he kept his opinions, for the most part, out of the news.  But today there is little difference.  For a great example see this piece by Russ Roberts. (They Report. I Edit. You Decide). They will defend the Fairness Doctrine by saying it is not censorship, but here’s the dirty little secret.

Let’s say you are a radio program manager and you put on three hours of Rush Limbaugh.  Great show. Great ratings. You make lots of money.  Now along comes the Fairness Doctrine.  You don’t have to touch Rush’s show because that would be censorship.  What you have to do, however, is give three hours over to Air America to be “fair”.  Three hours of Air America hate <fill in the blank: Bush, religion, gun owners, pro life> rants.  Ratings for those three hours go in the tank.  No revenue. You’re making no money.  Listener’s start complaining.  So what is a station manager to do?  It’s what they used to do when the Fairness Doctrine was here before, tell Rush he has to close up shop, dump the Air America crowd and play Top 40s songs all day long.  The fact that it wasn’t censorship doesn’t matter, the effect is the same.

The Census

The census, conducted every ten years, is important in two regards.  One, it helps allocate how money from government programs is distributed, and it determines how the number of Congressional seats will be apportioned among the states.  Based on current estimates states like New York (Blue) will lose one or two seats and states like Texas (Red) will gain seats.  That could mean a shift in power from the Democrats to the Republicans.  Uh oh.

The scene in the movie shifts to a darkened office with a light over the conference table.  “We cannot allow the opposition to gain any strength back, we have to consolidate our power.  What do we do?”

“Comrade, we can take control of the census.  Under our control we can count homeless people and illegal immigrants in Blue states and ignore them in Red states.”

“Brilliant!  You see that the census is directed out of your office rather than in some Department.”

You chuckle only for a minute, when you realize that Rahm Emmanuel will be overseeing the census, operating out of the White House, rather than handling it in the Commerce Department as it has been done for years.  Suddenly, the scene seems very real.

The Stimulus and ACORN

In the so called “stimulus bill” there appears to be about $4.1 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities.”  The money was initially limited to state and local governments but later changed to include non-profits, such as ACORN.  ACORN is surrounded by allegations of vote fraud.  It doesn’t take much of an imagination to understand how close races can be tipped by an organization that perpetuates voter fraud.  Now think about how your tax dollars are being funneled to them to do it.

We Need More Votes in The House.  So Let’s Add a Representative

In consolidating power, what better way than adding votes where you need them.  One way is to add a representative in the House for the District of Columbia.  It is a heavily Democratic district, so why not?  The Constitution? Ignore it.  Just go ahead pass a law.  If the Republicans object, just crank up the racist machine.

Handouts

Of all the tried and tested methods for turning around an economy in trouble, the Democrats seem to be picking all the ones proved not to work.  If you want to stimulate the economy through tax cuts, you cut marginal tax rates.  Instead the Democrats want to give rebates to people who pay no income taxes.  That’s welfare not tax cuts.  But the goal is not to turn around the economy.  The goal is to consolidate power.  What better way than to make sure more than 50% get something from the government and less than 50% are stuck with the bill.  Majority rules.  We won.  Once that threshold is crossed, the majority can start jacking up taxes on those evil rich, so that the “working and middle class” get checks from the government.  Comrade, it from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

Calling Dr. Mengele

In the movie a sinister doctor approaches the “patient” and plans how he is going to improve life for all of us.  For the “patient”, not so much.

Another provision in the stimulus bill is to establish a new bureaucracy that will “compare drugs, medical devices, surgery and other ways of treating specific conditions.”  This organization will take a role in your medical treatment that was formerly between you and your doctor. “Supporters of the research hope it will eventually save money by discouraging the use of costly, ineffective treatments.”  Isn’t that what medical journals are for?  Isn’t that why the AMA has conferences, to share such information?

“I’m sorry Mrs. Jones, we think you child has Down’s Syndrome, therefore you really must have the abortion, or your medical bills for your childbearing treatment won’t be covered by our national health care.  And you know the costs run into the hundreds of thousands.  What would you like to do?”

Do you really want some bureaucrat in Washington playing with a statistics program  telling your doctor what treatment he can and cannot perform to treat you?

Is This Real?

As you leave the theatre you laugh nervously that this couldn’t happen here.  But every time you pick up a newspaper, the similarity about how a dictator seizes control and then consolidates his power is just too eerie.  But as we have seen in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and now in Venezuela, it can happen and once it does it may be decades before it can be undone, if at all.  The Founding Fathers were very wary of a strong central government.  They believed that the only powers that the Federal government should have are limited and they went to the trouble to spell them out in the Tenth Amendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Where does it say in the Constitution that education is a federal function? I’m not against education by any stretch of the imagination, but how can the federal government do a better job than the local school board?  Why is the federal government putting cops on the street?  Shouldn’t each municipality handle this? The Federal Government has gotten too big and too powerful.  It is so vast no one can manage it.  We keep pushing so much up to the federal level we are almost begging for a dictatorship to form.  And with everything they take, and they will take all they can grab, your liberties go with it.

We better wake up, people, and start cutting this monster down to size.  Otherwise it will either consume all of us leaving nothing but a wasteland, or we will be reading our founding documents and see that they are telling to prepare for the Second American Revolution.

As I continue to read the book I mentioned in my last post, I become more wary of the politics surrounding it.  Man’s contribution to global warming is “settled science”, or in other words, no more debate folks the discussion is closed.  The suggestion from a politician in Australia that any Australian that doesn’t believe in man made global warming should be stripped of their citizenship until the are re-educated.  Does that kind of talk scare you?  It scares me.  The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has issued a statement on climate change that reads:

“There is convincing evidence that since the industrial revolution, human activities, resulting in increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and other trace constituents in the atmosphere, have become a major agent of climate change.”

Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel’s climatologist believes that any meteorologist who carries an AMS certification should lose that certification if they do not toe the company line.  If their science and their logic are so convincing, why resort to the threats and coercion?

There is an alternate theory that is not even addressed in the book and that is that the temperature increase that we are seeing is caused by solar activity.  In the book the author touches on the effect of the sun, but only with regard to the position of the earth relative to the sun, not solar activity and since the position hasn’t changed that much, he says it is not a factor.  But it is not the position of the sun that is the factor, it is the amount of solar activity.  There have been very high levels of solar activity between 1940 and 2000.  That activity has since decreased and has been low for several years now.  If you listen carefully you will hear news stories that global warming peaked about ten years ago.

The book states that from 1990 to 1999 global CO2 emissions increased at a rate of 1.1 percent per year.  In the years 2000 to 2006, the rate tripled to over 3 percent per year.  So with such a dramatic increase of CO2 being released into the atmosphere and it being “settled science” that CO2 causes global warming, why did the temperature peak in 1998, and begin falling while the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere accelerated?  Another study concludes, “if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, ‘there would not be much effect on temperatures.’”

My concern is that we have a rush to solve a problem that may no longer exist, or worse may be going in the opposite direction, and our “leaders” are clamoring for massive spending and changes to our economy.  But what about all the proof of CO2 emissions leading to increases in temperature?  The question should be what is the cause and what is the effect?  Has the increase in CO2 caused the increase in temperature or has the increase in temperature, caused by solar activity, led to an increase in CO2?

The author unintentionally makes this point when he mentions that increasing temperature in the oceans caused CO2 to bubble up and be released into the atmosphere.  He also mentions that if the arctic tundra should start to thaw then methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 will be released into the atmosphere.  I think he was trying to say that an acceleration effect would occur where CO2 warms the earth and thereby releases more CO2, but if this was the case we would have baked long ago.  There is a study that indicates that based on past data going back 250,000 years that CO2 concentrations actually lag temperature change, meaning the temperature increase caused the CO2 increase and not the other way around.

With this in mind, any proposal to immediately change to renewable fuels on a massive scale could actually have the opposite effect.  I believe we should convert to renewable fuels when and as they become economically viable.  We recently saw a dramatic climb in the price of a barrel of oil.  With that there came an economic incentive to switch to hybrid cars, build wind farms, install solar systems, etc.  With the housing bubble and the subsequent fall off in economic activity, the price of a barrel of oil has decreased just as dramatically.  Sales of hybrids have sharply curtailed.

So if we artificially push to change from oil to renewable energy now: 1) it will be disruptive to the economy; 2) if the Indians and Chinese do not increase their consumption as fast or faster than we would wean ourselves off, the price of a barrel of oil will continue to fall.  As the price of a barrel of oil falls, the economics of renewable energy will get worse not better, and therefore more coercion would be required through tax incentives and regulations to continue the process.

I believe we should put our energy in driving down the cost of the technology through manufacturing improvements and R&D, so that alternative energy can compete with fossil fuels without subsidies, and let the market determine the pace of the conversion.  We tried the massive government energy program with the Synfuels Project in the late 1970s and every one of those projects failed because they were not economically viable. An enormous amount of money was spent in that effort but it was shut down.  Command and control economies do not work, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the injection of capitalism in China have proved that.  Markets do work, if artificial constraints are not placed upon them by bureaucrats.

For all the Bush bashing that has gone on since September 11, 2001, it is a pretty sure bet that when he leaves office on January 20, 2009, part of his legacy will be that he kept us safe for the last seven years.  The fundamental difference between the polices of the Bush administration and those of Clinton and Carter was that Bush saw it as a war, Clinton and Carter as crimes.  On a war footing, you take the battle to your enemies with the objective of destroying them.  On a law and order footing, you investigate the crime after the fact, arrest suspects, give them their Miranda rights, put them on trial, and if you are lucky, they may spend some time in jail.

Law and Order

In 1979, where it all started, Iranian “students” took over the U.S. Embassy and held it for over 400 days.  Jimmy Carter tried to negotiate a settlement, sponsored a botched rescue, and saw the hostages finally released his last hour in office.  The Iranians didn’t want to be holding American hostages when Ronald Reagan was president.  Reagan would have seen the taking of the U.S. Embassy as an invasion on U.S. soil, which is what our Embassies are.  He would not have tolerated a ragtag bunch of radical students occupying U.S. soil.

From that, and Somalia, Osama bin Laden saw the U.S. as a paper tiger that would cut and run if hit hard.  Clinton’s law and order approach can be seen in the response to the first World Trade Center bombing and the constructing of a “wall” between the CIA and the FBI.

War Footing

President Bush saw the attacks on the U.S. as a war.  He mobilized the country and struck back hard.  By going on offense rather than hanging back playing defense, he has kept the enemy pinned down in Iraq and Afghanistan, while simultaneous rooting them out aggressively wherever they went.  Those captured on the battlefield were sent to Guantanamo, where they were interrogated and held.  Lawyers in the U.S. began to complain that these prisoners were being held without being charged and that was unconstitutional.  Again, that is seeing it from a law and order perspective.  On a war footing, the enemy that is captured on the battlefield is held until the end of hostilities, like we held Japanese and German prisoners during WWII.  If it takes 50 years until the war is won and hostilities ended, then they should be held for 50 years.

Rooting Them Out

In trying to prevent another attack at home, Bush also aggressively sought to disrupt their operations.  Part of that process was to intercept their communications and learn what they were up to.  This caused an uproar over eavesdropping on Americans without a warrant.  However, the program was designed to intercept international phone calls, even if one end was in the U.S.  For example, if an Al Qaeda terrorist is captured or killed on the battlefield but their cell phone is recovered and their cell phone has an address book in it, the administration would set up all the numbers in the address book to be monitored and calls listened to. The purpose was to keep all Americans safe.

Many on the left believe that people in the Bush administration should be prosecuted for this practice.  They call this activity criminal.

Who Are Your Enemies?

President Bush tried to prevent our enemies, those who wished to kill as many of us as possible, from doing us harm.  He knew our enemies to be deadly and ruthless.

And then you have Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber.  Joe the Plumber had the audacity to ask Barack Obama a question about how Obama’s policies would affect people like Joe.  Pretty dangerous stuff, no?  Since that chance encounter, Joe the Plumber has been investigated by six Ohio state agencies.  Did you see the ACLU representative on the evening news demanding what the Obama campaign knew about this and when they knew it?  Did you see Chris Matthews slamming his hand on his desk and saying, “This is AMERICA, not the Soviet Union!  We don’t investigate citizens because of their political beliefs.”?  Did you hear Senator Dick Durban rise in the senate to decry what happened to Joe the Plumber and compare it to the Nazis, the Soviet Gulags, and Pol Pot?

Neither did I.