Investors Business Daily House Editorial 09/21/2009 07:05 PM ET

Policymaking: If the stimulus isn’t working, perhaps it’s because it was largely written by a collection of leftist interest groups called the Apollo Alliance that counts among its directors a co-founder of the Weather Underground.

The Labor Department reported Friday that 42 states lost more jobs than they gained in August, and that 14 plus Washington, D.C., reported unemployment rates of 10% or more. Michigan’s rate rose to 15.2%, highest in the nation. Nevada, represented by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is second with 13.2%. California, home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is tied for fourth with Oregon at 12.2%.

Clearly, the stimulus bill that no congressman read is not working. As it turns out, no congressman may have written it either. It’s largely the creation of a coalition of leftist organizations called the Apollo Alliance, whose primary interests are saving the Earth, environmental justice and redistributing wealth. They are not friends of job-creating capitalism.

On Apollo’s Web site, Sen. Reid, whose state also leads in foreclosures, is quoted praising the group of which former green czar Van Jones was a board member. “We’ve talked about moving forward on these ideas for decades,” Reid is quoted as saying. “The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them.” Jones, the former Oakland, Calif., community organizer and self-avowed communist, was on the board of the Apollo Alliance when he accepted the position in the Obama administration as green jobs czar. As Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity told Glenn Beck, Jones has “described the Apollo Alliance mission as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes” that would tie elements of organized labor with community organizers and environmental groups into an outfit that would restructure American society. Wade Rathke, founder of Acorn, was also on the Apollo board, as is Gerald Hudson, vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which provides the shock troops in the movement to pass government-run health care. John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton and now president of the leftist Center for American Progress, also sits on the Apollo board. Each day his group sends out talking points to the left side of the blogosphere. Mark Lloyd, diversity czar at the Federal Communications Commission, was a senior fellow at CAP.

According to Kerpen, the Apollo Alliance put together a draft stimulus bill in 2008 that included almost everything in the final $787 billion package. Little did the voters know that the congressmen and senators they would elect would pass a bill written by activist outsiders.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of all this is that an even more radical Jones (no relation) has a relationship with the Apollo Alliance. Jeff Jones was a domestic terrorist in the ’60s and a fugitive from justice throughout the ’70s who, with Bill Ayers, helped found the Weather Underground in 1969. Ayers, Jones and the Weathermen participated in the violent Days of Rage riots in Chicago and a nationwide anti-government bombing campaign. Like Ayers, Jeff Jones has no regrets, saying: “To this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to do.”

Today, Jones finds himself director of the Apollo Alliance’s New York affiliate and a consultant to the national group. One of his clients is the Workforce Development Institute, a union-controlled organization. As a consultant to WDI, Jones helps write the grant proposals for federal stimulus dollars — funds authorized in the bill that Apollo helped write — all to ensure that taxpayer dollars end up in the hands of groups that share Apollo’s political agenda.

Welcome to government of the activist, by the activist and for the activist.

It’s All About The Money Boys

(click to enlarge)

 
Nationalized banking, nationalized automobile manufacturing, socialized medicine, socialized energy production, community organized voting, property rights down the commode, environmentalist eco-diversity global warming zealots prosecuting government of the lawsuit for the lawsuit and by the lawsuit, you can’t do or say anything without upsetting some hyper-sensitive aggrieved victim-in-waiting, history re-written by the volume on a daily basis, and the public square dominated by the anarchistic rules for radicals.  The cruel irony is that our elite leaders are doing all this in the name of the public good.  One wonders just how much dope they smoked for all this nonsense to seem reasonable to them.

Oh, and memos to David Letterman, Conan OBrien, 9 News, and Bill OReilly:  I turn all your shows off whenever you deliver propaganda.  Sometimes I’ll get to see a whole 30 seconds of one of your programs before that happens.  That’s Ok.  I need the sack time more than I need your nightly political re-education.  I guess the segments of your audience who consider propaganda to be news-worthy or entertainment are an easy-sell for your advertisers.

July 07, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin
The Republicans bring a knife to a gunfight, and lose again.

By David Kahane

One of the most terrifying moments of my political life came last summer at the Republican convention in St. Paul. No, I don’t mean seeing John McCain careering around the Xcel Energy Center like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein, his face frozen in a Lon Chaney Sr. rictus grin as he reached across the aisle to his erstwhile friends in the media and got his hand bitten off. Rather, I’m referring to the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s outrageous acceptance speech, which whipped up the Rotary Club delegates into a frenzy of white-boy fury that not even heckling by a brave Code Pink embed could deter. Truly a fascist classic and one that sent shivers down our collectivist spines.

Even worse was the glaze of horror on the phizzes of the assembled heroes of the Mainstream Media. Andrea Mitchell — yes, the very same Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, whose employer saw no conflict of interest at all when she married then Fed pooh-bah Alan Greenspan — stood there gaping like a frog while the rest of the assembled Finemans and Matthewses and Olbermanns scurried around like roaches when the light gets turned on: What the hell just hit us? For one horrible moment, it looked as if the carefully crafted plans of David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, George Soros, and the Second Chief Directorate, first department, of the old KGB were about to gang agley. (more…)

…was the vote in the Senate against shutting down Guantanamo, however Obama won’t stop lobbying his case.  Perhaps Obama is not so realistic as many think.

Obama Speaks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cheney Speaks

The force you must exert to survive is defined by your enemy, in this case, an enemy that views civility and individualism as weakness and infidelity.  So the dilemma is to uphold your own civility and be harmed or killed, or do what’s necessary to defend yourself so that you can survive and perhaps achieve civility.  Our enemies impose this dilemma on us, fully cognizant of what such dilemmas do to our media-enhanced national discourse.  Under the conditions we must accept as targets of the Islamist war, we cannot have both absolute civility abroad and guaranteed survival at home.  Pretending that we can is a prescription for our own annihilation.

Cheney is right to draw attention to the progressive’s redefinitions of terms related to the war, as if a few semantic adjustments on our part will make us materially safer.  The progressive’s fallacy in this case is to assert that because we must use barbarous tactics to defeat a barbarian enemy, we also do not value civility.  Of course we continue to value civility.  Why else would we do whatever we must do to reestablish conditions where we can enjoy it again?

Ironically, the progressive message–that Americans don’t value civility–is likely to come from a 20-something between sips of a hot latte’ at Starbucks with their Prius/mobile bike-rack parked in the lot.  Today, national policies issue from brains washed clean of analytic capacity, the naive graduates of America’s progressive universities who march in lock-step conformity and smug superiority in Ward-Churchill-inspired fantasies of the perfect present we could have had if only Bush hadn’t stolen the 2000 election.

Obama readily throws much of what America did in response to 9/11 under the bus to garner the approval of this or that 3rd world dictator or European socialist.  But consider the many people we’ve met in Asia who are amazed at the restraint shown by America in response to 9/11 when we didn’t drop nuclear weapons on the countries harboring, sponsoring, and emulating Islamic terrorism.  Had China been attacked the way the U.S. was on 9/11, the crater where Afghanistan once stood will still be smoking.

The Global Times is the voice of the Chinese government.

“The advanced health care infrastructure in the US has ensured that life has not been interrupted by the outbreak, at least for the moment.  But the impact of swine flue can be disastrous for countries without proper preventive systems.  Few countries can afford the expensive healthcare system the US enjoys. . . .More protective actions in the US would be for America’s own good and would benefit the rest of the world as well.”

It would seem the expensive healthcare system Americans “enjoy” serves America’s “own good” better than a guilt-trip from the Global Times.  This is a teaching-moment for all those countries who “enjoy” socialized medicine.

(click to enlarge)

“We have not yet understood that to subsume our world under the concept of “capitalism” is already to enter into the dichotomous worldview of ideology.” Alain Besancon

The psychological state of the militant is distinguished by his fanatical investment in the system.  This central vision reorganizes his entire intellectual and perceptual field, all the way to the periphery.  Language is transformed: it is no longer used to communicate or express, but to conceal a contrived continuity between the system and reality.  Ideological language is charged with the magical role of forcing reality to conform to a particular vision of the world.  It is a liturgical language for which every utterance points to its speaker’s adherence to the system, and it summons the interlocutor to adhere as well.  Code words thus constitute threats and figures of power.It is not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology.

The most obvious sign that ideological insanity is artificial is that it is reversible: when the pressure ceases and circumstances change, one gets out all at once, as if from a dream.  But it is a waking dream–one that does not block motility and maintains a certain apparently rational coherence.  Outside the affected area, which is the superior part of the mind in a healthy person–the part that articulates religion, philosophy, and the “governing ideas of reason,” as Kant would say–the comprehensive functions seem intact but focused on and enslaved by the surreal object.  When one wakes, one’s mind is empty; one’s life and knowledge must be entirely relearned.

Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.

The Republican mistake of the 2008 election was to embrace a portion of the left’s ideological insanity to bring in moderates, which ended up ratcheting the debate to the left.  Whoever concluded that Republicans could score by giving the ball to the opposition should be fired. (more…)

“Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist.  The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself.  Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise. . . . .[T]he larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for moral choice; it does not depend on the goodwill or the genuine decency of people.”  Shelby Steele, White Guilt, 2006.

The moral authority that comes from an absence of moral choice is actually no moral authority.  This is a prescription for endless manipulation–by both blacks and whites–which Steele documents at length.  He also wrote, (more…)

The Little Red Wagon That Can - What I saw at the Tea Party

by Andrew Klavan

“These are the same people who rushed en masse to cover Cindy Sheehan and a dozen or so antiwar protesters in Crawford, Texas, rechristening that sad, emotionally unpredictable woman with two of the most cherished words in the English language: Peace Mom. But what was their attitude when thousands of ordinary people gathered in defense of their rights all over the country? “Just move on, folks, nothing to see here.”

“Tea Party Movement”–the new Weather Underground?

The left needed to declare the war on terror over so they could free up the word “terrorist” to label conservatives, otherwise known as “rightwing extremists” by leftists, fascists, socialists, communists, social democrats, green reds, religious fundamentalists, islamists, various assorted totalitarian thugs, pirates, daily kos readers, george soros contributors, ward churchill clones, and other social defectives.

On April 13th, 2009 at 6:55 pm, Special K said:

The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about “right-wing terror groups”–kind of ironic that it came out just days before the TEA protests. (more…)

James Piereson  - Punitive Liberalism

“From the time of John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, (more…)