Top Ten

[Warph]

Top 10 Examples of the "War on Religion"


Don't let the secularists tell you otherwise:
There has been a war against religion being waged for decades by activist judges, artists, academia, liberal groups and the mainstream media. Judges have misinterpreted the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and have tried to force religion from the public square, while a culture that is becoming increasingly decadent does all it can to denigrate, mock and sneer at people of faith.

Find that hard to believe? Here is the evidence:

1. Public prayer ban

Ever since the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1962 Engel v. Vitale case, prayer has been disallowed in public schools. That precedent has spread to include banning prayers at graduation ceremonies and before high school football games. This out-of-control assault on public prayer reached the height of absurdity last year when a federal judge in San Antonio ruled that graduating high school seniors couldn't even say "amen, the word prayer," or ask the audience to bow their heads. And we thought the First Amendment had a free-speech clause.

2. Hollywood's jihad

From Martin Scorsese's 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ—with its depiction of Jesus having sex with Mary Magdalene in a dream—to the 2009 The DaVinci Code—showing a conniving Catholic hierarchy—Hollywood is rarely kind to religious sensibilities. Indeed, characters of faith in movies are invariably portrayed as wild-eyed-fanatics, immoral preachers or judgmental creeps.

3. Violating religious conscience

President Obama's attempt to force religious institutions to provide contraceptive services with their employees' health care benefits justifiably caused a considerable uproar. It wasn't the first time that people of faith have been forced to abandon their conscience or face dire consequences. Pro-lifers have had to fight to enact "conscience clauses," which permit pharmacists and physicians to opt out of giving services that violate their religious faith, such as providing contraception and performing abortions.

4. Crèches censored

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1984 Lynch v. Donnelly case that crèches could be placed in public places only if accompanied by secular holiday symbols. That bizarre ruling was further muddied by the court's 1989 stance in Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, which stated that including a crèche on public property violated the Constitution, while displaying a menorah on the same spot was fine. Still unsettled is exactly how many reindeers, snowmen and Santa Clauses are needed to make a crèche scene legal.

5. Media mocking

The Washington Post once called evangelicals, "poor, uneducated, and easy to lead." That pretty much sums up the media elite's view of religious conservatives. Most any daily newspaper reader can confirm: conservative Christians remain one of the few groups who can be treated with disdain. The sophisticates in New York and Washington newsrooms are much too enlightened to be duped by the opiate of the masses.

6. Pledge of Allegiance challenge

Atheist Michael Newdow went to court in 2002, challenging whether the recitation in public school of the words "under God" contained in the Pledge of Allegiance was a constitutional infringement of his daughter's rights. While unsuccessful, the attempt tied up the courts for some eight years and spawned similar challenges in other states. Newdow also lost a lawsuit aimed at stopping an invocation prayer at George W. Bush's 2005 inauguration.

7. Academia's assault

It will come as no surprise to any recent college student that academia is not particularly friendly to those with religious convictions, with discrimination common in hiring, promoting and admitting people of faith. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 40 percent of sociologists would be "less likely to hire" an evangelical. An astronomy professor sued University of Kentucky for losing a top job because of his Christian belief. The University of California system discriminated in its enrollment policies against Christian school attendees. And the list goes on.

8. Mojave cross battle

A simple cross in the Mojave Desert, erected in 1934 to honor members of the military killed in World War I, became the target of a decade-long battle by the American Civil Liberties Union. During the ensuing court battles, the cross was boarded up so as not to offend the nearby coyotes. Only after Congress transferred a small area of land containing the cross to a veterans group did the Supreme Court rule in 2010 that the cross was not a constitutional violation. However, within weeks of the ruling, the eight-foot tall cross was stolen by vandals.

9. Artistic antagonism

Artists and musicians think they are being edgy when they mock religious faith. In 1987, Andres Serrano used funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce "Piss Christ"—a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. Madonna's 1989 music video, "Like a Prayer," featured religious symbols, a burning cross, and a dream about having sex with a saint, prompting a condemnation by the Vatican. In 2008, producers of "South Park" brought religious blasphemy to the cartoon world with "The Most Offensive Christmas Song Ever."

10. Motto challenged

Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair dedicated her life trying to force religion out of public life and succeeded in winning a landmark case that resulted in banning the reading of religious texts in the classroom. One case she failed at was her attempt to ban the words, "In God We Trust," on the nation's money and coinage. That phrase was first placed on coins during the Lincoln administration and became the official motto under President Eisenhower. Both presidents turned to God frequently during times of crisis—which is the best evidence against the atheist's crusade to separate religion from the public square.

[Warph]

A panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders were asked to compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated.  A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of the panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc.  Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.
1. The Communist Manifesto

Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848
Score: 74
Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers' revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.


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2. Mein Kampf

Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26
Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in 1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called "Beer Hall Putsch" that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out "lebensraum" ("living room") for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.


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3. Quotations from Chairman Mao


Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966
Score: 38
Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People's Republic of China, enslaving the world's most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the "Cultural Revolution" he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. "It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism," wrote Mao.


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4. The Kinsey Report


Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948
Score: 37
Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. "Kinsey's initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws," the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. "The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial."


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5. Democracy and Education


Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a "progressive" philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.


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6. Das Kapital


Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894
Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx's materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.


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7. The Feminine Mystique


Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a comfortable concentration camp"--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that "Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley's radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer."


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8. The Course of Positive Philosophy


Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, "I have naturally ceased to believe in God." Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term "sociology." He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond "theology" (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through "metaphysics" (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries' reliance on abstract assertions of "rights" without a God), to "positivism," in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.


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9. Beyond Good and Evil


Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886
Score: 28
Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: "'God is dead'--Nietzsche" followed by "'Nietzsche is dead'--God." Nietzsche's profession that "God is dead" appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral "Will to Power," and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation," he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.


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10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money


Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.


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Honorable Mention

These books won votes from two or more judges:

The Population Bomb
by Paul Ehrlich
Score: 22

What Is To Be Done
by V.I. Lenin
Score: 20

Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno
Score: 19

On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Score: 18

Beyond Freedom and Dignity
by B.F. Skinner
Score: 18

Reflections on Violence
by Georges Sorel
Score: 18

The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly
Score: 17

The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17

Madness and Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Score: 12

Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Score: 12

Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead
Score: 11

Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader
Score: 11

Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
Score: 10

Prison Notebooks
by Antonio Gramsci
Score: 10

Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Score: 9

Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Score: 9

Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Score: 9

The Greening of America
by Charles Reich
Score: 9

The Limits to Growth
by Club of Rome
Score: 4

Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin
Score: 2


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The Judges

These 15 scholars and public policy leaders served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.

Arnold Beichman
Research Fellow
Hoover Institution

Prof. Brad Birzer
Hillsdale College

Harry Crocker
Vice President & Executive Editor
Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Prof. Marshall DeRosa
Florida Atlantic University

Dr. Don Devine
Second Vice Chairman
American Conservative Union

Prof. Robert George
Princeton University

Prof. Paul Gottfried
Elizabethtown College

Prof. William Anthony Hay
Mississippi State University

Herb London
President
Hudson Institute

Prof. Mark Malvasi
Randolph-Macon College

Douglas Minson
Associate Rector
The Witherspoon Fellowships

Prof. Mark Molesky
Seton Hall University

Prof. Stephen Presser
Northwestern University

Phyllis Schlafly
President
Eagle Forum

Fred Smith
President
Competitive Enterprise Institute

[Warph]

Whoops... sorry guys.  I need to preview from now on when I post something.  

Top 10 reasons to elect anybody but Obama.  While Republicans are locked in a brutal battle over their presidential nomination, let us not forget that anybody the GOP picks will be far superior than the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Not convinced?  Here's the evidence:

1. Mountain of debt

To say that President Obama spends like a drunken sailor is an insult to drunken sailors. From the stimulus bill and auto bailouts to Cash for Clunkers and green jobs, President Obama's spending reached epic proportions with annual trillion-dollar deficits. Any of the remaining Republican nominees would turn off the spigot of red ink.

2. ObamaCare demise

As long as Obama remains President, the Patient Affordability and Protection Act (ObamaCare), has a chance of remaining the law of the land. Not so with a Republican in the Oval Office, as all the candidates would seek an end to the healthcare law. As long as Obama holds a veto pen, he can stymie conservative legislative efforts to reduce its scope.

3. Capitalism reasserted

Despite Gingrich's assault on Bain Capital and Romney's counterattack on Newt's Fannie Mae contract, the Republican candidates are all, to varying degrees, free-market capitalists. Not so with the current White House occupant, who favors picking winners and losers out of "fairness" or "to help the environment." So we sink billions into Solyndra and other bankrupt companies in the Utopian hope that creating green jobs will save the planet. As Chevy Volt sales indicate, consumer engineering is best to be left to the marketplace.

4. Energy myopia

With his Keystone Pipeline XL ruling, Obama showed his true colors, choosing to placate the environmental lobby over jobs for American worker. His deep-water oil-drilling moratorium in the Gulf sent jobs to Brazil. Vast areas in Alaska and off the U.S. coasts remain off-limits for development. He even admitted his policies would dramatically increase electrical prices. Memo to President Obama: Spending billions to create green jobs doesn't substitute for a serious energy policy.

5. Class warfare

A Republican President would cease the insistent class-warfare attacks that Barack Obama wages. The President's constant references to Warren Buffett's secretary would end. We won't hear his repetitive pledge to tax "millionaires and billionaires. " We would no longer need to hear about evil banks, Wall Street traders, Big Oil and insensitive insurance companies.

6. Judicial nominations

President Obama gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor—who for decades will be two reliable liberal votes on the Supreme Court—and he is slowly remaking the entire federal judiciary by advancing activists to the bench. President George W. Bush pushed some bad policies, but he did nominate Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito—two solid conservatives. The next high court vacancy could be critical in tipping its ideological balance.

7. Regulatory overkill

This President is more than happy to see the Environmental Protection Agency enact global-warming regulations by fiat and EPA is now moving on getting the nation's dust in order. The regulations governing ObamaCare are many times longer than the 2,000 pages of the bill itself. Any of the Republicans still in the running would lessen the regulatory burden on small businesses.

8. Union coddling

SEIU (Service Employee International Union) and other union leaders have an open door to the White House, as the mobilization of its thuggish army of workers is critical to Obama's reelection. So we see the president pack the National Labor Relations Board with anti-business zealots who rule that Boeing can't build a plant in non-union South Carolina. So much for that laser focus on jobs.

9. War on terror

The Osama takedown notwithstanding, the President is not fully engaged in fighting the war on terror. He refuses to identify the enemy—radical Islamists—and has advanced their cause by turning against allies in Egypt and Libya. His failed Iranian policy has allowed a new power center of Western hate to flourish.

10. Leadership deficit

Obama often seems disinterested and aloof. He dithers when action is needed. The charismatic campaigner of hope and change has resorted to trotting out trite slogans. His class warfare shtick is wearing thin. These are trying times that the country is facing. America is in need of a leader, and not a teleprompter reader.

[Dee Gee]

Good post, Warph, but it is a little hard to read.

[Warph]

It is of special interest to read the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero regarding the danger of internal subversion. In a speech to the Roman Senate, as recorded by *Sallust, Cicero said:

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious.  But it cannot survive treason from within.  An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city.  But the traitor (Barack Hussein Obuma) moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.  For the traitor (Obuma) appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.  A murderer is less to be feared.  The traitor (Obuma) is the plague."

*Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust (86 BC – c. 35 BC) was a Roman historian, politician, and novus homo from a well-known plebeian family.

[Warph]

Top 10 Obama flimflams

This list of half-truths, sleight-of-hands, and outright lies are a good reason why Obama doesn't deserve a title more ennobling than huckster-in-chief.

1. Unprecedented shorthand:After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on ObamaCare, the President came forth with his thoroughly discredited analysis that it would be "unprecedented" for the high court to overturn a congressional action, perhaps thinking we all forgot about Marbury v. Madison (1803). After the nation's laughter subsided, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained away the fumble, saying "the President was not clearly understood by some people because he is a law professor, he spoke in shorthand."

2. Invoking Reagan:Obama tried citing President Reagan's tax policies as a cover for his own tax-hiking fervor, referring to Reagan as "that wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior." Not even close, Mr. President. We all know that Reagan cut the marginal rates for the top income bracket from 70 percent to 28 percent and reduced the capital gains tax from 28 percent to 20 percent, creating an economic boom.

3. Keystone cop-out:
President Obama was obviously stung by the backlash to his Keystone Pipeline decision, as even his union backers were aghast that he jettisoned a jobs-creating project. Obama tried to change perceptions by taking credit for the Southern leg of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico. But the Pipeline to Nowhere was already in the works before Obama said he green-lighted it and, besides, it will not bring any Canadian oil to the U.S. Market.

4. False Rutherford B. Hayes smear:
Obama's campaign rhetoric reached back to the 19th Century to make a point about Republicans opposing new technology. Obama said, "One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, 'It's a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?' That's why he's not on Mount Rushmore because he's looking backwards." Actually, Hayes was something of a high-tech geek for his era, introducing the first telephone to the White House and hobnobbing with Thomas A. Edison.

5. Weathering budget cuts:
It is a tried and true Democratic tactic to exaggerate proposed Republican budget cuts -- which are usually just slowdowns in future proposed spending. Obama got in on the act, saying that under Paul Ryan's budget, "Our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn't be able to afford to launch new satellites." Hmm, less accurate weather forecasts -- sounds like a prescription for more global warming alarmism.

6. Poisoning children:
Another liberal strategy is to demonize the opposition, making the GOP sound like evil maniacs. Obama recently implied that the Republican vision includes "poisoning our kids" by allowing higher levels of pollution. No, Mr. President -- the problem that our kids will inherit is the crushing debt caused by your out-of-control spending.

7. Buffett gimmick:
Even the President admits that the so-call ed Buffett rule is a gimmick that would do virtually nothing to close the budget deficit. But that hasn't stopped him from repeatedly trotting out the plan to make sure the very rich pay a higher marginal tax rate than their secretaries. Even Obama can't figure out how to do that in real life, as his own tax returns show him paying a 20.5 percent tax rate, lower than his own secretary.

8. Blaming others:
Obama has perfected the blame-game maneuver, saying his dismal record in office was the fault of George Bush, the Japanese, or the Arab Spring. Our favorite Obama excuse was his attempt to deflect attention from his poor job-creation record by saying it was the fault of Automatic Teller Machines putting bank clerks out of business.

9. Rhetorical overkill:
Obama is cranking up the rhetoric, calling Republicans "members of the flat Earth society," mocking Mitt Romney for using the word "marvelous," and calling Paul Ryan's budget a "Trojan Horse" for "social Darwinism." Of course, running a campaign that focused on the issues would require the President to defend his first term's record.

10. War on women:
Obama is attacking Republicans for waging a war against women, which in reality is nothing more than Democratic talking point. Obama tried to show solidarity with female voters by bemoaning higher dry-cleaning bills for women, saying, "We haven't gotten on the dry cleaning thing yet. I mean, I know that is still frustrating. I'm sure." Yes, Mr. Obama, focus your efforts on the dry-cleaning crisis and quit meddling with healthcare and the economy.

[Warph]

Rarely, if ever, has there been a more politicized Justice Department than the one presided over by Attorney General Eric Holder. Ask yourself this: In which administration have there been more egregious miscarriages of justice than the following Top Ten list?

1. Challenges voter ID laws

The Justice Department has challenged state voter ID laws, first in South Carolina and more recently in Texas, the first such actions in 20 years. Apparently requiring a U.S. citizen to bring a driver's license to the voting booth is an onerous infringement on their constitutional rights. Why would the chief law-enforcement office in the nation try to make it easier to engage in voter fraud? Could it be because Barack Hussein Obama is on the ballot this November?

2. Challenges immigration laws

The Justice Department is also challenging immigration laws enacted by states—most notably Arizona's legislation (hasn't Mr. Holder heard of the Constitution's 10th Amendment?) In its brief challenging Arizona's S.B. 1070, the Justice Department said the law interferes with the federal government's authority to enforce immigration policy. We didn't know that the federal government was doing much of anything to control illegal immigration.

3. Fast and Furious outrage

The Justice Department turned a blind-eye to the Fast and Furious gun-running operations, with the weaponry ending up in the hands of deadly Mexican drug gangs, and then obfuscated when Congress reviewed the operation. Allowing guns to cross the border resulted in the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and some 300 deaths in Mexico. New revelations are still coming, such as the news that one of the chief gun traffickers was questioned and released by Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents.

4. New Black Panther Party dismissal

The Justice Department decided to dismiss charges of violating the Voting Rights Act against three members of the New Black Panther Party, who acted menacingly outside a polling station in Philadelphia in 2008, hurling threats, racial slurs, and brandishing a night stick. The action by the Justice Department prompted a probe by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which heard testimony by J. Christian Adams, who resigned from the department over the issue. Adams said he was instructed by his superiors to ignore cases involving black defendants and white victims.

5. Defense of marriage recusal

The Justice Department served notice last year that it would no long defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which states that the federal government defines marriage to be between one man and one woman. The action, in a letter from the attorney general to congressional leaders, said President Obama had decided that the act, signed into law in 1996 by President Clinton, was unconstitutional. Odd, we can't seem to find the spot in the Constitution that allows the President to declare a law unconstitutional.

6. Sen. Ted Stevens case bungled

In its pursuit of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) on charges he failed to report gifts on his financial disclosure forms, the Justice Department concealed evidence from the defense. A report by a special counsel said there was "systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence" by the Justice Department, "which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens' defense." Stevens was found guilty and died in a plane crash before he could be exonerated. Imagine the howls from the mainstream media, if the senator in question had been Ted Kennedy, instead of Ted Stevens.

7. Civilian trials for terror detainees

The Justice Department sought to bring 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial in a civilian New York City courtroom, blocks from the World Trade Center site. The action would have afforded Mohammed all the constitutional guarantees of a fair trial, raising the possibility that Mohammed could go free on a technicality despite confessing to involvement in the 1993 and 2001World Trade Center attacks, the Bali, Indonesia, bombings, the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, and other failed terror plots. The outcry against civilian trials forced Holder to back down, and Mohammed and four co-defendants will now face a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

8. CIA probed

Attorney General Holder re-opened a probe of CIA officials involved in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terror detainees. Holder's action came despite earlier rulings that the interrogations were legally authorized, despite seven former CIA directors asking the probe be shut down, and despite the fact that the interrogations provided valuable intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideaway. Holder later admitted he hadn't read Justice Department memos that concluded no laws were broken.

9. NYPD probed

When the New York Police Department conducted surveillance operations in the Muslim community—including monitoring members of the Muslim Student Association, which has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood—the Justice Department decided to review the police department. While the NYPD is trying to thwart another 9/11, the Justice Department is siding with Muslim apologists. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had the right response to the Justice Department when he said, "To let our guard down would just be an outrage."

10. Pool fiasco

Justice Department guidelines for compliance with the Americans for Disabilities Act included a requirement for public swimming pools to install a lift that could move the disabled from a wheelchair to the water. As 300,000 public pools faced a March 15 deadline to install the lifts—at a cost of up to $20,000 each—DOJ backed down and issued a 60-day stay of execution in March before allowing lawsuits over the matter. Considering there is not an available number of lifts or installers of the devices for every pool in America, "poolmagedon" will provide the nation's trial lawyers—major supporters of the Democrats—with plenty of new business opportunities.


*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
It is of special interest to read the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero regarding the danger of internal subversion. In a speech to the Roman Senate, as recorded by *Sallust, Cicero said:

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious.  But it cannot survive treason from within.  An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city.  But the traitor (Atty.Gen. Eric Holder) moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.  For the traitor (Holder) appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.  A murderer is less to be feared.  The traitor (Holder) is the plague."

*Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust (86 BC – c. 35 BC) was a Roman historian, politician, and novus homo from a well-known plebeian family.

[Warph]

-- Government Workers Behaving Badly --
Every time you turn on the news, you see reports of government workers behaving badly.  We've rounded up the top 10 -- most recent --  misconducts.

1. GSA parties

Considering the lavish conferences, retreats, and bonuses paid for by the General Services Administration, it is disturbing to think this was the same agency in charge of spending President Obama's fiscally irresponsible stimulus package. While not every federal agency parties like the GSA, multiply waste and unnecessary expenditures across the entire federal government and the rationale of the tea party becomes clear.

2. Secret Service prostitutes

The Colombian romp with prostitutes by Secret Service agents and members of the U.S. military reflected poorly on the nation, just as President Obama was attending the Pan-American summit. We won't go into all the sordid details of the sexcapades at Cartagena's Hotel El Caribe, but let it be said that we expect a higher standard of conduct from the men who protect the life of the president, than we do for the president himself (see Clinton, William Jefferson).

3. Fast and Furious debacle

The Alcohol Tobacco and Firearm officials who approved the Fast and Furious operation allowing high-powered weaponry to fall into the hands of Mexican drug lords acted with reckless disregard for the outcome of their actions. That outcome turned out to be the deaths of hundreds of innocent Mexicans and the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. That the Justice Department won't come clean on the details of the operation, only makes the malfeasance worse.

4. Do-nothing Senate Democrats

The most essential task of just about any professional enterprise is crafting an annual budget. Tell that to the Senate, where the Democratic-controlled chamber hasn't passed a budget in three years. Enjoy your do-nothing fiefdom while you can, Harry Reid. Come November, your title will be minority, not majority, leader.

5. Panetta's pricey trips

No one expects the defense secretary to fly commercial, but was it really necessary for   Leon Panetta to take 27 weekend trips home to California, costing taxpayers some $800,000, or nearly the cost of a GSA convention in Las Vegas? Each round-trip cost taxpayers some $32,000, and Panetta reimbursed the government $630 per jaunt. Sure, it's nice to get out of Washington, but that's three trips every month to spend time on the Panetta walnut farm.

6. Federal tax scofflaws

One good way to tackle the mounting budget deficit would be to collect back taxes from federal employees. A report by the Internal Revenue Service showed that nearly 100,000 federal workers owed a combined $1 billion in back taxes. Some $2 million could be collected just by going after members and employees of the U.S. Senate.

7. Afghan photos

Yes, it is tough being a soldier in a war zone, but still part of their job is not to embarrass their nation or put their fellow warriors in harm's way like the military personnel did by posing with dead Afghan bodies. The worse crime, however, is that the Los Angeles Times would publish the photos.

8. TSA bullies

We are sure that there are many fine employees working for the Transportation Safety Administration, but their overall antics are wearing thin. Reports of juvenile behavior and criminal activity among TSA workers seem routine and their full-body pat-downs of grandmothers and small children are heavy-handed and nonsensical.

9. Anthony Weiner

The former Democratic congressmen was still on the government payroll when he Tweeted racy photos of himself on his government-issued BlackBerry. Weiner tried to fight to keep his job, but ultimately the public embarrassment was too severe to withstand. His resignation opened the door for Republicans to gain a House seat that they hadn't held in over 50 years.

10. Justice for Trayvon

What were Justice Department officials doing stoking racial division following the Trayvon Martin shooting? Members of department's Community Relations Service worked with the mobs protesting the lack of action by the police in the shooting, teaching leaders how to manage the crowd and arranging a police escort for a group of college students marching to demand George Zimmerman's arrest. The only action by the Justice Department in the case should have been to indict the thugs putting a bounty on Zimmerman's head.

[Warph]

In the unlikely event that the Supreme Court allows ObumaCare's individual mandate to survive, be prepared for an onslaught of new rules and regulations that force products upon us in order to advance the liberal agenda... Top 10 products Obuma will force us to buy:

1. Broccoli



Justice Antonin Scalia advanced the prospect of government-mandated broccoli during the Supreme Court's ObamaCare oral arguments. "Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli," Scalia said. The left has long been obsessed with what we put into our bodies—from transfat and salt, to tobacco and red meat. Be prepared for a Department of Eating Healthily, with Michelle Obama in charge.

2. Chevy Volt

General Motors' Chevy Volt was doomed to fail as consumers did not exactly flock to the showrooms for the overpriced, underperforming vehicle. Production of the Volt has been suspended and the dream of an electric car is endangered. According to the left, oil is evil, therefore the internal combustion engine must go. So be prepared to plug in your government-mandated electric car in order to save the world from global warming.

3. $5 gallon of gas

With Obama placing a good part of America's energy resources off-limits for development, the price of gas at the pump continues to rise. The higher the better, in order to wean us from our dependence on oil. It shouldn't be a surprise to see prices rise under this President, as he essentially promised higher energy costs when he was running for office.

4. Contraceptives

Under ObamaCare, everyone will be paying for contraceptives whether they need them or not. The misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandated that contraception be fully covered by health care exchanges, not even costing the recipient a co-pay. That means you will be subsidizing the sexual activity of your neighbors, co-workers, and prostitutes.

5. Inconvenient Truth movie

The left still wants us all to believe that global warming is imperiling the world and would rather not have us dwell on inconvenient inconsistencies in the theory. What with Climategate e-mails, flat temperatures, and scientists speaking out against global warming alarmism, the left is seeing their pet issue peter out. How better to reignite the cause than to require everyone to watch Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth?

6. MSNBC

The Obama administration has virtually declared war on Fox News, taking issue with its hard-hitting coverage. In the past, liberals have flirted with reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, hoping to silence right-wing critics. If emboldened by an Obama re-election victory, attempts to limit Fox and beam MSNBC into everyone's home could be in the works.

7. Solar panels

President Obama is trying his hardest develop a viable green-energy industry in the United States, funneling billions of dollars to solar-panel makers. The problem is that there isn't much of a market for the devices and the companies that the president has chosen haven't done too well—witness the bankruptcy of Solyndra. Get ready for a new push to install the panels in residences throughout America.

8. Union-label goods

Big Labor has Obama in their pocket, witness the GM bailout that was a sweetheart deal for the United Auto Workers and the National Labor Relations Board's ruling against Boeing building a plant in South Carolina. Expect more of the same with union-made goods getting a leg up over their non-union rivals.

9. Algae

Here is yet another ill-fated idea meant to put an end to U.S. oil dependence: Algae is the fuel of the future. According to President Obama, pond-scum can be harvested and turned into energy to power America. Soon, everyone will be scrapping the green algae from the bottom of their fish tanks.

10. Hoodies

As the Trayvon Martin shooting reached a boiling point, the civil rights lobby has turned the hoodie into the latest symbol of resistance to white oppression. One might expect the President to try to rise above the fray and seek to heal the nation. Instead, Obama's re-election campaign sent a Twitter message reminding supporters that they could buy an Obama hoodie. The tweet said, "Let everyone know whose team you're on for 2012 with today's merchandise steal: the college-style hooded sweatshirt."

[Warph]

Taken individually, the items on this list are outrageous enough; but collectively, these Top 10 misguided energy policies show how the current Obuma Gangster Administration puts America's energy needs behind the left's obsession with global warming alarmism:


1. Crucify oil companies

Al Armendariz, administrator of the EPA's Texas regional office, unwittingly let the Obama administration's true intentions be known with comments he made about enforcing environmental regulations on energy companies. "It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean," he said. "They'd go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they'd crucify them." That pretty much sums up the policies of an administration that has done everything it can to combat the oil industry. So it was Bye-Bye, Unwitty Al.
2. Keystone flub

Obama's decision to halt the Keystone Pipeline XL cost the nation jobs, as well as access to energy resources not controlled by Middle East madmen, all to appease his environmental backers and Hollywood activists. His subsequent attempt to take credit for the southern leg of the project—the so-called Pipeline to Nowhere—shows the ridiculousness of his policy.

3. Alternative-fuel fantasies

Obama's over-emphasis on alternative energy production has cost the nation billions of dollars as his administration showered stimulus money on companies like solar-panel producer Solyndra, which ultimately went bankrupt. While the number of failed green-energy projects keeps mounting, the amount of energy saved by such endeavors is minuscule.

4. Undeveloped resources

Vast swatches of energy-rich, federally controlled land in the United States—from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to areas off the East and West coasts—remain off-limits for energy development. Obama's mantra that more oil is being pumped in America than ever before must be tempered by hard facts—increases in production are on private land and are in spite of, not because of, any efforts by the Obama administration.

5. Bungling in the Gulf

The gulf oil spill prompted the Obama adminstration to declare a mortatorium on deepwater drilling, and when oil rigs relocated to Brazil, the president helped to fund that nation's oil production. Meanwhile, communities near the gulf are still suffering from a loss of jobs resulting from Obama's actions.

6. War on coal

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency is waging a war on coal, slowing the permitting process to a crawl and issuing crippling regulations. Candidate Obama signaled as much in 2008, when he said: "When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."

7. Taxing energy companies

Obama's class-warfare rhetoric routinely focuses on eliminating tax breaks on oil and gas companies, yet most energy tax write-offs go to renewable green-energy ventures that get little bang for the taxpayer's buck. The elimination of certain tax benefits would undoubtedly lead to less exploration for new energy sources and higher prices for consumers.

8. Chevy Volt fiasco

Obama's attempt to leverage the auto bailout by bullying carmakers into making energy-efficient vehicles was a miserable failure. The Chevy Volt cost too much, didn't work very well, and had safety issues. No wonder the American consumer roundly rejected the effort and the automaker had to suspend production of the Volt.

9. Fracking regulations

Techonological advances in fracking are allowing oil and gas companies to extract energy resources at reduced costs, helping rejuventate the economies of states from North Dakota to Texas. So leave it to the EPA to try to stifle the process with new regulations to curb emissions from fracking. The new standards will cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollar, slowing the fracking boom.

10. High gas prices

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recently called Republican energy plans "fairy tales" and "falsehoods." Salazar, asked at a different event if the cost of gas was headed to $9 per gallon, responded by saying, "Where it all will end, no one knows." What we do know is that Barack Obama and the environmental lobby have long wanted higher gas prices to "save" the planet from global warming. Which party believes in fairy tales, Mr. Salazar?