Beware of Obama’s Pay Czar

THE INFINITE ARM OF O'S 'PAY CZAR'

'PAY Czar' Kenneth Feinberg's official government title is "special master for compensation." You'll be happy to know that he's really getting into the confiscatory spirit of his role. Asked by Reuters if his powers include reaching back and revoking bonuses awarded to financial-industry executives before his office was created this year, Feinberg asserted broad and binding authorities -- including the ability to "claw back" money already paid out.

Regulations governing his office explicitly limit his jurisdiction over contracts signed before Feb. 11, 2009. But the fine print is no obstacle to President Obama's czars. "The statute provides these guideposts, but the statute ultimately says I have discretion to decide what it is that these people should make and that my determination will be final," Feinberg claims. "Anything is possible under the law."

Yes, he said "anything." It's not just senior execs who fall under Feinberg's purview. "These people" also includes "the next 100 most highly paid employees" of all bank-bailout recipients, who must file compensation proposals with their pay overlord by Friday.

But why stop there? The Troubled Asset Relief Program has morphed from a toxic-asset buy-up to a capital-injection plan and back to a toxic-asset buy-up. The money has been doled out to auto-supply companies and life-insurance firms. Congress wants to siphon off more of it to bail out bankrupt California and create a "national housing trust fund" to bail out low-income renters. Grabby-handed politicians have used TARP as a crowbar to pry open new areas for command-and-control meddling under the guise of saving the economy.

How much longer until the pay czar is determining all corporate pay he wishes to deem "inappropriate, unsound or excessive"? House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank has yapped all year long about extending pay curbs to all financial institutions and perhaps to all US companies.

Let's remember that the Beltway hysteria over bonuses served as a convenient distraction from the responsibility of subprime meltdown-enabling lawmakers like Frank -- and of Obama's crony economic team.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner landed his previous job as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York thanks to heavy lobbying by his Wall Street mentors Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, both of whom sat on the New York Fed's selection committee. Their cronyism had multibillion-dollar consequences for taxpayers.

Rubin was also an executive at Citigroup, which Geithner was supposed to regulate. Instead, he helped foster Citi's spending binge and engineered the teetering company's $52 billion federal bailout. This makes the Obama administration's recent protestations about one Citi employee's $100 million compensation package look like the very kind of manufactured outrage of which it incessantly accuses its political opponents.

Geithner also had a hand in the $30 billion Bear Stearns bailout and the multilevel AIG bailouts. Massive sums of that taxpayer money went to major financial institutions that had employed Obama's moneymen and their closest confidants. Goldman Sachs, for example, raked in nearly $13 billion in December from AIG in federal TARP funds -- and reported record profits this quarter with a bonus pool of more than $11 billion.

The "solution" isn't to empower a czar to curb bonus payouts ex post facto. The solution is to stop dumping billions into failing firms in the first place.

As for private businesses, this is a teachable moment, to borrow one of Obama's favorite phrases. If a basket-case company is willing to take bailout money, it will pay an interminable price.

The long arm of regulators can and will reach back and open sealed deals and signed contracts on a whim. The Obama campaign chant is the czars' chant, too: "Yes, we can!"

Michelle Malkin's new book is "Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies."

Michelle Malkin, NY Post, 8/19/09

Yes America, It’s Really a Death Panel After All

IT'S ALL A DEATH PANEL
THE TRUTH ABOUT OBAMACARE

WASHINGTON is all atwit ter about "death panels": President Obama derides the idea that his health-care reform calls for them; the Senate is stripping "end of life" counseling language from its bill -- and last Friday the voice of the liberal establishment, The New York Times, ran a Page One story "rebutting" the rumor that ObamaCare would create such boards to decide when to pull the plug on elderly patients.

But all those protests miss the fundamental truth of the "death panel" charge.

Even without a federal board voting on whom to kill, ObamaCare will ration care extensively, leading to the same result. This follows inevitably from central features of the president's plan.

Specifically, his decisions to (1) pay for reform with vast cuts in the Medicare budget and (2) grant insurance coverage to 50 million new people, vastly boosting demand without increasing the supply of doctors, nurses or other care providers.

Whether or not he admits it even to himself, Obama's talk of cutting "inefficiencies" and reducing costs translates to less care, of lower quality, for the elderly. Every existing national health system finds ways to deny state-of-the-art medications and necessary surgical procedures to countless patients, and ObamaCare has the nascent mechanisms to do the same. With the limited options that Obama's vision would leave them, many will find that "end of life counseling" necessary and even welcome.

"Reform" would cut care to the elderly in several ways:

* Slash hundreds of billions from Medicare spending, largely by lowering reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals for patient care.

If a hospital gets less money for each MRI, it will do fewer of them. If a surgeon gets paid less for a heart bypass on a Medicare patient, he'll perform them more rarely. These facts of the marketplace are not only inevitable consequences of Obama's cuts but are also its intended consequence. Without them, his savings will prove illusory.

* Expanding the patient load by extending full coverage to 50 million Americans (including such "Americans" as illegal immigrants) without boosting the supply of care will force rationing decisions on harried and overworked doctors and hospitals.

People with insurance use a lot more health-care resources -- so today's facilities and personnel will have to cope with the increased workload. Busy surgeons will have to decide who would benefit most from their treatment -- de facto rationing. The elderly will, inevitably, be the losers.

* The Federal Health Board, established by this legislation, will be charged with collecting data on various forms of treatment for different conditions to assess which are the most effective and efficient. While the bills don't force providers to obey the board's "guidance," its recommendations will still wind up setting the standards and protocols for care systemwide.

We've already seen Medicare and Medicaid lead a similar race to the bottom with their formularies and other regulations. With Washington dictating what every policy must cover and regulating all rates, insurers and providers will all have to follow the FHB's advice on limiting care to the elderly -- a de facto rationing system.

* In assessing whether to allow certain treatments to a given patient, medical professionals will be encouraged to apply the Quality-Adjusted Remaining Years system. Under QARY, decision-makers seek to "amortize" the cost of treatment over the remaining "quality years of life" likely for that patient.

Imagine a hip replacement costing $100,000 and the 75-year-old who needs it, a diabetic with a heart condition deemed to have just three "quality" years left. That works out to $33,333 a year -- too steep! Surgery disallowed! (Unless of course, the patient has political connections . . . )

Younger, healthier patients would still get the surgery, of course. The QARY system simply aims to deny health care to the oldest and most infirm, "scientifically" condemning them to infirmity, pain and earlier death than would otherwise be their fate.

In short, ObamaCare doesn't need to set up "death panels" to make retail decisions about ending the lives of individual patients. The whole "reform" scheme is one giant death panel in its own right.

Dick Morris & Eileen Mcgann, NY Post, 8/17/09

Democrat Trick # 2: Pull Out the Nazi Card

Nazis for Me, but Not for Thee
Why shouldn’t socialized medicine prompt comparisons to National Socialism?

It’s this week’s fashion on the left, and among such fashionably contemplative moderates as Mort Kondracke, to blast Rush Limbaugh for comparing Democrats to the Nazis. It’s no surprise that the Obama hardcores are misrepresenting the sequence and substance of events, but I would have hoped that Kondracke would at least have noted that Rush’s comparison — even if Kondracke thought it unwise — was neither gratuitous nor demagogic.

To recap, the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, started this episode by comparing American citizens who oppose Obamacare to the Nazis and asserting that her political opponents were donning “swastikas.” (Sen. Barbara Boxer simultaneously ripped Obamacare dissenters for their Brooks Brothers suits — it’s not altogether clear where on the twill the swastika goes.) Pelosi’s tactic was the shopworn smear we on the right have dealt with for six decades. There is no conceivable substantive connection between opposition to Obamacare and German National Socialism — they are antithetical. By invoking the Nazis, Pelosi was patently slandering dissenters as racist thugs.


Rush responded, and the response did not smear Democrats. He repeatedly and explicitly qualified that no one was saying Obama was Hitler, that Pelosi was Goebbels, or that the Democrats were engaged in the genocidal barbarity of the Third Reich. The comparison he drew was a substantive one: between the Democrats’ proposal for socialized medicine and the German installation of socialized medicine beginning with Bismarck and reaching its shocking apotheosis with Hitler’s National Socialism. (A transcript of what he actually contended is here, and his website has other relevant transcripts, since the argument was reiterated other times during the week.) The point was to show that if Pelosi wanted to engage in Nazi comparisons, the health-care policies of Nazi Germany had far more in common with the health-care policies of the Democrats than with those of the conservative opposition, which wants health care kept private and reforms to be market-based.

Whether you agree with that or not (I happen to think it’s undeniable), Rush was also making a larger point that is not only fair argument but essential argument. There is a trajectory of socialism, regardless of the good intentions of many socialists. As he framed it, you take things such as health care, things that are traditionally understood as within the ambit of individual liberty and free choice; you move such things into the ambit of state responsibility as the welfare state emerges and grows, on the theory that it is government’s responsibility to provide for everyone’s needs (by redistributing resources); as more things are moved from private to public control, the state by definition becomes totalitarian; and, inexorably, the totalitarian state gets bad leaders and the society comes to reflect the policy choices of those leaders.

Now, we can argue until the end of time about whether that trajectory really exists and whether it is inevitable. But however you come out, it is an argument very much worth having. It goes to what kind of society we are going to be, to what the proper relationship between the citizen and the state is.

Nazi Germany is a useful historical example of socialism run amok. The genocide and terrorism ultimately practiced by the Nazis were horrible — that goes without saying. But National Socialism went on for a dozen years, it was the last stage in a progressive nationalization of German society, and there was a lot more to it than genocide and terrorism. It cannot be that because there was genocide and terrorism, the socialist aspects of National Socialism are outside the lines of acceptable political discourse. Given the immense popularity of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, one of the most important political books of the last quarter-century, it doesn’t look like Americans are as convinced as Mort Kondracke seems to be that these comparisons are verboten.


Let’s put aside the Left’s propensity to slander conservatives with comparisons to Adolf Hitler, who was patently a man of the Left. Earlier this year, one New York Times writer seemed to find comparisons to National Socialism quite worthy when — at least in the telling — those comparisons worked in the Left’s favor. While Americans were hotly debating the merits of the Obama “stimulus” in April, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto called attention to a very interesting economic analysis offered by David Leonhardt. Leonhardt wrote:
In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.
After all due qualifiers about how terribly uncomfortable he felt about invoking lessons from the Nazis, Leonhardt somehow summoned the inner fortitude to make the obvious explicit:
Here in the United States, many people are understandably wondering whether the $800 billion stimulus program will make much of a difference. They want to know: Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century. Yes, stimulus works.

As Taranto correctly observed, whatever you may think of the merits of Leonhardt’s argument, it was appropriate for him to make it: The wisdom vel non of policies adopted during over a decade of Nazi socialism cannot be off the table simply because, in the end, the Nazis were monsters. We may find the seeds of their monstrousness in those policies, or we may not. But the thought that we should not talk about them is absurd. Notably, Leonhardt’s piece ran without any teeth-gnashing from Mort Kondracke and our other Beltway chaperones.

National Socialism is banned from the Right’s case against socialism, but is somehow acceptable when leftists use it as a smear or when the Left’s nuanced geniuses, after their very thoughtful consideration, decide its invocation is suitable for mature audiences? I don’t think so.


Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review Online, 8/14/09

Obama’s Afghan War: Why Are We Fighting Again?

THE WRONG WAR
STOP FIGHTING FOR LOSER AFGHAN GOV'T

OUR troops are performing superbly in Afghanistan. They can seize any objec tive or defeat any enemy on the battlefield. And it doesn't matter.

Using Afghan bases to strike al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan is the right fight. But defending the disastrously corrupt and despised Kabul government is the wrong war.

We've thrown our blood and treasure behind the latter.

Next week, Afghanistan will stage another national election. Given the machinations of President Hamid Karzai, his henchmen and warlord clients, the vote is on track to make Iran's recent balloting look like a model of probity. Even if a dark-horse candidate miraculously unseats Karzai, the result will be further internal polarization, not a sudden blossoming of national unity.

We are witnessing the postmodern take on our Cold War-era policy of supporting strongmen because they were "ours." But the shah of Iran or Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines at least delivered for decades. In Afghanistan, our troops are fighting magnificently to extend the reach of the criminal enterprise known as the Kabul government -- which works against our interests.

One example: A well-placed US official states bluntly that "Karzai's brother in Kandahar is directly benefiting from opium production."

Karzai's sibling is the regional opium czar. And "our man in Kabul" has no interest in interfering. Because the alternative would be for a political opponent to seize control of the opium trade. Eliminate poppies? You'll see bikinis in Afghan villages first.

Is it genuinely to our advantage to send our incomparable soldiers and Marines to give blood for a government of thieves that's despised by the population it loots and neglects?

In recent discussions with military officers, I've found some more optimistic than others. A few see value in our current policies. Others shake their heads. Some defend specific Afghan government departments -- such as the Ministry of Defense -- in which they detect progress. But I haven't found a single defender of Karzai or his government overall. Not one.

Meanwhile, our Marines are engaged in operation Eastern Resolve 2 in Helmand Province, moving with great skill to extend pacification efforts before next week's election.

No one doubts the Marines' combat capabilities: The "devil dogs" know how to bite. The worries I encountered are focused on higher levels -- where this struggle will be won or lost.

Despite some brilliant work by our Special Forces, there's a sense that we're losing the information war -- that the Taliban is whipping a media superpower. Deep generational tensions have arisen between play-it-safe senior commanders and subordinate officers with field experience in information ops. As one source put it, "the real pros are the younger officers who've learned this over time . . . but seniors won't get out of the way and accept any risks."

Brave, capable field officers vs. risk-averse seniors? Must sound familiar to Vietnam vets. Our dirty-boots officers want to win, while too many senior commanders just hope to avoid losing on their watch.

Information warfare requires speed. The Taliban are fast and unscrupulous -- a powerful combination. We agonize over the opinions of staff lawyers before issuing dreary press releases that the Karzai government promptly undercuts. And Washington pols object to US "propaganda," preferring dead soldiers to offended enemies.

In waging the vital information battle, you've got to "git there fustest with the mostest." Far too often, we don't get there at all.

Our troops and officials have other worries as well. We've had a string of targeting successes, culminating in the death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud last week, but insiders fear that al Qaeda's remnants will move to take control of the reeling Taliban.

As a tough-minded veteran commented, "Our government needs to level with the people and portray radical Islam for what it really is . . . Compartmentalizing this fight into boxes like Afghanistan and Iraq simply cuts off our arms."

Instead, our nervous leaders insist that "Islam is a religion of peace," pretend that Afghanistan has a responsible government, invest $40 billion in aid to line the pockets of thieving Afghan officials -- and fight tactically against enemies with a powerful strategic vision.

Should we squander blood and billions in a mad attempt to make Afghanistan a model state? Or should we concentrate on destroying our enemies, wherever we find them?

Here's what one warrior thinks: "Our business is finding, capturing and killing radicals who, left alone, would conspire and attack our interests and homeland . . . The problem is global."

Our enemies think beyond borders. We've locked ourselves down in the Ozarks of the Orient. Once again, we have heroes on the ground and hustlers in Washington.

Last week, I unfairly compared Vietnam with the muddle in Afghanistan. Our Vietnam War made more sense.

Ralph Peters, NY Post, 8/14/09

Obamacare Kills Health Competition

PRESIDENT Obama has repeatedly said that one of his "reform" goals is to increase "competition and choice" in the US health-care system -- but the policies he's pursuing would actually reduce competition and give consumers fewer choices. Meanwhile, he's ignoring reforms that would bring more choices and competition.

The nation now has some 1,300 insurance companies, but most consumers actually have far fewer choices. An American Medical Association survey found that in 299 of 313 largest metro areas, one insurer controls at least 30 percent of the market.

In New York, just two insurers, GHI and Empire Blue Cross, represent 47 percent of the market. In New Jersey, a single insurer, Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield, controls 43 percent of the market. And in Connecticut, Wellpoint holds an astounding 55 percent.

There's nothing inherently wrong with one company earning a large market share, but the lack of significant competition helps contribute to higher insurance costs and poorer service. Moreover, this market concentration hasn't necessarily flowed from consumer preference in a free market, but results in good part from barriers to entry erected by state insurance regulation.

Obama's answer to this problem is to set up a new government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers. But such a plan will ultimately result in less competition, not more.

A government-run plan would have an inherent advantage in the marketplace, because it ultimately would be subsidized by taxpayers. The government plan could keep its premiums artificially low or offer extra benefits, because it could turn to taxpayers to cover any shortfalls.

Plus, the government plan also could use its market power to impose much lower reimbursement rates on doctors and hospitals -- Medicare and Medicaid do that now, to the point where they often pay less than cost. Providers would be forced to recoup the income lost thanks to the "public option" by raising what they charge to private insurance -- driving up premiums and making private insurance even less competitive.

In the end, the private-insurance market would be eviscerated, leaving millions of Americans with no choice but the government-run program. No choice. No competition.

To truly create more choice and competition, Obama should tear down the regulatory barriers to choice by letting people buy insurance from states other than the one in which they live.

Though few realize it, it's illegal to purchase health insurance across state lines. This effectively creates insurance cartels in each state.

Tear down this barrier to interstate commerce, and you'd instantly increase competition. If someone in New York or New Jersey is unhappy with the insurance choices available in that state, he or she could buy a policy in Vermont, Pennsylvania or Delaware. For that matter, he or she could go online and purchase a policy anywhere in the country.

There'd be another benefit as well. Different states have different regulations and mandates that can dramatically affect insurance costs. New Jersey, for example, requires insurers to cover a wide range of procedures and care, including in-vitro fertilization, contraceptives, chiropodists and children until they reach age 25.

Those mandated benefits aren't cheap. To buy a standard health-insurance policy, a healthy 25-year-old man must pay five times as much in New Jersey as in Kentucky, which has far fewer mandates. Why shouldn't Jersey residents be free to decide whether those state mandates are worth the added cost, and buy a cheaper policy in Kentucky or elsewhere?

Ironically, one group has this ability today: big businesses. The federal ERISA law (the Employee Retirement Income Security Act) lets larger companies ignore state mandates and avoid uncompetitive state markets: They can create their own plans, and their employees can take that insurance anywhere in the country.

Thus, when Jerry Hairston Jr. is traded to the Yankees, he doesn't have to buy a new health policy in New York. But the Yankee fan who works for a small business, or buys insurance on his own, is stuck with high New York prices.

More competition in insurance markets would be a good thing. It would, as the president likes to say, "keep insurers honest." As it has with other goods and services, it would lead to lower prices and improved quality.

But true competition comes from expanding free markets, not from the heavy hand of government. If President Obama truly wants to give consumers more choices, that's a lesson he should heed.

Michael Tanner is a Cato Institute senior fellow and the author of "Healthy Competi tion: What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It." NY Post, 8/13/09

'GREEN' CAR? TRY BLACKOUT CITY

SORRY, the new Chevrolet Volt does not promise a "green" revolution -- indeed, the car could trigger a whole new wave of blackouts.

Chevrolet notes that the key to high-mileage performance to the tune of 230 miles per gallon "is for a Volt driver to plug into the electric grid at least once each day" to get "40 miles of electric-only, petroleum-free driving."

But that won't be "petroleum-free" in much of the country -- because so many utilities use heavy fuel oil to generate that electricity.

At current electricity-production levels, these plants emit as much as hundreds of thousands of cars on the road each day. If a few thousand well-meaning dupes plug a few thousand new Chevy Volts into electrical outlets (especially in urban centers), you could actually add millions of pounds of dangerous, dirty, unregulated pollution and carbon into the air we breathe -- possibly more pollution than would be offset by putting the Volts on the road.

That's if the electricity grid can handle the added load. In fact, all across the nation, the grid is fragile, antiquated and maxed out.

Generation is tight in many areas, too. For decades now, federal and state governments have pandered to the "Not In My Backyard" lobby and tabled proposals to build desperately needed power plants.

By currying favor with a few constituents in the short term, these politicians have put the safety and security of our electrical supply at great risk. Meanwhile, new technologies vastly increase our demand for energy. Adding Volts to the list of devices that need to be plugged in will put a major strain on an already flimsy electrical supply and distribution infrastructure.

Here in New York -- a vertical city -- we have to be even more vigilant. Our local politicians love hare-brained green schemes; should they start pushing the Volt as a transportation "solution," they could very well push us over the electrical edge.

Think about it: New York City's elevators, water supply, air conditioners, computers and backup servers, subways and traffic lights all depend on a reliable electricity supply. Yet, even after terrorist attacks and blackouts, local politicians have put the whims of local NIMBY groups ahead of plans to even clean, green, state-of-the-art power-generating facilities.

Don't buy the hype. If you decide to put a Chevy Volt in your driveway, be prepared for the shock of your life when there's little or no juice to charge and drive it.

Adam Victor is president of TransGas En ergy (transgasenergy.com), which has been fighting the city and state for permission to build a new type of power plant in Greenpoint., NY Post, 8/13/09

Obama's Nazi Straw man: An Old Alinsky Trick

When I saw this video

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/08/12/white_house_people_are_showing_up_to_events_with_swastikas.html

interview of Bill Burton, White House Deputy Press Secretary, I could not help but be reminded of one of old Saul Alinsky's favorite fake-em-out tricks of the revolutionary trade. Burton is reinforcing Pelosi's earlier claim that people were carrying Swastikas at town halls, but goes even further and claims that folks are actually "dressing up like Hitler."

You got to give ole Saul a little credit. He was one wily deceiver, right after his hero, Deceiver in Spades, Lucifer.

Saul Alinsky, crusader for the downtrodden, darling of the Auxiliary Archbishop of Chicago, was just an underachieving nobody with neither guts nor moral code, who flummoxed a whole lot of willing-to-be-deceived power seekers. Saul Alinsky didn't invent a single new thing. His whole methodology, so widely-hailed by whole generations of leftists, could have been devised by any 12 year-old gang-style bully with half a brain and an ounce of charisma.

It's quite disheartening, now, to see the top echelons of the Democratic Party using Alinsky tactics in an attempt to freeze political dialogue, most especially when that dialogue is about the most intimate service we Americans procure for ourselves and our families: our medical care.

Nevertheless, they've decided to go at this whole hog, even if it means stripping off their dignity and parading their political bloomers right out in the public square.

When Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and now the president's own deputy press secretary conjure up images of Nazis at healthcare town halls, they are engaging in one of the oldest tricks in anyone's book, but an especial favorite of their mentor, Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky himself employed this method, quite deviously. Alinsky biographer, Sanford D. Horwitt provides an anecdote using precisely this same diabolical tactic to deceive the people. From Horwitt's Let Them Call Me Rebel:

"...in the spring of 1972, at Tulane University...students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations - a speech likely to include a defense of the Nixon administration's Vietnam War policies. The students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush's address. That's the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very creative - and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, ‘The KKK supports Bush.' And that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results."

Planting major falsehoods has been a favorite Alinsky strategy from the start. His acolyte, Barack Obama, learned his Industrial Areas Foundation lessons on deceiving for power while on a side trip during his Harvard years, then taught the Alinsky power tactics at the University of Chicago.

Hardly qualifies as ‘Constitutional Law' if you ask me.

Covering for oneself by accusing the other fellow has been the left's most successful deception for decades now. It took on its best traction lately, as leftists within Moveon.org and others have used this Nazi smear tactic for the past eight years against George W. Bush. They've seen how well it's worked and just can't stop themselves now.

Here's a little hint from me on the Nazi card. If a few folks actually do start showing up at town halls, opposing the MediCoup*, even dressed like Hitler and carrying a Swastika poster, I'll lay good hard cash on a bet that they've been sent by this Alinskyite President or his minions to deceive, just as Saul did with getting students to dress like the KKK at that rally back in the 70s.

And any newsman worth an ounce of table salt ought to be able to pin the tail right on that Alinsky donkey.

*MediCoup is a term coined by writer, James Lewis, right here on American Thinker.

Kyle-Anne Shiver, American Thinker, 8/13/09