Help or Hurt?

Big Business Goes Big for Health-Care Reform

By John Stossel

"What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand," Frank Rich wrote in Sunday's New York Times.

That manipulation should disturb us. But contrary to Rich, it is not the work of "corporatists" who have sprung up to attack progressive reforms proposed by Obama and the Democratic majority. Manipulation is what we got many years ago when we traded a more or less free market for the "progressive" interventionist state. When government is big, the well-connected always have an advantage over the rest of us in influencing public policy.

Observe: Although President Obama and big-government activists demonize health-insurance companies, the companies "are still mostly on board with the president's effort to overhaul the U.S. health-care system," the Wall Street Journal reports; and ...

Although the activists criticize Big Pharma, "The drug industry has already contributed millions of dollars to advertising campaigns for the health care overhaul through the advocacy groups like Healthy Economies Now and Families USA. It has spent about $1 million on similar advertisements under its own name," the Times reports.

Big Pharma and Big Insurance want Obama-style health-care reform?

It's not so hard to understand. "The drug makers stand to gain millions of new customers," the Times said.

And from the Journal: "If health legislation succeeds, the [insurance] industry would likely get a fresh batch of new customers. In particular, many young and healthy people who currently forgo coverage would be forced to sign up." No wonder insurers are willing to stop "discriminating" against sick people. (Forget that the essence of insurance is discrimination according to risk.)

Not that Big Pharma and Big Insurance like every detail of the Democratic plan. Drug companies don't want Medicare negotiating drug prices -- for good reason. If it forces drug prices down, research and development will be discouraged. (Depending whom you believe, Obama may or may not have agreed with the drug companies on this point.)

As for the insurance companies, they worry -- legitimately -- that a government insurance company -- the so-called public option" -- would drive them out of business. This isn't alarmism. It's economics. The public option would have no bottom line to worry about and therefore could engage in "predatory pricing" against the private insurers.

But despite these differences, the biggest companies in these two industries are on board with "reform."

It illustrates economist Steven Horwitz's First Law of Political Economy: "No one hates capitalism more than capitalists". In this case, big business wants to shape -- and profit from -- what inevitably will be an interventionist health-care reform. Can you think of the last time a major business supported a truly free market in anything?

In light of all this, it's funny to watch Democrats and their activist allies panic over the protests at congressional town meetings around the country. Tools of the corporate interests! they cry. But anyone opposing "socialized medicine" at the meeting can't be a mouthpiece for big business because, as we've seen, big business supports government control. Conservative groups may be encouraging people to vent their anger at congressmen who pass burdensome legislation without even bothering to read it, but that's no reason to insult the protestors as pawns. What's wrong with organizations helping like-minded people to voice their opinions? Why do Democrats, such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, dismiss citizen participation as "AstroTurf" -- not real grassroots -- only when citizens oppose the kind of big government they favor?

They weren't so dismissive when George W. Bush was president and people protested -- appropriately -- his accumulation of executive powers.

"When handfuls of Code Pink ladies disrupted congressional hearings or speeches by Bush administration officials," Glenn Reynolds writes, "it was taken as evidence that the administration's policies were unpopular, and that the thinking parts of the populace were rising up in true democratic fashion. ... But when it happens to Democrats, it's something different: A threat to democracy, a sign of incipient fascism ... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls the 'Tea Party' protesters Nazis. ... "

So when lefties do it, it's called "community organizing."

When conservatives and libertarians do it, it's "AstroTurf."

Give me a break.

A question of trust

Guiding Peugeot-Citroën through the recession will be hard. Philippe Varin must get along with the owners

IN APRIL the Peugeot family, which controls 45% of the voting stock of PSA Peugeot-Citroën, finally got its man. Nearly three years ago, after Jean-Martin Folz decided to retire early from running Europe’s second-biggest carmaker, Thierry Peugeot, the chairman of the group’s supervisory board, made a concerted attempt to woo Philippe Varin as Mr Folz’s successor.

Mr Peugeot knew what he was looking for: an experienced industrialist with an international outlook and a record of undertaking difficult turnarounds. Mr Varin seemed ideal. After a 25-year career at Pechiney, a big French aluminium manufacturer, Mr Varin had been hired in 2003 to sort out Corus, a troubled Anglo-Dutch steelmaker. In three years he had recapitalised a business that was almost worthless on his arrival, restructured the British half of the firm, returning it to profit, and apparently healed the divisions between British and Dutch managers.

Peugeot, for its part, was basically a sound company, but had been drifting for a few years. The firm was too reliant on just three models and its popular light vans. The average age of its line-up had risen to 4.2 years, elderly by the industry’s standards. Margins and market share were slipping, as was the quality of Peugeot’s vehicles—especially compared with those made by the relentlessly ambitious Volkswagen Group.

Tempting though the offer to spruce up one of France’s most important companies must have been, it came at a bad time. Mr Varin was near the end of the search for a partner that would give Corus the scale he believed it needed to prosper in an increasingly global market. After seeing off a late bid by CSN, a Brazilian steel firm, Tata Steel ended up paying £6.7 billion ($13 billion at the time) for Corus, an inconceivable price before Mr Varin’s arrival. But Ratan Tata, the patriarchal boss of the Tata Group, had made it clear that a condition of the deal was that Mr Varin stayed. Mr Varin says the choice was simple: “I had given Ratan my word.”

When Mr Peugeot decided that the time had come to remove Christian Streiff, the bullish manager PSA had hired in Mr Varin’s stead, he was not put off by Mr Varin’s earlier rejection. Far from it: the demonstration of loyalty had made him all the more attractive. Meanwhile, Mr Tata had offered Mr Varin a senior post in the Tata empire, but Mr Varin had declined, being unwilling to move his family to Mumbai. Although Corus was undergoing the pain of a wrenching cyclical downturn in demand for steel, Mr Varin felt he could leave with honour.

Peugeot was one of Corus’s biggest customers. But Mr Varin is new to the car industry, which is itself nearly a year into one of the most brutal crises in its history. Partly for that reason, he has so far struck a note of caution in outlining the changes he intends to make at Peugeot, sticking to the cost-cutting plans that were being implemented by Mr Streiff until his dramatic exit (the firm will shed 11,000 jobs this year). Last month Mr Varin presented results for the first six months of 2009. They were predictably awful in most respects: the car business lost €1.3 billion ($1.7 billion). Yet there was a pleasant surprise in the form of a much better cash position than the market was expecting, owing to the timely slashing of inventories and a €3 billion loan from the French government in exchange for keeping open factories in France that might otherwise have been threatened with closure.

Given that Mr Varin seems reluctant to deviate much from the path set out by his predecessor, it is worth asking why Mr Streiff was so unceremoniously fired. Among Mr Streiff’s achievements, he speeded up the introduction of new models, which has stabilised Peugeot’s market share in Europe, and created a promising premium sub-brand for Citroën. But for all his dynamism, Mr Streiff is not much good at “managing up”. In 2005 he fell out with Jean-Louis Beffa, his boss at Saint-Gobain, and a year later he lasted only 100 days in the hot seat at Airbus after rowing with the board of EADS, the aircraft-maker’s owner. It is widely believed that the Peugeot family tired of Mr Streiff’s autocratic ways and penchant for confrontation.

In Mr Varin, the Peugeots have a manager who is just as steely but whose approach is more inclusive. Whereas Mr Streiff would take umbrage at any perceived interference from the family-dominated supervisory board, the unflappable Mr Varin is tactfully enthusiastic about working with the Peugeots who, he says, bring with them a strong set of values, like Mr Tata. Among those are stability and a willingness to stick with a long-term vision. He adds: “I have what I asked for, which is to run the business, to deliver value and to maintain independence.”

Family matters

The issue of independence is one that will not go away. Compared with Renault and Fiat, for example, Peugeot is large enough—in a “normal year” it produces about 3.5m vehicles—to generate reasonable economies of scale and it is good at spinning multiple products off the same platform. Mr Varin says that he is open to deepening existing alliances with BMW, Ford, Fiat and Mitsubishi, but he is cool about a full-scale merger with another carmaker. History, he says, shows how difficult cross-border mergers in the car industry are and he doubts whether consolidation—the main reason for attempting such a deal—is politically possible in Europe.

Mr Varin’s views chime, naturally enough, with those of the Peugeot family. But if something more radical is required in the future, will Mr Varin be allowed to show the boldness he displayed at Corus? Much will depend on Mr Varin’s ability to manage the relationship with the Peugeots, and the Peugeots’ handling of him. A succession of able executives who have worked for two other great automotive dynasties, the Agnellis of Fiat and the Ford family, know the pitfalls only too well. In the end, it always comes down to trust—on both sides. Mr Varin has it for now, but keeping it will not be easy.

Taiwan and China

Reunification by trade?

A plethora of free-trade deals is driving Taiwan closer to China

FREE-TRADE agreements (FTAs) are often contentious but rarely would one have as much strategic significance as that proposed between China and Taiwan. On July 29th Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, elected last year on a platform of liberalising business restrictions and easing military tensions with the mainland, said a China-Taiwan trade pact should be signed as soon as possible. The two sides have quietly concluded months of unofficial negotiations and Taiwan’s economy minister, Yiin Chii-ming, says he wants formal negotiations to start in October. The island is in a hurry.

Mr Ma is willing to take the political risk of tying a self-ruled democratic island economically to its giant authoritarian neighbour because of the rest of the world’s craze for free-trade deals. Taiwan has diplomatic relations with 23 countries. Most nations recognise China and fear to sign FTAs with Taiwan lest they incur China’s wrath. Already, says Huang Chih-peng, the director general of Taiwan’s Bureau of Foreign Trade, the world’s 230-odd bilateral or multilateral trade pacts are harming the export-dependent island’s economy.

Mr Ma is even more worried about what will happen next year when trade agreements between China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations—so-called ASEAN+1—take effect. Taiwan’s exports to China face tariffs ranging from 5% to 15% and its government fears that, unless they are lowered, the island will be left at a competitive disadvantage in the giant Chinese market. This disadvantage would greatly worsen if a planned ASEAN+3 were one day signed, embracing South Korea and Japan.

Economic benefits, political costs

A think-tank commissioned by the government said the proposed pact could increase Taiwanese GDP by 1.65-1.72%—more if services and investment were included. In addition, it argued, the pact could increase foreign direct investment by $8.9 billion in seven years and create around 260,000 jobs (though other economists said this was too high). The president wants an outline agreement in place before ASEAN+1 comes into force, with the details worked out and implemented bit by bit after that. An incremental approach, officials say, is needed because an immediate FTA would be too disruptive to Taiwan’s economy.

Disruptive is right, but not perhaps mainly to the economy. China still asserts that Taiwan is an integral part of the People’s Republic. Many Taiwanese, including the pro-independence opposition party, fear that the proposed accord is really a ploy by China to bring about unification by stealth. They also argue that once the pact is signed, there is no guarantee that China will not lean on members of other FTAs to keep Taiwan out anyway. In contrast, Mr Ma insists that the proposed pact would make it easier for Taiwan to sign free-trade accords with third parties.

“It is a suicidal policy that makes Taiwan locked into China,” says Huang Kun-huei, the chairman of the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union. In a sign of the popular unease raised by the pact, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, which has virtually no parliamentary clout, still managed to collect over 120,000 signatories to a petition asking the government for a referendum on it (though Taiwan’s high threshold for referendum participation means that such a thing may not get off the ground).

In fact, dramatic political shifts seem unlikely in the short term. Mr Ma has promised that when the deal is negotiated, the wording will not compromise the island’s political stance. And China-watchers think the increasingly sophisticated government in Beijing is not likely to make heavy-handed political demands in case this rebounds on Mr Ma and he is voted out of office in 2012 (the Chinese much prefer him to the independence-minded opposition). Nevertheless, in the long run China hopes that economic interdependency and goodwill will eventually encourage the island to return to the fold. The trade pact will be a test of whether that hope can be fulfilled.

The Madoff affair

A sidekick sings

Frank DiPascali will help prosecutors understand the Madoff fraud

HOW did Bernie do it? With an old IBM computer, oodles of chutzpah and, it seems, help from multiple sidekicks. On Tuesday August 11th Frank DiPascali, the senior lieutenant in Bernard Madoff’s bogus fund-management business, admitted to fraud and was arrested. His willingness to confess and, apparently, to co-operate—in contrast to Mr Madoff, who went to jail insisting he acted alone—is a coup for prosecutors. They will waste no time going after the unidentified “other people” with whom Mr DiPascali says he and his boss perpetrated the scam.

Mr DiPascali was the main point of contact for investors, who ranged from Jewish charities to film moguls. He also oversaw the mechanics of the vast Ponzi scheme. It purported to be making steady, double-digit returns trading options on a share index. In fact, client funds sat in an account at JPMorgan Chase and were withdrawn only to meet redemptions or to be parked in Treasuries and the like. This was “nothing more than a slush fund”, according to the complaint against Mr DiPascali by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Though there was no actual trading, the conspirators were far from idle. They cooked up phantom trading records, client confirmations and account statements to corroborate the fictitious investment strategy. They made thousands of wire transfers between the firm’s London and New York offices to make it look like it was earning commissions from real transactions.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing when cooking the books. The complaint says that Mr DiPascali “picked advantageous historical prices, often near the lows, to create the appearance of a profit once the purported trade was booked.” A single computer was programmed to allocate trades, pro rata, to individual accounts.

Some of the ruses bordered on comical. Worried that returns were suspiciously high, Mr Madoff occasionally instructed Mr DiPascali to book fake trades designed to lose money. They even created a fake computer platform so that, should outsiders spring a surprise visit, they could be shown “real-time” trading.

Absurd, perhaps, but not amateurish. The two made full use of their deep understanding of the workings and oversight of stockmarkets to pull the wool over inspectors’ eyes. They created a list of counterparties that were unlikely to be checked on: European firms for American regulators, and vice versa. They pretended to exit their options-trading strategy and shift into Treasuries before the end of each quarter, to avoid having their fishy positions disclosed in investors’ filings. To hide the scale of the operation, which had thousands of accounts, they devised a subset of 10-25 “special” accounts, which they presented as their full universe of business. Why regulators swallowed this, when Mr Madoff was widely known to have had hundreds of clients, is a mystery.

Who else was involved? Prosecutors have filed charges against the firm’s accountant, who denies them. They are looking to build cases against certain investors and “feeder” funds that funnelled their money to Mr Madoff. But the most fertile territory could be the co-workers whose help would have been needed to handle the programming and the mounds of paperwork. In court, Mr DiPascali lamented becoming “loyal to a terrible, terrible fault.” In that, he was surely not alone.

Help or Hurt?

Small Government Caused Our Current Problems?

by Robert Higgs

As soon as I saw the headline of an August 10 article by financial columnist Peter Cohan, I knew that something was terribly wrong. It reads: "How did the politics of small government lead to big government bailouts?" This is akin to asking, How did the extinction of the elephants lead to Barack Obama's election as president? If you make a claim of the form "A caused B," but A never happened, then you are wasting your time by delving into the historical details of this bogus relationship.

Yet we continue to see one example after another of what suspicious readers may be tempted to view as the Big Lie that deregulation or other obliging government measures caused the present economic mess. I won't go so far as to characterize this claim as a Big Lie. Although some its purveyors, acting out of partisan motives, surely know that they are blowing smoke, others may simply suffer from economic ignorance, analytical confusion, or loss of historical memory. In any event, the public is ill-served by commentators who purport to speak with authority about our current economic troubles and related government's policies, yet peddle this worse-than-sophomoric tale.

The Cohan article in question consists of so much nonsense that a full critique of it might be enough to compose a student's senior thesis, but the part that interests me right now is the claim that "the idea of small government . . . helped create the ineffective regulatory agencies which allowed all kinds of questionable practices to thrive in American business, especially in the world of finance. By helping create a record debt bubble, which thrived in an era of weak regulatory oversight, small government nearly ruined the global economy last fall."

So, there you have it in plain English. To repeat: "small government nearly ruined the global economy last fall." Cohan spares us any evidence that we actually had a small government at any time during the past twenty-five years. I would be especially interested in such evidence, inasmuch as I have written a number of articles and books brimming with evidence that in fact the governments of this country at every level were growing in size, scope, and power during those years.

Like Cohan, those who continually blame insufficient regulation for our present plight offer little or no evidence, relying instead on the implicit assumption that if only the regulations had been much stricter, the bankers and other business-sector malefactors never would have perpetrated their evil deeds. This faith in the regulators is touching, to be sure, but it is also extremely naïve. We now have – and long have had – miles of regulations on the books and legions of regulators at work in scores of government agencies. What specific power did they lack? And had they been given even greater powers, budgets, and staffs, what enchantment would have transformed these ostensible guardians into smart, dogged champions of the public interest, rather than the time-serving drones and co-conspirators with the regulated firms that they have always been?

Somehow, no matter how many regulations are created and how many regulators are put on the government payroll, when these rules and enforcement agents fail to prevent a disaster, many people's response is to propose that the government write more regulations and hire more regulators. If these advocates of expanded government intervention had been in New Orleans as it was being submerged under floodwaters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they no doubt would have proposed that the Corps of Engineers dynamite the remaining levies – to prove that they favored "doing something."

"Ironically," writes Cohan, "another Republican, Ben Bernanke . . . decided that in the midst of a catastrophic economic collapse . . . the prescription for the problem was the biggest government in American history." And thank goodness, too, he opines, because owing to all of the wonderful mitigation that the Fed's unprecedented actions have produced to soften and reverse this inexplicable, out-of-blue episode of financial panic and recession, "there is a good chance that historians will look back on Bernanke as the man who saved the world." I can't speak for all historians, of course, but speaking for one of them, I can guarantee that no such story will be disseminated under my name. On the contrary, by taking into account how the government and the Fed created necessary conditions for the financial bubble that burst last September – as many competent analysts have already shown, notwithstanding Cohan's disregard of their findings – we quickly appreciate that Bernanke's supposed world-saving would never have been deemed necessary had he and others in high government places not done so much to place the world in jeopardy in the first place.

Never one to linger over a single piece of nonsense when another beckons, Cohan proceeds without transition to the question, "How do we keep this from happening again?" To which his amazing answer is: "The most important way is to change how bankers get paid." Oh, sure, that will turn the trick. Never mind the government's countless measures from the 1930s onward to steer money into mortgage loans to borrowers with little likelihood of repaying them. Never mind the massive efforts of the government-sponsored giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to create secondary markets for rotten mortgage-related IOUs galore. Never mind the Fed's pumping up of the real-estate bubble by rapidly expanding credit and holding interest rates at absurdly low levels for years on end. Never mind all of this and a great deal more. Simply change how bankers get paid, and the sun will shine on us again.

"We [by which Cohan seems to mean the government] need to change banker's pay so that they only get rewarded if their risks are profitable," he declares, "and punished if they lose money." Some readers might find this idea appealing, if they don't spend much time thinking it through. In truth, however, the government already plays too large a role: if the government and the Fed did not stand in the background, ready and willing to bail out reckless bankers, the bankers would act a great deal more prudently, as would their boards of directors when deciding how to compensate the managers. Moreover, I venture to remind our financial guru – who is described as the president of a consulting and venture-capital firm, a management teacher at Babson College and the author of eight books – that how bankers get paid lies properly within the domain of the banks' boards of directors. It's really none of my business, or his.

In contrast, how the government and the Fed act is my business because they purport to act on my behalf, and even if they didn't so purport, they still act in many ways that harm me. So I'm entitled to hold them to account for their actions. As long as the Cohans of this world continue to blame private actors and "the idea of small government" for the economic disasters that the government and the Fed produce, however, we have little chance to clarify what might – and should – be done to remedy our plight and preclude serial repetitions of such destructive actions.

Not content with having embraced several stupendously erroneous and misguided ideas, Cohan plows to an equally dim-witted conclusion by declaring that besides setting the compensation of bankers, the government should establish "an independent government agency to create financial statements for companies and money managers." Sure. Let the government keep the accounts. After all, the government has a flawless record of keeping honest accounts and scrupulously avoiding multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi schemes, such as Social Security, and pie-in-the-sky promises, such as Medicare that stretches to the limits of the known financial universe. The Department of Defense, which since 1994 has been required by law to perform an annual financial audit, has yet to perform one. Each year a DoD accounting functionary dutifully testifies before Congress that the department's accounts are in such a mess that its records cannot be audited. Is this the kind of financial-accounting proficiency we want to impose on the private sector? Cohan thinks so.

Got a problem? Just give the government a great deal more power, and our friendly, competent rulers will take care of everything. I shudder to think that columnists may actually get paid for spouting such childish twaddle.

Obama Failed to Master Alinsky's Rule #12

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

Alinsky's 12^th Rule of Tactics: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying, ‘You're right - we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.'

Why is President Barack Obama suddenly drowning in a sea of widespread resistance to his centerpiece legislation? Because it has now become quite clear to Harry & Louise Q Citizen that this was a man without a "constructive alternative" to the out-of-control healthcare system he has badgered and rhetorically beaten bloody to a pulp.

Obama himself, Organizer in Chief, had no plan. He proposed no plan to Congress. He has let committee after committee of witless tax-and-spend, haggard old liberals write the convoluted mess they're calling healthcare reform, and has virtually done nothing for own his part but bash the insurance companies, the doctors and even the patients, who ask for individual control over their own life-and-death choices.

This, dear readers, is the fundamental difference between an empty-suited celebrity and a nuts-and-bolts executive: flim-flam artistry vs. substance and real results.

Barack Obama, the eternal campaigner, held a healthcare townhall, which even Helen Thomas and her just-as-liberal cohort, Chip Reid of CBS, called "orchestrated," "tightly-controlled," and seemingly "less transparent" than any previous White House occupants had ever dared. The questions posed to the President, it's now quite obvious, must indeed be orchestrated because he is tasked with selling legislation that he himself has neither read nor understands. And the worst of this becoming-nastier-by-the-day conundrum is that the whole cockamamie plan is built upon a disastrously failed European-socialist model, which has proven again and again and again to raise costs, lower quality and ration care. The only real difference seems to be that the Democrats' plan will allow those already at the table to reap even more profits than before, and we will be the ones footing the outrageous tab.

The President trips over his explanations with one real gaffe after another because he utterly failed to master Alinsky #12 before we allowed his ascension to the power-perch in the highest office in the land.

This Obama failure to form workable solutions to gigantic problems should come as no surprise to any American. When a supposedly literate public elects a man to the most powerful position in the universe upon a resume that would fit neatly upon the back of a postage stamp, the result is easily predicted long before Inaugural Day.

Honey, even a nitwit knows that when a president must hire out his real job to 32 czars, he was never CEO material.

When Saul Alinsky's early observers voiced the concern that he was building a host of agitated mobs, who could be overtaken and controlled by a skillful "fascist demagogue," those fears were well-founded.

What happens when a stranger to one's community comes in from nowhere and begins to ingratiate himself with the locals, with the sole intention of forming a political body of disgruntled folks, ready to demand from their government whatever the organizer tells them they really need?

The result of such a deceitful maneuver is a lot of very angry people, making demands without a single clue that the organizer knows what he's talking about. If he were truly one of them, if they had known him all his life, if he lived down the street and had grown up among them, they would know whether his words could be trusted, whether his intentions were truly good and whether he had the real smarts to lead them.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a perfect example of a true leader, and the antithesis of an Alinskyite community organizer. Dr. King wasn't leading a movement of complete strangers. Nor was he dropped into Atlanta by a gang of professional troublemakers, intent on gaining political power. Dr. King, and his father before him, were echelons of the black, upper-middle-class community in Atlanta. They had lifelong friends in every black community south of the Mason-Dixon. They were so well-known, so utterly respected by all, that when Martin spoke, people - black and white alike - knew there was absolute substance behind his thunderous voice. Even the Democratic Party racists who opposed him, gave him grudging private respect.

King had no need of deceptive Alinsky tactics; he had moral authority steeped in roots going back generations in the same home town.

Such is not at all the case with what Alinsky euphemistically called the "community organizer." A community organizer is by definition an outsider, someone hired not by the community itself, but by outside political operatives attempting to gain a foothold in the community.

Precisely the way a young Barack Obama was hired by outsiders to infiltrate a Southside Chicago community in the late 1980s.

Barack Obama dropped in for a few years on the Southside of Chicago. Rather than actually doing anything to improve the community where he was sent to "work," he made political friends and established a political base from which to launch his Organizer in Chief presidential campaign. His chief liaison from those days was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., a very influential friend of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington.

By the time Barack Obama returned from his sojourn at Harvard Law to his adopted home base of Chicago, he was no longer a man who wasn't sent by anyone. He was a political somebody, about to launch a meteoric rise to a job for which he is utterly unprepared. And this sad fact shows itself more apparent with every passing day.

When Bill Clinton put forth the notion of Barack Obama as a "fairytale" and was trounced for it, Democrats should have listened. They now have a man in the office of the presidency, for whom they must provide cover every single day. Why? It's simple. Barack Obama mastered Alinsky tactics of campaigning for power and working the crowds down to the last little letter, but he absolutely has no plan of governance, no workable solutions, and can't even talk about such things without a live-feed teleprompter glued to each hip.

Leaders don't fall from the sky without proof they ever made friends and dated girlfriends and earned grades and had businesses and wrote papers, folks. Leaders have visible trails; they have made a record of their successes and proudly show them whenever asked. Barack Obama resides in the White House without ever showing a shred of genuine evidence that he is the greatly-gifted man he and his media sycophants say he is. And 52% of the American electorate has bought this faster than they would buy a used car from a slick-suited salesman on a shady lot.

Suckers United for Change. Wow. I'm impressed.

Dr. Obama? I would sooner trust Dr. Frankenstein.

Hannity - 8/11/2009: Toomey questions cost of health care

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

JACK MCLAMB - La Nazificación de la Nación

Blaming 'Cable TV'