The Vetting, Part I: Barack's Love Song To Alinsky

Prior to his passing, Andrew Breitbart said that the mission of the Breitbart empire was to exemplify the free and fearless press that our Constitution protects--but which, increasingly, the mainstream media denies us.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – “Who guards the guardians?” Andrew saw himself in that role—as a guardian protecting Americans from the left’s “objective” loyal scribes.

Andrew wanted to do what the mainstream media would not. First and foremost: Andrew pledged to vet President Barack H. Obama.

Andrew did not want to re-litigate the 2008 election. Nor did he want to let Republicans off the hook. Instead, he wanted to show that the media had failed in its most basic duty: to uncover the truth, and hold those in power accountable, regardless of party.

From today through Election Day, November 6, 2012, we will vet this president--and his rivals.

We begin with a column Andrew wrote last week in preparation for today’s Big relaunch--a story that should swing the first hammer against the glass wall the mainstream media has built around Barack Obama.

The Kochs and Cato. Would Koch control doom the Cato Institute?. By Patrick Brennan

No one knows quite how the Koch brothers’ recent lawsuit to take shareholder control of the Cato Institute will end, but it seems fair to say that it will seriously wound both parties, and thus, the libertarian cause.

Charles Koch founded Cato in 1977, in conjunction with the institute’s current president, Ed Crane, and supplied the seed money (since then, the Kochs have provided approximately 8 percent of Cato’s donations). A shareholder’s agreement was drawn up, allocating shares equally to four men: Charles Koch (who later left the institute); Ed Crane; economist William Niskanen; and George Pearson, a Koch ally who later transferred his shares to the Kochs. Thus, the Kochs currently control half of Cato’s shares. But Niskanen passed away in October, and his wife essentially now controls his shares. The Kochs have filed a suit in Kansas to the effect that these shares should have reverted to Cato or been offered to the shareholders — giving the Kochs majority control of the institute.

Infinite Affirmative Action?

In Eric Holder’s world, the need for racial preferences will never end.

By John Fund

Lee Bollinger interviews Eric Holder at Columbia University’s World Leaders Forum, February 23, 2012.

Listen to the Audio Version

John Fund

Later this year, the Supreme Court will review the constitutionality of the use of racial preferences in college admissions in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. The battle lines will once again be drawn over the meaning of the equal-protection provisions of the Constitution. So it’s noteworthy that Attorney General Eric Holder has just made it clear he’s never bumped into a racial preference he didn’t like, and that he sees no time limit on such policies.

Last month, in an appearance at Columbia University, his alma mater, Holder made a jarring statement in support of racial preferences, saying he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.” “Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” he declared. “The question is not when does it
end, but when does it begin. . . . When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”

By Jennifer Rubin

At the AIPAC conference yesterday President Obama insisted: “But as you examine my commitment, you don’t just have to count on my words. You can look at my deeds. Because over the last three years, as president of the United States, I have kept my commitments to the state of Israel. At every crucial juncture — at every fork in the road — we have been there for Israel. Every single time.” He declared that “if during this political season you hear some questions regarding my administration’s support for Israel, remember that it’s not backed up by the facts. And remember that the U.S.-Israel relationship is simply too important to be distorted by partisan politics. America’s national security is too important. Israel’s security is too important.”
But unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of facts that Obama left out of his gauzy recitation of his record on Israel. Dan Senor, Mitt Romney’s top foreign policy advisor, provides a helpful chronology detailing the Obama’s rocky relationship with Israel.
And anticipating that the president might leave a bunch of things out of his speech, the conservative Emergency Committee for Israel commissioned a 30-minute documentary of what you didn’t hear from Obama. It is worth the time to watch:

By Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, is a Republican candidate for president.

Beginning Nov. 4, 1979 , dozens of U.S. diplomats were held hostage by Iranian Islamic revolutionaries for 444 days while America’s feckless president, Jimmy Carter, fretted in the White House. Running for the presidency against Carter the next year, Ronald Reagan made it crystal clear that the Iranians would pay a very stiff price for continuing their criminal behavior. On Jan. 20, 1981, in the hour that Reagan was sworn into office, Iran released the hostages. The Iranians well understood that Reagan was serious about turning words into action in a way that Jimmy Carter never was.

It Just Ain't So. by Walter E. Williams

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 2011 manufacturing output grew by 11 percent, to nearly $5 trillion. Were our manufacturing sector considered a nation with its own gross domestic product, it would be the world's fourth-richest economy. Manufacturing productivity has doubled since 1987, and manufacturing output has risen by one-half. However, over the past two decades, manufacturing employment has fallen about 25 percent. For some people, that means our manufacturing sector is sick. By that criterion, our agriculture sector shares that "sickness," only worse and for a longer duration.

A Biblical Case for Ron Paul on Four Issues of Importance to Christians. by Michael Eversden

In the debate among Christians about who should be the Republican nominee for president, the discussion is unfortunately informed more often by the Gospel According to O’Reilly and the Book of Limbaugh rather than the Bible. I have therefore undertaken in this article to apply Biblical principles to four issues that are under discussion in this year’s presidential campaign, which are or should be important to Christians, including foreign policy, life, education, and monetary policy. I conclude that Ron Paul’s positions are by far the most consistent with Biblical principles and indeed that the other candidates have decidedly unbiblical views on these issues.

It Usually Ends With Ed Crane. by Murray N. Rothbard

This article was first published in the January-April, 1981 issue of Libertarian Forum, Vol. 14.1-2.

Purged from Cato!

On Black Friday, March 27, 1981, at 9:00 A.M. in San Francisco, the "libertarian" power elite of the Cato Institute, consisting of President Edward H. Crane III and Other Shareholder Charles G. Koch, revealed its true nature and its cloven hoof. Crane, aided and abetted by Koch, ordered me to leave Cato's regular quarterly board meeting, even though I am a shareholder and a founding board member of the Cato Institute. The Crane/Koch action was not only iniquitous and high-handed but also illegal, as my attorneys informed them before and during the meeting. They didn't care. What's more, as will be explained shortly, in order to accomplish this foul deed to their own satisfaction, Crane/Koch literally appropriated and confiscated the shares which I had naively left in the Cato Wichita office for "safekeeping," an act clearly in violation of our agreement as well as contrary to every tenet of libertarian principle.

The Stupid and the Dishonest Join the Attacks on Ron Paul. by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Yet another neocon Republican establishment political hack has demonstrated ignorance, deceit, and bad manners in yet another attack on Ron Paul. This time it is one Jeffrey Lord, a "contributing editor" to The American Spectator magazine. Writing in a January 15 article on the Philly.com Web site, Lord feigns outrage over the fact that five years ago Ron Paul told NBC’s "Meet the Press" that the Civil War was unnecessary to end slavery. Lord is being deceitful here by taking what Ron Paul said out of context. I remember Ron Paul’s appearance on that show, and the point he was making was that all the rest of the world – the British, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, the Northern states in the U.S. – ended slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century. His point was that we should have done what the British did, and used tax dollars to purchase the freedom of the slaves and then ended it forever. That, Said Ron Paul, would have been preferable to a war that ended up killing over 650,000 Americans (850,000 according the the very latest historical research) while destroying a large part of the U.S. economy. Lord is obviously ignorant of all of this history.

Ayatollah Santorum the Sanctimonious (ASS). by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

In a January 18 interview with Glenn Beck Rick Santorum decided to compare his view of the Constitution with that of Ron Paul. His statements can only be described as delusional and totalitarian.

Santorum first claimed to have read an eighteenth-century dictionary that defined happiness as "to do the morally right thing." This is how the founding fathers defined happiness, he said. This is Santorum’s definition of "happiness," not the founding fathers. It’s a good bet he is lying when claiming to have read an eighteenth-century dictionary. (But I suppose anything is possible with a man who brought his deceased infant home who died two hours after birth and slept with it after showing it to his children, as Santorum admits to have done).

Charles Koch Makes a Good Point by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The word on the street (K Street, that is) is that Charles Koch's lawsuit against the CATO Institute is motivated by his desire to abandon what he once believed was a potentially successful Grand Strategy and replace it with a different institutional strategy. The Grand Strategy was explained to me back in the early 1980s by Richard Fink, the longtime head of the Koch Foundation, when we were both young assistant professors of economics at George Mason University (and before Richie was with the Koch Foundation). The strategy was to use institutions such as George Mason to educate undergraduate and graduate students in free-market economics who would then work for various arms of the Kochtopus, for members of congress or the executive branch, or become journalists or elected officials themselves. In other words, the strategy was all about influencing or taking over the Washington Establishment.

The Future of the Euro

by Philipp Bagus

The problems of the eurozone are ultimately malinvestments. In Greece these days the struggle continues about who will ultimately foot the bill for these investments. During the early 2000s an expansionary monetary policy lowered interest rates artificially. Entrepreneurs financed investment projects that only looked profitable due to the low interest rates but were not sustained by real savings. Housing bubbles and consumption booms developed in the periphery.

Regulatory-Industrial Complex

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

[The Left, the Right, and the State (1990; 2008)]

Socialists want socialism for everyone else, but capitalism for themselves, while capitalists want capitalism for everyone else, but socialism for themselves.
Neither Ted Kennedy nor Jane Fonda practices a vow of poverty, nor are they taking any homeless into their mansions, while too many big companies try to short-circuit the market with government privileges. And one way they do it is through the regulatory agencies that acne Washington, DC.

Stealing Assets, Ensuring Poverty. by Douglas French

Here in South Africa there is plenty of talk of nationalizing the nation’s mines, especially the country’s platinum mines. After all, SA is no longer the world leader in gold production, while the country still produces 80% of the world’s platinum. In fact platinum group metals (PGM) account for the bulk of SA’s mineral value.
However, as Nazmeera Moola points out in her “economic viewpoint” column in the February 24th Financial Mail, PGM production has been falling since 2007 at the same time profit margins fell, despite elevated prices. Ms. Moola writes that margins dropped 5-10 percent last year from the previous year, with rising wage and electricity costs to blame.

The State Is a Harsh Mistress

by David Masten

When I mention that I believe that it is not the proper role of government to subsidize research in space technology, the looks I receive from my fellow aerospace engineering classmates seem to suggest that they want to send me to the dark side of the moon (on the taxpayers' dime).
If there's one libertarian position that is exceedingly difficult to argue, it is the notion that scientific research should not be the concern of the state. This essay will focus on outlining two possible approaches that may allow my dear reader to explain free-market space technology to an outsider without sounding like a green-eyed Martian. These are as follows:

Who Were the Cameralists?

by Murray N. Rothbard

[An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]

In contrast to Great Britain, the German-speaking countries were predictably highly resistant to the spread of Smithian views. They had been ruled, ever since the late 16th century, by cameralism. Cameralists, named after the German royal treasure chamber, the Kammer, propounded an extreme form of mercantilism, concentrating even more than their confreres in the West on building up state power, and subordinating all parts of the economy and polity to the state and its bureaucracy. Whereas mercantilist writers were generally pamphleteers scrambling for some particular form of state advantage, the cameralists were either bureaucrats in one of the 360 tyrannical German states, or else university professors advising the princes and their bureaucracy how best to maximize their revenue and power. As Albion Small put it: to the cameralists

Seventeen Years of Boom and Bust

by Clyde W. Richey

The Federal Reserve must bear responsibility for our current recession. The seeds for this recession were clearly planted in 1995 and led to unsustainable booms and busts, and later to high unemployment, increased consumer prices, failed companies, and increased debt. Appropriate at this time is an overview of the Federal Reserve's booms and busts and the shocking similarities with those of the banks before the Federal Reserve was in existence — and a consideration of actions for prevention of these destructive booms and busts in order to establish a more healthy economy.

How I Would Not Lead the World Bank

Do NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, pick me.

BY WILLIAM EASTERLY

I am gratified by the widespread support that my non-nomination for World Bank president has received. My quest to help end poverty has led me to the ends of the Earth. My accomplishments speak for themselves, having successfully offended every official or interest group in any way connected to the World Bank, even the head of maintenance.

Putin cracks down on Moscow's protesters before the victory tears are dry on his face.

BY JULIA IOFFE

MOSCOW — When Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov left Pushkin Square Monday night, the crowd -- estimated by the police at 14,000 -- was just starting to disperse. They had stood for two hours in sub-zero temperatures, not 24 hours after Vladimir Putin wept after sweeping to victory in Sunday's presidential race with 63.6 percent of the vote. They had listened to speeches from the whole gamut of the opposition -- the leftists, the nationalists, Alexey Navalny, Mikhail Prokhorov, all had their turn at the microphone. They chanted "Putin is a thief!" and "We are the power!" They weren't as cheerful as they'd been in past protests, but they were peaceful, despite the crowd of Putin supporters that had arrived from central casting.

Yes, the U.S. economy is addicted to oil -- selling it.

BY STEVEN R. KOPITS |

The United States now faces a daunting challenge: The world's crude oil supply has been flat for years, even as emerging economies demand ever greater quantities. To prosper in this environment, the United States will have to make progress in using fuel more efficiently faster than emerging economies can bid away the oil supply. All of which raises the question: Can we live without oil?

Suicide attack on Afghan NATO base where Korans burned

Afghan policemen investigate at the site of a suicide bomb attack in Nangarhar province, March 5, 2012. REUTERS/Parwiz

KABUL | Mon Mar 5, 2012 10:26am EST

(Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed at least two civilians Monday after detonating explosives at the gates of the NATO base where copies of the Koran were burned, Afghan officials said.

Tell the Truth Already!

by Kelley B. Vlahos

“Dismounted complex blast injuries” caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan are felling our soldiers and Marines so frequently today that men are routinely banking their sperm as another item on the checklist before they deploy for the war.
They’re doing that because a dismounted complex blast injury — now being called the “new signature wound” of the Afghan conflict — can not only cause the amputation of multiple limbs, but often results in irreversible genital and pelvic injuries, meaning urinary tracts, genitals and bowels are being destroyed even as the victim stays alive.

(Reuters/Umit Bektas)

Emergency amputations in these cases sever the legs so close to the hip that it’s sometimes impossible to fit a prosthesis, and sexual function is gone forever.

Obama’s Red Line

War with Iran has just gotten more likely

by Justin Raimondo

“We’ve got Israel’s back” – that is the message President Obama sent out ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the US for a crucial summit at the White House, and he did it in an interview granted to one of the leading pro-Israel voices in the media, Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli prison guard and IDF soldier, now a columnist for The Atlantic. In that interview, Obama basically telegraphed his capitulation to the Israelis, who are demanding the establishment of “red lines” Iran may not cross without provoking an attack:
“[O]ur assessment, which is shared by the Israelis, is that Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain a nuclear weapon without us having a pretty long lead time in which we will know that they are making that attempt.”

The Balkanization of America 2/3

The Balkanization of America 3/3

The Joke That Is The American Presidential Race

In Russia, thousands protest presidential election results

At least 20,000 gather in Moscow to accuse Russian leader Vladimir Putin of stealing the vote. Hundreds of protesters are arrested in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Russian protesters accuse Vladimir Putin of stealing the presidential election.

By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Moscow—

With police helicopters hovering low over central Moscow and security forces blanketing the streets, at least 20,000 protesters gathered Monday to accuse Vladimir Putin of stealingRussia's presidential election and demand his immediate resignation.

File photo: Rush Limbaugh. (Associated Press)

By Rene Lynch

Rush Limbaugh is probably not sweating this one, folks. The critics keep piling on. But the immensely popular talk radio host has the biggest "sponsor" of all on his side: Clear Channel radio network.

Mexico's former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, hopes to ride back to power behind Enrique Pena Nieto, its handsome young presidential candidate, and a rejuvenated image. (Alexandre Meneghini, Associated Press )

By Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Mexico City—

Tuesday, March 6, 2012