Since the buzz is starting, I thought Corner readers might be interested in what Tom Wolfe had to say about the book: [Jonah Goldberg]

The Corner – national Review Online - link to original

“In the greatest hoax of modern history, Russia’s ruling “socialist workers party,” the Communists, established themselves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialist German Workers Party (quicknamed “the Nazis”) and Italy’s Marxist-inspired Fascisti, by branding both as “the fascists.” Jonah Goldberg is the first historian to detail the havoc this spin of all spins has played upon Western thought for the past 75 years, very much including the present moment.  Love it or loathe it, “Liberal Fascism” is a book of intellectual history you won’t be able to put down—-in either sense of the term.”
—Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons

By Jack Kelly

Real Clear Politics – September 13, 2009 – link to original

Around midnight on the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend, the White House announced Van Jones had resigned as President Obama’s “green jobs czar.”

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Mr. Jones said in his resignation letter. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

The “lies and distortions” consisted of reporting Mr. Jones’ arrest during a riot, and quoting, accurately, from statements Mr. Jones had made and from petitions he had signed.

Mr. Jones was arrested during the rioting in Los Angeles in 1992 that followed the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King. Mr. Jones spoke of that experience in a 2005 interview with a newspaper in the San Francisco Bay area:

“I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28, and then the verdicts came down on April 29,” he told the East Bay Express. “By August, I was a communist.”

Mr. Jones attributed his conversion to the people he met during his incarceration:

“I met all these radical young people of color, I mean really radical, communists and anarchists,” he told the East Bay Express. “It was like ‘this is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next 10 years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.”

Mr. Jones was arrested again in 1999 during the anti-free trade riots in Seattle.

In 1994, Mr. Jones was one of the founders of STORM, a Marxist-Leninist group whose hero was Chinese Communist dictator Mao Tse Tung.

But what did Mr. Jones in was the revelation that in 2004 he had signed a petition calling on then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to investigate whether the Bush administration had been behind the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Mr. Jones acknowledged he’d signed the petition but claimed he hadn’t read it carefully and that it did not represent his views. The veracity of this claim was called into question when it was reported that Mr. Jones had been one of the organizers of a “truther” rally in San Francisco in January 2002.

Reporters also uncovered a number of racist statements Mr. Jones has made, including this one from January of last year: “the white polluters and white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities.”

With the exception of the indefatigable Jake Tapper of ABC News, none of those who reported these things were part of the “mainstream” media. The first time that readers of The New York Times or The Washington Post, or viewers of CBS News or NBC News, were made aware there was a controversy about Mr. Jones was when they reported his resignation.

It was chiefly blogger Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit) and Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck who dug up the details of Mr. Jones’ colorful past. To do so, they utilized that newfangled instrument called “Google,” with which reporters for the Times and Post seem to be unfamiliar.

The Obama administration would like to have the controversy over Mr. Jones end with his dead-of-night resignation. But it should be just beginning.

Jeffrey Lord, who was a speechwriter in the Reagan administration, noted that in administrations past, the Secret Service would not have permitted someone with Mr. Jones’ background to enter the White House with a visitor’s pass. Yet Mr. Jones was made a high-level appointee with considerable influence.

For Mr. Jones to get a White House job, even more senior aides to President Obama either had to be unaware of his background, or indifferent to it. The former suggests an appalling degree of incompetence. The latter is more likely:

“Ooh. Van Jones. We were so delighted to recruit him to the White House,” White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told a conference of left-wing bloggers last month. “We were watching him … for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland.”

Did the Secret Service object to Van Jones? If so, who overrode them? What did the president know and when did he know it?

These are questions which ought to be asked. But I doubt anyone from CBS or NBC, The New York Times or The Washington Post will ask them.

by Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe –  link to original

August 27, 2009

On the morning after Senator Edward Kennedy died, the Boston Globe’s op-ed columnists were each asked to write a short piece reflecting on his life. My contribution appears below. To read the others, by Joan Vennochi, Derrick Z. Jackson, and Scot Lehigh, as well as guest columns by Alan Wolfe and Martin F. Nolan, please visit www.boston.com/opinion.

BY MY LIGHTS, Ted Kennedy was wrong about most of the great issues of our time.

Abroad, he failed to take seriously the stakes in the Cold War. “Today, with the exception of East Germany, Russia has no more satellites,” he wrote in 1968, the year Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. He hailed Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet dictator, as “a warm individual . . . completely committed to peace.” He fought to cut off aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 — aid that might have prevented a horrific communist bloodbath.

In recent years he was willing to consign millions to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, opposing not only the 2003 liberation of Iraq but even the 1991 campaign to roll back the occupation of Kuwait.

In domestic policy, too, Kennedy supported much that I thought misguided, especially the burgeoning of the welfare state, the reckless expansion of entitlements, and the vast growth in federal power. Once I asked him if there was any legislation he regretted having supported. Yes, he said — he no longer favored some of the deregulation he had voted for.

“The natural progress of things,” said Thomas Jefferson, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Over the course of — and in great measure thanks to — Kennedy’s 46 years as a US senator, the yardage gained by the government was immense.

Yet I have always admired the power and sincerity with which Kennedy pressed his views. “Give him this: He knows what he believes in and doesn’t hide it,” I once wrote in a column. “Kennedy rarely frets about whether his stand on an issue is politically popular.”

Born into riches and influence, Kennedy could have lived a life of ease, indulging his appetites and paying scant attention to those far less fortunate. He chose a different life, and became a prodigious advocate for the deprived, the disabled, and the dispossessed. I didn’t always like his answers, but I honor him for caring so greatly about the questions.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

by Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe - link to original

August 30, 2009

“It is a paradoxical truth,” he once told the Economic Club of New York, “that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” What he had in mind, he said, was not “a ‘quickie’ or a temporary tax cut.” He wanted nothing less than “an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes.”

Those were not the words of Senator Edward Kennedy. The speaker – in December 1962 — was President John F. Kennedy, and his ringing call for tax cuts was no anomaly.

 

In a televised address from the Oval Office four months earlier, JFK had called high tax rates a danger to “the very essence of the progress of a free society: the incentive of additional return for additional effort.” In his 1963 State of the Union message, he said his first priority was “the enactment this year of a substantial reduction and revision in federal income taxes.” In the speech he was scheduled to deliver to the Texas Democratic State Committee on Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy planned to report proudly: “We have proposed a massive tax reduction, with particular benefits for small business.”

In recent days, Ted Kennedy has been justly acclaimed as a lion of the Democratic Party. But how different the party mourning Kennedy today is from the one that first nominated him in 1962!

The reversal on taxes is one vivid example. When Ted Kennedy entered the Senate in 1963, JFK was leading a campaign for sweeping tax relief that would eventually slash the top marginal rate by a huge 21 percentage points, from 91 to 70. But Democrats have long since become the party that resists lower taxes. In our era, it has been Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who have championed JFK-style rate cuts — cuts that Democrats now condemn as “tax breaks for the wealthy.”

On civil rights, too, there has been a sea change.

Liberal Democrats in the 1960s upheld the colorblind ideal — the conviction that Americans should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Far from supporting racial quotas and preferences, civil-rights Democrats of that generation flatly rejected them. Senator Hubert Humphrey famously vowed that if anyone could find anything in the 1964 Civil Rights Bill that would compel employers to hire on the basis of race or national origin, “I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.” In a 1963 press conference, President Kennedy explicitly opposed racial preferences: “We are too mixed, this society of ours, to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color.”

But in the years that followed, as such preferences became entrenched in hiring and education, liberal Democrats became their doughtiest supporters. Senator Kennedy was “a leader in congressional efforts to preserve federal affirmative action,” his Senate website notes. When the Supreme Court ruled against the racial classification of schoolchildren in a 2007 case — “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” the court frankly advised — Kennedy blasted the decision as one that “turns back the clock on equality.”

Especially dramatic has been the Democratic Party’s metamorphosis on foreign affairs.

“There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future: Let them come to Berlin,” declared President Kennedy, a staunch Cold Warrior, in his great Berlin Wall speech in 1963. “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists: Let them come to Berlin.” But by 1987, when another American president journeyed to Berlin to challenge Moscow to “tear down this wall,” such muscular anti-Communism had all but vanished from Democratic Party thinking.

JFK likewise spoke for mainstream Democrats when he asserted that America would “pay any price, bear any burden” to spread freedom and democracy in the world. He was a hawk who pressed for higher defense spending and American military superiority. The Democratic Party of more recent years — the party of “come home, America” and a nuclear freeze — was one he wouldn’t have recognized.

All political parties alter over time, of course. Today’s Republican Party is not a carbon-copy of Eisenhower’s: It is more internationalist, more religious, more Southern. But a resurrected Eisenhower would still recognize the GOP, and still command its esteem.

The Democrats’ transformation has been much more profound. Over the course of Ted Kennedy’s long Senate career, his party’s ideological center shifted hard to the left. It goes without saying that a JFK today could never be the Democrats’ candidate for president. The question is, would he still be a Democrat?

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. To follow him on Twitter, click here.)

Related Topics

• Defense and National Security
• Democratic Party
• Edward M. Kennedy
• National Politics
• Race and Affirmative Action
• Taxes

Weekly Standard – link to original

August 31, 2009

If readers have any questions about the validity of the Obama broom sweeping through Washington–clearing out the corruption and changing the way things have been done, putting the status quo and the special interests and the bad old ways on notice–THE SCRAPBOOK suspects the U.S. Senate has given them a definitive answer.

This month, after a yearlong “investigation,” the Senate Select Committee on Ethics dismissed complaints against Senators Christopher Dodd and Kent Conrad. The two senior Democrats had been accused of using their positions to obtain sweetheart deals on home loans from Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation’s largest purveyor of subprime mortgages, and whose ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo has been charged by the SEC with fraud and insider trading.

Dodd and Conrad had participated in a Countrywide program for prominent customers known as “Friends of Angelo,” which furnished special deals on mortgage refinancing for their homes. Indeed, Dodd took advantage of his Countrywide deal to refinance his residences in both Washington, D.C., and Connecticut, which reduced his mortgage payments by some $75,000.

The ethics committee exercised some tough love here. To be sure, it saw nothing wrong with the connection between the Countrywide deals for specially selected customers and Dodd’s status as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee or Conrad’s position as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Finance Committee. No, it didn’t. But it did criticize the senators for not exercising “more vigilance in your dealings with Countrywide in order to avoid the appearance that you were receiving preferential treatment based on your status as Senator.”

More vigilance–or else! Then the ethics committee opened up both barrels–on itself, taking the blame for not providing better “guidance” to the chairman of the Banking Committee and the chairman of the Budget Committee “about issues surrounding mortgage negotiations.”

The executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, which filed the original complaint against Dodd and Conrad, commented that the ethics committee’s astonishing action was “like a battered woman who explains she brought the beating on herself.” Which is certainly true, although THE SCRAPBOOK would add, with a touch of cynicism, that this latest Capitol Hill whitewash confirms the fraudulence of President Obama’s calls for “change” in Washington.

 

THE SCRAPBOOK would also add that the silver lining in this particular cloud is that Senator Christopher Dodd is facing reelection in Connecticut. Forty years ago his father, the late Senator Thomas Dodd, was sent into early retirement by the voters of Connecticut after censure by the Senate for corrupt practices. May the family tradition continue!

BY MATTHEW HAGGMAN AND JACK DOLAN

MHAGGMAN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

 

Miami Herald – 8/23/09 – link to original article

 

When Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez delivered his State of the County speech in February, he said the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression required government to “do more with less.” Budgets must be trimmed, jobs cut and waste eliminated.

“Make no mistake, we are in for some tough times,” Alvarez warned. “We are all in this together.”

Yet, three-and-a-half weeks after the speech, Alvarez gave an 11 percent pay raise to his chief of staff, Denis Morales.

The hike increased Morales’ salary from $185,484 to $206,783 annually; he also gets $18,720 in cash and executive benefits. The raise was backdated to Sept. 21, 2008, so Morales received the pay increase over the previous five months, too.

The result: his March 8 bi-weekly paycheck was for $17,281.

On the same day, the mayor gave a 15 percent raise to Robert Villar, his director of policy and legislative affairs, boosting his pay from $95,779 to $109,879. That increase, too, was backdated to September. The policy advisor’s March 8 county paycheck: $9,747.

At a time when he is publicly preaching austerity and shared sacrifice, Alvarez has quietly used taxpayer funds to shower his closest advisors — from his spokeswoman to his scheduler to his senior advisor — with significant pay increases, county payroll data and personnel documents reviewed by The Miami Herald show.

In all, 12 employees of the mayor have received raises of more than 10 percent since last year, the county’s payroll database shows.

Commissioners were kept in the dark.

In July Commissioner Sally Heyman requested from the mayor’s office “personnel salaries and executive benefits packages for each individual as they were on January 1, 2009 and what they are today.”

Heyman said she wanted to see which employees received raises this year, prompted by concern that a county pay cut would disproportionately affect lower-level workers if high-level staffers had recently pocketed handsome raises.

The documents produced for Heyman by the county mayor’s office — three pages of spreadsheets listing name, title and compensation — reflect neither Morales’ nor Villar’s pay raises.

BACKDATED RAISES

The sheet showed their pay on January and again in July. Since their March raises had been backdated to September, the sheet indicated that their pay had been static.

“What the mayor submitted to us is false, absolutely misleading. A lie,” Heyman said. “Everyone knew we were coming into tough times, yet now to find out he gave raises to his top staff — I find it appalling.”

Mayoral spokeswoman Victoria Mallette said it would have been “untruthful” to tell Heyman what Morales and Villar were actually paid the first two months of 2009, because the raises they got in March were classified as retroactive.

“I don’t see the discrepancy,” said Mallette, whose own pay increased 54 percent in 2008. “We are making absolutely no attempt to mislead anyone.”

Alvarez refused to be interviewed for this story. But in a written statement, he said: “Nothing nefarious has happened here.”

After the adoption of a strong mayor form of government — and merger of the mayor and county manager offices — Alvarez realized his executives were not paid as well as those working for the manager, he wrote.

“It became evident that the salaries of members of my senior staff — my inner circle — were disproportionate with other executives in government,” wrote the mayor, who is paid $245,393 annually, with a $99,554 benefits package.

County Manager George Burgess, for instance, is paid an annual salary of $345,515, plus $100,466 in cash and benefits. Assistant county managers like Cynthia Curry and Alina Hudak earn annual salaries of $253,768 and $258,967, respectively, with $18,720 in cash and benefits each.

“To rectify the disparity, I made the decision to adjust the pay of several key employees,” Alvarez said.

He did so despite declaring in his February speech that Miami-Dade leaders have long anticipated the economic storm battering South Florida.

“Two years ago, we saw the writing on the wall,” Alvarez said.

Across Miami-Dade County, private businesses are grappling with the searing recession by trimming budgets, freezing or cutting salaries, and laying off workers. The unemployment rate has doubled in the past year, rising to 11.6 percent.

Even the White House, where top aides are paid less than in Miami-Dade County, has frozen salaries. President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel earns $172,200 a year.

Miami-Dade County government confronts a $427 million budget gap. That hole has prompted Alvarez to propose both tax increases and cuts that include laying off 1,700 county workers, reducing pay 5 percent and scaling-back government services.

While merit raises are not frozen, the automatic annual cost of living increase — 4 percent last year — has been suspended.

County commissioners will vote on a new budget next month, in what promises to be their most heated tax and spending debate in years.

But as budget woes gather steam, the mayor has doled out raises to favored staffers and old friends. Alvarez, 56, has been a mentor to Morales, 43, for 30 years, including decades working together at the Miami-Dade Police Department.

Heyman wasn’t the only commissioner surprised by the news.

“I must have missed the press conference where he announced that,” Commissioner Carlos Gimenez said Friday, when he learned of the pay hikes from a reporter.

The two biggest winners are the mayor’s senior advisor, Luis Gazitua, and Mallette.

Gazitua, a 33-year-old attorney whose father contributed more than $30,000 — either personally or through business interests — to Alvarez’s strong mayor campaign, saw his salary jump 26 percent following a series of raises in 2008, the county payroll database shows. His salary increased from $81,094 to $85,072 in March. By July it bumped to $88,426.

Around that time, in June 2008, manager Burgess called for “significant reductions” in all departments because of declines in tax revenues.

Then in November, with no change in title, Gazitua received his biggest boost. His salary increased 15 percent, rising to $101,842. He also receives $10,170 in cash and other executive benefits.

County spokeswoman Mallette’s salary soared 54 percent through a series of three raises in 2008.

The first came in January, when her title changed from media relations manager to director of the Office of Communications. That boosted her paycheck by 10 percent, from $81,319 to $89,451.

The 4 percent cost of living bump in July brought her salary to $93,030.

Then in October, with no change to her title, she received a 34 percent raise that brought her salary to $124,999. Her executive benefit package also climbed from $10,170 to $18,720.

Mallette said she is “absolutely not” embarrassed by her pay. The Executive Office raises reward employees for “an overall increase in responsibility or to bring people into parity with other people who perform similar functions,” she said.

The month before Mallette’s big raise, Alvarez had hired Matthew Pinzur, a then 31-year old Miami Herald reporter covering County Hall, as a $115,000 per year assistant to the county manager.

Mallette said her responsibilities have increased dramatically since the adoption of the strong mayor system in 2004. Public records requests and complaints now come to her office, instead of a countywide media relations staff that once served the manager.

Mallette said she also writes the mayor’s speeches, from his annual State of the County address to comments at police graduations.

“Sometimes he’ll want speaking points, sometimes he’ll want a speech, sometimes he’ll just want notes. There are times when it’s just crazy,” she said.

These tasks fall to her even though taxpayers bear the cost of a $46,000 per year mayoral speechwriter. Mallette said the job title is a hold-over from the Penelas administration, and that speechwriter Eric Esteban responds to constituent letters, composes occasional talking points and updates the mayor’s Facebook page.

Morales and Gazitua did not respond to requests for comment. Villar referred questions to Mallette.

“As a general rule, I don’t feel comfortable going case by case through personnel decisions,” Mallette said, noting that some in the mayor’s office had been “woefully underpaid” for what they were doing.

“While [the raises] may seem like they were timed at the perfect time — as we were coming into tough times — they were a long time in coming.”

Yet the economic times are the very reason not to give such raises, some say. “For him to make these raises in this kind of economy is ludicrous. It is contempt for the electorate,” said developer Martin Z. Margulies, a critic of major county initiatives like the new ballpark.

Two secretaries in the mayor’s office got 14 percent raises last year. Another, Delivette Gonzalez, who controls access to the mayor, got a 9 percent raise to $105,418. She is listed in the database as his scheduler — the calendar on the mayor’s website shows two public events this month.

While key staff have gotten big raises, the overall budget for the mayor’s office could be on the way down. A spreadsheet provided by Mallette on Thursday indicates the mayor’s proposed budget would reduce his office staff from 62 to 59 employees next year, and the budget from $9.1 million to $8 million.

COMPLEX COUNTY

Plus, work at a county with a geographic footprint comprising more than 2,000 miles is more complex than many realize, Alvarez wrote in a separate statement posted on the county’s website last week.

“Too often to outsiders, high-paid executives become just names with salaries next to them,” the mayor wrote. “That’s unfair. You never truly know someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”

———————–

Similar Stories:

•

Miami-Dade mayor proposes sweeping pay cuts

•

Miami-Dade commissioners decline to set property tax rate

•

Raising property taxes is the last resort

•

Miami politics, pensions a tricky balance

•

West Miami officials to raise taxes, but residents will still see savings

——————————————

letsgofins09 wrote on 08/23/2009 08:46:31 AM:

 

Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot

From “Francisco’s Money Speech“ by Ayn Rand  

Democratic consultants profit – link to original article

Miami Herald – August 19, 2009

Consulting firms close to President Barack Obama and two top advisors are making money promoting a healthcare overhaul.

    WASHINGTON — (AP) — President Barack Obama’s push for a national healthcare overhaul is providing a financial windfall in the election offseason to Democratic consulting firms that are closely connected to the president and two top advisors.

    Coalitions of interest groups running at least $24 million in pro-overhaul ads hired GMMB, which worked for Obama’s 2008 campaign and whose partners include a top Obama campaign strategist. They also hired AKPD Message and Media, which was founded by David Axelrod, a top advisor to Obama’s campaign and now to the White House. AKPD did work for Obama’s campaign, and Axelrod’s son Michael and Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe work there.

    The firms were hired by Americans for Stable Quality Care and its predecessor, Healthy Economy Now. Each was formed by a coalition of interests with big stakes in healthcare policy, including the drug maker lobby PhRMA, the American Medical Association, the Service Employees International Union and Families USA, which calls itself ‘‘The Voice for Health Care Consumers.’’

    Their ads press for changes in healthcare policy. Healthy Economy Now made one of the same arguments that Obama does: that healthcare costs are delaying the country’s recovery and that changes are needed if the economy is to rebound.

    There is no evidence that Axelrod directly profited from the group’s ads. Axelrod took steps to separate himself from AKPD when he joined Obama’s White House. AKPD owes him $2 million from his stock sale and will make preset payments over four years, starting with $350,000 on Dec. 31, according to Axelrod’s personal financial disclosure report.

    A larger issue is a network of relationships and overlapping interests that resembles some seen in past administrations and could prove a problem as Obama tries to win the public over on healthcare and fulfill his promise to change the way Washington works, said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a government watchdog group.

    ‘‘Even if these are obvious bedfellows and kind of standard PR maneuvers, it still stands to undercut Obama’s credibility,’’ Krumholz said. ‘‘The potential takeaway from the public is ’friends in cahoots to engineer a grass roots result.’ ’’

    White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said that Axelrod has had no communications with Healthy Economy Now or with Americans for Stable Quality Care, and his payments aren’t affected by the ad contracts. Axelrod’s son, a salaried AKPD employee, doesn’t work with either coalition ‘‘or stand to benefit from that ork,’’ LaBolt said.

    Ken Johnson, a PhRMA senior vice president, said GMMB and AKPD were the only two firms working on the $24 million in ads. He declined to reveal how much each was paid beyond saying that each received a small percentage of the total.

    On Wednesday. a key Democratic committee chairman involved in talks on a compromise healthcare plan said they are on track to reach agreement. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he’d prefer a bipartisan deal but ‘‘patience is not unlimited.’’

RONALD REAGAN Exposes OBAMA’S Socialist HealthCare Scheme @ AARP TownHall Meeting!! - link to original video

Maxine Waters threatens to nationalize U.S. oil industries – link to video