Another scandal that could take Obama down

Sometimes the news seems stranger than fiction.

Who could dream up a plot line like this?

Several law enforcement agencies of the federal government, including the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, got together to hatch a plan to sell guns to Mexican drug cartel members – at least one of which was later used to murder a Border Patrol agent.

Can't be, right?

Wait a minute. It gets worse. It now appears the money used by the known criminals in Mexico was federal "stimulus" money.

I know. It's a nightmare. It's government gone wild.

Yet that is exactly what the aptly named "Project Gunrunner" seems to have been all about – with a scandal and ensuing cover-up big enough to bring down Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Members of Congress have been trying to investigate, but are getting no cooperation from Holder and the Justice Department. Apparently, the plan of the Obama administration was for the acting director of the ATF to take the fall. His name is Kenneth Melson – but he has other ideas.

Melson says he first found out about "Project Gunrunner" – also called "Operation Fast and Furious" – after the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, killed with a gun sold to the Mexican gangs by U.S. law enforcement personnel.

But after checking through the files on the program, Melson said he got "sick to his stomach" by what he found – the direct involvement of the FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, etc.

While Melson is talking to congressional investigators, Obama's buddy Holder is in full stonewalling mode. He won't give Rep. Darrel Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the time of day.

The Obama administration appears to have put together a sophisticated, inter-agency conspiracy to provide money to Mexican gangsters to purchase guns from the U.S. to kill federal agents, but it is not at all happy about explaining itself to the American people, the press or Congress.

Initially, Holder tried to dismiss the operation as a botched sting run by ATF to track and stop cross-border arms-trafficking. But that story is a dead letter after secret testimony provided by Melson on July 4 to congressional investigators.

Melson wanted to testify earlier, but Holder stopped him. Holder pressured Melson to quit his job and go away. But he's not having any part of that. He may have become Obama's worst nightmare after Jerome Corsi.

Try to picture this: Holder, the FBI, Homeland Security, DEA and ATF all get together to run a sting operation at least partly in a foreign country. Is it even conceivable that Obama would not have to be informed of such a plan? Not likely. This was an operation with international consequences. If Obama didn't know, whose fault is that?

And then we get into the question of what really might have motivated such an elaborate plot. Is the explanation we've received really plausible?

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Or is it more likely that the ideologically driven Obama administration, which detests the constitutionally protected right of every American to own and bear firearms, was actively participating in a diabolical political program to put U.S. guns into the hands of Mexican gangsters as part of a false flag operation that would be used to seize the guns of U.S. civilians?

The old line is that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Maybe not in this case. What could Holder be so afraid of revealing that he would lie to Congress (a crime in itself) to conceal? Chances are it's pretty bad – probably worse than my scenario.

Just so you don't think I'm making this up, here's what ATF investigators told members of Congress last month – that they wanted to "intervene and interdict" large numbers of guns at the border, but were ordered to step aside and let them fall into the hands of the drug cartel.

"Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals – this was the plan," John Dodson, an ATF agent, told the panel. "It was so mandated."

Agent Olindo James Casa said that "on several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms."

Do you see why I say this is another scandal that could bring Obama down?

Mona Charen A Wedding: Not Just for Royals

By the time you read this, Prince William and his bride, Catherine Middleton (who, depending upon the distribution of titles, may henceforth be known officially by the odd formulation "Her Royal Highness Princess William of Wales"), will have exchanged vows. The organ will have boomed the recessional. The royal carriage with its elegantly adorned and perfectly groomed horses will have paraded the happy couple through cheering crowds in a London bedecked with Union Jacks and flowers. And the guests in their finery will have feasted on a sumptuous wedding breakfast.

You needn't be a royal watcher to join whole-heartedly in the rejoicing at a wedding. And we should celebrate -- not because the principals are royalty, but because marriage itself badly needs reinforcing. For the past several decades, we've been conducting an experiment to determine whether marriage really matters all that much to society. The results are in. But the news hasn't yet been taken on board.

People like Kate and William (absent the title) -- college-educated, upper-middle-class strivers -- are not the ones who need reminding about the importance of marriage. Among the upper middle class, marriage continues to be the norm. Among the lower middle class, though, marriage rates have collapsed.

This has created a cultural gulf between classes in America that affects every aspect of life and arguably threatens the cohesion of America itself. This territory has been explored by Kay Hymowitz in her 2006 book, "Marriage and Caste in America," as well as by scholars like Sara McLanahan, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, among others. Charles Murray's forthcoming book, "Coming Apart at the Seams," which he previewed in a recent lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, examines marriage as one of four key virtues that conduce to a healthy polity (the others are industriousness, piety and honesty).

Echoing George Gilder, Murray notes that marriage is crucial because it "civilizes men." Married men don't just earn more and have significantly lower rates of criminality, substance abuse, depression and poor health than single men. They also contribute more social capital to society. Married men are far more likely to coach little league, volunteer at church and shovel their elderly neighbor's walk. Married people, far more than singles (there are exceptions, of course), take responsibility not just for themselves and their children, but for the community.

In 1960, Murray observes, 88 percent of upper-middle-class adults was married. In 2010, the figure was 83 percent. A small drop. But among the working class, 83 percent of whom were married in 1960, the figure today is 43 percent. What does that mean?

Diana West How Will Congress React to the Latest Afghan Shooting

Even before the carnage inside Kabul airport was sorted and identified, before the squads of sober officers were deployed to inform stateside next of kin, and before the caskets were filled, closed, and draped with flags for the final flight home, this much we knew: Another Afghan Muslim "partner" in uniform -- a veteran Air Force pilot -- had opened fire on NATO trainers in a meeting, killing eight U.S. military personnel and an American contractor.

Question: Will our U.S. representatives -- and those of the deceased -- pay attention to this latest Afghan attack on Americans? If so, will they a) yawn; b) cluck; c) raise hell; d) none of the above?

The fact is, these murders are not "just one of those things" -- the unfortunate outcome of a "disagreement," or even "financial pressures" as mentioned, straight-faced, in early reports. These ritualistic murders of Westerners, like similar assaults before them, are the most shocking manifestations of our foundationally flawed policy of nation building in the Islamic world. They are some of the flesh-and-blood sacrifices to the make-believe "Democracy Project," whose postmodern-day missionaries believe must be advanced on the backs of the U.S. military according to the quasi-holy doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN).

It's way past time to call it off. The simplest reason is because it's crazy, and probably literally so in a certifiable sense. We, the people, have empowered elected officials to order our military forces to risk their lives not for our country but for a theory. A theory based on the absurd premise that the Western way is also the "universal" way. A theory whose practitioners must suppress logic, historical knowledge, moral principle and, most basic of all, survival instinct. And that's crazy.

Consider this evidence from the Clarksville (Tenn.) Leaf Chronicle. Last week, the newspaper sent a reporter to witness a bizarre event that tragically defines our age: a Fort Campbell send-off for troops en route to Afghanistan to "partner" with Afghan "allies," one of whom had just killed five U.S. troops, also from Fort Campbell (a separate killing spree). The story's headline is "NCOs offer stern message for war-bound soldiers." That message is, "Don't trust anyone but you still have to partner up."

Emmett Tyrrell Liberalism's Death Croak

WASHINGTON -- While inspecting the body politic, one encounters one clear sign that liberalism is dead. It is the condition of our political discourse. Polite commentators note that the dialogue is "rancorous." Some say toxic. Actually, it is worse than that. It is nonexistent.

From the right, from the sophisticated right, there is an attempt to engage the liberals. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan just did it by presenting a budget that cried out for intelligent response. President Barack Obama's response was to invite Ryan to sit in the front row for his "fiscal policy" speech at George Washington University. There Obama heaped scorn on an astonished Ryan and his work. He did not even mention Ryan's name. This is what Obama calls an "adult" debate?

From the rest of the liberals, there is generally silence. They prattle on about Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, but they pay almost no heed to the think tanks on the right, to their journals of opinion or to the writers and figures of heft. The liberals are dead.

There are the zombies out there. Well-known politicians such as Al Gore or writers such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who howls about The Heritage Foundation while fudging that think tank's findings or about the aforementioned Ryan, but there is no one capable of engaging the serious conservatives. None even tries. Their idea of dialogue amounts to hurling what are lines fit for a bumper sticker -- "I Am a Citizen of the World" or "War Is Not the Answer." Or perhaps they hurl a slur, such as "conservatives are extreme," though by now the conservatives have been around for decades and running the country more frequently than not -- the Reagan administration, both Bush administrations and the Gingrich Congress. Have the liberals not noticed this? As I say, liberalism is dead.

This has not always been the case. There was a time when liberals -- say, Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- engaged conservatives quite brilliantly. They knew what conservatives thought. They even could find elements of conservative thought that they disagreed with without disfiguring that thought and pouncing on the resultant red herring. This is not the way it is today. There has been a change in the politically charged audience in this great republic.

Matt Towery Poll Provides Gives Early Glimpse into GOP Presidential Contest

A recent NewsMax/InsiderAdvantage scientific national survey of likely voters in Republican presidential caucuses and primaries to be held next year provides a clear view of one fact: Any major candidate could win the GOP nomination, if -- and it's a big if -- they follow the right strategy.

Let's look at the potential candidates for 2012 and use the poll to tell us what they need to do to make it to the GOP convention in Tampa.

The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent, was conducted just before President Barack Obama decided, after years of speculation, to release his long-form birth certificate. Whether that has affected the effort of entrepreneur Donald Trump's candidacy, we can't really say.

Trump pushed the issue, and Obama seemingly called Trump's bluff. But Trump may well turn this into an advantage by proving that he is the one candidate who can force Obama to respond to issues that he's been able sidestep before.

In the poll, Trump was statistically tied with former governors Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Each received 14 percent.

For Trump to actually capture the nomination, he must prove that he has a realistic view of how to run a government, not just a business. Early on, statements such as Trump's suggestion that we should simply take Libya's oil sounded like juicy raw meat for the masses.

But down the road he will debate, yes, politicians, who will suggest that such an action can't be just taken on a whim by a president. My guess is that Trump will be smart enough to reign in the over-the-top comments, given that he has already pushed the envelope and succeeded in becoming a front-runner early on. Trump surely sees this as something like one of his massive construction projects. First give the people some sizzle, and then start pouring a solid foundation.

Mike Huckabee is viewed by voters as the most likeable of all of the candidates. He became the early conservative choice in 2008, and his gentle nature and sense of humor have endeared him to many Republicans. But Huckabee will likely have to be darn near drafted by a frustrated GOP electorate to enter this race. For now, he seems to relish his life as a Fox News talk-show host. He lacks any indication of having the "fire in the belly" necessary to win a Republican nomination.

As for Mitt Romney, there is not only sufficient desire to be president, but also an existing operation that is so efficient that it reminds me of some presidential re-election efforts that I have witnessed.

Public-sector workers: Save more now

The Government Accountability Office says states should have at least an 80% funding level. As of fiscal 2009, just 20 states were at 80% or above, according to Pew.

Pew also said states had saved in 2009 just 5% of the $635 billion needed to pay for retiree health care and other benefits. Just five states — Alaska, Arizona, North Dakota, Utah, and Washington — made the necessary contributions to fund their health-care liabilities, while 19 states set aside no funds to pay their bills coming due for retiree health care and other non-pension benefits.

“These states continue to fund these benefits on a pay-as-you-go basis, covering medical costs or premiums as they are incurred by current retirees,” Pew said in its report.

“For states offering modest benefits, this may cause little problem. But for those that have made significant promises, the future fiscal burden could be enormous if more savings are not set aside or costs are not better managed.” Read the Pew report here.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau said Wednesday that state retirement-system assets fell $641 billion in 2009, mainly due to a steep drop in earnings on investments. Read the Census report here.

Clearly, the public pension system is underfunded and something must be done to fix the problem. Taxes must go up, benefits to government workers must be cut, or some mix of those solutions is in order.

And current and former government workers should prepare now for the possibility that their retirement benefits could change, especially since more than 20 systems have cut their benefits, experts say.

It’s definitely a good idea for state and local employees and, frankly, all workers to start setting some money aside for both planned and unplanned expenses in retirement, said Michael Wilson, chief executive of the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans.

Health care

Meanwhile, retiree health benefits have been eroding since the mid-1990s and that trend is likely to continue according to a 2010 report from the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

This trend “has been driven by the excessive cost of offering this benefit due to new accounting rules and the increasing cost associated with providing the benefit,” EBRI said in its report. “Fewer private-sector employers offer the benefits, both private- and public-sector employers have been increasing retiree premiums and cost sharing, and workers are finding it harder to qualify for a subsidized benefit.” Read that report on EBRI’s site.

This month Aon Hewit said that “most large employers are beginning to rethink their retiree health-care strategy as a result of federal health-care reform.” In late 2010, Aon Hewitt surveyed 344 companies, representing 2.2 million retirees nationwide, and found that 61% were either already evaluating or were expected to evaluate their long-term retiree medical strategy by the end of 2011, due to health-care reform. Read that report here.

Public-sector workers, especially new hires, should put “paying for retiree health-care expenses” on their to-do list.

The President and the Preachers

If anyone can explain President Obama's choice of preachers to me, please do so, because I am very confused. You would think Mr. Obama would have learned his lesson after the Reverend Wright debacle, where his pastor of twenty years was exposed as an America-hating zealot. Then, after being outed, Wright turned on Obama, denouncing him.

But on Easter Sunday, the president and First Lady took their kids to the Shiloh Baptist Church, where Pastor Wallace Charles Smith holds court. The pastor is a race-activist who last year said this at a private Christian College: "Now Jim Crow wears blue pinstripes, goes to law school and carries fancy briefs and cases... he doesn't have to wear white robes anymore because now he can wear the protective cover of talk radio, or a regular news program on Fox."

Now, I have worked at Fox News for nearly 15 years, and don't know any racists on or off the air. At the very least, Pastor Smith is irresponsible in making that statement. And the whole tone of that diatribe is unfair and undisciplined. No fair-minded person indicts lawyers as racists. Barack Obama went to law school.

This whole deal is troubling. After the Wright fiasco, shouldn't the president's staff be more protective of their guy and not put him in front of another bomb-throwing preacher? Or did the president insist on going to that service? If so, why?

As the First Family sat in their pew, Smith did not hold back during his sermon, talking about his baby grandson who was trying, the Pastor posited, to say his first words: "I am here... they tried to write me off as three-fifths of a person in the Constitution, but I am here right now... I am not going to let anybody stop me from being what God wants me to be."

The three-fifths reference is to the Constitutional mandate of counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the U.S. House. That, of course, was overturned by the 13th Amendment in 1865, but apparently Pastor Smith holds a grudge.

And he is entitled to do so, under the First Amendment.

But, again, why does President Obama want to hear the pastor's bitter prattle from the pulpit? Mr. Obama, himself, is perhaps the finest example of a man being allowed to reach his full potential, is he not? In what other country could a mixed race child from a broken home grow up to lead his nation? Does that not speak well of America?

I bear no ill will towards Pastor Smith or Reverend Wright. They are both products of their life experience that was most likely very difficult. But President Obama has a deep responsibility to promote this country as a place of freedom and opportunity

A few thoughts from a 'birther'

The release yesterday of Mr. Obama's long-form birth certificate is a welcome development for America. I think, however, that a few cautions are in order before we put the "birther" issue to bed.

First, I believe this shows that Donald Trump was correct in his strategic assessment that Obama had planned to use the birth certificate issue as a distraction during the 2012 election campaign. Trump's efforts have denied him that ability.

Second, Trump has shown that even an issue that socialist big-media have delivered last rites over can be dug up and resurrected from the old ink-drum burial ground and brought to the forefront of public opinion by a prominent individual. This is a real slap in the face to the GOP establishment in our nation's capital. It shows that the tea party must continue to bring challengers forward during the primaries to remove the fossilized deadwood in the GOP.

Third, I think that, given the level of deceit shown by Mr. Obama to date, the physical birth certificate needs to be inspected by a panel of forensic document experts who visit it in its Hawaiian archive home. I would suggest that this be done on a live television broadcast, without edits. I say this only because Mr. Obama has had two years to use some of the best document forgers in the world (if our intelligence agencies still hold that distinction) to produce a long-form birth certificate. Yet he will still have found it difficult to alter the physical record that exists in Hawaii's archives.

Thoroughly researched for three years, the book that will teach BHO things he didn't know about himself: Jerome Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President"

I'm sorry to be so skeptical of the man, but remember, he reneged on even the small budget cuts he'd agreed to with House negotiators, as soon as the legislation was passed. His administration really has been one lie after another and one constitutional usurpation after another, followed by taxpayer-supported vacations to recover from all the stress.

Finally, the long-form birth certificate does nothing to quell the natural-born-citizen issue, which our Founding Fathers found important enough to write into the Constitution. If the reports of the senior Obama's British citizenship are true, Obama would not be natural-born – and would be unable to legally hold the office of president. That will be a more esoteric, but none the less important, argument. Most of the population, however, does not likely care.

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The fact of the matter is – both political parties in Washington, D.C., would be delighted to run the original copy of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence through a shredder, and then stand together in a "bipartisan moment" and deny that the documents ever existed. That way they could get on with the business at hand, which is stealing from the middle class and sending the money off to their various political benefactors (the newest tea-party electees being the sole exception).

Now onto the college records, Mr. Trump. And the lawyer records from the state of Illinois. By the time of the next election, America should have a much better picture of its affirmative-action president.

Michelle Malkin Michelle Malkin The Wisconsin Witch Hunt Goes National

On May 1, left-wing vigilantes will target companies across the country that have committed a mortal sin: sending donations to GOP Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Rest assured, such intolerable acts of political free speech will not go unpunished by tolerant Big Labor activists. They're calling for both a national boycott of Walker's corporate donors and a coordinated sticker vandalism campaign on GOP-tainted products.

The Wisconsin Grocers Association is bracing for the anti-Walker witch hunt. Anonymous operatives have circulated sabotage stickers on the Internet and around Wisconsin that single out Angel Soft tissue paper ("Wiping your (expletive) on Wisconsin workers"), Johnsonville Sausage ("These Brats Bust Unions") and Coors ("Labor Rights Flow Away Like A Mountain Stream"). Earlier this week, a "Stick It To Walker" website boasted photos of vandalized Angel Soft tissue packages at a Super Foodtown grocery store in Brooklyn, N.Y.

This destruction of private property is illegal. Not that it matters to anti-Walker protest mobsters, who trampled Wisconsin's Capitol at an estimated $5 million in security, repair and cleaning costs to taxpayers. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "The identity of the backers of the sticker effort is unknown, although many assume it is being orchestrated by public employee unions. This latest effort follows boycotts organized by members of the Wisconsin State Employees Union AFSCME 24."

AFSCME 24 is the same union affiliate that recently disseminated intimidation letters throughout southeast Wisconsin, demanding that local businesses support unions by putting up signs in their windows. The letter threatened not just Walker supporters, but any and all businesses that have chosen to sit on the sidelines and stay out of politics altogether: "Failure to do so will leave us no choice but (to) do a public boycott of your business. And sorry, neutral means 'no' to those who work for the largest employer in the area and are union members." Others on Big Labor's hit list: Kwik Trip, Sargento Foods Inc. and M&I Bank.

Walker, of course, has been at the forefront of government pension and budget reforms. Similar measures are being advanced by Democratic governors and Democrat-run legislatures from Massachusetts to New York to California. But union bosses have yet to sic their goons on individual and corporate donors to Democratic politicians imposing long-overdue benefit and collective bargaining limits for public employee unions.

Donald Lambro GOP Shouldn't Play Trump Card

WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump has been saying things about himself and others lately that are untrue, suggesting that he has a tendency to make up his own reality as he goes along. In an interview with CNN's John King, Trump cited a CNN poll that he said showed him "statistically tied" with President Barack Obama; proclaimed that he has been a loyal Republican "for a long while"; and declared that the Unites States gets no oil from Libya, while China is Libya's "biggest customer."

Let's take these one at a time.

CNN denies that it has ever conducted a head-to-head matching poll between Obama and Trump, though other polls showed Trump trailing the president by double digits.

A more recent nationwide Gallup poll found that more than 6 in 10 registered voters -- 64 percent -- said they definitely would not vote for Trump in 2012. Forty-six percent said that about Obama. A mere 7 percent said they would definitely vote for the real estate magnate, versus 31 percent who said that about Obama.

King challenged Trump's statement, but Trump stuck to his claim that CNN said he was tied with Obama.

"We also rechecked with our polling department and our polling director specifically. The Trump people never got back to us and this is why. We're positive, positive, CNN never conducted such a poll," King said on CNN.

Trump's claim to have been " a very strong Republican" for "a long while" is open to substantial doubt, too. In the last decade he was a registered Democrat between 2001 and 2008, according to ace Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler.

Moreover, Trump did not vote in primary contests for more than two decades, according to a search of his voting record by NY1, a New York-based news channel. In the 2008 presidential election, Trump said he supported Obama, adding that he "has a chance to go down as the greatest president."

What does that tell you about Trump's political judgment?

Deeper doubts are raised about his claims of party loyalty when you look at the long list of liberal Democrats Trump has supported financially -- from Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who got a whopping $50,000 to bankroll his successful run for mayor of Chicago.

A majority of the candidates who benefited from Trump's deep pockets -- 54 percent of them -- were Democrats, and far left ones at that, including former senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Rep. Charles Rangel and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, and the late senator Edward M. Kennedy.

USA will be especially youthful in 2020

True or false: By the end of this decade, the percentage of U.S. population who are less than 15 years old will be higher than in China.

The correct answer, believe it or not, is “True.”

Don’t be too hard on yourself if you answered this wrong, since almost everyone does so as well. For years now, there has been a drumbeat from economists about the increasing proportion of the U.S. population that is in or approaching retirement.

And that is indeed a powerful demographic trend. But the increasing proportion of the population in the below-15 cohort is a powerful trend as well, and it will have dramatic effects on the long-term health of the U.S. economy. And unlike the trend towards an increasing number of elderly citizens — which is well known — most investors are completely unaware of this other one.

Believe it or not, according to Ned Davis Research, on whose analysis I base these comments, the U.S. in 2020 will not only have a greater percentage in the below-15 cohort than China, but also relative to every European country (except Ireland) and most Asian countries as well.

If both the below-15 and over-65 cohorts are growing as a percentage of the overall population in the U.S., that means that the cohorts in the middle will be shrinking. And that indeed is true, according to Pat Tschosik, consumer strategist at Ned Davis Research, and Steve Sellers, a research analyst at the firm.

The investment implications of these trends are enormous, according to these researchers, since the typical individual’s peak earning power, as well as expenditures, occur within these shrinking cohorts. Among those companies that will be most adversely affected are retailers that depend on the U.S. luxury market — such as Nordstrom /quotes/comstock/13*!jwn/quotes/nls/jwn JWN -0.79% and Coach /quotes/comstock/13*!coh/quotes/nls/coh COH -0.32% .

Among the companies that Ned Davis Research is projecting will benefit the most from these demographic trends: Urban Outfitters /quotes/comstock/15*!urbn/quotes/nls/urbn URBN -0.03% , Gamestop /quotes/comstock/13*!gme/quotes/nls/gme GME -0.31% , and Children’s Place /quotes/comstock/15*!plce/quotes/nls/plce PLCE -1.39% .

A legitimate comeback to this analysis from Ned Davis Research is that the markets presumably have already discounted these demographic trends — and therefore it’s too late to make investment decisions because of them. But a fascinating academic study suggests otherwise.

Entitled “Attention, Demographics, and the Stock Market,” the study found that the market systematically does not take into account the consequences of demographic trends that are more than five years into the future — even when those consequences are quite predictable. (The study’s authors are Stefano DellaVigna, an associate professor of economics at University of California at Berkeley, and Joshua M. Pollet, an associate professor of finance at Michigan State University. Click here for a copy of the study .)

Another of the professors’ findings shows just how much is at stake: On average historically, they found, whenever demographic trends predicted a one-percentage-point increase in demand for an industry’s goods or services, its profits that year were 5% to 10% higher.

So even though 2020 seems like an awfully long way off, the rewards will be great for those who begin now to anticipate what the world will look like then.

How Tea Partiers in Congress Are Doing Their Corporate Masters' Bidding

They came, they saw, they conquered. This line pretty well sums up a little-reported but important story about the new tea partiers in the U.S. House of Representatives.

No sooner had they arrived than the corporate lobbying corps came to visit, saw what these supposed rebels were made of and quickly conquered them without a fight. The forces of big business needed only to lay out some campaign cash -- and quicker than you can say, "Business as usual," the budding lawmakers snatched up the money and immediately began carrying the lobbyists' corporate agenda.

Check out the financial services subcommittee, which handles legislation affecting Wall Street bankers. Five tea partiers got coveted slots on this panel, and all five were suddenly showered with big donations from such financial lobbying interests as Goldman Sachs. Now, all five are sponsoring bills to undo parts of the recent reforms to reign in Wall Street excesses.

Steve Stivers of Ohio, for example, hauled in nearly $100,000 in just his first two months in office -- 85 percent of it from the special interests his committee oversees. He insists that the cash he took from Goldman Sachs and others has nothing to do with his subsequent support of bills that Goldman is lobbying so strongly for. Stivers claims that his sole legislative focus is on jobs for Ohio's 15th district.

Really? Among the deform-the-reform bills that Steve is carrying is one to let Wall Street giants avoid disclosing the difference in what the CEO is paid and what average employees make. Another would exempt billionaire private equity hucksters from regulation. I can see that these bills are great job extenders for the barons of Wall Street, but how do either of them create a single job in his district?

This stuff does nothing but shelter the greed-headed banksters who wrecked our economy. Is that what the tea party rebellion was all about?

While Wall Street is running roughshod all over Americans, it's good to know that the FBI, Justice Department and federal courts are all over the major crime cases that so dramatically affect millions of Americans. Like the seven-year prosecution and $6 million trial of baseball player Barry Bonds.

What a waste of time, tax dollars and prosecutorial credibility. Meanwhile, not a single major player in Wall Street's mugging of our economy has even been charged, much less imprisoned. People were robbed of hundreds of billions of dollars -- and millions of jobs, homes and businesses were lost -- yet the banksters not only skated free, they're now collecting billions in bonus payments for their work.

A New York Times investigative report reveals that top Washington officials -- Republican and Democrats -- rushed to the crime scene at the start of the financial crash. They rushed not to arrest anyone, but to stave off any serious investigations of the top Wall Streeters who'd obviously cooked their books, fraudulently awarded bonuses to themselves, cashed in on inside information and lied to regulators.

Barry Bonds might've been juiced up on steroids, but these guys were juiced up on hubris and greed, doing criminal damage to America.

Yet, the FBI was backed off, the Justice Department averted its eyes, and bank regulators failed to build criminal cases. Why? Because top politicos, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, were convinced by their Wall Street confidants that prosecutions would make big investors jittery and endanger the markets.

A couple of weeks after Japan's nuclear meltdown began, a photograph ran worldwide showing a trio of the nuclear plant's top corporate executives. They were at the hospital bedside of a victim of radiation poisoning, bowing deeply in apology. That's the picture of Wall Street executives that I want to see.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and

Hugh Hewitt The Obama Project: The Case For Change

On my radio show Tuesday I launched The Obama Project --the attempt to list in succinct fashion the many reasons why President Obama should be defeated in November 2012.

Opponents of the president's re-election shouldn't be lost in the fever swamp of birtherism or challenging the president's Christian beliefs. In fact, Team Obama hopes that bizarre side-issues of zero credibility dominate election coverage and help to keep the public from focusing on thew president's record.

What is vitally necessary is a quick reference guide to the disaster that has been the Obama presidency. I began to assemble it on air and my listeners joined in and quickly we had fashioned "The Obama Project: 50 Reasons To Vote Against Obama 1.0." Your additional suggestions are welcome via hugh@hughhewitt.com

1. Obamacare

2. The failed $850 billion stimulus

3. High, persistent unemployment

4. Gas prices

5. The 2012 budget's fecklessness

6. Massive deficits each and every year

7. The seizure of GM and Chrysler, the transfer of bondholder wealth to unions, and the dumping of the GM stock at a loss

8. Dodd-Frank

9. Hostility to Israel, including attack on apartment expansion and icing of Prime Minister Netanyahu in basement of White House

10. Failure to support Iran's Green Revolution

11. Failure to support Syrian revolution

12. The Libyan Fiasco

13. The incompetent handling of the Gulf Oil disaster

14. The unnecessary permitorium in the aftermath of the Gulf Oil disaster

15. The shutdown of Shell's Arctic oil exploration by EPA

16. The president's push for cap-and-tax in the Congress

17. The president's attempt to unconstitutionally impose cap-and-tax via EPA when the Congress wouldn't pass cap-and-tax

18. The president's push for unconstitutional restrictions on free speech on his political enemies while keeping the unions free to spend money on campaigns via The Disclose Act

19. The president's attempt to unconstitutionally impose The Disclose Act on his political opponents but not unions via Executive Order

20. The president's use of unaccountable "czars"

21. The president's refusal to accept Congressional direction vis-a-vis his "czars" contained in the last 2011 Continuing Resolution

22. The president's verbal assault on the Supreme Court while the members of the Court sat before him in the state of the Union

23. The president and Eric Holder's politicization of the Department of Justice, including the black panthers case and the refusal to defend DOMA

Suzanne Fields Eichmann's Evil No Longer Banal

BERLIN -- Angela Merkel is losing her edge. Her party reacts to setbacks in local elections and is sidetracked by France's assertion of leadership toward the Arab Spring. But culturally and intellectually, Berlin is still the European capital pushing the envelope. Berlin drives the engine for thinking and rethinking Germany's past.

A new exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which ran in Jerusalem for nine months beginning in April 1961, continues this critical rethinking. "Facing Justice -- Adolf Eichmann on Trial," at the Topography of Terror, which documents the Nazi apparatus in the Third Reich, brings it back for updated reflection, with photographs and videos of witnesses, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges.

While the victims get a strong voice in telling of their suffering, Eichmann remains the central figure, who in his own words captures our attention for his matter-of-fact distortion of truth and his self-satisfied lack of remorse. If ever there was a man who gave definition to George Orwell's word "doublethink," it was Eichmann, director of "Section IV D4" for "Jewish affairs" in the Reich Security Main Office.

Hannah Arendt occupies a small part of this exhibit, presented in a photograph and in excerpts from the pages of the New Yorker magazine, for whom she reported the trial. But the exhibition is an accumulative refutation of her thesis that Eichmann reflected the "banality of evil" -- the ordinariness of a bureaucratic criminal merely following orders, and not the anti-Semitic zealot he was, carrying out the Nazi program of extermination of the Jews with pride, pleasure and perniciousness.

He explained his actions for getting rid of Jews with dull understatement, but he was considerably more than a small cog in the vast Nazi machine, who claimed to fear for his life if he refused to execute policy.

In fact, as this exhibit makes clear, no one who objected to following orders in the extermination of the Jews was severely punished. Arendt regretted using the phrase "banality of evil" in relation to Eichmann -- which was the subtitle for her book about the trial -- because there was nothing ordinary or boring about him. He fascinates as he hides in plain sight, manipulating through rhetorical tricks a revisionist history of his past. One scholar puts it succinctly in the catalogue that "Arendt had been hoodwinked to a degree by Eichmann's staging of himself at the trial as an obedient 'receiver of orders.'"

Ed Feulner Ed Feulner A Government Union Shakedown

“Raise our taxes!” Can you imagine chanting such a slogan at a public rally? Neither could most Americans.

There is one notable exception, however: government-union activists. They’re pretty explicit these days about their desire to see taxes go up.

If that surprises you, you may be unaware of how dramatically the face of organized labor has changed over the last few decades. There’s a very good reason they’ve got your wallet in their sights -- more and more, that’s where their wages comes from.

To see why, it’s vital to understand the difference between unions in the private sector (steelworkers, autoworkers, etc.) and unions in the public sector (government).

Private-sector union membership has been in steep decline. Back in 1980, one out of every five private-sector workers belonged to a union. Thirty years later, less than 7 percent do. That’s fewer than one in 14. But over the same period, government-union membership has been climbing. Today, in fact, more than half of all union members (52 percent) work for the government.

So when they lobby “management” (i.e., elected officials) for wage hikes and other benefits, that money isn’t coming out of the bank account of some private company. It’s coming from you and me. When those elected officials say, “We’re in the red. We have to balance our budget, and we can’t pay you more,” government-union activists reply: “Raise our taxes!”

Of course, they don’t just say it. Government-union leaders spend millions of dollars trying to elect politicians who are open to tax hikes. They were the top outside spenders in the last election. They put their money where their mouth is, all in the hopes of putting your money where their coffers are.

This circular arrangement may be nice and cozy for union leaders and their big-government buddies, but it’s a disaster for the taxpayers they’re exploiting. If taxes aren’t raised to satisfy their demands, will workers “strike” from providing government services? They can -- and they have (e.g., the New York City transit strike of 2005). Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the National Labor Relations Act, called such a prospect “unthinkable and intolerable.”

As George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979, once noted, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with government.” President Roosevelt agreed: “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” When it is, it sets up a chain reaction of painful choices.

It's settled Obama's ineligible

Now that Barack Obama has finally released his long-form birth certificate, the controversy is over. Right?

That's the news media's unanimous opinion.

Within minutes, perhaps seconds, of receiving the handout from the White House, our vigilant press watchdogs were busy attacking people like me and Donald Trump for even raising the issue of constitutional eligibility and proclaiming Obama meets all the requirements of the presidency.

Let me be the first to suggest the document Obama released demonstrates just the opposite – and raises far more questions than it answers.

For me, the release was not unexpected. For about two or three weeks, Jerome Corsi, author of the upcoming and already best-selling book, "Where's the Birth Certificate?," and I have been discussing our mutual expectation that Obama was going to be forced to act. Between the unprecedented success of the book in pre-sales, polls showing most Americans not believing Obama's birth narrative and Donald Trump's megaphone, he had no choice.

Obama recognized he was losing the battle for public opinion.

There's not a doubt in my mind that his central focus was to pull the rug out from under Corsi's book – which promises (and delivers, by the way) to prove Obama is ineligible for the presidency.

He was counting on the media to jump the shark as it did in the last 48 hours.

Now let me be the first to put everything in perspective and quickly dispatch the conventional wisdom about this new "proof" that Obama has released.

First, let's look at the document itself. I would like you to compare and contrast it with what I call the "control" long-form birth certificate from Hawaii circa August 1961 – the one belonging to the Nordyke twins, born just one day later than Obama's reputed Aug. 4 birthdate.

What do you see?

Do you see two documents that provide the same information? No. Do you see two identical documents? No.

Why not?

It's a simple question. Why would two long-form birth certificates from Hawaii, filled out at the same hospital within 24 hours of each other be so different?

No explanation was provided by Team Obama, and, of course, none was requested by the media watchdogs who were in a hurry to show they didn't miss the biggest political fraud of the 21st century.

Sadly, if what is represented on this new "birth certificate" is an accurate representation of Obama's actual birth, it does not prove he is eligible to be president, but just the opposite.

One of the reasons I was so eager to see the long-form document is because I was relatively certain it would provide different information than we saw in the short form certification of live birth released in 2008. I was relatively certain Obama was hiding something, for instance, the real birth father. Because if Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was, in fact, his dad, then there is no way he is eligible to be president. He was a visiting student from Kenya, a subject of the United Kingdom. He conferred U.K. and Kenyan citizenship on his son at birth.

The men who wrote the Constitution and used the phrase "natural born citizen" as a requirement of office intended that future U.S. presidents would not have "divided loyalties" or even the appearance of "divided loyalties." In other words, the type of president they were trying to avoid with this language was the very type represented by Barack Obama.

But it gets worse for Obama.

His sister, Maya, recently confirmed that her brother was adopted at the age of 5 by his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, who moved Obama there where he lived and attended school for several years. Though we do not have any citizenship records for Obama during this period, it is hard to understand how he could have been adopted by his Indonesian stepfather and moved to that country for years without a change in citizenship. But let's put that issue aside for a moment, because there's something about this adoption that is a game-changer with regard to the validity and accuracy of the "birth certificate" Obama just released.

Anyone who has ever been involved in an adoption knows a few things most others don't know.

When an adoption takes place in the U.S., the original birth certificate is either amended or replaced entirely with a new document that shows the adoptive parent or parents as the birth parents.

The incubator for narcissism

In the last few Technocracy columns, I have dealt with topics that have in common the theme of your mental and emotional fortitude. How do you approach your use of the network of networks we now take for granted as integral to our communications, data transfer and entertainment infrastructures? What does your use of the Internet tell us about you? How does your reaction to the experience of interacting with others online inform your personal choices, emphasize your personal strengths and betray your personal shortcomings?

Our contemporary society and its medical and psychological establishments have concluded that there is an ailment, a condition, a disorder – and a spectrum on which that disorder is found – for every single negative human behavior and character trait. Whether it is increasingly common or simply increasingly revealed online, there is a "personality disorder" whose descriptors seem stunningly appropriate for much behavior that takes place on the Web. That is Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD. The site Narcissism101 explains the disorder thusly:

Someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) has at least 5 of these symptoms:

• has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
• is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• requires excessive admiration
• has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
• is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
• lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
• is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
• shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

Doesn't paint a pretty picture, does it? Yet I guarantee it perfectly describes many people with whom you've interacted online ... especially if your interaction with them takes place exclusively on the Internet. The platform of the Internet and sites that share personal activity on the Web is tailor-made to facilitate NPD.

The Net gives each self-involved individual the opportunity to define, redefine, reinvent, or otherwise package himself to whatever degree he desires. He can claim to be whatever and whomever he aspires to be; he can manipulate the presentation of what he shares to bolster those claims; he can engage in a variety of behaviors (such as trolling or accusing others of trolling) to defend his fantasies and delusions, or to draw attention and criticism from himself.

This is the grand stage of the Internet, the public forum that is all Internet activity. There is very little Internet activity that is genuinely unedited and unscreened. The result is an epidemic of NPD inflicted on every member of every social media site, bulletin board, discussion forum and mailing list.

Awareness of raging, roiling, runaway NPD online is nothing new. Entire books have been written about it; media outlets have produced articles evaluating or promoting those books; articles analyzing articles about those other sources have explored and explored again the issue. There seems, in fact, to be a great deal of discussion about the people we see so busily discussing themselves.

Eliot Glazer wrote of online narcissism two years ago, saying, "The Internet Will See You Now." He wrote, "We Tweet. ... We blog. We update our status. We post pictures in real time. We share intimate details and vague musings as they happen, sending out attention-hungry pleas into the ether and hoping to receive some sort of validation in return."

Glazer rightly wanted to know where this self-absorbed transmission of every detail of our daily existences would or could end. And, really, how can it end, when the social media sites that hold ever more sway in our technologically saturated lives encourage us to share every second of what we do? Twitter was built on the notion that people you may not even know personally are interested in when you go to sleep, what you had for lunch, or whether you've just "checked in" at your local gym. How could this be anything but the most addictive of narcotics for those whose drug of choice is themselves?

OBAMA'S BUDGET: MORE WASTE, FRAUD AND SELF-ABUSE

In a priceless formulation in his budget speech two weeks ago, Obama said that Americans look at the poor and say, "There but for the grace of God go I." And so, in the president's words, "we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security."

Except we don't "contribute." We are compelled under threat of imprisonment to take out a joint checking account with the government. Ask Wesley Snipes what happens when you fail to "contribute" sufficient alms to Uncle Sam. It's easy to find him: He's sitting in the McKean Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania.

The downside of Obama's exponentially expanding government -- to the detriment of the private sector -- is that it is now impossible for young people to find work.

But there's also good news! Now there are plenty of government social workers to counsel the unemployed through their depression over not being able to find a job and to process their unemployment checks.

The unholy alliance between unionized government workers and elected Democrats has led to an explosion in taxpayer-funded government employees, who, incidentally, can never be fired.

In the 1980 award-winning PBS series "Free to Choose," Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman described the steps required to fire a civil servant:

"In January 1975, a typist in the Environmental Protection Agency was so consistently late for work that her supervisors demanded she be fired. It took 19 months to do it, and this incredible 21-foot-long chart lists the steps that had to be gone through to satisfy all the rules and all the management and union agreements.

"The process involved the girl's supervisor, his deputy director, his director, his director of personnel operations, the agency's branch chief, an employee relations specialist, a second employee relations specialist, a special office of investigations and the director of the office of investigations. This veritable telephone directory, need I add, was paid with taxpayers' money. Who could invent a better protected job than this one -- before it came to its end?"

Thirty years later, a civil servant whose poor job performance consisted of only being chronically late would qualify as "Civil Servant of the Year."

Taking only one performance problem in a single government office -- surfing Internet pornography at the Securities and Exchange Commission: In 2010, 31 employees were found to have spent their workdays downloading Internet porn in the 2 1/2 years during and preceding the financial crash that led to the greatest depression in nearly a century. (One of their favorite online porn sites was "Fannie Mae Hill," while those who prefer big girls were at "Too Big to Fail.")

If only Bernie Madoff had posted naked videos of himself on the Internet, the SEC might have noticed him. Seventeen of the porn-surfers were being paid government salaries of $99,356 to $222,418.

One senior lawyer at SEC headquarters in Washington, D.C., admitted to spending eight hours a day looking at Internet pornography. Sometimes he even worked through his lunch hour. He had downloaded so much pornography that his computer was full -- at which point he began burning the pornography onto CDs and DVDs, which he stored in boxes in his office.

In another classic example of the left hand not wanting to know what the right hand was doing, an employee with the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance admitted watching up to five hours a day of pornography in his office. His favorite pornographic websites were bookmarked on his government computer, and he had both downloaded and uploaded pornographic videos to the numerous websites he had joined.

Linda Chavez Democrats' Hispanic Problem

Among the challenges facing the Democrats in the 2012 election is the prospect that President Barack Obama will not be able to re-energize his base -- which included record numbers of Hispanic voters in 2008. Hispanics gave Obama 67 percent of their votes, but just as importantly, Hispanic turnout was higher than usual. More than 10 million Hispanics cast 9 percent of the total vote, the largest ever.

But many Hispanics have soured on Obama -- and not just because he failed to deliver on his promise of comprehensive immigration reform. Like most other Americans, Hispanics care most about the economy. High unemployment, which is at 11 percent among Hispanics, rising gas prices and a depressed housing market hurt President Obama's chances to repeat his 2008 performance among Hispanic voters.

A new analysis of 2010 voting patterns by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that voter turnout among Latinos plummeted. Fewer than 1 in 3 eligible to vote actually turned out on Election Day -- a much lower proportion than the nearly half of white and the 44 percent of black eligible voters who cast ballots. And among those who did show up, nearly 40 percent voted for Republican candidates, according to exit polls -- no doubt aided by the fact that the GOP ran Hispanic candidates at the top of the ticket in three states.

Demographics explain part of the problem with low Hispanic turnout. Even though the number of Hispanics has been increasing at record rates recently -- rising from 35 million in 2000 to more than 50 million in 2010 -- one-third of Hispanics are too young to vote, and another 22 percent are old enough but not yet citizens. The Hispanic population includes the lowest proportion of people eligible to vote of any major group -- just 42 percent, compared with 78 percent of whites, 67 percent of blacks and 53 percent of Asians.

But apathy clearly played a role, as well. The question is, Why? Like many low-income whites and blacks, some Hispanics may feel that participating in elections doesn't have much impact on their lives. But the 2010 elections signal deeper problems for the Democrats.

Hispanics never have been as reliably Democratic as black voters. In several recent elections, more than a third of Hispanics have voted for Republican candidates at the state and national levels, and 40 percent voted for President George W. Bush in 2004. Those GOP Hispanic voters tend to be more affluent and thus more consistent voters, as well.

End oil ... no, all subsidies

The president has renewed his call to end the billions of dollars in oil subsidies so that he can "invest" the savings into alternative energy vehicles. House Speaker John Boehner got caught up in the rhetoric and put his foot firmly in his mouth. The speaker indicated that he might be interested in eliminating the subsidies for all but "small independent oil and gas companies."

It is no secret that the Obama administration wanted $5-a-gallon gasoline. Now that the president has achieved this goal, he is looking to deflect public outrage by beating up on the oil and gas companies, again. But is Boehner pilling on? And what about eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for "big oil" but not "little oil"?

The GOP is supposed to believe in the free market. If oil is such a valuable commodity, then little oil should have no trouble attracting investors. The truth is "big oil" is made up of millions of little investors. If you have a retirement plan, chances are you are one of them. Are you comfortable with this kind of favoritism?

If we subsidize little oil but not big oil, then what about little mom-and-pop grocery stores? After all, these stores have a hard time competing with the big chains and giants like Wal-Mart. If we subsidize "little oil," don't we have a moral obligation to subsidize "little grocery" as opposed to "big grocery"? What about little hardware stores and little clothing stores? Shouldn't these owners be standing in line for a government handout, too?

The truth is much of the rhetoric about subsidizing the oil companies is just that, rhetoric. The Obama administration counts virtually any revenue it allows a business to keep or reinvest as a tax break, unless, of course, it is one of his favored industries. Ronald J. Sutherland did an analysis of these so-called subsidies – "Big Oil at the Public Trough?" – for the libertarian Cato Institute. Sutherland concluded that these subsidies "are a small share of oil revenues and far less generous than the preferences and subsidies provided for rival businesses and technologies."

Rival industries and environmental groups continue to churn out studies showing billions of dollars of subsidies that are supposedly flowing into the oil companies. These subsidies fall into three primary categories:

• Tax deductions for expense.
• Indirect expenditures in the form of defense outlays for the Middle East, the Alaska pipeline and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. (Tanks and planes don't run on windmills; therefore, the government has to buy oil and gas and make sure we have sufficient reserves.)
• The environmental costs related to oil consumption. (The contribution to air pollution and global warming – we're straining at gnats here!)

What we need is a level playing field. Tax deductions should be the same for all related industries – and that includes windmills and alternative fuels. The government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers.

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A little-known fact is that one out of every five dollars invested in alternative energy comes from the petroleum industry. If and when alternative energy becomes cost-effective, the petroleum industry wants in on it. What is wrong with that?

While we are on the subject of those dreaded subsidies, we should get rid of all of them. We simply cannot afford to subsidize Planned Parenthood or any other nonprofit. If those nonprofits are worthwhile, they will survive. If they are not, they won't. It's that simple. We can't afford to subsidize art or broadcasting. There is no shortage of either.

We should not be subsidizing farmers or big agribusinesses. We should not be paying the advertising budgets for McDonald's or any other company overseas. Get rid of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and all the rest. Close the Department of Education and consolidate the rest of the government agencies.

Of course, this downsizing would mean a lot of government workers would be without jobs. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have the stomach for this. What would we do with all of these displaced paper pushers? Put them to work pedaling windmill devices. Now that is a form of subsidized alternative energy I could support.

Breitbart book has much to say

Too many books by conservative personalities have too little to say and no larger rationale than making money for the personality in question.

To be clear, I have no problem with the rationale as long as it is someone else's money they are making. So I tend to avoid such books.

Given my biases, I picked up a copy of Andrew Breitbart's new book, "Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World," only because I felt I owed him one.

By book's end, I owed him another. "Righteous Indignation" is the single best account I have read of the media revolution and its political consequences, and it is all the better for being an insider's tale.

The day before I bought the book Breitbart came to my defense when MSNBC's Martin Bashir challenged my thesis that Bill Ayers helped write Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father."

This was one of several lines of attack, all racially charged, in a memorably silly attempt by Bashir to anoint Breitbart the Grand Kleagle of an emerging cyber-Klan.

Breitbart has since challenged Bashir to a lie-detector showdown with a $10,000 payoff if it proves that Bashir had actually read Breitbart's book as he claimed he had.

After reading "Righteous Indignation," I am confident Bashir will not take the bet. The book in no small part deals with grotesque attempts by people like Bashir to paint utterly innocent conservatives as racists.

Had Bashir read the book he would have known what a fool's errand his producers had set him on. He would have also known that Breitbart had dedicated less than one full sentence to my thesis and named me only in the footnotes.

What Bashir avoided was the heart of Breitbart's tale: the battle for the cultural no-man's-land now open thanks to the slow-motion implosion of what Breitbart calls "the Democrat-Media Complex."

Breitbart would seem an unlikely culture warrior. In the book's opening chapters, the self-effacing and often amusing author traces his own evolution from Hollywood nihilist to tea-party knight errant.

Lacking any orthodox career goals, this classic Generation-Xer stumbled into the nursery where the Internet counter-revolution was being hatched.

Breitbart's association with Matt Drudge gave him an invaluable perspective on the moment when the major media realized that the battle had been joined – that is when Drudge broke the "Monica" story Newsweek had hoped to spike.

In the wake of that revelation, the Democrat-Media Complex – an alliance that included pornographers, private detectives, the professoriate and much of Hollywood – set out to protect the soon-to-be impeached president by any means necessary.

Breitbart reminds us in detail just how ugly it got. It was a useful reminder. I had almost forgotten.

As the folks at WND can attest, given their own role as pioneers in the world of Internet journalism, it has stayed ugly ever since.

Unknown to most Americans, benefactors like financier George Soros have helped create an army of ankle biters who do not report news but rather annoy the people who do.

I have come to think of these diminutive souls as our Lilliputian media. Like the 6-inch-tall residents of Jonathan Swift's Lilliput, "They see with great exactness, but at no great distance."

During the course of the Bashir interview, Breitbart accused Bashir of getting his talking points from among the foremost of the Lilliputians, Media Matters for America.

Founded by the man whose Troopergate articles led to Clinton's impeachment, David Brock, and funded in part by Soros, Media Matters has transitioned its Lilliputian army from monitoring the news to what Brock openly calls "guerrilla warfare and sabotage."

Although Brock's principal target is Fox News, no one on the right is immune from the assaults of Brock's 90 or so foot soldiers, arrayed, writes Politico, "in neat rows in a giant war room above Massachusetts Avenue."

Since the publication of my book, "Deconstructing Obama," I seem to have been assigned my own Media Matters case officer. Nothing I write or say goes unmonitored.

I do not think Brock understands how useful a service this is. For instance, within hours of my appearance on "Fox & Friends" a few weeks ago, Media Matters had posted the video on its website.

I promptly reposted it to my Facebook and Twitter lists, fully confident that my friends would not be swayed by the rubbish rhetoric surrounding it. When reposted, the Bashir interview with Breitbart proved even more useful.

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With their eye for detail, the Lilliputians also force us on the right to fact check thoroughly. A month ago, I posted a video that proved unreliable. As soon as I realized this, I had it pulled.

Although the video was incidental to the article, it launched a crazed little Lilliputian end-zone dance that continues to this day. I will not make that mistake again.

What I have not been able to do, nor has Breitbart, is to get the media, large or Lilliputian, to engage on a subject worthy of the public's time.

In my case: Did Barack Obama write his own books? Is the story they tell true? Was TWA Flight 800 shot out of the sky? Was Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown the victim of foul play?

Unfortunately, today's anti-journalists do not aspire to be the next Woodward or Bernstein. They aspire to be the next Roy Cohn.

While the Internet players on the right have been successfully attacking large stories – ACORN, for instance, in Breitbart's case – the Democrat-Media Complex and its Lilliputian troops have been blindly attacking the right.

It is a shame. In the age of the Internet the truth has become so accessible that nervy kids with a video camera like James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles can bring down a corrupt national empire like ACORN.

Brietbart's book is a call to arms to the James and Hannah wannabes in your basement. "It's a long war," cautions Breitbart, but it is winnable, and today we can all join the fight.

If the nation is to survive, we all have to.

Michael Barone Barbour's Withdrawal Gives No Clues to GOP 2012 Nominee

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's abrupt withdrawal from the race for the Republican presidential nomination -- after hiring a topnotch New Hampshire campaign manager and planning to fly around the country next week -- has naturally inspired a lot of punditry on the Republican presidential race.

Some of it is nonsense. I read someone earlier this week confidently stating that Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were the only Republicans who can beat Barack Obama because they're doing better than other possible nominees in polls.

Please. All those polls show is that these two who ran in 2008 have higher name recognition than others who didn't. Voters will know far more about the Republican nominee in fall 2012 than they know now about any contender.

You can also find lots of articles naming Romney as the front-runner. Again, please. Most national polls show no one getting as much as 20 percent of the primary vote. That means no one is the front-runner.

Try applying this test. Make a list of your top 20 Republican elective or appointive officials of the last 15 years who have shown some capacity to be president.

Did you put Mitt Romney on the top of your list? I doubt it. You might have put him somewhere on it, based on his one term as governor of Massachusetts and his fine work organizing the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah.

You will hear often that Republicans inevitably nominate the candidate next in line. But "inevitably" covers a very limited number of cases -- just six by my count since the primaries became predominant in the 1970s. Serious social scientists resist making generalizations when, as they put it, n equals 6.

In addition, the 2008 contest doesn't provide much guidance for 2012. The 2008 nomination was won by John McCain, whose strategy once he burned through his initial campaign money was to wait for all the other candidates' strategies to fail.

They all did. Romney's came closest to succeeding: Had he won just 3 percent more popular votes in the Florida and Super Tuesday contests, he would have been roughly even with McCain in delegates at that point.

Instead, thanks to Republicans' 2008 winner-take-all rules, he was behind by roughly 300 delegates. Generally he fared well in caucuses, where his organizational talents were put to good use, and in affluent suburbs. But he was unable to convince cultural conservatives that he was one of them.

Huckabee stayed in the race longer and actually got more delegates than Romney. But despite his sparkling performance in debates, fine sense of humor and ready popular culture references, he was unable to get more than about 15 percent of the vote from those who did not identify themselves as religious conservatives.

Tangible investments … that lick your hand

This past week my husband and I had a wild hot date. It consisted of driving three hours north to a remote farm and buying a 5-month-old Jersey heifer, then driving three hours home again. Oooh yeah.

A Jersey is a cattle breed that gives rich, creamy milk. A heifer is a young unbred cow. A date is something my husband and I rarely experience.

The reason we bought this little girl is because our older Jersey is down to two out of four working quarters on her udder, and we're not getting nearly as much milk as we'd like. We thought buying a young, healthy animal was a worthwhile investment.

Investment, you ask? Why would we "invest" in a heifer rather than stocks or treasuries?

It's because we feel stocks and treasuries are worthless, and money isn't far behind. But a heifer grows. Bred to our bull, she will give us calves we can breed, sell, or eat. She will produce abundant milk from which I can make butter and cheese and yogurt. She will have a productive life of about 15 years.

Not a bad investment after all.

And this is the tactic my husband and I have decided to take from now on. During the rare times we have surplus money, we are not putting it in the bank. We are buying tangibles such as heifers or building materials or fencing or canning jars or storable food or fruit trees.

Pat Boone offers foreword to vital book on the economy: "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse"

We've decided on this radical tactic because money is losing its value at a startling rate. In the last eight months it has lost 14 percent of its value. This "dollar's road to hell," in the words of Gonzalo Lira, mean useful things like heifers and canning jars and storable food will only cost more and more as time goes by. So why not purchase them now while we can still afford them?

At this juncture I'll point out that I'm not a financial adviser. I don't even play one on TV. I'm a housewife on a limited budget. But my husband and I can't afford to have that limited budget evaporate in value because we naïvely swallowed Ben Bernanke's lies that our economy is just fine, thank you, and recovery is right around the corner.

We believe foolish people trustingly keep their money in the bank and don't notice when its purchasing power dwindles (or when their solid dependable bank just … goes away). We believe foolish people think the stock market can never fall to catastrophic lows (again). We believe foolish people think our economy is fundamentally sound despite all evidence to the contrary.

We believe smart people pay off debt and get rid of unneeded luxuries and put their money into things that will provide a useful function in the future. We believe smart people invest their retirement money in physical gold and silver rather than 401(k) plans.

Missing the point on Apple — it’s a retailer

Everyone (myself included) misses the point when considering this perspective. The first thing you do is compare Apple’s four /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 349.95, -0.49, -0.14%) items — Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad — with IBM’s /quotes/comstock/13*!ibm/quotes/nls/ibm (IBM 161.07, -0.30, -0.19%) huge range of products, services and licensing. Or with H-P /quotes/comstock/13*!hpq/quotes/nls/hpq (HPQ 42.10, -0.04, -0.10%) and its scope. Even Microsoft Corp. /quotes/comstock/15*!msft/quotes/nls/msft (MSFT 25.40, -0.01, -0.04%) delves into more things than Apple.

Jomo Moir/MarketWatch
Consumers line up for the iPad2 at an Apple store in San Francisco.

Yes, well, what’s overlooked is that Apple is not getting rich from four products. Apple is not first and foremost a hardware maker, a software maker or a dream maker. Apple turns out to be one of the world’s greatest retailers.

And that is the real reason why Apple is huge. It should not be compared with H-P, IBM or anyone else in the tech industry. Apple should be compared with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!wmt/quotes/nls/wmt (WMT 52.12, -0.07, -0.13%) , Target Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!tgt/quotes/nls/tgt (TGT 49.55, -0.40, -0.80%) and even Macy’s Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!m/quotes/nls/m (M 23.17, +0.01, +0.04%) . Best Buy Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!bby/quotes/nls/bby (BBY 29.35, +0.13, +0.44%) is a better point of comparison than H-P.

Heck, Apple has more in common with McDonald’s Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!mcd/quotes/nls/mcd (MCD 75.29, +0.29, +0.39%) than with H-P.

Apple stores, which are modern event-driven showcases, have made the company what it is today. Using some of the most advanced ideas in retailing, Apple married Silicon Valley to retailing, using its sense of style to make each store a Vegas-like experience.

The store itself is a form of entertainment, and often when people are bored, they will just go to an Apple store, hang out and help create the atmosphere of a perpetual “happening.” The store itself is an event.

It's not a smartphone; it's a Snapfon

While there were plenty of smartphones on display at CTIA, the Snapfon is decidedly at the other end of the spectrum — and proudly so. Like the better known Jitterbug, the Snapfon prides itself on big buttons and simplicity, aiming at the growing market for seniors.

Even before the first Apple store opened, I often said that computer companies need their own owned-and-operated sales palaces so they can control the sales pitch just like an auto dealer. Other companies have tried, but their formulas were off.

Not being in any meetings regarding these failures (CompuAdd, IBM, Gateway, etc.) I don’t know what they were thinking. Someone at Apple thought different, and it had to be Steve Jobs and his esthetics.

I say this because an Apple store is actually a Bang & Olufsen store writ large: a high-concept store selling high-concept designer items. The Apple store wouldn’t work if its products looked like black-box Dell Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!dell/quotes/nls/dell (DELL 14.79, -0.27, -1.79%) computers. The Apple store is a gestalt of appealing modernity.

These observations will become more apparent when Microsoft rolls out more stores, and their designs seem to ape Apple’s — as far as the stores themselves are concerned.

However, this won’t work because the Bang & Olufsen product-design element will be missing. The experience will be incongruous and off-putting.

I think I need to get a look at Microsoft’s effort. All I know is that the company predates Apple with an experimental retail store in San Francisco (since closed).

Few people ever went to this Microsoft store, but it was slick and professional and could be best described as one of those Discover stores where all the nature and science toys were replaced by boxes of Microsoft Office.

Back to Apple. What I’ve concluded is that to understand the future of Apple and its valuation, you have to have a firm understanding of what the company really does that makes it different and so successful. And that’s retailing. This is not your father’s Apple.

The famous venture capitalist, John Doerr, years back once described Apple jokingly as a vertically integrated advertising agency. It was a cute comment that didn’t quite make sense, but was memorable.

But now I think it can be rephrased accurately. Apple is a vertically integrated retailer. And if investors want to understand the company’s future and its value, this must be understood

Rebels With an Attitude

(Flickr/Fr. Dougal McGuire)

A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love With Rebellion in Postwar America, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Oxford University Press, 386 pages, $29.95

Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, John McMillian Oxford University Press, 277 pages, $27.95

Around 1950, Americans began to see signs of a new kind of discontent. A generation of young rebels started popping up in fiction and films -- Holden Caulfield, the characters played by Marlon Brando and James Dean -- who were fleeing from or revolting against the phoniness of American life and white middle-class adulthood.

America's iconic heroes had always included plenty of rebels, going clear back to the nation's founders, but white middle-class American adulthood wasn't what bothered them. Brando's and Dean's predecessors included weary figures like Humphrey Bogart's characters and anarchic tough guys like James Cagney's. They weren't young, and they had nothing against middle-class whites per se.

Nobody -- and that includes Grace Elizabeth Hale in her smart new study of post-1950 American rebelliousness -- has definitively identified the reasons behind this new kind of ferment. Surely it has something to do with the triumph of New Deal economics, which was creating, for the first time, a nation with a middle-class majority. Surely it has something to do with the rise of a bureaucratic, professional -- and to some, denatured -- class even as the nation's agricultural and manufacturing sectors shrank.

The ferment among the young also surely had something to do with the growth of a youth market -- teenagers with sufficient discretionary income to support artists and entertainers who spoke specifically to them. Young middle-class whites, Hale says, "learned to use mass culture to critique mass culture." And for the first time, Hale continues, they sought models of authenticity from outside their own ranks -- from African Americans and poor rural whites in particular. The young Elvis, she notes, appropriated the look, movements, sensibilities, and songs of black musicians ("Hound Dog" had been Big Mama Thornton's rollicking lament of her man's infidelity) to invent an identity and a sound that thrilled white teens. Brando, Dean, and the Elvis of "Love Me Tender" "created a new model of the white male hero as a blackened and feminized outsider who expresses his feelings and desires."

The attraction that outsider (chiefly, black) authenticity held for the white middle class, Hale argues, is crucial for understanding much of postwar liberalism and the white New Left in particular. Her perspective is particularly helpful in charting the New Left's evolution after whites were expelled in 1966 from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had been the primary organization bringing together young black and white leftists. The white New Left thereafter not only intensified its focus on opposing the Vietnam War but also identified itself with Third World revolutionary movements. Radicals even redefined young whites as an outcast vanguard unto themselves, as Jerry Farber did in a classic of the period, his 1967 article "The Student as Nigger."

Hale's argument is a helpful addition to our understanding of the American left, but she also applies it unconvincingly to the postwar American right. To be sure, unlike such earlier conservatives as Robert Taft and Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley had a playful and rebellious air. The American establishment had moved just enough to the left (there's that New Deal again) so that a young conservative could rail against it. But Buckley wasn't upset with white middle-class life. Hale lumps such latter-day right-wingers as the Young Americans for Freedom and even anti-abortionist Randall Terry into this anti-liberal-establishment rebellion, but the nuance that made her dissection of the left so resonant is missing here. The causes and role models embraced by the postwar young and the New Left were, in fact, new and distinctive, but those that the postwar right upheld were decidedly more conventional. At least as far back as Lexington and Concord, Americans have been claiming the mantle of rebellion, but while some are genuine revolutionaries, most are retreads.