And a timely warning, too:

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

Obama’s comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado about building a new civil service corps. Among other things, he called for expanding the nation’s foreign service and doubling the size of the Peace Corps “to renew our diplomacy.”

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” Obama said in July. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

In Germany it was, of course, the Sturmabteilung, in Italy it was the Fascisti, while in Russia it was Military Revolutionary Committee and Red Guards. The commonality is a paramilitary organization outside the control of the normal authorities and owing its allegiance to a political faction. We don’t want such things in America. Ever.

What Obama proposes – civilian national service – is actually a negation of service and of volunteerism. Lured by grants and subjected to peer pressure, the kids who will be sucked into such a program will be easy pawns for whomever commands the organization – and we can just imagine what sort of kook leftists dregs of the “community organizer” world will be placed in charge of such an organization. The safety valve for America is that such a grouping will almost certainly disintegrate into a cash machine for various connected liberal and leftwing politicians and groups – but the worry is that it might be used to intimidate opponents of leftwing opinion. Just the sight of a paramilitary force cruising through a neighborhood will intimidate those who don’t agree with the commanders of the force…no one has to be locked up or even harmed, for the most part. And, of course, if anyone takes forceful exception to paramilitary goons patrolling the local neighborhood, that person will be immediately classed as a criminal.

Provide government funds for the Scouts. Shell out cash for Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Open the floodgates for money for various religious youth organizations. But don’t, even for a moment, have a youth organization directly funded and controlled by the federal government – in that direction lies tyranny, and civil war.

This blog post was a long time coming. With the disastrous election behind us, the conservative blogosphere has an opportunity to play a role in delivering the Republican Party out of the wilderness… if we’re up to the challenge. Right now, however, I don’t think we are.

2004 was a good year for us, but it has been downhill ever since. The conservative blogosphere has become a series of self-serving cliques rather than a movement-serving community.

Back in 2004, we were all united because we had the same goal, and we worked together to achieve it. But now conservative bloggers, unable to duplicate the fundraising prowess of the left-wing blogosphere, have made their objective to try to recreate the party in their own image from the top down rather than by true grassroots buildng from the bottom up..

Conservative blogging used to be about building community. But it has become something that is elitist, DC-centric, and contrary to grassroots empowerment.

Look at some of the top blogs we have on the right… they’re run by people who are in the business of politics… I know and like many of them, but so far I haven’t seen huge successes from their work. I do applaud their efforts to help the party, and admire their dedication… I am just not convinced the current approach will help the cause. For instance, there are weekly “Conservative Blogger Briefings” and conference calls that I and many other bloggers are invited to, but if you live outside of the Washington DC area or have a full time job, you can’t take part in them. Even if you could, I have failed to see how they’ve helped the movement.

As the founder of Blogs For Bush, one of the most successful blogs during the 2004 presidential campaign, I have been effectively shutout because I don’t live in Washington DC and don’t blog full time for a living. Other successful blogs and bloggers have moved down the path of conglomeration… not so much to serve the movement but to serve their own ambitions and egos. Blogging for them is a business venture.

We were destined as a community to fail our party’s nominee when we made the primary season the quest to find the next Ronald Reagan. While the Democrats were pretty much united around one of two candidates, we were divided amongst all all of ours. And look at the result. Turnout this year was virtually the same as 2004 despite the huge operation Obama had. This means that given the huge deficit McCain had in the popular vote compared to Bush in 2004, too many decided that since McCain didn’t score high enough on the “Ronald Reagan Scale” that they weren’t going to help him win. There is more unity in the conservative blogosphere when we want to punish Republicans for not being conservative enough.

Whether it was blog posts about protest votes for a third party candidate or not wanting to make calls for GOTV, the conservative blogosphere just kept demonstrating that the impossibly high standard they set for McCain was enough reason to use their power to prop themselves up as arbiters of conservatism, rather than to encourage their audience to vote for the one man who could stop the Orwellian nightmare that Obama has promised to create.

And from the look of things they still don’t get it.

Perhaps my clout in the conservative blogosphere isn’t what it used to be, and none of the people who should read this will take my critique seriously because I am not a former campaign worker or some other blogger never bought me out to write for their own blog, but I did create something that worked back in the day, and while blogging has changed over the years, the formula for success has not changed so much.

Here is what I think the conservative blogosphere needs to do to get back on track: Continue reading →

Comrade Obama is planning on turning the White House into a taxpayer-funded campaign operation:

Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.

[…]

The nucleus of that effort is an e-mail database of more than 10 million supporters. The list is considered so valuable that the Obama camp briefly offered it as collateral during a cash-flow crunch late in the campaign, though it wound up never needing the loan, senior aides said. At least 3.1 million people on the list donated money to Obama.

Millions more made up the volunteer corps that organized his enormous rallies, registered millions of voters and held countless gatherings to plug the senator to friends and neighbors. On Election Day, they served as the backbone of Obama’s get-out-the-vote operation, reaching voters by phone and at the front door, serving coffee at polling stations and babysitting so parents could stand in line at voting precincts.

This is scary stuff… Piece by piece, our Republic will crumble, our freedoms will be taken away.

PREVIOUS: Big Brother Is Coming, Part 1

Even if Obama and his minions would prefer otherwise:

OSAMA bin Laden is planning an attack against the United States that will “outdo by far” September 11, an Arab newspaper in London has reported.

And according to a former senior Yemeni al-Qaeda operative, the terrorist organisation has entered a “positive phase”, reinforcing specific training camps around the world that will lead the next “wave of action” against the West.

The warning, on the front page of an Arabic newspaper published in London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi – and widely reported in the major Italian papers – quotes a person described as being “very close to al-Qaeda” in Yemen.

The paper is edited by Abdel al-Bari Atwan, who is said to be the last journalist to interview Osama bin Laden in 1996. According to the report, bin Laden is himself closely following preparations for an attack against the US and aims to “change the face of world politics and economics”. The operative is quoted as saying that “this will be shown by the fact that we now control a major part of the south of Somalia”.

Given the fact that I think bin Laden is dead – killed in the Tora Bora in December of 2001 – I take this report with a large grain of salt. On the other hand, I post it because (a) it might turn out to be true, even if we never see it due to disruption by our side and (b) because it is a dead certainty that our terrorist enemies will want to test Obama’s mettle early on to see what they can get away with from the new Administration. This would also have happened had McCain been elected – the whole world, indeed, wants to get the full measure of the new President. The problem with al Qaeda is that they usually get the full measure of something by killing lots of innocent people.

We can stick our heads in the sand and think that France and Iran will save us the trouble of fighting this war, but our enemies hate us for what we are, not what we do and they will keep coming at us until they are taken or destroyed. The central fact of our life is this: the enemy hates President Bush, but they also will hate President Obama. The only difference will be whether they’ll hold Obama in the awed and fearful respect they show to Bush, or whether they’ll run wild convinced that Obama has pulled the plug on the war and its only a matter of time before evil men take control.

From a radio interview:

Q — Why did your campaign lose?

A — I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a $10 trillion debt in a Republican administration, how have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration?

If we’re talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party had been representing. People desiring change I think went as far from the administration that is presently seated as they could. … It’s amazing that we did as well as we did.

It is a certainty that the run up of debt, the various Congressional GOP scandals and the long war with its errors (real and imagined) played a huge role in our defeat last week. McCain’s mishandling of Palin’s roll out post-convention also played a role, as did McCain’s decision to eschew attacks on Obama over his racist, anti-American pastor of 20 years standing. The final nail in the coffin was – in retrospect – McCain’s decision to get deeply involved in the bail out. All that accomplished was to remind people what they didn’t like about the GOP Congressional delegation, that McCain is part of the terribly unpopular Congress and that he’s in the same party as George Bush. Pretty much, take any of the varied factors which contributed to the defeat and turn it around, and McCain stood a good chance of winning.

On top of all of this, however, is the current institutional weakness of the GOP. The Democrats have a motivating desire – they want power; all of it, all the time, in order to enrich themselves and their cronies and remake the United States in their sophomoric image of what America should be like. They don’t care how they acquire power and will use everything short of rape and murder to obtain it. Ok, fine; they probably also wouldn’t use cannibalism. I think. Maybe…. Meanwhile, the GOP doesn’t know what it wants. Conflicts between social and fiscal conservatives, various fights over how libertarian we should be and then whether or not we should work with or fight tooth and nail against the Democratic party push and pull the party in various directions and make it nearly impossible to have a coherent message for the elections.

The first task of the GOP is to sit down quietly for a bit and think:

1. What do we want?

2. How do we want to do it?

Until we’ve got good answers to both questions, we’ll continue to flounder about and fail to create that generational majority we’ll need to really reform America and excise the left wing poison in our system. Answering those questions might not be necessary for electoral victory – Obama’s almost-certain-to-fail policies may well usher us, deserving or not, back into power – but they are necessary to make our efforts worthwhile and lasting. Governor Palin is at least understanding why we lost, and it will be up to her – and others – to figure out over the next four years what we need to win.

Looks like the future Redistributer-In-Chief doesn’t even want to bother with Congress, he want to impose his agenda before he even finishes his first bowl of corn flakes.

President-elect Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

John Podesta, Obama’s transition chief, said Sunday Obama is reviewing President Bush’s executive orders on those issues and others as he works to undo policies enacted during eight years of Republican rule. He said the president can use such orders to move quickly on his own.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” Podesta said. “I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.”

Yeah because the course the Democrats have taken us on is so wonderful… before they took control of congress we had growing economy… they really screwed that one up… I am tired of President Bush being the scapegoat for the mess the Democrats got us into.  Barack Obama can only dream of being 1/12th the president George W. Bush has been… and Obama knows it, so he has to act like a dictator in order to prove himself.

These next four years are going to be scary.

UPDATE: Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship:

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

Keeps getting creepier:

Plans are being made to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama, who will become the nation’s 44th president when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20.

“Yes We Can” planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald’s restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13. The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama’s honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809.

Some American common sense remains – from the comments in the linked article:

What next? Bow before His Excellence? Chant “Yes We CAn” while goose-stepping down the street in his Civilian Paramilitary Corps? Everyone REQUIRED to serve.

National holiday! This is OUTRAGEOUS! I doubt they would have promoted one for Hillary…especially even before she took office.

Man…this is getting TOOO weird!

WAKE UP, PEOPLE!

We’re swiftly getting past that “its just a few zealots, relax” statements from the left – the man has slavishly devoted followers, and that is unhealthy in the United States of America. It is up to Obama and his people to quash this sort of thing – if they don’t, then they provide tacit approval for it, and thus become complicit in this neo-Leninst nonsense.

Interesting:

Despite widespread predictions of record turnout in this year’s presidential election, roughly the same portion of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008 as in 2004.

Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004, according to a voting analysis by American University political scientist Curtis Gans, an authority on voter turnout.

He estimated that between 126.5 million and 128.5 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, versus 122.3 million four years ago. Gans said the gross number of ballots cast in 2008 was the highest ever, even though the percentage was not substantially different from 2004, because there were about 6.5 million more people registered to vote this time around…

…In 2004, turnout was 6 percentage points higher than in 2000. But Gans said he believed it did not spike more this year because fewer Republicans went to the polls. While it may be premature to draw conclusions, Gans said, it appeared that Republican voting declined 1.3 points, to 28.7 percent of the electorate, while Democratic turnout rose from 28.7 percent to 31.3 percent of the electorate.

The Democratic increase struck some analysts as modest, considering the party’s immense get-out-the-vote operation, strong anti-Bush sentiment and Obama’s popularity.

“It sort of calls into question some of the vaunted ground game discussion, the whole turnout machine,” said a Democratic strategist who did not want to be quoted by name criticizing Obama’s campaign. “The GOTV effort was redoubled in 2008 compared to 2004, but it did not seem to make that big of a difference.”

Not quite the sweeping victory for liberalism our leftwing friends are claiming. Now the stories about Obama’s paid “volunteers” (who seem to have went at least temporarily unpaid) massing in droves to back his candidacy take on the look of, well, nonsense. Here are some States which had a decrease:

Ohio: 5,379,765 in 2008, 5,722,443 in 2004, 6% decrease.

Indiana: 2,286,760 in 2008, 2,468,002 in 2004, 7% decrease.

Alaska: 223,258 in 2008, 312,598 in 2004, 29% decrease.

The Alaska number is especially amazing given the hotly contested Senate seat plus having the Alaska governor on the ballot. For all the hoopla and hype and election day stories of massive turnout, its clear that it wasn’t like that at all – so why were we getting stories saying such was happening when it wasn’t? Some States (Florida, eg) had a big increase in turnout, but there are not enough actual turnout increases in battleground States to support the election day meme of high turnout. We were also advised that turnout might be as high as 150 million, about 30 million more than actually showed up – where did the high estimate come from?

What shapes up initially is a lack of enthusiasm for John McCain on the part of rank and file GOPers which could not be made up by merely having Palin on the ticket (and for all the lefty attacks on her, the rank and file GOP holds a very high opinion on her) – as in 2006, not so much a resounding endorsement of liberalism but a rejection of the GOP as its been over the past few years. A better GOP should be able to get those voters back to the polls and put a swift end to the Era of The One.

UPDATE: Haven’t been able to secure the complete vote for Illinois, but it appears that turnout in The One’s State only increased about 1% over 2004. Strange, huh? It was up a bit more than 2% in Arizona…which is still a small increase, all things considered, but beats Barry’s.

Just wanted to note that Obama’s response to Iran via his press conference on Friday was a good start – now the President-Elect needs to get his advisors together and work out the exact language necessary to tell Iran, “you be damned”.

The Iran situation is a good chance for Obama to prove us wrong about him – we on the right feel certain that Obama will flub the issue. In an urge to get US troops out of Iraq as soon as possible and cobble together something which can be presented as a nuclear agreement with Iran, our fear is that Obama will give away the store. The lunatics who run Iran also see this – though they are delighted with the prospect.

Obama supporters can say what they will about it, but the plain fact of the matter is that our enemies around the world view the election of Obama as a signal for American withdrawal. They see a weak man who will refrain from using real US power against them. They may be right, but if they aren’t – if, that is, Obama is determined to assert himself as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world – then there is no place better for him to demonstrate it than Iran.

The Iranian government is in quite a fix right now. The economy was a basket case when oil was $140 a barrel and is just more so now at $65 a barrel. The cash from oil is the only thing the Iranian government has to pay for their military build up (including their nuclear program), support their surrogates Hamas and Hezbollah and provide just enough to the Iranian people to prevent revolution. Right now, Iran is the softest of soft targets and just a bit of firmness on the part of Obama will bring them genuinely to the negotiating table.

The best course of action remains what I’ve figured all along – a blockade against Iranian gasoline imports (Iran imports the majority of its gasoline) to be emplaced until the Iranians agree to a verifiable dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program. Working with Obama Administration policy, our withdrawal from Iraq can be made conditional upon Iran’s surrender of its nuclear option. Do this – or something similar to it – and Obama will prove he’s got guts, weaken Iran’s strategic position and reassure nervous allies in the region that our withdrawal from Iraq does not mean an abandonment of our friends.

Obama has a host of troubles to deal with, but he also has plenty of grand opportunities to cement the advantages we have gained through much effort and great cost. President Bush has left victory in Iraq and the larger War on Terrorism for Obama – it will be up to Obama to use this victory wisely.

From the consequences of their insane labor contracts with Big Auto:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent to send a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urging him to assist the Big Three auto makers by considering broadening the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program to help the troubled industry.

The two top Democratic leaders in Congress are likely to make the request in a letter to the White House, which could be forwarded as soon as Saturday afternoon, said individuals familiar with the matter. President-elect Barack Obama is generally supportive of the appeal, but at the moment is moving on his own track to assist the industry, these individuals said.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to meet with President George W. Bush at the White House Monday.

The White House has been reluctant to broaden use of the $700 billion program, which was created by Congress just ahead of the election to deal improve credit flows and calm turmoil in financial markets incited by the downturn in the housing economy.

“It was not set up for anything else,” said Bush spokesman Tony Fratto, noting the only assistance authorized by Congress for the auto industry is a $25 billion loan package meant to help the industry retool to meet higher fuel economy standards.

Democrats are worried that if the auto industry is forced to deal with economic reality it will result in fewer union members and thus less union swag for Democratic political campaigns – so, they want to bail out Big Auto and thus prevent any change to the way auto manufacturers do business. Now, don’t get me wrong here – Big Auto, at least its American component, appears to be the usual mush of corporate pinheads who, even with 12 million unit sales expected this year, have managed to run their cash machine up on the rocks. It isn’t hard to sell a car in America, ya know? Its not like they don’t have people knocking on their doors asking for their product, even if its a relatively crappy product which is over-priced and not fuel-efficient (I do like my Malibu Max, and thus I understand that GM is discontinuing the model…). Don’t anyone get the idea that I have any sympathy for the faceless blob corporations of the United States – devices to hide incompetence, that’s all they are…smaller is better, and if we can figure out a way to break up these big corporations without adversely effecting the free market, then I’m all for it.

Anyways – this is what we can expect from our Democrats; using taxpayer dollars to protect their electoral base. It doesn’t matter that the UAW and the corporations have made it almost impossible for our auto companies to swiftly react to changing market conditions, the only thing that matters to Democrats is the next election, and they want a lot of donations and no major union job losses, regardless of cost to the taxpayer and larger economy. This is what “hopenchange” really means, liberals – more corporate greed, union corruption and Democratic backscratching…