At a June 30th fundraiser in Wheeling, West Virginia, Speaker John Boehner told the audience of 200-300 that Republicans don't need to love Mitt Romney to get behind him.  The comments came in response to a woman asking Mr. Boehner "can you make me love Mitt Romney?" 

After conflicting versions of Mr. Boehner's exact words, the Speaker's office provided Roll Call with the following version of Mr. Boehner's reply to the woman's question:

“No,” Boehner said. “Listen, we’re just politicians. I wasn’t elected to play God. The American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney. I’ll tell you this: 95 percent of the people that show up to vote in November are going to show up in that voting booth, and they are going to vote for or against Barack Obama.  

“Mitt Romney has some friends, relatives and fellow Mormons ... some people that are going to vote for him. But that’s not what this election is about. This election is going to be a referendum on the president’s failed economic policies.

“Mitt Romney believes, just like we do, that if we’re going to get the economy back, if we’re going to put the American people back to work, we need to fix the tax code, we need to stop the regulatory juggernaut that’s going on in Washington and we need to fix our economy. Solid guy, he’s going to do a great job, even if you don’t fall in love with him.”

The fundraiser was hosted by Robert Murray, CEO of the Murray Energy Corp.

This week, the House Ethics Committee is scheduled to decide on whether to proceed with the investigation of Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV), who is also running for Senate against Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV). The case against Berkley is one of the more clear-cut conflict of interest cases imaginable: Berkley has repeatedly advocated, intervened, and sponsored legislation on behalf of matters in which she has a personal financial interest.

Here’s the story.

Berkley’s husband is Dr. Larry Lehrner, a nephrologist. Lehner is also managing partner of Kidney Specialists of Southern Nevada (KSSN). KSSN was contracted with Nevada’s University Medical Center (UMC) for nephrology services; KSSN earned just under $600,000 under the contract. Within a year of the signing of that contract, the federal government – under the auspices of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services -- revoked UMC’s kidney transplant program and ended Medicare financing for it, thanks to high death rates in the unit – “more than twice the expected level,” according to the New York Times.

That’s when Berkley stepped in. She protested CMS’ decertification and defunding, then set up calls between UMC and CMS. Then she called up Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and the head of the CMS. Berkley’s aim: keep the program open.

CMS ended up reversing the order. In fact, UMC had to expand its kidney staff – and KSSN got an even bigger contract. Now it earned $738,000 per year. Not coincidentally, employees of KSSN handed over cash to Berkley’s election campaigns.

Berkley has taken a special interest in pushing bills that provide subsidies to the kidney care industry. And she’s received disproportionate support from the industry. She’s pushed to reverse funding cuts for kidney dialysis under Medicare; she’s moved to protect Medicare reimbursement for specialty physicians. All of this looks highly suspicious, and certainly worthy of further investigation.

Berkley maintained recently that she has “never advocated for anything that was not in the best thing for patients and patient care.” Asked specifically about the personal financial benefit side of it, she stated, “That did not concern me, my only concern was to provide good health care in the state of Nevada for the people that live here. That's it.”  Let’s repeat that answer, “That did not concern me.” 

And that’s precisely her ethical problem: that she did not concern herself with the positive, beneficial impact her official actions had on her husband’s business and her family income.  The House rules concerning personal conflicts of interest are quite clear. Stating that she was only concerned with a publicly beneficial end does justify the means -- if the means for attaining that end also break the House rules and benefit her as well. It’s like saying, “I was only helping that little old lady cross the busy street, but the sign said ‘don’t walk.’”

If the House Ethics Committee does not establish a formal investigative subcommittee to more appropriately investigate this serious matter further, it will be just another black mark on a committee that has a long history of routinely and repeatedly allowing our Congresspeople to avoid culpability for their corruption.

President Obama and his campaign team are apparently fibbing to donors. Virtually every day, the Obama team sends out desperate emails complaining that they’re running behind Mitt Romney in the money race. But according to OpenSecrets.org, that’s simply not the case. As of May 31, 2012, Obama had raised $255,162,109. He’d spent $109,718,115. That means he had almost $110 million in cash on hand.

Mitt Romney, by contrast, had raised $121,023,126; he’d spent $104,036,499. He had just under $17 million in cash on hand. So Obama had raised nearly twice as much cash as Romney as of May 31, 2012, and had about six times as much cash on hand.

Obama hasn’t reported his June figures; Romney reportedly raised in excess of $100 million. People have supposed that the reason Obama didn’t release his figures is that he didn’t want to look like he was coming up short against Romney. In fact, the opposite may be true – Obama may be raising scads of cash, but wants to continue pressing a message of urgency into the donor base.

Even MoveOn.org, one of the most left-wing organizations out there, initially condemned racist, antisemtie Charles Barron, a Democrat who was running for Congress in New York’s eighth congressional district, who was endorsed by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Barron had made comments such as “the biggest terrorist in the world is the government of Israel” and “I want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.”

But after coming under pressure from the left, MoveOn.org has now apologized for condemning Barron. 

MoveOn had written an e-mail to its members that Barron was “unfit to serve” because he has spent his career “specializing in divisive, offensive, and just plain outrageous statements and behavior."

Now, in an amazing twist, MoveOn e-mailed an apology  -- for its condemnation of Barron -- to its members, according to the New York Observer. 

In an e-mail titled, “We apologize,” MoveOn.org’s political director wrote that the organization’s initial condemnation of Barron was “was offensive and inflammatory—and we shouldn’t have sent it.”

“On behalf of the MoveOn staff, I apologize to you and to the Brooklyn community,” the e-mail says, before noting that MoveOn aspires “to bring folks together to fight for racial and economic justice and democracy -- with respect for everyone” and that the previous condemnation “did the opposite.” 

“After the email was sent, we couldn’t undo the harm it had done,” the e-mail said. “We can’t take back our actions. But we can do better going forward to make sure that we are uniting, not dividing, our shared communities.”

Apparently, by MoveOn's logic, condemning a racist antisemite for "specializing in divisive, offensive, and just plain outrageous statements and behavior" is the equivalent of "dividing" liberal communities. 

When one of the most far-left organizations has to walk back its condemnation of a racist anti-Semite, it is a sign of how unhinged and radically liberal the organized left and its members really are. 

Few outside of Republican circles knew him in 1994, or the new organization he was launching to fight back against leftists and secularists, and provide a conservative answer to the ACLU. Now Alan Sears is the CEO of a massive national network of thousands of Christian attorneys, which today has changed its name to the Alliance Defending Freedom—known nationwide in legal circles by its initials, ADF.

Although since its 1920 founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was supposedly an organization dedicated to protecting the Bill of Rights, it has instead proven itself as a consistently far-left organization, and an unmitigated disaster for constitutional liberty when it comes to religion. The ACLU reads the Establishment Clause—which forbids the national government from creating an official national religion and subordinating other faiths to that one denomination—in an ultraliberal fashion to demand that every inch of the public square and every aspect of public life be purged of references to faith.

Beginning in the early 1960s, the ACLU has taken advantage of what became a very liberal Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren and later a reliably liberal Court under Warren Burger to systematically remove not only prayers and Bible reading, but even moments of silence and high school graduation benedictions, nativity scenes on public property during Christmas season, and Ten Commandments displays in government buildings.

Alan Sears is a committed Christian attorney who served in the Reagan administration, including in the Justice Department, who became increasingly concerned about the ACLU and its leftist allies’ success at sterilizing American life of every reference to God, faith, and biblical values. After returning to the private sector, he was recruited by more than thirty Christian leaders to start an organization that would build a nationwide network to fight for religious freedom, the sanctity of life, the importance of marriage, and the rights of parents. The Alliance Defense Fund thus began in 1994.

Fifty years ago, references to faith were widespread in American life, where public prayers were common and official communications and presidential speeches would frequently cite the Bible or Christian belief, and such things were not controversial. Now the ACLU and far left has succeeded in giving us so many years of sterile secularism that it has become the new baseline. Many local school boards that once had to be sued by the ACLU to ban singing Christmas carols at a properly named Christmas Concert are now quite content to ban those carols on their own, and to order the concert renamed a Winter Concert.

Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Instead of an ACLU lawyer suing that school on behalf of some militant atheist parent, now an ADF lawyer is suing the school for telling a Christian student that she cannot draw a picture of Jesus when she’s asked to draw someone who is important to her.

Headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, Sears has built an organization that is every bit an equal to the ACLU. Its staff of roughly 200 employees includes dozens of lawyers, who coordinate the efforts of over 2,200 “allied attorneys” nationwide, in almost every state of the Union and more than a dozen countries around the globe. To date, these lawyers have contributed an astounding $141 million in pro bono legal work (yes, that means free of charge) to people and organizations involved in legal fights on ADF’s issues. These attorneys become part of the Alliance upon completing ADF’s weeklong legal training conference. (Full disclosure: I have attended this training academy twice—once as a lawyer in their legal track and once as a journalist in their media informational track.)

ADF also makes grants to support lawyers and scholars for their work on behalf of those issues of faith, life, marriage, and families. And its Blackstone Legal Fellowship program takes over 100 promising law students every year and treats them to nine weeks of excellent food and accommodations over the summer in exchange for spending their days in lectures and seminars on natural law, government, philosophy, and learning key legal doctrines, followed by six weeks of “field work,” to equip them for lifelong service of ADF’s mission-related issues in whatever field they end up pursuing in their career.

On July 9, ADF announced that while keeping its initials, the organization changed its name from Alliance Defense Fund to Alliance Defending Freedom. Sears and his board wanted to emphasize that the core of the organization is not its funding of legal efforts—because again most of ADF’s work is done pro bono—and instead is focused on defending the constitutional freedoms of Americans regardless of whether their clients are able to pay.

And there’s no shortage of clients and work. ADF is litigating the HHS Mandate for abortion-related services under Obamacare, arguing (correctly) that this regulation imposed by President Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius violates religious liberty. It also fights for the unborn, including court fights on the rights of pro-life nurses and doctors not to be compelled to perform abortions. And it supports states and organizations being sued for discontinuing funding of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. Every day ordinary Americans call ADF’s toll-free number or use its website, asking for legal help. They are then connected with a locally-licensed allied attorney who steps into the situation to represent the citizen.

Alliance Defending Freedom is helping coordinate the legal support effort to reinforce the lawyers defending the Defense of Marriage Act, now before the U.S. Supreme Court for next year. ADF is also performing that role in the California case, defending traditional marriage in a case where the plaintiffs are arguing that the U.S. Constitution provides a right to same-sex marriage, and thus that all state laws defining marriage as between a man and woman must be struck down as unconstitutional.

ADF has fought for reinstatement of students expelled from graduate programs for declining to affirm same-sex relationships in violation of their religious beliefs. It’s also defending private school choice and homeschooling nationwide, having designed the case Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, where last year the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s law allowing tax credits for contributions that go to support religious schools.

Alliance Defending Freedom also protects religious expression. It fights to ensure that churches have equal access to schools for Sunday services that other organizations receive, that students are free to peacefully express their faith on equal terms with other students sharing their beliefs on other issues, and for people of faith to be able to speak and participate in the public square. It also protects local governments being sued by the ACLU for beginning their meetings with an invocation, a practice maintained every day in Congress. ADF is also involved in protecting home owners and private citizens who are told by authorities that local zoning ordinances do not permit them to have church gatherings or even Bible studies in their homes.

As full as its plate is, ADF is also aggressively expanding into other areas. It has a global religious freedom outreach program, working to advance religious liberty overseas both for Americans traveling abroad and also for foreigners in countries where the law forbids their religious faith. And here at home ADF is also working to increase its presence in law schools and among major law firms to create diversity in thought and belief often lacking in elite circles.

Spending time with ADF lawyers and staff one-on-one in the evening after hours, one is struck by two things. First is their sincerity, in that they see the work they do as a calling, rather than a career, and one that they should live out 24/7, not just when they’re in the office. The second is related, in that many of them chose to give up lucrative legal careers that pay much more, proving that these are things they’re passionate about.

As well as ADF is doing now, no one knows what the future holds for a relatively young organization that depends on the generosity of supporters. But ADF is now a $40 million organization, and its number of financial supporters is growing. And its network of 2,200 lawyers is growing by roughly 200 lawyers—or 10%—every year. So one thing that’s clear is that Alliance Defending Freedom is here to stay, and is having a massive and growing impact in courtrooms across America.

Breitbart News legal contributor Ken Klukowski is senior fellow for religious liberty at the Family Research Council and on faculty at Liberty University.

On Friday, President Barack Obama issued an executive order on the "Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions" because the "the Federal Government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive missions."

Section 5.2 states that Secretary of Homeland Security shall "satisfy priority communications requirements through the use of commercial, Government, and privately owned communications resources, when appropriate." 

Furthermore, the Secretary of Homeland Security must "maintain a joint industry-Government center that is capable of assisting in the initiation, coordination, restoration, and reconstitution of NS/EP [National Security and Emergency Preparedness] communications services or facilities under all conditions of emerging threats, crisis, or emergency."

The complete executive order can read here at the White House website.

We have examined many facets of the omni-directional terrible-ness that is Network Neutrality.

It is illegal for the federal government to unilaterally impose Net Neutrality.  Before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can do anything, Congress must first write a law that says “Yo, FCC, do this.”  Congress has never done this for Net Neutrality.  Yet in December 2010 the Barack Obama Administration's FCC illegally jammed it through anyway.

Net Neutrality is a “solution” running around in search of a problem.  Regulation-free, the Internet has become a free speech, free market Xanadu.  Net Neutrality is an all-encompassing, top-down, one-size-fits-all uber-regulation.  It is completely unnecessary - unless you wish to emulate the globe’s dictators.

Net Neutrality is a First Amendment free speech nightmare. 

All things news, media and communications will in the not-too-distant future be delivered solely on the Web. Thus is Net Neutrality your one-day-soon one-stop-shop for censorship.

Have a radio talk show host you want to shut up? Net Neutrality. Have a TV show you don’t like? Net Neutrality. Someone writing something of which you aren’t fond? The Big NN.

Media Marxist Tim Wu, Net Neutrality’s creator - and (shocker) an Obama Administration senior adviser - just said any data provided by any computer is not protected by the First Amendment.  And that the government absolutely should regulate it.

Net Neutrality is also an egregious assault on the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.  Which in part reads:

No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Net Neutrality allows the government - without Constitutional due process of law - to commandeer private property - without just compensation for its owners.

The private property here being the Internet infrastructure.  Private companies have spent - and continue to spend - hundreds of billions of dollars creating and building, maintaining and innovating the Web network. 

It’s theirs - just as an office space you build on your business property is yours.

Net Neutrality is the government basically saying:

“Thanks for the trillion dollar investment.  We’ll take it (over) from here.”

How do we know this?  Robert McChesney, one of the founding fathers of the Media Marxist movement, said so:

“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

How very Hugo Chavez of him.  And them.

Net Neutrality - like ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, Cap & Trade, Card Check, and nearly all major regulations - is a tremendous disincentive for companies to continue to invest in their businesses.  And that’s exactly the point.

ObamaCare makes it harder for private companies to invest in their employees’ health insurance - thereby creating room for an ever-expanding government role.  Ultimately leaving all of us with the government as our sole health care provider - which isn’t at all problematic.

Net Neutrality makes it harder for private companies to invest in their Internet infrastructure - thereby creating room for an ever-expanding government role.  Ultimately leaving all of us with the government as our sole Internet Service Provider (ISP) - which isn’t at all problematic.

Part of the gi-normous power grab that is Net Neutrality is this huge private property grab. Yet another reason it needs to go.

In 2010, influenced by the Tea Party and its focus on fiscal issues, 17 states elected Republican governors. And, according to an Examiner.com analysis, every one of those states saw a drop in their unemployment rates since January of 2011. 

Since January of 2011, here is how much the unemployment rate declined in each of the 17 states that elected Republican governors in 2010, according to theExaminer: 

Kansas - 6.9% to 6.1% = a decline of 0.8 [percentage points (11.6 percent)]

Maine - 8.0% to 7.4% = a decline of 0.6 [percentage points  (7.5 percent)]

Michigan - 10.9% to 8.5% = a decline of [2.4 percentage points (22 percent)]

New Mexico - 7.7% to 6.7% = a decline of [1.0 percentage points (13 percent)] 

Oklahoma - 6.2% to 4.8% = a decline of [1.4 percentage points - (22.6 percent)]

Pennsylvania - 8.0% to 7.4% = a decline of [.6 percentage points  (7.5 percent)]

Tennessee - 9.5% to 7.9% = a decline of [1.6 percentage points (16.8 percent)]

Wisconsin - 7.7% to 6.8% = a decline of [0.9 percentage points (11.9 percent)]

Wyoming - 6.3% to 5.2% = a decline of [1.1 percentage points (17.5 percent)]

Alabama - 9.3% to 7.4% = a decline of [1.9 percentage points  (20.4 percent)] 

Georgia - 10.1% to 8.9% = a decline of [1.2 percentage points (11.9 percent)]

South Carolina - 10.6% to 9.1% = a decline of [1.5 percentage points (14.2 percent)]

South Dakota - 5.0% to 4.3% = a decline of [0.7 percentage points (14 percent)]

Florida - 10.9% to 8.6% = a decline of [2.3 percentage points (21 percent)] 

Nevada - 13.8% to 11.6% = a decline of [2.2 percentage points (15.9 percent)]

Iowa - 6.1% to 5.1% = a decline of [1.0 percentage points (16.4 percent)]

Ohio - 9.0% to 7.3% = a decline of [1.7 percentage points (18.9 percent)] 

This was not the case for states that elected Democrats in 2010. For instance, the unemployment rate in New York actually went up. On average, states that elected Republican governors in 2010 saw their unemployment rates decrease at a faster clip than states that elected Democrats and the unemployment rate at the national level did.

This is yet another example of how the so-called "blue state" model is not working. 

*an earlier version of this article incorrectly relied on an analysis that mistook a decline in percentage points for a percent decline. 

The Romney campaign today released data, including the spending chart above, showing that the Obama campaign has spent nearly $50 million on television ads, most of them negative, since Mitt Romney became the Republican nominee in April--outspending Romney three to one--and yet has failed to budge the national poll numbers.

The Romney campaign cites polling data posted at the Huffington Post, but could also have cited data from the RealClearPolitics average, which shows Obama with a 3-point lead on April 16 and just a 2.7-point lead today. 

In addition, the Romney campaign notes that despite pleading poverty, the Obama campaign has far more cash-on-hand than its rival, and has been burning that cash at a high rate.

In a press release, the Romney campaign called Obama out on his hypocrisy, noting that he once complained about the negative nature of political campaigns. "Bemoaning negative ads while running a 75% negative campaign is the height of hypocrisy and reinforces the discouragement and cynicism that Americans feel about our broken political system in Washington DC."

President Obama is obviously panicked. Last month Obama and his supporters spent a lot more than Mitt Romney, but even with that cash advantage and the media on their side, the polls haven't budged. Moreover, the President and his campaign have been running around frantically trying to find something that will stick to Romney, be it provable lies about his outsourcing or outright smears involving offshore accounts. Still, Obama can't get above 47% and Romney hasn't even started campaigning in earnest or spending the $160 million he has on hand.

Today, in yet another desperate attempt to win a news cycle as opposed to do his job and what’s best for the country, Obama will use the high-profile setting of the Rose Garden to call for a huge tax increase on those making $250,000 or more, which will, of course, hit who knows how many small business owners. Naturally, Obama and his Media Palace Guards will spin today's announcement as a call to keep in place the Bush-era tax cuts for those making under $250,000 a year (a middle class tax cut), but it's really a call to raise taxes on our nation's job creators.

In other words, as the economy and job growth stalls, Obama will effectively propose taking money away from those institutions that represent America's engine of job creation. Back in 2008, when Obama first started prattling on about how a tax increase on those making over $250,000 would only hurt a small percentage of small businesses, using numbers from the Small Business Administration, Rush Limbaugh did a memorable job proving how untrue that was.

Regardless, as a general rule, there is no worse time to raise taxes than when the economy is slowing (as it is now). Taking money out of the private sector as though the government can somehow spend it better is a formula for economic suicide. But to take money directly away from those who create jobs in this country is grossly irresponsible, although, for this president, not at all surprising.

What Obama's obviously doing here is again ginning up the class warfare weaponry; cynically attempting to pit the middle class against the wealthy, even if that means hurting those who create the jobs that  employ the middle class and the poor.

The second bomb this unbelievably cynical and failed president is dropping on his failed economy today is more uncertainty. Currently, America's job creators are not only worrying about what kind of bureaucratic hell ObamaCare will rain down on them; they now have to worry about where this tax debate will lead. Until today, Congressional Democrats favored extending the cuts up to those making $1 million. So this is a real kick in the teeth.

If you’re a small business owner thinking about hiring or expanding but you have the spectre of all the costs and hidden costs of ObamCare hanging over you, that's bad enough. But now Obama is signaling a fight to raise your taxes on top of that.

Class division, racial division, division, division, division… All this president cares about is winning reelection and doing so by any means necessary. And now on top of his incompetence, the very people who are the only hope to bring down chronic unemployment must also worry about  a desperate president's increasingly erratic, desperate, and irresponsible behavior.

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright was in Washington DC Sunday morning to deliver a sermon for the 100th Anniversary of the Florida Avenue Baptist Church.  Breitbart News was in attendance.

Reverend Wright, Obama's former spiritual advisor, gained notoriety in 2008 when his sermon proclaiming "God Damn America" proved embarrassing for candidate Obama's presidential campaign. 

Wright's sermon on Sunday, rife with divisive rhetoric, urged the African American Community to assert their history rather than the history taught by society:

Most of our children do not know our story. They are not taught our story, they are taught somebody else's story. They are taught HIS-story. HIS-tory distorts our story. HIS-story destroys our story. HIS-story disses our story, cancels it out, makes it null and void.

He urged the church community to teach their children more than just "Oprah and Obama" and rap stars.  Wright warned not to "romanticize because we have the first African American elected President in the White House. You see what the Tea Party is trying to do."

The Reverend also ventured into political territory, and alluding to recent efforts to confront voter fraud, asked the congregation "how can they hope to know the new Jim Crow if they don't know the old Jim Crow?"

Wright was critical of blacks he called "sheep dogs" and "biscuits.” He told a story to the congregation about Malcolm X, who asked 50 years ago:  “if a cat crawls in to an oven and has kittens, do you call those kittens biscuits?” Wright added “if a cat is put into an oven….and has kittens while being in that oven, do you call those kittens biscuits….why is it that Africans born in the oven of America, put in that oven maliciously by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, why are those Africans called biscuits?” 

Wright hammered on those African Americans who had assimilated into American society:

Take that baby, him or her away, from the African mother, away from the African community, away from the African experience … and put them [sic] Africans over at the breasts of Yale, Harvard, University of Chicago, UCLA or UC Berkeley. Turn them into biscuits. Let them get that alien DNA all up inside their brain and they will turn on their own people in defense of the ones who are keeping their own people under oppression. Sheep dogs.

Wright retired from the Trinity United Church of Christ in 2008 shortly after his controversial sermon came to light.  He appeared in the news in May when he told NY Post reporter Ed Klein that he was offered $150K not to preach until after the 2008 election.

A reader at Professor William Jacobson's Legal Insurrection blog has offered convincing evidence that Elizabeth Warren's husband, Bruce Mann, also contributed a plagiarized recipe to the infamous Pow Wow Chow cookbook. Subtitled A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek & Seminole, the cookbook was edited by Warren's cousin, Candy Rowsey, and first published in 1984. 

As Breitbart News reported earlier, Ms. Warren contributed at least two recipes to the cookbook that were word for word copies of previously published recipes. Now, it appears her husband may have done the same thing. His Pow Wow Chow recipe for banana nut bread merely raises concerns about the use of bananas as a "traditional" Cherokee ingredient. His recipe for oriental beef stir-fry, which includes that well known "traditional" Cherokee ingredient of soy sauce cooked in a "traditional" Cherokee wok, suggests the possibility of potential plagiarism.

The oriental beef stir-fry recipe appeared in a small local newspaper, the Oswego Palladium (New York), virtually word for word in 1983, a year prior to the publication of the Pow Wow Chow cookbook. You can see the recipe as published by the Palladium in 1983 here and compare it to Mr. Mann's 1984 Pow Wow Chow contribution here. The only differences between the Palladium's 1983 recipe for oriental beef stir-fry and Mr. Mann's 1984 Pow Wow Chow recipe for oriental beef stir-fry are the order of the ingredients, the exclusion of the parenthetical description "about two cups" in the "8 ounces of small mushrooms" ingredient, and the addition of the word "makes" at the beginning of the last sentence of the instructions "5 to 6 servings."

Every contributor of a Pow Wow Chow recipe also indicated the tribe their family claimed. Both Ms. Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, claimed Cherokee heritage in their contributions. Presumably, Mr. Mann's claim to Cherokee tribe membership came via his marriage to Ms. Warren. Unlike Ms. Warren, Mr. Mann does not appear to claim descent from a Cherokee ancestor.

Elizabeth Warren and Bruce Mann were married in 1980. At the time Mr. Mann was a rising legal scholar with an impressive academic pedigree (Brown undergraduate, Yale Phd. and J.D.). Ms. Warren was an unknown professor of law at the University of Houston with a J.D. from the much less prestigious Rutgers University-Newark Law School. In 1981, both Warren and Mann joined the faculty at the University of Texas Law School, and in 1987 Warren joined Mann at the University of Pennsylvania Law School as a "trailing spouse." By 1993, however, when Harvard Law School offered Warren a tenured position, she had become the legal star of the family. Her husband didn't join her at Harvard Law School until 2007.

Michael Patrick Leahy is a Breitbart News contributor, Editor of Broadside Books’ Voices of the Tea Party e-book series, and author of  Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement.

Many citizens in the cities of Baltimore and Denver might be surprised to learn that they provided a “testing ground” for the Obama administration’s dangerous (and unlawful) policy of suspending the deportations of illegal aliens last year.

But that’s exactly what happened. And Judicial Watch has initiated an investigation of the matter. On June 11, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking records pertaining to this six-week pilot program designed to test the Obama administration’s new “standards” for the dismissal of immigration charges against certain illegal aliens. The Obama administration tested the program first in the cities of Baltimore, Maryland, and Denver, Colorado, beginning on December 4, 2011.

Here’s what we’re after specifically pursuant to our original November 23, 2011, FOIA request to the Executive Office of Immigration Review (“EOIR”), a component of the DOJ:

i. Any and all records regarding, concerning or related to the six-week pilot program in Baltimore and Denver that is scheduled to begin on December 4, 2011 and under which the immigration-related charges against certain undocumented residents may be subject to dismissal. This request includes, but is not limited to, any and all policy guidelines, implementation plans, training materials, and directives regarding the pilot program.

ii. Any and all records of communication between any official, employee or representative of the Executive Office for Immigration Review and any official, employee or representative of any other government agency, office or department (including, but not limited to, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Executive Office of the President, the City of Baltimore, and the City of Denver) regarding concerning or related to the pilot program.

The DOJ acknowledged receiving our FOIA request on November 28, 2011, and was required by law to respond by January 11, 2012, at the latest. As of the date of our lawsuit, however, the Obama administration has failed to turn over any records responsive to the request, indicate which records are exempt from disclosure, or notify Judicial Watch when a response is forthcoming.

And so, we filed a lawsuit to prod them into action.

If you’ve been reading this space for some time, you know that this “suspended deportation” controversy has been unfolding now for over two years.

It all began on June 30, 2010, when John Morton, Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent a memo to all ICE employees instructing local immigration officials to use their discretion in “prioritizing” illegal immigration deportation cases. (The memo was leaked to the press and caused a massive uproar.)

On June 17, 2011, John Morton followed up with another memo to all field officers, special agents and to the chief counsel further defining the term “prosecutorial discretion,” which, in essence, asked immigration officials to focus deportation proceedings on illegal aliens convicted of crimes. However, Judicial Watch uncovered documents proving immigration officials considered suspending the deportation of illegal aliens convicted of violent crimes.

In November 2011, as reported by CNN, the Obama administration announced that on December 4, 2011, it would begin a pilot program in Baltimore and Denver to “test the process for reviewing cases pending before the immigration court.” Details regarding this program were sparse, prompting JW’s investigation. 

The Obama administration has been playing games with its immigration policy from the beginning in its attempt to evade Congress and implement illegal alien amnesty. First, Obama administration officials tried to implement stealth amnesty outside of the public eye and then, when the cat was out of the bag, they doubled down on the policy in open defiance of the law.  (An alien who fails to register after 30 days with ICE and keep registration papers on their person is in criminal violation of the law – and can be jailed for up to 30 days - in addition to being deported. This administration is ignoring and condoning this mass criminality.)  We know that any number of illegal aliens who receive “get out of jail free cards” from the Obama administration will go on to commit additional crimes, including murder.  Obama’s stealth amnesty and sanctuary policies will result in the killing of innocent Americans as surely as night follows day.

And on Friday, June 15, 2012, the Obama administration announced it would no longer deport unlawfully present immigrants under age 30 who came to the United States as children, a policy described by Politico’s Steve Friess as “a temporary, de facto implementation of a part of the stalled DREAM Act,” that sends “a loud message to Hispanic voters to remember Obama in November.” 

The American people are tired of the obfuscation and gamesmanship from the Obama administration on such a serious issue: especially when they can plainly see this is all for political purposes. The message to the Obama administration is simple: No more secrecy. No more games. Obey the law. Release the records.

Back in the heady days of 2011, while the GOP seemed mired in a multi-candidate primary campaign, the Obama campaign boasted that it was on track to raise over $1 billion for the 2012 election. Reuters breathless reported at the time that Obama's campaign would be a "bigger, slicker machine likely to dwarf that of his eventual Republican opponent." As with most things, Obama's rhetoric has failed to match up with reality.  

This morning, the Obama campaign reported the campaign and the DNC had raised a combined $71 million in June. It's their highest monthly total to date, but, unfortunately for the Democrats, falls far short of Romney's June fundraising haul. The Romney campaign reported this morning that, together with the RNC, it had raised a whopping $106 million in June--$35 million more than the Democrats. 

Romney first started beating Obama's fundraising in May, but June's numbers show the financial disparity is growing. Romney and the RNC had over $160 million cash-on-hand at the end of the reporting period. 

Its possible that Romney's fundraising could go quite a bit higher. In the 24 hours after the Supreme Court's decision on ObamaCare, the Romney campaign reported receiving over $4 million in donations. In June, 94% of all donations received were under $250. As grass roots activists realize that the only path to undo ObamaCare lies through the election of Romney, expect a surge in the number of small dollar donations to the campaign. 

Given the powerful assist Obama receives from the news media, his campaign can survive being out-spent by Romney. But, it's a significant decline in fortunes for a campaign that used to arrogantly boast about its fundraising juggernaut. In Obama's world, his campaign is an overwhelming political force that can steam-roll through all opposition. In the real world though, his campaign spams potential donors with increasingly desperate pleas for money. The November election, fortunately, will take place in the real world. 

According to a CNN/ORC poll, 53 percent of adults surveyed approve of the House of Representatives vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in civil and criminal contempt of Congress. Holder refused to turn over documents associated with the Fast and Furious operation to a congressional committee. Weapons traced back to Fast and Furious were used to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

However, opinions do not divide cleanly along partisan lines. A majority of Republicans (73%) approved of the contempt vote, while slightly more than one-third of Democrats approve.  More than half (54%) of Independents sided with the Republicans and approved of the vote, suggesting that public perception has not fallen in line with Democrats spin on Fast and Furious.

The majority of people surveyed believed the House’s contempt vote was politically motivated.  A majority of Democrats (79%) say that the vote was used to gain political advantage, while a majority of Republicans say that congressional Republicans have real ethical concerns. Although a majority of Independents agreed with the contempt vote, 63% think the move was politically motivated.

The poll also found that 69 percent of Americans want President Barack Obama to answer all of the questions surrounding the Fast and Furious “gunwalking” scandal.

The week after Chief Justice John Roberts sided with liberal justices and upheld Obamacare in the Supreme Court, Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced that his state would not comply with the ruling. Said Scott: "We care about having a health care safety net for...vulnerable Floridians, but this is an expansion that just doesn't make any sense."

And while such an announcement may not have been applauded by the MSM, the left, or even the Republican establishment, we know today that it was applauded by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is taking the same stand in his state.

Said Perry: "I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab." He added: "We in Texas have no intention to implement so-called state exchanges or to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. I will not be party to socializing healthcare."

Both Scott and Perry are perfectly aligned with the 10th Amendment, which says clearly: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People." 

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ “yes” vote on Obamacare came as a complete shock to most court observers.  And perennial swing voter Justice Kennedy’s spirited opposition to Obamacare raised more than a few eyebrows. But Justice Elena Kagan provided no surprises when she voted in favor of keeping the president’s socialist takeover of our nation’s healthcare.

I say it’s no surprise, because, as you may recall, Judicial Watch uncovered evidence which suggests that, during Justice Kagan’s tenure as Solicitor General, the Office of the Solicitor General had been more involved in the legal defense of Obamacare than had previously been disclosed.  We also uncovered evidence that she enthusiastically supported the passage of Obamacare.

Consider this email from then-Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal to Brian Hauck, Senior Counsel to Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, suggesting that Kagan wanted her office to defend Obamacare from the very beginning:

Subject: Re: Health Care Defense:

Brian, Elena would definitely like OSG [Office of Solicitor General] to be involved in this set of issues…we will bring in Elena as needed. [The “set of issues” refers to another email calling for assembling a group to figure out “how to defend against the…health care proposals that are pending.”]

And then there was this March 21, 2010, email from Kagan to then-Senior Counselor for Access to Justice Laurence Tribe commenting excitedly on the passage of Obamacare: “I hear they have the votes Larry!! Simply amazing…” Tribe responds, “So healthcare is basically done! Remarkable.”

You can see how one might fairly conclude that Justice Kagan not only helped craft the defense of Obamacare, but also supported its passage.

(These are just two of many illuminating emails we uncovered. You can read more here and here.)

Predictably, as a result of Judicial Watch’s investigation and the details we uncovered, many people called for Justice Kagan to recuse herself from the Obamacare lawsuit.

The key question, of course, was whether Justice Kagan could dispassionately evaluate the constitutional arguments at issue with Obamacare given that she herself may have helped craft the Obamacare defense. If a reasonable person can wonder, then it is most certainly cause for concern. After all, the recusal option is available for a reason – even the appearance of bias undermines public confidence in the integrity of the courts.

(Justice Kagan evidently recognized this fact when she recused herself from hearing the Supreme Court’s SB 1070 case, presumably because of her duties as Solicitor General when the government filed its lawsuit against Arizona. But why is the Arizona SB 1070 litigation different from that involving Obamacare? That’s what we’d like to know.)

As you know, JW has been aggressively forcing the release of all of the details of Justice Kagan’s involvement in Obamacare discussions. Much of what the country, and Congress, knows about this issue as a direct result of the work done by our outstanding investigations team.

We don’t know what the American people would conclude after reviewing all of the evidence, but we believe that the more information is available, the better. So we continue to fight for answers. As you might expect, the Obama administration has not been forthcoming. Neither has Justice Kagan. (I wrote to Justice Kagan in March on the eve of Supreme Court oral arguments over Obamacare asking her to disclose additional information and her reasons for participating in Obamacare.  We have received no response.)

Attorney General Eric Holder has also chosen the cover up route, refusing to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on the matter in June, just before the Supreme Court issued its decision.

Per CNS News: “General Eric Holder has refused to provide written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to ‘questions for the record’ submitted to him by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R.-Ala.) that focus on Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan's involvement in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act--AKA Obamacare--while she was President Barack Obama's solicitor general.”

Here are a few of the questions DOJ refuses to answer, according to CNS News:

Question: “Are you aware of any instances during Justice Kagan’s tenure as Solicitor General of the United States in which information related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and/or litigation related thereto was relayed or provided to her?”

Question: “When did your staff begin ‘removing’ Solicitor General Kagan from meetings in this matter? On what basis did you take this action? In what other matters was such action taken?”

Question: “Did you ever have a conversation with Justice Kagan regarding her recusal from matters before the Supreme Court related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? If so, please describe the circumstances and substance of those conversations.”

And Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is refusing to turn over key calendars of Kagan and her staff.  As is typical, we had to sue to the DOJ to force compliance with the law. In the meantime, we have to wait for the court process to work as the scandalous stonewall continues.  

The Supreme Court issued a highly controversial ruling affirming the constitutionality of Obamacare.  Obama-appointed Justice Kagan provided a key vote saving Obamacare from constitutional oblivion. The DOJ, Justice Kagan and the Obama White House continue to stonewall the release of records and facts on the matter, while refusing to answer very basic questions posed by Congress.

What do they have to hide?

A poll by CNN/ORC International found that 53% of Americans approve of the contempt vote against Attorney General Eric Holder.

Last month, the House voted to hold Mr. Holder in contempt of Congress for not turning over documents pertaining to Operation Fast & Furious. Guns from the operation are linked to the deaths of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexicans, including the brother of a Mexican state attorney general. Guns have also been found at twelve crime scenes across America. 

33% disapproved and 13% had no opinion. 

69% of the respondents also thought President Barack Obama should end the executive privilege over the documents and just answer all the questions. 

During the contempt vote, Democrats tried to claim the American people thought this was a waste of time. Turns out they were wrong.

With the economy threatening to fall into another recession and job growth plummeting, Obama came before the American people today demanding taxes be raised on those making over $250,000 a year, including what he admitted would include 3% of small businesses. Even if that 3% is correct, which is disputed, that 3% means a tax increase on 900,000 small businesses.

That's nearly a million small business owners who will now be even more crippled and have less capital available to expand their payrolls -- which of course means fewer jobs for the middle class and the poor who would like to someday enter the middle class.

Moreover, Obama's announcement today puts him to the left of Nancy Pelosi, who is only proposing raising taxes on those making over $1 million a year.

And who knew this was even possible, but Obama has moved to the left of  even himself. In this video you can watch the President emphatically state that raising taxes on anyone, including the wealthy, during a recession is a bad idea:

[W]e have not proposed a tax hike for the wealthy that would take effect in the middle of a recession. Even the proposal that have come out of Congress, which by the way were different than the proposals I put forward, still wouldn't kick in until after the recession was over. So he's absolutely right. The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession.

Obama and his media apologists will state that we're not in a recession now, and that's a key difference. But it's actually not. Officially, the Great Recession ended in June of 2009 and Obama made this statement in August of 2009. The economy was staggering out of a recession then and might be staggering towards one now.

So why the change?

Obama is panicking, pure and simple. Since April, Obama's outspent Romney and gone hard-negative, but his poll numbers haven’t moved. And Romney hasn’t even started to make his case yet. So Obama is left playing a frantic and erratic game of checkers, hoping he can win news cycles and win voters through the cynical division of the American people by economic class.

The media, naturally, is playing along. All day you've seen them declare that what Obama intends to do is "extend tax cuts for the middle class," when in reality he's demanding a tax increase -- according to his own numbers -- on nearly a million job creators.

Both Obama and the media are once again putting what's best for our country, especially those struggling in the middle class, behind what's best for a failed president's reelection.

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Part One: The Opportunity

The Political Cudgel--and the Embedded Nail

The Supreme Court’s Obamacare-affirming decision--which can be summed up as “Read John Roberts’ lips, it’s a tax”--has put a political cudgel in the hands of Republicans.  The cudgel, of course, is taxes.  But a huge nail is also embedded in the cudgel: the fundamental deceit of Obamacare.  Yet in the week since the Court’s decision, Republicans have yet to demonstrate that they truly grasp the significance of this weapon--or that they can effectively wield it.  

Why?  Some Republicans are worried that the fight over Obamacare distracts from the issue of the economy. What these Republicans fail to realize is that healthcare and the economy are inextricably linked; Americans now realize that Obamacare was a detour on the road to economic recovery, so to remind them of one is to remind them of the other.  And the two issues, compounded, are all the more powerful.

Other Republicans believe that the healthcare battle has been lost, that Obamacare is just another permanent ratcheting of the welfare state.  What these Republicans fail to see is that the “ObamaTax” issue provides an opportunity to reignite healthcare into the white-hot issue that it was in 2010.   And if the 2012 elections were to be a repeat of 2010, huge changes in the status quo would be not only possible, but inevitable.  

This November, if President Obama goes before the voters on the defensive--that is, on a rickety platform of defending Obamacare as a tax increase--it is he who has a huge problem.   After all, his healthcare program was sold as a boon to the middle class, with a few regulatory sticks included therein.  But if Obamacare can be exposed for what it is--a huge tax increase, the reality of which Obamacare proponents did their best to obscure--then the probability of his survival shrinks dramatically.  To be sure, such an exposing of Obamacare as the ObamaTax will not be easy; the White House and the Democrats, as well as their handmaidens in the Main Stream Media, will do their best to armor up against any attack on the tax issue.    

So Romney must wield that cudgel, and wield it hard.  And so must Republicans, because if the campaign against Obamacare--the ObamaTax--is to be truly effective, it must be a top-to-bottom message.  Indeed, as we shall see, the anti-ObamaTax message could be even stronger for down-ballot Republicans than for Romney himself.  

The challenge is to keep the focus on the tax--the ObamaTax.  Obamacare is many things, but the biggest single thing is the thing that they said it wasn’t--the ObamaTax.   

The American people have shown that they can tolerate incompetent policy.  But what they will not tolerate is being lied to.  As a Jesuit might say, incompetence is a venial sin, but deception is a mortal sin.  And so if troubling questions about Barack Obama’s incompetence turn into serious concerns about his character, the President will lose.

If the Supreme Court had struck down Obamacare, the question of Obama's competence--why he  wasted the first 15 months of this presidency on a legislative goose chase as opposed to helping the economy--would have been front-and-center this November.  

Now the issue is his character.  The President promised no new taxes on the middle class, specifically saying that the mandate was a penalty, not a tax.  Meanwhile, through the entire process of the legal challenge to Obamacare, Justice Department lawyers argued that the mandate was a tax.  Indeed, his own Solicitor General asserted before the Supreme Court in March that the mandate was a tax.    

It was a classic “bait and switch.”  So thus the inevitable question: Was the President trying to deceive us when he said that the mandate was not a tax?  Or were his aides deceiving him--telling him to say one thing while they said another?  Answering that question poses a Hobson’s Choice for Obama: On the one hand, he admits to deception, and on the other hand, he admits that he can’t detect deception within his circle--and furthermore, that he tolerates it after it is exposed.  No matter what the answer to that forked question, the President will have lost his 2008 glow; he is no longer the man who can transcend the blue-state/red-state division through the grace of his own noble character.  

These are the big stakes for the 2012 election: whether a deceptive president--and/or a deceptive presidential administration--should be rewarded with a second term.  

The Achilles Heels: Taxes and Trust

While many on the right are angry about Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision, the importance of that ruling--flawed as it might have been--in exposing the health-insurance mandate as a tax cannot be underestimated.

Why? For two reasons, both starting with “T.” The first reason is “taxes,” and the second is “trust.”  

Let’s start with the obvious: Does anybody think that Obamacare would have been enacted in 2010 if it had been honestly billed as the largest tax increase in American history?  No, of course not.  Indeed, does anybody believe that Barack Obama would have been elected president back in 2008 if he had campaigned honestly on a tax-increase-to-pay-for-healthcare platform?  Not bloody likely.  

And Obama knew that, too.  That’s why he felt compelled to make the no-tax promise on many occasions; on September 12, 2008, for example, he offered this very specific commitment in tax-phobic New Hampshire: “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.  Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

Then after Obama was in the White House, in the midst of the Obamacare debate, he was equally stout in his declaration that Obamacare was not a tax.  In a September 20, 2009, interview, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos--not exactly a hostile interrogator--was nonetheless moved to observe about the mandate, “It’s still a tax increase.”  Whereupon Obama responded, “No.  That’s not true, George … For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.”  To his credit, Stephanopoulos kept after Obama during the interview; he even pulled out a dictionary to underscore his point that being compelled by the government to give up money was a tax.  And he gave it one last try: “You reject that it’s a tax increase?” Obama answered, “I absolutely reject that notion.”  

So what is it, then?  What other terms are available?  In fact, how well is the bill really understood?   As then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare in March 2010, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.”  That’s the sort of astonishing bravado and cynicism that has made her, today, the Minority Leader.  

Still, facts are stubborn things.  And as now we know, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts, it’s a tax.  Moreover, thanks to the Court, we know that it was all a lie all along--Obamacare is, and always was, a tax increase.  So the “T” word of taxes is now joined by the “T” word of trust--as in lack of trust.  Even ABC News’ Jake Tapper had to admit that the breaking of that pledge makes for “a sticky situation” for the president.  Some might say that “sticky” is a polite way of saying “quicksand.”  

Indeed, Obamacare contains many tax increases, a point that Republicans have failed to seize on.  Taking note of the GOP’s lack of interest in contesting new payroll taxes in the legislation, The New Republic’s Tim Noah wrote, “As a liberal, I find this pleasing. As a journalist, I find it puzzling.”  

The Obama administration, indeed, is flailing, because its no-tax lie at the inception of Obamacare is now being further compounded by its continued insistence, even in the wake of the Roberts decision, that Obamacare is not a tax.  For days now, Obama officials, such as White House chief of staff Jack Lew, have been insisting that the tax is a “penalty,” not a tax.  Meanwhile, White House press secretary Jay Carney, going off-message a little, insists that “it is not a broad-based tax.”  If the MSM were doing its job, the Obama administration would be torn up over these inconsistencies, but as we know, the MSM feels that it has a different job.  

For their part, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, along with the rest of the Democrats in Congress, are equally determined to shy away from the “T” word--they will not admit that a duck is a duck.  It’s time to “move on,” they say, as if the American people are sheep to be herded along by their masters.

The Obamans and the Democrats are sticking to this line because they know that to be labeled as the dishonest purveyors of the largest tax increase in history is a killer for them.  And so, like vampires fleeing from sunlight, they are retreating back into the darkened recesses of their own deception.  But the problem is that the further they stand away from the glare of public opinion, the more it becomes obvious that they are indeed vampires.   

Not to put too fine a point on things, Obama has misled, or dissembled, a total of three times: First, he misled by insisting that the original legislation was not a tax increase.  Second, he continued to say that it was not a tax increase, even as his lawyers were saying it was.  And third, his people continue this misleading charade even after it has been exposed as false.   

So again, the “T” word is really two words: “taxes” and “trust.”  These are the twin Achilles Heels of Obamacare.

The Abomination of Obamacare

From the night that Obamacare passed more than two years ago, I said that the American people would reject this legislation as a Crime Against Democracy.  That is, it was conceived, gestated, birthed, and weaned in corruption.  It was enacted thanks to unsavory deals--with Big Pharma, with health insurers, with trial lawyers--as well as through the buying and selling of US Senators.  And since then, it has been corruptly administered by the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services; as we have discovered over the last two years, those with enough clout can get a “waiver” from Secretary Sebelius, finagling their way out of health taxes that other people have to pay.   

Indeed, for more than two years now, since its passage, polls have consistently measured a majority of Americans favoring the repeal of Obamacare, in whole or in part.   This public contempt is seen, for example, in a June 29 poll from Newsweek/Daily Beast, not exactly hotbeds of Obama-skepticism, which asked if the Supreme Court’s affirmation of Obamacare would help or hurt the country, found solid rejection.  The results of the poll: the country is now better off, 24 percent; worse off, 47 percent (no impact, 14 percent; don’t know, 14 percent).  So even now, before much of the law has taken effect, the people have spoken: By 2:1, they fear the bill and its ill effects. 

Even so, some Republicans are fearful of taking on the ObamaTax.  They point to polls showing that certain provision of the bill are popular.  According to a March CBS News/New York Times Poll, for instance, a full 85 percent of Americans favor the requirement that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions, while 77 percent support the fill-the-donut-hole provision for Medicare recipients’ prescription drugs, and nearly seven in ten support allowing children under 26 to stay on their parents’ health plan.

Yes, parts of the bill are popular, but the bill as a whole is most definitely not popular.  From the outset, voters have understood--despite the sophistries to the contrary--that this bill would raise government spending at a time when the country was on the edge of a fiscal abyss, that it would make their own healthcare worse, not better, and that in fact it would endanger the healthcare system of the nation as a whole.  Obamacare, Americans knew, would not bend the cost curve downward, it would raise it upward.   

So, given Obamacare’s clanky bureaucratic construction, as well its the corruptness of its inception, the bill suffers from profound negative synergy--the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.    

And yet of all its weaknesses the fastest way to defeat the bill is to label it as the ObamaTax.  By zeroing in on the ObamaTax message--the lethal combination of taxes and lack-of-trust--Romney and the rest of the Republican ticket can focus the voters on Obamacare’s greatest liabilities.  And do so with new energy in the wake of the Court ruling, like a laser.  Taxes and Trust.

And so we come to a larger issue with significance even beyond Obamacare: Who inflicted this legislation on the rest of us?  What sort of mindset creates such monstrosities?  And what can we do about that?   

The Corruption of the Political Class   

President Obama did not act alone.  He has enjoyed the deep complicity of the permanent political class in Washington that admires cleverness, even deviousness, in the pursuit of power and tax money.  So if the Democrats said that Obamacare was not a tax, and it wasn’t--what’s not to like?  Inside the Beltway, such fibbing is never a big deal.  The overlords owe nothing to the peasants.  

Indeed, even when the Obama administration’s Solicitor General, defending the bill before the Supreme Court, conceded that the Obamacare mandate could be construed as a “tax,” or “tax penalty”--that is, freely admitting the lie--the Beltway looked on with bemusement.  The New York Times headlined its March 26 story on the Supreme Court arguments: “Arguing That Health Mandate Is Not a Tax, Except When It Is.”  Ha ha.   

But indeed, it is not the Democrats by themselves; it is also the Republicans who show a disdain for the American people, and the need to always speak the truth.  And that disdain is the fundamental reason why Republicans are having such a problem grasping the centrality of taxes and trust.  

The voters are not dumb.  They expect pols to exaggerate, misdirect, obfuscate, and stretch the truth--but a bald-faced lie is too much for them. And it’s too much for our democracy.  A lie crystallizes; in one illuminating moment, even non-attentive voters see clearly what has been done to them.  And that’s the cudgel that Democrats should fear--not the hammering of opposition to some particular provision of Obamacare, but rather the hammering of aroused public anger and fury.   

It’s fury against the lie--an insulting lie.  And the insult of a Big Lie--a Big Lie exposed--has changed the nature of the 2012 elections.

Thus we see that DC’s chalice of manipulative cynicism, so freely passed around in Washington,  can actually be a chalice of political poison--poison for officeholders, that is.  Needless to say, the permanent class of politicos and pundits will not suffer, insulated as they are in their Georgetown townhouses and Great Falls estates.  Instead, it will be Democratic officeholders who will have to face the voters back home--because while the American people might be slow to anger, once their anger is aroused, there will be a showdown, and a reckoning.    

Those politicians who voted for Obamacare--including the Democratic Senators, each of whom were the crucial 60th vote needed to pass it--must answer some fundamental questions: Were they part of the deception?  And if not, will they vote to repeal the ObamaTax?  Will they vote to repeal the lie?

In the light of the mandate-is-really-a-tax-ruling, Obamacare is no longer about such policy abstractions as “access”; it is about such hearth-and-home virtues as confidence and character. Confidence in our institutions, and faith in the character of our leaders.   

And of course, the Obamacare debate is also about the economy, because, as we all know, it’s never a good idea to raise taxes on a weak economy.  

Pollster Scott Rasmussen is a national resource, in part because he asks his questions in unique ways that shed valuable light on basic questions of national mood.  In his latest national poll, for instance, he asks voters to list each issue that’s important to them, not just to pick among them.  And so we see, in his latest finding, that the top three issues that rank highest are, in order, economy, healthcare, and corruption.  Bingo.  Thanks to Rasmussen’s poll, we see that the three all cluster together.  That’s the perfect storm threatening the Democrats: a lousy economy and a bad healthcare bill, all traceable to the permanent political class inside the Beltway, supported, of course, by an archipelago of funders and ideologues across the nation.  Sadly, these Beltway Democrats have forsaken their legacy as defenders of the common man--the folks who once looked to Jefferson, Jackson, FDR and JFK to defend them against the predatory powerful.  Now, sadly, that elite that controls my Democratic Party are the predatory powerful--and the voters are wising up.  

Obama Has Broken the Cord

Among the Democrats who should be afraid is the 44th President, who must face the voters in four months.  Obama knew that he would go into re-election with a soft economy, but now he could confront a bigger problem.  In 2010, the economy was by the far the biggest issue, but healthcare proved to be the decisive issue; fortunately for the President, he was not on the ballot.  

Now, in 2012, the economy is an even bigger issue--and because of the matter of trust, healthcare is an even bigger issue.  Some will argue, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  Well, if the only issue in 2012 is the economy, then Obama still has a chance to win, because most Americans still blame George W. Bush more than Obama for the current hard times.  Indeed, the Newsweek/Daily Beast poll found that on the economy, his disapproval was only two points worse than his approval.  But on healthcare, by contrast, he suffered a 21 percent net disapproval, 36 to 57.  

To win this November, Romney and the Republicans will have to walk and chew gum at the same time.  That is, they will have to talk about taxes--and the harm that the ObamaTax is doing to the economy--and they will also have to talk about trust.  Because Americans like to be able to trust their president.  And so again, the two issues, taxes and trust, are not, and should not be, severable.  

Some observers, reflecting DC’s habitual dismissal of truth as a mere detail, might ask: How important, really, is deceit?  Well, they might ask George H. W. Bush, President "Read My Lips."  Bush 41 deceived about the same T-word, taxes, and so, as a result, he summoned up the furies of the other T-word, trust.  His support for re-election collapsed; his 54 percent popular majority fell to just 37 percent four years later.  

Yet now, the grave danger to Obama is that if he is seen as untrustworthy on this issue, he could be seen as untrustworthy on other issues.  And if the door to even deeper concerns is opened, it must be asked: If Obama is untruthful on this, what else has he been untruthful to the American people about?  

Because now everyone is starting to sense the harsh truth.  As the only American leader elected by all the people, the president holds a special place in our hearts.  In school we memorize the Presidents, not the Presidents Pro Tem.  By the same token, when that bond of affection is severed, a moral disturbance erupts in the political cosmos; the process of good-naturedly celebrating the uniqueness of a president--all about his loved ones, and his personal life and history, all the way down to the family dog--is inverted into a sour ceremony of debunking and demystifying.  

So today, the sacred narrative that led to Obama’s improbable but inspiring election--our first African American president, the finest triumph yet of the civil rights movement--has been desacralized.  A majority of the electorate gave Obama their hopes four years ago, and now he has taught them a bitter lesson: The mandate was always a tax, and so the trust should always have been mistrust.  Thus President Transformational has become President Just Another Say-Anything Politician.  

There are some who say that Obamacare can be redeemed.  And yes, there are provisions that almost every American support.  And yes, American healthcare could be improved by opening it up to more competition and innovation, even while we close it off to trial-lawyer piracy.  But the stink of these 2700 pages of rottenness makes Obamacare irredeemable.  It can’t be rehabilitated.     

In the wilds of the outdoors, if we see a pool of stagnant, dirty water, we know that the pond cannot be cleaned by removing only some of the tainted water.  Nature doesn’t work that way.  And neither does political science.  A fundamental wrong was done, and the water has been polluted--and it can’t be purified by merely siphoning some of it away and leaving the rest.  Instead, the whole mess has to be filtered and cleaned up, and a new effort started afresh.  

Reject the lie.  Repeal the ObamaTax.