Washington Times

CRC President Terrence Scanlon has an op-ed in today’s Washington Times.

Here it is:

President Obama has his second term and will never face voters again. On one of his highest priorities — energy and the environment — he’s free to be the “transformational” figure he always wanted to be.

Since the beginning, Mr. Obama’s main goal on energy and the environment has been clear to anyone listening to him and his advisers: to make energy — at least, the carbon-based energy on which contemporary civilization was built — more expensive, forcing us to use other forms of energy or do without.

During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his “cap-and-trade” plan, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” He added, “Under my plan electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

After being elected, he brought in allies to support his misguided schemes. In September 2008, Steven Chu talked about the dilemma of finding out “how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” The European price of gas was roughly $8 a gallon. Soon afterward, Mr. Chu became U.S. secretary of energy.

Van Jones, the administration’s first “green jobs czar,” saw the energy agenda as a means for radical societal transformation. He declared in February 2009, “We want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism [sic] where at least we’re not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won’t be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether . [T]he green economy will start off as a small subset, and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”

The administration can drag us into an energy utopia using creative means. It can continue to funnel grant money to questionable enterprises in the name of “green” energy, to subsidize those projects with special-interest tax breaks and to guarantee business for those companies with “renewable energy” mandates. A president has a thousand tools, from national-monument designations (which can be used to block oil drilling), to building-efficiency standards (which can put “global warming” rules into effect), to fuel-economy standards for cars (which, incidentally, make cars less safe, causing people to die).

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Sen.  Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who was once a victim of a vexatious lawsuit filed by convicted terrorist bomber Brett Kimberlin, today weighed in on the ongoing Kimberlin saga.

As Kerry Picket of the Washington Times reports,  when he was a prisoner Kimberlin sued Hatch baselessly blaming the senator for his failure at the time to win parole. The suit went down in flames.

Hatch’s office issued the following statement:

Senator Hatch has had run ins with Brett Kimberlin before and they weren’t pleasant. So it’s certainly no surprise that Mr. Kimberlin has now taken to harassing and targeting conservative bloggers. Needless to say, efforts to silence and chill political speech are contrary to the values of our Constitution and First Amendment.

Former Capital Research Center editor Patrick J. Reilly has a fascinating op-ed in the Washington Times. Reilly is now president of the Cardinal Newman Society.

The op-ed begins:

Georgetown University seems to be in serious danger of losing what makes it truly special: its historical commitment to a quality Catholic education. The university’s stately spires, topped with crosses and standing high above the nation’s capital, are a permanent reminder of the fervent Catholic faith and vision of Archbishop John Carroll and his fellow Jesuit missionaries who founded Georgetown the same year the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

But today those crosses stand in stark contrast to the rapid secularization of America’s oldest Catholic university and the unprecedented threats from the White House, just blocks away, to the religious freedom of America’s largest religious denomination.

Both problems, the secularist oppression of the Obama administration and the secularization of Georgetown, will be on display this Friday when the university presents Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as the speaker for its Public Policy Institute diploma ceremony.

In 2008, the former governor of Kansas was asked by her bishop to stop receiving Communion because of her “30-year history of advocating and acting in support of legalized abortion.” Now at HHS, Mrs. Sebelius is the chief architect of a health insurance mandate that would force Catholic colleges and universities, in violation of Catholic teaching, to provide coverage for sterilization and contraception to both students and employees. [...]

Read the whole op-ed at the Washington Times.

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Times.

It begins

George Soros’ Democracy Alliance, an invitation-only club for billionaire leftist political donors, has decided to drown Democrats and President Obama’s re-election campaign in an ocean of cash this year. Democracy Alliance, founded in 2005, is a financial clearinghouse that recommends to its wealthy members projects and groups aimed at transforming America into a European-style socialist state. The secretive group has directed untold hundreds of millions of dollars to left-of-center causes.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Soros, he is the pre-eminent funder of the left in the United States. He openly favors American decline and has said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now.” The radical, anti-American philanthropist praises China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better-functioning government than the United States.” Mr. Soros already has begun doling out funds for Democrats. In the 2012 cycle, he has given a modest $203,500, but that number promises to rise exponentially.

Democracy Alliance’s original mission was to focus on building political infrastructure – think tanks, activist groups, leadership schools and media outlets – to help the left gain and keep power. The idea was to focus on long-term organizational issues as opposed to the more mundane task of helping Democrats get elected every election cycle.

But political expediency has forced a stunning course correction that is causing deep fissures in Democracy Alliance that ultimately may destroy it. On one side of an internal divide are Democracy Alliance members who believe in the original mission of the donors’ collaboration.

Soros doppelganger Peter B. Lewis, who helped found the group with Mr. Soros, thinks Democracy Alliance has become far too partisan. In a crushing blow to the club, the Progressive Insurance magnate, who spent $25 million in 2004 in a failed attempt to defeat President George W. Bush, reportedly resigned from Democracy Alliance in disgust weeks ago.

“Peter’s focus since 2004 has been on scaling up the progressive infrastructure, as opposed to election or political candidates,” a source told Politico last month.

To read the rest of it, click here.

I wrote an op-ed recently for the Washington Times that was well received.

It’s about Marxist academic and activist Frances Fox Piven who has called for bloody revolution against the U.S. government for decades.

Here are the top paragraphs from the article:

If you promote violent leftist insurrection for a living, should you be surprised when anonymous members of the public threaten you with violence?

Apparently.

Take the case of Marxist professor and community organizer Frances Fox Piven, a frequent target of conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck.

In the Nation magazine just last month, Ms. Piven expressed outrage that Wall Street bankers weren’t being dragged from their homes and led to the guillotine because of the country’s high unemployment rates and an anemic economy. “So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent,” she wrote.

Ms. Piven‘s next words ought to send a chill down the spine of every American.

“Local protests have to accumulate and spread – and become more disruptive – to create serious pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.”

Shocked staffers at the Nation report that the publication’s website has been flooded with angry comments, expletives and unprintable threats against Ms. Piven‘s person.

But instead of recognizing the root causes of this backlash, Occidental College professor and activist Peter Dreier points his finger at Mr. Beck, Ms. Piven‘s most persistent critic. Mr. Beck has railed against Ms. Piven almost daily on his cable TV show for the past two years, calling her “an enemy of the Constitution.”

It is a harsh but nonetheless accurate epithet directed at someone who sees the Constitution as an inconvenient obstacle standing in the way of socialist utopia. [...] 

The Washington Times published an op-ed by Capital Research Center president Terrence Scanlon titled “Obama’s Goldman Game.”

Here’s the top of the article:

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, the left’s favorite bank, are more than a little suspect – but not for the reasons you might expect.

It’s unclear what will happen with the case, involving an exotic investment gone bad, but at the same time, it’s clear that the unveiling of the civil action just happened to coincide with President Obama’s declaration of war on Wall Street.

There are other unusual “coincidences,” too.

Evidence has surfaced that as Goldman’s attorneys tried to cut a deal with the SEC over the potential charges, Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein visited the Obama White House at least four times.

The decision whether to sue the bank was so controversial within the SEC that members split 3 to 2 on filing the lawsuit. Chairman Mary Schapiro, an Obama appointee, and the two Democrats on the commission voted yes, while the two Republicans voted no.

Add to this that Goldman just hired former Obama White House counsel Gregory B. Craig, the lawyer who helped President Clinton send 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez back to communist Cuba a decade ago.

Then factor in that Goldman is a creature of the political left and a natural ally of the Democratic Party. It is a big-government lovers’ bank that despises the unbridled competition of laissez-faire capitalism. Akin to Fannie Mae in that it generates private profits but forces taxpayers to cover its losses, Goldman loves bailouts and feeding at the public trough.

Former Goldman employees – including Henry Paulson, President George W. Bush’s liberal, tree-hugging Treasury secretary – designed the $700-billion-plus “mother of all bailouts” in 2008 and then promptly steered $10 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the bank. Goldman veteran Neel Kashkari oversaw the doling out of bailout funds.

Goldman funds the left almost exclusively, so, as the left likes to say, follow the money. [...]

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Times.

It begins:

Growing up, I always thought Jesus’ admonition in the Book of Matthew, “The poor you will always have with you,” wasn’t meant to be taken literally as a directive to ignore the poor, but that’s exactly what a prominent Roman Catholic charity believes.

As this Sunday’s “second collection” approaches, most Catholics planning to donate to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development probably think their money will be used to help the poor by funding soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Well, the joke’s on them. CCHD has never provided direct relief to the poor. That’s not its purpose.

It is an extreme left-wing political organization created to feed and foster radical groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Most Catholics are blissfully unaware of its true mission, though it says right on its Web site that it aims to support “organized groups of white and minority poor to develop economic strength and political power.” [...]

Both ACORN and CCHD were inspired by radical agitator Saul Alinsky, the Marxist Machiavelli who dedicated his activism opus, “Rules for Radicals,” to Lucifer, whom he called “the first radical.” The late Mr. Alinsky developed the concept of “community organizing” in order to mobilize poor neighborhoods to make demands, long and loud, on public officials and the private sector.

CCHD gives generously to the Industrial Areas Foundation, which Mr. Alinsky himself founded, and to similar leftist groups including the Gamaliel Foundation, People Improving Communities Through Organizing (PICO), and Direct Action and Research Training Institute (DART). [...]

I’ll be on the Washington Times radio program, “America’s Morning News,” this morning at 6:45 a.m. to talk about the latest with ACORN.

Capital Research Center made it into the pages of the Washington Times two days in a row.

Today Amanda Carpenter quotes me regarding ACORN’s sham independent investigation of itself and yesterday Sean Lengell excerpted parts of my American Spectator commentary on the same topic.

I have an op-ed in the Washington Times today about the Obama administration’s attempt to turn Sept. 11 into a day of organic vegetables and radical community organizing.

A predictable diss from the Village Voice.