The Republican leadership does not have Obama’s bully pulpit, but they surely have the ear of the press when they emerge from these toxic closed door negotiations. The President’s fear-mongering should continue to be denounced in the harshest of terms; in fact, forget the ‘debate’ behind closed doors – the game has now shifted to public perceptions and it is out in the open. The current field of Republican presidential candidates should turn up the volume full blast on this latest Obama scam and criticize him in very personal terms as the disgraceful anti-leader that he is that he would scare some of the neediest among us for his own ends.

Of course there is already enough money in incoming revenues to pay Social Security checks and most else of the essentials of government! Representative Walsh is correct when he calls on the president to “quit lying” about the debt issue. Certainly, in the broad philosophical sense, no one can “guarantee” anything – we cannot “guarantee” our next breath – but a responsible leader – not Obama – would have answered Pelley, ‘We will do everything in our power to ensure that all of our required obligations are met.’

Besides passing “Cut, Cap and Balance” right now, the House should  direct the Government Oversight Committee under Rep. Issa to be prepared to take steps to subpoena any government worker or agency representative at Treasury or elsewhere in the Executive Branch who is involved with the issuance of checks, funds, and essential services if there is any question that, come August 2-3,  the normal processes of government and the law are being interfered with. We will want to see the emails of any Treasury official who will say, ‘Hold up there on those Social Security checks,’ or anything else along those lines.

And, if there is ANY question at that time as to whether Mr. Obama and his Administration are following the letter of the law or not, we may soon need to start using the ‘I’ word:  IMPEACHMENT. Obama’s endless national credit card has run out, and he is playing with the future of the country for his own political ends. He must follow the Constitution and current statutes explicitly. Any shady Administration legal interpretations supporting any of his fear-mongering should be subject to massive investigations under oath before Congressional committees and dealt with accordingly.

After seeing the main ‘sights’ at the library, we took the group to the Madison building to show them how they would apply for a library card at the Library of Congress….. except – shock, shock – the library staff said that THEY WERE OUT OF CARDS! Another staffer confirmed that they had been out of cards “for a week” and had “no idea” when a new supply might become available.

If the Library of Congress’ purpose is to serve Congress and the general public with access to its holdings, and if library cards are essential to that process, one would think that any supervisor or bureaucrat with an ounce of competence would have made sure that they had an ample supply of them on hand, or would move mountains to ensure that they obtained them as quickly as possible, with apologies and explanations to the public they supposedly serve.

This is the equivalent of sending soldiers into battle without rifles or McDonald’s opening its stores without hamburgers. No private sector business could survive with such an attitude of not knowing (and apparently not even caring) when its primary service might be back on line.

In April 2011, nearly $630M was proposed for Library of Congress (LoC) funding in the Continuing Resolution. Whatever the final budget number turned out to be, clearly the LoC receives a huge amount of funding each year, and what is probably a very tiny but vital part of that budget should be allocated for….procuring library cards.

What does this all have to do with Obamacare? Well, to start with, I used the library card example as a ‘teaching moment’ for the kids about the incompetence of so much of the federal bureaucracy and compared it to what life will be like if Obamacare is not repealed.

Just as the Library of Congress is perhaps the greatest library in the world, we also have the best or one of the world’s best health care systems. But even the greatest institutions – whether libraries or medical facilities – are worth nothing to us if we are denied access to them or only given limited access because some nameless bureaucrat hasn’t done his or her job.

This is only the beginning. What will it be like when they say to the widow: “Sorry about losing your husband, but last month we didn’t order enough heart valves because of our government-prescribed quota, and we don’t know when any more might be coming in…. Next!”

It’s also ironic that, after all these years, just as in the Justice Thomas nomination controversy, the name of Nina Totenberg is once again near the center of the controversy. Williams was fired for merely expressing his feelings of nervousness when getting on a plane and seeing fellow passengers in Muslim garb – an honest and straightforward expression of how he felt. Nina Totenberg, in a well-remembered and disgraceful statement from the past – for which she was not fired, openly wished that perhaps the late Senator Jesse Helms or his grandchildren might get AIDS as some sort of divine justice. Totenberg has expressed legions of public “opinions” over the years, but, unlike the black man who didn’t toe the line and had to be fired, Nina has been the darling of NPR elites and their liberal sycophants for many years.

NPR CEO Vivian Schiller and the NPR board were clearly looking for an excuse to fire Williams – he has been a thorn in their side for some time. Their vile hypocrisy and attack on free speech is as far-reaching as it is stunning. As an African-American appearing on both NPR and Fox News, Juan Williams had been driving the Left crazy for years simply because he existed and didn’t fit the template. LIberals’ hatred of Fox News is so intense that his presence there has infuriated them for a long time. But Fox-hatred aside, if Schiller and her board had any competence, they could merely have waited quietly and not renewed Williams’ contract when the time came. No one would have yawned. Instead, they had to make him a spectacle and seek to humiliate him. It was indeed a ‘high-tech lynching,’ to recall Justice Thomas’s phrase from his testimony nearly twenty years ago when he was so virulently attacked for his pursuit of a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

It was also Totenberg who helped engineer the national spectacle of Anita Hill, who was the main catalyst of the attack against Justice Thomas. Totenberg used her platform at NPR to catapult Hill to national prominence. She helped set the stage for the ideological lynching that brought Washington and much of the nation to a standstill during that time in 1991, as Thomas’ judicial nomination was subjected to the most cruel and vicious attacks in recent memory. (It is also quite ironic that, after all these years, the Juan Williams episode should occur during roughly the same timeframe as it has been reported that Mrs. Thomas has reached out to Anita Hill, asking for her apology for what she did. According to reports, Hill refused.)

The circumstances are different now than they were in 1991, but not much has really changed: an African-American man who doesn’t fit the liberal template is not welcome in the institutions of power that the Left considers its privileged domain. For Justice Thomas, it was for being conservative; for Juan Williams, it was for the ‘sin’ of regularly appearing on Fox News. Thus, they both had to be ‘dealt with.’  NPR was right in the middle of both incidents. Totenberg herself helped put the machinery in place for the first ‘high-tech’ ideological lynching of Justice Thomas and then stood by as the latest one against Juan Williams unfolded.

Where is her journalistic outrage or a threatened resignation from NPR? Where is the personal integrity of standing up for Juan’s freedom of speech, or of using this as a ‘teachable moment’? Instead, she mumbles about now being placed in an “awkward position.” As a pathetic apologist for NPR, Totenberg can only say: “I think it’s a very very difficult line to draw. And NPR tries to draw it, in my view, using rules that don’t exist anymore.”  What a joke. If enforced NPR “rules” had existed in the past, as Totenberg implies, she should have been fired many times over.

This incident is instructive on many levels:  hatred of Fox News, ideological bias, cowardice, hypocrisy, and incompetence are all on full display for all to see, but integrity and a passionate commitment to freedom of speech by so-called liberals are nowhere to be found. NPR has disgraced itself and continues to affirm its own contemptible actions. Both NPR itself and the Corporation of Public Broadcasting which supports it should be stripped of all public funding.

So, NPR fires Juan, positions itself to curry favor with CAIR and its own liberal elite taskmasters, takes a swipe at Fox News, and…. waits for our reaction, hoping for an over-reaction. The Huffington Post is already proclaiming the conservative ‘backlash’ at Williams’ firing. It’s not hard to see where they are going with all this before the election. While we certainly want to see NPR defunded from taxpayer dollars, for now, prior to the election, let’s just frame the firing as the disgraceful and obscene attack on free speech that it is. Otherwise, two weeks before the election, if we talk too much about defunding them, the airwaves will be full of commentary that our side hates Big Bird, while government schoolchildren will be told that if their parents don’t vote against those ‘evil’ Republicans, it’s all over for Cookie Monster. No joke – they’ve pulled this kind of stunt before, and in close elections, it could make the difference. Let’s talk less publicly about defunding and simply do it when the time comes.

Perhaps NPR’s firing of Williams did not take this factor or the election at all into their political calculus before making this decision but simply saw this as an opportunity to push their ideological agenda. Regardless, now that it’s a done deal, they will be looking to take advantage of the situation by drawing us out further so that they can attack us in any way possible.

Nevertheless, I keep reading in conservative blogs and hearing on Talk Radio that if this monstrosity of Obamacare finally passes and is signed into law that there is ‘nothing that we can do about it,’ that it will be a fait accompli, a new ‘right’ that it will be next to impossible to dislodge.

I understand this line of thinking and the history behind it, but I reject it. I also reject this wringing of hands, this attitude of, ‘well,-we-can’t-do-anything-until-November-if-this-goes-through’ feeling. Contrary to what some are saying, I believe we can dismantle this monstrosity in its entirety at some later date when we are back in power. After all, We Are The People. This is OUR COUNTRY and OUR GOVERNMENT.  It answers – or at least it should – to us!

I probably look at things a little differently than most conservatives because I myself am a former federal employee (yes, I served for many years in the Belly of the Beast!):  ex-Intelligence Community, ex-military, etc., both as a civilian employee and former military officer, now retired. I saw the federal bureaucracy up close and personal every day in all its glory and warts for many years. I battled within some of the Beast’s entrails. I know many of its weak points in terms of both its bureaucratic mentality and structure. Here’s the point:  none of Obamacare can ultimately be implemented by Congress itself. It is THE BUREAUCRACY that must actually implement it at the federal level to try to make it ‘work’, and it is to the bureaucracy that we must consider now turning our attention if it passes.

The bureaucracy is bloated; it is its own monstrosity; that is another story that will only get far worse under the socialist Democrats’ health care reform. But the key point is this:  bureaucrats who actually run the federal government from day to day do not like trouble, nor the spotlight – only the political types at the top crave the spotlight. Like most bureaucrats everywhere, the U.S. federal bureaucracy in general craves predictability, routine, quiet, security – most federal employees just want to get through the day, do their jobs and reach the next bonus or retirement.

If this legislation passes, there are several things that we can do besides simply waiting until November to make our voices heard or until the courts decide something. What I am proposing is the next step beyond tea parties and town halls.

If Obamacare passes, all Americans who are concerned about how this legislation affects them personally should flood the federal bureaucracy with Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests covering every conceivable aspect of this legislation. A little experience and training is all that is necessary in order to write solid and legally enforceable FOIA requests. We should produce them by the hundreds of thousands and they should cover every aspect of those departments and agencies that are charged with putting Obamacare into action, as well as the new entities created under the thousands of pages of this legislation.

Taking a page from our political adversaries’ playbook, this might not only choke the bureaucracy; it would also shine the spotlight on more and more corruption and incompetence.

Next, moving beyond ordinary Tea Party protests on Capitol Hill, where we are simply mocked and scorned by the likes of Reid and Pelosi, the Democratic majority and their media henchmen and sycophants, our next step should be protests aimed at those specific government agencies and entities in Washington, D.C., that are set to become involved in implementing Obamacare. I could go into more detail in a follow-on post, but you get the idea:  direct peaceful protest for redress of grievances.  We have a lot of grievances, and we need a lot of redress!

Given Internet communications today and our current level of organization as a movement, how this could be done practically would be far easier than it might have been in past years, but this is how we might begin taking the process to the next level, since we are all community organizers now

I think McDonnell will be an excellent Governor for our Commonwealth – jobs, education, pushing for offshore drilling, etc. – but the candidate that really got the conservative base fired up for this election was the candidate for Attorney General, State Senator Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli, a home-schooling dad, is very solid on all of the core social issues, and this pulled together an expanded base of evangelicals, conservative Catholics, home-schoolers, 2nd Amendment proponents (Ken is a regular at many local gun shows), and other like-minded Tea Party activists, etc. We had not seen a major grassroots effort like this in Virginia for some time. Many of us became politically active for the first time and flooded the state Republican convention as new delegates. That put Ken over the top in a three-way race for the AG spot on the ballot back in the summer.

His Democrat opponent, Steve Shannon, had more money coming in early on for television ads from big special interests, whereas Ken’s campaign was really mostly grassroots, with mom-and-pop donations pouring in from all over to get him across the finish line, which we did.

Now to the Obama Administration nightmare scenario:   Ken is a true believer in the 10th Amendment. The nightmare for the Obama Administration that will emerge is that, while McDonnell will be busy trying to create jobs and lower taxes and get our economic house in order in a center-right fashion, Cuccinelli will be busy challenging the feds on the legal front and going on the offensive right in DC’s own back yard, heh heh.  It will be fun to watch…. And we’re just getting warmed up.