By Michelle Malkin

President Obama traveled all the way to China to praise the free flow of information. It’s the only safe place he could do so without getting heckled. With a straight face, Obama lauded political dissent and told Chinese students he welcomed unfettered criticism in America. Fierce opposition, he said, made him “a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.” How do you say “You lie!” in Mandarin?

While the kowtower-in-chief’s press shop feeds paeans to free speech into Obama’s globetrotting teleprompter, the White House is still waging war on vocal foes at home. Obama has lectured his critics in Washington to stop talking and “get out of the way.” He has stacked his carefully staged town halls with partisan stooges and campaign plants throughout the year. The president recently derided limited-government activists in the Tea Party movement with a vulgar sexual term used by left-wing cable host Anderson Cooper on CNN and the MSNBC smear merchants (just Google “teabagging” and you’ll see what they mean).

There are now more muzzled watchdogs in the Obama administration than on the sidelines of the Westminster Kennel Club show.

Most recently, two EPA lawyers critical of the “fatally flawed” cap-and-trade system — peddled by their agency, the White House and the Democratic majority — were told by their superiors to yank a video they posted to YouTube explaining their views. Despite including a caveat that the opinions expressed were their own and not the agency’s, the couple faces possible disciplinary action by the feds. While demanding the video be yanked, the EPA disingenuously claims it tolerates all dissenting views of its employees.

The clampdown follows on the heels of the Obama EPA’s stifling of veteran researcher Alan Carlin’s dissent. He dared to challenge the agency’s reliance on outdated data to support its greenhouse gas “public endangerment” finding. Carlin’s report was squelched; his office is now on the chopping block.

In China, O proclaimed himself “a big supporter of non-censorship.” But his FCC “diversity” czar, Mark Lloyd, is bent on re-engineering public airwaves by redistributing free speech rights from conservative haves who earned their success to minority have-nots who demand talk radio entitlements in the name of “media justice.”

And among Obama’s closest advisers is a husband-and-wife duo who specializes in marginalizing and stifling the Democratic Party’s most effective enemies. Just days after White House interim communications director Anita Dunn — the administration’s resident Mao cheerleader and Fox News-basher — stepped down to take a planned role as a “consultant” behind the scenes, her husband, Robert Bauer, stepped up and shoved aside White House counsel Greg Craig.

The problem? Former Clinton lawyer Craig wasn’t tough enough for Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Obama needed an intimate ally who will put hardball politics ahead of policy and the law. Bauer fits the bill.

A partner at the prestigious law firm Perkins & Coie, Bauer served as counsel to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Obama for America. He has served as Obama’s personal attorney, navigating the corrupted waters of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play scandals in Illinois. He also served as legal counsel to the George Soros-funded 527 organization America Coming Together during the 2004 campaign.

That get-out-the-vote outfit, helmed by Patrick Gaspard (the former Service Employees International Union heavy turned Obama domestic policy chief), employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission under Bauer’s watch.

During the 2008 campaign, Bauer pooh-poohed GOP complaints about voter fraud. While decrying the Republicans’ “fear message,” it was Bauer who was on a fear-inducing crusade — pulling out all legal stops to silence conservative critics of Obama’s ties to the radical left.

As I’ve noted previously, and in light of Obama’s self-serving praise for political dissent abroad, I note again: It was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully last fall to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama’s ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

It was Bauer and his legal goon squad who attempted to sic the DOJ on GOP donor Harold Simmons and sought his prosecution for funding the ad. In a parallel effort launched the same week as Bauer’s legal efforts, a nonprofit called “Accountable America,” spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit, began trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with “warning letters” in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising.

It was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country into pulling the spot. Team Obama then summoned their troops to bombard stations, many of them owned by conservative-leaning Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails to squelch the commercial.

With Bob “The Silencer” Bauer now working from the inside and Anita “News Commissar” Dunn working from the outside, Obama has a state media police apparatus the Chinese regime itself could love.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters

I just finished watching Barack Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview via YouTube; talk about a flaming bag of problems on your White House porch.  Obama is really going to have his hands full (and perhaps his shoes).  He is going to have to deal with a United States in shambles.  We have an economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression, an ongoing energy crisis, several wars (war on drugs, war on terror, war in Iraq, and war in Afghanistan), a healthcare crisis, globalization and free trade, illegal immigration, and an education crisis.

Although this is a lot to have on anyone’s plate, many of these issues have links to each other.  So let’s look at a few of these over the next several days.

Globalization, free trade, poison milk, energy and pollution

Globalization and free trade help to improve the standard of living in other countries and brings the world together by sharing economic ties. Every day more and more US jobs move to China, India, and other developing countries.  We import much more than we export and waste so much more than the rest of the world’s countries that we should probably buy another country so we have a place big enough for our giant landfill.  Our filthy wasteful habits set a poor example for the rest of the world.  We are going to have to do better.

We need to transition to clean renewable energy sources and help our trading partners to do the same.  We also need to help our trading partners to establish or improve product quality monitoring systems so we can reduce or eliminate dangerous imported goods (like those irresistibly fun lead-painted toys, or that delicious melamine-laced Chinese milk).

Many of these job losses are inevitable as the world evolves.  Like most of you, I do not enjoy troubleshooting a problem that I am having with a new product via the telephone to a distant country. I do, however, enjoy the challenge of learning a new language at the same time as much as any other guy. But what happens if I’m the guy that that used to work in the customer service center here in the U.S., and now my job has been outsourced to another country?  I’m going to need another job.  Maybe I’ll go into politics.

Therefore, it will be necessary to create retraining programs for our displaced workers (and it needs to begin NOW).  With proper government incentives and funding, new industries can be created to supply clean energy to our growing nation.  Transitional training and educational programs will be required to supply workers for these clean energy industries. With proper planning and foresight, both issues (displaced workers and need for clean energy) can be handled for the benefit of all if these workers are trained and educated to handle and work in the field of clean energy.  But that’s the crux:  will we have the proper planning and foresight, both for the sake of the individual workers and for the future of our country?

The simple act of transporting goods from faraway places creates countless tons of unnecessary pollution. A semi-reliable flow of cheap energy has created fragile supply chains that go from your local Wal-Mart all the way back to China.  Our food supplies typically come from 1500 miles away.  My socks might come from 3000 miles away, my computer might come from 8000 miles away, and my technical support call to fix my computer might be answered by a person 7000 miles away.  There are many, many products that can be manufactured and serviced for a lot less money and a lot more efficiently in another country like China or India.  And as these countries grow, so do the amount of jokes that we tell about them. But hey let’s face it, we Americans are a lot easier to poke fun at, being the hypocrites that we are.

The explosive growth of economies like those of India and China are generating more and more unregulated pollution and greenhouse gases every day.  Providing incentives to reduce this behavior and clean up the world would be a step in the right direction.  Hopefully the countries that are going through the same transition from agricultural to industrial nations as we did don’t make the same mistakes.  I would hate to see any country squander their resources, pollute their water, and pollute their air like we did.  I hope they can learn from our mistakes and we can teach them what we’ve learned.  It costs a lot more to fix it after it is broken than it does if you’d taken care of it all along and not let a break in the first place.

In addition to the pollution that the factories create for the improved health and enjoyment of their country’s citizens, the products themselves are often tainted or poisoned.  Rewarding good behavior usually gets better results than punishing bad behavior. In China, however, this has not been the case.  According to the Washington Post, in just four months the FDA rejected about 300 food products only to have the same products be resubmitted two or three times (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/19/AR2007051901273.html).  You have to wonder what they were thinking.  Were they trying to slip them past the FDA when they were on break?  Maybe it was a quality assurance test or perhaps an episode of “Candid Camera”.  In response to incidents such as these, the FDA has established inspection offices in China. And according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the first of these offices opened up in Beijing this month (http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2008pres/11/20081118a.html).

With the Republicans’ demands for deregulation and small government being enacted year after year, you have to wonder how this skeleton crew of FDA workers is going to protect us from the billions of products that come from China every year when they can’t even prevent an E. coli breakout in our home country.

Heaven help us.

JCE

Oh, this is good.  Read all of it, but I’m going to excerpt a lot, because I want to make sure you read it:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Former US secretaries of state on Monday urged the next US president to work closely with key allies, engage with Iran, and avoid ruptures with awkward partners Russia and China.

Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, James Baker and Henry Kissinger gave advice at a panel here that often appeared closer to the views of Democratic candidate Barack Obama than than to those Republican John McCain.

And although they did not actually endorse Obama, Republicans Powell and Baker joined Albright, a Democrat, in saying that Obama’s election as the first US black president would send a powerful message to the rest of the world.

On Iran and Syria, both Republican and Democratic former secretaries backed engagement when they spoke at a panel at George Washington University. McCain slammed Obama earlier in the campaign for taking a similar stand.

“I believe we need to engage with Iran,” said Albright who served under President Bill Clinton during his second term.

Powell agreed with Albright.

“Let’s get together and talk about nuclear weapons… Start a dialogue at a low level and let it grow over time,” said Powell, who served President George W. Bush in his first term.

(snip)

Kissinger, who served under both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, said: “I’m in favor of negotiating with Iran.”

The US aim would be to achieve a stable Middle East, he said.

(snip)

Echoing a view shared by many on the panel, Kissinger said the next president must work “to restore a sense of confidence in the United States of America,” and let allies “know that America is reaching out to them.”

Mindful of US-Russian tension over Russia’s incursion last month into US-backed Georgia, Kissinger and Baker stressed there were larger strategic interests at stake.

Kissinger said Russia is needed to resolve the showdown with Iran over its nuclear program.

“I would urge the new president … to explore the possibility of cooperation and be very sure before we go the route of cutting off the WTO (World Trade Organization) and other international measures,” he said.

His view appeared closer to that of Obama, who blasted McCain’s hardline stance on Georgia.

Henry Kissinger!  Henry Fucking Kissinger!

Seems like more and more these days the only one who agrees with John McCain is John McCain. 

Hilarious.

Ezra Klein put it this way:

Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, James Baker, and Henry Kissinger all appeared together and agreed that America’s petulant stance towards perceived enemies and threats was ridiculous. Put sightly differently, they agreed that John McCain’s petulant stance towards perceived enemies and threats was ridiculous. That level of unanimity from most all the living representatives of America’s executive-level foreign policy tradition is a big deal, and the sort of thing that it would be interesting to see John McCain asked about at the debates.

Seriously.  They might as well have all endorsed Barack Obama.  Add to this the lukewarm support, the damnation by faint praise offered by Condoleezza Rice on the subject of Sarah Palin, and I’d say you have a full set of Secretaries of State (they’re the foreign policy ones, for those of you who aren’t very well-read) who are underwhelmed by the McCain-Palin ticket.  Hear that, wingnuts?

Sen. Barack Obama recently released this statement in regards to boycotting opening ceremony at the summer Olympic games in Beijing, as Sen. Clinton has called for President Bush to do:

If the Chinese do not take steps to help stop the genocide in Darfur and to respect the dignity, security, and human rights of the Tibetan people, then the President should boycott the opening ceremonies. As I have communicated in public and to the President, it is past time for China to respect the human rights of the Tibetan people, to allow foreign journalists and diplomats access to the region, and to engage the Dalai Lama in meaningful talks about the future of Tibet. I am also deeply concerned about China’s failure to support efforts to halt the genocide in Darfur.

If it is “past time for China to respect the human rights of the Tibetan people” then what is Obama waiting for? By saying we should wait until it gets closer to the games Sen. Obama risks looking like he is uneasy about taking stances on tough issues and acting boldly.

Obama on Boycott: Wait, Then Decide – [New York Times]