The Washington Free Beacon reports on the ethically-challenged former Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency which oversees the Macs — Fannie and Freddie.

As always, there’s more to the story. In April 2009 I wrote about Comradess Barbara Lee and her merry band of ‘Red’ men and women:

“One wishes Ms. Lee were just a clueless liberal, but her history leads me to conclude that she is the kind of ‘San Francisco Democrat’ that former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick criticized in 1984: someone who ‘always blames America first’.”–John Fund, WSJ, 09/17/01.

Mark Hemingway’s April 17, 2009, NRO article Comrade Barbara, about Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)’s new book, Renegade for Peace & Justice, set off my ‘Red’ alarm.

In his observations from the book, Hemingway made mention of Lee’s numerous visits to Cuba and her “fondness for Castro”. He wrote:

Lee’s fondness for the brutal dictator probably stems from the fact that he helped her good friend, Black Panther leader Huey Newton. Accused of killing an underage prostitute, assault, and tax evasion, Newton went to Cuba for three years in the mid-1970s rather than stand trial.

Although that may be true, Lee’s “fondness” for Cuba was exhibited in more recent events. J. Michael Waller wrote April 7, 2009, at PoliticalWarfare.org:

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) is making headlines again as only she can – by being on the wrong side once again.

Her latest hobby horse is her recent trip to Cuba for a visit with Raul Castro (right) – Fidel’s little brother who for decades ran the army, secret police, intelligence services, hard currency laundering operations.

Lee led a congressional delegation to Havana for a 4-1/2 hour meeting with Raul Castro, telling reporters, “All of us are convinced that President Castro would like normal relations and would see normalization, ending the embargo, as beneficial to both countries.” Reuters reported that Lee’s delegation “avoided specifics” with Castro “but were struck by his humor, impressed by his involvement in Third World causes and firm in their belief that he wants to end U.S.-Cuba enmity.”

The meeting between Castro, Lee, and five other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, took place in secret without the customary presence of a US State Department official. No reporters attended, and according to the New York Times, Cuban television, which covered the visit, offered no details of what was said.

Xinhua, the Chinese propaganda agency, described the Castro-Lee meeting as a “closed-door discussion, whose details were undisclosed.” [...]

Congresswoman Lee has some explaining to do. Her secretive Cuba trip looks like a replay of what she did more than 25 years ago for Castro’s Grenada ally. Anything Lee says or does on Cuba is suspect. So is anything that other lawmakers do with her.

Major US and European news organizations covered the meeting but did not publish a list of the members of Congress (left) in the meeting. The Cuban Communist Party daily Granma stated that the lawmakers were: Reps. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), Marcia L. Fudge (D-OH), Laura Richardson (D-CA), Bobby Rush (D-IL), Melvin Luther Watt (D-CA), and Barbara Lee. “Also particpating were Patrice Willougby, executive assistant to the [Congressional] Black Caucus, and Eulada Watt, wife of Congressman Melvin Luther Watt,” according to Granma.

Granma added that also attending CBC’s meeting with Castro were high-ranking members of the Cuban government:

[...] Political Bureau members Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, president of the National Assembly of People’s Power, and Pedro Sáez Montejo, first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party in Havana; Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla; Dagoberto Rodríguez Barrera, deputy foreign minister; and Jorge Bolaños Suárez, head of the Cuban Interests Section in the United States.

Politico reported April 9, 2009, that, after the meeting, Lee and CBC members praised Castro as “warm and hospitable during their visit” and “call[ed] for an end to U.S. prohibition on travel to Cuba.” “The fifty-year embargo just hasn’t worked,” said Lee. “The bottom line is that we believe its time to open dialogue with Cuba.” Reflecting on her moments with Castro, Lee said, “It was quite a moment to behold.”

Note that Watt’s wife, Eulada, made the trip to Cuba as well.

What are the odds that POTUS Obama would name a Friend of Castro to such a prestigious office in his administration?

No sooner did I post on the award of a multi-million dollar contract for a California high-speed rail project to Tutor Perini, Zachry, Parsons, a firm connected with the spouse of Sen. Dianne Feintstein, than I received a comment asserting that the contract selection process had been transparent and aboveboard.

It took no time at all to discover that that claim may not be accurate.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that all is not “go” for the projected July groundbreaking:

. . . the rail agency is coming under new scrutiny from the state Senate Transportation Committee, which is looking into the bid evaluation process for the first 29-mile segment of rail bed through Fresno. The authority’s staff changed its bid evaluation criteria last year, after the agency’s board initially set up a two-step process that would have thrown out contracting teams with the two lowest technical scores.

The board gave the agency staff permission to make non-substantive changes to a so-called term-sheet that spells out detailed contract terms. But the bid evaluation process was not among the items on the term sheet, records show, raising questions about whether the changes were authorized. Officials have not yet explained how the decision to change the review process was made.

“The committee has some concerns and we are going to look into it,” said Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord), the transportation committee chairman.

When the bids were announced this month, a construction team led by Tutor Perini Corp. of Sylmar had the lowest technical score, but was ranked highest because of its relatively low price of just under $1 billion.

The authority has defended the bid review change, saying it was designed “to increase transparency and gain greater value for the project.” The rules were not altered to favor Tutor Perini, which has a long history of government contracting in California, officials said. Tutor Perini officials did not respond to a request for comment.

The rail agency said the altered bid review process may have helped save the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Elizabeth Alexis, a co-founder of the watchdog group Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design, argued that the bid review process ultimately used was not properly authorized and that the Tutor Perini team’s selection should be invalidated.

Alexis and other critics are concerned that the authority is trying to reduce upfront cost estimates at the risk of a lower-quality project or future increases in outlays to complete the system.

Stay tuned. This could get interesting when we find out who changed the rules that allowed Tutor Perini to win the bid.

In our most recent book, Fool Me Twice, Aaron Klein and I reported on the $8 billion high-speed rail funds in the 2009 Porkulus bill. As bad as the following excerpt painted the picture, it gets much much worse. Read on.

We wrote in the section “Bullet Trains to Bankruptcy”:

In the original “stimulus” bill, Obama included $8 billion for high-speed rail and called for $1 billion per year for five years in his proposed budget to get his projects “off the ground.” Grant awards were designated to lay the “groundwork for 13 new, large-scale high-speed rail corridors across the country . . . part of a total of 31 states receiving investments, including smaller projects and planning work that will help lay the groundwork for future high-speed intercity rail service,” as the White House claimed in April 2009.

Grant awards were not announced until nine months later (January 28, 2010). Almost two years after that, in November 2011, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced that 2012 was “shaping up to be the year of significant high-speed activity.” Contracts had been let by states for design work, planning work, construction materials, and supplies.

A closer look at one of these high-speed rail projects is instructive. Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell wrote at the end of January 2012 about California’s prospective “Bridge to Nowhere.” Sowell pointed to Japan’s famous high-speed rail system between Tokyo and Osaka, in “one of the most densely populated countries in the world.” The “bullet train” carries 130 million riders a year. He compares this to the proposed first leg of California’s system, the route between Fresno and Bakersfield Tokyo has a population three times that of San Francisco and Los Angeles combined. Fresno and Bakersfield are much smaller communities in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley. The 2010 population for all of San Joaquin County was 685,306. “You can bet the rent money that high-speed rail traffic between Fresno and Bakersfield will never come within shouting distance of covering the operating costs,” Sowell wrote. “Some people have analogized putting such a rail line between these two towns to the infamous ‘bridge to nowhere’ in Alaska.”

Why is the project in the sparsely populated Valley? Politics. It’s about politics. If the high-speed train started where California’s governor, Jerry Brown, and Obama wanted it to go—between the mega coastal cities—environmentalists, and politicians connected with environmentalists, would lie down on the tracks to stop the trains, Sowell wrote. Instead, California gets federal taxpayer dollars, and Brown and Obama look like heroes.

Now we learn, via Wynton Hall at Breitbart.com, that a construction firm deeply-connected to Richard Blum, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband, has won a contract for a California high-speed project:

Sen. Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum won a construction contract for California’s high-speed rail project, reports the California Political Review.

Author Laer Pearce says Perini-Zachary-Parsons, a construction group partially owned by Blum’s investment firm, Blum Capital, and their investors, bagged the nearly billion dollar contract:

“The Perini-Zachary-Parsons bid was the lowest received from the five consortia participating in the bidding process, but ‘low’ is a relative term. The firms bid $985,142,530 to build the wildly anticipated first section of high speed rail track that will tie the megopolis of Madera to the global finance center of Fresno. Do the division, and you find that the low bid came in at a mere $35 million per mile.”

This is not the first time Feinstein has come under scrutiny for cronyism using taxpayer dollars.

A recent study by the Reason Foundation found that the California High-Speed Rail System will lose between $124 million to $373 million a year.

By the way, Hall’s calculation is a bit off. Do the math: divide that $985 million by 25 miles.

Fact Check

Here is the Fresno to Bakersfield leg of the system, a distance of 114 miles:

The section travels south through the center of the southern portion of the San Joaquin Valley. Stations will be in the cities of Fresno, where it will connect with the Merced to Fresno section, and Bakersfield, where it will connect with the Bakersfield to Palmdale section.

Recall that the 2010 population for all of San Joaquin County was 685,306. The population of Madera County, for which the city of Madera serves as county seat, was 150,865 in 2010. The city of Madera had a population of 61,416.

As of 2012, Fresno, the county seat for Fresno County and the fifth largest city in California, claimed a population of 509,039, with less than one million (930,450) in the whole county.

The distance from Madera to Fresno is a mere 25 miles, less than 25% of the Fresno to Bakersfield leg.

Note that as the pieces of the project become smaller and smaller, the cost continues to rise disproportionately. Out of a proposed 800-mile high-speed rail system, a mere 25 miles has been funded — and that singular piece to a senator’s spouse’s firm.

Also ask yourself why the population of a county with approximately 150,000 (and about 60,000 living in its county seat) needs high-speed passenger rail to transport a small percentage of its residents 25 miles distant to another county seat, where less than half its nearly one million residents reside. It is highly unlikely that the people residing in the fifth largest city in the state have a burning need to travel to a less significant city.

Can we explain it by ethnicity? What makes Madera, with its low median income community, so important? Could it be that Madera’s ethnic population is more than 76% “Hispanic” and about 17% “white” (and Fresno is less than 50% “Hispanic” and 30% “white”) — with more than 30% born in Latin America (and only 11% of the same in Fresno)? Is it about Democrat voters?

How about cheap labor? Major industries in Madera are “Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting” (28%) and manufacturing (14%), as compared to only 5% agriculturual workers (and no manufacturing) in Fresno.

Are we to believe that the residents of 76+% “Hispanic” Madera are just busting to invest their big agricultural earnings in the “global finance center” of Fresno?

Speedbumps

The first week of March, Madera County Supervisor David Rogers proposed a money-saving alternative for the route between Merced and Fresno:

Supervisor David Rogers, who represents the Chowchilla area, wants to convince the California High-Speed Rail Authority to use about 30 miles of partially abandoned freight railroad right of way between Merced and Mendota and to enter Fresno from the west along a short-line freight railroad. Doing so, he suggested Thursday, would enable the rail authority to almost entirely bypass Madera County — which is suing to stop the high-speed train project — and save the state a pile of money.

Rogers presented his idea at the San Joaquin Valley Rail Committee meeting in Fresno. The committee advises the California Department of Transportation on its operation of Amtrak’s San Joaquin passenger trains, but has no jurisdiction on the state’s high-speed rail plans.

Rogers said he has no detailed analysis of potential savings, but said he believed the state could save huge sums by using an existing rail corridor and not having to fight with property owners to buy the needed right of way. Additionally, he said, it would eliminate the need to disrupt or relocate roads, utilities and other infrastructure through the city of Fresno along the rail authority’s chosen route along the Union Pacific Railroad tracks near Highway 99.

Rogers, who opposes the high-speed rail project, said he would prefer an upgraded Amtrak San Joaquin service with trains running at 125 mph instead of a separate high-speed line with trains capable of 220 mph through the Valley. “But if they insist on building a brand-new system … they have to look at the cost of doing it efficiently,” he said.

“There are literally millions to billions to be saved,” Rogers said.

But Diana Gomez, Central Valley project manager for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, said Rogers’ proposal comes at least two years too late for serious consideration because the state is only weeks away from choosing a contractor to build the first sections of the line from Madera through Fresno.

The authority finalized its choice of a Merced-Fresno route last May, selecting a “hybrid” route that follows the Union Pacific Railroad freight tracks near Highway 99 between Merced and Chowchilla, wanders east to follow the BNSF Railway tracks east of Madera, and then returns to the UP/Highway 99 corridor from the San Joaquin River to downtown Fresno.

Although not being familiar with the locale, my “gut” tells me that there’s a pile of money to be made with all that property acquisition and road, utilities, and other infrastructure relocation. It’s always about the Benjamins. How likely is it that Blum Capital and its investors stand to gain a tidy sum? Right.

Well, somebody twisted some arms because on April 2 it was announced that Madera County had dropped its suit against the California High-Speed Rail Authority:

A divided Madera County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to drop the county’s lawsuit against the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

The county was one of several parties that sued the state agency last year over its environmental approval of the Merced-Fresno portion of the proposed statewide rail system.

Manuel Nevarez, appointed to the board last month by Gov. Jerry Brown and a vocal supporter of high-speed rail, tipped the supervisors’ scales.

You read that correctly. Gov. Brown pulled an Obama by rigging the vote.

All other lawsuits against the 60-mile stretch of the “proposed rail route between Merced and Fresno” were reported as settled on April 18.

Tutor Perini, Zachry, Parsons

Robert Cruickshank described the firm’s credentials on his California High-Speed Rail blog:

Tutor Perini is based in Sylmar and were the lead contractors on the BART to SFO project and the Alameda Corridor rail project. Parsons was also in on BART to SFO, is a “general engineering consultant” for Caltrain, and worked on the Channel Tunnel, Taiwan HSR, and the Northeast Corridor. The website indicates the consortium is Tutor Perini and Parsons, so I’m not quite sure where Zachry fits in. They’re based in Texas and have done a lot of highway projects there. They were also a partner with Cintra in the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor.

Hmmmm. Wonder how many of these projects were funded with taxpayer dollars — voted into existence with the aid of Sen. Feinstein?

Note the headline refers to multiple teacher strikes. I originally posted the following four long years ago — yet nothing appears to have changed. We learned yesterday, thanks to Dan Riehl, that a recent protest in the southern state of Guerroro turned violent when Mexican teachers attacked and set fire to political party offices “over an education reform plan to introduce competency exams for teachers.”

As you will read, this most recent “protest” is tame by 2006 and 2008 standards.

^{This is a multi-page post with numerous photographs. It may be slow to load. All emphasis added.}

Mexico’s status of failed state was clearly evident from two contemporary events — the 2006 and 2008 teachers’ strikes.

2006

By June 14, 2006, a month-old teachers’ strike begun in Oaxaca in southern Mexico for better pay had grown into a state-wide revolt “after state police tried to violently evict [an] encampment of striking teachers.”

The teachers’ original demands included better wages and more resources for students, as well as “free lunches, books and uniforms for Oaxaca’s mostly poor and rural student body to improve learning conditions in the hopes of offsetting the creeping privatization of public education.”

By June 22, the revolt had turned into a major social movement to oust Ulises Ruiz (left), the governor of Oaxaca State.

On June 21 the New York Times reported:

Last week began with strikers battling the police and ended with failed talks with a federal mediator.

Tens of thousands of teachers still occupy the central square and the surrounding streets of this colonial town of 265,000, a cultural center and tourist attraction known for its artists and haunting pre-Columbian ruins. But the teachers, who number 70,000, have been joined by dozens of community groups, Indian rights organizations, farmers’ cooperatives and revolutionary parties. The teachers’ initial demand for better pay has been drowned out by the general cry for Gov. Ulises Ruiz to resign.

”He has to go, Ulises, not just for what actions he has taken against us, but also for the things he has done to the people of Oaxaca, which have been nefarious,” said Eduardo Reyes, a longtime high school history teacher from San Pablo Guila. “It is no longer a teachers’ strike, it is a social movement.”

Mr. Ruiz is a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the political machine that ruled Mexico, often through fraud and corruption, for seven decades, until its presidential candidate lost in 2000. The party is still strong in Oaxaca State, where leaders of the opposition party have been killed in recent elections.

The governor’s decision a week ago to use the state police to dislodge the striking teachers from the central square, resorting to the old ruling party’s tactics, outraged left-wing organizations across Oaxaca, who generally disagree with Mr. Ruiz’s style of governing.

Let’s pause for a second. Can you imagine what would happen here in the US if the teachers’ unions, SEIU, ACORN, and any number of other left-wing organizations decided to organize in the same way? What would Barackistan HQ do?

In August 2006, Gerardo Renique provided an overview of Oaxaca itself in the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Report:

Besides having the largest indigenous population in Mexico, the state of Oaxaca is also one of the poorest: home to 356 of Mexico’s 400 most impoverished municipalities. Oaxaca also has the highest school dropout rates in the nation. This situation has been exacerbated during the last decade as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the related privatization of public services, lands and natural resources.

Unrestricted entry of foreign goods into Mexico’s internal market—including corn and beans, the main staples of the Oaxacan diet—has led to a collapse of local agriculture, pushing thousands across the border into low-paying jobs in the U.S. economy. The remittances sent home by Oaxacan migrants now constitute the state’s second-largest source of income after tourism.

Oaxaca’s wealth of natural resources and its potential for tourism attracted the interest of transnational corporations. With most of the beaches, minerals, water and forest within the boundaries of indigenous communal lands, investors established partnerships with local PRI political bosses, who have dominated state politics for the last seven decades. Through legal chicanery and outright violence, the last two PRI state administrations arbitrarily imposed local authorities, established paramilitary forces and jailed opponents to gain access to communal lands and resources.

Amid this dire economic situation, teaching has historically been the most readily available—if not the only—source of social mobility for peasant and working class youth. Teachers have also played a key social and political role as mediators between the state and society. This was particularly the case in rural areas where during the early years of the Mexican Revolution they acted as organizers for agrarian reform, literacy campaigns and nationalist mobilizations. Later, as Mexico’s progressive state turned increasingly authoritarian under the PRI, teachers were often at the forefront of democratic opposition.

Teachers in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Michoacán, Guerrero and Mexico City have challenged the leadership of the PRI-controlled National Education Workers’ Union (SNTE). Oaxaca’s local Section 22 was among the founders of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), a caucus that has fought to end corruption, undemocratic practices and political patronage within the broader national union since 1979.

As the largest union in Mexico, the SNTE has provided its leaders with significant leverage within the PRI as well as a ready source of cash. With both personal fortunes and their political careers at stake, the SNTE leadership has put up fierce resistance against the reform movement within the union.

Continued on next page.

One thing you can be sure of is that the Marxist propagandists are brewing up a new batch of vile-tasting bitters when they’re losing the message wars and “unexpectedly” resort to duking it out in meme wars instead. This time it appears that current and former Congress Critters have their undies all twisted into knots because they just don’t know what to do about those Tea Party terrorists bringing common sense and reason to the legislative halls in the nation’s capitol.

Mind you that what you are about to read is nothing new. Marxists just cannot allow any minor crisis go to waste.

Take former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, for example. The recent issue of Inspire, Al-Qaeda’s top-shelf magazine for budding jihadis like the pressure-cooker-bomb-making Tsarnaev brothers, criticized Frank’s sexual orientation.

Barney “compared the terrorist organization to the Tea Party and cracked that the two groups are ‘aligned’ with each other against gay marriage,” Joel Gehrke reported in the Washington Examiner. Gehrke continued:

“I wonder how the right wing in America feels about being aligned with al-Qaeda?” Frank said to Buzzfeed, adding that “there is an irony that the most active anti-gay [groups] are al-Qaeda and the American right-wing.”

The latest issue of Al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine spotlights “Barney Frank, Gay Congressman, Symbol of the American Dream” to argue that the United States is “a nation standing on no values.”

“It sounded like what the Tea party said when I got married,” Frank replied.

Barney’s delusional logic aside — maybe it’s that pot smoke swirling around his head that has him spewing trash — could he please provide one example of what the apparently-monolithic Tea Party bothered to comment on his marriage? (It obviously escapes Barney that the Tea Party is anything but monolithic as he cannot name a single individual for his attribution.)

Figuratively hot on Barney’s heels, Senate Majority Leader “Dirty Harry” Reid compared the Tea Party to “anarchists.” Tony Lee reported at Breitbart.com:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) believes the Tea Party is ideologically similar to anarchists and that government is “inherently good.”

Speaking on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Reid said he was frustrated that, “We have a situation where this country has been driven by the Tea Party for the last number of years.” He then insinuated Tea Partiers were like anarchists.

“When I was in school, I studied government and I learned about the anarchists. Now, they were different than the Tea Party because they were violent,” Reid said. “But they were anarchists because they did not believe in government in any level and they acknowledged it.”

Reid asserted that unlike the anarchists he learned about in school, the Tea Party “kind of hides that” by not acknowledging, he claimed, that they do not believe in any form of government.

“They don’t say they’re against government, but that is what it all amounts to,” Reid said. “They’re not doing physically destructive things to buildings and people, directly, but they are doing everything they can to throw a monkey wrench into every form of government, whether it’s local, state, or federal.”

Reid was upset that Tea Partiers are “happy” to slow down government. “Government is not inherently bad,” he retorted; “government is inherently good.”

Harry must be getting senile. He definitely needs to go back to school. In the 1940s and 1950s, when he was a lad, the anarchists were well known to be Lefties — insurrectionists, socialists, Marxists, Communists, syndicalists, anti-colonials, anti-imperialists — and bore not a whiff of resemblance to today’s conservative members of the Tea Party.

Anarchists perform acts of terrorism to push their anti-establishment agenda. Perhaps Harry could name just one member of the Tea Party who has blown anything up or led a violent mass protest against the government or murdered hundreds of people just to make his or her point. Just what I thought.

Hoocoodanode? An excerpt posted below from an article about the radicalized Islamists, the Tsarnaev brothers, who were reportedly converted while residing in Cambridge immediately brought to mind another Cambridge radical, Barack Obama. While at Harvard, between October 1988 and January 1990, Obama racked up a pile of unpaid parking tickets in Cambridge and Somerville, which he only got around to paying in March 2007 when he was campaigning for the White House.

There’s no need to delve into the further radicalization of Obama at Harvard — it was a continuation of a process begun long ago in Hawaii — as the story is well-known to those who have been paying a modicum of attention anytime during the past five or six years. All others are beyond convincing.

The latter would be those nonplused by the recent news that members of the bombmakers’ Tsarnaev family, according to the Boston Herald, were at one time or another moochers on the Massachusetts taxpayers’ dime — and who literally struck back at the hand that helped feed them.

Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.

State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home.

In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state.

Thanks to conservative Warner Todd Huston, we gain some perspective into the breeding ground that helped spawn the Tsarnaev killers. Huston wrote yesterday:

The fact is, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of the left-wing Harvard University, people slamming the USA is so common that no one paid any attention at all to Tamerlan’s hate for the USA.

Nearly everyone in Cambridge nods in approval when they hear anti-Americanism openly expressed. That is because the largest number of people in Cambridge are liberals, leftists, communists, socialists, foreigners, Marxists, and University professors and employees–all these terms being nearly synonymous with each other in that area.

So, when terrorist Tamerlan was seen and heard wandering about Cambridge full of hate for the USA, he didn’t on the surface seem any different than anyone else in the city. His hate was entirely, boringly, prosaically common.

This of course, draws the question: what is the difference between the hate that leftists feel for America and that of radical Islamist terrorists like Tamerlan?

And that, folks, sums up the neighborhood POTUS once called home.

Today, Bernie Quigley wrote in The Hill:

A hundred years of centralization cannot disappear overnight; it goes back further, to Jay’s Treaty in 1794 when Washington cast his lot with Alexander Hamilton and the New Yorkers in opposition to Jefferson, Madison, the South and western regions. The die was cast. But the end game of centralization came in 1913 with passage of the difficult-to-explain 17th Amendment, which fatally shifted focus from states to Wall Street in the election of senators.

But this needs more discussion, more explanation, and I have heard Lee explain it perfectly on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s groundbreaking TV show “Freedom Watch,” which rose in a creative arc with the Pauls, Lee and Sarah Palin, and was suddenly pulled by its network a year before last President’s Day.

We need it back.

Here’s a little reminder — Judge Andrew Napolitano’s last Freedom Watch show, “What If Democracy Is Bunk?” that aired February 10, 2012, on Fox Business Network:

Judge Andrew Napolitano, What If Democracy Is Bunk?, Townhall.com, February 23, 2012:

What if you are only allowed to vote because it doesn’t make a difference? What if no matter how you vote, the elites get to have it their way? What if “one person, one vote” is just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if democracy is dangerous to personal freedom? What if democracy erodes the people’s understanding of natural rights and the foundations of government, and instead turns elections into beauty contests?

What if democracy allows the government to do anything it wants, as long as more people bother to show up at the voting booth to support it than to oppose it? What if the purpose of democracy is to convince people that they could prosper not through the creation of wealth but through theft from others? What if the only moral way to acquire wealth — aside from inheritance — is through voluntary economic activity? What if the government persuaded you that you could acquire wealth through political activity? What if economic activity included all the productive and peaceful things we do? What if political activity included all the parasitical and destructive things the government does?

What if governments were originally established to protect people’s freedom, but always turn into political and imperialist enterprises that seek to expand their power, increase their territory and heighten their control of the population? What if the idea that we need a government to take care of us is actually a fiction? What if our strength as individuals and durability as a culture are contingent not on the strength of the government but on the amount of freedom we have from the government?

What if we’re seeing civil unrest around the world precisely because government is out of control? What if the cocktail of big government and democracy brings dependence and destruction? What if big government destroys people’s motivations and democracy convinces them that the only motivation they need is to vote and go along with whatever the government does?

What if the Republican primaries we’re seeing unfold aren’t actually as democratic as they may appear to be? What if the results you have seen from the states that have voted thus far don’t match the composition of the delegates those states send to the Tampa convention this summer because the polls aren’t what counts, but what counts are the secret meetings that come after the voting? What if Joe Stalin was right when he said the most powerful person in the world is the guy who counts the votes?

What if the greatest tyrant in history lives among us? What if that tyrant always gets its way, no matter what the laws are or what the Constitution says? What if that tyrant is the majority of voters? What if the tyranny of the majority in a democracy recognizes no limits on its power?

What if the government misinforms voters so as to justify anything the government wants to do? What if the government bribes people with the money it prints? What if it gives entitlements to the poor, tax breaks to the middle class and bailouts to the rich just to keep all of us dependent upon it? What if a vibrant republic requires not just the democratic process of voting, but also informed and engaged voters who understand first principles of limited government and free-market economics, and the divine origin of natural rights?

What if we could free ourselves from the yoke of big government through a campaign of education and information and personal courage that leads to a revolutionary return to first principles? What if the establishment doesn’t want this? What if the government remains the same no matter who wins elections?

What if because of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, because he isn’t campaigning just for votes as his competition is, because he is educating the population and winning the hearts and minds of a once free people and inspiring them to fight for their freedom once more, freedom wins? What if we can be free again? What will it take to make that happen?