Nancy Pelosi

Hear that? It’s the escalating cry of American employers and workers trying to hold on to their health care benefits in the age of stifling Obama health insurance mandates: Gangway! Gangway! Save me! Waive me!

Obamacare refugees first began beating down the exit doors in October 2010. As I’ve documented since last fall, waiver-mania started with McDonald’s and Jack in the Box; spread to Dish Networks, hair salon chain Regis Corp and resort giant Universal Orlando; took hold among every major Big Labor organization from the AFL-CIO to the CWA to the SEIU; roped in the nationalized health care promoters at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (whose board of trustees includes health care czar Nancy Ann DeParle); and is now gripping entire states (Maine, New Hampshire and Nevada all recently got in on the act).

The latest to catch the waive? West Coast liberals.

Yes, smack dab in the middle of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district, a cluster of San Francisco small businesses is among the latest recipients of get-out-of-Obamacare passes. As Jamie Dupree of Cox Media Group and Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller pointed out this week, there are at least two dozen Bay Area companies—including bars, restaurants, hotels, tourist shops, real estate and auto firms—that have secured temporary, one-year reprieves from the federal law. It’s the San Francisco Treat that voters didn’t foresee until after the bill was rammed down their throats.

Another noteworthy waiver winner: Seattle-based REI. The trendy Pacific Northwest outdoor equipment retailer’s progressive CEO and Democratic campaign donor, Sally Jewell, appeared with President Obama in 2009 to tout White House health care reform initiatives. Two years later, REI snagged a waiver to protect the health benefits of a whopping 1,180 workers from the very tentacles of the big government bureaucrats Jewell embraced at Obama’s roundtable.

To date, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has granted federal health care law exemptions to more than three million American workers covered by more than 1,300 unions, companies and insurers who had voluntarily offered low-cost health plans with annual benefits limits. Meddling Obamacare architects outlawed those private plans—nicknamed “mini med” plans—in the name of “patients’ rights.” But without special waivers, the escapees would have been forced to hike premiums or drop insurance coverage altogether for mostly low-wage, seasonal and part-time workers.

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Among the most recent union affiliates to secure pardons from the one-size-fits-all health policy that their bosses spent hundreds of millions of dollars of worker dues lobbying for:

—Teamsters Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund in Brooklyn, N.Y.
—Detroit and Vicinity Trowel Trades Health and Welfare Fund_
—Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1182 Security Benefits Fund_
—CWA Local 1183 Health and Welfare Fund
—Bakers Union and Food Employees Labor Relations Association Health and Welfare Fund
—Service Employees International Union Healthcare Illinois Home Care and Child Care Fund_
—United Food and Commercial Workers San Diego Employers Health and Welfare Trust_
—Welfare Fund of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 15, 15A, 15C, 15D AFL-CIO
—United Steelworkers Local 1-0318 Health and Welfare Trust Fund_
—United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices Local 198 AFL-CIO Health and Welfare Trust
—Teamsters Local 617 Welfare Fund in Ridgefield, N.J.
—Teamsters Local 734 Welfare Fund in Chicago
—Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 60 Health and Welfare Fund
—New York State Nurses Welfare Plan for New York City Employed Registered Professional Nurses

The ultimate goal, it bears repeating, is to force a massive, revolutionary and irreversible shift from private to public insurance designed by government-knows-best bureaucrats.

Pelosi and the Golden Ticket Administrators in Washington deny preferential treatment for waiver beneficiaries. But the stench of waivers-for-favors won’t be dispelled until and unless the Obama administration releases a full list not only of those who won exemptions, but also of those who applied and were denied.

With San Francisco businesses caught with their hands in the waiver jar, Pelosi’s office could do nothing else but pout: “It is pathetic,” said Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill, “that there are those who would be cheering for Americans to lose their minimum health coverage or see their premiums increase for political purposes.”

It is far more pathetic to have cheered, as Pelosi did on the one-year anniversary of Obamacare, the law’s onerous benefits limits from which thousands of her own constituents have now been exempted.

Once again, the rest of America wants to know: Dude, where’s my waiver?

Eric Holder

My fellow Americans, who are “your people”? I ask because U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who is black, used the phrase “my people” in congressional testimony this week. It was an unmistakably color-coded and exclusionary reference intended to deflect criticism of the Obama Justice Department’s selective enforcement policies. It backfired.

In pandering to skin-deep identity politics and exacerbating race-consciousness, Holder has given the rest of us a golden opportunity to stand up, identify “our people” and show the liberal poseurs what post-racialism really looks like.

Herman Cain is my people. He’s my brother-in-arms. I’ve never met him. But we are family. We are kin because we are unhyphenated Americans who are comfortable in the black, brown and yellow skin we are in. We are growing in numbers—on college campuses, in elected office, on the Internet, on public airwaves, everywhere. And that drives liberals mouth-frothing crazy.

Cain is the successful Georgia businessman who has wowed audiences across the country with his passion for free markets, free minds and the American Dream. The former president of Godfather’s Pizza and forceful tea party speaker happens to be black. So he must pay the price that all minority conservatives in public life must pay. As I noted last week, a cowardly liberal writer recently derided Cain as a “monkey in the window,” a “garbage pail kid” and a “minstrel” who performs for his “masters.”

Race traitors. Whores. Sellouts. House Niggas. Self-haters. I’ve heard it for nearly 20 years in public life. Every outspoken minority conservative has. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but these spiteful epithets can’t enslave us.

Val Prieto is my people. A fierce, freedom-loving American blogger of Cuban descent, he rejects race-card games and refuses to be lumped in with Hispanic ethnic grievance-mongers. In response to pro-illegal immigration marchers who infamously desecrated the American flag, Prieto wrote:

“I have never and will never, despite having many issues with the government of the United States throughout the years, burn a flag of the United States of America. I am Cuban by birth, American by the grace of God. And a darned proud, dignified, thankful and respectful American. ... I refuse to be lumped together as a class or a race simply because we speak a similar language. ... I ain’t Mexican, I ain’t Latino and I ain’t Hispanic. I am an American of Cuban descent. And damned proud of it.”

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Katrina Pierson is my people. She’s a feisty young Texas mom and Dallas tea party activist who supports limited government principles and rejects left-wing identity politics. She confronted the NAACP last year with a rousing manifesto of political independence and rebutted the left-wing group’s attacks on the tea party as racist:

“The reality is that we colored people no longer require the assistance from other Negros for advancement,” Pierson said. “These groups run to the rescue of distressed brown people only when the media deems it newsworthy. Meanwhile, there are inner city black children who continue to grow up fatherless while sharing a neighborhood with stray bullets, drugs and a plethora of liquor stores on every corner. ... I don’t believe that the true meaning of this nation’s creed was to move black people from one form of slavery to another.”

The NAACP, she observed, is made up of “Democrats who bow to a Democrat master today as they once did over 200 years ago. Once this is realized by the forgotten society, race in this country will be as irrelevant as those who thrive off of it.” Amen, sister.

Allen West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and freshman congressman from Florida who happens to be black, is my people. Unafraid to skewer progressive sacred cows, he speaks boldly against global jihad and its Fifth Column enablers screaming “Islam-o-phobe!” West has also nailed the Congressional Black Caucus as “a monolithic voice that promotes these liberal social welfare policies and programs that are failing in the black community, that are preaching victimization and dependency; that’s not the way that we should go.”

According to U.S. News and World Report‘s Kenneth Walsh, President Obama told guests at a private White House dinner that he believed the tea party movement had a “subterranean agenda” of racism against him. But Lt. Col. West summed up the movement’s transcendent, post-racial agenda forthrightly:

“The tea party is a constitutional, conservative grassroots movement—and that’s it. The tea party stands for three things: They want to see effective, efficient constitutional government, they stand for national security, and they stand for free market, free enterprise solutions. That’s it.”

It’s government of, by and for the people—all the people. Not just the ones still shackled by reflexive Democratic Party loyalty. We are beholden not to our skin pigment or ethnic tribes, but to American ideals, tradition, history and faith in the individual.

Three, two, one ... RAAAAACIST!

First lady Michelle Obama said, “Let’s Move!” Who knew Democratic politicians in Wisconsin and Indiana would take her literally?

Faced with stifling debt, bloated pensions and intractable government unions, liberal Midwestern legislators have fled those states—paralyzing Republican fiscal reform efforts. Like Monty Python’s Brave Sir Robin and his band of quivering knights, these elected officials have only one plan when confronted with political hardship or economic peril: Run away, run away, run away.

Scores of Fleebagger Democrats are now in hiding in neighboring Illinois, the nation’s sanctuary for political crooks and corruptocrats. Soon, area hotels will be announcing a special discount rate for card-carrying FleePAC winter convention registrants. Question: Will the White House count the economic stimulus from the mass Democratic exodus to Illinois as jobs “saved” or “created”? More important question: How much are taxpayers being charged for these obstructionist vacations?

Voters have spoken: In Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and across the heartland, they put Republican adults in charge of cleaning up profligate Democrat-engineered messes. Instead of defending their same old tax-hiking, union-protecting, spending-addicted ways, Democrats are crossing their state borders into big government sanctuary zones—screaming “la, la, la, we can’t hear you” all the way.

Wisconsin Democrats warned that their delinquent members—evading state troopers and literally phoning it in—could be gone “for weeks” to prevent a quorum on GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s modest plan to increase public union workers’ health insurance and pension contributions, end the compulsory union dues racket and rein in collective bargaining powers run amok.

Big Labor insists its intransigence isn’t about money, but about “rights.” But the dispute is about nothing but money and power—the union’s power to dictate and limit its members’ health insurance choices to a lucrative union-run plan, for example, which adds nearly $70 million in unnecessary taxpayer costs.

On Tuesday, only three of 40 House Democrats in Indiana showed up for legislative debate on a similar bill to end forced unionism and join 22 other “right to work” states. Hoosier media reported that some of the fugitive pols may be headed to Kentucky in addition to President Obama’s old political stomping grounds.

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The White House and Beltway Democrats have paved the way for subverting deliberative democracy, of course. If only Republicans in Wisconsin and Indiana had followed the Obama/Pelosi/Reid model and rammed their behind-closed-doors-crafted legislative agenda through in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, the Fleebaggers wouldn’t be on the lam today. But GOP legislators just don’t roll that way. It’s Democrats who cut and run—abroad in wartime and at home in crisis.

Almost eight years ago, more than 50 Texas Democratic state lawmakers holed up in Oklahoma and New Mexico for weeks to stymie a vote on Republican-sponsored redistricting plans they opposed. Over the past week, it was thousands of public school teachers in Wisconsin who faked illness and boycotted their classrooms. And it’s union henchmen calling out loud for statewide strikes to bring Republican reformers to their knees.

The Party of Truancy has become a laughingstock—and Americans aren’t waiting for left-wing late-night comedians to bring down the hammer of well-earned mockery. The Internet has lit up over the past week with “Wanted” posters and all-points-bulletin alerts for missing Democrats.

Blogger John Hayward of the conservative Human Events newspaper joked that “the next issue of National Geographic will track the migratory patterns of fugitive Democrats across the great plains.” Seton Motley of the Washington, D.C.-based Media Research Center weighed in: “First, Wisconsin. Now, Indiana. When we said ‘runaway government,’ it was a complaint—not a suggestion.” Comedian Stephen Kruiser snickered that OFA—the Democrats’ political organizing arm, Organizing for America—now stands for “Organizing Fleeing Americans.”

Note: Many of the loudest Washington and Hollywood critics of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s decision to resign from office in 2009 are themselves now AWOL on the Wisconsin and Indiana AWOL-ians. Who’s all for mocking “quitters” now? Anyone?

One mortified Wisconsin taxpayer speaks for many. “As the daughter of former Wisconsin Senate Minority Floor Leader William R. Moser (D-Milwaukee, Dist. 6),” Mary Magdalen Moser told me, she’s humiliated by the “flee-bagging” politicians. “I am ashamed of the actions taken by the minority party to subvert our system of government by boycotting its legitimate processes. Anarchy is undemocratic, and I know that my Dad is spinning in his grave right now. ... I do not support refusing to participate, because that will not solve any of the issues facing our state.”

Remember the 2008 Democratic Party chant: “Fired up! Ready to go!” Well, there’s a new Democratic Party motto in town: “Ready to go? OK, then, let’s blow this pop stand!” It’s difficult to see how Obama and his absconder allies can “win the future” when they’re stampeding over each other to escape the present.

While her husband may have paid lip service to ending the abuse of science for “politics or ideology,” first lady Michelle Obama gave herself a super-sized waiver. Two of her showcase social engineering campaigns—tax preferences for breast-pumping working mothers and expanded nutrition labels—are based on distorting or dismissing the prevailing public health literature.

Just as the White House costumed Obamacare activists in white lab coats, the fashionable Mrs. O has cloaked her meddling anti-obesity crusade in medical fakery.

Over the past year, the first lady has marshaled a taxpayer-subsidized army of government lawyers, bureaucrats and consultants against the “national security threat” of childhood obesity. She has transformed the East Wing of the White House into Big Nanny’s new Central Command headquarters. The biggest threats to Mrs. Obama’s 70-point plan for national fitness: parental authority and sound science.

As part of her “Let’s Move!” anniversary celebration this week, Mrs. Obama rolled out a new breastfeeding initiative because “kids who are breastfed longer have a lower tendency to be obese.” She made her assertion to an invitation-only group of handpicked reporters who were barred from asking questions about her scientific conclusions. It’s not healthy to challenge Super Nanny, you see.

After the Internal Revenue Service carefully studied and rejected an advocacy push to treat nursing equipment as a tax-deductible medical expense last fall, the tax agency suddenly reversed itself in time for the first lady’s new public relations tour. The surgeon general has also issued a “Call to Action” to pressure private businesses to adopt more nursing-friendly environments to combat childhood obesity, all while denying that government is intruding on personal decisions. “No mother should be made to feel guilty if she cannot or chooses not to breastfeed,” Surgeon General Regina Benjamin asserted, while laying an unmistakable guilt trip on moms and moms-to-be.

So, what do studies on breastfeeding and babies’ weight actually say? Rebecca Goldin, Ph.D., research director of George Mason University’s Statistical Assessment Service, points out that the literature is inconclusive or demonstrates that the health advantages of bosom over bottle are short-lived:

“Indeed, there is little evidence that using formula causes obesity. There is a correlation between formula use and obesity among babies and children ... though this correlation is not consistent in all studies. Some of these studies show a relationship in only some demographics and not others. Others show that the disadvantage of bottle-feeding and/or formula mostly goes away by the time a child is about 4 years old.

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“The result is that we cannot discover whether breastfeeding is correlated with obesity because infant formula or bottle feeding leads to subsequent overeating or disposition to being overweight, or whether those parents who breastfeed are also more likely to offer their children green beans instead of French fries. Despite weak evidence, there is a lingering conviction that formula causes obesity among pediatricians and the press; if anything, the study about infants should make us reflect more carefully on this conclusion.”

Alas, such nuance from Mrs. Obama and her unquestioning media water-carriers is scarcer than tofu at Taco Bell.

Don’t get me wrong. As a proud mom who breastfed both of her babies, I’ve been and will always be a vocal defender of women who have devoted the time, dedication and selflessness it takes. But there are myriad individual reasons beyond Mrs. O’s expansive goal of battling the collective scourge of childhood obesity—intimate bonding and health benefits for the mom, not just the baby, for example—that lead women to nurse.

And we don’t need Big Brother or Big Mother to lead the Charge of the Big Bosom to persuade us of the personal benefits. Many private hospitals and companies have already adopted nursing-friendly environments. If it’s as good for their bottom lines as it is for babies’ bottoms, they don’t need a government mandate to do the right thing.

But as I’ve noted many times over the past year, Mrs. O’s real interest isn’t in nurturing nursing moms or slimming down kids’ waistlines. It’s in boosting government and public union payrolls, along with beefing up FCC and FTC regulators’ duties.

Take another East Wing pet project: leaning on private businesses to print expanded front-package nutrition labels warning consumers about salt, fat and sugar. The first lady’s anti-fat brigade assumes as an article of faith that her top-down designer food labels will encourage healthier eating habits. It’s a “no-brainer,” Mrs. Obama insists.

However, the latest study on this very subject—funded by no less than the left-wing Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—confirms other recent research contradicting the East Wing push. A team led by Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School’s Eric Finkelstein, published in the peer-reviewed American Journal for Preventive Medicine, found that mandatory menu-labeling in Seattle restaurants did not affect consumers’ calorie consumption. “Given the results of prior studies, we had expected the results to be small,” the researchers reported, “but we were surprised that we could not detect even the slightest hint of changes in purchasing behavior as a result of the legislation.”

Will the first lady and her food cops be chastened by the science that undermines their spin? Fat chance.

Let’s give the “climate of hate” rhetoric a rest for a moment. It’s time to talk about the climate of death, in which the abortion industry thrives unchecked. Dehumanizing rhetoric, rationalizing language and a callous disregard for life have numbed America to its monstrous consequences. Consider the Philadelphia Horror.

In the City of Brotherly Love, hundreds of babies were murdered by a scissors-wielding monster over four decades. Whistleblowers informed public officials at all levels of the wanton killings of innocent life. But a parade of government health bureaucrats and advocates protecting the abortion racket looked the other way—until, that is, a Philadelphia grand jury finally exposed the infanticide factory run by abortionist Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D., and a crew of unlicensed, untrained butchers masquerading as noble providers of women’s “choice.” Prosecutors charged Gosnell and his death squad with multiple counts of murder, infanticide, conspiracy, abuse of corpse, theft and other offenses.

The 281-page grand jury report released Wednesday provides a bone-chilling account of how Gosnell’s “Women’s Medical Society” systematically preyed on poor, minority pregnant women and their live, viable babies. The report’s introduction lays out the criminal enterprise that claimed the lives of untold numbers of babies—and mothers:

“This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy—and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels—and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.”

Echoing the same kind of dark euphemisms plied by Planned Parenthood propagandists who refer to unborn life as “fetal and uterine material,” Gosnell referred to his deadly trade as “ensuring fetal demise.” Reminiscent of the word wizards who refer to the skull-crushing partial-birth abortion procedure as “intact dilation and evacuation” and “intrauterine cranial decompression,” Gosnell described his destruction of babies’ spinal cords as “snipping.” He rationalized his macabre habit of cutting off dead babies’ feet and saving them in rows and rows of specimen jars as “research.” His guilt-ridden employees then took photos of some of the victims before dumping them in shoeboxes, paper bags, one-gallon spring-water bottles and glass jars.

They weren’t the only ones who adopted a see-no-evil stance:

—The Pennsylvania Department of Health knew of clinic violations dating back decades, but did nothing.

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—The Pennsylvania Department of State was “repeatedly confronted with evidence about Gosnell”—including the clinic’s unclean, unsterile conditions, unlicensed workers, unsupervised sedation, underage abortion patients and over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street—“and repeatedly chose to do nothing.”

—Philadelphia Department of Public Health officials who regularly visited Gosnell’s human waste-clogged offices did nothing.

—Nearby hospital officials who treated some of the pregnant mothers who suffered grave complications from Gosnell’s butchery did nothing.

—An unnamed evaluator with the National Abortion Federation, the leading association of abortion providers that is supposed to uphold strict health and legal standards, determined that Gosnell’s chamber of horrors was “the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected”—but did nothing.

Meanwhile, the death racketeers have launched a legislative and regulatory assault across the country on pro-life crisis pregnancy centers from New York City to Baltimore, Austin and Seattle that offer abortion alternatives, counseling and family services to mostly poor, vulnerable minority women.

Already, left-wing journalists and activists have rushed to explain that these abortion atrocities ignored for four decades by abortion radicals and rationalizers are not really about abortion. A Time magazine writer argued that the Philadelphia Horror was “about poverty, not Roe v. Wade.” A University of Minnesota professor declared: “This is not about abortion.”

But the grand jury itself pointed out that loosened oversight of abortion clinics enacted under pro-choice former GOP Gov. Tom Ridge enabled Gosnell’s criminal enterprise—and led to the heartless execution of hundreds of babies. Mass murder got a pass in the name of expanding “access” and appeasing abortion lobbyists.

As the report made clear: “With the change of administration from (pro-life Democratic) Gov. Casey to Gov. Ridge,” government health officials “concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”

Deadly indifference to protecting life isn’t tangential to the abortion industry’s existence—it’s at the core of it. The Philadelphia Horror is no anomaly. It’s the logical, bloodcurdling consequence of an evil, eugenics-rooted enterprise wrapped in feminist clothing.

There isn’t a shred of evidence that deranged Tucson massacre suspect Jared Loughner ever listened to talk radio or cared about illegal immigration. Indeed, after 300 exhaustive interviews, the feds “remain stumped” about his motives, according to Tuesday’s Washington Post. But that hasn’t stopped a coalition of power-grabbing politicians, progressive activists and open-borders lobbyists from plying their quack cure for the American body politic: government-sponsored speech suppression.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting rampage, Democratic leaders mused openly about reintroducing the Orwellian “Fairness Doctrine”—a legislative sledgehammer targeting conservative viewpoints on public airwaves. New York Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter assailed the Federal Communications Commission for failing to police broadcast content and vowed to “look into” more aggressive language monitoring. Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey blamed “incendiary rhetoric” for triggering “unstable individuals to take violent action.” In his own manifesto calling for resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn pressed public officials to “rethink parameters on free speech.”

This week’s fashionable new media meme is to deride talk radio hosts for taking these speech-squelching threats seriously. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jay Bookman sneered at the “persecution complex” of conservative broadcasters who reacted to Slaughter and company. Politico’s Keach Hagey dismissed concerns about the Democrats’ chilling campaign against right-leaning media outlets and knocked conservative talkers’ “defensive posture.” (Sound familiar? This is the same tactic they used against Sarah Palin and all those on the right falsely accused of being accessories to the Tucson massacre: Attack ‘em. Attack ‘em for responding. Accuse the smear victims of playing the victim card. Repeat.)

Make no mistake: The Hate Speech Inquisition is real. And it’s being fought on all fronts. Last week, using the non-radio-inspired Tucson massacre as fuel, the National Hispanic Media Coalition called on the FCC to gather evidence for the left’s preconceived conclusion that conservative talk radio “hate speech” causes violence. It’s Red Queen science—sentence first, research validation later.

The head of the NHMC is Alex Nogales, who has filed more than 50 petitions to deny broadcast licenses and has led anti-corporate crusades to “force” broadcast stations across the country “to hire Latino reporters and anchors” and adopt “diversity initiatives.” Grabbing the Tucson shooting limelight, Nogales told Broadcasting and Cable magazine last week:

“We can’t stand there with our arms crossed and make like there isn’t a reason why this is happening. ... We started this dialog(ue) in the last immigration debate four years ago. We could see that it was just out of control. It started with just an issue of immigration, then every pundit on radio and TV who wanted an audience started talking about it and started using the worst of language, and now it has spilled out into mainstream.”

Loughner’s wild Internet rants and creepy campus meltdowns clearly demonstrate that crazy doesn’t need a motive. But progressive censors need their bogeymen, and Nogales isn’t about to give them up for reality’s sake. The NHMC first filed a petition in October 2009 demanding that the FCC collect data, seek public comment and “explore options” for combating “hate speech” from staunch critics of illegal immigration. The petition followed on National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguia’s call for media outlets to keep immigration enforcement proponents off the airwaves “even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights.”

Nogales’ group is part of a larger “media justice” coalition dedicated to curtailing and redistributing conservatives’ political speech under the guise of diversity and decency. As left-wing philanthropists at the Media Justice Fund put it: The movement “is grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies.” But, hey, we better just ignore these communications control freaks lest we be accused of suffering a “persecution complex.”

The Praetorian Guards of civility keep telling us that “words matter.” Threats should be taken seriously, they insist. Except, of course, when those words and threats are uttered by those hell-bent on regulating their opponents’ discourse out of existence.

No matter how you rearrange President Obama’s inner circle, it still looks, smells and tastes like a rotten Chicago deep-dish pizza.

Ready for the latest topping on this moldy old pie? It’s a possible chief of staff slot for Wall Street banker/lawyer/wheeler-dealer William Daley, brother of outgoing Chicago mayor/machine politics mastermind Richard M. Daley (also the former boss of White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and first lady Michelle Obama), whose retirement paved the way for former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel. Phew.

The White House is reportedly looking to manufacture a “pro-business” aura with Bill Daley, who holds a “corporate responsibility” executive office at J.P. Morgan and once headed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the latter, a left-wing hate object and Obama punching bag leading up to the midterms.

But the Beltway-based Chamber of Commerce is too often a fair-weather statist lobbying organization. It supported the TARP all-purpose bailout, the auto bailout and the bottomless, pork-filled stimulus package, all of which have forcibly redistributed money from taxpayers and small businesses to politically connected special interests (including Daley’s J.P. Morgan, which was most recently swept up in a massive pay-to-play bond scheme in Alabama).

Daley has about as much real experience creating jobs as Da Boss now sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave—which is to say, less than a thimble full. (It’s a New Year. I’m being generous.) In 2009, the head of Chicago’s sanitation department implicated Daley in a hiring corruption scheme tied to his brother’s mayoral administration. The official was convicted; Daley shrugged off the federal probe. “Even if it happened—and I’m not saying it did—things were different. There was nothing illegal about that stuff.”

Instead of distancing himself from the favor-trading Wall Street fat cats who have earned the ire of both anti-bailout tea party activists and anti-corporate liberals, Obama remains wedded, embedded and indebted to the worst kind.

Daley has served on the board of government-sponsored financial behemoth Fannie Mae since 1993. Like the Richard Daley machine in Chicago, Fannie Mae in Washington has served as an industrial-sized patronage factory—sharing profits with political allies, spreading taxpayer funds to ethnic groups, and doling out jobs to left-wing academics, Washington has-beens and back-scratching buddies. Like Daley. And close Obama adviser Jim Johnson, the Fannie Mae exec who got sweetheart loans from shady subprime lender Countrywide.

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While they raked in six-figure salaries, Fannie Mae and government-sponsored sibling Freddie Mac engaged in Enron-style accounting, plunged into debt and helped usher in the subprime housing meltdown through reckless lending practices.

Bill Clinton, the man who appointed Daley to the Fannie Mae board, also appointed Emanuel to the Freddie Mac board of directors at a time when its oversight manager called the quasi-governmental agency “so pliant” that it enabled rampant book-cooking. Freddie Mac’s stock skyrocketed; its CEOs helped themselves to massive bonuses. Emanuel’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, exposed how Emanuel’s “profitable stint” during this corruption-plagued period entailed almost no work:

The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board’s working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.

On Emanuel’s watch, executives told the board of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.

And now the torch may be passed in an endless Windy City circle, from Daley to Emanuel, from Emanuel to Daley, with Obama. ‘Round and ‘round it goes in Chicago on the Potomac. Remember: When Crony State corruptocrats brag about “job creation,” the only jobs they’ve ever created are each other’s.

No matter how soothing the White House overtures to business leaders sounded this week, an inconvenient fact remains: Washington is gripped by crab-in-the-bucket syndrome. And there’s no cure in sight.

Put a single crab in an uncovered bucket, and it will find a way to climb up and out on its own. Put a dozen crabs in a bucket, and 11 will fight with all their might to pull down the striver who attempts escape. President Obama sought to reassure 20 CEOs that he wasn’t the king crab holding them down: “I want to dispel any notion we want to inhibit your success,” he cooed. “We want to be boosters because when you do well, America does well.”

Take it all with a huge grain of sea salt.

This is, after all, the same “booster” who in April mused openly about limits on profits, government determinations for what constitutes a “good” product or service, and the expectation that private businesses serve a collective need to goose Washington’s jobs numbers. “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” the president said. “But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.”

Our Founding Fathers had quite a different view of “the American way,” of course. In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”

But like a success inhibitor injected into the body politic, Obama’s policies have only served to suppress growth, punish ambition and discourage profit-maximizers. He has railed against “fat cats” on Wall Street while protecting his favored financial industry benefactors. He threatened to “kick” the “a**es” of oil industry executives while refusing to punish the scientific lies and distortions of his own job-killing environmental czars and bureaucrats. He inveighed against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for collecting dues from international affiliates while ignoring the same practices among deep-pocketed unions. And he bemoaned tax relief for “millionaires and billionaires” that would actually benefit wealth-producing couples who annually earn more than $250,000 and individuals who earn $200,000 or more.

Most small-business owners will tell you they don’t want Obama “boosting” them. They just want him to get out of the way. But none of them was represented at his CEO shindig. Instead, among the business “leaders” the White House invited was billionaire Penny Pritzker—a Chicago crony, Democratic fundraiser/bundler and heiress whose family co-owned a failed subprime specialty bank.

While Obama, the olive-branch poseur, has called for a restoration of “civility” in Washington and liberal elites whine and whinny about the need for “no labels,” class-warfare demagoguery has metastasized unchecked.

Socialist Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor to filibuster tax relief for all Americans last week in a ponderous, eight-and-a-half-hour harangue against “greed,” the “rich,” “richer” and “richest,” and “millionaires and billionaires” he had the audacity to liken to “bandits.” On the House side, N.Y. Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley attacked the GOP as the party of the wealthy and compared all people who earn more than $250,000 a year to the late convicted tax evader Leona Helmsley and her Maltese doggie heir.

The left wastes no opportunity to blame tea party and talk radio rhetoric for violent acts by lone nuts. But when a suspected serial arsonist (still on the loose) burns down expensive homes in an upscale Cape Cod neighborhood and spray-paints “f**k the rich” graffiti at the crime scenes, the “words-have-consequences” crowd is nowhere to be found. Such is the silence of the crabs.