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From The Mailbag

20 years

ew York's William M. "Boss" Tweed had nothing over Chicago's Rahm Emanuel. The former Illinois Congressman has become novice national politics newbie Barack Obama's Bobby Baker. And, even though the far left believes it was, this was not a match made in Heaven. It was a match made in Chicagoland. Chicagoland is a political world unto to itself, with its own rules of conduct that eagerly allows the dead to vote, wanabee politicians to buy their seats in State government (and in the US Congress) and county officials to use Party sanctified sleights-of-hand to manipulate the votes once they have been cast to assure that those who paid-to-play win the offices they paid for. It's no wonder that three of the last seven Illinois governors ended up in prison over "let's make a deal" schemes. Even though Illinois-sired presidential candidates Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Adlai Stevenson and Ronald Reagan, the American people should know better than to vote for anyone whose resume includes Chicagoland politics. Dig deep enough and the odds are pretty good that you'll find that even though there's a shiny gloss on the surface veneer, the political character of the Chicagoland politician will be tainted with the stain of corruption somewhere along the path to political success even though those campaigns and the State party organizations have done everything humanly possible to scrub the stains of scandal from the coattails of their rising stars.

The match-up between the community organizer turned President and the Chicagoland insider, political wheeler-dealer, fundraiser extraordinaire, investment banker, community activist with Illinois Public Action turned White House chief-of-staff wasn't an accidental friendship between likeminded Chicago liberals. It was a friendship forged by left wing political circumstance. The linchpin in the friendship between community organizer Barack Obama and community activist Rahm Emanuel is political consultant David Axelrod. Axelrod and Emanuel are, and have been for many years, close personal friends. Axelrod served as best man at Emanuel's wedding to Amy Rule. Axelrod signed the ketuba (the Jewish marriage contract) at his wedding—an honor reserved for the groom's closest friend. Axelrod, like Obama and Emanuel is a product of Chicagoland politics. According to Axelrod, Obama was "...not just a client, he's a very good friend. We share a worldview." Axelrod's specialty as a political strategist is making black candidates acceptable to white voters. In Obama's case, Axelrod succeeded in making a very racially-biased black man acceptable to whites even though Obama is so biased he disowned his own half-white heritage.

Axelrod was introduced to Obama in 1992 by Chicagoland Democratic activist Bettylu Saltzman who told Axelrod she was convinced Obama would become the nation's first black president. Saltzman has described the friendship between Obama and Axelrod as a "Yin-and-Yang" personality. He can best be described as Obama's James Carville. Today he is Senior White House Adviser, a key component of the Obama trifecta, and a key strategist in the White House plan to politicize the 2010 census in order to make certain the Republicans do not gain back any of the seats the radical far left Association of Community Organizations [ACORN] stole from them last year. Even before the ACORN absentee ballots were counted, criminal investigations of ACORN practices were initially launched in 14 States. Today, the FBI t is investigating allegations of ACORN-generated vote fraud in 21 States.

Yet, millions of challenged ACORN votes were counted, and candidates whose elections should have been challenged by precinct workers were not. And candidates with no honest rights to the seats they claimed and now serve as congressmen and women, just blindly voted to enact the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 even though no member of Congress was allowed to read over 1,000 pages of that specific piece of legislation which will force every American to register every firearm they own, restrict religious freedom in every college and university, and ration healthcare to seniors. Congressmen who signed on to the stimulus boondoggle suppose that the legislation, which was delivered to the White House for Obama's signature late on Fri., Feb. 13, 2009 speculate that it will create some 3 million new jobs. If it does, thanks to Obama Executive Orders 13496, 13497, 13498 and 13499 (which were not yet posted on the government tracking website when this article was written), those jobs will be denied to 84% of the workers in America since they do not belong to a labor union. Only blacks and labor union members need apply.

Absent from any government tracking website that posts Presidential Proclamations, Presidential Decision Directives and Executive Orders was the most controversial decision Obama has made since his inauguration—mandating that the Director of the Bureau of the Census reports directly to White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel rather than the Secretary of Commerce, as required by federal law. While it was reported via the Internet that Obama moved the Census Bureau from the Dept. of Commerce to the office of the White House Chief-of-staff via Executive Order, it appears that is not the case. At least, not as far as the Executive Order is concerned. Unless our newbie president chose, for some reason, not to post what would likely have become Executive Order 14504 in the Federal Register and Congressional Record, after he issued it. Stated plainly, there is no evidence that Obama issued an Executive Order moving the Bureau of the Census from Commerce to the White House. It appears that he will simply direct the as yet unnamed Director of the US Census Bureau to report to Emanuel instead of the Secretary of Commerce. Why would Obama do that since he controls both the decisions of the Dept. of Commerce and the flunkies in the Executive Branch? Because while Obama controls the Commerce Department and the goingson of his own Chief of Staff, Congress does not. Constitutionally, the Congress has oversight authority over the Dept. of Commerce but not the White House department heads who report directly and solely to the guy in the Oval Office. Congress has no authoirty to question the president's chief-of-staff about his instructions from the commander-in-chief.

It is becoming more likely that Obama will tap former Clinton Census chief, Kenneth Prewitt (1998 to 2001), or someone like him, to serve as his Director of the Census. Prewitt fought, and won, the right to use statistical sampling in 1998 after successfully arguing that FDR used statistical sampling to estimate the number, and whereabouts, of homeless people in 1940. (Roosevelt, who was running for an unprecedented and unpopularly-received third term in 1940, needed to generate millions of new voters in order to beat GOP challenger Wendell Wilke, a political novice New York businessman with more money than experience took the nomination. As is usually the case in presidential primaries, Wilke—the designated loser of the Election of 1940—won only because the front runners, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey [R-NY] and Sen. Robert Taft [R-OH], diluted each other's votes. That's precisely why the worst Republican running in 2008, Sen. John McCain, won the GOP nomination. Too many Republican candidates diluted the vote-getting ability of Gov. Mitt Romney [R-MA] who should have easily prevailed.

When Philip Rucker of the Washington Post reported this fact on February 5, 2009 he dismissed this irregularity by saying "...under the Bush administration, the Census Bureau director reported to the commerce secretary." Rucker quoted White House spokesman Ben LaBolt who said Obama simply decided to add oversight of the director by senior White House aides, but that the Census Bureau itself would remain under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce. Rucker's causal, offhand remark suggests that the White House has the option to interject new management over the Bureau of the Census on a whim. It doesn't. Under 13 USC 141(c), 5 USC 301; 13 USC 4, 141, 195; 15 USC 1512 federal law dictates the political pecking order in the Bureau of the Census. By law, "...The Secretary of Commerce shall make the final determination regarding the methodology to be used in circulating the tabulations of population reported to States and localities pursuant to 13 USC 141(c)."

Bruce Chapman, Director of the Census under Ronald Reagan, noted that "...everyone knows it's possible to organize a decennial census in a way that benefits one party or another politically. One way to effectuate this otherwise unpalatable departure from the Census Bureau's 200 year history of nonpartisanship is to put the Bureau administratively under direction of the politics in the White House. In reality, that would be a sure invitation to cook the books on the highly consequential count of Americans. Advocates argue that putting the 2010 Census under direct White House control some how assures a higher priority to its mission. This is cynical. It puts a priority on manipulation of carefully derived Census criteria. The only reason the White House would want to be involved is in figuring out how to add more voting power to certain states and groups within states. Simply put, there is no excuse for this idea. It is not true that the Census Bureau has ever been under the direct management of the White House, and for good reason..." (Except the one instance in 1940 when Roosevelt manipulated the census to aid his quest for a third term.) "...Even if angels were in charge of the Executive Mansion, if the nation's premier statistical agency were placed under the White House direction the danger to public trust would be enormous. The decennnial count is one of the few federal functions specifically described in the Constitution itself and must operate above suspicion of politics...Power flows from an accurate census count. Everyone involved for years has seen the count as a sacred trust. It must not be polluted with even a semblance of Presidential meddling."

Who Obama has picked for Director of the Bureau of Census and whether or not it will be Prewitt is, for the moment, anyone's guess. The fact that he is a closely guarded secret strongly suggests that Obama and the Democrats fully intends to politicize the census. It is becoming clear to everyone watching Obama that he is attempting one of the most blatant, nefarious power grabs in the history of the United States since the illegal ratification of the 16th and 17th Amendments and the unconstitutional creation of the Federal Reserve.

According to the Congressional Quarterly and the Los Angeles Times, Latinos have complained for the last three or four census cycles that the language barrier between English-speaking census takers and Spanish-speaking resident Hispanics, as well as the fear and mistrust of government officials, are responsible for the undercounting of the immigrant Hispanic population in the United States. While the Obama White House now claims that Hispanics only began being concerned about the undercounting when it was announced that Obama had picked anti-Commerce Department advocate Sen. Judd Gregg to head the department. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, Latino advocacy groups in California were ecstatic when Obama tapped Hispanic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary since they knew he would control the 2010 census. Richardson, as Energy Secretary under Bill Clinton, was part of the White House inner circle management team fighting for statistical sampling to reapportion House seats in Congress and in the State legislatures.

In 2001, Bush-43 Commerce Secretary Donald Evans stripped the Census Bureau of the authority to manipulate population totals to account for people that the bureaucracy was convinced live in specific areas and were simply missed—or were double-counted in areas dominated by Republicans—in error. Since 1941 Republicans have insisted that statistical sampling is illegal because the Constitution calls for the actual enumeration in taking the census rather than mathematical guesswork based on the need of the party in power to create more people in areas, or States, dominated by Democrats. That allows the bureaucracy to create new congressional seats in Democratic strongholds and, conversely, reduce them in areas, or States, that vote Republican. Obama wants to restore that authority before the census next year.

According to a recent Congressional Quarterly article, Obama is keeping his "as-yet unnamed" Census Director under wraps. The first inkling that a new Obama shell game might be in the works came when an unnamed senior White House official let the cat out of the bag by telling CQ that the new census director would bypass the Commerce Secretary completely and report directly to Rahm Emanuel. The news leak, confirmed in part by the White House to Sen. Judd Gregg [R-NH]—Obama's pick for Commerce Secretary—led to Gregg's abrupt withdrawal of his name as Commerce Secretary. The White House modified what was going to happen when the Republicans accused the White House of violating federal law by attempting to circumvent the Commerce Secretary.

In an effort to minimize the growing appearance of "amateur hour at the White House," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told the White House Press Corp that the White House failed to understand why Gregg suddenly declined the job since, Gibbs noted: "...it was Mr. Gregg who asked the administration for the job in the first place." Even before the ink was dry on the stories filed by the press corp, Emanuel and Sen. Harry Reid [D-NV] corrected Gibbs. Reid confirmed to the Washington Times that he recommended Gregg. The selection of Gregg for a plum job that usually goes to a major party fundraiser, a personal friend of the President, or a loyal wealthy Party donor as a way of saying thanks for the big bucks left Democrats and political pundits scratching their heads—particularly since Gregg had previously voted to abolish the Department of Commerce. Gregg had also tried to block the Clinton Administration from securing additional money to do the statistical sampling that would help Gore win the Election of 2000. However, since it was Reid who suggested putting Republican from a State with a Democratic governor whom he thought would replace Gregg with a Democrat, its clear the object of picking Gregg was to have him replaced with a Democrat who would have been one of the last two nails driven into a filibusterable GOP coffin in the Senate.

Gregg said he didn't realize joining Obama's administration would be "a bridge too far." Gregg's "irresolvable conflicts" arose when he learned the Director of the Census would be reporting to Rahm Emanuel and not the Secretary of Commerce as required by 13 USC 141. When Obama named Gregg for the job, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee [D-CA], who heads the Congressional Black Caucus and who was expecting more minority seats in Congress in 2010 but had no idea that Obama had already promised the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and several other Latino groups that the Census Director would report directly to the West Wing of the White House. That means long before he offered the job to Gregg, Obama planned to oversee the reapportioning of the seats of Congress himself. He was smart enough to know that would be the only way he would ever get reelected because the economic messiah gloss is already wearing off of the community organizer who simply is not qualified to lead the most powerful nation in the world. The Oval Office isn't a backroom in Chicago.

And, that's what sent the Republicans to the airwaves. Three Republicans joined the fray. First, House Minority Leader John Boehner told Chris Wallace of Fox News: "It just tells me that the census, the counting of the population of the United States is going to be politicized. This is very simple. The Constitution says that every ten years there will be a count of all persons who live in the United States..." The statement in the Constitution is: "The actual enumeration shall be made...every...ten years." The constitutional phrase is compelling, and easy to understand. "That means," Boehner told Wallace, "we need to have an actual count. And why this has been moved from the Commerce Department over to the chief-of-staff's office, I would think he'd have better things to do than to coordinate the census, but apparently they have ideas about what they might want to do to politicize the counting of our population next year."

Congressmen Darrell Issa [R-CA] and Patrick McHenry [R-NC] of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which has legal jurisdiction over the conduct of the census, sent a scathing letter to Obama, saying: "...Requiring the Census Director to report directly to White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel is a shamefully transparent attempt by your Administration to politicize the Census Bureau and manipulate the 2010 Census. The Constitution-mandated Decennial Census needs to be fair, accurate and trusted. By circumventing the Secretary of Commerce's oversight of the Census Bureau and handing it directly to a political operative such as Mr. Emanuel, you are severely jeopardizing the fairness and accuracy of the 2010 census. Mr. Emanuel, who is a former colleague and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman, has a reputation that has been described as 'one of hyper-partisanship,' and thus has no business overseeing the activities of the Census Bureau, a division of the Commerce Department that needs to remain free and clear of any and all political considerations. Moreover, requiring the Census Director to report directly to the White House and placing responsibility for administration of the Bureau outside the Department of Commerce may even violate Federal law. "

Issa and McHenry reminded Obama that the census is used not only for the allocation of seats in the US House of Representatives—which is Constitutionally limited to 435—but for the allocation of all federal funds to the States. William Lacy Clay [D-MO], Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee that directly oversees the Census doesn't have a problem with Obama's breach in protocol. "If [he] decides to have a new Census Director report directly to him, that's fine with me. Obama," he said, "represented an entire State, and before that a State Senate district that had a large number of hard-to-enumerate people. He personally understands how damaging an undercount can be to a community and to our nation as a whole." I wonder if Clay would be as understanding if President George W. Bush had used statistical sampling to realign congressional districts in and around St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri where rampant voter fraud took place in favor of Al Gore and dead Gov. Mel Carnahan who was running against, and beat, living Sen. John Ashcroft in the Election of 2000? Or to unseat Sen. Claire McCaskill who won the US Senate seat held by Jim Talent [R-MO] in 2006—but only through the efforts of ACORN and the Daley Dead.

What Obama is attempting to do after only three weeks on the job is an impeachable offense. However, with a Democratic super majority in the House and Senate who have a vested interest in manipulating the apportioning of voters to increase the number of House seats held by Democrats, its not likely that would ever happen. Republicans and moderate Democrats would not be able to get a vote on Articles of Impeachment against Obama let alone impeach him. And, even if it was possible to impeach him for malfeasance in the House, the GOP does not have enough votes in the Senate to remove him from office. The only alternative open to the Republicans is to sue the White House in federal court to prevent Obama and his political hatchet man from meddling with the census.

A very determined Obama needs only to select a radical Democrat like Barbara Lee [D-CA], Maxine Waters [D-CA] , former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney or even Emanuel as Commerce Secretary. But, since Sen. Arlen Specter [R-PA] has already aligned himself with the Democrats by selling out the American people with the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, he might just was well join the Obama Administration as Commerce Secretary and sell out the American people for all time. That way, not only would Obama be able to reapportion the House of Representatives, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendall could appoint John Murtha to Specter's Senate seat and give the Democrats their filibuster-proof upper chamber in Congress at the same time. It would be a win-win for the far left and a lose-lose for the United States of America.