Observations From the Back Row

By Rich Kozlovich

Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught. - J.C. Watts

Who's behind '99 percenters'? Ad company for Pepsi, Ford, partner of Wall Street giants blames '1%' for hoarding the nation's wealth
A company hired to lead marketing campaigns for such corporate giants as Pepsi, Starbucks, IBM and Toyota now is promoting Occupy Wall Street while complaining about the top "1 percent" ultra-wealthy allegedly hoarding the country's wealth……A visit to GOOD's websites on any given day finds an abundance of pro-Occupy content, including articles supporting the movement. Just yesterday, the main site's rotator featured an article by GOOD's managing editor, Megan Greenwald, complaining, "No plan that included raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans had a chance of earning Republican support." The article contained a photo of protesters demanding, "Tax the rich."

The next Islamist domino in Middle East?
King fearful radicals soon may wrest control - The Israeli government is concerned instability can threaten the rule of Jordan's King Abdullah II, and is committing to work quietly with the king on security matters, according to a top Palestinian Authority official….. Jordan is worried a "big wave" of anti-regime protests will sweep the country in the future. Similar unrest is threatening the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, as revolutions already toppled the rulers of Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya.

Norquist's no-tax-hike pledge
There's an old saying: Politics makes strange bedfellows. I believe this axiom explains why the left has seemingly focused so much attention on Grover Norquist's no-tax-hike pledge and helped build him up into a near mythical political figure in the conservative movement – even while Norquist is pandering to the left on so many other issues……..I take a backseat to no one on the tax issue. But there's a lot more to saving America from the abyss than holding the line on taxes.

• Norquist approved the debt-hike surrender by House Republicans. In fact, I contend he even helped orchestrate it. How meaningful is a pledge not to raise taxes if Republicans are given permission to spend money without regard to revenues? How is that going to achieve Norquist's stated goal of reducing the size of the federal government to the point that it can be "drowned in a bathtub"?
• Norquist's support for GOProud's extremist pro-homosexual, anti-family and anti-conservative agenda speaks for itself.
• Norquist's support for Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups speaks for itself.
• And Norquist's recent courtship with George Soros and other left-wing globalists likewise speaks for itself.

……….God help us if Norquist is, indeed, one of the most powerful people inside the conservative movement – and continues to be.

Anderson Cooper: Media snake
Last week, I wrote in my WND column about The Learning Channel's new "All-American Muslim" program, which is an attempt to guilt-trip Americans into thinking that it is "Islamophobic" to be concerned about the jihad threat. As you'd expect, the mainstream media love this show, and CNN's Anderson Cooper gave it lavish attention, even inviting me to be on a panel discussing the show with some of its cast members. But what happened then was indicative of how the leftist media stack the deck.

How Washington's destroying America
Author Martin Gross probably thinks of the supercommittee members as "those clueless congressionals who can't cut the budget even with one another's help." Gross has been "cutting America's budget" all alone for years. He's testified at congressional hearings half a dozen times, winning applause from members of both parties. And yet Congress has never acted on Gross' advice! ….They discovered 1,069 federal programs for rural areas, mostly duplicating one another…60 federal job-training programs, averaging a cost of $25,000 to train each individual. Most wound up without a job, or flipping hamburgers, for which McDonald's has a much cheaper training program. The several dozen overlapping federal programs to fight teenage pregnancy and drug abuse………early child development…… 90 different programs….28 programs spread over 15 federal agencies on telecommunications, 50 programs for the homeless, 20 different moderate- and low-income HUD programs, 75 programs across 16 federal agencies devoted to cultural and foreign affairs development, 131 programs for juvenile delinquency and 313 labs, including 175 in the Department of Agriculture alone. ……Somebody in government discovered that taxpayer money could be saved if the appropriate federal workers were just issued credit cards, to replace the old "expense account" system. So a half-million were handed out. Among the uses of those cards: a cruise to Alaska, breast enlargement for a girlfriend, home-closing fees and prostitutes. Aren't superiors held accountable for all those expenses? That was "then"! Now they get their underlings to sign off on them……20 percent of the federal workforce is unnecessary. With benefits, the federal worker comes in at around $120,000 eacH……. Martin will pull out his transcript of interviews with government workers explaining, as one example, their "flex time." "I get to work at 6 a.m. and leave at 2 in the afternoon," one told Martin. "And what do you do when you get there?" asks Martin. "Well," explains our public servant earning double what the private sector pays, "Nobody else is there at 6 a.m., so I just do crossword puzzles."

The Islamist-Environmentalist Alliance
Saudi Arabia has no better friend than the Sierra Club, and the Emirates have no better salesmen than the environmentalists who keep the country hooked on conflict oil. The administration’s sabotage of the Keystone XL project through delays aimed at killing the pipeline is a cynical act of cowardice, and it’s a shot in the arm to the very regimes that it claims to oppose........

Every time environmentalists kill a project in America, they revive it overseas with less oversight, more pollution and without the human rights. The death of Keystone XL means more pollution in China and war in the Middle East. Crusading environmentalists helped kill America’s industries and kept the regime in Beijing alive. The tanks that rolled over the democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square were as green as their environmentalist backers. Both of them painted in the resplendent color of American money.

###