Takoma Park is legendary when it comes to enforcing its strict tree laws. Even TreeWorld.info, a website devoted to tree regulation around the world, notes how strict Takoma Park is: “You may want to do the right thing in this place because the city is proactive at busting people.”3
What’s more, Takoma Park employs an arborist named Todd Bolton to roam the small city looking for the tiniest of violations.4 Repaving a driveway within 50 feet of a tree requires permission from Bolton. Even pruning a tree requires an almost impossible-to-get permit from the city. So Browner knew there was no way she was going to get a permit to cut down a beautiful, healthy oak that had spread its branches for more than 80 years, giving shade to passersby and a pleasant green glow to Browner’s neighbors.
So she cut it down in the middle of the night, under cover of darkness. Or she had someone cut it down for her. The one thing we know for sure is that the 120-foot tree disappeared one night, leaving only a stump and a sprinkle of sawdust.
Of course, one of Browner’s neighbors turned her in. She had to appear before the city council on more than one occasion, but eventually she was given an after-the-fact permit.
Neighbors say it is the only time they have ever heard of anyone in Takoma Park getting permission to fell a large, live, healthy oak.
Browner is typical of Obama’s accomplices: She doesn’t believe the laws and regulations apply to her—but only to the “little people.”
Years later, Browner was forced to admit to being a tree killer in a little-noticed online discussion with the Washington Post: “Before I was at EPA, my husband and I did take down one tree that was threatening the sidewalk, driveway, other trees in area.”5
Did you get that?
The tree was threatening the sidewalk!
And the fact that she planted some three-foot saplings to “replace” the downed oak doesn’t make it right. She destroyed a 120-foot giant, whose branches saw Henry Ford’s Model T’s rumble underneath. While the Takoma law might be wacky, the intent of it is clear: to preserve the city’s oldest residents, its trees.
But Browner got a pass for the liberal-run city. They didn’t want to hurt one of their own.
Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called “pay czar,” wants to set the salaries and bonuses of bankers. Sure, some of these bankers didn’t do much except ruin the economy and buy expensive purses for their wives to put their dogs in. And write campaign checks to Obama. But I’m worried about the principle and the precedent.
If a banker is paid too much, the only people he is hurting are the people dumb enough to buy shares in his bailed-out bank. Let’s not forget the principle at stake here: Once the government begins telling banks how much they can pay people in private industry, it won’t be long before it starts telling building contractors, business owners, and manufacturing companies how much to pay their employees. Once the government thinks they have the right to do it, they will do it everywhere.
Now I come to the precedent. If anyone objects to the “pay czar” setting private industry salaries, that unelected czar can point to the banks and say the legal precedent is already established. Every office has a guy who works hard and another guy who is just coasting. You know what I mean. Do you want a pay czar—who’s never met either one of these guys—saying they should make the exact same amount, no matter how hard they work? That’s how the Obama tyranny works.
I’ve got something to say about Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar, in the next chapter, but I want to introduce him to you now. You think you know all about him? Well, I uncovered some new material that will outrage you and any thinking American.
This unelected panjandrum is supposed to supervise all the regulations issued by the federal government. It’s a big job. The federal agencies put out several hundred thousand pages of new regulations every year. The new rules—and just the new rules, not the old ones—take up 11 times more pages than the New York and Los Angeles phone books put together.
And it is a complex job. Regulations are not laws, but rules based on laws. They are supposed to fill in the blanks in laws. And laws, which can only be passed by Congress, are supposed to be based on the Constitution. So you’d think that Cass Sunstein would be a big defender of the Constitution.
But you would be wrong.
Sunstein doesn’t like the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects free speech. He actually wrote a book called Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech. In that book, he says that many forms of speech should not be protected at all, including commercial speech—advertising, product presentations, billboards, and so on. He’s also against speech that invades privacy—no more embarrassing stories about politicians and movie stars—and what he calls “hate speech,” which amounts to criticizing anything that liberals don’t want criticized. In the book he calls for a “large-scale reassessment of the appropriate role of the First Amendment in the democratic process.”6
But the form of speech that Cass Sunstein dislikes the most is political attack ads on television and radio—the very ads that go around the mainstream media and educate voters about the records of liberal politicians. Of course, if politicians supported what the majority wants, there would be no attack ads. But when politicians support something that five or ten percent of special interests want against the will of 80 to 90 percent of the public, those political positions make politicians unpopular. And politicians don’t want the public to know anything that would make them unpopular.
When Congress was debating campaign finance laws that would forbid people from putting political signs on their lawns fewer than 60 days before an election and banning people from spending money to buy independent political ads, Sunstein came to the defense of people who wanted to ban free speech. He said, “A legislative effort to regulate broadcasting in the interest of democratic principles should not be seen as an abridgment of the free speech guarantee.”7
It shouldn’t?
So he thinks that this kind of “hate speech” should not be protected by the First Amendment and that all political speech should be regulated by campaign finance laws. He likes the idea of banning political ads by independent groups 60 days before any federal election—the very point in time when voters start to get curious about the political records of candidates.
Instead he calls for a “New Deal” on speech that would give free air time for political candidates, strictly regulate what can be said about political issues, and deny access to the airwaves by citizen groups or principled individuals.8
And it is not just Obama’s czars who flout the law and the Constitution. At least two of his cabinet secretaries have trouble paying their taxes.
None of these czars are poorly paid. While most sources list “salary unknown” for positions such as the Great Lakes czar, most czars earn north of $100,000, and some, like intelligence czar Dennis Blair, earn as much as $197,700. Poor Joshua DuBois, the faith-based czar who acts as a liaison between faith-based and secular community groups, couldn’t break the 100K mark, earning just $98,000 a year. But he is the exception. Then there is the “pay czar,” who is widely reported to have worked as an unpaid government employee. Turns out the pay czar should have been called the Pretty Well Paid Czar. He received a salary of $120,830 annually according to U.S. Treasury Department and U.S. Office of Personnel Management documents obtained by Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information Act request.
When the news broke, his spokesman told the Washington Examiner that Feinberg received paychecks “every two weeks, but as soon as he got it, he endorsed it over and returned it.” Yeah, right. Judicial Watch tried to get clarification from both Feinberg and Treasury officials, but neither would comment. Thus, said the Examiner, “[a]s a result, it could not be learned if Feinberg has been cashing the government paychecks, returning them to the Treasury Department, forwarding them to a charity, or otherwise not accepting them.”9
Congress has tried to rein in Obama’s unconstitutional czars. House Speaker Boehner,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and President Obama struck a budget deal back in April 2011 for funding the remainder of fiscal 2011 that eliminated funding for four czars: Health Care, Climate Change, Auto Industry/Manufacturing Policy, and Urban Affairs.10 Eager to blunt the Republican victory, the White House told Politico.com that three of the four positions were already vacant anyway: “Over the last several months, the White House has undergone a reorganization that involved the consolidation of several offices and positions. Included in that larger reorganization, earlier this year the Domestic Policy Council assumed responsibility for health care, as well as energy and climate change policy coordination and development in the White House. The agreements reflect those changes.”11
The “agreements” didn’t stay agreed to for long. Three days later, Obama issued a “signing statement,” a written comment printed with a bill when a president signs it into law that makes some claim about the legislation’s constitutionality and states whether the administration plans to ignore the legislation or implement it in ways they believe are best. In the signing statement he attached to the spending bill, Obama claimed that the passage about defunding the czars had a meaning opposite of what the words actually say. He wrote: “Legislative efforts that significantly impede the President’s ability to exercise his supervisory and coordinating authorities or to obtain the views of the appropriate senior advisers violate the separation of powers by undermining the President’s ability to exercise his constitutional responsibilities and take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Therefore, the executive branch will construe section 2262 not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives.”12
The bottom line: Obama will continue to pay his czars claiming his tyrannical presidential prerogatives. So much for his “agreement.”
The prerogatives Obama claims are expressly forbidden by the U.S. Constitution: “The President . . . shall nominate, and by and with the advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.”13
Writing in the Federalist Papers on this very subject, Alexander Hamilton, President Washington’s first secretary of the Treasury, said this in Federalist 69: “The President is to nominate, and, with the advice and consent of the Senate [italics in original], to appoint ambassadors and other public ministers, judges of the Supreme Court, and in general all officers of the United States established by law, and whose appointments are not otherwise provided for by the Constitution.”14
Hamilton contrasted the checks and balances placed on U.S. presidents with the prerogatives of the tyrannical kings of England: “The king of Great Britain is emphatically and truly styled the fountain of honor. He not only appoints to all offices, but can create offices. He can confer titles of nobility at pleasure, and has the disposal of an immense number of church preferments. There is evidently a great inferiority in the power of the President, in this particular, to that of the British king.”15
President Obama has rectified this “inferiority of power.” He now claims the prerogatives of kings.
Obama’s Cabinet: Tax Cheats, Dupes, and Double Agents
And then there is Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, whose job is to enforce all federal laws—including tax laws. He too has a problem paying the taxes he owes. When he was caught failing to pay property taxes on his childhood home in the New York City borough of Queens, which house he and his brother had inherited when his mother died, he said he “wasn’t aware” that he had to pay taxes. He owed more than $4,146 in property taxes.
When Holder was caught trying to duck out on his tax bill, his Justice Department spokesman blamed the Attorney General’s dead mother. Apparently Holder missed the tax payments “in the last months of [his] mother’s life, when she was battling illness.” In fact, it took him almost a year after his mother’s death to pay the borough of Queens the property taxes he owed—and he only paid up after he was outed in the New York Post.16
It’s hard to believe that Holder simply forgot about his boyhood home on 101st Street in the Queens neighborhood of East Elmhurst. Holder often talked in public speeches and media interviews about the home where he grew up, saying that the neighborhood was a hotspot for black entertainers and personalities. “Jazz legends Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie lived there, and civil rights leader Malcolm X was a neighbor,” the New York Post reported.17 He even bragged about his famous neighborhood in his Senate confirmation hearings for the Attorney General post. But when the taxes came due, he went silent and blamed everyone but himself.
I’ll have more on Holder’s treasonous tenure as attorney general in chapter 10, “Tyranny of the Anti-Justice Department.”
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is another of the Obama tax cheats. He owed a small fortune in back taxes and only agreed to pay up after he was caught by investigators for the U.S. Senate. He realized that he would never be confirmed as Treasury Secretary if he didn’t pay his debts to Uncle Sam.
The question became, “Was Obama concerned about putting a tax dodger in charge of the U.S. Treasury, which prints America’s money and supervises the Internal Revenue Service itself?”
The answer came out fairly quickly: Not really. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, dismissed the tax problems as “minor” and said that Geithner’s “service should not be tarnished by honest mistakes, which, upon learning of them, he quickly addressed.”18
Here are the “honest mistakes” the Treasury Secretary—the guy who’s in charge of handling the nation’s money—made. Geithner failed to pay taxes in 2003 and 2004 while he worked at the International Monetary Fund. The IRS caught up with him in 2006, finding that he owed $17,230 in back taxes and interest. Later, Senate investigators discovered that Geithner also failed to pay taxes for 2001 and 2002, in the total amount of $25,970.19
Geithner had all types of excuses. He said that he was entitled to deduct his child’s time at overnight camps in 2001, 2004, and 2005 as child care expenses. The IRS wasn’t amused. He also tried to deduct the cost of a housekeeper for the three and a half months after her right to legally work in the U.S. had expired.20 In other words, he was trying to deduct the costs of illegal labor. Finally he claimed there were problems with the software he used to calculate and file his taxes. The software in question was TurboTax, a popular program used by tens of millions of Americans every year without any mysterious “software problems.”21
Leon Panetta may share more than just a first name with Leon Trotsky, the infamous communist who helped form the Soviet Union in after the bloody revolution of 1917. Disturbing new evidence has surfaced that Panetta, Obama’s first CIA director and now Secretary of Defense, may have had a decades-long relationship with Hugh DeLacy, a member of the executive committee of the Communist Party USA with known connections to Soviet agents, “including Victor Perlo of the infamous Perlo spy group, and Frank Coe and Solomon Adler of the equally infamous Silvermaster spy group. DeLacy is also associated with suspected Soviet agent John Stewart Service, of the ‘Amerasia’ spy case.”22
Trevor Loudon went through the archives of the University of Washington and discovered evidence of a “cordial, long-term relationship in the 1970s and 1980s” between Panetta and DeLacy. At the time, Panetta was a Democratic congressman from California, known for his liberal voting record, and DeLacy was notorious for his Communist Party USA membership and his fierce anti-Americanism. Loudon discovered that “DeLacy was in regular contact with Leon Panetta, grilling him and regularly asking him for military, defense and foreign policy related information, which Panetta heavily supplied him.”23
Panetta was also tied to the Institute for Policy Studies, a well-known pro-Soviet think tank based in Washington, D.C. The Institute for Policy Studies vigorously opposed President Ronald Reagan’s plans to topple the Soviet-backed Sandinista junta in Nicaragua.
Panetta strongly agreed with the institute and even pushed in Congress for a “normalization” of diplomatic relations with communist Nicaragua. Indeed, Panetta as a congressman had a disturbingly pro-Soviet record. He pushed measures to make the USSR and its Eastern European satellite countries into most-favored nations in trade agreements. He voted in favor of turning over the Panama Canal to the government of Panama, which was then an ally of the Soviet Union. He even opposed America’s defense pact with Taiwan on the ground that Taiwan acted as a check against communist China.24
And what did Panetta think about DeLacy, who met with a string of notorious Soviet and Chinese communist spies? He stood up at DeLacy’s 1993 funeral and gave a long speech praising DeLacy. He even saw to it that favorable remarks about DeLacy were placed into the Congressional Record.
All of these facts would have been turned up in Panetta’s White House background check—and can easily be found by anyone with an Internet connection. We can only conclude that Obama knowingly and deliberately put someone who cavorted with communist spies for decades, and who took a hard-line pro-Soviet foreign policy stance throughout his long tenure in Congress, in charge of the nation’s secrets and the CIA and the nation’s security at the Defense Department. It simply cannot be an accident.
Transportation secretary Ray LaHood may be a former Republican congressman from Illinois, but he is a bought-and-paid-for member of the Chicago political machine. He seems to have two main tasks as Obama’s transportation secretary: to get a third runway built at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport at federal taxpayer expense and to oversee the TSA, which gropes grandmothers, inspects infant diapers, and eagerly scans the bodies of attractive young women for hints that they might be terrorists conspiring to blow up commercial airliners. While the TSA is excellent at detecting toenail clippers and bottled spring water in your carry-on luggage, it hasn’t been able to catch any terrorists on domestic flights since it was founded. Instead, it is a government jobs program that employs more than 44,000 people, whose union dues to the American Federation of Government Employees go to the reelection efforts of President Obama.25
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