Remember good old Joe the Plumber, who bravely confronted candidate Obama in Ohio? Joe had the audacity to ask then-Senator Obama, “Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?” Obama didn’t hesitate a second. He assured Joe that 95% of Americans would see their taxes go down, and then he told Joe “…from 250 [thousand dollars a year] down, your taxes are going to stay the same.”

Joe was skeptical, but millions of voters drank the Kool-Aid and believed Obama. The rest is history. Fast forward to yesterday, when Obama was asked about a new task force he is appointing to come up with deficit solutions. What if it recommends middle-class tax hikes? Would Obama’s promise still hold? No way! He responded, “What I want to do is to be completely agnostic in terms of solutions.” That is Obamaspeak for “you better hold on to your wallet!”

Back in 2009 Joe the Plumber, who didn’t go to Harvard, knew there was no way Obama could pay for all his schemes without raising everyone’s taxes. I am sure Obama knew that too. 2010 is going to be the year of the tax hike.

Here are some reactions to Obama’s West Point speech that may surprise you.

“Reporters love a deadline — we’ll hound him over it. Just wait until next year. There will be flashy graphics on our screens saying, ‘Countdown to Drawdown.’” That might sound like sarcasm from Sean Hannity, but it actually came from CBS’s Kimberly Dozier.

“How do you on the one hand say: ‘We need to send these troops over there; it’s critical; this is in our national-security interest to do this.’ But then say: ‘But we’re only going to keep them there for 18 months; we’re going to start to withdraw them after 18 months’? I just don’t understand the logic of how that works. …This is not a football game, where the time runs out. To win this war, you have to defeat the enemy.” Glenn Beck? No, that was veteran CBS anchor Bob Schieffer.

Here’s one more: “Where’s the hope? … It sounds more Rube Goldberg than ‘Remember the Alamo.’ … If I were with the Taliban right now, I’d put a little Post-it up on that month in 2011, and say: ‘This is when we do OUR surge.’” Rush Limbaugh? Believe it or not, that was MSNBC’s Chris Matthews speaking Tuesday night, after he had thought more about the substance of Obama’s remarks.

If liberal media elites are starting to second-guess Obama, I suspect millions of Americans are too!

The evidence is now overwhelming that the Fort Hood murderer, Nidal Malik Hasan, is an Islamist who was trying to please Allah when he gunned down our American heroes. ABC News reported this morning that the CIA has evidence that he had tried to contact Al Qaeda in recent months. For normal Americans the news that he shouted “Allahu Akbar,” the battle cry of jihadists, as he poured bullets into our sons and daughters was all we needed to know.

But that information wasn’t good enough for Dr. Phil, Larry King, major media outlets such as Newsweek, the president and, sadly, even our military elites. Many of them jumped to the conclusion that this was another example of a soldier “breaking” from battle stress. It didn’t seem puzzling to them that he had never been in combat! In fact, all of our elites wanted to lecture the rest of us and warn us that we’d better not jump to conclusions.

Now we know that for years Hasan was quite open about his Islamist views. In fact, HE HARRASSED his fellow soldiers – not the other way around, as has been suggested. Complaints about Hasan’s anti-American rantings were ignored. Some military people say they didn’t file complaints because they were afraid that doing so would hurt their careers in the increasingly “politically correct” Army bureaucracy.

Hasan made presentations that justified suicide bombings, and argued that the wars we have been fighting since 9/11 are really wars against Islam. He tried to convert his military patients to Islam and was put on probation. He attended a mosque in Northern Virginia that two 9/11 hijackers also attended. The list goes on and on.

As an obvious Islamist, Hasan did the predictable – he killed as many of us as he could. His actions should be no more mysterious than those of the hijackers who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 or the Palestinian family who celebrates when they receive news that their teenage child has blown himself up while killing Jews.

What is harder to fathom is why so many elites are more interested in spreading politically correct lies than in confronting the strong likelihood that our jihadist enemy has infiltrated key American institutions. More of our soldiers will die, as will more of us, if the media and our government leaders don’t wake up. Nidal Hasan should not have been in the Army – he should have been in jail. He should not have been assigned to counseling returning American warriors. He should not have been promoted.

On Meet The Press Sunday, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey continued to urge people not to jump to conclusions about the overwhelming evidence in this case. He expressed deep concern about a possible backlash against Muslim members of our Armed Forces. He actually said this: “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” Does he really believe that? I think that 13 American families would argue that we could have had one person less of “diversity” at Fort Hood in exchange for 13 live American heroes.

And what about the White House? Since long before this attack, this president has refused to use the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” and has banned its use by others in the government. He began his administration by attempting to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Hasan’s jihadist brothers are imprisoned. Day by day, America becomes less safe under his leadership.

Compared to other proposals the administration has thrown at the American people this past year, the home buyer tax credit was not bad. Unfortunately, the government could not even effectively run this program.

New home buyers would receive up to $8,000 in tax credits under the plan. The money was supposed to be available for first-time buyers who bought a primary residence after April 9, 2008, and only individuals making less than $75,000 or couples making less than $150,000 would be eligible. However, during a Ways and Means oversight subcommittee hearing yesterday, House members were informed that thousands of fraudulent claims were made.

The Treasury Department said that at least 19,000 filers who had not bought homes claimed $139 million in tax credits and were in turn reimbursed. An additional 74,000 tax-credit claims, totaling $500 million, could become invalid because of previous home ownership. Even more surprising, 500 people under the age of 18, including a 4-year-old child, had their names on applications for the credit, which has no minimum-age requirement according to federal officials. Evidently some adults used a child’s name as the purchaser of the home because they were ineligible to receive the credit due to their incomes.

Many of these fraudulent claims occurred before the IRS had updated their computer programs. If they had done this correctly, the program would have automatically checked the claims to ensure that they were valid based on the information submitted.

When added up, the total potential waste of your tax money from fraudulent home-credits could be upwards of $639 million. This is the same government that wants to take over our entire healthcare system! We have seen the government’s ineptitude in recent months with cash-for-clunkers, a behind schedule H1N1 flu vaccination and now this. When will liberals in Washington learn that government isn’t the solution to every problem? As my former boss Ronald Reagan correctly said, “Government is the problem.”

Who would have thought that the candidate who promised to transcend partisanship, who promised to unite the nation under the banner of “hope and change” and who rode into Washington with a herd of new donkeys would bear such a striking resemblance to Richard Nixon?

In recent weeks, the White House has decided to fire back against its critics and opponents. To a degree, that’s normal and expected. Politics is a contact sport, after all. But this White House and its allies – with some personnel taking inspiration from communist dictators – have gone way beyond what is normal or expected.

Calling critics “un-American,” threatening businesses with regulatory retribution and punitive taxation, literally locking committee doors and locking out the press is way beyond normal. It is, as House Republican Leader John Boehner said, “flat-out despicable.”  I’m pleased to report that in the past few days, there have been some positive developments.

Earlier this week, Tennessee’s soft-spoken senator, Lamar Alexander, went to the Senate floor and blasted the White House for compiling, as Nixon did, an “enemies list.”

This week, the White House made “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg available to the Washington press pool for interviews regarding his plan for salary caps at bailed out banks and companies. But Fox News was locked out. The other network news chiefs were stunned. To their credit, they told the White House to let Fox in or none of them would show up. The White House backed down.

Politico reports today: “A White House effort to undermine conservative critics is generating backlash on Capitol Hill – and not just from Republicans.” Many moderate Democrats are increasingly concerned about the White House’s heavy-handed attacks on the Chamber of Commerce.

Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are essential to the survival of liberty. If every media outlet spouts the same “party line,” how is that any different than what the Soviets did with Pravda? But that seems to be exactly what this White House wants – to control the media as White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said.

We’re getting dangerously close to going down the slippery-slope toward a state-run media, the subject of my weekly Human Eventscolumn, which you can read here.

Here’s a news story that you probably didn’t hear about over the weekend. Some of Obama’s staunchest supporters are beginning to question his foreign policy. Former Senator Bob Kerrey (D-NE), a Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War who endorsed Obama last year, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed Friday. He congratulated Obama on his Nobel Peace Prize but criticized his foreign policy for being too “naïve.” Kerrey also criticized Obama for “apologizing for America too much.”

Kerrey wrote, “[Obama] has made too many apologies. And at this point, his strategy is too naïve and has too little coherence to be called a strategy.” Kerrey even went so far as to praise George W. Bush on Iraq. He wrote, “Then, against all reasonable predictions, President Bush chose to increase rather than decrease our military commitment. The ‘surge,’ as it became known, worked. Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat… Great American leaders of our past had ignored popular sentiment and pressed on during the darkest hours, even when setbacks give rhetorical ammunition to skeptics.”

Kerrey is respected in and around Washington for his foreign policy opinions. In fact, he is respected so much that he was placed in charge of the 9/11 commission. Normally, when a top supporter begins to criticize a president’s foreign policy, it is a lead story on the nightly news. But then again, the mainstream media would never want to insult this Administration.

Today’s announcement that the unemployment rate has hit a 26-year high is crushing news to millions of Americans desperately in need of employment and to those hoping that “change” was on the way. The administration promised us that the stimulus plan would hold the line on unemployment. In fact, we were told that if lawmakers didn’t waste time trying to read the bill and just voted “yes,” unemployment would go no higher than 8%. Today it stands at 9.5%, and even Obama now concedes it will hit double digits.

Twenty-six years ago, the nation was mired in a deep recession, much worse than the one we are facing today. How did we get out of it? Back then President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes and did his best to reduce spending. The world marveled at the Reagan Recovery. Today, Barack Obama is spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need. He’s also promising to raise taxes through the roof to create new programs we can’t afford. In short, he’s doing the exact opposite of what worked for Ronald Reagan, and putting America on the fast track to the “Barack Bankruptcy.”

Obama’s Energy Tax

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced yesterday that the House of Representatives will be voting on “cap and trade” legislation this week. A recent Rasmussen poll found that only 24% of likely voters correctly understand the term, and I’d be willing to bet that an even smaller share of Congress has read the 1,200 page bill. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, summarized it best when he said, “Nobody in this country realizes that cap and trade is a tax, and it’s a great big one!”

Writing in the Washington Post several weeks ago, Robert Samuelson put it this way: “The centerpiece of Obama’s agenda is a ‘cap and trade’ program. This would be, in effect, a tax on fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas). The idea is to raise their prices so that households and businesses would use less or switch to costlier ‘alternative’ energy sources, such as solar. In general, we would spend more on energy and get less of it.”

Spend more and get less. That sounds like Obama’s rationed healthcare proposal too! That concept is antithetical to economic progress and rising standards of living. But it’s generally the outcome of socialism and leftwing thinking.

According to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation, the “cap and trade” bill before the House will result in a “58 percent increase in gas prices, 90 percent for electricity, and 55 percent for natural gas. Cumulative higher energy costs for a household of four from 2012-2035 would reach nearly $20,000.” The Heritage Foundation also predicts more than one million job losses as a direct result of higher energy costs.

Just think about that for a moment. Here we are in the middle of a deep recession, with the president predicting double-digit unemployment, and this White House and the liberal politicians on Capitol Hill are scheming to impose one of the biggest tax increases in history. It will affect every American who turns on a light switch, drives to work or consumes products, since just about every economic activity involves the use of fossil fuels.