The Beginning of The Revolt Against Obama?

There are three big new stories from the past few days that offer signs of resistance.

The first is the defeat in California of five ballot initiatives that would have ratified tax increases proposed by the state legislature in an attempt to prevent a massive budget deficit without really cutting government spending. George Will provides a good, concise summary of the defeated initiatives. More important, he understands that the federal bailout that is now being talked about would turn the state into "a federal poodle on a short leash held by the president." This is the ulterior motive behind all of Obama's bailouts: they are a power-grab by a president who is scheming to make himself the ruler of, well, everything.

Will describes how Obama would use this federal control of the state to knock down the last remaining barriers to runaway government in California—an account I have seen confirmed elsewhere.

He might make aid conditional on the state doing things that California Democrats and their union allies would love to be "compelled" to do: eliminate the requirements of two-thirds majorities of both houses of the Legislature to raise taxes and pass budgets, and repeal Proposition 13, which voters passed in 1978 to limit property taxes. These changes would enable the Legislature (job approval: 14 percent) to siphon away an ever-larger share of taxpayers' wealth and transfer it to public employees.

If California is considered a bellwether of political trends, this is an ominous indication of what is in store for the rest of us. But the actual trend here may turn out to be in the opposite direction, as indicated by the voters' resounding rejection of these tax-and-spend measures, The Wall Street Journal wonders if this is the first electoral sign of a tax revolt.

California voters sent a blunt but welcome message Tuesday about runaway government. By rejecting by nearly two-to-one the political establishment's $16 billion in higher taxes, spending gimmickry and more borrowing, the voters said it's time government faced the same spending limits that the recession is imposing on everyone else. Teachers unions, business leaders and the politicians outspent initiative opponents by six-to-one, and they still lost….

Tuesday's vote was the best fiscal news out of California in 30 years. It showed that the voters are paying attention to the games their elected leaders have been playing, and they have finally blown the whistle. We hope the sound was heard as far away as another out-of-control government, the one in Washington, DC.

Meanwhile, we just got a reminder of something that has gone right over the past eight years, which we tend not to notice because it consists of what is prevented from happening. The FBI foiled another terrorist plot.

Muslims fueled by hatred of America and Jews, [the suspects] spent months scouting targets and securing what they thought was a surface-to-air missile system and powerful explosives—all under the watch of an FBI informant.

The four were arrested late Wednesday outside a synagogue in the Bronx, following a long line of homegrown, headline-making terror plots since Sept. 11 that never came close to reality because the FBI inserted itself in the earliest stages.

The bombs they planted outside two synagogues Wednesday were useless, packed with inert explosives supplied by the FBI instead of the Pakistani terrorist group they had pledged to support, according to a criminal complaint.

This report is better than most because it promptly names the fact that the would-be terrorists were Muslims, a fact glossed over or buried in other reports. But note that at least three of the terrorists were recent converts, apparently of the Black Muslim variety.

Relatives said Payen, David Williams, and Onta (pronounced ON-tay) Williams were introduced to Islam in prison—a phenomenon present in prisons around the country in recent years. "The Onta I know wouldn't do something like this, but the new Onta, yeah," said Richard Williams, an uncle. "He wasn't raised this way. All this happened when he became a Muslim in prison."

The foiling of this plot is good news, but it is also a reminder of the continued violent threat from the "religion of peace." So it was good to see Congress repudiate—in a stunning 90-6 vote—the closing down of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for captured foreign terrorists.

In a rare, bipartisan defeat for President Barack Obama, the Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to keep the prison at Guantanamo Bay open for the foreseeable future and forbid the transfer of any detainees to facilities in the United States.

Democrats lined up with Republicans in the 90-6 vote that came on the heels of a similar move a week ago in the House, underscoring widespread apprehension among Obama's congressional allies over voters' strong feelings about bringing detainees to the US from the prison in Cuba.

Perhaps the most important sign of hope in foreign policy is that it looks like Israel might be preparing itself to take action against Iran's nuclear program, even if the United States refuses to cooperate. Jack Wakeland sent me a report on what he's been seeing in the Israeli newspapers.

"For the first time, Israeli centrists (who are leftists by American standards) are beginning to think about a nuclear Iran. Half-measure, ineffectual centrists like Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak—as well as the great mass of the Israeli electorate—are now taking a close look at life under the Iranian nuclear threat.

"The coverage that the leading center-left newspaper of Isreal—Haaretz—has been giving to the Iranian nuclear threat is very instructive. They've been running stories that contemplate different kinds of Israeli military strikes against Iran and running a generous number of stories about politicians who are considering such an attack. And the tone of these stories is uniformly positive.

"And even more significant sign of the change in Israeli thinking is that Haaretz is also running stories about the split between Obama and Netanyahu over Iran—and Haaretz is backing Netanyahu.

"With this level of attention and this willingness to seriously consider military action, among the vast majority of Israel's leaders and Israel's people, a big war in the Middle East may be upon us within the next 12 months; for Israel, it will be a war of national survival; the biggest war since 1967."

This could be very good news in the long run. It has long been the function of Israel to be strong when we are weak and thus to help sustain civilization during America's bouts of fecklessness. I, for one, will be very grateful if they choose to do it again.

But in the short term, this could also mean a very harrowing and difficult conflict in the Middle East—and we cannot expect President Obama to give our ally the support it deserves.

Yes, there are signs of hope—but as of yet, they are small positive signs just beginning to show themselves, in what is still predominantly an evil political context.