More disturbing is Barack Obama's tax relief program under which there would be alleged tax cuts for 95 percent of the American people. Under Obama's plan the majority would not only pay no federal taxes but would actually get government checks, presumably for just being alive and breathing, while a tiny minority of their fellow Americans would pick up the tab.

Dick Morris and co-columnist Eileen McGann explain that while the bottom 50 percent of U.S. taxpayers pay a total of $30.6 billion in federal income taxes on a combined income of about $1 trillion (just 3 percent of total taxes), the top 1 percent pay 40 percent and the top 25 percent pay 85 percent of the federal income tax.

"In one stroke," they write, "this would transform the majority of voters from taxpayers into tax eaters, and leave an increasingly small minority to pay the bill," putting those who actually pay taxes into "much the same situation as landlords in New York City: hopelessly outvoted by their tenants, who use their political clout to limit rents and landlords' profits.

"For the economically well off," they warn, "it effectively could become taxation without representation, which, as the founders of our nation warned, leads to tyranny."

It's not merely the dangerous trend that is developing in the economic realm that disturbs me, however. In the past week we've seen Obama's nominee for Commerce Secretary, Bill Richardson, forced to withdraw because it develops that he is under a federal corruption investigation -- a fact the Obama people should darn well have known before the president-elect chose him for a Cabinet post.

Then we have the astonishing appointment of Leon Panetta -- a man with no experience in the cloak and dagger trade to head of all things, the CIA. Moreover, the appointment was made without notifying Sen. Diane Feinstein, who is now heading the Senate Intelligence Committee.

You have to wonder if Team Obama has any idea of what they're doing. I sure wonder.