A page devoted to excerpts of content from all over Nikitas3.com, both past and present, including editorials. A good way to quickly familiarize yourself with the site's ideas.
About those “47 Million” Without Health Insurance:
We are reminded by Democrats every day that there are “47 million uninsured”
people in
But let's consider the 47 million that Democrats say are not
insured:
How many millions of these people lacking health insurance have purposefully led a derelict life as criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics etc.?
Many, friends, many millions. Yet Democrats claim that drug
addicts and alcoholics have “a disease” and that criminals are decent people who
just have had bad breaks.
How many millions of people without health insurance grew up poor because they did not have a father in their home, as Democrats and feminists have insistently maligned the presence of men in the home, and advocated a lifestyle of single motherhood, with its vastly higher rates of poverty?
Many, friends, many millions.
How many millions of people without health insurance are living in rural areas where environmentalist Democrats have destroyed the economies and thrown people out of their jobs with endless eco-regulations and restrictions on mining, farming, ranching, quarrying and timber cutting, and power plant construction?
Many, friends, many millions.
How many millions of people who have no health insurance have had their jobs shipped overseas by companies that cannot any longer bear the burden of endless taxation, regulation bureaucracy and eco-rules as imposed by the relentless crusades of the Democrat party against American business?
Many, friends, many millions.
How many millions of people without health insurance have had their jobs destroyed, or never have been able to find jobs because belligerent labor unions, allied with the Democrat party, have destroyed trillions of dollars in wealth through endless confrontation with the business interests and corporations that traditionally provide jobs?
Many, friends, many millions.
How many of the 47 million of uninsured have no health coverage because they live in the cities of America, controlled without challenge for more than 100 years by Democrats, where taxation, regulation, bureaucracy and corruption have thwarted the creation of businesses, wealth and jobs?
Many, friends, many millions.
How many millions of people lacking health insurance were poorly educated in, or dropped out of the public education system - run lock, stock and barrel by the Democrat party - because of the terrible schools and failed educational policies established over decades by the teacher unions?
Many, friends, many millions.
How many millions of people without health insurance have seen their incomes
taxed away by the heavy hand of the Democrats across
Many, friends, many millions.
How many millions of people cannot afford health insurance because of the rising cost of energy caused by the Democrats and environmentalists who have blocked new American energy supplies from nuclear power to oil drilling?
Many, friends, many millions.
How many Americans cannot afford health insurance because the cost of their food is going up every day as a result of Democrats and environmentalists advocating unworkable energy sources like ethanol, which diverts corn away from feeding people and into energy production, pushing up food prices by increasing the demand?
Many, friends, many millions.
How many millions of uninsured people cannot afford health insurance because the trial lawyers, who are allied closely with the Democrat party, have drastically increased the cost of all aspects of health care by putting every single health-care provider (doctors, nurses, ambulance services etc.) under legal duress and frightening them into paying sky-high insurance premiums, into doubling or tripling up on testing and other procedures, and leading doctors to use overly-expensive treatments to avoid any possible legal liability?
Many, friends, many millions.
In order to make health insurance more affordable, the first thing we should do
is to expose the Democrats and socialists for who they are and what they are
doing to
Conservatives have the real solution: Restrain the Democrat party from
destroying our system.
The editorial below was posted on
List of Deadly Sins Grows by 7
The Seven Deadly Sins, listed by Pope Gregory the
Great in the 6th Century, now has been expanded by the
Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti has declared that the
new Sins include pollution, genetic engineering, accumulation of wealth by the
few at the expense of the majority, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and
causing social injustice, according to the
Said the Monsignor, “New sins have appeared on the horizon of humanity as
a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.”
And while this certainly may not seem overly significant, it is, because
it represents the ongoing usurpation of history by people with a modern-day
agenda that leans to the political left.
The seven original sins are pride (belief in one’s own abilities without
recognizing the grace of God); envy (jealousy of others’ traits or abilities,
status, money or circumstance); gluttony (wants beyond one’s needs); lust (a
desire for pleasure of the body); anger (the rejection of Christian love in
favor of wrath); greed (a desire for material wealth); and sloth (the avoidance
of physical and spiritual work). These Sins refer to individuals.
The Church offers Virtues to combat those original Sins including
prudence, temperance, courage, love and faith, along with humility, abstinence,
chastity, patience and diligence.
But beware. The new Sins no longer are personal, but are political and
social in nature and they reflect the trend in our media-centered world to
reject simple and straightforward concepts of law, justice and goodness - as in
the Ten Commandments - in favor of endless new interpretations that micromanage
every aspect of life with specific details, all wrapped in the cloak of
socialist idealism.
In fact the expanding list of Sins is much like the expanding
interpretations of, say, freedom of speech, in which myriad individual examples
of expression (cursing, pornography, gratuitously treasonous speech etc.) are
defined and re-defined - always with a leftist political bias - while watering
down the straightforward and original intent of that freedom.
That “pollution” would become a deadly new Sin is totally relative. What
is “pollution”? Is “pollution” acceptable to allow people to have a higher
standard of living? Is burning wood to cook food in a poor nation exempt? Or
will nuclear power in wealthy nations be seen as “pollution” even though it
actually produces much less pollution per person and per meal than burning wood?
Just watch how this new Sin is manipulated to work against the interests
of the advanced nations, particularly in the capitalist West.
Is “genetic engineering” a bad thing?
Apparently, according to the new list. But just ask billions of poor
people around the globe whose food supplies have been vastly increased by
genetically-engineered crops.
This demonization of genetic engineering will be used a bludgeon against
the advanced nations and against the use of modern science for the common good,
i.e., another criticism of the West and its technologies.
What about the accumulation of wealth, ostensibly by “the few”? Go to any
communist nation and you will find a few leaders at the top with Swiss bank
accounts and all the luxuries while the people live in misery. Will they be
criticized?
No, this new deadly Sin will be used as a selective
tool against rich people in the Western capitalist nations, where their wealth
is part of higher living standards for all. This will happen while giving a pass
to the ultra-rich socialists like the
Yet these elites will be forgiven their genuine greed for one reason
only: Because they preach the socialist ideology that the new Sins codify.
Drug dealing? That always has been a sin, according to sensible people.
Yet whoever has said that drug dealing is a good thing?
Liberal leftists in
And who is financing drug dealing around the world
except, among others, marxist Castro in
Abortion and pedophilia? Conservative Christians and
other decent people always have known these to be the worst of sins. Yet leftist
groups around the world have been normalizing abortion and pedophilia for
decades. The far-left American Civil Liberties Union has been aiding and
abetting the North American Man-Boy Love Association, a pro-pedophilia group,
for years now. And who supports unfettered access to abortion but the Democrat
party in
And what about the new Sin of “causing social injustice?”According to the
worldwide media and intellectual classes, it is only capitalism and Christianity
that cause social injustice while worldwide socialism/communism fixes it.
Yet socialism/communism in fact is the leading cause of social injustice
in the world, with its accompanying poverty, corruption and denial of individual
rights and private-property rights in return for the well-being of a few at the
top of these societies.
In the increasingly liberal Catholic Church, with
its billions in
That Girotti included abortion and pedophilia in his declaration is two
things: First it is only an obvious restatement of ideals that Christians
historically have accepted (although today, it might be seen as a belated cover
for the Catholic pedophilia scandal). But more important, it is a dodge to make
the world believe that the Church is being even-handed with this new list.
But this is nonsense. Because liberals know that abortion rights are not
threatened anywhere in the industrialized world, while every day, “corporate
polluters” and “genetic engineers” are under threat of prosecution and media
harassment. This trend will continue with the blessings of the church.
Ditto pedophilia. The socialist left worldwide
supports the lowering of the age of sexual consent, which has been gradually
introduced to societies in
So really this new declaration is a sly political
calculation that is intended to institute new taboos that are political in
nature, and not personal. This is like Democrat lawmakers in every state in
What it really is intended to do is to offer the world a new politically-correct, leftist agenda legitimized by the Catholic Church, much as churches everywhere in the Western nations slowly are marginalizing biblical teachings in favor of subjective notions like “peace" and "social justice” and environmentalism, which are political and economic ends, not spiritual ones directed at uplifting society person by person. And this trend has only one closing scene and that is to increase the power of worldwide environmentalism/socialism at the expense of faith and justice, hope and temperance, and all the other Virtues.
The editorial below was posted
Passing the Prime-Time Trash
Flipping through the channels, as
is a habit of Nikitas3.com in order to gauge where our culture is going,
I recently came across a prime-time network TV show that was shocking in its
vulgarity. I don’t know the name of the show, but the so-called “star” was named
Charlie Sheen, son of far-left
Shown on CBS, I stopped surfing
when I heard a female character call a male character a “goofy, clueless
bastard”. Since it was only
The next few minutes of this program were
eye-opening for those of us who do not subscribe to this trash on a regular
basis. In it, the Sheen character admitted that “I slept with Miss Pasternak”, a
reference to the teacher of a young boy who was to appear in the next scene of
this so-called sitcom. Audience titters abounded.
When the young boy arrived a moment later, the Sheen
character said to him, “Go to school and we’ll act like this never happened”, in
reference to the sexual relation with the boy’s teacher.
The boy responded dryly, “Like the Cub Scouts all
over again,” followed by uproarious audience laughter.
In a scene a few moments later, several jokes were
exchanged about a piece of rubber novelty-store dog excrement, and shortly
thereafter, a busty “Miss Pasternak”, cleavage well exposed, made some joking
references to the hand of God being on her and directing her to the caddish
Sheen. And that was all I could take.
Over and over again, we are told
by “the media” that low morality, pornography, adultery and the resulting social
chaos are just harmless fun, and that it does not hurt anyone, and heck, who
would want to be prudish like those silly Christians who attend church on
Sundays. Yet if you look carefully, you will notice the elite billionaires in
the media and elsewhere across liberal
And this disintegration abounds in our society - in
our schools, in our media, on the internet, in the behavior of Bill Clinton -
and is implied in our rewritten history books that refuse to even acknowledge
the existence of God or the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.
The Catholic Church, turning more liberal every day,
practically has been consumed by two waves of scandal involving homosexual
pedophilia among only about 1% of its priests. And while thousands of good
Catholic children were brutalized, this same church today is moving ever closer
to the liberal/gay positions on loosened morality, marriage and other social
issues. This obvious contempt for the ruined lives of their own children shows
an ostensibly Christian faith drawn into the tempest and consumed.
In a recent report in The Oregonian
newspaper, out of
The report starts with the case of Kenneth John
Cushing, a
Cushing’s deal was one of 47 – called “passing
the trash” - that the paper was able to confirm. Said the report: “During the
past five years, nearly half of
Now just a minute! Are we fully understanding what is being done here!?
This is what is being done: The school districts are using taxpayer funds
to pay off the offenders to get them out of the districts.
Said the Oregonian report, “
Sixteen months?!
In the private sector, of course, employee manuals cover sexual
harassment for pages at a clip, all at the urging of leftist/feminist groups.
Someone accused of harassment in the private sector is taken to the HR
office, asked a few questions and fired on the spot if there is good reason to
believe the allegations. No severance. No sweetheart deals. No recommendations.
Yet in a leftist bastion like public education, action hardly can be taken
without union intervention and massive bureaucratic stalling.
In the Cushing incident, the teacher eventually
ended up at a private all-boys school in
The key point here is this: The American educational establishment, both
public and private, is liberal, and it protects its employees against offenses
that routinely are prosecuted in the rest of the private sector.
So what do these two cases -- the prime-time trash on CBS and “passing
the trash” in public schools – have in common? It is this: Most of the
entertainment industry and most schools are owned lock, stock and barrel
by the liberal left. They perpetuate trash that reaches into our living rooms
every evening, and protect trash that may be teaching in our schools.
That the Sheen character in the TV sitcom is said to be having a sexual
relationship with a schoolteacher is only expected. Art indeed imitates life.
But life imitates pop culture, too, and the moral destitution of this
entertainment-education complex (like the military-industrial complex we are
warned about day after day) needs to be protested.
With homosexual activists at the
That Sheen would appear in a profane, smut-laced prime-time “comedy” is
in itself scandalous. And the “writers” who create this nonsense recently went
on strike and should have stayed that way. That Americans would be "missing"
this stuff during the strike is a sterling example of how our society has traded
virtue for a cheap suit. And the materialist leftists among us who have invaded
our churches, our schools and our living rooms are only too willing to sell them
that suit, at a handsome profit, that is, and in exchange for our souls.
About "Compassionate Conservatism"
An excerpt from the Thinking Points section of Nikitas3.com concerning the ongoing calls by liberals for conservatives to be more "compassionate". And how conservatism really is the naturally more compassionate approach to begin with:
Remember the 2000 Presidential
election, when George Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative”?
What was that all about? And why do we conservatives need to mark out
territory within our ideology that is “compassionate”, as if to say that we are
not “compassionate” people in the first place and that it is
our ideas that need to be modified and
not, perhaps, those of Democrats? Is this not insulting to us as conservatives,
and manipulative of the public mind that somehow only we conservatives need to
adjust our way of thinking in order to seem like we even care about our
neighbor?
To comprehend the “compassionate
conservative” phenomenon, it is important to understand where conservatism comes
from and how modern-day media socialism sways public opinion in order to paint
the picture that only leftist liberalism somehow is “caring” and
“compassionate”, and that conservative capitalism needs to re-think itself in
order to be accepted as part of the brotherhood of man.
Our American nation was built on freedom first, and is the most unique experiment in human history. And freedom itself is the most compassionate form of social structure. Freedom has been rare in all of human history, and we should cherish freedom more than any other aspect of our lives. Freedom always leads to infinitely more prosperity, more happiness and more human potential unleashed than any other system.
Freedom and prosperity are
inextricably linked. This is not to say that the ultimate goal of freedom is
prosperity. No, the ultimate goal of freedom is… freedom.
Yet one of the miraculous byproducts
of freedom is… prosperity.
And we are not talking about the
historical prosperity that you may think of when you see castles in Old Europe,
or the lavish lives of the select few throughout history. The prosperity that we
see today spread across much of
Thus freedom, and the prosperity
that it may engender, indeed is the ideology of compassion.
Has freedom itself solved all of the
problems of society?
No. We have failed in many ways and
there have been many inequities in our society. But to somehow claim that some
system other than freedom is going to somehow better cure the inequities in
society is false. A closed system can forcibly solve some problems for some
people, but ultimately will cause other much worse problems to arise for the
majority.
The next question is: Who creates
freedom?
And the answer to that question goes
to the issue of what is called Natural Law or God’s Law which states that man’s
highest freedoms come not from man, but from God Himself because it is only God
who cares enough to give man his real rights. And these rights include the
important freedoms that we too often take for granted… freedom of speech and to
peaceably assemble, freedom to worship as we wish, freedom to own property and
to profit from our labors on that property, and freedom to defend ourselves and
our property from attack.
Now consider which political
ideology
best represents God’s Law.
First of all, to believe in God’s
Law, you first must believe in God. And this automatically eliminates an
ever-increasing majority of modern-day Democrats who refuse to believe in the
power of God in any way, shape or form. They believe that our churches should be
silenced, that the Ten Commandments should be kept out of the public square,
that the very mention of the world “Christmas” should be limited because it
might offend certain people who are not Christians.
So belief in God is critical, and it
is conservatives who believe most forcefully in the power of God and are the
ones you can rely on to uphold God’s Laws as they are passed on to
Since the Democrats hardly believe
in God, how can their party represent the tenets of God’s Law in true “freedom
of speech”, for instance. Is it not the Democrats, who day after day, year after
year, are trying to impose “speech codes” on our society; who attempt over and
over to ban
certain types of speech as “hateful” when our Constitution indeed protects those
types of speech; whose leftist universities are bastions of censorship?
In fact it is the conservative
Republicans in our society who uphold the real right of free speech because it
is the genuine conservative who recognizes that even when speech may “offend”
someone, that it remains protected.
Democrats think not. They believe
that if speech offends anyone, then it must be censored so as to protect us from
being offended. Yet it says nowhere in our founding
documents that we have right to be free from offense. In fact freedom of speech
practically guarantees that you are going to be offended at times in your life.
Another tenet of God’s Law – which
is simply another term for freedom – is the right to worship as we wish.
And naturally Democrats use every
tactic at their disposal to push the authentic churches of
How about the "God-given" right to our private
property and our labors on that property to give us our prosperity? Here is what
English philosopher John Locke, one of the best-known proponents of Natural Law,
said:
"That labour... added something to
them (the acorns or apples) more than Nature, the common mother of all, had
done, and so they became his private right. And will any one say he had no right
to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated because he had not the consent of
all mankind to make them his?... If such a consent as that was necessary (the)
man (would have) starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him... It is
the taking of any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state
Nature leaves it in, which begins the property, without which the common (gift
from God) is of no use. ...Thus this law of reason makes the deer that (property
of the Indian) who hath killed it; it is allowed to be his goods who hath
bestowed his labour upon it, though, before, it was the common right of every
one."
Yet who is it that insistently is
attempting to minimize our rights to own land and to profit from our own labor?
It is the big taxing government, that is who, represented by the Democrats, that
is who. They wish to make our labor
worthless through relentless taxation and regulation and paperwork and
bureaucracy. Meanwhile,
their environmentalist allies are trying every day to deprive us of our right to
even own property by setting up rules and regulations and government bodies to
tell us when, where and how we may even use our own property, according to their own standards,
so as to not upset nature.
Another tenet of God’s Law is the
right to defend ourselves and our property from attack. You may say, “Of course we Americans
have the right to defend ourselves and our property!” But that is false. Today,
imagine that a burglar with an illegally obtained gun breaks into your house and
threatens you and your family. If you respond by taking a legally-owned gun off your shelf
and killing that intruder, you will be tried for murder. You DO NOT have the
right to defend yourself in
We conservatives believe that you
have the right to kill that intruder as a basic tenet of your human rights, to
defend yourself and your property.
Therefore those of us who call
ourselves “conservatives” indeed are the most compassionate people just by our
natural way of thinking and defending Natural Law as the basis of our freedoms.
We do not need to add the word “compassionate” to our ideology because by its
basic nature, our conservatism already is the most compassionate form of
thinking in the history of the world.
Meanwhile, the liberals and
Democrats among us do not see the value of freedom of speech, of the
ownership of land, of our right to defend ourselves and our property, or of our
right to worship God as we wish.
They simply take our tax money,
redistribute it as they see fit and call that “compassion”!
No, that is not what real compassion
is about. Compassion is much deeper and more complex and much harder to create
and maintain. Conservatives are the
truly compassionate ones.
Keep Labor Unions at Bay... or Else We End up Like France
An excerpt from the News in Review section from Autumn 2007...
More French Strikes:
The unionized and bureaucratic public
sectors in
Most French citizens were outraged by
the strike, and their anger has been growing for years. If it continues long,
the strike is expected to be costly to the French economy, which suffers chronic
high unemployment and slow growth because of a bloated bureaucracy and
astronomical tax rates. It is reported that one millionaire per day is leaving
...These two situations are a perfect
example of why
The French strike was a reaction to Sarkozy’s plan to
eliminate a special pension and early retirement for certain workers in
physically demanding jobs. But the general population that pays the taxes for
these pensions feels that the unions already are pampered.
Sarkozy also has sought a law that would provide a minimum
level of service during public strikes.
Meanwhile, in Germany, more than one thousand public railroad
engineers walked off their jobs demanding better working conditions and causing
major tie-ups across the nation.
French union leaders hoped the strike would remind the
populace about a 3-week strike in 1995 that challenged President Chirac’s reform
plans.
Fear Over Obama's Safety
On May 23, 2008, Hillary Clinton made reference to Robert F. Kennedy's June 4, 1968 assassination late in the presidential primary season that year. Her reasoning appeared to be that the nominee still had not been decided at that late date. However her words have been construed by some to imply that Barack Obama is under the threat of assassination. Here is a News in Review clip from Nikitas3.com from Winter 2008.
Blacks Fear for Obama Safety: As Barack
Obama comes closer to being the Democrat nominee for President, black Americans
are concerned for his safety.
“You can’t have
lived through the civil rights movement and know something about the history of
African Americans in this country and not be a little concerned,” said
Said Pam Hart, an
elementary school teacher in suburban
Nikitas3.com comment:
This is just
more media propaganda. After all, who has the American media propagated the most
vile hatred of, day in and day out, over the last 8 years? George W. Bush. Who
has been the target of repeated ill will and even wishes of death from
celebrities all over
Obama, on the other hand, is the subject of the most massive barrage of media adulation in the
history of US politics since JFK. Obama is in vastly less danger than Bush has been since he assumed the presidency.
An Excerpt from the Essay From Wealth Creation to Wealth Destruction accessible from the home page
It is time to set aside the media bias, and to re-think the whole concept of wealth. Today, the 8 richest people in the United States Senate are not Republicans but… all Democrats.
The three wealthiest men in
How could this be? Aren’t all rich people Republicans who wish to hold the
“little people” down?
The richest female in the history of
Yet at the same time the former CEO of ExxonMobil Lee Raymond has been
raked over the coals by the ultra-rich socialist captains of the New York media (NBC, CBS,
New York Times, Time magazine, Oprah
Winfrey etc.)
over his $400 million retirement payout, much of which was in the form
of stock options whose value increased dramatically for one reason only –
because Raymond was such a successful manager of ExxonMobil.
When considering his wealth, it is important to remember
that Raymond’s company provides the basic resource that fuels our economy –
petroleum. He did not own a string of glossy magazines, or sit in front of TV
cameras like Oprah, or sue people like Democrat trial lawyers, or manipulate securities, or play-act in the
movies like the people in
After years of stagnation, Raymond brought Exxon and Mobil back from the financial brink, making ExxonMobil the world’s largest corporation that went on to garner $335.1 BILLION in revenues in 2006 alone, while its "obscene profits" that the media so viciously describe are annually plowed back into research and development or divided among its stockholders including schoolteachers, factory workers, plumbers and other "regular folks" who now are invested in the American economy through stocks.
Yet Oprah Winfrey and her media friends sit in
front of their TV cameras with their billion-dollar fortunes and pontificate
against people like Lee Raymond while sidestepping any possible criticism of
Oprah Winfrey for sitting on a couch and accumulating six times as much
money as Lee Raymond. Or of colleges for demanding exorbitant tuitions. Or of
urban socialists like George Soros or Joseph P. Kennedy sitting in offices in
places like
One of the richest members of the United States Senate is
John Kerry of
An excerpt from the News in Review section
Sex Diseases Spreading Fast:
The Centers for Disease Control reports that 3 million teenage girls nationwide,
or one of every four, is infected with a sexually-transmitted disease. The most
common and deadly is human papillomavirus, HPV, which can lead to cervical
cancer.
Black girls had the highest rate of STD infections, followed
by Mexican-Americans and then whites.
“You’re talking about nearly half of the sexually experienced teens at any one
time having evidence of an STD,” said Dr. Margaret Blythe of Indiana University
School of Medicine and head of the
Blythe added that many doctors will not discuss STDs with
young females, or will not offer screening, because they fear that negative
results would allow parents to learn the truth about their children’s sexual
habits.
Said Dr. John Douglas, director of CDC’s division of STD
prevention, “High STD rates… are clear signs that we must continue developing
ways to reach those most at risk.”
My comments: Yes doctor, that is what conservatives have been saying for
decades, that we must teach young people well. Conservatives have been telling
young women to avoid sex before marriage, and to avoid promiscuous sex in all
its forms. They have advised that families stay together, and that parents tell
their sons and daughters about the dangers of promiscuous sex. They have
expressed concern and contempt for public schools that promote promiscuity
through sex-ed programs, and that allow teenage girls to secretly get abortions
on school time, without their parents’ knowledge.
But the media and popular culture have ridiculed
conservatives, while the liberals in government have said that sexual abstinence
should not even be taught in public schools, when in fact abstinence is a 100%
guarantee that STDs will never spread.
And the idea suggested by Blythe that doctors will not discuss or test for STDs
with teen patients for fear of parents finding out is outrageous. First, that
doctors would choose not to investigate possible disease is unbelievable. It
shows how these so-called doctors are so driven by political correctness that
they would sacrifice health for it; and how protective they are of the “rights”
of children above the rights of parents to know what their children are doing.
This is part of leftist socialism, to empower the young while disempowering
parents… at any cost.
Now CDC and other “women’s health” groups are suggesting that every young girl be vaccinated against STDs, particularly against HPV. This is an affront to people who raise their children properly, to avoid sexual contact until marriage.
What are the harmful long-term effects of these vaccines?
Nobody knows.
Since the 1960s, with moral relativism becoming the rule of the day, sexual promiscuity has spread from adults to teenagers. The best way to arrest the decline in moral and health standards is to give strong parents and conservatives a more effective voice in the lives of young people.
Nissan Announces that it will Market Electric Car by 2010
And here is an excerpt about electric cars from the Nikitas3.com essay That Weird, Wacky Weather Channel:
Natalie
Allen opened the Weather Channel's Forecast Earth show by addressing the concept of the electric car,
which has been promoted for decades now by environmentalists who say: “Look!
There’s no pollution. There’s no tailpipe with nasty emissions coming out. It is
all electric!” And the gullible among us actually believe that this thing is a
good idea.
But even the most cursory investigation proves that this argument is nonsense.
Because the electric car -- which eco-conspiracy-nuts have theorized had all of
its patents bought up and destroyed by the oil companies – is an extremely
inefficient form of transportation. The oil companies need not have spent a
penny conspiring to destroy the electric car. It revealed its flaws long ago and
never has made any inroads into the car market. And here is why:
Electricity is a highly-refined resource. It is not like wood which you can cut
or scavenge in the forest and toss onto a fire to warm your house or cook a
meal. The production of electricity requires a technologically complex and
precise turbine system and conversion process which needs to spin a heavy copper-wire generator in
order to make electricity. This is the way that virtually all of the world’s
electricity is generated. Big generators weigh many, many tons.
The spinning can be accomplished by the rushing of falling water over a
hydroelectric dam and through the turbine; by the breezes blowing over a giant
windmill; or, in most cases worldwide, by the power of steam pressure when water is heated to boiling in
what is called a “thermal” power plant, in which the heat source is burning coal
or a nuclear reaction. The steam pressure has energy, just as the steam
emanating from the
top of a pressure cooker could be used to spin a child’s pinwheel.
Once you go through all the steps of making electricity, it should be used for
refined purposes like running a computer or lighting lamps for which there is no alternative source. We should use electricity for powering stereo
systems and TVs and hospital MRI machines, and running all the electric motors in our daily lives, or for
manufacturing processes like mixing, sawing, welding, drilling etc. And on and
on.
To use refined energy like electricity to power a car is nonsense. Because when you go through all
the steps to produce electricity, you lose a tremendous amount of efficiency. In
other words, if you burned coal as the heat source in a generating plant, that
heat energy is converted, and the electrical energy that you get out of the power
plant is much less than the raw energy in the coal. In short, you 'lose' a lot
of energy in making electricity, just as a cabinet-maker starts with raw wood,
then 'loses' a lot of wood in cutting, shaping and drilling it to make an
elegant table.
To look at it anther way: If you took 10 pounds of coal and burned it in a
'thermal' power
plant to make electricity, then used the electricity to run a space heater in
your home, you would have gained vastly more heat out of burning the 10 pounds of
coal directly than you would get out of the electric heater powered by burning
that same 10 pounds of coal. This is why electric heat is so expensive… because
it is the wrong use for electricity.
And this is the way to think about the electric car. Because it too is the wrong
use for electricity. It is much more efficient to use gasoline to power an
automobile because it is a much more direct energy source. And the power in
gasoline is awesome, particularly with the highly efficient internal-combustion
engines we have today. Just think of driving your car at 50 miles per hour up a
hill. It might burn a cup of gasoline. Now imagine how many men it would
take to push that car up that same hill at 50 MPH. It would take 100 men to
replace that one cup of gasoline.
So therefore, the idea of moving an automobile and its passengers with
electricity is a very expensive and wasteful proposition and actually causes
more pollution than the gasoline-powered car because of all the energy loss in
making electricity in the first place.
What about the “no pollution” aspect of the electric car?
Indeed there is no tailpipe, and there are no carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide
and other emissions like the ones put out by gasoline-powered automobiles. In
the Weather Channel program, Allen nods her head in agreement
with an electric car proponent, saying that the car "saves gas" and uses no foreign oil.
But an electric car must account for the 'upstream' pollution at electrical generating plants, i.e., if the generating plant burns coal, then there is air pollution from the burning of the coal. So rather than playing conveniently dumb like Ms. Allen, you must account for the 'upstream' pollution. And therefore, the electric car indeed pollutes.
Of course, some environmentalists will take it a step further and simply say
that if we put up windmills, that the electricity will be generated by the clean
breezes. But first, windmills never will be able to produce the massive amounts
of electricity needed to power 200 millions cars unless we put up windmills
everywhere. And second, environmentalists already have been some of the
strongest opponents of wind power because of its huge negative environmental
impact (they are big and ugly) on mountaintops and out in the ocean, as they are
proposed off Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Ms. Allen then went on to praise one experimenter for teaching electric-car hype
to kids from “low income homes, you’re bringing new technology into their
lives.” In other words, not only is this program promoting this bogus technology without
scrutiny, but it is bringing in the usual media/socialist economic theory too, that
environmentalists’ ideas will save our economy, and the poor too. Which is
nonsense. Because it is only cheap, reliable and large-scale energy sources like
nuclear power that will sustain our high standard of living and our energy
supply, not windmills and electric cars.
This Recession is Not Such a Bad Thing
There is much anxiety associated with the current economic
downturn, and for good reason. Many are losing jobs, the poor and lower classes
are suffering greatly, housing values have fallen and 401Ks are decreasing in
real terms.
Many of these indicators will bounce back somewhat, but this
recession appears different than the others and will have longer-lasting effects
on our lives. It is what former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called a
“once in a century” event which means it is serious.
And this is happening for a reason. While our economy has
given us great prosperity, we have been doing many wrong-headed things to bring
this mess upon ourselves. So this recession will cause us to change the way we
conduct our lives and our business and, in the long run, will make us a better
nation.
So consider what this downturn should be teaching us:
*If we cannot go to Las Vegas for the weekend, or buy that
new kayak or that new stereo system, then perhaps we will think less about the
material things in the life and more about what is really important. It is
amazing how much a warm home on a cold winter day seems like a wonderful thing
when we previously had taken it for granted.
*If we decide to stay home instead of
taking that one-day 300-mile trip to the
*If we cannot afford to patronize Starbucks to buy a $4
coffee, perhaps we will appreciate what it means to sit home in the kitchen and
enjoy a 10 cent home-brewed cup of coffee talking with our spouse or our kids,
or reading a good book on the couch.
*If our house value drops, perhaps we will come to realize
that home values were inflated to begin with, and that these inflated values
were not realistic. So if your house now is worth $300K instead of the $500K you
thought a few years ago, then it is worth $300K. Period. Get used to it.
*If we ran out and bought homes to get in on the “hot”
housing market, perhaps we should not be so intent going forward on being part
of the latest craze or trend, but should think more rationally about how we
spend our money.
*If we bought homes with no money down and cannot afford to
pay the mortgage, perhaps the laws of economics are telling us that we should
not be taking on the responsibility of owning a home in the first place.
*If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - which hold half of all the
mortgages in America – collapsed, perhaps that is a sign that we should not be
issuing mortgages to people who are not creditworthy as Fannie and Freddie
allowed, and that we should not be allowing government agencies, run by
liberals, to be setting the parameters by which people purchase the most
expensive item of their lives – their house.
*Many of the big liberal newspapers
like the New York Times are on the brink of financial disaster. If
these publications go out of business, that will be a happy outcome for our
nation. The New York Times plans to borrow up to $225 million against
its mid-Manhattan headquarters building to deal with a a potential cash flow
problem in a time of shrinking profits.
Meanwhile, Tribune, publisher of the far-left Los Angeles Times – filed
for bankruptcy under $13 billion in debt.
Far-left Newsweek magazine is planning big staff cuts as part of a move to a smaller publication. It also may cut the number of weekly copies it promises to advertisers from 2.6 million today to as little as 1.6 million. Many other publications are on the financial brink.
And so as a result of this recession, perhaps we can move
forth with less left-wing propaganda in the air.
*Liberal states that have been spending wildly for the last
30 years now have to start living within their means. This means cuts in
inflated budgets that they normally would never make. This will put the libs
more in touch with fiscal reality. Our federal government also has been giving
away hundreds of billions of dollars every year for nothing, and now it must
stop.
*Americans will start to think
seriously about creating wealth through manufacturing things, rather than just
getting money through funny-money transactions, paper wealth and other 'soft'
wealth appropriation techniques. Wealth is created when we make things.
Now with people coming face to face with reality, perhaps they will be more
accommodating to a new generation of real manufacturing productivity here in
*With Americans suffering economically, we need to start
cutting the government bureaucracy and wasteful spending and allowing people to
keep more of their own money because now it has become a matter of survival. We
no longer have the luxury of taxing more and more and more of the nation’s
wealth away from the citizens. They simply do not have it.
*We must reconsider all the environmental extremism that is halting economic development all over the United States and forcing us into bad policies. Unnecessary and bureaucratic enviro restrictions are killing jobs everywhere. And we must realize that the trifling energy return on investments in wind power, solar power and ethanol are not even feasible for the energy we need for the future, and that we must spend our investment capital wisely or we will literally run out of energy.
*The Democrats are being exposed for who they are. After
decades of running up huge government tabs with wasteful spending, they suddenly
don’t have the money to fix roads and bridges and schools and other infrastructure items.
This is bunk. Democrat-run states have wasted billions beefing up their
bureaucracies while neglecting the infrastructure which belongs to “the people”.
So now they are saying they are out of money. They are not. They just wasted it
on their corrupt party practices, as conservatives always have publicly charged.
*And finally we can see that is it rich liberal Democrats
who have been running much of our financial system and destroying it. Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac, whose collapses set off the whole housing downturn, are run by
the Democrat party; Bernard Madoff, the biggest investment swindler of all time,
is a big Democrat contributor; the two men who ran the fabled investment bank
Lehman Brothers into the ground – Jim Johnson and Richard Fuld – are both
big-time Democrats; the man who looted Fannie Mae for more than $90 million,
Franklin Raines, is a big-time Democrat operative; while the Community
Reinvestment Act, a piece of liberal legislation from 1977, forced banks to lend
money to low-income and moderate-income people without any guarantee that they
could pay it back, setting off the current housing crisis. Much of Wall Street
today is liberal Democrat. Don’t let the media fool you into thinking otherwise.
If a man is an incorrigible drunk and he finally crashes his
car and finds himself bleeding in the gutter - as America currently is bleeding
economically after years of bad policies - that man may finally realize that it
is time for him to change his way of life.
This is what this recession will teach us, and in the long
run we will be much better off for what we should be learning from this
wrenching period in our history.
Watch out. Here comes Washington Woodstock.
Just in time to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the
dreadful baby-boomer Woodstock rock concert debauchery in upstate New York in
the summer of 1969, some of the same ‘hippies’, older and grayer now, are going
to gather in Washington to celebrate Obama’s installation into the presidency on
January 20.
Throngs are expected to gather for four days of peace and
love and music. The inauguration itself is Tuesday, January 20 but the
festivities are expected to start Saturday, January 17 and extend to the morning
of the 21st.
This celebration is to be expected.
After all, liberals will make any excuse to take time off from work. That is why
you cannot rely on them to keep the nation running. The DC city council even has
approved an extension of the operating hours for the city’s bars until
What kind of message is this in these times of economic
crisis?
It is this: Democrats, as usual, are thinking only about
their own pleasure and fun. And the marijuana and LSD of Woodstock now will be
replaced by drugs like Viagra and Boniva.
Will
No, he died of a drug overdose in 1971, one of the millions
of casualties of the 1960s era of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, the destructive
lifestyle that was advocated by the same people who love Obama and hate Bush.
The more things change, the more they
stay the same. Back in
Meanwhile many of the hippies of the 1960s became the
materialist yuppies of the 1980s. While they preached anti-materialism back in
the day, they then cut their hair, went off to Yale and Wall Street and learned
how to make the money they love with more passion than anyone else. They will
all be there to praise materialist-in-chief Barack Obama.
Who else will be there for Obama?
But truth be told, the Woodstock
Generation that is going to converge on
They were too busy admiring themselves
in the media to take note of the really difficult issues facing the nation, the
same hippies who told us back in the 1960s that full-employment, prosperous
1950s
Other celebrants will be in
The
Like heck. Back in ’69, the New York
State National Guard had to fly in food and medical supplies to save all those
happy hippie concert-goers from… themselves. Then of course, like the
narcissists they were and are, the hippies left the concert site a stinking,
filthy mess just as their policies have left
So who will fly in and save
No. In the big picture,
Our nation will emerge from its
current difficulties only if we slowly and methodically move to abandon
wholesale the policies hatched at
Only when our nation returns unabashedly to free markets,
low taxes, growth, opportunity and prosperity will we learn the real lessons of
economic life, the ones that the Woodstock Generation never learned and never
will accept.
Merry Christmas to All!
In the founding of this great nation, our forefathers faced
trials that would have undermined a people less determined, less strong, less
creative and less resilient. And in pursuing the cause of freedom, which
repeatedly appeared far out of reach, our wise Founders kept in their hearts the
promise of a Divine Providence watching over our worthy experiment.
Today in 2008, in the 227th year since
we officially defeated the juggernaut called
In our revolutionary quest, our first President and premier
general George Washington spoke repeatedly of divine intervention in aiding our
victory, and said that it was only this grace from on high that saved our new
nation from defeat.
In his farewell address,
Thus today it is crucial to recall that it is not intellect, serendipity or
happenstance that has saved us all from the ash heap of history, but our faith
in a higher power that is infinitely stronger and more benevolent than all the
trillions of dollars in the material world today.
As we pursue our prosperous lives in
liberty, it is important to reflect on our great fortune to be living in the
President Ronald Reagan said: "Freedom is a
fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.
It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by
each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known
freedom and lost it, have never known it again."
And that is why our founding morals and virtues must
constantly be put to the test - in order to determine indeed if we are worthy of
that freedom.
As certain American groups seek to de-Christianize us, to
remove the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments from our consciousness, to
marginalize our churches, and to banish any mention of our Christian faith in
the public square, we must stand our ground against those who would replace
freedom, virtue, piety and morality with a “whatever culture” that sees darkness
as equal to light, immorality no different than morality, and bad the same as
good, a culture that believes that somehow there are no objective judgments to
be made.
Because there are judgments to be made each and every day.
And throughout time, we have seen the result of ambivalence and non-judgmentalism,
and it is not a pleasant reality. Freedom to think, say and worship the way we
please is not only a right but a privilege that we enjoy because great men
embraced God’s laws and made hard judgments, while hundreds of thousands of our
finest have since died valiantly in battle to protect the integrity of George
Washington’s dream.
As we approach Christmas 2008, the grinches are hard at work as they are every
year around this time. The birth of God’s only begotten Son, the Good Shepherd,
the Prince of Peace, has been reduced to a “holiday”. The very word “Christmas”
now has been in many ways muscled out of our vocabulary not really for fear of
offending non-Christians, but in order to extinguish the awesome power
associated with the birth of Jesus.
If only the anti-Christians knew that the word “holiday” is
derived from the words “holy day”. Perhaps it is time to remind them.
To regain the upper hand that favors piety and virtuous
freedom, those of us who believe in the divine power of God and of the pious
people among us, must speak out to reassert our faith in the Heavenly Father and
His rules, which are simple and straightforward. Just read the Ten Commandments
and you have it all.
The grinches, however, wish for the Commandments to be seen as tired dogma that
is hardly up to speed for our modern and ever-changing world. Nothing could be
further from the truth. The very timeless concept of Christmas… a time of birth,
of peace, of joy, of family, of generosity… speaks to the rugged and optimistic
personalities that founded the greatest nation on earth, those who followed the
Commandments more than two centuries ago.
Despite those who wish to make us forget our Constitution,
ignore our Declaration of Independence, and allow the Ten Commandments to slip
away, along with the meaning of Christmas itself, it is WE who say, “Bah,
humbug!”
Because it is WE who hold these truths
to be self-evident; it is WE who guarantee your freedom to dissent from the
foundational principles of
Those of us who celebrate Christmas proudly -- not at the
mall, but in our churches, and singing carols and praying and studying the Bible – represent the new
generation of “founders” bearing the gift of freedom for all. We will remain
ever-vigilant while much of the world dallies in a haze of materialist
equivocation. And in order to remind each and every citizen of the origin of our
greatness, we say these four simple words:
“Merry Christmas to all!”
Caroline Kennedy: Dry as Toast
Caroline Schlossberg is one lucky
woman. She has major name recognition and could be headed for a big political
appointment to represent a major state in the United States Senate in
Unfortunately, the media have been calling her by the wrong
name. Strangely they continue to call her by her maiden name – Caroline Kennedy
– in order to grease the skids for her entry into the Senate from New York State
to fill the seat left open when Hillary Clinton becomes secretary of state in
the Obama administration .
Mrs. Edwin Schlossberg is the only
surviving member of the family of president John F. Kennedy who was assassinated
in
Dry as toast, Mrs. Schlossberg is lucky to have her family
name. Otherwise she would not have a chance. She has about as much charisma as a
turnpike toll collector but her political pedigree makes her a shoo in.
Mindlessly liberal, a member in good
standing of
The seat she wants to fill has a rich
history. Mrs. Schlossberg's uncle Robert F. Kennedy once held it. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan did too. In January 2001, Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill officially moved
from 8 years in the White House to
At that time, the nation as a whole
was prospering economically, but Upstate New York, which is a 40,000 square mile
empire that is largely rural and small town, was suffering. Upstate had bustled
with American commerce for 150 years as the
But in the last 50 years, Upstate has
declined like many rural parts of the northern industrial belt of
As part of her 2000 campaign, Hillary
made a “listening tour” of Upstate as if to act like she really cared about the
people there, when traditionally Upstate had tended to vote Republican. But 2000
marked something of a turning point. Rural folks in
It was a hopeless errand, and it did not work. While Hillary
promised in her campaign to created 200,000 new jobs for Upstate, she ultimately
did only some token things like helping to win a few million dollars for the
Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, put Upstate farmers together with New York City
restaurants (wow, there’s a real bonanza. Pass the belgian endive, please…) but
otherwise managed to preside over the destruction of 35,000 jobs from the
Upstate economy between her initial entry into the Senate in January 2001 and
the beginning of her re-election campaign in January 2006.
No mind, somehow the people of Upstate, completely oblivious to the connection between the Democrat party and their economic decline, gave her surprisingly strong support in her re-election in 2006.
Now along comes
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. Within a week of being mentioned as a possible
replacement for Hillary in the Senate - through appointment by New York's
Democrat governor - she too went on whole one-day “listening tour” of the
dreary rural purgatory north of
But what did she actually do on that tour?
She bee-lined it for Democrat outposts
in urban
And what did she say to reporters afterward?
How about this: "I wanted to come
upstate to meet with (
‘Learn more about how
What planet does this female come from?
Oh, yes, Planet Manhattan.
Driscoll later said that Kennedy spoke about her background
in education during the meeting.
"Certainly it's no secret that her
family has been very involved over the years, so she discussed some of that,"
Driscoll said, adding that he told her about the concerns of Upstate including
the need for uninterrupted rail service, the environmental movement in
This is just Hillary redux. Mrs.
Schlossberg is an elite
But the big question is: How, Mrs.
Schlossberg, is
This is the way that liberals see the world. They do not see
people creating their own wealth and their own destinies under the free economy.
It is always “How can the government help?”
Problem is, Democrat policies do everything possible to
thwart economic growth. Over the last 30 years, development in Upstate New York
has been thwarted first by ruinous statewide economic policies imposed by the
increasingly Democrat-controlled political machine including crushing taxation
(8.25% statewide sales tax), out-of-control income taxes and state spending, a
bloated bureaucracy, greedy and powerful state-employee labor unions, huge
handouts to the welfare-staters down in the City, and even a judge’s order that
the rest of the state cough up extra cash for the corrupt New York City school
system, controlled by you-know-who.
Meanwhile, however, it is
environmentalist policies that are the real Enemy #1 to rural development not
only in
Rural Americans are finding life in their environments
increasingly unsustainable. While much of this certainly is natural – for
instance, logging, mining and farming have become much more mechanized,
requiring fewer workers – the rest of it comes from the policies of urban
Democrats and environmentalists making rural life all but impossible through
endless micro-management, taxation, regulation and obstruction.
Mrs. Schlossberg probably can have the Senate
seat if she wants it. After all, she is entitled as a Kennedy. And she will
continue to conduct business as usual, doing for the rest of
Obama Enviro, Energy Picks Troubling
President-elect Obama has made some moves to the center on
economics and national security. This is to be expected because further economic
erosion or a domestic terrorist attack will doom his presidency.
But he plans to move the country to the left in other areas
like the legal arena with the nomination of Eric Holder as attorney general. And
just as significantly, Obama’s choices for energy secretary and for sectary of
the Interior Department all point in a direction that is not encouraging.
At his December 15 press conference,
Obama said that he will nominate Steven Chu as energy secretary;
Nancy Sutley as the chair of the Council on
Environmental Quality in the White House; Lisa Jackson as administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency; and Clinton-era EPA administrator Carol Browner
to a new post in the White House to coordinate “energy and climate policy”.
Added to this is Obama’s
nomination of Democrat Colorado US senator Ken Salazar as secretary of the
interior, which is another step in the direction of energy restriction and price
increases.
Here are excerpts from
Obama’s press conference announcing the chioces, with comments:
Obama: “All
of us know the problems rooted in our addiction to foreign oil – it constrains
our economy, shifts wealth to hostile regimes, and leaves us dependent on
unstable regions. These urgent dangers are eclipsed only by the long-term threat
of climate change, which – unless we act – will lead to drought and famine
abroad, devastating weather patterns and terrible storms on our shores, and the
disappearance of our coastline at home.”
Comment: This is the standard enviro boilerplate. Our “addiction” to foreign oil is nothing more than the use of petroleum, 70% foreign, to grow our economy. And since the American economy is called the ‘economic engine’ of the world, our use of oil is wise in order to help all the world’s people. We should be developing our own domestic oil resources, however, to reduce our reliance on foreign sources, but it is Obama and his enviro friends who are blocking us.
Obama’s reference to
“climate change” is more enviro scaremongering. It used to be called ‘global
warming’ until that whole notion was debunked. Just look at the vicious December
weather across the US, with snow in New Orleans on December 11 and minus 50 wind
chills in North Dakota on the 13th.
The term “climate change” is
false too, because the climate always has changed over both long and short
periods. Why is it suddenly being blamed on man’s activities?
“Terrible storms on our shores”? Those have always existed. And the nonsense about sea levels rising and swallowing our cities, which has been promulgated by Gore for years, is totally bogus.
Obama: “Yet
our dependence on foreign oil has only grown, even as the world’s resources are
disappearing.”
Comment:
There is 12 to 16 times as much in known oil reserves remaining in the earth as
mankind has used in the last 150 years since the first modern-day oil well was
drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. You can read about it
here And most
of the planet is still unexplored. We are not running out of oil.
Obama: “The
pursuit of a new energy economy requires a sustained, all-hands-on-deck effort
because the foundation of our energy independence is right here, in America – in
the power of wind and solar; in new crops and new technologies; in the
innovation of our scientists and entrepreneurs, and the dedication and skill of
our workforce.”
Comment:
Yet we have huge amounts of fossil fuels that we cannot use because of
obstruction by people like Obama and enviro pressure groups. And we cannot use
the most efficient energy source ever devised by man – nuclear power - because
of the same groups. Briton James Lovelock, the founder of the modern enviro
movement, and Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, are both pro-nuclear.
Obama: “As
we face this challenge, we can seize boundless opportunities for our people. We
can create millions of jobs, starting with a 21st Century Economic Recovery Plan
that puts Americans to work building wind farms, solar panels, and
fuel-efficient cars.”
Comment:
Notice he does not say the word “ethanol”. Because 5 years ago, the
environmentalists said that ethanol was going to be a miracle energy source too,
and it has totally failed. The ethanol industry worldwide is shutting down after
just a few years of operation. Windmills and solar panels are equally
inefficient and far too costly. And fuel-efficient cars have been offered on the
American market since World War II – Volkswagen, Toyota Corolla, Chevy Chevette,
Dodge Neon etc. Yet Al Gore and his radical enviro friends have never purchased
them, while they are the people who are demanding “fuel efficient” cars most
vociferously.
Obama: “We
must also recognize that the solution to global climate change must be global. I
spoke a few days ago with Senator John Kerry, who updated me on the recent
climate negotiations in Poland. Just as we work to reduce our own emissions, we
must forge international solutions to ensure that every nation is doing its
part.”
Comment:
This is Obama planning to cave in to every wacky socialist/enviro treaty that
the left can dream up. And these treaties represent one thing only: An attack on
our capitalist system and the turning of our basic energy supplies over to
environmentalists who will destroy our economy.
Now Obama has chosen Steven
Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist as his secretary of energy. Don’t let the
Nobel Prize part fool you. The awarding of that prize has been taken over by
leftists who give it virtually exclusively to people who promote world
socialism. Even that kook economist Paul Krugman at the New York Times
has won it They gave it to Al Gore even through Gore has been preaching a
completely refuted theory of ‘global warming’. Gore at one point testified
before Congress that sea levels were going to rise 17 feet and submerge our
coastal cities. This is pure bunk. Over the last 20 years, sea levels have risen
ZERO and give no indication of rising anywhere at any time.
Colorado US senator Salazar, a moderate liberal Democrat, a hispanic and a 5th generation Coloradan, is a poor choice for secretary of the Interior Department at a crucial time when we need to be increasing our domestic energy supplies. In naming Salazar, Obama said that under Salazar the Interior Department would not sit back "waiting for whoever has the most access in Washington to extract what they want."
Only problem is, fewer and fewer resources are being extracted these days, with enviro obstruction the rule rather than the exception. And at the urging of his eco-donors and other enviro supporters, Salazar is going to move even further to restrict traditional energy resource extraction across the energy-rich American West under the pretext of a Westerner protecting his home territory. Salazar appeared in a Stetson cowboy hat and a string tie at the announcement to make that point.
This is nonsense. Salazar's policies
will be
dictated from
Here are some of Salazar’s political positions, with
comments
*Salazar voted YES on addressing CO2
emissions without considering
*Salazar voted YES on disallowing an
oil leasing program in
*Salazar voted YES on a recommendation to reduce oil
usage by 40% by 2025. Comment: This is unrealistic and is not a good sign
for a secretary of the interior.
*Salazar voted YES on banning drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Comment: This is more energy restriction when we should be producing more of our own domestic energy.
*Salazar voted for a tax credit for gas stations providing
85% ethanol fuel. Comment: Ethanol is an economic and environmental
disaster. His support is troubling.
*Salazar voted to set a goal of 25% renewable energy by 2025. Comment:
This is unrealistic environmentalist idealism and dangerous for our economy.
This is the way that Obama is going to really move our
nation to the left and put it under the control of government socialists.
Americans may not initially make the connection between all these ‘soft’ energy
sources and the economic decline that will accompany them, but once they do,
Obama will be exposed and we will need to begin an aggressive program to restore
the energy sources that have given the whole world the highest living standards
in history.
Merry Christmas to a Wonderful Life
It’s the Christmas season again and cheer is upon us.
Merry Christmas to all!
And while many are dancing around their atheist rock or whatever, you might notice that we are being subjected to the annual
rerun of the famous 1946 Frank Capra movie, It’s A Wonderful Life
starring Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey.
For those unfamiliar with IAWL, it is
a black-and-white version of the modern-day anti-capitalist classics like the
Reagan-era film Wall Street. These are movies made by filthy rich left-wing
If only it were so. In IAWL, the evil
capitalist curmudgeon Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) dismisses the “sentimental
hogwash” of George Bailey, whose family bank, Bailey Savings & Loan, has
provided loans for years to the working folks of fictional
When Potter takes control of the Savings & Loan, it easily
could be any media-depicted American robber baron/monster from John D.
Rockefeller to ExxonMobil’s Lee Raymond. Basically the plot line is simple and
subtle as a skunk: Rich people stink.
George Bailey is portrayed as the humble good guy who cares about
the people in his town, as opposed to Potter. As IAWL reaches its climax, the Savings &
Loan runs into trouble. George’s Uncle Billy misplaces the $8,000 that is
supposed to save the bank from closure by regulators, and George, seeing his
family’s business ruined, contemplates suicide.
When George is preparing to jump into the icy river on
Christmas Eve, his guardian angel Clarence shows him what life in Bedford Falls
would have been like if he had not lived, with the town run by Potter and the
housing development for the working people just a slum called Potter’s Field,
Well, you get the ham-handed socialist message. It’s the
usual stuff.
This Christmas, however, we’ve received two interesting wakeup
calls, and it is not pretty or predictable from the standpoint of
the media.
In one story, a real-world Mr. Potter, Bernard Madoff, a
70-year-old Wall Street guru, made off with a whopping $50 billion in investment
capital in what has been called the world’s biggest private ponzi scheme.
Madoff had among his clients several big American hedge
funds and some Euro banks, and so the loss of $50 billion will affect many
wealthy people and come at the same time as the current financial crisis.
According to the criminal complaint, Madoff "deceived
investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost
investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment
with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in
losses of approximately billions of dollars."
And while this case certainly would have many on the brink
of declaring the death of capitalism and the Republican party that supports it,
it is worth noting that, according to newsmeat.com, Madoff gave $118,450 in
campaign contributions to Democrats and $6,300 to Republicans between 1996 and
2008.
But how can this be? How can he be giving so much money to
Democrats? Aren’t lefty liberals like Madoff all good-hearted George Bailey
types?
Hardly. The Democrats who today control much of the American
financial system have brought ruin to our nation and are corrupt as hell. Madoff
is just the latest example. Top officials at Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers and
Countrywide were all Democrats and were making sweetheart deals with other
Democrats. Barney Frank in the House and Christopher Dodd in the Senate – both
Democrats - were supposed to be regulating Fannie Mae but instead were covering
up for its losses and then letting it slide into a $200 billion disaster.
At the same time, a whopping 60% of
the campaign contributions in 2008 from employees at the top
The history of Democrat corruption is long. Our original Democrat royal family - the Kennedys -
have inherited a fortune
built on Wall Street fraud in the 1920s. Back then Joseph P. Kennedy manipulated
securities markets in such a way that every dollar that went into the Kennedys’
$1 billion inheritance was a dollar lost by some other sucker when Old Joe pulled
the plug on his own ponzi scheme. That’s a lot of hurt folks.
Question: Since Madoff was a BIG Democrat donor who traveled
in Democrat circles, were most of the scammed people rich Democrats? So far,
three major libs have been named - Steven Spielberg, Mort Zuckerman and US
senator Frank Lautenburg. Will Obama
bail them out?
Now to add to the Christmas gloom,
Sarah Palin’s
Governor Palin visited the site and apologized to her fellow
parishioners if the fire was connected to “undeserved negative attention” from
her vice presidential run.
Just think. In
If you are a Republican, that is.
The Wasilla fire is very likely to be
connected to Palin-haters and other atheists who are on the march this
Christmas. After the media trashed Palin throughout the campaign, some nuts obviously don’t consider her defeat
enough. They are evil people who may be taking their cues from the radicalized
media and attacking churches in the spirit of anti-Christmas, perhaps an
extension of the anti-Christian demonstrations perpetrated by gays in
The Wasilla church even had
been criticized in the media for promoting a Love Won Out Conference organized
by the conservative group Focus on the Family that promised to "help men and
women dissatisfied with living homosexually understand that same-sex attractions
can be overcome."
In 1995, the national media propagated a summer-long series of false
articles insinuating that white racists were burning black churches across the
South. This caused a great national stir but investigations into insurance
records showed that the fires statistically were nothing out of the ordinary,
and that many of the fires were accidents that were being misrepresented as
arson by
activists seeking to make a national case for a rebirth of white supremacism.
What will the media report about Palin’s church? Will they
report on who the real perpetrators are, and their motives, if they are caught?
For decades, we have had a media, from Frank Capra to
today’s New York Times, that are insistently constructing a false
portrait of conservatives, capitalists and Christians as bad people who care not
a whit about their fellow man, while they portray Democrats as loving people
whom the world cannot live without.
If only it were true.
By the way, where were all those
investigative media to look into the massive corruption of
Merry Christmas to all!
Big 3 Bailout Bust
The proposed bailout of the Big 3 auto companies, killed in
the Senate on December 11, is burning up the media and the internet. And if you
are interested in how the problem is being approached, you need look no further
than the comments issuing from the two sides and the two political parties.
Democrats are relying on emotion and provocation, while
Republicans like US senator Corker of Tennessee are calmly talking about the
facts of the case. “We were about three words away from a deal,” said Corker,
the GOP’s point man in the negotiations, referring to any date in 2009 on which
the United Auto Workers union would accept wage cuts. Since the unions refused
to name a date before 2011 when their contract expires, the deal fell through.
Meanwhile the car companies are painting the picture as dire in order to get the
cash quickly with no scrutiny.
Democrats do not want the facts to come out, and wish to manipulate the process emotionally because they want the bailout to proceed with no major concessions from the unions. Since money flowing to the unions flows directly back to the Democrat party in campaign contributions, Democrats are pushing for a straight bailout, with no regard for the well-being of the nation or the taxpayer.
This is a standard Democrat tactic. Unions rarely give in.
And when companies go bust as a result of union intransigence - as hundreds of
companies have gone bust under the weight of union demands in the last 50 years,
killing millions of jobs and trillions in wealth - the unions simply say it was
an evil capitalist plot to save the rich company owners at the expense of the
workers.
But
The Big 3 certainly have been poorly
managed, and conservatives agree that all workers should take a pay cut
including management and white collar. But the main problem is that unionized assembly-line
workers today are earning roughly $72 per hour in wages and benefits. Meanwhile non-unionized workers
at Toyota, Nissan and other foreign companies in the southern
UAW president Ron Gettelfinger is manipulating the situation
for his ends. He is saying that his unionized workers are getting roughly
the same hourly wage as workers at successful American Toyota plants and other
non-union factories. Whether this is true or not is suspect because
liberals always manipulate the facts, for instance representing entry-level
wages as the norm for all workers. All we know is that “wages” are different
from the total cost to the company per employee as stated above – 72 union
versus 48 non-union. This discrepancy is due to union demands. Until those union figures are
cut, the Big 3 are not going to become viable.
Why should somebody making $20 an hour
in
Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican US senator from Oklahoma
recently lit up the media with the fact that both GM and Toyota worldwide sold
the same number of cars in 2007 – roughly 9.4 million – yet GM lost $38.7
billion while
Toyota profited $17.7 billion.
This simple fact spread like a prairie
fire because it puts the whole situation in perspective.
In order to see more contrast in the
way that liberals approach the bailout, here’s Democrat congressman Barney Frank
of
"No. We’re not propping up companies. That’s your mistake. We’re propping up individuals. The world doesn't consist of companies. The world is people. The country is people."
This is rather weird coming from a person of an ideology that insistently tars the tobacco companies and oil companies as evil corporations. And when Stahl pointed out that Frank is then talking about welfare, Frank said:
"Yeah, I’m for
welfare. You’re not? Are you for letting people starve?"
Frank then went on to oppose bankruptcy because it harms individual workers:
"There's only one thing you can do in bankruptcy: break your
word, break your deals. It allows you to say to the small businesses who have
been catering lunches for you…the workers, 'Sorry, we’re not paying you'.”
So rather than debate
rationally about an industry that has been failing for decades, Frank immediately puts it
into the most extreme emotional terms using cheap theatrical tactics that do nothing to advance the
debate.
When the bailout failed on Thursday
evening, December 11, Democrat majority leader
Think about that. What a
horrible thing to say. But convenient. That is a direct emotional attack on the
failure of the bill and another way to talk down the stock market and make the
economy worse. Liberals do that in order to try and impose their agenda.
Democrat House speaker Nancy Pelosi used the most base attack after the bill failed:
"Senate Republicans' refusal
to support the bipartisan legislation passed by the House and negotiated in good
faith with the White House, the Senate and the automakers is irresponsible,
especially at a time of economic hardship. The consequences of the Senate
Republicans' failure to act could be devastating to our economy, detrimental to
workers, and destructive to the American automobile industry unless the
president immediately directs Secretary Paulson to explore other short-term
financial assistance options, including TARP and those available to the Federal
Reserve. That is the only viable option available at this time.
In an irresponsible
statement like this, Pelosi makes no mention of the unions. She then goes on to
make an immediate appeal for Bush to help the car companies using money
already allotted last September in the $700 billion bailout. This is the
Democrat fall-back position to get their money because they know they will get
it. But when the companies come back next April for more money, there will be no
public stomach for more cash.
Now here is Republican
senator Corker in a statement before the bailout vote came up. Listen to his
rational tone explaining the problem and a possible solution:
So we're really talking -- I just want
to make this clear to people. We're talking about three entities that we need to
talk to: General Motors, Cerberus or Chrysler and the U.A.W. and there are three
things that are basically causing these companies difficulty. One is the capital
structure. The debt that these companies have is not sustainable. It doesn't
matter how much money we were to put into General Motors with the $62 billion in
debt that they have today, there is no way that they can sustain their company.
They cannot. G.M. only has a market cap today of around $2 billion. $2 billion.
Several paragraphs later Corker laid out the three rational ‘covenants’ that need to be met:
The first
covenant is that by March 15, the outstanding indebtedness at the two companies
that are going to apply for this has to be reduced by two-thirds, two-thirds, or
the companies have to file for bankruptcy on March 15th. That gives the
companies, it gives the bondholders, which we've talked to on the phone, plenty
of incentive to make sure that the debt is reduced by two-thirds so these
companies have a capital structure that allows them to go forward. This is the
only way they're going to be successful. We've had plenty of people testify and
say that if we put our money on top of the $62 billion in debt that G.M. has,
there is no way they can be successful. Even if we're selling 20 million cars a
year in our country, and today we know we're selling at a $10 million rate.
So that's number one. Give them the money. If by March 15th, they haven't
reduced their capital structure in that regard -- and by the way, we've talked
to people on all sides who believe this can happen. But it can only happen with
the stick of government, meaning that we're going to force them into bankruptcy
if they don't do this. That's the first covenant. The second covenant is – and I
listened to Mr. Gettelfinger's testimony and talked to him on the phone this
morning-- he says the only way the U.A.W. can make concessions is if they see
the bondholders have done so first. This legislation makes that happen by March
15th. So, secondly, after the U.A.W. has seen that the bondholders have -- quote
– “taken a haircut” – a word that’s used around here a lot -- they have to do
two things.
Number one, they have to convert half of the VEBA obligations--Voluntary
Employee Benefit Association obligations-- they have to convert half of those to
equity. If a company goes bankrupt, these future payments are never going to
happen anyway. And that again, that reduces the debt at G.M. by another $10.5
billion, and it gives the U.A.W. equity in a company that actually has value
now, because the debt by the bondholders has been reduced too. That's the second
covenant. Very, very simple. And then the third thing they have to do is at that
same public meeting where they take a vote, they have to agree to have a
contract in place that puts them on parity -- on parity – with companies like
Toyota and Nissan and Volkswagen and other companies here in our country.
Now look at this accusatory statement from United Auto
Workers president Ron Gettelfinger: "We wondered, quite frankly, if we were just
being set up." Gettelfinger added that Republicans are seeking restructuring “on
the backs of workers and retirees”. He then said that some Republicans from
southern states see the bailout negotiations as a way to "cripple the union" while
helping out the Japanese, South Korean and German automakers that have located
plants in their home districts.
"They thought perhaps they could have a twofer here maybe --
pierce the heart of organized labor while representing the foreign brands,"
Gettelfinger said.
“Pierce the heart of organized labor”? That is wording that
poisons the debate as Democrats always do because they know they cannot win on
the merits.
The reason that Gettelfinger has made no concessions is that
he knows that President Bush will give the $14 billion that the industry says is
needs… for the next few months.
Ultimately this bailout is going to cost $100 billion and
more and will not solve the basic problem in the industry, and that is labor
costs. Until there is a serious change in the way that GM, Ford and Chrysler
deal with their past and present employee pay scales, health plans and
retirement payments, those companies never will survive.
Naturally Republicrat commentator Bill
Kristol of the once-conservative Weekly Standard fretted that “McCain got 40% of the
union vote” and that Republican intransigence on this bailout is going to hurt
the GOP politically. Note that Kristol does not mention that the recalcitrant
Republican senators are standing up for what is right, for common sense and for
the well-being of the taxpayers of
Colin Powell Turns on the GOP
Despite the fact that three Republican presidents made
former secretary of state Colin Powell the national figure that he is, Powell
now is turning his back on the Republican party.
It is not hard to understand why.
It is about the parties.
Not about the political parties, but
about the
Ronald Reagan named Powell as national security adviser;
Bush 41 named him chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; and Bush 43 made him
Secretary of State. But that’s not enough for Powell.
To show his ingratitude, Powell told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria
among other things that the Republican party must stop “shouting at the world.”
Surprisingly Powell does not seem to acknowledge that the
media and the Democrat party just finished 8 straight years of non-stop shouting
at a calm and collected and decent man named George Bush and the Republican
party, calling him names like Hitler, and telling an endless string of lies
about everything that the party represents.
Even when Bush gave America the biggest government expansion
in the last 40 years in the Medicare prescription drug program, the Democrats
just ignored that and continued “shouting”.
Powell went on to say that the GOP’s attempt to “use
polarization for political advantage” backfired in the 2008 presidential
election.
What polarization, Mr. Secretary?
Have you forgotten how the Democrat party has played the class warfare polarization card and the race polarization card against Republicans for 50 years now; how Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright was and continues to be a hatemonger whose sole weapon has been polarization; that Obama was associated with America-hating bomber William Ayers; that Illinois and Chicago are completely corrupt, polarizing entities under Democrat rule; how Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have relentlessly used racial polarization against white America?
And how did you, Mr. Powell, as a black man, get so high up
in three Republican administrations?
Of Sarah Palin, Powell said: "Gov.
Palin, to some extent, pushed the party more to the right, and I think she had
something of a polarizing effect when she talked about how small town values are
good. Well, most of us don’t live in small towns. And I was raised in the
Uhhh, last time we looked, Mr.
Secretary, the
Powell pontificated: "I think the (Republican) party has to
take a hard look at itself. There is nothing wrong with being conservative.
There is nothing wrong with having socially conservative views — I don't object
to that. But if the party wants to have a future in this country, it has to face
some realities. In another 20 years, the majority in this country will be the
minority."
And what has the current “minority”
produced? Where are the wonderful technologies and jobs and opportunities that
have come out of the black and hispanic inner cities of
Are you saying, Secretary Powell, that conservatives
need to sign on to more government spending, approve more sexual license, accept
the redefinition of marriage, tolerate more generations of dependent, single
mothers, become pro-abortion and send more money to the dead-end public schools
in order to appeal to minorities?
How about if those minorities see the wisdom of Republican
ideas like school vouchers, cohesive families, self reliance, sexual restraint
and Christian wisdom as conservatives have suggested for decades now? Because
progress is not possible in the chaos that currently rules thousands of these
neighborhoods.
Powell endorsed Obama in the recent
election. You might think that he would at least give Obama a chance to prove
himself before lashing out at the GOP. How does Powell even know that the
Republican party won’t make a huge comeback when Obama falters? Because it will
when he does. Because Obama is a lightweight who already is in trouble over the
scandal in
Powell said. "I think that the party has to take a hard
look at itself, and I've talked to a number of leaders in recent weeks and they
understand that." Powell says he still considers himself a Republican, but
added that he believes that Republicans should stop listening to conservative
radio show hosts like Rush Limbaugh.
"Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when
these kinds of spokespersons (Limbaugh) seem to appeal to our lesser instincts
rather than our better instincts?"
Mr. Secretary,
The reason that Rush Limbaugh has wide appeal is that he is one of the few sources who gives the “other side” of the story to counter the background noise of modern day media liberalism. In a criminal trial, people often are ready to convict a defendant until they hear “the other side” of the story. Why cannot we hear it? Why are you so anxious to censor the conservative side of the debate?
For instance, Al Gore has been scaremongering about ‘global
warming’ for years now. Limbaugh has maintained from the start that ‘warming’
does not exist. Yet now Gore himself is calling it ‘climate change’ because the
whole concept of ‘warming’ has been debunked.
Did you see the snow in
Powell even is suggesting that the military reconsider its
“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about gays. But if that policy is reversed,
it will disrupt the military because many people historically have objected to
homosexuality on moral and religious grounds and this millennia-long opinion
should not be disregarded. “Don’t’ ask, don’t tell” covers all bases, Mr.
Powell. Leave it intact.
Colin Powell obviously loves the spotlight and wants to stay
in it. With Obama as president, he is hoping for a new visibility. Powell should
be more thankful to the people and the ideas who made him who he is. But
apparently he is not. And that is the really big story of this interview.
Setup in
Riots broke out all over
Gligoropoulos was killed when a mob he
was part of attacked a phalanx of police officers in
Widespread looting was reported all
over
So what is going on here?
It’s not hard to figure out: It is communists at work again using any pretext to cause trouble. Because communists are pathological troublemakers who will use any excuse for mayhem.
Just coincidentally, Greek leftist groups are claiming that
the center-right government of prime minister Costas Karamanlis was responsible
for the death of Gligoropoulos, and then that that government could not contain
the riots.
In other words, you’re damned if you are baited into
responding to provocation, and damned when you cannot control the resulting
violence. Socialist opposition leader George Papandreou said, "This country does
not have a government. This chaos ... is a result of the decisions and omissions
made by a government that has become dangerous for the Greek people."
No, Mr. Papandreou, the chaos is the result of the rioters
who planned this all out.
The conservative government has only a 1-seat margin in the
300-member legislature and the street actions are seen as an attempt by leftists
to use violence and intimidation to tip the country politically.
This is standard operating procedure
for the provocateurs on the political left. This is how they operate from their
guerilla wars in
Notice that the rioters did not take the time for a trial,
or to have the facts come out. They immediately hit the streets the day after
the killing in order to create havoc and to smear the conservative government.
In one instance, a peaceful protest by a left-wing party called Syriza was
broken up by youths in masks who threw firebombs at two luxury hotels and a bank
branch.
Police said that the original killing was set off when they
were attacked by the mob including Gligoropoulos in the Exarchia district of
Athens which is home to music clubs, bars, restaurants and a growing population
of students, anarchists and drug users.
Note: Urban bars, night clubs, drug users, left-wing
students, and anarchists.
Does this sound like a place for conservatives?
Hardly. This is the lair of the angry urban left everywhere
in the world who riot for one reason; because their lives are centered on
violence which comes out of self-hatred, like the World Trade Organization
protesters who simply followed WTO meetings around the world for years fostering
riots and destroying property wherever possible. These people are destroyers, no
different than the terrorists of Mumbai. They hate the world because they hate
themselves. Period.
Anarchists – another name for communists - will take any
occasion to inject themselves into public demonstrations and usually instigate
violence. This whole thing was a setup.
Rioters ultimately burned more than 30
stores in
Does this not sound like the
anti-capitalist, anti-Christian left at work? Does it not resemble the violence
and protests launched on a much smaller scale by the gay protesters in
Answer: No. Conservatives are out
working hard to make a better life, provide for their families and build up the
nation, rather than tearing it down with violence.
"It is inconceivable
for there not to be punishment when a person loses their life, particularly when
it is a child," interior minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos said, acting like a
respectful conservative would. "The taking of life is something that is not
excusable in a democracy.”
But such humility is never enough for the enraged left that
is like a hungry lion looking for fresh meat.
Government officials, however, stood
for law and order. "These people respect nothing, look what they have
destroyed," said
Kaklamanis said Christmas celebrations would take place as
planned because he did not want to give the rioters the satisfaction of seeing
the festivities canceled.
Blagojevich Scandal: Business As Usual
Liberal CNN commentator Roland Martin is among the myriad observers who have expressed feigned shock at
the scandal surrounding Democrat Illinois governor Blagojevich.
Martin says in a recent column that 'the vast majority of politicians in the
Yes, certainly, but that does not explain the inordinately high percentage of corruption.
And
a curious thing is happening. In naming a
handful of
Martin discusses Chicago Alderman Arenda Troutman, former city clerk
James Laski, former
Naturally, there has been much talk about former Republican
governor Ryan. Other than that, there’s been little talk about party
affiliation. Fox News reported that NBC did not even mention that
Blagojevich was a Democrat during one extended morning news report,
while the talking heads are all dutifully reporting that there’s plenty of
corruption “on both sides” politically.
That is nonsense. C
Just think about it: The cities of
Payoffs, kickbacks, bribery, extortion, patronage jobs, cronyism, sweetheart deals,
mafia deals, envelopes full of cash, political offices sold to the highest bidder –
these are the foundations of the Democrat party. It indeed is The Party of
Corruption.
When you think about corruption, what immediately comes to mind?
How about labor unions, Democrat party machines,
Corruption is synonymous with our cities.
Why?
Because liberals choose to live
easy and decadent lives in those cities. They don’t get their hands dirty. Then when
much of the nation's wealth is concentrated and serviced in the cities, they see that wealth as
theirs to control through the political process.
Meanwhile, it was amusing to watch congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., the son of
so-called ‘civil rights leader' Jesse Jackson holding a press conference on
Wednesday trying to explain that he had nothing to do with allegations that
someone representing him had offered Blagojevich up to $1 million in campaign help in exchange
for giving Jackson Jr. the US Senate seat vacated by Obama.
Said Jackson Jr. of Blagojevich’s alleged attempt to sell the
Senate appointment to the highest bidder: "If
these allegations are proved true, I am outraged by the appalling, pay-to-play
schemes hatched at the highest levels of our state government. Sadly, today's
criminal complaint casts another dark, wide cloud over our state. The people of
Illinois deserve better.”
What a load of bull that is,
coming from the son of Jesse ‘Shakedown’ Jackson, the activist who virtually
invented the modern version of pay-to-play, who has threatened and harassed
private companies for decades to give money to his causes or he would start
picketing those companies and smearing them in public. Most companies have
complied. It is nothing more than extortion
Jackson Jr. added that he has been such a diligent congressman that he has only missed two votes in his entire 13-year Washington career, which is no surprise. Every time a Chicago Democrat like Jackson Jr. votes, he is voting himself and his cronies cash, and Democrats never miss a pay day. Because that is the Democrat party’s sole purpose for existing: To get as much public money as possible - legally, illegally or unethically, it makes no difference.
At the same time, Obama is finding himself in a
pickle having denied that he talked about his vacant Senate seat with
governor Blagojevich while Obama's own chief adviser David Axelrod
already had said, “I know he's (Obama
has) talked to (Blagojevich), and there are a whole range of names, many of which
have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them."
But Obama himself said, "I have not discussed the Senate seat with
the governor at any time.”
So who is right? Is this the beginning of the first
cover-up even before Obama gets inaugurated?
Now we must wonder exactly who in the Obama camp had
contact with Blagojevich. And now Axelrod even has recanted his statement.
Obama continued,
"Like the rest of the people of Illinois I am saddened and sobered by the news
that came out of the U.S. attorney's office today.”
Another load of bull. Obama was born and bred of this type of corruption. That is how he got where he is and that is why conservatives warned about him during the election. But the gullible people who voted for Obama will believe anything this guy says.
It is now being suggested that the Illinois
General Assembly call a special election to fill Obama’s vacant seat since the
entire appointment process under Blagojevich has been tainted.
That would be a good idea, rather than letting
the Democrat party steal yet another election right from under our noses.
Has Obama Been Scared Sensible?
‘Obama Vows Public Works on Vast Scale’, the New York Times
announced in a Sunday, December 7 headline, noting Obama’s press conference the
day before in which the president-elect vowed to invest government dollars
heavily in infrastructure to help the ailing economy.
‘With unemployment on the rise and no end to the recession in sight’
the Times reported that although Obama ‘put no price on it, he said he
would invest record amounts of money’ in the repair of bridges, roads and other
infrastructure including energy efficiency, hospital modernization and extension
of internet service to underserved areas.
But let's review the situation.
Last summer, there was no recession. The 2nd quarter
growth rate was plus 3.1%, which is growth, not recession.
So the real “recession” hit on September 15 with the failure of
Lehman Brothers and then the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The rest
has been a tumbling house of cards.
Thus
the recession has been with us a full 3 months.
But by saying that there is 'no end to the recession in sight', the
Times seems to be suggesting, like all doomsday liberals do, that we are
recession-weary after years of hard times.
We are not.
If Obama gets his way, however, we may be in for an extended period
of bad times.
This crisis has been a long time coming and it will be a long time
getting finally resolved if the government keeps meddling. After all, the government caused most of it. There have been so many stupid and wasteful Democrat
policies imposed on our free-market economy that this current situation was
inevitable. A capitalist economy can take care of capitalist problems. But it
cannot solve problems imposed by the government and other socialist forces. Thus
bailout after bailout.
The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 literally forced banks to
loan money to poor people to buy houses. Then loans for “low-income people”
magically morphed into loans for “low-
and moderate-income people”. This is called Creeping Socialism. And by 1999, the
Federal National Mortgage Association abandoned all caution and began buying
loans whether people had collateral or not.
This is not banking, but socialist foolhardiness. And it started us
down the road to collapse.
Meanwhile for the last 50 years, federal, state and local
governments, flush with money from the postwar boom, spent recklessly, putting
governments deeper into hock and putting more pressure on individuals and
business to produce more tax revenue, leaving less capital for investment and
expansion. That is how
In the same period, public-employee unions have been robbing
taxpayers blind with endless wage and benefit demands, while $70-an-hour
unionized assembly-line workers in the auto industry have sucked the life out of
the Big 3.
Now Obama’s plan to spend a lot of government money on
infrastructure is the first step to more economic malaise. According to Obama
himself on Meet the Press on December 7:
“Things are going to get worse before they get better.”
Oh really? Wasn’t Obama supposed to instill confidence and bring “change”?
Yeah, right. Is that why the stock market dropped 2,000 points in the two weeks
after Obama’s election? That is hardly confidence.
There were signs that Obama might have been scared sensible by the
current economic woes. His selection of conservatives Paul Volcker and Christina
Romer as economic advisers offered hope that he would not repeat the mistakes of
Jimmy Carter, or of Hoover and Roosevelt in causing the great depression to
happen and to deepen. Now, however, we cannot be so sure.
In 2005, the federal government passed the biggest, most expensive
transportation infrastructure bill ever. What is Obama going to do to top that?
Will he just throw more money around willy-nilly to create jobs?
Because he indeed may create jobs, but his plan will not
create wealth and that is a difference like night and day. That is
why
What is the difference?
If you create jobs by spending government money, you are simply
dispersing existing wealth. If you create jobs slowly and methodically by
allowing business to invest capital and grow, you create new wealth.
New jobs or new wealth? Which is better?
Wealth is. Because it expands the economic pie. And Obama’s plan
will not. In fact the bigger debt and higher taxes that the nation will incur to
finance Obama’s public works plan will take precious capital out of the private
investment market in both the short term and the long term.
If Obama plans to be a successful president, he must look at the big
picture. The nation is suffering because we have allowed Creeping Socialism to
invade every agency, every product, every service, every local, state and
federal government decision.
Our nation is suffering from government overload. There’s an old
adage that you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. Unless
the American economy is revamped from the bottom up and geared with lowered tax
rates for new growth and new enterprise and new wealth, it will slide into
socialist oblivion with slow growth, high unemployment and increasing poverty,
just like
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he inherited a dismal
economic situation. Tax rates were sky high, inflation was out of
control, unemployment was 11%, interest rates were 21% and the national
spirit was hurting.
Reagan took command and turned the nation around not by throwing
government money at make-work employment, but by reducing taxes. This spurred
investment in new wealth creation. But since his
time we have been sliding back into our old habits including a new Democrat
party force working to hinder us – the environmental movement which is blocking
growth everywhere and thwarting the energy production we need for the future.
America needs a bold leader who will bring back wealth creation not
just create make-work jobs; who will urge change at all levels of government;
and who will point fearlessly to the Founding Fathers’ call for a free nation of
low taxes and individual enterprise.
Obama will not be that leader. And that will cost him the election
in 2012. Remember Jimmy Carter, another little-known politician that the nation
pinned its hopes on in 1976? After 4 years,
Illinois' State of Corruption
Unionized workers at the Republic
Windows and Doors factory in
Political leaders including Jesse Jackson and
Democrat Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich appeared with the 250 employees to
demand that Bank of America extend credit to Republic so that Republic could pay
the severance and vacation packages. BofA is said to have cut off the company’s credit line when
business went bad.
The case has received national
attention as a study in worker’s rights. But here’s the question: How many
people in our society have lost their jobs and simply accepted the outcome as
part of the natural economic cycle rather than crying about it as the unions are doing in
Why is the government preparing a bailout for the Big 3 auto
companies with hardly a mention of any concessions by the unionized
assembly-line employees who are making $70+ an hour, the wages that are pushing
the car companies out of business in the first place?
Did the Republic workers have exorbitant wages and absurd
union work rules? And did that have anything to do with the company losing its economic
viability?
Even before his December 9 arrest on charges of pay-for-play, bribery and extortion, Democrat
Blagojevich was well-known as the nation’s most corrupt governor;
heavily-Democrat
What does all this Democrat corruption have to do with the
Republic Windows and Doors case?
Everything. Because it represents government and union
intervention into the private sector when everyone knows that government is always incompetent
while unions are corrupt and greedy.
Under law, Republic was supposed to give workers 60 days
notice of the plant closing. Republic’s monthly sales had fallen to $2.9 million
a month from $4 million. Republic CEO Rich Gillman said that the company had no
choice but to close.
Yet what company is going to tell people that it is going
out of business in 60 days? That would be like a person announcing he is going
to die in 60 days. This makes no sense at all. Most businesses hang on until the
last minute hoping to turn things around and throwing in the towel only when
options run out.
Bank of America recently received $25 billion in government
bailout money. So Republic workers are protesting that the bank should be paying
their severance and vacation packages if it got money from the government. BofA has responded that as a bank it is not responsible for
the financial obligations of an employer to its employees, although it decided
after several days of the protest to extend some credit.
But BofA is just a bank. Banks lend money; they are not institutions of social engineering as Democrats have made them out to be. So what kind of precedent does this set? Are banks going to be intimidated into financing bankrupt companies for fear of media harassment, as they were forced by laws like the Community Reinvestment Act to lend money to people with no credit history and no downpayment?
Just look at what that produced.
Obama has joined the
Republic fray. "The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that
they have earned, I think they're absolutely right and understand that what's
happening to them is reflective of what's happening across this economy," he
said.
The next question is: How is
private enterprise supposed to deal with unions that demand inflated wage and
benefit packages and impose bizarre work rules; states and localities that tax business heavily; regulators
who slap every type of law on business; and corruption by Democrats? Was Republic
Windows and Doors ever extorted by corrupt officials like Blagojevich or someone
lower down on the political chain? Where is the media investigation into that?
In 1980, president Jimmy Carter signed a bailout for Chrysler which required Chrysler to restructure itself. In that action, unions gave back $462 million in wages and non-union workers gave back $125 million. Lee Iacocca put Chrysler back into profitability by 1983, earning a $350 million profit that year. Workers gave back a total of $2.5 billion and the number of Chrysler employees was reduced by 40%.
Imagine that. 40%!
Obviously Chrysler was
overstaffed and union workers were overpaid. Sound familiar? Like the Big 3
today? Was Republic Windows and Doors overstaffed? Did excessive union wages and
crazy work rules have anything to do with the company’s unsustainability in
these hard times?
In all the congressional
hearings about the car company bailouts, hardly a word has been mentioned about
union leaders being forced out or union workers accepting pay cuts.
Because the Democrat party wants to continue to funnel money to the unions – and
the Democrat party – at the expense of the taxpayer.
And as far as the media have
let on, the closing of Republic Windows and Doors was simply a group of evil
capitalists heartlessly throwing people out of work. How about hearing
management’s side of the story? After all, managers
are out work too. And the company owner has gone bust. Why not hear their views?
No, their side will not be
reported because if the public hears the management side, they might understand
the situation rather than seeing it through the media’s anti-capitalist filter.
By the way, where are the media stories about 43,000 newspaper jobs lost across the country in the last few years? Or 500 people recently thrown out of work at NBC in New York?
No, the media do not want to
report on media failures. They only want to point the finger at others.
And where were the media to
report on Blagojevich for his 5 corrupt years in office?
Will Napolitano Defend our Homeland?
The recent bipartisan report
predicting that America can expect a terrorist attack before 2013 was
unsettling. “Our margin of safety is shrinking, not growing,” wrote the
Commission on the Prevention of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) Proliferation
and Terrorism, led by former
The report says that terrorist groups still lack the
scientific and technical knowledge to perpetrate attacks using pathogens or
radioactive material in bombs, although that can change quickly if terrorists
find scientists willing to join their cause for ideological or financial
reasons.
"The
The commission wrote that biological weapons are more
likely to be deployed before nuclear or radioactive weapons are because nuclear
facilities are more carefully guarded. Anthrax will be the most likely bio
weapon, the report states.
The report makes recommendations, ten of which are listed in
abridged form at the end of this editorial.
Now president-elect Obama has
nominated
First, Napolitano’s history. She
served as an attorney in 1991 for Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment
against then-Supreme Court associate justice nominee Clarence Thomas. So right
there, you have someone who is partisan in favor of the feminist crusade against
certain men, while those same feminists ignored charges of rape against Bill
Clinton because
Would she pick and choose what crimes
terrorists should be investigated or prosecuted for?
In 1993, Napolitano was
appointed by Bill Clinton as US attorney for the district of Arizona. She won
the position of Arizona attorney general in 1998 and was elected Arizona
governor in 2002 and re-elected in 2006.
If confirmed as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Napolitano’s purview will include the agencies responsible for protecting our borders and capturing illegal aliens. And so her past record gives an indication whether she will be vigilant or not.
If the Clinton administration is any
indication, we should be concerned. Because like the Clinton people, Napolitano
may well side with the doubters and with the soft-on-terrorism and the
soft-on-the-border leftist minority that is more concerned with the well-being
of illegal aliens and enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay than with that of the
majority that wishes to guarantee our national security.
During the
During Meissner’s tenure, Visalaw.com wrote:
At a congressional hearing, House Republicans severely
criticized INS Commissioner Doris Meissner for her failure to request 1000 new
border patrol agents as well as the short-lived INS plan to release some
nonviolent criminal aliens from detention. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of
the House Immigration Subcommittee, called the administration’s approach to the
border "a full retreat, if not a complete surrender, in the war on drugs."
Meissner even said that catching immigrants who overstay their visas has been "a very, very low priority, and I think it should be a low priority."
She said this before 9/11 of course.
Wisconsin Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner said
that Meissner could have lobbied harder for more funding and added that 17 of the 19
suspects identified as the hijackers of airplanes used in the 9/11 attacks were
people who had overstayed temporary visas.
In wrapping up Meissner’s career at INS, CNN said:
“Republican lawmakers were especially critical of criminal aliens allowed into the United States and of a large increase in naturalizations prior to the 1996 presidential election campaign, which they claimed was designed to benefit Democrats at the polls.”
In addition to Meissner’s
soft-on-illegal-immigration plan and failure to track visa overstays, the
Will Napolitano use her post for political purposes?
Her past is not encouraging. While making feints to stem the illegal alien tide, she has not really done so at all.
In July 2007 she signed a sanctions law on employers that hire illegal aliens. While some applauded, skeptics saw this as just another way for liberals to punish business while the same liberals do nothing to stop the flow at the border.
Meanwhile Napolitano also vetoed a bill that would have put
restrictions on day laborers, many of whom are illegals.
So in being “tough” on illegals, she offered sanctions for business but not on illegals themselves.
When Arizona House bill 2345 was passed requiring a driver’s license or two forms of ID in order to vote on election days, Napolitano vetoed the bill while supporting legislation to grant driver’s licenses to illegals. It is important to note that all of the 9/11 hijackers had one or more state driver's licenses, which enabled them not only to board the planes but also to live and travel easily around the US.
Napolitano also supported the
Also in 2007, Napolitano sent Arizona
National Guard troops to the Mexican border, as did Democrat New
Meanwhile Arizona Republican state
representative John Kavanagh said that Napolitano has been very weak on
“internal enforcement”, having vetoed an
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, says that “she is probably the least bad person that an Obama administration could have picked.”
Is this the time to pick the least of all bad candidates?
Or a time to pick someone who will enforce the laws?
With the Terrorism Commission warning about an attack by 2013, this is no time to guess about our national security. Napolitano is a bad choice. And our nation will pay the price if she is confirmed.
Here are the excerpts from the Commission report, including
from the executive summary and the recommendations
The Commission believes that unless the world community acts
decisively
and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a
weapon of
mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack
somewhere in the
world by the end of 2013.
The Commission further believes that terrorists are more
likely to
be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear
weapon.
The Commission believes that the
more aggressively to limit the proliferation of biological
weapons and
reduce the prospect of a bioterror attack.
RECOMMENDATION 1: The
a series of mutually reinforcing domestic measures to
prevent bioterrorism: (1) conduct a comprehensive review of
the domestic program to secure dangerous pathogens,
(2) develop a national strategy for advancing bioforensic
capabilities,
(3) tighten government oversight of high-containment
laboratories, (4) promote a culture of security awareness in
the
life sciences community, and (5) enhance the nation’s
capabilities
for rapid response to prevent biological attacks from
inflicting mass casualties.
RECOMMENDATION 2: The
a series of mutually reinforcing measures at the
international
level to prevent biological weapons proliferation and
terrorism: (1) press for an international conference of
countries
with major biotechnology industries to promote biosecurity,
(2)
conduct a global assessment of biosecurity risks, (3)
strengthen
global disease surveillance networks, and (4) propose a new
action plan for achieving universal adherence to and
effective
national implementation of the Biological Weapons
Convention,
for adoption at the next review conference in 2011.
RECOMMENDATION 3: The
internationally toward strengthening the nonproliferation
regime, reaffirming the vision of a world free of nuclear
weapons.
RECOMMENDATION 4: The new President should undertake
a comprehensive review of cooperative nuclear security
programs, and should develop a global strategy that accounts
for the worldwide expansion of the threat and the
restructuring
of our relationship with
recipient to a cooperative partnership.
RECOMMENDATION 5: As a top priority, the next administration
must stop the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons
programs.
RECOMMENDATION 6: The next President and Congress
should implement a comprehensive
policy toward
works with
safe havens through military, economic, and diplomatic
means; (2) secure nuclear and
biological materials in
(3) counter and defeat extremist ideology; and (4) constrain
a
nascent nuclear arms race in
RECOMMENDATION 7: The next
should work with the Russian government on initiatives to
jointly reduce the danger of the use of nuclear and
biological
weapons
RECOMMENDATION 8: The President should create a
more efficient and effective policy coordination structure
by
designating a White House principal advisor for WMD
proliferation
and terrorism and restructuring the National Security
Council and Homeland Security Council.
RECOMMENDATION 9: Congress should reform its
oversight both structurally and substantively to better
address
intelligence, homeland security, and crosscutting
21st-century
national security missions such as the prevention of weapons
of mass destruction proliferation and terrorism.
RECOMMENDATION 10: Accelerate integration of effort
among
the counterproliferation, counterterrorism, and law
enforcement communities to address WMD proliferation and
terrorism issues; strengthen expertise in the nuclear and
biological
fields; prioritize pre-service and in-service training and
retention of people with critical scientific, language, and
foreign
area skills; and ensure that the threat posed by biological
weapons remains among the highest national intelligence
priorities
for collection and analysis.
Poor Harvard. You would think they wouldn’t even care about
all that money, being rabid preachers of anti-capitalism every day. But don’t be
fooled - modern-day elite socialists love money more than any other people in
history, and they prove it every minute.
Given the weak economic circumstances
of
But a look at the statistics of college costs demonstrates
that all the poor-mouthing and panic in academia is just a diversionary act.
College tuitions have risen an average inflation-adjusted 439% since 1982, while
median family incomes have risen only 137% in that same period.
In short, college costs have risen more than 3 times as fast
as the cost of living and family income, allowing the universities to accumulate
vast riches at the expense of American families. Yet now they are claiming that
all these riches are not sufficient to get them through tough times.
How has this happened?
The reason is quite simple: As all those power-to-the-people
1960s liberals in American academia have gouged the public relentlessly and
enriched themselves year after year, their media friends have avoided reporting
it. Meanwhile the parents of America get poorer in a simple reassignment of
wealth, which is the basis for all of socialism – transferring wealth from one
group to another, in this case from parents to the universities.
Yet at the same time, students at these
same universities are subjected to an ever-diminishing quality of education and
a relentless barrage of anti-capitalist propaganda, and for one reason only: To
throw them off the scent of who is really doing the price gouging in
This is much like the auto industry. After decades in which
unionized auto workers with only high school degrees have been earning (in
today’s dollars) $70+ an hour in wages and benefits for virtually unskilled
assembly-line labor, the companies now are demanding a bailout from the
government as if they do not know why they are failing.
Conservatives know why the universities and the Big 3 car
makers are in trouble. Because under the socialism of organized labor and the
universities, collusion and price fixing produce bad products at ever-higher
costs (lousy automobiles, watered-down education).
The Associated Press reported on
Further AP reported:
For the current academic year, the average cost of tuition and fees at four-year public universities rose $394, or 6.4 percent, to $6,585 for in-state students. At private colleges, costs rose $1,399, or 5.9 percent, to $25,143, according to the annual Trends in College Pricing report from the College Board. When room and board are added in, some high-tuition private institutions can total $50,000 a year or more.
So take note of the price
rises - 6.4% and 5.9%, or close to twice the rate of inflation.
Meanwhile Gordon H. Wadsworth
at Inflationdata.com reported on August 6, 2007
College tuitions soar each year, advancing far in excess of
the inflation rate. The overall inflation rate since 1986 increased
92.32%, which is why we pay nearly double for everything we buy. On the other
hand, during the same time, tuition increased a whopping 343.81%.
Yet, the main reason tuition continues to rise is a dramatic
change that took place regarding the Federal Stafford Loan more than a decade
ago. When Uncle Sam opened the floodgates to government-backed student
loans without parent income restrictions in 1992, colleges welcomed the news
with open arms. The sudden injection of millions of additional aid dollars
only furthered tuition increases. Add to that the government’s continued
promotion of the Stafford Loan as a low-cost program, and you have the formula
for hyperinflationary costs.
When the government made it exceptionally easy for students
to borrow massive amounts of money, the colleges followed the lead by increasing
their tuition rates. This combination led to record-level borrowing.
Today the average undergraduate student loan debt is nearing $20,000.
Those who go on to graduate school often end up with an additional $30,000. Law
and medical students report an average accumulated debt from all years
(undergraduate and graduate study) of $91,700.
In other words, when the supply of tuition money is increased artificially by the government, the power-to-the-people crowd in academia artificially increases tuition, and for one reason – because the money is there, guaranteed by their friends in the Congress. So as the taxpayer subsidy increases for college students (socialism), the college administrators and professoriate improve their own financial positions through higher tuitions.
Meanwhile all American families are paying those higher
tuitions, weakening those families economically. Then those same professors use
their power over students to argue in favor of the socialism that is enriching
the colleges at the expense of taxpayers and parents.
And this is the reason that the Democrat party continues to
urge more government aid for students rather than demanding that the colleges
find ways to cut their bloated budgets - because it maintains the flow of
capital into the left-wing and Democrat-oriented universities.
It is a vicious cycle of price gouging perpetrated not by
capitalist oil companies or railroad robber barons or Halliburton, but by
far-left socialists in academia.
Since the 1970s, Congress has held more than a dozen
congressional hearings on price gouging in the oil industry and has never found
any evidence – never mind proof – that the oil companies are overcharging
consumers. Yet just two inquiries in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that academic
institutions indeed were colluding on pricing and overcharging students.
Here’s an
excerpt from an article by Andrew Williamson in the Yale Daily News of
Let me tell you an open
secret: In 1989, the Justice Department of the United States filed a civil
antitrust lawsuit against all eight Ivy League schools and MIT under the Sherman
Antitrust Act for collusion in the determination of need for financial aid. The
schools had been meeting every spring to discuss how much money they believed
commonly admitted students could afford to pay for college. The Justice
Department decided that this practice amounted to price fixing, and eventually
all eight Ivy League schools signed a consent agreement with the department in
1991 not to engage in the activity. (MIT refused to admit culpability.)
Another reason for skyrocketing college costs? More administrative bureaucracy, which is the way all socialist entities operate, i.e., pad the payroll.
From 1975 until 1985, college
enrollments in
In reaction to the rapidly rising cost of college education in
the 1980s and 1990s, and even a congressional inquiry that found colleges
colluding, the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education presented its
findings in a report called Straight Talk About College Costs and Prices
which was released on
The phenomenon of rising college tuition evokes a public
reaction that is sometimes compared to the "sticker shock" of buying a new car.
Although this reference to automobile prices may irritate some within the higher
education community, it serves to remind all of us that higher education is a
product, a service and a life-long investment bought and paid for, like others.
Rising college tuitions are real. In the 20 years between
1976 and 1996, the average tuition at public universities increased from $642 to
$3,151 and the average tuition at private universities increased from $2,881 to
$15,581. Tuitions at public two-year colleges, the least expensive of all types
of institutions, increased from an average of $245 to $1,245 during this period.
Public anxiety about college prices has risen along with
increases in tuition. It is now on the order of anxiety about how to pay for
health care or housing, or cover the expenses of taking care of an elderly
relative. Financing a college education is a serious and troublesome matter to
the American people.
Further the report noted
Between 1987 and 1996, median family income rose 37 percent
and disposable per-capita income rose 52 percent. During this same period, both
measures of net price (at colleges and universities) rose considerably faster.
Specifically, the price of attendance minus grants rose 114 percent at public
four-year institutions, 81 percent at private four-year institutions, and 159
percent at public two-year institutions. Total price minus all financial aid
(grants, loans, and work-study) demonstrates a similar pattern: this measure of
net price increased 95 percent at four- year institutions, 64 percent at private
four-year institutions, and 169 percent at public two-year institution.
The report noted these other factors in the rise in college
costs:
Administrators. The
need to employ more administrators to cover both expanded services and larger
numbers of Federal, state, and local regulations combined with higher
administrative salaries is thought to drive up administrative costs.
This contention may be true for the first half of the 1980s,
when administrative expenditures increased as a share of total educational and
general (E&G) expenditures, but, between 1987 and 1994, administrative
expenditures either remained the same or fell, as a percentage of total E&G
expenditures. Another way of looking at rising administrative costs is that
administrative expenditures per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student increased
over 22 percent between 1979 and 1986, but less than 1 percent between 1986 and
1993, after adjusting for inflation. The expenditures for student services costs
increased 16 percent during each of the two time periods in question.
Faculty. Many believe
that the labor structure and tenure system of college faculty drive up college
costs. It is true that higher education is a labor-intensive industry and that
changes in policies that affect the number of faculty required to teach courses
as well as the types of faculty hired (part-time vs. full-time, tenured vs.
non-tenured) have an impact on an institution's cost of providing education.
Regulations. The number and types of regulations with which colleges and universities are asked to comply have grown rapidly in recent years. Complying with these regulations costs money. The Federal government regulates colleges and universities through a maze of mandates covering personnel, students, laboratory animals, buildings, and the environment.
Stanford Universityfor example, estimates that the university incurs approximately $20 million a
year (or 7.5 cents of every tuition dollar) in costs related to complying with a
range of regulations.
Despite the report’s release in 1998, college costs have
continued to rise, showing that academics arrogantly ignore reality, have the
media and politicians in their pockets, and do absolutely nothing to create more
decent, affordable and more equitable institutions.
The outrageous and unsustainable costs of college education is a subject about which more Americans must become aware. As the 90% liberal professoriate and their administrative brethren have set up this vast mechanism for wealth transfer, socialism is being enriched as American families are being weakened.
And the very fact mentioned above that 7.5 cents of every
tuition dollar goes to cover government regulation at colleges and universities
– where few would even suspect that regulation is at work - is indicative of
the doubly corrosive nature of socialism on our economy, our families and the
prospects for the education of future generations.
The time to act is now.
Elite Republican Media All Wet
In a column called 'After the Election, Rebooting the Right',
senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review magazine sounds not
like a descendant of NR founder and conservative godfather William F. Buckley
but more like a child of Republicrat Arnold Schwarzenegger Shriver.
This is what has happened with all the elite East Coast Media
Republicans like Ponnuru, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and David
Brooks, the “house conservative” at the New York Times.
Ponnuru’s tone in the column is exactly what is wrong with
today’s Republican party. After two electoral defeats which are in large measure
part of a natural cycle, today’s soul-searching Therapy Culture Republicans
sound like a cowering father who decides that he should be more like his
permissive wife in order to win the affections of his children, rather than
acting as a strong role model to guarantee those children’s future.
Writes Ponnuru:
Republicans are feuding in the wake of the November election.
But they are not descending into civil war. That would be too tidy. What is
unfolding instead is an overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with
its own theme.
This is the tone of the entire debate in the wake of two GOP
electoral losses in 2006 and 2008, suggesting that it is an unwinnable conflict.
But consider the facts:
*The Republican party had 24 years of big victories including
Ronald Reagan’s first election in 1980 through 2004. Of course there are going
to be setbacks. It is part of the natural cycle.
*After a ‘perfect storm’ for Democrats in 2008 including the
political cycle, all-out media cheerleading for Obama, relentless attacks on
Bush and Republicans, a lousy McCain campaign, a financial collapse, and the
Iraq war, Obama only won the popular vote by 6.7 points. That is hardly a
landslide, Mr. P. Stop whining.
*During his campaign Obama at least once took the following
public positions, all of which are conservative. He said he favored, or would
consider, nuclear power, clean-coal technology, a rebuilt military, FISA
anti-terror legislation, 2nd amendment gun rights, offshore oil drilling and tax
cuts for the middle class. In addition he took the opposite positions on most of
those issues.
If McCain has stated these positions that clearly, he would
have won.
Writes Ponnuru of the “war” in the Republican party:
The war that will
get the most attention will center on social conservatives. Some Republicans
believe that their reputation for intolerance is costing the party the votes of
the next generation of Americans.
Never does Ponnuru question the
intolerance of gays toward the
majority that opposes homosexuality as evidenced in the riots and smears over
Prop 8 in
No, Republicrat Ponnuru then goes on to
scrutinize the role of neoconservatives in advocating the
But consider:
*The
*On illegal immigration, does Ponnuru suggest that Republicans
should agree with the open-borders crowd? That state and federal treasuries
should be opened to unlimited spending for non-citizens? Welcome, amigos, to the
Estados Unidos do Mexicano Norte.
*What does Ponnuru suggest as a response to Bush overspending?
A more pliant Republican party willing to spend even more so as to soften the
blow of evil fiscal conservatism, which would have prevented the current fiscal
crisis?
*With the Obama/Biden
ticket far to the left, and the McCain/Palin ticket split
centrist/conservative, what more does Ponnuru want from the GOP? Ted Kennedy as
VP?
Ponnuru then writes:
My guess is that the winning side in these Republican debates
will be tough on illegal immigration, federal spending and Obama. But all these
arguments will also largely miss the point. When a party suffers the kind of
beating the Republicans have taken in the past two elections, the public has not
rejected one of its factions. It has rejected the party as a whole. Voters have
turned on pro-choice as well as pro-life Republicans, on Senators who favored
amnesty and ones who fought it.
Yet what does that last
sentence suggest except that Americans are confused and don’t even think about the
issues any more. And of course Americans are confused. They watch Oprah Winfrey,
Brian Williams and CNN, they read Ramesh Ponnuru and the New York Times
and they listen to Obama take both sides of every issue without even asking any
questions.
Ponnuru suggests, as elite Media
Republicans always do, that the electorate has turned on conservative ideas. But
that is not true. The public has rejected Republican waffling and corruption
while electing many Democrats running on conservative platforms like governor
Schweitzer in
But if the Republican party is afraid to stand tough on the
issues, and against the liberal elites and the thumb-sucker Republican Media,
it will continue to lose. If conservatives drift left and take liberal
positions, the Democrat will always win. You can’t out-Democrat a Democrat.
McCain showed that.
Ponnuru writes:
At the GOP governors' meeting this
month, Tim Pawlenty of
Mr. Ponnuru, when you say that “A
revitalized conservatism would push for tax reform with an eye on the middle
class.”, aren’t you forgetting that the Republican party has been fighting
excessive taxation at every level for 100 years? Where have you been? Your name
sounds Indian. Do you recall the economic devastation visited on
Ponnuru says that a revitalized Republican party “would seek
solutions to global warming rather than deny that it exists.”
This is more Media
Republican bullcrap. Even the ‘warming’ kooks now call it ‘climate change’
because ‘warming’ has been debunked by the sheer weight of evidence
against it. And the climate always has ‘changed’. So there is no debate. ‘Global
warming’ does not exist while ‘climate change’ is nothing outside the natural
cycle. So now that we have these environmentalists trapped in their own lies, Ponnuru advises we wave the white flag. Typical moderate.
Making health care more affordable? The first step is to call
off the Democrat trial lawyers who are destroying the system by instilling fear
into every health care provider from doctors to ambulance crews, and forcing all
to pay sky-high insurance premiums, pushing up the cost of care dramatically.
Ramesh Ponnuru is one of
the elite Media Republicans who thinks that the GOP will start winning elections
again when it becomes more sensitive to the opinion page of the Washington
Post. This is nonsense. What the Republican party must do is offer a clear
alternative to an evolving Democrat culture of energy shortages, government dependency,
military un-preparedness and relentless taxation at the hands of Obama and his
Democrat cronies.
George W. Bush is leaving office with an approval rating
around 30%. This is not only because he has been unpopular with the 50% of
Americans that vote Democrat – that is a given. It is because his liberal
policies like excessive spending and open borders are unpopular with huge
numbers of people in the Republican party itself. Yet those very liberal
positions did not gain Bush one single vote from Democrats while
costing him dearly in the polls and in the media, thus ruining the “Republican
brand.”
And that is the big lesson of the last 8 years.
The 30 X 30 inch placard placed by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Coalition, an atheist group, says:
“At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell.
“There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”
The placard was allowed after a Jewish
menorah, a “holiday” tree, and a Christian crèche were placed in the statehouse.
The crèche, depicting the birth of Jesus, was placed in the statehouse this year
after a suit was filed following Gregoire’s lighting of a Jewish menorah in the
statehouse on
This year's atheist action only adds to the anti-Christian trend embodied in the substitution of the word “holiday” for “Christmas” during the Christmas season, part of a movement in America toward secular materialism and atheism and away from the Christian ideals on which our nation – and on which all the world’s freedom – is based.
Gregoire is described as a “Catholic” as are Democrat House speaker Nancy Pelosi, US senator Ted Kennedy, and thousands of other elected officials across the nation. Yet many of the political positions of these so-called "Catholics" – particularly their embrace of unfettered access to abortion – ally these figures with secularism and atheism.
The media promote the views of the Catholic Church only when bishops or clergy take liberal position like advocacy of pacifism or of government programs. But this is media cherry-picking of positions it finds useful to promote its own agenda. Meanwhile the genuine agenda of Christianity is challenged by the media in every way, including on the grounds of 'separation of church and state'.
Consider the religion of environmentalism, which is nothing more than the worship of nature as pagans have worshiped nature throughout history. Environmental paganism is entrenched in every single government institution from lawmaking legislatures to public schools and is never questioned.
What are the ties between environmental paganism and atheism?
They both put people last, that is what. Abortion is supported wholeheartedly by most environmentalists and most pagans. Abortion puts human life last. Yet if a citizen suggests we do a mass killing of deer or porcupines to control their populations, there is an outcry. And in environmentalism, human needs are always subservient to that of pristine nature.
Now consider the handiwork of 20th century
atheism. The three most notorious mass murderers of the last 100 years were
Joseph Stalin in the
All were committed atheists for whom human life and thus their own human existence itself was meaningless. Hitler even was an occultist who embraced the equivalent of ‘new age’ religions like those finding power in pyramids or crystals, palm reading, fortune telling, astrology, tarot cards etc. And nazi ideology included the love of nature, vegetarianism, love of animals, health fanaticism and hatred of cigarette smoking.
Sound familiar?
Now look at the message from the
Notice it does not say “there is no God” which is a good sign, because atheists are afraid even to use the word "God". But in private atheists actually spend more time thinking about God than Christians do, which shows the power of God. Just look at atheist writings… God does not exist, God is not who people say He is, God is a figment of the imagination. A recent best-selling atheist book was entitled The God Delusion. For people who do not believe in God, atheists spend an awful lot of time thinking about and talking about God.
So what is their message? It seems confusing. But atheists are confused people. Because if you have no beliefs, you do not even know who you are. If Christians believe in the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and Jews celebrate at Hanukkah the dedication of the new altar in the Temple of Jerusalem, what is the symbol of atheism? Is there any?
How often have we heard the phrase "living for something bigger than ourselves." This always is what great people and great cultures do. Yet to live for nothing and to believe in nothing but yourself and your own pleasure and convenience, as atheists do, represents selfishness and narcissism. In other words, nothing.
“There is only our natural world” says the atheist placard.
This phrase shows that atheism actually is an offshoot of modern-day environmentalism, which believes that man should live subjugated to the natural world.
And why are the words “Winter Solstice” capitalized on the Washington state placard?
Because atheists have so much respect for a date on the calendar that they must emphasize its importance. In other words, they are worshipful of… nothing at all... of a natural phenomenon that happens every year.
Do not be fooled. Underneath their blasé or happy exterior, atheists are angry people. That is why Mao Tse Tung and Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin executed tens of millions of people. And why Christian-based America has been the force that in the 20th century has spread the concept of freedom around the globe, a concept on which no nation ever had been built until the 18th century when men like Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, relying on Biblical principles, created a state in which people did not have to fear their fellow man and their own government.
“Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds,” says the atheist placard.
This is nothing more than hate speech, revealing the genuine
anger behind these people. Yet since liberals are perpetrating the hate speech,
it is not challenged. And it is the opposite of the truth.
Look at the hardening of hearts and enslavement of minds in Hitler’s
Republican US senator Jim DeMint of
The
“The current CVC displays are
left-leaning and in some cases distort our true history. Exhibits portray the
federal government as the fulfillment of human ambition and the answer to all of
society’s problems. This is a clear departure from acknowledging that Americans’
rights ‘are endowed by their Creator’ and stem from ‘a firm reliance on the
protection of Divine Providence.’ Instead, the CVC’s most prominent display
proclaims faith not in God, but in government. Visitors will enter reading a
large engraving that states, ‘We have built no temple but the Capitol. We
consult no common oracle but the Constitution.’ This is an intentional
misrepresentation of our nation’s real history, and an offensive refusal to
honor
‘…[I]t would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official Act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the Universe, who presides in the Councils of Nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the People of the United States, a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes: and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success, the functions allotted to his charge.’
“The fundamental principles of the freedom we enjoy in this country stem from our Founding Fathers’ beliefs in a higher power, beliefs put forth in the Declaration of Independence and manifest throughout our Constitution,” said Senator DeMint. “If we cease to acknowledge this fact, we may cease to enjoy some of the freedoms we take for granted. We must not censor historical references to God for the sake of political correctness. And we must truthfully represent the limited form of government the Constitution lays out so that our ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ So help us God.”
A troubling election in
In the November 23 ballot Hugo Chavez’s socialist party won strong majorities in
local elections.
On the bright side, the opposition made important gains, capturing
the mayoralty of the capital
Does this not sound just a little like the push for Obama and his
Democrat party to expand our government?
Obviously Chavez is much, much worse. His ultimate plans include
constitutional changes that would allow him to remain in power indefinitely – in
other words, dictatorship. But in the
meantime, Chavez is playing a marginally democratic game, not taking full
control of every office. If he feels threatened, however, he certainly will.
There was talk of tanks in the streets before the recent election.
After 10 years in office in which Chavez has sought to incrementally
take total control of the nation, the opposition was emboldened
by the
Chavez was legitimately elected in 1998, but has moved the nation
further toward dictatorial socialism using massive voter fraud, political
corruption and party control of the courts.
But Venezuela has huge and growing problems as a result of Chavez’s
rule, as explained in the October editorial below from my website and also including big increases in crime, rampant corruption, deteriorating
public services, electricity shortages and double-digit inflation, all hallmarks
of big-government socialist rule.
As Chavez has increased his power, the oil industry is degrading,
and food and energy shortages are plaguing the nation.
Here in America we have a somewhat parallel situation - the states dominated by
the Democrat party like New York State, Massachusetts, Michigan, Vermont and
Rhode Island - have shrinking economies, increasing poverty and bureaucratic
government blocks on economic development.
Chavez, leader of oil-rich
Chavez now is conducting joint military
maneuvers with Russia off the coast of Venezuela. This is Russia’s way of
“retaliating” against the US for courting Ukraine and Poland for NATO
membership. But both oil-rich Russia and oil-rich Venezuela now are suffering
big-time because of falling oil prices and declining petroleum production due to
inefficient and corrupt state-run oil companies. So failing birds of a feather
puff up their chests in order to act as if they are big and strong. Fat chance.
Both nations are in much deeper trouble than America currently is, even at our
lowest ebb.
Through socialism, Chavez is impoverishing larger and larger
portions of the population with policies of economic statis – high taxes,
bureaucracy, nationalization and corruption. Meanwhile Chavez is winning elections largely with the
support of the nation’s poor by handing out larger shares of the shrinking
pie to them. In turn he is using their votes to accomplish things like
nationalizing the oil industry.
In the
What is happening to the people of
Here is my October editorial called Business as Usual in Venezuela:
The production of oil
in the petroleum-rich nation of
The drop is attributed to corruption and inefficiency
as Chavez has nationalized the oil industry under the name PDVSA. In addition to
these cuts in production, Chavez is selling half of daily oil production to
friendly but poor South American countries at a discount, sapping
The
This drop in production is to be expected in a nation
where PDVSA has been called “central to the social battle for the advance of our
country,” said the Venezuelan minister for petroleum.
Blah, blah, blah…
This is just more socialist pablum from another
collapsing state-run economy that says it is seeking to better the lives of its
people. Instead, Chavez is driving
Government knows best! It even is being reported that
This is exactly what all rational capitalist economists
warn about when socialist blowhards start to talk about nationalizing resources
and using them for the benefit of “the people”. All you can do then is pray for
those “people”.
The private worldwide oil companies that built
Chavez even now has PDVSA producing furniture and
appliances(!?!) to get the foreign currency that it used to get by producing and
selling… oil.
But that oil was being produced and sold under the evil
capitalist system, which Chavez hates as much as he hates freedom. His
usurpation of political power is another story entirely.
This same tale keeps getting repeated over and over
throughout the world. Left-wing communist despots take over whole nations,
promising to help “the poor” and in the process destroying the entire nation,
making the middle class poor, and the poor even poorer.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the citizens of the world
understood what really happens under socialism, that it has nothing to do with
“the poor” but only with seizing absolute power?
Chavez and his cronies are doing to
There are many Americans in the Democrat party who
think everything is fine in
If that ever was achievable in the first place using
his tactics.
Which it is not.
Public Education ‘Reformers’ Don’t Reform
“Tenure is the holy
grail of teacher unions, but it has no educational value for kids; it only
benefits adults,” said so-called ‘reformer’ Michelle Rhee, the chancellor over
the last 18 months of the
Which is obvious, and which all sounds fine and dandy, as if she really is a ‘reformer’.
Which she is not. Rhee is just another bureaucrat who floated to the top of the
DC public school cesspool, but who will make no genuine changes because the
teacher unions run the education system, lock, stock and barrel.
So why did Obama talk so much about
‘change’ but he never ran on the idea
of reforming one of the most corrupt and underperforming institution in
Answer: Because Obama’s ‘change’ does not refer to his teacher union
friends whom the Democrat party showers with money, and who, in return shower
the Democrat party with contributions and electoral muscle.
Michelle Rhee is just another Democrat. She got her ‘reformer’
moniker by closing 23 failing DC schools and restructuring 27 others. So big
deal. She is the proverbial captain reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The Titanic still will go down. Rhee is simply trying to keep it afloat long
enough for the teacher unions to figure out how to commandeer the silverware,
china and anything else of value.
Rhee is acting as a change agent when she is nothing of the sort.
Another of Rhee’s ‘reforms’ is to scrap
the union tenure system which often keeps lousy teachers in lifetime
positions at ever-escalating salaries. But in exchange for eliminating tenure, Rhee is proposing... get this... a potential doubling of teacher salaries to an
average $130,000 a year(!) And remember that teachers work 9 months a year and
35 hours a week.
So even when a so-called ‘reformer’ comes in to fix the public
schools, it somehow always ends up costing more and more money. This is Democrat
unionization writ large.
It seems that every time a Democrat politician gives a speech, it
always includes the phrase “we must raise teacher pay”. This is a sop to their
loyal teacher union supporters. But the myth that teachers are underpaid is
precisely that... a myth. According to a US Bureau of Labor Statistics study
from 2005, the average public school teacher pay was $34.06 an hour, or an
annualized salary of $68,000 per year, which in 2008 would top $72,000. That’s
solidly at the upper end of middle-class salaries and higher than virtually all
other workers at teachers’ skill level in what is known as the ‘professional
specialty and technical worker’ class which includes nurses, architects and
computer scientists.
Median nationwide
public school teacher salaries in 2006 were $48,316 a year for 9
months of work, whereas the median salary for all American workers was roughly
the same…. for 12 months work. Meanwhile public school teachers get the best
benefit and pension plans of all workers in
The Washington DC situation looks like the Big 3 auto bailout in the
appropriate urban setting of Democrat-controlled Washington, DC where instead of
cars people don’t want to buy we get students that no employer would want to
hire, where only 12% of 8th grade students are proficient in reading
and 8% in math. These dreadful results come from the currently overpaid DC
teachers who are making an average annualized salary of $89,000 ($65,000 for 9
months work) for a job that is often the equivalent of unskilled labor.
After all, what does it take to be a public school teacher today in
most urban school districts besides being a baby-sitter/police guard? Even in
decent school districts, the average teacher attains his/her position through a
painstaking trek through mediocrity and pub-ed indoctrination, which requires
primarily a willingness to submit.
Of course there are “good teachers” in the public system. A few of
them. But for the most part, public schools are not run “for the kids”. That is
only the rhetoric they use to keep their funding pumped up artificially high.
They are run “for the union”. Period.
Once upon a time, the
public schools in
Arnold Kling an
adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute reported in January 2007 that 88% of
all American kids attend public schools. He also noted that the schools in his
home of
Average salary per employee - $89,686!
For 9 months of work per year.
With the number of students divided by the number of employees,
however, Kling found a ratio of 6.3 students per employee. But since everyone
knows that average classes in public schools are anywhere from 20 to 30 students
in a place like Montgomery, the obvious culprit in the persistently
skyrocketing cost of public education is in the bureaucratic tactic of hiring
more and more non-teachers to pad out payrolls. Kling’s example: When No Child
Left Behind was instituted the Montgomery Country schools hired a group of NCLB
testing coordinators.
The same is happening
in our left-wing universities. From 1975 until 1985,
college enrollments in
And with Montgomery County public school salaries of almost $90,000
per year, those jobs obviously are going to be awarded to chosen Democrat
party/union loyalists as they are everywhere in American public education. This
is why the public schools are getting worse and worse at the same time that they
are getting more and more money, because they are strictly political/union
institutions, not educational ones. Meanwhile, the public ed bureaucracy does
everything it can to thwart options like vouchers, charter schools and even
parent-chosen home schooling.
Naturally while Obama and his rich Democrat friends
have supported public education and the teacher unions wholeheartedly, those
schools are not trusted with the president-elect's own children. Obama’s
daughters will attend tony Sidwell Friends, a private school in
So the president-elect will never be able to experience the bliss of chancellor
Michelle Rhee’s so-called reform program, which will chug merrily along into
oblivion nibbling away at the fringes of the public education blob while the
teacher union juggernaut rolls on with the blessings of the Democrat party that
supports it, and that it supports in return in every way possible.
Holder a Bad Choice for Attorney General
While president-elect Obama appears to be moving to the center on
economic policies, it is important to keep our eyes on the attorney general
position because the legal system is the vehicle through which Obama plans to
really shift the nation left.
Eric Holder, who gained his law degree
from
Holder first was nominated to serve as
a judge of the superior court of the
The office of the
Holder’s nomination should give us pause because the AG acts
as the de facto model for the nation’s jurisprudence. But Holder has been
involved in four controversial cases since his rise to national prominence in
1997, each of which gives an indication where he might take our legal system.
None is encouraging. Below are the four cases, with a comment following each.
1) The most famous case involved Elian
Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who was brought to
After a prolonged legal battle, Elian
was seized at gunpoint by immigration officials from his great uncle’s home in
Below is an interview involving Holder
from Fox news on
Napolitano: The order issued by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals four days ago .... said once the INS chooses the guardian, and the INS chose Lazaro Gonzalez to be the guardian, and an application for asylum has been made by the guardian, the INS can not change the guardian and that’s exactly what they did here."
Asman: "So is this executive overreach?"
Napolitano: "This is more than executive overreach. This is contempt of the circuit court of appeals order. This is a high class kidnapping is what it is, sanctioned by no law, sanctioned by no judge..."
In an interview later that morning, Napolitano questioned Eric Holder:
Napolitano: Tell me, Mr. Holder, why did you not get a court order authorizing you to go in and get the boy?
Holder: Because we didn’t need a court order. INS can do this on its own.
Napolitano: You know that a court order would have given you the cloak of respectability to have seized the boy.
Holder: We didn’t need an order.
Napolitano: Then why did you ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for such an order if you didn’t need one?
Holder: [Silence]
Napolitano: The fact is, for the first time in history you have taken a child from his residence at gunpoint to enforce your custody position, even though you did not have an order authorizing it.
Earlier in that interview:
Napolitano: When is the last time a boy, a child, was taken at the point of a gun without an order of a judge. Unprecedented in American history."
Holder: "He was not taken at the point of a gun."
Napolitano: "We have a photograph showing he was taken at the point of a gun." (Editorial note: The famous photograph of an armed soldier from the US Border Patrol’s BORTAC unit was taken by Alan Diaz and won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.)
Holder: "They were armed
agents who went in there who acted very sensitively..."
Two weeks before the raid that seized Elian, NBC’s Tim Russert asked Holder: "You wouldn't send a SWAT team in the dark of night to kidnap the child, in effect?"
Holder said: "No, we don't expect anything like that to happen."
When the INS did exactly that Russert asked Holder in a later interview: "Why such a dramatic change in position?"
Holder responded: "I'm not sure I'd
call it a dramatic change. We waited 'til five in the morning, just before
dawn." (of
Meanwhile Obama’s nominee as White
House Counsel, Greg Craig, was the lawyer who represented Elian Gonzalez’s
father, who was living in
Comment: So for once, liberals sided with the father in a custody case, but only since the father lived in a communist nation.
Those Holder interviews show a disrespect for law. And this
type of uncertainty and concocted law really is not what we should expect of an
attorney general. That Holder would be silent when Napolitano asked “Then why
did you ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for such an order if you didn’t
need one?” shows that Holder does not have the ability to interpret the law and
make a case for sound legal actions.
2) Holder was the driving force behind
Bill Clinton’s pardon of 16 members of the communist FALN Puerto Rican terrorist
group which executed an estimated 146 bombings and a string of armed robberies
in the US and Puerto Rico between 1974 and 1983, killing six and wounding many.
Their attacks included the infamous
The terrorists in that case were belligerent and unrepentant.
Ida Rodriguez told the judge, “You say we have no remorse. You’re right. … Your
jails and your long sentences will not frighten us.”
After 18 years in prison, eight of the
Fraunces Tavern terrorists were pardoned by Bill Clinton.
As deputy attorney general at the time,
Eric Holder had to sign off on all clemency pleas that went to
But rather than consult bombing victims and their families,
Holder met with members of Congress and then recommended a course of action for
the terrorists to take.
Comment: This is
hardly the way an attorney general should act. This was a blatant disregard for
the common security of the American people. This is the type of legal laxity
that led to 9/11, where terrorists were either not pursued during the
3) In another controversial action,
Holder in January 2001 participated in one of the most notorious pardons of all
time,
Rich has never served
time in prison. He fled the
In exchange for Rich’s pardon, Rich’s
ex-wife Denise gave almost a half-million dollars to
Comment: Holder played dumb in the Rich
case, saying he did not know much about Rich. Is this the type of person we want
as attorney general? Someone who works to grant clemency to people who don’t
deserve it any way, shape of form, people who fled justice and the United
States? What does this say about Holder?
4) As deputy attorney general, Holder was a strong supporter
of restrictive gun control, federal licensing of handgun owners, a waiting
period on handgun sales, restricting handgun sales to one per month, banning
possession of handguns by anyone under age of 21, national gun registration, and
mandatory prison sentences for minor offenses like giving a child an heirloom
handgun if he were too young.
Holder also quoted the anti-gun propaganda that every day “about 12, 13 more children in this country die from gun violence" which is true only if you include 18-year-old gang members.
Holder also co-signed an
amicus brief in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the
landmark firearms case which was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court in
favor of gun ownership as an individual right.
The brief was filed in support of DC's ban on all handguns, and a ban on the use of any firearm for self-defense in the home, saying that the 2nd Amendment is a "collective" right, not an individual one.
After 9/11, Holder authored a Washington Post column entitled ‘Keeping Guns Away From Terrorists’ arguing that a new law should give "the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms a record of every firearm sale."
Comment: This type of thinking goes against the Natural Law on which American freedom is based. One of Natural Law’s primary tenets is that all people have the right to self-defense, which may sound like common sense. But in America today, people who harm criminals in defending themselves against those criminals frequently are prosecuted. This has happened under liberalism, which entrusts all defense to the courts - often after it is too late - and none to individual action. So there is no intrinsic right to self-defense according to liberal socialism.
Real self-defense today means the individual right to own a
gun in order to defend both your person and your home. Holder’s persistently
anti-gun positions disqualify him from being an acceptable candidate for
attorney general of the
Ronald Hoover
There was question in the media about exactly how
president-elect Obama planned to deal with the economic crisis. Some have
speculated that he would move right with moderate economic policies that
would foster growth the old-fashioned way – by creating wealth through the
methodical process of wise capital formation and deployment. And several of his
appointments including Reagan-era Fed chairman Paul Volcker, Christina Romer, a
tax cutter from UC Berkeley, and Tim Geithner at Treasury indicate that he may
be prudent in this area.
But for those who are skeptical about a candidate who said
he wanted to “spread the wealth around,” Obama’s Saturday November 22 radio
address offered some troubling language. Here are excerpts from the address
followed by observations:
Excerpt: The news this week has only reinforced the fact that we are
facing an economic crisis of historic proportions. Financial markets faced more
turmoil. New home purchases in October were the lowest in half a century.
Five-hundred-forty-thousand more jobless claims were filed last week, the
highest in 18 years. And we now risk falling into a deflationary spiral that
could increase our massive debt even further.
Observation: This is Obama talking down the economy. We would never get
this from an optimist or a conservative. Ronald Reagan would have said something
like: “We have challenges that we will meet with American optimism”. When Obama
aides said that the current economic crisis offers an historic opportunity to
reshape the economy, they were really talking about reinstating Roosevelt-type
New Deal policies which utterly failed to improve the economy of the 1930s.
Let’s hope Obama resists temptation. Volcker is a good sign he might. But you
never know.
Excerpt: While I'm pleased that Congress passed a long-overdue
extension of unemployment benefits this week, we must do more to put people back
to work and get our economy moving again. We have now lost 1.2 million jobs this
year, and if we don't act swiftly and boldly, most experts now believe that we
could lose millions of jobs next year.
There are no quick or easy fixes to this crisis, which has
been many years in the making, and it's likely to get worse before it gets
better. But January 20th is our chance to begin anew - with a new direction, new
ideas, and new reforms that will create jobs and fuel long-term economic growth.
Observation: Obama here is setting the table for big government
intervention in the economy in addition to the $1+ trillion in bailouts already
in effect. “A new direction, new ideas, and new reforms” is nothing more than
the same old stuff: Use the government to try and fix the economy. It will not
work. He has talked about $500 billion more in economic stimulus. This is just
throwing money at a problem that requires patience. Perhaps his appointees will
talk him out of it.
And indeed the crisis has been years in the making, but it
has evolved out of Obama’s ideology – decades of massive government waste,
corruption at Fannie Mae, and laws like the Community Reinvestment Act that
forced private banks into the role of social engineers.
Excerpt: I have already directed my economic team to come up with an
Economic Recovery Plan that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011 -
a plan big enough to meet the challenges we face that I intend to sign soon
after taking office. …We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling
roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and
building wind farms and solar panels…
Observation: Obama plans to create these 2.5 million jobs using the
government as an employer, creating huge new deficits. He can easily create 5
million or 10 million jobs in this way if he is willing to take on enough debt.
But it will not improve the economy in the long term. Only private growth will
do that.
The whole idea of “rebuilding our
crumbling roads and bridges” is classic socialism and is exactly the route that
FDR took between 1933 and 1938 with make-work government jobs building roads and
bridges and other public projects. It did not work. The unemployment rate was
higher in 1938 than it was in January 1933 when
“Modernizing our schools” is just another term for throwing
more billions into the pot for the public school bureaucracy and the teacher
unions, which then will contribute it back to the Democrat party. The public
schools have been failing for decades now. Why give them more money?
Meanwhile Obama’s plan to finance “wind farms and solar
panels” with government cash is nonsense. Think ethanol. The whole
pie-in-the-sky ethanol program, touted for years by environmentalists, has
turned out to be hugely inefficient, has pushed up food prices by diverting
large amounts of the corn crop to fuel, requires tens of billions in government
subsidies, and never even has been shown to produce more energy that it
consumes. In other words, ethanol production is voraciously consuming three
critical things – food, energy and capital, while its government subsidies hide
its real effects. Wind farms and solar panels will be no different.
Excerpt: These aren't just steps to pull ourselves out of this
immediate crisis; these are the long-term investments in our economic future
that have been ignored for far too long. And they represent an early down
payment on the type of reform my administration will bring to Washington - a
government that spends wisely, focuses on what works, and puts the public
interest ahead of the same special interests that have come to dominate
our politics.
Observation: Obama talks about “investments”, but most government
spending is not “investment” because it relies on taxation, which is the
nationalization of private investment capital. Private capital in private hands
is true “investment”.
To learn more about “investment”, just
go to the states where the economies were collapsing long before the financial
crisis hit and you will find Democrats in control with their big government
spending programs and high tax levels.
In Obama’s big economic rollout on
Monday, November 24, he called for more government spending including a tax cut
for the “vast majority” of Americans in the middle class paid for by the nation’s “wealthiest”.
Let’s hope Volcker and Romer talk some
sense into Obama.
Here is an excerpt from the
article 'Irrationalizing Employment Growth' in the National Review of
September 14, 2004, by contributing editor Tom Nugent restating a
well-established fact that increasing taxes on upper-income citizens harms the
economy:
In particular, Democrats continue to
press the idea that the first four Bush years have turned in the worst rate of
job growth since the
So not only has Obama talked about
“taxing the rich” but he is protectionist as well, which will hurt our economy
just as Smoot Hawley did. He campaigned on renegotiating free-trade agreements
Regarding Obama’s plan to genuinely cut taxes for the middle
class: The Democrat party has relentlessly taxed the middle class over the last
50 years. Real tax reform would permanently encode significantly lower tax rates
for the entire middle class. Obama won’t do this. He already has plans to
increase the Social Security tax
Obama has sent so many mixed signals that even normally level-headed Fox News headlined its story about Obama’s November 25 press conference like this: Obama Promotes Fiscal Restraint, Big Spending
Huh?
What we do know is that the Fox headline is half right. Obama probably is going to do one thing to restrain spending and that will be to cut the military substantially as Bill Clinton did. Clinton went farther however, gutting out intel agencies too, which led to 9/11. In the wake of the Mumbai, India terrorist attacks of November 26, we must realize that vigilance it crucial. Whether Obama plans to remain vigilant economically or militarily is another story. Time will tell.
Obama’s Worldwide Recession
Remember president Bill Clinton vowing to “end welfare as we know
it”?
After the Republican congress twice sent him welfare reform legislation, he finally signed it on the third try only because he thought that he might lose the 1996 presidential election if he didn’t.
And while “ending welfare as we know it” has been a conservative
dream for decades, Democrats have been promising to end “corporate welfare” for
the same amount of time. But these “welfare” descriptions really are opposites
because poor people collecting welfare are a net minus to society, while
corporations that create jobs and wealth are obviously a plus.
The old adage is that you get more of what you subsidize, and you
get less of what you tax. So if you subsidize poverty with welfare payments, you
will have more poor people which is why there is so much poverty in America 40
years after Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’.
On the other hand if you tax business heavily, you will have fewer
jobs which is why
But the definition of “corporate welfare” is inaccurate because it
is derived from the viewpoint of liberalism in which it refers to anything less
than a 100% tax rate on corporations. So if a corporation pays 35% corporate
tax, Democrats call it “65% corporate welfare” or “a 65% corporate subsidy”. And
then any reduction in that 35% rate is said to be “an increase in corporate
subsidies” or “more corporate welfare.”
This is also how the media have framed the debate on taxes as well.
Over and over we hear about “the Bush tax cuts for the rich that will expire in
2010”. But there is no such thing as a “Bush tax cut”. It really is a Bush-era
tax rate on the wealthy, which also is 35% and is lower than the
So don’t be fooled because there is no baseline against which all
taxes are measured. Except in liberal
Now Time
magazine is building up the Obama mystique, photo-shopping Obama’s face onto a
famous picture of socialist president Franklin Roosevelt. Because Obama has
promised, among other things, to raise the existing tax rates on wealthy
Americans, raise capital
gains tax rates and raise taxes on businesses.
Yet at the very same time most commentators, even including
And it is well known that one of the main causes of the great
depression of the 1930s was that president
During the 2008 campaign, Obama was advocating more of the policies that already
have led to the Obama Worldwide Recession. Here is why it is Obama’s recession:
1)
Our current domestic woes began - and have spilled over into the international
arena - as a result of banks lending trillions of dollars over
the years to people without the ability to repay. Under the socialistic Obama-oriented Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, banks were forced to loan
money to “low income” people. But never satisfied, liberals then made these
mandates apply to “low- and moderate-income people”. This is called Creeping
Socialism and is the way that it goes from helping the poor into supporting the
middle class.
2)
Obama’s Democrat friends in the government-sponsored Federal National Mortgage
Association (Fannie Mae) then gave banks a way to rid themselves of these loans
by buying the loans and passing the liability on to the taxpayer.
3)
Obama’s friends at Fannie Mae then cooked the books and looted the agency.
Franklin Raines, an Obama and
4)
The entire banking industry has been permeated over the last 40 years by Obama-type
intellectuals who say that the word “conservative” is evil and that banks should
become institutions for social engineering. So banks lowered their standards.
The current crisis is the end result.
5)
Wall Street has been taken over by liberals who have corrupted the system.
According to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics, employees at the top
6)
The huge stock market selloff of Autumn 2007 came as a result of the Obama-caused
mortgage crisis and from fear that Obama was going to get elected and jack up
capital gains tax rates. So people sold out before the Obama rates kicked in.
7)
The Big 3 American car companies – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler - have been
slowly collapsing for years because Obama’s union friends have been getting $70
an hour wage/benefit packages. Meanwhile the pay rate in the thriving non-union
“Southern auto industry”, which includes foreign nameplates like Nissan,
8)
Many
Obama-friendly American cities are running to the
federal government for bailout money, yet their fiscal crises have been caused
by decades of profligate spending by corrupt Democrat administrations.
Conservatives have warned that these policies eventually would lead to collapse.
Now they have.
9)
10)
Obama’s friends in the public
school teacher unions have decided not to teach anything to tens of millions of
people who now have no education and no ability to think. Their ignorance is a
key factor in the Obama American Recession. Obama says that the solution is to
give these schools more money while rational people (conservatives) have been
suggesting alternatives for decades.
Certainly Obama wants to “end
corporate welfare” like all liberals. It actually means “raise taxes”.
Except “corporate welfare” is OK when it
comes to bailing out his union friends at the Big 3 car companies, in which case
he wants unlimited taxpayer funds.
The unions should bail out the
car companies with their own money. They have drawn a hundred times the wealth
out of the auto makers than those companies need to stay afloat.
This indeed is the Obama Worldwide Recession. America, and the world, needs to cut business tax rates and all other taxes, cut their bloated government budgets, let banks do their lending according to historical standards and promote alternatives to the failed public school system.
We are in the Obama Worldwide Recession for one reason only: It is called Obama Socialism.
Final note: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9625.28 on election day November 4. The Dow figures for every day afterward is a function of many factors, including the incoming president Obama who was supposed to offer us hope and optimism.
The editorial below was posted
November 19, 2008
Have you ever heard of The Washington
Monument Ploy? It works like this: Imagine the city of
The public is outraged. Letters pour
in from all over the nation. How could the city close a monument that represents
all that
Angry citizens and members of the DC
city government then go into serious closed-door sessions trying to decide what
to do. They emerge and announce that the
This is what is happening all over
This is done in order to cover up the Democrats’ wasteful spending practices and to keep their bloated budgets intact and hidden so that nobody suggests that perhaps before raising taxes that they city could trim swollen bureaucracies, throw lazy citizens off of the government dole, eliminate wasteful sweetheart spending deals with private contractors, or scale back the outrageous pay, benefit and pension packages that cities pay to their cronies in their own unionized work forces. Or perhaps the cities could review their decades-long spending frenzies that conservatives have warned about.
Today we have states and cities all
over begging for government handouts in light of the fiscal crisis. Here are
just a few of the Washington Monument Ploys and wasteful practices that have put
governments in fiscal holes from which they now wish to be rescued:
In
The Capitol Visitor Center in
Washington, DC, part of the United States Capitol complex,
finally has been completed at a cost of… $621 million.. for a visitor
center!?! It was started in 2000 and is way late and over budget. These
government projects must under law pay inflated union wage scales, and so the
taxpayer works more and more hours in order to put more money into union pockets
and into the coffers of the Democrat party.
In
Between 2004 and 2007,
And for 8 years (1999-2007),
The only Republicans to have much
power in
The
In
In light of the fiscal crisis, one
commuter told CBS2 in
So you have to wonder: Isn’t that commuter practicing the
‘thrift’ that our Founding Fathers recommended over and over (Benjamin Franklin:
“A penny saved is a penny earned.”), the kind of common-sense economics that has
been laughed out of money-hungry Chicago politics for the last 100 years.
In
Perhaps all the leftist wastrels in
Hey, Arnie, it is both! But what else can you expect from a
Republicrat like Schwarzenegger.
“We must stop the bleeding,” said
Arnie. Which
Ahh, California… the ultra-liberal
state with the Welcome Illegal Aliens sign at the border. In
In Democrat/union-dominated
Interestingly, some ‘red states’ that voted McCain but that have conservative Democrat governors have gotten the message about big bureaucracies. Joe Manchin of West Virginia cut the number of state workers two years in a row to keep that number in line with the state’s economic growth and population. This is a good sign that Republican ideas are taking hold in a few corners of the Democrat party. “By adopting an attitude of customer service and operating more like a business, we’ve boosted quality and not quantity,” Manchin said.
Since he took
office in January 2005, Manchin has stressed trimming waste and finding ways to
cut government’s cost. From December 2005 through December 2006, the decrease
was 873 employees, or from 26,915 to 26,042 which may seem small, but actually
is significant because it is going in the right direction (down), rather than
going up every year.
1984 All Over Again
When the
There were arms-control agreements that sought to limit offensive
missiles and even defensive radar installations on each side as an alternative
to Mutually Assured Destruction, the doctrine that said that the sheer volume of
missiles on each side would make a first nuclear strike so costly in retaliation
that nobody would make that first strike. MAD was the deterrent with one fatal
flaw – it could end in Armageddon.
The Soviets often cheated on arms control, leading Republicans to
favor certain strength over suspect negotiation. And while Ronald Reagan
famously said “Trust but verify” in order
to be tough on Soviet compliance (verify), but not to shut the door on dialogue
(trust), he ultimately took the confrontational road to its logical end, seeking
to deploy the offensive MX ‘Peacekeeper’ missile and other advanced systems
including the 'Star Wars' defensive system. The result was the fall of an empire
that Reagan openly called “evil” in a 1983 TV address.
Today
This is how Soviet tyrants for decades made gullible pacifists
worldwide believe that even the West’s defensive systems would lead to arms
buildups. This happened with the 'Star Wars’ outer space Strategic Defense
Initiative which the communists said would cause an arms buildup because they
(the Soviets) would have to massively build up their offenses to have any chance
of overwhelming Star Wars with sheer numbers.
Rather than doing the civilized thing by joining the free world,
that is.
Now Russian president Dmitri Medvdev announced to the world the day
after the
Anyone old enough to remember the year 1984 recalls a somewhat
parallel situation.
That year, president Reagan began without hesitation to move forward with the
deployment of an upgraded version of 380 offensive, mobile, intermediate-range
nuclear-tipped Pershing missiles on French and German soil to counter the
offensive, intermediate-range nuclear-tipped Soviet SS-20 missiles that already
were installed in the Soviet bloc and pointed at
In other words Reagan was seeking to counter an offensive threat with an offensive threat in order to show that we meant business with a balancing of forces. This was seen as a terrifying situation by the peaceniks, and they marched against the Pershings by the millions.
They instead offered the nice-sounding Zero Option in which both
sides would agree to pull back their offensive missiles, i.e., America would
halt any pending deployment, while the Soviets would dismantle their existing
missiles. Reagan, however, having worked with communist liars and agitators in
the Screen Actors Guild in
The Pershings were deployed and ultimately, in 1991, the
Today, Medvdev is threatening to counter a defensive system
in
During his campaign, Obama was
appropriately vague on the Polish defensive system. And now, as president-elect,
Obama has had a phone conversation with Polish president Lech Kaczynski about
it. Kaczynski said on his website that in the call Obama
"emphasized the importance of the strategic
partnership of
But the Obama transition
team disagrees and says that “the president-elect had a good conversation with
the Polish president and the Polish prime minister about the important US-Poland
alliance. President Kaczynski raised missile defense but president-elect Obama
made no commitment on it. His position is as it was throughout the campaign –
that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is
proved to be workable”
First, notice the wording -
“when the technology is proved to be workable.”
This is key. Because
incrementally over the years, missile defense systems have been improving. But
the liberals and media have done everything they can to marginalize them, to
make it seem the opposite, highlighting test failures and ignoring test
successes. So Obama always can say that the system is not 100% and therefore
that he will not deploy. This is how he probably will cave in to Russia and
telegraph American weakness from his first day in office.
But not only is this “workable” wording disturbing, but moreso is the fact that Obama just can’t seem to agree on what was exchanged with the Polish president. This might seem like a miscommunication, but it is reminiscent of another incident in the campaign when Obama had a similar disagreement over what he said to a foreign leader.
It leaves us wondering: Is
there a pattern here?
The Washington Times reported last summer that Samir Sumaidaie, Iraq’s ambassador to the U.S., said that in a June 16 telephone conversation with Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari that Obama “urged Iraq to delay the [memorandum of understanding] (about withdrawals of American troops) between Iraq and the United States until the new administration was in place.”
And like the disagreement over what
Obama said to the Polish president, the Obama campaign denied that he made such
a request of the Iraqis because among other things it would be a violation of
the Logan Act, a federal law from 1799
forbidding unauthorized citizens from negotiating with
foreign governments.
So on two separate occasions
involving Iraq and Poland, once as a nominee and once as a
president-elect, Obama has contradicted statements that foreign leaders claimed
he made to them.
What does this say? And who
is telling the truth?
It says what conservatives
have warned about: That Obama will say whatever is convenient to advance his
agenda. This is a dangerous situation because it is an indicator of how he would
lead.
Fortunately, we do not face
a Cold War situation today. But there are many dangerous situations in the
world. How will Obama deal with them?
His behavior thus far is not encouraging. Since he has expressed a desire to cut back our military substantially, he probably will cave in on the Polish defense shield in the face of a Russian threat as part of his pullback strategy and his plan to make America newly palatable to world opinion – and newly weaker. This will set the template for his four years in office, to lead from weakness and not from the strength that leftists believe has caused American prestige to slip in the world.
That is the issue we should
be most concerned about.
Obama’s Distressing First Press Conference
President-elect Barack Obama’s first press conference was
distressing. Appearing on stage with a group of economic advisers standing behind him
(including only one conservative), Obama's
opening statement, which he read, was expectedly smooth. But in reporters'
questioning he appeared hesitant and unable to complete his thoughts. When
challenged, he never answered a question about raising taxes on the rich
but instead meandered aimlessly through a campaign talking point about tax cuts
for the middle class.
There is only one chance to make a first impression and Obama’s first encounter with the press made a highly questionable one. Most of the press conference was boilerplate.
First, he was 22 minutes late. Naturally some would say that that is
a minor point, but George Bush - and conservatives
in general - always are punctual, while Bill Clinton was notoriously late. Lateness
is a trait of liberals because they think only about themselves. So Obama is
continuing in that vein.
You would have thought that he would have made sure to be on time for this first big public appearance. He wasn’t, and it was annoying for a national TV audience waiting to hear his comments. It set a low standard. Isn't our economic crisis urgent? Does it not need immediate attention? What kind of signal does his tardiness send?
Obama said in his statement that he would keep “fully informed” about
the economy as he approaches his inauguration. Yet we all can be “fully
informed” by going on the internet or turning on the television. Obama then
discussed “small businesses that are struggling to meet payrolls and finance
holiday inventories.” These are the same small businesses he promised to tax more heavily,
like Joe the Plumber’s dreamed-of small business.
Obama fell back on his talking points about “fuel efficient cars… clean energy, health care, education and tax relief for middle-class families” which we’ve heard before a thousand times. Why repeat it?
He also said he would “put aside partisanship.” Yet his choice of partisan Rahm Emmanuel as White House chief of
staff is hardly reassuring.
Obama made some lame attempts at humor. He talked for far too
long about the impending purchase of a dog for his daughters but assured the
media that the dog would be hypoallergenic and not “a mutt like me”, referring
to his biracial ancestry.
Obama then took a swipe at the late president Ronald Reagan and his widow Nancy Reagan, suggesting he might have “séances” with her in response to a question about whether he had consulted former presidents about the job. This was completely uncalled for and showed a lack of class and respect. Obama called Mrs. Reagan to apologize. This is a bad start to his presidency.
When asked whether his children would attend public or private
schools, Obama answered that his wife Michelle "will be scouting out some
schools”, obviously skirting the question and the inevitable fact that his
children will never attend the Washington DC public schools that Obama’s
party and political philosophy support wholeheartedly… for other children, that
is.
Obama stumbled repeatedly throughout the Q&A part of the press conference. It was a litany of “uhhh… um… uh… um…. uh… uhhh…” He seemed unable to think on his feet.
Obama defenders would say that he might have been nervous in his first outing. But that is nonsense. He has been in the public eye for more than a decade.
Barack Obama has made his presence felt on three occasions since his
election: In his unsmiling acceptance speech in
If this is the beginning of the Obama presidency, it does not look
good. The president-elect practically bolted from the room after 19
minutes, while he kept the national audience waiting 22 minutes for his arrival
You do the math.
The Manchurian Candidate
For those who may not have missed it,
our new president’s victory speech in Grant Park in
Obama was downright angry throughout the speech, and after. His face
seemed oddly blank and passionless for someone who had just won the presidency.
The speech certainly is available all over the web. Check it out. You’ll see.
You can tell when someone is happy. It
shows. Even Bill and Hillary managed to smile at their victory party in
Just before the election, on October 30, a trickle of
curiosity from the Ancient Media began to emerge. Here’s an exchange between PBS
media maven Charlie Rose and Tom NBC Brokaw:
ROSE: I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is.
BROKAW: No, I don't, either.
ROSE: I
don't know how he really sees where
BROKAW: We don't know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
ROSE: I don't really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him.
BROKAW: Yeah, it's an interesting question.
ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.
BROKAW: Two of them! I don't know what books he's read.
ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?
BROKAW:
There's a lot about him we don't know.
Actually, some of us know. Plenty.
We tried to warn the public that Obama was an associate of terrorist William
Ayers, that he was a student of radical Saul Alinsky who wrote the book
Rules for Radicals, that his associates were communists including his
Indonesian step-father Lolo Soetero and his cousin Raila Odinga who now is
sharing power as president of
Of course 'Mild John' McCain would have nothing to do with
looking into the real Obama. In McCain’s get-along universe, polite people have
everything to lose and nothing to gain. To challenge Obama might have been too
intrusive for someone who would rather lose an election than win an election.
Sometimes you wonder about McCain, if he really wanted to be president
anyway, or maybe just get back at the Republican party by throwing it to Obama.
Curious. Perhaps he felt some guilt about being white or Republican or having a
$100 million wife when we could have a black guy for president.
What have other media gnats been saying about Obama since
his election?
Here’s a few selections from an interview among Rose and
Newsweek’s ultra-liberal Evan Thomas and more-ultra-liberal Jon Meacham:
Obama is “slightly creepy” and “very elusive”. He is “deeply
manipulative”. At his victory speech Obama was “watching us watching him”. And
”he has the self awareness to know that this creature he’s designed isn’t
necessarily a real person.”
Excuse me?
And this comes from the dying paper-bound
media that still have just a handful of reporters on staff who
are supposed to find out “things” about “people”. Like the guy who wants to be
our president.
Captain Bennett Marco,
Sergeant Raymond Shaw and the rest of their platoon are captured during the
Korean War in 1952. They are all brainwashed into believing Shaw saved their
lives in combat, for which he receives the Medal of Honor when they return to
the United States. Years after the war is over, Marco, now an intelligence
officer, begins to have a recurring nightmare in which Shaw murders two of his
comrades while being watched by Chinese and Russian officials. When he learns
that another platoon member has been having the same dream, he sets out to
uncover the mystery.
The Communists intend
to use Shaw as a sleeper agent and, using the queen of diamonds in a deck of
playing cards as a subconscious trigger, compel him to follow their orders,
which he does not remember afterwards. Shaw is controlled by none other than his
own politically ambitious and domineering mother, who is working with the
Communists in a plot to overthrow the U.S. government.
To have seen Obama unsmiling
in his victory speech you start to wonder: Who is this guy? Where did he come
from? Who has influenced him and why? Is he programmed in some way? What do we
really know about what he really thinks?
Now word has emerged that some in the McCain camp are angry with Sarah Palin. This is interesting coming from the campaign of a man of such honor, who served his country, who seemed to want to be president enough to run twice. Now Palin is under attack from people inside a failed candidacy. This is to be expected. Among the losers, there always is finger-pointing and blame. These people are looking for a scapegoat and seeking to save their own necks.
By blaming Palin for being
“a diva” and spending money on clothes and “going rogue” by bringing up Obama’s
Ayers connection without approval from the official campaign, Palin broke a lot
of rules. Some say that McCain and Palin weren’t speaking by campaign’s end.
Which is as it should be. McCain was dragging down the ticket and Palin knew it.
In four-and-a-half hours of debate, McCain could have devoured Obama. What was McCain afraid of? Why didn’t he call Obama out? Why did he gloss over the Ayers connection as if it were nothing at all? Why didn’t he challenge Obama on his connections to Fannie Mae?
McCain represents the
liberal wing of the Republican party. These are the corporate guys and the Golf
Course GOP who want to take their big check and go home early on Friday.
These are the people who are slowly draining away the party identity. If you
have a Republican and a Democrat saying the same thing, the Democrat wins. But
if a Republicans espouses a certain and sure-footed opinion in contravention to
the liberal agenda, people will listen. Because they very might well not have heard that opinion
before and they might want to know more. Because it is “right”.
The Republican Middle thinks
it is going to win elections by appealing to more other people in the middle.
But despite years of McCain moderation, independents abandoned him in droves,
while 20% of conservatives voted Obama because they were disgusted with McCain.
Meanwhile the Democrats are
moving father to the left. And so the voter in many cases has nothing but a very liberal or a
moderately liberal choice. They hear no other opinion. Yet “liberal” California
just adopted a constitutional amendment to define marriage as being between a
man and a woman. Who woulda thunk it? This is pretty conservative. Because once
people hear conservative ideas, they listen. Because they make sense in a world
where there seems to be little.
Conservatives could have won
this election. But one candidate seemed to be programmed for his role. Who was
the real Manchurian Candidate? Here is the description of the
book again from Wikipedia.org. Substitute the words “Vietnam War in 1967” for
“Korean War in 1952” and you see who the real Manchurian Candidate was:
Captain Bennett Marco,
Sergeant Raymond Shaw and the rest of their platoon are captured during the
Korean War in 1952. They are all brainwashed into believing Shaw saved their
lives in combat, for which he receives the Medal of Honor when they return to
the United States. Years after the war is over, Marco, now an intelligence
officer, begins to have a recurring nightmare in which Shaw murders two of his
comrades while being watched by Chinese and Russian officials. When he learns
that another platoon member has been having the same dream, he sets out to
uncover the mystery.
The Communists intend
to use Shaw as a sleeper agent and, using the queen of diamonds in a deck of
playing cards as a subconscious trigger, compel him to follow their orders,
which he does not remember afterwards. Shaw is controlled by none other than his
own politically ambitious and domineering mother, who is working with the
Communists in a plot to overthrow the U.S. government.
Fox Flushes out Ayers
Fox News recently sent a reporter to
Ayers said nothing, which is interesting for someone with so many
opinions. But when the reporter crossed the line from the public sidewalk onto
Ayers’ steps, Ayers said his only words of the brief confrontation, reminding
the reporter that he now was on Ayers’ property. The reporter followed Ayers up
the steps until Ayers entered his home and shut the door on the reporter.
Ayers later emerged from his home
and walked toward his car. But the police had arrived and they
kept the reporter away from Ayers.
Isn’t this all interesting?! Self-professed “anarchist” and
“marxist” Ayers certainly was protective of his
“private property” when in fact everything Ayers has stood for and has broken
the law for contravenes private property rights.
And isn’t it interesting that Ayers called the police to guard him
against not a terrorist or armed thug or criminal, but against a reporter with a
microphone? These are the same police whose
Liberals and leftists do not like to answer questions because they
are cowards.
They like only to ask questions, always in an accusatory manner.
Isn’t it interesting how little tolerance of opposition and dissent
and even simple questions that these people have? They always want their
“rights” protected, while they fight to strip away rights from every other
citizen.
Like Obama supporter Warren Buffett with his $52 billion fortune
backing Obama’s plan to raise taxes on businesses making more than $250,000.
Or rich
Or elite leftist college professors talking about the evil,
overcharging oil companies when in fact college tuitions have gone up at 3 or 4
times the rate of increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline over the last 30
years.
Or how about dissent? How many times have we seen hecklers shouting
down Republicans at speeches and rallies? Yet one single heckler once shouted
down one liberal - John Kerry - and the protester actually was taken down and
tasered by police. That was the famous, “Don’t taze me, bro!” incident.
This is what Americans can expect from liberals. Dissent from
socialism will be questioned, intimidated or crushed. Dissent against
conservatives is called “patriotic”.
Liberals usually live their lives just like conservatives, enjoying our freedoms, enjoying our prosperity and enjoying the use of our resources.
But a look into their behavior shows how hypocritical they
really are. And it is frightening.
The editorial below was posted on
October 21, 2008.
Light at the End of the Housing Tunnel
Consulting firm MDA DataQuick of San Diego has reported that
The leap was spurred by a big drop in the median home price in the
region which fell 33.2% to $308,500 in September from $462,000 a year before,
and 38.9% below the median peak of $505,000 in Spring 2007.
The return of large numbers of foreclosed homes to the market
(increase in supply) as
credit eases is said to be the primary reason for downward pressure on prices,
spurring sales.
Or as the old adage goes, when the price goes down, sales go up.
While the September figures generally represent decisions made
during the summer, before the big financial crisis... and the save-the-world
bailout... the recent stock market drop may spur more investment in real
estate going forward.
So what does all this mean?
It means that - as usual - if you allow a market to right itself, it will. It means that markets are highly rational economic entities that react to excesses and correct them. And that after all the caterwauling of the past year, the housing market correction will be of long-term benefit for the majority.
It is interesting to compare the housing situation to the events of
Free markets anyone?
On July 12, gasoline was easily over $4 a gallon and today it is
below $3 in many places around the nation. This drop was achieved by two simple
rules: Don’t panic. And keep a sharp eye on the economics.
On July 12, panic was everywhere, just as there has been panic
everywhere for the last year in the housing market, multiplied a hundred-fold in
the last five weeks.
On July 12, the enviro movement, along with the worldwide media
pronounced the Western industrialized economies doomed, that man was on the
verge of extinction and that oil soon would be $300 a barrel and gasoline $8 a
gallon.
What a difference 100 days make.
Naturally one of the most powerful forces in the oil market was that
high prices stifled demand, causing prices to fall. Those media wonks who never
heard of "supply and demand" - or believe in their academic hearts that it is just
a counterfeit theory dreamed up by conservatives -
could never admit that gasoline could
never go to $8 a gallon without a major catastrophe. Because after $4 a gallon,
many people simply stopped buying the stuff.
Remember all those airlines parking their jets because fuel had
become too expensive? That caused downward pressure on jet-fuel prices as well.
Today in the housing market we are seeing the same forces at work.
Housing today is in the midst of what could be called a major correction. Like
oil on July 12, housing by late 2006 had become unsustainably expensive and
there were too many housing units being built, just as there was too much office
space built in go-go
So now rather than homeowners panicking and envisioning their life
investment drying up, they should be looking rationally at what has happened and
feel confident of a future rebound.
For two decades now, Americans have been experiencing what Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance”. In other words, housing and stock portfolio values were increasing at such rates as to induce euphoria. And like a drinker of the devil’s absinthe, you need to be really, really careful when things look that good.
With housing prices almost doubling in some locales over the 10
years from 1996 until 2006, few seemed interested in when the other shoe
might drop. And now that it has, we are all looking back and trying to see where
we failed to notice the predictors.
There were plenty: Lots of easy credit;
too much credit-card debt; too-easy loans to poor people, egged on by the
government; too-easy loans to middle-class people, often with teaser rates; too many house flippers and
speculators adding too many housing units to the supply; and too many buyers
flocking into the market not to buy a home, but to get in on the action.
The housing market collapse thus has proven to us that housing is
not some invincible force, but just another commodity; that we shouldn’t be
spending our family budgets into oblivion to get in on a hot market like the
tulip bulb mania of the 19th century; that we shouldn’t be seeing
‘flipper’ dollar signs in every derelict property; that we should see our houses
as a legitimate long-term investment, not a short sprint to fortune; and that we
should stop lending money to people who cannot pay it back.
And while we are at it, how about cutting hundreds of billions in
federal government spending instead of putting all that on our national credit
card?
The housing crisis is going to solve itself, possibly beginning in
the next few months and into the Spring. The Southern California figures are
encouraging. Once credit eases and all those bargain
properties look like pleasant hallucinations for people once priced out of the
market, we may see a genuine home-buying boom.
No, no, the doomsayers say. Our housing recession is the precursor
of a deep worldwide depression.
Right, and these same nitwits predicted $300 a barrel oil
and now need to explain why 3 months later OPEC is cutting production to keep petroleum prices
from falling through the floor.
There are millions of people who scurried into an overheated, overpriced housing market and got nailed in the process. Today, on the other hand, millions are preparing to enter a much more reasonable market with total confidence in their pending investment. Those in between who have lost equity will see it regained over time, but in a methodical and incremental way. And all in all this is not the greatest outcome, but then again, a lot of people made not-so-great decisions.
In sum, this a decent and rational outcome brought to us by the
working of free markets and their coherent behavior on which man has eternally
relied.
Child Abandonment… and Weddings
A 13-year old boy from
Unfortunately Creighton is located in
This is a travesty of vast magnitude and an indicator of
where our culture is going.
Since
Fox News reported that the abandonment
of one 14-year old girl from neighboring
Really? How interesting.
Alarmingly, every state in the nation now has
'safe haven'
laws where infants can be left at hospitals. Conservative Texas passed the first
such law in 1999. The age limit there is 60 days. In
Those who oppose all of these laws, including conservative
pro-family activists, adoption-rights advocates and child welfare experts, say
that the laws
simply give young parents the wrongheaded idea that abandoning
an infant is a solution to their problem. Most such laws promise anonymity to
the mother.
Adoption-rights advocate Adam Petman
added that the high age limit in
These laws represent yet another area where anti-family
socialism is creeping into the heart of our society. They are typical of the
types of legislation we get from people who claim that they want to preserve
children’s health and well-being, but who, in the long run and in the big
picture, are destroying it wholesale.
Liberal Democrats in
Leftists oppose the nuclear family because
the family is by nature a conservative entity. Families not only are the most
stable emotional unit, but the most independent financial unit. By breaking down
families, liberals create emotional chaos and financial dependency on the
government, thus expanding liberal power.
This Nebraska policy is just the most recent and disturbing
chink in the armor of a durable culture. Watch this older-child idea spread
across the nation as an extension of the movement to slowly degrade the family.
These policies simply are part of a pattern that can be
traced back to unfettered access to abortion under the so-called Roe v. Wade
decision of 1973. At that time, abortion was considered to be a response to the
first stages of a pregnancy. Now abortion has come to include tens of thousands
of annual
‘partial-birth’ abortions where the baby simply is killed at the time of birth
by having its brains sucked out.
But you don’t stop there under the new socialist dystopia.
An Illinois female, Elizabeth Ehlert, in 2003 even had her
1995 murder conviction overturned by Cook County circuit court judge Karen
Thompson because Ehlert had killed her baby after delivering the child
herself but before cutting the umbilical cord and thus before the baby had
“established a separate and independent life”, according to Thompson.
So now abortion has been extended even to outside the womb,
while abandonment picks up there and now extends into technical adulthood (18
years 364 days old).
It is important to recognize that these safe-have laws developed after liberals promised us that sex is just a lot of fun and that abortion would ‘solve’ the problem of unwanted pregnancy. Then when that failed, they reverted to their fundamental strategy of negating the very concept of personal responsibility.
Another troubling aspect of this case
is that several parents dumping their older
children in
This whole 'safe haven' story
coincides with another recent news item in
“It really is what we call a teachable
moment,” said the interim director at the charter
Yet at its core, most of the problems of child abandonment
are
a result of the breakdown of traditional marriage and family, while the same
people on the political left are seeking to legitimize homosexual unions.
Business
as Usual in
The production of oil in the petroleum-rich nation of
The drop is attributed to corruption and inefficiency
as Chavez has nationalized the oil industry under the name PDVSA. In addition to
these cuts in production, Chavez is selling half of daily oil production to
friendly but poor South American countries at a discount, sapping
The
This drop in production is to be expected in a nation
where PDVSA has been called “central to the social battle for the advance of our
country,” said the Venezuelan minister for petroleum.
Blah, blah, blah…
This is just more socialist pablum from another
collapsing state-run economy that says it is seeking to better the lives of its
people. Instead, Chavez is driving
Government knows best!
This is exactly what all rational capitalist economists
warn about when socialist blowhards start to talk about nationalizing resources
and using them for the benefit of “the people”. All you can do then is pray for
those “people”.
The private worldwide oil companies that built
Chavez even now has PDVSA producing furniture and
appliances(!?!) to get the foreign currency that it used to get by producing and
selling… oil.
But that oil was being produced and sold under the evil
capitalist system, which Chavez hates as much as he hates freedom.
This same tale keeps getting repeated over and over
throughout the world. Left-wing communist despots take over whole nations,
promising to help “the poor” and in the process destroying the entire nation,
making the middle class poor, and the poor even poorer. America even experienced
this situation as E-Z credit home loans to poor people with no credit history
ended up collapsing the entire housing market, to the detriment of all.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the citizens of the world understood what really happens under socialism, that it has nothing to do with “the poor” but only with seizing absolute power?
Chavez and his cronies are doing to
There are many Americans in the Democrat party who
think everything is fine in
If that ever was achievable in the first place using his tactics.
Which it is not.
Being Frank about Liberals
We have been subjected to a whirlwind lesson in politics recently
over the government bailout plan. Ultra-liberals like congressman Barney Frank,
Democrat of Massachusetts, chairman of the House financial services committee, even reminded us once again that he is in office to
“help the poor”.
As if we hadn’t already heard that.
This is standard leftist boilerplate and it emerges from most news
outlets, from the universities, from social activist groups, and from every
Democrat candidate in the land.
If only it were so.
First, we know that Frank and his “compassionate” Democrat friends
in Congress were praising, lauding, aiding and abetting the government-sponsored
enterprises called Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association) and
Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.) during a 2004 congressional
hearing in which Republicans were sounding alarm after alarm that these agencies
were going to collapse, which they did in September 2008. The video is on
YouTube. Type ‘fannie mae hearings’ into the search box.
But no, Frank & Friends assured us that the regulators and those
evil Republicans were the enemy, and that these agencies were doing God’s work.
If only it were so.
The fact is that these agencies put hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of poor people into houses that they came to own only by dint of the
no-downpayment, easy-credit, cash-for-all mentality prevalent in American
socialist politics since the 1960s. Poor people, liberals have claimed, need to
have access to the American dream of home ownership. And soon, of course, in
typical socialist fashion, this deserving group came to include “moderate
income” people, which means that this social engineering scandal was extending its
tentacles into the middle class.
As it turned out, however - and what ‘conservative’ bankers have
told us for millennia - poor people may deserve compassion,
but to trust them routinely with the
responsibilities of home ownership is a horse of an entirely different color.
And the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their takeover by
the government shows once again that the public at large will pay the price for
aiding the poor with a no-questions-asked approach, as is the standard operating
procedure for the Democrat party.
It is kind of like giving a high-powered sports car to a teenager.
Chances are pretty good he’s going to get in trouble. But why does he deserve
that car in the first place?
Because, hey, kids need to have fun, right?
There are many reasons that people are poor. And if you take a trip
into a poor neighborhood, or visit a poor person’s home, it usually becomes
evident why that person is poor and why that person should probably not be
trusted in their existing state with the responsibility of paying back a home
mortgage loan, and with the responsibilities of home upkeep and ownership.
Because in the end, that person is more likely to be hurt by
owning a home, rather than helped. Many of the poor people who took out home
loans over the last 20 years have lost their homes and their equity money too.
The problem with liberals is that they come from a political
position that they claim has a lock on so-called “compassion” when in fact
compassion has many different aspects.
Is it compassion to give something to someone who is not
responsible enough to take care of it?
No.
Is it compassionate to hand out trillions of dollars to poor people
who show no signs of responsibility while the responsible and hard-working citizens of America are footing the bill and themselves becoming
poorer through taxation?
No.
And why should we make one group poor in order to help another?
We should not. But that is how socialism impoverishes entire societies.
And who are “the poor” anyway?
Just observe them and you will know.
One group of “the poor” are people who have been hurt by
circumstance: The death of a breadwinner, the loss of a home in a hurricane,
financial reversals etc. If these people are responsible, we certainly can help
them to get back on their feet with prudent aid.
Another group is made up of people who deserve nothing: They are
lazy and stupid. They refuse to shape up or to do a good job at anything. They
are irresponsible. They hurt other people. They take advantage of every
situation. There are many, many millions of them in
The third group is comprised of people who put themselves at risk and lose. Oftentimes, they risk out of stupidity, sometimes out of hoping for some kind of gain.
The fourth group are people who live in areas that support little economic activity, like people in rural areas where there are few jobs, or cities where there are not enough jobs for people.
And the fifth kind are people who are made poor by their government, which
includes tens of millions in
So should we treat all poor people the same?
No.
Do liberals treat them all the same?
You might think “yes” but in fact they do not.
Because when people are made poor by liberalism – for instance when
Democrat over-taxation and over-regulation kills jobs; when radical
environmentalism shuts down economic opportunity; when labor unions run
companies into the ground out of sheer greed; when poor inner-city neighborhoods
cannot support jobs because of incompetent and bureaucratic urban governments –
liberals look the other way and point their fingers.
That is why Barney Frank’s comment that he is in politics to “help
the poor” is false. Because it is his party's policies that have made most poor
Americans poor in the first place.
How many blacks have had their futures destroyed by the
dysfunctional inner-city public schools that are controlled lock, stock and
barrel by “compassionate” Democrat teacher unions?
Millions.
How many inner-city blacks live in a hopeless, nihilist culture of
violence propagated to a large degree by hip-hop/rap music that is put out by
entertainment-industry liberals who get rich on that stuff?
Millions.
How many banks have suffered huge losses because radical left-wing
groups like ACORN pressured them into making home loans to poor people who
defaulted on the loans?
Hundreds, maybe thousands. And a weakened banking system hurts all
of
How many people in rural
Millions, and this is spreading. A total of 30,000 loggers were
thrown out of work in
How many Americans have had their cities and towns destroyed by
radical labor unions demands that drove productive companies away?
Millions. Just look at the union strongholds of Flint and Detroit,
Michigan; Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; many other cites and
towns in the Rust Belt, and all the unionized manufacturing strongholds in the
Northeast that now are devastated.
Who controlled them and sucked the life out of them?
Democrats and labor unions.
Some of these losses, of course, were natural. The business
environment changed and the companies’ products became obsolete. There is
nothing you can do about that.
But liberals like Barney Frank and his allies in labor unions and in the enviro
movement, along with the taxers and regulators and bureaucrats, have made business impossible to
conduct in liberal places. That is why most of the economic growth in
Don’t let people like Barney Frank tell you how much they “care”
about the state of the American worker and the American poor. Their policies
make millions poor, and then those same libs always point the finger.
That finger should be pointed back at themselves.
Bailout Folly - Part II
The House bill to provide $700 billion in liquidity
to the financial system failed on Monday, September 29 by a vote of 228-205. A total of 95 Democrats
joined 133 Republicans to kill the bill, showing a bipartisan concern over its
cost.
Just before the vote, House speaker Nancy Pelosi threw a bomb into
the negotiations with a brutal 5-minute-long rant against President Bush, saying,
among other things, that Bush policies
were “built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything-goes mentality, with no
regulation, no supervision and no discipline in the system.”
This is not exactly the way to build bipartisanship before a crucial vote, and Pelosi's comments poisoned the proceedings among some Republicans, leading to the bill's defeat.
In the same speech, Pelosi praised the
If you want to see a shocking video showing how Republicans in late 2004 tried to warn
about now-bankrupt Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while Democrats were praising those agencies and
lauding Fannie chairman Franklin Raines, who
eventually was fired over corruption and a $90 million payout, please visit
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
Or you can go to YouTube.com and type in ‘fannie mae hearings’ in the search box.
Bailout
The financial bailout finally has taken form and is expected to be
voted on Monday, September 29. After its initial draft was thankfully rejected
by House Republicans, this fiscal blow-up doll is on its way to becoming law.
It is hard to say what its final effect will be; nobody really
knows. Both Obama and McCain have given their tentative blessing, and the
package is expected to offer grease to the creaking wheels of credit. We shall
see. The same basic idea was used in the savings-and-loan bailout of the 1980s.
The Resolution Trust Corporation did a decent job in that instance.
The $700 billion will be broken into chunks, which is a good idea.
Why give the government its whole allowance when you don’t know how the money is
going to spent in the first place?
Otherwise, McCain and the Republicans helped to craft sound
provisions that would protect the taxpayer by
*insuring some loans rather than buying them;
*requiring that financial firms repay the government for losses; and
*giving the government stock warrants in the aided firms in return for bailout
help so that taxpayers can reap any rewards.
These are common-sense provisions that hold private business
responsible for its actions.
Republicans also removed two of the most shameful parts of the
bailout slipped in by Democrats. One involved a ‘mortgage cramdown’
provision which would have allowed courts to make decisions about mortgage
payments, politicizing financial transactions and giving a sop to the Democrat
trial lawyers. Meanwhile liberal judges could have used the provision to weaken
private banks.
The most reprehensible provision removed was a Democrat attempt to
funnel 20% of any profit from the bailout to the derelict and corrupt
far-left urban voter registration group ACORN, which has been convicted on
several occasions for fraudulent practices and is suspected in many other cases
across the nation.
Who once acted as legal counsel and a trainer for ACORN?
Barack Obama.
This bill is going to add to our public debt, and it is important to remember that all public debt is socialist in
nature. While "the poor" could be much better cared for by state and
local governments and by private and religious
charities at much lower costs, the only real responsibility of the federal government is to defend the
nation, which means that the federal budget should be roughly the size of the
defense budget. But today, the federal budget (more than $3 trillion) is six
times bigger than the defense budget and we now live in a handout
state controlled in large part by Democrat politicians, college professors, the
media, urban political machines, utopian social activists and the like.
This entire mortgage meltdown comes out of
this same entitlement culture that has given us our huge national debt.
When banks are pressured under socialism into making loans to people with
no credit history, the trouble begins. And it spreads.
Then it moves into the middle class, just as handout programs started with the poor and then have moved into the middle class. Soon, the middle class comes to believe that the government is their savior, when the handouts in fact are nothing but a transfer of wealth from one person to another under the supervision of the Democrat party, which always takes a big percentage for itself as a 'commission'.
This type of wealth transfer has created our $50 trillion Social
Security debt and our $10 trillion national debt both of which the Founding
Fathers warned against. They knew well the power of taxation to control the
people, the idea that our Revolution was fought to defend against.
George Washington spoke about debt as an enemy of freedom: “No
pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge
of the public debt; on none can delay be more injurious.”
Said Thomas Jefferson: “If we can prevent the government from
wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them,
they must become happy.”
The Founders of our nation were not materialistic wastrels. They
were humble men who eschewed lives of relative ease because they believed in their
noble cause and in the power of the people to create their own
economic well-being without being consumed by it. They rejected the urbanized,
decadent, socialistic and materialistic societies that thrived in
But after centuries of social engineering, and the substitution of atheist
materialism for dignified and liberating free-market prosperity, the Founders
would never recognize our nation today.
Where does our materialism come from?
It is an urban, anti-Christian and un-virtuous trait based in
instant gratification. In other words, the love of money and of material things
comes out of the heart of the Democrat party power base. No one could rightly
say that the love of money is conservative and rural, or middle class and
religious in the way that it represents
Liberals love money more than any other people, and their love of
money and material objects (think
We must be sure never to make the same mistakes again. When asked in the recent debate what effect the credit crisis might have on his administration’s spending plans, McCain suggested a spending freeze while Obama balked and fell back on the Democrat talking point to "invest in education" which is code for throwing more money at the failed public education bureaucracy. Obama literally could not bring himself to talk about thrift. Democrats never can.
We must learn from this fiasco and start today to cut back government spending across the board, stop making everyone feel that they are entitled to anything, stop substituting "needs" for "rights", become thankful for our freedoms, and appreciate the simple but powerful concepts on which our nation was founded. If we do not learn, we will careen farther into state socialism, and lose our liberty, all for a few pieces of silver.
Media Bias Finally Nailed
After months of attacks on the Republican ticket and decades of
attacks on conservatives in general, a senior McCain campaign advisor finally
said out loud that “Whatever The New York Times once was, it is today not
by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy
organization.”
Steve Schmidt is right. But everyone always knew this. The media are biased. But for a major figure in a national political campaign to be so brazen shows that the tide has shifted from contempt for the media among conservatives and suspicion among the general public, to open hostility.
The emperor indeed has no clothes.
Naturally the Times responded in its typical elite fashion
that it is operating “fairly and aggressively”. This is nonsense. Everyone in
America knows that the Times speaks in very biased tones to a very small
and extremely liberal audience in and around New York City, and that it sets the
template for the rest of the Ancient Media nationwide including NBC, ABC, CNN,
CBS, Los Angeles Times, and newspapers and magazines across the fruited
plain.
Conservative commentator Sean Hannity has proclaimed that 2008 is
"the year the media died” in their extreme and incontestable bias. The treatment
of Sarah Palin has sealed the deal for many Americans who in recent polls have
expressed a high degree of disdain for this reprehensible prejudice. The recent
Saturday Night Live skit suggesting that Todd Palin had committed incest with
his daughters is the most grotesque manifestation of a monstrous left-wing
baby-boomer culture of arrogance, anger, self-loathing and pop-culture
narcissism.
Nothing is off limits to media imaginations. Karen Tumulty of
Time magazine even planted the idea - and 1988 presidential candidate
Michael Dukakis has furthered it - that one McCain campaign ad has racist
undertones.
The ad features Franklin Raines, the corrupt former chairman of
Fannie Mae who walked away from the company with more than $90 million while the
company went under. Tumulty and Dukakis are claiming that the ad is racist
because it shows two blacks – Obama and Raines – and then shows a white woman
with the suggestion that she has been hurt by the Fannie corruption.
Yet is McCain supposed to suggest that perhaps Obama is white? Is
McCain supposed to ignore the corruption of Raines simply because he is black?
Those are racist suggestions in their own right. But then again, it
is clear that the Democrats are the ones playing the race card every day in this
campaign.
Why is it racist for white Democrats to reject Obama because he is
black as suggested recently by an AP poll, but perfectly acceptable for blacks
to reject McCain because he is white and to vote overwhelmingly for Obama
because he is “one of them”?
This is the way the media are bending every fact and this is why the American people have a much lower regard for the media than they do even for President Bush – because they understand that Bush has a tough job, but that the media are dealing only with the reality that they themselves are conjuring.
Dukakis is claiming that the McCain ad is the contemporary
equivalent of the notorious third-party ‘Willie Horton ad’ in the 1988 race in
which it was explained that a black convicted murderer named Willie Horton was
released from prison on a furlough and raped a white woman. Dukakis supported
the furlough program.
Yet what is unsavory about pointing out a political fact about Dukakis? Why was his actual record said to be off limits? Is it not reverse-racist to put that off limits because of race?
The Horton ad sank Dukakis and for good reason. Americans did not
want a soft-on-crime president.
Dukakis further says that the McCain ad about Raines is false
because Raines is not advising Obama as McCain claims in the ad. Yet the McCain
campaign got that information from the notoriously pro-Obama
Is the Post wrong? Did the Post print false information? Why should we then believe other things that the Post prints?
Again, this is the media being extremely selective in their
criticism.
Meanwhile the sneering grilling that Sarah Palin received in her
foreign policy ‘interrogation’ by ABC’s anchor Charles Gibson is yet another
example of media bias. While Gibson gave Obama a puffball interview, he peered
disdainfully over his glasses at Palin as if to challenge her very being.
Yet Palin answered the questions with dignity and assurance, while at the same time foreign policy "expert" Joe Biden has been dead wrong on three of the most significant issues of the last 25 years: He opposed Ronald Reagan’s tough tactics with the Soviets (which helped us win the Cold War); he opposed the first Gulf War (which we won easily); and he opposed the troop ‘surge’ in Iraq (which helped us to win that war).
So who has the better foreign policy record?
Obviously Palin.
Yet the media are acting as if Palin is not ready for prime time.
If Palin and Biden were reversed, the media would be trashing Palin
for being wrong on major issues, and praising Biden for being a quick study.
All over
The editorial below was posted September 15, 2008
Time for Calm
Bear Stearns bailed out by the government. Stock market off 504
points. Insurer AIG seeking a $40 billion loan. Lehman Brothers bankrupt.
Merrill Lynch bought by Bank of America in a fire sale. And former Federal
Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan calling the current fiscal crisis a “once in a
century” occurrence.
It all sounds dire, does it not?
Shades of the great depression?
Yes, but only shades.
And clearly a time for calm.
Obviously there are problems in the economy, and it is time to take stock. We have survived before and we will survive this. Perhaps the American economy is entering a new phase, and it is time for a fresh start; out with the old and in with new industries and technologies and growth. The loss of the venerable Wall Street names like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch is alarming, but then again Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills are now gone too. Things change.
We need to avoid making the same errors of the last 60
years over again, all of which centered on incrementally empowering the Democrats and their
big-government friends. The only thing that has grown consistently over the past
60 years is government itself. And that is at the heart of our current problem.
Since 1945 with the victory over
The 1960s ushered in a decade of plenty, and a decade of questions.
Who wants to work in some dreary factory? they wondered. We
needed to liberate ourselves with drugs and fantasy, they said. And that was the
beginning of the end.
Millions of people took all of our good fortune with a grain of
salt. And today, opportunity is slipping away because we allowed it to happen in
a utopian haze of false promises.
The government began to tax everything in sight. Where there’s
money, you will find the tax man with his greedy hand out.
Other liberals decided that the wealth we were creating needed to be
redistributed and they set up unwieldy and ever-growing government programs to
“serve” the poor. Mostly they empowered the slothful
bureaucracy and left poor people dependent and adrift.
Environmentalists amassed power and lectured us that our very
existence threatened the planet. And so we stopped doing efficient things to
create more energy, and now we are paying the price.
Our public education system has been taken over by radicals in the
Democrat party who care not a whit about education, but only about their own
wages and benefits and early retirements.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were given taxpayer guarantees to buy securitized home loans made to people without the wherewithal to repay.
Now Lehman Brothers and others are on the way out. Must be those
greedy Republicans, the average observer might think. But no. Lehman employees
have given huge amounts of campaign cash to Democrats like Hillary Clinton and
Charles Schumer, the same far-left Schumer who sent
The myth of the 'conservative banker' is as outdated as the DeLorean sports car. Today the investment banking and brokerage industries no longer are the old boys’ clubs of lore, but are loosey-goosey, metrosexual, politically-correct, postmodernist behemoths that toss caution to the wind. Meanwhile, the credit binge unleashed by "genius" Greenspan’s low interest rates of 2001-2005 gave pots of money to anyone with a pulse, which socialist dogma says is a good thing.
It is not. It is a bad thing.
Poor people have been extended massive amounts of credit under government fiat, and cannot repay, setting off the housing crisis, which has fueled the Wall Street crisis. Middle-class people buy houses they cannot afford simply because the money is there. Homeowners are promised something for nothing – buy a house and watch your money double.
That is not the rational way to build wealth. That is the easy way.
And the bottom always falls out when you over-promise, with the government
guaranteeing it all.
The Democrat party has moved farther and farther to the political
left in the last 60 years, assuming that all “needs” like health care and
housing are now “rights” that must be supplied overtly or covertly by the
government.
But the Founders of our nation never intended that mere needs be
codified into, or confused with, the set of God-given rights on which our
freedom is based -
a right to speak our minds and to assemble, to defend ourselves from harm, to
worship as we please.
Today,
Our nation currently is suffering from all the excesses of the past
60 years in which we believed that everyone could have everything. But they
cannot. We have a Social Security system that is going bust,
a $10 trillion debt besides, and a sense that we all are owed something. And it
is
this sense of entitlement that is
clouding our abilities to create wealth the old fashioned way – by earning it.
Obama &