The Five Thousand Year Leap (Part 1)

 

(The Five Thousand Year Leap, The 28 Great Ideas That Are Changing the World is the title of a book that first was published in 1981. Written by W. Cleon Skousen, founder of the National Center for Constitutional Studies in Boise, Idaho, the book clearly outlines the historical precedents for and the founding principles of American liberty. This column is the first in a multi-part series summarizing the book.)

 

The Five Thousand Year Leap starts by analyzing world government structures, with tyranny on the left (total government control) and anarchy on the right (no government control).

The Founders believed in something halfway in between, in People’s Law, which derived from Anglo-Saxon common law including government by consensus, natural or God-given rights for the people, power dispersed among the people, individual responsibility, rights being unalienable, a system of justice including reparations for wrongs, and a system to solve problems on the level on which they were created.

People’s Law was based in the system of the ancient Israelites and thus the Old Testament can be referred to not only as a moral guidebook, but as a foundation for our democratic system.

The original seal proposed for the United States by Jefferson, Adams and Franklin featured on one side Hengist and Horsa, two 5th century AD Anglo-Saxon leaders, and, on the other side, a depiction of the Israelites struggling through the wilderness following God’s pillar of fire. 

The Founders’ first attempt at writing a Constitution ended on November 15, 1777 when they completed the Articles of Confederation. But this document was far too close to anarchy in that it was more a committee of the states than a strong centralized government structure capable of doing the two things governments is supposed to do - protect the rights of the people while seeking to solve problems.

In the Constitutional convention ended on September 17, 1787, the Founders established a balanced “center” in People’s Law, which was depicted by a three-headed eagle with the legislature at the center – divided between a lower but bigger House of Representatives, and a higher and smaller Senate - and the executive and judicial branches on the sides. The wings of the eagle represented on the one hand the problem-solving, activist part of the government, while the other wing represented the conservation of liberty.

The Founders were well aware of the tendency for government to drift to the collectivist left and to try and “take care of” citizens. But Thomas Jefferson knew that this system always led to corruption, writing: “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.”

They also were concerned about taxation and debt. Jefferson warned that “we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with out debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves.”

The Founders also believed that the government must be established to protect individual “rights” but not to distribute “things” or wealth. Wrote revolutionary theorist Samuel Adams, “The Utopian schemes of leveling (re-distribution of the wealth) and a community of goods (central ownership of the means of production and distribution) are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the Crown. (These ideas) are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.”

They also wanted an educated electorate. And for those who claim that that means a public education system, that is false. It means any effective system. Because while the public system in America once was a good one, the mis-education of millions under public education in America today is contrary to what the Founders desired. Today the thinking of the Founders’ favorite philosophers like Polybius, Cicero, Montesquieu and John Locke are rarely even discussed in public schools.

The 1st Principle for freedom, according to Skousen, is that the only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law.

Skousen considers the writings of the Roman political philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), who believed that the creation of a durable and free culture relied on the rules of ‘right conduct’ that included belief in the power of a Supreme Being to give to good men their “God-given” rights or Natural Law rights. He describes Natural Law as ‘true law’ which Cicero said “is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions…. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst punishment.”

Cicero also remarked on the superiority of man’s reasonable mind over all the rest of God’s creation: “The animal which we call man, endowed with foresight and quick intelligence, complex, keen, possessing memory, full of reason and prudence, has been given a certain distinguished status by the Supreme God who created him… But what is more divine, I will not say in man only, but in all heaven and earth, than reason.”

Cicero came to believe that loving, respecting and obeying God was indeed the first commandment for creating a lasting culture and that loving thy neighbor indeed was the second, leading to justice.

He wrote that legislation to violate God’s prescriptions are invalid. He also wrote: “Therefore Law (of the Creator) is the distinction between things just and unjust, made in agreement with that primal and most ancient of all things, Nature…”

Cicero believed that men must escape the depravity and corruption that had infiltrated into society.

Skousen completes his section about Cicero by concluding that Natural Law is based on unalienable rights; unalienable duties; habeas corpus; limited government; separation of powers; checks and balances; self-preservation; the right to contract; marriage and family; justice by reparation; the right to bear arms; and taxation only accompanied by representation.

Which Way Home?

 

There is a new documentary film that has Hollywood all agog. It is called Which Way Home? and it focuses on children who try to come to the United States from Mexico, and who end up failing in their mission to cross the border.

But such a film leaves conservatives wondering: Why have all these millions and millions of immigrants been flowing into the United States from Mexico in the first place? After all, from 1929 through 2000, Mexico was controlled lock, stock and barrel by the socialistic PRI, the Mexican equivalent of the American Democrat party. Most everything in Mexico was run by the powerful central government in Mexico City.

Rational people see that this indeed is the problem. Because as any right-minded economist will tell you about centrally-planned economies, growth is slow to nonexistent and corruption is rampant. Mexico has been and continues to be one of the most corrupt nations in the world. Thus Mexico has suffered under poverty imposed by the elites who control the central government.

And who are those elites?

They are Europeans who migrated into Mexico over centuries, took over the nation and established a Euro-type socialism, controlling and keeping as much as possible of the nation’s wealth and power for themselves and their cronies.

In the last 10 years, Mexico has made some reforms and there have been improvements. But 71 years of socialist corruption has been devastating to overcome.

So why do we have yet another sob-story film like Which Way Home? Why have all these Mexicans been leaving their socialist, big-government Workers’ Paradise behind and migrating into evil capitalism? After all, according to the world media, America is a wicked free-market nation where health insurance is not even provided to a whole 10% of the population. Yes Evil America is a nation of the rapacious rich while the poor are held down in poverty. It is a right-wing, racist, reactionary republic full of gun-toting militias and Confederate flag wavers. Yet all these Mexicans continue to come here. Why?

Well, apparently even poor, uneducated Mexicans don’t read or believe the New York Times or MSNBC or Harper's magazine. Which is very telling. There is no other explanation. It exposes the media's lack of genuine credibility. Otherwise word would spread, and the illegals would not come, would they?

So here is another question:

Why, throughout the 20th century, were not the world’s poor migrating to the socialist/communist Workers’ Paradises like the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, North Korea or China? Why are not Mexico’s poor today sailing south to get to Chavez’s socialist Venezuela?

Answer: Because all of the mythology about socialism is false. Most people know the truth not from what they read in the media, but from what they know to be fact. Because these socialistic governments are always run by small cabals of leftists for the benefit of those leftists and their cronies only, and nobody else.

These governments do not “take care of” people. Rather they destroy economies and make people poor. Just look at Mexico - so poor, corrupt and uninhabitable that the children even need to leave, often on their own.

Then, of course, America is cursed for not welcoming them with open arms. Perhaps the desperate Mexicans should all row to Cuba with its “free” health care touted by super-rich gringos like filmmaker Michael Moore.

No, the illegals from around the world just keep coming and coming and coming. We can’t stop them. In fact, the United States now needs to build a wall on the southern border to keep the illegal immigrants OUT.

Yet what did the communists in East Berlin do in 1961?

They built the Berlin Wall to keep people INSIDE their city and their country. Yes, the Berlin Wall was intended to keep the population of East Berlin in, like a prison, because so many people were fleeing their Workers’ Paradise for the capitalist West.

Which shows the difference between capitalism and socialism/communism and exposes the media lie about the system of socialism, which is propagated by people who will benefit when the leftist minority dominates a system that ultimately leaves the majority of the population in tatters.

Today anyone who tries to flee communist North Korea is executed or imprisoned and tortured, as are their whole families. Because North Korea does not want anyone escaping and telling the world about the brutal conditions there.

Why did millions of black immigrants from surrounding countries migrate into South Africa for decades throughout the second half of the 20th century even though that nation was controlled by whites and had a racial apartheid system that discriminated against blacks?

For the same reasons that Mexicans are coming to the US now. Because they understood economic reality. The white government of South Africa was relatively capitalist and provided good jobs, economic growth and stability for the people. Yet today South Africa is endlessly touted by the world media as a beacon of liberation when in fact it is a massively corrupt, socialist/communist black-ruled nation that is spiraling down into poverty, misery, crime, AIDS and malnutrition.

Nearby Zimbabwe was once prosperous and stable when it was known as Rhodesia and was controlled by capitalist colonialist whites. Today, controlled by far-left blacks, Zimbabwe is one of the most corrupt marxist dictatorships on earth with its tyrannical leader Robert Mugabe at the helm. Starvation, corruption and poverty are rampant as Mugabe and his cabal in the central government get richer and more powerful.

Here are two quotes from an April 8 column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times - head cheerleader for black rule in Africa -  from two black residents of Zimbabwe: "When the country changed from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, we were very excited... but we didn't realize the ones we chased away were better and the ones we put in power would oppress us." Said another, "It would have been better if whites had continued to rule because the money would have continued to come. It was better under Rhodesia. Then we could get jobs. Things were cheaper in stores. Now we have no money, no food."

Here are excerpts from newamericanmedia.org from an article entitled South Africa: Worse Now Than Under Apartheid? by William Reed, posted Oct 5, 2007:

 

...a leading South African activist is in America saying that conditions for most of the South African population are worse today than under apartheid.

How African-American civil and human rights groups and elected officials -- who staked their bona fides on protests and initiatives that led to blacks running South Africa’s government -- will react to Mfanelo Skwatsha’s tour telling American audiences that the current black government has left the majority of its people worse off than under the white government will be interesting.

African People’s Solidarity Day events organizer Wendy Snyder says, “Many people around the world who supported the struggle against South Africa’s apartheid system erroneously believe that since the installation of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in 1994 conditions have improved. However, Mr. Skwatsha will show, the reality is the opposite. Many workers say life in South Africa today is worse than apartheid." (end of excerpt)

You can find information like this all over the web, not just about Africa but about any nation living under communism/socialism. Just look. You will see. It is easy to find.

 

Targeting Toyota

 

Is Toyota being targeted by the Democrats and the unions?

It could be, the way the Ancient Media (New York Times, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Newsweek etc.) have been treating the Japanese carmaker as if it were a terrorist.

It is impossible at this time to compare the so-called Toyota accelerator problem to other defects in the past like the detonating Ford Pinto gas tanks of the 1970s or dozens of other automotive failures that have caused deaths and led to recalls. Because we do not even know what the real problem is.

The media are so anxious to run negative stories about corporations that the Dateline NBC TV show once even staged a phony ‘exploding pickup truck’ segment after an allegedly faulty GM vehicle would not fail on cue on camera.  Are they now sabotaging Toyota?

Could be. Toyotas are said to be accelerating on their own. It has been blamed on everything from the floor mats to the gas pedal to the car's computer's software. But nobody, including Toyota, can pinpoint the problem. Isn't this suspicious? After all, they're pretty smart people at Toyota.

Tens of millions of Americans have driven their Toyotas many trillions of accumulated passenger-miles with complete satisfaction. Thus we should not allow this so-called acceleration problem to paralyze the company, particularly since 200,000 Americans are employed either directly or indirectly by Toyota’s American operations, including manufacturing.

So what is really going on with this story? Is it being grossly exaggerated?

The Ancient Media and its Democrat friends in Congress and in the American auto unions certainly would be amenable to targeting Toyota because it is a foreign, non-union company that makes great cars. And most Toyota workers want it to remain non-union because they are happy with their pay, benefits and pensions and have seen how labor unions strong-arm companies, create workplace strife and kill jobs. So isn't it curious that the Toyota story has emerged after pro-union Obama's brief time in office?

And since Toyota has been making better cars than the unionized companies like Ford, General Motors and Chrysler and outselling them, then those unions certainly would like to bring Toyota down. And now that opportunity seems to have arisen. This is where the media and the Democrat politicians step in. Attack, attack, attack.

This is akin to the ongoing media attempts to collectively assassinate the characters of perfectly decent people like Sarah Palin. Those media have lied about or misreported on everyone from Bush to Limbaugh to Reagan to Cheney to Iraq to Tom DeLay to 'global warming' to ACORN to stolen elections and on and on. Why not misreport about Toyota? Or lie?

How many of the acceleration problems are actually elderly people stomping on the gas when they think they are hitting the brakes, as we see routinely in accidents across the country? Or is this acceleration trouble perhaps a real glitch in just a few cars that is being trumped up or falsified by Toyota-haters?

And don’t think for a second that the United Auto Workers union and its friends would not do such a thing. They absolutely would. This union is corrupt through and through and will stop at nothing to promote its interests. Lying is just a baby step for the average hardball union functionary. Think about Jimmy Hoffa and a thousand other union thugs who have suddenly, well, ended up in the hospital or disappeared altogether.

Just think... the GM/Ford/Chrysler unions would LOVE to drive Toyota out of business and steal its huge market share. Is this a coincidence that is just too obvious to ignore?

What about the California driver James Sikes whose Toyota Prius recently was said to have accelerated uncontrollably up to 94 miles per hour for more than 20 minutes until he was able to stop the car using the emergency brake. Why didn't he step on the emergency brake right away? How did he have so much time and composure to call 911 during his car's high-speed runaway, conveniently ending up with so much media coverage? Why didn't he drop the car into neutral after the 911 operator suggested it? Or into low gear? Or into park? Or shut the car off? Could this all have been an anti-Toyota stunt?

What about the story he is telling, that he took the car to the dealer after receiving a recall notice but that the dealer told him to go away?

Doesn't all this sound unlikely, even suspicious since it is happening right when there is maximum focus on Toyota? Are routine accidents being blamed on the so-called acceleration problem in an anti-Toyota campaign? Are a small number of actual Toyota acceleration problems being hyped by the media into a national panic the same way that a few warm winters in the 1990s were morphed into a planetary crisis called 'global warming'?

And if Toyota itself can't find and fix the problem - which they certainly would do as quickly as possible if they could - is it really the problem that it is being made out to be? Or is it just another highly embellished media fiction?

Anti-Toyota forces have seized on the work of David Gilbert, an auto technology professor at Southern Illinois University who told a congressional hearing February 23 that he re-created the acceleration problem in a Toyota Tundra truck by purposely short-circuiting the electronics.

But Chris Gerdes, director of Stanford University's Center for Automotive Research, said that the experiment is bogus. "There is no evidence that I've seen to indicate that this situation is happening at all in the real world,” said Gerdes, adding that Gilbert’s  work "could result in misguided policy and unwarranted fear."

Toyota owners now are even filing class-action lawsuits against the company saying that the resale value of their cars has fallen.

So who would be handling those lawsuits? Could it be Democrat trial lawyers out to enrich themselves at the expense of a company that they and their political allies hate? And where have we seen this movie before?

Yes, in suits against the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, the tobacco companies, doctors, nurses, hospitals etc.

These falling-value lawsuits are more ominous for Toyota than the accidental-death litigation because they can spread to every single Toyota owner. Kelley Blue Book, a used-car pricing bible, recently lowered  the resale value of recalled Toyotas an average of 3.5%. One attorney estimated that such suits alone could cost Toyota $3 billion. Actions like this could ruin the entire company.

That is music to the ears of Toyota-haters, the left-wing media, and UAW union activists. And so perhaps we should look more closely at their motivations in this case, and scrutinize the real facts and personalities involved before we allow the destruction of a fine company.

 

Limbaugh, Beck Defeating Obama

 

On a regular basis so-called Republicans like Colin Powell criticize Rush Limbaugh, calling him too extreme, calling his core of listeners too conservative, and saying that the GOP needs to "reach out" to moderate voters to win elections. Meanwhile Tea Party activists have been portrayed by some GOP moderates as too intransigent, and too wedded to principle.

Only problem is that Powell voted for Obama. This in itself should tell us everything we need to know. Because Powell is nothing but a political adulterer.

Glenn Beck is another conservative commentator who is marginalized by some Republicans, while doing an exceptional job in fearlessly explaining what is going on with Obama's radical agenda. This is another reason why Americans are so well informed today. One recent survey showed Beck to be the second most admired figure on television after Oprah Winfrey. This comes after only one year on Fox for Beck's program...

Beck, Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest of the conservative media are in fact the people who have held firm and taught us why and how we must fight against the establishment of socialism in America. Even after the big victory of Obama and the Democrats in November 2008, Limbaugh advised us to hang on, don’t lose faith, and that the Democrats would choke on their own corruption.

And so they have.

After Obama’s win, however, moderate Republicans like Meghan McCain - John McCain’s daughter - were acting starstruck by Obama’s political prowess. She even noted with awe that some pop singer named Kate Perry showed up at the 2009 MTV music awards show in an Obama shirt.

To which we conservatives responded: Who the hell is Kate Perry? Why do we care what they think at the MTV awards? Then we recommended that America wait to see Obama’s policies before judging his political abilities.

Because those of us who were not impressed by the 2008 political fireworks warned that Obama was not nearly as strong as he was being portrayed, and that people like Meghan McCain and Colin Powell have been hurting our cause unnecessarily. Now Meghan’s mother Cindy even has appeared in a pro-homosexual-marriage advertisement. Perhaps it was a good thing that John McCain was not elected...

“Reach out and touch someone!” said the old AT&T ad from the 1960s. That seems to be what the McCains and the rest of the GOP liberals are doing – reaching out to the leftists who will bite their hand at every opportunity.

We need people like Limbaugh and Beck and wonderful books like The Five Thousand Year Leap to explain to us what is happening because only principled people can explain the bankruptcy of unprincipled Chicago-style hardball leftist politics. Otherwise we might fall for those politics as many independents, and even some Republicans did in the 2008 election.

Glenn Beck’s recent shows have exposed the left-wing ‘progressives’ who advocate a far-left “revolution” in America, but in an “evolutionary” way, incrementally, step by step, which is what Obamacare was intended to be. These progressives are largely intellectuals in the universities and the media, think they know what is best for the nation, have contempt for the 'little people' out there in Middle America, and have infiltrated not only the Democrat party but the Republicans too. John McCain is a classic product of American progressivism along with his dopey wife and daughter.

Who is the Democrats’ favorite Republican president?

Teddy Roosevelt, who was a ‘progressive’, i.e., he agreed with a leftist agenda of radical environmentalism, hostility to business, an income tax etc. Democrats love people like McCain and Powell because they have been swayed by the progressive agenda as much as any Democrat. Now they are bringing that agenda into the GOP alongside people like Christie Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor, who is more prone to agree with Democrats on any 100 random issues than she is likely to agree with Rush or Beck or the Tea Partiers. 

Indeed the progressives intend to disseminate Obama’s agenda throughout the whole political spectrum to whoever will listen. Beck has warned about this and so has Limbaugh. And the GOP had better watch out because we have seen what happened to the Democrats when they embraced Obama’s progressivism – they now are headed for a defeat at the polls that will be stunning in its scope compared to just one year ago when Obama seemed indomitable.

Why?

Because Americans understand exactly what is happening thanks not to John McCain or Colin Powell, but thanks to Limbaugh and Beck and Cleon Skousen, the author of The Five Thousand Year Leap, and all the other rational commentators who are warning us day-by-day about Obama and his radical agenda.

Without anchors like Limbaugh and Beck and Sarah Palin explaining once again the genius of our Founding Fathers, America might simply have swallowed the nonsense that we need Obamacare; that we need cap and trade; that we should fear ‘global warming’ amidst the coldest winter in decades; that we should grant amnesty to illegals; that labor unions need more power etc., all part of an agenda that will undermine our nation and our economy and most importantly our freedom.

Look at what happened in Massachusetts and you can see the template clear as day. Republican US Senate candidate Scott Brown said unequivocally during his campaign that he opposed Obamacare and the Democrats’ reckless spending. Brown did not say he was going to look at the health bill and consider its merits and its pitfalls as some moderates would. He said he was going to oppose it. Period. Then he said that he would diametrically oppose Obama’s approach to terrorism. In his victory speech, Brown said:

“And let me say this... I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation – they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.”

Strong, unequivocal positions like this won him the election, not mealy-mouthed compromise.

Even the citizens of New York City agreed with Scott Brown and with Rush Limbaugh, and now it appears that the 9/11 terror trials will be moved out of New York. This shift in sentiment rightward is really the big political revelation of our time, not Obama's election. Because as we conservatives always have said, America is much more right-leaning than people are willing to let on, and the last 12 months have proven it.

We conservatives should be thanking Barack Obama for putting into deep relief what the leftist agenda really stands for. He has fired up our movement like nobody’s business in just one year. He is causing more and more Americans to become informed. Now a weakened Obama even went hat-in-hand to the Republican conclave in Baltimore to talk bipartisanship. This comes after a year of strong-arming any opposition to his policies.

What a difference a year makes...

Obama's show of political contrition at Baltimore was just that - a show. You might not know it unless you continue to listen to our real 'educators' on the political right, people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who are crucial to maintenance of freedom in America  and who fearlessly will tell us the truth. They should be embraced by the Republican party. Because when we listen to them, we will  become wiser again and again and again.

 

 

Romney for President?

 

(This is another in a series of columns about potential Republican presidential candidates for the 2012 election. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, is seen as the front runner in some polls after he failed to win the nomination in 2008. Romney has been making media appearances recently with his new book,  No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (St. Martin’s Press), which seems to be setting the stage for his 2012 run as a patriotic, no-nonsense, capitalist  conservative. Romney is touted for his career in private business through his investment company  Bain Capital  which helped to grow companies like Staples, Domino’s Pizza and others. In 2002 he served as CEO of the troubled Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and turned them into a success. He served as Massachusetts governor from January 2003 to January 2007. He is the son of 1968 presidential primary contender George Romney, who was Michigan governor. Here are excerpts from his new book and from his March 7 appearance on Fox News Sunday, each followed by my comment.)

 

On the Massachusetts health care overhaul, which Romney backed as governor, he writes: “All of us knew the bill (establishing universal health care coverage in Massachusetts) wasn’t perfect; nothing that groundbreaking could be. But it was a big improvement over what we had. It would need to be fine-tuned as it was implemented and it would undergo midcourse correction as time went on. From the outset, I and my team knew that some of the features the legislature had added would be expensive, including the full complement of coverage mandates such as unlimited in vitro fertilization treatments and dental care, a small fee paid by employers who didn’t insure their employees, and no opt-out provision for people who wanted to forgo insurance and pay their own way. I was also concerned by the implementation decisions of the administration that followed my own.’’ Comment: This plan could be Romney’s Achilles heel for many who will see him as just another liberal Republican. He needs to explain himself very clearly.

Romney writes: “Never before in American history has its president (Obama) gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many misdeeds, both real and imagined. It is his way of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable. There are anti-American fires burning all across the globe; President Obama’s words are like kindling to them.’’ Comment: Good. This is the kind of blunt talk that McCain avoided in 2008. This is the kind of talk that wins elections.

 

 Romney writes: "As President Obama proposes to once again reduce our investment in national defense, I acknowledge the public fervor and widespread wish that world peace will prevail nonetheless. …The truth is that we are at war with a formidable enemy and that nations like Russia and China are intent on neutralizing our military lead. The truth is that hatred and tyranny are pervasive; that we will be attacked again and that we cannot confidently predict the nature of the attack, or when or from where it will come. And so the truth is that for our freedoms to endure, we must pay a large price to maintain our freedom, and if we do not pay enough in dollars, we may be forced to pay the price in blood.” Comment: Yes, let’s not let down our defenses. Romney obviously is positioning himself as a Reagan-like figure in so many ways. This is significant.

 

Romney writes: “Even so, because we significantly dismantled our military prior to World War II, the investment required for us to catch up and confront our enemies was massive. The defense budget reached 34.5 percent of the GDP in 1945, about nine times today's 3.8 percent, and the delay prolonged suffering and loss of life.” Comment: It is refreshing to hear real numbers. They bring our current situation into focus. This  is a good strategy.

 

Romney writes: "I can think of no social program that is more valuable than the lives and freedom of our sons and daughters. Rather than scale our military according to our hope for peace or out of a desire to shift funds to domestic priorities, we should build it to be capable of fulfilling each of the missions necessary for our sure defense. Only then can we be confident that we will secure America's place in the world and preserve life, liberty, and prosperity." Comment: We can only build a nation that is secure. This should be a central campaign theme for Romney. It makes sense to millions who are concerned that cuts in security spending are hugely counterproductive.

 

Romney writes: "I can remember only one time during my life when most Americans presumed that we didn’t really have any great challenges. It was during the period that largely coincided with the Bill Clinton presidency. George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan had pushed the Soviet Union to the wall and won. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and here at home, there was talk of a “new economy” that sent the bulls running on Wall Street…. We shrunk our military by 400,000 troops during the 1990s, retired over one hundred ships from the navy, and decreased the size of our air force by more than a quarter. More ominously, we gutted our human intelligence capabilities…" Comment: This is straightforward language that will resonate with millions in light of our current situation.

 

Romney writes of a meeting with prime minister Shimon Peres of Israel, who said: “Only one nation in history, and this during the last century, was willing to lay down hundreds of thousands of lives and take no land in its victory— no land from Germany, no land from Japan. America. America is unique in the history of the world for its willingness to sacrifice so many lives of its precious sons and daughters for liberty, not solely for itself but also for its friends.” Comment: This is uplifting to hear after Obama’s litany of grievances about America. Go Romney!


Romney said about the Massachusetts health plan on Fox News Sunday: “Let me tell you, there's a big difference between what we did and what President Obama is doing. What we did, I think, is the ultimate conservative plan. We said people have to take responsibility for getting insurance, if they can afford it, or paying their own way. No more free- riders. And we solved this at the state level — not a federal plan, but a state plan. This is a federalist nation. States should be able to solve their own problems. We didn't raise taxes. We did not at the same time cut Medicare and expect our seniors to have to pay for all this. We didn't do what President Obama's doing, which is putting controls on our system of premiums for private insurance companies.” Comment: Still, conservatives are going to have questions.

 

Romney said about Obama’s scapegoating of insurance companies: “Our health care costs are very, very high because we use a lot of health treatments. Hospitals, doctors, MRIs, surgeries and so forth are more extensively used and far more expensive in this country than they are in many other countries. It's not the insurance companies that are driving our health care cost up and up. The reason their premiums are going up is because doctor bills and hospital bills and usage and so forth is also going up." Comment: This is clear language that explains the situation. Americans must realize that excessive use of health care is driving up the cost.

Romney later said: "And frankly, I'm very, very concerned that America is on a severely wrong track, that if America doesn't change course that we're going to kill the American dream for our kids and our grandkids, that we're going to get surpassed by other nations. And that's why I wrote the book, which is to lay out precisely what I think we have to do in everything from energy, education, taxes, deficit spending, the debt we've racked up through entitlements. We're going to have to make some dramatic changes in America or we're going to find ourselves being weakened. And this president is not doing that job. He's not taking the action that needs to be taken to make America strong in the face of the kind of challenges we have.” Comment: This is the type of thinking that is spurring millions of Americans to get involved in politics. They are deeply troubled. Romney is clear and unequivocal and will appeal to those people. Because our current course is unsustainable.

 

Romney said: " And I continue to believe very deeply, as I have in that last campaign described, that marriage must be defended. I think it's under attack. I speak at great length in the book about the importance of marriage prior to children. And I believe that being pro-life is a very important feature of the American culture, and that's something I will continue to defend." Comment: Excellent. Someone who is not afraid of the homosexual lobby or the abortion lobby.

Fantasy Gardening in Detroit

 

There was a clip on the national news recently about a black activist in Detroit. She was surveying the wreckage of a city that just a few decades ago was one of the most prosperous places in the world, which today is a ghost metropolis of empty lots, abandoned factories and boarded-up homes.

But this activist had A Big Plan. She would turn all the empty housing lots of Detroit into thousands of… vegetable gardens!

Yes! Vegetable gardens! So that the industrious, creative and self-reliant population there can make money selling squash and lettuce and tomatoes in the summertime.

To which the rational skeptic replies: "Yeah, right… In your dreams... Vegetable gardens…"

Detroit once was bustling manufacturing center and also was a consumer of vegetables and furniture and lamps and everything else, and had homes and families and factories making every type of car. Until the United Auto Workers union destroyed the auto industry with outrageous wage demands and silly, unsustainable work rules. Unions destroyed the steel industry and the railroads too. Today those same unions are driving the last nails into the coffins of General Motors and Chrysler.

So now that Detroit is destroyed, those vegetable gardens are going to theoretically give a solid annual income to the people like the car industry once gave them.

To which the rational skeptic replies: "Yeah, right… In your dreams... Vegetable gardens…"

In truth the only person who is going to make any money off of vegetable gardens in Detroit is the activist who is proposing it. Because this Fantasy Gardening is just one more brick in the wall of unsustainable, surrealistic socialism.

Fantasy Gardening works like this. Some leftist activist looks at an intractable problem like the death of an entire city and sees a silver lining. Like vegetable gardens.

Then the activist files a ‘grant application’, which is what liberals do instead of working. This world of ‘grant applications'  is one in which liberals sniff out, file for and win huge monetary awards, usually from the taxpayer, by proposing ideas that have no practical application. This is how university professors end up flying around the globe studying headaches in migrating squid or charting the effect of moonlight on sunbathers. We all know the stories too well. While the rest of America is doing something that actually matters like selling insurance or manufacturing plastics and paying their taxes.

Someone then sees this wonderful grant application for Fantasy Gardening and thinks it is a great idea. “Yes. They have the empty land. And the poor people have all day to work on the gardens because they’re unemployed. Why not put the two together. Bingo! This will increase the food supply. And reduce ‘global warming’...”

This is how it goes, folks. Honestly. And you’ve gotta get that "global warming" part in. That is critical. Because everything on the political left now ultimately comes back to GW.

Then the activist gets the million-dollar grant and immediately calls the local TV station and explains her plan. And being in the clueless media, the TV reporters think that this is a really good idea that will look good on the small screen. Upbeat. Optimistic. Yes! Vegetable gardens!

The media then portray the activist as a visionary and wonder why somebody didn't think of this before.

The clip runs on the Detroit TV station. And since the station is part of a national network, it is picked up and run on the national news and Americans across the fruited plain see it and cheer, that finally we have a plan for Detroit.

Then if some curmudgeon skeptic dismisses the idea saying “Yeah, right.. in your dreams... Vegetable gardens…” some other leftist activist in, say, Massachusetts, who got a government grant to publicly defend the vegetable garden government garden grant, replies: “The 'vegetable garden deniers' are just rich Republican bigots who wants to hold minorities down. So what is THEIR big idea for revitalizing Detroit?”

To which conservatives reply: "Build automobiles without labor unions."

Fantasy Gardening is part of the vicious cycle of irrational socialism. Leftists create an unsustainable economic climate and drive companies out of business. Then the people suffer. Then some activist comes along and gets taxpayer money to dream up some moronic scheme like Fantasy Gardening in Detroit. And then the national media pick up on it and millions of Americans are further propagandized into thinking that irrational liberalism is the salvation of the nation.

If only they knew…

What Americans really need to understand is that socialism and its offspring are merely ways to entrench greed and stupidity. We would all be better off if we thought rationally about economics and growth and jobs. But since the media are promoting these silly ideas, it becomes a mantra for the people. And they are led down a path of economic destruction.

 

 

 

Protests from Greece to Berkeley

 

Well, the college students are at it again.

Protesters took to the streets all over America on March 4 in a National Day of Action for Public Education to voice their anger at increasing tuitions at state universities and community colleges. Some protesters were said to be carrying clubs and knives, and one demonstration in Milwaukee turned violent, as did another in Berkeley, California where car windows were smashed.

You'll never see violence at a Tea Party, guaranteed.

Said one California graduate student who plans to become a high school teacher, ""We're one of the largest economies in the world, and we can't fund the basics. We're throwing away a generation of students by defunding education."

Meanwhile, in Greece and Portugal, government workers are protesting and even rioting against proposed cuts in their pay, benefits and pensions that their governments are imposing to solve those nations’ deep financial crises.

What do these phenomena have in common?

They both are leftist reactions (students or government workers protesting, sometimes violently) to problems created by leftist policies in the first place (exorbitant levels of government spending that no longer are sustainable). Even the website to coordinate the student day of protest was full of left-wing activist groups including the Students for a Democratic Society, the radicals from the 1960s.

States across the US are jacking up school tuitions because state budgets have fallen way out of balance and the money no longer is there to subsidize education. This happened because the unionized functionaries in public education (teachers, administrators, professors, ancillary staff, librarians, consultants etc.), both in the K-12 system and in the public universities were signing fatter and fatter pay, benefit and pension contracts in the flush years of the postwar boom. Since times were good, most taxpayers did not notice the increasingly rich outlays. But now that state economies have turned down, the schools are facing deep budget cuts.

But are those teachers and professors going to see any pay cuts or layoffs, or are the students simply going to be asked to pay more to make up the budget shortfalls? Similarly, when the federal government has a budget shortage, do government workers see pay cuts and layoffs or, on the other side, does the taxpayer see his taxes rise first, just as the students are seeing tuition hikes?

Truth is that government pay cuts and layoffs are always done as a last resort, and tax increases and tuition hikes are the first. So perhaps the students are directing their ire in the wrong place. Perhaps their anger should be directed at the unionized professors, administrators and staff for their exorbitant salaries and perks and bloated bureaucracies piled up after years of inertia.

And why aren't those students protesting the Democrat policies that have led the most liberal states to have the worst economic problems in the first place? Like, say, California...

USAToday.com reported:

Many of the demonstrations Thursday were being organized by student groups, faculty associations and employee unions that often have a contentious relationship with the universities.   (end of excerpt)

Oh, interesting. Notice who is helping to organize the "student" protests... 'faculty associations and employee unions that often have a contentious relationship with the universities'. And many outside groups. These lefties are never going to take the blame, but will always point fingers at everyone else to shift the spotlight from their own complicity in creating the problem in the first place. Conservatives have warned about these people for decades.

Overseas, Greece is seeking steep cuts in public spending to shore up the nation’s fiscal credibility within the European Union. Demonstrators at one point took over the Finance Ministry building in Athens. This is not peaceful protest but the beginnings of violent action being fomented by Greece’s strong communist element.

Wrote Maria Petrakis on Bloomberg.com:

 

In Athens, about 200 members of the PAME union group, aligned with the Communist Party of Greece, occupied the six- story ministry building today while protesters took over the nearby General Accounting Office, according to a police spokeswoman. (end of excerpt)

 

This is the type of violence that emerges from the far left whether it be here in the US or overseas. Some of the club-wielding and window-smashing American students come from the same leftist fringe that rewards slacker government workers here and abroad with endless pay, benefits, perks, sweetheart deals and pensions and then turns violent when those payouts are challenged. Wrote Petrakis:

 

EU officials praised the... (government spending cuts) and Greek bonds gained on the measures, which include a 30 percent cut to three bonus-salary payments to civil servants. (end of excerpt)

 

Notice that in a time when tens of millions of private-sector workers worldwide are losing their jobs that a '30 percent cut to three bonus-salary payments' is seen as threatening the livelihoods of civil servants. This is typical leftist featherbedding that has led these nations to the economic brink in the first place.  

Wrote Petrakis:

 

The main union for public workers, ADEDY, called a three- hour work stoppage for tomorrow and a protest rally in the city center that the country’s private-sector union group, representing 2 million Greek workers , will also join, according to spokesman Stathis Anestis. Most unions representing public- transport services also called a 24-hour strike tomorrow, affecting trams, rail and bus services in the Greek capital as well as the Athens subway.

Portugal’s public workers held a 24-hour strike today to protest a wage freeze that’s part of government efforts to convince the EU and investors that it can pare its own budget deficit to 8.3 percent of output from 9.3 percent last year. (end of excerpt)

 

This all means that government and union leftists have the capability to hold entire nations hostage in Europe. They will use violence. We may see the same here in the US. Watch these actors and how the media treat them. The Ancient Media in America may report peripherally on violence, but will never expose the real truth about all of this – that these crises are the result of an empowered left ruining universities and entire states and nations with pure, unadulterated greed. And that the time now has come to pay the piper, peacefully, we hope. But never trust the left.

 

A Man’s View of Motherhood

 

A Scottish university recently announced a hard statistic about childbearing - that women lose 90% of their reproductive eggs by the age of 30. This certainly is going to send shockwaves throughout the female population of America because it puts things into mathematical perspective.

What should conservatives - both men and women - say about all this?

We should state yet again how much we conservatives are the real pro-woman agents in America, and not the feminists and the liberals on the political left.

It is important to remember that the Republican party was the first to support women’s suffrage; that the first woman in the US Congress was Republican Jeanette Rankin of Montana; that Republican Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was the first woman elected in her own right to the US Senate; that conservative Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as prime minister of England; that the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court was Sandra Day O’Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan.

Then just look at how brutally Obama & Co. treated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary campaign, or how the left-wing media have trashed Sarah Palin without letup. And don’t think for a second that these were not examples of pure leftist misogyny.  Yet somehow those same liberals have stolen the mantle of “women’s rights.”

Do they deserve it?

Heck no. Conservatives do. Hands down. And it is because “women’s rights” have been portrayed by the liberals and the media only as women having high-paying, high-profile and powerful positions in society.

But we conservatives treat “women’s rights” differently. In fact we treat "women's rights" and “men’s rights” as exactly the same thing, that both men and women should have equal opportunity to live fulfilled, happy lives in a decent, free society based on Constitutional principles. That men and women should treat one another with respect, not with the utter contempt that feminists have for men. And that a good life for any person, man or woman, includes a solid, centered emotional well-being that feminism has deemed insignificant. Because one thing you often notice about feminists is how cold and unlovable that they are.

No wonder all the lib guys hate Palin. Because secretly they love her but can’t have her. They see her as warm and beautiful and real, not like the frigid, power-mad witches in their own universe.

Because liberalism/socialism is a materialistic ideology that is based solely on the acquisition of power and wealth. And so the only path in the liberal mind to empowering “women” is intellectual and financial, to grease the skids through the universities and the government, through education and laws. No genuine warmth or human emotion is involved.

Nowhere in liberal America is the natural and wonderful state of men and women as equal partners in matrimony and with children at the center of their wedded universe considered the top priority. Yet that is the absolute center of the conservative universe. And it is infinitely more significant that all the feminist theory combined. Because it treats the whole person, including his/her emotional core, as an integral part of God’s wonderful creation.

Look at the Democrats’ radical agenda on abortion. Feminism is even based largely on the hatred of children. How can it go any lower? Millions of feminists think that unlimited access to abortion - any time, at any stage of pregnancy, at any age - is the most crucial step to feminist perfection. This is just cruelty. Then many of them end up old, unmarried and without children to make any real joy in their lives.

Today, the news even has come out that women in America now have higher salaries than men on average. Yet we will rue the day that this happened. Because it means that manly endeavors like mining and construction and electronics and computers and mechanics now are being marginalized in a society where the economy has been ‘feminized’ into functions like government bureaucracy, law, education, health care and environmentalism.

But if we don’t have men out there building things and inventing things and fixing things, who is going to create the hardware for the future?

That is a good question.

Men are losing out to women in many ways today. The reason is simple: Real men do not seek to appease others and to gain power, but to progress through the accumulation of real skill and knowledge, often just for the sake of having them.

And so do real women, people like Laura Bush and Lynn Cheney, who recognize that they are there to support their partner, not to try and compete with him as Hillary did to her husband, but to serve quietly alongside him, just as Todd Palin serves quietly alongside his powerful wife, not cheating on her like John Edwards or Bill Clinton.

Just look at history to see how feminism accelerated itself, a result of the horrible treatment of women by the liberal ‘hippies’ of the 1960s. The 'hippies' treated women with contempt, like sex objects. That is how Bill Clinton became the monster that he turned into. And that is why feminists are so cold – because they understand the real relationship between liberal males and their female counterparts. And they do not like it one bit.

No, it is we conservative men who value and treasure women not as superiors (as feminism has made them) or inferiors (as the 'hippies' treated them) but as equals. Because that is the essence of a free society, that “all men” – and women – “are created equal”. Because only genuine equality can create the kind of freedom that is required to make a world that allows all people to pursue life, liberty and happiness under the watchful eye of a just, loving and all-caring God.

 

88 Public School Teachers Fired - Good!

 

A group of 88 unionized public school teachers in Rhode Island is being fired for incompetence.

In the tiny town of Central Falls, which is one square mile in size and one of the state’s poorest communities that ranks in the lowest 5% of Rhode Island schools, the federal government cited the district’s failures and offered superintendent Frances Gallo four choices including shutting the school, having it taken over as a charter school, changing school policies from the ground up, or firing all the teachers.

Gallo chose the last.

And it's about time some drastic action like this was taken…

After decades of teacher union propaganda always blaming failures on other people and particularly on the "lack of funding" – i.e., send more money to the teacher unions – the firing of these 88 teachers is a positive development in the crucial transformation of American public education from an untouchable, bureaucratic kingdom to a representative democracy where teachers are held to account for their performance.

In Central Falls,  only 7% of high school kids are proficient in math, while 52%  drop out before graduation. Many students are poor immigrants.

Naturally the teachers banded together and offered tearful sob stories about how the decision is going to disrupt their lives, and about how much they give to the kids. "I'm after school every day, I'm always available. I'm heartbroken. I'd do anything for this school system, I've done everything I can," said Frank Delbonis.

Blah, blah, blah…

This kabuki theater needs to end. Public education is a disaster in America, while teachers get more and more money every year, bigger benefit packages and, more and more often, early retirement in their 50s while offering an endless litany of how much more valuable they are to society than anyone else.

Which they are not. Public school teachers are no more valuable than welders or insurance salesmen or waitresses. Except that welders and insurance salesmen and waitresses who fail in their jobs can be fired while teachers virtually cannot be.

Until now. Good for Dr. Gallo. More and more Americans are aware of the union deceptions and support her decision. And don't believe Obama's malarkey about how he wants school reform. He does whatever the most radical fringe of the union movement wants, which is to never interfere in union business.

Public school teachers are rarely fired because many are protected by two of the strongest unions in America, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. This is what the New York Times reported recently about efforts to fire incompetent New York City school teachers:

[I]n the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence. Ten others whom the department charged with incompetence settled their cases by resigning or retiring…. The city’s effort includes eight full-time lawyers, known as the Teacher Performance Unit, and eight retired principals and administrators who serve as part-time consultants to help principals build cases against teachers. Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, said that the team, whose annual budget is $1 million, had been “successful at a far too modest level.” (end of excerpt)

One incompetent teacher, Michael Ebewo, was found to have misspelled words on a chart, to have ignored many of his special-needs students, and to have offered answers to those students who could not respond to questions, confusing the students. But according to the Times, reporting on the proceedings to fire Ebewo:

Mr. Ebewo’s lawyer interrupted with objections more than two dozen times, but the arbitrator overruled him in nearly every instance. The hearing, which covered lessons dating to 2005, lasted four hours... the hearing will probably go on for months, because of a rule the city agreed to four years ago. (end of excerpt)

Teachersunionexposed.com gives some insight into teacher union corruption.

 In Los Angeles, eighth-grade teacher Carlos Polanco humiliated a student who had tried to commit suicide saying that “you can’t even kill yourself.”

Is Polanco going to be fired?

No, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times:

 

The Los Angeles school board, citing Polanco's poor judgment, voted to fire him.

But Polanco, who contended that he had been misunderstood, kept his job. A little-known review commission overruled the board, saying that although the teacher had made the statements, he had meant no harm.

It's remarkably difficult to fire a tenured public school teacher in California, a Times investigation has found. The path can be laborious and labyrinthine, in some cases involving years of investigation, union grievances, administrative appeals, court challenges and re-hearings.

…The Times reviewed every case on record in the last 15 years in which a tenured employee was fired by a California school district and formally contested the decision before a review commission: 159 in all (not including about two dozen in which the records were destroyed). The newspaper also examined court and school district records and interviewed scores of people, including principals, teachers, union officials, district administrators, parents and students.

Among the findings:

* Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time.

* Although districts generally press ahead with only the strongest cases, even these get knocked down more than a third of the time by the specially convened review panels, which have the discretion to restore teachers' jobs even when grounds for dismissal are proved.

* Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare. In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor. (end of excerpt)

 

Later the LA Times reported that school district bureaucrats even have purposely sabotaged the dismissal process on behalf of a unionized teacher:

 

But it is not uncommon for districts to sabotage themselves with technical missteps. In Polanco's case, for example, L.A. Unified administrators began firing proceedings before giving him the required 45 days' "notice of unprofessional conduct" -- one factor in the commission's decision to overturn his firing. (end of excerpt)

 

The LA Times further reported:

…Meanwhile, said Kendra Wallace, principal of Daniel Webster Middle School on Los Angeles' Westside, an ineffective teacher can instruct 125 to 260 students a year -- up to 1,300 in the five years she says it often takes to remove a tenured employee. (end of excerpt)

And not only can bad teachers usually not be fired, but…get this… good teachers who speak out against the unions can be targeted for harassment. Reported the LA Times:

Cynthia Acerno was a last-minute hire at an elementary magnet school in the San Diego Unified School District, according to a summary of her case by a review commission. Though known for being strict, the district veteran had had no previous problems.

But "vocal, politically well-connected" parents accused her of being a "menace," and started unfounded rumors that she was screaming at children, drinking and using drugs, the panel found. Some pulled their children from her class.

"The case against her was a cocktail of hearsay on hearsay with an ill-will chaser," the panel commented in its ruling in favor of Acerno, who could not be reached for comment. ". . . Many of these scurrilous and damaging things were said in front of the children of this class by parents. This was shameful." (end of excerpt)

So just imagine a leftist union structure allied with leftist parents in the community ganging up on a whistleblower teacher. That is how corrupt the system has become. And that is why the Rhode Island decision is the first step in the right direction of undoing decades of  union abuses.

But don’t feel sorry for the Rhode Island teachers. Half can re-apply to be rehired.

To read more about how difficult it is to fire public school teachers, type 'impossible to fire public school teachers' into your search engine. Or 'difficult to fire teachers' or 'unions protect incompetent teachers'. The stories are endless. We all know it.

Tiger and the Ten Commandments

 

There have been two big stories in the media recently, both of which have raised social issues.

The first is the tale of a Hollywood actor/director named Kevin Smith who was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. Southwest has specific guidelines for overweight passengers that the captain of the flight may enforce at his discretion.

The second is the emergence from seclusion of golfer Tiger Woods who got caught in a sex scandal and who made an apologetic statement on February 19.

Problem is that these guys are relatively insignificant figures in our culture except that they are famous. And that is the problem. We have elevated some pretty low and inconsequential people to some pretty high stations, and that is the crux of the dilemma.

After Smith was thrown off the flight, he went on the internet and cursed out the airline and created a national media stir. Yet he didn’t seem to have much self-criticism for being a glutton.

Why not? Why can’t a Hollywood narcissist like Smith just once say, “You know what? Kevin Smith is a fat slob. I should be ashamed of it. Southwest Airlines was right. I should lose 100 pounds. I apologize to Southwest.”

But no. Never. The narcissist is first and foremost a manipulator. And the first thing a narcissist does is to A) blame somebody else for their problems, hopefully a conservative entity like a private corporation (Southwest Airlines); and B) seek some advantage from his victimization, like Smith is using the incident to promote his career.

In fact gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. So do you think that that might be the reason that these leftist media elites like Smith are always seeking to draw people away from concepts of right and wrong as stated in the Seven Deadly Sins or the Ten Commandments?

Indeed. They want you to forget about the Big Picture of moral and social decency so that you gravitate to their stupid Follywood movies or to some dopey golf match. Which is what is driving our nation off a cliff. Because we are being drawn away from what is important in order to undermine our freedom.

What about Woods? Oh, there’s a real peach. A golfer… wow… we’re all impressed. The media fuss around this cad is obscene.

Woods was involved in the most promiscuous types of relationship with more than a dozen females, yet he came out ashen-faced and looking like a corpse when he made his apology statement. His delivery was stiff. His small studio audience looked like they were sitting before Saddam Hussein waiting for the news about who would be executed next.

So you wonder why Woods was never so ashamed of his behavior before. Could it be that… he was getting away with it?

Basically who really cares about Tiger Woods? He is a sleazy guy who hid his true character for years. He’s worth a billion dollars. And we are supposed to feel sorry for him?

I don’t think so. I think we all have much bigger things to think about, like maintaining our prosperity and our freedom at a time when both are under political assault from the wealthy elites like Woods and the Hollywood billionaires and all the rest of them. And maintaining our moral bearings when they are under personal assault from the same people.

The media made a big deal out of Woods’ statement. But why should we even care what Woods says in trying to redeem himself? What has Woods ever done besides entertain us? He is not some protector of our freedom, or a legendary scholar, or a leader of men in a dangerous world. He’s a golfer. Period.

But the media have built Woods into a legend. And oh, yes. Woods is half-black. So he's a half-god. Like Obama. And it's all done in the name of money. And all of Woods' sycophant friends and sponsors are wrapped up in this materialistic web of money, money and more. This is part of the leftist media culture which is based in greed and materialism.

And whatever anyone on the political left can do to get more money, they will. Because despite all their verbal assaults on “the rich”, the fact is that liberals are the richest and most materialistic money-grubbers of all. Just look at the profane wealth concentrated in Hollywood and San Francisco and New York and Silicon Valley and Aspen and Santa Fe and Martha's Vineyard and Chicago. Hardly a conservative in sight.

Woods’ apology and Smith’s war with Southwest Airlines are about one thing: Putting them in the position to profit. Don’t think for a minute that Woods cares about what he did wrong. He is looking down the road for more profit, which he can’t have until he redeems himself.

It is also instructive and hilarious to watch the feminists seething at Woods and sticking up for his cuckolded wife. These are your typical lefty witches - angry, confused pseudo-intellectuals. Because modern-day feminism is nothing but a manic-depressive psychosis where men get crucified for sexual harassment for looking sideways at a female co-worker, while females are told on the other hand that the world is one big whorehouse of sexual freedom – abortion, birth control, lesbianism, adultery.

The traditional family? Forget about it. The feminists’ liberal friends in the media and in Follywood – people like Kevin Smith - mock the traditional family every minute of every day. They disdain Christianity, strong men, our military, traditional values, motherhood, patriotism. So the feigned outrage by feminists at Woods is just so much blarney. These feminists should look at their own hideous faces in the mirror to find out about Tiger Woods. Because feminism/socialism have created cultures of amorality/immorality that allow Woods to thrive.

Socialist progressivism is devoted to legitimizing the proscriptions that contradict a decent society. And if you do not know what those proscriptions are – which would be no surprise since popular culture has marginalized them - the Seven Deadly Sins are lust, envy, gluttony, sloth, greed, anger and pride. (Note: pride means “arrogance”) while the Ten Commandments are:

 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My Commandments.

 “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.

 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.

 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

 “You shall not murder.

 “You shall not commit adultery.

 “You shall not steal.

 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

 “You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.”

 

Inhofe Wants Truth on ‘Warming’

 

US Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, is asking the Obama administration to investigate so-called ‘climate scientists’ over what Inhofe is calling “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” which is also known as ‘global warming’.

Inhofe, who has been a staunch critic of the ‘warming’ theory, has been a beacon for truth in a world of deception and nonsense. And good luck to him in prodding the Obama administration to investigate. That certainly is not going to happen and we will have to wait for a Republican Senate and a conservative’s return to the White House in 2012 to have the potential for any action at all.

Inhofe also is calling for Al Gore to be called back to testify before the Senate to explain all the discrepancies between the established facts and the assertions that Gore made in his 2007 testimony to the Senate and in his film, An Inconvenient Truth.

Hooray for Inhofe. He easily is the most sensible leader in the United States Senate today for standing firm on his principles, and who now is being proven correct in the wake of several series of revelations about the fraudulence of the so-called “settled science” of ‘climate change’.

Inhofe recently released a minority staff report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which he is ranking member, requesting an investigation by the Department of Justice about  whether there has been research misconduct or criminal actions by ‘climate change’ advocates like Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The report alleges that many scientists may have violated fundamental ethical principles and even federal laws regarding research that has received taxpayer funds. This type of allegation is unprecedented in the history of the Senate. Inhofe also believes that e-mails hacked last Autumn from the computers of English climate scientists, along with other damning documents, prove that the alleged ‘consensus’ that man is causing so-called ‘global warming’ is not based in scientific fact.

Inhofe also is charging that re-examination of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 AR4 report has forced IPCC to retract some of AR4’s conclusions, including the prediction that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. This prediction was not even peer-reviewed science, but instead was the product of environmental activists. One of the editors of AR4 has admitted that he knew that the Himalaya data was false.

This is all absolutely stunning in light of the fact that governments worldwide had planned to proceed with major economy-changing legislation based on the false science. Thus Inhofe plans to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Federal Clean Air Act and plans to ask Congress to withdraw funding for further EPA action in this regard.

Inhofe's report describes some important issues revealed by the hacked e-mails including the fact that some climate scientists were cooperating to obstruct the release of evidence countering the 'warming' theory; were manipulating data to reach desired conclusions; were acting to pressure scientific editors to squash research opposing the ‘warming’ dogma; and were acting more as climate activists than objective scientists.

The report also suggests that the Shelby Amendment, which requires public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research,  may have been violated; notes the potential that the Federal False Statements and False Claims Acts may have been violated, which can bring both civil and criminal penalties; and includes the possibility for charges of  obstruction of Congress and obstruction of justice.

If proven, these charges could subject the scientists involved to criminal penalties and to bans on receiving any further federal research dollars. 

As a result of questions raised in the e-mail controversy,  Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in the UK has been forced out of his post,  while Mann is currently being investigated by Penn State for potential misconduct. If other are threatened with criminal charges, Inhofe believes that some researchers may join his inquiry in order to save themselves. Senator Inhofe believes that Hansen and Mann should be fired.  

Of course, we can expect the Senate’s Democrat majority to block Inhofe.

Still Inhofe's report is part of a big step forward in uncovering not only the junk science behind ‘global warming’, but the criminal nature of the participants. Senator Inhofe is certainly opening up a big can of worms that will lead to major questions about the nature of scientific inquiry today. Thousands of careers and reputations certainly are at stake, as they should be.

But this is the type of fraudulence that we get when the drug-addled and self-deceiving 1960s generation grows up and gets into positions of power and leadership. The 1960s were a false myth about a better world, and indeed we have seen in this climate scandal that liberals from that era will say anything to fit a template that simply does not add up, just as they did 40 years ago.

 

 

Goodfellas? Or Bad...

 

There is a movie from the 1990s called Goodfellas. It has been highly praised over the years and stars Robert DeNiro, Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci. The director is Martin Scorcese.

It is a violent film about organized crime and murder and drug dealing. It is nihilistic and angry. And oh, yes, it is made by and features members of the Follywood elite who always claim how “pacifist” and peace-loving they are.

Pacifist my foot. These people will do anything for money, and often it involves violence. Just look at all the thug roles that DeNiro has played.

What do these movies do?

They promote violence in society, that is what. These films are vehicles that exploit violence and nihilism in order to make profits for all those so-called humanitarians in Follywood.

You know, all those ‘caring’ Democrats…

Oh, no, say the lefties. These are just innocent movies portraying real slices of life. They are just fun, and people pay to see them.

Truth is, they are not fun. They are incubators of violence and violent ideas. These lefties could make other more innocent movies. But no. The money is in the violence.

These movies often glamorize organized crime, which is what you can expect from Follywood. Through labor unions and through its influence on Democrat political machines, organized crime is an arm of the same Democrat party that is woven into the fabric of Follywood. So is that why they love to make movies about their friends?

The Columbine High School massacre of 1999 was directly inspired the movie Natural Born Killers by far-lefty Olive Stone. You know, the guy who hates Bush, conservatives, Christians etc. Meanwhile John W. Hinckley was motivated to shoot president Ronald Reagan in 1981 by the violent film Taxi Driver directed by... Martin Scorcese.

Gee, that Scorcese sure loves violence. And he is liberal to the core. And like all liberals, he loves violence as a way to make money at the same time that he is an anti-capitalist socialist. And he lives in a mansion tucked away on a guarded street while millions of people across America live with violence every day, the victims of the seeds of violence that are planted by Scorcese films.

Now a member in good standing of another sector of liberal Entertainer America - Oprah Winfrey - has announced that she will end her talk show in 2011.

Hallelujiah…

Unfortunately she will be concentrating on expanding her media empire on cable TV.

Booo...

Winfrey is another ultra-wealthy liberal who has had a corrosive effect on American discourse. She has pushed a leftist agenda at the expense of any alternative point of view. She has given Al Gore a forum for his nutty ‘global warming’ theory but never has given anyone with an alternative view the same consideration.

And while the media claim that a serious political commentator like conservative Rush Limbaugh is “an entertainer” – and Limbaugh is sometimes very entertaining - who obviously has too much money, they never have taken Winfrey to task for being a genuine “entertainer” or for having a giant fortune which is many times Limbaugh’s. And for promoting frivolous ideas and lightweight entertainment and fraudulent ideas like ‘global warming’.

This is not to disparage Winfrey. She has been successful at what she does. But she is a media person who has succeeded only by being an engaging interviewer. And that is fine. Except that her wealth comes as a result of the overall wealth of a prosperous America.

Like the entire entertainment industry, Winfrey is a “service” to the American economy. She is a frill. But she is certainly not crucial to our existences. We do not fundamentally need her like we need electricity and gasoline and lumber to build our homes. Just like we do not need Martin Scorcese’s violent films.

Yet her overall advocacy of radical environmentalism, for example, seeks to deny us the resources to sustain our lives out here in Small Town America. Because Oprah Winfrey and Martin Scorcese will not be affected if Al Gore and his enviro friends push up the price of energy as Obama promised that energy prices will “skyrocket” under his plans. But the rest of us will be affected.

Which we conservatives have always warned about. And for which we conservatives have offered a simple solution – build nuclear power plants and tap our domestic energy sources.

Winfrey, on the other hand, was a huge Obama supporter. And she advocates the myopic views of the world that always come from the elites in their secluded mansions, insulated from the real world.

An economist named Thomas Malthus once wrote that mankind was doomed because the amount of land needed to feed horses for the growing population was going to outstrip the supply of land. And he was right.

Except that Malthus never considered that some new technology might come to the rescue, something he never had thought about.

And who came to the rescue. Was it Al Gore? Or Oprah. Or Martin Scorcese?

No, it was a common-sense capitalist named Henry Ford who made automobiles available to the common man, automobiles that replaced horses and severely reduced the amount of land needed for horse, making that land available for food production.

Hmmm… that sounds like a perfectly world-saving idea.

But it was too good to be true. Now we have people warning that our use of the automobile is going to kill the planet just like the horses were supposed to. And Oprah Winfrey and all the wealthy elite in Hollywood are supporting that point of view.

What is going to happen, however, and what already is happening is that technology is going to create a better world and new energy resources so that we can sustain our higher standard of living. Most of the world is underexplored or unexplored for oil and natural gas. New drilling technologies are making oil easier to find and extract. Nuclear fusion is a promising technology to produce large amounts of energy. Nuclear power already is the ‘miracle’ power source that we need.

But liberals like Robert deNiro and Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama do not want us to use these sources, or to find more oil. Because in their fantasy world, we should be afraid of all this progress.

Yet at the same time we are supposed to enjoy their stupid TV shows and pay to see their violent movies.

Which makes no sense at all.

 

Why Americans Lack Health Insurance

 

The big health-care summit at Blair House in Washington on February 25 could have addressed one issue in more detail: Why do so many Americans lack health insurance to begin with? Democrats seems to blame everyone but themselves. Here are the questions we might ask to find out:

 

How many millions of people without health insurance grew up poor because they did not have a father in their home, since 1960s-style 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 and government dependence?

 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, lawsuits and bureaucracy 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 confrontations with the business interests and corporations that traditionally provide jobs?

 Many, friends, many millions.

 How many people  have no health coverage because they live in the cities of America, particularly the inner cities, which have been controlled without challenge for more than 100 years by Democrats, where taxation, regulation, bureaucracy and corruption have thwarted the creation of new 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 left-wing 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 America, leaving them with no money to pay for health care… or other crucial needs?

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, physical therapists, 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.

How many millions of citizens cannot afford insurance because the health-care industry's Democrat labor unions like SEIU, particularly nurses, are pushing for relentless pay increases, pushing up the cost of care for all?

Many, friends, many millions.

How many millions of citizens cannot afford health insurance because busybody Democrat legislators in every state have mandated exactly what must be covered under insurance plans sold in those states, forcing people to pay ever-increasing costs for unnecessary and unwanted coverage?

Many, friends, many millions.

How many millions of our citizens cannot afford health insurance because they live in Democrat-dominated states with devastated economies like California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Rhode Island and Vermont where liberals have undermined those states’ economies over decades, leaving people with no jobs and no hope?

Many, friends, many millions.

So what is the solution?

In order to make health insurance available to most people, the first thing we should do is to expose the Democrats and socialists for who they are and what they are doing to America's economy and health care system.

Conservatives have the real solution: First, restrain the Democrat party. Then implement market-based solutions, and legal reform.

Media Covering for Libs' Electoral Losses

 

If you recall January 20, 2009 when Obama was inaugurated and was being seen as invincible, that the Ancient Media (New York Times, CBS, CNN, NBC, Time magazine etc.) were portraying a nation gone left; a Republican party that was dead; that Republicans were just a bunch of angry, white Southern men; that the leftist majority finally had awakened etc. Even Newsweek magazine said on its cover 'We Are All Socialists Now'

Yet today some estimates say that Republicans could gain as many as 13(!) seats in the United States Senate and more than 40 seats in the House of Representatives in the upcoming elections, giving the GOP majority control in both houses of Congress.

What a difference a year makes.

And all this happened because the manic-depressive Ancient Media were irrationally exuberant one year ago  declaring that Obama would transform the nation and that Obama would be Emperor for Life and the next bust on Mount Rushmore.

What a difference a year makes.

Indeed the Ancient Media told us that health care was going to shower ‘free’ care on all; that unions finally would take control of every workplace; that illegal immigrants would all become productive, taxpaying American citizens; and, oh yes, Chicago would be preparing in just 6 short years to host the summer Olympics.

If only that were true. What a difference a year makes.

What happened?

Well, first, it’s not over. Because the same Ancient Media that were wrong about everything in the past year now are doubling down on their conventional wisdom with a new template like this: Yes, Republicans have won three huge elections since last fall, the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, and the US Senate seat in Massachusetts. The libs are holding onto one final straw, however, talking about the conservative candidate in the 23rd congressional district in New York state, Douglas Hoffman. They say he lost a seat to a Democrat that for decades had been Republican and that this is the really big story of the past year, that now it is conservatism that cannot really win.

If only it were so. Because they even have this one backward.

Look at the truth about that race. In NY-23, Douglas Hoffman was running on a conservative, third-party ticket, the ticket that usually gets 1% to 5% of the vote in any given election.

Not only did Hoffman then rise up with hardly any money or name recognition and force the liberal Republican off the ticket, but then he got 46% of the total vote while his Democrat opponent got 49%. And this is the real story – not of conservative weakness, but of astounding conservative strength. He almost won a national election as a third-party candidate which is virtually unheard of. And Hoffman is expected to win that seat next November in a rematch.

And as the media continue to misrepresent that story and others like it across the nation, they are going to watch the Democrat majority in America slip through their fingers for the next 20 years.

Look at the way that Republican US senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts has been treated in the media after he won the seat held by Ted Kennedy for 47 years. Before the election Brown was dismissed without a prayer. And now that he has won, the Ancient Media say that Brown won only because he is a liberal,  because his opponent ran a lousy campaign, that it was a fluke etc.

What really happened, though, is that Brown ran specifically and strongly against Obama and he won. And this is the most frightening prospect of all for the Democrats and their media allies, that their invincible Emperor Obama has been exposed as having not only no coattails, but no clothes at all.

What the elections in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey have proven is that the conservative movement is gaining strength, and is pulling the entire American discourse back toward the right where it belongs, and that Republicans of every stripe are going to win big in November including conservatives. This is something that the elite, know-it-all media deemed unthinkable just one year ago.

Now the media are taking on the National Tea Party Convention and Sarah Palin’s appearance there. One CNN commentator even falsely reported that Palin was going to accept a $100,000 speaking fee several days after it had been announced that she would not accept that fee.

This is the way the media are seeking every advantage - by conveniently ignoring the facts.

No, the Ancient Media continue to report that the Tea Partiers are just a bunch of fringe kooks, that they are going to hurt Republicans as much as Democrats, that the movement never will last, that the movement is fracturing.

This is nonsense and comes from the same media elites who declared the Republicans dead last year.

The Tea Parties are another barb in the conservative anchor that has sunk its teeth into the mind, body and spirit of the American electorate, holding firm to ideas and concepts that are necessary to taking America back from the brink of Obama socialism. Without those firm policies that contradict Obama directly and without equivocation, candidates like Scott Brown might never have ventured boldly out. So not only are we going to see Republicans winning big this year, but more conservatives too, as well as the entire conservative ethos that powers it all. And that is the big story that the media are going to miss - and misreport wherever they possibly can.

 

 

 

Democrats’ War on Men

 

US Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said on February 22: “Men when they're out of work tend to become abusive. I met with some people while I was home dealing with domestic abuse. It has gotten out of hand. Why? Men don't have jobs. Women don't have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time. Men, when they're out of work, tend to become abusive. Our domestic crisis shelters in Nevada are jammed.”

Oh, really, senator? “Men” are abusive? That sounds like an awfully broad statement. Sexist even. Why are you picking on “men” and making such a sweeping charge?

This statement appears to be part of Harry Reid’s personal mental crackup as he sees his re-election bid going down in flames.

Keep babbling, senator. In the 10 months you have left in office…

Reid’s statement is blatant anti-man bias  just like the unvarnished bias against white men by four liberal Supreme Court justices who voted in favor of a lower court ruling that a group of white male New Haven, Connecticut firefighters could not be promoted simply because no blacks had passed the promotion test.

Indeed Reid’s charge is part of the Democrats' decades-long effort to marginalize strong and confident men. This had been going on since the 1960s when men were turned from responsible father figures of the 1950s into demons and oppressors.

Just look at the popular media today and bias is everywhere. In television, advertising, movies etc. white men often are portrayed as bumblers, adulterers, fools and criminals while females and minorities are portrayed as crime stoppers and honest problem solvers.

Of course Reid forgot to mention that "men" traditionally have fought the wars, built the powerplants and houses, cut the timber, mined the coal and, for millennia, have done all the brutal, backbreaking work that has sustained mankind and built economies.

But now, according to Reid, men are “abusive” in times of economic stress. Which makes you wonder: Does that include powerful Democrat men like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy and John Edwards and their “abusive” attitudes towards women not in times of economic stress, but just in their everyday lives?

The fact is that men indeed are losing out because the Democrat War on Men is succeeding. Women now are more secure and numerically superior in the American workforce, and actually are surpassing men in incomes.

America will rue the day that this has happened, however. Because women have moved en masse into “armchair jobs” like health care, media, education and law. More women today attend college than men. But as men and their contributions are marginalized, our nation is becoming poorer because we do not expand economically through health care, media, education and law, but when we do “manly” things like building and manufacturing.

Yet across America today, if a white man is applying for any job, and the same job is being applied for by a black man, a gay male, a lesbian, a feminist, or other minorities, often the white man is eliminated first even if he is more qualified, as in the Connecticut case. If he is known to be conservative, he often hasn’t got a prayer.

In this recession, men are being much harder hit than women. Here is an excerpt from a report by Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn, at the Pew Research Center:

… The national economic downturn is reinforcing these gender reversal trends, because it has hurt employment of men more than that of women. Males accounted for about 75% of the 2008 decline in employment among prime-working-age individuals (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). Women are moving toward a new milestone in which they constitute half of all the employed. Their share increased from 46.5% in December 2007 to 47.4% in December 2009. (end of excerpt)

Casey Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in the New York Times recently:

 

For the first time, women have outnumbered men on the nation’s payrolls.

The Labor Department revised on Friday its previous estimates of nonfarm payroll employees, the monthly aggregate employment series that gets the most media attention.

The most recent jobs estimates by gender are for January 2010. Before adjusting for seasonal changes, 64.2 million payroll employees last month were women, and only 63.4 million were men. (end of excerpt)

So in other words, not only have women taken the jobs of men, but the higher incomes as well.

A larger share of men in 2007, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of demographic and economic trend data. A larger share of women are married to men with less education and income.

From an economic perspective, these trends have contributed to a gender role reversal in the gains from marriage. In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. In recent decades, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women. (end of excerpt)

This is all a result of Reid’s and the Democrat party’s war on hard-working men, fathers, the military, Christianity etc. That is why so many white men are finding themselves shut out of an economy under legal strategies set up by the Democrats as in the Connecticut case. And the marginalization of men has accompanied the breakdown of the family and the social mayhem that has ensued, putting further stress on state and federal budgets as the economic protections of the nuclear family erode and more children fall on the government dole.

The War on Men in the Democrat party is a very bad development and Reid’s comment is obnoxious. And it is time for men to strike back fearlessly at this terrible bias.

 

Living Beyond Our Means?

 

Are we Americans living beyond our means? Are we in the midst of a paradigm shift in the way we conduct our lives? Is this recession perhaps a bellwether that something is terribly wrong?

Well, yes and no. And this is the way people always have looked at the future which always is full of uncertainty, perhaps positive, perhaps negative. And uncertainty lies ahead for our nation.

We face economic uncertainty because the Democrat party, along with world socialism, is following the path of debt and economic stasis, which can easily be remedied by sensible conservative economic policies.

We face uncertainty over our energy supplies because there are man-made restrictions on supply by environmentalists and governments. This situation can be remedied by sensible conservative energy policies.

We face political uncertainty over terrorism first because Democrats do not want to confront it head on, and second because terrorists with nuclear weapons can kill millions of Americans, a threat that never has existed before. These threats can be remedied only by conservative vigilance.

Yet while there is trouble ahead if we follow our current policies, conservatives know that America ultimately will make the right decisions.

And things are not so bleak. There is much to be thankful for. There is more liberty and more literacy in the world than ever before. More people are better fed and have a higher standard of living and medical care than ever in history, and the world is generally more peaceful than it ever has been. The internet is an amazing tool for expanding knowledge. So we also can look at the bright side and consider that we have much to build on for a better tomorrow.

But have we become too demanding in our modern lives that are often too easy and frivolously self-indulgent?

Indeed that is true in many cases. Consider our American lifestyle. Today we each consume huge amounts of energy and resources. We have air conditioning for the heat, oil burners for the cold. Our houses can be kept at a perfect, level temperature by thermostatic control. This was unheard of throughout history when people suffered with the weather.

We have had good jobs and vast material wealth. We have excellent health care with breakthroughs extending our lifespans every year. We have every educational tool available to better ourselves intellectually. And best of all we have our Christian God and our Bible for our spiritual solace, which led us to this point and will lead us into the future. And we have an amazing Constitution to protect us.

Yet today many people seem to want more and more and more, as if we do not already have enough. They need to go gambling in Las Vegas or shopping in Paris or skiing in the Rockies. And when we have a recession and they cannot go, they feel let down.

They need to have a big house and expensive automobiles. And the biggest TV that money can  buy. And clothes and jewelry and the latest in electronic gadgets.

In addition, millions of Americans often throw away perfectly good lives by inventing traumas, addictions and pathologies, evolving into the Therapy Culture that has submerged millions of minds into confusion and chaos. Through the media, Therapy Culture liberals have so corrupted our lives that psychoses surface in ways that never existed before.

This is evidence of a severely superficial and materialistic culture in which we must be constantly be entertained and diverted. Because we have lost sight of what we have. And as the old saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got until it is gone.

On a recent television program about rich people in California, the husbands were sitting around lamenting the recession. And despite the fact that they were obviously rabid materialists several of them agreed that in these economic hard times that they suddenly were more thankful for 'the little things' that they had come to overlook in their hectic, acquisitive lives – family, friends, health, nice homes, good jobs etc. One man said “What was I thinking?” as he reviewed his credit card bills that showed profligate spending.

This sentiment never would have been revealed in the good times. And it is an indicator that perhaps this recession has a silver lining,  that tough times indeed can make us tougher and wiser, that a bad economy is acting as a wake-up call for us all to recount our blessings in life. And perhaps it is a summons to recognize the difference between the prosperity that we have been blessed with; and the materialism that we have evolved into. And it is important to note the difference.

Prosperity is defined in The American College Dictionary as ‘prosperous, flourishing or thriving conditions; good fortune; success’.

So prosperity is a good thing and is what the Founders of our nation wanted for all Americans. Because those wise Founders had seen governments controlling peoples’ lives for millennia, usually causing those people to be poor. Prosperity means you can live your life at more than the subsistence level, and find more meaning in that life through a higher standard of living. You can own a home, run your own business and have many of the essential comforts that man has been denied throughout most of time.

Materialism, on the other hand, is quite different and is described in the same dictionary as ‘devotion to material rather than spiritual objects needs and considerations’

Thus materialism is a corruption of prosperity, just as many American lives have become corruptions of the freedoms that the Founders wanted for us. Just look at the materialist money-lovers in Follywood flaunting their wealth in our faces. It is shameful. Yet underneath many of them have myriad psychological problems because their lives are empty inside. They have no spiritual basis for living.

Materialism is a liberal trait. Materialism originates in narcissistic and decadent lives in the cities of the world, where liberalism reigns. Just thumb through the New York Times or any of the other glossy New York publications to see all the advertisements for multimillion-dollar apartments, jewels, expensive cars, clothes, chic vacations etc. Yet the Times editorially is socialistic and says over and over how much it hates Rich People.

Hah...

Materialism is the love of luxury that has spread from the cities into the middle class in some parts of America. And it has caused those middle-class people to lose their moral bearings and to become more like the liberal epicureans in New York, San Francisco etc. – dissatisfied, needy, greedy, trivial and self-indulgent.

Yet now, with the economic hard times, many of those materialists are reappraising their lives. And they are understanding that money - prosperity - is nice to have, but that their obsession with material things is unimportant compared to the better things in the world that cannot be taken away by a recession like faith, family, scholarly knowledge and friends – you know, all the things that are “free”.

So we wonder: Have some Americans simply been living far too high in the modern world, taking prosperity to the point of unchecked materialism and losing themselves in it, damaging our nation as a result?

Indeed that appears to be true.

Go look at history. Or look around the world today where billions of people still live primitive lives. Should this not make us thankful for what we have in our advanced cultures, even if we have just the basics?

Apparently not for millions of our fellow citizens. No, today women are sold little $100 tubes of wrinkle cream so that they can feed their dermatological vanity. Men drive the most expensive sports cars so that they can appear powerful and interesting. Children have all the latest fashions to appear to be in control of their ‘cool’ lives.

Now with the bottom falling out, suddenly all Americans have to face up to themselves. And often the picture is not a pretty one because many have ignored their basic humanity in favor of unrelenting materialism. Yet we conservatives who did not fall into the trap of urban materialism find ourselves much happier, healthier and better adjusted than those who tumbled into the abyss.

Conservatism has consistently favored prosperity for all, but has opposed gross materialism. Because conservatives are wise people who know the old saying, that you can’t take it with you. And so you might as well find something that you can take with you into the next world like your honor and your belief in a life well-lived. Because those things do not have a price tag on them no matter how hard you look for it.

 

Tide Turning in Terror War

 

The conflict once known as “the war in Iraq” or Operation Iraqi Freedom now has been given a new name - Operation New Dawn. That is encouraging but it still is just a new title for a war that has been far more costly than we ever could have imagined, but which now seems to be trending toward stability and ultimately democracy.

The number of American troops in Iraq now has fallen below 100,000 for the first time since the conflict began in 2003, and parliamentary elections are slated for March. The American death toll in recent months has fallen to zero. And even far-left Newsweek magazine has a cover saying that Bush finally has won in Iraq!

In considering these hard-won victories it is important to remember that in 2006 then-Senate minority leader Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada said, “The war is lost.” And the whole Democrat party, along with its compliant media, joined in a chorus of doubt. Now, however, it appears that Reid is going to be voted from office in November, which shows that there is such a thing as poetic justice.

What a difference four years make. The Democrats were more than ready to throw in the towel and concede defeat, which would have been a huge blow to America and to the War on Terror.

Instead, we have a tentative victory in Iraq and improving conditions in Afghanistan where US forces have taken the Taliban stronghold of Marjah. Our boys  took it back though sheer, brute force and on February 17 it was announced that bridges, roads and government centers in Marjah now are under the control of American forces.

As the tide in Afghanistan and Iraq are shifting, so is the political tide in America shifting against the defeatist Democrats who just six months ago were reminding us that everyone from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union had been driven from Afghanistan in defeat.

But our troop “surge” worked in Iraq and now seems to be working in Afghanistan as well, while the New York Times and the university elites were bloviating that we were headed for defeat in both.

Near Karachi, Pakistan, Taliban second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured on the night of February 10-11 by security forces in a nation that now is using its intelligence wisely. Some reports say that US agents helped in pinpointing Baradar.

Baradar's capture is likely to provide a treasure trove of intelligence that will lead to more captures and more death and destruction for the bad guys. Another major Taliban leader in northern Pakistan was seized within ten days of Baradar's capture. And don’t expect Pakistan to give Baradar American Constitutional rights or to read him his Miranda warning - even though ACLU will somehow demand both.

Is the noose tightening on terrorism worldwide?

It seems so despite the Democrats’ insistence that we could never prevail in such a war.

One of the most interesting developments of all is the widespread deployment of pilot-less lightweight Predator 'drone' aircraft that are flown by remote control. All over Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, drones are launching small missiles that are killing top terror leaders left and right. With these strikes coming from out of the blue from airplanes that cannot be detected from the ground, we now have developed a solution to the problem of so-called “asymmetric warfare”.

In asymmetric warfare, the US plays by the rules against terrorists who don't. They use every underhanded tactic to attain their goals from targeting civilians, to suicide bombing, to using women and children as shields, to firing from mosques and cemeteries, to refusing to wear the uniform of any nation.

Yet now the drones are said to be striking as much fear in terrorists’ hearts as terrorists strike in the hearts of innocent people everywhere, which is a wonderful thing to behold. Imagine you are a terrorist sitting in a house in a remote corner of rural Afghanistan on a sunny day. Your lookouts see no evidence of advancing ground forces. There are no jets flying overheard and the sky appears clear. Yet suddenly you and your house are blown to bits by a compact Hellfire missile fired from an American Predator that nobody could even spot, much less shoot down.

Such an attack is just as devastating and unexpected as a car bomb in a Baghdad marketplace. And that is its beauty. In fact it is just like a terrorist attack... on the terrorists themselves. And now accounts of these surprise strikes are spreading rapidly and they are instilling fear in the terrorists themselves.

So the question is: How will terrorists train and recruit others if they themselves are running scared?

Answer: They cannot. And increasingly the Predator strikes are putting huge psychological stress on the bad guys. This is great news for the civilized world. We are giving the terrorists a taste of their own medicine. We have developed our own form of asymmetric warfare.

As another indication that the tide is turning, even Muslims are being reported as increasingly angry with Al Qaeda for killing mostly Muslims with its assaults.

And who said we could never beat the bad guys, that terrorists were invincible in fighting a guerilla-style war against us? Who said that there is an endless supply of terrorists?

The Democrats did, along with our leftist media and the university professors who never, ever have fought in war or even cared about our freedoms.

Indeed it appears that we are finally turning the corner in the War on Terror despite Obama’s dithering and the Democrats’ insistence on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Even as restrictive American rules of engagement have led to canceled kills when other innocents might have died as well, we still appear to be turning the tide.

Because our mission always has been honorable – to establish decent governments in a region known for tyranny and violence. And only through sheer force of will and determination – along with far, far too much American blood - the world appears to be changing for the better.

While the job is still far from done, it sure looks better than it did a few short years ago. And we all must be thankful to our armed forces for doing a job that the rest of us never ever would do, but which has been absolutely critical to preserve our own freedoms and to spread the concept of liberty around the globe.  God bless them all.

15 Reasons Health Care is So Expensive

 

A famous doctor named Atul Gawande recently said in a speech that there are now 6,000 different drugs available along with 4,000 separate procedures that may be combined to cure 13,000 identified human maladies.

So is it any wonder that health care costs are out of control?

The reasons are simple. Here they are, without obfuscation:

1) Today we can mend diseases and conditions that would have killed the patient 50 years ago. Or even 10 years ago. And now that we all have become accustomed to seeing every malady treated, we expect it. Indeed we are probing deeper and deeper into every corner of human health, at higher and higher cost. For instance, we are spending large amounts of money on research and treatment for “orphan” diseases that affect very few people. This is wonderful, but the monetary return on research and treatment per person cured is very, very low. And we all pay that cost.

2) At the same time, we are living longer and longer, and retiring younger and younger and spending more of our lives consuming health care rather than producing the wealth to pay for it. Thus the costs per person go up and up and up.

3) Insurance payments are a third-party system. People generally do not pay their own health-care bills. Often they do not even look at the bill. And so they do not scrutinize how much they are being charged and there is no consumer brake on costs.

4) Then think about the black teenager gang-banger who gets shot and sits in a hospital for a month getting well. Uninsured, the rest of the consumers of health care pay his bill. Millions of people have no insurance and we who pay must account for them. No wonder the costs are going up for us who pay the freight.

5) Then think about the 90-year-old man who needs a heart operation. Fifty years ago, that same operation was not available to even a 40-year-old man to help him live and be productive for the next 25 years of life until his retirement. Yet today, that 90-year-old man could get an expensive surgical procedure that may extend his life by just two years, showing very little return for the investment. And we wonder why health costs are spiking.

Then bleeding-heart liberals counter, “You are hard-hearted, thinking about everything in terms of return on investment.” To which the rational conservative replies: “Isn’t that what the entire debate is about – costs?”

6) Think about the poor, uninsured, unmarried teenage girl who goes into a hospital and has her child delivered for free. Free to her, that is. While the rest of us pay for it. And the child’s father gets off scot free and never sees the child and then goes off and impregnates another young, poor, uninsured girl. And another. Then we wonder why health-care costs are going up, up, up.

7) Think about the accident victim who gets 30 surgeries and hundreds of hours of physical therapy to get well. This is a large amount of expensive health care consumed by one single person. And somebody has to pay for it. Which we all do. Or think of the rich athlete who gets hundreds of thousands of dollar in care for injuries sustained on his/her 'job', which we all pay for.

8) Think of all the elderly people who are summoned over and over again to the doctor’s office, often unnecessarily, just to enrich the doctor from insurance plans, for repetitive treatments and checkups that do little to improve health. Many of these doctors are big-time, money-loving liberals. Or think about old people who report to the emergency room for every ache and pain, when for millennia they ignored those aches and pains as simple old age. And it all must be paid for. Today elderly people in the last years of life consume an astonishingly large percentage of health-care dollars because we are afraid to say the truth, which is “No, you cannot have it all. It simply has become too expensive.”

9) Think about preventative medicine which Obama claims is going to solve our health crisis. In fact, it makes things worse. Because millions of people end up getting treatments and tests that are unnecessary and costly.

10) Then we have liberalism, which says that somehow we must cure everything, that every last malady, no matter the economic status of the patient, is to be fixed, that even the indigent and idle poor deserve a heart operation, that even a sleazy drug dealer is entitled to emergency room treatment when he overdoses on his own drugs or is shot on the street corner. And we all pay for it.

What we need are separate hospitals for the poor and uninsured so that the uninsured do not undermine our existing hospitals, which is what is happening today. And these "poor hospitals" can be manned by liberal doctors and nurses who tell us how much they "care". And then we will see how much they really "care".

11) Then we have the trial lawyers, who are 98% Democrat. Every single practitioner in the field of health care from doctors to nurses to therapists may double up or triple up on tests, treatments and procedures just to cover themselves so they won’t be sued. Sky-high malpractice insurance costs are passed on to consumers. And as these lawyers get rich and give their campaign contributions almost exclusively to the Democrat party, they are pushing up the cost of health care dramatically. And the Democrats protect them. No wonder the cost of health care is out of control.

12) SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, organizes millions of health-care workers. These workers get artificially high wages, pushing up the cost of care because those wages are paid by the consumers of health care. You and me. The basic cost of labor is one of the driving forces in the cost of any product. No wonder health costs are spiking.

13) Think about Democrat busybody legislators all over the country, in every state, making laws that say that health insurance policies sold in their state must cover this, this and that, maybe 100 different conditions or more. This takes the choice out of the hands of the consumer and pushes up prices.

Why should a person pay to insure for blemish removal or toenail treatment if he/she does not want that coverage? Why not let insurance companies compete across state lines and sell people exactly the policies they want with only the coverage they want, like car insurance or homeowner policies? Why can’t an insurance company offer any person in any state a huge deductible policy like $30,000 or $50,000 to cover only catastrophic costs. The policy would save consumers huge amounts of money.

Because if insurance should cover one thing, it should be catastrophic costs, not everyday costs. But under the current system, under laws implemented by Democrats, insurance must cover every doctor visit from a headache to a broken arm to cancer. Thus costs are pushed through the roof because every transaction has a fixed bureaucratic cost built in – also known as insurance company paperwork and doctor paperwork. And the more transactions, the more insurance costs. Imagine, ideally, if the number of insurance transactions dropped dramatically, for instance only for catastrophic costs, while the rest of the bills were paid directly by the patient to the doctor. That would bring down costs dramatically.

14) Homosexual males have the highest rates of disease and death than all other Americans because of their lifestyle. This is paid for by all insured people. Why shouldn't homosexuals pay much higher premiums than even cigarette smokers do, to cover their much higher risk? Answer: Because Democrats and the media are covering up the truth.

15) The media promote endless health-care scare stories, planting anxiety into the minds of the people, leading them to seek our more and more health care unnecessarily.

We can easily solve the crises in our health-care system just by being honest about what is driving up costs. And the time is right to start today.

 

Saved or Created…

 

It is just amazing how liberals manipulate language. For instance, president Obama has made the words “saved or created” part of our lexicon as in “my economic policies have saved or created” such and such number of jobs.

But this is a fantasy. There is no way to measure how many jobs have been “saved”. Just because somebody does not lose his job, does not mean that the job is “saved”. That would be like saying that everyone who didn’t die was somehow “saved” by Obama.

So it looks like our president must have “saved” 300 million lives in the last year.

“Saved or created” is more media/liberal spin. It is meaningless except in the world of words where anything can mean anything. And the world of words is the liberal world or the theoretical world that exists on college campuses and in newspapers where you can solve every problem with…. words, words and more words. And you can manipulate those words any way you want.

Look at the phrase “single payer” health plan. Everyone knows that “single payer” really means “nationalized health care” without saying it. But what does “single payer” really mean?

If you think about it, it is a phrase of genius obviously concocted by an intellectual. Because it means absolutely nothing at all like the overwhelming majority of that which is spoken by today’s intellectuals. Does not “single payer” mean that individual people have to pay for their own health care? That sounds rational. But that is the complete opposite of what libs mean. So you can make words say anything you wish.

“Single payer” truly is a phrase for the ages.

Liberals love to talk about “revenues” for the government. But what are “revenues” but “taxes” to those of us outside of the Beltway Bubble. Yes, indeed, we need to “raise revenues”, they say. Which means they are going to “raise taxes”. But they can’t say that. After all, people understand what “taxes” really are. “Revenues” sounds much sexier. But who wants to pay more in "revenues". Everybody!

Obama always talks about “investing in” education or energy. But when he talks about it, you know that he is talking about “investing taxpayer money in” education and energy. If he were not, he would have to say “investing private capital in” education or energy, which he would never do.

“Investing in” job creation through the government sounds really appealing because it sounds like something an economist would say and that it would mean jobs for everyone. But the way Obama says it there is only one meaning and that is “jobs for Democrats, union members, college professors" etc.

How about the word “liberal”. No, they won’t even say that any more because it is so wildly unpopular. Now they use the word “progressive”. But what does that mean?

Who knows… It must mean “very liberal” because the people who say they are “progressive” are always “very liberal”. Fact is, “liberal” would be less harmful to their cause.

“Progressive” really means radical socialism and government control of everything. “Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive and he was a Republican,” say the libs. But Teddy Roosevelt was about as Republican as Colin Powell is. Which is not at all.

How about the granddaddy of all, ‘global warming’. What did this mean?

Nothing at all. Because it described a set of circumstances that are part of our natural world. The globe has warmed up many, many times in our history. So they changed it to ‘climate change’. But we conservatives have been saying all along that the climate has always changed. So in other words, the ‘global warming’ kooks are now actually agreeing with us conservatives. That must be very, very difficult for the kooks. 

“Planned Parenthood” is a real zinger. It is another term for “abortion clinic” as when some girl says “I had planned parenthood but I got an abortion instead.  Because my boyfriend left town on me, so now I’m living with another guy who does not want my former boyfriend’s baby.”

Gee, honey, perhaps your former boyfriend should have used a “latex flow interrupter” so that you didn’t have to get a “planned parenthood”.

Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano referred to “terrorist attacks” as “man-caused disasters”. That’s an interesting thought because most Americans have thought that “man-caused disasters” were caused by Dad when he let the spaghetti sauce burn onto the bottom of the pan.

How about “Muslim-caused disasters” since Muslims are the ones causing the disasters? Wouldn’t that be more accurate?

But isn’t “man-caused disasters” sexist? Let’s call them “people-caused disasters”. But that would be insulting to… people. So why don’t we just call terrorist attacks “cotton candy” and make everything nice, as in “the cotton candy of 9/11 caused untold damage to America.”

And of course now “war on terror” has become “overseas contingency operations”.

Obama even managed to make “September 11” into a “day of service”. What the heck does that mean?

It means that Obama wants us to forget the “man-caused disaster” of 9/11. Which we already are forgetting by calling it a “man-caused disaster”.

It is interesting to note that Obama frequently talks about “volunteering” and “public service”. Yet who are the people LEAST likely to do volunteer work?

You guessed it, Democrats. As in labor unions, public employee unions (you can’t even get them to do their own jobs, never mind volunteer), the idle poor, Democrat politicians, college professors, the idle Democrat rich etc.

Blacks are always talking about how they should get “reparations” for slavery. I guess they sort of ignored the $10 trillion in "handouts" that they have received from the American taxpayers since the 1960s. So why don’t we just say that that $10 trillion is “reparations” and call it even.

“Rich people” used to be called “Republicans”. But that has changed. Most of the rich people in America today are statistically Democrats. In fact, all the richest people are Democrats like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and George Soros. So maybe we can call Republicans “rich” and Democrats “fiscally advantaged”.

Remember when Democrats said that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” in reference to opposition to Bush. Yet when you dissent from Obama, it is the “highest form of punching bag” because some SEIU union thugs will beat you up in the streets of St. Louis as they did last summer to ObamaCare opponents.

And when you dissent from US senator John Kerry, asking him a  question that he did not want to answer as did the "Don't taze me, bro!" guy, you get zapped with a stun gun. And silly me, I always thought it was Democrats who favored free speech.

How about “illegal immigrants”. Si, senor, they are here illegally, but they left their “documents” back at the house, you know, like their forged American Social Security card and forged Houston birth certificate that the Democrat party has provided for them free of charge. So we will call them “undocumented cross-border transients”.

“Tea baggers are inflamed because we’re winning,” former president Bill Clinton said about the health-care bill and its progress through Congress which Tea Party adherents oppose.

Isn’t it really beneath a former president of the United States to use the word “tea baggers” to refer to members of the Tea Party movement? The term “tea bagger” is a dismissive pejorative. Why couldn’t Clinton have said that “the opposition” is inflamed or “Republicans” are inflamed.

Why did he have to resort to a disdainful characterization of people who are in fact hard-working, honest and who are part of the foundation of our nation, who contribute every day and want nothing in return from the government?

Because "teabagging" is apparently a reference to a sexual practice by gays. So "teabagger" really refers to homosexuals who are prone at very young ages - even in their 20s and 30s - to require large amounts of health care to treat their myriad diseases passed around through practices like "teabagging". In other words, they are consuming wealth, not creating it like Tea Party patriots who work hard and pay their taxes.

Yet you never hear this type of inflammatory language from the upper echelons of the modern conservative movement because conservatives are infinitely more mature than liberals. Surely you might hear rough language on the internet, or from a provocateur like Ann Coulter, or jokes about Ted Kennnedy from Rush Limbaugh. And that is fine. We expect that. And that is what Republicans generally rely on – surrogates – to do the trash talking.

But then again, to liberal politicians themselves like Bill Clinton, "trash talking" is the highest form of patriotism.

 

Washington’s Wisdom in his own Words

 

We celebrate the birth of George Washington on February 22. He was born in 1732. We all know the many stories of Washington, who easily is one of the greatest political figures in world history, if not the single greatest.

But it is his actual words that portray how wonderful he was. He was a leader of men, a philosopher, an observer of human nature, and very witty, in a dry, erudite way. Here are some of his timeless quotes taken, with appreciation, from the website notable-quotes.com, with my comment after each:

 

“It is with pleasure I receive reproof, when reproof is due, because no person can be readier to accuse me, than I am to acknowledge an error, when I am guilty of one; nor more desirous of atoning for a crime, when I am sensible of having committed it.” Comment: Washington knew that willingness to admit one’s fallibility is an essential ingredient for genuine success.

Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.” Comment: Without conscience, we are but animals.

 

“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” Comment: This may appear to be isolationism, but it is more like common sense.

“Few men have virtue enough to withstand the highest bidder.” Comment: Washington saw into men's souls. All the way.

“A people... who are possessed of the spirit of commerce, who see and who will pursue their advantages may achieve almost anything.” Comment: This is true, and an advertisement for the free-market capitalism upon which America was based.

“I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is the best policy.” Comment: How often have we said this without knowing who said it first?

“Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light.” Comment: This is why so many people are destroyed by seeking to hide or manipulate the truth. Like Al Gore.

 “As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is, to use it as sparingly as possible…” Comment: Why have we allowed our leaders to ignore this wisdom?

“To contract new debts is not the way to pay old ones.” Comment: Except to Democrats…

“There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet an enemy.” Comment: Peace through strength. It is a timeless credo.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.” Comment: Yes, because people quickly realize that it is the highest state for mankind, and wish to nurture it.

 

“The cause of our common country calls us both to an active and dangerous duty; Divine Providence, which wisely orders the affairs of men, will enable us to discharge it with fidelity and success.” Comment: Washington truly was a Christian believer in the goodness of God. Don’t ever believe anyone who says otherwise.

“Associate with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.” Comment: Is that ever the truth.

“The right wing, where I stood, was exposed to and received all the enemy's fire ... I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” Comment: These are the words of a true patriot, soldier and freedom fighter. And cool as a cucumber.

 “No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.” Comment: Again, Washington was a true believer in the divine power of a Supreme Being, and that His hand was essential in creating our great nation.

 “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.” Comment: This is the source of Washington’s greatness – a recognition of the power of government and the fervent desire to restrain it.

 “Should the States reject this excellent Constitution, the probability is, an opportunity will never again offer to cancel another in peace—the next will be drawn in blood.” Comment: Washington knew that the establishment of American liberty was perhaps a once-in-history proposition.  

 “I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.” Comment: This is a brilliant observation about the essence of human nature.

“To form a new government requires infinite care and unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid, the superstructure must be bad.” Comment: This is universal, for buildings as well as government. And everything else.

“To place any dependence upon militia is assuredly resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life, unaccustomed to the din of arms, totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill ... makes them timid and ready to fly from their own shadows.” Comment: This is very shrewd and funny and a little demeaning. But hey, it's true.

“Soap is another article in great demand--the Continental allowance is too small, and dear, as every necessary of life is now got, a soldier's pay will not enable him to purchase, by which means his consequent dirtiness adds not a little to the disease of the Army.” Comment: Washington even could talk about the critical nature of soap. What a guy!

 “I hate deception, even where the imagination only is concerned.” Comment: This is deep. Very deep. From a deep man.

“Facts may speak for themselves.” Comment: How often have we said this without knowing its origin?

“Example, whether it be good or bad, has a powerful influence.” Comment: Washington knew well about how humans can influence others.

“The best way to preserve the confidence of the people durably is to promote their true interests.” Comment: This is Politics 101, although many political leaders seem to ignore it.

“It is easy to make acquaintances, but very difficult to shake them off, however irksome and unprofitable they are found, after we have once committed ourselves to them.” Comment: How true.

“Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men any more than fine feathers make fine birds.” Comment: Hilarious.

“Avoid gaming. This is a vice which is productive of every possible evil; equally injurious to the morals and health of its votaries. It is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and father of mischief. It has been the ruin of many worthy families, the loss of many a man's honor, and the cause of Suicide.” Comment: This is brilliant, for all those advocates who think that gambling is a good thing for their states.

“I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one's life, the foundation of happiness or misery.” Comment: Again, very witty, concise and true.

 

“When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves, and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.” Comment: Wisdom for the ages.

 

 

Hannah’s Gold Needed Here

 

Hannah Teeter is an Olympic snowboarder who won a gold medal in Torino in 2006, and silver in Vancouver. She comes from small-town Vermont and humble origins.

Since her big victory in Italy four years ago, she has become famous and has developed a charity called Hannah’s Gold. “I wanted to be a helpful person,” she said in a recent interview on NBC. The charity's largess is directed toward a small village in Kenya, Africa, where the money has helped to build some classrooms and a health clinic. “People are counting on me,” she says about the African venture.

So what is wrong with this picture?

Nothing, it seems. It truly is wonderful. But maybe everything is wrong. Because Hannah’s Gold is classic youthful – and liberal – misdirection coming from a super-liberal state like Vermont.

Because the problem is this: While it certainly is heart-warming to see Teeter helping out people halfway around the world, perhaps she could direct her fame toward an end closer to home. Like her own state of Vermont.

Yes, perhaps Teeter could channel her personal energy toward rebuilding the economy in her own state which is suffering rapid decline at the hands of the same liberal socialists who would induce her to put her energies into faraway Africa in a politically correct, multicultural way.

Here is a reprinted 2009 editorial from Nikitas3.com that explains the situation in Vermont:

Vermont vs. Vermont

 

Brandon, Vermont has been called “the art and soul of Vermont” because of the work of a dynamic, vibrant, and varied collection of 50-plus artists belonging to the Brandon Artists Guild whose exhibit space is open to the public 7 days a week throughout the entire year.

- Statement of Brandon Artists Guild

 

Governor Jim Douglas Wednesday signed legislation aimed at slowing the exodus of young people from Vermont…. And Huckstep is not alone, many of his peers plan to leave the state in the next few years. "Personally, I don't know whether I want to stay in state," said Stephen Dennis, a senior at Burlington Technical Center.

- Excerpts from a news article of May 23, 2007 on wcax.com

 

Vermont Getting in Gear: An old ski town finds new life as a mountain biking destination... Ready to Rock: Abandoned quarries gain ground as a mountain biking retreat... Thinking Autumn: A scenic portfolio by Vermont Life contributing photographers... The Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge offers an oasis for nature lovers... Brush With Destiny: A Vermont philanthropist is betting that by funding art, he can fuel discussion about the future of the state

- Table of contents from Vermont Life magazine, Fall 2009

 

What do these above excerpts tell us?

They show that there are two Vermonts, one in which the state is weakening economically and losing its young people, and another which shows the result of the state focusing for decades on developing a ‘soft’ tourist-based economy.

But with the Northeastern United States losing population and jobs, is Vermont heading down the wrong path by marginalizing traditional economic development and putting all its eggs in the tourist basket?

Yes.

And how has this happened?

It started in the 1960s. During that decade of ‘back to the land’ socialism, educated liberals from the cities and suburbs of the East Coast started settling in rural states like Vermont. Improvements in transportation and communication had opened up rural areas to a new type of development, which often was tied to the cities. In addition, the postwar ski industry had drawn tens of thousands of ‘flatlanders’ to Vermont who developed a lifestyle quite different from the traditional ways of the Green Mountain state which were farming, logging, quarrying, tourism, and small-scale manufacturing.

There were struggles and conflicts between the ‘locals’ and the ‘outsiders’ that now have been resolved. The ‘outsiders’ have taken over the state and drowned out many signs of the past. Once a conservative agricultural state with local manufacturing industries scattered throughout, today Vermont has gone soft and ultra-liberal. Many of the new settlers were environmentalists and no-growth activists.  And while New England was an economic engine for the first 200 years of our nation, today productive enterprises are moving South to escape the highly eco-regulated and taxed economies that the libs have created in much of the Northeast.

On the other hand, the arts economy and the tourist economy and the eco-tourism economy suggested in the Vermont Life table of contents have come to dominate the state. Meanwhile many of the newcomers since the 1960s established careers in small business or as independent contractors (consultants, architects etc.) working from Vermont and serving clients far and wide. The state also has attracted many  wealthy retirees, largely liberals.

And the people who have furthered this 'softening' of the Vermont economy are the same ones who have been making manufacturing and even farming increasingly difficult. The Hill Country Observer, a regional weekly newspaper in southern Vermont, did a big fear-filled feature recently about a Vermont grade school that went on red alert after a nearby farm applied essential chemicals to the corn crop without properly notifying school officials. This is the type of emotional environmentalism that pervades the state.

Meanwhile more wealthy, educated 'flatlanders' move to places like Vermont and find ways to protest dairy farming – they don’t like the smell or they protest the chemicals - while second-home and retirement-home development makes farming uncompetitively expensive by pushing up land values.

This is all part of the softening of the state and the loss of jobs and income that is leading young people to leave. Vermont says it is striking back at the economic loss, however. Here is another excerpt from the WCAX article:

 

To try to entice students like Huckstep and Dennis into staying, state officials passed a $12 million Scholarship and Workforce Development Bill into law.

The bill includes $6 million for scholarships and grants, nearly $5.5 million for workforce training programs and a half a million dollars for loan repayment.

 

So what is wrong with this?

Answer: Everything. Because it makes no difference if students get a technical education if there are no technical jobs for them when they graduate.

Since the university leftists began moving to Vermont in the 1960s, they have been marginalizing ‘hard’ economic activity. And the result is now in. Manufacturing, which in Vermont long had been small-scale operations in places like Brattleboro, Bellows Falls and Springfield, is becoming scarce to invisible. And once the skilled youth leave who would have served that manufacturing, it will be impossible to bring it back. The decline is feeding on itself right now and the crisis of young people leaving Vermont is widely acknowledged.

And what rational businessperson would consider moving to a state like Vermont which has as one of its US senators the radical-left socialist Bernard Sanders?

 I lived with a group of Ivy League obstructionists in Vermont in the late 1970s, and one member of our community got onto the local planning board and did everything in his power to nitpick every aspect of every development project, in our particular town relating to skiing. This has occurred all over the state since the 1960s. And ultimately the goal of these people was to tag all ‘hard’ development as dispensable just as environmentalists nationwide are essentially halting economic activity all over and sending jobs abroad.

Today, after 40 years of obstructionism, Vermont has one of the worst economies in America and one of the most liberal electorates to match. The two are intertwined. To see the state’s small manufacturing base fleeing, and farming made more and more difficult by taxation and radical environmentalism means that the traditional economic foundation of the state is decaying while publications like Vermont Life seem to be praising the result with its endless subservience to the ‘soft’ tourist economy.

Meanwhile, ‘right to farm’ laws, which are supposed to legislatively favor farming, are popular among liberals in places like Vermont who want to see farming sustained - by other people that is. But these laws are just like the workforce development legislation mentioned above: They do not address the underlying issue but approach it from the perspective of government which is perfect for the socialists who think they can legislate behavior through political power.

One caller to a national radio talk show said last year that she was planning to leave Vermont after speaking with her state legislator who said that the move to obstruct economic development has been intentional, that there were many people in Vermont who want the state for themselves, unspoiled. This is classic liberal narcissism - my way or the highway. I recognized this 30 years ago and left the state.

On its current path, Vermont is going to fade away. It will become like Newfoundland or some other faraway place with few jobs but a gorgeous countryside and a tourist industry. Unfortunately, it soon will be full of elderly people who will wonder where all the young folks went, and with fond memories of their own youths in the 1960s when they moved to Vermont and started the state down the path to get it to where it is today.

So perhaps Hannah Teeter could spend less time thousands of miles away in Africa, and become a spokesman for the economic revitalization of Vermont. It would not cost a dime. Lower taxes! Less regulation! Reduce restrictive environmentalism! Perhaps she could adopt her own town instead of flying halfway around the world to feel good about herself.

Unfortunately the political incorrectness of such a pursuit would likely preclude it before it even started. Too bad.

Dems Don't Redistribute their Wealth

 

A famous entertainer lives up here in western Massachusetts and he has been around since the 1970s, has sold millions of records, tours regularly, and has a ton of money. Or two tons. He is a big-time liberal and his wife holds a prestigious job with an arts organization. She’s a big lib too.

The question is: Why must she work too? He has lots of money. So why must the wife take a job that someone else could use, particularly in this very tough economy? Why can’t she enjoy her husband’s fortune like most women would love to do, and maybe work as a volunteer in some charity or arts organization?

We all know male liberals who have successful businesses and careers. Yet their wives often work too, taking jobs that could otherwise go to other people in the community who are unemployed or under-employed. Or the wife could work and the husband could stay home.

But they don’t.

Republican wife Nancy Reagan never had a big career. Neither did Barbara Bush or Laura Bush. Many conservative women have let their husbands do the heavy lifting in the income department. They were happy in their roles as wives and mothers and doing other productive things. But Democrat wife Hillary Clinton was a lawyer, as was Michelle Obama who had a huge salary, much bigger than most Americans. But still she said she was never proud of America.

Typical liberal… Grateful for zero. Even when they get everything they want.

So among those leftists who always say they want to “redistribute the wealth” most, these libs really seem to want to "concentrate the wealth" - in their own hands, that is. Because liberals love money more than any other people including capitalists.

This is just classic liberalism, where certain people (Democrats) seek to publicly influence society to act one way while they personally do the opposite. Like the Hollywood environmentalists who warn us about impending climate catastrophe and oil shortages but who themselves have the biggest carbon footprints of any single person, flying in private jets, traveling the world, incessantly on the move, multiple houses, SUVs, boats etc.

Why must Barbara Streisand have a huge air-conditioned building to house her career memorabilia? Isn’t that causing ‘global warming’? Why must disgraced senator John Edwards live in a sprawling, air-conditioned mansion in North Carolina while politically he advocates rabid and restrictive environmentalism?

Answer: Because they are are big-time liberals. They never can have enough money or prestige. Ever. Their needs are endless. Because they are weak and insecure people. No, for liberals there is one set of rules for everyone else and one set for them. Their rules are always this: Liberals first, money first, me first.

If you ever have known one of these libs, you know that they are all mixed up. And who wouldn’t be, with all those contradictions in their lives, like Democrat US senator John Kerry and all his multiple mansions and cars and his high-speed boat, while he supports the passage of radical cap-and-trade legislation.

Yeah, right. Cap somebody else’s energy use, not his.

How about Al Gore and his energy-guzzling mansion in Tennessee? Big Mr. Environmentalist uses 20 times as much energy as the average house. But that’s OK. After all, he is Al Gore.

Look at the Kennedys. They always have said how much they stand politically for the Little Guy. Yet John F. Kennedy once said that “I learned about the great depression at Harvard” because his father Joe’s money insulated the family.

Yet what triggered the great depression in the first place?

The stock market crash of 1929 did, which happened because rich investors like Old Joe Kennedy manipulated stocks and then pulled out so he got rich while everyone else lost and the market collapsed. Ol' Man Kennedy's crooked ways are well known - except to  most Americans who are left clueless by the Kennedy-loving media.

How about environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who lives in New York City and flies his family to Sun Valley, Idaho for Christmas every year. Why doesn’t he put his money where his mouth is and go to nearby Vermont and save all that energy?

No, he is a Big Rich Liberal who does what he wants. Because all this radical environmental legislation will not affect him because his grandfather gave him all that ill-gotten wealth. Because liberals have two goals in life: Live well. And then get other people to do what liberals want them to do.

Doesn’t it seem that the essential truth is that libs really want all the money and all the energy for themselves? Aren’t they really the rabid materialists in our society? Just think about any rich lib you know and you will see how this is true.

Isn’t the point of urban socialism to funnel more and more capital into the cities, where wealthy leftists like George Soros work in their offices getting richer and richer, while throwing rural people out of work with environmental regs and tax policies that put mining, timbering, ranching and manufacturing out of business? Hell, the billionaires in Hollywood support Democrat tax increases on people making $100,000 a year!

Aren’t these wealthy black entertainment-industry moguls getting rich selling vile material to black America that destroys communities with lyrics about violence and misogyny and dissolution? Hasn’t Robert deNiro become super-affluent playing tough-guy mafia killers in the movies, but then screams for gun control along with all his rich Hollywood friends?

Heck, people need guns to defend themselves from the people who get violent ideas from watching Robert deNiro movies…

If you know anyone on the conservative right, however, you will notice one thing: They live by their principles and are happier, more humble, less materialistic and more faithful to God than anyone else in America. And this is really what drives the liberals nuts, that there are people who are happy with their families and their faith and their ordinary lives and the simple things.

How can those people be so happy with so little, the materialist libs wonder.

The total wealth of George W. Bush is less than 1% of the wealth of Oprah Winfrey. How can he be so content, the libs would like to know? Doesn’t he miss all that money? No wonder the Hollywood elites hate Bush. Because he is not obsessed with money like they are. Yet even with all their money, libs are still unhappy, just as senator John Kerry seems like the saddest character in the US Senate despite the fact that his wife has more money than… well, you know…

And where did she get her money?

She married into the capitalist Heinz food products family and then her husband was killed in a plane crash. So she inherited the money and she and her husband now use it to advocate socialism and radical environmentalism. Which never will affect them. Because they have Somebody Else’s Money to cushion them from the effects of radical eco-legislation which will push up the cost of energy for everyone.

Always look closely at rich liberals and watch how they act. You will find many contradictions among the libs that they will vehemently deny, but that we conservatives know to be true. And truth is our most potent weapon.

 

Who Hates Wall Street?

 

In January four bigwig Wall Street CEOs were hauled before Congress to testify about the current crisis. These guys are always portrayed in the media as rich capitalist Republicans who are sucking the life out of the "little people" of America and giving their campaign contributions to Dick Cheney.

If only it were so. Here are the actual campaign contributions of two of those CEOs, in percents, as reported on newsmeat.com, a contribution tracking website: Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO, Goldman, Sachs (66% of contributions went to Democrats, 2% to Republicans, 32% to special interests); Jamie Dimon, CEO, JP Morgan Chase (82% Democrats, 8% GOP, 10% special interests).

And what did Obama say recently about big bonuses for Blankfein and Dimon after fulminating against such bonuses for many in the financial industry? He said he doesn’t begrudge bonuses  of $9 million for Blankfein and $17 million for Dimon. Said Obama: “I know both those guys ; they are very savvy businessmen. I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

Oh really?

This is classic two-face Obama. He spouts endless trash talk in his attempt to gin up populist anger at Wall Street and banks, but then does not begrudge millions in bonuses – for his Democrat friends, that is. Obama's party and media allies then trash wealthy people endlessly, but say nothing about rich Democrats like Stephen Spielberg and Larry Ellison. Because rich people like Ellison and Dimon and Blankfein are Friends of Obama and friends of the Democrat party who will kick back their influence and part of their wealth in campaign contributions, guaranteed.

This illustrates a perennial trick of the Democrat party which says it hates banks and Wall Street when in fact a survey of the 2008 campaign showed that a whopping 60% of all contributions from employees at the top nine Wall Street investment banking firms went to Obama. This gives the lie to the notion that Wall Street is just a 100% cabal of rich Republicans.

And since Obama and his party tilt to the radical left while John McCain was a moderate Republican, every dollar donated to the Democrats and Obama contributes to a much more extremist ideology compared to the centrist nature of much of the Republican party today. Thus those Democrat Wall Street campaign contributions are having a magnified impact in moving the nation to the left while Obama blames the same firms for the economic meltdown in a classic show of kabuki theater.

This truly is the Audacity of Nope, as in Obama implying, “Nope, I don’t know those people.” Which he says to act like a populist when in fact virtually all of the people who caused the financial collapse are Democrats and liberals, many his close friends.

This is intentionally confusing. The media are in on it too, and are covering for the Democrats and will not report the truth - that liberals control large sectors of the American financial and banking industries, and that this is why some of those institutions have gotten themselves into so much trouble. Because lefties have turned many of our banking and financial institutions into casinos (as Mr. New York Liberal Robert Rubin ruined Citigroup with risky practices) and into agencies for social engineering, most specifically the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are government agencies that collapsed, bringing down Lehman Brothers and many other firms and investors.

How has this happened?

Because today all the people who go into Wall Street, into banking and into finance - including Fannie and Freddie - pass through the same university/college filter as everyone else. And they are targeted for leftist indoctrination by the professors, even in business schools, who want to turn the banking/finance industries into instruments of socialist progressivism just as they have done with the arts, the courts, the media, the public education system etc.

 That is how hundreds of billions in loans were made by private banks to people with little documentation even beyond the disaster of Fannie and Freddie. Back when 'conservatives' ran the banks, you needed 20% down for a home loan along with a documented work history

But what did the media and the liberal elite say about those 'conservative' policies?

They said that they were racist and discriminated against poor people. So they replaced sensible credit policies with easy credit. And easy credit is truly what has undermined our economy. Easy credit is more dangerous to an economy than hard-to-get credit because it leads to vastly more bad debt. And debt has been the curse of individuals and societies throughout all of time.

Easy credit fed the housing bubble which was caused by too many people buying too many houses with cheap loan dollars offered when the government (the Federal Reserve) set interest rates too low. George Washington warned specifically against the government setting wages and prices. And allowing the Fed to set interest rates in essence set the "price" of loan money.

 Meanwhile most of the economic collapse was caused by Democrat policies that forced banks to make trillions in loans to poor people who could never, ever pay it back, i.e., easy credit for those least able to repay it. Those loans, after being bought, packaged and sold by Fannie and Freddie, defaulted at sky-high rates, polluting the entire financial system through mortgage-backed securities. 

By the way, Fannie and Freddie have held or do hold 40% of all the bad home loans in America, 11 million mortgages.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government agencies run lock, stock and barrel by the Democrat party, which also controls much of Wall Street and many of our banks and other financial institutions. So look no further than the puritanical Democrats when seeking to place blame for the current collapse.

 

Governor Christie is Bold in New Jersey

 

(Below are excerpts from newly-elected Republican governor Chris Christie's February 11 speech to the New Jersey legislature. Christie is a true reformer after decades of Democrat corruption, and his speech is a model for toughness and bold action that can serve as a template for conservatives across the nation, including the Republican presidential nominee in 2012. It  puts the crisis in perspective, offers clear and unequivocal solutions, and is a blueprint to put all of America on a sound fiscal footing. Each excerpt is followed by my comments.)

 

Christie: "New Jersey is in a state of financial crisis.  Our state’s budget has been left in a shambles and requires immediate action to achieve balance.  For the current fiscal year 2010, which has only four and one-half months left to go, the budget we have inherited has a two billion dollar gap. The budget passed less than eight months ago, in June of last year, contained all of the same worn out tricks of the trade that have become common place in Trenton, that have driven our citizens to anger and frustration and our wonderful state to the edge of bankruptcy." Comment: This is blunt, straightforward language and is infinitely better than the usual soft-soaping of a crisis. Christie is willing to state the truth.

 

Christie: "What do I mean exactly? This year’s budget projected 5.1 % growth in sales tax revenue and flat growth in corporate business tax revenues. In June of 2009, was there anyone in New Jersey, other than in the department of treasury, who actually believed any revenues would grow in 2009-2010? With spiraling unemployment heading over 10%, with a financial system in crisis and with consumers petrified to spend, only Trenton treasury officials could certify that kind of growth.   In fact, sales tax revenue is not up 5%, it is down 5.5%; and corporate business tax revenue is not flat, it is down 8%.   Any wonder why we are in such big trouble?  ...The facts are that revenues are coming in $1.2 billion below what was projected last year, and over $800 million in additional spending was done by the previous administration on their way out the door." Comment: You can't argue with facts. Good for Christie.

Christie: "Our conscience and common sense require us to fix the problem in a way that does not raise taxes on the most overtaxed citizens in America.  Our love for our children requires that we do not shove today’s problems under the rug only to be discovered again tomorrow. Our sense of decency must require that we stop using tricks that will make next year’s budget problem even worse." Comment: Wow, somebody who no longer sees spending as an inevitable one-way entitlement. And he is refusing to use "the children" as props for more spending but to be honest about their future prospects if that spending is not controlled.

 

Christie: "The defenders of the status quo will start chattering as soon as I leave this chamber.  They’ll say the problems are not that bad; listen to me, I can spare you the pain and sacrifice.  We know this is simply not true.  New Jersey has been steaming toward financial disaster for years due to that kind of attitude.  The people elected us to end the talk and to act decisively.  Today is the day for the complaining to end and for statesmanship to begin." Comment: Speak boldly, governor. You may be president someday. The Democrats who have caused our state and national debt crises are running scared from coast to coast.

 

Christie: "This morning, I signed an executive order freezing the necessary state spending to balance our budget. We will freeze the spending of unspent technical balances across a wide array of state programs.    This includes everything from unspent funds to upgrade energy systems in state facilities to those aimed at assisting local governments in their consolidation plans...  Some projects will be delayed or terminated, some services will be reduced.  But in total, we can reduce spending by over $550 million this year by lapsing these unspent balances – by not spending these funds and applying them now towards our multi-billion dollar budget gap." Comment: Has any Democrat ever uttered those words... "freezing the necessary state spending to balance our budget"? It's hard to recall.

Christie: "In total, deferral of these long term projects and items to a less rainy day in New Jersey can reduce spending by $90 million in this fiscal year. We can improve certain practices in the ways we use and collect revenues. Two examples:  we can accelerate our dispute resolution processes on taxation settlements and save $20 million..." Comment: It used to be that $90 million  here and $20 million there were considered chump change. Christie is showing that this no longer is acceptable. All those millions add up to real money.

 

Christie: "By far the biggest category of spending we will need to cut, however, is that for programs which actually have merit, and in most cases make sense, but which we simply cannot afford at this time." Comment: This is how to balance a government budget - by talking honestly, fearlessly and boldly.

 

Christie: "For example, the state cannot continue to subsidize New Jersey transit to the extent it does.  So I am cutting that subsidy.  New Jersey transit will have to improve the efficiency of its operations, revisit its rich union contracts, end the patronage hiring that has typified its past, and may also have to consider service reductions or fare increases.  But the system needs to be made more efficient and effective." Comment: Finally, a political leader who won't continue to throw money down the drain in the name of 'public services' but who will instead demand efficiency and accountability.

Christie: "The state cannot this year spend another $100 million contributing to a pension system that is desperately in need of reform. I am encouraged by the bi-partisan bills filed in the Senate this week to begin pension and benefit reform. ... These bills must just mark the beginning, not the end, of our conversation and actions on pension and benefit reform. Because make no mistake about it, pensions and benefits are the major driver of our spending increases at all levels of government—state, county, municipal and school board." Comment: For decades, unionized government employees - mostly Democrats - have been draining taxpayers across the nation dry. It is going to end now in one state.

 

Christie: "One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him?  $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits -- a total of $3.8m on a $120,000 investment.   Is that fair? A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her?  $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it “fair” for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?" Comment: These are the kinds of figures that Democrats have been hiding for decades. Christie will cause a major political shift by finally exposing them. The people of New Jersey are going to be aghast at what has been going on underneath their noses.

Christie: "The total unfunded pension and medical benefit costs are $90 billion. We would have to pay $7 billion per year to make them current. We don’t have that money—you know it and I know it. What has been done to our citizens by offering a pension system we cannot afford and health benefits that are 41% more expensive than the average fortune 500 company’s costs is the truly unfair part of this equation." Comment: Good. Compare what the citizens get to what the bureaucrats get. There is nothing like a side-by-side comparison to awaken the public.

 

Christie: "I am implementing a solution which insures that every school district has the resources to provide a thorough and efficient education to its students.... Suburban districts will sacrifice.  Urban districts will sacrifice.  Rural districts will sacrifice.  Some, both inside and outside this chamber, will urge you to retreat to the corner and protect your own piece of turf.  Our state is in crisis.  Our people are hurting.  Now is the time when we all must resist the traditional, selfish call to protect your own turf at the cost of our state.  It is time to leave the corner, join the sacrifice, come to the center of the room and be part of the solution."  Comment: "Sacrifice" used to be code language for "tax increases". No longer.

 

Christie: "In total, I am cutting spending in 375 different state programs, from every corner of state government... Taken as a package, they will achieve the required savings and eliminate our $2 billion budget gap... I ask of you in the legislature to show the same frankness and commitment.  For inaction is not an option.  That was the path taken for far too long. The cuts I have outlined may sound dramatic.  And they are.  Some sound painful.  And they will be." Comment: Never before have such truths been uttered in such succinct terms.

Christie: "So upon arrival, my administration had $6 billion of balances to work with -- $6 billion of balances from which to find $2 billion of savings.  We had to cut 1/3 of our available funds with only 4 ½ months to go in the fiscal year... We chose not to use gimmicks or band aids to hide the budget gap or defer it until next year, when it would be even worse.  We refused to repeat the failures of the past. We chose to confront the problem head on by reforming our spending habits, and laying the groundwork for reform so that we can repair a structural deficit that will be even larger – many times larger – in the next fiscal year, 2011." Comment: This type of boldness will garner applause from rational people, while the greedy Democrats scowl that they finally have been exposed and will be forced to give up their financial armchairs.

 

 

 

Islamists Always Testing Us

 

Delta Flight 253 on the Amsterdam-Detroit route was disrupted a total of three times, first on Christmas Day by the Underwear Bomber Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab and again on the next day. The third time was Tuesday, January 12 when four males, speaking Arabic, were talking loudly on the flight. Two air marshals who understand Arabic said that the men were making “inappropriate jokes about terrorism”. After being considered a potential threat, the Arabic speakers were interviewed by Transportation Security Administration officials but no arrests were made.

This certainly appears to  be just more fallout from the Underwear Bomber incident. But it is much more. Because this incident is part of a pattern that brings to mind the case of The Flying Imams, four Islamic preachers who say they were discriminated against after they were removed from US Airways Flight 300 from Minneapolis to Phoenix on November 20, 2006.

Those Imams had initially attracted attention by praying loudly in the departure lounge before boarding the plane. Then several passengers and crew members felt that the imams were acting suspiciously on the plane before its departure. That behavior included refusal by the imams, including Omar Shahin, to sit in their assigned seats; requests for large metal seatbelt extenders even though they did not appear to need them; three of the imams traveling without checked baggage and with one-way tickets; and speaking to each other in Arabic about bin Laden and condemning America for “killing Saddam” (Hussein, the Iraqi leader)

The takeoff was delayed and the men were escorted off the plane after they refused to leave. The imams were detained, questioned and released.

A US Airways spokesperson said, "We've done what we typically do in a situation where there is a removal or some kind of customer service at issue.... We talked with crew members and passengers and those on the ground.... We found out the facts are substantially the same, and the imams were detained because of the concerns crew members had based on the behavior they observed, and from reports by the customers.... We're looking at it as a security issue and as a customer-service issue and where we might need to do outreach."

On March 12, 2007, the Flying Imams' lawyer filed a lawsuit on their behalf. The suit targeted US Airways and the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Airports Commission, along with some passengers on the flight who had reported on the imams' behavior to the flight crew.

So notice how the imams and their lawyers not only targeted the airline, but other passengers too. This is classic leftist strategy of intimidation, much like the strategy of Jesse Jackson and other black leaders to make any critic of black behavior to be seen as racist. This is a tactic of shutting down debate and criticism, just as the Islamists are trying to incrementally shut down scrutiny of potential terrorists to soften up the airlines for another attack.

Shahin had been involved in a similarly provocative incident previously when two members of his mosque were removed from an America West flight after making two attempts to open the cockpit. The students filed racial-profiling lawsuits against America West, which is now part of US Airways, with Shahin as their defense attorney. Shahin also had been quoted after 9/11 saying that Muslims could not have perpetrated the attacks because more than 1,200 Muslims died in the World Trade Center attack (which is false).

The Flying Imams settled out of court with US Airways.

What do these incidents mean?

Well, everything. Because any rational and decent person knows that in this age of terror, that you should behave yourself on airline flights because the system is under so much stress. That is why Americans who have become drunk or unruly are often handcuffed and charged with crimes.

But the January 12 incident, along with the actions of the Flying Imams and especially Shahin, is part of an ongoing scheme to constantly test the limits of the American airline system. This is how it works:  Innocent Middle Eastern imams, young Muslim males, and Arab-speakers get onto flights and create a stir. Then when the stir is noted and acted upon, the fliers cry “discrimination” and are immediately defended by Islamist lawyers, along with American leftists. The settlement, like the one awarded to the Flying Imams, then becomes a warning to other airlines.

This all is intended to do one thing – to make the airlines less likely to even to take note of any suspicious activities by Middle Eastern males, Arabic speakers etc. This is to instill fear in the airlines, just as members of our own US Army were afraid to act on years of obviously radical Islamic rantings by the Fort Hood murderer – an Army psychiatrist - for fear of appearing ‘discriminatory’ or ‘racist’.

 So bit by bit, we are being intimidated into ignoring suspicious behavior so that suspicious behavior can morph into violent behavior when the moment is right. This is a long-term process that is being joined backhandedly by the Obama administration in its soft approach to terrorism. And it is setting us up for another 9/11.

By dint of the fact that our attorney general Eric Holder is going to pursue CIA agents for their tactics in questioning terrorist  detainees while seeking to give civilian trials to alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shows that we indeed are pursuing a policy of “moral equivalence” in which both sides are treated equally.

Normally we might think that “equivalence” seeks to level the playing field. But it does not. It tilts the field way over in favor of terrorists. Because we have seen many instances where unruly white passengers are handcuffed and arrested - or CIA agents are prosecuted - while Islamic passengers who act suspiciously are escorted to a lawyer’s office to file a lawsuit against the airline. Or the Underwear Bomber is allowed to board Flight 253 in Amsterdam despite many red flags.

This is called “moral INequivalence”. Because we know that the white passengers and our CIA guys are not involved in terror, but that the people always involved are Islamists, either peripherally, as interested parties, or intimately. This presents us with a clear and present danger that we must heed or pay a very big price down the road. 

 

24 Inches of Global Warming

 

The Virginia Republican party recently launched a web ad ridiculing two Virginia Democrat congressmen for supporting ‘global warming’ legislation when 24 inches of snow was falling on eastern Virginia and Washington, DC. It really was pretty funny.

MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan charged to the rescue of the Democrats, however, saying that the heavy snow was exactly the kind of extreme weather that ‘global warming’ alarmists have been warning about.

But notice that the warnings are now mostly about ‘climate change’ and not ‘global warming’ (GW). Because it is not getting warm. It is getting statistically colder. And everybody knows it.

This is classic extremist thinking on the confused political left. Scrambling to salvage their treasured GW theory amidst freezing winters, growing ice sheets in Antarctica and worldwide temperature drops that now have all rational scientists proclaiming that we are in yet another perfectly natural ‘global cooling’ period, the libs have pulled out all the stops. Al Gore is nowhere to be seen anywhere near anyone who might disagree with him.

In addition, the ClimateGate e-mail scandal and other fraudulent studies about melting glaciers have sunk the credibility of the GW alarmists to their lowest levels in the three years since the theory was dumped in our laps with Gore’s Nobel Prize.

So what is with these people?

It is this. They have a common trait of leftists, that they get behind some illusory intellectual theory like ‘global warming’ because it fits their political template, that only they, through massive government outlays, can save the world. Think of welfare or national health insurance. Same idea.

Then they latch onto some historical data - like a few warm winters in the 1990s - that support their point of view just as the climatologists said in the 1970s that we were entering a New Ice Age because we had many cold, snowy winters in the 1960s.

Then when the facts on the ground shift against their ideas, they cannot tolerate it. Because liberals can never admit that they are wrong. It is too embarrassing and traumatizing, particularly when they have invested so much time and energy to the cause. So they double down like a gambler, saying now that cold, snowy weather is caused by ‘global warming’ which they now are conveniently calling ‘climate change’.

Yet ‘climate change’ is what conservatives always have claimed is really happening, completely naturally. In other words, the climate always is changing, with long and short periods of warming and cooling fluctuating with no discernible pattern, and emerging from natural shifts in ocean currents and sunspot cycles.

So ultimately now the ‘warming’ alarmists are actually agreeing with conservatives... That is very painful for the Klimate Kooks. Because they now know deep down inside, after years of evidence mounting against them, that we conservatives are correct. So they need to slink around the facts and to proclaim, alas, that giant snowstorms and falling temperatures are no indication that ‘global warming’ is any less serious that it was, say, three whole years ago.

Now, however, they got together and cooked up a new approach. They are claiming that we should not confuse “weather” and “climate”. Oh, yes, have you heard that one? It is all over the news and the web.

This new argument says that wintry “weather” like the snowstorm in Washington or the freezing temperatures in Florida or record cold in China should not be used to contradict their theory that the overall “climate” is really warming up. Except that the same alarmists used the cold “weather” of the 1960s to proclaim in the 1970s that we were entering a New Ice Age. Or they  used the warm "weather" of the 1990s to declare planetary heating armageddon.

Is this confusing enough?

It should be. Because trying to follow the thinking of leftist intellectuals is enough to make you crazy. Which the ‘climate change’ alarmists are. Crazy. Loco. Demented. So don’t listen to them. Because they will make you crazy too.

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who grew up near Washington, DC, said in an interview in 2008 that he was concerned that there have not been a lot of snowy winters in the DC area like there were when he was a kid in the 1960s. Yet he never takes a long-term view like we conservatives do, that the 1960s were unusually cold and snowy, which is now being seen as historical fact. This shows how the GW alarmists always will manipulate the data to their own end, but always will ignore the Big Picture.

So why else are the alarmists sticking so tenaciously to their apocalyptic theory?

Actually it is finally about MONEY. Because they have developed a template through which to funnel millions and billions of government and research dollars worldwide to anyone who propagates the GW or ‘climate change’ theory. It is the new Environmental Armageddon that they say only can be solved by partisans who get that money and then write reports and give speeches.

Confused?

Don’t be. Because all you have to really do is to remember that five-letter word: M-O-N-E-Y. And then think about what some people have done for money throughout the ages. They have murdered and imprisoned and lied and enslaved and cheated and done everything possible. And don’t think that this is not what this whole ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ hysteria is about. They are lying like hell and will metaphorically enslave us with restrictive laws while they get rich. Like Al Gore's $100 million fortune built on just one thing - 'global warming' alarmism and speeches.

If somebody took away your job, you would be upset too. The alarmists are now upset that increasing numbers of people no longer believe their theory. Because this is their livelihood. Except that it is based on a lie. And that is how they get your money, and why they need to do everything to keep it. And why we need to do everything to get it back and to expose the truth.

 

Those Big Conspiracy Theories

 

There are many Big Conspiracy Theories out there today, but three stand out at this point in time.

*The first is the widely-held Conspiracy Theory that ‘global warming’ is heating up the planet, and that it is caused by the oil companies, the coal companies, the United States, Bush/Cheney, our high standard of living etc. This theory is widely promoted in the media and in academia and is being used as the basis for advocating major changes in American laws.

*The second is the smaller 9/11 Truther theory which claims that the United States government was involved in the September 11 attacks. This is accepted among millions on the radical political left and is used as a wedge issue against conservatives, Bush, Cheney etc.

*The third much smaller theory – a tiny one really - is the Birther Theory which claims that president Obama is not an American citizen since neither he nor the state of Hawaii have produced his original state birth certificate, but only a computerized version. Two other original records exist however -  an official hospital birth record, and birth announcements in two Honolulu newspapers. This Birther theory is promoted by a small bunch of people who have been ruthlessly maligned by the Ancient Media, and exaggerated as a much bigger force than they really are.

What is the difference among these three theories?  

It is this: Two of the theories – ‘global warming’ and the 9/11 Truther theory - have been debated openly for years with evidence presented on both sides. Yet despite the utterly fallacious nature of both – they are easily debunked with common sense – tens of millions of American still believe in them. And both theories empower the political left because they cast doubt on America, capitalism, Bush, our military, etc. The Ancient Media have done nothing to challenge ‘global warming’ while those same media allow the Truthers to hang out there without too much scrutiny so that they can be a permanent barb in the side of Bush, patriotism and conservatism among millions of fringe lunatic actors in America.

Yet that tiny group of so-called Birthers that believes that Obama is not an American citizen are outright slandered by the media. Ironically the Birther theory is the one theory of the three that can be simply and unequivocally disproven by one simple act - by producing the original birth certificate of the president.

But no, say the media, that is unnecessary. These Birthers are kooks!  Obama doesn’t need to show anything! Why don’t these nuts just get lost!

Contrast that with the story about John McCain’s birth status in the Panama Canal Zone, as a child of a military family stationed in the Zone. The issue was raised in the 2008 election and the New York Times was all over the story, treating it on the front page like a potentially serious threat to McCain’s eligibility to be president. This despite the fact that McCain’s family has served our nation militarily since the American Revolution.

Yet the same New York Times maligns the Birthers and then acts in concert with the rest of the Ancient Media to make it seem like the Birthers are a much larger group than they really are, as if most conservatives believe them. Which shows how little regard that those media have for truth. Because McCain’s birth status was easily  proven, just as the Birthers can easily be proven wrong when they see Obama's original birth certificate.

So why hasn’t the Times and the rest of the leftist media got behind the Birther story and simply urged that the original birth certificate be produced by Obama or the state of Hawaii in order to end the story once and for all?

Answer: Because of pure bias. Because that would be far too easy. Because now they can use the issue to tar the Birthers and to tie them to Sarah Palin, the Tea Parties, Limbaugh etc., despite the fact that most on the political right have dismissed the story as well.

Meanwhile, those same media never, ever even deign to question Al Gore. No, when it snows in all 50 states in the era when Gore is screaming “Global warming!” somehow that is not preposterous or even suspicious to the media, while those same media then allow the Birthers to continue calling for Obama’s birth certificate in order to keep the story alive and make them a media target.

If it were Dick Cheney’s birth certificate that was in question, however, there would be endless media calls to see it.  The New York Times would be commanding condescendingly: “If the original birth certificate exists, then why don’t we just end this controversy right now. We call upon Mr. Cheney to produce the birth certificate immediately.” Can't you just picture that editorial?

Only problem is that Cheney would have produced it himself long ago because Cheney is a conservative who is dedicated to the truth, and would have issued the birth certificate just to show what that truth is.

This story illuminates how the Democrats operate. Leftists always operate in the shadows, in Hollywood fantasy like 'global warming' and the 9/11 conspiracy. In backroom deals. In closed-door meetings. In shady, illegal labor-union transactions. In junk science. In payoffs, kickbacks and bribes like everyday in Chicago. And in media obfuscations.

But the truth? No that is something that is not important to them. Don't expect to see the original Obama birth certificate. Ever.

 

 

 

GOP Poised for More Massachusetts Gains

 

Up here in western Massachusetts the Berkshire County Republican Association held its annual Lincoln Day dinner on Friday. It was an upbeat occasion in a place where the Republican party is a shell of its former self. But the election of Scott Brown has rocked us all.

At the dinner we hosted three great candidates for office in the Bay State. And their victories in the Fall elections will mark a turning point for left-wing liberalism in New England.

Our keynote speaker was Charlie Baker, who is very likely to be the next governor of Massachusetts because the people of this state are extremely anxious about the future and want change. The current governor, lefty Democrat Deval Patrick, is not popular. Baker showed us in a sobering and rational speech why he is going to win in November.

His website is www.charliebaker2010.com Here is an excerpt about Baker:

He attended Harvard College and received a degree in English in 1979. Over the following five years, Charlie worked as Media Relations Director for the New England Council, and then as Corporate Communications Director for the Massachusetts High Technology Council. He decided to return to school in 1984 and earned an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in 1986.

In 1988, Baker helped start the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, an independent, nonpartisan state think tank. Baker left Pioneer in January, 1991 to join the newly elected Weld/Cellucci Administration as Undersecretary for Health in the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. As Undersecretary, Charlie played pivotal roles in Medicaid reform, facility consolidation, and the expansion of a number of key public health programs. He became Secretary of Health and Human Services in the fall of 1992, and led the Administration’s efforts to enact welfare reform.

 Baker became Secretary of Administration and Finance in the fall of 1994, and served in that position until September of 1998. He re-structured and simplified the state’s purchasing system, led a major effort to improve the state’s capacity to collect third party revenue, and oversaw the largest effort ever to modernize the state’s code of regulation. He received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Governor’s Association in 1998.

 Baker became CEO of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates (HVMA) in the fall of 1998, and was soon recruited by Harvard Vanguard’s parent – Harvard Pilgrim Health Care – to serve as its CEO in May, 1999. Baker led a major turnaround at HPHC, which included a $220 million year-to-year improvement in financial performance from 1999 to 2000, and the amicable separation of HPHC and HVMA. Under Baker's tenure, HPHC went on to become the highest ranked health plan in the country for member satisfaction and clinical effectiveness for five years running, and was named a Boston Business Journal “Best Places To Work” for seven straight years.

 

Wow... His speech to BCRA was one of the most common-sense talks you can imagine. He described the massive spending and debt that the 90% Massachusetts Democrat legislature has foisted on the state with, for example, future pension liabilities for unionized state employees of $33 billion(!)

He warned about the business-hostile climate in Massachusetts, and his words are resonating in speeches that he is giving across the state. Because those of us up here in formerly Deep Blue Massachusetts can no longer bob like corks atop the waves of prosperity of the post-World War II boom.

Baker has a clear, logical approach to fighting corruption and debt spending in the same manner that Chris Christie is doing it in New Jersey, and the same way that Rudy Giuliani did in New York City starting in 1994. Because strong leadership can turn things around even with Democrat majorities in the legislature.

Baker could well have at his side another of our Lincoln Day speakers, Mary Connaughton, who is running for state auditor. Normally you don’t think much about such a post, but today, with fiscal crises mounting all over, Connaughton is the type of person we need in Boston. She is just another honest Republican who is willing to confront Democrat corruption.

Connaughton was trained at Ernst & Young, has acted as chief financial officer of the Massachusetts Lottery and was a toll payer’s advocate on the Mass Turnpike Board. In that last position, she was known as a whistleblower who exposed some of the backroom deals that the Democrats were cooking up, and was described as a thorn in the side of the bureaucracy.

According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, “If board member Mary Z. Connaughton of Framingham had not raised questions about the calculations (that resulted in the firing of a Turnpike consulting firm), the $6 million gaffe might have gone unremarked upon.”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine when she is elected auditor… Her website is www.maryforauditor.com

Running for state representative and speaking at the dinner is a guy that we all can trust. Mike Case, from the tiny rural town of Washington here in Berkshire County, is a clear-thinking, well-spoken candidate who already has induced the Democrat incumbent to quit. Go  Mike!

Mike is a US military veteran, served in Iraq, is a former police officer and is honest as the day is long.  His campaign website is still under construction though. Mike plans to go to Boston and start the job of cleaning up the mess that the Democrats have been creating over the last 50 years, with the last three Democrat speakers of the Massachusetts House convicted on various charges.

These great candidates are exposing the corrupt left-wing socialism that is endangering us all, and showing that the only response is sound, honest Republican/conservative fiscal policies. Charlie Baker, Mary Connaughton and Mike Case are a good start for Massachusetts.

 

3.6 Million Miles Per Gallon

 

The old story among environmentalists goes like this: Some guy tinkering in his garage invented an electric car. He patented it and presented it to industry, planning to make a fortune.  So General Motors, in collusion with ExxonMobil, seeing a threat to their auto/petrol monopolies, bought the patent and promptly burned it. End of car.

This is good fodder for the enviro left and is repeated year after year. Only problem is that the story is nonsense, and there is no efficient electric car for the reason of simple physics: Because automobile transport is the "wrong use" for a highly-refined energy source like electricity. Just ask anyone who has electric heat in their home how expensive it is. It would be much moreso with an electric car.

Electricity should be used for things like lights, computers, refrigerators, pumps etc. for which there is no alternative. On the other hand, efficient internal combustion engines are a proven method for powering cars.

But no, the enviros continue to claim that the electric car could prosper in the free market. But it cannot. General Motors did not need to kill the electric car. It kills itself. It is simply unfeasible. Electric cars are available today and they still have hardly any market except among a few idealists who use them for show. 

On the other end, however, in electricity production, we have the equivalent of a car that gets 3.6 million miles per gallon. But certain entities have essentially “bought up the patent and burned it.” No, not oil companies or the coal companies that wish to maintain their monopolies. No, it is the environmentalists who have destroyed the system that gets this incredible efficiency.

And that system is called  nuclear power, which is literally up to 3.6 million times more efficient than our current coal-fired electricity generating plants. Because according to one industry statistic, a refined uranium pellet one gram in size over its lifetime in the reactor will produce as much heat energy as 4 tons of coal – in other words, it is 3.6 million times as efficient as coal by weight. 

Imagine if we could stretch our oil supplies by a factor of millions, if every barrel of oil in the ground today could be multiplied to 3.6 million barrels. Would that not be a wonderful idea? We would have limitless energy for millennia just on the basis of the oil supplies we have today, never mind those we have not even found.

But who would try to stop that efficiency from happening?

Environmentalists would. Because environmentalists do not favor energy efficiency. They favor energy IN-efficiency. That is why they are fighting super-efficient nuclear power - the most efficient energy source ever - and advocating highly inefficient windmills everywhere.

Nuclear power will produce vast amounts of electricity for a given investment of resources and capital. Wind power, on other hand, will produce less than one-third the electricity for the same investment. And that is the point.

To understand it, imagine this scenario:  Over the next five years, America builds 800 new nuclear reactors, each at 1,000 megawatts. This could be done easily. That means that 800,000 megawatts of installed capacity will be added – about 75%of the total installed capacity that we have today, which is 1.1 million megawatts.

This would provide plenty of energy for our needs, and the cost of electricity would remain stable because the supply would be high. And Americans could continue to have a high standard of living with very low levels of pollution. Most nuclear fuel can be recycled, and that which cannot is relatively benign and can be safely stored. Nuclear power produces zero air pollution.

But wait. There’s more. And this is the best part. Those 800 reactors could replace all the coal-fired and natural-gas-fired power plants in America. The United States then could convert all that DOMESTIC coal and natural gas (1.2 billion tons of American coal are consumed per year in electricity-generating plants; 5 trillion cubic feet of American natural gas are consumed per year) to transportation fuel and other types of fuel with enough energy output to completely replace all oil imports into the United States (15 millions barrels of oil per day).

Pretty good deal, right? That would solve all of our energy problems for the next several hundred years. Only problem is that environmentalists do not want us to have energy independence. That is why they are opposing nuclear power – because they do not control it. And that is why they are fighting in favor of windmills – because they will get rich on them. Only problem is that the windmills all need to be subsidized by the government. They are so inefficient that they cannot sustain themselves in the marketplace like nuclear power can.

So imagine that we installed that 800,000 megawatts of capacity not in nuclear power but in windmills. What would this mean?

This would mean that we would only have one-third of the electricity production of nuclear, because wind energy is incredibly inefficient for two simple reasons. First, the wind does not blow all the time so we would need to triple up the capacity just to get the same output. This would waste hundreds of billions of dollars in precious investment capital and cause electricity prices to skyrocket.

Second the scattered small-scale megawatt-by-megawatt production of electricity through windmills is very inefficient according to the most basic economic law of Economies of Scale that says that when you do something on a large scale, it is vastly more efficient than doing it on a small scale. For instance, if you bake 200 cakes at a time in a huge oven for your bakery it is vastly more efficient than making and baking 200 separate cakes, one at a time.

So with all these windmills our energy supplies would fall substantially, leading to sharp and massive price hikes. But don't expect enviros to ever work toward genuine energy efficiency because they really want IN-efficiency, and it is always is coerced by government subsidies. Meanwhile real efficiency, like nuclear power, is thwarted by the same people.

At the same time the type of efficiency that happens naturally in our economic system - like nuclear power - is a good thing that was not produced by environmentalism but by the free market. The American economy today produces twice as much GDP per unit of energy invested as it did in 1950, which all is a result of the natural striving for efficiency inherent in our open capitalist system.

If we want real energy efficiency, we should look to the free market. Environmentalists will take us down the wrong road, and into disaster.

 

Jimmy Carter’s Iranian Revolution

 

February 11 marks the 31st anniversary of the fundamentalist Islamic takeover of Iran in 1979.

So who was president of the United States in 1979?

Oh, yes. It was Jimmy Carter. And if you look at the pattern, our enemies since World War II always have been emboldened and have made significant geopolitical advances under weak Democrat presidents.

JFK and LBJ, both Democrats who together served from December 1961 to December 1969, started and escalated the disastrous Vietnam War that drained our national energy and emboldened the Soviet Union. Richard Nixon said repeatedly that we never would have been in Vietnam if he instead had been elected in 1960.

During Jimmy Carter’s tenure from 1977 to 1981, Iran fell and the Soviets marched into Afghanistan.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the United States failed to respond to terrorist attacks on New York City in 1993, on US embassies in Africa in 1998, and on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, leading to the perception that America was ripe for a Big One. George Bush got an empty briefing book from Clinton, with CIA and FBI communications hamstrung by decades of Democrat restrictions. The terrorists then pulled off the September 11, 2001 attacks that were laughable in their simplicity. It never should have happened.

And now Obama is treating terrorists with kid gloves. This will lead to another attack.

Now look at Jimmy Carter. He hates Bush and often has broken the rule of presidents, that one does not criticize the policies of any of his successors. Yet Bush kept us safe. On the other hand, Carter booted Iran into a radical camp that has been attacking the West since 1979. This is one of the main reasons we have such strong terrorist networks today. Because of nations like Iran.

How did Carter blow it?

By being a left-wing foreign-policy weakling, that’s how.

In a speech that Carter gave on New Year’s eve in Tehran, Iran on December 31, 1977, he called Iran  "an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world." These words would come back to haunt him. Then just over one year later, the Shah was on his way into exile, undermined by the same Jimmy Carter.

The brief history of the Shah is this: He came from a powerful Iranian family and rose to power in 1953 with American backing. At that time, Iran could have gone one of three ways – with the Shah; with the pro-Soviet Mossadegh who was duly elected; or with Islamic fundamentalism. Our CIA helped the Shah to topple Mossadegh with the intent of preventing a possible Soviet takeover or domination of Iran and the subsequent destruction of its economy and its freedoms.

The Shah ruled with harsh measures in a place that was indeed "one of the more troubled areas of the world". But the important part was the positive things that the Shah was doing to bring stability and progress to his nation.

Here is an excerpt from wikipedia.org about the Shah’s rule:

 

The Shah made major changes to curb the power of certain ancient elite factions by expropriating large and medium-sized estates for the benefit of more than four million small farmers. In the White Revolution he took a number of major modernization measures, including extending suffrage to women, much to the discontent and opposition of the Islamic clergy, the participation of workers in factories through shares and other measures, the improvement of the educational system through new elementary schools and literacy courses set up in remote villages by the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces.  The latter step was called "Sepāh e Dānesh", "Army of Knowledge". As part of the White Revolution, the Armed Forces were engaged in infrastructural and other educational projects throughout the country as well as in health education.... Moreover, he instituted exams for Islamic theologians to become established clerics. As a further step, in the seventies the governmental program of a free of charge nourishment for children at school was implemented. Under the Shah's reign, the national Iranian income showed an unprecedented rise.

Doesn't this look preferable to what we see in Iran today? Or what we see in any communist nation?

If we had stood by the Shah, Iran would have evolved into a peaceful, pro-Western democracy just as other pro-Western dictatorships became democracies after insuring stability in places like South Korea, Taiwan and Chile.

But there were leftists all over the world and in America who hated the Shah, just as leftists today hate pro-American leaders like the president of Colombia who have brought stability to their nations and routed the marxist left. Under Carter, America ultimately abandoned the Shah who fled Iran on January 16, 1979. On February 11 of that year, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran from Paris and the fundamentalist revolution began.

Here is a quote from the Shah himself about how his demise happened.

 

“I did not know it then, perhaps I did not want to know? But it is clear to me now that the Americans wanted me out. Clearly this is what the human rights advocates in the State Department wanted. What was I to make of the Administration’s sudden decision to call former Under Secretary of State George Ball to the White House as an adviser on Iran? Ball was among those Americans who wanted to abandon me and ultimately my country.”

 

Indeed. And today we are in a panic about Iran developing nuclear weapons when it all started with a weak Obama-like liberal, and need never have occurred. 

So how should the United States now prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

Here is the Nikitas3.com solution: Pick a small, remote Iranian military base and obliterate it with cruise missiles and B-2 stealth bomber attacks that the Iranians cannot counter. Destroy all planes, buildings, runways, military vehicles and personnel. Then tell the Iranian leadership that we will destroy one military base per week until they give up their weapons program. It will be very persuasive. They are not that strong. The thought of being militarily emasculated will be very convincing.

 

NASCAR Politically Maligned

 

Sunday is the Daytona 500. It is the most important race of the NASCAR season but comes not at the end but right at the beginning. We race fans are all cranked up, and our underdog favorite is 51-year-old Mark Martin, who is the oldest active driver but who has never won the Daytona 500 or a season championship but has come close to both many times. Go Mark!

Have you ever noticed that NASCAR stock-car racing is virtually all white, that there are hardly any black faces on the track, in the pits or in the grandstands? And could this possibly be the reason that NASCAR is so often targeted for insult by sports media, general media, intellectual elites and liberals? These people publicly call NASCAR a dumb sport, say it is just a bunch of stupid white rednecks going in circles with a crowd of drunk hillbillies come down from the 'hollers to watch.

But I don’t seem to recall any basketball game ever being disparaged as just a bunch of dumb blacks running up and down the same court time after time after time.

Why?

Answer: Because basketball is a largely black, urban sport and is subject to the tyranny of political correctness.

Yet according to many in the media those evil NASCAR fans are Southern bigots and rural hayseeds with their guns and their pickup trucks. They're conservatives, dammit! And NASCAR races feature – heaven forbid - military personnel as honored guests, and include Christian religious invocations!

So now we get it. Those obviously are signs of pure malignancy to the media establishment including most of the sports media which is as liberal as the rest of the media and which treat NASCAR as a crazy uncle. Even though NASCAR has been the fastest-growing sport in the nation over the last 20 years.

Maybe they're just jealous. Liberals suffer from inordinate jealousy, you know.

So if you want to find discrimination in America, just look up what liberals say about NASCAR. The language alone is telling. Here is a sampling from just one brief internet search:

The Association of Washington Business, a Washington state business group said about NASCAR potentially building a track near Seattle: “As much as some in Seattle and Portland like to disparage NASCAR…”

Gee, do they openly disparage basketball up there? Or the Seattle Seahawks football team?

Here is a sample from something called the Snadandjohn.blogspot talking about a big NASCAR race near their home in Tennessee: "Well, 'The Big One' has come and gone. I'm talking about the event of the year for all the big-belt-buckle-wearin', backy-chewin', boot-scootin' boogyin', American-flag-wavin', farmer's-tan-showin', NRA-sticker-totin' NASCAR fans out there. The Bristol Motor Speedway Sharpie 500 took place just over the mountains from us this weekend."

So when was the last time you read about all them rappin’, baggy-pants wearin’, baseball-hats-on-crooked negroes at a New York Knicks basketball game?

Here is how a website called Game Vortex described a new NASCAR video game called Dirt to Daytona:

"Hicks and gamers collide, with generally favorable results in both camps. Not to disparage NASCAR or suggest that it's just a hick thing, because there's some mighty fine racin' to be had in NASCAR Dirt to Daytona."

Gosh, I’m having a really hard time finding the last time that black football players were called “hicks”. Because you would lose your job for criticizing them, and be tarred for life as a racist.

Now here is another question: Have you ever noticed how many black people are on television these days? It is just astounding. They either have their own programs, are hosts, are guests, star in or appear in commercials, do voice-overs or soundtracks, are commenters and commentators, star in football or basketball, are interviewed, are featured on awards shows for music, acting, sports etc. By unscientific observation it appears that 50% of the people on television today are black. Just look and count. You will see that this certainly cannot be that far from the truth.

What does this have to do with NASCAR?

Well, maybe everything. It means that blacks are getting preferential treatment in America today in every field - media, college scholarships, hiring, housing, sports, entertainment etc. Meanwhile white people like dedicated firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut who worked hard and passed their promotion tests were actually told by the courts that they cannot be promoted because no blacks passed the same test! Think of it! Pure legalized anti-white racism in a decision that was supported by four Supreme Court justices but finally overturned last summer by the other five.

Is this the New Racism?

Yes.

It goes further. Here is what black TV commentator Bryant Gumbel said in 2006 on an HBO program called Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, about the Winter Olympics: "Count me among those who don't care about them and won't watch them...  So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the winter games look like a GOP convention."

Really Bryant? Well, folks, there you have it - a black media liberal publicly disdaining white people. How perfectly racist! Imagine the firestorm if a white commentator dismissed the summer Olympics as "too black".

Did Gumbel lose his  job over such comments the way football commentator Jimmy 'The Greek' Snyder lost his job with CBS for making remarks about the athletic abilities of blacks relating to slavery?

Don't think so.

Did you see it when black entertainer Kanye West grabbed the microphone from caucasian singer Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Video awards last year after Swift's grand prize win, and shouted that the black singer Beyonce had a better video than Swift?

When was the last time you saw a white entertainer grab a microphone from a black entertainer and seek to upstage and belittle her in front of a national television audience?

Never that I can recall in the last 50 years. That white entertainer would be fired immediately.

Friends, public racism is rampant in America and is directed at white people.

Just to let you know. And to tell you to point it out boldly when you see it.

And one last thing: Have you ever noticed how the Democrat party has only had three black US senators in its history (Carol Moseley Braun, Roland Burris and Obama, all from Illinois) for a total of just 12 years’ tenure? Shouldn’t there have been dozens and dozens of blacks with hundreds of years of tenure since Democrats claim to be the party of African-Americans? Is this perhaps a sign that the Democrat party itself has its own racial prejudices?

 

 

Obama’s Die is Cast

 

“I would rather be a really good one-term president, than a mediocre two-term president,” Barack Obama said recently in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer.

CNN reporter Candy Crowley then said, “He’s one-quarter of the way through his administration. I don’t think we can kiss it off yet.”

Quotes like these about a potentially shortened or hobbled presidency are not just idle talk. Public perceptions of Obama are shifting and his die increasingly is cast. He looks more like Jimmy Carter every day, with nothing he can do about it.

In the good old days of invincible Obama just one year ago at his inauguration he would have simply predicted with utmost conviction, “I am going to be a great two-term president.” Because he believed that the presidency simply was a matter of mastery of the friendly media and his big majorities in Congress.

How wrong he was. His hundreds of speeches and public statements have not endeared him to the public, but have alienated him. And while he should have seen it coming, his arrogance and overconfidence did not allow it.

After the Democrats’ famous loss of control of the House of Representatives in November 1994 after just two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Clinton claimed that he was “still relevant”. This was seen as an obvious backhanded sign that Clinton had been shaken by what had happened.

Yet after just one single year in office, Obama’s relevancy is astonishingly faded. He is not the self-assured, media-savvy Master of the Universe that he was just one year ago. And don’t let his cool demeanor fool you. He knows what is going on. Politics is his life’s work.

On the first anniversary of Obama’s inauguration, both Time magazine and Newsweek featured him on their covers not in a happy color photo with a smiling Michelle at his side, but alone, in black and white, with ominous headlines like ‘The Inspiration Gap’, normally the negative type of treatment reserved for Bush, Cheney and other Evil Republicans.

Are even Obama's allies bailing out on him? And what will he look like in one year?

That may be a very unsightly picture.

Just look at the Massachusetts election results, along with the vote in New Jersey and Virginia, all three big Republican victories. Now Obama’s own former US Senate seat in Illinois looks poised to fall to the GOP in the person of 5-term congressman Mark Kirk, while vice president Joe Biden's former US Senate  seat in Delaware also is likely to fall to a Republican named Mike Castle.

Nobody would have predicted this one year ago. But now Obama's die seems cast.

Obama apparently is not going to go down without a fight. A leftist ideologue named Saul Alinsky has inspired Obama. Alinsky’s famous book is Rules for Radicals and it is a red-meat guide to establishing a left-wing state. Alinsky says that when you are in a position like Obama’s, where you think your power may be ebbing, you don’t moderate your course but you charge ahead at even higher speed. Step on the gas! Because it is the agenda that matters and nothing else.

During his recent state of the union speech, Obama seemed to be taking Alinsky's advice. He seemed unconcerned about suggesting a new more centrist agenda after recent Democrat losses at the polls. He seemed shrill and combative and he talked too long, as if another speech would make things better. In addressing his fellow Democrats at their February winter meeting, he even re-stated his commitment to passing health-care legislation.

Obama certainly understands well that he has just a few more months this Spring to possibly try to salvage something before his party gets beheaded at the polls in November. He won't salvage anything, though. His die is cast. Obama is going to end up with little to show except a reputation as a president who did everything wrong.

He now cannot even make an innocent remark without retribution. When Obama compared rampant government spending to a gambling trip to Las Vegas, he  foundered again. The mayor of Las Vegas Oscar Goodman, normally the upbeat Mr. Nice Guy mayor of Fun City, replied in public  that "I'll do everything I can to give him (Obama) the boot back to Washington," adding, "(t)he president is a real slow learner."

Ouch! Even Obama ally Harry Reid, the Senate Democrat majority leader from Nevada, got in the act, saying, "The President needs to lay off Las Vegas and stop making it the poster child for where people shouldn't be spending their money.”

Is Obama’s die permanently cast? Is there anywhere for him to go? Can he do anything right? And what if there is another terrorist attack, as several top officials predicted at a recent hearing? Meanwhile Obama's attorney general Eric Holder already is under increasing fire for the way he has handled terrorism in the last year. Even his Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano failed to show up at a recent congressional hearing about the Christmas Day attack, adding to the air of incompetence and detachment.

A successful attack will doom Obama...

The president’s plan for the economy has failed. His health care deal is dead. His strategies to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, to pass cap and trade, and to usher through pro-union card-check legislation all are gone. He even misspoke in his state of the union address, about foreign corporations. His decisions on terrorism - from closing the Guantanamo detention facility, to civilian trials for alleged terrorists in New York City, to the mishandling of the Christmas Day underwear bomber – are conspiring like a perfect storm to haunt him and to remind America that Obama really never was ready for prime time.

Is Obama’s die cast? Are the gods aligned against him?

“I would rather be a really good one-term president, than a mediocre two-term president,” he told Diane Sawyer.

He did not mention one other alternative - that he already is headed to a place in history as a really bad one-term president. Just like Jimmy Carter.

 

Enviro Elitism on Display

 

Every once in while, a TV program comes on about climbing Mount Everest showing an extraordinary landscape, daring people and tense situations.

They say that 3,000 people now have summited Everest but that 200 dead bodies are strewn around the peak from those who have failed. This is creepy. And to think of those dead all clad in that non-biodegradable nylon climbing gear and frozen solid. Yikes. What a mess…

A non-biodegradable ecological mess, that is, in a once-pristine place.

Hikers from all over the world pay guides as much as $50,000 to take them up to Everest, but even with experienced guides, many thousands have failed to get to the top.

Then you start to think about what kind of people attempt to climb Everest, and what kind of people run the guide services that seek to escort climbers to the top. And generally you can assume that most are  environmentalists, as are most of those involved in mountaineering around the world.

Yet look at what they are doing to Mount Everest. After only 50 years of climbing, it is now littered with hundreds of corpses, while thousands of people every year invade this pristine region and tromp all over it and drop garbage on the land. Or they leave it behind, or it is blown away. In their quest for what? To have their bragging rights that they climbed The Big Mountain? Just for their own personal gratification.

Wouldn’t it be more reassuring to an environmentalist to know that Everest is pristine and to leave it alone, the way they always lecture the rest of us that we need to keep so much of the world in wilderness? Why do they always make exceptions for… themselves?

Now think about what is required to get to Katmandu, Nepal, the nearby city, and then to Everest.

It requires huge amounts of energy, to fly in on jetliners from around the world and then to get up to the mountain. And to fly in all the equipment. Yet you can assume that most of these participants are the same quaking ‘global warming’ alarmists who tell us that we need to buy new spiral light bulbs, or that we cannot drive to work because it wastes too much of the world’s precious resources.

This arrogance, elitism and sense of privilege is rampant in the environmental movement. Because in environmentalists’ minds, it is only they who are saving the world. So obviously it is they who can use all the energy they want, and create all that pollution in the pristine environment of Everest. Then it is always someone else who is causing all the world’s ecological problems.

Yet if you really think about it, does it not seem quite likely that these environmentalists as a group probably use more discretionary energy per person than any other group in the world?

Well, sure.

Just think about the elites at the mountaineering schools and all the readers and writers at those snobby outdoor publications flitting off to Alaska and Chile and Nepal and Africa to do their climbing. Those glossy magazines are full of expensive package tours to Everest and everywhere else. They watch birds in South America and study wild animals in the jungles of Borneo. This all requires large amounts of energy.

Think of all the rich eco-pretenders who live in cities and suburbs – man-made places far from nature – and read conservation magazines, give large amounts of money to enviro causes, but then fly halfway around the world in order to watch whales in the South Pacific.

That sure takes a lot of energy…

Think of all the bleating, perpetually indignant enviro-snobs in university towns like Boulder, Colorado who preach environmental purity but who themselves are constantly in the mountains of the world on their  expeditions, using large amounts of petroleum to travel back and forth.

And while even their very own nylon outdoor gear - from sleeping bags to insulated gloves - is made from petroleum-based compounds, they are the first in line to sermonize against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or to sign petitions to stop ‘global warming’ through radical and restrictive legislation.

Thus it certainly appears anecdotally that these eco-nuts use more energy per person than any other people in America. And this gluttony is classic liberal elitism and hypocrisy. Liberals love to have everything for themselves, but then to lecture the rest of us about why we should not have those very same things.

So why don’t they live according to their own ethos?

Answer: Because then they would have to face up to what their ideas really represent. Because then maybe they would have to stay home like us boring conservatives who keep the world running while the ecologists pass their indulgent lives away in the mountains, telling us how much they love Mother Nature. Until it is time to go home, that is. To their modern homes and their computers and their air conditioners and their Volvos in the driveway…

And who are today’s environmentalists?

Many are adults who spent their youth as left-wing 1960s ‘hippies’. Yet today they have accumulated small, medium and large fortunes and now are using their money to fly around the world climbing mountains and studying lions on the Serengheti plain of Africa.

Now many of their children - biologically or intellectually - have prominent jobs in universities, with enviro groups, or in many other elite occupations where they make good incomes and spend their disposable wealth to travel around the world, wasting all that energy while preaching 'energy abstinence' for the rest of us.

Next time you hear an environmentalist lecturing about our profligate lifestyle, ask them why they themselves use so much energy. There are literally millions of examples of this in America today. All you need to do is to think about it and refuse to allow their condescending demeanors to hide the reality. Because often it is staring you in the face as the Al Gores of the world misdirect us with their lofty, but empty rhetorical flourishes.  

 

Palin for President? – Part 2

 

(In two recent appearances, one a speech to the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, and the other a Sunday interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin showed some genuine fire for the conservative cause. Here are excerpts from those two appearances, with my comments.)

 

She told the National Tea Party Convention (NTPC):  “I’m so proud to be an American. Thank you so much for being here tonight. Do you love your freedom? If you love your freedom, thank the vets. Any of you here serving in uniform, past or present, raise your hand. We’re going to thank you for our freedom. God bless you guys! We salute you! We honor you! Thank you! I am so proud to be American!” Comment: When was the last time you saw Barack Hussein Obama or his wife expressing such strong patriotic sentiments? Answer: Never.

She told NTPC: “Happy Birthday, Ronald Reagan!” Comment: Indeed, one of the most successful presidents ever. She thinks like Reagan. And that is a good thing.

She told NTPC: “Well, a special hello to the C-SPAN viewers. You may not be welcome in those health care negotiations, but you have an invitation to the Tea Party.” Comment: Good for Palin! This is the type of blunt language that we need to show Obama for who he is, with a little sarcasm thrown in. She is masterful and really speaks to people with this approach.

She told NTPC: “And I am a big supporter of this (Tea Party) movement. I believe in this movement. Got lot’s of friends and family in the lower forty-eight who attend these events, and across this country, just knowing that this is the movement and that America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this.” Comment: This is unequivocal talk. And this is where the American electorate is generally heading.

She told NTPC: “Now, in many ways, Scott Brown represents what this beautiful movement is all about. You know, he was just a guy with a truck and a passion to serve our country. He looked around, and he saw that things weren’t quite right in Washington. So he stood up, and he decided that he was going to do his part to put our government back on the side of the people. And it took guts. And it took a lot of hard work. But with grass roots support, Scott Brown carried the day.” Comment: This is the type of talk that further encourages people to run for office. Good for Palin…

She told NTPC: “A lot of great common sense candidates—they’re going to put it all on the line in 2010. This year, there are going to be some tough primaries. And I think that’s good. Competition in these primaries is good. Competition makes us work harder and be more efficient and produce more. And I hope you’ll get out there and work hard for the candidates who reflect your values, your priorities, because despite what the pundits want you to think, contested primaries aren’t civil war. They’re democracy at work, and that’s beautiful.” Comment: Palin is doing two things here: Stating that the Tea Party movement will not be ignored, but conceding that it plans to work within the system. This is a sigh of relief for the Republican party, which feared a third-party movement.

She told NTPC: "And in that spirit, I caution against allowing this movement by be defined by any one leader or politician. The Tea Party movement is not a top-down operation. It’s a ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they are doing business, and that’s beautiful. This is about the people! This is about the people, and it’s bigger than any king or queen of a Tea Party. And it’s a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter." Comment: Notice that Palin is doing the opposite of Obama or Bill Clinton. She is NOT seeking to co-opt the movement. She even gave back her $100,000 speaking fee. Imagine Clinton doing that. Never…. Democrats like Clinton and Obama are too greedy and self-centered.

She told NPTC: "Now in recent weeks, many of us have grown even more uneasy about our administration’s approach to national security, the most important role ascribed to our federal government. Let me say, too —  it’s not politicizing our security to discuss our concerns, because Americans deserve to know the truth about the threats that we face and what the administration is or isn’t doing about them, so let’s talk about them." Comment: Two things. First she said that national security is the most essential duty of the federal government, which liberals want us to forget. And second she is calling out Obama for minimizing the threats. Good.

She told NTPC: "And in that we spirit, we should acknowledge that on Christmas Day, the system did not work. Abdul Mutallab passed through airport security with a bomb, and he boarded a flight hell-bent on killing innocent passengers. This terrorist trained in Yemen with Al Qaida. His American visa was not revoked until after he tried to kill hundreds of passengers. On Christmas Day, the only thing that stopped this terrorist was blind luck and brave passengers. Really, it was a Christmas miracle, and that is not the way the system is supposed to work… What followed was equally disturbing. After he was captured, he was questioned for only fifty minutes. We had a choice in how to do this. The choice was only question him for fifty minutes and then read his Miranda Rights. The administration says then, 'There are no downsides or upsides to treating terrorists like civilian criminal defendants.' But a lot of us would beg to differ." Comment: Go Sarah! Put all the information on the table. That is the way to win. With side-by-side comparisons.

She told NTPC: “There are questions that we would have like answered before he lawyered up. Like 'Where exactly were you trained and by whom? You’re bragging about all these other terrorists just like you. Where are they and when and where will they try to strike next?' The events surrounding the Christmas Day plot reflect the kind of thinking that led to September 11th. That threat then . . . as the U.S.S. Cole was attacked . . . our Embassies were attacked . . . It was treated like an international crime spree, not like an act of war. We’re seeing that mindset again settle into Washington. That scares me for my children and for your children. Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk. Because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this. They know we’re at war. And to win that war, we need a commander-in-chief, not a PROFESSOR OF LAW STANDING AT THE LECTURN!” Comment: She is punching hard with comments like that. This could get her elected president of the United States.

Question from Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday: "I mean who else comes to mind...? (for dereliction of duty in the Obama administration). Palin answered: “Well right now... (attorney general Eric) Holder is giving poor advice on how we are to treat these terrorists, to bestow upon these terrorists the Constitutional rights that our men and women in uniform fight and die for. These terrorists do not deserve these protections. And yet we are choosing, according to the White House, we are to choose to give them these protections. That's nonsense, they do not deserve these protections.” Comment: This is black and white, right and wrong. She is fearless. You know exactly where  she stands.

Question from Wallace: “Did you say anything then...?” (about Obama’s joke about the Special Olympics)? Palin, who has a Down Syndrome son replied: “I sure did, I did. I was the governor then and I made a statement saying you know, insensitive, come on, coming from the most powerful man in the free world, you should do better than that, Mr. President. Yeah I made a statement about that and was criticized for that too, but I don't care – I’m not gonna sit down and shut up.” Comment: This is the type of courage that terrifies Democrats.

Wallace asked: “Now, where do you see the future of the Tea Party movement and your role in it as well?” Palin replied: “The tea party movement is beautiful. It's a grassroots effort -- not a well-oiled machine that is replicated with the Dems or the Republicans thank goodness, because hopefully personalities and power struggles and titles won't get in the way of just doing what is right for this country and that's what the tea party's all about. Let's do what's right for this country, let's let our voice be heard on reminding Congress that we are taxed enough already. There are constitutional limits to what our federal government is trying to do, we're gonna remind them of that, and we are going to respect our Constitution and do all that we can to protect it.” Comment: Awesome... A leader who is willing to put the good of the nation before her own political ambitions.

Wallace asked: "This poll said by I think a margin of about 4-1 among Republicans they thought you were more qualified to be president than Obama. Do you think you're more qualified to be president than President Obama? Palin answered: "The whole qualification issue still perplexes me, because in the campaign we tried to bring attention to the fact that Obama had really not a lot of experience. And I do say that my executive experience, as an administrator, as a team manager if you will was, and so was John McCain's as a matter of fact, was stronger and we had more experience than Barack Obama did in terms of managing huge multi-billion dollar budgets and thousands of employees that I had just come from a position of that and that hasn't changed. Comment: Now that America has seen Obama’s inexperience, statements like this make sense. It will be a good year for Republicans.

 

Palin for President? - Part 1

(This is another column in a series that will consider potential Republican presidential candidates for the 2012 election.)

 

After Scott Brown stole the political spotlight for two weeks with his historic win in Massachusetts, we need to return to the phenomenon of Sarah Palin.

She is traveling far and wide, wrote a best-selling book, is being mobbed by admirers, addressed the Tea Party convention in Nashville, will speak at Republican fundraisers and other Tea Party events, and will participate actively in conservative causes. She is the most visible Republican in the nation.

The question is: Why is Sarah Palin such an important figure? How has someone who has been known for such a short time generated so much political enthusiasm? Why will she redound to the benefit of the Republican party for years to come, perhaps even as president?

It is an amazing spectacle...

Obama and the unpopular Democrats are currently taking a huge political beating. And as Palin rises, many Republicans are emerging to offer their services to a party deemed politically dead just one year ago.

Here are some of the US Senate candidates who can definitely win for the GOP in November, people who weren't even being talked about just a few months ago: Popular former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson could take away the seat of lefty Democrat Russ Feingold (of McCain-Feingold); former Indiana GOP US senator Dan Coates appears poised to possibly re-enter the Senate by winning Evan Bayh's seat.

Conservative Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania seems likely to take party-switcher Arlen Specter's Democrat seat; Democrat majority leader Harry Reid is going down to defeat in Nevada(!); Democrat Blanche Lincoln is toast in Arkansas; and Obama's former seat in Illinois is likely to go to Republican Mark Kirk with Kirk's opponent already being tied to corruption. Estimates are that  7 seats to as many as 13(!) US Senate seats could go from Democrat to Republican in November.

In addition, the Michigan governorship is seen as vulnerable with the current Democrat term-limited out. Many other offices are looking good for the GOP.

This truly is looking bad for the Democrats and Obama, just one year into his presidency. Because they did what they always do: They overreached and insulted America with their arrogance of power.

But still, with all the increasing excitement about the GOP, we have Palin rising above it all. Why?

The reason is that Palin represents the mirror opposite of Obama, his nemesis and his demise. In fact, it is the same force - the  media- that created them both, but in opposite ways. The media created Obama with sycophancy, and have at the same time attempted to destroy Palin. But this is backfiring and making Palin more famous than ever. She is rising as Obama is falling, and she is diametrically different from Obama in the following ways:

*Obama is a truly liberal male and Palin is a truly conservative woman. These are like night and day. And with the nation's serious problems, Americans have seen what liberals do: They use hardball tactics and ignore the will of the people. So now the voters are showing increasing trust in someone like Palin. And because the media have done such a superb job in differentiating between Obama and Palin, she has been set apart. This is a good thing.

*Obama is an emotionless intellectual who is hiding his real feelings under a veneer of ‘cool’ left-wing elitism. People do not find that likeable. They want to see some passion. Palin on the other hand is like your next-door neighbor. She is animated, open, emotional, loving, caring and she says what she thinks, not what she has read somewhere, or what is written on her teleprompter.

*Obama is a socialist who has “plans” to fix everything in America through the government. He got all these “plans” from books and left-wing mentors. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, has lived a real American life and at one point actually helped her husband on his fishing boat. She knows that people working hard on their own, in their own interest, to solve their own problems creates the most durable economy. Most Americans realize this. They see Obama's wild government spending doing nothing to improve the economy, but instead hurting it.

*Obama comes out of the corrupt urban politics of Chicago. Americans knows what that means. They see the payoffs and the fraudulence and violence in Chicago. They understand that it is a system based on dishonesty and selfishness. And most Americans reject it. Everything Obama does is a political calculation based on The Chicago Way. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is from a small town where people are much more honest and treat one another with respect. Small-town people are infinitely more genuine and giving than people in corrupt Chicago. These Palin traits appeal to many, many Americans.

*Obama is a pathological liar. He took both sides of virtually every issue in the campaign (see  www.massdiscussion.blogspot.com  ). This was driven by politics. He said he would televise the health-care debate on C-Span and then reneged. He said he would not have lobbyists in his administration, but now has more than 40. He has spoken repeatedly out of both sides of his mouth. Now it even has emerged that several TV chefs claimed they were using produce from the White House garden for a special cooking program when in fact the produce came from stores. This certainly sounds like a minor point, but it reinforces yet again the myriad ways in which Obama and his presidency are based on deception and media spin, even in small ways.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is someone who says what she means and means what she says. If Palin had said that the vegetables came from her garden, you could bet that they came from her garden. There is no politics involved. She is the type of person that America was founded for – honest, hard-working, and straight to the point. Liberals do not like this. They wish for everything to be seen through the prism of political advantage.

*Obama does not want to take responsibility for his own actions. He constantly blames Bush for everything. Americans do not like this. They want a leader who takes responsibility. Palin, on the other hand, stands by what she says and does, and does not try to pass the buck. This is a very important trait to many Americans. Because most of our fellow countrymen believe in the significance of personal responsibility. They increasingly see Obama as a crybaby.

*Obama came out of Harvard, while Sarah Palin went to the University of Idaho. If there ever was a contrast in America, that is it. Most Americans do not relate to the elitists at Harvard, but more with Palin’s identity as Everywoman who went to a college like most Americans attend, and who thinks like most Americans do. Her educational pedigree is not a wall between her and the people.

*Obama is a fake Christian. He attended a political church, not a religious one. He received left-wing indoctrination from an angry, anti-American pastor. Since he has been in Washington, he has not found a church to attend. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is a real, committed Christian who lives by her principles. Her church even was burned in an arson that is believed to have been set by a political adversary. Yet the media have ignored the arson story and Palin has not made a big deal of it. If the media ever covered the Palin church-burning story the way they fabricated stories in the 1990s about the alleged burning of black churches in the South – which never happened – Americans would be even more supportive of Palin’s quiet faith.

*Obama operates in secret after promising transparency. Everything is done in sweetheart deals and behind closed doors. This is classic liberalism. Payoffs, bribes, kickbacks, lies. Sarah Palin had an open government in Alaska and actually prosecuted corruption in her own party. Imagine Obama prosecuting corruption among Democrats. Forget it. He would have to spend 24/7 on it.

*Obama is a ‘grievance liberal’. Everything he does is intended to settle a score. American do not like this. He wants to “get back at” the bankers (who are largely his Democrat friends), the car companies, the insurance industry, i.e., any productive capitalist entity. Palin on the other hand, does not operate on an ideology of vindictiveness. And she lives by this personally. Despite the media onslaught of attacks on her, she still smiles and offers people an optimistic outlook. She does not seek to "get back at" her media tormentors. She accepts it for what it is and understands that it will work against the media in the long run.

*Obama has not worked in the real world. He has only been a student and then a community organizer. Americans prefer someone like Sarah Palin and her husband Todd who has been a commercial fisherman and an oilfield worker in Alaska. In other words, real work, not political activism. Todd Palin even is a snowmobile racing champ! Americans love that rugged individualism.

*Obama has led the nation astray. And he was supposed to be so damned smart. Yet Palin is charged with being dumb. But the nation right now would be much better off if Palin were president and had put in place policies for growth, and a strategy to deal with terrorists realistically. Increasing numbers of Americans know this and no longer believe the media narrative that Obama is the genius and that she is dumb. They understand that she is a person of common sense and that it is Obama who is the clueless one, despite his silver tongue. 

Indeed Sarah Palin matters. And this is going to haunt the Democrats for years to come. Palin is still very young. She will be a force in American politics for years. And someday she will be president of the United States, possibly sooner than we think.

 

 

Tea Parties: Bigger than Anti-war Movement?

 

There is a perception developing that the Tea Party movement is more significant than it currently appears. In fact some see the Tea Parties as the most transforming movement since civil rights of the 1950s.

Are the Tea Parties over time going to have a larger impact than the anti-Vietnam War movement?

They will. In fact in less than one year of existence, they already are having an impact far beyond their membership numbers, as seen in the recent election in Massachusetts which was heavily influenced by Tea Party members from inside and outside the state.

Yet the Tea Party movement is the opposite of the anti-war movement in many respects:

*The Tea Parties are fueled by a fundamental frustration and anger with our government’s essential intervention in our lives, primarily taxation and reckless spending, as warned about by our Founding Fathers and the documents that they left us - the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

The anti-war movement, on the other hand, was aimed at one specific policy of the government in a time when the nation was prospering economically and Washington was much less involved in our lives. It was a visceral reaction to a war entered into and escalated by two Democrat presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Richard Nixon said that if he had been elected in 1960 that the US never would have entered that war.

*The Tea Party movement is a genuine, nationwide grass-roots movement that does not have a fixed leader, but has bubbled up from the people. This is unique. It is an authentically democratic force based on Constitutional principles that wants a peaceful transformation for America. It was not dreamed up in Washington. It is populated not by activists or college students who have few other responsibilities, but by hard-working people who need to take time out from their busy lives in order to express themselves.

The anti-war movement, on the other  hand, was led by politicians, entertainers, university professors, leftist theorists, writers, musicians and professional agitators,  many of them well funded and scripted, and all way over on the political left.

*Tea Party activists are well-informed, well-behaved, clean cut, middle-class tax-paying people from every state who are trying to prevent the nation from slipping further into the type of decay and debt that the Founding Fathers warned against.

Anti-war rallies, on the other hand, were often drug-fueled protests attended by radical, propagandized college kids and ‘hippies’ that sometimes descended into chaos. Many were simply social occasions for young people who really knew very little. Meanwhile the media built up the anti-war movement to be a national one, when in fact was largely a California/East Coast phenomenon.

*The Tea Party movement is not nearly so far to the political right as the anti-war movement was to the left, which gives it much more credibility to a wider audience, which is why it is growing in influence faster than in actual numbers. And while there are some outspoken and controversial adherents in the Tea Parties, they are not nearly as extreme as the anti-war movement, although the media are making them out to be.

The anti-war movement was marked by a lot of bad behavior – violence, anti-Americanism, drug use, bad language, promiscuous sex, demonic rock music and dissolute, radical leaders spewing extremist rhetoric.

The Tea Parties are simply citizens acting within the law and voicing their displeasure and concern. In fact leftist agitators even visited some of the original Tea Party protests on April 15, 2009 and sought to instigate violence by confronting Tea Partiers with provocative actions and taunts.  It did not work, and will fade as a tactic as the left watches the Tea Party ideology grow in legitimacy.

*From files since released by the Soviet Union's KGB secret police, we know that the anti-Vietnam War movement was funded by large amounts of communist money, moral support and propaganda.

The Tea Party movement, on the other hand, is being funded by people's own hard-earned money from within the United States, and by citizens and ideas that are totally American. These participants know that when the people have a grievance with their government that they have the right to change that government as stated in the Declaration of Independence:

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 

When did you ever see the anti-war movement referring to our founding documents?

Never.

'Safety and Happiness'? ... 'deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'? These are powerful and uplifting sentiments of freedom, far from the destructive, negative and angry tone of the anti-Vietnam protesters. And that is why the Tea Parties are going to have a more longer-lasting life and impact on America than the anti-war movement did.

*The Tea Parties are being disrespected and even maligned by the Ancient Media (New York Times, CBS, NBC, Follywood etc.). Yet these same media supported and showcased the truly extremist and demagogic anti-war movement. Those media magnified the anti-war movement and made it seem much larger than it really was while they are now seeking to make the Tea Parties appear smaller and less significant than they really are.

The media portrayed the 'hippies' as the enlightened wave of a better future. Even in 2008, the media did everything they could to cover up for Obama’s association with William Ayers, the anti-war radical who detonated three bombs in the 1970s (one at the Pentagon, one at New York police headquarters, one at a military recruiting station) but who was never convicted in those bombings.

Those same media then ruthlessly and relentlessly attack a Tea Party favorite like Sarah Palin when she has been a law-abiding, hard-working, family-oriented, honest, Christian person who believes in the basic goodness of America. She did positive things in her political career like fighting corruption in Alaska, and even pushing through a natural gas pipeline project that had been stalled for 30 years.

Now, after less than one year in existence, one arm of the Tea Party movement has held a convention in Nashville, Tennessee. This is striking. It will not be composed of stoned-out 'hippies' camping in a park or meeting in a campus classroom. It was as well organized as a Rotary Club meeting in a hotel ballroom. This terrifies the left because they see a sustainable, orderly movement that is growing. So the media have done everything they can to portray that convention in a negative light, describing it as a division in the Tea Party ranks, that the movement is fracturing, that it will spawn third-party  candidates that will destroy the Republicans etc., etc.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Convention speakers noted quite directly and openly from the start that they intend to work alongside whomever agrees with their goals - not even necessarily Republicans - and will not create a third political party. This is another bad sign for the libs.

The convention also started to address grass-roots electoral issues which long have escaped conservatives, like identifying and engaging like-minded voters, cultivating candidates and getting out the vote.

The Ancient Media and their leftist allies are just angry, jealous and bewildered that the Tea Parties have grown so quickly and already are having such a significant impact on America, playing a big role in stripping Obama of much of his power in just the first year of his presidency. At the same time the libs are wondering what happened to a similar movement in the Democrat party that brought Obama to power, which has now collapsed.

Indeed the Tea Party movement is going to change America. It is just getting started. It is not a temporary surge of political passion, as the Ancient Media have been saying. It is not shallow "Astro Turf" as Nancy Pelosi suggested but a deeply-rooted, grass-roots movement, a confluence of longstanding frustrations with government that is going to grow and flourish. Because it is based in the positive and hearty nature of American freedom as described by our wonderful Founders and their awesome revolution more than 230 years ago. And ultimately that is all that you need to know about it. www.nationalteapartyconvention.com is the website

 

Conservative Voter Registration Drive Needed

 

How should conservatives proceed now that president Obama’s polls are sinking and his agenda is being exposed for what it is – a huge financial and power grab by the government that is unpopular with most productive Americans?

First, events will continue swaying existing independent voters, which already is happening naturally. The November 3, 2009 elections resulted in big Republican victories in Virginia, Maine and New Jersey coming just one year after the Democrats declared the Republican party dead in the wake of the Obama victory. Ted Kennedy's  seat has fallen to the GOP in Massachusetts. Obama's former Illinois US Senate seat is likely to go Republican. At the same time, more than 30 state races have gone to the GOP in 2009, one in Kentucky in which the Republican candidate made it into a referendum on Obama and won by 12 points.

But more crucially, we on the “right” side of the issues must start registering new voters, particularly in the suburbs, small towns and rural areas. We must begin to prepare for the coming conservative resurgence which is going to continue in the 2010 elections and after.

Over the last 50 years, the Democrats have been running huge voter registration drives in cities and on college campuses, most recently through the corrupt ACORN organization and other groups, often using government money. And they have signed up millions of voters who vote Democrat every election, often in a straight swap for government handout cash.

Today the Democrat registration agenda is largely tapped out compared to the conservative drive which is hardly started. And it is time for conservatives to go out and start to register people who want to see our nation proceed into prosperity and freedom, not poverty and government control.

How?

The foundation already has been laid by conservative groups like the Tea Party movement; a growing audience for Rush Limbaugh and Fox News; Glenn Beck’s 912ers; and Sarah Palinites and others who are alarmed about our nation’s drift to the collectivist left. This is a huge and energized population as evidenced by the recent elections, including one in which a conservative third-party candidate almost won a congressional race in New York state. That candidate, Douglas Hoffman, will win that race in a 2010 rematch.

Today many conservatives are chomping at the bit and wondering when they can make a difference. And that time is coming. It is called the mid-term elections of  November 2010.

And since we know that energized conservatives are in the millions, all that need happen is that each one must be called to go out and register one single voter - or more - as their contribution to the cause. That will amount to millions of new votes for our side. And it would produce more political change than all the Washington rallies and protests put together. That is how conservatives can change America with individual efforts right in your local community.

And it must start now. And it can happen very quickly. Our political leaders and commentators – Palin, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck etc. - must step up with a Vote Right registration campaign and website. Other conservative celebrities, entertainers and politicians need to get involved too like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Chuck Norris, Lee Greenwood, military figures like Oliver North, fiscal conservatives and others.

There are tens of millions of unregistered voters across America. And there certainly are more unregistered conservatives than liberals since liberals have been doing voter drives for decades.

Just think of your own friends and acquaintances. Certainly among, say, a few dozen people, you know one or two people who are not registered to vote, or who have not bothered to vote. Or if you ask your friends you can learn about one person. It is important to identify these people and to talk to them.

Every small town in America should have one conservative coordinator who can work with locals on registration. But this is not going to be one of those clipboard-toting drives where you stand on a street corner for days at a time. This will be a one-on-one campaign done by people on their own time in their own neighborhood or community contacting people they may already know. Imagine one conservative registering just one other person. That's it! Because that is the nature of conservatism - not driven by government or money, but by personal passion and individual initiative like the bottom-up Tea Party movement.

If just 3 million activist conservatives registered just one person each at this stage, the political landscape of America would change dramatically. After all, left-wing Democrat Al Franken won the 2008 US Senate race in Minnesota by only 300 votes. And that happened only after several hundred Franken votes magically appeared in pro-Franken areas, obviously the work of ACORN or a similar Democrat fraud group.

Conservatives need to explain to new voters what is happening with our national debt, perhaps publishing on a Vote Right website the projections of the debt for the future under Obama and the Democrats. Conservatives need to explain that Democrats may give people “free” health insurance  - paid for by someone else, of course - but that those same people may never work again because Obama policies are killing the economy.

On a Vote Right website - which could be mounted independent of the Republican party, or as part of an official, new Republican party system that links every county in America on a single, interconnected site  - people could be encouraged to tell their stories about how they identified a potential voter and how they got that person registered. This will give other people ideas on how to proceed. The website could offer a series of one-page printouts on various issues with bullet points for people to explain about conservatism, and to give to potential voters.

Just think of young people or 20-somethings in suburban, small-town and rural areas who are, at heart, conservative, but who don’t think their vote counts. They are in the millions. Conservatives also should be going onto college campuses. Because young people already are abandoning Obama and are going to be getting hit hard by Obama policies, like those that would have forced young, healthy people to buy health insurance, or those Democrat policies that are killing jobs.

Just think of middle-aged people who are not voting, or who are on the fence. Conservatives need to go and talk to them and to be courageous. The tide has shifted to conservatives after just one year of Obama. And if you get some liberal trying to intimidate you, ignore him. That is usually their only strategy.

Older folks too. In small-town and rural areas, it is important to explain how environmentalism is ruining peoples’ livelihoods as happened recently when the government shut off the water in the Central Valley of California, disrupting farming on behalf of some endangered species.

Conservatives must go and do anything to get this drive going including giving a speech in somebody’s house to invited guests. Word will spread. Conservatives can energize large numbers of people that way.

It is time for those of us on the political right to use the tactics that liberals have been using for decades. And to simply use our common sense and our sense for what is right. Because those are our ultimate weapons.

 

 

Keep Policy of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

 

The Obama administration is calling for a change in the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that requires that gays hide their homosexual orientation while serving in the US military.

This change would be a bad idea that would not only harm military morale and cohesion, but would subject our armed forces to endless legal challenges. And don’t think for a second that leftists like ACLU do not want to target the military with this issue. They have been waiting for decades for such an opportunity.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) gets its name from its requirement that the military does not ask service members to divulge their homosexual/lesbian orientation (don’t ask) while gays are required not to reveal to the military their homosexual/lesbian orientation (don’t tell). It is a policy that supersedes long-established laws banning gays from serving at all. And today, sodomy still violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

More than 13,000 homosexuals and lesbians who have abridged DADT since it was established in 1993 have been mustered out of the military. So why should we maintain Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?

Because if it is scrapped, two things will happen:

1) Openly homosexual male soldiers will be sharing close living quarters with other males in the military. This will be extremely disruptive to many male military service members  who are opposed to homosexuality to start on the grounds of personal or Christian morality. They will be forced to live in close quarters with, shower with and share bathrooms with gays who can and will be sexually excited by them. There is no way that an openly homosexual male will be perceived in the same way as everyone else by heterosexual male soldiers under the conditions in which military personnel live and serve.

2) Openly lesbian female soldiers will be sharing close living quarters with other females in the military. This will be extremely disruptive to many female military service members who are opposed to homosexuality to start on the grounds of personal or Christian morality. They will be forced to live in close quarters with, shower with and share bathrooms with lesbians who can and will be sexually excited by them. There is no way that an openly gay female will be perceived in the same way as everyone else by heterosexual female soldiers under the conditions in which military personnel live and serve.

That is the whole issue in a nutshell. Military life is different from civilian life.

According to one poll, 10% of personnel say they will quit the military if homosexuals and lesbians are allowed to serve openly. This would be a huge blow to our armed forces and shows how this policy will hurt us just by being implemented. And this is the goal of Obama and the social engineers who are promoting this issue - to harm our military.

Homosexuality has been considered a mental disorder throughout the ages. Only in 1973 did the American Psychiatric Association stop describing it as such. Despite media insistence otherwise, acceptance of homosexuals is not nearly as widespread in America as liberals would like to think. In fact most surveys show that a majority of Americans still think that homosexuality is wrong and immoral.

And this comes after the massive and ongoing media and medical cover-ups of the grim health and mortality statistics among gay males, which, if exposed like the statistics about cigarette smoking or obesity, would turn many more Americans against homosexuality. Anyone who looks up the health statistics will find the terrible truth. Here is just one excerpt from one source, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about gay males:

 

*“The number of new syphilis infections in the United States rose last year for the first time in 11 years, with large increases occurring among men who have sex with men…”

*“In the United States, HIV and AIDS have had a tremendous impact on MSM (men who have sex with men). Consider the facts:

*“AIDS has been diagnosed for more than half a million MSM.”

*“Over 300,000 MSM have died since the beginning of the epidemic.” (This translates mathematically into a proportional death rate of 30 million people in the general population, or about 1 million deaths per year. – Nikitas)

*“MSM made up more than two-thirds (68%) of all men living with HIV in 2005.”

*“In a large CDC study, conducted in sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinics in five major cities, researchers found the rate of new HIV infections among MSM to be nine times higher than among women and heterosexual men.”

 

So the military also might be accepting an expensive health problem if gay males suddenly flocked to military service.

Now consider the so-called ‘sex abuse scandal’ in the Catholic Church. It was actually a ‘homosexual abuse scandal’ that allowed just a few hundred promiscuous gay priests, using their entrée into the Church under permissive Christianity, to molest thousands upon thousands of young buys, destroying those boys’ lives and disrupting the Church in a significant way.

Yet today, after decades of proof of homosexual promiscuity, disease and death, and statistically high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide, we are supposed to extend their reach into the American military.

We should not.

Homosexuality has progressed incrementally in stages. First gays wanted tolerance, which all Americans should grant them. But then they desired acceptance. Then legitimacy. Then sanctification. But they do not stop there. Because once homosexuality has been codified by law, the next stage kicks in - they want to marry and adopt children and indoctrinate young school kids into their way of thinking.

Then it goes further - they now want cross-dressers and sex changers and drag queens and transvestites to be seen as normal and acceptable, and will use laws to push that agenda and to punish people who disagree. This would work its way  into the military if gays openly served. It is a slippery slope.

All this explains why homosexuality was proscribed for millennia; because it is just a starting point for lifestyles that societies throughout history have deemed undesirable and unsustainable.

Now gays want open and unfettered access to our military. To which we should Just Say No.

Crazy Talk from the Media

 

Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson, a whipping boy for the liberal media and university elite, recently blamed the Haiti earthquake on that nation’s past. He said:

 “(S)omething happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'OK, it’s a deal.' They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

“But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island.

“They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy I’m optimistic something good may come. But right now, we’re helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.” (end of Robertson quote)

 

So we have a devout Christian expressing a traditional Biblical proposition that those who act contrary to what is perceived as God’s will, or those who act contrary to what might be perceived as that which is righteous and good, may be punished by unconnected reprisal (like plagues of locusts) through spiritual retribution alone. This is simply an expression of religious dogma that has been spoken in a billion different ways by people of all stripes throughout history.

Remember the ‘hippies’ talking for years about the Hindu concept of 'karma', that you get back in life what you put out? Or the old secular saying, “What goes around, comes around”? Or the idea accepted universally across the globe that “you reap what you sow”?

Yet Robertson was absolutely savaged in the media. And this quote will be resurrected every time the media wish to trash him.

Now a nutty Follywood actor named Danny Glover said about the earthquake: “When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?”

This also is an expression of religious zeal in saying that mankind will be cursed for not reaching an international agreement on so-called 'global warming' at the Copenhagen climate meeting. Because it represents the pagan religious belief of the Church of Climate Armageddon that when we treat Mother Nature – who is God to the enviro left - wrongly, that we will pay a price.

But Glover's thought really is much more insidious than that. Because a thought like Glover's represents the intersection of junk science and junk religious paganism, neither of which is based in either science or genuine religious spirituality, but instead is an expression of the false say-anything intellectual deceit that animates the enviro movement today. You know, the stuff Al Gore tries to pass off as fact (sea levels will rise 17 feet, all the glaciers are melting, planet has "a fever" etc.)

Yet Glover’s comment will be forgiven and has received much less media play than Robertson’s even though it was infinitely more stupid. Maybe they went soft on him because he's black.

Now we have another quote from another leftist, the dictator Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, whose every word is somehow quickly passed through the American media’s nonsense meter like Omar Abdulmutallab going through the screeners at Amsterdam airport. Chavez said that the Haiti quake was a result of American underground nuclear bombs that are intended to be used to destabilize Iran.  

But the reaction from many in the American media was essentially to ignore Chavez as if to say that Chavez is not nuts. Which is trying to prove a negative. Which you can’t do unless you are in the American media defending a dictator.

In the same week that these quotes came out, we had another quote from another screwball. But this time it was not from a flaky dictator or a washed-up actor, but from a cable news commentator. This is what Ed Schultz of far-left MSNBC said before the Massachusetts election that threatened to replace Democrat US senator Edward Kennedy with Republican Scott Brown:

 

"I tell you what, if I lived in Massachusetts, I'd try to vote ten times. I don't know if they'd let me or not, but I'd try to. Yeah, that's right, I'd cheat to keep these bastards out. I would. 'Cause that's exactly what they are." (end of Schultz quote)

 

Look at his words. Isn't that illegal to "try to vote ten times"? Is Schultz promoting lawbreaking? Should he be arrested for provocation?

Then he says,  "I don’t know if they’d let me or not..."

Gee, Ed, you better check with your precinct boss. If it is a Democrat, he will arrange it. He always has.

Will Schultz be thrown off the air for promoting voter fraud? Will his comments be replayed over and over as an example of Democrats' nonchalance about stolen elections?

No. The media will bury it. But his quote is much more serious than Robertson's, or than his jesting tone lets on. It is too close to truth to be even vaguely funny because voter fraud is a very serious issue in America today, particularly with the exposure of ACORN corruption, the suspiciously close win by Al Franken in Minnesota in the 2008 election, or suspected Democrat fraud in the 2002 US Senate race in South Dakota or the 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington State.

But hey, they’re Democrats. They’re used to this stuff.

Here is what uber-liberal Chris Matthews said on MSNBC a few days before that Massachusetts vote:

 

"You know in the old days...if the Democrats faced this kind of a disaster in the works (a potential loss of Edward Kennedy's seat to a Republican) you'd go back to your ones, the people you were sure are going to vote Democrat, and you`d make sure they got to the polling place...

"You`d get them lunch, you`d get them a car. You`d make sure they got there, and in some cases you`d be buying people to get them... But I hear talking to somebody today there aren`t people up there in Massachusetts like that anymore." (end of Matthews quote)

 

Look at this quote: "...and in some cases you'd be buying people to get them..." ??

This isn't just stupid. This is illegal. But to Democrats, you do anything to win. And then admit it. Ha-ha-ha...

But you've got to feel sorry for poor Matthews when he said of his old-fashioned Democrat party... "But I hear talking to somebody today there aren`t people up there in Massachusetts like that anymore."

Darn it... Whatever happened to the good old days when Democrats could steal elections fair and square, like the Kennedys did?

Remember how the media savaged Dan Quayle over every mistake he made? Or George Bush over every malapropism he spoke? Yet when Democrats talk about voter fraud, these same media think nothing of it.

Barack Obama said he had campaigned in “57 states”. Vice president Joe Biden talked about “a three-letter word, J-O-B-S...” Those goofs were buried in the media and ascribed to  politicians who were “tired”. Because these liberals, always portrayed as ultra-smart, indeed make more dumb statements than conservatives, and the media must cover that up.

In fact the Haiti earthquake hit just in time to save the skin of Democrat US Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada who was quoted as having said that Obama did not have a “negro dialect”. Or Bill Clinton’s alleged statement to Ted Kennedy that black people like Obama would have been “getting us coffee” just a few years ago?

No, those statements now are dead and gone, buried under the rubble of Haiti just as the prospects of the Democrat party in the November 2010 elections are buried under the rubble of Democrat stupidity like Ed Schultz and Danny Glover and Barack Obama himself mocking the pickup truck of US Senate candidate Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Except that that was Brown’s real truck. Because Brown is a real person who is now a real United States senator, not "an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees” as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann described him.

So who really are the nut cases in the American media? Pat Robertson speaking Biblically? Or Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and Danny Glover?

You decide.

 

Socialism’s Intentional Destruction

 

If you want to know where America is headed with health-care legislation and other big spending programs, look no further than Korea. Today, South Korea is a nation rooted in capitalism while North Korea is rooted in communism. And nowhere can you see better side-by-side what the two systems produce than on the Korean Peninsula.

After World War II, North Korea became communist. Naturally, being a leftist nation, it aggressively attacked the South because socialism is an ideology of anger and war. When the United States intervened in the Korean War and saved the South from the aggression of the North, 33,000 American lives were lost, but the nation was saved. South Korea became a capitalist nation defended by a military government to fend off the North. It became a democracy in 1988. North Korea has remained a dictatorship since its birth like most communist nations do.

North Korea and South Korea are about the same size with about 25 million people each today. They are  composed of the exact same people separated only by a border. But North Korea now is a destitute, starving, oppressed and backward rural and agricultural nation with hardly any electric power. Satellite maps of the North at night show the whole nation virtually dark. Meanwhile South Korea is a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world that makes some of the most advanced products on the planet. And oh, yes, the lights are on all over South Korea.

So you have a contrast. A communist system in the North that theoretically was supposed to care for all of the people, while a capitalist system in the South never promised to theoretically take care of anyone. Yet the South is rich and the North is poor. The South has an annual average income 18 times that of the North. For those bad at math, that would be like comparing a $54,000 annual income to a $3,000 income.

And today, while America is not going to become communist by any means, we are headed toward severely reduced standards of living at the hands of a Democrat party that says that it wants to theoretically take care of everybody.

Oh, no, you might say, that is overstating the case.

But if we continue to pursue Obama policies, we will end up much poorer. The Democrat party is taking us into the circumstances that the Founders warned us we would face if we allowed the government to take over our lives and our tax money and our freedom. Which is exactly where we are headed under Obama.

Obama is pursuing policies that are antithetical to growth. That is why the economy is not recovering and will never recover despite all of Obama’s meetings and speeches.

And what caused our economic collapse in the first place?

Socialism did. First, the word 'conservative' has been vilified for decades by the Democrats and the media, and the banks abandoned sensible 'conservative' lending policies at the nagging of liberals. The government since has forced banks to loan trillions of dollars to poor people with no means to pay it back. When they could not pay it back, the economy collapsed under the strain of all that bad debt which was spread throughout the economy via various financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities.

Now what is Obama doing to fix things?

He is spending more and more and more money. Which makes no sense. Because any rational person who is in a financial crisis reduces his spending so as not to build up more debt. Yet Obama and his Democrats cronies are building more and more debt.

What will all this debt, along with expensive new government programs, ultimately do to our economy?

Well, just imagine you lost your job and your spouse goes on a spending spree with your credit card. You still have to pay back that money even if you don’t work ever again. Or you go bankrupt. Which is where Obama is taking America.

And if your bank account is empty, how are you ever going to recover?

Answer: You won’t. Ever. This is classic socialism and this is where the Democrats are taking us. And this is intentional.

Look at all the nations around the world with big debt loads, and all of them have depressed economies. The United States has historically had less than half the debt load percentage-wise of most of the industrialized nations, which is why our economy has led the world. Today Obama is pushing that debt up and up.

This is intentional.

Many of the Democrats in Congress have been running as ‘moderates’ yet they are all voting for more and more debt and bigger and bigger government programs like the health care bill. This is going to permanently harm America’s future.

Intentionally.

Look around the world at places like the Soviet Union. Every person there was controlled by a government that was corrupt through and through, just as Obama and his Democrat cronies are handing out our taxpayer dollars to anyone who will sign on to his agenda. This is called Chicago-style corruption. And it is intentional. The Democrats know exactly what they are doing because they are getting all the money, and they love it.

Imagine the American economy is $14 trillion, which it has been in recent years, and that the political power is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Now imagine that the economy is reduced to $10 trillion, that tens of millions of people are permanently out of work, but that the Democrat party has total control.

Would the Democrats want that?

You bet they would. Because that is what they are doing. And it is intentional.

It is what happened in North Korea. A small group of people took over the nation and established a communist state. They do not care that the nation has suffered massive injustice and poverty and starvation over the last 60 years. They see it every day. They know that it has happened. But the only important thing is that they have control. Because leftists are people who want to control other people’s lives no matter what the final outcome is. And Obama is on that path. Don’t let his cool and reassuring demeanor fool you. He knows exactly what he is doing.

Look at Europe, which could stimulate its economies by giving more economic freedom to its people. But they won’t because certain special interests (labor unions, government workers, rich leftists etc.) control the economy, the government and the media, and are taking large amounts of wealth for themselves. Meanwhile Europe has had decades of unemployment rates around 10% that we today call outrageous when we have them here.

Remember when unemployment was 5% under George Bush? And what did the Democrats say every single day?

They caterwauled about “tax cuts for the rich” and tried to make prosperity look like a bad thing.

Yet now that we have 10% official unemployment (it is 18% really when you count all the people out of work) and no relief in sight, the same Democrats are pushing for more taxes and more debt which have historically been proven to stunt economic growth. And once millions of Americans get used to being poor, the Democrats will have all the power by giving them government handouts. Or at least that is the theory.

Today states like Michigan, once one of the richest places in the world, is dying. Ditto California, New York and Massachusetts. And what do they all have in common? They are all controlled by the Democrats and the labor unions and their powerful state-employee unions that steal all the money while the people suffer. And their increasing poverty and joblessness are intentional outcomes of Democrat policies because the money and power are in the hands of the Democrats.

Do the Democrats care that people are suffering, even their own voters like blacks and hispanics?

No. The blacks have been suffering increasingly in the inner cities for the last 50 years as the Democrats have increased their grip on those communities. Murder, illegitimacy, awful schools, joblessness - these are the hallmarks of Democrat social policies.

These are intentional policies to undermine the people in order to have power over them.

Yet when you point out what is really going on, the Democrats repeat the usual nonsense, that it is all George Bush’s fault. And capitalism’s fault. And millions of people believe it and continue to vote Democrat as they continue to do in places like Michigan and Vermont, both of which have rapidly declining economies because they already are controlled by Democrats.

There is a growing backlash against the Democrats’ intentional destruction of our economy. People are catching on. The Republicans are going to win big time in the November 2010 elections. Because Americans knew what prosperity is. We can regain it if we act in the next election cycle. Because only conservatism can save our nation.

But the Democrats may do so much damage that we cannot fix it for years or decades to come. And that suffering will be an intentional outcome of Democrat policies. And this deprivation is what Obama will go down in history for.

 

Khalid Sheikh Bloomberg

 

As we seek to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his cohorts for the 9/11 attacks, we certainly should be looking for a venue other than New York City, which apparently is finally being reconsidered as a trial site by the Obama administration. This reversal came after vehement protests from city residents and businesses who knew that the trials would essentially put large areas of lower Manhattan under police lockdown for months at a time.

There are several parts to this evolving trial story that need to be told, however. It is not so cut and dried as the media let on.

First, we conservatives immediately protested long and loud about holding the trials in New York for many reasons including security, the exorbitant cost, the folly of giving American trial rights to enemy combatants, the foolhardiness of giving alleged terrorists a megaphone for their grievances, and the inanity of divulging American security secrets to the terrorist world, which is what would have happened with civilian trials.

Chalk a big one up for our side.

Second, the media myth is that attorney general Eric Holder wanted to stage the trials in New York in order to showcase our wonderful American justice system to a skeptical and angry world.

This is pure baloney. Holder's real intent was to harass the people of New York with an inordinately expensive and dangerous trial that was estimated to have potentially cost the city $1 billion for security. This on top of the anguish the city already suffered from the attack itself.

Because Holder is a leftist who has intellectually defended terrorists as people with a legitimate grievance against the United States. This also is Obama’s thinking and the mindset of ACLU and other left-wing interest groups. Holder’s law firm, from his days before being nominated as attorney general, even has represented Guantanamo detainees from Yemen.

In other words Holder wanted to create chaos because progressivism/liberalism are systems that create mayhem with their irrationality and extremist views.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani opposed the trials right from the start. But his successor Michael Bloomberg, a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Independent, first supported the trials and then came to oppose them. Because Bloomberg is a political chameleon whose mayoralty has only been successful because tough-guy Giuliani laid the groundwork.

Bloomberg is truly a political ghost posing as a rational leader. He became a multi-billionaire with his Bloomberg financial services TV network, and so he is at heart a liberal media mogul who is out of touch with reality and the “little people” of his city.

So first Bloomie approved the terror trials because he calculated that anyplace as liberal as New York would support the trials in the interest of justice for terrorists. In other words he was just being a really ‘hip’ New Yorker.

But he was grossly wrong. Because he did not consider that New York’s gigantic, left-wing, Republican-hating, military-averse population actually might oppose the trials with vigor, along with all the top police brass. Because Bloomberg does not even know his own people. He does not understand that even New York liberals are much more conservative at heart than they ever will let on. That they might have been clandestinely supporting the conservative position on the trials, something they could not admit until they actually had to go out and protest in public.

Another side of the story is that maybe the people of New York actually deserve these trials and all their peril. After all, these trials were cooked up by the Obama administration which got an overwhelming supermajority of the Manhattan votes in the November 2008 election. And now the same people suddenly, in a panic, oppose Obama after conservatives warned that this is exactly the type of thing that Obama was going to do.

Perhaps these trials would give them a taste of their own political medicine. Or perhaps they already have tasted it because 9/11 itself was a result of Manhattan-style elitist laxity on terrorism. The 9/11 attacks never should have happened and never would have happened if conservatives were in charge. During the time that the attack was being planned, however, Bill Clinton, ever popular in the salons of the Upper West Side, was chasing Monica Lewinsky around his desk; the CIA and FBI were banned from communicating with each other by years of leftist restrictions; and terrorists saw a lackadaisical America refusing throughout the 1990s to respond to attacks on American interests around the world and even at the World Trade Center in 1993. And nowhere was this isolationist/pacifist mindset more pronounced than in New York City.

Then the same New Yorkers who were hammered on 9/11 trashed George Bush every day for treating terrorists harshly and holding them without trial.

In order to sway public opinion back to the military tribunal route we should ask every American city or town: Will you accept the trials in your locale? And in response you will not get any towns seeking to bring the trials in. Because after all the chatter, Americans are really conservatives at heart on terrorism and many other issues.

We should keep the trials in place where the terrorists currently are being held in captivity, in Guantanamo Bay, which is an American possession on the island of Cuba. Those trials should be conducted as military tribunals.

What we are discovering about Obama and his cronies is that America largely rejects his policies. And until Obama understands this, he will continue to falter. That he seemed almost detached from the Fort Hood Massacre and from the Christmas Day bomber is intensely discomfiting to America.

Then you get a distant, out-of-touch mayor like Bloomberg shifting with the political winds and you really start to put the pieces together, that we still live in a dangerous world, and that most Americans understand that fact except some very powerful but aloof people in the White House, the Justice Department and the mayor’s mansion in Manhattan, all of which should scare every American like nothing else ever has.

 

‘All In’ Democrat Ploy Backfires

 

The Democrats have gambled everything and they have lost. Big time. They were urged by their far-left progressive flank into an 'all in' strategy, like a poker game where one player pushes all his chips into the center of the table to bet on the cards he has. And when that player ends up with a losing hand, he goes home broke. Just as the Democrats are gong politically broke today.

How did all this happen? It seems like a dream, does it not?

Just look at the political landscape today. Who woulda thunk it? The Democrats are wounded and cannot buy an election, Massachusetts even went Republican, important  and powerful liberals are retiring left and right or are facing defeat at the polls, Obama’s popularity is collapsing, and the president is being savaged even by increasing numbers of his media friends.

Compare that to just one year ago, January 2009, when Obama was seen as an invincible force. He had 70% approval ratings, big majorities in both houses of Congress, a glamorous can-do image, and a dispirited Republican electorate that was ready to throw in the towel on the future of America as a free and capitalist nation. As a Newsweek magazine cover crowed at the time: We Are All Socialists Now

So what happened?

Well, after a few good hands, like a blackjack player on a hot streak in Vegas, the Democrats did what many conservatives predicted: They overreached and starting betting heavy. Since Obama came from the far left in Chicago and Harvard, he tried to implement a far-left agenda, taking the November 2008 election victory as a mandate for change. And who could blame him? On the surface it looked like a perfect political storm that was set to realign the nation once and for all.

But Obama & Co. seemed oblivious to the fact that his election was more cosmetic than the media portrayed it. After all McCain was a horrible candidate, was far outspent by Obama, and the political cycle favored the Democrats. Obama even took many conservative positions in order to get elected. Yet on election day 2008, Obama still only won by 6 points, which is called a ‘modest’ victory in American electoral parlance. And as it turns out that some elected congressional Democrats were more conservative than Obama could count on for his agenda and so he had a false sense of political superiority.  

Then Obama started off on the wrong foot, with the bungled oath of office at his inauguration. This might seem insignificant, but to those of us who look at symbols, it was an omen of things to come.

Obama then confidently promised to close the Guantanamo terrorist detention facility; launched an expensive stimulus spending plan; strong-armed the bankrupt car companies and gave large chunks of their stock to the unions; seemed nonchalant about terrorism; and promoted a huge, unwieldy national health-care plan that would become the Democrats’ Waterloo.

Despite poll after poll showing increasing public displeasure with Obama and his policies, the president and his congressional cronies forged forth as if public opinion did not matter. Town halls turned into shouting matches between angry citizens and arrogant legislators. But the Democrats’ plan was this: Push it through. Push all our chips to the middle of the table. We have the votes. This is historic. Ignore public opinion. This is too important. And we will deal with the consequences later.

What they did not predict was that not only would their agenda fail, but that they would have to deal with the dire consequences as well, sooner rather than later. In other words, they gambled not once but twice, and lost.

Consider Harry Reid, the Democrat US Senate majority leader from Nevada. A good liberal from a somewhat conservative state, he thought that the national health-care plan was such a significant advance for a better nation that he pushed it relentlessly even though polls in Nevada showed it harming him to the point where he is, by all indicators, going to fail in his November re-election bid.

But Reid was as arrogant as the rest of them. He figured they had it all in the bag. Even after he came to realize that he indeed could lose his Senate seat, he figured that the cherished goal of national health care would be worth it. And that he could become a multimillionaire lobbyist once he was bounced from office.

So what happened?

Not only did Reid so disrespect and anger his Nevada constituents that he indeed is going to lose his seat, but he will have nothing to show for it. Because health care reform is dead. So is the rest of the Obama agenda on illegal immigration and unions that was supposed to cement Democrat victories for decades.

Lose, lose, lose. Reid gambled it all and lost. He went ‘all in’ and came up with nothing. And his legacy in Nevada politics - and in American politics - has become nothing more than a cautionary tale. Remember What Happened to Harry Reid is going to be a chapter title in the political lexicon for decades to come.

Look at US senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. One of the most prominent Democrats of the last 50 years, he took a sweetheart loan deal from Countrywide Mortgage at the same time that the mortgage market was collapsing along with the American economy. But nonetheless he was going ‘all in’. He saw himself and his party as so powerful that he was going to weather the political storm and that he and Obama and the Democrats were going to get a leftist agenda through that was going to transform the nation. And that whatever happened to Dodd would be of no significance because the agenda would be the thing that mattered.

Now the election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts has undermined the entire Democrat ploy. The progressive agenda is dead. And Dodd has called it quits even before his upcoming election because that would have further exposed Obama and the corrupt Democrats during the campaign.

No, Dodd went ‘all in’. And he lost. Everything. Including his legacy. Just like Harry Reid.

Look at Nancy Pelosi. Since January 2007 when she became Speaker of the House she has been portrayed in the media as a powerful, able leader. Yet now that the Democrats went 'all in' and lost, she has been exposed as the confused, know-nothing leftist that Republicans always have called  her. She and her Democrat cronies gambled everything. And they lost.

Consider our American media, our all-knowing, all-seeing, intensely intellectual media who backed Obama to the hilt and covered for his every failure. They said We Are All Socialists Now. They even compared Obama to God. Chris Matthews got "a thrill up my leg" listening to Obama talk. Fox news was savaged.

Yet they too have lost. They went 'all in' and lost. Big time. Air America, the lefty radio network, has closed its doors. MSNBC and CNN are falling in the ratings, while Fox is soaring, along with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Who would have thought this scenario would be possible just one year ago when Obama was threatening conservatives with the Fairness Doctrine, and worse.

Look at the Democrat party of Massachusetts. They have bet on Democrats for decades, manipulated the laws, stolen elections, and spread around the cash and the power. Yet Scott Brown came out of nowhere in his pickup truck and vanquished them.

Most significantly president Obama himself went ‘all in’ and lost. He is badly weakened. Americans are tired of his endless speeches which he believed, through a friendly media, would give him total power. But the election of Scott Brown, the loss of Dodd and Reid , and the overall mood of the nation has hurt Obama significantly.

So he had a 'midnight conversion' and went over to humbly address congressional Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore to make peace. "Can't we all just get along," he seemed to be saying after a year in which Democrats ignored the opposition. Obama's visit happened only after his ‘all in’ strategy was finished and he had no alternative but to accommodate the rising power of the Republicans who were dismissed as "dead" just one year ago by all of our liberal media lapdogs.

But this sudden change of heart is not going to save Obama or his party. Americans may not have eternal memories and may be forgiving people, but the arrogant, strong-arm tactics of the Democrats in 2009 are going to be fresh in voters' minds in November 2010 when the elections are going to be “a bloodbath” for the Democrats even according to a pro-liberal commentator like CNN curmudgeon Jack Cafferty.

Indeed, the Democrats played like gamblers in a back room in Las Vegas. They had all the cards. They had all the excitement. They held the winning hand. They rigged the deck. They  used mirrors to spy on the other players. They couldn't lose. Or so they thought. But then, just when they thought they had it all, after they had pushed every chip into the center of the table, they realized that they had a handful of unsuited, unsequenced cards and that it all was quickly turning into a big, giant bluff.

Game over...

 

Is Recession Over, or Just Beginning?

 

The Commerce Department announced Friday, January 29 that the economy grew at an annualized rate of 5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2009. This sounds like good news for the Obama administration, the biggest quarterly growth rate since 2003.

But is this really something to cheer about?

No. Because this growth is like a dying patient who suddenly feels better. In other words, the economy was so low that anything is an improvement over the alternative. And although it indeed is a positive sign in a sea of negatives, the question is: Will the patient continue to improve, or was this just a spike fueled by the morphine of seasonal Christmas spending, inventory spending and temporary government stimulus?

There still is a vestige of natural resilience in our economy that surely helped the fourth-quarter numbers. But that last gasp of capitalist buoyancy is being thwarted by punitive Obama policies against taxpayers, banks and businesses both large and small. We should be thankful that the health-care bill, along with cap-and-tax and pro-union card check legislation will no longer pass Congress. Because they would have polished off any chances for a future rebound.

The bad news is that the national debt load being incurred by Obama policies is going to undermine any chances for growth. On the same day that the 5.7% quarterly result was announced the US Senate - with all Republicans voting ‘no’ and all Democrats voting ‘yes’ - voted to increase the national debt ceiling by a whopping $1.9 trillion, the largest such increase in history.

Does not this news in itself negate the hoopla over the big growth spurt? 

Indeed it does.

Here are the details about the fourth quarter 5.7% rate: It is the second positive quarter in a row after four negative quarters (third quarter 2008 through second quarter 2009). Third-quarter 2009 growth was 1.5%. So this all appears to be a good sign – two quarters of growth, which usually marks the end of recession. But 60% of the 5.7% growth was attributed to companies’ refilling depleted inventories, a trend that will dissipate unless the overall economy picks up and makes it a permanent trend as part of a national economic expansion.

Business spending on equipment and software jumped 13.3% in the fourth quarter. Christmas spending gave the economy a jolt. Exports also rose 18.1%.

Again, however, these figures are compared to very depressed figures in the past year.

So can Obama point to the 5.7% figure and claim that his policies are finally working?

No. And the reason is simple. There are many factors acting on the economy today and only one factor at a time seems to be pointing upward. Real growth means that all the indicators are rising. But at the same time that the fourth-quarter growth figure was announced, the stock market was ending January on a strongly negative note after big advances in the second half of 2009. And the trend generally has been that January stock market activity sets the tone for the year to come.

Look at our national debt figures and you can see trends that point to a stalled economy for years to come.

From 1980 to 2010, we have seen fluctuations in spending and taxes, according to a graph in The Wall Street Journal.  In 1980, government spending was 22% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product, or the total national wealth of goods and services) and receipts were 19%. The difference (-3 points) is the deficit.

The two lines crossed, where spending and receipts were the same (budget balanced) around 1997. In 2000 there were substantial budget surpluses of +3 points because Clinton deeply slashed military spending while the economy was still artificially strong, before the dot-com and tech sector collapses, and before 9/11.

By 2005, receipts were 16% of GDP while outlays were 19%, or -3 points again. For 2010, however, it is estimated that spending will be 25% of GDP(!) while receipts to the government are only 15%(!). This is a whopping -10 points difference attributable to Obama’s incessant spending while the economy is hobbled.

Meanwhile the gap between receipts and spending is expected to be 15% and 24% or -9 points for 2011. Projections for 2012 and beyond are in the area of  -7 points. These deficits are unsustainable.

Within a few years, our national debt is going to be 100% of our annual GDP ($14 trillion+). This is a distressing figure because America was the one major industrialized nation whose debt always has been significantly less than its GDP. Japan, on the other hand, a high-tax, socialist nation, has a debt that is reported to be 170% of its GDP. That is why Japan is in a long-term recession.

When we look at America’s unemployment rate today, we think it is shocking. Yet 10% is a standard unemployment rate for much of the industrialized world, which all rational economists will tell you to expect in high-tax, economies. Europe has year-after-year “official” rates of 7% to 12% or more depending on the country, with actual rates much higher. Europe also consequently has very low growth figures, which is why the global recession is not being remedied by growth abroad – because  there is little or none.

After decades of stasis, however, Europe is adjusting its economic policies rightward toward lower taxes just as the US is going left. In many European nations, corporate tax rates, individual tax rates and capital gains rates today are actually lower than the US. These American figures are a result of decades of incremental liberal influence on our economy even when Republicans were in power.

Japan has been in a severe recession since 1990 when its stock and real estate markets collapsed. The past 20 years in Japan are called The Lost Decades. In his state of the union speech recently, Obama referred to the last 10 years in the United States as The Lost Decade. And he was partially right. It was a bubble that burst. But before bursting, things were really hot with economists calling the American economy around 2006 the best they ever had seen it.

Today, however, there are many structural problems that can only be solved by policies that Obama is unwilling to pursue like drastic government spending cuts, and tax cuts on individuals and businesses. And so in the long run, until our policies change, the fourth-quarter 2009 growth rate of 5.7% may be seen as just a positive blip in a recession that is not ending, but that may just be beginning and  that may last for years and years to come.

 

Thinking About Transportation

 

President Obama went to Florida recently to promote a big, multibillion passenger railroad project. Because he is one of those environmentalists who is always telling us how inefficient automobiles are. But not so fast. In many ways, cars easily are the most efficient way to move people around.

Consider the Triangle Theory: Imagine you live in Vermont and you need to get to central Pennsylvania. The first option is to drive along the direct diagonal route southwest, which is not served by mass transit. And the second option is to take mass transportation from Vermont straight south to New York City and then straight west to central Pennsylvania which is the way that ground-based mass transit routes work in the Northeast.      

Now imagine that when you drive directly on the diagonal leg of the triangle, it is 250 miles total from Vermont to central Pennsylvania. But if you take mass transit, the route is 150 miles south from Vermont to New York City and then 200 miles west from New York City to central Pennsylvania.

So if you drive directly in a car, you are only driving 250 miles. But if you take mass transit, you need to cover 350 miles (150 south + 200 west).

Is that efficient, to travel 40% extra miles in order to take the train? Is that not a waste of energy? That sure seems to debunk the theory that cars are inefficient.

So indeed in many, many cases the automobile is very efficient. Yet you never hear environmentalists praising the automobile as an energy-saving device. Al Gore even wrote in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance that man should focus on "eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a 25-year period."

That means that we need to find an alternative to cars by... 2017.

Now think about how we travel. If you were just one person who needs to get from Vermont to Pennsylvania, you might be willing to travel 350 miles by mass transit south then west, rather than driving straight 250 miles.

But what if two people are traveling? Or two adults and three children? Wouldn’t they all cost a lot of money to move by mass transit, with five tickets required? And what if that family is taking a bunch of packages along for Christmas? Doesn’t the car seem much more sensible?

Indeed it does.

Now think about how we use our time. Because environmentalists always see transportation only through the lens of energy consumption. They never think about time.

So if it takes you, say, 5 hours to drive straight from Vermont to Pennsylvania on the diagonal, or it take you 14 hours by mass transit, then mass transit is a huge waste of time. And in our economy, time is money and people do not have large amounts of time to waste. That is one of the reasons that our society is wealthy. Because people use time to create efficiency.

Here is another way to think about transit: Up here in Berkshire County, a semi-rural county in western Massachusetts, we have a bus system called the Berkshire Regional Transit Authority. It is a miniature equivalent of a European rail passenger system because BRTA runs six days a week, all day long from sunup to sundown, and serves all the major towns in the county. The buses are modern, clean and comfortable and operate to the minute like a Euro train system does.

Yet most of the time those buses run empty here in one of the most liberal counties in America. And when it does have riders - mostly around the morning and evening rush - it is used mostly by poor people who cannot afford a car.

So since the BRTA is like a European train system, why don’t all the many liberals and environmentalists around Berkshire - many of them very wealthy - use this wonderful, efficient system?

Answer: Because liberals always have big, expensive ideas for other people to use. But never themselves. And the BRTA system is a hugely expensive state-funded system that burns up large amounts of cash and fuel to move small numbers of people. Yet the libs all have some excuse not to use BRTA while every day they write letters to the editor about how America needs a nationwide rail transit system just like BRTA.

In fact, liberals are always talking about how we need high-speed trains to alleviate the terrible traffic congestion on our highways. Yet the very first such rail project funded by the Obama administration is a multibillion-dollar train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas which is not a congested corridor at all. The whole project was just a political payoff for Democrat US senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Which is typical; forget about moving people and get the cash out to your Democrat cronies.

Indeed liberals tell us repeatedly how stupid we American are, that our inadequate mass transportation system is somehow behind the curve. Yet our mass transit system is the best in the world for our sprawling nation. It is called "the airlines" and it gets you coast-to-coast in just six hours. The airlines are private corporations and use no government subsidies. But the Democrats complain about the airlines all the time. Why?

Because the airlines are not part of the government. And this enrages liberals. Because the airlines are not under liberal control. And so they are subject to endless attacks by the media, academics, consumer activists, passenger rights groups etc..

Today the airlines sell 750 million tickets per year while Amtrak sells 25 million. And there are precious few people who would trade a 6-hour flight for one of those three-day torture trips on government-run Amtrak, a railroad that has become synonymous with rude employees, terrible service, dirty trains and late arrivals.

Still the liberals are constantly criticizing the airlines, an industry that has done an amazing job in creating the fastest, most efficient mass transit system in the world using what economist Adam Smith called “the invisible hand”. In other words, there was no person or law or politician or policy telling the airlines to fly this route and that. The system simply developed naturally through supply and demand.

And when did the airlines truly become a mass-transit system available to all citizens at low prices, and not just to the rich?

It was when the airlines were deregulated in 1978, when the government got out of the way and allowed the airlines to serve all the people through the free-market system.

Of course the Democrats complain endlessly that air travel is horrible and that we need to re-regulate the airlines. But the reason air travel is often so crowded and chaotic is because so many people use the system. It is truly "for the people". Isn't that who the liberals always say they favor?

After all, the airlines are moving 2 million people per day. And that is called “efficiency”. And if you don’t like the crowds, you can always pay more for a First Class seat. Because that is what air travel was like when the government regulated it, when only the rich used it, when all those pesky "little people" weren't ruining air travel for the snobs.

It is time for Americans to look at energy and transportation through the lens of rationality not idealism. And to build a system of energy production and consumption that makes our efficient lives possible well into the future.

 

 

State of Obama’s Union – Deceptive

 

(Below are excerpts from the January 27 State of the Union address, with my comments.)

 

Obama: One in 10 Americans still can't find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined. Small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard. And for those who'd already known poverty, life has become that much harder. Comment: The real number is 1 in 5 who can’t find work, sir. And Democrat environmental policies in rural and small-town America were hurting those areas even before the recession. This is classic urban-based elitism.

Obama:  They don't understand why it seems like bad behavior on Wall Street is rewarded, but hard work on Main Street isn't, or why Washington has been unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems. Comment: A majority on Wall Street statistically supports Obama. So he should stop this us-versus-them fiction. And Washington cannot solve the problem. Only economic growth can. Obama is clueless.

 

Obama: They're tired of the partisanship and the shouting and the pettiness. Comment: Then stop your partisan big-government one-party approach which is not working.

 

Obama: So we face big and difficult challenges. And what the American people hope -- what they deserve -- is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences, to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. Comment: Republicans have been shut out of all negotiation, sir.

 

Obama: Our most urgent -- our most urgent task upon taking office was to shore up the same banks that helped cause this crisis. It was not easy to do. And if there's one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans -- and everybody in between -- it's that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. Comment: The private banks have paid back most of the bailout. It is the government agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that are bankrupt and never will pay back the bailout. Fannie and Freddie are run lock, stock and barrel by Democrats.

 

Obama: To recover the rest, I've proposed a fee on the biggest banks. Comment: Which will kill any prospects for future stability. Tax, tax, tax... that is his only solution.

 

Obama: Now, let me repeat: We cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. Comment: But your reckless spending means that citizens will be paying higher taxes for decades to cover it. You economic plan is a big shell game.

 

Obama: Talk to the single teacher raising two kids who was told by her principal in the last week of school that, because of the Recovery Act, she wouldn't be laid off after all. Comment: He has let the cat out of the bag with this one. Stimulus funds were used to pay for unionized public school teacher salaries not for infrastructure or other critical repairs.

 

Obama: But I realize that, for every success story, there are other stories, of men and women who wake up with the anguish of not knowing where their next paycheck will come from, who send out resumes week after week and hear nothing in response. That is why jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010, and that's why I'm calling for a new jobs bill tonight. Comment: By “new jobs bill” he means another hunk of taxpayer cash. And it will not create sustainable jobs, only temporary ones.

 

Obama: Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses... but government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire more workers. Comment: Yes, government can step aside from the economy, not take your path which is more intervention.

 

Obama: So tonight, I'm proposing that we take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat. Comment: Business does not need credit nearly as much as business needs customers. But credit is something that Obama can control. So he emphasizes it.

 

Obama: I'm also proposing a new small-business tax credit, one that will go to over 1 million small businesses who hire new workers or raise wages. Comment: Yes, a small credit of $3,000. Yet if a business needs to hire a new worker for $30,000 a year, that credit means nothing, sir.

 

Obama: Tomorrow, I'll visit Tampa, Florida, where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act. Comment: This will be another boondoggle when roads and bridges need repair.

 

Obama: We should put more Americans to work building clean-energy facilities… Comment: ’Green energy’ is simply inefficient, government-subsidized energy. It does not work. That is why the government must subsidize it.

Obama: We can't afford another so-called economic "expansion" like the one from last decade, what some call the "lost decade," where jobs grew more slowly than during any prior expansion, where the income of the average American household declined while the cost of health care and tuition reached record highs, where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial speculation. Comment: Blame Bush…

Obama: China's not waiting to revamp its economy; Germany's not waiting; India's not waiting. These nations, they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. Comment: Yes, and guess what? These countries have more capitalist pro-growth tax policies than the United States. Go look it up.

Obama: ...and that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. Comment: This is double talk. He knows that his enviro cronies will block both nuclear and offshore drilling.

Obama: So tonight, we set a new goal: We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support 2 million jobs in America. Comment: That will happen when we have lower tax business rates than our competitors. Otherwise trade will go the other way. And Obama will not lower those tax rates.

Obama: And that's why we'll continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets and why we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea, and Panama, and Colombia. Comment: The Democrats in Congress oppose all these treaties.

 

Obama: And let's tell another 1 million students that, when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years, and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college. Comment: Right, and a 1998 federal study showed that Obama’s ripoff cronies at the universities are overcharging big-time for education. But rather than force them to control their spending, Obama puts the onus on the taxpayer.

Obama: And according to the Congressional Budget Office, the independent organization that both parties have cited as the official scorekeeper for Congress, our approach would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades. Comment: When was the last time a 2,000-page government program brought the deficit down? Answer: Never.

Obama: Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will not be affected, but all other discretionary government programs will. Comment: This only will affect 17% of the budget and will not even address the biggest problems of all – Social Security and Medicare.

Obama: But understand -- understand, if we don't take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery, all of which would have an even worse effect on our job growth and family incomes. Comment: Is that why you are spending like there’s no tomorrow? What a phony this guy is!

Obama: Tonight, I'm calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single Web site before there's a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent. Comment: This is a call for more of the ‘transparency’ that does not exist today after he promised it in his campaign.

Obama: I know that all of us love this country. All of us are committed to its defense. So let's put aside the schoolyard taunts about who's tough. Comment: No let’s talk about who is NOT tough. YOU are NOT tough, Mr. President.

Obama: We are filling unacceptable gaps revealed by the failed Christmas attack with better airline security and swifter action on our intelligence. Comment: Yes. After the fact. Like 9/11.

 

Obama: This year -- this year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It's the right thing to do. Comment: Obama will be even more unpopular than he is today with this proposal. This is simply a route for a small group of homosexuals to join the military and disrupt it, which is exactly what they have planned.

Obama: Unfortunately, too many of our citizens have lost faith that our biggest institutions -- our corporations, our media, and, yes, our government --  But each time a CEO rewards himself for failure or a banker puts the rest of us at risk for his own selfish gain, people's doubts grow. Comment: Like Democrat Franklin Raines looting Fannie Mae and leaving it dead for the taxpayer to save with hundreds of billions in bailouts.

 

New York Times – Laugh then Cry

 

If you need to have a good chuckle, just open up (if you dare) the New York Times on any given day when the left-wing kooks who write it and those who read it get their heads all tangled up in mind-bending exercises that today are passed off as journalism.

Weekends are even worse because that is when the philosopher/kings get full rein to prattle on about any subject at all for their Sunday readers who think the Times is indeed the real Bible (“Hey, I read it every Sunday. It must be the Bible…”)

The Sunday Magazine section recently featured one of those gee-whiz essays about what we can expect in the next 10 years. And while this stuff generally is something to be read lightly over French toast at a sidewalk bistro in Manhattan, they print this stuff because they actually take it seriously and want us to do so as well.

Because who would have thought 10 years ago that we would be putting up these windmills that are now all over the place, destroying the landscape that environmentalists claim they wish to save.

The magazine recently had two Ideas for the Future that were typical of what passes for serious conversation at Upper East Side dinner parties. The first brainstorm was entitled Lithium in the Water Supply and this immediately should ring alarm bells among us non-depressed Americans. Because lithium is the wonder chemical of the Depressed Left in America. Or rather the Left in America, with the ‘depressed’ part understood. Because they’re all depressed. And angry, and confused. And now this article actually posits the idea of adding lithium to our drinking water to cheer us up.

Here is what the Oracles of 43rd Street let slip into their hallowed Magazine recently:

‘Lithium often occurs naturally, in trace amounts, in water supplies, particularly in areas with a high concentration of granite. In the British Journal of Psychiatry earlier this year, the neuropsychiatrist Takeshi Terao and other researchers showed that communities in Japan’s Oita prefecture with higher levels of naturally occurring lithium in their water supplies had fewer suicides than those with lower levels… Lithium in prescription doses helps reduce mood swings in patients with bipolar disorder… The researchers note that more work is needed before public-policy makers can consider adding lithium to water supplies… In a follow-up paper (Terao and his team) even posited that adding lithium to drinking water could “potentially offer an easy, cheap and substantial strategy for worldwide suicide prevention”.’

 

And don’t for a minute think that the lefties in Government/Psychiatry Complex wouldn’t just love another way to control the population through chemicals in the water supply, food supply, information supply etc.

Worldwide suicide prevention!? Why didn't I think of that?! Just add lithium! It's totally natural!

But aren’t these the same lefties who are seeking to wall us off from another naturally occurring chemical in the atmosphere called "carbon dioxide"?

Indeed. And the futurists writing in the Times had an answer for carbon dioxide too, this one from a group of British engineers who have 'recommended building a forest of artificial carbon-filtering “trees” across the United Kingdom to combat climate change.’

The accompanying illustration looks like a string of  100-foot-tall fly-swatters lining a rural British highway with their handles stuck in the ground, which the Times opines ‘the Institution of Mechanical Engineers estimated that a forest of 100,000 such "trees" could mop up half the United Kingdom’s carbon emissions…’ blah, blah, blah.

So after they’ve wrecked the environment with windmills, now they’re going to polish it off with Godzilla-scale fly-swatters…

God help us!! Please!

But didn't all those communist filmmakers back in the 1920s warn us that capitalist factories were dehumanizing man with their clattering machinery dominating our lives? And now aren’t the same communists turning the entire planet into a forest of skyscraper-scale windmills and carbon trappers? Will that dehumanize us? Will we even have time to think about it before these nuts start to put this stuff into place?

So the $64,000 question is: Why are people so depressed that we need to put lithium in the water supply in the first place?

Answer: They are depressed over all those windmills and carbon-catchers looming over their lives like doomsday machines. And they are even more depressed about armageddon-style environmentalism in general. Just think about all the children of the world utterly terrified of our Planetary Scrooge named Al Gore reminding them every day that we are doomed from ‘global warming’ that is going to kill all the polar bears and submerge their neighborhoods in a flood of biblical proportions. Would this not cause psychosis and depression among the young?

Indeed it would. That is the main reason for it.

And then when those same kids see record snowfalls and cold from Vermont to Vietnam, aren’t they feeling betrayed by Uncle Al? And will their psychosis and depression not worsen once they have no idea at all what is real and what is not?

Indeed. Because insanity can be defined as people not knowing the difference between fact and fiction.  And today, through our world media and the internet and the apocalysts in the worldwide enviro movement, our brains are being bashed around from side to side like fish thrashing in a barrel. Millions of people – no make that BILLIONS of people – have no idea what is really going on and they see their world turned topsy-turvy by loons who first want to tell us that the end is near and then want to calm us all down with big doses of lithium as a new daily food group.

This is part of the madness of today's worldwide socialists/environmentalists who are trying to draw every person on the planet into their web of lies, deceptions and utopian schemes. And it is time for us rational people to keep the lithium out of our water supply and the stupidity out of our - and our  children's - daily discourse.

 

 

Only Conservatism Will Revitalize Us

 

Have you heard the ongoing calls from Democrats that we must now re-regulate the banks to prevent another collapse?

Yet what we really need to do is to simply get the banks to re-implement ‘conservative’ lending policies that existed for centuries in America. We need to take policy out of the hands of liberals whose “regulations” today run the banks, financial institutions and Wall Street firms and have ruined them.

Back in the 1950s and the 1960s, ‘conservative’ bankers worked on a 9 to 3 schedule. That meant that they arrived at work at 9, made a few solid loans every day and were on the golf course by 3. It was called "bankers' hours". And that was when a home loan required 20% down, a full-time job and a verified credit history.

Liberals did not like this. They said it “discriminated” against this person and that. So in 1977 we got the Community Reinvestment Act, a product of the Democrat party, which forced banks to lend money to poor people who did not have the proper downpayment or work history.

Up until that time, 'conservative' lending policies were a form of rational self-regulation that banks knew were necessary just to stay in business. CRA then “mandated" reckless lending behavior. And this is how the Democrats ruined our financial system – by forcing negligent banking practices while at the same time eliminating sensible 'conservative' policies.

By 2008, the government agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both established by the Democrats, had purchased trillions of dollars in loans made to unqualified people by private banks under government duress. The loans had been made to poor and even middle-income people who had No Income, No Job and No Assets - so-called NINJA loans. In other words, you could walk in off the street and get a loan with virtually no documentation.

When these loans went into default like a string of dominos, it triggered the Subprime Crisis that sparked the economic collapse. But the banks themselves were largely unaffected because the government was taking the risk in buying the loans.

So it was the Democrats’ so-called “regulation” of the banking system that caused the crash. Actually they were "mandates" on banks to behave in a certain way, not "regulation" that restricted behavior. And now the same Democrats want to re-regulate the banks.

So you wonder: Why didn’t they just leave the bankers alone in the first place, those bankers who used old-fashioned ‘conservative’ methods?

Answer: Because Democrats need to intrude in every aspect of life. And their policies have ruined the nation and the economy.

Consider another area - our energy supplies. We were going merrily along, converting over to the most efficient energy source ever developed by man – nuclear power – when the environmentalists said they did not want us to use nuclear any longer. America today is 20% nuclear while Japan is 80% and so is France, which exports electricity to other nations in Europe.

Yet the fact is that more people die in America every year from house fires started by wood-burning stoves (more than 9,000 homes per year are damaged or destroyed by wood-stove fires) than have died in the whole history of “dangerous” American nuclear power (zero people killed, zero homes destroyed).

So now that they have denied us nuclear, the eco-nuts are now saying that the coal-fired plants that we have built instead are killing the planet with so-called ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ or whatever they are calling it this month. Yet if they had let us develop nuclear power, we would have abundant energy supplies, zero carbon emissions and we would not have to gouge 1.2 billion tons of coal out of the ground every single year, and burn 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas every 365 days.

And now the enviros are proposing ridiculous and inefficient wind power, which will kill our economy if we continue to put our limited investment capital in these low-yield windmills and solar panels.

Why could not the Democrats and their enviro cronies just have left things as they were back when sensible conservatives were advocating nuclear power?

Answer: Because Democrats need to intrude in every aspect of life. And their policies have ruined the nation and the economy.

Look at our horrible public schools today. Anyone who went to school back in the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s knows that we had excellent public schools that actually taught kids science, history, math and the truth about the supremacy of Western culture.

Yet today the radical Democrat left through its teacher unions has decimated the public education system replacing it with a system of socialist indoctrination. Now virtually all Americans agree that our schools are in crisis. The worst schools are in the inner cities where the teacher unions and the Democrat bureaucracy is strongest.

So why couldn’t we just have left the schools as they were back when America was a ‘conservative’ nation and teachers actually cared about education and not about indoctrination or union power and union paychecks? Why is America now so focused on a big crusade to improve the schools when the schools once very were good until the Democrats got hold of them and destroyed them?

Answer: Because Democrats need to intrude in every aspect of life. And their policies have ruined the nation and the economy.

Look at our nation’s social and moral structure. Back when ‘conservative values’ reigned -  back before the ‘hippies’ of the 1960s told us that marriage was unnecessary but that sex and drugs and pleasure and abortion were crucial - families stayed together and the economic unit of the family was strong. Back then, one parent worked to support three or four or five kids. Yet today two parents working can often only support one or two kids.

Why?

Because the Democrats have been crushing productive, family-oriented people with taxes, ridiculing the nuclear family through leftist Hollywood TV and movies, and subsidizing tens of millions of single mothers, encouraging massive illegitimacy and creating widespread dependence on the government. Because Democrats need to intrude in every aspect of life. And their policies have ruined the nation and the economy.

Remember back in the 1950s when the economy was strong and people had good jobs and good incomes?

The Democrats claim that labor unions created the middle class. But that is the opposite of the truth. It was economic growth following World War II created the middle class. Because Europe and Japan were destroyed and America was making 50% of all the world’s finished goods, creating enormous wealth.

Yet the labor unions and their Democrat friends were not happy with all the money and good jobs that Americans had. They wanted that money. And so unions got power and repeatedly disrupted the economy with strikes and walkouts and exorbitant wage demands and stupid union work rules, destroying millions of jobs, and trillions in wealth. Today the American car companies are barely hanging on after years of labor union extortion.

Why couldn’t the Democrats have allowed our capitalist economy to prosper on its own? Why did they have intervene and ruin so many companies including the steel industry, the railroads, the auto industry and many others?

Answer: Because Democrats need to intrude in every aspect of life. And their policies have ruined the nation and the economy.

If you were a kid back in the 1950s, your mother would let you walk to school alone, often long distances, without giving it a second thought. Yet today, after the promiscuous 1960s culture got hold of America, sex perverts have infected our culture, and children are not safe anytime, anywhere under any circumstances. And still today, the Democrats are continuing to do everything they can to cover up for and defend sex offenders at every level, blocking anti-predator legislation like Meghan's Law, seeking reduced sentences for offenders as judge Cashman did in Vermont in 2006, trying to legitimize child pornography etc.

Why couldn't the Democrats just let America be 'conservative' like it was back when every child did not have to live in fear of every person on the street?

Answer: Because Democrats need to intrude in every aspect of life. And their policies have ruined the nation and the economy.

This should be a lesson to America. We need to return to being a 'conservative' nation that relies on capitalist economics, that is moral and based in traditional values, and that abides by the law. But do not expect the Democrats to sign on to that. They have an agenda to weaken America and to undermine its every positive trait. And today Obama and his cronies are pushing that agenda hard. And that is why conservatives already have begun to take the nation back as evidenced in the recent elections, and will continue to do so over the next ten years.

 

Corporations Cleared for Political Spending

 

For decades, liberals have insisted that we need to "get the money out of politics”, that campaign contributions and strong political advocacy by individuals needed to be limited, that spending by businesses and corporations should be eliminated, and that government funding of campaigns needed to be codified in law.

Yet when Barack Obama sought the presidency, he abandoned the public finance option and raised more than $600 million in private funds which he used to defeat John McCain. This is classic Democrat hypocrisy.

Now the US Supreme Court has sent shock waves across the political landscape when it ruled on January 21 that government cannot restrict private corporations, or even unions, from spending their own money to influence political campaigns. And the decision could lead to challenges to the long-time ban on direct campaign contributions from corporations and unions.

In the 5-4 decision, supported by the conservative wing of the Court and joined by justice Anthony Kennedy who was the swing vote on the issue, Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach.” Special-interest groups also have been liberated.

The Center for Competitive Politics called the decision "a win for the First Amendment political rights of small businesses, grassroots groups and others who now can avoid the burden of running through a regulatory maze before speaking out in campaigns."

But Democrats immediately blasted the decision. Obama said,  "With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests." Meanwhile Democrats like US senator Charles Schumer of New York have vowed to propose new restrictive legislation. Liberal groups like Common Cause also protested.

The case arose when an organization called Citizens United wanted to offer through a TV video-on-demand service an anti-Hillary-Clinton movie that it had made for the 2008 presidential campaign. The Federal Election Commission ruled that the film was subject to a 2002 campaign law that bans TV or radio ads funded with money from private corporations or unions. 

When the Court first considered the case, it focused narrowly. But then it asked a broader question: How far may government go to restrict corporate and union spending on elections without abridging the First Amendment?

Its recent decision overturns a 1990 ruling, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, in which justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the majority that "corporate wealth can unfairly influence elections."

But one might have asked of Marshall's decision: Why were the  entities (private corporations) that provide the best, most stable jobs and the most crucial products and services to the American economy somehow barred from participating in elections? Wouldn’t our economy be improved if these productive entities had equal influence as everyone else? After all, do not Democrats routinely swing elections through welfare handouts and other government subsidies in exchange for votes? And is that not having a deleterious effect on our economy by putting more and more power in the hands of the idle poor and other unproductive citizens? Does not this Supreme Court decision in fact level the playing field?

Another contradiction in the old law was that media corporations (NBC, CNN, New York Times etc.) often have dedicated their corporate wealth and power to harming Republicans. So now these same companies and their allies in Congress are angry that, say, gun makers or oil companies now will have the same power against Democrats.

And opponents of the Supreme Court decision now are ignoring the fact that many corporations will use their new power to support Democrat causes. A recent survey reported on Fox News showed that since 1990, private corporations politically have favored Democrats and Republicans equally.

General Electric, for instance, with its very-liberal CEO Jeffrey Immelt, has been close to the Obama administration because Obama favors government subsidies for wind energy while GE is a maker of wind turbines. Many companies in fields like clothing, fashion, recreation equipment, education, health and beauty aids, and women’s products - to name just a few - also could tend to lean left. Bill Gates is a liberal on most issues so Microsoft might support Democrats.

The final effect of the decision is that three new entities are being empowered - conservative corporations (which will support Republicans), unions (which will support Democrats) and liberal corporations (which will support Democrats). So overall the court ruling actually seems poised to benefit liberals!

At the same time, unions for decades have been using their members as volunteers in Democrat campaigns, a type of ‘funding’ that could not be challenged under the old law. Yet there would have been a huge outcry if a corporation sent 1,000 employees out to campaign for a pro-business Republican candidate.

This Supreme Court decision will level the playing field somewhat for common-sense opposition to liberal bias. But it is hardly what it is being portrayed as.

 

Who is Profiled at Airports?

 

One thing you always will notice about socialism/liberalism is that it is a zero-sum game. For instance, rather than promoting an agenda of capitalist growth under which a rising economic tide lifts all people, socialism seeks to elevate one group at the expense of another group that sinks.

And while liberals like to say that their economic plan means that rich people lose some wealth through taxation while poor people gain through government handouts, that is hardly accurate. Because even among the poor, certain types of poor people ‘lose’ under socialism while other types of poor people ‘win’.

The recent suspension by Democrats of a scholarship program for poor minority students in Washington, DC to attend private, charter or religious schools is another sterling example of discrimination against ambitious poor people by Democrats. Because those poor kids realized clearly that those scholarships were their key to success in that the students then could distance themselves from the Democrats and their public school purgatory. And this realization was unacceptable to liberalism. So they took the scholarships away.

In today’s War on Terror, we are seeing this zero-sum agenda in the area of racial profiling.

Under traditional profiling, airport screeners can focus on certain people for more scrutiny on account of their race, ethnicity, age and gender because we know for certain that dark-skinned Middle Eastern Muslim males in their 20s are those most likely to blow up planes. We also could be using 'behavioral profiling' in which a person’s actions in the airport can betray trouble... nervousness, suspicious movements, unusual actions etc. Also we could be using a third technique, conducting direct one-on-one verbal interviews with suspect passengers.

Israel uses all of these types of profiling very effectively. But liberals oppose these types of profiling here in the United States allegedly on the grounds that they are discriminatory. But the real reason they oppose them is because profiling works well and it exposes liberals as wrong. So you have the same people who take scholarships away from poor black kids now wanting to take the effective practice of profiling away from law enforcement.

Yet what have leftists and the ACLU lawyers now done in the area of airport security?

Amazingly they have completely turned the tables without most of us even knowing it. They actually have managed to institute a system of ‘reverse profiling’ in which the people who are being racially profiled at airports today are white.

How does that work? 

Well, just compare it to the Democrats' decades-long policy of affirmative action, or intentionally discriminating against white people like firefighters in Connecticut who were denied promotions just because no blacks passed the promotion test. This is called 'discrimination' pure and simple. But since Democrats practice it and have legalized it, they rationalize it.

 In the same way, the liberal approach to airport security – to ostensibly avoid any hint of profiling by treating everyone the same under the guise of fairness – in fact entrenches discrimination. Because 'fairness' draws tremendous amounts of energy out of the screener system by focusing equally on the huge law-abiding majority -  white people, including college girls or caucasian grandmothers in wheelchairs - as it does on the tiny minority of dark-skinned, Middle Eastern males speaking in Arabic accents in their 20s. This is intended to gum up the system and is simply a means of, in effect, harassing innocent white people or 'profiling' them on account of their race.

Americans now are being told that full-body scanners are the only way to keep air travel safe, when in fact racial profiling is a vastly more effective way. But what liberals really want to do is to make white Americans suffer in these scanners even though whites are law-abiding in the field of airliner terrorism. Just like they want hard-working white firefighters to suffer even though they successfully passed the promotion test. Or black kids on scholarships to suffer even though they were prospering in alternative schools.

In other words, a zero-sum game where white people are brought down in stature while Muslim males in their 20s are elevated. Now, as the Christmas Day bomber proved, suspicious Muslims may even get green-lighted right through at airports as did the Underwear bomber who was black, had no passport, paid for his ticket with cash and had a one-way ticket and no baggage.  And was on a terror watch list…

Unbelievable. This is indeed the most insidious form of racial profiling, to select out one group - white people - for levels of scrutiny that are infinitely beyond their expected threat level.

It would be interesting to see how many white people on that Christmas Day flight were patted down and had their bags searched. How about posting on the internet the surveillance tape from the Amsterdam airport for Flight 253 and letting us see it? Let’s really see what went on at that airport gate and see who was searched and who obviously was not - the black African Muslim male in his 20s with no bags, no passport, paid $3,000 in cash for his ticket, explosives in his underwear etc. etc.

We will not see that tape, however. Because it would be so volatile that it would blow the doors off of caucasian racial profiling for the genuinely discriminatory practice that it is. And it would prove how much the profiling of white people is rampant and unnecessary and is consuming valuable resources in the airline safety system while real terrorists waltz onto airplanes.

So what is the ultimate zero-sum game of liberalism at our airports?

It is to see the United States hurt and to see terrorists dancing in the streets as a result of successful attacks.

And that is the most horrendous zero-sum game of all.

 

Air America Dies; Is MSNBC Next?

 

Two media stories have emerged in recent days which have received inversely intense media coverage to their real significance.

The first story is the collapse of Jay Leno’s prime-time career, his return to NBC’s Tonight Show and the cashiering of Conan O’Brien from that show.

This story has received much media focus because it concerns popular culture. The bigger issue, however, is the crisis at NBC itself which is competing poorly in prime-time and late-night television ratings in a world of diverse media choices.

The other less-heralded media story was the closing of the doors on January 21 of Air America, the left-wing radio network established in 2004. After several years of declining ad revenue, AA decided to call it quits citing the bad economic environment. It had 100 affiliate stations nationwide.

The more significant issue here, however, is that Air America was founded on a false premise, the same premise that may come back to haunt NBC itself in the person of its far-left cable offspring MSNBC. In other words, MSNBC could be headed for the same extinction as Air America because the audience for the product of both is shrinking while MSNBC's parent itself is in such poor financial shape.

Meanwhile “conservative” Fox News continues to thrive and grow.

Air America was established on the thesis that it too could flourish in the environment established by conservative AM talk radio and the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Air America backers assumed that not only could it thrive, but that some of Limbaugh's 22 million listeners might be up for grabs. What Air America failed to realize was that Limbaugh’s gradual rise to prominence – his show now is affiliated with more than 600 stations nationwide - was fueled by audiences seeking relief from leftist media bias in the first place, and that the void that Air America planned to fill on the radio already was saturated in many other fields of the media.

It was the enduring slant of NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, most of the major print media and most of academia and the entertainment industry that enabled Limbaugh to flourish. Told early on that his 3-hour political show in the middle of the day never would work, Limbaugh went on the air nationally on August 1, 1988, enabled by the suspension of the Fairness Doctrine, a law intended to curb the speech of certain parties deemed overly-controversial in the marketplace of ideas.

Limbaugh’s steady growth and dedicated audiences spawned an entire industry that has been built from the grass roots up. And like Rush or not, he has been a brilliant agent for conservative ideas and is often thanked by his listeners for acting as a lifeline in the sea of media bias.

Air America's AM radio plan could not have been more wrong, and today, progressive liberal bias in every part of the media is collapsing. The hallowed New York Times itself is in dire straits. Newsweek magazine has been reduced to a skinny propaganda pamphlet for far-left thought. The Boston Globe is on the brink. And nutty-left MSNBC is being trounced in the ratings by Fox News as prime-time MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann descends into madness. He recently launched a diatribe against newly-minted Republican US senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts, calling him "an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

"I'm sorry," Olbermann later said. "I left out the word 'sexist.'"

This type of language really does not draw viewers except fringe lunatic Air America-type audiences that already think like Olbermann. And both Olbermann and his audience are contracting into a fetal ball together.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who just last year said that he had gotten “a thrill up my leg” listening to Obama, called the election of Brown “premeditated murder” of Obama’s health plan and then was called “crazy” by one of his own guests, Vermont governor Howard Dean, in reaction to an indecipherable Matthews rant. MSNBC happy/angry girl Rachel Maddow, one of the founders of Air America, was so tongue-tied at Brown’s victory that she spoke an unpunctuated sentence about the national budget that still is being parsed by CIA English-language specialists.

After Brown’s win, Fox News played in their entirety both the concession speech of Brown's opponent Martha Coakley, and Brown's victory speech. Yet CNN and MSNBC played all of Coakley’s speech, and much less than half of Brown’s when in fact Brown was laying out a fiery call for future political action while Coakley was talking about how happy her dog was going to be now that the campaign was over.

To play such a defeatist speech in its entirety is no way to salve a crowd that just has been throttled. But that is the polar way of the left that seems equally fascinated with internalizing big victories like Obama’s but also huge defeats like Coakley’s.

This all indicates the growing cluelessness of the left, once deemed the only savvy media types. But they appeared savvy only when they were a monopoly. What we are seeing today, however, is that in a competitive environment that they are intellectually busted. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama today sound curiously irrelevant.

Meanwhile Limbaugh continues to gain in strength just by being Rush, "one harmless lovable little fuzzball" as he describes himself. When he was  admitted to a Hawaii hospital with chest pains in December, the outpouring of love and sympathy came from all over the nation. At the same time, Sean Hannity, speaking rationally and welcoming liberal challenge, has a dedicated following that is as conservative as it is solid. Glenn Beck is shaking up the media world with his 5 o'clock show on Fox. Yet the same doubters who said Limbaugh could never thrive during the day never would have anticipated Beck's success in that slot. Because they do not see the message, but only the process.

Air America miscalculated big time. It saw the national universe for its ideas expanding at the very time that it was contracting, while increasing numbers of liberals are listening to Limbaugh and watching Fox News. After a dalliance with subliminally threatening Fox, even the White House has backed down. Because they can see the reality, that indeed a nation founded on Constitutional principles is going to find itself thinking more like Scott Brown that like Keith Olbermann.

And that is a very positive development for all of us. And thus we all can breath easier.

 

Conservatism Rebounds... as Predicted

 

(This is a verbatim reprint of an editorial from this website written shortly after Obama's November 4, 2008 election victory.)

 

After the loss of the White House in the November 4 election, conservatives must begin rebuilding and planning for 2010 and beyond, by taking the following steps:

1) We must first look back. We must be thankful for many great election results for our movement since the time of Ronald Reagan including Reagan in 1980 and 1984, Papa Bush in 1988, the recapturing of Congress in 1994, George W. Bush winning in 2000, the midterm election of 2002, and Bush re-elected in 2004. We cannot win everything but our movement faltered in 2008 and we could have won this one even in the difficult political climate of the times. We need to rebuild the movement with force and vigor.

We need to recall that one recent survey showed that 34% of Americans still describe themselves as conservatives while only 22% say they are liberal. America still is a center-right nation.

2) We must recall that conservatives were dispirited at the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Yet in 1994, Republicans rejoiced when they took back the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years because Clinton overreached with the gays-in-the-military issue and a national health-care plan.

3) We must recognize that Obama will overreach too because he probably will govern as a radical and an ideologue. Do not think of him as invincible; that's all spin. He was supposed to win this election in a landslide, yet the final results show only a 6-point popular vote victory (7 million votes), which is a modest win. Meanwhile Democrats have not achieved their hoped-for victory of 60 US senators, while their lead in the House increased by only 18 seats. They could see big losses in 2010 or 2012.

4) We must remember that despite the endless media cheerleading for Obama; the media trashing of conservatives for the last 50 years; the media trashing of Bush and the GOP over the last 8 years; the Iraq war; the economic meltdown; McCain’s often hapless campaign; relentless Obama obfuscation and pandering; and certainly some voter fraud, Obama still only won a modest victory. This is telling. After all the hype, Americans still were not convinced about this guy or about his ideas.

5) We must remember that many people have overly-high expectations of Obama. One woman caught on tape at Obama’s victory rally was saying that Obama was going to buy her gas and pay her mortgage. Many people probably believe this because Obama mesmerized them. When people see what real results he provides, many are going to be very disappointed. At best, things might improve slightly for millions, and things easily could get much worse. Conservatives must prepare to take advantage of this.

6) We must reach out to voters with clear and unequivocal explanations of how jobs and wealth are created, explaining that they are not created by government, but by establishing a hospitable business climate with low taxes and low regulations, and with environmentalist interference reduced. Enviros are endangering our energy supply. We must explain how. Many areas of this website explain this phenomenon.

7) We must stop talking about trying to attract moderates to our movement and focus on rousing the conservative base which always wins elections. McCain took many moderate positions over the years, yet independents abandoned him in droves for Obama. At the same time, 20% of conservatives abandoned McCain for Obama in one poll.  So McCain lost on both ends, as conservatives could have predicted.

8) We must note that even with Obama’s big win, Florida, Arizona and California on election day passed conservative traditional-marriage state constitutional amendments. This was a political earthquake that should give conservatives a huge morale boost. California is a very liberal state but still supported this legislation. And with its reputation as a bellwether and trend-setter, this type of question could move across the nation, firing up conservative sentiments along the way. Such questions on ballots over the next 2 to 8 years can bring conservative state legislators, US congresspeople and US senators into office

9) We must unabashedly stand for military strength and readiness. Obama actually said at one point that he would strengthen the military (which he won’t) because he knows that that stand would garner him many votes. Obama even voted for the conservative FISA anti-terror legislation probably because he knew that if he voted against it, he would jeopardize his chances at the presidency.

Ronald Reagan used the strong American military as a backdrop in his campaign to bring down the Soviet Union... without firing a shot.  Isn't that better than a European-type continental war?

10) We must note all the conservative positions Obama took in order to seem palatable to the electorate. In at least one point in the campaign he said he favored the following: Offshore oil drilling, nuclear power, clean-coal technology, 2nd amendment gun rights, tax cuts for the middle class, keeping troops in Iraq until the job is done, building up the military, and FISA terrorist eavesdropping legislation. He even professed himself to be a practicing, believing Christian. This sounds like George Bush!

11) We must not see the Democrats as monolithic. They are a bunch of squabbling factions and their media friends often are nutty left-wing fabricators who will say and do anything for their cause, like creating the fake George Bush National Guard documents of 2004 that ended up killing off the career of Dan Rather at CBS and probably backfired enough to elect Bush. Remember that the media are much more unpopular than Republicans ever were.

12) We must realize that after all the hype about massive voter turnout for Obama, the vote in 2008 was about the same as 2004! So all this hype that Democrats put out about their huge voter registrations was more nonsense. This extends to everything they say and do. Most of it is pure baloney. This is tremendously important because it once again exposes the Democrat media machine as full of hot air.

13) We must recall that with only 2 exceptions in all of American history (1938 and 2002), the party that was not in the White House always has gained seats in Congress in the first election after the presidential election. So Republicans can expect gains in 2010.

14) We must recall that President Bush has done an excellent job of defending our homeland from terrorism and that current economic crisis is part of a cyclical pattern and not his fault. We also have won in Iraq and that will benefit America in the long run.

15)  We must recognize that the stock marked plunged 486.01 points the very day after Obama was elected, the biggest post-election drop ever. This is just the first sign that Obama is not the reassuring figure that he holds himself out to be. He could end up undermining the economy in a very significant way if the economy has no faith in him, paving the way for financial whiz Romney in 2012, or Bobby Jindal or Sarah Palin. Or Rudy!

16) We must recognize that Obama’s political positions of the past point to him mishandling the economy. Jimmy Carter mishandled a bad economy after he was elected in 1976 and in 1980, Reagan drubbed him in the election when the economy was much, much worse.

17) We must recognize that