On the Merits of Self Determinism

Why Isn't John Corzine in Jail?

2012-01-12T06:41:00.002-06:00

Steal a few hundred dollars from the cash register at the local convenience store, go to jail.
Steal 1.2 BILLION dollars, get interviewed by Congress and tell them, "I simply do not know where the money is." and you go home.
Justice.
Where did it go?

This is the End

2012-01-12T04:24:00.001-06:00

Anybody reading the story below, who argues that this ruling is no big deal, very likely has no clue what is going on in Europe and has certainly not read "America Alone" by Mark Steyn. -W.S.

Court: Oklahoma can't enforce Sharia law ban
By Robert Boczkiewicz | Reuters – Tue, 10 Jan, 2012
DENVER (Reuters) - A federal appeals court upheld an injunction against a voter-approved ban on Islamic law in Oklahoma on Tuesday, saying it likely violated the U.S. Constitution by discriminating against religion.
A three-member panel of the Denver-based U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the rights of plaintiff Muneer Awad, a Muslim man living in Oklahoma City, likely would be violated if the ban on Sharia law takes effect.
The decision upholds the ruling of a lower federal court.
"While the public has an interest in the will of the voters being carried out ... the public has a more profound and long-term interest in upholding an individual's constitutional rights," the appeals court said in a 37-page written decision.
The Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations welcomed the ruling, calling it "a victory for the Constitution and for the right of all Americans to freely practice their faith."
Oklahoma's "Save Our State Amendment," which was approved by 70 percent of state voters in 2010, bars Oklahoma state courts from considering or using Sharia law.
The lawsuit challenging the measure was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Awad, who is director of the Oklahoma chapter of CAIR.
A federal judge in Oklahoma City issued a court order in November 2010 barring the measure from taking effect while the case is under review, finding a substantial likelihood that Awad would prevail on the merits.
The Council said the Oklahoma amendment is among 20 similar proposed laws introduced in state legislatures nationwide.
Defenders of the amendment say they want to prevent foreign laws in general, and Islamic Sharia law in particular, from overriding state or U.S. laws.
But foes of the Oklahoma measure, also called State Question 755, have argued that it stigmatizes Islam and its adherents and violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment prohibition against the government favoring one religion over another.
State Senator Anthony Sykes, one of the measure's sponsors, called the decision an attempt "to silence the voice of 70 percent of Oklahoma voters. At some point we have to decide whether this is a country of, by and for the judges, or of, by and for the people."
Opponents also say it could nullify wills or legal contracts between Muslims because they incorporate by reference specific elements of Islamic prophetic traditions.
(Editing by Mary Slosson and Paul Thomasch)

The 2nd Great Battle for America's Soul

2011-12-28T01:16:00.000-06:00

The day the Democrats took over control of Congress was not January 22nd 2009, but two years earlier on January 3rd 2007. They took over the House of Representatives and the Senate, at the start of the 110th Congress. The Democratic Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995. This is when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House (2nd in line for the Presidency), and Harry Reid became Majority Leader of the Senate.

For those who are listening to the liberals propagating the fallacy that everything is “Bush’s Fault”, think about this:

At the time (January 3rd, 2007):

The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77

The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%

The Unemployment rate was 4.6%

George Bush’s Economic policies SET A RECORD of 52 STRAIGHT MONTHS of JOB CREATION!

Remember the day…

January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dod took over the Senate Banking Committee.

The economic meltdown that happened 15 months later was in what part of the economy?

BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES!

Thank Congress for taking us from 13,000 DOW, 3.5 GDP and 4.6% Unemployment to this CRISIS by dumping 5-6 TRILLION Dollars of toxic loans on the economy from YOUR Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiasco’s!

(BTW: Bush asked Congress 17 TIMES to stop Fannie & Freddie – starting in 2001, because it was financially risky for the U.S. economy, but no one was listening).

And who took the THIRD highest pay-off from Fannie Mae AND Freddie Mac?

OBAMA.

And who fought against reform of Fannie and Freddie???

OBAMA and the Democratic Congress.

So when someone tries to blame Bush…

REMEMBER JANUARY 3rd, 2007…. THE DAY THE DEMOCRATS TOOK OVER!” Bush may have been in the car, but the Democrats were in charge of the gas pedal and steering wheel – they were driving. Set the record straight on Bush!

So, as you listen to all the commercials and media from the Democrats who are now distancing themselves from their voting record and their party, remember how they didn’t listen to you when you said you didn’t want all the bailouts, you didn’t want the health care bill, you didn’t want cap and trade, you didn’t want them to continue spending money we don’t have.

Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party.

In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases.

For 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the 2009 budget.

And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete 2009. Let’s remember what the deficits looked like during that period:

If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets.

If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.

In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is “I inherited a deficit that I voted for,

And then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th.”

There is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on!

“The problems we face today exist because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.”

What Does Romney Really Think About Vietnam? by Bruce Thornton

2011-12-26T06:40:00.000-06:00

Private Papers
www.victorhanson.com

December 23, 2011
What Does Romney Really Think About Vietnam?
by Bruce Thornton
Frontpage Magazine

Mitt Romney recently said something on Fox News Sunday that raises questions about his understanding of history and its pertinence for foreign policy. In the course of talking about the war in Iraq and the “lessons learned” from that conflict and its “errors,” Romney responded to a question about an incident from his father’s brief 1967-68 run for the Republican nomination. In August 1967, George Romney told a Detroit radio-television reporter, “Well, you know when I came back from Vietnam [in November 1965], I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only by the Generals, but also by the diplomatic corps over there . . . . And, as a result, I have changed my mind . . . in that particular. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression.”

Little remembered today, Romney’s remark, particularly the careless use of the term “brainwashing,” ended his run for the nomination. The other governors and the journalists who had been on the 1965 trip disavowed Romney’s insulting characterization of the military and diplomatic personnel who had accompanied the governors. Romney was accused of flip-flopping on his earlier comments that the war was “morally right and necessary” and that withdrawal was “unthinkable.” One journalist, noting the amount of time between the trip and Romney’s about-face, wondered why it took so long for Romney to get his brain back from the laundry. The media pounced on Romney’s clumsy use of the “brainwashing” metaphor: the New York Times headline read, “Romney Asserts He Underwent ‘Brainwashing’ On Vietnam Trip.” In February 1968, faced with polls showing voters in New Hampshire preferring Richard Nixon by a six-to-one margin, Romney dropped out of the race.

When Chris Wallace raised the issue in his Fox News Sunday interview, Romney responded, “Years later when my dad was proven to be right in terms of the errors in Vietnam, my wife asked him, ‘You know, dad, how do you feel about the fact that you’re finally being vindicated in what you said?’ And he said, ‘You know, I never look back. I only look forward.’ He’s quite a guy.”

Unfortunately, Chris Wallace didn’t ask an important follow-up questions. When Romney said his father “was proven to be right in terms of errors in Vietnam,” what exactly did he mean? Was one of the “errors,” as George Romney had explicitly said, getting involved in Vietnam in the first place “to stop Communist aggression”? And what events exactly does Mitt Romney believe “proved” his father was right? These are critical questions for understanding Romney’s grasp of history and its lessons.

What that history now shows us is that resisting Communist aggression in Vietnam was a “necessary war,” as Michael Lind calls it, a critical Cold-War duel that enforced the doctrine of containment of Soviet aggression. Thus if Romney thinks that subsequent events “proved” that intervention wrong, he’s on the wrong side of history. Indeed, there were “errors” made under General Westmoreland in the conduct of the war. But after the Tet Offensive of 1968 ended in disaster for the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, and after General Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland and instituted effective counter-insurgency and Vietnamization programs, the tide turned. By 1972, the war was as good as won, as ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker said. American troops were coming home, the communist guerrillas in the South had been neutralized, the countryside was pacified, political and economic reforms were taking hold, and an improved South Vietnamese army was in a position to defend the country as long as the South Vietnamese received aid and air support from the US to counterbalance the resources provided the North by China and the Soviet Union, which had made the Army of North Vietnam the fifth largest in the world. But a Democratic controlled Congress in June 1973 passed the Case-Church amendment to the Defense Appropriation bill, which prohibited any further American military involvement in Vietnam after August 1973. Further legislation cut funding and planned to end all assistance in 1976. Left helpless before the combined might of North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union, South Vietnam was quickly overrun in 1975. The Congressional abandonment of South Vietnam was the fatal error of the war that squandered that victory.

What subsequent events “proved” right, then, was not, as George Romney and apparently his son believe, that the intervention was a mistake, but that a failure of political nerve can waste a hard-won military victory and render meaningless the nearly 60 thousand dead and 150 thousand wounded who had earned that victory. Indeed, the following expansion of communism not just in Southeast Asia — including the genocidal murder of two million Cambodians by communist fanatics — but also in Latin America and Africa, proved not the error of intervention, but the error of failing to follow through on the part of politicians motivated by ideology or political self-interest.

Mitt Romney may have been displaying filial loyalty, or he may even not know what his father had actually said. Considering that in his Fox News interview Romney had spoken of the errors committed in the Iraq war, while still voicing support for it, he may have thought that his father was making a similar criticism. Either way, Romney needs to make clear whether or not he endorses the narrative of Vietnam that makes our intervention there a misguided instance of neo-colonial aggression. The answer to that question is critical for our understanding of Romney’s foreign policy philosophy.

Merry CHRISTmas !

2011-12-22T08:57:00.000-06:00

REMEMBER TO KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS

Budget in Plain English

2011-12-20T11:03:00.003-06:00

IBD Healthcare Stats

2011-12-19T06:45:00.000-06:00

1.A recent "Investor's Business Daily" article provided very interesting statistics from a survey by the United Nations International Health Organization.

Percentage of men and women who survived a cancer five years after diagnosis:U.S. 65%England   46%
Canada    42%

Percentage of patients diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment within six months:U.S. 93%England  15%
Canada    43%

Percentage of seniors needing hip replacement who received it within six months:U.S.     90%England   15%
Canada    43%

Percentage referred to a medical specialist
who see one within one month:U.S.       77%England   40%
Canada     43%

Number of MRI scanners (a prime diagnostic tool) per million people:U.S.     71England  14
Canada    18

Percentage of seniors (65+), with low income, who say they are in "excellent health":U..S.    12%England    02%
Canada     06%
Check this last set of statistics!!

2..The percentage of each past president's cabinet who had worked in the private business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet.

Here are the percentages.
T. Roosevelt................... 38%
Taft............................... 40%
Wilson .......................... 52%
Harding.......................... 49%
Coolidge....................... 48%
Hoover ......................... 42%
F. Roosevelt...................50%
Truman......................... 50%
Johnson........................ 47%
Nixon............................ 53%
Ford............................. 42%
Carter........................... 32%
Reagan..........................86%
GH Bush....................... 51%
Clinton ......................... 39%
GW Bush...................... 55%
And the winner is:
Obama................... 08%
This helps to explain the incompetence of this administration: only 8% of them have ever worked in a job not supported by tax money!
That's right! Only eight percent---the least, by far, of the last 19 presidents! And these people are trying to tell our big corporations how to run their business? They know what's best for GM, Chrysler, Wall Street, and you and me?

How can the president of a major nation and society, the one with the most successful economic system in world history, stand and talk about business when he's never worked for one? Or about jobs when he has never really had one? And when it's the same for 92% of his senior staff and closest advisers? They've spent most of their time in academia, government and/or non-profit jobs or as "community organizers." They should have been in an employment line.

Oil-Rich America by Victor Davis Hanson

2011-12-15T06:07:00.002-06:00

December 12, 2011
Oil-Rich America?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

There is a revolution going on in America. But it is not part of the Tea Party or the loud Occupy Wall Street protests.

Instead, massive new reserves of gas, oil, and coal are being discovered almost everywhere in the United States, due to revolutionary methods of exploration and exploitation such as fracking and horizontal drilling. Current prices of over $100 a barrel make even complex efforts at recovery enormously profitable.

There were always known to be additional untapped reserves of oil and gas in the petroleum-rich Gulf of Mexico, off America’s shores, and in the American West and Alaska. But even the top energy experts never imagined just how vast the energy there was — or that it was also beneath far more unlikely places such as South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. Some studies suggest the United States has now expanded its known potential gas and oil reserves tenfold.

The strategic and economic repercussions of these new finds are staggering, and remind us how a once energy-independent and thereby confident American economy soared to world dominance in the early 20th century.

America will soon again be able to supply all of its own domestic natural-gas needs — perhaps for the next 90 years at present rates of consumption. We have recently become a net exporter of refined gas and diesel fuel, and already have cut imported oil from OPEC countries by 1 million barrels per day.

With expanded exploration and conservation, the United States could also eventually supply half of its own petroleum needs. If we were to eliminate 5 million barrels of our current daily 9 million barrels of imported petroleum, the annual savings could reach nearly $200 billion per year. Eventually, the new gas and oil could add 1.6 million new jobs and up to nearly $1 trillion in federal revenue.

That windfall would cut out about a third of our present annual trade deficit — apart from additional income earned by new natural-gas exportation. “Investments,” “shovel-ready jobs,” and “stimulus” would finally become more than empty sloganeering.

But America’s new oil discoveries are not occurring in a vacuum. The entire Western Hemisphere is enjoying a fossil-fuel boom, from northern Canada to Brazil and Argentina. America’s backyard will soon be comparable to the oil-rich Persian Gulf, keeping more American money — and troops — at home. Illegal immigration should taper off as well, as oil-rich Latin American economies reap huge cash bonanzas. Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela will soon be simply one of many regional exporters.

Current crises in American foreign policy — Iran’s efforts to obtain the bomb, the protection of an embattled Israel, stopping the funding of radical Islamists — might be freed from the worries of perennial OPEC threats of cutoffs and price spikes.

Federal subsidies for inefficient corn-based-ethanol production in the Midwest also could cease. That would save the Treasury billions of dollars and allow millions of American acres to return to food production to supply an increasingly hungry world.

The Obama administration’s efforts to subsidize “green” energy so far have proved both uneconomical and occasionally corrupt — as we have seen in the Solyndra affair. Yet more gas and oil can offer America critical breathing space until better technology makes wind, solar, and electric power more price-competitive — without massive federal subsidies and a marked reduction in our standard of living.

Of course, there are sizable interests opposed to the new American gas and oil finds — not all of them foreign governments, but instead reflected in the current Obama-administration policy of halting new pipelines, placing moratoriums on offshore drilling, and putting lucrative federal lands off-limits. Yet if the United States does not produce much of the fuel that it uses, will the oil-exporting Gulf sheikdoms, Nigeria, or Iran better protect the world’s environment than American-based oil companies? Would our oil dollars or theirs be less likely to fuel terrorism, illegal arms sales, and rogue regimes?

For the American poor and unemployed, how liberal is it, really, to keep energy prices high while stalling millions of high-paying private-sector jobs that would both lower government costs in entitlements and empower the working classes?

In the current presidential campaign, three issues dominate: national security, fiscal solvency, and high unemployment. Development of America’s vast new gas and oil finds would address all three at once.

The idea of vastly expanding American gas and oil production in the 21st century is almost as unbelievable as the present administration’s apparent reluctance to capitalize on its windfall.

The President Who Never Was by Victor Davis Hanson

2011-12-14T13:23:00.000-06:00

December 8, 2011
The President Who Never Was
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

A Teen-age President in Search of an Adult Identity

Barack Obama keeps looking for a presidential identity not his own [1]. In 2008, he wished to be JFK—whom he often referenced as a youthful and charismatic figure supposedly similar to himself. So we heard references to Obama’s father’s arrival to the US during the golden Kennedy Camelot years. Caroline Kennedy herself [2] came out of seclusion to assure us that Obama had the same Kennedy zest, and she flirted with a senate run to help restore the lost age of grandeur. And at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama would have liked to electrify Europeans with another “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” speech. But even the left-leaning Germans sorta balked at that, and relegated the new Galahad to the Victory Column — a nice enough gesture that earned them a snub when a later President Obama chose not to go to Berlin for the commemoration of the twenty-year anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall (But flying ad hoc to Copenhagen to lobby for the Chicago Olympics is a horse of a different color).

The New Gipper

Next candidate Obama channeled his inner Ronald Reagan. He reminded us that that he too had a sense of a new “trajectory.” His supporters swore that he had the same sunny disposition and eloquence. Obama liked that new persona. Soon he was talking about being the same “transformative” president — as long as we understood that Obama was going to be Reaganesque solely in the way he campaigned and soared with “hope and change” rhetoric — a sort of ironic payback to the Reagan Revolution as Obama mimicked the Gipper’s personal talents to undue his legacy [3].

Young Mr. Lincoln

That did not last long. When he won the election, Obama now referenced the Civil War, slavery, and the Civil Rights struggle as he became the Great Emancipator to finally bind up the nation’s wounds. So he was for a bit Barack Lincoln. I mean this literally and to such a degree that he chartered a slow train [4] from Springfield to DC in December 2008, to remind us that it had been 148 years since a similar messiah had trained from Illinois to Washington to save the Union. Aides got copies of “Team of Rivals,” since Obama had long seen himself as a saintly Lincoln in magnanimous fashion bringing in former political opponents who perhaps were more experienced but surely less talented than himself. A Biden or Hillary as Seward or Stanton?

Hyde Park Redux

But when he assumed office, there being no Civil War, Obama of Chicago Hyde Park now channeled FDR [5] of New York Hyde Park to meet the same crisis of yet another Great Depression induced by Bush/Hoover. The “100 Days” of 1933 were upon us again. Those were the glory moments, as the White House let it be known, when a new FDR would bookend Social Security with Obamacare. That did not last too long — given the fury over the healthcare machinations, the Tea Party, 9% plus unemployment, the horrendous new debt, and the greatest mid-term setback since Roosevelt’s own in 1938.

Axelrod as Morris?

In this search for another persona after the 2010 disaster, Obama flirted briefly with a Bill Clinton identity. He gave signals that he would be another triangulator of the Dick-Morris brand, who saved his presidency after the 1994 “shellacking” by moving to the middle. So in December 2010, a subdued Obama announced that these recessionary times were not the right moment to raise taxes on anyone. There was no more talk of “punish our enemies.” Remember Rahm Emanuel had wisely resigned right before the midterm wipeout, and Chicago fixer Bill Daley took his place as proof of the new pragmatism. The Left howled and soon even the New York Times was printing op-eds that Obama was more or less a fraud.

Missouri Obama

But given that Obama had, by his own advisors’ admission, already lost the clingers’ vote, triangulation passed. Obama had not Clinton’s political savvy or flexibility. So he dug in, searching for yet another identity — only to find it in Harry Truman circa 1948 [6]. “Give ‘em Hell” Barry now crisscrossed the country in campaign mode, damning another do-nothing, Republican-controlled Congress that had tried to stall the fair deal. The premise was that if over $4 trillion in borrowed money had not jump started the economy, someone should be blamed for not borrowing an additional half-trillion that surely would have.

Obama Versus the Trusts

And what mask now? Apparently it is to be Obama as Teddy Roosevelt [7], crusading against the modern equivalent of trusts, monopolies, and John D. Rockefeller zillionaires — and this from the largest recipient of campaign cash in presidential history, and the first candidate to renounce the public financing of presidential campaigns.

Note that Obama’s TR trust-busting does not include mention of tax-avoidance by a Timothy Geithner or John Kerry. Ill-gotten gains and unfairness do not include Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, much less a Leonardo DiCaprio or Johnny Depp’s many annual millions, still much less those who pony up $38,000 a head to meet with Obama. We are not to hear much about Jon Corzine’s missing $600 million [8]. Nor is there reference to Bill Clinton’s firm’s charging $50,000 a month [9] to a broke MF Global.

The evil “they” are not the liberal elite whose children are at Harvard, but the lesser, more uncouth folk who hustle to run three muffler shops, or operate barges, or own a timber company, lacking the grace that comes with government sinecure or inherited wealth and with no guilt over their success, and no desire to purchase psychological exemption from Obama.

A Better Mask

How odd that Obama has tried on every mask except one that naturally fits him, that of Jimmy Carter [10]. Carter, remember, railed about luxury boats and three-martini lunches, as if that kind of indulgence had sent the economy into 8% unemployment, 12% inflation, and 15% interest rates. Our problem was always Nixon of old, never Carter of the present. Beneath the utopian Christian caring was the mean streak and petulance; Carter, you see, loved humanity but not humans.

Currently we also see a return of Carter’s foreign policy disasters. Do we remember them — the reach out to leftist enemies, the suspicion of Israel, and the drift away from Europe?

What happened with Obama’s natural resonance, as he promised in his Al Arabiya interview, with Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and Egypt? Now reset is also over with Russia. The pressure is heating up with Iran, which not long ago we dared not slight when a million were on the streets trying to topple the regime.

Finally, there is furor rising against Syria. All this schizophrenic heat is also reminiscent of Jimmy Carter circa 1979-80. After three years of proclamations about having no inordinate fear of communism, of loudly elevating human rights in sanctimonious fashion as the adjudicator of foreign policy, of lecturing allies and reaching out to enemies, of blasting Kissinger realpolitik, the charade ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the communist expansion in Central America, the end of the Shah and the seizure of power by Khomeini, the hostage taking in Teheran and rise of radical Islam, general chaos abroad as China invaded Vietnam, and so on.

Carter, then, got angry that lesser folks had betrayed his trust, and suddenly we had defense increases, a new angry Carter Doctrine and saber-rattling talk. That is natural, as we see too with Obama: those abroad did not appreciate his godhead, and now he too is furious that enemies are, well, even more enemies, and friends are less friendly. If they cannot see that he is not Bush, well then screw them…

As the Curtain Falls

What are we left with in the end? Empty soaring rhetoric of the day, as the president without an identity desperately searches for one about every three months. In the old days the masks were a Bill Ayers for revolutionary fervor, or a Rev. Wright for black fides. Now they are dead presidents.

Where does this lead? Nowhere. Obama’s TR persona is based on an untruth. The “rich” are not ruining his economy; indeed they pay an inordinate percentage of the income tax burden, and give us everything from iPhones to fracking. All their net worth, if confiscated, is not enough to match the trillions Obama himself has run up. For every extra $20,000 Jerry Brown can squeeze out in taxes from an about to leave California employer, three more deserving are waiting to gobble that up in all sorts of entitlements as their “fair share.”

Them

It is true, that Wall Street greed in 2008 helped crash the financial markets. But mold to appear needs moisture. And Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers were well watered by a corrupt Congress that empowered both Freddie and Fannie. Chris Dodd was the poster boy, taking Wall Street perks and covering them with liberal concern about housing the poor. These Fannie/Freddie troughs, in turn, were fed at by hungry ex-administration insiders and retired gadflies — a Jamie Gorelick, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, and, yes, for a bit, Rahm Emanuel and even Newt Gingrich. Even those were not the only guilty. “They” were also “us” — the millions who jumped into a hot real estate market to flip houses and make thousands with little labor in an endless round of musical chairs with the music supposedly never stopping, the chairs never one short. And there were the millions more — with lousy credit ratings, and no history of discipline or thrift. But they “deserved” “home ownership” [11] and so bought a house that neither their income nor savings, such as they were, warranted. They walked away. They were innocent “victims.” And they let others pick up the tab [12] as others “should.”

And?

The next year will be nothing but more teenage petulance. The world has disappointed Barack Obama. Like any adolescent, he will keep reinventing himself, endlessly trying on new presidential masks and blasting “them” who were not so charmed. What else can a man without an identity do, a president who never really was?

Toilet Paper

2011-12-12T05:41:00.001-06:00

Flag Day

2011-12-05T09:37:00.001-06:00

Occupy Wall Street - Not My Kind of Americans

2011-11-29T11:08:00.005-06:00

List of Announced Supporters & Sympathizers

	Communist Party USA Sources: Communist Party USA, OWS speech, The Daily Caller
	American Nazi Party Sources: Media Matters, American Nazi Party, White Honor, Sunshine State News
	Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran Sources: The Guardian, Tehran Times, CBS News
	Lisa Fithian (Left-wing anarchist – “What do I do? I create crisis.”) Sources: RedState.com
	President Barack Obama (“We are on their side.”) Sources: ABC News, CBS News, ForexTV, NBC New York
	Government of North Korea Sources: Korean Central News Agency), The Marxist-Leninist, Wall Street Journal, Times of India
	Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Member of Congress/Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee Source: RealClearPolitics.com
	Louis Farrakhan Jew-hating leader of Nation of Islam Sources: video statement (starting at 8:28), Black in America, Weasel Zippers, Philadelphia Weekly
	Revolutionary Communist Party Sources: Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolution newspaper, in-person appearance
	Bill Ayers Marxist/former domestic terrorist who said to Occupy Chicago, “Every revolution seems impossible in the beginning." Sources: BigGovernment.com
	David Duke Jew-hating former Grand Wizard the Ku Klux Klan Sources:Talking Points Memo, video statement, davidduke.com
	Hugo Chavez Communist ruler of Venezuela Sources: Mother Jones, Reuters, Examiner.com
	Black Panthers Organization of radical black nationalists Sources: in-person appearance, Occupy Oakland, Oakland Tribune
	Socialist Party USA Sources: Socialist Party USA, IndyMedia, The Daily Caller
	Nancy Pelosi Democratic House minority leader who said of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, “God bless them.” Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, ABC News, The Weekly Standard
	Communist Party of China Sources: People’s Daily (Communist Party organ), Reuters, chinataiwan.org, The Telegraph
	Hezbollah Anti-Jewish terrorist organization Sources: almoqawama.org, almoqawama.org (2), almoqawama.org (3), wikipedia
	Stephen Lerner Militant labor activist/leading mastermind behindOccupy Wall Street - “How do we take down the stock market?” Sources: BusinessInsider.com
	International Bolshevik Tendency Sources: bolshevik.org, Wire Magazine
	Van Jones Avowed communist/former senior advisor to Obama White House – “I’ll drop the radical pose to achieve the radical ends.” Sources: HuffingtonPost.com
	Harry Reid Senate Majority Leader (D-NV) Source: HuffingtonPost.com
	International Socialist Organization Sources: Socialist Worker, socialistworker.org, in-person appearance
	Frances Fox Piven Marxist professor/honored elder stateswoman of the Democratic party – “It’s okay to use violence.” Source: video statement
	Marxist Student Union Sources: Marxist Student Union, Big Government, marxiststudentunion.blogspot.com

It's All Yours

2011-11-29T09:32:00.002-06:00

2011-11-10T04:17:00.001-06:00

DAVID AXELROD'S PATTERN OF SEXUAL MISBEHAVIOR
November 9, 2011

Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country -- Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but never in Chicago.

So it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod.

Suspicions had already fallen on Sheila O'Grady, who is close with David Axelrod and went straight from being former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley's chief of staff to president of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), as being the person who dug up Herman Cain's personnel records from the National Restaurant Association (NRA).

The Daley-controlled IRA works hand-in-glove with the NRA. And strangely enough, Cain's short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only period in his decades-long career during which he's alleged to have been a sexual predator.

After O'Grady's name surfaced in connection with the miraculous appearance of Cain's personnel files from the NRA, she issued a Clintonesque denial of any involvement in producing them -- by vigorously denying that she knew Cain when he was at the NRA. (Duh.)

And now, after a week of conservative eye-rolling over unspecified, anonymous accusations against Cain, we've suddenly got very specific sexual assault allegations from an all-new accuser out of ... Chicago.

Herman Cain has never lived in Chicago. But you know who has? David Axelrod! And guess who lived in Axelrod's very building? Right again: Cain's latest accuser, Sharon Bialek.

Bialek's accusations were certainly specific. But they also demonstrated why anonymous accusations are worthless.

Within 24 hours of Bialek's press conference, friends and acquaintances of hers stepped forward to say that she's a "gold-digger," that she was constantly in financial trouble -- having filed for personal bankruptcy twice -- and, of course, that she had lived in Axelrod's apartment building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive, where, she admits, she knew the man The New York Times calls Obama's "hired muscle."

Throw in some federal tax evasion, and she's Obama's next Cabinet pick.

The reason all this is relevant is that both Axelrod and Daley have a history of smearing political opponents by digging up claims of sexual misconduct against them.

John Brooks, Chicago's former fire commissioner, filed a lawsuit against Daley six months ago claiming Daley threatened to smear him with sexual harassment accusations if Brooks didn't resign. He resigned -- and the sexual harassment allegations were later found to be completely false.

Meanwhile, as extensively detailed in my book "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America," the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator -- allowing him to run for president -- is that David Axelrod pulled sealed divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama's Democratic primary opponent, and then against Obama's Republican opponent.

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was way down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader.

But then The Chicago Tribune -- where Axelrod used to work -- began publishing claims that Hull's second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.

From then until Election Day, Hull was embroiled in fighting the allegation that he was a "wife beater." He and his ex-wife eventually agreed to release their sealed divorce records. His first ex-wife, daughters and nanny defended him at a press conference, swearing he was never violent. During a Democratic debate, Hull was forced to explain that his wife kicked him and he had merely kicked her back.

Hull's substantial lead just a month before the primary collapsed with the nonstop media attention to his divorce records. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

Luckily for Axelrod, Obama's opponent in the general election had also been divorced.

The Republican nominee was Jack Ryan, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard law and business schools, who had left his lucrative partnership at Goldman Sachs to teach at an inner-city school on the South Side of Chicago.

But in a child custody dispute some years earlier, Ryan's ex-wife, Hollywood sex kitten Jeri Lynn Ryan, had alleged that, while the couple was married, Jack had taken her to swingers clubs in Paris and New York.

Jack Ryan adamantly denied the allegations. In the interest of protecting their son, he also requested that the records be put permanently under seal.

Axelrod's courthouse moles obtained the "sealed" records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially "unseal" them -- over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.

Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!

A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).

With a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama's Republican opponent, Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate election, winning with a 43 percent margin.

And that's how Obama became a senator four years after losing a congressional race to Bobby Rush. (In a disastrous turn of events, Rush was not divorced.)

Axelrod destroyed the only two men who stood between Obama and the Senate with illicitly obtained, lurid allegations from their pasts.

In 2007, long after Obama was safely ensconced in the U.S. Senate, The New York Times reported: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece (on Hull's sealed divorce records) later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story."

Some had suggested, the Times article continued, that Axelrod had "an even more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story."

This time, Obama's little helpers have not only thrown a bomb into the Republican primary, but are hoping to destroy the man who deprives the Democrats of their only argument in 2012: If you oppose Obama, you must be a racist.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK
1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106; 816-581-7500

Iraq Withderawl Plan a Disaster

2011-10-27T13:31:00.000-05:00

The GOP's Solyndra Problem by Kimberley Strassel

2011-10-14T13:29:00.000-05:00

The following opinion piece by the WSJ's Kimberley Strassel is painfully dead on balls accurate". Or at least that's the way Mona Lisa Vito would say it. Romney & Perry both have their green baggage. Newt has his "I just plain been around here too long" baggage. Ron Paul has his "I don't believe Mahmoud Amahdinejad really wants to nuke Tel Aviv, NYC, Pittsburg, fill-in-the-blank" baggage. Michelle Bachman has her....I don't know what exactly you call her problem....but whatever it is, it sure incites a full measure of wrath from the Lefties.

Then there's Herman Cain. I like Herman. But I am not convinced he can win. I know I'd vote for him. But can he win?

So the Ochamberlain gang are cartwheeling across the White House lawn, whilst the Right fails to garner a candidate to unseat the Marxist in the most pivotal election in maybe 100 years.

Man oh man. I am scared. -W.S.

**********************************************************************************************************************************

The GOP's Solyndra Problem

Republicans have their own green baggage.

On Friday Rick Perry delivers his first major policy address, unveiling an aggressive energy and jobs plan. It will no doubt be good. It will no doubt address serious problems. It will no doubt be ignored.

That's because, unfortunately for Mr. Perry, drilling isn't the energy topic du jour. The buzz is the bankrupt Solyndra, which is why the only energy question that came to Mr. Perry at Tuesday's New Hampshire debate was this: How, exactly, is his state's vaunted "Emerging Technology Fund"—which has dumped some 200 million taxpayer dollars into private companies—any different from Obama programs that subsidized the likes of Solyndra?

It isn't, of course, and that's a problem for Mr. Perry. The political merit of Solyndra is that it perfectly illustrates the failed Obama economic mentality—that politicians should allocate capital, that government creates industries. Nothing should be further from a free-market mentality, and Solyndra ought to be providing Republicans a potent contrast with the president. Instead, candidates like Mr. Perry and Mitt Romney are dragging green baggage.

Congressional Republicans are now investigating the solar panels out of Solyndra, and rightly so. But no one should forget it was Republicans who in 2005 created the loan program that Mr. Obama would later expropriate to funnel stimulus dollars to his green boondoggles. This was the height of the Bush-era spending craze, when the GOP had come to see green energy as a slick way to funnel yet more pork (ethanol, nuclear, wood chips) to their states. As a side benefit, it offered cover against charges that Republicans were stooges of Big Oil.

Where the handouts really got rolling was at the state level. It used to be that Republican governors competed for business by lowering taxes and regulations. Then some genius worked out that it was easier to flat-out bribe companies to relocate by offering cold, hard taxpayer cash. And with green energy all the rage, a lot of state tax dollars started flowing to Solyndra-like ventures.

Enlarge Image

Associated Press

Texas Gov. Rick Perry

Mary Kissel gives an update on the Solyndra scandal.

Mr. Perry did all this on a grand scale, convincing his legislature to create two investment funds, one being the Emerging Technology Fund, which has acted as state venture capitalist to more than a hundred firms, including green companies. In fairness, he wasn't alone. Indiana's Mitch Daniels, Mississippi's Haley Barbour, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal—conservatives all—have happily staked their taxpayers' dollars on green bets.

But it's Mr. Perry who is running for president, and who came out of the primary gates touting his funds as a centerpiece of Texas's job-creation story. As Solyndra has escalated, the Obama political liabilities have begun to attach to the Texan. The press is churning out exposés about how many jobs the Texas grants actually produced, or how many recipients had donated to Mr. Perry. His rivals, notably Michele Bachmann, have directly called the funds Mr. Perry's "Solyndra."

Mr. Perry's response has been to say that "the federal government shouldn't be involved in that kind of investment, period," but that it is "fine for states" to pick winners and losers in the economy. All of which sounds a bit like a certain governor attempting to explain away RomneyCare.

Speaking of Mr. Romney, he's taken his own shots at Solyndra, and his 59-point economic plan warns that government "should not be in the business of steering investment toward particular politically favored approaches." The former governor seems to be hoping that the press won't notice a day in early 2003 when he used a solar company as the backdrop to announce that his state was shifting millions to a new Green Energy Fund (still in existence) that would provide venture capital and loans to renewable companies.

True, the Massachusetts fund wasn't run out of the governor's office, and the amounts were a smidgen of Mr. Obama's green stimulus. Bets are Team Obama won't make that distinction when highlighting Mr. Romney's prior support for state-sponsored venture capital for solar.

Past mistakes aside, why aren't candidates using this moment to disavow green slush? Congressional Republicans—the tea party at their backs, Solyndra in their sights—are themselves beginning to envision the upside of abandoning green pork.

Yet Mr. Perry sticks to his flawed federalism argument. And the Romney jobs plan insists "government has a role to play in innovation in the energy industry," although Romney spokesman Ryan Williams tells me his candidate is focused on "basic research through programs that ensure long-term, apolitical funding for a wide variety of early stage technologies," and that he "opposes President Obama's efforts to play venture capitalist."

The problem is that there are no apolitical subsidies. The economics of political venture capital are bad, but the politics are worse. For Republicans in particular, the green subsidy road leads only to scandals, job-number embarrassments, poor excuses, and a missed opportunity to draw distinctions with big-government liberals.

At Tuesday night's debate, Mr. Romney told Herman Cain that "simple answers are . . . often inadequate." But when it comes to green subsidies, Mr. Cain's simplicity is to die for. Government simply "should not be in the business of picking winners and losers, because most of the time they pick the losers," said Mr. Cain. Now there's a presidential energy philosophy for the ages.

(Note to readers: Thank you for your many kind notes inquiring about my absence. I was on maternity leave.)

Write to kim@wsj.com

Post-Racial U.S. Still Not Reality At White House by Thomas Sowell

2011-10-11T07:36:00.002-05:00

ON THE RIGHT

Post-Racial U.S. Still Not Reality At White House

By THOMAS SOWELL Posted 10/10/2011 06:48 PM ET

Among those who have been disappointed by President Barack Obama, none is likely to end up so painfully disappointed as those who saw his election as being, in itself and in its consequences, a movement toward a "post-racial society."

Like so many other expectations that so many people projected onto this little-known man who suddenly burst onto the political scene, the expectation of movement toward a post-racial society had no speck of hard evidence behind it — and all too many ignored indications of the very opposite, including his two decades of association with the egregious Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Those people of good will who want to replace the racism of the past with a post-racial society have too often overlooked the fact that there are others who instead want to put racism under new management, to have reverse discrimination as racial payback for past injustices.

Attorney General Eric Holder became a key figure epitomizing the view that government's role in racial matters was not to be an impartial dispenser of equal justice for all, but to be a racial partisan and an organ of racial payback. He has been too politically savvy to say that in so many words, but his actions have spoken far louder than any words.

The case that first gave the general public a glimpse of Attorney General Holder's views and values was one in which young black thugs outside a voting site in Philadelphia were televised intimidating white voters. When this episode was broadcast, it produced public outrage.

Although the Department of Justice's prosecution of these thugs began in the last days of the Bush administration, and the defendants had offered no legal defense, the case was dropped by the Justice Department after Eric Holder took over. One of the lawyers who were prosecuting that case resigned in protest.

That lawyer — J. Christian Adams — has now written a book, titled "Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department." It is a thought-provoking book and a shocking book in what it reveals about the inner workings of the Department of Justice's civil rights division.

Bad as the Justice Department's decision was to drop that particular case, which it had already won in court, this book makes painfully clear that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Despite the efforts of some in the media and in politics to depict the voter intimidation in Philadelphia as just an isolated incident involving a few thugs at one voting place, former U.S. Attorney Adams shows that these thugs were in fact part of a nationwide organization doing similar things elsewhere.

Moreover, the civil rights unit of the Justice Department has turned the same blind eye to similar voter intimidation and corruption of the voting process by other people and other organizations in other cities and states — so long as those being victimized were white and the victimizers were black.

This is all spelled out in detail, naming names and naming places, not only among those in the country at large, but also among those officials of the Justice Department who turned its role of protecting the civil rights of all Americans into a policy of racial partisanship and racial payback.

The widespread, organized and systematic corruption of the voting process revealed by the author of "Injustice" is on a scale that can swing not only local but national elections, including the 2012 elections. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder has not only turned a blind eye to blatant evidence of voter fraud, it has actively suppressed those U.S. attorneys in its own ranks who have tried to stop that fraud.

Even in counties where the number of votes cast exceeds the number of people legally entitled to vote, Eric Holder's Justice Department sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil — if the end result is the election of black Democrats. It has become the mirror image of the old Jim Crow South.

This is an enormously eye-opening book, which makes painfully clear that where racial issues are concerned, the Department of Justice has become the Department of Payback. A post-racial society is the last thing that Holder and Obama are pursuing.

From : Investors Business Daily 10/11/11

Occupy This

2011-10-10T12:26:00.002-05:00

All hail social networking.

They call themselves the 99%-ers.

Even if there are 250,000 of them nationwide (which there isn't)

that would only make them the 250,000/311,000,000 or

the .000803-ers.

What's the big deal when you exaggerate your numbers by a factor of 1200+ ?

But hey, what's the difference?
Arithmetic probably wasn't their best subject anyhow.

The chap in the above photo, fresh out of charm school, is doing some performance art. And is he ever telling the NYPD a thing or two. Wouldn't it be nice to see one of NY's finest rub his face in his own art work?
But alas, the days of spontaneous retribution are of a bygone era, lest the overzealous police officer, who, by the way, is the only thing standing between each of us and the ugly mob, over step his bounds, and wind up getting fired after some YouTube exposure.

Unfortunately, we have these filth ridden clowns in Chicago too.
Surprisingly, for being all disenfranchised and stuff, they sure seem to own a lot of stuff made by franchises.
They have Ray Bans and i-Pods, I-Phones, North Face wind breakers that most of the workers in the Chicago Board of Trade, cannot afford. They wear Levi's jeans and Nike running shoes. They gulp $3.87 lattes from Starbucks and they are the downtrodden. The only thing they seem to be short of is hygiene, brains, ambition and self respect. Why just a couple of weeks ago I attempted to walk down LaSalle Street, fresh from the surgeon and on crutches. Won't try that again. You see they are short on civility too.

Once upon a time, when men were men, Chicago had real men occupy the offices on the 5th floor of City Hall. These guys knew something about dead beat removal procedures. They had tactics. Horse tactics. And fire hose tactics. No need to hurt anybody. Just go up top the Federal Reserve, Board of Trade and Bank of America buildings and uncap the fire hoses. A little 24/7 rain storm is all these guys need. Then Proctor and Gamble could drive up in some semi tractor trailers with some soap. Talk about Road Runner clouds. BEEP BEEP.

Oh, to have been alive, when men were men.
When leeches were commonly disdained as leeches.
When pride reigned supreme and one's time was better spent working, rather than whining.
They say there are no jobs.
I bought coffee at McDonald's this morning.
They had a sign, HELP WANTED.
A friend of mine informs me that the milk wholesaler company he works for cannot find nor keep drivers. They pay $15 to start so long as you have a regular and clean driving record.
But it's tough.
You have to drag your A$$ outta bed every morning.
And you cannot be late.
Ooops there goes the 12-pak of Bud and the 17 bongs from the night before.
What's a matta?
Are those jobs beneath your pay grade?
Then you shoulda paid attention in school.
Or you should go back to school.
Ok, you don't like school.
Then start driving the milk truck.
My friend put 5 kids through college driving that milk truck.
Better not tell him he's a low life.
But then, he has ambition, self respect and a drive to make something of himself.
Occupy Wall Street.
How about Occupy This?

More from a favorite of mine, Star Parker.
Ms. Parker has a very interesting biography.
Google her past.

Occupy Wall Street: more from culture of narcissism

By Star Parker

I wouldn't think it would be worthwhile to draw attention to the Occupy Wall Street "movement," or its list of demands that wouldn't pass muster in an average kindergarten class.

But if America's president and vice president choose to talk about it, and give it credibility, then it's news.

According to Vice President Joe Biden, demands such as free college, pay independent of work, a $20 minimum wage (why not $100 or $1,000?), and a nation with open borders have legitimacy and "a lot in common with the Tea Party movement."

President Barack Obama sees these demonstrations against corporate America as reasonable protest toward "the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this situation to begin with."

This should provide perspective to what our most fundamental problem is today.

We have an endangered species in America whose loss threatens our future. That species is called the American adult.

Can someone please explain to our vice president the difference between a screaming infant not getting what he wants when he wants it, and an adult who understands personal responsibility, humility, work and service to others?

A functioning free society requires citizens who are adults, capable of overseeing and administering a government that enforces laws that protect life and property.

Once government simply becomes a playpen for those who believe they run the universe and make its basic laws, and also believe that the rest of us must submit to their hallucinations about what is just, we wind up where we are today.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that, according to the latest census data, 48.5 percent of American families are on the receiving end of some sort of government program, the highest percentage in our history.

To provide some perspective, this figure was 10 percent in the 1920s, and a little more than 30 percent in 1980.

By 1980, four of these programs of the 1960s ― food stamps, Pell grants, Medicare and Medicaid ― accounted for $164 billion in annual spending. Today these four programs swallow almost an additional trillion dollars.

In all our history, there is only one instance of major reform of a government spending program, and that was the welfare reform that was passed in 1996.

These government programs are pure monopolies driven by political power, not by efficiency or whether they are serving real needs of citizens. They don't change, they only grow.

This contrasts with America's corporations, which Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, and America's president and vice president, would like us to believe control everything.

But if big corporations did control everything, they would, like government programs, never change or lose power.

But large firms regularly come and go, because, in contrast to government programs, they remain powerful only as long as they are serving consumers.

Of the 30 major corporations that constitute the Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, only eight were on the list in 1980.

The 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average firms have changed 45 times since the average was started 115 years ago.

No, Mr. Biden. Occupy Wall Street has nothing in common with the Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party movement is protest against abuse of political power and the increasing marginalization and disrespect for truths, such as protection of life, liberty and property that define American freedom.

Occupy Wall Street is about lust for political power, about defining what others should have, and redistributing and spending what belongs to some else.

Star Parker is an author and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE, www.urbancure.org). She can be reached at parker@urbancure.org. The article was distributed by Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).

The Miracle of iCapitalism by Michelle Malkin

2011-10-10T02:04:00.000-05:00

OCTOBER 7, 2011 12:00 A.M.

The Miracle of iCapitalism
The pursuit of profits empowers people beyond the bounds of imagination.

Here is your high-resolution teachable moment of the week: anti-capitalist, anti-corporate extremists of “Occupy Wall Street” mourning Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs without a trace of irony.

While the Kamp Alinsky Kids ditch school to moan about their massive student debt, parade around in zombie costumes, and whine about evil corporations over poached Wi-Fi connections, it’s the doers and producers and wealth creators like Jobs who change the world. They are the gifted 1 percent whom the “99 percenters” mob seeks to demonize, marginalize, and tax out of existence.

Inherent in the American success story of the iMac/iPhone/iPad is a powerful lesson about the fundamentals of capitalism. The “occupiers” chant “people over profit.” They call for “caring” over “corporations.”

But the pursuit of profits empowers people beyond the bounds of imagination.
I blog on an iMac. When I travel, I bring my MacBook Pro. I Tweet news links from my iPhone. My kids are learning Photoshop and GarageBand on our Macs; they use metronome, dictation, video, and camera apps daily. I use the technology for business, pleasure, social networking, raising awareness of the missing, finding recipes, and even tuning a ukulele.
None of the countless people involved in conceiving these products and bringing them to market “care” about me. They pursued their own self-interests. Through the spontaneous order of capitalism, they enriched themselves — and the world.
One of my favorite economics essays from which I’ve drawn bottomless inspiration is Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil.” He turned a mundane writing instrument into an elementary study of free-market capitalism. What goes for the pencil goes for any of the products Jobs introduced.
“I have a profound lesson to teach,” Read wrote in the voice of a metaphorical lead pencil. “I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because — well, because I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”
Read traces the family tree of the pencil from the Oregon loggers who harvest its cedar wood, to the California millworkers who cut the wood into thin slats, to Mississippi refinery workers, to the Dutch East Indies farmers who produce an oil used to make erasers. All of these people, and many more at the periphery of the process, have special knowledge about their life’s work in their separate corners of the earth. But none by himself has the singular knowledge or ability to give birth to a pencil. Few will ever come in contact with the others who make the production of that pencil possible.
It’s not because they “care about each other” that they cooperate to deliver any one good. It’s the result of self-interest, multiplied millions of times over.
Read illuminates: “There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.” This spontaneous “configuration of human energies” is repeated endlessly in our daily lives. Think of the countless and diverse people involved in producing a Slinky, jump rope, or baseball, a diaper, refrigerator, or Boeing 747.
And, of course, an iMac, iPhone, or iPad.
Appreciating this voluntary configuration of human energies, Read argued, is key to possessing “an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.” Indeed. Without that faith, we are susceptible to the force of class-warfare mobs and the arrogance of command-and-control bureaucrats in Washington who believe the role of private American entrepreneurs, producers, and wealth generators is to “grow the economy” and who “think at some point you have made enough money.”
The progressives who want to bring down “Wall Street” will snipe that Jobs was one of “theirs,” not “ours.”
He belonged to no one. He was transcendently committed to excellence and beauty and innovation. And yes, he made gobs of money pursuing it all while benefiting hundreds of millions of people around the world whom he never met, but who shed a deep river of tears upon learning of his death this week.
From “I, Pencil” to iPhone, such is the profound, everlasting miracle of iCapitalism — a triumph of individualism over collectivism, freedom over force, and markets over master planning. To borrow an old Apple slogan: It just works.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2011 Creators.Com.

The ‘Hunger’ Hoax By Thomas Sowell

2011-10-07T13:29:00.000-05:00

Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over "hunger in America."

Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, "one in eight American children is going hungry tonight." Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.

When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.

That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same "hunger in America" theme reappeared years later, when Senator John Edwards was running for Vice President. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day.

Ironically, the one demonstrable nutritional difference between the poor and others is that low-income women tend to be overweight more often than others. That may not seem like much to make a political issue, but politicians and the media have created hysteria over less.

The political left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But this attempt to salvage something from the "hunger in America" hoax collapses like a house of cards when you stop and think about it.

Burgers, pizzas and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. An article in the New York Times of September 25th by Mark Bittman showed that you can cook a meal for four at half the cost of a meal from a burger restaurant. So far, so good. But then Mr. Bittman says that the problem is "to get people to see cooking as a joy." For this, he says, "we need action both cultural and political." In other words, the nanny state to the rescue!

Since when are adult human beings supposed to do only those things that are a joy? I don't find any particular joy in putting on my shoes. But I do it rather than go barefoot. I don't always find it a joy to drive a car, especially in bad weather, but I have to get from here to there.

An arrogant elite's condescension toward the people — treating them as children who have to be jollied along — is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening a society.

Those who see social problems as requiring high-minded people like themselves to come down from their Olympian heights to impose their superior wisdom on the rest of us, down in the valley, are behind such things as the hunger hoax, which is part of the larger poverty hoax.

We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and own either a car or a truck.

Why are such people called "poor"? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.

Those who believe in an expansive, nanny state government need a large number of people in "poverty" to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.

Politicians, welfare state bureaucrats and others have incentives to create or perpetuate hoaxes, whether about poverty in general or hunger in particular. The high cost to taxpayers is exceeded by the even higher cost of lost opportunities for fulfillment in their lives by those who succumb to the lure of a stagnant life of dependency.

The Constitution and Limited Government by Edward J. Erler

2011-09-27T07:51:00.000-05:00

September 2011

Edward J. Erler
Professor of Political Science
California State University, San Bernardino

The Constitution and Limited Government

Edward J. Erler is professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He earned his B.A. from San Jose State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from Claremont Graduate School. He has published numerous articles on constitutional topics in journals such as Interpretation, the Notre Dame Journal of Law, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He was a member of the California Advisory Commission on Civil Rights from 1988-2006 and served on the California Constitutional Revision Commission in 1996. He has testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the issue of birthright citizenship and is the co-author of The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on May 24, 2011, in Dallas, Texas.

Two cases that are currently making their way to the Supreme Court may well in the short term decide the constitutional issue of the reach and extent of the federal government. At stake, in other words, is the future of limited government. And together, these two cases present an exceedingly odd situation. In the case of the Arizona illegal alien law, the federal government is suing a state for constitutional violations; and in the case of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—that is, Obamacare—more than half the states are suing the federal government, contesting the Act’s constitutionality. It is indeed a litigious season.

But the Supreme Court’s decisions in these two cases may not be the last word, because both of them present eminently political issues that will have to be decided ultimately by the American people.

The administrative state, of course, always seeks to extend its reach and magnify its power. This is an intrinsic feature of a system where administration and regulation replace politics as the ordinary means of making policy. If there are to be limits to the reach of the burgeoning administrative state, they will be political limits imposed by the people in the ordinary course of partisan politics. The advent of the administrative state poses the greatest challenge to limited government, because it elevates the welfare of the community—whether real or imagined—over the rights and liberties of individuals. The task today is to confine the federal government to its delegated powers. The minions of the administrative state seek to destroy constitutional boundaries in their desire to replace politics with administration. This is tantamount to denying that legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed, or that limited government rests on the sovereignty of the people.

One of the proofs offered in the Declaration of Independence that King George was attempting to establish an “absolute Tyranny” over the American colonies was the fact that “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” Obamacare certainly fits the description of the activities denounced in the Declaration. The number of regulations and the horde of administrators necessary to execute the scheme are staggering. We have only to think here of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It is a commission of 15 members appointed by the President, charged with the task of reducing Medicare spending. This commission has rule-making power which carries the force of law. The Senate, it is true, will have the power to override its decisions—but only with a three-fifths majority. There are no procedures that allow citizens or doctors to appeal the Board’s decisions. The administrative state—here in the guise of providing health care for all—will surely reduce the people under a kind of tyranny that will insinuate itself into all aspects of American life, destroying liberty by stages until liberty itself becomes only a distant memory.

The advent and extraordinary success of the Tea Party movement, with its emphasis on restoring limited government, has made this a propitious time to rethink what the Framers meant by limited government and how they understood the relationship between limited government and the protection of rights and liberties. It is rare to see a people acting spontaneously in a political cause. The Tea Party movement must be regarded as a testament to the independent spirit—the freedom-loving spirit—of the American people.

How did the Framers understand limited government? In the first place, limited government was not for the Framers identical with small government, as the Tea Party sometimes tends to believe. The identification of limited government with small government was the position of the Anti-Federalists who opposed the ratification of the Constitution. Limited government, for the Anti-Federalists, meant government that was too weak to threaten the rights and liberties of the people. Small government was, therefore, both the necessary and sufficient condition of political freedom. Consequently, the Anti-Federalists preferred a purely confederal form of government in which the states assumed priority.

The Federalists, on the other hand, regarded confederal government as an attempt to do the impossible: to create a sovereignty within a sovereignty. Conflicting claims to sovereignty would be debilitating and would render the government of the whole ineffective—as was surely the case under our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation.

The Framers of the Constitution settled upon a novel design for government, one that Madison said was “partly national, partly federal.” For some purposes, Madison explained, we will be one people; for others, we will be multiple peoples. With respect to the national features—those things that concern the nation as a whole—the federal government will have sovereignty—complete and plenary power to accomplish the objects entrusted to its care in the Constitution. Those objects are principally found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. National defense, for example, is exclusively delegated to the federal government. And since the exigencies that face nations in foreign affairs are unpredictable and innumerable, the federal government must have sovereignty to fulfill this delegated trust. And if that trust is to be fulfilled, the federal government must also be accorded the necessary means to achieve that end. If this entails large government—and today it surely does—then large government must be compatible with limited government. Similar reasoning applies to all the objects delegated to the care of the federal government.

The Declaration of Independence provided the authoritative statement of America’s political principles. For the first time, government was said to derive its legitimacy—its just powers—from “the consent of the governed.” This was a turning point in world-historical consciousness: no longer would it be possible to argue that sovereignty belonged to governments or kings—even if kings claimed appointment by divine right.

In order to form just government, the people delegate a portion of their sovereignty to government to be exercised for their benefit. The fact that only a portion of sovereignty is ceded by the people is the origin of the idea of limited government. The people delegate only some of their sovereignty to government, and what is not granted is retained by the people—the people, for example, always reserve (and can never cede) the ultimate expression of sovereignty, the right of revolution. The Declaration describes this right as “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” government when it becomes destructive of its proper ends—namely, the protection of the safety and happiness of the people. This right of revolution, as understood by the Founders, was the right that secures every other right, because it serves as a constant reminder of the sovereignty of the people.

The Anti-Federalists never understood these revolutionary implications; they seemed to believe still that governments, not the people, were the ultimate repositories of sovereignty, and that the only way to secure the rights and liberties of the people was to weaken the power of government—as if freedom existed only in the exceptions to government power. But as Madison wrote, “Energy in government is essential to that security against external and internal danger and to that prompt and salutary execution of the laws which enter into the very definition of good government.”

What limits the federal government is not a limit on its power to act, but the limited range of objects entrusted to its care—the enumerated powers of government. The powers not delegated to the federal government nor forbidden to the states in the Constitution (e.g., ex post facto laws, bills of attainder, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts) are reserved to the states. These are the police powers, which are generally described as the power to regulate the health, safety, welfare and morals of the citizens of the states.

In cases of conflict, the supremacy clause of the Constitution gives preference to the federal Constitution and laws made in pursuance of the Constitution. The supremacy clause was described by Madison as an essential improvement over the Articles of Confederation. Where there is no final authority to arbitrate disputes between the federal government and the states in this “compound Republic,” government will be paralyzed. Madison confessed, however, that the exact boundary between the powers of the federal government and the state governments will be impossible to determine in advance. The precise lines of demarcation will have to be worked out in practice. The Supreme Court—and through the supremacy clause, the state courts—will have to determine conflicts on a case by case basis.

An illustration of the difficulties of drawing clear lines between federal and state authority in our “compound Republic” is the Arizona illegal immigration bill, passed in April 2010. The law allowed police officers to verify the immigration status of any person after a valid stop or arrest if there “is a reasonable suspicion that the person is unlawfully present in the United States.” Everyone remembers the hysteria that was unleashed when the bill passed. The President called the law irresponsible, saying that it threatened “basic notions of fairness.” Others said the provision of the bill relying on “reasonable suspicion” would mandate racial profiling; and some of the more hysterical commentators even insisted that the law was tantamount to genocide. The Assistant Secretary of State felt compelled to apologize to members of a Chinese delegation visiting the United States for this egregious assault upon human rights. One can only imagine the bemused looks on the faces of the Chinese delegation.

The President ordered the Justice Department to intervene. And to the surprise of many, the Justice Department’s lawsuit did not seek to enjoin the law based on racial profiling or equal protection or due process, arguing instead that the law conflicted with the federal government’s exclusive power to regulate immigration. Perhaps someone had explained to the Attorney General that “reasonable suspicion” has been a part of our due process jurisprudence for many years. It means that a police officer can question on suspicion that is less than probable cause; reasonable suspicion, of course, must be something more than a hunch or a guess or an intuition—it must be based on articulable facts. In addition, the Supreme Court in 1975 ruled that ethnicity could be one of the factors determining reasonable suspicion. The Arizona law, in contrast, disallowed any use of ethnicity in determining whether a person could be asked about his immigration status.

In United States v. Arizona, the Federal District Court judge enjoined the operation of the law because it intruded upon the federal government’s exclusive power to regulate immigration and control foreign policy. On appeal from the District Court, one piece of evidence adduced by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that the Arizona law was an unconstitutional impingement upon the federal government’s exclusive power to conduct foreign policy was the fact that the President of Mexico and the heads of several other Latin American countries had expressed severe criticisms of the bill both in the press and in amici briefs! Rarely do we encounter such humor in court opinions, however unintended the humor might be.

The Constitution, of course, does not specifically grant control over immigration to the federal government. Instead Congress has power to “establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Control over naturalization, however, seems to imply control over immigration—so uniform rules governing immigration would seem, by necessary implication, to fall within the scope of federal power. The real question here—although it was not addressed by the District Court or the Court of Appeals—was what power, if any, devolves upon state governments when the federal government fails to carry out its obligations. The District Court had candidly noted that the Arizona law was passed “against a backdrop of rampant illegal immigration, escalating drug and human trafficking crimes, and serious public safety concerns.” In the face of federal inaction or manifest indifference, does Arizona have the reserved power—indeed the obligation—to secure the safety of its citizens? The President’s recent remarks that the border has been secured and that it is now time to think of providing a path to citizenship for illegal aliens is, in reality, a statement of declared indifference to the people of the State of Arizona and to all the border states similarly situated. Surely those states have the constitutional right, sustained by their police powers, to protect themselves through laws that are as unobtrusive as the Arizona law. But in the District Court’s judgment, the Arizona law invoked “an inference of preemption” because it placed an “impermissible burden” on federal “resources and priorities” and inevitably “will result in the harassment of aliens.” The burden on federal resources stems from the fact that there will be an increased number of requests to verify immigration status. This increased burden will in turn force the immigration services to reallocate resources away from other priorities. Such is the logic of the District Court.

These reasons seem trivial when compared to the real and pressing dangers that Arizona faces as a result of federal inaction and indifference. Surely this is not what the Framers had in mind when they crafted the supremacy clause, while at the same time reserving to the states the essential responsibility of protecting the safety and welfare of their citizens. Madison wrote in The Federalist that “the powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” This extensive power reserved to the states should weigh heavily on preemption decisions. In this light, the Arizona law seems to have been a clear exercise of the state’s police powers, and any burden imposed on the federal government to have been incidental and insignificant.

Obamacare is another issue that tests our understanding of the Constitution and the role of limited government. In federal courts, the Obama administration has defended the bill as a legitimate exercise of Congress’ power to regulate commerce. At issue here is the individual mandate that forces individuals to purchase health care insurance and carries a penalty for failure to do so. Congress has the power to regulate commerce; but does it, as here, have the power to create commerce—i.e., to force individuals to engage in interstate commerce by purchasing health care insurance from private providers? Another way to look at the issue would be to ask whether, under the commerce clause, Congress has the power to regulate inactivity, i.e., the refusal to buy insurance. This would indeed be a novel extension of commerce clause jurisprudence and utterly impossible to square with any notion of commerce that was held by the framers of the Constitution.

In addition to the commerce clause argument, the Obama administration maintains that the individual mandate is authorized by Congress’ power to tax and spend for the general welfare. Congress’ power here is extensive. Over the years, the Court has generally deferred to Congress in determining what constitutes the general welfare. This is proper, since Congress represents the nation and what promotes the general welfare is essentially a political question. If Congress determines that a universal health care system serves the general welfare, then the courts will not interfere. The power to “lay and collect Taxes,” however, has been subject to judicial scrutiny. While Congress may tax for the purpose of raising revenue, it may not use the power of taxation for the express purpose of regulation. A tax that is merely a subterfuge for regulating activities will not be allowed, although a tax that only incidentally regulates behavior will pass constitutional muster as long as the principal purpose is raising revenues.

Madison argued that the general welfare clause was actually a limitation on the federal government. Taxes could be imposed and money spent only for the general welfare—meaning the welfare of the whole of the American people. It is true that Alexander Hamilton had a more extensive view of the general welfare clause, but throughout much of our history Madison’s view prevailed. Today, however, the idea that the general welfare clause was ever intended as a limit on the reach of government has been destroyed by the progressive architects of the welfare state.

In any case, if the individual mandate is to be defended under the general welfare clause, what the plain language of the bill calls a penalty must be regarded as a tax for the express purpose of raising revenue. If the penalty can be sold as a tax, the Obama administration argues, then Obamacare is authorized by the general welfare clause. In the Florida District Court case, the Justice Department made the wholly tendentious—not to say absurd—argument that since the IRS was charged with administering the individual mandate and collecting the penalties, this was sufficient to convert a penalty into a tax. But as Florida District Court Judge Roger Vinson remarked: “Besides the fact that President Obama confidently assured the American people that there would be no new taxes to support the medical insurance scheme, no amount of administrative indirection should be allowed to convert a penalty into a tax for raising revenue. This is not a revenue raising measure and therefore cannot be justified under the general welfare clause.”

But here is a somber thought: If, instead of using the individual mandate, Congress had relied on its general revenue-raising powers, under current Supreme Court doctrine, it is almost certain that Obamacare would be constitutional. It would be an example of Congress spending money for the general welfare.

In conclusion, the only certain method of defeating universal health care and other cases of federal overreach—as it appears that the American public desires to do—is political opposition. A political party dedicated to genuinely limited government—not small government—is an urgent political task. Whether the Tea Party is up to this task remains to be seen—but it is probably our best hope. The Tea Party will have to learn, however, that the task today is not to weaken the power of government—it is to confine the government to the exercise of its delegated powers and to restore to its full vigor the partly national, partly federal form of government that was the legacy of the Founders.

Copyright © 2011 Hillsdale College. The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used: “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.” SUBSCRIPTION FREE UPON REQUEST. ISSN 0277-8432. Imprimis trademark registered in U.S. Patent and Trade Office #1563325.

Five People to Call

2011-09-23T13:07:00.002-05:00

I spoke with a lifelong friend yesterday, a fella I went to grammar school with, who I've always liked, and who still lives only one mile from my home. He told me that he has received a very good job offer in a neighboring state and he will be moving 180 miles away next Thursday, with his family to follow in the late spring. I am happy for him. But in a selfish way, I am bummed that he will be less in my life.
We only saw each other 2 or 3 times a year and some years even less. But it has been a comfort for me to know he's is so close, that I could call, that we could go to the local ballgame, anytime.

The day before yesterday, my sister told me the woman who lives across the way and who has kids who are my sister's kids age, some of whom palled around with one of my nephews for many years, committed suicide on Tuesday. Apparently she drove to the local shopping center and shot herself while sitting in her car in the mall parking lot. My sister told me that she was a rather reclusive woman, an empty-nester like my sister, and that she would often see her around the neighborhood. The poor woman would sometimes say, "Call me. Let's get a cup of coffee". or "Let's go for a walk on the path". My sister did not call her. And she did not call my sister. And having done so may not have made any difference. But then again, it may have helped. We'll never know.
Good health, sound finances, nice kids, seemingly solid marriage were not issues for this woman or her family. But obviously there were issues.

It occurred to me that if each of us call the five people who mattered to us most, we would all have a better weekend and a better tomorrow.

We take this capability for granted. We are on this earth for such a short while. Maybe we should pretend like each day is our last. As the saying goes, "Live each day as if it were your last and eventually you will be right".
My friend who is moving, my sister's friend who is now gone, these are opportunities lost.
We all "need somebody to lean on". Do it today.
That Bill Whithers knew a thing or two about a thing or two.

"Lean On Me"

Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow.
But if we are not wise, we know that there's always tomorrow.

Lean on me when you're not strong
I'll be your friend I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long â€˜til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on.

Please swallow your pride
If I have things you need to borrow
For no one can fill those of your needs
That you won't let show.

You just call on me, brother, when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on.
I just might have a problem that you'll understand,
We all need somebody to lean on.

Lean on me when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long â€˜til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on

You just call on me, brother, when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on.
I just might have a problem that you'll understand,
We all need somebody to lean on.

If there is a load you have to bear
That you can't carry I'm right up the road
I'll share your load if you just call me.

Call me (If you need a friend)
Call me
Call me

General Musings - Not for Faint of Heart

2011-09-22T14:19:00.003-05:00

I was in the local library studying yesterday for yet another governmental agency administered qualifying exam to do my job, which I have a vague understanding of, given that I have been at it for three decades plus now, when I happened upon a prominently displayed placard on an easel appealing to me to shore up my "disaster preparedness". September is fittingly "National Disaster Preparedness Month", this, the brainchild of some clever FEMA bureaucrat.

Before you misconstrue the sarcastic overtone, permit me to state that I do realize that sound hurricane preparation habits are good for one's longevity. I personally practice good hurricane preparedness every day by choosing not to live 18 feet below sea level in some reconstructed backwater parish in Bayou County, Louisiana.

What bugged me about the placard wasn't the notion that people ought to be careful about hurricanes. We should. Nor was I bothered by the notion that having a plan about what to do in the event of any other variety of natural disaster can actually save our hides. We should do that too.

What bothered me was the somewhat fuzzy painting/drawing of a chunk of the World Trade Center hazily drawn in a water-color kind of way in background of the text. Well, it wasn't precisely a chunk of the Twin Tower smoldering in the ruins of 9/11, rather it was an artistic representation of that lingering horrific visual. T

The unspoken message, the subliminal implication was clear. Stuff happens. And next time, it could be big. And you know, we want you to know that we here at FEMA want you to be really safe. So go to our website and learn all sorts of neat stuff about adequately planning for your nutritional provision. Batteries! Don't forget the batteries. They are so important. I mean, if you want to see in the dark. And always have a meeting place so you and your loved ones can congregate around the part of town formerly known as Grandma's neighborhood.

So much easier to advocate this kind of non-sense, rather than incite mass hysteria while suggesting that the electorate truly contemplate a nuclear Iran. Remember, this U.S. government is the same U.S. government that once upon a time instructed school kids to duck their heads under the desk to avoid getting zapped by any of that radiation stuff. Geez, I am starting to remind myself of George Carlin in his cranky later year diatribes.

Why should any of this bother me?

Mother Nature did not coerce 19 Muslim radicals to crash occupied (with Real life Mommies & Daddies) jet liners into the World Trade Centers, killing nearly 3000 American citizens, whose only crime that day was getting out of bed and going to work, and thereby plummeting the American economy into a seemingly never ending death spiral. (Yes, I am aware there are many other contributory factors).

Who then? Who done it? I'll tell you who done it. It was RADICAL MUSLIM EXTREMIST KILLERS. If this phrase eludes your sensibilities, may I suggest you spend a few hours studying the homicidal/genocidal chronology of these adherents to Islam, The Religion of Peace (and a whole bunch of dead bodies). http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

So while FEMA advocates disaster praredness "light", of the tornado / river's a-risin' variety, they dare not mention the uber-gargantuan elephant in the living room of each and every house, in each and every burg in our America, which is, of course, dare I say it?, NUCLEAR DETONATION IN AN AMERICAN CITY, killing 100's of thousands or even millions of Americans in a single broad hit.

That kind of reality check would "scare the people" and common logic says that's no no.
I for one, would rather like to see the people scared.
Scared as in scared sh&^less!

Then perhaps, the people, more correctly, the electorate, might fully engage, recognize what's at risk, and choose, perhaps not to ever again elect or re-elect people like our current anti-Western, anti-Constitution, anti-capitalist, decidedly Marxist, quasi-American apologist, President who is currently doing his very best to dismantle our nation' greatest disaster preparedness tool, namely the US Navy, Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force.

That my friends is irony of the highest order. Is it now de facto, that rather than commit as one people to do WHATEVER it takes to prevent such a scenario from ensuing, our Leftist leaders choose rather to coax us merrily along, while working to advance our "disaster preparedness" skills when, NOT IF, that day eventually arrives?

I have a wee bit of a problem with this logic.

And the rest of my fellow citizens might agree, if they took the time to recognize that survival as a nation, survival as in individual, is predicated on National Security and is more important than all of the other issues. Newt Gingrich is carrying this torch and I would wager that it hurts his electability. People just don't want to contemplate the unthinkable. It's so depressing. And it is. But it is less depressing than appeasing Iran and winding up in a very sorry condition. So I will take the lesser of those two evils every single time.

Listening to the radio last night, I chanced upon an interview with John Bolton. You know, John Bolton, that wacky guy GWB tried to install as the US representative at the (puking) United Nations. Remember that his Senate confirmation in that post was blocked by Chaffee and Reid and other Senate Democrats.

Ah yes, the U.N. That would be the same institution that regularly affords the insane, tyrannical, president of Iran a world forum, from which to spew his hate. In fact he is there TODAY. Doing his thing. Spreading the love.

The U.N. is a heck of a fine organization, one frankly beneath the dignity of an American patriot like John Bolton. I'd like to see the next American president tell the U.N. to pack up their junk and take it to France.

Bolton, you see, unlike the President, and unlike our esteemed, really influential and super important and highly esteemed and... and...and etc. (all the news mags say she's so electable) Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and unlike most of the other nationally elected Democrats, takes Mr. Ahmadinejad at his word.

His word essentially goes something like this...."I hate you America!!! You, you Great Satan. I hate your Jewish friends even worse. And given the chance, I hope to start WWIII and reduce the West and the Jews to ashes". I paraphrase. Of course he did not say precisely that. What he did say was far worse, far more redundant, far more ridiculous and ultimately far more ignored by our Neville Chamberlain act-alike President.

So, yeah, I am highly offended, that FEMA couches behind disaster preparedness rhetoric that implores Joe Citizen to get his game on just in case Katrina's evil twin bounces off the troposphere and viciously descends upon Omaha or San Diego or Schenectady, particularly when what they really mean to say is Uncle Sam is somewhat resigned to the notion that wacked despots like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might nuke the USA or our friends. Now rather, they are making sure that those of us lucky enough to withstand the initial incineration will be adequately hydrated, have meeting places, and have access to cell phones to contact the steaming cellular ashes of our kin.

Sorry for being a downer. But this is the sad truth. And it will remain the sad truth until this unpalatable reality comes to the forefront of the American electorate's foggy, entitlement-focused brain stem and the arguments of guys like Gingrich and Bolton are taken seriously and they are revered as the genuine American patriots and heroes that they most assuredly are. - W.S.

Game On: Wesley Mouch vs. US Constitution

2011-09-21T15:43:00.001-05:00

The California Corridor by Victor Davis Hanson

2011-09-19T07:45:00.001-05:00

September 18, 2011
The California Corridor
Some Lessons on Government Largesse From the New Frontier
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

The Great Warpath

This summer it has been a softer, modern version of living in a cabin on the Great Warpath circa 1740 near Albany or Montreal (in this regard, take a look at Eliot Cohen’s new book Conquered into Liberty on the origins of the American way of war), readying oneself for the next break-in — so our inland “California Corridor” has become from Bakersfield to Sacramento.

More specifically, I have been on the lookout around my farm for a predatory, nearly new, grey/silver Toyota truck that drives in and then speeds out — always a day or so before the nocturnal theft. He’s clever, this caser — and audacious too, like a wily Sherman tank prowling through the hedgerows. (Why, if poor, is he not home growing a tomato garden or scouring the roadside for the ubiquitous tossed aluminum cans and plastic bottles?)

On three separate occasions from June to August, I have had copper wire stripped out of pumps, the barn ransacked, and the two locks pried off the shop and various things stolen. (Why did they steal buckets of 1900 antique bolts and square nails and leave alone a drill press and grinder? Ease of recycling? Ignorance?)

When Metal Grows Legs

One of the stranger things in the California Corridor is to periodically walk around a barnyard and notice: “Hmm, that set of rusted furrowers is gone? Hmmm, what happened to those sections of 2-inch pipe? Hmmm, didn’t I have an old compressor next to the shed? Have I got dementia, or wasn’t there once upon a time three metal ladders leaning against the shop?” It is as if they became animate, grew legs, and quietly walked off in the sunset.

Hippo Regius

Twice I ran into the barnyard to see the truck, with its two gangbanger youths, peel off in clouds of dust. (And, yes, as a CSU ex-professor, I know the party line: the dominant culture neglects/exploits/oppresses/fill in the blanks the “other” to such a degree that he sometimes must lash out, or, on occasion, to find validation, might just do something illegal like steal buckets of antique nails, or illogical, like in poverty buying a new truck, and thus so disturbs/finally wins the attention of those with privilege and their self-constructed norms. Been there and heard that for thirty years).

The Toyota is always around when theft occurs, and always speeding off when anyone spots it. Rural California is also like North Africa circa 420 AD: the few family farms left are mostly fenced or walled, the dogs large, the owners armed — trying to survive against organized Vandal attacks. All we need are mosaics in the courtyard portraying happier times as a testament to future archeologists. Maybe a “Cave Canem!” on the doorstep.

I know of no neighboring farm that has not been broken into or fought/scared off such intruders. (The urban counterpart in our town are a few municipal workers stealing their own city manhole covers; two ex-policemen, like rogue legionaries, now up on felony charges; or Gothic-like gangs, prying off all the bronze dedicatory plaques from the hallowed buildings. Perhaps they are similar to the bullet-hungry occupying Ottomans in 16th-century Greece, destroying classical temples and shrines to find and melt down the lead seals over metal block clamps — on the theory that someone 2,000 years earlier knew a lot more about making lead than did they, or maybe impoverished Greeks around 1850 finishing up the destruction of antiquity by fracting and melting down the scattered marble blocks for lime whitewash.)

Then and Now

So it is that in 1935 poor people scraped and saved to cast a bronze plaque for their Depression-era new city hall, and in 2011 rather more affluent people ripped it off to melt it down for a layaway payment on some chrome rims or another round of meth.

Civilization ends when the pampered beneficiaries of the hard work of the now dead have the luxury of ignoring how hard it was — and is — to build shelter from the elements, to erect public buildings from scrub, to grow food and sprout farms from sage. Our contemporary criminals are protected from the elemental struggle and so have the indulgence to gnaw away at civilization’s veneer — and we, in our conspiratorial silence about them, likewise forgot that to keep still about the destruction of the work of others is to be complicit in it.

Jaws on Wheels

Seven days ago, I left to teach here at Hillsdale for my month vacation. My son, back home on the farm — he often rushes out armed when trucks come into the driveway at night — called. He mentioned in passing that the Toyota was back, Jaws-like circling around the farm in short bursts of speed to see if anyone was there. (The modus operandi in the rural California hinterlands is to drive into a farm, check if anyone comes out, if so, either peel out or even stay put to “inquire” about a “rental” or “work.” If no one comes out, then break a window, grab a TV or computer and speed off. Also: Please do not suggest, “call the sheriff”; I have and even “filled out a report” over the phone, no less. Enough said. And yes, I probably should sell the 140-year-old farm and move away, but also probably won’t. Why leave and give in to barbarism? There are still far more good than lawless people in the valley.)

Stealing Up For a Truck?

My point in this long excursus? Note the description “late-model Toyota.” I think it is a Tacoma, maybe 2009-11, so not a cheap truck by any means.

Earlier another youth drove in without seeing me mowing the lawn. I ran up; startled he stammered, “Hey, mister, I’m only looking for scrap metal to buy.” (What is it with the national epidemic with good wire or scrap metal?)

I’ll pass on his shoulder to finger sleeve tattoos, the ink drops under the eyes, the shaved head, wife-beater T-shirt, the inked-in but impressive religious icon tattooed on the neck, and the whole nine yards. As I wrote earlier, I immediately noticed brand new hot-water tanks, still in their labeled cardboard containers, in the bed of his truck. They seemed very “metal” to me, but not very “scrap.” Words were exchanged and he backed out.

Here’s the point: he too drove a brand new truck, this one a custom-painted fire-engine red Dodge, hopped up, with an expensive stereo blaring.

Chrome-rimmed Poverty?

Where are we going with this?

Yes, I confess once more to the same destination as the flash mobs and the London riots. What we think in the West now as too little is far too much. Both these thieves could trade in their multi-thousand-dollar trucks for cash to buy food, rather than steal the property of others and cause mayhem to make their payments. Heck, the rims alone are worth $1000.

(Thieves and gangbangers create a climate of general fear; they ruin the sense of tranquility, and they betray 150 years of collective labor of the now dead to create civilization from near nothing. Shame on them. Americans should not need to have armored rural mail boxes.) To suggest that they could do without the trucks or go without the dole, is not — channeling the president’s most recent speech warning against anti-government zealots — the same as wanting children to suffer from mercury poisoning or to render us helpless against the healthcare industry or to destroy government and want to start over from scratch.

More Federal Cash to the Rescue

So it is too with the federal government. In 2008 the housing market collapsed due to Wall Street speculation in sub-prime paper, dishonest banks, and real estate agents pushing mortgages and houses, and to be fair, either stupid or greedy unqualified house buyers who, late to a doomed game of musical chairs, thought even they, as the music ended, could find cheap loans, buy a home, earn thousands in instant “equity,” borrow against it, and get “free” cash.

But the glue that held the entire amorphous mess together were federally-guaranteed loans backed by Freddie and Fannie, agencies that were guided by congressional politics and not market worries — and themselves skimmed by incompetent bureaucrats who ended up millionaires. Take away those multibillion-dollar guarantors, and the market would have precluded the unqualified, the Wall Street roguery would have been neutered, and the inevitable housing bust would have been serious rather than catastrophic.

They Borrowed All For Us

Then there was George Bush’s 2008 multitrillion-dollar “stimulus” that “saved” the country, but destroyed the real progress he had made from 2006 to 2008 in addressing mounting debt. Then there was Barack Obama’s “second” $800 million “shovel-ready” stimulus. Now, of course, discredited Keynesians post facto decry its timid minuteness — but go back to January 2009 and read the op-eds. Then there was ebullition that Obama had taken the big dare and gone “big.” Only spending of that magnitude, we were lectured, would save us — as in funding “millions of green jobs” and “investments” and “infrastructure.” It was a weird time of Van Jones’ fakery, and preachy assurances/warnings from Geithner, Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, and Summers. Pelosi et al. were even bragging that there was no need to read the vast borrowing bills before they were passed.

Money, Money Everywhere — and Not a Drop of Prosperity

We know that, like the first stimulus, the second went into the hands of those who were pretty well off; if banks and Wall Street profited the first time from conservative largesse, the second left-wing version enriched pseudo-green soon-to-be-bankrupt companies, pension funds, municipal and state employees, unions, and environmental bureaucracies.

Now we are supposed to be saved by Stimulus III. At nearly $500 billion in a single year, it may prove the largest single year payout in history. And we are assured it will not go to Wall Street, big banks, green companies, broke city and state governments, and “shovel ready” projects, but instead be “invested” in “work” programs fixing “infrastructure.” (Note the president no longer can use words and phrases like “shovel ready,” “green jobs,” or “stimulus”; they have all gone the way of sermons on “civility.”)

But does anyone dare imagine that what got us into this mess in 2008 and kept us stuck through 2011 are these huge federal programs that distort market forces while piling up trillions of dollars in debt, destroying rather than enhancing personal initiative? Both employers and workers are losing incentives, the former better off are ossified in fear of losing something, the latter worse off calcified in assurances of getting something.

Subsidizing Stasis

Maybe it is a fine and noble thing that the Obama administration vastly extended unemployment insurance. And, bravo, that nearly 50 million are now on food stamps. But a tragic voice from the past warns us that the more we diminish human incentives and guarantee a sort of cushioned permanent poverty, two things result: one, fewer people scramble to find productive work; and, two, envy sharpens as they begin to turn on their benefactors as being cheap, or mean-spirited in never giving quite enough to ensure parity with “them.” A cherry-red new truck or silver Toyota is never quite what others might have.

Epitaph

The problem with those who invaded my farm this summer was not poverty, but too much — at least in the sense of driving late-model trucks as they sought to destroy the lives and tranquility of others to get things that, by the very fact of their mode of transportation, they did not need. For the last two years, I have witnessed two constants: late-model cars in the valley shopping centers, an epidemic of obesity apparent to the naked eye, majorities on plastic food stamp debt cards, without apparent work in mid-morning, and a general unhappiness in the check-out lines that the government, state, city, etc. is not doing enough for them. All that is coupled with a media message of a cruel, heartless society that needs to do more for its oppressed — and a popular culture that damns any so witless and heartless for pointing the contradictions out.

Welfare on Top and Bottom

The welfare state, aside from being broke, is eroding initiative and warping reality — both for the elite at the top, like the executives who just milked a half-trillion dollars in sweetheart loans from some idiotic “green” bureaucrat, to the late-model truck drivers robbing productive farms to pay for their stereos and hydraulic-lifters.

So when the president speaks of “millions of green jobs” and “bringing jobs home,” I worry.

You see, I wish it were true, but I have doubts. I can imagine an employer offering to open a new state-of-the-art plant, but I fear only for millions in guaranteed federal loans, to be justified on some faddish green or “put people first” con.

Then I see someone like “sons of bitches” Jimmy Hoffa, or the Seattle longshoremen, or an NLRB plant-shutting academic nincompoop entering the picture to “have labor do its part.” And I don’t know what we are going to do to get those working, like the late-model truck-driving thieves — would such idle promise to be innovative, show up on time, be honest and disciplined, be familiar with written blueprints and warnings about their lathes and grinders, and be more productive than their competitors overseas?

And so I ask myself: “Is all this more efficient, more productive than what the Chinese offer?” “Will our solar panel or drill press be better built and at a cheaper cost and more durable?” “Have we justified our standard of living that allows us to slack while others toil?” “Is there a limit to the borrowed subsidies?” “How many engineers, brain surgeons, and savvy mechanics is California — near last in its high school test scores — producing that are better than those found elsewhere?”

Reality Cannot Be Reinvented

The tragic voice now shouts, not whispers: “Of course, this is not sustainable, you idiot! You must put real hope of profit and greater fear of loss into the employer who is freed to sink or swim on his own, a sense of challenge in the heart of the scrambling workers, and end the subsidies that allow someone to steal as a pastime to custom paint his truck cherry red and lift his truck bed up and down with a button, while the government gives him cash for his food and shelter.”

We are in a weird predicament where too much is not enough and the medicine is worse than the malady — and saying just that earns one ridicule.

It is not Barack Obama’s fault; he is a mere totem, just the overdue dividend of our long ago collective investment.

Again, if he didn’t exist, we would have to invent him.

Announcements

On this topic of decline or slogging through: Rome collapsed in the West in the latter fifth century AD, although the series of Gothic invasions posed no more of a threat than what both the republic and empire had thwarted many times over the prior 700 years of Roman history. In contrast, in the East, Constantinople fought off invasions from the north, east, and south and persevered for another millennium. That contrast raises the question about the nature of external threats and internal inability to meet them — when and why do unlikely civilizations survive and likely ones no survive? I’ll talk about that on Monday, October 3, in Boston at 6 p.m. at a convention sponsored by the Retirement Income Industry Association [1]. On another note, be sure to look into a counter-commemoration conference [2] protesting the “anti-racism” so-called “Durban III” symposium, to be held across the street from the UN in New York on September 22. If one collates the new axis of Iran, Hezbollah, Turkey, Hamas, and perhaps revolutionary Egypt, then Israel is back to 1967, but this time with enemies energized not by sclerotic Sovietism, but radical Islamism. What is eerie is that Israel remains a constitutional state, while its neighbors turn to theocracy — while the West, and increasingly the US, blames it for these metamorphoses.

Bill Whittle (my new favorite lover of Liberty)

2011-09-08T16:59:00.000-05:00

I know there is a fair amount of dread out there right now. We’re ramping down one war, and ramping up another; the threat of total financial collapse seems actually possible; the moral decay and loss of decency in much of society is endemic and spreading… Good Lord, we’re seeing famine, pestilence and death… lions and lambs lying down together, plagues of frogs from the skies! – and no one seems to know exactly what is happening.

And a lot of people are starting to think that it’s hopeless. My friends, it’s not hopeless. It’s dire! But it’s not hopeless. It’s never hopeless.

You see, people have been here before. Not us, but other people. The great conceit of the modern age is that this is, in fact, a modern age. But it isn’t.

Let’s start at the top: with Barack Obama. Is he:

A. A Muslim-sympathizing, neo-Marxist true believer, who sees America and Capitalism as the principle barrier to fairness and world peace?

Or B, is he merely an empty suit, an unwitting pawn of much larger, hidden forces?

Or C, simply a self-obsessed, incompetent narcissist who happened to be at the right place at the right time.

I’ve given this a lot of careful thought, and I think the real answer is yes.

He is a product of his time; a product of a civilization that has been dynamic and successful long enough for its prosperity to feel inevitable and indestructible. It’s not even really his fault. It has always been pretty clear from his record who he is and what he believes, and we elected him because the country was in the mood for a “progressive” president.

But Progressivism is not progressive – it’s ancient. Cyclical. It’s circular. It is, in fact, the symptom and the eventual cause of impending collapse.

In fact, in all of human history, there has been only one genuinely progressive, genuinely liberating idea: a lightning bolt across the pages of history – the why in 1776, the how in 1787 – the idea of limited government, god-given rights, personal liberty and rule by the vast collective wisdom and industry of the common man, and not by the bored, pampered and self-hating elites that have run everything before and since. This is a once-in-history idea. This is why we have to conserve it. We have to conserve this fundamentally liberal idea.

I said that what we today call Progressivism is in fact ancient and circular. Don’t believe me? Well, the great roman orator Cicero, speaking in defense of his friend Sestius, around 55 BC, said – quote:

“Gaius gracchus proposed a grain law. The people were delighted with it because it provided an abundance of food without work. The good men, however, fought against it because they thought the masses would be attracted away from hard work and toward idleness, and they saw the state treasury would be exhausted.”

When a society – after generations of hard work, sacrifice and hardship – reaches a certain level of prosperity, “Progressives” like Bill Maher, Janeane Garofolo, Rosie O’Donnell and Gaius Gracchus – that last Progressive died in 121 BC – assume that the prosperity is endless, and push for more and more people to get more and more goods and services for less and less work. Why? Because – as today, in America, as with the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottomans, the Mongols, Rome, Greece, Eqypt, Babylon… They do it for political power. They live for political power. This “Progressivism” is ancient, recurring, tyrannical and ruinous.

And we voted for it. Just like the Romans did.

We can see from Cicero that throughout history, the disease is always the same – too much security and prosperity breeds laziness, narcissism, resentment and entitlement.

So if this is the cycle of civilization, and we see these same recurring signs around us in abundance today – how can there be any hope?

There’s hope because we are Americans. We’re different. Not genetically – although we are in fact the world’s mutts and that is an enormous strength. No, we are different, unique and exceptional culturally – because unlike the Babylonians, the Eqyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, the Turks, the Spanish, the French, The British and all the rest – we have actually done it. We have created the political tools to limit power and reward hard work, and we have lived with them for almost a quarter millennia. It is only by restoring and strengthening these truly progressive, but now-called conservative ideals that we can break the cycle of history.

How?

Well, first, we have to know how we got into this mess in the first place.

This time around – our cycle – the rot began to take hold in America due primary to a group called The Frankfurt School. Keep in mind that the Frankfurt school is merely a product of where they appear on this great wheel of history – there have been dozens of civilizations that had their own “Frankfurt schools” in languages now lost to history.

But right after World War One, in Frankfurt, Germany the Institute for Social Research – they wanted to call themselves the “Institute for Marxism” but that was too on the nose – was left wondering why the world communist revolution — predicted as a certainty by Marxist social science – was not leading to the international revolution of the proletariat, the actual common working man.

And they figured out that capitalism – damn it! – was providing enough comfort and material gain, enough of an increase in the working man’s standard of living – that it just simply wasn’t going to happen. Ever.

Now, one kind of person might look at this and say, hooray! People’s lives are getting better – guess we weren’t needed after all.

But not these guys. These guys felt they had to bring heaven to earth.

And so they asked themselves: if the vanguard of the revolution wasn’t going to be the worker, then who would it be? And the answer they came up with was: the dispossessed.

The Neo-Marxist revolution would not attack the capitalist economy – that was too successful. The target of the new Marxist revolution would be the Culture.

Marxist philosophers like Antonia Gramsci, and later, Saul Alinski – personal hero to such present-day fellow travelers as Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton and, of course, The President of the United States – started to create narratives – stories – about America. This rapidly evolved into a philosophy called “Critical Theory” and the idea of Critical Theory was to attack the dominant culture – that would be us – from all sides, simultaneously.

For instance, Black Americans would be told that their labor built the entire country, while White Americans merely sat back and essentially stole everything. Black slave labor did build the cotton economies of the Southern Confederacy, but the entire Confederacy had less factory capacity than New York City alone.

Nonetheless, many black Americans today have been taught that all of this belongs to them and not the truth, which is that that they were, and are, an integral and essential part of the group effort that built this country together.

Likewise, women are told that we live in an evil patriarchy, where all men are tyrants and potential rapists, determined to keep them in a form of domestic slavery, instead of being their partners and helpmates and husbands and protectors.

Gays are told not that this is one of the most inclusive and forgiving societies in the history of the world, but rather home to knuckle-dragging, murdering Neanderthals – when in plain sight, across the seas, one and a half billion Muslims routinely hang or stone or crush to death innocent people merely because of their sexual practices.

And on and on.

And when you try to argue against this social weapon of theirs, this Narrative, this lie that they tell again and again, well then, prepare for their counter-attack, which is called Political Correctness – the attempt to put the argument out of bounds before it can be had.

They use terms like Hate Speech and Racism. They want to put our arguments and rebuttals out of bounds so that they don’t have to hear them or deal with them. They have to exclude those arguments because if they don’t, those arguments are going to kick their asses and they know it.

And by the way: charges of Racism only work on decent people. You go up to a Klansman or a Nazi and call them a racist, and they say “duh!” Of course they’re racists. They’re proud of being racists. But you go up to someone who is not a racist, a person who finds racism appalling and disgusting, and tell them what they are saying is racism – even when it not only isn’t racism, but is in fact the opposite of racism– well, they’ll shut up. Mission Accomplished.

The objectives of the Frankfurt School, of Gramsci and Alinski in their assault on the culture, were laid out in detail and were very clear: Eliminate not only the voice, but the very idea of reason. Destroy history. Delegitimize shared morality. Medicate instead of discipline children. Promote the idea that problems are so complex that only elitists, experts and academics can discuss, let alone solve them. A later pair of American Marxist philosophers developed what became known as the Cloward-Piven strategy: overwhelm America’s social systems – welfare, health care, immigration, etc. by telling people they were owed things, and by intentionally overwhelming them, cause them to collapse – leaving nothing but smoking wreckage, and no where to turn but to the government.

But above all, for this Frankfurt school strategy to work, it needed to foster resentment, envy, hopelessness and despair.

And it’s been spectacularly successful.

My fellow Americans… we are in an information war, a battle of narratives, and if that analysis is true then you and I are the last best hope of the last best hope. We are, together, soldiers in this narrative war for America and for civilization.

So can we win?

Of course we can win!

Let me tell you where we are right now. We’re on the Titanic. Now hang on! There are some amazing things about that night that not many people know about. Things that give me hope.

Some people know that if the lookouts aboard Titanic had spotted the iceberg as little as five or six seconds earlier, Titanic would have been able miss that wall of ice by a few feet and would have survived to come home.

But very few people know that if those lookouts had spotted that iceberg only five or six seconds later — Titanic still would have survived. You see, Titanic was designed to remain afloat with up to five or her forward watertight compartments flooded – but not six. Had the lookout on Titanic seen that iceberg only a few seconds later, she would have hit it straight-on. It would have crumpled the bow, and a few hundred people would have been killed in the collision – but she would have stayed afloat, and instead of 1,490 people drowning in those icy waters, she would have limped home to New York, been refitted and repaired, and continued to do what she was built to do: bring people to America – to freedom. She represented what was best in us: vision, industry, ingenuity and hard work. That ship deserved to come home.

Some people misinterpret this to mean that there were a few seconds where Titanic could have been saved. It’s just the opposite. There were only a few seconds – ten or fifteen seconds – where Titanic could have been sunk. That iceberg went right down the side of the ship, staving in compartment after compartment. Progressivism is doing the same thing to our culture: flooding academia…movies…television…news media…comedy…music…government policy… damaging and flooding, one by one, the social institutions that kept this ship of freedom, ingenuity and prosperity afloat.

Like an iceberg, the danger from progressivism lies beneath the surface: the slow erosion of the work ethic, the fostering of division and resentment and unearned entitlement, the abandonment of the entire idea of decency and morality – all of this beneath the placid surface of simply claiming to help people.

My friends, it far too late to avoid this ancient iceberg, this giant dark wall that has sunk civilization after civilization under the calm disguise of compassion and concern. We cannot steer around it. If we are to avoid that fate, there is only one option left.

We need to ram the iceberg. We need to hit it head-on. We need to put in all the power we have – all of the power – and go right at the heart of that monster. Because everyone talks about what the iceberg did to Titanic, but no one talks about what Titanic did to the iceberg.

You see, I know something critical about this iceberg out in front of us, and that is this: that iceberg is hollow. It’s hollow.

Even the people who believe in it most strongly know it’s a lie. That’s why they have to lie to you about what they believe. They know, in their heart of hearts, that this philosophy has been the ruin of civilization in every one of the countless times it has been applied. They know – consciously or not – that in the last century alone their ideas have cost the lives of no less than 150 million people executed, or starved to death, to bring this paradise to earth.

And unlike the brave and selfless men and women that daily risk, and often give their lives in defense of freedom for their fellow man, these people believe in nothing greater than the sound of their own voice and are willing to die for nothing.

What would Bill Maher, or Janeane Garofolo, or Rosie O’Donnel be willing to give their own lives for? Nothing. Nothing.

It’s hollow. That iceberg is hollow. And we need to ram it, and we need to ram it now. It’s going to crush the front of our ship, and severely damage us as a culture – but we will survive. And by surviving, we can repair the damage and make ourselves better than we were.

We, for the first time in human history, have an example of what a free society looks like. We, for the first time in history, are children of the only real progressives in all of human history. And we, for the first time in history, have the technology that allows common people to talk to each other, to encourage and inform each other, and to make an end run around the suicidal elites and their suicidal, dying media organs.

We can do it. And we’re gonna do it. We are going to whip these communists out of their boots. And starting next time, we’ll start figuring out exactly how.

Being Obama It’s all about him by JONATHAN V. LAST, The Weekly Standard

2011-09-05T11:00:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time we had a president who sulked that his relatively uneventful tenure denied him the chance to thrust his way into greatness. In the days after 9/11, the New York Times carried a quotation from a “close friend” about Bill Clinton’s misfortune: “He has said there has to be a defining moment in a presidency that really makes a great presidency. He didn’t have one.” Clinton, the Times reported, was “described by friends as a frustrated spectator, unable to guide the nation through a crisis that is far bigger than anything he confronted in his eight-year tenure."

This tracked with earlier accounts from two of Clinton’s advisers. George Stephanopoulos wrote that Clinton “envied Lincoln his enemies, knowing that it takes a moral challenge to create a memorable presidency.” In his book about his White House years, Dick Morris related a conversation he had with Clinton about his place in history. “You can’t be first tier,” Morris explained gently to his boss, “unless unanticipated historical forces put you there.” “Like a war,” Clinton agreed glumly, before asking, a little more hopefully, “Okay, second tier?”

At the time, this sort of wistfulness seemed the height of vanity. Today, it’s almost charmingly quaint.

Earlier this year on March 11, a Friday, Japan was struck by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake. An hour later a 30-foot tidal wave swamped the northeast portion of the country, killing thousands and leaving devastation in its wake. Four hours after that, Japan declared itself in a state of nuclear emergency. Within days, at least three of the country’s nuclear reactors were in states of partial meltdown. While the crisis in Japan was accelerating, oil prices continued to hover around $100 per barrel, America’s domestic economic recovery continued to disintegrate, a revolution in Libya continued to blossom into a full-fledged civil conflict, and American troops continued to fight in Afghanistan.

On Saturday, March 12, President Obama played golf. On Monday, March 14, President Obama visited a middle school in Northern Virginia to kick off a week’s worth of activities centered around “Winning the Future” of education. Because it was a big day, he also kicked off a “Sunshine Week” celebration to trumpet reforms to the Freedom of Information Act. On Tuesday, March 15, President Obama sat down with ESPN to tape a segment about his NCAA March Madness picks.

As he surveyed the globe you could practically hear Obama thinking to himself, Chance the Gardener-style, I like to watch . . .

We’ve seen this President Obama all too often. It started with the stimulus. Instead of crafting his own bill, one which put government money into projects with both economic impact and practical benefit—like, say, defense procurement—he handed the job to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. The result was $787 billion for Democratic clients and “shovel-ready projects” that, Obama now says laughingly, were never really shovel-ready. He took the same approach with his health care reform act, arguing and arm-twisting from the sidelines without getting involved in the specifics of the legislation. After having a budget rejected by the Senate (97‑0) last March, he declined to put forward another plan. Oh, he talked a lot about what his plans might be. His collected mutterings on the subject prompted Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf to quip, “We don’t estimate speeches.”

But it’s not just his executive approach to policy. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up last summer, Obama spent a lot of time on peripheral activities. As the rig was leaking in May, he sat for an interview about basketball with Marv Albert, toured the country promoting the stimulus, and met with Duke’s basketball team. During a memorial service for the workers killed on the oil rig, he was on his way to a fundraiser in California. When he did finally get down to Louisiana, the very first thing Obama did after he walked off the plane—literally—was put his arm around Gov. Bobby Jindal and take him aside. He did not want to talk about the spill in the Gulf. Jindal explains what followed in his book, Leadership and Crisis:

I was expecting words of concern about the oil spill, worry about the pending ecological disaster, and words of confidence about how the federal government was here to help. Or perhaps he was going to vent about BP’s slow response. But no, the president was upset about something else. And he wanted to talk about, well, food stamps. Actually, he wanted to talk about a letter that my administration had sent to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack a day earlier.

The letter was rudimentary, bureaucratic, and ordinary. . . . We were simply asking the federal government to authorize food stamps for those who were now unemployed because of the oil spill. Governors regularly make these sorts of requests to the federal government when facing disaster.

But somehow, for some reason, President Obama had personalized this. And he was upset.

There was not a word about the oil spill. He was concerned about looking bad because of the letter. “Careful,” he said to me, “this is going to get bad for everyone.”

This summer it wasn’t a single oil rig that exploded but the entire nation’s economy, which is now rushing toward a double-dip recession. In the last month America’s long-term sovereign debt rating was downgraded, the Dow Jones shed nearly 10 percent of its value, unemployment stayed firmly over 9 percent, and the Fiserv/Case-Shiller Indexes pushed their projections for a housing recovery even further back, to the second quarter of 2012. All of which prompted President Obama to travel around the Midwest on a bus for three days. On the fourth day, he flew to Martha’s Vineyard for a well-deserved rest.

What makes President Obama’s executive passivity so interesting is that it seems to be a symptom not of policy uncertainty, but of personal narcissism. The president is free to delegate the tasks of the president because he’s already done the important job of simply showing up. It’s the same impulse that leads him to make all sorts of claims about the singularity of his tenure. For instance, at an August 15 town hall event in Minnesota, he boasted that after his administration took control of General Motors and Chrysler, the two companies posted profits for the “first time in decades,” even though both companies were profitable as recently as 2004. Similarly, he recently lectured reporters that,

What I have done—and this is unprecedented, by the way; no administration has done this before—is I’ve said to each agency, “Don’t just look at current regulations or don’t just look at future regulations, regulations that we’re proposing. Let’s go backwards and look at regulations that are already on the books and if they don’t make sense, let’s get rid of them.”

The Government Accounting Office sheepishly noted that “every president since President Carter has directed agencies to evaluate or reconsider existing regulations.” These little delusions give a window into Obama’s view of the relationship between his office and his self. Policy and initiative aren’t the point of his presidency. He is.

President Obama never tires of inserting himself into measurement of the world around him. Bestowing the Medal of Honor on Staff Sgt. Sal Giunta at the White House last November, President Obama felt it important to add his personal endorsement of the man: “Now, I’m going to go off-script here for a second and just say I really like this guy.” In a statement about the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, Obama began by noting, “One year ago, I was humbled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize—an award that speaks to our highest aspirations, and that has been claimed by giants of history and courageous advocates who have sacrificed for freedom and justice.” On the Sunday after the 2010 midterm elections, Obama appeared on 60 Minutes to talk about his view of America going forward. “I think that I’ve learned that America is incredibly resilient,” he said, before continuing, “I think I’ve learned about myself that I’m pretty resilient too.” That’s right, America: You can knock Barack Obama down, but he’s going to get right back up and govern you, like it or not.

When people don’t appreciate how important the job of being Barack Obama is, our president can get a little testy. “As time passes, you start taking it for granted that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States,” he told a group of donors in March. “But we should never take it for granted. . . . I hope that all of you still feel that sense of excitement and that sense of possibility.” Last November he met with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, who began his remarks by thanking the president for setting the “tone right” for their talks. Obama huffed, “That was my goal. Every once in a while, I do things right.”

In his postelection press conference that month, Obama complained that one of the problems his party has is that Americans don’t get to see him doing the hard work of being president. For instance, he mentioned that he reads letters from ordinary Americans all the time:

Those letters that I read every night, some of them just break my heart. Some of them provide me encouragement and inspiration. But nobody is filming me reading those letters. And so it’s hard, I think, for people to get a sense of, well, how is he taking in all this information?

It was good of the president to let voters off the hook for not understanding how hard he works on their behalf. And he didn’t have to do that. Especially since, back in August 2009, the White House did film him sitting up late at night reading letters from Ordinary Americans. They even posted the video on the White House website and YouTube.

Maybe that’s why the president sometimes seems exasperated with the country he’s allowed to follow him. Just two days before the earthquake hit Japan, the New York Times carried an amazing little nugget: “Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China,” the Times reported. “As one official put it, ‘No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in [Cairo’s] Tahrir Square.’ ”

He’s right—Hu has a pretty sweet deal. Yet it’s not clear that Obama really would be happy as president of China. After all, China’s a big country with a lot of problems, too. And even Hu Jintao is expected to show some initiative. Tibetan monks don’t suppress themselves. But at least Hu probably has some awesome electronic gadgets at his disposal. Holograms, videophones, maybe even a Death Ray. Last spring Obama complained during a fundraiser, “The Oval Office, I always thought I was going to have really cool phones and stuff. . . . I’m like, c’mon guys, I’m the president of the United States. Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen comes up? It doesn’t happen.”

But we should forgive Obama his mutterings. Petulance is merely a sister of narcissism—and it’s not as if we didn’t know what we were getting into with this president. In 2004 Ryan Lizza penned a profile of Obama for the Atlantic Monthly. Obama was running for Senate at the time, largely unopposed. Lizza sat with Obama one day while the candidate was making fundraising phone calls. As he talked to the donors, he started drawing a little sketch on the newspaper lying in front of him. Lizza reported:

I couldn’t help noticing, when we sat down to talk in the dilapidated storefront that houses his Springfield campaign headquarters, that the blue-pen drawing he’d doodled on his newspaper during fundraising calls was a portrait of himself.

Bill Clinton’s vanity was that he wished he could have been at the center of a world historical event. Barack Obama’s vanity is that he believes he is a world historical event. And the greatness of his being dwarfs any necessity to establish greatness through action. That’s why, despite his passivity as president, we’re likely to see a much more vigorous Obama in the coming months as he switches from governing to campaigning. However ambivalent he may be about leading the country, arguing for the indispensability of Barack Obama is the one project that has always commanded his full attention.

Perry v. Ochamberlain

2011-08-30T10:11:00.000-05:00

Liberal Psychoses by Victor Davis Hanson

2011-08-29T04:08:00.000-05:00

August 25, 2011
Liberal Psychoses
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

How are we to make sense of flash mobbing, the London rioting, more hatred expressed for the Tea Party, more calls for ever more debt and spending, and Barack Obama’s dive below 40% approval in the polls? Let me backtrack a bit.

Paleolithic Liberalism

I grew up with die-hard Roosevelt Democrats. Packers, shippers, and distributors made all the profits; farmers, we were told, did the work. Co-ops like Sun-Maid were noble; in contrast, grasping private packers paid on “consignment”: give us your produce in an oversupplied market and we will get what we can, when we can, for it. Often plums and peaches were dumped, and we paid the packing and storage fees for the privilege of losing the crop. Unfairness, not the capricious nature of market capitalism, is what we wished to hear.

In my youth, my mother helped out in the “Dollars for Democrats” campaign. I remember the 1960s’ talking points still, as she drove us through the poorer sections of the San Joaquin Valley raising money for JFK (Nixon would win the state by 36,000 votes). We had high hopes for Pat Brown and Sen. Claire Engle. Charles “Gus” Garrigus was our local assemblyman. At eight I met a young Alan Cranston at a run-down café on the old 99 Highway in Selma, a sort of awkward gangly guy still at that stage talking about hard-core, bread-and-butter populism.

After all, what was so unfair about wanting a 40-hour week, overtime pay, disability and unemployment insurance, public works and infrastructure (e.g., the California water projects, LAX, the state freeway system), fair housing, money for the new JC/CSU/UC tripartite “master plan” of higher California education? It was not uncommon in those days to see unpaved streets and a few outhouses — something I was told the distant wealthy could avoid but the state should not.

Most of my parents’ and grandparents’ friends, however, were Grange/Farm Bureau/Chamber of Commerce Republicans. I emphasize “friends” since in the early sixties, pre-Vietnam-protest age, politics still never impeded friendships. Most of my mom’s rural friends were amused rather than angered by her genuine liberalism, since it was directed at trying to improve the lot of the working poor, who were ubiquitous and often next door.

Remember, this was pre-Great Society stuff, well before globalized cheap material goods, the age of food stamps, two years of unemployment insurance, aid to dependent families, and the entire government umbilical cord. Most readers will shake their heads and now mutter: “Victor, Victor, did you not see even at seven that the obvious, the logical result of that idealized government help would be something like the annual $1.6 trillion debt and entitlement culture of the present? Did not Plato warn us that the egalitarian mandate has no logical end?”

Perhaps, but in those days it was not hard to think that the ‘”Okies” and “poor folks” and “Mexican-Americans” in the San Joaquin Valley needed some sort of foundational equality of opportunity — given the scarcity of capital and endemic prejudice. My most distinct memory of first grade was hygiene and dentistry problems: half the kids had rotten teeth and clothes that were unclean. (I remember Jimmy Hopson pulling out his front [permanent] tooth in second grade and showing it off.) Stern teachers from the southwest, with Texas and Oklahoma accents, lectured us on how to shampoo and comb our hair, change socks and underwear, brush our teeth, and use soap under our arms and on the backside of our arms. We were to “make something of ourselves” and be “presentable,” the sort of people “we ourselves would want to sit next to.” “Relief” carried the same stigma associated with “hypos” and “switchblades” or “bums” and “hobos.”

Word and Deed

I detour here, because late 1950s liberalism was in some sense conservative, given the rural poverty, the lack of high-tech appurtenances, the coming end of the US postwar monopoly in manufactured goods, and the worry over “commies.” Of course, JFK, like FDR, personified noblesse oblige, but mostly the heroic Democrats were guys like Truman and Humphrey. For my dad, FDR had built the B-29s, Truman stopped the North Koreans, and JFK had stood down Castro — some mythic history in that, but not much.

You might think their square-deal politics were naïve, but they were salt-of-the-earth types, whose lifestyles reflected the politics that they advocated, and whose personal tastes were simple. To the best I can recall, there was no manifest contradiction in my grandfather’s voting for JFK in 1960, and his stern warnings about “lazy” “no-goods” who came out to prune for a week, abruptly to quit when they earned enough money for “booze” and “were up to no good.” The new pocket transistor radios, he swore, only encouraged sloth and poor work habits — and he wanted no one on the farm listening to one, us included.

In those days, liberalism, if we can even call it that, was clearly an equality of opportunity idea — whatever the intrinsic contradictions of the prior New Deal that logically led to the Great Society and the other failed “societies” to come. It was still not socialism of the European type, but singularly American and predicated on a “fair shake” as the majority of its adherents’ lives were not too distant from the objects of their worry.

I’ll skip the next half-century, since the tragedy is too well known, and focus instead on the vastly different, contemporary liberal mindset. To be blunt, what strikes us about its recent and most vocal emissaries — politicians such as a Barbara Boxer, John Edwards, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi; or the Hollywood celebrities; or the great fortuned like a Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, or George Soros; or the credentialed technocrats who run the foundations and government agencies, or the high-paid media types in the NY-DC corridor — is how vast apart are the circumstances of their own lives from the objects of their concern. In addition, present-day liberalism finds its most numerous adherents among the upper-middle class suburbanites and those who work for government and enjoy de facto tenure (e.g., the public employee unions, teachers, the public professoriate, etc.).

Let Them Eat Steak

Insulation is the common theme here. To the degree that one’s job insulates one from the vagaries of the marketplace — not just the danger of losing a job, but often the petty humiliation so often integral in making a scarce buck, by selling, peddling, hawking, or working for a business — one is now more likely to support the redistributive state and all its satellite philosophies. And to the degree that one has a good salary and capital, and can buy such insulation — where one lives, where one sends one’s children to school, where one vacations — one is most likely to advocate a sort of politics that will not affect directly oneself. The key then is to insulate oneself from the worry over losing a job and livelihood, either by guaranteed employment or ample wealth. (When the London riots started to hit the “better” sections, then suddenly the police appeared in real numbers and the unapologetic public anger increased.)

In other words, if one opposes charters and vouchers, supports teachers’ unions, praises the present-day public schools, and champions the therapeutic curriculum, one is still hardly likely to put one’s child in the L.A. or Fresno school system. If one is a strong advocate for more state subsidies and redistributive policies, one will not live in an East Palo Alto, an Orange Cove, or the wrong side of St. Louis or Baltimore where the money is aimed. Liberalism is, like all politics, self-interested, embraced by those who receive transfer payments and those in charge of administering the redistributive state. But it also provides psychic exemption to a new upper class and asks little concrete in return — no tutoring of the illegal alien, no side-by-side residency in the Section 8 apartment to help create “community,” no hiring in the progressive law firm of a ghetto intern in lieu of the Yale undergraduate. It is the worst sort of petty hypocrisy: an exemption for the guilty soul through support of the redistributive state aimed at the noble but unapproachable poor —and through a clear disdain for the crass and aspiring middle class, which lacks the taste of the elite and the supposedly tragic nobility of the impoverished and victimized.

The Apotheosis of Barack Obama

Some are surprised that Barack Obama — the community organizer, the hard-core leftist, the pal of Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright (compare the homes of each), the totem of the left — would buy a mansion and worry about the price of arugula. Or that when president, he would play golf more in three years than the aristocratic Bush did in eight. Or that in recessionary times, when iconic presidential sacrifice is critical, the First Family would favor Martha’s Vineyard, Vail, and Costa del Sol over the White House grounds or Camp David.
But this disconnect again is logical not aberrant. It is precisely because Obama rails about “fat cats,” “corporate jet owners,” “millionaires and billionaires,” and pontificates about “redistributive change,” “enough money,” “spread the wealth,” and “unneeded income” that he feels spiritually cleansed and so can satisfy his natural appetites for the rarified good life. On Monday swear that corporate jets blew up the budget, on Tuesday feel free to host corporate jet fly-in donors who pay $50,000 to hear you rail about the pernicious culture of corporate jets. Mutatis mutandis, so too an Al Gore or John Kerry.

Human nature argues that contemporary liberalism does not work; but if one is not proximate to human nature in the raw, then one can find psychological penance in promoting something that will never come back to haunt you. Let a flash mob hit Park Avenue or have a group from East Palo Alto swarm the quad at Stanford, or have a Malibu star’s kid shoved about in a downtown Los Angeles school, or an open borders idealist live in an apartment in Calwa, and then one sees firsthand the real-time dividends of a distant elite channeling state money to the less fortunate.

The Wages of Hypocrisy

Barack Obama has hit 39% approval in the Gallup poll. Pundits point to the debt, to the mixed-up foreign policy, to ObamaCare, to his grating sermons on civility, to his blame-Bush fixations, to the serial banality of his inauthentic cadences and his canned Nixonian “make no mistake about it” and “let me be perfectly clear” emphases. All that is true.

But much of our public weariness stems from his loud liberal hypocrisy. Our president lectures about a certain sort of school he never has sent his child to. He talks about “folks” with whom he has never wished to vacation. Unlike a Truman or Humphrey, he sought office not to help those clingers with whom he might have wished to associate, but to feel good about wanting to help from a safe distance from those with whom he most certainly did not wish to mingle.

Golfing or walking the Martha’s Vineyard beach, in the fashion of Kerry’s 7th estate getaway or million-dollar yacht, makes one fret over “why lucky me?” — and requires an antidote of one or two spread-the-wealth sermons a week.

The weird sudden appearance of smarmy, young urban and highly-educated leftist bloggers, with little experience in the physical world or with manual labor, is likewise logical given that most do not raise families in the barrio or shop in the ghetto, or teach school on the wrong side of town or try to buy a house and support three kids on $70,000, or even hit the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Only such abstract liberal advocacy can square the circle of self-absorbed concerned metrosexuality.

As we saw last week in Britain and in some American cities, liberal redistributionism makes far worse the innate problems it was hailed to solve. But it remains a powerful narcotic to an aberrant elite, one that feels guilty over its apartheid circumstances and is desperately seeking spiritual redemption on the cheap.

Barack Obama was contemporary America’s clearest example of just such an iconic liberalism — both as a purveyor and a recipient. Just as voting for Obama gave a pass to so many, so too for Barack Obama his own rhetoric and advocacy provide a pass for his own preferences. Liberalism has gone from a first-hand concern for equality of opportunity to a psychological condition of very blessed, but equally unhappy, people.

Ten Ways Progressive Policies Harm Society's Moral Character by Dennis Prager

2011-08-26T20:40:00.002-05:00

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society's moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:
1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.
The greatest description of American civilization was written in the early 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans — through myriad associations — took care of one another. Until President Franklin Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state — vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents — Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared.
2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them. But today's workers don't have enough money to sustain the scheme, and there are too few of them to do so. As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, and many American states, like California, are going broke.
3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.
4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work. Americans work considerably harder than Western Europeans, and contrary to liberal thought since Karl Marx, work builds character.
5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality — another expression of narcissism. And the rhetoric of liberalism — labeling each new entitlement a "right" — reinforces this sense of entitlement.
6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation's currency, and they cannot arrest you.
7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband.
8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults. As regards men specifically, I was raised, as were all generations of American men before me, to aspire to work hard in order to marry and support a wife and children. No more. One of the reasons many single women lament the prevalence of boy-men — men who have not grown up — is that the liberal state has told men they don't have to support anybody. They are free to remain boys for as long as they want.
And here is an example regarding both sexes. The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26.
9. As a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evils and even to defend them.
10. The leftist weltanschauung sees society's and the world's great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.
None of this matters to progressives. Against all this destructiveness, they will respond not with arguments to refute these consequences of the liberal welfare state, but by citing the terms "social justice" and "compassion," and by labeling their opponents "selfish" and worse.
If you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.

Call it (lack o') Memory, i.e. Most Egregious Misrepresentation Of Reality Yeesh

2011-08-26T05:17:00.001-05:00

Watching a rerun of a. Law and order episode last night, where these cops get a tip about a dog fight ring,and bust into a house to break it up. The owner is a rich white guy,as are his cohorts. Not just rich but wine collectors (in one scene the homeowner has to put down his glass of wine) in an upper class neighborhood. When they are busted by a black policeman and his superior, wait for it... An Hispanic male, who gets right in whiteys face and asks him if he thinks watching two dogs rip each other to pieces is fun. Later a female district attorney muses that she doesn't mind going after "rich jerks" that host dogfights, she is speaking by the way to a black female police commander, well you can see where this is going. All I could think about was the only people that I ever saw accused of running one of these were either black or Hispanic, and the only rich person was a black football player.
- contributed by Tom S.

What do we need jobs for?

2011-08-26T04:52:00.002-05:00

Contributed by Tom S.

Obama Has Left the Economy in Ruins, by Wayne Allyn Root

2011-08-19T06:15:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama was my college classmate (Columbia University, class of '83). I tried to warn the country that virtually all of my classmates and professors were marxist, despised America, and wanted to bring down capitalism.

I tried to warn the country that Obama would follow the detailed plan of two Columbia professors named Cloward and Piven — a plan designed to destroy capitalism by overwhelming the U.S. economy with government spending, regulations, entitlements, taxes, and debt.

That is precisely why I authored one of the most popular commentaries on the entire Internet in 2010 entitled, “The Obama Economic Plan — Purposely Overwhelming the System to Cause Crisis and Destroy Capitalism.” I predicted Obama’s radical tax and spend policies were designed to crash the system with debt, bring us to our knees, starve business owners (the biggest contributors to his political opposition), make us all doubt capitalism, and dependent on big government.

It’s all come to pass.

I’ve written about this plan for 2 ½ years now. My commentaries have predicted the destruction of the U.S. economy under Barack Obama, the decimation of small business and the middle class, and the start of not only the Obama Great Depression, but what I called “the greatest depression ever.”

Afterall, when the first Great Depression began in 1929, our country had very little debt. We had no obligations for welfare, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. We had no illegal immigrants bankrupting our public schools and hospitals. We didn't have 21 million government employees with bloated salaries and unfunded $100,000 pensions. We had no Obamacare with an obligation to pay for the medical bills of every American.

Back in 1929, we also had a nation filled with hard-working citizens who believed in personal initiative and personal responsibility. All of that has changed dramatically. Those modern government programs, entitlements and obligations add up to national catastrophe as we enter this new Obama Great Depression.

I wrote the commentary entitled, “Obama, the Great Jobs Killer.” Time magazine quoted my line “Obama has killed so many jobs, he should be on top of the FBI's Most Wanted List.” That was well over a year ago. What is happening today makes the economy and unemployment picture back then look like child’s play.

I wrote “Obamageddon” a year ago about the wreckage of the U.S. economy from sea to shining sea. Today that wreckage is larger than even I imagined back then.

I wrote “The Unraveling of a Ponzi Scheme," “Obama — the Marxist in the Mirror,” and “The Obama Teleprompter Depression.” All of them had a common theme: Obama’s goal was to target, demonize, and punish the wealthy and small business owners- the very groups that pay all the taxes and create all the jobs. I predicted that the result would be economic crisis and collapse.

I wrote “The Strike — Why the Rich Are Going on Strike Against Obama.” I explained why as a result of Obama’s rhetoric and policies against the rich, America’s job creators were going on strike. I predicted the economic decline would accelerate because business owners would stop producing, stop hiring, in response to being punished for their success. Each day these predictions are confirmed by alarming new economic reports.

I wrote that Obama’s debt rampage wasn’t just suicide for Obama's political career. It would bring us all down in a murder/suicide. The entire U.S. economy would come down upon not only taxpayers today, but our children and grandchildren for decades to come.

I wrote a commentary many months ago entitled “The Greatest Depression of All Time Has Begun.” And so it has.

It’s true that the odds of Obama’s re-election just went down in a ball of flames, along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But no matter — Obama has accomplished his goal. He has taken down the entire U.S. economy with him. He has trashed the political opposition, small business owners who fund conservative candidates and causes. He has overseen the decimation of the middle class homeowners and stock owners who vote conservative.

He has left retirees with few assets, bank savings eroded by massive inflation. He has made 50 states into welfare queens begging for bailouts from the federal government. The nation is severely overwhelmed, right out of the playbook of Cloward and Piven.

Obama has left in his wake a U.S. economy in ruins. He has made many of us doubt capitalism. He has turned the American dream into a nightmare. He has brought tens of millions in society to their knees begging for government to save them. Even though it is government that made them dependent in the first place. He has convinced the masses that government feels their pain, even though it is government that caused it. He has enslaved us all under an avalanche of debt so massive it’s unimaginable, and of course unsustainable. He has turned hope into a 4 letter word.

Congratulations Mr. Obama. Mission accomplished.

Wayne Allyn Root is a former libertarian vice presidential nominee. He now serves as chairman of the Libertarian National Campaign Committee. He is the best-selling author of "The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gold & Tax Cuts." His web site: ROOTforAmerica.com

Read more on Newsmax.com: Obama Has Left the Economy in Ruins
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Dow Jones Industrial Average Down 14% in 4 weeks...

2011-08-18T09:30:00.000-05:00

.....but hey, life is good.

Lobster & Steak. Yummy.

2011-08-14T21:09:00.001-05:00

On Super Bowl Sunday, 2010, I stopped into the local Costco to get a salmon filet for the Super Bowl party that I was going to attend. Anybody who eats salmon knows that the price of salmon has gone up about 25% in the last two years. Inflation! What inflation?
The black lady in front of me was buying $273 worth of shell fish, as in crab legs and scallops and shrimp. Does it matter that I identify her race? Yeah, it matters. Am I a racist for noticing? Hell no. I would have to blind to not notice. She payed for her purchase, or rather I should say "we" , that is the American taxpayer, payed for her purchase, using a LINK card. That's what we call food stamps in Illinois. Those pesky stamps were so degrading and insulting. What a stigma !! Free food. The LINK card looks like a regular credit card. You know...bona fide. So after I helped buy her shell fish extravaganza, I then dug into my blue jeans and scraped out $30 bucks, that's green backs, as in after-tax green backs. I didn't have the desire to see if said shell fish consumer was driving a better car than me. I figured my day was already severely damaged, why obliterate what was left of it by seeing if she got into a Mercedes and sped off?
Here I was thinking that bringing a nice salmon filet to the Super Bowl party was kind of unique and I would cook it up real nice on a cedar board. If I had only known that I could have brought $273 worth of crab and scallops and shrimp at someone else's expense???
So when I received the attached receipt from Angeli's County Market, it rang a bell.
So who is the dummy here?
The lady who gets the free lunch or the people who pay it?
But don't think that I am condoning her behavior or suggesting that she is clever for playing the system. There is a little thing called pride involved here. And she has none of that.
I knew a man who had 12 kids when I was a boy. He wasn't exactly raking in the big bucks. But you know what? Sam would have worked 20 hours a day, 7 days a week before he would have taken a handout from Uncle Sam or anybody else. The same could be said for most men back then. Now? Pride is obsolete. It's so yesterday.

Is Our System 'Broken'? No, This Is How It Works By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

2011-08-12T11:42:00.000-05:00

Of all the endlessly repeated conventional wisdom in today's Washington, the most lazy, stupid and ubiquitous is that our politics is broken.

On the contrary. Our political system is working well (I make no such claims for our economy), indeed, precisely as designed — profound changes in popular will translated into law that alters the nation's political direction.

The process has been messy, loud, disputatious and often rancorous. So what? In the end, the system works. Exhibit A is Wisconsin. Exhibit B is Washington itself.

The story begins in 2008. The country, having lost confidence in Republican governance, gives the Democrats full control of Washington. The new president, deciding not to waste a crisis, attempts a major change in the nation's ideological trajectory.

Hence his two signature pieces of legislation: a near-$1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in galactic history; and a health care reform that places one-sixth of the economy under federal control.

In a country where conservatives outnumber liberals 2-1, this causes a reaction. In the 2010 midterms, Democrats suffer a massive repudiation at every level.

In Washington, Democrats suffer the greatest loss of House seats since 1948. In the states, they lose more than 700 state legislative seats — the largest reversal ever—resulting in the loss of 20 state chambers.

The Tea Party-propelled, debt-conscious Republicans then move to confront their states' unsustainable pension and health care obligations — most boldly in Wisconsin, where the new governor proposes a radical reorientation of the power balance between public-sector unions and elected government.

In Madison, the result is general mayhem—drum-banging protesters, frenzied unions, statehouse occupations, opposition legislators fleeing the state to prevent a quorum. A veritable feast of creative democratic resistance.

In the end, however, they fail. The legislation passes.

Then, further resistance. First, Democrats turn an otherwise sleepy state Supreme Court election into a referendum on the union legislation, the Democrats' candidate being widely expected to overturn the law. The unions/Democrats lose again.

And then last Tuesday, recall elections for six Republican state senators, three being needed to return the Senate to Democratic control and restore balance to the universe. Yet despite millions of union dollars, the Republicans hold the Senate.

The unions/Democrats lose again. The people spoke; the process worked. Yes, it was raucous and divisive, but change this fundamental should not be enacted quietly. This is not midnight basketball or school uniforms. This is the future of government-worker power and the solvency of the states. It deserves big, serious, animated public debate.

Precisely of the kind Washington (exhibit B) just witnessed over its debt problem. You know: The debt-ceiling debate universally denounced as dysfunctional, if not disgraceful, hostage taking, terrorism, gun-to-the-head blackmail.

Spare me the hysteria. What happened was that the 2010 electorate, as represented in Congress, forced Washington to finally confront the national debt. It was a triumph of democratic politics—a powerful shift in popular will finding concrete political expression.

But only partial expression. Debt hawks are upset that the final compromise doesn't do much. But it shouldn't do much. They won only one election.

They were entrusted, as of yet, with only one-half of one branch of government. But they did begin to turn the aircraft carrier around. The process did bequeath a congressional super-committee with extraordinary powers to reduce debt.

And if that fails, the question — how much government, how much debt — will go to the nation in November 2012. Which is also how it should be. The conventional complaint is that the process was ugly. Big deal. You want beauty? Go to a museum.

Democratic politics was never meant to be an exercise in aesthetics. Not just ugly, moan the critics, but oh so slow. True, again. It took months. And will take more. The supercommittee doesn't report until Thanksgiving. The next election is more than a year away.

But the American system was designed to make a full turn of the carrier difficult and deliberate. Moreover, without this long ugly process, the debt issue wouldn't even be on the table. We'd still be whistling our way to Greece.

Instead, a nation staring at insolvency is finally stirring itself to action, and not without spirited opposition. Great issues are being decided as constitutionally designed.

The process is working. Notice how the loudest complaints about "broken politics" come from those who lost the debate. It's understandable for sore losers to rage against the machine. But there's no need for the rest of us to parrot their petulance.

The Essential Rules Of Tyranny by Brandon Smith

2011-08-05T07:49:00.000-05:00

By Brandon Smith:

As we look back on the horrors of the dictatorships and autocracies of the past, one particular question consistently arises; how was it possible for the common men of these eras to NOT notice what was happening around them? How could they have stood as statues unaware or uncaring as their cultures were overrun by fascism, communism, collectivism, and elitism? Of course, we have the advantage of hindsight, and are able to research and examine the misdeeds of the past at our leisure. Unfortunately, such hindsight does not necessarily shield us from the long cast shadow of tyranny in our own day. For that, the increasingly uncommon gift of foresight is required…

At bottom, the success of despotic governments and Big Brother societies hinges upon a certain number of political, financial, and cultural developments. The first of which is an unwillingness in the general populace to secure and defend their own freedoms, making them completely reliant on corrupt establishment leadership. For totalitarianism to take hold, the masses must not only neglect the plight of their country, and the plight of others, but also be completely uninformed of the inherent indirect threats to their personal safety. They must abandon all responsibility for their destinies, and lose all respect for their own humanity. They must, indeed, become domesticated and mindless herd animals without regard for anything except their fleeting momentary desires for entertainment and short term survival. For a lumbering bloodthirsty behemoth to actually sneak up on you, you have to be pretty damnably oblivious.
The prevalence of apathy and ignorance sets the stage for the slow and highly deliberate process of centralization. Once dishonest governments accomplish an atmosphere of inaction and condition a sense of frailty within the citizenry, the sky is truly the limit. However, a murderous power-monger’s day is never quite done. In my recent article ‘The Essential Rules of Liberty’ we explored the fundamentally unassailable actions and mental preparations required to ensure the continuance of a free society. In this article, let’s examine the frequently wielded tools of tyrants in their invariably insane quests for total control…

Rule #1: Keep Them Afraid

People who are easily frightened are easily dominated. This is not just a law of political will, but a law of nature. Many wrongly assume that a tyrant’s power comes purely from the application of force. In fact, despotic regimes that rely solely on extreme violence are often very unsuccessful, and easily overthrown. Brute strength is calculable. It can be analyzed, and thus, eventually confronted and defeated. Thriving tyrants instead utilize not just harm, but the imminent THREAT of harm. They instill apprehension in the public; a fear of the unknown, or a fear of the possible consequences for standing against the state. They let our imaginations run wild until we see death around every corner, whether it’s actually there or not. When the masses are so blinded by the fear of reprisal that they forget their fear of slavery, and take no action whatsoever to undo it, then they have been sufficiently culled.

In other cases, our fear is evoked and directed towards engineered enemies. Another race, another religion, another political ideology, a “hidden” and ominous villain created out of thin air. Autocrats assert that we “need them” in order to remain safe and secure from these illusory monsters bent on our destruction. As always, this development is followed by the claim that all steps taken, even those that dissolve our freedoms, are “for the greater good”. Frightened people tend to shirk their sense of independence and run towards the comfort of the collective, even if that collective is built on immoral and unconscionable foundations. Once a society takes on a hive-mind mentality almost any evil can be rationalized, and any injustice against the individual is simply overlooked for the sake of the group.

Rule #2: Keep Them Isolated

In the past, elitist governments would often legislate and enforce severe penalties for public gatherings, because defusing the ability of the citizenry to organize or to communicate was paramount to control. In our technological era, such isolation is still used, but in far more advanced forms. The bread and circus lifestyle of the average westerner alone is enough to distract us from connecting with each other in any meaningful fashion, but people still sometimes find ways to seek out organized forms of activism.

Through co-option, modern day tyrant’s can direct and manipulate opposition movements. By creating and administrating groups which oppose each other, elites can then micromanage all aspects of a nation on the verge of revolution. These “false paradigms” give us the illusion of proactive organization, and the false hope of changing the system, while at the same time preventing us from seeking understanding in one another. All our energies are then muted and dispersed into meaningless battles over “left and right”, or “Democrat versus Republican”, for example. Only movements that cast aside such empty labels and concern themselves with the ultimate truth of their country, regardless of what that truth might reveal, are able to enact real solutions to the disasters wrought by tyranny.

In more advanced forms of despotism, even fake organizations are disbanded. Curfews are enforced. Normal communications are diminished or monitored. Compulsory paperwork is required. Checkpoints are instituted. Free speech is punished. Existing groups are influenced to distrust each other or to disintegrate entirely out of dread of being discovered. All of these measures are taken by tyrants primarily to prevent ANY citizens from gathering and finding mutual support. People who work together and organize of their own volition are unpredictable, and therefore, a potential risk to the state.

Rule #3: Keep Them Desperate

You’ll find in nearly every instance of cultural descent into autocracy, the offending government gained favor after the onset of economic collapse. Make the necessities of root survival an uncertainty, and people without knowledge of self sustainability and without solid core principles will gladly hand over their freedom, even for mere scraps from the tables of the same men who unleashed famine upon them. Financial calamities are not dangerous because of the poverty they leave in their wake; they are dangerous because of the doors to malevolence that they leave open.

Destitution leads not just to hunger, but also to crime (private and government). Crime leads to anger, hatred, and fear. Fear leads to desperation. Desperation leads to the acceptance of anything resembling a solution, even despotism.

Autocracies pretend to cut through the dilemmas of economic dysfunction (usually while demanding liberties be relinquished), however, behind the scenes they actually seek to maintain a proscribed level of indigence and deprivation. The constant peril of homelessness and starvation keeps the masses thoroughly distracted from such things as protest or dissent, while simultaneously chaining them to the idea that their only chance is to cling to the very government out to end them.

Rule #4: Send Out The Jackboots

This is the main symptom often associated with totalitarianism. So much so that our preconceived notions of what a fascist government looks like prevent us from seeing other forms of tyranny right under our noses. Some Americans believe that if the jackbooted thugs are not knocking on every door, then we MUST still live in a free country. Obviously, this is a rather naïve position. Admittedly, though, goon squads and secret police do eventually become prominent in every failed nation, usually while the public is mesmerized by visions of war, depression, hyperinflation, terrorism, etc.

When law enforcement officials are no longer servants of the people, but agents of a government concerned only with its own supremacy, serious crises emerge. Checks and balances are removed. The guidelines that once reigned in police disappear, and suddenly, a philosophy of superiority emerges; an arrogant exclusivity that breeds separation between law enforcement and the rest of the public. Finally, police no longer see themselves as protectors of citizens, but prison guards out to keep us subdued and docile.

As tyranny grows, this behavior is encouraged. Good men are filtered out of the system, and small (minded and hearted) men are promoted.

At its pinnacle, a police state will hide the identities of most of its agents and officers, behind masks or behind red tape, because their crimes in the name of the state become so numerous and so sadistic that personal vengeance on the part of their victims will become a daily concern.

Rule #5: Blame Everything On The Truth Seekers

Tyrants are generally men who have squelched their own consciences. They have no reservations in using any means at their disposal to wipe out opposition. But, in the early stages of their ascent to power, they must give the populace a reason for their ruthlessness, or risk being exposed, and instigating even more dissent. The propaganda machine thus goes into overdrive, and any person or group that dares to question the authority or the validity of the state is demonized in the minds of the masses.

All disasters, all violent crimes, all the ills of the world, are hoisted upon the shoulders of activist groups and political rivals. They are falsely associated with fringe elements already disliked by society (racists, terrorists, etc). A bogus consensus is created through puppet media in an attempt to make the public believe that “everyone else” must have the same exact views, and those who express contrary positions must be “crazy”, or “extremist”. Events are even engineered by the corrupt system and pinned on those demanding transparency and liberty. The goal is to drive anti-totalitarian organizations into self censorship. That is to say, instead of silencing them directly, the state causes activists to silence themselves.

Tyrannical power structures cannot function without scapegoats. There must always be an elusive boogie man under the bed of every citizen, otherwise, those citizens may turn their attention, and their anger, towards the real culprit behind their troubles. By scapegoating stewards of the truth, such governments are able to kill two birds with one stone.

Rule #6: Encourage Citizen Spies

Ultimately, the life of a totalitarian government is not prolonged by the government itself, but by the very people it subjugates. Citizen spies are the glue of any police state, and our propensity for sticking our noses into other peoples business is highly valued by Big Brother bureaucracies around the globe.

There are a number of reasons why people participate in this repulsive activity. Some are addicted to the feeling of being a part of the collective, and “service” to this collective, sadly, is the only way they are able to give their pathetic lives meaning. Some are vindictive, cold, and soulless, and actually get enjoyment from ruining others. And still, like elites, some long for power, even petty power, and are willing to do anything to fulfill their vile need to dictate the destinies of perfect strangers.

Citizen spying is almost always branded as a civic duty; an act of heroism and bravery. Citizen spies are offered accolades and awards, and showered with praise from the upper echelons of their communities. People who lean towards citizen spying are often outwardly and inwardly unimpressive; physically and mentally inept. For the average moral and emotional weakling with persistent feelings of inadequacy, the allure of finally being given fifteen minutes of fame and a hero’s status (even if that status is based on a lie) is simply too much to resist. They begin to see “extremists” and “terrorists” everywhere. Soon, people afraid of open ears everywhere start to watch what they say at the supermarket, in their own backyards, or even to family members. Free speech is effectively neutralized.

Rule #7: Make Them Accept The Unacceptable

In the end, it is not enough for a government fueled by the putrid sludge of iniquity to lord over us. At some point, it must also influence us to forsake our most valued principles. Tyrannies are less concerned with dominating how we live, so much as dominating how we think. If they can mold our very morality, they can exist unopposed indefinitely. Of course, the elements of conscience are inborn, and not subject to environmental duress as long as a man is self aware. However, conscience can be manipulated if a person has no sense of identity, and has never put in the effort to explore his own strengths and failings. There are many people like this in America today.

Lies become “necessary” in protecting the safety of the state. War becomes a tool for “peace”. Torture becomes an ugly but “useful” method for gleaning important information. Police brutality is sold as a “natural reaction” to increased crime. Rendition becomes normal, but only for those labeled as “terrorists”. Assassination is justified as a means for “saving lives”. Genocide is done discretely, but most everyone knows it is taking place. They simply don’t discuss it.
All tyrannical systems depend on the apathy and moral relativism of the inhabitants within their borders. Without the cooperation of the public, these systems cannot function. The real question is, how many of the above steps will be taken before we finally refuse to conform? At what point will each man and woman decide to break free from the dark path blazed before us and take measures to ensure their independence? Who will have the courage to develop their own communities, their own alternative economies, their own organizations for mutual defense outside of establishment constructs, and who will break under the pressure to bow like cowards? How many will hold the line, and how many will flee?

For every American, for every human being across the planet who chooses to stand immovable in the face of the very worst in mankind, we come that much closer to breathing life once again into the very best in us all.

VDH on the Near Future

2011-08-02T05:42:00.000-05:00

August 1, 2011
The Tragic View Returns
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

In hard times, as in war, questions arise that were once considered taboo. As we approach $15 trillion run up in aggregate national debt, and confront the reality of a welfare state that is predicated on flawed assumptions about everything from demography to human nature, a rendezvous with brutal reality is now upon us.

Indeed, an entire array of tragic questions arises in a bankrupt but suddenly open-minded society in a way unimaginable in a reactionary, affluent one with endless credit: Should those on welfare who have more than three children still qualify for increased assistance for each additional offspring? Should state-subsidized elective operations automatically be provided for the chronically obese or lifelong smokers? Does the affluent class deserve mortgage-interest deductions on second and third homes? Should US troops subsidize the defense of an allied and rich Germany or Japan 66 years after World War II?

Social Security reform used to be the third rail that politicians dared not touch. But is that prohibition really still operative as big government approaches insolvency? Expect soon not just the retirement age to jump, reflecting modern longevity, or automatic cost-of-living increases to cease, mirroring the reality found in the private sector, but also the entire notion of disability to change as well.

Quite simply, the dogma that a teenager with dyslexia or a mature man with a bum knee will receive years of Social Security disability benefits will be assessed as an historical aberration of the last twenty years. A decision by an insurance company or government agency that a 62-year old must settle for arthroscopic surgery on a chronically torn meniscus rather than a complete knee replacement will not be interpreted as social cruelty.

Almost everything that can be said has been said about illegal immigration — and about the sustainability and morality of millions of Mexican and Latin American nationals crossing the US border unlawfully and plugging into the American entitlement system. But an insolvent state like California, despite the liberal protestations, cannot continue to house 50,000 Mexican nationals in its penal system at a per capita cost of nearly $35,000 a year, or to extend free tuition in its broke university system to those without legal residence, or to provide social services to illegal aliens that may well cost the state nearly $10 billion a year. Even to suggest such limits was once considered illiberal. Now, not to state the obvious — that those without education, English, and legality have been expecting far more than what they could contribute in return — will be considered derelict.

An eight-decade tradition of direct agricultural subsidies was once considered sacrosanct. In laughable fashion, farm-state senators invoked everything from the “Save the family farm” mantra to national security to green energy, all to ensure ongoing direct cash grants to affluent and influential corporate agribusiness. But even in flush times the system had long ago become intellectually and morally indefensible: Why subsidize one crop and not another? Why give public money to those who already make good profits in the private sector? As the government crosses its financial Rubicon, such largess will quietly disappear as well. The only mystery that will remain a decade from now will be how such an absurdity lasted as long as it did.

Nearly 50 million people are now on “food stamps.” Of course, the nomenclature is an anachronism, because modern therapeutic society long ago rejected the stigma of shuffling clumsy stamps at the check-out counter, and reduced the process of getting free food into flashing a government-issued plastic card no different in appearance from a bank ATM card. The calcified liberal technocracy talks as if each new person added to the program was faced with Dickensian starvation, even as the other five-sixths of Americans trade anecdotes about waiting in line behind a subsidized cart of food far superior to their own.

But again, $14 trillion-plus in debt cuts into a lot of liberal screeds. At some not too distant date, we will begin to see only poor people buying food on taxpayers’ money, and buying only essentials — we will not see those in the middle class counting on such subsidies to free up cash for elective purchases.

In that regard, the entire modern therapeutic sensibility will wane when the ability to borrow endlessly ceases, and the old tragic view of human experience will reassert itself. A classical Greek would suggest that the more one supplies generous pensions, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and direct government subsidies, the more entirely human responses assert themselves: the incentive to be self-reliant disappearing in direct proportion to the spread of self-righteousness about deserving such entitlements as a birthright. A year ago, to hint that many were not looking so eagerly for work because they enjoyed long-term unemployment benefits and an array of state subsidies would have been deemed heartless; soon the pieties of a credit-obsessed society will vanish with the tragic nod, and the remark “But of course — human nature being what it is.”

Finally, the entire debate about wealth and poverty, confined solely to the ossified realm of reported income and federal and state entitlements, will also change. Is one poor who has access to an iPhone or iPod, a big-screen television, or a hand-held GPS — appurtenances that even a decade ago were mostly confined to the affluent? Is one poor who can walk into a Wal-Mart and buy a Chinese- or Indian-made sweat suit for less than $20, one that appears not much different from the $500 designer sports outfit worn by the Wall Street grandee in Central Park?

Is the hot water any less hot, the stovetop any cooler, in the HUD-subsidized tract houses two miles from my home than in the mansions of a John Edwards, John Kerry, or Barack Obama?

Is the cash economy always to remain just an abstraction, or at some point does one tabulate officially what we know privately is commonplace? Do millions perennially count as impoverished who mow lawns, clean houses, and serve food for tax-free cash wages while qualifying for state subsidies?

Reactionary politicians in a time warp harangue about 19th-century-style poverty as if only their efforts to borrow more money to extend more entitlements to more people each day save humanity, even as high technology has reinvented modern consumer life, a huge cash economy has arisen hand-in-glove with half the nation not paying income tax, and some 500 million Indian and Chinese workers flood US stores with low-cost items unimaginable just twenty years ago.

There is a certain brutal honesty about this debt crisis. It is slowly beginning to force us to see the world in the tragic way it is, rather than in the therapeutic way we dream it must be.

The New Bill of Rights

2011-07-31T08:49:00.000-05:00

Economics 101

2011-07-29T12:29:00.001-05:00

Threatening to default to achieve legislative concessions from the Communists Left side of the aisle is FINE..
Actually defaulting is NOT FINE.

It is really that simple.

The economic fallout from defaulting, if even for a day or a week, could last for years, even decades.

Tea Party types, which I am hugely sympathetic towards, are on the wrong side of this issue.
But then, so are Harry Reid and Ochamberlain.

This entire debate is one to be decided by the electorate.
The Libs have no mandate.
Nor do the Conservatives. Unfortunately.
It comes down to 2012.

Defaulting could actually lessen the strength of the Tea Party's argument, depending on which way the chips fall.
Every American has a huge stake in this conflict.

It is NOT Armageddon. But it is very very very bad for the long term economic prospects of our nation.
It is a battle that must be waged.
Every resource, every gambit, ever posture should be made with the idea of winning the long term war being waged between those who want a Social Democratic Greece-styled Nanny State that will implode and those that want America to remain the last best hope of the planet.

Winston Churchill said, "America will always do the right thing, but only after exhausting every other possibility". Let's hope he was right.

It would be a lot more fun to watch if I didn't have a horse in this race.

The Message

2011-07-27T12:10:00.005-05:00

The Democrats and the Left, who somewhere along the road became one and the same, with the apparently everlasting assistance of their evil twin, Mass Media, have constructed an incredibly efficient marketing behemoth, that if left unchecked will run Mothership USA directly into oblivion.

Repeat: Will run Mothership USA directly into oblivion.

Disagree?
Think California.
Think Illinois.
Think Detroit.
Think the county you live in.
Think (fill in the blank)_______________.

Don't take my word for it. Pluck a high school physics book off of the library shelf and read/reread the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. Everything you know, think you know, or don't know, about the possibility of makin' sumpin' outta nuthin' is all there in black and white as was once upon a time 'splained to you by Mr. So&So, your high school science teacher.

The 1st Law states: energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Apparently this matters not, when the Democratic playbook is imbued with all of the core tenets of Madison Avenue. Fact and physics stuff is strictly for the eggheads and the birds.

It also helps if you have a very, very large printing press in the basement.

When I picture Uncle Sam, it is no longer as the " I Want You" character beckoning me to the high adventure of the Mekong Delta. Now I envision Uncle Sam as a sweaty, overworked exhaused old man, toiling over the crank of an immense printing press in the basement of the US Treasury, pumping out freshly minted Lira, I mean Rubles, I mean pesos, er.... I mean Dollars. (I don't know why those other 3rd rate currencies keep coming to mind.)

Bottom line: the Democrats are gifted and tenacious, which is an extremely lethal combination. They are universally more efficient, more steadfast, more resilient, more dedicated, more determined, more organized, more united and more successful controlling THE MESSAGE, no matter what aspect of American life they are demagoguing about. Amazingly they achieve this Heisman Trophy-worthy dominance while simultaneously shredding the Conservative message. Think Bork. Think Quayle. Think Palin. Think Tea Pary. And now think Boehner.

This morning's case in point is the Reid/Schumer assault perpetrated upon Speaker Boehner.
You know, the hardscrabble crybaby who grew up in a grubby Ohio tavern and somehow, defied the Orchid Man, stumbling bumpkin-like into the corridors of power. Unlike say, the esteemed Senator Harry Reid, the epitome of propriety who alighted on The Hill indirectly from his position as the onetime commisioner of the Nevada Gaming Commission. Now I don't know precisely what that all entails, but I did see Godfather II, and I figure Scorcese knows a thing or two about a thing or two, especially if that thing or two is a thing or two about money and power and corruption and the Mafia. This assault-soundbite, no doubt handily crafted by the most gifted of word-smiths will be played later tonight by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and all the news networks, here and abroad. Even FOX will perpetrate the lie, since despite their editorial predisposition, regularly air such drivel in the name of the "Fairness" they so vigorously espouse and which they can and will trot out at their defense trial when the witch hunt just around-the-corner to bury FOX News once and for all comes to fruition. I would bet a months earnings that FOX has a guy whose soul reason for coming to work is to assemble Fairness. Hi my name is Bill McGillicuddy, Director of Fairness, FOX News. What do you do Bill? Well, er, I assemble Fairness. You know digital files of the kind of drivel, I mean Dem-lite programming that will save our asses in a pinch when the Fairness Police try to put us out of business for running counter to the herd.

Where is Boehner's rebuttal? Cantor? Ryan? Romney?
Absent.
That's where.
It may not be technically absent. But if you are speaking to the abyss, then you, my friend, are absent. That's what marketing is, getting your story in front of people. Period. So, Cantor and Ryan and Romney et. al. may all have a lot to say on this matter and other matters. But if there ain't no camera running, if there ain't no network hottie carrying your water, then you got nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The GOP and the Conservatives flunked Madison Avenue 101 and have only one hope of gaining any traction in the great debate of our age; should America spend itself into oblivion? or should America right itself and move towards the Founders original ideal of self determinism?

The only hope the Conservative movement has is if the People speak.
If the People speak, then the People will become the story.
At that juncture, Tea Party will go Grass Roots and the Mass Media will sign on.
Since the only thing Mass Media loves more than telling America how to think,
is not getting scooped by their competition (Translation: getting paid less), they will cover a grass roots movement to right the ship.
Grass Roots can trump Madison Avenue.
All could yet be well.
Precisely as the Founders intended.

Now That is What I Would Call....

2011-07-25T16:35:00.003-05:00

Planless Dems by Mark Steyn

2011-07-23T14:48:00.000-05:00

Planless Dems
From National Review Online
The ruling party has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more.

Earlier this month, Moody’s downgraded Irish government debt to junk. Which left the Irish somewhat peeved. The Department of Finance pointed out that it had met all the “quantitative fiscal targets” imposed by the European Union, and the National Treasury Management Agency said that Ireland was sufficiently flush “to cover all its financing requirements until the end of 2013.”

Which is more than the government of the United States can say.
That’s not the only difference between the auld sod and America. In Europe, austerity is in the air, and in the headlines: “Italy Fast-Tracks Austerity Vote.” “Greek Minister Urges Austerity Consensus.” “Portugal to Speed Austerity Measures.” “Even Queen Faces Funding Squeeze in Austerity Britain.” The word has become so instantly ubiquitous that leftie deadbeats are already opposed to it: “Austerity Protest Takes Place in Dublin.” For the rentamob types, “austerity” is to this decade what “Bush” and “Iraq War” were to the last. It can’t be long before grizzled old rockers are organizing some all-star Rock against Austerity gala.
By contrast, nobody seems minded to “speed austerity measures” over here. The word isn’t part of the conversation — even though we’re broke on a scale way beyond what Ireland or Portugal could ever dream of. The entire Western world is operating on an unsustainable business model: If it were Borders or Blockbuster, it would be hoping to close the Greek and Portuguese branches but maybe hold on to the Norwegian one. In hard reality, like Borders only the other day, it would probably wind up shuttering them all. The problem is structural: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. Developed nations have 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and then wonder why the shrunken rump of a “working” population in between can’t make the math add up.
By the way, demographically speaking, these categories — “adolescents” and “retirees” — are an invention of our own time: They didn’t exist a century ago. You were a kid till 13 or so. Then you worked. Then you died. As Obama made plain in his threat to Gran’ma last week that the August checks might not go out, funding non-productivity is now the principal purpose of the modern state. Good luck with that at a time when every appliance in your home is manufactured in Asia.
As I said, these are structural problems. In theory, they can be fixed. But, when you look at the nature of them, you’ve got to wonder whether they ever will be this side of societal collapse. Blockbuster went bankrupt because it was wedded to a 1980s technology and distribution system. In government, being merely a quarter-century obsolete would be a major achievement. The ruling party in Washington is wedded to the principle that an 80-year-old social program is inviolable: That’s like Blockbuster insisting in 2011 that there’s no problem with its business model for rentals of silent movies with live orchestral accompaniment. To be sure, there are some problems parking the musicians’ bus in residential streets, but nothing that can’t be worked out.
But “political reality” operates to different rules from humdrum real reality. Thus, the “debt ceiling” debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting “Hats off, strangers!” at Britain’s Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on — or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something.
Obama has done his best to pretend to take them seriously. He claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as “the grown-up in the room.” There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president’s staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he’ll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he’s going to play Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2, and, even though there’s no cello in sight and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they’ve ever heard.
The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.
How about Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democrat Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Senator Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.

It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street — and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more — and nobody’s downgrading them.
Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional.
In the debt-ridden treasuries of Europe, they’re talking “austerity.” In the debt-ridden treasury of Washington, they’re talking about more spending (Kathleen Sebelius is touting new women’s health programs to be made available “without cost.”) At the risk (in Samuel Johnson’s words) of settling the precedence between a louse and a flea, I think Europe’s political discourse is marginally less deranged than ours. The president is said to be “the adult in the room” because he is reported to be in favor of raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.
By the year 2036.
If that’s the best offer, there isn’t going to be a 2036, not for America. As the Europeans are beginning to grasp, eventually “political reality” collides with real reality. The message from a delusional Washington these last weeks is that it won’t be a gentle bump.
-– Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.

Obama the Compulsive Liar

2011-07-18T02:10:00.000-05:00

Fresh doubt cast on Obama's health care story

By: Byron York | Chief Political Correspondent Follow Him @ByronYork | 07/11/11 8:05 PM

Then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) addresses a rally in the gymnasium of Concord High School January 4, 2008 in Concord before the 2008 New Hampshire primary, where the Democratic presidential hopeful made this remark examined by Examiner columnist Byron York: "She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn't have to reimburse her for her medical bills."

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama often discussed his mother's struggle with cancer. Ann Dunham spent the months before her death in 1995, Obama said, fighting with insurance companies that sought to deny her the coverage she needed to pay for treatment.

"I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn't thinking about how to get well, she wasn't thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence," Obama said in September 2007.

"She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn't have to reimburse her for her medical bills," Obama added in January 2008.

"The insurance companies were saying, 'Maybe there's a pre-existing condition and we don't have to pay your medical bills,' " Obama said in a debate with Republican opponent Sen. John McCain in October 2008.

It was a simple and powerful story, one Obama would tell many more times as president during the national health care debate. But now we're learning the real story of Ann Dunham's health coverage is not quite what her son made it out to be.

The news is in "A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother," a generally admiring new biography written by former New York Times reporter Janny Scott. According to the book, Ann Dunham, an anthropologist who spent most of her working life in Indonesia, moved from Jakarta to New York in 1992 to work for a nonprofit called Women's World Banking, which encouraged micro-lending in Third World countries. Unhappy in New York, in 1994 Dunham took a job with an American company called Development Alternatives, which had a contract with the Indonesian State Ministry for the Role of Women. Dunham returned to Jakarta to work, and Scott reports the job provided Dunham with health insurance, a housing allowance, and a car.

At the time she took the job, Dunham was increasingly worried about her health; she was suffering from intense abdominal pains. In November 1994, Dunham went to an Indonesian doctor who diagnosed appendicitis. As Dunham debated whether to leave the country for surgery, she called her boss at Development Alternatives. "You've got health insurance, that's taken care of," the boss told her. "We can cover the airfare."

Dunham decided to stay in Jakarta, where she underwent an appendectomy. But the pain did not go away, and Dunham feared, correctly, that she was terribly ill. In January 1995 she left Indonesia to go home to Honolulu, where she was diagnosed with advanced uterine and ovarian cancer. She began a regime of surgery and chemotherapy.

That is the time during which Obama says his mother battled insurance companies to cover her illness. But Scott, who had access to Dunham's correspondence from the time, reveals that Dunham unquestionably had health coverage. "Ann's compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment," Scott writes. "Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month."

Scott writes that Dunham, who wanted to be compensated for those costs as well as for her living expenses, "filed a separate claim under her employer's disability insurance policy." It was that claim, with the insurance company CIGNA, that was denied in August 1995 because, CIGNA investigators said, Dunham's condition was known before she was covered by the policy.

Dunham protested the decision and, Scott writes, "informed CIGNA that she was turning over the case to 'my son and attorney, Barack Obama.' " CIGNA did not budge.

In September 1995, Dunham traveled to New York for an evaluation at the renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Returning to Hawaii, she began a new course of treatment. She died in November.

A dozen years later, her son turned her ordeal into a campaign pitch for national health care. But the story Obama told, Scott writes, was "abbreviated" -- the abbreviation was to leave out the fact that Ann Dunham had health insurance that paid for her treatment. "Though he often suggested that she was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition," Scott writes, "it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage."

That's a different story altogether. One the president never told.

Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

Selective Shaming by Mark Steyn

2011-07-13T04:13:00.001-05:00

JULY 9, 2011 7:00 A.M.

Selective Shaming
If only government were as accountable as British tabloids.

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, the Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering the News of the World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of royals and celebrities — Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set to either 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

But last Monday it emerged that the News of the World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voicemails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.
The News of the World wasn’t any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid–20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, selling 9 million copies a week. Even in today’s emaciated market, every week more than 2.6 million Britons boughtNews of the Screws (as it was affectionately known). Last Sunday, it was the biggest-selling newspaper in the United Kingdom and Europe. This Sunday, it’s history. To put it in American terms, consider those George Soros–funded websites claiming they pressured Fox into “firing” Glenn Beck. This is the equivalent of pressuring Mr. Murdoch into closing down the entire Fox News network.

I confess to feeling a little queasy at the sight of bien pensant liberal opinion gloating at having deprived 4 million people of their preferred reading matter. If one were so inclined, one might be heartened by the swift responsiveness to pressure of the allegedly all-powerful bogeyman Murdoch. But you can’t help but notice that this supposed public shaming is awfully selective. In the week of the News of the Worldrevelations, it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers — whoops, pardon me, “educators” — and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for “No Child Left Behind” federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let’s face it, it’s easier than teaching, right?
The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few illegally had an early report into test-tampering destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children. And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award, and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.
In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students in order to improve its employees’ cozy sinecures. The whole rotten, stinking school system is systemically corrupt from the superintendent down. But what are the chances of APS being closed down? How many of those fraudulent non-teachers will waft on within the system until their lucrative retirements?
Or consider “Operation Fast and Furious,” about which nothing is happening terribly fast and over which Americans should be furious. The official explanation is that the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels. As I said, that’s the official explanation: As soon as your head stops spinning, we’ll resume the narrative. Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords’ weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies — FBI, DEA, and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies. So, in case you’re wondering why Obama’s second annual Recovery Summer is a wee bit sluggish at your end, relax: Stimulus dollars went to fund one federal agency to buy guns for the paid informants of another federal agency to funnel to foreign criminals in order that the first federal agency might identify the paid informants of the second federal agency.
Meanwhile, what did the drug cartels, the recipients of the guns, do with them? Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn’t bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians. If, by this stage, you’re wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners — that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

We’re not talking about hacking a schoolgirl’s cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody’s going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn’t yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards as Beverly Hall, judging from his cheerfully upfront obstruction of the congressional investigation, he’s not planning on going anywhere soon.
So, at the News of the World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of Big Government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability — legal, fiscal, electoral, popular. A media mogul, a bank chairman, an oil executive, a corporate-jet depreciation-claimant are easily demonizable: As President Obama cautioned CEOs a couple of years back, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
More fool us. Our pitchforks are misdirected.