Conservatives, Hang Tough and Get Ready

It’s hard to be a conservative these days, knowing that a majority of Americans share your basic beliefs, but, through the vagaries of life, a group that is setting out to destroy America has somehow gained immense political power. With such majorities in Congress, especially in the House, and with just enough Republican cowards in the Senate to look the other way, it is obvious that whatever Obama and the liberals want, they will get.

In addition to massive spending bills not seen before, here are just a few changes you can believe in that they have already made in about a month:

1. Stopped oil exploration and drilling and conversion of shale to oil.
2. Announced the closing of Guantanamo with no idea what to do with the terrorists there.
3. Blundered into the dismissal of charges against the planner of the USS Cole bombing.
4. Given Al Qaeda terrorists the rights of American citizens.
5. Forced Americans who pay their mortgages to support those who do not.
6. Raised income taxes on job creators and threatened to raise capital gains taxes while renewing death taxes. Cut mortgage and charitable deductions.
7. Devoted billions to combating man-made global warming, a condition that remains unproven and likely untrue; phasing in a carbon tax.
8. Managed to damn with faint praise the incredible achievement of Bush and our military in planting in Iraq the only functioning democracy among 22 Arab nations.
9. Effectively banned private businesses from entertaining their customers or rewarding their employees.
10. Forced Catholic hospitals and people of faith to provide abortions against their will.

Besides sharing a set of beliefs in common values based on religious principles, conservatives share a belief in the greatness of America and in its ability to overcome all obstacles, remaining, as it has for over 200 years, the hope of the world. This belief sustains me even as I look at the huge shrinkage in my savings that has taken place since Obama pulled ahead in the polls last fall and even as I consider the damage being done to our economy and to society in one short month.

Already, in such a short time, Tea Party rallies are springing up all over the country, as more and more people realize what the Obama administration is up to. They may not amount to anything, but as surely as Reagan followed Carter, this massive overreaching will have consequences in 2010 and especially in 2012 if conservatives can unite and prevent another McCain from winning the Republican nomination. A program of rewarding sloth and dishonesty and turning over our country to people looking only for handouts cannot be sustained and cannot succeed.

Although the liberals destroyed Bush with an incredible campaign of lies and vulgar ridicule, conservatives are mostly people of goodwill and cannot find it in themselves to act in a similar fashion. Besides, every personal criticism will be met with charges of ‘racism’, and behind Obama lies Biden and Pelosi. If anyone could be worse than Obama it would be one of these two. We will stick to attacks on policies when those policies are destructive to the fabric and well-being of our country and to its hard-working, tax-paying citizens.

Anti-Stimulus Protests Sprout Up

BY DAVID HOGBER 2/20/2009 INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY (excerpt)

“Holding signs reading "Stimulate Business, Not Government," "Families Against Porkulus" and "Say No To Generational Theft," protesters opposed to the $787 billion stimulus package have been mobilizing across the country.

It started last Monday in Seattle, then moved Tuesday to Denver, where President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law. That was followed by another one in Mesa, Ariz., where Obama unveiled a mortgage rescue plan.

Another protest was planned for Saturday outside the office of Rep. Dennis Moore in Overland Park, Kan. The Democrat voted for the stimulus. His office didn't return calls seeking comment.

A New Populism?

As unemployment soars and anger over Wall Street bailouts mounts, public outrage will seek an outlet. Populism could go in many directions — and could easily ebb when the economy revives.

But if it takes shape as an anti-spending movement, it could revive conservatives much as the 1970s tax protests did.” INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

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

'Tea Party' Protests Wasteful Spending

Feb. 27, 2009 WJXT-TV MSNBC.com (excerpt)

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - "In a protest harkening back to a milestone in American history, people at the Jacksonville Landing and in cities large and small across the nation turned out Friday to reenact the Boston tea party in protest to the latest stimulus package and the foreclosure assistance bill.

The tax revolt, partly inspired by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli's rant earlier this week about President Barack Obama's housing rescue plan, resulted in a grassroots effort pushing "tea party" protests Friday in large cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Houston, and small towns like Tulsa, Iowa, and Calera, Ala." MSNBC.com

A Contrived Crisis? - You Decide

As I write this, the Dow Jones is down another 150 points the next day after Obama has made his major speech to Congress. A few days ago I asked my readers to forward to me any information they might have found concerning the September, 2008 run on U.S. money markets that was the precipitating factor behind the huge TARP bailout, and which was the trigger that catapulted Obama ahead of McCain in the presidential polls. So far none of us have found anything from reliable sources that explains what and who were behind this devastating draw-down. The respected conservative author, Nancy Morgan, does, however, offer this overview of events last summer and fall. The greatest October surprise of all time may have been carried out last summer and fall.

A Contrived Crisis? - You Decide

Nancy Morgan February 23, 2009 RightBias.com

Through a series of supposedly random but arguably deliberate chain of events, America is poised to jettison 220 years of a free market system called capitalism, in favor of the tried and failed system of socialism. This writer, and others, are now starting to question how we reached this point.

Last summer, as McCain and Obama were in the midst of their campaigns to capture the presidency, a series of events dramatically changed the focus of the campaign from Iraq to the economy. From that point on, Obama took the lead and eventually won the presidency.

June 26, 2008: Democrat Chuck Schumer leaked a memo questioning the solvency of IndyMac bank. This memo precipitated a run on IndyMac which led to its failure. Federal regulators pointedly cited U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., in explaining the bank's failure. "The immediate cause of the closing was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York."

This event, coupled with the Lehman Brothers collapse in September, marked the beginning of the current economic meltdown and provided the ammunition for massive government intervention in the private market.

July 12, 2008: The federal government takes control of the $32 billion IndyMac Bank.*

Sept. 6, 2008: Fannie Mae begins its downward spiral, which will end with a crash in November. This crash was avoidable, as the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were identified in June of 2006, when 15 Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee introduced legislation to address the problem. Democrats, led by Barney Frank, killed the reform efforts.

Sept. 15, 2008: Obama and McCain are virtually tied in their race for the presidency. Out of no-where, in the space of less than 2 hours, the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the U.S. to the tune of $550 billion. Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania said that if authorities had not closed the banks, $5.5 trillion would have been withdrawn from US banks, which would have caused the collapse of the US within 24 hours.

This seminal event marked the ascendancy of Obama's candidacy, and eventually resulted in his election as president.

Fast forward to this week. The markets reacted to Obama's proposal to bail-out mortgages and Senator Christopher Dodd's talk of nationalizing banks by reaching 11-year lows.

Obama continues to stoke the fears of imminent crisis, actually using the word 'crisis' a total of 26 times in one speech.

Enter George Soros. The infamous one-worlder, billionaire George Soros adds his voice to the media doomsayers by opining that the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of near-term resolution to the crisis.

Soros said the turbulence is more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.

He may be right. The series of 'inadvertent errors', deliberate obstruction, political shenanigans, behind the scenes manipulation of the money markets and non-stop calls for immediate infusions of taxpayer cash have brought the U.S. to its knees.

With one voice, politicians, economists and 'experts' agree by unspoken consensus that government is the only solution. No one points out the fact that every single step taken so far by the government has exacerbated the problem, effectively bringing America one step closer to centralized government control. Which, coincidentally, Obama favors.

I am not an economist. But I will challenge any expert to dispute the fact that if President Obama took to the airwaves tomorrow and announced the Bush tax cuts would be extended and a capital gains tax cut was under consideration, the markets would immediately turn around.

That no-one is proposing this common sense solution is alarming. That no free market solutions are even under consideration is more alarming. That no-one is questioning who was responsible for the Sept. 15 run on money market accounts, or why the media was silent on it, lends credence to the possibility that our current economic crisis might not have been the result of a series of random events.

The economic meltdown is undoubtedly responsible for Obama becoming president. It is also responsible for the current consideration of socialistic solutions, if not outright socialism. Without a doubt, this crisis has strengthened the Democratic party. Yet to connect the dots and suggest that this crisis isn't a result of capitalism gone bad risks branding this author with the title of paranoid conspiracist.

Color me paranoid. Was this current crisis manufactured? I don't know. Does the possibility exist? You decide.


* Six months later, Jan 2, 2009, a seven-member group of investors agreed to buy the remnants of failed lender IndyMac for $13.9 billion. Other investors included a fund controlled by billionaire George Soros' Fund Management.


Nancy Morgan is a columnist and news editor for RightBias.com
She lives in South Carolina

A Surprising Editorial in the (gasp) NY Times

A Surprising Editorial in the (gasp) NY Times

The Big Test

By DAVID BROOKS Feb. 21, 2009 New York Times

“We cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing all of them.”
Barack Obama

When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book. Burke argued that each individual’s private stock of reason is small and that political decisions should be guided by the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Change is necessary, Burke continued, but it should be gradual, not disruptive. For a young democratic socialist, hoping to help begin the world anew, this seemed like a reactionary retreat into passivity.

Over the years, I have come to see that Burke had a point. The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

Before long, I was no longer a liberal. Liberals are more optimistic about the capacity of individual reason and the government’s ability to execute transformational change. They have more faith in the power of social science, macroeconomic models and 10-point programs.

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy.

I fear they are going to try to undertake the biggest administrative challenge in American history while refusing to hire the people who can help the most: agency veterans who are registered lobbyists.

I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge. Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions. I worry that we lack the political structures to regain fiscal control. Deficits are exploding, and the president clearly wants to restrain them.

But there’s no evidence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have the courage or the mutual trust required to share the blame when taxes have to rise and benefits have to be cut.

All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.
**********************
What is really roiling the market is the ineptness being shown by Obama. The deepening recession ahead of us had already been priced into the stock market last summer. He talks the talk, but can't walk the walk.

Racial Tensions to Increase, Not Disappear Under Obama

Because I am a loyal and proud American and because, I believe, I am a person of goodwill, the post I have written here causes me much distress. I did not support Obama, and I do not support the left-wing ideas he wishes to advance; for example, I want him to fail in his ideas to impose a national healthcare program or to spread the wealth through federal coercion. On the other hand, I do not want him to fail in taking steps to bring us out of the housing, banking and credit crisis we are in, nor do I want him to fail in his sworn duty to protect the United States.

The stock market reaction to Obama and his stimulus bill and the anger being expressed by a large number of Americans who pay their taxes and pay their bills, including their mortgages, has been compounded by a general feeling that he may not be up to the job of President. It has only been one month, but the corruption and tax-cheat records of so many of his Cabinet appointments and his constant references to the “catastrophe” we are in have raised jitters in many Americans and caused the stock market to ‘tank’ substantially.

In a previous post I enumerated many examples of a “goon-squad” mentality that existed among many of his supporters - a mentality that actually threatened the lives of some of his political opponents. Now that so many people are questioning his basic competence, the fact that he is an African-American and is our first African-American president may raise racial tensions to the boiling point. It will be a great irony if the election of our first black president caused racial tensions to explode rather than fade away.

What are the signs of this? Not long ago, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and now a prominent Obama advisor authored a column suggesting that the government bailout should favor awarding jobs to black people over white people. Representative Conyers has decided that the time is right to submit a “black reparations” bill in Congress and has done so. The new senator from Illinois, the now-infamous Senator Burris, has campaigned in black districts for years as a champion of black reparations.

And just this week, we witnessed the spectacle of a black Congressman, James Clyburn, Democrat from South Carolina, accuse southern, white governors of racism for opposing Obama’s stimulus bill:

SC Rep: Opposition to stimulus is slap in face

February 20, 2009 AP (Excerpt)

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- "The highest-ranking black congressman said Thursday that opposition to the federal stimulus package by southern GOP governors is "a slap in the face of African-Americans."

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said he was insulted when the governors of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and his home state, which have large black populations, said they might not accept some of the money from the $787 billion stimulus package.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday he would accept the money, and none of the others has rejected it outright. The Republican governors of Idaho and Alaska also said they had reservations about whether the money would come with too many strings attached, but Clyburn said he was particularly taken aback by southern governors who said they might decline it.

"These four governors represent states that are in the proverbial black belt," Clyburn said.

A spokesman for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford accused Clyburn of playing the race card.

"Spending money at the federal level that we do not have represents a future tax increase on all South Carolinians, regardless of their color," Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer said in an e-mail statement. "And in the process of doing so, he's ripping off everyone he claims to represent.""

This is the kind of thinking that can lead to a breakdown in society if out-of-work white people begin to suspect that the pork-stimulus bill contains provisions that have elements of “black reparations” in it. Let’s hope this is not true, otherwise it could raise race tensions to new heights. Their anger and vocal opposition could then lead to an over-reaction and the kind of violence that resulted in the death of Yankel Rosenbaum in Crown Heights, NY. With racist instigators like Al Sharpton (Tawana Brawley) and Jesse Jackson (Hymietown) lingering in the background, anything is possible if the state of the economy continues to worsen and racism is continually injected into the equation.

Don’t Get on Obama’s Enemies List

I have mentioned to friends and on this website the fact that twice last fall, when driving south on I75 in Florida with a McCain-Palin bumper sticker on my car, two different cars with Obama stickers tried to run me off the road. Now we have an instance of an Oklahoma City police officer harassing a peaceful citizen for having an anti-Obama, anti-abortion sign and confiscating the sign. See the second report below.

Where do these Stalinist acts come from? They come from the examples set by Obama and his goon squad. As the criticism of Obama’s ineptness in selecting cabinet appointees grows, and as the reactions to some of his spread-the-wealth policies become more vocal and violent, you can expect tensions to reach a boiling point. Eric Holder also isn’t helping things with stupid comments.

Obama's Enemies List

By Mark Hyman on 2.18.09 The American Spectator

After the Democratic convention, Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer warned TV stations against airing a TV ad that was embarrassing to Barack Obama. The commercial focused on the longtime relationship between Obama and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Bauer sent letters to the Justice Department imploring the agency to pursue criminal action against those behind the ads. It was not lost on anyone at that time that Bauer was considered a candidate to be the next U.S. Attorney-General.

A team of Obama campaign operatives, joined by major news outlets, descended on Wasilla, Alaska immediately after Governor Sarah Palin was introduced as Senator John McCain's running mate. This was immediately followed by patently false reports claiming Palin imposed book bans, joined a fringe political party, charged rape victims for emergency room treatment and cut funding for special needs children.

In late August, the Obama campaign emailed an "Obama Action Wire" to thousands of supporters and liberal activists exhorting them to harass the offices of Chicago's WGN radio by flooding the station with angry phone calls and emails. Activists screamed insults to call-in screeners.

The radio station's offense was that a long-time, respected radio host had the temerity to interview Ethics and Public Policy Center watchdog Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz had uncovered university records that documented a much closer relationship between Obama and Ayers than the presidential candidate had previously disclosed.

A few weeks later, state prosecutors and top sheriffs in Missouri who were prominent Obama supporters responded to a chilling Obama campaign request. They styled themselves as a "truth squad" and threatened to prosecute anyone including media outlets that printed or broadcasted material they deemed to be inaccurate about the Illinois Senator.

Obama contributors in the Justice Department's Civil Rights section (headed by $2,000 Obama donor and former ACLU attorney Mark Kappelhof) urged preemptive prosecution of individuals the Obama campaign believed might disrupt the November election. A cited example of anticipated disruption was to send mailings of a non-violent nature addressing voting issues unfavorable to Obama.

In October, a question from a middle-class voter resulted in an answer from Obama indicating the Democratic nominee was in favor of "spread[ing] the wealth around." This voter became the symbol of middle-class America and Obama's response the touchstone of his neo-Marxist policies.

Immediately thereafter, Democratic Ohio state officials scoured government data bases and confidential records in an effort to find embarrassing information on "Joe the Plumber" (e.g., he is divorced) that quickly found its way into the press.

In the final days of the campaign, three newspapers that had endorsed McCain were booted from the Obama campaign bus. The New York Post, Dallas Morning News, and Washington Times were unceremoniously shown the door only days after their papers' endorsements appeared. Obama campaign officials claimed the move was to make room for more important media outlets: Jet and Ebony entertainment magazines. Both publications were publishing fawning coverage of Obama.

Those heartened by the hope that a President Obama would be more tolerant of critics and criticism than a candidate Obama had their expectations dashed. In only his third full day as the 44th president Obama personally went on the offensive against a media personality. On January 23rd, Obama warned Congressional Republicans against listening to Rush Limbaugh. The man who offered to sit down with Holocaust denier and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without any preconditions whatsoever views an American radio talk show host as a dangerous threat.

In precedent-setting action, Obama moved his director of political affairs, a highly partisan post, from the Old Executive Office Building into the West Wing. Political operative Patrick Gaspard was given White House access not experienced by his predecessors. Obama official Shauna Daly, a non-lawyer and career opposition researcher described as a "partisan dirt-digger," was assigned to the White House counsel office. The move signals not only a new low in partisan activities, but suggests the office assignment may be intended to hide Daly's political activities under the guise of the counsel's attorney-client privileges.

What America witnessed before the election and mere hours after Obama was sworn into office is just a sampling of what Americans can likely expect throughout an Obama presidency. One cannot help but reach the conclusion an Obama Enemies List is already being compiled and free speech restrictions are being considered.

Fortunately for Obama he has no shortage of Congressional foot soldiers to help in his cause to muzzle critics and silence news outlets that refuse to adhere to Democratic talking points that are faxed directly into the network newscast teleprompters.

On Election Day, Senator Chuck Schumer likened conservative talk radio to pornography and argued it should be regulated. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed speech restrictions more than once during the election season. Senators Harry Reid, Dick Durbin and John Kerry have also advocated various limits to political speech.

Senator Debbie Stabenow assured a liberal radio talk show host that regulating conservative speech is imminent. House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman is reportedly working on speech restrictions with acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps.

Imagine the gross violations against political speech that may very well occur when there are no checks and balances from a sycophantic Congress and there is complicity from the national news gatekeepers. The public may be very surprised at the lengths the Obama Administration may pursue to silence critics. Moreover, the self-anointed Praetorian Guard of the First Amendment will conveniently develop a case of amnesia regarding on which side of the debate they fall when it comes to press freedoms. Do not expect to see the New York Times editorialize against Obama and the Congress when it comes to protecting free speech rights aside from its own and that of like-minded, liberally-biased press outlets.

The Clinton White House had its own enemies list and engaged in dirty practices that clearly broke the law. Clinton enemies audited by the IRS included Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, White House Travel Officer Director Billy Dale and the independent watchdog group, Judicial Watch, just to name a few.

Early in Clinton's first term, staffers improperly squirreled away more than 400 FBI files on prominent Republicans. This give the Clintons access to confidential information on key Republicans they viewed as political threats.

Just weeks after the Monica Lewinsky story broke in early 1998, then Deputy-Attorney General (and current Attorney General) Eric Holder engineered a federal grand jury investigation of The American Spectator. The magazine had long been a very successful critic of both Clintons, having broken several stories embarrassing for the President and First Lady. Fourteen months later, the federal prosecutor dropped the probe without filing any criminal charges. The probe may have achieved its purpose as it nearly bankrupted the magazine.

Much has been made by the political left of Richard Nixon's infamous enemies list. The reality is while there was a Nixon's enemies list most of the names were those who did not receive presidential Christmas cards or White House reception invitations. This was a hardship that even the most vulnerable in American society could easily withstand.

The heavy-handed actions against Obama critics and opponents that occurred before he had government institutions firmly under his control should have had public interest watchdog groups up in arms. Because so many of such groups are ideologically aligned with Obama may explain why there was not even a peep. Conservative and balanced news outlets have the disturbing habit of holding accountable liberal public interest organizations that engage in dishonest or deceptive practices that the major news organizations just so happen to overlook.

How soon and how far the Obama Administration will extend its attacks against its critics and the political opposition may become evident in the days ahead. Spared any serious scrutiny by most news outlets during his very brief career in public office, Barack Obama has displayed an exceptionally thin skin when he has come under a microscope or when he has suffered political and public relations setbacks.

Note: This week Obama supposedly signaled he did not support a move to impose the "Fairness Doctrine". In the light of his scores of broken promises and changed positions, we shall see.

Oklahoma City police officer pulls man over for anti-Obama sign on vehicle

By Johnny Johnson February 19, 2009 NewsOK.com (excerpt)

“The police officers who stopped Oklahoma City motorist Chip Harrison and confiscated a sign from his car told him he has a right to his beliefs, but the U.S. Secret Service "could construe this as a threat against President Obama," according to the incident report released this morning….

The sign, which read "Abort Obama Not the Unborn," was returned to Harrison later that day, the report said.

Police spokesman Steve McCool said this morning that the sign was taken in error, and Oklahoma City residents should not be worried that their First Amendment rights will be violated. He said a supervisor "intervened and quickly returned the sign" after Harrison called the police department.

"Obviously, it was not a good decision to confiscate the sign," McCool said.
Harrison, who could not be reached for comment this morning, told the officers that in his opinion the words "Abort Obama" meant to impeach him. He told the officers he does not believe in abortion because he is a Christian.

Harrison was stopped while driving a white truck on westbound Interstate 44 at SW 119th at 8:45 a.m. on Feb. 12, according to the police report.

According to Harrison, an official said the Secret Service had been contacted on the matter and had told them the sign was not a threat to the president.

Harrison was asked if he would like to file a complaint. He said he was not sure but would take the paperwork, just in case.

But his run-in with the law wasn't over yet.

''The Secret Service called and said they were at my house," Harrison said.

After talking to his attorney, Harrison went home where he met the Secret Service.

''When I was on my way there, the Secret Service called me and said they weren't going to ransack my house or anything ... they just wanted to (walk through the house) and make sure I wasn't a part of any hate groups."

Harrison said he invited the Secret Service agents into the house and they were "very cordial."

''We walked through the house and my wife and 2-year-old were in the house," Harrison said.

He said they interviewed him for about 30 minutes and then left, not finding any evidence Harrison was a threat to the president.

''I'm still in contact with a lawyer right now," Harrison said. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

Harrison said he feels his First Amendment rights were violated.”

What Is the Stock Market Telling Us?

The stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones average, has dropped about 3500 points since Obama pulled ahead in the polls last October, and today, it dropped another 300 points as Obama signed his pork-stimulus bill. Investors, in dealing with their own money, are giving a clear message: this is about the most stupid thing we could be doing at this time, and the history of the period from 1932 to 1942 proves it.

It was the collapse of the monumental bubble in the housing market combined with an accompanying period when gasoline was selling for $4.00 per gallon that turned a gathering recession into a financial disaster not before seen in the lifetimes of most of us. Until the credit situation stabilizes, and our banks and other financial institutions become healthy, we have little chance of getting out of this mess; and the federal government should be focused on this instead of borrowing huge sums to spend on pet projects. It’s hard to sell politically, but billions more are needed to normalize credit markets.

Liberal Democrats are having great fun anticipating distributing the pork and excoriating bankers, brokers and automotive executives (who are almost impossible to defend), but let’s not forget that they (the Democrats) are the ones who are mostly to blame for getting us in this mess in the first place. The old saying that good fences make for good neighbors was violated when lenders were both encouraged and forced to make mortgage loans that made no sense - and then greed took over and turned another example of unintended consequences into a world-wide disaster. The unbelievable greed and irresponsibility of firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros. and AIG, who devised ways to take advantage of the situation, was exposed by the credit crash, but unfortunately for the taxpayers, we desperately need a functioning and robust credit system for our economy to function, and we have to grit our teeth, do what is necessary and pay for it.


If you have difficulty playing these videos, you can access the first one here and the second one here.

The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam

How did such a monumental scam as the man-made global warming scenario ever get started in the face of well-known historical evidence of many warming and cooling cycles in our history and the evidence that CO2 increases follow warming trends (not the other way around, and just what is happening now)? This is a long report that explains how this all happened.

The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam

By John Coleman January 28, 2009 KUSINews.com

John Coleman is one of the co-founders of the Weather Channel and has been a weather forecaster and broadcaster in San Diego for many years

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax we citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have lead to a rise in public awareness that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not a significant greenhouse gas that is triggering runaway global warming.

How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government we have to struggle so to stop it?

The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle saw the opportunity to obtain major funding from the Navy for doing measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute’s areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago, who was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle tagged on to Suess studies and co-authored a paper with him in 1957. The paper raises the possibility that the carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. It seems to be a plea for funding for more studies. Funding, frankly, is where Revelle’s mind was most of the time.

Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of Carbon dioxide. In 1960 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels.

These two research papers became the bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could have any significant impact on temperatures.

Now let me take you back to the1950s when this was going on. Our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution from the crude internal combustion engines that powered cars and trucks back then and from the uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. Cars and factories and power plants were filling the air with all sorts of pollutants. There was a valid and serious concern about the health consequences of this pollution and a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action. Government accepted this challenge and new environmental standards were set. Scientists and engineers came to the rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed for cars, as were new high tech, computer controlled engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer big time polluters, emitting only some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. Likewise, new fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced, as well.

But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a continuing crisis issue. So the research papers from Scripps came at just the right moment. And, with them came the birth of an issue; man-made global warming from the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants began to flow and alarming hypothesis began to show up everywhere.

The Keeling curve showed a steady rise in CO2 in atmosphere during the period since oil and coal were discovered and used by man. As of today, carbon dioxide has increased from 215 to 385 parts per million. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. While the increase is real, the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about .41 hundredths of one percent.

Several hypothesis emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause a significant warming. But they remained unproven. Years have passed and the scientists kept reaching out for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on building up.

Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation’s bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meeting.

Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations, a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But, he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was not a pure climate study scientific organization, as we have been lead to believe. It was an organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists who craved the UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Over the last 25 years they have been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, the UN IPCC has made its points to the satisfaction of most and even shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

At the same time, that Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950’s as he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla. He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the first Chancellor of the new campus.

He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It was there that Revelle inspired one of his students to become a major global warming activist. This student would say later, "It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!" The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming," That student was Al Gore. He thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992.

So there it is, Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his road to his books, his movie, his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from the carbon credits business.

What happened next is amazing. The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause celeb of the media. After all the media is mostly liberal, loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling". The politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too.

But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of Congress. He wrote, "My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." He added, "…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer."

And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine. They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain and curbing the use of fossil fuels could have a huge negative impact on the economy and jobs and our standard of living. I have discussed this collaboration with Dr. Singer. He assures me that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon dioxide was not a problem.

Did Roger Revelle attend the Summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in the Summer of 1990 while working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore onto this wild goose chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong? The answer to those questions is, "I think so, but I do not know it for certain". I have not managed to get it confirmed as of this moment. It’s a little like Las Vegas; what is said at the Bohemian Grove stays at the Bohemian Grove. There are no transcripts or recordings and people who attend are encouraged not to talk. Yet, the topic is so important, that some people have shared with me on an informal basis.

Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam.

Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s Mea culpa as the actions of senile old man. And, the next year, while running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more debate, From 1992 until today, he and his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when ask about we skeptics they simply insult us and call us names.

So today we have the acceptance of carbon dioxide as the culprit of global warming. It is concluded that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint which we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists to offset. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.

We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by no drilling and no new refineries for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that the whole thing about corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies. That also has driven up food prices. And, all of this is a long way from over.

And, I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.

Global Warming. It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is a high-jacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history.

Gregg Withdrawal Ignites Census Rhubarb

The $800 billion dollar pork-stimulus bill represents Obama's opening move in centralizing all power in himself and his party. He won this gambit. Will he win the next move - to take over the national census?

Gregg Withdrawal Ignites Census Rhubarb

February 14, 2009 pajamasmedia.com (Excerpts)

“Unfortunately for the Obama administration, Judd Gregg’s withdrawal as commerce secretary has highlighted the effort by the White House to wrest control of the census (and with it, the groundwork for the 2010 Congressional reapportionment).

Gregg took a second or third tier issue and vaulted it to the front pages.

Since word had broken that the White House intended to take oversight of the census out of the Commerce Department and give it to the hyper-partisan political operator Rahm Emanuel, the Republicans had worked feverishly to raise public awareness. They had hit the Sunday talk shows and written letters to the White House. Then early on Thursday top Republicans held a press conference to protest the move. Minority Leader John Boehner explained the GOP’s chagrin:

This unprecedented move would undermine the goal of a fair and accurate Census count. And it would open the door to massive waste and abuse of taxpayer funds.

The American people expect the Census to be fair, impartial, and free of politics.

And they expect us to protect the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars the government distributes each year based on Census data. If this process is controlled by political operatives at the White House, instead of experts and statisticians at the Census Bureau, Americans are right to lose confidence in it.

The Republicans met with limited success. During the week, some op-eds appeared and conservative media did pick up on the story. But given the news of the stimulus bill and the rocky rollout of the bank bailout by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the census story had not reached critical mass. That changed with Gregg’s withdrawal.

Millions of Americans are now hearing about the census power grab by the Obama White House. Bradley Blakeman, writing at Politico, set out the narrative which will now get some visibility:

"Turns out that that the President and the Democrats sought to gut the Department of Commerce from the exercise of any authority, starting with taking away from Commerce of the operation of the 2010 Census and giving it to the White House. The Democrats are drunk with power. Senator Gregg got a taste of what was to come from their behavior on the Economic Bill and the Census and said to himself I am sure, “I want no part of this.”

And the Wall Street Journal chimed in as well:

"The Obama White House, however, indicated that it might be willing to involve itself more directly in the Census Bureau, with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs claiming “historical precedent” for a closer association. This put Mr. Gregg in an impossible situation. It is bad enough that one of the Senate’s famous straight arrows had his integrity questioned. Equally impossible, the White House’s expressed willingness to bring the Census director under the informal sway of, say, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel effectively undermined the authority Mr. Gregg would have needed to run his department."

Certainly the Obama team will receive new scrutiny over the issue. This week’s Sunday talk shows likely will feature the census flap as another ongoing element in the story of the Obama administration’s bumpy first month. And the Washington Post today cautions that “The Census Bureau is staffed by experts with a well-earned reputation for integrity and political independence.” Translation: the Obama administration should let them do their jobs without political interference.

But the real fireworks may come at the confirmation hearing for whoever is selected as the next commerce secretary. Republicans can be expected now to grill the nominee and seek assurances that the trained professional staff at the Commerce Department, not Rahm Emanuel, will run the census. It will be amusing to watch the Democrats explain that it is perfectly acceptable for White House operatives to meddle in the day-to-day work of our nation’s dedicated civil service employees.

Thanks to Gregg, it will make for the most interesting commerce secretary confirmation hearing – ever.

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

Sen. Gregg comes to his 'Census'

By JOSEPH W. MCQUAID
New Hampshire Union Leader Publisher
Saturday, Feb. 14, 2009

Two weeks ago, this newspaper wrote that Judd Gregg's decision to accept the post of Secretary of Commerce for President Barack Obama "may actually bring some much-needed balance to an administration that seems bent on spending the nation into oblivion.''

"That's a long shot, but even if Gregg has only a 1-in-10 chance of being heard on fiscal and business issues, that's better than no chance at all.''
It is now clear that Sen. Gregg wouldn't have had even that small chance. The White House's planned political kidnapping of the Census Bureau from Commerce jurisdiction was all the sign that Gregg needed to realize he would have been mere conservative window dressing in a liberal giveaway store.

As tough as it must have been for him, Gregg has made the right call to withdraw his name. He graciously chose not to blame the President, but as the Wall Street Journal put it yesterday, "Obama could have resolved this mess by telling Senator Gregg that as always the Census Bureau would report to the Commerce Secretary.''

We also wrote two weeks ago, "Three terms in the U.S. Senate is plenty. It would have been time for change, one way or another.'' So we also applaud Gregg for announcing that he will not seek reelection next year.

We wish Sen. Gregg a happy birthday today. He deserves one, especially after the last couple of weeks.

What Obama’s Visit to Fort Myers Tells Us

Historians and other students of the American experiment in democracy (such as Tocqueville) have often warned that it would all come apart and follow other democracies into the graveyard if two things happened: if those who work and produce are overwhelmed by a class of people who only take what they can get and produce nothing, and/or if the voters become ignorant and apathetic of the issues they are called upon to decide.

Please read the following report of Obama’s visit to Fort Myers to sell his pork-stimulus bill and also view the two videos that follow. You decide where we are headed, or whether or not we are already there.

Hapless have hands out

By Michael Graham February 12, 2009 BostonHerald.com

I have seen the future of the American economy, and it’s waiting for a handout in Fort Myers, Fla.

On Tuesday, America got to watch as proud members of the new Obama Nation lined up at a town hall microphone to ask not what they could do for our country, but what our new president was going to do for them.

One woman wanted President Barack Obama to do something about the waiting list for public housing in Florida. Unfortunately we don’t know of any illegal immigrant members of the Obama family living in public housing outside New England. So the president could only share her pain.

Another Obama supporter wanted to know what the president’s stimulus plan was going to do for those who don’t like their jobs at McDonald’s. Again the bad news: The guy wanted a job as a disc jockey - a career track with the same trajectory as buggy whip maker, VCR repairman or Beacon Hill ethics investigator. No future there.

Still another young man was upset that when he lost his $3,000-a-month job, he got a mere $1,100 a month in unemployment. That can’t be right, he insisted. Shouldn’t the government make up the difference?

“How - if you go from making $3,000 a year, a month, to $1,100 a month - how are you able to take care of your families,” he asked the president. “Why can’t we have that to be automatic?”

Yeah, why not get as much money for staying home as you do for going to work? And why do I have to pay this stupid mortgage every month, too? Why can’t I use that money to buy a PlayStation 3?

Speaking of which, do you know where I can get a Wii Fit? All my friends have one, but not me! What I really want is a membership at the health club where all the hot . . . er, “health conscious women” hang out. How about a federal health club benefit? Or at least a free Ab Master?

C’mon, Mr. President, it’s time for “A six-pack for every pot!”
On and on it went, as Obama supporters formed a political soup line.

It’s not that I lack sympathy for struggling American families. How can you not feel for a woman like Henrietta Hughes, who told Obama she was living in a truck and just wanted “a kitchen and a bathroom”?

But people who worked and saved for their homes also have to ask “why?”
Why can’t she do what so many of us have done when bad times have come before - find a way to get by?

Like most middle-class Americans, I’ve been broke. I’ve lived for a time with just the cash in my pocket and the clothes that fit in the back of my crappy, second-hand car. Plenty of us have.

But at no point did it ever occur to me to drive to a political rally and demand that some pol pay my bills, give me a house or find me a job.

Should the government help people in need? Sure. But when did a government handout become the first place to turn? Instead of “Times are tough, what am I gonna do about it?” these folks said “I’m not happy! What are you gonna do about it?”

Then again, why am I surprised? They’re only repeating what they’ve heard from Obama, that “only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy.” Yeah, only the government can solve our problems, raise our kids, fix our souls.

Me? I’d be happy with an administration that could explain its bailout plan without tanking the stock market.

If you have difficulty playing the videos, this is a link to the first one, and here is a link to the second one.

A Must Read for Everyone Over 50 (and their children)

This is another example of the "hope and change" some of you good folks voted for:

Will Old Folks Get in the Way of our Brave New World?

By Pamela Meister February 13, 2009 AmericanThinker

Washington bureaucrats hoped something wouldn't see the light of day until it was too late. Buried in the stimulus bill is the framework for rationing medical care to the elderly. The part Obama and his cohorts are talking about publicly -- electronic medical records -- sounds great: no more having to fill out annoying paperwork at the doctor's office or hospital when you are ailing.

But according to the provision's author, former Health and Human Services director nominee (and tax cheat) Tom Daschle, there's much more, including the newly-created bureaucracy of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. What will the NCHIT be doing? Making sure your doctor gives you the treatment it deems to be efficient and cost-effective. And if your doctor doesn't comply? Well, that part is still a bit fuzzy.

What is clear is that the elderly will be the ones to bear the brunt of this brave new world. Older citizens shouldn't bother treating those ailments that come with age. After all, being retired and collecting Social Security and Medicare, they're not as productive as younger members of society. And Social Security and Medicare, despite Democrats' protestations to the contrary when George Bush tried to do something about it, are on thin ice as it is. So if the proposed Federal Council does not think a treatment is cost-effective due to the patient's age, then the patient will have to do without for the good of the collective. You will assimilate.

This already happens in the UK. But according to one medical ethics expert there, that's not enough. Those who suffer from dementia, for example, are not only wasting their own lives and the lives of their families, but they are wasting precious resources from the National Health Service, and so they should just get on with dying. Sooner rather than later, thank you very much.

Joe Biden told us it's our patriotic duty to pay higher taxes. Will dying off so we don't use up precious resources be our next patriotic duty? Perhaps we can consider a set "expiration date," like in the movie Logan's Run: when the crystal on your hand turns black, it's off to Carousel.

I'm going to take a page from the liberal playbook and use a personal example to put a face on the problem. A few years ago, there was a devastating fire at my mother's home. My mother was unable to get down the stairs and was forced to jump out the second story window, breaking both legs and shattering her feet. On the first day after her accident, we were told that the worst case scenario was that she might have to have both legs amputated. However, her orthopedist managed to put her legs and feet back together. Medicare paid for part, but she and my stepfather were responsible for quite a bit. She spent many months recuperating and now, while she will never be back to "normal" and still endures daily pain, she can once again walk without assistance and go about her daily routine. As a popular "English as a second language" teacher at a middle school in a nearby town, she continues to be a productive, contributing member of society.

But what if Tom Daschle's plan had been in place three years ago? Already in her sixties, would my mother have been told that the first possibility -- amputation of both legs -- was the only option open to her because of her age? Would she be sitting at home in a wheelchair today dealing with the onset of severe depression because her age dictated that even trying to repair her broken legs and feet was not a possibility and she could no longer do anything for herself? Would she, as UK medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock suggests, be better off "offing" herself so that she wouldn't waste everyone's time and taxpayer resources?

Nancy Pelosi's contraception measures were removed from the stimulus bill because she let it slip that "too many people" around is not cost-effective. Will the Daschle healthcare provision be struck out too, before it's too late?

Considering that supporters of the bill like Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) didn't seem to even know the provision exists, I wouldn't count on it.

Pam Meister is the editor for FamilySecurityMatters.org and a contributor to Pajamas Media. The opinions expressed here are her own.

Eventually, the American Public Gets It

It usually takes a long time for Joe Six-pack (a term used endearingly) to wade through the media blitz to the truth, but eventually the American public gets it. This is true regarding global warming and Darwinism, as the following reports point out. What has been amazing to me is the speed at which the scales have fallen off Obama, as the corruption and ineptness of his appointees has become painfully obvious, and as the details of his pork-bill became understood.

Zogby Poll Shows Dramatic Jump in Number of Americans Who Favor Teaching Both Sides of Evolution

EvolutionNews.com February, 2009

Surprisingly Strong Support Seen Among Democrats and Liberals

A new Zogby poll on the eve of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday shows a dramatic rise in the number of Americans who agree that when biology teachers teach the scientific evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution, they also should teach the scientific evidence against it. Surprisingly, the poll also shows overwhelming support among self-identified Democrats and liberals for academic freedom to discuss the “strengths and weaknesses” evolution.

Over 78% of likely voters agree with teaching both the evidence for and against Darwin’s theory, according to the new national poll.

“This represents a dramatic 9-point jump from 2006, when only 69% of respondents in a similar poll favored teaching both sides,” said Discovery Institute’s Dr. John West. “At the same time, the number of likely voters who support teaching only the evidence that favors evolution dropped 7 points from 21% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2009.

“We need to change Darwin Day to Academic Freedom Day because just when Darwinists are celebrating evolution’s triumph, this poll shows that they have been losing the public debate over whether students need to hear both sides,” added West. “There appears to be a public backlash against the strong-arm tactics being employed by many Darwinists to intimidate scientists, teachers, and students who want to raise criticisms of Darwin’s theory.”

The poll results also shatter some preconceptions about who supports letting students hear a balanced presentation on Darwinian evolution, with Democrats supporting teaching Darwinism’s “strengths and weaknesses” even more overwhelmingly than Republicans, at 82% and 73%, respectively.

Added West: “Media reports insinuate that a right-wing conspiracy of know nothings and religious extremists is afoot. But the Zogby poll reflects a very broad-based and well-informed constituency for academic freedom that includes liberals, moderates, independents, and people from every race and age group. The Darwin Lobby has really isolated itself from public opinion.”

Editorial Note: Thank you, Ben Stein; thank you, “Expelled”.

44% Say Global Warming Due To Planetary Trends, Not People

Monday, January 19, 2009 Rasmussen Reports (Excerpt)

“Al Gore’s side may be coming to power in Washington, but they appear to be losing the battle on the idea that humans are to blame for global warming .

Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who blame it on human activity.

Seven percent (7%) attribute global warming to some other reason, and nine percent (9%) are unsure in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats. Voters not affiliated with either party by eight points put the blame on planetary trends.

In July 2006, 46% of voters said global warming is caused primarily by human activities, while 35% said it is due to long-term planetary trends.

In April of last year, 47% of Americans blamed human activity versus 34% who viewed long-term planetary trends as the culprit. But the numbers have been moving in the direction of planetary trends since then.“

Editorial Note: When temperatures in Maine hit 50 below, it's hard to keep selling global warming.

Group pledges to fight GOP senators who support stimulus

February 11, 2009 CNN.com (Excerpts)

WASHINGTON (CNN) – “An influential conservative political action committee is pledging to support primary challenges to any Republican senator who backs the economic stimulus package -- the latest public show of dissatisfaction from the right over the massive measure before Congress.

Three GOP senators voted for the $838 billion compromise version of the package that the Senate approved Tuesday, but all three have said they might not vote for the final version.

"The American people don't want this trillion-dollar political payoff that will just line the pockets of non-governmental organizations who supported [President Barack] Obama in the election," said Scott Wheeler, the executive director of The National Republican Trust PAC, an organization that calls for less government spending and lower taxes.

"Republican senators are on notice," he said. "If they support the stimulus package, we will make sure every voter in their state knows how they tried to further bankrupt voters in an already bad economy."

Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania were the three GOP senators who voted for the bill Tuesday. All three were involved in forging the Senate compromise, in which some spending proposals were cut from the plan, and have said they may not vote for the final version -- which will be hammered out by a Senate-House conference committee -- if more spending projects are added to it.

The PAC's pledge appears most threatening to Specter, the only one of the three who faces re-election in 2010. A longtime moderate, Specter has faced tough primary challengers in the past, including Club for Growth President Pat Toomey in 2004.

"[Sen. Specter] crossed the line one too many times," Wheeler told CNN. "We're now going to get involved in finding a conservative alternative."…

Collins and Snowe did not return CNN's calls seeking comment. Collins solidly won re-election last November and Snowe's seat is not up until 2012.

The PAC's pledge came the same day another conservative group launched a series of robo-calls in Pennsylvania and Maine, urging constituents to call their Republican senators and demand they stop supporting Obama's stimulus package.

Delaware-based Let Freedom Ring on Tuesday began making 100,000 robo-calls in Pennsylvania and 50,000 in Maine, according to Colin Hanna, the group's president."

IT'S A RECESSION NOT A 'CATASTROPHE'

The Democrats in the Senate (aided by three turncoat Republicans, Snowe, Collins and Specter) passed the pork-stimulus bill today, and the tax cheat, Geithner, introduced his non-plan financial bailout as well. The result was an almost 400 point drop in the stock market as investors understand full well what is going on.

IT'S A RECESSION NOT A 'CATASTROPHE'

By ALAN REYNOLDS February 9, 2009 New York Post

PRESIDENT Obama, writing in The Washington Post, said, "By now, it's clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression." But how would we know if and when this crisis is really more "deep and dire" than others?

Many may believe we're in the worst recession since the Great Depression, if only because politicians and the press keep repeating that claim. But we need to compare some facts to discern whether this recession is (or will be) "worse" in some sense than those of 1973-75 or 1981-82.

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf told the House Budget Committee that if the economy is still contracting by mid-year, then this recession will be longer than the 1981-82 and 1973-75 downturns, each of which lasted 16 months. Yet this recession was quite mild until last September. And the severity and human discomfort of downturns can't be measured by their duration.

A wise adviser to President John Kennedy, Arthur Okun of Yale, devised the "misery index" to gauge the pain of economic crisis - a measure that simply adds together the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. It hit 22 percent in June 1980, during an inflationary recession that preceded the Fed's disinflationary squeeze of 1981-82. The misery index was nearly as bad in January 1975, at 19.9 percent.

Assuming inflation was close to zero this January, the misery index would have been roughly the same as the unemployment rate, or 7.6 percent. By this standard, we have a very long way to go before the economy feels nearly as miserable as it did in 1975 or 1980.

There are several other ways to measure economic distress, however, some of which are shown in the nearby table. The first two columns show the total change in real GDP and industrial production from the economy's peak to its trough for that cycle.

Current data show only what happened so far, of course. But that gives us some idea of how much further the economy would have to fall to end up as "deep and dire" as the recessions of 1973-75 or 1981-82.

An average of 55 forecasters in the Jan. 15 Wall Street Journal survey expect real GDP to fall by another percentage point (a 2.1 percent drop in total) before recovering in the third quarter. If they're right, this would be just the third deepest postwar recession by that broad measure.

Measured by unemployment, on the other hand, this might well be the second deepest recession. The current unemployment rate of 7.6 percent is quite unlikely to reach the postwar record of 10.8 percent. But the Journal forecasters expect the jobless rate to top out at 8.9 percent after the recession is technically over - making this very close to becoming the second worst recession in terms of job loss.

In a 1999 Business Week column, Harvard economist Robert Barro suggested we should also improve the misery index by adding a long-term interest rate (and GDP). The table shows 30-year mortgage rates. By that measure, there's no way we'll come close to matching the sort of misery of past recessions - notably, the 18.45 percent mortgage rate of October 1981.

With one exception - the steep 45 percent drop in the S&P 500 stock index since October 2007 - few other indicators of economic distress could support this being the worst postwar recession. Thanks to low inflation, for example, real disposable income rose every month during the fourth quarter - at an annual rate above 6 percent.

The president needs to be a calming voice right now, a source of strength. It's not helpful for him to be warning of a "catastrophe" and making vague, untenable allusions to the Great Depression.

Recessions have almost always ended within a year or so, long before there was a Federal Reserve or Keynesian theory. Debts have to be worked down and excess inventories sold off so that profits, and therefore stock prices and wealth, can revive.

Such curative processes do not take years, as the president suggests - unless the government does too much foolish tinkering. But recovery will require more perspective and patience than we've been seeing from the White House lately, because time really does heal many economic wounds.


Alan Reynolds is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute.

Bush and the Bush-Haters

Rush Limbaugh has been criticized, and even some of my readers have been critical of our attempts to defeat Obama’s efforts to socialize America and ensure Democrats’ hold on power with appointments of corrupt people and a fake, stimulus bill. After eight years of disgusting displays of “power at all costs”, these critics can just go to Hell. They changed all the rules, and the new rules now apply to them as well. It will be a long time before I forget the two, separate Obama supporters who tried to run me off the road because I was sporting a McCain bumper sticker.

Bush and the Bush-Haters

By J.R. Dunn January 19, 2009 The American Thinker

There is one thing certain to go through Barack Obama's mind during the inauguration: at one point or another, while glancing at George W. Bush, he will consider the treatment that Bush got as president and hope to God he suffers nothing even vaguely similar.

It can be stated without fear of serious argument that no previous president has been treated as brutally, viciously, and unfairly as George W. Bush.

Bush 43 endured a deliberate and planned assault on everything he stood for, everything he was involved in, everything he tried to accomplish. Those who worked with him suffered nearly as much (and some even more -- at least one, Scooter Libby, was convicted on utterly specious charges in what amounts to a show trial).

His detractors were willing to risk the country's safety, its economic health, and the very balance of the democratic system of government in order to get at him. They were out to bring him down at all costs, or at the very least destroy his personal and presidential reputation. At this they have been half successful, at a high price for the country and its government.

Although everyone insists on doing so, it is impossible to judge Bush, his achievements, or his failings, without taking these attacks into account. Before any serious analysis of the Bush presidency can be made, some attempt to encompass the campaign against him must be carried out. I hope no one is holding his breath.

It's quite true that other presidents have suffered baseless attacks. Lincoln was generally dismissed as an imbecile, an unwashed backwoodsman, and an orang-outang (as they spelled it then). There exists an infamous Confederate cartoon portraying him with devil's horns and one foot on the Constitution. Next to no one at the time could have foreseen the towering stature Lincoln would at last attain.

Richard M. Nixon probably stands as the most hated president prior to Bush. But that was largely thanks to a relatively small coterie of east-coast leftists and their hangers-on, angered by Nixon's early anti-communism (which had become more "nuanced" by the time he took office, as the 1970 opening to China clearly reveals.). Nixon had the support of most of the country, the famed "silent majority", during his first term, and if not for his own personal failings, he would unquestionably have prevailed over his enemies. Difficult though it may be to believe, Nixon was only one paranoid slip away from being considered a great or near-great president

With Reagan, the coterie was even smaller and more isolated. His enemies continually underestimated him as a "B-movie actor" (which, by the way, showed a serious misunderstanding as to how the old studio system actually worked), and were just as continually flummoxed by his humor, his intelligence, and his unexcelled skill at communication. As the outpouring of public emotion surrounding his state funeral made clear, Reagan today stands as one of the beloved of all modern presidents.

Bush is alone at being attacked and denied support from all quarters -- even from many members of his own party. No single media source, excepting talk radio, was ever in his corner. Struggling actors and comics revived their careers though attacks on Bush. A disturbed woman perhaps a half step above the status of a bag lady parked outside his Crawford home to throw curses at him and was not only not sent on her way but joined by hundreds of others with plenty of spare time on their hands, an event covered in minute-by-minute detail by major media.

At least two films, one produced play, and a novel (by the odious Nicholson Baker, a writer with the distinction of dropping further down the ladder of decency with each work -- from sophisticated porn in Vox to degrading the war against Hitler in last year's Human Smoke) appeared calling for his assassination -- a new wrinkle in presidential criticism, and one that the left will regret. And let's not forget that tribune of the voiceless masses, Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 911 once marked the end-all and be-all of political satire but today is utterly forgotten.

While FDR was accused of having engineered Pearl Harbor (as if even an attempted attack on the US would not have been enough to get the country into WW II in real style), no president before Bush was ever subjected to the machinations of an entire conspiracy industry. The 9/11 Truthers, a mix of seriously disturbed individuals and hustlers out to pull a profitable con, accused Bush and his administration of crimes that put the allegations against Roosevelt in the shade, and with far less rational basis. These hallucinations were picked up the mass media, playing the role of transmission belt, and various fringe political figures along the lines of Cynthia McKinney.

But even this pales in light of the actions of the New York Times, which on its downhill road to becoming a weekly shopper giveaway for the Upper West Side, seriously jeopardized national security in the process of satisfying its anti-Bush compulsion. Telecommunications intercepts, interrogation techniques, transport of terrorist captives, tracking of terrorist finances... scarcely a single security program aimed at Jihadi activity went unrevealed by the Times and -- not to limit the blame -- was then broadcast worldwide by the legacy media. At one point, Times reporters published a detailed analysis of government methods of searching out rogue atomic weapons, a story that was no doubt read with interest at points north of Lahore, and one that we may all end up paying for years down the line. The fact that Bush was able to curtail any further attacks while the media as a whole was working to undermine his efforts is little less than miraculous.

As for his own party, no small number of Republicans (not all of them of the RINO fraternity) made a practice of ducking out on their party leader. Many refused to be photographed with him, several took steps to be out of town when he was scheduled to appear in their districts, and as for the few who actually spoke out in his favor... well, the names don't trip easily into mind. This naked pusillanimity played a large role in the GOP's 2006 and 2008 electoral debacles. Until the party grasps this, don't look for any major comeback.

And last but not least (I think we can safely overlook the flying shoes, which have been covered down to the last aglet), Bush is the sole American chief executive -- perhaps the sole leader in world history -- to have had a personality disorder named after him, the immortal Bush Derangement Syndrome. Few at this point recall that this was an actual psychological effort at diagnosing the president's effect on the tender psyches of this country's leftists. Was there a Hitler syndrome? A Stalin syndrome? The very existence of BDS says more about the left in general than it does about Bush.

What were the reasons for this hatred and the campaign that grew out of it? We can ask that question as often as we like, but we'll get no rational answer. All that we can be sure of is that Bush's actual policies and personality had little to do with it. Al Gore's egomaniacal attempt to defy this country's constitutional rules of succession merely acted as a trigger, giving the left a pretext to open up the attack. The same can be said about lingering bitterness over Bill Clinton's impeachment. While certainly a factor, it by no means accounts for a complete explanation. After all, did the GOP of the 70s go overboard in avenging Richard Nixon's forced resignation by working over Jimmy Carter? The best course was actually that which they followed, to allow Mr. Peanut to destroy himself.

As in all such cases, Bush hatred involves a number of factors that will be debated by historians for decades to come. But one component that cannot be overlooked is ideology, specifically the ideologization of American politics. It is no accident that the three most hated recent presidents are all Republican. These campaigns are yet another symptom of the American left's collapse into an ideological stupor characterized by pseudo-religious impulses, division of the world into black and white entities, and the unleashing of emotions beyond any means of rational control. The demonization of Bush -- and Reagan, and Nixon -- is the flip-side of the messianic response to Barack Obama.

There's nothing new about any of this. It's present in Orwell's 1984 in the "Five-Minute Hate" against the imaginary Emmanuel Goldstein, himself based on Leon Trotsky. The sole novel factor is its adaptation as a conscious tactic in democratic politics. That is unprecedented, and a serious cause for concern.

Being a Democrat, Obama has little to worry about, even with the far-left elements of his coalition beginning to sour on him. The ideological machinery is too unwieldy to swing around in order to target a single figure. Even if circumstances force him to violate the deeper tenets of his following, personal factors -- not limited to skin color -- will serve to protect him.

For the country as a whole, the prospects are bleaker. The left is convinced that hatred works, that it's a perfect tactic, one that will work every time out. They have already started the process with Sarah Palin, their next target in their long row of hate figures. They're wrong, of course. In a democracy, hatred is not a keeper, as the Know-Nothings, Radical Republicans, segregationists, Birchers, and many others have learned to their eventual dismay. But the process can take a long time to work itself out -- nearly a century, in the case of racial segregation -- and no end of damage can occur in the meantime. One of the byproducts of the campaign against Bush was to encourage Jihadis and Ba'athists in Iraq with the assurance of a repetition of Saigon 1975 as soon as the mad and bad Bush 43 was gotten out of the way. This time, the price was paid by the Iraqi people. But in the future, the bill may be presented somewhat closer to home.

And as for the "worst president in history" himself, George W. Bush has exhibited nothing but his accustomed serenity. Despite the worst his enemies could throw at him, his rehabilitation has already begun. He will be viewed at last as a man who picked up the worst hand of cards dealt to any president since Roosevelt and who played it out better than anyone had a right to expect. As Barack Obama seems to have realized, there is much to be learned from Bush, a man who appears to personify the golden mean, never too despondent, never too overjoyed, and never at any time overwhelmed.

Other presidents may encounter the same level of motiveless, mindless hatred, others may suffer comparable abuse -- but we can sure that no one will ever meet it with more equanimity than George W. Bush.

We Welcome the Choice of Michael Steele, and Thoughts on the Stimulus Bill

I feel almost the same invigoration with the announcement that Michael Steele has been elected Chairman of the Republican National Committee as I felt when Sarah Palin was nominated. All traditional Americans who love their country and its history and understand that free-market capitalism has been the driving force in doubling man’s lifespan and allowing the poorest American to live better than the royalty of old – should rejoice at this choice. It does not matter that he is black, just as it did not matter to most Americans that Obama is half-black, but it is a nice touch.

All polls show that a majority of Americans are conservative in their beliefs, and conservatives usually win the day when they are matched against modern liberals for political office. It is always galling and a slap in the face when conservatives go to Washington and catch some kind of disease that makes them think they have to vote for liberal causes to retain their seats. I know that the liberal press is unmerciful in its criticism of conservatives; I know that the liberal elites throw the best parties, and that the movie stars mostly embrace liberal causes. Nevertheless, the people we send to Washington should be able to withstand the pressures and stay true to conservative principles much more than has happened in recent history.

It was especially galling to swallow John McCain as our candidate, and then have his campaign people undermine a true conservative, Sarah Palin. It has been very distressing since the election to read the comments of so many fools that conservative principles lost the election, and that the Republican Party has to “get with it”. The election of Michael Steele should give millions of Americans some hope that we might soon return to the policies that won the day in 1994 and kept Republicans in power until they deserted those principles and lost in 2006. The American people will elect real Democrats over pseudo Democrats every time, and they will elect conservative Republicans who stand up for their values over both of them.

Democrats: Beware of Michael Steele

By Bob Beckel February 06, 2009 RealClearPolitics.com (Excerpts)

“After blasting Republicans for an endless string of missteps last week, I concede the GOP finally got one right. Electing the former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, Michael Steele, to chair the Republican National Committee is a smart move for the GOP and a warning for Democrats.

I have spent hours with Steele at the Fox News studios, and in dozens of TV encounters, and at dinners. Steele is a friendly, formidable, and very partisan man who should not be underestimated. He has a disarming and gifted television personality and an uncanny ability to make the most unreasonable arguments sound rational. In a debate, he can charm his opponents into a false sense of security, and then proceed to maul them. Democrats who underrate Steele do so at their own peril.

The press continually refers to Steele as a "moderate", but he is not a moderate -- he only plays one on television. Under that friendly persona of reasonableness lies the soul of a doctrinaire conservative. From an ardent supply-sider to a committed pro-life advocate (he came within a year of being ordained a Catholic priest), Steele is firmly on the Right.

In the pro-choice state of Maryland, Steele rarely raised the abortion issue in his races for Lieutenant Governor and the U.S. Senate. But his party is looking to him to rekindle the passions of the pro-life movement on a national stage. And Steele is aware of the 2008 falloff of voter turnout in precincts where the pro-life movement is strong….

Democrats beware: Steele faces challenges, perseveres, and succeeds. Given the state of the GOP Steele holds a weak political hand, but you can be sure he will maximize the opportunities of whichever card he holds.”

Bob Beckel managed Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign. He is a senior political analyst for the Fox News Channel and a columnist for USA Today.

Final Note: Senators Collins and Snowe from Maine and Specter of Pennsylvania reflect what has gone wrong in the Republican Party. These RINO’s should be cooperating with their Republican colleagues to stop the Democrat pork-bill, labeled a “stimulus” bill to fool voters, and substituting a much smaller bill that actually stimulates lending and home buying. Instead, as they have done many times in the past, they are playing to the liberal press who regard them as heroes. They are not heroes; they are a disgrace.

History tells us that substantial tax cuts work in helping to end recessions, while stimulus attempts always prolong the agony. Obama’s stimulus bill may be the worst piece of major legislation ever introduced in Congress – and the most damaging. The only intent of this bill is to cement Democrats's hold on power.