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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

No Songs About Stalin

Back in the 1970's I used to contribute to PBS in appreciation of the mystery and Rumpole stories that were so enjoyable. It was in the late 1970's, though, that I woke up to the left-wing bias that was so entwined with everything that came out of NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS, and I stopped contributing to PBS. Perhaps the one thing that really opened my eyes was the Walter Cronkite reporting on CBS, and the lies he told about what was happening in the Vietnam War (especially the Tet offensive) - at a time when President Nixon was trying to find an dignified way out without dishonoring all the sacrifices we had made there. PBS was just as bad.

I did not understand, and I still do not understand why the US government was helping to finance a television network that consistently blamed the American people for everything bad that happened in the world - those taxpayers who were footing the bill.

Since then I have wanted the government funding of PBS to stop, and for a while, in the mid 1990's, it appeared that it would end, but the moment was lost.

A short time ago, the true colors of PBS were shown to everyone when Juan Williams was fired in a humiliating fashion for voicing a personal feeling that every American who travels by airplane has. I hope this new moment to cut off their funding will not be lost this time.

Ben Stein's Diary

No Songs About Stalin
By Ben Stein on 11.29.10 American Spectator

Now, here is something interesting. It is a windy night in Rancho Mirage. In fact, the wind is terrifying, roaring around our home like a freight train. When it first started, I thought maybe a helicopter was landing nearby, but, no, it was wind. The palm fronds by the pool are going wild.

I have been sitting at the breakfast table paying bills. It is scary how many bills I have, especially mortgage and property tax–related bills. What an idiot I was to buy so much real estate. Well, maybe it will come back in Tommy's lifetime. In the meantime, I am helping a lot of kids in Riverside County, California, Los Angeles County, California, Bonner County, Idaho, and Washington, D.C. get a good education. I guess I should say I am helping them get "access" to a good education. Whether they get that education is up to them and the omens are poor.

Anyway, I was paying the bills and watching a fund-raiser for the major Southern California PBS station, KCET. The show was a mish mash of folk songs from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, with such giant groups as Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, that foursome who sang "Creeque Alley" (which the host of the show calls "Creaky Alley"), oh, yeah, the Mommas and the Poppas, and even Bobby Darin. They were all singing songs against war, against racism, against the bourgeois sterile conformity of the era (which turns out to have been the most creatively fertile time of the century in this country), against the institutionalized racism of this country.

As I am watching (or maybe "as I was watching") I am getting steadily more furious and puzzled.

Why are there so many songs about what's wrong with this glorious America and NO songs about Stalin's murder of fifty million innocent people? Why are there no songs about the intentional starvation of the Ukraine and its people by the commissars, mass murder against the most beautiful people on the planet there in the Ukraine?

Why were there so many songs against the U.S. attempt to save Vietnam from Communism, and not one song -- not ONE -- about the mass killings by Ho Chi Minh after 1954 or about the murder of thousands of innocents when the Communists briefly held Hue in the Tet Offensive?

Why have there been no songs about Mao's murders of tens of millions of Chinese after he seized China in 1949? Why not one song about the amazing brutality of Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il of North Korea, who have starved and murdered millions of the most capable people on this earth?

Why are the folk singers always finding fault with the light of the world, the United States, and never against Communist, totalitarian regimes? It must have to do with the power of the Party in media circles. It must. What else could explain it? (Well, maybe hatred of a weak but dominant father…)

That Party Power lingers: A case on point: the Russian parliament just formally admitted guilt for the brutal murder of 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1940. No compensation. No punishment of anyone. But admission of guilt. That is something. For generations, the Communists tried to pass it off as a Nazi atrocity but the Nazis denied it and many people believed Stalin.

Now, as long suspected, it turns out the Polish officers were murdered OGPU style, bullet in the back of the head, by the Soviets, who did not want any aristos resisting their sway in Poland.

This is a BIG, BIG story of Stalin's atrocities and lies. It appeared in a bold headline in the Wall Street Journal. It was on page A 5 of the New York Times in one small paragraph of tiny type next to another paragraph about energy legislation in the EU.

Even now, even after the General Secretary has been dead for 57 years, after there is no more USSR for close to 20 years, even now, from beyond the grave, the orders of the Comintern go forth like irresistible zombies. No meaningful criticism of Stalin! Not a word! Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime is death!

ZA STALINA!

Well, thank you, God, that I live far from where the Comintern's writ still runs. At least for now. I think I will go swim in that windstorm.


Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American Spectator.

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Sunday, November 28, 2010

Obama and Holder and Their Massive Failure to Think

Obama and Holder and Their Massive Failure to Think

By Kyle-Anne Shiver November 22, 2010 American Thinker

Well, the bubble of Obama supremacy has finally exploded in all our faces and is now lying in tatters, with little giblets of its former hot-air glory spread from here to kingdom come. The candidate who played his "Peace is just an Obama speech away" tune to the easily bamboozled left has just been dealt the final blow that crashed the big, fat hot air balloon.

The very first test case was just last week: a former Gitmo detainee, brought to NYC to be tried as a civilian with all the rights of a genuine American citizen, was found guilty on a single picayune count from a list of 280-plus murder charges.

Ahmed Ghailani was found guilty by a civilian jury on a single count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings. Never mind the hundreds murdered by means of the TNT bought by this enemy combatant, obeying the orders of his own commander in chief, Osama bin Laden. Due to constitutional protections gratuitously bestowed on him by President Barack Obama and the Department of Injustice, Ahmed Ghailani will soon be sentenced to serve a couple of decades in an American prison (minus time served, for sure), where he likely will sue the people of the United States of America over and over again with some trumped-up "cruel and unusual punishment" claim.

Wherever he is, Osama bin Laden is having one heck of a great laugh right this minute as he watches Western civilization shoot itself again, again, again, and again in the foot.

What we have here is a great, big, fat failure to think. A failure to think beyond the next sentence. A failure to give an ounce of credit to the president in charge on 9/11 and the thousands of career security personnel who devised the enemy combatant plan and engineered Gitmo to hold these bad guys indefinitely as the prisoners of war that they are. A complete failure to think through possible outcomes and plan around them.

Obama & Company have been called the Keystone Cops too many times to count. But they are far, far worse than mere incompetents. They are blowhards who believe in their own mental and moral superiority to the point where they put all Americans at gratuitous risk.

In the very first month of his presidency, Barack Obama announced the closing of Gitmo within one year. That one was a wash before the words ever cleared his teleprompter-enabled mouth.

Immediately after this thoughtless announcement, Obama moved to shut down the military tribunals set to take place at Gitmo. Despite the huge sums of taxpayer money spent on the Gitmo enterprise, Obama was ready to throw all that away on another of his liberal dream schemes. But the political will had evaporated in the Congress, and the funds to do all this were refused. If Obama had merely thought this through before the big announcement, he could have saved himself and us a lot of embarrassment, not to mention dollars.

Then Holder decided to release for public consumption hundreds of formerly classified CIA memos on prisoner interrogation despite the erstwhile bipartisan pleas of former CIA heads and many other experts. This sent a message to the entire world that our new leader would prefer to sacrifice our own valiant security officers on the altar of his political fantasies than to protect American citizens. And it told the entire Islamic terrorist network exactly how we had interrogated their comrades in arms and simultaneously sent the message that we would surrender rather than fight smart and tough in the future.

As if that were not enough, Holder soon announced -- with Obama's enthusiastic backing -- that the 9/11 terrorists would be gifted with full-court-press civilian trials in NYC, mere blocks from Ground Zero. Another massive-beyond-massive failure to think. No one in the whiz-kid cadre at the White House bothered to check with NYC and NY state officials first. Neither did they pre-gauge the furious public reaction. Neither did anyone think to check the budget problems of New York.

To make matters even more horrible, the latest shot at the bubble of Obama supremacy -- the failed civilian trial of Ahmed Ghailani -- comes at a time when real American citizens are voluntarily giving up their own right to fly upon their own airplanes due to overzealous, most likely unconstitutional searches.

Tempers are flaring daily at security checkpoints. Lawsuits are being filed. Petitions are being mounted. The citizenry is quite nearly so distraught over this disgusting double standard that it'll be a wonder if the airline industry can survive this latest Obama failure to think.

If these completely arbitrary naked scans and gropings of American citizens by the TSA could actually protect us from terrorists, then perhaps we would be willing to go along with them. But surely it has already occurred to the terrorists -- even if it has not occurred to our brilliant president and his beyond-brilliant secretary of homeland security -- that all they need to do now is use package bombs instead of people. Right -- they did that. And they have also figured out that neither the high-tech scanners nor the sexually molesting pat-downs will detect explodable things put into their little body cavities.

Now, since it is a documented fact that the modern terrorist is a Muslim male somewhere between the ages of 17 and 40, we should begin to put on our little thinking caps and realize that if Islam is indeed a religion of peace, then all that inbreeding has caused vast numbers of Muslim males to completely take seriously the dozens of dicta in the Koran to kill all infidels. In reality, no one gives a tiny whit why they blow people up, what religion they are, or how hard they had it as kids, much less if they got here because of consanguinity. The only thing any decent person cares about is stopping these Muslim males before they kill us all and put their imams in power.

Do any of these so-called smart people in the executive branch of our federal government understand that the only way to win any war is by singling out the enemy (profiling!) and vowing to destroy them before they destroy you? Dying in the name of political correctness does not appeal to truly intelligent people. And the Obama Doctrine of sucking up to Islam is nothing but a suicide pact made between utterly stupid people and the enemies who have sworn to destroy us all.

Failure to think on such a grand scale as the one we are currently witnessing from Obama & Co. is just cause to consider the possibility that this president cares far more about the rights of terrorists than he does about the citizens whom he has sworn to protect and defend.

Would some smart American please let me know when we can begin to use the word "impeach"? Until then, I am holed up in my own little household bunker -- grounded by idiots -- until further notice.

Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.

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Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Gore Changes Mind on Ethanol

If Al Gore is someone who drives you crazy, this article will blow your mind. Now that manmade global warming has been exposed for the fraud that it is, and, with carbon credits plummeting to near zero, the carbon exchange (on which Gore made millions) has closed its doors, I expect to see another article like this any day now that Gore has changed his mind about global warming.

U.S. corn ethanol "was not a good policy"-Gore

Nov 22, 2010 Reuters

* U.S. ethanol consumes about 40 pct corn crop

* Impact on food prices "real"

By Gerard Wynn

ATHENS, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said support for corn-based ethanol in the United States was "not a good policy", weeks before tax credits are up for renewal.

U.S. blending tax breaks for ethanol make it profitable for refiners to use the fuel even when it is more expensive than gasoline. The credits are up for renewal on Dec. 31.

Total U.S. ethanol subsidies reached $7.7 billion last year according to the International Energy Industry, which said biofuels worldwide received more subsidies than any other form of renewable energy.

"It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol," said Gore, speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank.

"First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.

"It's hard once such a programme is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going."

He explained his own support for the original programme on his presidential ambitions.

"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

U.S. ethanol is made by extracting sugar from corn, an energy-intensive process. The U.S. ethanol industry will consume about 41 percent of the U.S. corn crop this year, or 15 percent of the global corn crop, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.

A food-versus-fuel debate erupted in 2008, in the wake of record food prices, where the biofuel industry was criticised for helping stoke food prices.

Gore said a range of factors had contributed to that food price crisis, including drought in Australia, but said there was no doubt biofuels have an effect.

"The size, the percentage of corn particularly, which is now being (used for) first generation ethanol definitely has an impact on food prices.

"The competition with food prices is real."

Gore supported so-called second generation technologies which do not compete with food, for example cellulosic technologies which use chemicals or enzymes to extract sugar from fibre for example in wood, waste or grass.

"I do think second and third generation that don't compete with food prices will play an increasing role, certainly with aviation fuels."

Gore added did that he did not expect a U.S. clean energy or climate bill for "at least two years" following the mid-term elections which saw Republicans increase their support.

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Sunday, November 21, 2010

The TSA - Right On the Ball

Actually, Barack Obama has done all concerned citizens a great favor. By using strong-arm tactics to push through so many socialist programs he woke the country up to the failures of socialism and to the loss of our freedoms that socialism represents.

In the same fashion, by going overboard, the Transportation Security Association has demonstrated the gross stupidity of our airport screening procedures. They are actually performing full-body scans and pat downs, not only on all passengers, but also on the very airline pilots who fly our planes. Hopefully the angry reactions among airline passengers will force the TSA finally to adopt procedures that make sense: begin profiling young Muslim men for special screening – interviews, checking no-fly lists, full body scanning and pat downs. They can then deal with ordinary Americans (including Swedish-American grandmothers) on a random basis.

NAPOLITANO: THE BALL’S IN MY COURT NOW

by Ann Coulter November 17, 2010

After the 9/11 attacks, when 19 Muslim terrorists -- 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon, 14 with "al" in their names -- took over commercial aircraft with box-cutters, the government banned sharp objects from planes.

Airport security began confiscating little old ladies' knitting needles and breaking the mouse-sized nail files off of passengers' nail clippers. Surprisingly, no decrease in the number of hijacking attempts by little old ladies and manicurists was noted.

After another Muslim terrorist, Richard Reid, AKA Tariq Raja, AKA Abdel Rahim, AKA Abdul Raheem, AKA Abu Ibrahim, AKA Sammy Cohen (which was only his eHarmony alias), tried to blow up a commercial aircraft with explosive-laden sneakers, the government prohibited more than 3 ounces of liquid from being carried on airplanes.

All passengers were required to take off their shoes for special security screening, which did not thwart a single terrorist attack, but made airport security checkpoints a lot smellier.

After Muslim terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried to detonate explosive material in his underwear over Detroit last Christmas, the government began requiring nude body scans at airports.

The machines, which cannot detect chemicals or plastic, would not have caught the diaper bomber. So, again, no hijackers were stopped, but being able to see passengers in the nude boosted the morale of airport security personnel by 22 percent.

After explosives were inserted in two ink cartridges and placed on a plane headed to the United States from the Muslim nation of Yemen, the government banned printer cartridges from all domestic flights, resulting in no improvement in airport security, while requiring ink cartridges who traveled to take Amtrak.

So when the next Muslim terrorist, probably named Abdul Ahmed al Shehri, places explosives in his anal cavity, what is the government going to require then? (If you're looking for a good investment opportunity, might I suggest rubber gloves?)

Last year, a Muslim attempting to murder Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia blew himself up with a bomb stuck up his anus. Fortunately, this didn't happen near an airport, or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would now be requiring full body cavity searches to fly.

You can't stop a terrorist attack by searching for the explosives any more than you can stop crime by taking away everyone's guns.

In the 1970s, liberal ideas on crime swept the country. Gun owners were treated like criminals while actual criminals were coddled and released. If only we treated criminals with dignity and respect and showed them the system was fair, liberals told us, criminals would reward us with good behavior.

As is now well known, crime exploded in the '70s. It took decades of conservative law-and-order policies to get crime back to near-1950s levels.

It's similarly pointless to treat all Americans as if they're potential terrorists while trying to find and confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon. We can't search all passengers for explosives because Muslims stick explosives up their anuses. (Talk about jobs Americans just won't do.)

You have to search for the terrorists.

Fortunately, that's the one advantage we have in this war. In a lucky stroke, all the terrorists are swarthy, foreign-born, Muslim males. (Think: "Guys Madonna would date.")

This would give us a major leg up -- if only the country weren't insane.

Is there any question that we'd be looking for Swedes if the 9/11 terrorists, the shoe bomber, the diaper bomber and the printer cartridge bomber had all been Swedish? If the Irish Republican Army were bombing our planes, wouldn't we be looking for people with Irish surnames and an Irish appearance?

Only because the terrorists are Muslims do we pretend not to notice who keeps trying to blow up our planes.

It would be harder to find Swedes or Irish boarding commercial airliners in the U.S. than Muslims. Swarthy foreigners stand out like a sore thumb in an airport. The American domestic flying population is remarkably homogenous. An airport is not a Sears department store.

Only about a third of all Americans flew even once in the last year, and only 7 percent took more than four round trips. The majority of airline passengers are middle-aged, middle-class, white businessmen with about a million frequent flier miles. I'd wager that more than 90 percent of domestic air travelers were born in the U.S.

If the government did nothing more than have a five-minute conversation with the one passenger per flight born outside the U.S., you'd need 90 percent fewer Transportation Security Administration agents and airlines would be far safer than they are now.

Instead, Napolitano just keeps ordering more invasive searches of all passengers, without exception -- except members of Congress and government officials, who get VIP treatment, so they never know what she's doing to the rest of us.

Two weeks ago, Napolitano ordered TSA agents to start groping women's breasts and all passengers' genitalia -- children, nuns and rape victims, everyone except government officials and members of Congress. (Which is weird because Dennis Kucinich would like it.)

"Please have your genitalia out and ready to be fondled when you approach the security checkpoint."

This is the punishment for refusing the nude body scan for passengers who don't want to appear nude on live video or are worried about the skin cancer risk of the machines -- risks acknowledged by the very Johns Hopkins study touted by the government.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to keep the government as far away from airport security as possible, and not only because Janet Napolitano did her graduate work in North Korea.

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Saturday, November 20, 2010

GM selling at a loss should tell you something

Don't get too uplifted by the GM IPO yet:

GM selling at a loss should tell you something

The Daily Caller (Excerpts) November 18, 2010

“When a government sells stock in a company, it is usually trying to maximize short-term revenue. Therefore, the share price is normally pegged at what the market will bear. If the valuation of the total stock offering is less than the value of the company (or a portion thereof) being sold, something is amiss. That is certainly the case with the initial public offering of GM stock sold to investors on November 17. The stock price is telling us something the federal government doesn’t want to admit, all the rhetoric about the supposed success of the GM bailout notwithstanding….

If the federal government wanted to recoup its investment in GM, then the GM stock price should be much higher than the $33 initial price. In order to break even, as the Deal Journal reports, the stock price would have to rise to around$50 per share. So why is the Treasury Department selling off the company at a loss?

First, the government is what is known as a “motivated seller.” By offering such a low stock price, the administration is essentially admitting that it has no place in running an auto company. While GM’s financial position is much better than it was when it should have gone bankrupt, the company’s finances are not great. A quick crunch of any of the numbers in the GM prospectus shows the company is not the healthy organization the politicos would have you believe. They have done a poor job running the company, even if they did save it from going under by ignoring the law and throwing billions of dollars at it. The sale prospectus even admits “our (that is, the government’s) disclosure controls and procedures and our internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective.” Hardly a ringing endorsement!

Second, they’re not the only ones in the game. The unusual bankruptcy settlement for GM granted a significant portion of the company to the United Auto Workers. The union is in this game too, even though it has no investment to recoup. The UAW is selling around 18 million shares, so it stands to gain about $500 million for its pension fund — at taxpayers’ expense.

Finally, just as with RailTrack, there is considerable political risk involved. If the feds could nationalize GM once, they can do it again. The company admits in its prospectus that “The UST [U.S. Treasury] (or its designee) will continue to own a substantial interest in us following this offering, and its interests may differ from those of our other stockholders.” It suggests that government might interfere in “The selection, tenure and compensation of our management; our business strategy and product offerings; our relationship with our employees, unions and other constituencies; and our financing activities, including the issuance of debt and equity securities.” Furthermore, the government has asserted sovereign immunity, meaning that the IPO is not subject to anti-fraud laws….

By selling GM stock at a loss, the federal government is giving us fair warning, and admitting the bailouts’ enormous cost to the taxpayer.”

Iain Murray is Vice President for Strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.


This is the same government that is subjecting airline pilots to full-body screening and pat downs - possibly the most stupd act committed by any government ever!

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Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Day "Global Warming" Ended


November 20, 2009: The Day "Global Warming" Ended

By Alan Caruba NOVEMBER 17, 2010

November 20, 2009 is an important date because it was the day that “global warming” ended. It was the day that a total fabrication, a hoax, was revealed to be the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), aided and abetted by a vast network of governmental and business leaders, a compliant media, and scientists who sold their souls for grants and other funding.

It was the day that Al Gore was shown to be unworthy to share a Nobel Peace Prize with the iniquitous IPCC, nor an Oscar for his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

It was the day that Cap-and-Trade legislation, the largest tax ever on energy use, was eviscerated as lacking any basis in science. The legislation proposed to establish a “carbon credits” trade that would have enriched the Chicago Climate Exchange created by investors that included Goldman Sachs. Following the "global warming" hoax revelations, the Exchange would close its doors within a year.

November 20 was the day that three thousand emails between the meteorologists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England, specifically its director, Phil Jones, and Penn State’s Michael Mann, as well as others involved in the hoax were made available on the Internet.

The Washington Times reported that “Obama administration climate czar Carol Browner rejected the revelations in the email exchanges, saying “I’m sticking with the 2,500,” referring to the IPCC climate science members. “These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real.” This, like all the other assertions about “global warming” was a lie.

It must be noted that President Barack Obama continues to talk about “climate change”, the term used to replace “global warming”. His administration has many “global warming” advocates including his science advisor, Dr. John Holden, and Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu. The Environmental Protection Agency is engaged in securing authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas emissions” as this is being written.

The administration’s funding through subsidies and mandates for “renewable energy” sources such as solar and wind energy is entirely based on the assertion that the generation of energy by coal-fired plants, is causing “global warming.” Neither solar, nor wind can even begin to provide sufficient energy for the nation, now or in the future. Support for ethanol, a biofuel, is equally without merit.
The primary assertion behind “global warming” was that it was “anthropogenic”, created by human activity, primarily the burning of “fossil fuels” by utilities to generate electricity and by industrial users. Similarly the use of oil derivatives, gasoline and diesel for transportation is blamed.

A segment of IPCC members did not support the global warming hoax and tried for years to marshall opposition to the Panel’s findings, published in reports shot through with baseless distortions and assertions that the Earth was heating to an extraordinary degree. Over time, they came forth and publicly disputed the IPCC for spreading the "global warming" hoax.

A year earlier in 2008, testifying before a congressional committee, Dr. Roy Spencer, the principal research scientist of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said, “Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

“The warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural,” said Dr. Spencer, adding that whatever warming had occurred had since been replaced by satellite data documenting that the Earth had “not warmed for at least seven years now.”

A “little ice age” from about 1300 to 1850 was well known to meteorologists and climate scientists.. Dennis T. Avery, the director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, noted in April 2008 that “The Earth’s warming since 1850 totals about 0.7 degrees C. Most of this occurred before 1940.” The global warming hoax went into high gear in the late 1980s when no significant warming was occurring. Avery, too, noted that “The Earth has experienced no discernible temperature increase since 1998, nearly nine years ago.”

Following the leaked emails, on November 26, 2009, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal concluded that “the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.”

By then, however, the lies put forth by the IPCC had been debunked by a series of international conferences on climate change sponsored by The Heartland Institute. Participants represented many internationally respected climate scientists.

How profitable was it for those involved? Al Gore and others are alleged to have made millions from the now defunct Chicago-based Climate Change Exchange. The emails revealed that CRU director Phil Jones had, since 1990, collected a staggering 13.7 million British pounds (about #22.6 million US) in grants.

In the United States, an estimated $50 to $60 billion in government grants for climate research had been squandered since the late 1980s when James E. Hansen, a NASA employee, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), testified before a congressional committee claiming that a massive heating of the Earth was occurring.

Drs. Mann and Jones have both been exonerated by the universities for their work, but there has been a seismic shift in the scientific community as institutions such as the Royal Society in England have begun to back off from their support of the “global warming” hoax.

The “global warming” hoax was supported vociferously by the mainstream media in the U.S. and around the world. The worst offenders have been The New York Times, Newsweek and Time magazines, but there are others too numerous to list, including leading scientific publications.

On November 20, 2009, the world began to awake from a totally fictitious nightmare called “global warming.” It persists among those desperate to keep the truth from reaching a world that has been duped by the largest collection of governmental leaders, politicians, scientists, and media collaborators ever to engage in such a Big Lie.

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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

This Is the Genius We Somehow Elected?

We watched as he refused to salute our flag. We watched as, for 20 years, he imperturbably listened to Rev. Wright spew hatred of whites and hatred of America (the core of Black Liberation Theology). We watched as his association with William Ayers became clear. We looked at his record of zero accomplishments and zero management experience. Then we watched as the left-wing press destroyed the candidacies and the reputations of Senator McCain and Governor Palin - and ushered this jackass into office. ACORN was very busy on November 4, 2008.

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Monday, November 15, 2010

Just Stay Home

I remember flying all over the country in the 1960's and 1970's on my job. It was wonderful. The service was great; the meals were tasteful; and they made you feel like a king. Now there is no food; you stand in line for hours and are humiliated; and they pack you in like sardines. It is a capsule of what has been happening in all aspects of American life roughly since the end of the Vietnam War.

Just Stay Home

By Jed Babbin on 11.15.10 American Spectator

The trade association of U.S. airlines -- the Air Transport Association -- says that it expects that about 24 million Americans will take to the air over the Thanksgiving holiday. That would be about 3 percent more air travelers than flew last Thanksgiving. I hope they are wrong. Travelers should drive, take the train, bicycle, walk or just stay home. Just don't fly. If we stay on the ground, the message may finally get through to our government: stop harassing us and concentrate on finding the bad guys.

Air travel was almost pleasant in the 1970s and '80s. The food -- at least on airlines other than the now-defunct Eastern Airlines -- was pretty decent, service existed and all in all it wasn't too bad even for those of us shuttling between Washington and Los Angeles every two weeks. It got steadily worse because the airlines were going broke in the 1990s and now -- since 9/11 -- only fools travel when they don't absolutely have to.

There are two ideas which dominate US airline security, and both are false. The first is that every air traveler -- be it a four-year-old girl or a 24-year-old Yemeni man -- is an equal risk. The second is that it more important to keep dangerous objects off the plane than to keep a dangerous person on the ground. And plans based on these assumptions are metastasizing into a burden on air travel that will damage our economy severely.

We have been dutifully marching through magnetometers for decades. After 9/11, were grimly tolerant of the new searches, taking off our shoes, divesting our laptops of their cases and even leaving liquids and cigar lighters in the checked bags. But last Christmas, none of that prevented Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding a Northwest flight with PETN (a very concentrated and powerful explosive) sewn into his underwear. Were it not for the action of a young Dutch filmmaker -- who, if memory serves, leaped over several rows of passengers and forcefully doused Umar's drawers -- a lot of people might have been killed.

And in reaction to this, our dear Homeland Security Secretary, the lovely and talented Janet Napolitano, said that "the system worked." Now, though I claim some expertise in matters of national security, I am unaware of any system which ensures that there's a brave Dutch filmmaker on each flight, sitting on the edge of his seat and waiting for a faint puff of smoke to rise from someone's BVDs.

As a result of Umar, the Touching Sensitive Areas agency ordered accelerated deployment of the x-ray scanners which display us naked for inspection by TSA employees and the use of enhanced "pat down" techniques that the selfsame TSA clods use to run their hands over every part of our bodies. And yes, I do mean every part, even those we render inaccessible to all but our spouses and physicians. A multitude of news reports say that there is a whole lot of groping going on.

Airline pilots and stewardi are refusing to go through the scanners because of the health risk attendant to repeated X-ray exposure (and because they don't like being fondled by TSA). TSA -- not your radiologist -- says the scanners are safe. Right.

I am a cancer survivor. I have not, and will never, submit to the full-body x-ray scans. You should follow my lead. And when someone gropes you -- touches your privates even briefly or "by accident" -- get their name and their supervisor's name, and the names of any and all who assist them and report them to the airline you were going to fly. Not to TSA: they're governmentally impervious to such complaints.

Better still, stay on the ground until the Touching Sensitive Areas gang is brought under adult control. Which will require a complete rethinking of how we screen passengers for air travel: we need to concentrate on keeping bad guys -- not just bad things -- off the aircraft. It's time to shift the security burden off the typical American traveler and onto the backs of the would-be terrorists.

Yes, we still need the magnetometers, the bomb-sniffing dogs and better high-tech screening of air cargo. We need the Federal Air Marshals, and more of them, aboard our airliners. But we must make air travel tolerable again for those of us who aren't trying to blow ourselves up. And there's two ways we have to do it.

As the Christmas underwear bomber's case proved, we could -- if we weren't governed by lazy libs -- gather intelligence on people who are dangerous and keep them off the aircraft. Abdulmutallab's dad tried to report his Islamic radicalism to the State Department, but the information went into a black hole and wasn't translated immediately into a "no-fly" order on the young man, as it should have been.

After the incident, the Obama administration was said to be revising the way information was handled. I have no confidence that this has been done, and no evidence to say it has been accomplished. The incoming chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (probably Michigan's Mike Rogers) should hold a hearing to find out as soon as the new Congress convenes in January. We need to make it very easy to get on the "no-fly" list and very hard to get off.

And then there is the liberals' biggest bugaboo, profiling. Yes, it's high time we adopted the methods of profiling that have kept the Israeli airline El Al free of terrorist attacks for more than three decades. Every passenger should be screened behaviorally and -- let's say it loudly and clearly -- special attention needs to be paid to every Muslim male between the ages of 17 and 45.

Would that be discriminatory? Of course. But discrimination is legal unless it is -- as the courts have said for many years -- invidious. In the 1984 case ofMcLaughlin v. Florida, the Supreme Court said that invidious discrimination is a classification which is arbitrary, irrational, and not reasonably related to a legitimate purpose.
The facts of Islamic terrorism demonstrate that additional screening for Muslim men in that age group is supported objectively and rationally and is related to the legitimate purpose of preventing terrorist attacks. It may be discrimination, but it is both legal and necessary. And it should be done, comprehensively, throughout our air travel system.

The 9/11 attacks were aimed at crippling our economy by hampering our ability to conduct air commerce. We recovered from it because we are innovative and because we know that air commerce has to continue if our economy is to thrive again. Secretary Incompetano and her gang are doing what UBL couldn't: making it so miserable to travel that most of us won't. Janet should be fired, and her replacement ordered to take the burdens of air travel off the businessman and the vacationer and put it on the backs of the would-be terrorists where it belongs.

Jed Babbin served as a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. He is the author of several bestselling books including Inside the Asylum and In the Words of Our Enemies.

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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Even Maureen Dowd Starts to Understand

Maureen needs to put her thoughts in her brother's words, but we all know what's going on.

Kevin Rubs It In

By MAUREEN DOWD November 9, 2010 NY Times

My Mom used to say, “When you’re blue, wear red.” America took that advice on Election Day, and you can color Kevin happy. My conservative brother celebrated by doing his year-end political letter early. Here is his tour d’horizon:

As a semichastened Barack Obama appeared at the press conference following the election, he conjured up the image of the curtain opening in “The Wizard of Oz,” revealing a little old man working the controls, not the great and powerful Oz.

The president had to wonder how this could happen in two short years. He must long for the days when the media routinely referred to him as “cerebral and brainy” (savvy was never mentioned) and salivated over “Michelle’s amazing arms.”

The voters left no doubt about their feeling for his super-nanny state where the government controls all aspects of their lives and freedoms. Warning signs were up in the three elections held in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey and with the noisy birth of the Tea Party. But the president, swathed in the protective cocoon of adulation and affirmation from the media and his own sycophants, soldiered on in his determination to turn our country into just another member of the failed European union — France without the food.

No one should be surprised by this. The president is a devoted disciple of the teachings of Saul Alinsky and a true believer in a redistribution of wealth controlled by big government. We can see how well that is working in Greece, Portugal, Spain and France. Instead of focusing on jobs and turning the private sector loose to provide them, he insisted on giving the American people things they did not want: expensive health care, more regulation and higher taxes. He clumsily interjected himself on behalf of the mass-murdering Muslim Army major, the ground zero mosque, the civil trials of enemy combatants and the lawsuit against Arizona.

His theme song could have been “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

On Nov. 2, voters across every spectrum loudly stated their preference for a return to American exceptionalism, self-reliance, limited government and personal freedoms.

They delivered a message that they would demand that their representatives start reflecting their wishes. They showed their muscle to shocked elitists who had dismissed their dissent as ignorance, bigotry or racism. It is probably a product of the revisionist history we now teach in our schools that the Tea Party, a replica of the beginnings of the American Revolution, was marginalized and mocked as a lunatic fringe group by a dismissive news media.

That same media is becoming increasingly aware that its creation is in over his head. He seems unaware of, or ambivalent about, the results of his actions. The last three weeks of the campaign were particularly unseemly. The vision of the President of the United States, one who spoke of civility and hope and change, exposed as just another Chicago pol, viciously and personally attacking his opponents, was undignified.

When my children were small, I used to take them to visit my mother. One of her favorite lines if they complained was, “Do you want some cheese with that whine?” We may have to call Switzerland to get enough cheese for the presidential whines.

I once had a Jesuit English teacher who asked for an example of irony. A classmate raised his hand and wondered if Othello mistakenly killing Desdemona qualified. The old priest shook his head, noting, “That is not irony, bud, that is tragic irony.”

So it is with the idea being floated that Hillary might join Obama on a dream ticket as V.P. to save his presidency. Hillary, the only member of the cabinet with any political savvy, saving the guy that jumped line on her. I don’t think so.
Here are my random thoughts for 2010:

To Sarah Palin: Mirror, mirror on the wall, you’re the fairest of them all. You don’t need to run for the presidency.

To Nancy Pelosi: It’s hard to watch a noble ideal ravaged by facts. We’re going to need that military jet back.

To Keith Olbermann: A welcome, but all too brief, respite. Thank God you’re not handicapping horses.

To Chris Matthews: Is that tingle now a spasm?

To Jon Stewart: Good work and great rally! You tower above your critics.

To Alan Grayson: Good riddance.

To Eric Holder: Try suing the bad guys.

To Chris Van Hollen: Pickett was not promoted after Gettysburg.

To Jimmy Carter: You make my hair hurt.

To Vivian Schiller: Too bad the truth didn’t set you free — as in fired.

To President Bush : A 50-to-42 winner over Obama in a mock presidential poll in Ohio after doing absolutely nothing. A Nobel Prize is on the way.

To John Boehner: You are on double secret probation. Be grateful for a second chance. Vaya con Dios!

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Monday, November 08, 2010

I’m not going to stop fighting these morons

Although my readers know that, despite Republicans regaining the House, etc., I feel that the battle for America has already been lost. What else explains the election of boobs like Jerry Brown, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer and Barney Frank? What else explains electing a jackass who hates his country, like Obama? As I have said before, the liberals have infiltrated our schools and colleges and are turning out young people who know nothing and hate America. While we learned of the leaps in civilization due to western culture, today’s students are taking women’s studies, or extolling the culture of savages in Africa, or protesting for so-called, gay rights. The liberals have destroyed our money, our education system, our culture, our healthcare and are working to destroy our ability to defend ourselves and protect and advance our interests. It is over.

But while I feel this way, I’m not going to stop fighting these morons. That’s why I am publishing this piece by Pam Geller, the lady who has done the most to try to stop the building of the Muslim “victory” mosque nearby 9/11:

We Won - Now What?

By Pamela Geller November 07, 2010 American Thinker

The Republican win on Tuesday was far larger than the historic takeback of 1994, the stunning rebuke of Bill Clinton that subsequently forced a chastised president to enact welfare reform (a flying-pig moment). On Tsunami Tuesday, the Republicans won more seats in the House than at any time since 1948 -- 65 seats, the biggest swing by either party in the 62 years since then, along with another six seats in the Senate. We changed the world at the state level, completely flipping 18 state legislatures, including North Carolina, which hasn't seen a Republican majority since 1870. The Republicans gained over 500 legislative seats. Republicans picked up at least 10 governorships, giving them more than 30. Think about that.

Even the sparse wins the subversive left managed to pull out on Tuesday were riddled with chicanery, cheating, union payoffs, and the buying of votes with "free lunches." Harry Reid's systemic corruption garnered a win funded by millions of dollars from public-sector unions. It was all in the game. Same for California -- a state from which decent, hardworking Americans (aka Republicans) have been fleeing, a state destroyed by a union chokehold.

The stakes could not have been higher or more serious in the triumph of the rational on Tuesday. But despite the voter fraud, the SEIU/ACORN thugocracy, and the illegitimate tactics, the people spoke, and the people won. Now what? We are done with big government. We are done with recklessly stealing huge private sector wealth. We are done being taxed half to death, our future leveraged and our competitive edge destroyed.

Obama still doesn't get it. Obama's tone at his press conference on Wednesday was still contemptuous of the American people and shocking in terms of simple math. He had the audacity to say this: "We should be able to agree now that it makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth. That used to be us. They're making investments, because they know those investments will pay off over the long term."

Singapore and China are free market economies -- laissez faire capitalism (though China is politically repressed, which is why they will ultimately fail). So here we have Obama whining about more successful countries that are successful because of capitalism, while driving America to the failed European model of socialism, Marxism, and serfdom.

In Obama's big government America, the conditions in which free men produce, invent, and prosper quickly deteriorate due to government taxation and regulation. Big government has been encroaching on our lives for decades now, and with Obama, the bottom falls out.

Higher taxes imposed on the rich (and the semi-rich) come out of their investment capital (i.e., their savings). These taxes mean less investment, i.e., less production, fewer jobs, higher prices, etc. By the time the "rich" lower their standard of living, those who work in their companies or subcontract with them will be gone, along with their savings and their spouses' jobs -- and no power in the world (no economic power) will be able to revive the dead industries: there will be no such power left. (In this I am paraphrasing Ayn Rand's words from decades ago.)

The Concorde was going to be the future of air travel, in which we'd bop from place to place in half the time. Now the Concorde is defunct. Kaput. Much like the environment for producers and businessmen, who are the "villains" of Democrats, statists, collectivists, moochers and looters.

This is the price of force. This is the price of coercion. This is the price of statism. This is the price of big government. The very idea of America has been subsumed by an enslavement mentality.

Every dollar the government robs from business, from the individual people, is a dollar that won't be invested in the private sector. Wealth won't be created, jobs won't be created, entrepreneurs and businessmen will be deprived of capital, etc. The United States was founded on the principle of individual rights -- government was designed to be small. The objective of the government was defense -- protection of individual rights.

What has the government done with the untold wealth they looted from the American people, other than sucking much-needed capital out of our free society to pay off their thugs, crooks, and corrupt organizations, and get-out-the-vote community organizations?

Government is not the answer -- it destroys everything it touches. We must take back the culture, because politics is merely a reflection of the culture. The left has the culture in a chokehold. They demonize the successful and hardworking and exalt failures, moochers and looters -- an inverted moral priority.

We are done with lies. We are done with "It's Bush's fault." We are done with "Obama inherited the second Great Depression." No. Obama's policies led to a great coming depression. Obama talks about Bush spending? The utter gall. Bush was Jack Benny to Obama's profligate Mack Daddy Warbucks. The left can spin it any way they like -- the economic emergency of 2008 was a direct result of Democrat entitlement/financial policy: Carter's Community Investment Act (CIA), Clinton's sub-prime push and the ensuing Barney Frank Freddie Mac/Fanny Mae plunder. I do not fault Bush war expenditures. We are at war with a ruthless, bloodthirsty savage ideology that has no humanity. No expense can be spared in defeating jihad. Obama's sniveling like a little girl falls on deaf ears when you consider the trillions he stole from us for no reason but to pad the pockets of his shadow government.

Our victory is the beginning of the 40 years war -- who is with me?

We will repeal national socialist ObamaCare.

We will destroy all old propaganda media. New media is steamrolling over the dead media walking.

We will repeal the financial reform bill that scapegoated business for the abject failures of the Fed.

We will take back the college campuses.

We will get on our children's school boards and, just like in Texas, change the whitewashed history books and review the syllabi.

Get government out of our lives. Dismantle big government. Piece by piece.

Deregulate business. Piece by piece. Sector by sector. Unshackle the motor of the country. Free the producer.

We will volunteer in homeschooling networks. We will donate and offer our services in our respective areas of expertise.

Unshackle America. Repeal "hate crime" legislation. All crime is hate. This is an attack on free speech. Islamic supremacists will invoke "hate speech" to kill free speech.

We will expose and prosecute the subversives like CAIR, ISNA, ICNA, ISNA and all Muslim Brotherhood fronts whose stated aim is "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within."

We will call our mortal enemy by its rightful name: Islamic jihad.

We will turn the Muslim Brotherhood into the Muslim Little-Girlyhood.

We will stop funding Ground Zero Mosque Imam Rauf's fund raising junkets to the Middle East.

We will stop importing whole Muslim communities from Somalia under the "UN's Resettlement Program."

We will ridicule, polarize, and render irrelevant the dogmatic, evil leftists.

We will crush them with our logic and reason and concrete facts.

We will demand reasoned discourse and laugh at their ad hominem attacks.

RINOs will not be tolerated. Leave the party, join the traitors. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, take note.

Drill baby, drill.

We will raise the voting age to 21. Military excluded. If "children" are still on their parents health-care at 26, maybe 21 is too low.

We will mandate trips for key liberals in leadership to Iran, Somalia, Darfur, et al, to see the results of clitorectomies, stonings, and gender apartheid.

We will arrange for youth summer camps in Somalia and Darfur for Obama's youth corps, and tell them it's the peace corps for the lefties.

We will demand accountability from the United Nations, or withdraw from it.

We will save Israel from Islamic anti-semitism.

We will disqualify the Organization of the Islamic Conference at the UN until there is an Organization of the Christian Conference and Organization of the Jewish Conference.

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. -- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

The source of the government's authority is "the consent of the governed." This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose. --- Ayn Rand, "The Nature of Government," The Virtue of Selfishness, 110.

Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author of The Post-American Presidency.

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Sunday, November 07, 2010

The Biofuels Scam

The Biofuels Scam

By James M. Andrews November 07, 2010 American Thinker

Since 2007 the price of food around the world has just about doubled. Bad harvests, inflation, or George Bush didn't cause this price increase. According to a secret report from the World Bank, reported in the UK's Guardian, 75% of the increase in price has one source: "Biofuels." This contrasts with US claims of only a 3% biofuels-caused increase. The World Bank also says that rising food prices have pushed 100 million people worldwide below the poverty line. Riots have been sparked from Bangladesh to Egypt.

Where is the outrage? Where are the MSNBC stories on food riots? Where is Sean Penn?

The Holy Grail of the Left in recent years is Climate Disruption (formerly known as Global Warming and Climate Change). Much ink has been spilled and much airtime has been devoted to pushing the Green Agenda. Legislation has been passed in the US, Europe and other places to address this so-called crisis. Incandescent bulbs have been banned, and mercury laden CFLs required. Coal-fired power plants are shuttered, raising the price of energy. Vast oil fields are placed off limits. "Cap and Trade" rules threaten our already reeling economy. Among other measures, Congress mandates that gasoline contain 10% by volume of ethanol. As a result, the US is currently burning about 25% of its corn crop as fuel. Government subsidies and mandates work quite well at converting food into fuel, thus reducing the amount of food. As anyone with more than a room temperature IQ knows, less of something results in higher prices. Hungry people? Pssh! Saving the planet takes precedence.

Brazil is clearing (by burning) tens of thousands of acres of rainforest to plant sugarcane -- not for human consumption, but for conversion to ethanol. Much more acreage has been cleared for sugarcane production than for lumber. As a CO2 "sink," sugarcane is non-existent compared to the trees it replaced. If CO2 were such a threat to the survival of the human race, wouldn't keeping the rainforest be a good idea? Don't burning millions of trees produce many thousands of tons of CO2? Clearly, common sense is missing from the "settled science" agenda of Climate Disruption.

There are other problems with biofuels than "merely" world hunger, deforestation and air pollution. Corn is a thirsty plant. Much water is used to make it grow, and copious quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer. In addition to depleting the aquifer, fertilizer runoff ends up in the ocean. The Gulf of Mexico has a dead zone the size of New Jersey. Fish and nitrogen aren't compatible. The blue crab population in the Chesapeake is at a record low, and the sizes caught are smaller than in the past. Of course, "there are those who say" that Climate Disruption is to blame.

Ethanol is highly corrosive. It absorbs water from the air like a sponge. It cannot be transported in pipelines, necessitating delivery by (diesel) tanker trucks. If used in aircraft, water in the fuel can cause engine failure at the colder high altitudes. If left in your lawn mower or chainsaw over the winter, it causes serious rust problems. It lowers your car's mileage, negating any benefits from "reducing our dependence on foreign oil." It causes rust in your fuel lines and engine. It burns too hot in catalytic converters, causing premature failure. However, your car and lawnmower are not the only things at risk. According to a study conducted by National Institute of Health, there is a nearly three-fold increase in thyroid cancer risk for women who had used a public water supply that had nitrate levels of 5 milligrams per liter (mg/L) or higher for five years.

Given all these easily verifiable facts, why would we continue to mandate the use of ethanol in our gasoline? Why would we spend billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing it? Why would Big Ag be pressuring our corrupt and greedy political class to increase the mandate from 10% to 15%, despite alarm from automotive manufacturers concerning engine damage? You be the judge. Think about this the next time you shop for groceries, fill up your car, or pay your utility bill.

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Wednesday, November 03, 2010

A British View of Our Election Results

The midterms may have saved a superpower: Americans say no to US decline

By Nile Gardiner World November 3rd, 2010 telegraph.co.uk

Tonight’s emphatic conservative House victory in the US midterms is a powerful rejection of President Obama’s handling of the economy and his Big Government agenda, including his controversial healthcare reform plans. The conservative revolution has been largely spurred by disenchantment with the federal government, and a strong belief in limited government, lower taxation, and reduced public spending, as well as a desire to return to America’s Founding principles.

It is also a powerful rejection of American decline, currently being fueled by massive debts at home, weakened defences and a defeatist foreign policy. The federal debt has jumped from 40 percent of GDP in 2008 to 62 percent by the end of this year, the highest percentage since World War Two.

As I noted several weeks ago, when I wrote of the consequences of an unchecked presidency acting with impunity:

Under the Obama White House, economic decline, feckless borrowing and towering debts, which will rise dramatically further if hugely expensive health care reforms are implemented, are combined with a flawed foreign policy and national security strategy which is leaving America weaker on the world stage and more vulnerable to attack. From its decision to scrap Third Site missile defences in eastern and central Europe, to its failed policy of engagement with Iran and its timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Obama presidency is projecting dangerous weakness and compromise in the face of its enemies.

Ultimately, President Obama’s legacy to America will be the decline of a great superpower, weighed down by crushing debts and massive entitlement programs, and facing an emboldened set of adversaries, from Moscow to Tehran to Pyongyang. The damage inflicted by the Obama administration will ultimately be worse than the harm caused by the presidency of Jimmy Carter due to the scale of the long-term economic crisis now facing America.

The overwhelming repudiation of the Obama administration’s failing policies sends a clear message to the world that the American people will not accept the decline of the world’s most powerful nation. Now the hard part begins, and a very top priority for the new Congress must be reigning in the ballooning national debt, which the Congressional Budget Office predicts could rise to 87 percent of GDP by 2020, 109 percent by 2025, and 185 percent of GDP by 2035.

While the Conservative-led government in Great Britain has already embarked upon a $130 billion austerity cuts package, shedding nearly 500,000 public sector jobs, the US administration has defiantly remained with its head in the sand, while still talking in terms of further stimulus spending. That position is unsustainable.

Dramatic spending cuts (with the exception of national defence) must also be coupled with a pro-growth agenda of lower taxes, private sector job creation, free trade and economic freedom.

After the immense damage of the last two years, the midterms have offered the United States an opportunity to reverse course and get back on its feet. The world needs a powerful, successful, dynamic and prosperous America, where individual liberty and freedom are the driving forces, rather than the overbearing deadweight of federal government. The American people have spoken, and the White House must be held to account.

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