From Sea To Shining Sea

Some Questions On Obama and Holder Justice

2012-02-02T05:57:00.000-08:00

Can some of my readers enlighten me as to:

What is happening with Major Hasan, the American Muslim jihadist who murdered 13 soldiers at Fort Hood?

What is happening with the murderers of the 17 USS Cole sailors?

What is happening with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the planner of 9/11, who Obama tried to bring to a New York courtroom?

What is happening with the ‘underwear bomber’, and with the ‘Times Square bomber’?

Where is al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber of Pan Am 107, who Obama and the British allowed out of prison to return to Libya, now that we gave Libyan rebels all that unlawful help?

When are the Black Panthers who terrified white voters so they couldn’t vote in Philadelphia going to be arrested?

And one question on the dysfunction of liberal justice in general: there is a lady in Venice, Florida who could be jailed for five years for disturbing a turtle nest, but we in Florida are literally surrounded by thousands of known sex offenders – some of whom have molested children. These child molesters get probation or 1 to 5 years, when ones with multiple convictions should be castrated or executed for the damage they do to children and to their families. Child molestation is worse than murder; when someone is murdered, at least their suffering is over, and the family might be able to grieve and get on with their lives. I know from personal experience that when a child is molested, that child suffers for the rest of his or her life. The family and any future spouses and children also suffer by having to deal with the consequences of the molestation. And this can go on and on for generations. Why, then, is the liberal’s sense of justice to treat people who disturb a turtle nest more harshly than they treat a child molester?

Abbott and Costello Discuss Unemployment

2012-02-01T06:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Dave and Errol for this:

Unemployment as reported is at 9 percent. But it's actually more than 16 percent. Some smart statistician came up with a distinction ……A sleight of hand to make the unemployment number tolerable rather than frightening.

The concept is simple: 9 percent are unemployed and are actively looking for work. The 16 percent includes those who gave up and are no longer actively looking for work. So those casualties are no longer counted. They cease to exist. The 9 percent is a fake …….

A sham - and worthy of an Abbott & Costello routine. If that great comedy team were still alive, the routine on our unemployment woes might go something like this.

COSTELLO
I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America.

ABBOTT
Good Subject. Terrible Times. It's 9%.

COSTELLO
That many people are out of work?

ABBOTT
No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO
You just said 9%.

ABBOTT
9% Unemployed.

COSTELLO
Right - 9% out of work.

ABBOTT
No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO
Okay, so it's 16% unemployed.

ABBOTT
No, that's 9%...

COSTELLO
WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 9% or 16%?

ABBOTT
9% are unemployed. 16% are out of work.

COSTELLO
If you are out of work you are unemployed?

ABBOTT
No, you can't count the "Out of Work" as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.

COSTELLO
BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!!!

ABBOTT
No, you miss my point.

COSTELLO
What point?

ABBOTT
Someone who doesn't look for work can't be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn't be fair.

COSTELLO
To who?

ABBOTT
The unemployed.

COSTELLO
But they are ALL out of work.

ABBOTT
No, the unemployed are actively looking for work... Those who are out of work stopped looking. They gave up. And, if you give up, you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.

COSTELLO
So if you're off the unemployment rolls, that would count as less unemployment?

ABBOTT
Unemployment would go down. Absolutely!

COSTELLO
The unemployment just goes down because you don't look for work?

ABBOTT
Absolutely it goes down. That's how you get to 9%. Otherwise it would be 16%. You don't want to read about 16% unemployment do ya?

COSTELLO
That would be frightening.

ABBOTT
Absolutely.

COSTELLO
Wait, I got a question for you. That means they're two ways to bring down the unemployment number?

ABBOTT
Two ways is correct.

COSTELLO
Unemployment can go down if someone gets a job?

ABBOTT
Correct.

COSTELLO
And unemployment can also go down if you stop looking for a job?

ABBOTT
Bingo.

COSTELLO
So there are two ways to bring unemployment down, and the easier of the two is to just stop looking for work.

ABBOTT
Now you're thinking like an economist.

COSTELLO
I don't even know what the hell I just said!

If you count the underemployed, the figure is probably more like 23 %

Obama Is Really a Most Successful President

2012-01-31T11:48:00.000-08:00

Even if you do not agree with my past comments in which I say that Obama's main objective in life is to make successful Americans pay dearly for the history of racism and colonialism that he (Obama) believes in, you must admit that from a certain perspective, he has been a most successful president. The following article explains what I mean:

President Obama's Civilian Soldiers

January 31, 2012 By Christopher Chantrill American Thinker
Everybody is outraged and disgusted by our divisive politics, from Jewish bubbies in Florida to AT's own Rick Moran. The rest of us just think that President Obama is incompetent. "Obama doesn't have the experience, character, or personality to be president. To put it flatly: he's in over his head." That's Barry Rubin.

And if he's not incompetent he is polarizing, writes Peter Wehner. And that from the candidate whose "core claim" wasn't simply that he would heal the planet; he would also heal the nation's political breach. He would elevate the national debate.

Reason would prevail over emotion... Obama would "turn the page" on the "old politics" of division and anger.

Sorry to disagree, but I am not disgusted. I don't believe that the president is incompetent. And I don't believe he has reneged on his promise of bringing us together. To me, everything about President Obama makes sense.

First of all, the division. Our national politics is in a space very like the 1850s just before the showdown over slavery. You remember the history. For 60 years, ever since the ratification of the Constitution, the South had refused to discuss slavery, and would stage a tantrum if anyone raised the subject. Eventually the North got fed up and organized an explicitly anti-slavery party. It was called the Republican Party.

But why was the South so intransigent when "everybody knew" that slavery was immoral? The simple answer is that business was too good. Slavery was profitable, very profitable for the South.

The same thing applies to today's America. "Everybody knows" that the welfare state is finished, but the peculiar institution is profitable, very profitable -- for liberals. Look at usgovernmentspending.com. Liberals get to spend $4 trillion a year on their favorite programs. Conservatives get $1 trillion a year for defense. Why would liberals give up on a deal like that without a fight?

Nor is the president incompetent. He is doing exactly what his liberal base wants him to do. He is doing Keynesian stimulus, taking care that most of it goes to Democrats. He is doing clean energy, regulating the environment, canceling pipelines, carrying water for unions, cutting defense. He has held off Republicans that want to cut and slash spending. He is a liberal dream.

Polarizing? Look, if you are a liberal, the problem is Republicans. We would have sweetness and light if only those bigoted, mean-spirited, racist Republicans weren't opposing the president at every turn. What this nation, this anti-intellectual nation, needs is a national conversation on civility, led by its educated class.

In this 1850s rerun, the Republican Party is reinventing itself as the anti-liberal party. That means division, because liberals are the ruling class that has run America as a very profitable plantation for the last 70 years, and they are not going without a fight. What's ahead for America, in consequence, is a classic Clausewitzean "decisive battle."

President Obama's State of the Union speech last week was about battlefield preparation. He is taking his party back to the old Progressive totem of the "moral equivalent of war." Jonah Goldberg: "Ever since William James coined the phrase 'the moral equivalent of war,' liberalism has been obsessed with finding ways to mobilize civilian life with the efficiency and conformity of military life."

George Will chimes in as well: "Onward civilian soldiers, marching as to war."

Likewise the president's fairness argument. "Fairness" is how liberals talk to the American people. To each other, they talk about "inequality." There is another word they like: "exploitation." They use that one on the masses. But the words all mean the same thing. Liberals don't like the economic results of 200 years of capitalism in which the daily income went from $3 per head per day to over $100 per day, and they don't like the results of the 20th century which began with the rich fatter than the poor and ended with the poor fatter than the rich. Invisible hand? It's a myth, say liberals. What we have here is exploitation:
In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, [capitalism] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

There's a harsh logic to this. Ever since Karl Marx, liberals have rebelled against the fat, sloppy way of voluntary cooperation that leaves no room for political power and civilian soldiers. So voluntary cooperation must go. Forget about humans as social animals. Think soldier ants.

The great achievement of President Obama is to present his vision so clearly: America as a progressive ant-hill.

Here's an alternative vision. How about America as a city on a hill, a beacon, a magnet for all those who must have freedom?

Some Reminders on Global Warming

2012-01-30T05:54:00.000-08:00

Some recent articles reminded me that, with liberals, you can shoot down an idea with facts, put it in a grave and bury it – and it will still keep popping up. Everyone is aware of socialism’s collapse everywhere, but Obama keeps trying to impose it, and global warmists also keep trying (under the new name of Climate Change).

Despite the release of the hacked e-mails that revealed that top global-warming scientists at East Anglia were well-aware that world temperatures have not risen since 1997 (as reported by the IPCC body of the UN), and in fact these scientists were fraudulently revising data to hide that fact, still the Associated Press recently published a story that said that NASA records showed that the last 35 years were the warmest since records were kept. I don’t believe this, but maybe somehow, the average of the last 35 years was very warm, despite the fact that the last 15 years experienced cooling or level temperatures. From experience I don’t believe anything the AP says anymore, but others do.

Another fact that liberals ignore is the lesson history tells us of the correlation between mankind’s progress and warming and cooling periods. Whenever there has been a warming cycle, mankind has prospered and flourished; whenever there has been a cooling cycle, mankind has faced famine, plagues and declining populations. We have much more to fear from global cooling than from global warming.

Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about

Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

By David Rose January 2012 Daily Mail

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.

However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.

Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.’

These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts.

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.

CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.

So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.

‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.

Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’.

‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.

He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.

‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.

She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years.

Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.

The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’

Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

Meanwhile we in the lower United States seem to be experiencing unseasonably warm temperatures while Alaska is setting records for low temperatures.

My First Airplane Ride

2012-01-29T07:03:00.000-08:00

It was in the winter of 1954, when I was a student at Northeastern University. My wife, Lois, and daughters, three month old Sharon, and 15 month old Connie, and I shared a tiny apartment on Francis Street in Boston, when, in Rhode Island and in Massachusetts, there developed a polio epidemic. The Salk vaccine had not yet been made available, and large numbers of children were coming down with this dreaded, paralysing disease

Lois and I decided to protect our girls by taking them to Towson, Maryland to stay with Lois’ parents until the epidemic had run its course. I drove them down in my 1940 Plymouth (which had an Edmunds hot head and was chopped and with dual exhausts), and then I drove right back alone. After a few weeks I decided to fly down for a weekend visit. I left Boston on an Eastern Airlines’ Silver Falcon (DC 3).

In those days there were machines in the lobby of an airport where you could buy trip insurance by feeding in quarters. I put in two quarters, looked at the two quarters I had left, and decided that was enough. After take-off, we had just been served dinner on trays that sat on your lap when the plane hit an air pocket that all the airlines say don’t exist. All our dinners ended up on the ceiling of the plane, and when we hit the bottom of the pocket it felt like we were hitting the ground. I thought that we were going to crash, and the next thought that came into my mind was,”Why didn't I put those other two quarters in the insurance machine?”.

Obviously we didn’t crash, and the rest of the trip and the trip back were routine. I don’t remember whether I went for my family or whether Lois’ parents brought them back to Boston, but in a few more weeks the epidemic seemed over, and they returned.

RE-ELECT OBAMA: VOTE NEWT

2012-01-26T06:24:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately some of my friends have been moved by the oratory of Newt Gingrich into forgetting that we can't win the Presidency without the support of independents. Just what we need: another super-smart, narcissistic orator with massive grievances and scores to settle.

RE-ELECT OBAMA: VOTE NEWT!

January 25, 2012 AnnCoulter.com

To talk with Gingrich supporters is to enter a world where words have no meaning. They denounce Mitt Romney as a candidate being pushed on them by "the Establishment" -- with "the Establishment" defined as anyone who supports Romney or doesn't support Newt.

Gingrich may have spent his entire life in Washington and be so much of an insider that, as Jon Stewart says, "when Washington gets its prostate checked, it tickles [Newt]," but he is deemed the rebellious outsider challenging "the Establishment" -- because, again, "the Establishment" is anyone who opposes Newt.

This is the sort of circular reasoning one normally associates with Democrats, people whom small-town pharmacists refer to as "drug seekers" and Ron Paul supporters.

Newtons claim Romney is a "moderate," and Gingrich the true conservative -- a feat that can be accomplished only by refusing to believe anything Romney says ... and also refusing to believe anything Gingrich says.

-- Romney's one great "flip-flop" is on abortion. (I thought the reason we argued with people about abortion was to try to get them to "flip-flop" on this issue. Sometimes it works!)

Nearly two decades ago, when Romney was trying to defeat champion desecrator of life Sen. Teddy Kennedy, he sought to remove abortion as a campaign issue by declaring that he, too, supported Roe v. Wade.

(Nonetheless, Kennedy ran a campaign commercial against him featuring a Mormon woman complaining that Romney, as a Mormon elder, had pressured her not to have an abortion, but to give the child up for adoption. Are you getting the idea that Massachusetts is different from the rest of America, readers?)

Romney changed his mind on abortion -- not when it was politically advantageous, but when it mattered. As governor of liberal, pro-choice Massachusetts, he vetoed an embryonic stem cell bill and "worked closely" with Massachusetts Citizens for Life. The president of MCL recently issued a statement saying that, "since being elected governor, Mitt Romney has had a consistent commitment to the culture of life."

He didn't defend his changed position by saying he was a "historian," or denounce people who raised the switch as "fundamentally" dishonest asking "absurd" questions, or go back and forth and back and forth. He just said he changed his mind.

Meanwhile, Gingrich, who has run for office only in a small, majority Republican, undoubtedly pro-life congressional district, lobbied President Bush to support embryonic stem cell research.

-- Romney is now the only remaining candidate for president who opposes amnesty for illegals. (Ever since President Bush's amnesty plan cratered on the shoals of public opposition, no Republican will ever use the word "amnesty," despite wanting to keep illegals here -- just as Democrats refuse to say "abortion," while supporting every manner of destroying human life.)

Romney supports E-Verify and a fence on the border. As governor he promoted English immersion programs for immigrants, signed an agreement with the federal government allowing state troopers to enforce federal immigration laws, and opposed efforts to give illegal immigrants in-state tuition or driver's licenses.

At the same time, Romney says he'd like to staple a green card to the diploma of every immigrant here on a student visa who gets a higher degree in math or science.

Gingrich supports importing a slave labor force from Mexico under a "guest worker" program and wants to create government "citizen review boards" to grant amnesty on a case-by-case basis (i.e. all at once) to illegal aliens.

-- Romney supports entitlement reform along the lines of the Paul Ryan plan, as he has said plainly, but without histrionics, in the debates.

Just last year, Gingrich went on "Meet the Press" and called Ryan's plan -- supported by nearly every House Republican -- "right-wing social engineering."

He apologized for those remarks, then took back his apology, still later doubled down, calling the Ryan plan "suicide," and now -- currently, but it could change any minute -- Gingrich supports Ryan's entitlement reform efforts.

For the latest updates on Newt's position on the Ryan plan, go to http//twitter.com/#whatcheapshotgrandstandymovewillworknow?

-- As for crony capitalism, Romney made all his money in the private sector by his own diligence and talent -- even giving away all the money he inherited from his parents. He's never lived in Washington or traded on access to government officials.

Meanwhile, without the federal government, Gingrich would be penniless. He has been in Washington since the '70s, first as a congressman, then becoming a rich man on the basis of having been a congressman.

Most egregiously, he took $1.6 million to shill for Freddie Mac, one of the two institutions directly responsible for the housing crash that caused the financial collapse. (Or one of three, if you consider Barney Frank an institution.)

If the tea party stands for anything, it stands in absolute opposition to government insiders shoring up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the very time those institutions were blowing up the economy.

-- Romney could not be more forceful in saying he will issue a 50-state waiver to Obamacare his first day in office and then seek its formal repeal. Whether you like a state-wide insurance mandate or not, it's a world of difference when the federal government does it. Conservatives, having read the Constitution, ought to understand this.

It was on account of the difference between state and federal powers that the Supreme Court overturned the federal Violence Against Women Act. The court was not endorsing rape, but reminding us that states make laws about rape, not Congress.

To act as if Obamacare is the same thing as "Romneycare" is just a word game, on the order of acting like a "gun" has the same properties as a "gunny sack," or "fire" is the same thing as a "firefly."

Romney supported the idea of other states doing something along the lines of his health care bill, but always opposed insurance mandates from the federal government (just as I oppose the federal government issuing general laws about rape, but support state laws against rape.)

For those of you who still think Romneycare is the worst possible sin a Republican candidate could commit -- even worse than taking money from Freddie Mac as it destroyed the economy -- that doesn't help Gingrich: He supported Romneycare.

(While we're on the subject, the nation's leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped draft Romneycare. Indeed, Bob Moffit, Heritage's senior fellow on health care issues, can be seen in the picture of the bill-signing ceremony, standing proudly behind Romney.)

But Gingrich did more than support Romneycare. As former senator Rick Santorum has pointed out, Gingrich supported a FEDERAL individual mandate to purchase health insurance from 1993 until five minutes ago -- i.e., at least until a "Meet the Press" appearance just last May.

Asked by Maria Bartiromo in the CNBC debate last November to explain what he would do to fix health care, Newt attacked the question as "absurd" and said he would need a "several-hour period" to answer it.

In a world where words have meaning, Mitt Romney is not the "moderate" in this race. He is the most conservative candidate still standing, with the possible exception of Rick Santorum, who is bad on illegal immigration. (Santorum voted in the Senate against even the voluntary use of E-Verify by employers, which means he doesn't want to do anything about illegal immigration at all.)

Romney is "moderate" only in demeanor -- which is just another word game. His positions are more conservative than Gingrich's, but he doesn't scare people like Gingrich does. Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms were moderate in demeanor, too. No one would call them political moderates.

Romney is the most electable candidate not only because it will be nearly impossible for the media to demonize this self-made Mormon square, devoted to his wife and church, but precisely because he is the most conservative candidate.

Conservatism is an electable quality. Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.

Gingrich Reverts to His Normal Self

2012-01-16T06:27:00.000-08:00

I have been in such a state of melancholy over the state of our nation and the political process that I haven't wanted to post anything for quite a while. If you love America and the Constitutional process, the daily ourages by Obama eventually sweep over you and overwhelm you like a tsunami. I have been so angered, however, by Gingrich's campaign tactics that I felt compelled to publish this piece. Gingrich and his idiot buddy, Perry, may have thrown a winnable election to Obama this year.

Bane Capital and the GOP's Dark Night

By JED BABBIN on 1.16.12 American Spectator (Excerpt)

Newt's bad narrative has made a mockery of this presidential race.

The media always has an established theme -- a narrative -- into which the coverage of political stories is shoehorned. Sometimes that results in important stories being ignored because they just don't fit. That's okay with the media bosses this year because they're not in the news business. They're in the business of helping Obama get re-elected.

The narrative is important because it shapes the flow of information voters get and thus defines the political debate. If the narrative controls what the voters hear, read, and see -- and it usually does -- then the voters are thinking and deciding on the basis of the information to which they're exposed. Were it not for conservative talk radio and publications such as the Spectator, the media would be pretty much in total control of that information flow leading up to the election.

Before the Iowa caucuses, the media narrative of the Republican primaries was pretty much a personality contest about who was more electable, who was more conservative -- or, as the media phrase it, more radical -- and who was going to score in Iowa's beauty contest in which social issues usually play a disproportionate role.

Mitt Romney's campaign had launched a barrage of negative ads against Gingrich and when Gingrich finished fourth, it was clear that the former speaker needed to do something to change the narrative. It was the right moment for him to do it, and he could have with -- for example -- a speech critical of the media I suggested on this page some weeks ago.

But Gingrich's ego was injured. The fact that Romney's negative ads worked really got under his skin. On the morning of caucus day, Gingrich called Romney a liar on a talk radio show, and in the thirteen days since the Republican primary campaign has followed a script that could have been written by David Axelrod. It has formed a media narrative around the top two candidates that is so damaging that both of them need to do everything in their power -- which may not be enough -- to change it.

For two weeks, Gingrich and Rick Perry have stuck to the theme that Romney, as a venture capitalist in the Bain Capital firm in the 1990s, destroyed jobs and hurt people in ways that the two intimate (but don't say directly) were unethical, unfair, and possibly illegal. The two -- directly and through an independent "SuperPAC" supporting Gingrich --- have carpet-bombed Romney for his role in Bain, but making themselves collateral damage.

Perry, whose campaign has already failed, lashed out at Romney for "vulture capitalism." That undefined term implies financial corruption and worse. Gingrich has ranted against Romney's form of capitalism in terms (such as accusing Romney of "looting" companies) previously unheard among conservatives. It's the language of the Occupy Wall Street riffraff. Many conservatives have called on both to cool down, but neither has.

Now we have a 30-minute hit video titled "King of Bain" supposedly documenting Romney's actions at Bain Capital published by "Winning Our Future," a Gingrich-supporting "SuperPAC."

"King of Bain" is comprehensively vile. I watched it. You should too. It looks and sounds like an MSNBC feature story replete with every lefty cliché and "Occupy Wall Street" theme there is. And it's so full of falsehoods that the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" column awarded it four "Pinocchios."

Winning Our Future hasn't corrected or withdrawn the video in light of the publicized problems. Instead, WOF managing director Greg Phillips issued a smarmy "open letter" to Romney on January 13 offering to revise the video if Romney answers -- to Phillips -- five questions he poses in the letter and threatening to keep pushing the unchanged video if he doesn't.

Gingrich has called on WOF to fix the errors in the video or take it off the air. But after Phillips's letter to Romney, that's not enough. Gingrich should have condemned the video and issue a statement that any independent groups supporting him must not engage in smearing his opponents. On Meet the Press yesterday, Gingrich unconscionably defended the WOF open letter to Romney. The video is now Newt's version of the Ron Paul newsletters.

In the Democrat-media culture, Republicans are always the heartless big business-Wall Street-rich man's party. Now we have two supposedly conservative Republicans attacking Romney starting from that point and taking a quantum jump into terms used only by the most radical lefties.

Gingrich and Perry have created a media narrative that says Romney and Bain were vulture capitalists and corporate looters. If you buy that and watch "King of Bain" you might confuse Romney's old company with something run by Bane, the super-villain in the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. From the movie trailer we know that Catwoman will meow lines taken from the Occupy Wall Street crowd. I can hardly wait to see how the Dems will combine "King of Bain" with the movie ("Bane Capital"?) this fall.

The context in which the Gingrich-Perry narrative has to be judged is the underlying Obama campaign narrative from which the media will never vary. It is class warfare, pure and simple. Obama has identified himself -- and his administration -- with the Occupy Wall Street groups. They exist only to attack capitalism. Romney's Bain Capital is the perfect symbol of it for them to attack because it benefits Obama to do so and is bespoke tailored to Obama's class warfare politics.

It's too late to change the narrative before the South Carolina primary this Saturday. The damage has been done. The media will ensure that it is repeated many times because it will damage whoever is the Republican nominee, Romney or Gingrich. Nevertheless, both Gingrich and Romney have a duty to try to move the narrative away from Bain Capital. But to what?" American Spectator

To see "King of Bain" click here

More on the US Housing Crisis

2011-12-19T14:39:00.000-08:00

If any of you saw 60 Minutes last night, you probably saw the segment wherein the city of Cleveland has identified 10,000 houses that have been abandoned by owners who were far under water – homes that were then gutted and destroyed by vandals and thieves. Cleveland has already taken down 2,000 of these festering hulks, and intends to break up and remove all the rest.

City officials saw that the existence of these wrecked homes was destroying the housing values of nearby homes that were in good shape and were occupied by their owners. They decided that radical action was necessary to save the values of these still-occupied homes. These officials are to be commended for showing some courage in a situation that is unprecedented.

Radical action is also needed to save the country from years of suffering and, perhaps, from the kind of violent, revolutionary activities and the toying with communism that marked the years of the Great Depression.

I was very disappointed when not one of my readers commented on a radical plan that I support that will solve the housing crisis almost overnight. Perhaps you were surprised and embarrassed that a conservative person like myself would support a plan that smacks of extreme socialism. It’s because I think the situation that confronts us is that serious.

Please re-read the following article at this link:

Is the Housing Crisis Almost Over?

2011-12-18T08:13:00.000-08:00

Before addressing the housing crisis, let me say that Republican support for a payroll tax cut leaves me in shock. Already this hair-brained idea has shorted the almost bankrupt Social Security Fund by more than 100 billion dollars and has forced even more borrowing with no benefit whatsoever to our economy. If we cannot trust Republicans to protect workers and taxpayers, who can we trust?

Now as for the housing situation, I noticed the following analysis on Townhall this morning. The first chart best illustrates the bubble, but pay close attention to the second and the third graphs (left-click to enlarge). They indicate that we may have to endure at least another five years of the housing crisis - with lost equity, millions of foreclosures to come, and the unemployment that comes with lost home construction jobs.
Revisiting the U.S. Housing Bubble

Townhall 12/18/2011

Once upon a time, we developed a better method for detecting housing bubbles. Today, we're going back to the data mines to do some refinement and to see where things stand today.

Our first chart shows the relationship between median new house prices in the United States and median household income for the years from 1967 through 2010.

Here, we've revised our earlier look to better define the major trends evident in the data. Here, we see one major trend running from 1970 through 1986, then a second trend running from 1987 through 1999. After 1999, we see the housing bubble beginning its inflation phase as the relationship between median new house prices and median household income became decoupled, running through 2007. Since then, the U.S. housing bubble has been in its deflation phase, which appears to still be ongoing, as the relationship between the median prices of new houses and median household income remains decoupled.

One important thing to note is the shift in the trend that occurred after 1986. We believe this shift was triggered by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which eliminated a number of debt-related tax deductions, but which left the long-standing mortgage interest deduction in place, even increasing the amount of the deduction.

The changes brought about by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 had two main effects. First, it incentivized home ownership by enhancing the tax benefits associated with owning property and having a mortgage. Second, in eliminating the favorable treatment of other debt interest, it made the home mortgage the primary channel by which people would choose to accumulate debt thanks to the interest on that debt being tax advantaged.

These changes however are not the cause of the U.S. housing bubble, as there is no correlation between the shift in trend and the beginning of the bubble in 2000. More interestingly though, we see that both trends would project nearly the same median new home price given the current level of the U.S. median household income.

Looking at the more recent trend that was defined in the period from 1987 through 1999, we can see that the relative affordability of a median new home in 2010 is still well elevated above where it would have been during that period. The following chart shows the percentage deviation between the 1987-1999 trend and actual median new home prices from 1987 through 2010, which gives a sense of how overpriced the median new home has been since 1999 thanks to the U.S. housing bubble:

Here, we see that the relative affordability of the median new home with respect to where it typically was from 1987 through 1999 peaked in 2005, with a percentage deviation of 25.7%. Since then, the median price of a new home has fallen, bottoming in 2009 at a level 11.9% over where the linear trend that ran from 1987 through 1999 would place it, before bouncing back up to be 14.4% higher than the level of the projected trend in 2010.

What's interesting to us is that it appears that we stumbled directly into something that looks very much like the Case-Shiller house price index.

Here, looking at both the 10-city and 20-city composite indices, we find that our representation above closely follows the pattern traced out by the Case-Shiller 20-city composite data - at least with respect to the linear trend we created in the chart for the period from 1987 through 1999.

But unlike the Case-Shiller data, because our method correlates house prices with household income data, it will better communicate the relative affordability of homes in the U.S. over time!

Since the Case-Shiller data has been updated more recently than the Census data, it appears that house prices in the U.S. have resumed falling in 2011. And even though those falling prices are making homes more affordable today, they would have to fall by roughly another 12-14% before they would be in the same ballpark for affordability that they were in the years from 1987 through 1999.

Or as the projected trend works out to be from our first chart, the same level of affordability that they were for Americans in the years from 1970 through 1986 as well.

Rush and Winning the Presidency in 2012

2011-12-15T06:23:00.000-08:00

Rush Limbaugh gave a fascinating interview on Greta last night, but I disagree with him that only a real conservative can win.

I am very conservative on most political and societal issues, and the lack of political courage often shown by RINO Republicans usually makes me disgusted. However, in 2012 the only thing that matters to me is that Obama be defeated by someone who will go on to reverse Obama’s policies and slow down spending. As Michael Medved shows in the piece below, the only reasonable chance we have to win is to nominate a candidate who can frame the issues and also win the votes of moderates. While Gingrich has proven to be a superb debater, and I agree with more of his positions than with Romney’s, I am supporting Romney for president because he can win, and Gingrich, who is already starting to implode, can’t.

Seizing (or Blowing) 2012 Victory

By Michael Medved 12/14/2011 Townhall (Excerpt)

“In a much-debated Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal (“Conservatives, Romney and Electability,” November 23rd) I insisted that “the electoral experience of the last 50 years does nothing to undermine the common-sense notion that most political battles are won by seizing and holding the ideological center. In the last two presidential elections, more than 44% of voters described themselves as ‘moderate,’ and no conservative candidate could possibly prevail without coming close to winning half of them (as George W. Bush did in his re-election).”

Please note: I argue that a conservative candidate must earn moderate votes in order to win, not that a centrist nominee is the only formula for victory.

The math here isn’t complicated: even if the Republican nominee drew every available conservative voter (an obvious impossibility, since exit polls show that even the heroic Reagan got less than three-fourths of them in 1980) then he would still need more than a third of self-described moderates to win a popular vote majority.

Suggesting that conservative candidates need to appeal to the center as well as to the right if they want to win isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s a simple statement of fact. There has never been an election in the history of exit polling where a majority of voters described themselves as conservative. In the Bush victory of 2004 and the McCain defeat of 2008, identical percentages (34 percent) called themselves conservative.

When ideological purists claim that conservative candidates who succeeded in the past (including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) relied only on the support of their fellow right-wingers, they diminish the real achievement of these formidable campaigners. For instance, the esteemed economist Thomas Sowell wrote a syndicated column (“Lessons of History?”) that took me to task for suggesting that the outcome of every election depends upon uncommitted voters in the center. “But just when did Ronald Reagan, with his two landslide victories, ‘seize the center’?” demanded Dr. Sowell.

Actually, the answer to that question is easy: Reagan swept voters who placed themselves in the center of the electorate in both 1980 and 1984. He won “moderates” in his battle to unseat Carter (49-43 percent), and did even better against Mondale four years later (54-46 percent).

Nor did this success represent some happy accident, or the magical force of President Reagan’s considerable charisma. The general election campaign against Carter aimed squarely at the center, beginning with the selection of the moderate, country-club-Republican George W. Bush as the Vice Presidential nominee (after Reagan tried, but failed, to work out a deal with another moderate – Gerald Ford – to join his ticket).

Every history of the epic 1980 campaign reports the determined GOP effort to locate the party’s nominee within the national mainstream, and to avoid the disastrous Goldwater experience of allowing Democrats to characterize his candidacy as dangerous and extreme. Reagan’s famous line “there you go again” in the televised debate meant to reassure the public and defuse Carter’s suggestion that a Republican victory might endanger Medicare – a program which Reagan had, in fact, energetically opposed in the 1960’s. When running for re-election, Reagan ran a gauzy, feel-good “Morning in America” campaign that pointedly avoided ideology and emphasized the administration’s practical achievements, leading to a sweep of 49 states (including New York, California and Massachusetts).

As much as all Republicans revere the Gipper’s memory, it’s also important to recall that he was by no means the only modern GOP candidate to win landslides. Richard Nixon’s heterodox approach to the economy (wage price controls), the environment (he launched the EPA), and foreign policy (recognition of Red China) certainly qualified him as a moderate rather than a doctrinaire conservative, but he swept 49 states in 1972. In fact, Nixon’s share of the popular vote (61 percent) exceeded even Reagan’s in his biggest win (59 percent).

I greatly admire Dr. Sowell, but I can’t understand his citation of an utterly fictitious “long string of Republican presidential candidates who seized the center – and lost elections.” In this context, he mentions Thomas Dewey, who was beaten by Truman in long-ago 1948, without acknowledging that the famously centrist Eisenhower won a crushing landslide just four years later (442 Electoral Votes) and then did even better in his 1956 re-election drive (57 percent of the popular vote, 457 Electoral Votes).

Dr. Sowell’s “long string” of losing centrist candidates consists of only two consecutive campaigns in the last 60 years: the failed re-election bid for the “kinder, gentler” first President Bush in 1992 and the dismal effort by an aging Bob Dole to unseat Bill Clinton four years later. It’s noteworthy that Dole, despite his Washington insider background, attempted to run to the right, not the center, in the general election. He proposed dismantling the Department of Education, cutting capital gains taxes by half, and selected conservative hero Jack Kemp as his running mate. Both Dole and Bush, however, found themselves badly damaged by the quixotic Third Party campaigns of Ross Perot, which drew heavily from voters of the center-right and helped make Bill Clinton twice victorious without ever winning popular vote majorities.

This history bears review because it makes the point that selecting the strongest candidate doesn’t always mean selecting the most conservative candidate. Losing GOP campaigns aren’t simply a matter of “’Republican In Name Only’ failures” (in the words of one of the letters to the Wall Street Journal protesting my column), any more than triumphant Republican candidacies only involve robust, unapologetic conservatives.

This year, the party will certainly pick a conservative nominee because the party’s become more than ever unequivocally conservative and because none of the seven presidential contenders counts as authentically “centrist” or “moderate.” All of them take positions on issues that place them well to the right of Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, who both conducted serious campaigns last time.

The conservative stance of the party’s ultimate champion (almost certainly either Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney) won’t doom the ticket to defeat, any more than a more moderate tone by the nominee would assure victory. The outcome of the election will depend on the public’s verdict on Barack Obama—and solid Republican arguments that his unbending, doctrinaire, impractical liberalism has damaged the country and delayed recovery.

But in making that case the GOP must do more than rally conservative true-believers and must make a serious, successful effort to persuade the moderate-minded voters who inevitably and invariably decide the outcome of every major election.” Townhall

The Whole Truth for a Change

2011-12-14T08:56:00.000-08:00

His mother was an unabashed hippie from 1960s central casting. His father was an openly avowed Communist from Kenya. While his father wasn't around much, his devoutly progressive grandparents arranged for him to be mentored during his adolescent years by a dues paying member of the U.S. Communist Party, Frank Marshall Davis.

When he went to college, he was attracted to the Marxist professors and student activists, according to his own published memoirs. When he graduated, he moved to Chicago and became an instructor for the left-wing extremist organization ACORN in the social manipulation methods of radical Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky. He attended for close to two decades the Trinity United Church of Christ, which practiced neo-Marxist Black Liberation Theology. That church was headed during those years by the openly socialist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who declared that the 9/11 terrorist attack on America was "America's chickens coming home to roost." He also famously preached from his pulpit, "Not God bless America, God damn America…."

He launched his political career in the living room of the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, co-founders and former leaders of the openly Communist domestic terrorist organization, the Weather Underground. That organization conducted several bombings in America and engaged in other violence that resulted in several injuries and even deaths.

All of this is documented in the public record. This is the man the Democrat party took off the streets of Chicago, then pursuing a career as a Marxist street agitator, and launched into the White House, favoring him over Hillary Clinton because she was too moderate for the party. They did that because he best reflects the heart and soul of today's radical-left, Che Guevara Democratic Party. It is in this context that we should understand and analyze Obama's Hugo Chavez speech given last week at Osawatomie High School in Kansas.

Obama's Hugo Chavez Coming Out

In that speech, he drew a picture of America as a struggling third world nation, saying at stake today "is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure a retirement." In fact, he said, "there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal."

This sounds more like Indonesia, or Venezuela, or Nicaragua. But it is not America "long before the recession hit."

He explained the roots of the problem as:

Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world…. Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle…. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.

This Luddite analysis fundamentally misconceives the role of technology in a modern economy. Such advancing technology increases worker productivity, and, therefore, wages and standard of living. Technological progress over the decades is why the average American worker in 2000 enjoyed 7 times the standard of living of the average American worker in 1900.

He then tries to pin the blame for his failures on others, saying, "Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that's happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess."

The policies that got us into this mess included primarily the so-called "affordable housing policies" Obama himself and other Democrats long advocated, with the government forcing the banks by overregulation to drop their traditional lending standards to provide loans and mortgages to low and moderate income applicants who could not qualify under those traditional standards. (See the full documentation and discussion in Paul Sperry's The Great American Bank Robbery: The Unauthorized Report About What Really Caused the Financial Crisis and Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner's, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.

The other major factor was the Fed's loose monetary policy starting under Bush in the 2000s, which funded the housing bubble. Both policies were departures from the fundamental planks of Reaganomics. As I discuss in detail in my own book, America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, the four planks of Reaganomics had been effectively abandoned by 2008, and that was the cause of the financial crisis, which ended the 25-year economic boom from 1982 to 2007 that Reaganomics had created.

Obama tries to continue his historical revisionism, saying, "Remember that in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts in history, and what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country."

Here is what really happened. Those Bush tax cuts quickly ended the 2001 recession, despite the contractionary economic impacts of 9/11, and the economy continued to grow for another 73 months. After the rate cuts were all fully implemented in 2003, the economy created 7.8 million new jobs and the unemployment rate fell from over 6% to 4.4%. Real economic growth over the next 3 years doubled from the average for the prior 3 years, to 3.5%.

In response to the rate cuts, business investment spending, which had declined for 9 straight quarters, reversed and increased 6.7% per quarter. That is where the jobs came from. Manufacturing output soared to its highest level in 20 years. The stock market revived, creating almost $7 trillion in new shareholder wealth. From 2003 to 2007, the S&P 500 almost doubled. Capital gains tax revenues had doubled by 2005, despite Bush's 25% cut in the capital gains rate.

The deficit in the last budget adopted by Republican Congressional majorities was $161 billion for fiscal 2007. Today that deficit is nearly 10 times as much. Total federal revenues under Bush soared by nearly 30%, from $1.991 trillion in 2001 to $2.568 trillion in 2007. The day the Democrat Congressional majorities took office, January 3, 2007, the unemployment rate was 4.6%. George Bush's economic policies, "the failed policies of the past" in Obama's rhetoric, had set a record of 52 straight months of job creation.

What has continued to fail us now is that Obama's own policies, the exact opposite of Reaganomics in every detail, have failed to produce any timely real recovery from the last recession. Before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously at 16 months. But here we are today 48 months after the last recession started and there is still no real recovery. Instead, we have record poverty, and record extended unemployment.

They can't say that is because the recession was so bad, because the historical record in America is that the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery. Based on the historical record, we should be ending the second year of a booming economy right now. The failure to achieve that is the responsibility of Barack Obama.

Obama himself was counting on precisely this history making him look like a hero. That is why he so confidently told the Today Show on Feb. 2, 2009, "a year from now I think people are gonna see that we're starting to make some progress…if I don't have this done in three years, then this is going to be a one-term proposition."

Before Barack Obama as President, the rest of the world looked to America as the example for the economic model that works to achieve prosperity. But today Obama tells America "It doesn't work. It's never worked. It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade."

But it's President Obama, who fundamentally doesn't understand his own country, that doesn't work.

Obama's Tax and Spending Fantasies

In his Kansas speech, Obama offered as his solution increased government spending as the foundation for rising prosperity. He says:

Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and communicate with the rest of the world. That's why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed shouldn't be sitting at home with nothing to do. They should be rebuilding our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband; modernizing our schools -- all the things other countries are doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.

Instead of the American capitalist model maximized by Reaganomics, Obama tells us to look at the basic infrastructure spending of other countries as the model that works. But American economic growth is not suffering because of a lack of basic infrastructure like a third world country. It is suffering because Obama is so doggedly pursuing the opposite of every policy that would free the economy to produce and boom. Under such Obamanomics, soon enough America will be suffering from the lack of a reliable energy grid like a third world country.

Obama whines that Bush's massive deficits (if his deficits were massive what are Obama's?), supposedly caused by his tax cuts (not--revenue again rose during the Bush years), "have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class -- things like education and infrastructure; science and technology; Medicare and Social Security."

But spending on all of those items soared during the Bush years, and they have rocketed up all the faster under Obama. To no avail, because government spending is not the foundation of increased economic growth and prosperity. Increased production, spurred by ever stronger incentives, is.

Of course, essential to all of President Obama's essential spending is to increase tax rates on the rich, otherwise known in English as the nation's investors and job creators. As President Obama tutored us in Kansas last week:

But we don't have unlimited resources. And so we have to set priorities. If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to make choices…. Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can't afford to do both. That's not politics. That's just math.

So there you have the Obama formula for economic growth and prosperity. After the greatest runaway spending spree in American history during the Obama Administration, the answer is for government to increase spending even more, financed by increasing tax rates even more on the very investors and job creators that produce the jobs for the middle class and working people in America's economic system. That is a perfect prescription for another recession, not the long, long overdue recovery America is still waiting for under Obamanomics. Obama tells us, "It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay a higher tax rate than somebody pulling in $50 million." That would be wrong if it were true. But it is not.

What Obama is peddling to America on tax policy is only the ugliest example of his well-established rhetorical style of calculated deception. It is based on what he thinks the average voter does not know and will not know, and can be manipulated to believe to Obama's political advantage. For the picture he is painting of the rich getting away without paying their fair share while working people bear most of the tax burden is the opposite of reality.

Even before Obama was elected, under those "failed policies of the past," the top 1% of income earners in 2007 paid 40% of federal income taxes (up from 17.6% when Reagan entered office), while the CBO just reported that they earned 17% of the income in 2007. Moreover, that 40% of federal income taxes paid by the top 1% was more than paid by the bottom 95% combined, according to official IRS data. While the top 1% paid 40% of federal income taxes, the bottom 40% paid no federal income taxes as a group on net. Today 47% pay no federal income taxes.

Yet, Obama has already enacted under current law further tax increases on the nation's job creators, investors and small businesses going into effect in 2013, when the tax increases of Obamacare become effective and the Bush tax cuts expire. Consequently, that year the top two income tax rates would rise by close to 20%, the capital gains tax would soar by nearly 60%, the tax on dividends would nearly triple, and the Medicare payroll tax would rocket up by 62% for these disfavored taxpayers. This alone would take us well beyond the Clinton tax rates, despite Obama's outdated talking point that he is still repeating from 2008.

This is in addition to America suffering with virtually the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world at nearly 40% on average, counting state corporate rates. As I have previously noted, even Communist China imposes only a 25% rate, with the rate in the EU even less on average. Our Canadian neighbors, enjoying a booming economy since Obama was elected in America, will enjoy a 15% rate next year, down from 16.5% this year.

Yet Obama barnstorms America calling for still more tax increases on American business, large and small, and the job creators and investors on which jobs and prosperity for working people depend. The galloping regulatory burdens he is now imposing effectively involve still further tax increases stifling production. It all adds up to a brew for another recession in 2013, unless the American people force a change in course in 2012.

By Peter Ferrara on 12.14.11 The American Spectator

Nero Fiddles as Our Country Slips Away

2011-11-24T07:05:00.000-08:00

We are witnessing the disintegration of the great idea espoused by our Founding Fathers and, they hoped, protected for all time by the structure and limitations set out in our Constitution. They pledged and risked "their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor" to achieve this country and this Constitution.

Those statesmen were well aware of the failings of democracy – and of the short-lived nature of the ones that had risen and fallen throughout history. They were determined that this would not happen to the United States of America, a place where personal freedoms and private property would be protected by limitations on government, and where every man would have the opportunity to succeed or fail on his own merits and the vicissitudes of Lady Luck.

But it is happening; we are going the way of all the others, and the main reason we are is that so many people decided that they were smarter and knew better than the men we call the Founding Fathers.

The downhill slide probably began when the smart people decided we should tax away the fruits of men’s labors and redistribute that wealth among those who failed or who refused to engage in an honest occupation. Without these revenues, there would be no welfare for able-bodied people and no monster government. There is no point in advocating an anti-income tax crusade, but a simple flat tax combined with greatly reduced government and reduced government spending would go far in getting us back to our roots and regain that which made us great.

The ridiculous idea of a “Super Committee” and its predictable failure shows all who care to see that most of our legislators and others in government service are more committed to keeping their jobs and keeping their benefits and their opportunities to profit at our expense – than in serving the public. I have long opposed term limits, but the corruption and utter failure of our government has changed my mind.

Super Committee Proves Point for Term Limits

By Bill Tatro 11/23/2011 Townhall

If there was ever a case for term limits, the actions of this past week have certainly demonstrated that now is the time.

Twelve Senators and Congressmen were asked to not make budget cuts, but to simply slow down the growth rate of government.

The greatest con is that a budget increase of 10% reduced to 7% is considered a 30% reduction in growth.

The growth, however, is still 7%.

The attitude exemplified by all these politicians of both parties is one of entitlement, which explains why nobody wants to do anything that will rock their boat. Just imagine if you were an elected official.

You would be entitled to pension and healthcare benefits that are far superior to the benefits available to the very same citizens that you govern. You would be able to access inside information and buy stock based upon that information, thereby dramatically increasing your net worth.

You can buy a useless piece of land, and based upon your decision and your special committee, create actions that will make that land worth a fortune.

You can buy IPOs related to companies whose future is predicated upon your public statements and influence.

All of these things would send anyone else to jail.

As Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes said, “It not illegal, but it certainly isn’t right.”

When presented with all the benefits of nationally elected officials, why would anyone want to leave public office?

Thus, in my opinion, any decision by the twelve super committee members was not done for the benefit of this country, but simply for the twelve’s own self interests.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Any twelve people who did not have a personal vested interest would have been able to accomplish the assigned task.

Most likely, here’s what they would have done. On the revenue side, institute the jobs repatriation act which states that all corporations pay a flat 20% tax. No loopholes. There, revenue is done.

On the spending side, all increases to the federal budget frozen for the next three years, with a 3% increase to offset inflation.

There, spending is done.

The combined total of these measures would far exceed the $1.2 trillion which was sought after.

Why was this so easy?

Because the twelve members in my committee weren’t running for re-election; instead they just proposed the right thing.

Term limits, the time has come.

Connect the Dots, Obama and Occupy Mobs

2011-11-21T06:44:00.000-08:00

It's amazing that so few in the media have connected the dots between Obama and the "Occupy" thugs. Fact one: Obama led an Occupy Chicago group in 1988 which invaded a bank and broke into a meeting there. Fact two: the various "Occupy" movements started up immediately after Obama began his reckless "blame the rich" campaign. Fact three: the "Occupy" movements are an exact example of the methods taught by Saul Alinsky, a mentor of Obama. Fact four: Obama and leading Democrats like Pelosi and Reid have praised and supported the "Occupy" groups.

Even Chris Matthews, who once famously said he felt a thrill down his leg whever Obama spoke, has had enough of this demagogue.

Panicked AP Attempts to Memory-Hole Democrats’ #Occupy Endorsements

John Nolte Nov 18th 2011 Bigjournalism.com (Breitbart)

Occupy Wall Street’s imploding, Obama and the Democrats own the chaos, and now the AP is panicking.

But first a little context…

Something happened this month that the mainstream media and the Left (but I repeat myself) never expected. Two months ago, the White House, Democrats, and the MSM were all sure that the #OccupyWallStreet movement would save them in 2012. With thousands of astro-turfed morons in the streets raging against Wall Street, Obama’s allies hoped to use said morons to create a silver lining in the economic cloud he himself created.

Obama "We are on their side" Drudge report

The plan was a simple one. The path to Obama’s second term requires that enough voters forget that our current economic woes are the fault of a failed President who enjoyed two years of having every single item on his wish-list passed by Congress. And so the idea was to create Occupy in order to give the MSM the cover they desired to spend every single day up until the election talking about greed and income inequality in order to blame both for the stagnant economy.

The hope was that by repeating this message incessantly, enough voters could be convinced that Wall Street, and by extension, evil Republicans, were to blame for our chronic unemployment, record deficits, and stillborn economic growth. President Obama who?

Fortunately for America, this plan has not only failed miserably it has backfired completely. Thanks to the rise of New Media and our unwillingness to let the MSM’s lies, bias, and cover ups stand for even one more day, Occupy is in its death throes and might take the President and Democratic party down with it. First and foremost, we uncovered the lie that Occupy was grassroots and then we exposed every Occupy rape, poop, death, overdoese, old woman thrown down the stairs, attack on a police officer, and public act of masturbation. In the process, public opinion turned against the Occupiers and as a result these Leftists have started doing what the Left always does when they lose, have a tantrum.

But like I said, the Left and their media allies didn’t expect New Media to own this story and to use the truth to drive the narrative out of their control. And we know they didn’t expect to lose this one because almost every prominent Democrat in America very publicly jumped aboard the Occupy movement with the expectation that their allies in the MSM could control the outcome.

Well, now Democrats like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are way out on a limb and have been caught in bed encouraging, endorsing, and attempting to legitimize a wildly unpopular movement most voters now find repulsive.

So what’s a shameless left-wing media to do?

What they always do. Rewrite history.

And it looks as thought the Associated Press has decided to start the memory-holing with the following:

Democrats See Minefield in Occupy Protests

NEW YORK (AP) — The Republican Party and the tea party seemed to be a natural political pairing. But what may have seemed like another politically beneficial alliance — Democrats and Occupy Wall Street — hasn’t happened.

Insert record scratch here.

Sorry AP, but the only reason Democrats see a minefield is because they’re standing in it.

Democrats such as…

…House Democrats. And look, the story about House Democrats endorsing Occupy is an AP story!

…Top Democrats.

…Nancy Pelosi.

…A President named Obama, who said of Occupy, “We are on their side.”

…The SEIU.

Need I go on?

When the AP matter-of-factly (the most effective way to propagandize) states that this natural alliance “hasn’t happened” … they are lying. The alliance between Occupy and prominent Democrats occurred weeks ago and as one honest Democrat, Doug Schoen, put it just today:

Thursday’s coordinated Occupy Wall Street “National Day of Action” is bad news for the Democratic party, and bad news for President Obama.

But is it really bad news for Democrats when they have the corrupt MSM already out there shilling for them and pretending this solidarity never happened?

Well, maybe it is. If the slow motion implosion of Occupy has taught us anything it’s that the MSM doesn’t have the power it once had to control the narrative. New Media won this one and maybe New Media can can also win the battle of reminding voters of just who it was who ran out to endorse, encourage, and attempt to legitimize vandals, poopers, rapists, and public masturbators.

A Radical Plan To Solve the US Housing Crisis

2011-11-19T06:33:00.000-08:00

Every thinking person recognizes that the housing and unemployment crisis we are in is not easily solvable, with almost half of all homes under water, with new home construction at a standstill, and with home prices continuing to fall. Most people realize also that home construction is an important component of employment. We will not get out of the overall economic crisis we are in until the housing crisis is over.

I am a strict Constitutionalist, but I recognize that in time of war we need to do things that violate our Constitution. I also believe that people who work and save and plan should not have to support people who are suffering through their own folly or recklessness, but the housing crisis is bringing us all down; I am prepared to set aside my lifelong beliefs in the face of this catastrophe. I support a radical plan called ReMortgageAmerica, developed by an organization of the same name headed by an economist, Dr. Dennis Paulaha.

Although his plan is risky and smacks of socialism and almost unthinkable actions by the U.S. government, I believe it is the only way to avoid further catastrophe. We are seeing in the various “Occupy” movements the beginnings of violent revolution. Revolutionary thinking is needed to head it off. You can get more information about the plan at ReMortgageAmerica.com

“The Plan:

The US government offers every US citizen a 30-year mortgage at a 1% fixed rate of interest, with interest-only payments for the first two years. All financially qualified US citizens, not just those in immediate danger of default, would be able to finance a new or existing primary residence, with a $500,000 lifetime limit.

The reason for the plan:

Government programs have had a tremendous impact on big business. But the “trickle down” effect has not worked. Implementing this 1% mortgage rate for the people adds a “trickle up” boost to the economy because people will be able to spend and save more, and it is consumers who are the real job creators. The decline in net worth, wealth, and America’s standard of living will be reversed. Most important, the dignity and self-esteem of the American people that has been lost will be regained.

Why the plan will create jobs: It will let the people save and spend more.

When the US Government refinances a 4% mortgage at 1% and you pay only the interest for two years, it will cut the monthly payment on a $180,000 loan from $859 to $150 a month. That is an extra $709 a month! An extra $8,512 a year! For two years. Money you can save or spend. (Minus some additional taxes due to a smaller interest deduction.) After two years, if you have a 30 year mortgage at a 1% fixed rate, instead of 4%, your monthly payment on a $180,000 loan is $614 instead of $859. That is an extra $2,940 to save or spend every year for the length of the mortgage.

Why the plan will save homes:

It will stop home prices from falling.
It will stop people from walking away from “underwater” mortgages by making their mortgage payments less than rent, which will prevent many foreclosures and turn the housing market around. We believe this plan will increase home values, which will offset some of the financial losses experienced during the past years and help stop foreclosures.

Why the plan will eliminate the debt:

It will eliminate the federal debt in 10 – 15 years. This is a government loan program—not an increase in government spending—which means the money will be repaid. Plus, the economic expansion it generates will increase federal and state revenues while decreasing federal and state spending on unemployment and welfare. And taxpayers will have a smaller interest deduction, because they will pay less interest on their mortgages. Annual deficits will turn into surpluses of $1 trillion to $2 trillion a year, which will eliminate the $15 trillion debt in 10 to 15 years if all the extra money is put toward the debt and not spent by Washington.

The bottom line:

US citizens deserve and need this plan.
The American people who helped build this country deserve and need a plan like this—a plan that will help them directly while also stimulating economic prosperity, just like the GI Bill after World War II that gave returning veterans the opportunity to purchase a home at a low mortgage rate and virtually no down payment. In fact, the GI Bill is the model for this plan, because it was the GI Bill, not World War II, that ended the Great Depression and created the greatest era of expansion and prosperity in American history. Today, as then, the purpose of a plan focused on people and housing is not only to end a long-lasting recession, but to create prosperity that will last for decades.“

Listening to Rush Limbaugh Less and Less

2011-11-12T10:27:00.000-08:00

I have listened, almost religiously, to Rush Limbaugh since 1988, and I have long been one of his greatest admirers. I even used to arrange my teaching schedule with more early morning classes so I could be free to listen to more of his 12:00 noon to 3:00 PM broadcasts.

When I first discovered Rush it was a revelation to hear someone so articulate express political views that coincided with mine at a time when all you saw on the networks and read in the newspapers were asinine liberal views. It has also been wonderful to hear him occasionally launch into a passionate expression of patriotism and of the extraordinary exploits of many American heroes. I love my country and understand its greatness and history; in the face of so many ignoramuses who wish to tear it down, Rush has often brought tears to my eyes with his monologues that honor America.

Things began to change for me when Obama became president. Don’t misunderstand me; I agree completely with Rush that Obama has been a disaster as president, and that this country will not survive another Obama Presidency, but the constant Obama-bashing on Rush’s program has begun to wear very thin. This has been compounded by Rush’s support and making excuses for certain conservative Republican candidates, no matter how stupid they sound. This came to a head for me this week when Rush tried so hard to excuse Perry’s 53 seconds outage – an episode that I believe has ended his candidacy.

Of course, there has been a big change in how I get my information since I began with Rush. I have the internet, and I can hear both sides on Fox News now. I will still tune in to Rush occasionally, but my dependence on him is over.

If you don't understand, shut up

2011-11-11T08:01:00.000-08:00

When you fight them in court and you lose, they have the deck stacked so you have to pay for their lawyers, so I guess one of the best ways to fight these trouble-making meddlers who have too little to do with their time is to ridicule their more outlandish protests.
I agree with the comment made by Winston Churchill, "Whether you are a believer or a non-believer, it is very wicked to rob others of hope". In other words, if you don't understand, shut up.

Oppressing the Atheists Among Us

By Lincoln Brown 11/11/2011 Townhall

Amendment I of the United States Constitution:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Recently the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case Utah Highway Patrol Association v. American Atheists. The ADF has a story on the matter. At issue: whether or not memorial crosses can remain along Utah’s roadways. The crosses mark the places where Utah Highway Patrol Troopers sacrificed their lives in the line of duty. One such cross stands about 90 minutes from where I am writing this. Another is about 15 minutes away from my house, and was erected by the family of a sheriff’s detective who died in a helicopter crash while searching for a missing woman. I knew him. He was a good man, a good cop, and had a wickedly dry sense of humor.

What had the American Atheists so indignant was the notion that the crosses amount to a government endorsement of Christianity as they are located on small plots of public land. The atheists have no objection to say, obelisks, but the crosses have got to go.

The irony here is that in Utah the predominant religion is that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints, which does not hold the cross in any particular esteem. In fact I have yet to visit any LDS church (and I’ve been to more than a few) that have a cross, picture of a cross, or even cruciform architecture. In fact as members of the Utah Highway Patrol Association have said, the crosses were not erected as expressions of Christianity, but because crosses are frequently associated with memorials.

So the atheists are fighting to remove religious symbols that were not erected as religions symbols. Or as one listener rather laconically put it to me off-air: “What’s next? Are they going to cut down all the telephone poles?” The guy had a point. Telephone and power poles with their cross beams do in fact have a rather Christian look about them. No telling how many people may be thrown into theological conniption fits from having such a symbol thrust upon them by the municipality!

I have a friend who is a Vietnam vet who to this day hates to see a peace sign.

Mainly because to him the peace sign is a not a symbol of back of those beautiful 60’s when “It was so groovy now that people are finally getting; together” but rather a symbol of those peaceful, love-filled people who called servicemen and returning veterans names and spit on them. But he doesn’t run around pitching a fit over every peace sign he sees. He’s got better things to do with his time, and he respects the First Amendment. Besides, he’s a cop too, and has his hands full protecting people who want to gripe about crosses erected to peace officers.

Those in support of the atheists will undoubtedly cite the First Amendment cited at the beginning of this column and will say that the atheist struck a blow on its behalf. These are the same people who in this discussion will with wild-eyed abandon, hair standing on end, teeth set in grim defiance shout about “separation” and that Jefferson was a Deist. And he was, but these same people either do not know, or will not acknowledge that Jefferson, was also very much a proponent of freedom of religion.

These are the same people who cannot read past the word “establishment” and somehow seem to gloss right over the “free exercise” clause. The argument can be made that the framers of the Constitution were averse to the British tradition of the king or queen being the head of the church, but they were not fans of a monarch being the head of anything in the new nation. But they were by and large men of faith and never intended to remove faith from the public square.

These atheists were not oppressed by the crosses. But they decided to use memorials erected by grieving families to grind their axes, and force a change that the majority of the people of Utah don’t want. And that begs the question: who is oppressing whom?

Let's Get Real, Republicans

2011-11-10T05:41:00.000-08:00

Let's face it, fellow conservatives, there are only two Republican candidates who have a reasonable chance to beat Obama and go on to become an effective president: Romney and Gingrich. Conservative favorites Bachmann and Santorum are going nowhere, Perry and Paul have made fools of themselves, Huntsman has no support, and Cain doesn't know how to handle the bright lights. These 8 person debates seem nonsensical, but they have narrowed the field so we can now have some real and substantive, one-on-one debates. Let's just knock out all but Gingrich and Romney.

An ‘Oops’ From Perry in G.O.P. Presidential Debate

November 9, 2011 By JEFF ZELENY and ASHLEY PARKER NY Times (Excerpt)

ROCHESTER, Mich. — "Gov. Rick Perry of Texas arrived at the Republican presidential debate here on Wednesday night on a mission to get his candidacy back on track. The first hour passed without incident. The second hour did not.

He emphatically declared that he planned to eliminate three government agencies in Washington. But as he began to explain, he could think of only two.

“Commerce, Education,” Mr. Perry said before pausing for an uncomfortable moment as he looked from side to side, counting on his fingers and flipping through his notes.

As his rivals volunteered suggestions, a moderator asked Mr. Perry if he could name the third agency.

“The third one, I can’t,” he finally said, a sad look on his face, after 53 seconds had gone by. “Sorry. Oops.”

For any other candidate, the moment may have been quickly forgotten or easily explained. But for Mr. Perry, whose candidacy has been consistently undercut by his debate performances, the gravity of the matter grew obvious as chuckles in the Republican audience turned to gasps. The lapse reinforced negative stereotypes about his candidacy, a point that was made clear after the debate when he made a rare trip into an adjoining room to face reporters and try to brush away what had happened.

“I’m glad I had my boots on tonight,” Mr. Perry said, “because I sure stepped in it out there.”

Supporters of Mr. Perry groaned, with one contributor saying by e-mail: “It’s over, isn’t it?” One of his rivals, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, offered pity, declaring: “We all feel very badly for him.” And Republican operatives almost uniformly declared it as a sign of great trouble for his candidacy, with Mark McKinnon, an aide to former President George W. Bush, describing the moment as the “human equivalent of shuttle Challenger.”

“I think the biggest question now is whether or not he can raise any more real money,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist. “A donor strike will totally cripple what’s left of his campaign.”

It remains an open question whether Mr. Perry will be able to move beyond the moment, particularly given that the video was already looping around the Internet and television broadcasts. But his path to the presidential nomination grew more difficult, and his rivals began furiously working to present themselves as the best alternative to Mitt Romney.

The lapse by Mr. Perry was the most memorable of a two-hour debate on CNBC that was otherwise dominated by polite exchanges over economic policy. It was not until several minutes later, when he received another turn, that he explained himself, saying: “By the way, that was the Department of Energy I was reaching for a while ago.”

It was clearly a blow to Mr. Perry just as he was investing heavily in reintroducing himself to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire through television advertising. It could be weeks before it is clear whether it has a permanent effect on his campaign, but at a minimum it left him facing additional questions about his candidacy.

“It was a political death knell,” said Sara Taylor Fagen, a Republican strategist who advised Mr. Bush. “There’s just no recovering from a moment like that when you’ve had such a bad record of debates.”

It was notable that Mr. Romney, who had aggressively tangled with Mr. Perry at the last debate, on Oct. 18, did not see a reason to confront him on Wednesday night."

Some Thoughts on Sexual Harassment and Cain

2011-11-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

As a former college professor, I know what every college instructor knows, "Never let the door to your office be closed when counseling a female student". At the public school grade level, the rule is, "Don't touch or hug a student regardless of their emotional distress and need for comfort". Recently a kindergarten boy was disciplined for sexual harassment because he hugged a girl. This is where we are.

When I was young I worked in factories and restaurants. There was a constant and steady stream of sexually suggestive banter going on all the time between males and females - as often as not initiated by the females. After President Clinton's escapades became known (Clinton's main historical note will be that he introduced the idea of oral sex to our grammar school students), supervisors in factories and restaurants were warned to observe and step in if it appeared that a female looked like she "felt uncomfortable" with the banter. This was to prevent an expensive, she said-he said lawsuit that the company would usually lose - along with the wasted time of all involved.

Where am I going with all this? Sexual overtures only become sexual harassment when a person holding power over another punishes that person when those overtures are rejected. Someone is going to have to show me that testimony taken under oath resulted in a judgement against Herman Cain that he punished someone for rejecting his advances. Sexual banter only becomes sexual harassment when someone complains, and the banter doesn't stop. Neither normal sexual banter nor mistaken intentions on either side constitute sexual harassment.

Gloria Allred and Herman Cain

2011-11-08T04:11:00.000-08:00

Now that ultra left-wing attorney Gloria Allred has entered the offensive to destroy Herman Cain's reputation and presidential campaign, I have reached two conclusions: 1. Cain is innocent of charges of sexual harassment, and 2. this mission to destroy Cain is not directed by Rick Perry, but by supporters of Barack Obama. These are the same tactics used to try to destroy so many conservatives who pose a threat: Sarah Palin, George Bush, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Ray Donovan, Edward Meese, etc., etc. etc.

Fresh from her successful effort to destroy Meg Whitman with silly charges involving an illegal alien, (which succeeded in putting Jerry Brown into the governor's mansion in California - the same Jerry Brown whose policies and philosophy turned the golden state of California into a third world country), Ms. Allred has once again gained the TV cameras with this crude effort to destroy Cain.

You would think the people of this country would revolt against this baloney, but then you remember that O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony went free, and that most people are more interested in the antics of Lindsay Lohan than in stopping the bankruptcy of the once-greatest country in the world.

I cannot support Mr. Cain's bid for the presidency; I can't see replacing a bumbling president with another neophyte whose knowledge seems pretty shallow, but I am truly outraged by the treatment this good man is getting. Get ready for blood on the floor once we Republicans actually choose our candidate.

Mr. Obama, Call Off Your Vicious Mobs

2011-11-04T06:28:00.000-07:00

In a survey conducted under the auspices of Fordham University, it was found that 60% of the Occupy Wall Street mob voted for Obama, while only 2% voted for McCain. The rest did not vote or voted for an obscure party. While many surveyed indicated displeasure with the Obama presidency so far, IS THERE ANY REASONABLE PERSON IN THE USA WHO DOES NOT BELIEVE THAT OBAMA INSTIGATED THESE MOBS THROUGH HIS 'HATE THE SUCCESSFUL' RHETORIC AND THROUGH THE EFFORTS OF HIS GOONS?

I assure you, it was no accident that the 'Occupy' movement started up immediately after Obama began his 'blame the rich' campaign. it is no accident that William Ayers became a main speaker of the 2011 Occupy Chicago movement. It is no accident that this movement is a main component of the teaching of Saul Alinsky, one of Obama's teachers and heroes. It is no accident that today's 'Occupy' movement so closely resembles the Occupy Chicago movement of 1988 organized by Obama, himself.

It is also no accident that former ACORN staffers have been caught organising 'Occupy Wall Street':

ACORN Officials Scramble, Firing Workers and Shredding Documents, After Exposed as Players Behind Occupy Wall Street Protests

By Jana Winter November 03, 2011 FoxNews.com

Officials with the revamped ACORN office in New York -- operating as New York Communities for Change -- have fired staff, shredded reams of documents and told workers to blame disgruntled ex-employees for leaking information in an effort to explain away a FoxNews.com report last week on the group’s involvement in Occupy Wall Street protests, according to sources.

Unfortunately, we are now in such a mess that it will take years and much self-sacrifice to get our country back. Even if we defeat Obama in 2012, it will only be a first step, as the following article explains:

Does America Deserve Obama?

November 4, 2011 By David Deming American Thinker

President Obama is a socialist and a vapid demagogue who has been educated beyond the level of his intelligence. He is the choice of a puerile and spoiled electorate who want to be taken care of and obtain handouts from a parental figurehead.

I can't believe the West won the Cold War. The Cold War was a competition of economic ideologies. In the 1960s, we used to have sincere debates about which economic system was better -- a socialist, centrally-planned economy, or a capitalist, free-market economy. The debate is over. By 1990, even the Russians and Chinese were forced to implicitly admit the superiority of market economies. But while our former enemies were busy converting their socialist systems to market economies, we were happily rushing headlong into socialism.

People have been discussing economic systems for more than two thousand years. As described in my books, Science and Technology in World History, Vols. 1 & 2, communism was advocated by Plato as early as the fourth century BC. But Plato's student, Aristotle, disparaged communism by observing "that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual." Aristotle concluded that the ills which are supposed to arise from private property in fact originated in human nature.

We have been aware of the superiority of market economies since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. When a person is left free to pursue his own interest unimpeded, he is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention ... [and thus] by pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

In Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) gave three reasons to severely limit government interference in a nation's economy and markets. First, any increase in government power is a threat to human individuality, freedom, and originality, qualities necessary for the progress of the human race. Second, market economies function more efficiently and produce more prosperity. Third, laissez-faire economies inculcate moral virtues in citizens by making them more self-reliant, virtuous and intelligent. "A people," Mill explained, "who expect to have everything done for them ... have their faculties only half developed."

The test of any theory is experiment, but it is virtually impossible to conduct large-scale controlled experiments in economics. It is difficult to even make meaningful and unambiguous comparisons between countries. Nations differ -- not only in economic systems, but in cultures, languages, traditions, geographies, and natural resources. To test socialism versus capitalism, we would have to take one or more countries with similar social and physical characteristics and divide them in half. After assigning a different economic system to each country, we would then sit back for fifty years and observe what happens.

But this experiment has already been performed through an accident of history. We know the answer. At the close of World War II, Germany and Korea were divided into socialist and market economies. Socialism failed dramatically. East Germany had to build the Berlin Wall just to keep people from fleeing. North Korea is still in the stone age. A satellite photo taken at night shows South Korea ablaze with the light of civilization. But North Korea is dark, both literally and metaphorically.

In the U.S., we exist in a curious state of denial. We acknowledge the inferiority of socialism but continue to become more and more socialistic. Every attempt to shrink the size of government or repeal a regulation brings about a shriek, like a bottle being pulled out of the mouth of an infant. I cannot recall a Republican president or Congress who reduced the size of the federal government. No one wants to surrender a special privilege or entitlement. We know what the best system is, but we lack the discipline to return to it.

Ronald Reagan used to say that liberals know only how to tax and spend. If there was ever a man who embodies that aphorism, it is Barack Obama.

He has no clue as to how a free-market economy works or why it produces economic prosperity. Obama continues to insist that government should determine what energy technologies we're going to have. Thus the debacle of Solyndra. Five hundred million dollars went down the drain needlessly. Government can't pick winners because it doesn't know how to do so. If a centrally planned socialist system worked, it would have produced prosperity in China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. It didn't. Only a free-market system knows how to efficiently distribute resources.

Since the inception of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society," we have had at least forty years of welfare programs designed to reduce poverty. These programs have not worked. The current U.S. poverty rate is the same as it was in the late 1960s. So what do we do about it? Instead of reversing course, we continue on the same path. If the "Occupy Wall St." protestors have no jobs, it is because they are reaping the rewards of their own success. Socialism has killed the prosperity produced by our formerly great system. The U.S. is now ninth on the index of economic freedom and heading downward.

Yes, we have a clueless poseur for president. But we have no one but ourselves to blame. Obama was chosen by the people of the U.S. He was elected democratically, and therefore is nothing more than an iconic representation of our own ignorance, greed, and infantile sense of entitlement. Obama is not the problem, and his electoral defeat in 2012 will not magically heal the country or return us to prosperity and freedom.
Elections change nothing, because they are not causes, but results. The U.S. Congress now has an all-time low approval rating of nine percent. This is nothing more than an indication that we have lost the ability to govern ourselves. After all, we elect our congressional representatives. We have the government we deserve. Prosperity and freedom will return only if and when the American people again become educated, virtuous, and intelligent.

Occupy Mobs Organized by Obama Operatives?

2011-10-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

As Robin of Berkeley explained in her article that I featured on September 7, 2011, the mobs we see and the violent language we hear have been organized and encouraged by Obama operatives as Barack Obama stands back and pretends otherwise. They have developed into the ‘brown shirts’ of the 1930’s now befouling the streets of our major cities in 2011-2012 – all in the pursuit of an Obama re-election. This is a community organizer at work encouraging class warfare and violence against successful people – in the guise of equality and social justice.

I said during the summer of 2008 that Barack Obama was the most dangerous man ever to appear on the national scene in our country, and nothing I have seen since then makes me think I may have been wrong.

The following article was uncovered by Andrew Breitbart, the journalist to whom all Americans who love freedom owe so much. Biggovernment .com is Breitbart’s website.

Barack Obama organized Occupy Chicago in 1988 using means and to ends eerily similar to today’s ‘Occupy’ mobs. Why would anyone think he is not behind the mobs now protesting something or other today – especially since William Ayers is a prominent speaker featured in the current Occupy Chicago mob scene?

Barack Obama Led #OccupyChicago – Circa 1988

by Joel B. Pollak Biggovernment.com

Just twenty or so years ago, Barack Obama wouldn’t just have supported the Occupy protests.

He would have organized them.

From Stanley Kurtz’s essential Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, pp. 117-8:

In fact, Obama personally helped plan one of UNO’s most confrontational actions of the eighties [in 1988]: a break-in meant to intimidate a coalition of local business and neighborhood leaders into dropping a landfill expansion deal.

We know of Obama’s involvement in this demonstration only because his supporters in 2008 felt it necessary to rebut charges that, contrary to his claims of inter-racial healing, he had organized exclusively with blacks. Only then did Obama’s former colleagues from UNO [United Neighborhood Organization, a largely Mexican group] of Chicago reveal that he had helped to plan and lead this multi-ethnic demonstration against landfill expansion on Chicago’s South Side.

…Shouting “No deals!” somewhere between eighty and a hundred UNO-DCP [Developing Communities Project, a black group organized by Obama] marched to a local bank. There they broke into a meeting being conducted by the bank president and local community leaders. The group was exploring the possibility of a deal with Waste Management. The protestors, presumably including Obama, surrounded the meeting table while [Mary-Ellen] Montes [of UNO] told the negotiators, “We will fight you every step of the way.”

Obama was also likely involved with other aggressive UNO protests, including protests for school reform, through which he likely met former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers is involved in the Occupy protests today.

In the 1990s, Obama maintained his ties to radical activists, and “channel[ed] foundation funding to his confrontational Alinskyite colleagues.”

It’s clear that Obama’s ties to the Occupy movement–its forbears, its tactics, and some of its current luminaries–run deep.

This is what “community organizing” looks like.

9-9-9? Nein, Nein, Nein

2011-10-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

On August 8, well before Rick Perry’s campaign disintegrated in the debates, I warned that it would be a critical mistake to make him our nominee because he would be ridiculed once some of his views became well-known.

I feel the same way about Herman Cain. I love Mr. Cain and his conservative views, but his 9-9-9 tax plan is complete nonsense, and will also become a subject of ridicule. God knows we need a simplified tax code, but a flat tax that rewards millionaires and punishes low income earners is unacceptable, and a sales tax added to an income tax will give future Congresses a weapon similar to handing a match and gasoline to a firebug. Mr. Cain may appeal to some conservatives, but Obama will win 48 states if Cain is our nominee. I wonder how many conservatives recognize that Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan turns Social Security and Medicare into welfare programs entirely financed by Congressional authorizations.

Although the following analysis was published in the NY Times, the author, Bruce Bartlett, is someone to be trusted:

Inside the Cain Tax Plan

By BRUCE BARTLETT October 11, 2011 NY Times

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Benefit and the Burden.”

With recent polls showing increased support for Herman Cain as the G.O.P. presidential nominee, attention is being drawn to his platform, especially what he calls the 9-9-9 tax plan. News reports describe it as a 9 percent tax rate on business and personal income, combined with a 9 percent national sales tax.

Little detail has been released by the Cain campaign, so it’s impossible to do a thorough analysis. But using what is available on Mr. Cain’s Web site, I’m taking a stab at estimating its effects.

First, the 9-9-9 plan is actually an intermediate step in Mr. Cain’s plan to overhaul the tax system and jump-start growth. Phase 1 would reduce individual and business taxes to a maximum of 25 percent, which I assume means reducing the top statutory tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent.

No mention is made on the site of a tax cut for those now in the 10 percent, 15 percent or 25 percent brackets. This means that the only people who would get a tax rate cut are those now in the 28 percent, 33 percent or 35 percent brackets. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, only 4 percent of taxpayers pay any taxes at those rates.

As for corporations, Mr. Cain’s proposal is primarily going to benefit those with revenues of more than $1 million a year, because they account for 98.7 percent of all receipts by C corporations. (A C corporation is a legal entity separate and distinct from its owners that is taxed as a corporation; its shareholders pay taxes individually on their gains.) Those companies with receipts over $50 million account for 88.8 percent of total receipts.

Other business entities — sole proprietorships, S corporations (which have between 1 and 100 shareholders and pass through net income or losses to shareholders) and partnerships — would not benefit because they are not taxed on the corporate schedule. But they represent 92 percent of all businesses.

Second, Mr. Cain would eliminate all taxes on profits earned by multinational corporations outside the United States. It’s hard to know the impact of this provision, but according to Martin Sullivan, an economist with Tax Analysts, the 50 largest corporations in the United States generated half of their profits in other countries.

The actual benefit of Mr. Cain’s proposal would be much greater to many of them, because, according to Mr. Sullivan, while some of these 50 companies have no foreign operations, others derive 100 percent of their gross profits in foreign countries.

In 2010 these included Philip Morris, Pfizer and Abbott Laboratories.

Third, Mr. Cain would abolish all taxes on capital gains. Such taxes typically generate more than $100 billion in federal revenue annually, according to the Tax Policy Center. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, two-thirds of all capital gains are reported by those with incomes over $1 million.

Mr. Cain says these three proposals, which he would put into effect immediately without offsetting the lost revenue, will jump-start economic growth. He offers no evidence for this assertion; it is simply put forward as self-evident. But the experience of the George W. Bush administration was that cuts in tax rates on the wealthy and on capital gains had no effect whatsoever on growth, according to the Congressional Research Service.

And this is only Phase 1 of the Cain plan. In Phase 2, the payroll tax would be eliminated, causing more than $800 billion in revenue to evaporate. The estate and gift tax would be abolished, further reducing taxes on the wealthy. And the 9-9-9 plan would be implemented.

It’s important to understand that the 9 percent rates on personal and business income would apply to very different tax bases than now exist. For individuals, the tax would apply to gross income less only the deduction for charitable contributions. No mention is made of a personal exemption.

This means that the 47 percent of tax filers who now pay no federal income taxes will pay 9 percent on their total income. And elimination of the payroll tax won’t even help half of them because the earned income tax credit, which Mr. Cain would abolish, offsets both their income tax liability and their payroll tax payment as well.

Additionally, everyone would now pay a 9 percent sales tax on all purchases. No mention is made of any exemptions from this tax, so we may assume that it will apply to food, medical care, rent, home and auto purchases and a wide variety of other expenditures now exempt from state sales taxes. This would increase their cost of living by 9 percent while, at the same time, the poor would pay income taxes.

The business tax in the Cain plan bears no resemblance to the present corporate income tax. The tax would apply to gross sales less dividends paid and all purchases from other companies, including investment goods. Thus, there would be no deduction for wages.

How benefits would be treated is unclear, because purchases of things like health insurance might constitute a purchase from another company and remain deductible. If so, what is to stop a company from paying its employees by leasing their cars and homes for them and even buying their food and clothing? That would reduce their taxable revenue.

The abolition of any deduction for wages is likely to raise the cost of employing workers, even with abolition of the employers’ share of the payroll tax. And since the dividend deduction doesn’t appear to be related to profitability, companies could borrow to pay dividends and still get the deduction. Even a novice tax lawyer could easily make a tax shelter out of that.

And here’s the kicker in the Cain plan. Phase 2 is merely a transition to yet another fundamental tax reform. In Phase 3, the United States would adopt the so-called Fair Tax, which would replace all federal taxes with a 30 percent sales tax on all goods and services. In a previous post, I explained why the Fair Tax is a bad idea. I went into more detail in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee on July 26.

Whatever one thinks of the Fair Tax, it makes not the slightest bit of sense to have a plan that requires fundamental changes to the federal tax system twice to achieve its objective.

Veterans of tax reform attempts in the United States know reform is very difficult and time-consuming even once. If the Fair Tax is a good idea, Mr. Cain ought to just do it, without confusing the issue with his unnecessary and highly complicated 9-9-9 plan. After all, one of the prime selling points of the Fair Tax is its simplicity, and the 9-9-9 plan is far from that.

Because so little detail exists, it’s hard to do either a proper revenue estimate or distributional analysis of the Cain plan. It’s obvious, however, that Phase 1 would represent a huge tax cut for the wealthy at a time when federal revenues are at a historical low as a share of the gross domestic product and the economy’s fundamental problem is a lack of aggregate demand.

Thus the Cain plan would increase the budget deficit without doing anything to stimulate demand, because rich people can already spend as much as they want and are unlikely to spend more even if their taxes are abolished.

The poor and the middle class might increase their spending if they could keep more of their earnings, but they will unquestionably pay more under Phase 2 of the Cain plan. With no tax on capital gains, the rich would pay almost nothing, while elimination of all deductions and credits, as well as imposition of a national sales tax, must necessarily raise taxes on everyone else, especially those not now paying income taxes.

At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distributional monstrosity. The poor would pay more while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that economic growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase.

Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain’s tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill conceived.

A Letter to the Lazy

2011-10-13T06:22:00.000-07:00

President Obama, VP Biden and Nancy Pelosi are on record as encouraging the mobs now demonstrating in various cities against something or other. This makes sense as the main idea of the Democratic Party seems nowadays to be based on “hate”. They hate anyone who has worked hard and been successful – hence the class warfare gambit. They hate anyone who disagrees with them – they never respond with facts and logic, only abuse and attempts to destroy reputations.

What will become of these mobs is anyone’s guess, but I hope voters aren’t thrilled that an American President is encouraging them. This is another page out of Saul Alinsky’s book, and another indication that Dinesh D'Souza was absolutely correct in his conclusion that what drives Obama is an urge to punish America.

A Letter to the Lazy

By Ben Stein on 10.13.11 American Spectator

Don't just whine and beat drums about people and institutions you don't know the first thing about.

Dear Demonstrators,

What a great time you must be having. I used to demonstrate a lot myself. In the 1950s and 1960s we marched and picketed for civil rights for black Americans and we accomplished a lot. In the late '60s and '70s we demonstrated to end the war in Vietnam and "bring it on home to Babylon..." as we often said. The results were a catastrophe for the Cambodians but probably good for the U.S., which was caught in a meat grinder there in Asia.

My wife and I also danced and screamed and sang for the Black Panther Party. That was a bit of a mistake but we were at Yale and we didn't know any better.

But we always had specific goals: voting rights. Equal housing and accommodations. Bringing the troops home.

What are your specific goals? It means zero to be against greed. Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.

And, what does it mean to be against corporations? Corporate ownership is by far the most efficient, responsible way of organizing industrial production there has ever been. It is a billion times more democratic that the Marxist forms of organization some of your speakers are advocating. Marxism is so much uglier than capitalism it's not even in the same universe. Marxism is just systemized envy, violence, and repression.

Besides, your parents and grandparents are the owners of those corporations through their retirement investments. Do you want to impoverish your own parents and grandparents? Do you want to impoverish yourselves?

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for Barron's magazine and I found a lot to write about.

But the overwhelming majority of the people on Wall Street get up early, work an incredibly long, hard honest day, mostly trying to make money for your parents and grandparents and for the endowments of your universities -- and for a very few wealthy people who often leave their money to your schools.

To tar all of Wall Street with the same brush is outrageously unfair and false.

Look, many of you have educations. If you want to fight the evil you see in finance and industry, get to work reading the corporate filings, see if there has been fraud, and where you find it, report it to the SEC or write about it or blog about it.
But don't just whine and beat drums about people you don't know and don't mock the best political and economic system there has ever been. Do something specific and constructive, and if you are willing to work as hard as the people on Wall Street, you might just accomplish something.

The Lies of Class Warfare

2011-09-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

This is a long but thorough shredding of the lies told by President Obama in his campaign to win re-election by setting groups of Americans against one another:

Obamas Biggest Lies

By Peter Ferrara 9/26/2011 Townhall.com

If you work hard, play by the rules, save your money, create jobs, and make a success out of yourself, President Obama and the Democrat party will plunder everything you have worked so hard for, because in their view that is only fair.

That is the meaning of the policies President Obama is espousing as he campaigns for re-election around the country this week. As Mark Steyn has explained, there is no bill yet that the President is demanding Congress pass, it won't create any jobs, and there is no money to pay for it. It is just a traveling road show, and we need to start to hold accountable our relatives, friends and neighbors who would fall for it, and thereby darkly threaten the entire future of America.

Calculated Deception

Campaigning for re-election on Monday, President Obama said,
Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher tax rates than millionaires and billionaires. That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that. Warren Buffet's secretary shouldn't pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it. It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million. Anybody who says we can't change the tax code to correct that.... They should have to defend that unfairness -- explain why somebody who's making $50 million a year in the financial markets should be paying 15 percent on their taxes, when a teacher making $50,000 a year is paying more than that -- paying a higher rate. They ought to have to answer for it.

Let me educate you, Mr. President, even though I am quite certain you are not interested in hearing any answer that contradicts your committed religious beliefs.

But the truth is that the unfairness you discuss is a fantasy. The facts are just the opposite.

Even before you were elected, Mr. Obama, under the tax policies adopted by President Reagan, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the much vilified President George W. Bush, official IRS data for 2007 showed that the top 1 percent of income earners paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent combined! The top 1 percent of income earners that year earned 22 percent of income but paid 40.4 percent of total income taxes. When Reagan became President, the top 1 percent paid 17.4 percent of income taxes, as I note in my recent book, America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb. As Jack Kemp used to say, if you want to soak the rich, cut tax rates. Moreover, the bottom 40 percent plus of income earners now pay no federal income tax on net as a group.

So if "the rich" are not paying their fair share, Mr. President, what would that fair share be? Based on these official facts, for you to run around the country telling America that we could have jobs and balance the budget and solve the debt crisis you are creating if the rich would just pay their fair share of taxes only demonstrates that you are not qualified to be President. Either you don't understand the basics of America's tax policies even after you have been President for three years, or you are engaged in calculated deception thinking your fairy tale will fool enough gullible people that you can be re-elected despite an economic record so bad that it is threatening to rival the Great Depression.

As the Wall Street Journal further explained yesterday, in 2008 official IRS data shows that taxpayers earning over $1 million paid an average federal income tax rate of 23.3 percent. Those earning between $500,000 and $1 million paid an average federal tax rate of 24.1 percent. As the Journal further elaborated, "that is more than twice the 8.9% average rate paid by those earning between $50,000 and $100,000, and more than three times the 7.2% average rate paid by those earning less than $50,000. The larger point is that the claim that CEOs are routinely paying lower rates than their secretaries is Omaha hokum."

Actually it is a Warren Buffett scam. His company that made him rich, Berkshire Hathaway, itself is a sophisticated tax shelter. If tax rates are raised, that will only lead more of the wealthy to flee to investing in his company to avoid the abusive multiple taxation. The IRS claims that Buffett's company owes a billion dollars in back taxes. If Buffett thinks the rich don't pay their fair share, why is he fighting this? Why doesn't he just pay his fair share as required under current law?

Buffett is just playing all of us like President Obama is. What a disgrace that our public debate has fallen this low, to this level of rank, manipulative dishonesty.

And the above doesn't even count the corporate income tax. America suffers from virtually the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, nearly 40 percent on average counting state corporate income taxes. Even Communist China has a 25 percent corporate rate. The average rate in the European Union, which is reputedly mostly socialist, is even less than that. In formerly socialist Canada, the corporate tax rate is 16.5 percent, slated under current law to fall to 15 percent next year. Compared to America, Canada has been booming since Obama was mistakenly elected.

The Obama/Buffett ruse arises just like any other magician's trick. It focuses attention on just one tax rate paid on income arising from capital investment -- the capital gains tax rate of 15 percent. The florid abusive rhetoric distracts from the multiple taxation of that income, which is actually taxed at least four separate times under our tax code. Capital investment income is taxed first by the above mentioned, abusive, internationally uncompetitive corporate income tax. If any is paid out as dividends, then it is taxed again by the individual income tax. If the value of the capital interest, say a share of stock, manages to increase in the Obama depression, then it is taxed again by the capital gains tax. If anything is left at death, then it is subject to taxation again by the death tax.

Moreover, a basic principle of our tax code is that any business expenses incurred to produce income are deductible in the year they are incurred. But not the expenses of capital investment. Those expenses can only be deducted over several years under depreciation rules, which is yet another form of discrimination and plunder of capital investment. Moreover, the money devoted to any capital investment has already been taxed when it was earned, so that is effectively still more taxation of the same income.

That is how the top 1 percent of income earners ends up paying more than the bottom 95 percent combined. And it is why the average tax rate paid by millionaires is three times the average rate paid by the middle class.

On the basis of his abusively misleading rhetoric, President Obama in his campaign speech on Monday called for $1.5 trillion in increased taxes. That would be on top of all the tax increases for which Obama has already won enactment under current law for 2013. In that year, the tax increases of Obamacare become effective, and the Bush tax cuts, which President Obama has refused to renew for the nation's small businesses, job creators, and investors, expire.

As a result, the top two income tax rates will go up by nearly 20 percent. The capital gains tax would soar by nearly 60 percent. The tax on dividends would nearly triple. The Medicare payroll tax would rocket up by 62 percent for these disfavored taxpayers. That is before the new tax increases our Dear Leader called for on Monday.

Those Tax Increases Are Not Paid For

President Obama said in his campaign speech on Monday that Congress should pass his jobs plan "knowing that every proposal is fully paid for." They are paid for by his tax increases on "the rich," which he says will raise $1 trillion, 573 billion over 10 years. But those tax increases don't have a prayer of raising nearly that much.

Obama and Buffett are blowing smoke over the 15 percent rate on capital gains and on dividends adopted in the Bush years. But over the last 40 years, every time the capital gains tax rate has been cut, revenue has gone up. And every time the capital gains tax rate has been raised, revenue has gone down.

In 1968, a 25 percent capital gains tax rate yielded real capital gains tax revenues of $40.6 billion calculated in 2000 dollars. The capital gains tax rate was then raised four times in the next eight years to 35 percent. By 1975, at the higher rate, capital gains revenues totaled $19.6 billion in constant 2000 dollars, less than half as much.

In 1978, the capital gains tax rate of 35 percent raised $29.9 billion in 2000 dollars. The capital gains rate was then cut three times to 20 percent over the four years. By 1986, the new rate 43 percent lower than the 1978 rate raised $92.9 billion in 2000 dollars, about three times as much.

The capital gains rate was raised by 40 percent the next year, to 28 percent.
Capital gains revenues fell to $56.2 billion that year, and declined all the way to $34.6 billion by 1991.

The reason for this is that when the capital gains rate was cut, more taxpayers sold their capital and realized their gains, and a rising stock market produced more gains. When the rate was increased, more taxpayers held on to their capital and a declining stock market cut off the gains.

You might say that the estimate Obama gives for his tax increase just reflects the official scoring of the proposal from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Tax Committee. But in 1997, Congress was considering a cut in the capital gains rate from 28 percent back down to 20 percent. The Joint Tax Committee (JTC) estimated that as a result revenues would increase by $7.8 billion from 1997 to 1999, but the tax cut would produce a loss of $28.8 billion over the following seven years, for a net loss of $21 billion over the 10 year period.

The actual numbers after the tax cut was passed showed an increase of $84 billion over the pre-tax cut projections for 1997 to 2000. Despite an almost 30 percent cut in the rate, capital gains revenues rose from $62 billion in 1996 to $109 billion in 1999.

Similarly, Congress considered cutting the capital gains rate again in 2003, from 20 percent to 15 percent. The JTC estimated that this would cause a loss of revenue of $5.4 billion from 2003 to 2006. But after Congress passed the tax cut, capital gains revenues increased by $133 billion during those years, as compared to the pre-tax cut projections. As Dan Clifton of the American Shareholders Association said, "There is no excuse for this $138 billion error." Capital gains tax revenue doubled from 2003 to 2005 despite a 25 percent cut in the tax rate.

Similarly, when the tax rate on dividends was cut to 15 percent in 2003, dividends paid soared, and so did the resulting revenue.

So if we effectively raise these rates again under President Obama's tax piracy proposals, revenues will most likely decline rather than rise. If those tax increases push the economy back into recession, federal revenues will decline across the board, and the national debt will soar further.

Moreover, there is further miscalculation in Obama's proposals. He claims $2 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. But most of his spending cuts involve $1.84 trillion in supposed savings due to the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan over the next 10 years that have long been expected. President Bush signed a peace treaty with Iraq providing for withdrawals in 2008.

Another $436 billion in spending cuts are from assumed interest savings due to the supposed spending cuts in the plan. But interest rates over the next 10 years will only rise from the current historic low levels. Moreover, there are no net spending cuts in the plan. The remaining cuts outside the planned reductions in Iraq/Afghanistan spending over the next 10 years total $577 billion. But the proposal involves $447 billion in increased "stimulus" spending for the President's so-called Jobs Plan. In addition, $320 billion of the remaining $577 billion are cuts to Medicare and Medicaid mostly involving further reduced payments to doctors and hospitals providing health care to the poor and elderly under those programs.

That only threatens the continued provision and quality of that health care.

Class Warfare: Making War on Working People

Before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months. But in August 2011, 44 months after the last recession began, unemployment was stuck at 9.1 percent, with exactly zero jobs created for the month, leaving over 25 million Americans unemployed or underemployed. This is the longest period of unemployment that high since the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics first reigned supreme.

Unemployment for African-Americans in August was 16.7 percent, stuck at depression levels for over 2 years. Hispanic unemployment at 11.3 percent has been in double digits for over 2 years as well. Teenage unemployment was a depression level 25.4 percent. Black teenage unemployment was at a Jim Crow level 46.5 percent.

The U6 unemployment rate, reflecting total unemployment and underemployment, was 16.2 percent. And that still doesn't fully count the millions of Americans who have given up and dropped out of the work force altogether.

The Census Bureau reported on September 14 that median family income has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels. As the Wall Street Journal explained the next day, "Earnings of the typical man who works full time year round fell, and are lower -- adjusted for inflation -- than in 1978."

Census also reported that the poverty rate climbed to 15.1 percent, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago. The child poverty rate climbed to 22 percent, nearly a quarter of all American children.

The total number of Americans in poverty is higher than at any time in the over 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tallying poverty.

Obama apologists cannot argue that this is because the recession he inherited was so bad. The historical record for the American economy is the worse the downturn the stronger the recovery. Based on the historical record, we should be completing our second year of a booming recovery by now.

These are the natural results of Obama's class warfare. If you try to rob the rich, you only end up stealing from the poor and working people. That is because the poor and working families have the most to lose when the economy turns bad, as they lose the jobs and wages they need to maintain a basic standard of living.

Most small business income is earned by singles making over $200,000 or families making over $250,000. Obama's $1.5 trillion tax increase, and his 2013 tax increases, will fall precisely on these small business earners. And most jobs are created by small business.

Moreover, what creates jobs is capital investment. Virtually all of Obama's tax increases will fall on capital investment, as proposed in his supposed jobs plan, and in 2013. The result would be even fewer jobs. If the economy falls back into recession, unemployment will soar further, along with government spending, deficits and debt.

But Obama figures the suckers will have re-elected him by then, and he could care less.

The Stupidity of Opposing the Keystone Pipeline

2011-09-19T04:55:00.000-07:00

U.S. would benefit from pipeline

By Mark J. Perry September 18, 2011 Republican-American

While European and Asian countries have become increasingly dependent on oil imported long distances from politically volatile regions of the world, the United States has its own supplier right next door in Canada.

There's nothing threatening about our friendly neighbor to the north, unlike the disparate oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf whose revolutionaries and rulers belong to a restricted club of oil producers known as the OPEC cartel.

Canada is America's No. 1 source of imported oil, supplying 2.5 million barrels daily by pipeline. This extraordinary amount of crude oil is carried to refineries in the United States, where it's turned into gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products that fuel and sustain our economy.

About half of the Canadian crude oil is derived from the Athabasca oil sands, a formation in northern Alberta that few people 20 years ago could have imagined would become the world's second largest oil reserve and transform the economies of North America.

Canada's vast oil sands hold an estimated 174 billion barrels of recoverable oil, second in the world only to Saudi Arabia's reserves. What's significant is that Canada now supplies the United States with more oil than all of the Middle East countries combined.

If not for our access to Canada's oil sands, the United States would be unable easily to replace declining oil imports from Mexico and Venezuela, and we would be at the mercy of Gulf sheikdoms with shifting allegiances.

By 2020, the amount of Canadian oil shipped to the United States could double from current levels, increasing up to 5 million barrels per day and accounting for at least 40 percent of America's oil imports. But that depends on the construction of the Keystone pipeline, a 1,700-mile artery extending from Alberta to Texas refineries at the Gulf of Mexico. Because it would cross the U.S.-Canadian border, the Keystone pipeline would also carry stranded American oil that is flowing in large quantities from shale deposits in Montana and North Dakota.

Despite the Keystone's great importance to U.S. energy security, environmental organizations are trying to block its construction, largely on grounds that an increase in oil-sands production, processing and refining would increase greenhouse-gas emissions. But experts tell us that the carbon content of oil sands is no greater than California heavy oil or some of the oil produced in Saudi Arabia.

Despite harsh attacks, the Canadian government and oil-sands developers have shown they're serious about mitigating carbon emissions and curbing environmental damage from mining operations.

As for the Keystone, it will be the most modern pipeline in the world, equipped with monitoring devices to check its integrity.

Most important, if construction of the Keystone pipeline is blocked, the Canadians won't leave oil sands in the ground. China covets the oil, and if need be, a pipeline could be built to carry the oil to Pacific ports in Canada, where it would be loaded on tankers and shipped to Asian markets.

Another thing: the Keystone pipeline would create 20,000 American jobs and nearly 120,000 indirect jobs as well as increase revenues for state and local governments along its route.

It would be senseless to forfeit such a huge economic stimulus with guaranteed job creation and an estimated $20 billion in revenue at a time when 25 million Americans are looking for work.

The enormity of the challenge before us is obvious. If America is to have a reliable and affordable supply of oil in the future, we will need Canada's oil sands.

Since this great resource is nearby and its development will stimulate our economy, provide jobs and strengthen our energy security, there are few more important tasks than ensuring the Keystone pipeline gets built.

Red Sox Hopes

2011-09-18T05:39:00.000-07:00

A very long time ago, when the Braves were still in Boston, there was a season when many of us were singing, "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain".

Now, as for the Red Sox:

Except for Lester and Beckett
The pitching belongs in Pawtucket
The bats have gone cold
And Youk suddenly grown old
We're going down like the Nantucket

The Bastards Went Too Far This Time

2011-09-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm unusual. I don't think she has much of a chance to be President, but I love Sarah Palin. I'm such a fan that I turn off O'Reilly when he has on Alan Colmes, because of Colmes' smear of Palin that her son was actually her grandson. This was only one of all kinds of vicious smears that the left threw out - hoping that some of it would stick. We shouldn't have let Charlie Gibson and Kathy Couric define Palin. We should have fought back more. We should have fought back more when they did it to Judge Bork, and to Justice Thomas. and to Dick Cheney, and to Justices Alito and Roberts, and to countless others who only disagree with their nonsense.

'Lamestream media' defends Palin

By: Molly Ball September 16, 2011 Politico (Excerpt)

"They kicked her around, victimized her, tried to destroy her. But all of a sudden, the lamestream media is coming to Sarah Palin’s defense.

Faced with a barrage of negative portrayals — a much-hyped investigative book, a Levi Johnston memoir and a new movie — Palin is finding support in the unlikeliest of places.

Film reviewers have slammed the British documentary “Sarah Palin: You Betcha!”

Newspapers have refused to run comic-strip excerpts of Joe McGinniss’s rumor-mongering tome “The Rogue.” Johnston’s accusations have been consigned to the gossip pages. And none other than The New York Times has angrily taken Palin’s side in a brutal takedown of the McGinniss book.

Reviewer Janet Maslin called “The Rogue” a work of “caustic, unsubstantiated gossip,” accusing its author, who rented a house next door to the Palins for a time, of sloppiness, attention seeking and a lack of neighborliness.

“‘The Rogue’ is too busy being nasty to be lucid,” Maslin concludes, describing its many accusations as “indefensibly reckless.”

In a statement issued through a PR representative, Todd Palin trumpeted the Times review, pointing to it as proof that the book was so reprehensible that “even The New York Times” disdained it.

But it wasn’t the first time in recent weeks the Palins have found the Times — the print voice of East Coast intellectualism — in their corner. The Gray Lady also recently published an op-ed praising Palin as a person of ideas and calling for her to be taken seriously.

The column by Anand Giridharadas — impeccably credentialed as an Aspen Institute fellow and Cambridge, Mass., resident — accused the media of “ignoring the ideas [Palin] unfurled” in her recent speech at an Iowa tea party rally. “Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism,” he wrote.

It’s a lot of love for Palin from the news outlet she decried back in March in a Facebook post titled “NYT, There You Go Again,” wherein she speculated that the paper’s “false reporting” was the source of its “economic and reputation woes.”

And it’s not the sort of treatment Palin generally perceives from what she loves to call the “lamestream media” — because, as she explained in another Facebook post, “The ‘mainstream’ media isn’t mainstream anymore. That’s why I call it ‘lamestream,’ and the LSM is becoming quite irrelevant, as it is no longer the sole gatekeeper of information.”

“The Rogue” hasn’t yet been widely reviewed — the Times defied the publisher’s embargo to publish its take, and the Los Angeles Times followed suit with a less acerbic take that nonetheless called the book “tame” and said it lacked credibility.

But many of its accusations have been aired over the past several days in “Doonesbury,” which received McGinniss’s permission to weave excerpts from the text into the strip’s narrative.

Once again, though, media outlets haven’t played along with the anti-Palin gambit. The Chicago Tribune and other newspapers have declined to publish the “Doonesbury” strips, with the Trib explaining, “The subject matter does not meet our standards of fairness.”

And then there’s “You Betcha!” a cheerfully ruthless documentary about Palin from Nick Broomfield, whose past subjects have included Kurt Cobain, Margaret Thatcher, Heidi Fleiss and Tupac Shakur.

The film premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it wasn’t exactly a critical darling.

Variety called it “a sarcastically toned, strategically timed character assassination” that “lacks sufficient humor and insight to make it a must-see for anyone outside the Brit muckraker’s fan base.” Other critics called it “obnoxious” and “unnecessary.”" Politico

Obama’s Jobs Plan and a Video

2011-09-12T06:06:00.001-07:00

It is common knowledge that American business owners and managers are sitting on billions that could be invested in projects that would create jobs.

I ran my own business for 13 years; I have some idea of what a business owner considers when evaluating whether or not to make an investment that, as a side effect, will create more jobs.

The thousands of new regulations and the dozens of new taxes are having a massive dampening effect on this type of investment. Temporary gimmicks, like reducing the payroll tax on employees only and extending the Bush tax cuts only for a limited time, have no effect. Business owners want some certainty about the future environment, and all they see are the continued imposition of new regulations and the continued attempts to add new taxes and tax increases.

It is virtually impossible today for an entrepreneur to start a new business, as I did in 1968, because of the stifling and unnecessary regulations that are in place.

President Obama is being devious, or he simply has no conception of how business and our economy works!

This is what business owners face right now (21 new taxes):

1. A 156 percent increase in the federal excise tax on tobacco

2. Obamacare Individual Mandate Excise Tax (takes effect in Jan 2014)

3. Obamacare Employer Mandate Tax (takes effect Jan. 2014)

4. Obamacare Surtax on Investment Income (Tax hike of $123 billion/takes effect Jan. 2013)

5. Obamacare Excise Tax on Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans (Tax hike of $32 bil/takes effect Jan. 2018)

6. Obamacare Hike in Medicare Payroll Tax (Tax hike of $86.8 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

7. Obamacare Medicine Cabinet Tax (Tax hike of $5 bil/took effect Jan. 2011)

8. Obamacare HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike (Tax hike of $1.4 bil/took effect Jan. 2011)

9. Obamacare Flexible Spending Account Cap – aka “Special Needs Kids Tax” (Tax hike of $13 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

10. Obamacare Tax on Medical Device Manufacturers (Tax hike of $20 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

11. Obamacare "Haircut" for Medical Itemized Deduction from 7.5% to 10% of AGI (Tax hike of $15.2 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

12. Obamacare Tax on Indoor Tanning Services (Tax hike of $2.7 billion/took effect July 2010)

13. Obamacare elimination of tax deduction for employer-provided retirement Rx drug coverage in coordination with Medicare Part D (Tax hike of $4.5 bil/takes effect Jan. 2013)

14. Obamacare Blue Cross/Blue Shield Tax Hike (Tax hike of $0.4 bil/took effect Jan. 1 2010)

15. Obamacare Excise Tax on Charitable Hospitals (Min$/took effect immediately)

16. Obamacare Tax on Innovator Drug Companies (Tax hike of $22.2 bil/took effect Jan. 2010)

17. Obamacare Tax on Health Insurers (Tax hike of $60.1 bil/takes effect Jan. 2014)

18. Obamacare $500,000 Annual Executive Compensation Limit for Health Insurance Executives (Tax hike of $0.6 bil/takes effect Jan 2013)

19. Obamacare Employer Reporting of Insurance on W-2 ($min/takes effect Jan. 2012)

20. Obamacare “Black liquor” tax hike (Tax hike of $23.6 billion/took effect immediately)

21. Obamacare Codification of the “economic substance doctrine” (Tax hike of $4.5 billion/took effect immediately)

All tax information summarized from the Americans for Tax Reform website.

This whole mess isn’t a bit funny, but we all need a laugh sometime. Watch this Obama impersonator for some laughs:

9/11, From Let's Roll to Let's Roll Over

2011-09-10T08:05:00.000-07:00

I am staying away from the programs in remembrance of 9/11 mostly because of the inane political correctness of Mayor Bloomberg, who seems to think this is an occasion to blame America and honor diversity. No room for firemen or Christian or Jewish prayers at Ground Zero. Let’s not offend the Muslim bastards who did this to us.

I will silently honor Jeremy Glick, who decided to lead his fellow passengers on Flight 93 in an attempt to take back the plane from the terrorists – knowing death was all but certain and together with fellow passengers Todd Beamer and Lisa Jefferson and others saying the 23rd Psalm as he did so.

From ‘Let’s roll' to 'Let's roll over'

By MARK STEYN 2011-09-09 OC Register

Waiting to be interviewed on the radio the other day, I found myself on hold listening to a public service message exhorting listeners to go to 911day.org and tell their fellow citizens how they would be observing the tenth anniversary of the, ah, “tragic events.” There followed a sound bite of a lady explaining that she would be paying tribute by going and cleaning up an area of the beach.

Great! Who could object to that? Anything else? Well, another lady pledged that she “will continue to discuss anti-bullying tactics with my grandson.”

Marvelous. Because studies show that many middle-school bullies graduate to hijacking passenger jets and flying them into tall buildings?

Whoa, ease up on the old judgmentalism there, pal. In New Jersey, many of whose residents were among the dead, middle-schoolers will mark the anniversary with a special 9/11 curriculum that will “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.”

And, if the “9/11 Peace Story Quilt” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art teaches us anything, it’s that the “tragic events” only underline the “importance of respect.”

And “understanding.” As one of the quilt panels puts it:

“You should never feel left out

You are a piece of a puzzle

And without you

The whole picture can’t be seen.”

And if that message of “healing and unity” doesn’t sum up what happened on September 11th 2001, what does? A painting of a plane flying into a building? A sculpture of bodies falling from a skyscraper? Oh, don’t be so drearily literal. “It is still too soon,” says Yidori Mashimoto, director of the New Jersey City University Visual Arts Gallery, whose exhibition “Afterward And Forward” is intended to “promote dialogue, deeper reflection, meditation, and contextualization.” So, instead of planes and skyscrapers, it has Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” on which you can hang little tags with your ideas for world peace.

What's missing from these commemorations?

Firemen?

Oh, please. There are some pieces of the puzzle we have to leave out. As Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. “Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago.” On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed – CIA, FBI, FAA, INS – the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York. When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies – ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel. Far “too soon” for any of that at the New Jersey City University, but perhaps you could re-enact the moment by filling a peace tag for Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree” and then letting it flutter to the ground.

Upon arrival at the foot of the towers two firemen were hit by falling bodies. “There is no other way to put it,” one of their colleagues explained. “They exploded.”

Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum “Peace Quilt”? Sadly not. We’re all out of squares.

What else is missing from these commemorations?

“Let’s Roll”?

What’s that – a quilting technique?

No, what’s missing from these commemorations is more Muslims. I bumped into an old BBC pal the other day who’s flying in for the anniversary to file a dispatch on why you see fewer women on the streets of New York wearing niqabs and burqas than you do on the streets of London. She thought this was a telling indictment of the post-9/11 climate of “Islamophobia.” I pointed out that, due to basic differences in immigration sources, there are far fewer Muslims in New York than in London. It would be like me flying into Stratford-on-Avon and reporting on the lack of Hispanics. But the suits had already approved the trip, so she was in no mood to call it off.

How are America’s allies remembering the real victims of 9/11? “Muslim Canucks Deal With Stereotypes Ten Years After 9/11,” reports CTV in Canada. And it’s a short step from stereotyping to criminalizing. “How The Fear Of Being Criminalized Has Forced Muslims Into Silence,” reports The Guardian in Britain. In Australia, a Muslim terrorism suspect was so fearful of being criminalized and stereotyped in the post-9/11 epidemic of paranoia that he pulled a Browning pistol out of his pants and hit Sgt. Adam Wolsey of the Sydney constabulary. Fortunately, Judge Leonie Flannery acquitted him of shooting with intent to harm on the grounds that “‘anti-Muslim sentiment’ made him fear for his safety,” as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported on Friday. That’s such a heartwarming story for this 9/11 anniversary they should add an extra panel to the peace quilt, perhaps showing a terror suspect opening fire on a judge as she’s pronouncing him not guilty and then shrugging off the light shoulder wound as a useful exercise in healing and unity.

What of the 23rd Psalm? It was recited by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and the telephone operator Lisa Jefferson in the final moments of his life before he cried “Let's roll!” and rushed the hijackers.

No, sorry. Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg’s official commemoration hasn’t got any room for clergy, either, what with all Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who’ll be there. One reason why there’s so little room at Ground Zero is because it’s still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us; the 10-year hole is something we did to ourselves – and, in its way, the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.

In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half-an-hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”

And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.

Have You Noticed the "Look"?

2011-09-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

Robin of Berkeley explains the "Look" and the new kind of violence:

The Cult of Obama

By Robin of Berkeley September 7, 2011 American Thinker

We're playing those mind games together
Pushing the barriers,
Planting seeds
Playing the mind guerrilla
Chanting the mantra, peace on earth
- John Lennon

It's a chilling moment when the light goes out in someone's eyes. A once-radiant child hardens from abuse. A woman's heart shrinks after her husband's abandonment.

The person looks the same, maybe acts the same. But something is gone, and what's lost is irretrievable. It's like when a person dies: in a heartbeat, the soul vanishes.

I see this phenomenon every day: a light dimming. The friendly shopkeeper snaps at me. My cheerful neighbor seems flattened.

And you hear it in the news: people acting strangely, going off the deep end. The most bizarre behavior becoming the new normal.

A thug bites off a finger. Sarah Palin's church is torched. Black Panthers intimidate voters.

An esteemed Columbia University black architecture professor punches a white female coworker in the eye for not doing more about white privilege. He has no history of violence. Why now?

Meanwhile, liberal leaders, such as Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden, incite attacks on political opponents by using incendiary language, such as "barbarians," "Nazis," "tea-baggers." Perhaps not coincidentally, flash mobs of blacks attack innocent whites all over the country; black youths injure or even kill non-whites in "knock 'em down" assaults.

In the past week or so, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus tells the Tea Party to go to hell, and the head of one of America's biggest unions incites union members to violence: "Let's take these son of a bitches out." When Barack Obama takes the stage to follow this incitement, he says he is "proud," and the following day his press spokesman refuses comment.

Why now? This may be the most important question of our time. Why are some people reaching the boiling point? Why do many others look vacant, like in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The shootings at military bases, from Little Rock to Fort Hood -- why now?

It's Obama, of course.

Liberals will excoriate me for writing this. They'll insist that bad behavior is not Obama's fault. He's a man of peace.

But study the phenomenon of cults, and the dynamics are always the same. The leader can incite violence without ever getting his hands dirty. Obama is controlling the marionette of the masses.

If Obamamania is a cult, then Obama is the cult leader. Cult leaders routinely pull the strings of their followers. The most extreme example is Charles Manson. He rots in prison for murders he never committed. He didn't have to do the dirty work. His brainwashed charges did his bidding.

I'm not saying Obama is a Charles Manson. There are varying degrees of manipulation, from using sexy blondes to entice men to buy cars all the way to hypnotizing them to drink poisoned Kool Aid. But there's a common denominator in all mind-control: manipulating people through mind games.

As soon as Obama came on the scene, the programming began. His face was plastered everywhere, like Mao's. In his speeches, Obama lulled audiences with a melodious voice and feel-good phrases repeated over and over. And he began inciting people with his charming smile.

First, the vultures starting swooping down on Hillary. Obama chose not to call off the dogs.

Then thugs invaded caucuses. Again, silence.

Which led to vicious misogyny against Sarah Palin and threats on her life. From Obama: not a peep.

We even saw armed thugs at polling places. Ignored and not prosecuted by Obama's attorney general.

The moment Obama became president, he upped the signals. At the Grant Park rally celebrating his victory, the entire family eerily chose to wear black and red, colors associated with communism and black nationalism. Obama's first radio address was broadcast in the Arab world.

Obama returned Britain's gift of a Winston Churchill bust while embracing dictators. He gave a white police officer a dressing down for doing his job, in effect calling the officer a racist.

Obama's greatest magic trick? Brainwashing the masses to believe that racism is a greater danger than radical Islam, and that Obama himself is in constant peril.

Opposing health care means you oppose Obama. Oppose Obama and you are the enemy.
Thus, more and more people are finding themselves on the receiving end of a fist, figuratively or literally. After the White House released a directive for his followers to strike back hard, a frail, diabetic black man at a Town Hall was beaten up.

Even women can get slugged in the face. Obama signaled during the primary that women were fair game.

Obama and the left are making sure that there is an increasing number of persuadable people. By displacing workers, panicking business owners with draconian laws, and whipping up rage and paranoia, they amass more lackeys. And people go along with the programming because they know that, as with all cults, they'll be ostracized if they balk.

The American hard left knows how to create a cult because it is a cult, one with a violent history. The Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen, Black Muslims -- all nefarious cults.

And lesson number one of cults: group members must have their spirits broken. The young Weathermen, for instance, were required to participate in forced wickedness, such as animal abuse. Patty Hearst morphed into bank robber Tania after weeks of isolation, rape, and beatings by the SLA. Huey P. Newton sent his Black Panthers to the hospital or to the grave if they didn't practice total obedience.

Isn't the left doing the same thing to the masses today, albeit in a more clandestine manner? Aren't people's spirits being broken by the helplessness and horror of Obama's acting as our king, with little regard for the Constitution -- of beholding our economy in free-fall and the world exploding in flames?

So what's the endgame here?

The first goal is power. The left has an insatiable need to control every aspect of our lives.

But there's a deeper reason, one much more insidious.

The left wants to tear Americans down. Just as the Weatherman did to those naïve lost kids, they want to break our spirits. This goal of degradation is more crucial than their one-world government.

The progressives want to turn us into them, to make us feel as deprived and depraved and deadened. It's the only way that they can silence the roar of shame and self-loathing.

What they don't understand is this: it's not going to happen. There are too many of us who won't be hypnotized, who have a light in us that will not be extinguished.
We see right through them. We know who they are: the most piteous of human beings, and the most dangerous. Men without a country, orphans far from home. The forsaken and disowned.

They're "hungry ghosts," to use a Tibetan phrase: tormented beings who are starving to death from an inner void that they cannot fill, no matter how much they try.
Mother Teresa was once asked how she coped with serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. She responded that what she saw in the cities of the United States was much more disturbing, because it was a "poverty of the spirit."

Poverty of the spirit. No truer words can be spoken of the progressive left. And they want nothing more than impoverishing your spirit as well..

Sexual Perversions Gone Wild

2011-09-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

Having lost a child to the ravages of a life destroyed by sexual molestation by an adult when she was a child, I am especially concerned with reports and consequences of this abuse. When a child is abused in this way, his or her life is destroyed; they never get over it. Sexual abuse of a child is worse than murder. At least after a murder, it’s possible for the family to grieve and eventually live normal lives. When a child is abused, not only do they never get over it, often turning to drugs, alcohol or other addictions to stop the pain, but everyone else in the family is affected. The parents are constantly trying to deal with the problems of that child; if the child marries, the spouse has to deal with these problems as well, and if the child has children, the children and their children have to deal with the consequences of this curse. It goes on and on, maybe forever.

That’s why I’m publishing this long article that details the filth that sick people are dedicated to spread in our society – surprisingly strongly supported by prominent members of the Obama Administration.

By the way, NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association) mentioned below actually advises perverts on its website how to seduce and kidnap a child, and how to deal with any police investigation that may ensue. The ACLU supports NAMBLA’s right to do this. Look up the Curley case in Massachusetts if you have difficulty believing this.

Sexual Anarchy By Matt Barber 9/3/2011 Townhall.com

In “Batman,” the Joker rhetorically asks a young Bruce Wayne: “Tell me, kid – you ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?” Well, I have. Not by the pale moonlight, but in a brightly lit Four Points Sheraton in Baltimore, Md.

On Wednesday, Aug. 17, I – along with the venerable child advocate Dr. Judith Reisman – attended a conference hosted by the pedophile group B4U-ACT. Around 50 individuals were in attendance, including a number of admitted pedophiles (or “minor-attracted persons” [MAPs] as they euphemistically prefer), a few self-described “gay activists” and several supportive mental-health professionals. World renowned “sexologist” Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address, saying: “I want to completely support the goal of B4U-ACT.”
Here are some highlights from the conference:

• Pedophiles are “unfairly stigmatized and demonized” by society. • There was concern about “vice-laden diagnostic criteria” and “cultural baggage of wrongfulness.” • “We are not required to interfere with or inhibit our child’s sexuality.” • “Children are not inherently unable to consent” to sex with an adult. • “In Western culture sex is taken too seriously.” • “Anglo-American standard on age of consent is new [and ‘Puritanical’]. In Europe it was always set at 10 or 12. Ages of consent beyond that are relatively new and very strange, especially for boys. They’ve always been able to have sex at any age.” • An adult’s desire to have sex with children is “normative.” • Our society should “maximize individual liberty. … We have a highly moralistic society that is not consistent with liberty.” • “Assuming children are unable to consent lends itself to criminalization and stigmatization.” • “These things are not black and white; there are various shades of gray.” • A consensus belief by both speakers and pedophiles in attendance was that, because it vilifies MAPs, pedophilia should be removed as a mental disorder from the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in the same manner homosexuality was removed in 1973. • Dr. Fred Berlin acknowledged that it was political activism, similar to the incrementalist strategy witnessed at the conference, rather than a scientific calculus that successfully led to the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder: The reason “homosexuality was taken out of DSM is that people didn’t want the government in the bedroom,” he said. • The DSM ignores that pedophiles “have feelings of love and romance for children” in the same way adults love one another. • “The majority of pedophiles are gentle and rational.” • The DSM should “focus on the needs” of the pedophile, and should have “a minimal focus on social control,” rather than obsessing about the “need to protect children.” • Self-described “gay activist” and speaker Jacob Breslow said that children can properly be “the object of our attraction.” He further objectified children, suggesting that pedophiles needn’t gain consent from a child to have sex with “it” any more than we need consent from a shoe to wear it. He then used graphic, slang language to favorably describe the act of climaxing (ejaculating) “on or with” a child. No one in attendance objected to this explicit depiction of child sexual assault. There was even laughter. (In fairness, Dr. Berlin did later tell Mr. Breslow that his words might “anger” some people and that he [Berlin] is categorically opposed to adult-child sex with “pre-pubescent” children. When asked about the propriety of adult-child sex with pubescent children, Dr. Berlin did not provide a clear answer.)

So, am I just an intolerant, “pedophobic” bigot? Apparently so. In fact, Dr. Berlin says pedophilia is just another “sexual orientation.” Some of the “minor attracted” conference-goers insisted that they were “born that way.” Sound familiar?

This is sexual anarchy – fulfillment of the moral relativist dream.

In the 1940s, homosexual psychopath and secular-humanist messiah Alfred Kinsey's stated goal was to destroy, in society, the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. He has largely achieved that goal.

Indeed, during his sexology “research,” Kinsey facilitated the rape of thousands of children – some as young as 2 months old – placing stopwatches and ledgers in the hands of “minor-attracted persons” to document their “findings.” He then recorded everything in what is generally referred to as the “Kinsey Reports.”

Kinsey determined, among many things, that children are not harmed by sex with adults and that it can be a positive experience. Old Al even earned his very own Kinsey Institute, still in existence today at Indiana University.

As recently as 1998, the APA seemed to agree with Kinsey's assessment, releasing a report that suggested harm caused by child rape was “overstated” and that “the vast majority of both men and women reported no negative sexual effects from their child sexual abuse experiences.”

Furthermore, the APA report suggested that the term “child sex abuse” be swapped with “adult-child sex,” indicating, as did Kinsey, that such “intergenerational intimacy” can be “positive.” Isn't “tolerance” wonderful?

Oh, and the “progressive,” political-activist APA has also seen fit to join an amicus brief in favor of so-called “same-sex marriage.” What does this have to do with psychiatry? Your guess is as good as mine.

Make no mistake: Children are the target of what I call the “sexual anarchy movement.” Whether it's the movement's pedophile wing that seeks to literally rape children, or its radical pro-abortion, homosexualist and feminist wings, which seek to rape the minds of children, the larger sexual anarchy movement has a shared goal:

Attack, corrupt and destroy God's design for human sexuality. Children are just collateral damage.

Sexual anarchists know that to own the future, they must own the minds of our children. Hence, groups like B4U-ACT, GLSEN (The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network), Planned Parenthood and the like utilize academia from pre-school to post-graduate to brainwash and indoctrinate. Still, sexual anarchists are not restricted to the world of not-for-profit perversion advocacy. They also permeate the Obama administration.

Consider, for instance, that the official website for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently linked to “parenting tips” that referenced children as “sexual beings” and suggested that they should experiment with homosexuality and masturbation.

Small surprise when you consider that radical feminist and pro-abort Kathleen Sebelius was President Obama's pick as HHS secretary.

You may also recall that Mr. Obama appointed Kevin Jennings, founder of the aforementioned GLSEN, to the post of “safe schools czar.” The position is now defunct, ostensibly due to national outrage over Jennings' appointment.

In keeping with the thinly veiled goals of B4U-ACT, GLSEN seems to be “running interference” for pedophiles, having tacitly advocated adult-child sex through its “recommended reading list” for kids.

Again, not surprising when you consider that one of Jennings's ideological mentors is “gay” activist pioneer Harry Hay. “One of the people that's always inspired me is Harry Hay,” he has said glowingly.

What did Mr. Hay think? I'll let him speak for himself. In 1983, while addressing the pedophile North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), Hay said the following:

“[I]t seems to me that in the gay community the people who should be running interference for NAMBLA are the parents and friends of gays. Because if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world. And they would be welcoming this, and welcoming the opportunity for young gay kids to have the kind of experience that they would need.”

(Oddly, there's another “gay” activist group, Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or PFLAG, that frequently partners with GLSEN. I wonder where they came up with the catchy title.)

Bolstered by support from the National Education Association, GLSEN has access to your children through sex education curricula it provides thousands of public schools across the country, and via adult sponsored “Gay Straight Alliances,” hosted in those same schools.

Alas, we live in a post-Kinsey America wherein our culture, along with our Judeo-Christian heritage, rots in the heat of the day. The stench of sexual anarchy is masked by the soaring, disingenuous rhetoric of “tolerance,” “diversity” and “comprehensive sex education.”

Sick to your stomach? I am. Why can't these sexual anarchists leave our children alone and let kids be kids?

Liberal Ridicule of Rick Perry on Evolution

2011-09-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of my blog are well-aware that I disagree with some of the tenets of Darwinism because of the scientific discoveries that have been made since Darwin published his theories in 1859. Liberals tend to stick closely to Darwinism and ridicule those who have reservations because these recent discoveries tend to support a belief in a Supreme Being. Liberals, of course, both progressives and those on the hard-left, tend to be atheists, but even a former atheist, like Dr. Francis Collins. the scientist who led the team that charted the human genome, said at the conclusion of this project that “I have looked into the mind of God”. I won’t go into details of what the science now shows to be the case involving evolution and the tree of life because I have done that several times already, but I am going to publish this excellent article by Ann Coulter. To see my past articles on the subject, just click on the label, “Darwinism”, at the bottom of this blog entry.

I have no brief for either Ann Coulter or Rick Perry, because both of them have a habit of saying outrageous things, but this ridicule from liberal morons who refuse to consider the implications of real science concerning either Darwinism or manmade-global warming must be confronted.

Liberals' View of Darwin Unable to Evolve

By Ann Coulter 8/31/201 Townhall.com

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were "gaps" in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in The New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, "Evolution, I think, is correct!"

That's the most extended discussion of Darwin's theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

There's a reason the Darwin cult prefers catcalls to argument, even with a 9-year-old at the helm of their debate team.

Darwin's theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the "fittest" to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Otherwise, the mutations aren't random, they are deliberate -- and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about "intelligent design" and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record -- for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

But that's not what the fossil record shows. We don't have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the "trade secret" of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have "secrets.")

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Unlike high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory were correct. He said there should be "interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps."

But far from showing gradual change with a species slowly developing novel characteristics and eventually becoming another species, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing.

Darwin's response was to say: Start looking! He blamed a fossil record that contradicted his theory on the "extreme imperfection of the geological record."

One hundred and fifty years later, that record is a lot more complete. We now have fossils for about a quarter of a million species.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.

Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: "The situation hasn't changed much."

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin's time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. "Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record," Raup said, "such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."

The scant fossil record in Darwin's time had simply been arranged to show a Darwinian progression, but as more fossils were discovered, the true sequence turned out not to be Darwinian at all.

And yet, more than a century later, Darwin's groupies haven't evolved a better argument for the lack of fossil evidence.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted -- without evidence -- that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, "the dog ate our fossils" excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery The New York Times called "among the most spectacular in this century," Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures -- precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn't fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence -- it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of five million to 10 million years.

Even the eye simply materializes, fully formed, in the pre-Cambrian fossil record.
Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian Period was not "evolution," it was "a revolution."

So the Darwiniacs pretended they missed the newspaper that day.

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

These aren't scientists. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true so that they can explain to themselves why they are here, without God. (It's an accident!)

Any evidence contradicting the primitive religion of Darwinism -- including, for example, the entire fossil record -- they explain away with non-scientific excuses like "the dog ate our fossils."

What to Think About Black-on-White Violence

2011-08-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

I certainly understand why the media and politicians shy away from confronting the outbreak of black-on-white violence that seems to be occurring. We do not want to lose the gains made in racial harmony and civil rights since the 1960's, nor do we want to place labels on any ethnic or racial group. But just as we have to face the fact that virtually all terrorists are Muslims to deal with the problem, so must we deal with inter-racial violence before lots of white people decide they must carry firearms to protect themselves.

Why does this seem to be happening now? Is it because black people are suffering disproportionately from the failures of Obamanomics? Have we reached a tipping point with respect to the violent behavior of fatherless children? Is it another symptom of the general breakdown of American society we see on all sides from television programs designed for ignorant slobs to incivility and invectives in our politics? Can it possibly be a black reaction to the criticisms being heaped on a failed black president? I don't know the answers, but we need answers and effective action fast.

The Racial Violence that Dare Not Speak Its Name

By John T. Bennett August 30, 2011 American Thinker

Recent flash mob violence has alerted Americans to a troubling wave of sadistic racial mayhem. A notable outbreak occurred in Denver in 2009, setting a pattern of delay, denial, and silence. Now that same scourge has returned to Denver, among many other places.

In 2009, a four month wave of mayhem broke out in Denver. There were at least 26 violent robberies committed by two black gangs. The victims were -- without exception -- whites and Hispanics. When the dust settled from that initial spate of violence, victims were left with injuries ranging from a skull fracture to broken noses and shattered eye sockets. The local Denver ABC news affiliate summarized the crime spree:
Black gangs roaming downtown Denver often vented their hatred for white victims before assaulting and robbing them during a four-month crime wave, according to interviews and court records obtained by 7NEWS.

That is not the language of a conservative commentator; it's simply a mainstream local news report from an American city that has witnessed widespread racial violence.

The first-hand accounts and surveillance videos of the 2009 attacks are shocking. These weren't sucker punches or fair fights -- the attackers swing madly and rapidly with a viciousness that can only come from blind cruelty. The victims, who can be seen in interviews, were kind-looking, ordinary people. The victims were mostly either gay or straight couples. They didn't provoke the attacks in any conceivable way. The attackers sometimes fractured skulls, or broke eye sockets, and left one victim in a coma. There were a total of 26 attacks from July 17 to Nov. 17.

An incredible 38 people were arrested in connection with this campaign of racist violence. Thirty were ultimately charged, all black. Has this number of arrests been made against any violent white supremacist or right wing organization in the last 50 years?

The story first came to light in 2009 when a source inside the Denver police department said that the department was "keeping the public in the dark" about the attacks. Court documents show that the police did indeed have knowledge of a pattern of racial attacks, but remained silent for 27 days. One victim complained that, had the police informed the public sooner, he could have protected himself.

The same group responsible for that violence is suspected in the murder of Andrew Graham, a young graduate student who was senselessly shot in 2010.

Late last month, Denver saw a possible return to violence, as couples leaving restaurants were being attacked by a group of black men with baseball bats. The Denver Police have renewed warnings of those attacks.

The brutality in Denver is disturbingly similar to violence occurring elsewhere, nationwide. In the last few months alone, a young white lady named Shaina Perry was taunted and beaten in Milwaukee. A young white man named Carter Strange had his skull fractured by a mob in South Carolina. Dawid Strucinski was beaten into a coma by a mob in Bayonne. Anna Taylor, Emily Guendelsberger, and Thomas Fitzgerald were beaten and kicked to the ground in separate Philadelphia flash mobs. Every weekend in July, mobs have attacked in Greensboro, NC. In a mostly-white suburb of Cleveland, witnesses reported large groups of "teens" walking through the streets, "shouting profanities and racial epithets," and one man was viciously beaten while leaving a restaurant with his wife and friends. In all of those cases, the victims were white and the attackers were black.

Then there are the ominous stories that no one has ever heard about. For instance, a mob of 150 "young people" descended on a small, predominantly white NJ town named Winfield Township during a firefighter's carnival. Perhaps the townspeople are merely lucky that there wasn't violence. Isn't the racial mob mentality scary enough that we shouldn't have to wait for violence before we take it seriously?

It cannot be emphasized enough that these attacks often occur in suburban areas where the black groups have to leave their own neighborhoods and purposefully travel to areas that are predominantly non-black, to attack non-black victims. For instance, in one of the many flash mob attacks in Chicago, Trovulus Pickett, 17, is part of a group that attacked and robbed several victims, including a 68-year-old doctor. The attacks occurred in the North side, which is 15 miles away from Pickett's home. This indicates a serious level of planning and potential racial targeting. If these were just run-of-the mill robberies, it wouldn't be too surprising. But the social problem we're looking at is large groups, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, sometimes armed, engaging in racially-focused violent crimes.

There is quite simply no way for a politically correct society to grasp these events, much less effectively deal with them. Liberals have reached the depths of self-deception and self-censorship in response. The Washington Post, New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, have all openly stated that they will refuse to report on the racial facts of these violent crimes. The Los Angeles Times explains that they don't want to "unfairly stigmatize racial groups." They prefer the soft bigotry of low expectations instead.

These flash mobs have turned the comfortable narrative of racism on its head.

Politicians, the media, academics, and the legal community do not have the capacity to face the issue. The reigning dogma of white racism is too deeply entrenched.

There is a small grievance industry built around condemning white racism and intolerance, real or imagined. Indeed, the welfare state itself is in large part based on the assumption that whites need to give more to achieve racial equality, as reflected in President Obama's lament that the civil rights movement didn't focus on economic redistribution. Legal treatises complain that the racist white power structure grows into the bitter fruit of anti-minority racist violence. For instance, the work of Mari Matsuda and Richard Delgado is featured in countless undergraduate courses, and is ubiquitous in graduate and law school courses. They argue that hate speech is a severe social problem and that such speech, along with other tools of racism, keeps minorities in an inferior position (1). While academics dwell on hateful speech, the actual violence continues. We all pay the price, as racial guilt is used to extort tax money for the welfare state, which fosters the mobs. The PC status quo will not acknowledge the fact that the worst form of racism today is black mob violence.

Atom Smasher Disproves Global Warming

2011-08-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

I keep saying I'm not going to publish another piece on global warming. I've been convinced for many years that it is mostly a natural condition that has gone through cycles throughout our history, and most of my readers are bored by the subject by now. However, this latest study, rather than just disproving the theories of the global warming alarmists, actually proves a positive - that global temperature changes are entirely of natural causes.

CERN: 'Climate models will need to be substantially revised'

New atomsmasher research into cloud formation

By Andrew Orlowski 25th August 2011 Science

CERN's 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.

The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.
Left Click To Enlarge

Unsurprisingly, it's a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

CERN's director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer warned his scientists "to present the results clearly but not interpret them". Readers can judge whether CLOUD's lead physicist Jasper Kirkby has followed his boss's warning.

"Ion-induced nucleation will manifest itself as a steady production of new particles that is difficult to isolate in atmospheric observations because of other sources of variability but is nevertheless taking place and could be quite large when averaged globally over the troposphere."

Kirkby is quoted in the accompanying CERN press release:
"We've found that cosmic rays significantly enhance the formation of aerosol particles in the mid troposphere and above. These aerosols can eventually grow into the seeds for clouds. However, we've found that the vapours previously thought to account for all aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can only account for a small fraction of the observations – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays."

The team used the Proton Synchotron accelerator to examine the nucleation using combinations of trace gases at various temperatures, with precision. These first results confirm that cosmic rays increase the formation of cloud-nuclei by a factor of 10 in the troposphere, but additional trace gasses are needed nearer the surface.

Climate models will have to be revised, confirms CERN in supporting literature.

"[I]t is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours [sulphuric acid and ammonia] and water alone.

The work involves over 60 scientists in 17 countries.

Veteran science editor Nigel Calder, who brought the theory to wide public attention with the book The Chilling Stars , co-authored with the father of the theory Henrik Svensmark, has an explanation and background on his blog, here [4], and offers possible reasons on why the research, mooted in the late 1990s, has taken so long.
Svensmark, who is no longer involved with the CERN experiment, says he believes [5] the solar-cosmic ray factor is just one of four factors in climate. The other three are: volcanoes, a "regime shift" that took place in 1977, and residual anthropogenic components.

When Dr Kirkby first described the theory in 1998, he suggested [6] cosmic rays "will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century."

Republican Delusions

2011-08-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

The following article lays out what I have been trying to say for weeks: that Republicans and America are in real trouble because we will probably get another term of an Obama presidency if we do not wise up. Of the candidates now in the race, it is delusional to think that anyone but Mitt Romney can beat Obama - and although I love Sarah Palin, she can't beat him either.

This is a long article, but well worth reading:

Republican Delusion is Obama's All-Too-Secret Weapon

By John Ziegler August 21, 2011 American Thinker
When exactly did Republicans seemingly become so delusional?

The first sign that the GOP base had left the gravitational pull of the rational earth in the Obama era was when professional blowhard Donald Trump shot to the top of the presidential polls on the strength of his bogus birth certificate crusade.

Fortunately, that particular problem took care of itself (at least for now), but the overall situation may have actually gotten worse. The most troubling part is that the vast majority of the party's rank and file seems to have no idea the peril its prospects of unseating President Obama are really in.

There is no doubt that Obama is very vulnerable, far more so than most observers (including me) believed likely when he was swept into office by a tidal wave of biased media coverage less than three years ago. His approval ratings are in the low forties, and in many of the battleground states he appears to be a heavy underdog.

The census-induced changes in the Electoral College slice his margin of error to almost nothing, and the economy shows very little sign of improving enough to rescue him. He has also left a trail of damningly false televised statements which should make for great attack ad fodder.

And yet the Republican Party appears on the verge of making Obama's reelection about as likely as the circumstances surrounding his presidency would make possible.

Consequently, this golden opportunity to help the country largely dodge the Obama bullet is on the verge of being squandered.

While the vast majority of conservatives (including many prominent commentators) would find that notion laughable, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that, thanks largely to their predilection for seeing reality through overly optimistic and star-spangled glasses, they are dangerously out of touch.

The first misunderstanding that has led to this dangerous case of Republican hubris is the nature of the polling data. When the average conservative thirsting to see Obama be a one-termer hears that his "approval rating" is in the low forties (or even lower) they seem to think this means that almost sixty percent of the voting public has decided that they are unlikely to vote for him next year, but this is far from the truth.

Plenty of people have no problem saying now that they "disapprove" of a president in 2011 and still decide not to vote him out of office in 2012. In fact, saying they "disapprove" of the president's job performance doesn't even mean that they want him replaced at the instant they are asked.

The best way to think of this may be to consider the president as the national spouse. Plenty of wives may say at any given moment (especially when the honeymoon is long over and things seem to be going poorly) that they "disapprove" of the job that their husband is doing, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily going to leave him for someone else, particularly when there is no other specific option available at the time.

Another red herring in the political data is the "Obama vs. Generic Republican" number, which could not be more deceiving. Currently, Obama regularly loses nationally to this fictitious candidate, but if anything, these numbers show just how unlikely it really is that he will actually be defeated. When a poll respondent processes that question they conjure up the image of Republican who has no major blemishes and has yet to have their entire careers picked apart by a media all too eager to destroy them.

The only thing this number really means is how high the eventual Republican candidate's vote total could be. Unfortunately, this data currently actually provides good news for Obama because while he has lost at least once to the mythical untarnished Republican, this nonexistent challenger still has yet to get over 50 percent of the vote. Currently, despite all of his recent problems, no named candidate comes close to beating Obama in an actual head to head matchup except Mitt Romney.

Of course, none of the leading or even potential Republican candidates comes close to fitting the 'generic" description either. Ironically, the one candidate who came by far the closest, Tim Pawlenty, ended up, through little fault of his own, being the very first to be knocked out of the race.

The early demise of the Pawlenty campaign tells you everything you need to know about how this delusion/ignorance regarding political realities is stunting the Republican nominating process in a way Obama should only be able to dream about.

Pawlenty was the one candidate who clearly would have made the election an unambiguous referendum on Obama. That is a battle which, even with the media on his side, the president cannot win unless the economy makes an unexpected recovery.

Pawlenty's campaign was doomed by some of the very qualities which made it so attractive to those who understand how a national presidential election works in the modern age. He was seen as "boring" by a Republican electorate that is clearly looking to be highly stimulated. But in his case 'boring" also meant "electable."

He would have provided very little ammunition for the forces traditionally set to obliterate the Republican candidate. His record was strong and inoffensive, he didn't say things that the press could make sound outrageous, and he wasn't too rich, dumb, old, corrupt, crazy or racist (the usual laundry list of attack points on Republican candidates). In short, he was nearly the perfect candidate to run against Obama, and yet he barely got out of the starting gate, mostly because, as he said, the "audience" (which polls indicate believes electability is the most important quality in a nominee) was looking for something different.

Unfortunately for Pawlenty, he was either unwilling or unable to even make this argument. A couple of months ago at an event in Los Angeles attended by hundreds of conservatives in the entertainment industry (yes, they do exist), I asked Pawlenty during the Q and A how he planned to communicate the reality that he obviously had the best, and perhaps only, chance to beat Obama.

In a moment that directly foreshadowed his "Obamnycare" debate debacle, the former governor balked at the opportunity I presented him in a way that is emblematic of this issue of Republican overconfidence. Pawlenty's answer not only didn't augment the argument for his campaign, it actually destroyed it. He didn't accept the premise that he was the only candidate who could beat Obama and attacked the notion that the president was going to be particularly difficult to take down, saying that it would be a mistake to overestimate his electoral strength.

Well, even forgetting the obvious dangers of underestimating Obama, why wouldn't the base go for a "sexier" option if nearly anyone could slay this Democratic dragon? He was basically saying, "If you don't like me, go ahead and take a flyer on a riskier candidate."

That is exactly what the Republican base is in the process of doing.
As of now, there is only one current candidate who, barring a total economic collapse, has even the slightest chance of beating Obama and he (Romney) is distrusted by at least half of the Republican electorate. This is not simply a matter of opinion. The facts overwhelmingly point towards this conclusion as being patently obvious.

Even most Republicans would admit that Ron Paul (foreign policy dove/nut), Rick Santorum (just google his name and homosexuality) and Herman Cain (the Muslim issue and lack of experience) can't possibly win a general election, especially against a media darling like Obama. It also seems to be accepted wisdom that Newt Gingrich (his global warming commercial with Nancy Pelosi and his Paul Ryan comments) and Jon Huntsman (worked for and praised Obama) can't possibly win the nomination.

This of course leaves Romney along with, for now, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

Regardless of what Tea Party activists will tell you, neither Bachmann nor Perry has any chance to defeat Obama unless there is an economic catastrophe or massive scandal between now and the election. This would be the case if both of these candidates didn't hold policy positions (which they do) that the media will easily be able to use to make them seem far outside the mainstream.

This argument can be made almost entirely without even looking at their politics (a factor, by the way, which is becoming increasingly overrated as the electorate becomes more ignorant and frivolous). One need only see how the basic narratives of the general election would take hold with each candidate as the nominee to see that Obama would win, probably easily.

In the case of Bachmann, she would be trying to become the first female president (ask Hillary Clinton about how tough that is just on its own) with the added burden of being seen by the media as a near clone of Sarah Palin, who herself has already been, largely wrongly, destroyed in the eyes of sixty percent of the public. Heck, Saturday Night Live already uses a Bachmann character that is just as devastating as their Palin impression was.

On top of that, she would be trying to become the first congressperson to be elected president in the modern history of the country -- during a time period when Congress is probably the most unpopular it has ever been. If that weren't enough, Bachmann leads the portion of that Congress (the Tea Party caucus) which is by far the scariest and easily demonized to non conservative portions of the country.

Heck, even if everything broke her way (which the media would never allow), the statement about her from her own former governor, Tim Pawlenty, at the last debate, where he mocked her lack of accomplishments in Congress would be played on a televised loop until Obama got over the top.

Quite simply, even if she were qualified and politically sound (two very questionable presumptions) Bachmann could never beat Obama without some sort of massive disaster hitting the country or his campaign.

The Perry problem is only slightly less definitive. At least he has been the governor of a major state for the past ten years and has a plausibly sellable record. Unfortunately, thanks to that state being Texas, the negative narrative about his candidacy almost literally writes itself. It took all of one day on the campaign trail for comedians to practically quote Perry when joking that the big difference between him and the roundly vilified George W. Bush is that the famously "stupid" former president is better educated.

Thanks to the obvious comparisons to Bush (they were even both on school cheerleading squads!) Perry will be far easier to negatively caricature than even Bachmann. His free-wheeling campaign/speaking style will provide fertile ground from which the media will inevitably reap a bounty of easily manipulated sound bites.

His rant on the Federal Reserve chairman was a classic example. The fact that he was correct on the issue and said " almost treasonous" was completely (and purposely) lost in the coverage of that event.

Should Perry get the nomination, this phenomenon would only get more pronounced.

While Perry would likely fight back (perhaps the one characteristic that truly separates him from Bush) and hold his own, his record of accomplishments would not be enough to sustain him against the inevitable onslaught. For one thing, Texas is in the middle of its worst drought in a generation and by election time Perry's economic stats will not look nearly as impressive as they do today, especially when put in the biased light shined on them by the pro-Obama media.

So now we are left with only Romney or a late entry into the race. There appear to still be two legitimate possible future candidates: Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin.

Since he is a congressman and a Tea Party favorite, Ryan has many of the same disadvantages in his narrative that Bachmann does, but without the attention grabber of being a woman. While he is clearly brilliant, he has the great misfortune of having already put down his plan to save the country in detailed writing. This would provide the Obama campaign team far too many attack points where the rebuttal would take more than the six seconds the tiny attention span of the media and the public would allow him to explain why electing him wouldn't really mean the end of Medicare and Social Security.

If we lived in a country where facts and details mattered and where courage and intellect were rewarded, Ryan would at least have a shot. Sadly, we don't and he doesn't.

As a legitimate Sarah Palin expert, I have written extensively (at great personal cost) about how her premature resignation as governor of Alaska completely disqualifies her as the person who should take on Obama. Even if she hadn't already been unfairly destroyed during the 2008 election, quitting her only major job, in a way that appears to have been designed for her to stay famous and get rich, would make it impossible for her to take on an incumbent president. Not surprisingly, in nearly every head-to-head poll Palin does worse against Obama than every other Republican candidate. Her fans have seemingly forgotten about the resignation, but were she ever to get the nomination the nation would be reminded of it on a daily basis.

That leaves only Mitt Romney as the last hope.

This is not to say that Romney doesn't have "issues" even in a general election, because he does as well. Being a Mormon won't help, though the media will really have to do gymnastics to justify this as an issue after the way they protected Obama on the Rev. Wright scandal in 2008. His business record as a job cutter would certainly be exploited and his personal wealth would play right into the class warfare campaign the Obama forces intend to run (which is why Pawlenty should have been the nominee). Finally, his penchant for changing positions would potentially allow him to be cast as the Republican equivalent of John Kerry.

While these circumstances are hardly ideal, against a weakened Obama they can be overcome. None of them rises to the level of a "disqualifier" and together they are still less dangerous than the negatives in any of the other candidates. Plus, Romney would have the ability to win key states like Michigan and New Hampshire which would be clearly out of reach for Bachmann or Perry. Then, of course, there is the fact that he looks and sounds more like a president than perhaps anyone else who has ever run for the office. Unfortunately, that seems to matter more than just about anything else these days.

While the evidence (both from polling and observational data) strongly indicates Romney has the best chance to beat the Obama candidacy the Republicans are most likely to face in 2012, his biggest problem appears to be that while the base claims electability is the most important quality it is looking for, it doesn't yet understand that he may be the only person with a real shot.

It is also possible that, much like a young woman on the dating scene, what the Republican base says it wants and what it really desires are two very different things. They have already discarded the "nice" guy who would have been best for them in the long run (Pawlenty) and are now enamored with the latest "bad boy" (Perry) who is exciting but who has very little "marriage" potential.

In short, Romney is in great danger of being left at the alter by a base which wrongly thinks that Obama's weakness has left them free to follow their hearts instead of their brains.

So, how it is all going to work out? Obviously, no one knows for sure, but here is my best analysis.

I continue to believe that Sarah Palin has no choice but to get in the race. While I am no longer in contact with her or her team after I came out against her running, everything I observed from the "inside" indicated to me that she was very open to running and nothing since then has changed my mind about that.

Her brand depends on her running because if she doesn't, her followers will feel let down and she will have no apparent next act. Once there are two new nominees on the 2012 ticket, she is old news with no office to change her narrative. By 2016 she would be ancient history with either a Republican president in office or with a brand new crop of highly qualified challengers ready to pounce on what should be the slam dunk of replacing a term-limited Obama.

My prediction is that she gets in and runs almost exclusively an air war intended to create the appearance of a real primary campaign without any of the hassles. She knows that her vote is pretty much set in stone and it won't be impacted much, if at all, by creating a traditional organization. If she is as smart as I think she is, her goal would be to exceed low expectations and finish a respectable second to Romney and thus use the campaign to change minds about her for the future. In a sense, she would then become a hybrid of Romney and Mike Huckabee after 2008: technically "unemployed" but well known and respected enough to sustain her viability into the future.

Weirdly, one of the reasons I am convinced Palin will get in is that there is actually a chance she could come "close" to winning the nomination. The spotlight of scrutiny is already directly on Bachmann and Perry and it is possible that one or both could either evaporate or at least wear thin in an era when two months is an eternity.

If things break her way, she could end up as the last Tea Party Star standing up against Romney (not counting Ron Paul) and it would be possible that Romney would not be popular enough with the base to reach the vote threshold needed to put her away. Still, she could not beat Romney in a protracted battle because, as Obama proved in 2008, winning a delegate battle is still all about organization, an area when Romney would dominate Palin, who frankly may not even want to actually win the nomination.

In that sense, Palin entering the race would probably be the best development the Romney campaign could hope for. She would immediately split votes from Bachmann and Perry and simultaneously raise the issue of electability to the front burner. Ironically, the fact that she probably helps Romney would be the only genuine excuse Palin could use at this point not to run.

An entry by Ryan seems less easy to predict both in likelihood and potential impact. Like Palin, he would probably hurt Bachmann most, but he could also take votes from Romney. Having him in the debates would definitely change their tenor and tone in a way that would heighten their substantive nature, but also may have negative consequences for the eventual nominee in a general election. For instance, I doubt that Romney would look forward to having to either embrace Ryan's plan on camera and hurt himself in a the general, or reject it and further turn off the base. Ryan is definitely a wild card, but my gut tells me he will not get in, especially if it becomes clear that Palin will.

As far as the potential implosions of Bachmann and Perry, this will not happen as easily as it may have in past cycles. This is where Obama's current weakness may end up as his greatest strength.

If Obama was perceived as nearly unbeatable, the Republican base would be far more sensitive towards the obvious signs that Bachmann and Perry can't play to a national audience. But now the base is so suspicious of "moderation" (especially after John McCain) that any attacks from the media/left are seen as a badge of honor by those who will be voting in the early primary states. As shown by Bachmann's victory in Ames the week of her "crazy eyes" Newsweek cover photo, the more a candidate is seen as the target of the left, the more they are instinctively trusted by the hard right, even when there is little or no logic to such support. It is also important to point out that the conservative media has shown itself extremely hesitant to strongly criticize any Republican candidate with a following (Palin being a prime example) for fear of losing their fans as customers.

If Obama were really smart (I know what you are thinking), he would spend every day ripping/mocking Bachmann and Perry and praising Romney. Doing so would single handedly make it almost impossible for Romney to win the nomination.

This is not to say that Bachmann and Perry can't fade away by the time South Carolina comes around. Bachmann will be vulnerable to a run by Palin and Perry will now have to deal with the absurdly high expectations of a frontrunner which would make anything less than a second place finish in Iowa a campaign killer. Assuming Palin gets in the race, only one of the Bachmann/Perry duo (likely the one who wins Iowa) makes it to South Carolina as a still viable candidate.

Palin, on the other hand, thanks to her celebrity, low overhead, the overwhelming desire of the news media to keep covering her, and lack of anything to lose, will be able to keep going as long as her bus doesn't break down.

This means South Carolina will likely come down to Romney, Palin, Paul and either Bachmann or Perry (probably Perry). In that scenario, if Romney finishes second (third at the very worst, which he barely did in 2008) he should be fine. Thanks to Michigan and Florida on the horizon, he should be able to outlast whoever wins South Carolina unless it is decidedly Perry. If Romney fails to meet this mark, it could create the nightmare scenario of a Perry, Palin and Paul death march to the finish, a race which would eventually be "won" by Perry.

One of the keys to the race is whether Palin catches fire in Iowa, which seems unlikely at this point. She is beloved by much of the base, but they also have grave suspicions about her electability. If she finishes third or worse in Iowa (which will happen without at least either Bachmann or Perry collapsing) the same will happen in New Hampshire and her greatest weakness will be set in stone, making it much easier for Romney to beat her in South Carolina. Again, her lack of organization and the fact that the establishment greatly fears her nomination, make it impossible for her to win a long slog, but how well she does will play a huge role in shaping the dynamic of the race.

In the end, Romney is still the favorite, but almost nothing can go wrong for him. Should he somehow lose the perception of being the most electable option, he would almost immediately be toast. He is like golfer Nick Faldo in the final round of the 1987 British Open: eighteen pars and he is the winner, but any major blunders and he will need a huge break to pull it out.

When it comes to the general election, there are two other important factors in Obama's favor that are being totally overlooked at this time. The first is that Obama will not just be running against an unpopular Congress, but rather against the even more powerful force of undivided government.

Americans have usually mistrusted too much power being in the hands of one party, but in today's toxic environment this trend is on steroids. Even in 2008, Obama benefited greatly from a massive misperception among his voters that Republicans still controlled Congress. In fact, according to two national polls I commissioned after the election, had voters been required to know that it was the Democratic Party which ruled Congress, Obama would have actually lost. Huge portions of the country had little or no idea that they would be handing one party total control of the political process.

In 2012, Obama will undoubtedly make sure that every voter knows that if he is replaced there is an excellent chance that Republicans will be in total command and that there will be nothing from keeping the Tea Party from sending the country into fiscal chaos. The debt ceiling debate will be made to work in his favor because he will be able to make it seem as if his defeat would cause the United States to default on its debt, with economic calamity certain to follow.

The "Obama as goalkeeper against the Tea Party" argument has the potential to be very powerful, especially with the media more than willing to help sell it and the president still personally popular. And yet I have yet to hear anyone even mention it.

The other unmentioned pro-Obama factor is even less likely to get any public conversation.

Thanks to the massive fragmentation of the media, the landscape of news outlets has been dramatically altered over the past decade. One of the many consequences of this reality has been that "news" organizations have been forced to make decisions base almost solely on business considerations and to become ideologically driven in order to attract and please a core audience.

The dirty little secret of this development is that it is actually economically beneficial for conservative outlets to have a Democratic president and for liberal ones to have a Republican commander in chief. In fact, about the only part of the economy that President Obama has dramatically improved is that of conservative commentary, especially that of Fox News whose ratings have never been better.

There is absolutely no doubt that conservative news/commentary outlets will have a profound self interest for Obama to remain in office. While many of them will not act on that self-interest, at least some of them undoubtedly will. I know this because a few of the most influential "conservative" sources took a dive for Obama in 2008 and have so far gotten away with it without their customers even having a clue.

Even if this problem somehow doesn't transpire, there is no doubt that the vast majority of media will be favoring Obama in 2012 almost as much as they did in 2008. If the conservative base hasn't yet learned the obvious lessons of that unprecedented display of "Media Malpractice," then perhaps they deserve to have history repeat itself.

It is not too late yet, but it is getting close.

We Republicans are In Real Trouble

2011-08-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

I know that some of the more rabid supporters of Bachmann, Perry and Paul will call me a traitor or worse, but, if you listen to what these candidates actually say with just a little bit of wisdom and maturity, you realize that Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Ron Paul are almost certifiable.

Mrs. Bachmann, there is no way we can move forward without raising the debt ceiling. We cannot possibly work our way out of this mess in a month. It’s going to take years and a fundamental change in the attitudes and expectations of voters.

Mr. Perry, we really don’t want to end Social Security or Medicare, and Ben Bernanke may be mistaken, but he’s not a traitor.

Mr. Paul, we really don’t want Iran to get nuclear weapons, and they are the threat in the Middle East, not America.

I have great reservations about what Mitt Romney would actually do as president, but he’s looking better and better to me all the time. I keep hoping Governor Christie will get in.

We Need to Call Them Bastards Again

2011-08-15T05:29:00.000-07:00

We have learned that they may be black, or they may be white, but one thing that links the rioters in London, Philadelphia and Wisconsin is that they are fatherless children of welfare, and they hate us. In England, more than 50% of births are to unwed mothers; in the USA it has risen to over 40%.

Senator Moynihan, who coined the phrase, “defining deviancy down”, warned us that this was coming. Children, particularly boy children, need fathers who work, both to discipline them and to set an example for them. In Moynihan’s time the statistics were just starting to move; today it’s clear: before President Johnson’s Great Society and its expansion of government benefits, the percent of children of unwed mothers for both blacks and whites was only 5%. Today it’s 33% for whites and 72% for blacks, even higher for Hispanics, and society is unraveling.
Left Click to Enlarge

We need to make more changes in welfare, specifically AFDC. I wouldn’t change things for those now getting benefits, but, unless there is some form of real disability involved, we need to make welfare a temporary program to handle emergency situations. The unintended consequences of today’s welfare programs are destroying the people who get the benefits, and, shortly, they will be out there destroying the rest of us. Obama's broken promises of hope and change have also accelerated the destructive process. See The Sleeping Giant Awakens.

Cameron: Riot-hit UK must reverse `moral collapse'

By DAVID STRINGER and SHAWN POGATCHNIK Aug 15, 2011 AP (Excerpt)

Riot-hit UK must reverse `moral collapse'

LONDON (AP) -- Britain must confront its "slow-motion moral collapse" Prime Minister David Cameron declared Monday, following four days of riots that left five people dead, thousands facing criminal charges and at least 200 million pounds ($326 million) in property losses.

Cameron said his coalition government would outline new policies designed to tackle a culture of laziness, irresponsibility and selfishness which he believes fueled Britain's unrest.

He also pledged to toughen rhetoric from ministers and officials, who he claimed had too often had shied away from promoting strong moral standards.

His government would no longer be timid in discussing family breakdown or poor parenting, or in criticizing those who fail to set a good example to their community.

"This has been a wake-up call for our country. Social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face," Cameron told an audience at a youth center in Witney, his Parliamentary district in southern England." AP

Oh,Oh, Did Rick Perry Really Say This?

2011-08-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I mentioned that I hoped that Rick Perry was for real because I was discouraged by the performances of the GOP debaters in Iowa. Since I knew little about Perry, I decided to do some research. The first thing I learned was that all the left-wing blogs were going crazy with delight because an interview that Perry gave Newsweek last fall had come to light - an interview in which he made some careless, and not-smart comments about Social Security and Medicare.

Whatever you think about the original justification for these programs, they are ingrained in American life, and any person who is running for president cannot let himself be portrayed as someone who would end or seriously slash Social Security and/or Medicare, and this is just what Rick Perry has done to himself. Republicans should focus on the message that they wish to SAVE Social Security and Medicare for their children, and no changes they make would affect those on or about to enter these programs.

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It needs adjustments because of the increased longevity and better health of older Americans. The liberalizing of disability benefits and the expansion of the definition of disabilities that occurred several years ago must also be revisited.

I think we Republicans are in real trouble. We'll vote for anyone to beat Obama, but we need independents and some Democrats too. Rick Perry won't get them.

Rick Perry on the Record

From scrapping Social Security and Medicare to immigration to Constitutional amendments, Texas Governor Rick Perry spoke openly last fall with Andrew Romano.

Questions in bold type.

by Andrew Romano August 12, 2011 Daily Beast

In "Fed Up!", you criticize the progressive era and the changes it produced: the 16th and 17th Amendments, Social Security, Medicare, and so on. I understand being against these things in principle—of longing for a world in which they never existed. But now that they’re part of the fabric of our society, do you think we should actually do away with them?

I think every program needs to stand the sunshine of righteous scrutiny. Whether it’s Social Security, whether it’s Medicaid, whether it’s Medicare. You’ve got $115 trillion worth of unfunded liability in those three. They’re bankrupt. They’re a Ponzi scheme. I challenge anybody to stand up and defend the Social Security program that we have today—and particularly defend it to a 27-year-old young man who’s just gotten married and is trying to get his life headed in the right direction economically. I happen to think that the Progressive movement was the beginning of the deterioration of our Constitution from the standpoint of it being abused and misused to do things that Congress wanted to do, and/or the Supreme Court wanted to implement. The New Deal was the launching pad for the Washington largesse as we know it today. And I think we should have a legitimate, honest, national discussion about Washington’s continuing to spend money we don’t have on programs that we don’t need.

America’s looming debt crisis is a real problem, but neither Republicans nor Democrats have really been addressing it seriously. What solutions should your party be pushing?

I think the states are the ones who should be making the decision on whether or not they want to be spending their dollars on those types of programs—not having it made in Washington, D.C.

I see how that might make sense for, say, education. But what would it mean for something like Social Security—a big, national safety net? In the book, you call Social Security a “failure” that “we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now.” Is it time for it to end?

Well, the counties of Matagorda, Bresoria, and Galveston in 1981 decided they wanted to opt out of this Social Security program. They have now very well funded programs and their employees are going to be substantially better taken care of then anybody in Social Security. So I would suggest a legitimate conversation about let the states keep their money and implement the programs. That’s one option that’s out there. But I didn’t write the book and say here are all the solutions. I think the first step in finding the solutions is admitting we have a problem—and admitting that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

What about Medicare? That’s an even bigger contributor to these debt problems.

Here’s the problem, in the 25 years that I’ve worked in Texas state government both as a legislator, an appropriator, then as lieutenant governor and the governor of Texas: Washington attaches strings to all these programs. They take away the incentive for innovation because they say here is a portion of your money back and here are the only ways that you can spend it. That on its face is bad public policy.

And again, I think it’s an abuse of our Constitution. There’s no place in the Constitution that says Washington, D.C. is supposed to be mandated health-care coverage, for example. That gets to the very core of the book. If America really wants to be strong again, we need to get back to the principles this country was based upon. The Constitution as it was written, and the 10th Amendment that clearly says the states are where these decisions should be made. Moving back in that direction will create substantially more competition. States should be laboratories of innovation. I promise you, I know you did a profile on Bobby Jindal, who I happen to think is one of the brightest governors in our country. Bobby knows health care very well. If he were given the freedom from the federal government to come up with his own innovative ways working with his legislature to deliver his own health-care innovations to his citizens, I guarantee he could do it more efficiently and more effectively than one-size-fits-all coming out of Washington, D.C.

But again, Medicare. It’s been in place for more than four decades now. What do you suggest we do to set it on a more fiscally sustainable path going forward?

I think we need to have a national discussion and not be afraid to talk about it.

That is my goal. I didn’t write the book and say anywhere in it, I got all the solutions. What I did say is, We have to be courageous as a country and stand up and admit that we have a Social Security program that is bankrupt, that is a Ponzi scheme, that Medicare and Medicaid collective had $106 trillion worth of liability that is unfunded, and that we need to deal with it and quit passing it on to the next Congress and the next generation.

You’re a supporter of the Tea Party movement. What was your reaction when activists were out there saying “keep your government hands off my Medicare”? Isn’t that a contradiction? Medicare is a government program, but a lot of people are reluctant to have it affected in any way—even as they’re calling for spending cuts. Doesn’t that make the job of balancing the budget and shrinking Washington more difficult?

[Laughs] I think you can find any sign on any issue at any rally. I’m not going to respond to one person’s sign.

I think the first step in finding the solutions is admitting we have a problem—and admitting that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

That’s fair. But the larger problem is that we have Republicans in Washington railing against Medicare cuts in the Democratic health plan—even though they’re exactly the kind of cuts they’ve been advocating for decades. Can we take these talking points about reduced spending seriously when the people who are making them are refusing to actually cut the necessary programs?

I would suggest that any Republican who is not going to work toward finding a solution to the budgetary problems that we have in this country ought to just go home and just let somebody come who really is interested in not spending more dollars that we don’t have on programs that we don’t want. The issue is about spending. One of my solutions that I would move forward on is put a freeze on spending for a year. Quit doing the earmarks. These are simplistic but the fact of the matter is they’ll go a long way toward giving the private sector the confidence that Washington is not going to continue spending dollars in the long or short term, devaluing the dollars they have today. You want to see job creation, get some stability in Washington, D.C. And frankly if you want to see a great growth spurt in America, have Washington basically block grant those dollars back to the states and have the states come up with their own innovative ways to deliver health care, pension programs, whatever it make be: transportation, infrastructure, education. Our goal is to quit sending so much money to Washington, D.C.

Let’s talk about some Constitutional issues, which take up a large part of your book. In the book, you argue against the 17th Amendment, which allowed the people to elect their senators directly instead of letting their state legislatures do it for them. This has become a big Tea Party talking point, but I’m not sure I understand the logic behind it. You say that by allowing people to elect their own senators, “the states have handed over a significant chunk of their sovereignty to the federal government.” But wouldn’t we be less free, and the country less democratic, if we didn’t have a say in who was representing us in Washington?

Stand by just a second. [30 seconds of silence.] OK, I’m back with you. I apologize. I’m sorry, I got distracted when you were talking. I think the issue is about consolidating the power in Washington, D.C. The 17th Amendment is one of those where they were making... the states were historically more in control when they decided who those senators were going to be. They took the states out of the process at that particular point in time. So that’s the... uh... the historic concept of checks and balances, when you had the concept of the federal government and the states. The 17th Amendment is when the states started getting out of balance with the federal government, is my belief.

Some Tea Partiers call for the 17th Amendment to be reversed or repealed. Is that something you would support?

Here’s what I think. We need to get the spending under control before we start... This is kind of like, deliver my mail on time, preferably on Saturdays, defend the border before you come down here and start telling us how to do all these other things. The base responsibilities... If the federal government would just take care of the base responsibilities the Constitution calls for then we might have a bit more progressive conversation about the federal government getting involved in a whole lot of other things. But for me, that’s what people are really upset about. We’ve got a border with Mexico that’s not secure today. We had another Texas citizen killed yesterday in Juarez. Americans are looking at that and going, Why are you trying to tell us how to educate our children, how to deliver health care, how to do this myriad of things, you know, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of lightbulbs we can have in our house, when you’re not even taking care of your basic responsibilities. And so I kind of put the repeal of the 17th Amendment in the, you know... It’s important to have that conversation, but relative to the spending, it’s secondary.

The Constitution says that “the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.” But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116, you left “general welfare” out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that “general welfare” includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document. What does “general welfare” mean to you?

I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by “general welfare”?

I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant.

But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution.

[Silence.]

OK. Moving on. Many Tea Partiers want to repeal the 14th Amendment, which provides for birthright citizenship. Do you agree with them?

Again, I think it’s one of those that you put out there and have a discussion on the issue. But the 14th Amendment was clearly put in place during a period of time when we had individual coming into the country, and it served its purpose. Is it being abused today? It may be. But from the standpoint of does it rise to the level of having a constitutional prohibition or removal of that, probably not.

You mentioned border security, earlier. You’re the governor of a border state and have been for some time. As you write in the book, Ronald Reagan signed a bill in 1986 trying to reform immigration that didn’t work out — the borders security provisions weren’t enforced—then President George W. Bush tried again and could get it through Congress because “people had been to that rodeo before.” Is there a possible path to pursued in two parts: first, a measure that establishes stricter border security and then, and only then, a later measure that provides a pathway to citizenship for the millions of immigrants who are here illegally? A one-two punch.

We have a pathway to citizenship in this country today: it’s get in the line and do what it takes to get here legally. You cannot have a comprehensive discussion about immigration reform until you secure the border. I’ve got a 1,200 mile border with Mexico and it’s not secure. We have American citizens being killed, we have drugs coming across, we have illegal immigrations and all types of other human trafficking going on. Our border is not secure because our federal government has been an abject failure at it.

I think everyone can agree on that, but...

Here’s what everyone should agree on: get the border secure, then we can have a conversation about what type immigration policy we want to put in place. If there’s a revolving door at the border, your immigration policy is not worth the paper it’s written on.

But just to be clear: if border security is accomplished, you can envision some sort of path to citizenship for people who are here illegally.

Sure.

You write about how drastically the size of government has expanded over the past few decades. But during much of that time, Republicans were in office. The government grew under Nixon. It grew under Ford. It grew under Reagan. And it grew under Bush. These presidents couldn’t cut spending or shrink Washington. Does that mean they weren’t true conservatives?

I think I could probably go through and find programs from each of those presidents that were not as conservative as I am. Again, what I think we need to be focusing on is our current situation here. Going back and picking and choosing what either the Nixon or the Bush 41 or the Reagan years didn’t do right is not particularly productive.

I understand that. But the arc of history you trace in the book is all about this inexorable growth of government and the harm that it’s done to the country.

As I point out, it happened with Woodrow Wilson and the monstrous growth of the New Deal. If what you’re asking me is if Ronald Reagan is more conservative than Franklin Roosevelt, uh, yeah, I think so.

But the larger question that I’m trying to get it is whether it’s even possible to be your kind of conservative—the kind of conservative you’re advocating for in this book—if you’re working in Washington. Because in theory, Reagan was your kind of conservative, and yet government grew when he was in office. Can conservatives actually reverse the last 75 years of federal policy?

Sure. Absolutely they can. We just have to be principled and disciplined and learn how to say no. The idea that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle is not correct. I don’t subscribe to it. It takes people who will say no to special interests and no to new spending, and say yes to allowing the states to be more in control of their futures.

Earlier this year you told Newsweek that “when the history books are written, I think George W. Bush will go down as … an incredibly good president.”

I still think that.

But in this book you slam Bush’s 2008 stimulus as “a quick (non) fix” and criticize him for signing into law “large education increases and a massive expansion of Medicare to the tune of more than $500 billion.” Later, you criticize his attempt at comprehensive immigration reform and disparage his notion of compassionate conservatism. Are you now saying that in some sense, President Bush was a disappointment domestically?

Yeah, there were programs that President Bush promoted that I don’t think, neither on the front side or not with history, were particularly good. Medicare Part D was one of those. A $7 trillion expansion in that one program.

You also place a lot of blame for the growing deficits on Obama, and his stimulus package in particular. But if you were president after Lehman Brothers collapsed, and you were facing that economic crisis, what would you have done?

I think you allow the market to work its way through it. The idea that we own an automobile company today is staggering in its proportions. I don’t understand why the TARP bill exists. Let the processes find their way. I don’t think it’s the government's job to be protecting a company that’s “too big to fail.” I don’t buy into that premise. We have bankruptcy laws and reorganization laws on our books for a reason. I think history will show those were bad decisions.

But the counterargument is that if GM collapsed, there would have been tons of jobs lost—and now it’s profitable again. Without TARP, the banking system would’ve imploded—and now the money’s been paid back.

I don’t necessarily buy into the premise that somehow or another those measures saved these jobs. There are companies that get restructured on a regular basis and the workers don’t lose their jobs. They get new management, they put a pay-out plan in place and we go on about our business rather than getting these huge amounts of debt piled on future generations.

Another criticism you have of Obama is on health care—and in particular the individual mandate, which you call unconstitutional. But according to the Constitution, Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce. Shouldn’t that include health insurance? After all, most health insurance is sold through interstate companies. And when a person declines to purchase health insurance, that affects interstate commerce by driving up health insurance premiums for everyone else.

I happen to think that forcing citizens to buy a private sector product is unconstitutional on its face. I can’t find that anywhere in the Constitution. The commerce clause has been highly overused, and that’s just another example of it through the years.

You were just reelected. When you finish out this term, it’ll be 14 years as governor of Texas—an all-time record. Given that there are no term limits in the Lone Star state, are you planning to stay on and run again?

To look past this term, the next four years, is way down the road. To say “here’s what I’m going to be doing in 2014” is a bit of stretch.

But you’ve said that you’ve got the best job in the country...

I do.

... and that you have no interest in running president. Still the case?

Not going to run for president. Not going to be a vice-presidential candidate. Not going to be in anybody’s cabinet. And I suspect I’m not going to be anybody’s ambassador either.

No Winners Last Night

2011-08-12T06:33:00.000-07:00

I really don't know much about Rick Perry, except for his excellent record in Texas, but I sure hope he's the real thing after watching last night's debate. Michelle Bachmann is lovely, but her answers to most questions were absurd. Santorum, Paul, Cain, Huntsman and Gingrich have no real chance, and I can't grasp the difference between Romneycare and Obamacare when Romney explains it. I didn't agree that Pawlenty lost big, but he didn't win either. The most points were scored by Gingrich, who has no chance at all. As far as all the hands up to reject 10 to 1, I put that as a necessity to win Republican primaries, and not a serious position.

No winners in Thursday’s debate, but many losers

By Ezra Klein August 12, 2011 Washington Post

The most telling moment of Thursday’s GOP debate wasn’t when Michele Bachmann cooly stuck a knife between Tim Pawlenty’s ribs, or when Rick Santorum plaintively begged for more airtime, or when Mitt Romney easily slipped past questions about his record on health-care reform. It was when every single GOP candidate on the stage agreed that they would reject a budget deal that was $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. Even Fox News’s Bret Baier couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

He asked again just to make sure the assembled candidates had understood the question.

Primary debates are usually watched for what they say about the candidates, but they’re generally important for what they say about the party. This one was no different. With the notable exceptions of Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, the candidates didn’t disagree over policy. They disagreed over fealty to policy.

Bachmann didn’t attack Pawlenty’s policy proposals. She attacked him for past statements suggesting he might believe in other policy proposals, like the individual mandate and cap-and-trade. Palwenty’s assault on Romney took the same form. This debate wasn’t about what policies the candidates believed in. That was largely a given. This debate was about which of the candidates believed in those policies the most.

The best policy in this debate wasn’t the policy most likely to work, or the policy most likely to pass. It was the most orthodox policy. The policy least sullied by compromise. A world in which the GOP will not agree to deficit reduction with a 10:1 split between spending cuts and tax increases is a world where entitlement reform can’t happen. It’s a world where the “supercommittee” fails and the trigger is pulled, and thus a world in which $1 out of every $2 in cuts comes from the Pentagon. It’s not a world that fits what many in the GOP consider ideal policy. But it is a world in which none in the GOP need to traverse the treacherous politics of compromise.

Perhaps no candidate is better suited for that world than Michele Bachmann. But tellingly, the candidate who is best on the politics also proved worst on the policy.
Over and over again, Bachmann misstated basic facts. She said that Tim Pawlenty “implemented” cap-and-trade in Minnesota. He did no such thing. She said “we just heard from Standard Poor’s,” and “when they dropped our credit rating what they said was we don’t have an ability to repay our debt.” Simply not true.
S&P has never questioned our ability to repay our debt. That’s why we remain AA+.

They have questioned whether political brinksmanship will stop us from paying our debt. The downgrade “was pretty much motivated by all of the debate about the raising of the debt ceiling,” said John Chambers, head of S&P’s sovereign ratings committee. That is to say, it was motivated by political brinksmanship from the likes of, well, Michele Bachmann.

It’s fitting that the candidate best able to resist compromise is the candidate who seems least able to correctly explain the policies at issue and the choices we face.

It’s a lot easier to take a hard line if you don’t understand the consequences of your actions, and a lot simpler to belt out applause lines if you’re not slowed down by the messy complexities of the issues. But where Bachmann is leading, the other candidates are following. Mitt Romney knows perfectly well that a deal with $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases is a great deal for conservatives. What he probably doesn’t know is how he’s going to explain why he pretended otherwise when he was vying for the nomination.

After the debate, the punditry immediately turned to who won and who lost. Pawlenty, most said, was the clear loser. Romney, Bachmann, and maybe the absent Rick Perry were the possible winners. I would look at it more broadly.

The losers in tonight’s debate were anyone who wants to see the sort of compromise necessary for the political process to work, and anyone who has been convinced that they can achieve their goals simply by restating their convictions. As for the winners? Well, I didn’t see too many of those.

The Sleeping Giant Awakens

2011-08-10T06:32:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, there seem to be common links among the violent riots that took place recently in Philadelphia, at the Wisconsin state fair and in London. The vicious thugs we saw were mostly black, children of welfare and fatherless. Chronic and high rates of unemployment - and the cuts in programs and benefits already made with more to come may also be contributing factors. Ringleaders also all seem to have iPhones and Blackberries.

When I read the following piece this morning, I remembered the lady in Fort Myers who exclaimed in 2008, "Obama's going to pay my mortgage for me".

We are in for tough times and the most vicious presidential campaign in history.

The Sleeping Giant Awakens

By Robin of Berkeley August 10, 2011 The American Thinker
One of my closest friends, "Gail," lives in a pristine suburb in northern New Jersey. It's one of those leafy bedroom communities where residents drive their Lexus SUVs to the railroad station each morning to catch the train to Manhattan.

After 9/11, Gail told me that eerily, several vehicles were left abandoned in the parking lot for weeks. Their drivers never returned home that day to retrieve them.

But, in general, not much goes on in her sleepy, idyllic town. The residents rave about shopping sprees to Loehmanns and sprints to Whole Foods for organic strawberries. There is no crime to speak of; the local paper blares news about a recent traffic accident or the opening of a Trader Joe's. So when Gail told me what happened to her son, I was absolutely dumbfounded.

As for Gail, like my former self, she's a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party. This isn't surprising given that she's a born-and-raised East Coast Jew. But, unlike the former me, Gail is a liberal, not a self-proclaimed progressive/leftist.

While many conservatives merge liberalism and leftism, there are huge differences between the two camps. Liberals, like Gail, want a kinder and gentler America.

They choose safe, suburban suburbs, with schools that (as of yet) do not radicalize their children. While it's the rare liberal who would display a flag on July 4, he still cares about this country, supports Israel, and is wary of radical Islam.

The progressive/leftists are an entirely different species entirely; they do not love this country or Israel. In fact, the far left would like nothing better than to knock the US and Israel down from their high horses.

Leftists sympathize with the "victims" of the United States, not those Americans who are brutalized by thugs or terrorists. The left practices third-worldism, the belief that the paths of Chavez and Lenin are vastly superior to our own Founding Fathers. Having become smitten by the renegade image of Che Guevara, they fashion themselves as post-modern revolutionaries, who set out, with a missionary zeal, to change the world.

Consequently, leftists turn a blind eye to the savagery of the third world, e.g. the burqua or beheadings. Progressives justify the brutality of gang violence and perhaps engage in mob behavior themselves. While they label conservatives as reactionary, leftists are, in truth, the true reactionaries, reacting against Mommy, Daddy, God, and country.

Like me, my liberal friend, Gail, voted for Hillary Clinton during the primary. Gale was pleased with the prospect of a female president and nostalgia for the "good old days" of husband, Bill. After Hillary lost, Gail was a Good Democrat, and chose Obama instead.

She voted for him, even though I tried and tried in vain to wake her up to the truth. I myself voted for Hillary until the ascent of Obama snapped me out of my lifetime progressive trance.

I saw that something was terribly wrong, that people were acting crazy around him. The multitudes were entranced, hypnotized, in a cult-like way. Even more disturbingly, the more emotionally unstable supporters were behaving violently towards any and all opponents. And Obama, taking in the whole scene, said nothing.

The smearing of the opposition, the misogyny directed at Hillary, the cloud of aggression that followed Obama around, like the grime that trailed after the cartoon character Pigpen, felt frightening to me, menacing, and creepy. It finally dawned on me that should Obama be elected, the dark and uncivilized behavior that I see in Berkeley would spread and multiply and envelope the entire country.

I tried my best to explain all of this to Gail; I pleaded with her to reconsider her automatic pilot vote for Obama. I pulled out all of the stops: I explained in painstaking detail what life was like in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco under the radicals. I told her about walking a gauntlet of paranoid, drug-addled derelicts on Telegraph Avenue, about the frequent attacks on tourists in San Francisco. I reminded her of my own mugging , and informed her that everyone out here has a similar story -- or knows someone who does.

And, I told her, the worst part of it is that no one seems to care -- that citizens have become so programmed in the dogma of white privilege that they offer themselves and their children up as sacrificial lambs. Like the hostages of Stockholm, Berkeley-ites defend their abusers, protecting them rather than guarding themselves.

And finally I explained that Obama was cut from the same radical cloth -- that he surrounds himself with the type of militants who hold Berkeley captive. And, I warned her, should Obama be elected, the antisocial behavior that is tolerated in Berkeley will become the new normal all across the country.

Gail listened politely, though ultimately she voted for Obama. While she listened, she didn't really understand. Of course, she didn't -- how would she?

This wasn't her world. When you live in a safe, sheltered reality, you have no idea what it's like for people in Berkeley or Oakland or Detroit. You can't grasp what it's like to hear story after story of horrendous crime; of what it's like to attend a meeting at work one day and hear gunfire outside, as I did; or how it feels to walk to a restaurant on a cloudless blue-sky day and find yourself lying prostrate minutes later, with nose broken and two black eyes.

I didn't blame Gail; it is human nature to reject what we cannot relate to. It is impossible to fully grasp what another person goes through unless you walk in his shoes. You can't fully understand the horror of that moment when the doctor utters the word "cancer," nor the enormity of being a woman enslaved by a burqua. And you cannot comprehend what it's like to live in a place like Berkeley or, to take an even more extreme example, Zimbabwe, where gang violence is not just tolerated but it is heralded as part of a noble revolution.

You can't understand this, that is, until it happens to you.

Gail told me this week that her only child, Justin, was playing basketball in the well-manicured park down the street with his college-aged friends and his girlfriend. Suddenly they were surrounded by a group of black guys from somewhere else who began taunting them, invoking racist language.

Her son and his friends yelled at them to go away, but one young male lunged at Justin, punching him in the face. Justin fell and was knocked unconscious. The hoodlums then ran away; luckily, one of the kids got their license plate. I hope and pray that small-town USA takes unprovoked street violence more seriously than places like Berkeley.

Justin became conscious again after a few minutes, but he sustained a deep gash that required several stitches. Any head injury is potentially serious. But perhaps even more worrisome than his physical wounds are the emotional ones sustained by Justin and his friends.

These are good kids, well-raised, polite, and tolerant. They have held no malice towards anyone based on the color of skin.

But will racial hate now be planted in their hearts? Will it corrupt their trusting souls? Of course, everything that is happening right now, whether in New Jersey or Wisconsin, is purposeful.

The radicals want to promote anarchy. But it's more than this: they want the hate that blackens their souls to warp others as well.

My dear friend, Gail, was in tears, shell-shocked, incredulous. She kept repeating over and over again, "How could this happen? How could this happen?" She struggled to find the words for such barbarism; she had not a clue of how it could invade her insular world.

I spoke to Gail tenderly, as though I were calming down a frightened child stirring from a deep sleep.

"I'm so sorry, sweetie. This is horrible. Justin didn't deserve to be treated this way, and his friends didn't need to see such brutality.

"But, Gail, it's not just happening in your small town, but it's happening all over the country, and it's getting worse every day. There have been random mob violence against white people in Iowa , Chicago, Atlanta, in Wisconsin , where dozens of white people were beaten up, even pulled out of their own cars."

"But why?" Gail asked me plaintively. "Why is this happening now?"

"It's Obama," I explained. "It's what I told you a few years ago. This is what happens when you put someone in power like Obama. Something spreads, like a virus. It's subtle; it's almost invisible. But it poisons one person, and then another and another, until soon the whole country is corrupted.

"It's a sickness called hatred, Gail. Most black people are good, law-abiding, moral people. Obama comes from a far-left fringe group of militants who hate America and want to drag us down. Those same people have degraded and exploited poor black kids for years. These radicals use them as their foot soldiers. Obama would never get his own hands dirty.

"I know these militants, Gail; I live among them. They hate America; they want to devolve us back into some primitive brute state. This is why things are getting worse and worse in this country: the economy, the Middle East, and hate crimes against whites."

After I finished, Gail was quiet for several seconds. Then she said, sounding heartbroken, "But he made so many promises. He seemed so nice. "

"Yes, that's true, sweetie," I answered. "But people aren't always as they seem."
Three years ago, I sounded the clarion call to my friend Gail to wake up and discern the person behind Obama's carefully crafted mask. I tried to make her see what would happen to this country if the radical left seized power.

Back then, she didn't understand what I was saying; she simply couldn't.
She is starting to understand now.

Obama is Most Successful President of All

2011-08-09T10:12:00.000-07:00

When I was teaching in college, and found myself to be a conservative in a cauldron of liberals, I kept making the mistake when debating them, that they also had the best interests of America in their hearts. It took me quite a while to figure out that most of these liberal college professors actually hated this country, and wanted to bring it down.

I keep making the same mistake in my reaction to the policies and programs that Obama champions, because it is becoming perfectly obvious to more and more Americans that, the worse things get here, the more he is succeeding in attaining his true goal: the humiliation and the weakening of a country Obama believes has been an oppressor of poor peoples thoughout the world.

To understand why he believes what he does, you need to read the book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage" by Dinesh D'Souza in which he describes the impact Obama’s parents had on him, and how much he desires to implement the real “dream of his father”. Suffice it to say that, in his mind, we, the British and the French and most of the European countries carry the sin of colonialism and must be punished. Obama’s socialist leanings are secondary to his anti-colonialism.

Why else would he be buddies with William Ayers?

Why else would he sit for 20 years in a church listening to anti-American and anti-white rantings?

Why else would he cancel the anti-Iranian, anti-missile defense system the Poles and Czechs risked so much to deploy?

Why else would one of his first acts in office be the return of the Churchill bust and the insult to the Queen?

Why else is he trying to destroy Israel, a country he also considers a colonial criminal state?

Why did he immediately undercut Mubarek, while refusing to offer any support for the Iranian freedom marchers?

Why else has he destroyed our currency and our ability to repay our debts?

Why else does he go on and on about the so-called super rich and wanting to confiscate the wealth of successful businessmen?

Why else does he seem completely unconcerned about the unemployed - going to the podium about every six months to announce that :”Now I’m going to really work to get jobs”, but doing nothing?

I could go on with dozens of more examples, but I’ll stop here.

Of course, not every Obama act is in this vein. He also tries to do just enough to get re-elected, such as his support of the war in Afghanistan, where, incidentally, he changed the mission (the same as did Clinton in Somalia to disastrous results), and he changed the ROE (rules of engagement) so much that we are losing thousands of dead Americans for the first time and drove General McChrystal to distraction.

As someone whose parents were of white, European stock, I can say that I despise Obama almost as much as he despises me. He’s not the worst president since Carter, he is the most successful one - and the most dangerous to our freedom and prosperity!

Obama Apologists and the Downgrade

2011-08-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

Here are a few gems gleaned from cable news channels this weekend:

Standard and Poors was stupid to downgrade US bonds.

The Standard and Poors downgrade was political.

The Tea Party is responsible for the downgrade.

Standard and Poors made a mistake with their math.

We would have cut 4 trillion, but the Tea Party wouldn’t go along.

These huge cuts by the Tea Party will cause a depression.

Tea Party members are terrorists
(They don’t call Muslim mass murderers ‘terrorists’)

The media should not publish what Tea Party leaders say.
(Courtesy of Senator Kerry, the Vietnam hero)

“I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade”
(Also courtesy of Kerry)

“S&P had shown “terrible judgment”
(Treasury Secretary Geithner)

The cause of the downgrade was the reckless spending and borrowing by President Obama, and the unwillingness of the Obamaites to recognize the need for major cuts in spending, wholesale dumping of government regulations, cancelling of Obamacare and making America's tax code fairer and more competitive with other nations.

New Strategy For Ground Zero Mosque

2011-08-07T06:24:00.000-07:00

New Strategy For Ground Zero Mosque

By JanSuzanne Krasner August 7, 2011 American Thinker

The Park51 project for a 15-story mosque/community center at Ground Zero, led by developer Sharif El-Gamal and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has dwindled down to a much smaller vision, a four or five-story 'PrayerSpace' and community center. This may be a far cry from their original plan, but many are bewildered as to why they are still moving ahead with any planned mosque at this site, given the tremendous negative opinion most Americans have of its location.

Sharif El-Gamal believes in his vision and he is committed to its location at Ground Zero. He admits that the introduction of his idea to the general public was "backwards" and now he is "going back to basics." He believes that he is acquiescing to the community's desire for the building not to tower over Ground Zero and states: "If the community only wants four or five floors, it's going to be four or five floors." This new shorter version will still require El-Gamal to raise about $10 million. He believes that depending on the community board's recommendations could take as much as five years before there are any changes to the Burlington Coat Factory building site.

Meanwhile, in spite of El-Gamal's insistence that he'd like to work with the community, the chairperson of the Community Board, Julie Menin, said that he has not responded to several of her requests to meet to discuss the plans that they would like to see implemented at 45-51 Park Place. Although the community board is not as interested in the blueprints of the building, they do want to have input into the public activities the center will offer. Menin commented: "A tremendous number of young families need services, like classes, recreation and athletic centers."

Since El-Gamal's purchase of this property last year (for $4.85 million in cash) this unpopular and contentious project has undergone several important developments as a result of pressure from the neighborhood community and the American public. El-Gamal has had trouble raising the necessary $150 million to build the original planned Park51, previously known as the 'Cordoba House' Mosque/Community Center at the site that is only two blocks from Ground Zero.

Back in early January, 2011 Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and El-Gamal cut off their business ties. Rauf had taken on a greater quest, that of launching a global movement to fight misunderstanding of Islam and improve relations between people of different faiths and cultures. By late January the Park51 Group selected NYC Imam Abdullah Adhami as its senior advisor and one of several Imams who would eventually be picked to coordinate religious services in the mosque.

Americans have been able to witness the slow unraveling of a cover up by the Park51 Group to hide the radical intent of their planned Mosque. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the son of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, claims to be a moderate. Through the hard work of Pamela Geller's organization 'Stop Islamitization of America' (SIOA), and other investigative journalists, Feisal was exposed for what he truly is, a Islamic extremist and NJ slum landlord. So off he went on greater conquests.

Then the non-profit Park51 Group selected Imam Adhami, a NYC Imam who was then heard in one of his sermons to call for 'Sharia Law;' who posted his opinion on a website that people with "homosexual feelings are the result of some form of violent emotional or sexual abuse at some point in their life;" and who was also proven to have links to Anti-American Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid and terror supporter Imam Siraj Wahhaj. By early February Adhami quit.

According to Sharif El-Gamal the past year has taught him that he needs a new strategy, slower and more realistic, one he should have started before going public last year. He has spent the past year traveling around the country to garner supporters and has attempted to build relationships with the residents of the neighborhood and Muslim groups in NY, NJ and CT; and he has seduced the Aunt of a 9/11 victim to his advisory board. In addition to organized prayers, he has held events in Park51's makeshift space, including various art exhibits, yoga and Brazilian martial arts classes, to Muslim holiday ceremonies and discussions on bullying with Muslim and non-Muslim children. He says all of this will provide him with a better understanding of the community's needs to aid him in formulating a better community center.

El-Gamal's new tactic is in line with the moderate, non-violent global approach for Islamic conquest of Western societies. Terrorism is the tool of choice by radical Muslims. But, under the guise of love and peace, moderate Muslims populate neighborhoods and build Mosques as the tool to take over communities, one at a time. This is what has happened in Germany with multiculturalism, as well as France, Sweden, Spain, Australia, Denmark and the UK. Neighborhood after neighborhood, Muslims build up their population to an intimidating level where police do not even enter. They build their religious centers with leaders and literature that radicalizes their membership. They demand that 'Sharia Law' becomes the law of their enclave and the original residents are either driven out or run scared.

This pattern is starting in communities in America. Dear reader, please keep your eyes open and be aware. In each of these US cities there is a growing Muslim population: Dearborn, Detroit, Tampa, Philadelphia, Camden, Wilmington, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago, DC, Dallas, Houston, Ft. Worth, Atlanta, San Diego, Seattle, St. Louis, Columbus, Memphis and Miami and the residents are beginning to see a growing demand for 'Sharia Law' to take precedence over our civil courts.

Look at the college campuses where the Muslim Student Association, founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, have intimidated many of our youth into silence. Understand that 'Sharia' compliant financial demands are being met on Wall Street and in public and privately owned companies. Educate yourself about the hate and justifiable murder of Infidels that is part of 'Sharia Law' and is found in the Koran. And clearly understand that Islamists want to symbolize the conquest of America with a Mosque at Ground Zero that Arabs are calling a 'Rabat' (the point of contact at the heart of the infidel's territory that had been raided).

It will shortly be ten years since 9/11 and the Park51 Rabat is still being planned in the hallowed grounds of 9/11 under the protection of the Dhimmis of NYC. Here's hoping that in the five years El-Gamal needs to actually begin building his vision the American public will wake up to the real dangers of Islamic political ideology and the Mosque at Ground Zero will just go away.

Amy Winehouse and Social Security

2011-08-06T06:26:00.000-07:00

Social Security benefits are financed by a payroll tax that was 6.2% of pay. This amount was paid both by employees and employers. When tax collections exceed the cost of benefits in any one year, the excess goes into a trust fund; when tax collections are insufficient to pay for benefits, the US Treasury pays the difference. Under President Obama, the Treasury has borrowed money to pay the difference, which happened in 2010 and is happening this year as well.

Last Year Obama cut the 6.2% tax only on employees by 2 points for one year. This had no effect of stimulating the economy, but it sharply reduced tax receipts so that the Treasury had to borrow even more billions to prop up Social Security.

During the recent debt increase negotiations, Obama wanted to extend this cut for another year, and he is still pursuing this move.

More Amy Winehouse government.

Amy Winehouse and Governing by Liberals

2011-08-04T06:37:00.000-07:00

President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are to be pitied; they just don't understand that everything they do, in the name of "jobs", destroys jobs. Every one of the thousands of new regulations they put in place destroys jobs. Every new tax they slipped in and the huge new taxes and costs coming from the implementation of Obamacare destroys jobs. Every time President Obama curses out businessmen and successful people, including those who dare to own or rent corporate jets, it destroys jobs as investors run for the hills.

And when Obama's stimulus program turned out not to finance "shovel-ready" jobs, but to save the jobs of public-sector union government workers and pay their pension benefits, more jobs were lost.

Of course, maybe they are really not interested in creating private sector jobs. Maybe they like things just the way they are.

Winehouse Government

By Ralph R. Reiland 8.4.11 American Spectator

It feels like we're dealing with an Amy Winehouse form of governing.

"These overdoses happen because these guys drink 20 beers and then reach for their heroin," a friend of mine said after the late star's recent death, at 27. "You can't think straight once you're totally blitzed."

It seems the same with our politicians, overdosed on their own importance. Their non-straight thinking and out of control spending has already put us $14.3 trillion in the hole at the federal level, not counting the tens of trillions in unfunded entitlement liabilities, and they're still racking up $4 billion per day in new red ink.

Even with the deal in Congress to supposedly cut $2 trillion or $3 trillion in federal spending over the next 10 years, the national debt would still firmly be on a trajectory to increase by another $8 trillion to $10 trillion over the coming decade.

Part of the problem in all this is that eighth graders can't vote. The self-absorbed politicians, always fixated on their re-election, know it's safer to play Santa Claus than Scrooge, and so we get more and more "free" goodies from the government and the re-elected politicians just keep passing the bill onto our children and grandchildren.

Per person, the national debt now comes to nearly $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America -- $200,000 for each family of four.

But not everyone's going to pay. No kid is going to pick up the tab from the sales at his lemonade stand, about 50 percent of households don't pay any federal income taxes, 20 percent of working-age American males between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working (and layoffs are increasing), so it's clear that the $50,000 debt burden per capita is going to be far from equally distributed.

"The national debt per taxpayer calculates to $128,000," reports Roy Filly at The Rugged Individualist .

But everyone shouldn't pay, according to President Obama's "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody" redistributionist philosophy and leveling goals.

"According to our President, the 'rich' are the top 5 percent of earners," writes Filly. "If we divide the national debt among the top 5 percent of earners, then each of them owes $2,539,068. Importantly, the top 5 percent of earners range in earnings from something a bit more than $150,000 (which, by the way, is household income, not individual income) on up."

Obama doesn't adjust his definition of the "rich" for the different cost of living in different locations. A two-income couple living in Manhattan with total annual earnings of $150,000 aren't likely to see themselves as living high.

So let's change the target to the real super-rich to pay off the debt, the guys Obama likes to portray as joyriding around in their corporate jets. "Honey, let's gas up the Gulfstream and shoot over to Dairy Queen for some chocolate-vanilla twisties."

The "fair share" of the current national debt for these targeted super-rich? "The extremely affluent -- those making more than $1,500,000 per year -- would each owe $96,230,700, or every penny they make for the next 64 years," writes Filly.

Add the nearly $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities to the $14.3 trillion national debt and it's clear that we'd have to wipe out the entire upper class in order to make even a small dent in the red ink.

In an earlier era, pursuing his egalitarian utopia with vigor, Stalin slaughtered millions of kulaks, Russia's "rich" peasants, identified as those whose ramshackle shacks had two windows instead of one.

The Tea Party Tide

2011-08-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

Now that enough Tea Partiers saw the light and finally supported Boehner's plan, and this compromise has been reached, I will resume my support of the Tea Party. There should be no question in the mind of any fair-minded person that a welcome tide of change is sweeping across America, and that it was the Tea Party that initiated it and nurtured it. But it has been the overreaching by Obama and the statists that provided fertile ground for this movement, and over-reaching on our side is just as wrong.

Who would have thought a year ago that the center of progressivism, Wisconsin, would see such changes, or that more and more voters would wake up to the ludicrousness of public-sector unions negotiating their benefits with the politicians who they put in office?

The whole idea of "bringing home the bacon" combined with misplaced compassion is what put us in this hole. Now let's concentrate on winning the Presidency and both houses of Congress in 2012.

Krauthammer Says It Better Than I Can

2011-07-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

I've been taking some heat for my position that the Tea Partiers should grow up and keep their eyes on the prize - which is the defeat of Obama and the Democrats in 2012 and the winning of a mandate to effect real change in the direction of the country.

Tea Partiers (of which I was one) should realize three things: 1. liberals control the media, 2. most people do not follow political events closely, and 3. about one-half of the population now gets direct benefits from the federal government.

They should also remember that it was George Bush (whom I supported on most issues) who gave us Medicare Part D and a tax system that collects NO income tax from more than 40% of working people.

The Debt-Ceiling Divide

Charles Krauthammer July 28, 2011 NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

We’re only at the midpoint of the battle to change the ideological course of the country.

W e’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic versus limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.

The sausage-making may be unsightly, but the problem is not that Washington is broken, that ridiculous, ubiquitous cliché. The problem is that these two visions are in competition, and the definitive popular verdict has not yet been rendered.

We’re only at the midpoint. Obama won a great victory in 2008 that he took as a mandate to transform America toward European-style social democracy. The subsequent counterrevolution delivered to that project a staggering rebuke in November 2010.

Under our incremental system, however, a rebuke delivered is not a mandate conferred. That awaits definitive resolution, the rubber match of November 2012.

I have every sympathy with the conservative counterrevolutionaries. Their containment of the Obama experiment has been remarkable. But reversal — rollback, in Cold War parlance — is simply not achievable until conservatives receive a mandate to govern from the White House.

Lincoln is reputed to have said: I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. I don’t know whether conservatives have God on their side (I keep getting sent to His voicemail), but I do know that they don’t have Kentucky — they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the White House. And under our constitutional system, you cannot govern from one house alone. Today’s resurgent conservatism, with its fidelity to constitutionalism, should be particularly attuned to this constraint, imposed as it is by a system of deliberately separated — and mutually limiting — powers.

Given this reality, trying to force the issue — trying to turn a blocking minority into a governing authority — is not just counter-constitutional in spirit but self-destructive in practice.

Consider the Boehner plan for debt reduction. The Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm calls it “regrettably insufficient.” Of course it is. That’s what happens when you control only half a branch. But the plan’s achievements are significant. It is all cuts, no taxes. It establishes the precedent that debt-ceiling increases must be accompanied by equal spending cuts. And it provides half a year to both negotiate more fundamental reform (tax and entitlement) and keep the issue of debt reduction constantly in the public eye.

I am somewhat biased about the Boehner plan because for weeks I’ve been arguing (in this column and elsewhere) for precisely such a solution: a two-stage debt-ceiling hike consisting of a half-year extension with dollar-for-dollar spending cuts, followed by intensive negotiations on entitlement and tax reform. It’s clean. It’s understandable. It’s veto-proof. (Obama won’t dare.) The Republican House should have passed it weeks ago.

After all, what is the alternative? The Reid plan with its purported $2 trillion of debt reduction? More than half of that comes from not continuing surge-level spending in Iraq and Afghanistan for the next ten years. Ten years? We’re out of Iraq in 150 days. It’s all a preposterous “saving” from an entirely fictional expenditure.

The Congressional Budget Office has found that Harry Reid’s other discretionary savings were overestimated by $400 billion. Not to worry, I am told. Reid has completely plugged that gap. There will be no invasion of Canada next year, no bicentennial this-time-we-really-mean-it 1812 do-over. Huge savings. Huge.

The Obama plan? There is no Obama plan. And the McConnell plan, a final resort that punts the debt issue to Election Day, would likely yield no cuts at all.

Obama faces two massive problems — jobs and debt. They’re both the result of his spectacularly failed Keynesian gamble: massive spending that left us a stagnant economy with high and chronic unemployment — and a staggering debt burden. Obama is desperate to share ownership of this failure. Economic dislocation from a debt-ceiling crisis precisely serves that purpose — if the Republicans play along. The perfect out: Those crazy tea partiers ruined the recovery!

Why would any conservative collaborate with that ploy? November 2012 constitutes the new conservatism’s one chance to restructure government and change the ideological course of the country. Why risk forfeiting that outcome by offering to share ownership of Obama’s wreckage?

My Fellow Tea Partiers Should Grow Up

2011-07-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

Although the House went solidly Republican last fall, Democrats still control the Senate, the Presidency and the media. Unless you control all three institutions of government, you do not yet have a mandate to make sweeping changes, and the way things are going on the debt-limit battle, we will lose the election in 2012. A government shutdown will be blamed on Republicans.

It is a strategic mistake to press for major changes in Social Security and Medicare at this time and give the Democrats a major issue on which to campaign. It is also a major mistake for Tea Partiers to undermine Speaker Boehner at this time. Obama still holds most of the cards. My friends are throwing away the baby with the bath water by letting Obama off the hook and destroying all hopes of accomplishing the most important thing - the defeat of Barack Obama in 2012. Without the mess that Tea Partiers have created, we had a great chance to win all three institutions and a mandate. Now it is about gone. I was one of the original Tea Partiers in April, 2009; now I say, "Thanks a lot, Tea Partiers".

So Long, Speaker Boehner?

With tea partiers reluctant to negotiate, he has only bad choices as the default deadline looms.

By David Morris July 26, 2011 Kiplinger

House Speaker John Boehner is stuck between the tea party and a hard place. No matter what happens in the debt ceiling debate, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the Ohio Republican is the top dog in the House for just one term.

On the surface, the Ohio Republican seems perfectly suited for the role of negotiator. You can’t grow up as one of 12 siblings in a house with just two bedrooms and one bathroom without learning something about the art of compromise.

But Boehner is in a bind, knowing that the U.S. debt ceiling has to be raised soon, but caught between tea party Republicans who won’t give an inch and a president and Senate Democrats who won’t roll over and play dead.

It’s a lose-lose mess for Boehner. If he throws the Democrats a bone, perhaps agreeing to save money by tightening some tax loopholes, he risks not getting enough support from his own party to push a debt bill through the House. But if he tries to appease the tea party wing of the GOP, the bill won’t get enough votes to clear the Senate. Either outcome threatens to rattle the already shaky U.S. economy.

A third option -- kicking the can down the road -- isn’t likely to make those who lend money to the U.S. by buying Treasuries more inclined to keep buying without upping the risk premium. They’ll demand higher interest rates, which will both cost the government billions of extra dollars at a time when it can least afford it and increase borrowing costs across the board for consumers, homeowners and businesses. Moreover, the prospect of another big political standoff over the debt ceiling in the middle of next year’s presidential race is unappetizing, at best, and potentially catastrophic, at worst. That’s where things seem to be headed, though.

Congress and President Obama are on the verge of missing the best chance in a generation to get a handle on the debt and deficit, and to tackle changes to the Social Security and Medicare systems, which will only get shakier financially as more baby boomers stop paying in and start taking out benefits. Boehner and Obama seemed to be moving in the direction of such a megadeal -- combining big spending cuts and entitlement reform with additional revenues. But a relative handful of GOP lawmakers, mostly first-termers, decided that approach wasn’t their cup of tea.

Here’s the problem: Tea partyers in Congress don’t have enough votes to pass anything, but they can stop nearly everything, at least until fellow Republicans stand up to them and explain the gravity of the situation. So far that hasn’t happened. Getting control of the country’s debt and eliminating wasteful spending is a laudable goal, but allowing one part of one party that controls only one piece of the American government to dictate policy is unworkable.

That brings us back to Boehner. At some point -- soon -- he has to decide whether doing the tea party’s bidding is the best course for his party, not to mention for the nation. Either way, the decision may be personally painful. Tick off the tea party, and Boehner is likely to see House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) take over as speaker in 2013. But anger enough voters, and Boehner could see Democrats win back the House and Obama claim a second term in the White House.

What’s the speaker to do? It’s not too late to strike a deal with the president.

Boehner could give a little ground on tax revenues but insist that the president put forth his plan to tighten Medicare and Social Security benefits and hope that Obama takes a political hit for that. Then the speaker could hammer away at the high unemployment rate and the sluggish economy and let voters decide which candidates and which party they trust to move the country forward.

It’s a risky strategy, for sure, and there’s no guarantee of success. But it would give Boehner at least a fighting chance to remain relevant instead of retired.

Understanding Social Security and Medicare

2011-07-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

The Social Security fund and the Medicare fund are set up in similar ways: taxes are collected from employers and employees and used to pay current benefits. Medicare is somewhat more complex in that recipients pay premiums to help pay for benefits. For most of the life of the funds, tax receipts have exceeded benefits paid, and the excess moneys went into trust funds, which bought (invested in) special US Treasury bonds. These bonds are non-negotiable; that is, they can only be redeemed by the US government. The trust funds are to be a backup in years when taxes collected are less than benefits paid.

To redeem the bonds, the federal government might use general receipts from taxes, issue ordinary US bonds (borrow more money), or print money causing hyper-inflation.

In 2010, Social Security benefits paid exceeded Social Security taxes collected, and the trust fund was required to make up the difference. Current official projections indicate that the trust fund will be used up by 2036, and benefits will have to be sharply reduced.

In 2011 Medicare benefits paid exceeded Medicare taxes collected, and the trust fund was required to make up the difference. Current official projections indicate that the trust fund will be used up by 2024, and benefits will have to be sharply reduced.

The combined deficit, on a monthly basis, is now running about $20 billion a month, and it is feared by many economists that the current economic stagnation, combined with increasing retirements, will actually use up both funds within 10 years.

To do your own research, a good place to start is
“Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs”

They Get It, But Pretend Not To and Lie, Lie, Lie

2011-07-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

If I live to be a hundred I will never understand how Americans can not see through the constant lies of the Democrats. No Republican has proposed cuts in Social Security or Medicare benefits for any current recipient, and the changes proposed would not take effect for many years. Yet, we are watching TV commercials and Democrat politicians (including the President) telling seniors on SSI and/or on Medicare that Republicans want to cut their benefits!

What Republicans want to do is save these programs from bankruptcy so our children and grandchildren will have a reasonable safety net. It is not Republicans who are claiming that bankruptcy is on the horizon for these programs – it is the neutral CBO, and the end is coming in as soon as 10 years.

Out of the Way, Please, Mr. President

The Gang of Six puts forward some ideas worth pursuing.

By PEGGY NOONAN July 22, 2011 Wall St Journal (Excerpt)

It's good, it represents progress, build from it. That would be a helpful approach to the Gang of Six proposal on the debt. Don't deep-six it because it's flawed. Flawless isn't going to happen. There will be a big election in 2012. A lot can be settled then, and after.

The Gang of Six—three Democrats and three Republicans in the Senate—this week put forward a plan aimed at reducing the national debt by almost $4 trillion over the next 10 years. It includes $500 billion in immediate cuts, and repeals a costly provision of ObamaCare. The plan would lower the top individual tax rate to 29%, push corporate tax rates down to 29% from 35%, and abolish the Alternative Minimum tax. On long-term spending the plan includes a legislative supermajority and sequester feature. In the words of a senator involved in the bargaining, "For the first time, we have some real teeth" in spending controls.

This is all pretty good. It moves the ball forward in the right ways.

As for the flaws: A lot is left up to committees and future action. A lot is left vague. But a critic of the plan, the Cato Institute's Dan Mitchell, highlighted with justice one of its central advantages: It "is not fueled by class-warfare resentment." These days that always comes as a surprise and a relief. And it might have come at a cost to the Democrats in the bargaining sessions.

The primary good of the plan is that it represents the work of three serious liberals and three serious conservatives who together are moving in the right direction, not the wrong one. They admit the spending crisis is a crisis; they appear to admit that we cannot, at least now, tax our way out of it. This seems small but isn't. Agreement on these essentials is an antidote to feelings of widespread public hopelessness: "Washington can't do anything." That hopelessness damages us more than we know, both at home and in the world. We have to look competent. We have to look like we can reform ourselves. The other day there was an apparently incorrect report that the Republicans and the president had neared a debt ceiling deal. The markets immediately jumped. Everyone wants Washington to work.

People hunger for it.

The plan has already garnered a lot of opposition, much of it fair, but to quickly push it aside would be a real missed opportunity. Those who critique the plan can help it. Its cuts in entitlements and its attempts to reform them are unclear and appear insufficient. If the Senate passed a final proposal along Gang of Six lines, House Republicans would have to make the bill more concrete, more reliable in its mechanisms. And they'd probably have to make deeper cuts. Overshadowing all negotiations is the persistent threat of a credit downgrade. The senator at the bargaining table said that if a final bill doesn't contain "at least $4 trillion in cuts," we will get a downgrade, which would carry costs greater than the cuts in the Gang of Six plan.

Attempts to find a final compromise are delicate, with a lot of moving pieces. But the Gang of Six proposal is cause for encouragement. It could not be turned into specific legislation quickly. Gang of Six member Kent Conrad said Thursday morning it could take six months to get it all done and through the appropriate committees. But President Obama signaled this week, for the first time, that he might back a temporary debt ceiling increase to allow work to continue.

That's good. But a note on his efforts in the drama. It is time for the president to get out of the way.

For the longest time he wouldn't engage, and now he's engaged. For the longest time he didn't care about spending, and now he cares about spending. Good, both in terms of policy and for him. But his decision to become engaged has become a decision to dominate, to have his face in front of the television with his news conferences, pronouncements, and what his communications people are probably calling his "ownership" of any final agreement. He's trying to come across as the boss, the indispensable man, the leader. And, of course, the reasonable one.

That's all very nice and part of Political Positioning 101, but at this point it's not helping. He's becoming box-office poison. His numbers are falling. The RealClearPolitics composite job approval poll rating has him down six points since June 2, when the debt ceiling crisis began. That fall, from 52% to 46%, exactly tracks his heightened media presence and his increased attempts to be seen as dominant. Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, said that if he ran for president today he'd lose, that his job numbers are "worse than they appear," and that he continues to have real trouble with undecided voters.

And if you've watched him lately, you know why. When he speaks on the debt negotiations, he is not only extremely boring, with airy and bromidic language—really they are soul-killing, his talking points—but he never seems to be playing it straight. He always seems to be finagling, playing the angles in some higher game that only he gets. In 2½ years, he has reached the point that took George W. Bush five years to reach: People aren't listening anymore.” Wall St Journal

Negotiating with Lunatics

2011-07-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, even some of my wisest, conservative friends have fallen for the idea that Medicare and Social Security don't need to be changed because enough cuts can be made in other programs. The real truth is twofold: 1. Our children and grandchildren will have no Medicare or Social Security because both programs will have gone bankrupt, and 2. The proposals for changes by Paul Ryan and other Republicans don't affect anyone now benefitting from these programs.

We need to make some major changes in all levels of government and in most programs to reverse the direction our country has taken for many years, or we will end up like Greece, Ireland and other European countries now on the edge of disaster.

Negotiating with Lunatics

By Carol Peracchio July 15, 2011 American Thinker

One of the benefits of having been a nurse for over thirty years is that people will occasionally allow me to be brutally honest. For example, I can get away with telling an acquaintance, "God did not create gastric reflux medication just so you can eat an entire pizza and then go lie on the couch like a beached whale."

Until recently, I was willing to believe that President Obama and his party were merely way-out-leftists, even Marxists. But after listening to their response to last week's horrific economic news, I can only conclude that today's Democratic Party has lost its collective mind. In this nurse's expert opinion, Obama and the Democrats are crazy.

By "crazy," I mean looney, batty, daft, bonkers, and nutty as a fruitcake, to put it in medical terms.

On Friday, we learned that the recovering American economy added a piddling 18,000 jobs in June and that the unemployment rate rose to 9.2%. The underemployment rate jumped to 16.2%. Americans based in reality were not surprised. Contrary to the reactions of professional economists, these numbers were hardly "unexpected" to us.

After all, chances are that we are unemployed or underemployed, or else we love someone who is one or the other.

But the economic picture is very different on Planet Democrat. In his comments last Friday after receiving the dismal jobs report, President Obama actually suggested :
Right now, there are over a million construction workers out of work after the housing boom went bust, just as a lot of America needs rebuilding. We connect the two by investing in rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our railways and our infrastructure. And we could put back to work right now some of those construction workers that lost their jobs when the housing market went bust.

That statement is indicative of a person suffering from delusions and a lack of short-term memory. After a trillion dollars in stimulus spending a mere year and a half ago that didn't work, President Obama suggests... more stimulus!

Today in Washington, Republicans are attempting to negotiate with the president and the Democrats on raising the debt ceiling. Why bother? Any sane adult will tell them: it is impossible to negotiate with a crazy person . And it's obvious to every rational American that today's leading Democrats are crazy.

Only a crazy person would insist that we raise taxes in a recession.

Only a crazy person would tell us that Social Security is just fine.

Only a crazy person believes that people won't vote based on the unemployment rate.

Occasionally in my work in emergency and intensive care nursing, I would be assigned a patient who was delusional in addition to whatever physical trauma or disease brought him to the hospital. These patients are challenging, to say the least. I quickly learned that if the two of us were going to make it through the shift, there were some very important ground rules.

First, the nurse must accept that the patient is delusional, and therefore a lot of the things he "knows" are not based in reality and therefore not true . Asking a delusional patient who sees a giant pink bunny in the corner what medications he takes is not the best way to gather information. Asking a Democrat who believes that the rich are not paying their fair share to come up with a budget that makes sense is ludicrous.

Second, it is impossible to compromise with a person who is not in touch with reality. Hospital staff can't realistically make a discharge plan with a patient who believes she lives in Buckingham Palace. Likewise, Republicans can't compromise with any delusional Democrat who, for example, actually believes that the 14 th amendment gives the president the authority to raise the debt ceiling all by himself.

Third, it's important to avoid validating the patient's delusions by arguing about them. In nursing school, we were taught to say, "I understand that the penguin at the foot of the bed is very real to you. But I don't see it." Then simply get on with your job. Republicans need to stop wasting their breath trying to prove to crazy liberals that Medicare is going broke. Republicans will never win that argument, because the two sides are working from different solar systems.

Republicans work from reality. Liberals live on Planet Democrat.

I've always been fascinated by how differently we treat crazy people who happen to be rich and/or powerful as opposed to the run-of the-mill nut found in everybody's family or workplace. Examples abound, from Howard Hughes to Michael Jackson to Charlie Sheen. Famous lunatics are surrounded by people whose livelihood depends on the crazy person. These sycophants are thus charged with keeping the famous person's more outrageous statements and antics under wraps. Should the crazy famous person actually find his way to a microphone or camera, the sycophants' responsibility is to spin the incoherency of the crazy person into something resembling rationality.

Crazy Democrats have sycophants. They are known as the mainstream media. With Obama's election, the press fully embraced its role of publicist to the looney left. The president's statements are tightly scripted and confined to his teleprompter, even when speaking at a grade school . Official business is conducted out of sight. (Note how all the debt negotiations with President Obama are being held in secret.) Should a crazy Democrat's lunacy actually be disseminated unfiltered, the press stand at the ready to explain, obfuscate, and, if all else fails, attack the messenger.

So as I observe the ongoing negotiations on raising the debt ceiling, I have to express great admiration for Speaker of the House John Boehner. I understand that many conservatives are disappointed in the speaker, wishing that he could bring the president and the Democrats to our side of the table. But how can Boehner do that when the crazy Democrats are at a fictional table on another planet?

No, John Boehner appears to be doing what a good nurse would do: get to the end of shift with as little damage as possible. In the speaker's case, that means no tax increases. Here's hoping he's able to stand firm. The bad news is that the shift isn't over until November 2012.

Carol Peracchio is a registered nurse.

NASA and Obama’s Vision for America

2011-07-10T07:48:00.001-07:00

The Shuttle program has ended, as everyone knew it would at some point, but the cancellation of Constellation and other NASA programs should shock all Americans who believe in American exceptionalism. Our president, who went around the world apologizing for America, is succeeding in his plan to cut America down to size. We will no longer be first in space, if Obama has his way, and soon we will be just another weakened shell of a former colonial power – like France, Spain and Great Britain.

The hatred that Obama feels for those of us of white, European stock is being played out in many ways, and the destruction of NASA is only one of them. As Dinesh D’Souza explained in his perceptive book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”, Obama’s main inheritance from his parents and his early surroundings was a hatred of colonialism and a determination to make them (us) pay.

In Obama’s world at the time, the moon landing wasn’t seen as a giant leap for mankind, it was seen as Americans now owning the moon, and another humiliation for the third world. No wonder that he 1. “wants to blunt NASA’s space program, to divert it from being a symbol of American greatness to a more modest operation that builds ties with Muslims and other peoples”.

2. “Time and money issues aside, accusing NASA of a lack of innovation is ludicrous. According to NASA Scientific and Technical Information , NASA has filed over 6,300 patents with the U.S. government. So much new technology has come from NASA that one can hardly look around without seeing devices and techniques that originated from the space program -- exercise machines, satellite radio, scratch-resistant lenses, memory foam, shoe insoles, water filtering systems, cordless tools, home security systems, and flat-panel televisions, to name just a few. In addition to reducing our national energy consumption by such innovations as Radiant Barrier , it has been estimated that for every dollar the U.S. government has given NASA for space R&D, seven dollars are returned in the form of corporate and personal income taxes from increased jobs and economic growth. One NASA innovation, "safety grooving" in concrete for highways and airport landing strips, was so successful that it has been estimated to have reduced highway accidents by 85%, as well as created an entire industry, as shown by the International Grooving and Grinding Association .”

The selective modesty of Barack Obama

By Charles Krauthammer July 9, 2010 Washington Post (Excerpt)

“Remember NASA? It once represented to the world the apogee of American scientific and technological achievement. Here is President Obama's vision of NASA's mission, as explained by administrator Charles Bolden :
"One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering."

Apart from the psychobabble -- farcically turning a space-faring enterprise into a self-esteem enhancer -- what's the sentiment behind this charge? Sure America has put a man on the moon, led the information revolution, won more Nobel Prizes than any other nation by far -- but, on the other hand, a thousand years ago al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra.

Bolden seems quite intent on driving home this message of achievement equivalence -- lauding, for example, Russia's contribution to the space station. Russia? In the 1990s, the Russian space program fell apart, leaving the United States to pick up the slack and the tab for the missing Russian contributions to get the space station built.

For good measure, Bolden added that the United States cannot get to Mars without international assistance. Beside the fact that this is not true, contrast this with the elan and self-confidence of President John Kennedy's 1961 pledge that America would land on the moon within the decade .

There was no finer expression of belief in American exceptionalism than Kennedy's. Obama has a different take. As he said last year in France , "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Which of course means: If we're all exceptional, no one is.

Take human rights. After Obama's April meeting with the president of Kazakhstan, Mike McFaul of the National Security Council reported that Obama actually explained to the leader of that thuggish kleptocracy that we, too, are working on perfecting our own democracy.

Nor is this the only example of an implied moral equivalence that diminishes and devalues America. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner reported that in discussions with China about human rights , the U.S. side brought up Arizona's immigration law -- "early and often." As if there is the remotest connection between that and the persecution of dissidents, jailing of opponents and suppression of religion routinely practiced by the Chinese dictatorship.

Nothing new here. In his major addresses, Obama's modesty about his own country has been repeatedly on display as, in one venue after another, he has gratuitously confessed America's alleged failing -- from disrespecting foreigners to having lost its way morally after 9/11.” Washington Post

Note 1. "The Roots of Obama's Rage"
Note 2. American Thinker

Why Global Cooling Proves Global Warming

2011-07-07T06:37:00.000-07:00

There was an excellent article reproduced in the Providence Journal today (Science, blinded) about how scientists have the same personality flaws as the rest of us, and giving, as an example, the personal bias the great scientist, Stephen Gould, introduced into some of his major findings. I point this out because of the report below, which explains why climate-change alarmists hang onto the myth of global warming even in the face of no warming since at least 1998.

There has been no global warming since 1998

By James Delingpole July 6th, 2011 Telegraph (Excerpt)

"The headline of this post really shouldn’t be controversial. It chimes perfectly with what Kevin “null hypothesis” Trenberth wrote in that notorious 2009 Climategate email to Michael Mann:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

And it’s what Phil Jones admitted in a BBC interview when he said that there had been no “statistically significant” warming since 1995.

Why then am I mentioning it now? W-e-l-l, because just as ze war is to the Germans, Chappaquiddick is to the Kennedy family and that Portland masseuse incident to Al Gore, so the recent lack of warming is to the, er, Warmists. They hate it. It’s an affront to everything they believe in. Damn it, if the world isn’t warming with the alacrity they’d prefer, how are they going to keep the funding gravy train going, and how are they going to persuade an increasingly sceptical populace that the “science” is “settled”, the debate over and the time for action is now? That’s why they can’t be reminded of the truth often enough. It’s like salting the slugs that are ruining your garden: necessary, but also kind of fun too.

Consider their latest desperate effort in fudge, denial, and duplicity. It concerns a new report which – if you believe the Guardian and Michael Mann – confirms that man-made global warming is even more man-made and more happening and more dangerous than at any time ever.

Michael E Mann, at Pennsylvania State University and not part of the research team, said the study was “a very solid, careful statistical analysis” which reinforces research showing “there is a clear impact of human activity on ongoing warming of our climate”. It demonstrated, Mann said, that “the claim that ‘global warming has stopped’ is simply false.”

Actually the paper Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 [PDF] by a team led by Robert Kaufmann at the Department of Geography at Boston University demonstrates no such thing. What it shows – yet again and in excelsis – is the chutzpah and threadbare desperation of the “scientists” involved in the Great Global Warming Boondoggle. Rather than admit that their Ponzi scheme is dead in the water, they try to dazzle us with new imaginative theories which prove that, even though they’re wrong they are in fact right.

No global warming since 1998? Simple. All you’ve got to do – as Kaufmann et al have done – is apply the Even Though We’re Wrong We’re Right Panacea Get-Out Formula. In this instance the ETWWWRPGOF (as it’s snappily known) involves Blaming The Chinese. Yep, it turns out all that pollution that Chinese are pumping into the air thanks to their unhealthy obsession with economic growth and giving better lives to their children is actually counteracting the effects of Man Made Global Warming.

“Results indicate that net anthropogenic forcing rises slower than previous decades because the cooling effects of sulfur emissions grow in tandem with the warming effects greenhouse gas concentrations. This slow-down, along with declining solar insolation and a change from El Nino to La Nina conditions, enables the model to simulate the lack of warming after 1998,” the team explains.

In other words Man Made Global Cooling is cancelling out Man Made Global Warming.

Judith Curry is unimpressed:
Their argument is totally unconvincing to me. However, the link between flat/cooling global temperature and increased coal burning in China is certainly an interesting argument from a political perspective. The scientific motivation for this article seems to be that that scientists understand the evolution of global temperature forcing and that the answer is forced variability (not natural internal variability), and this explanation of the recent lack of warming supports a similar argument for the cooling between 1940 and 1970. The political consequence of this article seems to be that the simplest solution to global warming is for the Chinese to burn more coal, which they intend to do anyways." Telegraph

This article goes on to give many more examples in the same vein: Warmists can explain anything away, if not to us, than to themselves.

The president's horrifying mistake

2011-07-03T07:34:00.000-07:00

Calling this a 'senior moment' is also an insult to me and to the millions of seniors like me who occasionally have to reach for the word they are looking for. This Obama blunder shows carelessness, lack of attention and the taking of the occasion too lightly. When an NHL goalie does this, he is pulled.

The president's horrifying mistake

Sherman Frederick Jul. 3, 2011 ReviewJournal.com

If George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan had made the kind of mistake President Barack Obama made 10 days ago, the full weight of the condescending liberal class, led by the so-called "mainstream media," would have mercilessly rained criticism upon their heads.

"Senile," they would have cried. "Stupid," the talking heads would shout.

But because it was Obama, the liberal mob hardly managed a peep.

In case you missed it (which you more than likely did), here's what happened:
Our commander in chief, in full campaign mode, stopped by Fort Drum in upstate New York to address the troops from the 10th Mountain Division, which had recently completed deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama said: "First time I saw 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq. When I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there. I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn't receiving it posthumously."

The soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division listened in stunned obedience.

It was actually Staff Sgt. Sal Giunta of the 173rd Airborne who last year became the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor to have fought in Afghanistan, and the first living recipient since the Vietnam War. Sgt. 1st Class Jared Monti of the 10th Mountain Division was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2006 and awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously in 2009 by President Obama.

A reader of the military blog "Blackfive" put a finger on the magnitude of the mistake:
"How does the commander in chief mix these heroes up? He put that medal around Giunta's neck and he stood with Monti's parents as they grieved. These fallen heroes leave such a great legacy, and we should know all their names."

There's no particular value in speculating as to why America didn't hear more about this mistake. Some might say it had something to do with the degree of care the general media has for the military -- one dead soldier's story looks like another dead soldier's story. Others might point out the "plantation mentality" the liberal elite demonstrate for minorities ("There, there, there, Mr. President, how can anyone expect a disadvantaged American such as yourself to keep these names straight?")

The point we ought to contemplate this Independence Day weekend is that our president committed an error such as this and it barely touched the American consciousness. Had the president mixed up NBA stars Steve Nash and Carmelo Anthony, can you imagine the media attention?

Americans can by and large name the No. 1 draft pick of their favorite NFL team, but they can't name one distinguished soldier from their home state.

President Obama apologized to the family of Jared Monti for the mistake, once he was informed of it. The White House has yet to say whether it was the mistake of a speech writer somewhere or whether the president was winging it off script. They only say the president "misspoke."

The Los Angeles Times illustrates the "there, there, there" philosophy of most big newspapers to this mistake:
"President Obama, at recent campaign stops, has pointed out that his hair is now getting gray, a sign of how he has aged and the toll taken by his job. But on Thursday, the president had a different kind of senior moment."

A "senior moment" hardly describes it. How about an outrageously embarrassing moment? Or, a horrifying mistake considering his audience was Fort Drum?

President Obama ended his ill-fated pep talk to the soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division by concluding, "your commander in chief has your back."

If the president does, indeed, have the backs of our soldiers (and if we as a country do as well), then the least we can do is get the names of our heroes right.

Our Pakistan, Wrong or Wrong

2011-06-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

The silly season on Pakistan began long before we learned that Osama bin Laden was living a short distance from a Pakistani army base. Now we hear cries from ignorant or opportunistic politicians (I think mostly Republicans) that all aid should be cut off from Pakistan, because of Pakistani perfidy and double-dealing.

Do they not understand Pakistan's problem?

Do they not understand that Pakistan is a Muslim country where most of the population sympathizes with Al Qaeda, and that Pakistan's politicians must often appease their public and their voters. Do they not understand that Pakistan has nuclear arms?

Sometimes resonable people have to stand and take it when unresonable people do unreasonable things. We should continue to work with Pakistan; we should continue to give them financial aid and weapons, and we should stop the shrill rhetoric.

Our Pakistan, Wrong or Wrong

By Frank Schell 6.28.11 American Spectator

While the Government of Pakistan merits charges of duplicity and incompetence for aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden, the desire of Congress to conduct a vendetta against the country and cut aid would be an emotionally understandable but realistically unwise course. Whether we like it or not, America is Pakistan's sponsor and has been so since the early days of the Cold War.

The recipient of about $20 billion in aid since 9/11, Pakistan is the conduit for an estimated 50% of U.S. military supplies going into Afghanistan. Disrupting that effort has already happened on occasion, during tension from border incidents and Predator drone strikes.

With 29 million Pashtuns in Pakistan and nearly 13 million in Afghanistan, Pakistan has ethnic and linguistic affinity for this population. The Pashtuns have Persian antecedents and reside on two sides of an arbitrary and largely unrecognized frontier known as the Durand Line, established by the British in the late 19th century. Pakistan will therefore be, for better or for worse, the guardian of the endgame accommodation when the U.S. and NATO substantially withdraw -- it cannot risk alienating this group known for its ethnic nationalism.

Democracies are not common in the Muslim world. Pakistan, the world's second largest Muslim nation, has a parliamentary system, relatively free press, respected judiciary, and of late, interest in election reform to prevent fraud. It is a struggling, fragile democracy founded on secular principles. Many leading Pakistanis also wish to see a lesser role for the Pakistan Army, with more civilian control of the nation's course.

While some in Pakistan recognize that they need U.S. sponsorship, opinion is quite divided about whether the U.S. or China is the natural and strategic long-term partner. China's construction of the port at Gwadar near the Persian Gulf is an opportunity for potential use by the Chinese navy, which would then have easy proximity to some the world's oil lanes. U.S. vindictiveness could cause Pakistan to embrace China, although China may not rush to underwrite a bad Pakistani economy and a nation viewed in the West as a failing or potentially failed state.

The time has come for the U.S. to transform the form and substance of foreign aid to Pakistan. It continues to be vague -- and a blank check. It is well-documented that it is offered through different administrative channels with various operating procedures, without sufficient transparency or third party review. U.S. aid is viewed in Pakistan as supporting the military and ISI, the intelligence service, for the benefit of an elite few -- in a tide of cynicism there, it is not seen as benefiting the people of the country.

Instead, U.S. aid should be directed at natural gas and electricity development projects, as these would have a direct benefit on the daily life of the people.

Natural gas is used in cooking, space heating, and automobile transportation and has industrial applications; electricity outages are well-known, affecting households and business and damaging productivity. Textiles are the leading export industry and would benefit greatly from more reliable electric power. A highly visible partnership in rural medicine could also help reposition U.S. aid to Pakistan.

There are reforms that only Pakistanis can enact for themselves: a vigorous tax collection system, land redistribution, free elections, an enhanced judiciary, and reduced control of the political system by the Pakistan Army and ISI -- which have both suffered major damage to their reputations for alleged complicity in harboring and protecting bin Laden.

However, there is more that the U.S. can do: it can recommend an anti-corruption initiative, with advice from the American Bar Association. While this will be opposed by the Pakistani government, the U.S. will then be on record for promoting better governance. This should be viewed favorably in Pakistan, where much of the population is outraged over the level of corruption which impairs governance and human initiative.

As with the Raymond Davis affair, and more recently the arrest of alleged CIA informants who assisted in finding bin Laden, the relationship with Pakistan is subjected to more stress. Our dismay with Pakistan should, however, be expressed in private diplomatic channels. Public criticism only causes further intransigence and makes it easier to hype anti-American sentiment, already running at record levels.

Finally, U.S. encouragement of Indian moderation over the Kashmir dispute and the Line of Control separating the two countries would, even if only symbolic, be a constructive signal to allow Pakistan potentially to deploy more forces to address the Taliban to the west.

While the outrage over Pakistan's harboring of Osama bin Laden, is well-warranted, it is not wise to threaten to reduce U.S. civilian and military aid. Following a cooling-off period, we must hope that Congress sees that the issue is not the level of aid to Pakistan, as much as it is how that aid is structured and managed.

(These recommendations on U.S. aid and others may be found in the National Strategy Forum Review Spring 2011, "The U.S.-Pakistan Relationship: Toward a Complementary Strategy." )

Some Sobering Thoughts on Father's Day

2011-06-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

The situation described below is the result of 60 years of liberal thinking and Democratic policies. To begin to restore America, please vote for conservative Republicans for all political offices. Don't let misplaced compassion completely destroy our culture and our freedoms.

The War on the Family Rages On

By Trevor Thomas June 19, 2011 The American Thinker

On Father's Day, here is some sobering information concerning dads. According to the U.S. Census, one-third of American children are growing up without their biological fathers, while 40% of newborn babies in the U.S. are delivered to unmarried mothers. This percentage has increased about ten-fold since 1950.

Even more sobering: According to the CDC, over 72% of black children in the U.S. are born out-of-wedlock, along with over 52% of Hispanic children. Thus, while accounting for only about one quarter of the total U.S. population, blacks and Hispanics account for about 57% of the total number of out-of-wedlock births.

The absence of dad is devastating for children in a wide variety of ways. Children from single-parent homes are twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school and are more than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 85% of children with behavioral disorders don't have a father at home.

Children living without dad are much more likely to abuse drugs, commit suicide, and run away from home. They are more likely to have lower academic achievement along with lower self-esteem. Children born to unwed mothers are about seven times more likely to live in poverty than children with fathers in the home. The correlation between fatherless homes and the negative effects on the family is irrefutable.

With statistics like these, which have been trending in this negative direction for decades, one would think that no matter a person's religion, political persuasions, etc., it would be clear to most that it benefits our culture to support traditional marriage.

Yet, in spite of all this, the left continues its march towards the destruction of the family. Led by the homosexual movement and its war on marriage, like-minded liberals in the media, the aiding and abetting by Democrats in Washington, and Feministas like Gloria Steinem (who once declared, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.") and NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, author of "Are Men Necessary?" (which has been described as "the manifesto of the man-hating movement"), the varied attacks on the family are well funded, coordinated, and unrelenting.

For example, recently in the U.S. House, a bill introduced by Democrat Pete Stark (CA), called the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, would, according to World magazine, "force any group that receives federal aid to place kids in foster families and adoptive families without regard to the sexual orientation, gender identity or marital status of the prospective parents."

Stark's bill currently has 52 co-sponsors in the House (all but one are Democrats). Not to be left out, Democrat Sen. Kristin Gillibrand (NY) plans to introduce similar legislation in the Senate.

Then there's the case of the Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, California. According to the Oakland Tribune, last month "children learned more about what gender means, how it's been expressed in different cultures throughout human history, and that it's possible to be both genders -- or neither."

Recently MSNBC (surprise!) proudly profiled Andrew Viveros as the "first transgender student in the United States to be crowned prom queen at a public school." Despite being born a boy and having male reproductive organs, Viveros wants to be a girl -- thus MSNBC treated him as a girl and permitted no voice in opposition to such behavior on their show. Echoing one of the great lies of the secular left, Andrew said, "it's OK to be who you are, it's OK to do what you want to do."

Whether we are talking about divorce, out-of-wedlock births, redefining marriage, or disappearing dads, there are profound consequences for everyone in our culture anytime we deviate from the traditional family model. It is amazing that such has to be said in these "enlightened" times -- as Mark Alexander wrote in 2006, "What cadre of nescient dolts does not already know (such things)?"

Adoption, education, legal issues such as custody, wills, inheritances and estates, matters concerning health care and retirement benefits -- all of these are affected by how a society -- and its government -- view marriage. President Reagan summed it up well when he noted, "The family has always been the cornerstone of American society...in the family we learn our first lessons of God and man, love and discipline, rights and responsibilities...the strength of our families is vital to the strength of our nation."

Regarding Firearms, Personal Protection and Safety

2011-06-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

Anyone who thinks through the implications of having a firearm available in the event of a serious threat soon realizes that compromises have to be made between protection and safety.

I have talked with several NRA certified instructors, and they all believed that a loaded revolver, kept handy, was the only way to go: loaded, because an unloaded handgun is useless, and a revolver, because of its reliability and simplicity. Nevertheless, I have made different choices because I believe that an accident with a handgun is much more likely than its use as intended.

I had a license to carry in Massachusetts for 30 years, and now that I am a Florida resident, I have one here. Not once have I ever had to use or even show a firearm in all that time. I have chosen to own two semiautomatic .380 pistols, a Walther PPK and a Kel-tec P3. I chose a .380 caliber because that is the smallest round that will stop an attacker if a non-lethal spot is hit.

My biggest fear with handguns has always been that a child would gain access to one and have a terrible accident. I chose pistols over revolvers because you can keep the chamber empty until a threat is perceived, and many pistols have external safety switches as well, which revolvers do not. You can also keep the clip separate from the pistol. The NRA instructors scoff at this, maintaining that, in the heat of the moment, the average person will fumble getting the pistol ready to shoot. I decided that I would just have to live with that. Pistols are also easier to carry on your person because they are flatter and smaller than the typical revolver.

I bought the Walther PPK many years ago. It has every feature one could want and is a marvel of design and workmanship. It is both single and double-action and has an external safety switch. It is very accurate and reliable, and it has a pin that sticks out when a round is in the chamber. Its only disadvantage is that it is a little heavy to carry. That is why I also bought the Kel-tec P3 to carry, which is very light and so small, it looks like a child’s cap gun. You could keep it comfortably in your pocket. The Kel-tec’s grip and lower body is made of plastic; the frame is aluminum, and the firing mechanism, the barrel and the slide are hardened steel. Even though there is little danger of an accidental firing because the hammer is recessed, and there is a trigger safety, I still carry it without a round in the chamber.

Another thing I like about both the Walther and the Kel-tec, having originally learned how to shoot and clean a Colt 1911 A1 (which are a bitch to clean without taking someone’s eye out with the recoil spring), is that they are both easy to disassemble, clean and reassemble.

I carry the Kel-tec and keep the Walther in my nightstand, and I made a small change in my handling of the Walther; I decided later in life to move a bit toward protection and away from safety. In the movies you always see someone who hears a noise in the night call out, “Who’s there?”. In real life this is the last thing you want to do. In real life you want to surprise the intruder, not the other way around. You want to approach in complete silence until you understand the situation; therefore you do not want to pull back the slide on your pistol. That makes a very loud sound in the middle of the night. Since there is virtually no chance of a child being in my condo now (when grandchildren visit I lock up my guns), I do keep a round in the chamber of the Walther, and I keep the safety on.

When I was a younger man with children in the house I kept my firearms secret and locked up at all times. There are two schools of thought on this. One is to teach your children all about guns and how to handle and to shoot them. The other theory is the one I followed. There were always so many children, stepchildren and playmates in and out of my house that I felt I had to keep the guns secure, out of sight and out of mind.

Judge Judy and Faux Disabilities

2011-06-15T06:54:00.000-07:00

I love Judge Judy, and I’m not too proud to admit I watch her program when I can. In a world full of complexities and grey areas that can never be solved because some interest group will object, (even NAMBLA, the group that promotes sex with young boys, and thinks it’s normal and wholesome, has the support of the ACLU), Judge Judy cuts right through to the core and renders a decision that sticks.

Judge Judy also often expresses moral outrage that is all too missing in our society these days – moral outrage at the charlatans who fraudulently live to exist on the compassion of society expressed through various welfare and disability benefit programs. Many of those litigants who stand before her are obvious dregs of society, and, all too often, we learn that they survive through some sort of highly questionable disability benefit. It makes one wonder just what the rules are, and what can be in the minds of the decision-makers.

During yesterday's program a woman who received disability payments for "agoraphobia" turned out to be someone who paid all her bills in cash at various stores. That's whats known in literature as an "oxymoron". Another woman lived on AFDC payments she received for five children from five different fathers. Something is really rotten in Denmark

I wonder also if George H.W. Bush was aware that drug addicts, alcoholics and extremely fat people would receive benefits and protections when he signed the terribly flawed Americans With Disabilities Act.

If Weiner’s sick, so too is much of the nation

By Marybeth Hicks 6/15/2011 Townhall

It must be said: Rep. Anthony D. Weiner is what’s wrong with America today. Once again, when confronted with behavior that clearly speaks to the character of a man’s heart, we’re being asked to accept that he’s not entirely responsible for his actions because of some unspecified “disorder.” (Maybe narcissism, maybe obsessive-compulsive disorder, maybe chronic nerdism; hard to say without a psych assessment.)

There was a time - in low-tech America - when actions like Mr. Weiner’s would have taken place in a park and involved a trench coat. But there I go again, longing for a simpler era when a pervert was a pervert and not necessarily a guy with a condition.

As it is, now that Mr. Weiner has used Twitter to indulge his icky sexual proclivities and yet refuses to resign from his congressional seat, we’re again confronted with the new American reality: You don’t have to suffer the consequences of your actions.

Not just that. Even if you’re as skeevy as yesterday’s sweaty socks, people who like your politics will tolerate your creepiness. To wit: Mr. Weiner maintains the support of the president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, Julie Kirshner . She claims that just because she has learned her congressman is “a 14-year-old boy” doesn’t mean he doesn’t support feminist causes.

Sorry, Ms. Kirshner , but you’re making a big mistake. You can’t simply write Mr. Weiner’s antics off as immature for the purposes of political pragmatism. At least, not without further eroding our national ethos.

Our habit of detaching a person’s behavior from his character is having a deleterious impact on our country, and, at the risk of using hyperbole, is going to be our ultimate undoing. Maybe not in this specific case, as it’s likely the two-week leave of absence that has been granted to Mr. Weiner will turn into an early retirement with well-wishes for a “full recovery.”

No, it’s not Mr. Weiner , but the habit of moral relativism he represents that scares me. The now-familiar pattern - heinous immoral behavior, indignant denial, public humiliation, victimization through disease - is likely a manifestation of our decades-long infatuation with unconditional self-esteem.

Americans are so focused on feeling good about themselves, no matter what abhorrent behavior they put on display, they no longer exhibit the shame that ought to come with wrongdoing. You might say, well, Mr. Weiner must have felt shame because he tried to lie his way out of the mess he created for himself. That was only an effort to cover his … tracks.

No, if he feels shame, he quits Congress. Simple as that. A person of good character knows a congressman would never, could never, do the things Mr. Weiner has done and remain in office. It’s insulting to the office and the constituents he serves, not to mention humiliating for his family and friends.

Which is why this incident doesn’t prove Mr. Weiner is “a 14-year-old boy,” it proves he’s a man without a conscience, and this is what’s wrong with America.

The bad news? It’s only going to get worse.

We already know the next generation of Americans is growing up without a proper moral compass. In its biennial survey of teenagers, the Josephson Institute of Ethics in 2010 once again established the alarming disconnect between the immoral and unethical behavior of our teens - which it describes as “entrenched” - and their positive self-esteem. More than 90 percent say they feel good about their moral and ethical selves despite habitual lying, cheating and stealing.

Can’t wait until they run for Congress.

To be fair, everyone makes mistakes. Actually, to be more accurate, everyone sins. Guilt and remorse are how a well-formed conscience tells us we’ve sinned, and repentance is how we recover and make amends.

But sin has consequences, and in Mr. Weiner’s case, those consequences must be more than therapy.

Can We See Obama's Emails Too?

2011-06-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, a left-wing website, supported by the New York Times and the Washington Post, using the Freedom of Information Act, gained access to the e-mails written by Sarah Palin while she was governor of Alaska. The Times and the Post also went so far as to ask their readers to help them examine the e-mails - looking for dirt. Have we ever seen the lengths to which these horrible people will go to try to destroy this woman?

Is it possible that we can gain access to Obama's e-mails? How about Bill Clintons? Never mind. It will never be tried. Even the most obnoxious right-wing group would not stoop so far down into the muck to do such a thing.

Sarah Palin email frenzy backfires on her media antagonists

By Toby Harnden June 11th, 2011 Telegraph (Excerpt)

"The trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.

One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment.

If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced. As a blogger at Powerline noted , the whole saga might come to be viewed as “an embarrassment for legacy media”.

Mrs Palin, who suddenly resigned as Alaska governor in July 2009, is no longer a public official. She holds no position in the Republican party. Despite the media hubbub that surrounds her every move, she is unlikely to be a candidate for the White House in 2012.

She is, however, viewed with a kind of horrified fascination by many in the media, who faithfully records everything she says and does while at the same time decrying her as ignorant and even evil.

Whether or not she runs for the White House – and the solid consensus among Republican leaders is that she won’t – the scramble over the Palin emails confirms her status as a pivotal figure in the race to challenge President Barack Obama next year.

It comes at a moment when the battle for the Republican nomination appears set to be transformed by the late entry of Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a social conservative and Palin ally who could almost immediately leap to the front of a currently lacklustre field.

Sources close to Mr Perry have confirmed that he is “highly likely” to announce a presidential run in the coming days. Intriguingly, they have also hinted at a something they believe would increase immeasurably Mr Perry’s chances of winning the White House – an endorsement from Mrs Palin.

On policy, Mrs Palin and Mr Perry, who succeeded George W Bush in 2000 and has since become the longest-serving governor in Texas history, are in almost perfect alignment. In addition, they are both beloved of the Tea Party, highly suspicious of Washington and physically attractive (Mr Perry is often likened to the Marlboro Man), charismatic figures.

Mrs Palin has repeatedly said that she believes Mr Obama can be defeated and that she will do everything to achieve that. With her popularity among independent voters very low, despite the intensity of her core support, throwing her weight behind a stronger candidate would be a better way of preserving her political capital and earning power than being one of the losing candidates in the Republican primaries.
The notion of Mrs Palin as White House kingmaker would have seemed wildly improbable if anyone had raised it before August 2008.

It was then that she was catapulted to international fame by Senator John McCain’s surprise decision to make her his vice-presidential running mate. Her reaction? “Can you flippinbelieveit?!”

This was a world, as the emails reveal, in which the then Alaska governor fretted about things like there being alcohol in her official residence, that might be a temptation to the teenage friends of her children.

In May 2007, she sought help from her staff in keeping the alcohol in the governor’s mansion away from young people, stating that it should be boxed up and “removed from the People’s House” – both for practical reasons and as a statement about her administration.

“Here’s my thinking: with so many kids and teens coming and going in that house, esp during this season of celebrations for young people – proms, graduations, etc, I want to send the msg that we can be – and ‘the People’s House’ needs to be – alcohol-free. There’s a lot of booze there – its too accessible and may be too tempting to any number of all those teens coming and going.”

In a February 2007 exchange, one adviser recommended that when she was in Washington she meet Pete Rouse, a Senate official who had lived in Alaska. “He’s now chief-of-staff for a guy named Barack Obama,” the aide wrote, adding that Mr Rouse “wants to help Alaska however he can”. Far from shrinking at the idea of conferring with a Democrat, Mrs Palin replied: “I’m game to meet him.”

The emails will finally confirm – in all but the darkest recesses of the world of Left-wing conspiracy theories – that Mrs Palin is, in fact, the mother of her youngest son Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome.

After relentless promotion by Andrew Sullivan , the British blogger who now works for Daily Beast/Newsweek, of the proposition that the mother was in fact Mrs Palin’s daughter Bristol, a teenager at the time, the subject had become part of mainstream debate.

The emails show Mrs Palin’s determination to protect Bristol but also her desire for a degree of privacy. “I wish I could shame people into ceasing such gossip about a teen, but I can’t figure out how to do that,” she wrote.

Communications from her children and husband make her family appear close and loving.

An email from Bristol, referring to her younger sister, said: “Hello Mother, Um, I’m sitting in library and I really thing you need to get Piper a cell phone!! Wouldn’t that be so adorable! She could text me while she was in class!! It’s a done deal right?! Perfect! Ok, I will talk to you later and I need some cash flow! Love ya!”

To an extent, the emails remind Americans of the person they saw take the state at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota nearly three years ago – refreshing, plain-speaking, open and uncomplicated." Telegraph

I have a confession to make. Andrew Sullivan may have been the first to spread the blood libel about Sarah's son, Trig, but Alan Colmes put this up on his website. I like the Bill O'Reilly program, but I turn it off whenever Colmes appears. I don't allow him into my house, even on TV.

I Once Campaigned for Romney, Never Again

2011-06-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

It is indeed ironic that people who live in Boston, the center of this country’s most advanced medical institutions, are increasingly finding that they have to go to New Hampshire to find a doctor. This situation, coupling shortages of doctors and medical facilities with greatly increased medical costs and is a system that is already failing, is the direct result of what people call “Romneycare”.

In 1994 I was Mitt Romney’s Campaign Coordinator for Bristol County in Massachusetts when he ran for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Ted Kennedy. I ended up disgusted with Romney. I was willing to work for him because he described himself as a conservative, but in the final weeks of the campaign he decided to get to the left of Kennedy. Obviously it didn’t do him any good.

Now we learn that Romney has decided to finesse the climate change issue, by declaring that “I believe the world’s getting warmer. I can’t prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer”. He has obviously not read the temperature readings since 1998. In the past he has also switched positions on abortion at least three times.

There is no way that I can support Romney in his campaign for the Republican nomination. My candidate is Sarah Palin, the only person who has been reviled for being a wholesome person. Until lately, I didn’t think Sarah could beat Obama, but now, considering the rest of the field and the necessity to explain why only a plan like the Ryan plan can save Medicare for our children, I believe she has the best chance. The thing I like best about Sarah is that I trust her instincts to do the right thing in the face of grey and complex issues.

Of course, if Romney wins the nomination I will support him, because, flawed as he is, Romney would still be a much better president than Obama.

My Friend Bob and the Boston Red Sox

2011-05-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

The year 2004 was momentous, full of great ups and terrible downs for me. Early in June I watched the Tampa Bay Lightning, a team I had started following when I moved to Florida, win their first Stanley Cup. A little later that month I lost my older daughter, a truly beautiful woman who succumbed to many years of alcohol addiction. In August there was another disaster when my Florida condo was severely damaged by Hurricane Charlie, which ravaged the state and single-handily changed the economics of Florida living, perhaps for all time.

Then in October, 2004, the Boston Red Sox came from three games down to win the American League pennant and the World Series, for the first time since 1918, and this really starts my little story.

In 1946 in Rhode Island, one of my best childhood friends, Bob, introduced me to baseball and to the Red Sox, who were in the World Series that year, but lost to the Cardinals. At that time, Ted Williams, the last .400 hitter, had just returned from military service as a Marine fighter-pilot in World War II to resume his role at the best hitter in major league baseball. (Ted would later, in the early 1950’s, take more time out of his career to become once again a Marine pilot, flying 39 combat missions during the Korean War.)

From the time Bob introduced me to baseball, the Red Sox and Ted Williams, we became inseparable companions who played baseball morning, noon and night, usually wearing out three sets of playmates every day. Eventually, as we went to different high schools and made our separate ways in life, we lost track of each other, and the Red Sox never won another World Series.

For more than 50 years our lives never crossed until the fall of 2004, when the Red Sox finally won another world championship. At the time I was living in my summer home in Rhode Island, and I decided that I had to find out if Bob was still around and where he was, so we could revel in the Red Sox win.

I took out my Rhode Island phonebook and looked up his last name, intending to call everyone with that name until I found someone who might know him. As luck would have it, the very first name I called was Bob’s older brother who gave me his phone number and e-mail address. I found out that Bob lived in a small town in North Carolina, and I immediately called him.

For six and one-half years now we have communicated by phone and e-mails and talked baseball talk and other things. We have tried to visit one another, but some crisis has always prevented it from happening.

Last week I discovered this video of Ted Williams, and I have placed it just below. This is for you, Bob:

If video doesn't play, go here.

Please Pat Down That Baby!

2011-05-28T14:09:00.000-07:00

Usually I'm on the side of those seeking to limit government actions and maximize individual freedoms, but in the case of the protection of airline passengers from Muslim terrorists, please pat down that baby! I have felt that way ever since I learned of that Iraqi couple who put explosives in their baby's diaper so they could blow him and themselves up in the midst of American soldiers. The people who want to kill us are crazy, and it takes mind boggling measures to stop them.

Please, you nuts in Texas and Utah, get out of the way and let the TSA do their job so I can feel some measure of safety when I fly. You are obviously ignorant of what has been going on in the world.

Texans Revolt Against TSA Tyranny

Steve Watson May 27, 2011 Prisonplanet.com

Utah looks likely to be the next state to follow the example set by Texas in attempting to make TSA grope downs a felony.

Rep. Carl Wimmer, R-Herriman has introduced a bill into the Utah House of Representatives that would ensure TSA agents would have to abide by the same Fourth Amendment limits that police do when performing searches on Americans.

“It is a work in progress,” Wimmer told the Utah Daily Herald. “What it would do right now is simply say TSA agents are not exempt from the requirement of reasonable suspicion or probable cause to pat down a citizen.”

Like the bill that was recently unanimously passed in the Texas House, Wimmer’s legislation would make it an offense to touch the private parts of the person on the receiving end of the pat-down.

As we reported yesterday, the man who was instrumental in working with the federal government to sabotage the Texas bill was Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a former CIA agent and establishment insider considered to be the wealthiest man in Texas politics.

The bill stalled in the Texas Senate, after the Department of Justice sent a letter threatening to impose a no fly zone over Texas and shut down Texas airports. The warning was nothing short of a federal blockade and an act of financial terrorism.

Rep. Wimmer, a long time champion of states rights, told the Utah Daily Herald that it is untrue that the federal government has supremacy over the state of Texas in the matter.

“The absolute overbearing audacity of the federal government in threatening Texas while Texas is trying to protect their citizens should really offend any red-blooded American,” Wimmer said, adding that the issue has been transformed from solely a Fourth Amendment concern to an assault on the Tenth Amendment and states rights.

As a former police officer, Wimmer is adamant that TSA agents should be held up to the same standards as law enforcement officers, and that law abiding citizens should not be subjected to personal searches without reason.

“It does not feel like America when you are going through a TSA checkpoint at the airport,” Wimmer said.

Wimmer’s bill will be considered and debated in the new year when the 2012 legislative session begins in Utah.

Lawmakers in other states, including New Hampshire and California, have already looked into banning TSA gropedowns.

A number of other lobby groups, state and local authorities around the country have also resolved to either block the TSA body scanners or kick the TSA out of airports altogether, including New Jersey, where Republican state Senator Mike Doherty has vowed to push for legislation that will ban both the scanners as well as invasive groping techniques.

Should several more states follow the same example set by Texas, the TSA and the Justice Department will have a major job on their hands threatening half the country with no fly zones and convincing Americans that it is the prudent course of action.