I THOUGHT HE SEEMED A LITTLE STRANGE, BUT ALL THIS?
Barack Obama - Narcissist or Merely Narcissistic?
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 8/13/2008
Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist. Granted, only a qualified mental health diagnostician can determine whether someone suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and this, following lengthy tests and personal interviews. But, in the absence of access to Barack Obama, one has to rely on his overt performance and on testimonies by his closest, nearest and dearest.
Narcissistic leaders are nefarious and their effects pernicious. They are subtle, refined, socially-adept, manipulative, possessed of thespian skills, and convincing. Both types equally lack empathy and are ruthless and relentless or driven.
Perhaps it is time to require each candidate to high office in the USA to submit to a rigorous physical and mental checkup with the results made public.
As non-uniformed combatants, all of the detainees at Guantanamo could have been summarily shot on the battlefield under the Laws of War.
Instead, we gave them comfy chairs, free lawyers, better food than is served in Afghani caves, prayer rugs, recreational activities and top-flight medical care -- including one terrorist who was released, whereupon he rejoined the jihad against America, after being fitted for an expensive artificial leg at Guantanamo, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.
Only three terrorists -- who could have been shot -- were waterboarded. This is not nearly as bad as "snowboarding," which is known to cause massive buttocks pain and results in approximately 10 deaths per year.
In this unspeakable brutality, a harmless caterpillar is placed in the terrorist's cell. Justice Department lawyers expressly denied the interrogators' request to trick the terrorist into believing the caterpillar was a "stinging insect."
Human rights groups have variously described being trapped in a cell with a live caterpillar as "brutal," "soul-wrenching" and, of course, "adorable."
If the terrorist manages to survive the non-stinging caterpillar maneuver -- the most fiendish method of torture ever devised by the human mind that didn't involve being forced to watch "The View" -- CIA interrogators had another sadistic trick up their sleeves.
I am not at liberty to divulge the details, except to mention the procedure's terror-inducing name: "the ladybug."
Sadly, the truth seems to fall on the deaf ears of the Liberals.
No matter how many people who have lived through the hell of Socialism speak up and warn the USA not to ‘go there’, people just refuse to listen to facts.
The elites drum up the ‘class-warfare’ beat and the unwashed masses boogie blindly to the tune while the government absquatulates with our tax dollars whilst borrowing and printing up ever more to ’spread’ where it sees fit.
There is no utopia in Socialism to be sure and it always fails and creates miserable people as history has proven time and time again.
It is disheartening to see how many people want to go down that slippery slope regardless of the eventual, ugly outcome.
One reason Obama and others before him can get away with the “equality of results” programs is that the poor and the lower middle class foolishly believe that “equality of results” will provide everyone with a solidly middle class lifestyle. And it will–for a few years.
After all the wealth has been sucked away from the upper middle class and modestly rich, and our lifetime savings are acquired by confiscatory taxes, the “equality of result” lifestyle will resemble that of our poor people today.
In 2012 the working population will have 40% working for the government, 40% working for private companies, and 20% on the dole mooching off everyone else with half of them working under the table.
Turning the US into a nanny-state country with a failed economy, that’s Obama’s promised change.
My colleague Adam Lerrick showed in these pages last year that the percentage of American adults who have no federal income-tax liability will rise to 49% from 40% under Mr. Obama's tax plan. Another 11% will pay less than 5% of their income in federal income taxes and less than $1,000 in total.
To put a modern twist on the old axiom, a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at 40 either has no head, or pays no taxes.
Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the "sharing economy." They are fighting a culture war of attrition with economic tools.
There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise -- the principle at the core of American culture.
Despite President Barack Obama's early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the "tea parties" that have sprung up around the country. In these grass-roots protests, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have joined together to make public their opposition to government deficits, unaccountable bureaucratic power, and a sense that the government is too willing to prop up those who engaged in corporate malfeasance and mortgage fraud.
Certainly the bondholders deserve to take a haircut like everybody else. But squeezing them in such a blatant fashion has other consequences. Who would be crazy enough to lend GM money in the future?
The Treasury also says it wants banks that do poorly in its "stress tests" to try to raise private capital before putting in more public money. The mauling of GM creditors tells investors not to invest in TARP banks because everything this Treasury touches turns to politics.
Monday's offer is so devoid of economic logic or fairness that it confirms the fears of those who said the original bailout would lead to a nationalized GM run for political ends. This fiasco will in part go down on George W. Bush's copybook, since he first decided GM was too big to fail.
HEY, YOU CAN SUPPORT BOTH SIDES, IT'S CALLED MAGIC.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in a book out next week, tells of congratulating freshman Sen. Obama on a phenomenal speech. Without a hint of conceit, Mr. Obama replied, "Harry, I have a gift."
He does. We know from tradition, though, that when the gods bestow magic on mortals, the gift can also imperil its possessor.
The first hint of potential peril in Mr. Obama's gift arrived last week with the confusion over where the president stood on the terrorist interrogation memos and prosecution of former Bush officials. Here, as 19 years ago, many on both sides of a contentious issue who heard him speak thought Mr. Obama agreed with them.
Yet something very different happened at this year’s “Miss USA” affair.
Mario Lavandeira, a homosexual activist pageant “judge” who goes by the pseudonym of “Perez Hilton,” asked Carrie Prejean, Miss California, a direct question about her views on same-sex “marriage.” She returned an equally direct and honest answer that was well thought out and expressed, but not “politically correct,” explaining that marriage is between one man and one woman.
In response, he vindictively scored her with a zero, thereby costing her the competition. Since that time, all of the hounds of liberal Hell have been loosed upon her.
The people of traditional America had better wake up to the sobering ramifications of this sorry episode. For unless such atrocious actions are confronted and rebuffed, even in so trivial a pursuit as a “beauty contest,” her plight will eventually become our own.
And then will come his heavy lifting. He has yet to raise taxes, regiment healthcare or provide amnesty for illegal immigrants. He hasn’t closed down the car companies he now runs and he has not yet forced a 50 percent hike in utility bills with his cap-and-trade legislation. These are all the goodies he has in store for us all.
Obama’s very activism these days arrogates to himself the blame for the success or failure of his policies. Their outcome will determine his outcome, and there is no way it will be positive.
Why?
• You can’t borrow as much as he will need to without raising interest rates that hurt the economy;
• The massive amount of spending will trigger runaway inflation once the economy starts to recover;
• His overhaul of the tax code (still in the planning phases) and his intervention in corporate management will create such business uncertainty that nobody will invest in anything until they see the lay of the land;
• His bank program is designed to help banks, but not to catalyze consumer lending. And his proposal for securitization of consumer loans won’t work and is just what got us into this situation.
So Mr. Obama should enjoy his poll numbers while he may.
Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we've become.
AFTER a mere 100 days, the "Obama Doctrine" for our foreign and security poli cies has emerged. And it's terrifying. The combination of dizzying naivete, dislike of our allies, disdain for our military, distrust of our intelligence services and distaste for our own country promises the worst foreign policy of our lifetimes. That includes President Jimmy Carter's abysmal record of failure. http://www.lucianne.com/
Even the European left got out of the nationalization business as a loser after the 1970s. But the Obama White House and Treasury are nationalizing GM and Chrysler, expanding government's role in the mortgage markets, and widening their ownership of the U.S. banking system. The deeper they dig in, the harder they will find it politically to exit.
And as economic policy, the mauling of GM bondholders, the banker-baiting on Capitol Hill, and the refusal to let even healthy banks escape the TARP won't revive animal spirits.
Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, and sooner or later the twain shall meet. For now, we are living in another era of unchecked liberal government. The reckoning will come when Americans discover how much it costs.
So why the furor over all of this after 9/11 when terrorists killed or maimed over 3,000 innocent American men, women and children in New York City? This was a scar of true evil carved into the American spirit. Our government acted accordingly to do what was necessary to stop future attacks on our people, especially when shopping malls, schools, arenas or airports could be possible targets of wanton terror affecting innocents across our nation.
This administration seems to want to destroy our economy by raising taxes on small businesses, forcing them to lay off employees; increasing taxes on large corporations, encouraging them to relocate to other countries that offer lower taxes. The current administration can also ruin our Republic by appointing leftist judges and Supreme Court Justices who will use foreign laws instead of our Constitution, also by aiding and abetting our enemies by feeding them our defense secrets. Finally, we must beware of our inexperienced leader, who has managed nothing in his lifetime, and who seems bent on making America the laughing stock of the world.
If you want to witness a clinic in "hate," watch the YouTube video of homosexual celebrity blogger Perez Hilton excoriating Miss California, Carrie Prejean, for courageously offering her opinion under loaded questioning that marriage should be between a man and a woman, a belief shared by a clear majority of people in her state.
This man proudly called Prejean vile names and might have single-handedly caused her to lose the Miss USA title. Now, that's an example of direct harm inflicted on one because of her beliefs.
It is often not opinionated heterosexuals doing the hating, harassing, thought-control intimidation and speech chilling these days, but militant homosexual activists.
Lovers of free speech and free exercise of religion should awaken to the relentless effort of radical homosexual activists to validate their lifestyle by demonizing, criminalizing and silencing those who disagree with them.
That war continues, so there is no reason to turn terrorists loose before it ends. They chose to make it that kind of war. We don't need to risk American lives to prove that we are nicer than they are.
The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that law is not some "brooding omnipresence in the sky." It is a set of explicit rules by which human beings structure their lives and their relationships with one another.
Those who choose to live outside those laws, whether terrorists or pirates, can be-- and have been-- shot on sight. Squeamishness is neither law nor morality. And moral exhibitionism is beneath contempt, when it sacrifices the safety of those who live within the law for the sake of self-satisfied preening, whether in editorial offices or in the White House.
In releasing the memos, the administration proved it was playing politics instead of promoting our values or national security, because it deliberately redacted information in those memos detailing the success of the interrogations, information that would justify the administration's actions but the release of which would not compromise our national security.
So the administration released information that will undermine our trust with foreign intelligence services, compromise our intelligence capacities in the future, and enable terrorists to train and prepare for us, but it blacked out portions solely because they would place Bush officials in a more favorable light.
After Daniel Ortega finished spitting in our face, accusing us of inhumanity toward Fidel Castro's Cuba, Obama was asked his thoughts.
"I thought it was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought."
Hillary Clinton was asked to comment: "I thought the cultural performance was fascinating," she cooed.
Pressed again on Ortega's vitriol, Hillary replied: "To have those first-class Caribbean entertainers all on one stage and to see how much was done in such a small amount of space. I was overwhelmed."
Thus the nation that won the Cold War, contained the cancer of Castroism in Cuba, liberated Grenada, blocked communist takeovers of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, and poured scores of billions in aid into this region was left undefended by its own leaders at the Summit of the Americas.
When during the Panama Canal debate Ronald Reagan declared: "We bought it. We paid for it. It's ours. And we're gonna keep it," and crowds came roaring to their feet, the elites could not comprehend it, because they do not understand what Pascal meant when he said, "The heart has reasons that the mind knows not."
Rooted people love the things of the heart: God, country, family and faith. The weapons of the mind have been given to us, they believe, to defend the things of the heart.
Knowledge follows love; it does not precede it.
Most Americans have grown to love America long before they read the Constitution, or the Federalist Papers. There are heroes in Arlington who never learned to read.
A true nation is an extended family. If fathers or sons do not defend it, it is their conduct that is indefensible.
Obama may be popular today, but he will lose the country and his presidency if he lets the perception take hold that he, the personification of American sovereignty, does not react as a normal patriot.
So it’s no surprise that the world is delighted with our new president. Rather than projecting strength and a willingness to defend and promote America’s interests, he is eager to validate the criticisms of states that are our rivals or enemies.
Where liberals see a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to global affairs, one that dismisses the crude moral tone of George Bush, these states see a weakness to be exploited in order to achieve their own national interests, which necessarily must often conflict with ours.
Weakening America’s security is too large a price to pay for transient popularity.
In other words, the nations of the world will continue to pursue their interests, many of which run counter to ours. Their behavior is not going to be changed by cosmetic public relations gestures or by legitimizing autocratic regimes by cozying up with dictators.
Worse yet, the groveling apologies that have issued from the “leader of the free world” will not give “greater moral force and clarity,” as the President claimed, to our criticisms of human-rights violations or support for terror and revolution.
On the contrary, donning the hair shirt of American guilt will only damage our prestige and tell the world that we are weak, that despite our power and wealth we can be had.
France’s President Sarkozy said as much in his off-the-record critique of Obama’s performance when he called Obama “Weak, inexperienced, and badly briefed.”
FREE SPEECH FOR AL GORE BUT DISSENTERS NEED NOT APPLY.
“The Democrats have a lot to learn about the right of free speech under the US Constitution.
Congress Henry Waxman's (D-CA) refusal to expose Al Gore's sci-fi comedy-horror testimony to proper, independent scrutiny by the House minority reeks of naked fear,” Monckton said from the airport Thursday evening.
“Waxman knows there has been no 'global warming' for at least a decade. Waxman knows there has been seven and a half years' global cooling. Waxman knows that, in the words of the UK High Court judge who condemned Gore's mawkish movie as materially, seriously, serially inaccurate, 'the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view,'” Monckton explained.
FEAR AND LOATHING AS SOCIALISM SPREADS OVER THE U.S.A..
Private Property And The Right Of Disposition
MSNBC reports:
"The Treasury Department is preparing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing for Chrysler that could come as soon as next week."
Look to the language. Think about that.
Things are not to the point where it is reserved for government to liquidate American industrial concerns, but every American should be transfixed with fear and loathing at the idea that government ever gets to call these kinds of shots.
hOW TO BUILD A SUBSERVIANT THIRD-WORLD CLASS AMERICA.
Global climate change has morphed out of global warming. The shift was required to allow the theory to fit the reality of changeable weather.
There is a body of evidence to support the contention of cyclic weather patterns of global heating and cooling. There are supporters of the theory that man's impact on the weather is not as significant as we are sometimes told it is.
There is data that indicates we are currently in a cooling period after a decade or two of heating. There is reasonable basis for a fair and equitable debate.
Unless, of course, you are an Academy Award winning Nobel laureate and former Vice-President of the US. Then you can testify before the friendly Congress despite absolutely no credentials in the field of climatology without fear of challenge:
Because We Said So
That's right. A recognized expert has been requested by the minority party in our government to come and engage in challenging dialogue. He might be right or he might be wrong, but the same can be said of the VP. The difference is that this guy is credentialed in the field.
Why can't the public see the arguments pro and con, expressed in the hallowed halls of government? Why can't we weigh the evidence ourselves after seeing a point-by-point refutation of the argument? What are they afraid of?
Could it be truth? Could it be derailing of their agenda to build a subservient Third-World class America?
Think the issue through. Do you see McCulloch vs Maryland writ very much larger?
A government credit card in your wallet means non-profit competition for the very banks they ostensibly are trying to rescue. It means the death of large entities like AmEx, MasterCard and VISA who will simply be undercut until they are gone.
But, look beyond the immediate disaster to the real future.
If your government is your credit card company they now hold your very life in their hands. They know who you are, where you are, what you earn, how much you are worth, who you work for, and what you buy--they've got the book on you in greater detail than they ever had. The last vestige of privacy and individualism is gone.
Now they control credit approval for every purchase you make. Want to buy a new pickup or SUV? Sorry, disapproved. Pick the hybrid Prius or Volt, you'll slide right through. Want a gun? Ooops, my bad. They were already outlawed. But, you get the idea.
Then keep in mind that "spread the wealth" promise. Do you like the progressive income tax concept? Apply it to credit card rates. How about a monthly "fairness" charge against your card to help the homeless, support a welfare mom, or fight for the environment? And for the low/no income crowd, how about a monthly fill-up for your credit card courtesy of Uncle Sam?
But, Slate thinks it's a reasonable idea. They point out the Europeans just love it. Yeah, that explains it so well.
THE ROAD TO UNTOPIA WILL BE A BIT BUMPY AS WE MOVE ALONG.
It was the second time in a week that blackouts had hit the Paris region as striking gas and electricity workers adopted radical tactics to support their call for a 10 per cent pay rise and an end to outsourcing of jobs.
They are denounced as industrial saboteurs by the Government and face disciplinary action and prosecution, but say they are determined to press ahead with what they portray as a struggle against free-market forces."
Of oourse the Health Care program will be rushed through because it will be socialized medicine similar to Hillarycare.
One major reason her plan was rejected by the American people was because the Elderly will be denied life -saving care and will be offered only pallitive care (read hospice care)
This rationing of health care will save money by eliminating Seniors and at the same time allow the government to give health care and Social Security to illegal immigrants and their families.
Again The Republicans will vote no, but the majority will win.
Prisoner abuse has been banned. Mr. Obama himself, as he notes in the quote above, banned it. It's over.
The press, with great difficulty, and if arguably belatedly, did and is doing its job: It uncovered and revealed the abuse. The historians are descending, as they should.
Hearings, commissions or prosecutors would suck all the oxygen out of the room and come to obsess the capital, taking focus off two actual, immediate and pressing emergencies, the economy and the age of terror.
Hearings, especially, would likely tear up the country as we descended into opposing camps. They would damage or burden America's intelligence services, and likely result in the abuse of those who acted from high motives, having been advised their actions were legal.
As for the memo writers, some of whose constitutional theories were apparently tilted to the extreme in favor of the executive, it is hard to see how it would help future administrations, or this one, to have such advice, however incorrectly formulated, criminalized.
SENATOR RUMDUMB SHOULD BE INSTITUTIONALIZED AS INCOMPETENT TO CARE FOR SELF OR OTHERS.
What's up with Arizona politicians?
Arizona Sen. John McCain made the dubious claim Friday that Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States through Canada -- just days after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, said the same thing.
Napolitano retracted her claim on Thursday after Canadian officials chided her for the remark, calling it an unfortunate misconception. Napolitano admitted Thursday that she made a mistake -- since the 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijackers entered the U.S. from overseas.
But when asked about the gaffe on FOX News Friday, McCain said: "Well, some of the 9/11 hijackers did come through Canada, as you know."
This drew an instant retort from the Canadian embassy, which re-issued Canadian Ambassador Michael Wilson's public comments from Tuesday, in which he said:
"Unfortunately, misconceptions arise on something as fundamental as where the 9/11 terrorists came from. As the 9/11 Commission reported in July 2004, all of the 9/11 terrorists arrived in the U.S. from outside North America.
They flew to major U.S. airports. They entered the U.S. with documents issued to them by the U.S. government. No 9/11 terrorists came from Canada."
Whatever Muse's birth year, his photos in New York show a boy: a boy agog at the towering metropolis to which his crimes against the Maersk Alabama brought him; a boy terrified by the power of that hulking civilization to smash him.
Life behind bars? The thick texts of Blackstone should not be the walls of a compactor crushing the promise of a redeemable young life.
Though serious, Muse's misdeeds hurt Americans less than those of some other Manhattan residents rewarded with bonus dollars for their form of freebooting.
ANYONE KNOW THE NUMBER OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT?
Prisoner abuse has been banned. Mr. Obama himself, as he notes in the quote above, banned it. It's over.
The press, with great difficulty, and if arguably belatedly, did and is doing its job: It uncovered and revealed the abuse. The historians are descending, as they should.
Hearings, commissions or prosecutors would suck all the oxygen out of the room and come to obsess the capital, taking focus off two actual, immediate and pressing emergencies, the economy and the age of terror.
Hearings, especially, would likely tear up the country as we descended into opposing camps. They would damage or burden America's intelligence services, and likely result in the abuse of those who acted from high motives, having been advised their actions were legal.
As for the memo writers, some of whose constitutional theories were apparently tilted to the extreme in favor of the executive, it is hard to see how it would help future administrations, or this one, to have such advice, however incorrectly formulated, criminalized.
An understanding of animal spirits -- the human psychology and culture at the heart of economic activity -- confirms the need for restoring the role of regulators as guiding hands in a healthy, productive free-enterprise system.
History -- including recent history -- shows that without regulation, animal spirits will drive economic activity to extremes.
This "Dirty Harry" theory of governance -- Do you feel lucky? -- is as cynical as it is destructive.
And contra Mr. Markey, if cap and tax is killed this year, it will be done in by Democrats, many of whom are starting to realize the economic harm it would inflict.
In March, the Senate voted 89 to 8 on a resolution vowing to pass a climate bill only if "such legislation does not increase electricity or gasoline prices."
That's called democracy, but for the Obama Administration such debate is an inconvenient truth.
If they can't get Congress to pass their agenda, they'll use EPA and the courts to impose it. How lucky do you feel?
The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, the U.N.'s top anti-torture envoy said Friday.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations. He had previously absolved CIA officers from prosecution.
HOW TO FIX WHAT IS BROKEN AND LEAVE ALONE WHAT ISN'T.
What sort of language would restore a healthy balance between federal and state power while protecting the liberties of the people?
One simple proposal would be to repeal the 16th Amendment enacted in 1913 that authorized a federal income tax. This single change would strike at the heart of unlimited federal power and end the costly and intrusive tax code.
Congress could then replace the income tax with a "uniform" national sales or "excise" tax (as stated in Article I, section 8) that would be paid by everyone residing in the country as they consumed, and would automatically render savings and capital appreciation free of tax.
There is precedent for repealing an amendment. In 1933, the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment that had empowered Congress to prohibit the sale of alcohol.
The CIA will have its reputation smeared, and its agents second-guessing themselves. And if there is another terror attack against Americans, Mr. Obama will have set himself up for the argument that his campaign against the Bush policies is partly to blame.
Above all, the exercise will only embitter Republicans, including the moderates and national-security hawks Mr. Obama may need in the next four years.
As patriotic officials who acted in good faith are indicted, smeared, impeached from judgeships or stripped of their academic tenure, the partisan anger and backlash will grow.
And speaking of which, when will the GOP Members of Congress begin to denounce this partisan scapegoating?
Senior Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Richard Lugar, John McCain, Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts and Arlen Specter have hardly been profiles in courage.
Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, due in part to his personal charm and his seeming goodwill. By indulging his party's desire to criminalize policy advice, he has unleashed furies that will haunt his Presidency.
But to avoid the issue of a potential for government control of the banks, everybody agreed that the stock the feds would take back in return for their money would be preferred stock, not common stock.
“Preferred” means that these stockholders get the first crack at dividends, but only common stockholders can actually vote on company management or policy.
Now, by changing this fundamental element of the TARP plan, Obama will give Washington a voting majority among the common stockholders of these banks and other financial institutions.
The almost 500 companies receiving TARP money will be, in effect, run by Washington.
And whoever controls the banks controls the credit and, therefore, the economy. That’s called socialism.
Obama’s leap to socialism
By Dick Morris
Posted: 04/21/09 05:21 PM [ET]
President Obama showed his hand this week when The New York Times wrote that he is considering converting the stock the government owns in our country’s banks from preferred stock, which it now holds, to common stock.
This seemingly insignificant change is momentous. It means that the federal government will control all of the major banks and financial institutions in the nation. It means socialism.
The Times dutifully dressed up the Obama plan as a way to avoid asking Congress for more money for failing banks. But the implications of the proposal are obvious to anyone who cares to look.
Some Americans accept and have respect for the Tenth Amendment, which reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Other Americans, the majority I fear, say to hell with the Tenth Amendment limits on the federal government.
Which is a more peaceful solution: one group of Americans seeking to impose their vision on others or simply parting company?
Since there are state and local police forces all across the country, an FBI to investigate federal crimes and a Department of Justice to prosecute those who commit them, as well as a Defense Department with military forces, just what role would a federal police force play?
Maybe it was just one of those bright ideas that gets floated during an election campaign. Yet there was no grassroots demand for any such federal police nor any media clamor for it, so there was not even any political reason to suggest such a thing.
What would be different about a new federal police force, as compared to existing law enforcement and military forces? It would be a creation of the Obama administration, run by people appointed from top to bottom by that administration -- and without the conflicting loyalties of those steeped in existing military traditions and law enforcement traditions.
In short, a federal police force could become President Obama's personal domestic political army, his own storm troopers.
Perhaps there will never be such a federal police force. But the targeting of individuals and groups who believe in some of the fundamental values on which this country was founded, and people who have demonstrated their patriotism by volunteering for military service, suggests that this potential for political abuse is worth watching, as Obama tries to remake America to fit his vision.
NOT EXACTLY WHAT THE FREE RIDERS WANT TO HEAR DOC.
Medical care is what doctors can do for you. Health care includes what you do for yourself -- such as diet, exercise and lifestyle.
If a doctor arrives on the scene to find you wiped out by a drug overdose or shot through the heart by some of your rougher companions, there may not be much that he can do except sign the death certificate.
Even for things that take longer to do you in -- obesity, alcohol, cholesterol, tobacco -- doctors can tell you what to do or not do, but whether you follow their advice or not is what determines the outcome.
Americans tend to be more obese, consume more drugs and have more homicides. None of that is going to change with "universal health care" because it isn't health care. It is medical care.
It is axiomatic that ideas have consequences, a theme being played out by the Obama administration's turning a blind eye to the magnitude of terrorist evil and seeing a rough moral equivalence between beheadings by terrorists and aggressive American interrogation techniques to extract lifesaving information from terrorists.
Commentators who believe Obama only released the "torture memos" to appease his bloodthirsty, Bush-hating, leftist base, which would be bad enough, are missing the point that Obama shares his base's beliefs.
Obama is commander in chief, and his guiding foreign policy doctrine is "peace through weakness."
PROOF OF FISCAL SANITY IS HARD TO COME BY IN WASHINGTON DC.
Here's the problem. The heart of Obama's health-care reform is universality. Covering more people costs more money. That is why Obama's budget sets aside an extra $634 billion in health-care spending, a down payment on an estimated additional spending of $1 trillion.
How does the administration curtail the Medicare and Medicaid entitlement by adding yet another (now universal) health-care entitlement that its own estimate acknowledges increases costs by about $1 trillion?
Which is why in his March 24 news conference, Obama could not explain how --when the near-term stimulative spending is over and his ambitious domestic priorities kick in, promising sustained prosperity and deficit reduction -- the deficits at the end of the coming decade are rising, not falling.
The Congressional Budget Office has deficits increasing in the last seven years of the decade from an already unsustainable $672 billion annually to $1.2 trillion by 2019.
This is the sand on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.
California’s Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has said as much: “EPA, through its scientists, has given us a warning that global warming pollution is a clear, present, and future danger to America’s families.
If Congress does not act to pass legislation, then I will call on the EPA to take all steps authorized by law to protect our families.”
Translation: Either you vote our way or we’ll render voting meaningless.
Other Democrats are delighted by the EPA decision because it allows them to have their preferred policy — carbon regulation — without actually having to vote for it.
Either way, it doesn’t sound like these folks take their oaths of office very seriously.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court — the least democratic branch of our formal government — decided in Massachusetts v. EPA that the agency could regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
With this judicial green-light, the EPA has launched its power grab over all that burns, breathes, burps, flies, drives, and passes gas.
Yes, the head of the EPA reports to the president, which gives some patina of democratic accountability. Except the EPA is supposed to be politically autonomous, doing what it thinks best according to what President Obama calls “sound science.”
So the government bureaucracy is on its way to strong-arming the economy in ways Congress never imagined when it passed the Clean Air Act in 1970.
Or the president has suddenly gained sweeping new powers over American life, in ways never imagined by Congress or the founders, and despite the fact that these new powers were never put before the voters.
COMING SOON TO A PAYCHECK NEAR AND DEAR TO YOUR HEART.
The government will increase its top rate of income tax to a higher than expected 50 percent from next year, Chancellor Alistair Darling said on Wednesday as he delivered the government's annual budget.
The tax band had originally been due to rise to 45 percent from 40 percent in April 2011 as Britain seeks to claw back lost tax revenue caused by a deep recession.
The 50-percent rate will apply to any income above 150,000 pounds.
"In November, I announced a new rate of income tax of 45 percent on incomes above 150,000 pounds -- the top one percent of taxpayers," Darling said in his budget speech.
"In order to help pay for additional support for people now, I have decided that the new rate will be 50 percent and will come in from next April -- a year earlier."
WILL SUCH DISCOURSE BE PERMITTED IN THE NEW AMERICA?
All the political initiative now is with the forces of Amsoc. Where the so-called conservatives have fought generations of piece-meal rear-guard action against the integral resolution of socialism to corrode its worst enemy -- the practical and living ideal of freedom: America -- out of existence, and as they have done so as effects of disintegrated philosophy, the socialists are assuming the commanding heights in full political battle gear.
It is important to understand that this can only and inevitably mean physical battle gear, right in front of your eyes, right here in America.
The spirit of this place that was not born of the slave's obesience will require this government to bare its fangs. I still believe that.
The ways in which and the singular souls from Americans select their values are not yet so beaten to any alien molds so well that they will peaceably stand for the conformations that this government will eventually require and demand -- not "ask".
An administration that seems to have a hard time finding people to work for it who are not some sort of tax cheat or scofflaw, which also redoubles efforts for the culture of death while labeling opponents of abortion “extremists,” which is determined to interfere in markets, condemn business leaders, fund extortionate community groups that specialize in voter fraud, and compromise national security (at least according to the just retired head of the CIA), well, that is an administration at war with at least half of America, and probably closer to three-quarters of it.
And I’m not using “war” as a metaphor. These matters are life and death matters.
We have a president experienced in ideology and absolutely nothing else. We have a media that ignored and continues to ignore everything about the president but his cult of personality, of which the media itself fills the box seats.
I honestly don’t see how the country can survive where these people — Obama, Pelosi, Geithner, Emanuel, Reid, Frank, Dodd, Napolitano, Holder, Soros — are taking it. They will drive the United States into bankruptcy, violence, and civil disaster.
None of this began overnight, but these people are, and I want to emphasize this, vanguardists.
They are not just effects, no more than Lenin was just an effect of Czarism.
A VERY SMART GUY SEEMS NOT TOO HAPPY ABOUT OUR FEARLESS LEADER. PAY HIM A VISIT.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Fort Bergen-Belsen
It is easy to be paranoid these days. One need only watch the daily show in DC and see the creation of the totalitarian future of America. Money is dispensed without regard for the future debt burden to those who support the administration. Pork has become earmarks which have morphed into infrastructure development which is actually vote buying.
Major industries are being nationalized. Resisting companies are being mandated to become subservient through arm-twisting, jaw-boning and outright coercion. When the resistance becomes too great, the CEOs are summarily removed and Boards of Directors are disolved or simply over-ruled.
The future of firearms ownership in the nation seems in jeopardy and a virtual gun-buying panic has developed. Non-sporting guns are in short supply and they are exactly the items that the Second Amendment was written to protect. Ammo for defensive handguns and tactical rifles has simply disappeared from inventories.
People who are successful anticipate being stripped of their property in a vast redistribution effort while those who have insured their healthcare look to a future of reduced benefits and clinical indifference modeled on the third world. Schools are on the verge of becoming indoctrination centers and the military is downsized to depend upon 1980's technology available for 1920 sized forces.
Top it off with impending environmental restrictions which are going to disable our power plants, shut down our industries, stifle our economy and blow inflation out the roof as shortages become rampant. We'll be green but hungry and poor. But at least we will have saved the planet.
In his appearance before employees of the CIA Monday -- part inspirational, part pep rally -- Mr. Obama held forth on the need to improve our image in the world, and on how in adhering to this great nation's principles of justice and right we could only be made safer.
He was here to assure the employees of the CIA of his support, to explain, again, the release of those memos. And to describe, as he did, with some eloquence, how great and exceptional a democracy we were.
That no such estimation of the United States managed to infiltrate the content or tone of the president's remarks during his European tour -- nary a hint -- we know, and it is not surprising.
He had gone to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them -- arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday proposed a $100 billion U.S. loan to the International Monetary Fund to boost the IMF's resources and urged a bigger stake in the IMF for emerging powers.
April 19, 2009 - by Victor Davis Hanson Page 1 of 2
One wonders whether President Obama, for all the soaring rhetoric, grasps why certain nations really do hate us.
Does he think a Grozny, Darfur, Rwanda, Serbia, or Tibet happen in reaction to US global sinful conduct?
Does he appreciate why hot spots like Cyprus, Taiwan, or Georgia, do not boil over—or under what conditions they might?
Does he really believe that in the pre-Bush era we all got along (cf. his al Arabiya interview); then Bush’s strutting, unilateralism, and preemption, presto, caused anti-Americanism?
A good article, but with one major fallacy. VDH is discussing Obama as if he were a sane, rational person, instead of an arrogant megalomaniac who, having power does not care what anyone thinks of his words or actions.
Pre-election he told America that he blamed America for everything that is wrong in the world. He told America that he was going to change it into a social welfare state, e.g., the greater good, distribution of wealth, social responsibility, unselfishness, etc. All concepts that simply mean…I will take away your freedom of choice…I will take away your freedom….I will get you to cooperate with my agenda and not your own, and if you cannot be persuaded, then I will force you.
Americans who were too busy working to make a living to pay attention were dumbed down by the media and the academics into a complete misunderstanding of the terms “the greater good”, “distribution of wealth”, “social responsibility”, “equality” and “unselfishness”.
These terms, while sounding virtuous and altruistic, are in fact nothing more than a means of gaining control of people, as every totalitarian state has done in the past.
Obama is no different than a Bernard Madoff, a con man who has convinced far too many gullible and greedy people that they can gain prosperity by sacrificing their prosperity, and it is the prosperity that is earned that always helps far more people than any “prosperity” handed out.
His sloppy and distainful “diplomatic” moves thusfar show clearly that he does not care about other countries, he does not care about Americans. When journalists write that he should consider one thing or another, they are wasting their words, because he has the power, is consolidating it more every day, and does not give a damn about what any of us think.
Brief definitions:
Greater good: The good of those in control.
Wealth distribution: stealing earned money to give to those whom the state deems “entitled”.
Social responsibility: A completely meaningless term. No one can be responsible for everyone else.
Equality: A non-existent concept, except for equal treatment under the Rule of Law. No two humans are equal.
“Unselfishness”: Giving up your self interests to help other people by sacrificing the resources you need to help them to a controlling state.
Granted these are not book definitions, but they explain why falling for Obama’s claptrap is leading us to hell.
His overwhelming faith in the UN is an illustration of this. He sees the UN as the U.s. Congress writ large, and thinks that as long as “the right people” (i.e., people who think like him) are in the majority, it will always do the “right thing”, and do it better, nicer, and more respectfully of “other cultures” than us provincial, trigger-happy Yanks.
He fails to consider the fact that most of the “nations” in the General Assembly, and about half the members of the Security Council, are little more than thugocracies run by self-absorbed plutocrats, grasping autocrats, and/or barely-literate borderline psychotics with AK-47s and “Death To (Your Name Here)” T-shirts. (He equates the likes of Hugo Chavez’ and Danny Ortega with serious “statesmen”. No more need be said.)
Holy cow pie! You nailed it, Sir Hanson! I wanted to copy-paste a reply but, dayummmmmm…your whole post was so on target I can’t even pick one paragraph or even sentence because it’s ALL good.
No doubt about it, our Country is hurting and is in for a whole great deal of future hurtin’. My heart breaks for our Country being raped like a victim of date rape drugs and suddenly, fuzzily wakes up and says, “What happened to me?”.
Where do we go from here? I’m scared. Nix that. I’m TERRIFIED. WTF has gone wrong with our USA?
I’m up for a FIGHT. I DO NOT WANT THIS FOR MY CHILDREN AND THEIR CHILDREN.
Why are so many people ‘numb’ regarding 0bama’s B.S. policies? What is driving them? Free lunch?
YOU BETTER NOT DISAGREE WITH THE MAGIC MULATTO OR YOU'RE A RACIST.
"We may have just seen the whole movement" at these protests, says Mr. Kimball. "I don't see it as a groundswell, but a manifestation by those people who form the core of ... the extreme right reacting both to the condition of our time and President Obama – he's black and he's liberal."
"The role of the protester has not been to fix things, but to complain about what's going on, and that's where these tea party protests are different from the average protest," says J.M. Kata, a Tea Party attendee in South Bend, Ind.
"We want these problems to be fixed, and we know how to fix them: be responsible in the way you levy taxes and be responsible in how you mortgage our children's futures.
Those aren't the cries of a lunatic or the criminal insane, those are common-sense everyday values held by Americans in this country."
The Times editorial about climate change is an excellent example of editorial elitism and arrogance.
If you are middle-aged or beyond, get set for derision if you question the editor’s opinion on global warming and write about it.
I am one of those far beyond middle age, and I read the newspaper. Consequently, according to the Times, I am both smart enough to realize the dire consequences of global warming, but too old to care about it’s effect on the future.
Then I am told that since I haven’t noticed the climate change in my short time on the planet, I can’t visualize the future effect of such change.
Next we are told that modeling done by some unidentified university scientists predicts apocalyptic environmental and economic disasters from global warming, unless we limit our greenhouse gas emissions.
Modeling gives you whatever prediction you want by selecting the data you put into your model. The expression for this is, garbage in, garbage out.”
One thing I do know is editorial garbage when I see it and read it. I have been on the planet long enough to recognize it.
The greatest danger to our children and grandchildren are groundless and insulting assumptions made in editorials like the recent Times piece on global warming.
They make take such assumptions as fact, not yet being middle-aged, when they are able to recognize the difference between fact and opinion.
The even greater danger to all of us is the California Legislature making new and additional rules to curb greenhouse emissions, as if they knew what there doing.
I THOUGHT I WAS A U.S. CITIZEN BUT NOW I'M CONFUSED.
As global citizens, we must urge Salazar to do what is right, and take the first steps in repairing the environmental damage of the Bush administration by immediately rescinding these Endangered Species Act regulations by May 9.
WE LOVE YA BROTHER. NOW SEND US A BUNCH OF FREE STUFF.
Concerning Cuba, President Obama has just significantly eased restrictions on travel and financial transfers from the United States, while permitting telecommunications companies to pursue contracts in that country.
In rapid response, President Castro has declared that Cuba is willing to negotiate with the U.S. without preconditions or restrictions on the agenda.
Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, had introduced the resolution to adopt the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776. He was prophetic in his concluding remarks: "Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law.
"The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repost.
"If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American Legislatures of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens."
Our forefather’s could have said, “Hey, I’ve got crops to plant, I don’t have time to start a revolution”, and we would still be living under the British Crown. This is important, excuses are just not going to cut it today.
Don’t stress about the GOP’s attempts to co-opt these events. The VAST majority that are going are completely disgusted with them as a party anyway, and maybe some of their members will wake up and get the idea.
The tea party in my area has already informed the GOP and the DNC not to show up as a group to espouse any of their party agenda. They will be asked to leave if they do.
Reply 31 - Posted by: Paul Revere, 4/17/2009 9:46:14 AM (No. 5444406)
I think a third party movement would only ensure the dominance of liberals for years to come, if not decades.
We need to fix the Republican party, clear out the RINOS and stop acting like we're embarrassed about our positions. What we really need to do is effectively communicate what conservatism means.
I was taken in by the term 'compassionate conservatism', because I thought it meant clarifying what conservatism was. People need to realize that conservatism is compassionate by nature.
Conservatives don't believe in giveaways, bloated welfare programs and bailouts, yet we are extremely generous in our charitable endeavors.
We know that those who struggle learn and grow in the process, while those who are spared occasional hardships tend to become soft, selfish and lazy.
Do we need to be ashamed because we want to spare people from this scourge?
We need to unite, fire the RINOS, and find a voice like Ronald Reagan's who is unashamed of what it means to be a truly compassionate, God-loving conservative.
My wife and I were first time protestors at the tea Party in St. louis which drew 8-10,000 of the most well behaved radical extremists I have ever seen.
I too long for the day for leaders like Ronald Reagan, but we cannot wait on them. Too much is at stake and our country is under attack from within.
It is the DUTY of each of us to no longer be silent.
In the past I have been restrained/polite when the conversation turned political somehow hoping or expecting common sense to prevail. We may never convince a die hard liberal the error of their ways, but by GOD those on the fence or those who are misinformed are going to hear the truth.
It's almost as if Republicans were daring the kind of people who attended this week's events to go the dead-end route of starting their own third political party.
The tea party movement proves that even in the left-leaning Northeast, a huge natural constituency exists for these bread-and-butter American issues — lower taxes, less government, a strong military that's allowed to win, tough measures to end illegal immigration, term limits and family values.
It's all there, waiting to be tapped into — if only a few smart politicians would grasp the opportunity.
The crowds responded with thunderous applause to the various local activists' rallying cries, ranging from "How about those Navy Seals!" referring to the recent rescue of Americans from Somali pirates, to attacks on Hollywood for its role in moving America away from traditional Judeo-Christian values.
The audience roared when resentment was expressed toward illegal aliens who eat away the social welfare resources funded by taxpayers. When unemployed information technology manager Troy Johnson took the podium, he elicited an ovation with the quip:
"Just to prove how radical I am, I believe we should all be speaking English!"
IGNORANT PEOPLE WITH A "RIGHT" TO VOTE IS A STUPID PROPOSITION..
What we have very seldom seen or heard in such parading of statistics are other statistics— which are readily available— showing that (1) whites are turned down for mortgage loans more often than Asian Americans, (2) whites resort to subprime loans more often than Asian Americans, (3) whites have been laid off more in a downturn than Asian Americans, and (3) the children of white mothers have higher infant mortality rates than the children of mothers of Filipino or Mexican ancestry, even though these mothers receive less prenatal care than white mothers.
In other words, numbers do not "speak for themselves." Politicians, the media and others speak for them— very loudly, very cleverly and often very wrongly.
HEY, WHY NOT JUST BUY MORE PRINTING PRESSES AND LET THE BANKS PRINT THE MONEY THEY WANT?
And then there's Congress, which is suddenly looking at billions more in red ink than expected.
In 2007 it estimated a 15-month extension of the credit would cost taxpayers $333 million. It has since revised those numbers to take into account black liquor and is now figuring a one-year cost of more than $3 billion.
Wall Street analysts are talking $6 billion.
Senate Finance Committee bosses Max Baucus and Charles Grassley are reportedly aware of the issue, none too happy, and they are working to bar the paper industry from receiving the credit.
But this, in turn, has tossed up uncomfortable questions.
The paper industry argues that if the government is going to be in the business of rewarding good behavior, it ought to do it equally. Is green policy only to be aimed at dirty or economically unviable actors?
Is black liquor any less useful than ethanol or biodiesel, and if so why? If not, shouldn't Washington encourage its use? Isn't every green subsidy in fact the basis for a trade dispute?
These are questions Congress has no interest in confronting, since it would expose the muddle that is its entire green-energy program.
Bottom line: None of the current plans, government or private, provide my patients with the care they need. And the care that is provided is increasingly expensive and requires a big battle for approvals.
Of course, we're promised by the Obama administration that universal health insurance will avoid all these problems. But how is that possible when you consider that the medical turnstiles will be the same as they are now, only they will be clogged with more and more patients?
The doctors that remain in this expanded system will be even more overwhelmed than we are now.
I wouldn't want to be a patient when that happens.
And then there's Congress, which is suddenly looking at billions more in red ink than expected.
In 2007 it estimated a 15-month extension of the credit would cost taxpayers $333 million. It has since revised those numbers to take into account black liquor and is now figuring a one-year cost of more than $3 billion.
Wall Street analysts are talking $6 billion.
Senate Finance Committee bosses Max Baucus and Charles Grassley are reportedly aware of the issue, none too happy, and they are working to bar the paper industry from receiving the credit.
But this, in turn, has tossed up uncomfortable questions.
The paper industry argues that if the government is going to be in the business of rewarding good behavior, it ought to do it equally. Is green policy only to be aimed at dirty or economically unviable actors?
Is black liquor any less useful than ethanol or biodiesel, and if so why? If not, shouldn't Washington encourage its use? Isn't every green subsidy in fact the basis for a trade dispute?
These are questions Congress has no interest in confronting, since it would expose the muddle that is its entire green-energy program.
If Congress is going to lard up the tax code with thousands of complex provisions designed to "encourage" behavior, it shouldn't be surprised when those already practicing said behavior line up for their reward, too.
In March, International Paper announced it had received $71 million from the feds for a one-month period last fall. The company is on track to claim as much as $1 billion in 2009.
Verso took in nearly $30 million from the operation of just one mill in one quarter of last year.
Other giants are gearing up to realize their own windfalls.
CONSTITUTION, WHAT CONSTITUTION? SPEND-SPEND-SPEND.
The GOP record on fiscal matters, while better than their colleagues across the aisle, has not been praiseworthy. The nation’s current financial condition is unstable but it did not reach this point because of President Obama.
America is where it is because for decades politicians convinced people that Washington can and must involve itself in areas where it has no business. Politicians assured voters that, whatever their desires, they would deliver.
The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Washington politicians have allowed that amendment to corrode.
The federal government has stretched its tentacles into numerous areas where it does not belong, causing mischief, squandering money and usurping state authority.
The growth of the federal government is directly connected to Washington’s extravagant spending. It must end.
It will not end with the Democrats in charge and the record indicates it may not end under a new Republican watch either.
It depends upon what type of Republicans run. More importantly, it depends upon who the people will support.
Here's the problem. The heart of Obama's health-care reform is universality. Covering more people costs more money. That is why Obama's budget sets aside an extra $634 billion in health-care spending, a down payment on an estimated additional spending of $1 trillion.
How does the administration curtail the Medicare and Medicaid entitlement by adding yet another (now universal) health-care entitlement that its own estimate acknowledges increases costs by about $1 trillion?
Which is why in his March 24 news conference, Obama could not explain how --when the near-term stimulative spending is over and his ambitious domestic priorities kick in, promising sustained prosperity and deficit reduction -- the deficits at the end of the coming decade are rising, not falling.
The Congressional Budget Office has deficits increasing in the last seven years of the decade from an already unsustainable $672 billion annually to $1.2 trillion by 2019.
This is the sand on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.
His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen.
He wants government to narrow the nation's income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy.
And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.
Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.
WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU EXPECT FROM A JANET NAPOLITANO TYPE?
How dare they slander military veterans by suggesting they are more prone than the average citizen to criminal, seditious and violent activity?
As The Washington Times' editors note: "A 2000 Justice Department study found that 'veterans were incarcerated at less than half the rate of adult male nonveterans.' Veterans are more likely to be peace officers."
Adding insult to injury, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was all over TV depicting conservatives as Timothy McVeigh clones. Then she issued a disingenuous statement, that "we do not – nor will we ever – monitor ideology or political beliefs."
Thus, as America ceases to be a Christian country, it is ceasing to be a democratic one.
Consider. In every referendum in 16 states, where homosexual marriage has been on the ballot, majorities ranging from 52 to 86 percent have voted to outlaw it as an absurdity and an abomination.
Yet, in Massachusetts, California and Iowa, unelected judges have imposed it, as they will in other states, regardless of what the people want or how the people vote. For secularism has become the established religion of the American state and judges are the high priests of the new order.
Yet, one wonders if they know what lies at the end of the road upon which they have set the nation.
For five decades, Americans resisted Godless Communism. If they come to realize they did so to save Godless Capitalism, or Godless Socialism, what happens to loyalty and love of country?
To love one's country, said Edmund Burke, one's country ought to be lovely. If this is not God's country anymore, whose country is it?
NOT TO WORRY. THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY WILL PROTECT YOU.
A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos “unbelievable.”
“It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. …
Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake."
I DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' BIRTH CERTIFICATE. I'M THE "ONE."
On another note-
As Obama lies, the Constitution dies!
Whether he is an actual constitutionally mandated citizen of the US or not his refusal to provide documentation as proof is akin to using the Constitution as a snot rag.
One small step for the democrat party, one giant leap for a "New World Order."
Even today, the U.S. government fudges statistics to make the realities look brighter. For example, The New American of June 23, 2008 exposed how the government has continually altered methods of determining the Consumer Price Index.
Under Richard Nixon, food and energy costs were eliminated from the new "core CPI." Later:
In 1983, the Reagan administration decided that rising real estate costs were causing the CPI to be overstated, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) substituted an "Owner Equivalent" measurement, basing housing costs on what homeowners might get if they were renting their houses. Homes were labeled an investment, and the cost of buying a home (like other investments) was no longer included in the CPI.
Both of the Bush administrations and the Clinton administration further modified how the CPI is determined, each change serving to lower reported price inflation.
The end result of all these tweaks is that the U.S. now reports an annual price-inflation rate of about four percent, whereas true price inflation is closer to eight percent or more.
This enables the government to cheat senior citizens out of their Social Security: Social Security payments are ostensibly tied to inflation so that recipients get automatic cost-of-living increases, but payments are based on a distorted CPI, rather than the actual rising costs the elderly face.
In the culture of 1984, the truth is reversed. Two of the governments's main slogans are "war is peace" and "freedom is slavery."
Today, many of yesterday's truisms have also been reversed. For example, homosexuality, once understood as perverted, is now construed as "normal"; abortion, previously a crime, is today a "right"; advocates of traditional family values, once mainstream, are now "extremists."
I see there were Tea Parties today protesting the out of control spending of the gummint. Unfortunately, the crowds weren't large enough to get the attention of the spendthrifts in Washington. The crowds need to number in the thousands and there needs to be a march on Washington in the tens of thousands to get their attention.
Will the people protesting today, protest next year? Will they have Tea Parties on other days rather than on April 15? If this is a genuine grassroots movement it needs to continue and grow and it must culminate in November 2010.
Big spenders of both parties, need to be voted out. At the grassroots level, fiscal conservatives need to run against the big spending, career politicians who are about to give us trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
Normally I'm pretty optimistic, but I don't see that happening. Much as I hate to say it, but I see these Tea Party protests as a one time thing.
Today's Americans think Congress has the constitutional authority to do anything upon which they can get a majority vote.
We think whether a particular measure is a good idea or bad idea should determine passage as opposed to whether that measure lies within the enumerated powers granted Congress by the Constitution.
Unfortunately, for the future of our nation, Congress has successfully exploited American constitutional ignorance or contempt.
I used to be for this option (Constitutional Convention) as a means of enacting a spending limitation amendment to the Constitution but have since reconsidered.
Unlike the 1787 convention attended by men of high stature such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams, today's attendees would be moral midgets: the likes of Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Olympia Snowe and Nancy Pelosi.
UNFORTUNATELY THE SNAKE OIL SALESMEN HAVE ALREADY WON THIS NON-BATTLE.
The Waxman-Markey plan intends to give the federal government near-total control of America's energy supplies and usage.
Depending upon how the allowances are organized, it may also create the largest redistribution of money from American families to the federal government since the creation of the American income tax.
To keep America prospering, our economy growing, and jobs expanding, we need not less energy, but more of it; not higher energy prices but lower ones; and more energy generation through nuclear power, clean coal and offshore oil and gas as well as possible new energy sources.
Waxman-Markey will take us in one direction, but to keep America prospering we need to go in the opposite one.
Cap-and-trade policies are another part of the bill intended to give the government more regulatory authority over the energy industry and a great deal more money--perhaps trillions of dollars--some of which would be available to grant to favored people and industries.
The bill's outline does not say who would the energy allowances free, who would have to pay for them, and how much they would pay, but it does intend to make energy much more expensive and less available to consumers.
THE BEAT GOES ON AND ITS TRAVELING COMPANION IS INSANITY.
As Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted last month, "Waxman-Markey would put big government in charge of how much energy people can use. It would be the biggest government intervention in people's lives since the second world war, which was the last time people had to have rationing coupons in order to buy a gallon of gas."
And for what? According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Earth's average rate of warming in the 30 years from 1977 to 2007 was just 0.32 degree Fahrenheit per decade, and the global surface temperature has remained virtually flat since 1998.
The Waxman-Markey bill contains some serious mistakes. Slighting nuclear power is one.
Nuclear plants generate no carbon dioxide or other pollution, and the 104 already in operation provide America with 73% of its CO2-free electricity generation.
It is estimated that each new nuclear plant would employ some 2,000 workers to build and 500 to 600 people to operate. America could use some 40 more nuclear plants, but in the Waxman bill and the Obama administration's policies, additional nuclear power plants are likely nonexistent.
When it was over, President Barack Obama said the right thing. "Those who commit acts of piracy," he said, should be "held accountable for their crimes."
One may assume the president was speaking only of Somalia's pirates.
"When it was over, President Barack Obama said the right thing. "Those who commit acts of piracy," he said, should be "held accountable for their crimes."
But that pirate assault on an American-flagged ship, its captain's bravery, and his rescue by one U.S. Navy ship should be seen for what it is: A metaphor of the world as it is today. It is a world awash in pirates.
So far, Mr. Obama has decided to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011 and avoid forcing Democrats to take a tough vote.
But the tea parties reveal how hard it will be for the president to hide the Democrats' tax-and-spend tendencies from voters.
Mr. Obama plans to boost federal spending 25% while nearly tripling the national debt over 10 years. Americans know that this kind of spending will have economic consequences, including new taxes being imposed by the new progressives.
BUT AHNOLD TOLD US THAT WE MUST HAVE ALL THE PROGRAMS FOR ALL OF THE PEOPLE.
I want to remind you of something very important. California was broke long before our economy went into a recession. The only reason we didn’t experience the crisis earlier on is because the governor and the Legislature lied, borrowed and cheated their way through several budget hearings, racking up tens of billions of dollars in debt in the process.
Nothing has changed. The propositions in this special election simply represent more tax hikes, more borrowing, and more smoke and mirrors.
"China has woken up. The West is a black hole with all this money being printed.
The Chinese are buying raw materials because it is a much better way to use their $1.9 trillion of reserves. They get ten times the impact, and can cover their infrastructure for 50 years."
One thing is clear: Beijing suspects that the US Federal Reserve is engineering a covert default on America's debt by printing money. Premier Wen Jiabao issued a blunt warning last month that China was tiring of US bonds. "We have lent a huge amount of money to the US, so of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets," he said.
There are so many reasons to abhor the Left for their deceit, treachery, and calumny. I merely point to the tip of the iceberg here. Just a small, small smattering of the corrupt nature of the Infantile Class. But never let it be said I did not call that spade a spade.
Are those of the Left who know me, or read me, repulsed? I am sure they are. I do not give a fig about that. More importantly to me, am I repulsed by them?
I don't presume you must read between these lines to assume that fact.
I am absolutely repulsed by the Left, for they do not engage in adult conversation. They rely upon prevarication, code words, hate, personal attacks, and vitriol to disguise their true reason for the inability to debate on the merits: simply put, they hate individualism, hate those who do not think as they do, and wish to use the plenipotentiary power of the state to force those who disagree with them to toe the line, and get on board with their grandiose schemes to remake the world not as it is, but how in their tiny and unsophisticated minds they wish it to be.
And when they lose the debate, because they have no rational facts to sustain them, they will simply play the race card, or fagbash one of your own, or pass a goddamn ex post facto law and take away your money unconstitutionally because they managed to arm a dozen convenient spastics with pitchforks.
For they do not believe in a government of laws. They believe in a government of emotions. Which is a dangerous thing, when you have the emotions of a thirteen year old girl.
It's one thing to show up for a gun fight with a knife. It's quite another thing to show up for a debate with nothing more than a Che tee, Mao's Little Red Book, and an enema bag with what passes for your brain inside it.
After gorging ourselves on a dinner of fine beer and pizza and fried calamari at an Italian restaurant, we wandered through the Red Light District. Within the first two minutes, I was speechless. I’ve seen naughty in my life, but this was in a league all its own.
It is exactly as you have heard, if you’ve never been there.
Hundreds of near-nude hookers in the windows, thousands of pedestrians, the smell of pot floating out of every coffeeshop, more bars than I have the math skills to count. Not to mention the live sex shows and the sex shops that offer the kind of window-shopping that would make your Grandma cry.
There are more good-looking hookers than I’d heard there are, but the ones you really remember are the sad-looking, defeated specimens. I saw one that was actually crying. One that was quite pregnant. A few with missing teeth. Several that make performance art out of boredom.
You’re not supposed to take pictures of the hookers so I didn’t until the next day, and I really don’t know how these particular hookers can complain because their windows are a mere few feet away from an old giant photo-worthy church. This cracked me up, a big church RIGHT SMACK in the middle of the Red Light District.
I still tried not to be obvious but felt obligated to get at least one shot of some hookers, because that’s what I do here at this web site, hard-hitting investigative photojournalism.
MAGIC MULATTO FINDS AND APPOINTS SOMEONE WHO PAID HIS TAXES I SUPPOSE.
Knox is the militant homosexual activist who, just last month, called Pope Benedict XVI and certain Catholic bishops "discredited leaders" for opposing same-sex marriage.
He said the Knights of Columbus are "foot soldiers of a discredited army of oppression" because they supported California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman.
Knox also denounced the teachings of the apostle Paul as "not true." "Paul," said Knox, "did not have any idea of the kind of love that I feel for a partner when I am partnered. … The straight man, the heterosexual man who got the privilege of writing the book, the educated, rich heterosexual man, Paul … didn't think it was natural because for him it must not have been."
But two things must be achieved: first, the core financial institutions must become credibly solvent; and, second, no profit-seeking private institution can remain too big to fail.
That is not capitalism, but socialism.
That is one of the points on which the right and the left agree. They are right.
Bankruptcy – and so losses for unsecured creditors – must be a part of any durable solution. Without that change, the resolution of this crisis can only be the harbinger of the next.
I agree with the critique of the policies adopted so far.
In the debate on the Financial Times’s economists’ forum on Treasury secretary Tim Geithner’s “public/private investment partnership”, the critics are right: if it works, it is because it is a non-transparent way of transferring taxpayer wealth to banks.
But it is unlikely to fill the capital hole that the markets are, at present, ignoring, as Michael Pomerleano argues. Nor am I persuaded that the “stress tests” of bank capital under way will lead to action that fills the capital hole.
This influx of new energy and new talent is likely to inject new life into small-government politics around the nation.
The mainstream Republican Party still seems limp and disorganized.
This grassroots effort may revitalize it. Or the tea-party movement may lead to a new third party that may replace the GOP, just as the GOP replaced the fractured and hapless Whigs.
What does the U.S. Agency for International Development get for a $25 million grant to two United Nations agencies working in Afghanistan?
How about “a central bank without electricity and a bridge at risk of ‘life threatening’ collapse”?
According to a USA Today story on the USAID inspector general report, “The U.N. delivered shoddy work, diverted money to other countries and then stonewalled U.S. efforts to figure out what happened.”
Unsurprisingly, one of the two UN agencies involved in the scandal is the UN Development Program (the other culprit in this case is UN Office for Project Services or UNOPS) which conclusively violated UN rules and regulations in North Korea.
According to the USAID report, “Due to the refusal of the United Nations to cooperate with this investigation, questions remain unanswered.”
No wonder! The USAID report is a litany of mismanagement, corruption, willful violation of contracted obligations, and refusal to cooperate and provide documentary evidence.
UH, ARE YOU SURE THIS SHOULD BE BROUGHT TO THE ATTENTION OF THE MAGIC MULATTO?
This is precisely the wrong time to burden the economy with higher taxes and additional wasteful government spending.
Remember, if government spending got us out of recessions, why would we ever have recessions? We’d just spend out way out of everything.
But no matter. If worse come to worse, and we can’t pay off all our debt, we’ve got this whole group of cheap, unskilled laborers to pick up the slack:
For the deskbound academic who does not work on a ocean-going container ship, history’s pirate can be a Robin-Hood redistributionist who takes from the mercantile class and spreads booty to the poor;
or he is anarchist who defies the bourgeoisie norms of an oppressive society;
or he is a sexual libertine—a cross-dresser, a sexually ambiguous Steppenwolf, a polymorphously perverse rebel, who has said no to the straightjacket of heterosexual norms;
or he is an egalitarian who constructs an alternate “pirate community” that is without racial, gender, and class bias.
There are all sorts of noble Jewish, black, and female pirates in academic discourse, far better folk that the British navy that tried to stamp them out.
TWO VIEWS BUT ONLY ONE CORRECT ANSWER. YOU DECIDED.
The president devoted a significant portion of his speech to defending actions he has taken in the face of criticism he has heard mainly from Republicans _ but also from some of the more conservative members of own Democratic Party _ that he has "been spending with reckless abandon, pushing a liberal social agenda while mortgaging our children's future."
In 1994, California voters rebelled and overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187, which sought to limit liability for mass illegal immigration. Since then, state and local governments have blatantly ignored the wishes of the voters, and continue to shell out publicly financed benefits on illegals.
The costs of illegal immigration have skyrocketed, while the state has spiraled into a fiscal crisis.
Santa Maria is in the thick of this problem. Why? Because it seems to be giving illegals every indication it is a sanctuary city, thereby creating a magnet for more illegals, including the criminal element, to become imbedded here.
We wonder about President Obama's decision to act only in case of "imminent danger"
to the hostage. It seems to us that if the snipers had a clear shot at the pirates and Phillips was not in the line of fire, they should have been permitted to act.
WE CAN'T INVEST IN ANTI-FRAUD MEASURES BECAUSE IT MIGHT DISEMPOWER THE CROOKS AND THAT WOULDN'T BE POLITICALLY CORRECT.
But anyone who thinks that a public plan could serve as a "yardstick" for the private sector needs to consider Medicare's dismal record with regard to fraud, waste and other abuse.
In fact, the total amount of Medicare fraud is unknown.
The government does not measure or estimate fraud in its programs; instead, it measures payments made "in error." According to Medicare's own most recent data, payments made in error amount to over $10 billion annually.
(Medicaid's payment errors in 2007 equaled a whopping $32.7 billion, according to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services.)
Others have claimed Medicare's payments made in error are much higher. Even with the inclusion of the budget of the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, Medicare spends less than
one-fifth of 1% on antifraud measures -- a small fraction of what private plans invest in their efforts to build a network of honest providers.
Worse, in four of the past five years Congress has turned back Medicare's pleas for $579 million of additional antifraud funding, on the grounds that these dollars subtract from the budget funds for curing cancer and anti-obesity campaigns.
Will a public plan also hemorrhage from fraud because of chronic Congressional underinvestment?
That would be nirvana to IMF employees who have been running low on money to lend but love to roam the world signing up new "clients." Borrowers would like it too, since they take the general resources of the fund at rock-bottom rates with no implied obligation ever to retire the loan.
You may wonder why the IMF simply doesn't ask for a quota increase to expand its resources. Probably because that requires 85% of member votes and can take years.
By using the NAB, Treasury can simply attach the request to any spending bill, and that is apparently what we can expect. A U.S. Treasury official told us last week that "the current U.S. share of the NAB is about 20%, so consistent with that, our share of a NAB increase of $500 billion could be up to $100 billion."
The upshot for U.S. taxpayers is that neither the $40 billion-plus in new SDRs nor the $100 billion for the NAB will get much democratic scrutiny. Yet they amount to a massive expansion in U.S. foreign aid.
We can see why the G-20 applauded. But this is the opposite of the "transparency" this Administration has promised, and someone on Capitol Hill should blow the whistle.
Back in 1954, when there were no restrictions on owning shotguns in England and there were far more owners of pistols then than there were decades later, there were only 12 cases of armed robbery in London.
By the 1990s, after stringent gun controls laws were imposed, there were well over a thousand armed robberies a year in London. In the late 1990s, after an almost total ban on handguns in England, gun crimes went up another ten percent.
The reason-- too obvious to be accepted by the intelligentsia -- is that law-abiding people became more defenseless against criminals who ignored the law and kept their guns.
The same thing applies internationally. We might keep that in mind as the Obama administration pursues the will o' the wisp of banning nuclear weapons.
If that Utopian dream ever came true, those nations naive enough to get rid of their nuclear weapons would be at the mercy of those rogue states who kept theirs.
If Friday's ruling is upheld, John Demjanjuk, who has been charged with no crime on German soil, is to be taken to Germany, home of the Third Reich, to be tried by Germans for his alleged role in a genocide planned and perpetrated by Germans.
He is to serve as the sacrificial lamb whose blood washes away the stain of Germany's sins.
But if Germans wish to prosecute participants in the Holocaust, why not round up some old big-time Nazis, instead of a Ukrainian POW.
Answer: They cannot. Because the Germans voted an amnesty for themselves in 1969. So now they must find a Slav soldier they captured -- and Heinrich Himmler's SS conscripted and made a camp guard, if he ever was a camp guard -- to punish in expiation for Germany's sins.
The spirit behind this un-American persecution has never been that of justice tempered by mercy. It is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.
The cash is out the door, and at some point, the Fed will have to rake it back in. Congress may have to choose between giving the Fed the authority it wants, or having the mother of all inflation episodes.
Crowd Out Spending
Should the Fed’s balance sheet climbs to $6 trillion, then its losses might be enormous and threaten to crowd out spending on defense, education and health care. And it would do so without Congress ever voting on the increase in the debt ceiling that would have been required if Treasury were performing the rescue.
If the Fed receives the authority to issue debt whenever it wants to, then future bureaucrats can, in principle, play whatever financial games they want. The powerlessness of voters will be codified into law.
WAKE UP CALL: TEXAS GOV. BACK RESOLUTION AFFIRMING SOVEREIGNTY
Tue Apr 14 2009 08:44:54 ET
AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry joined state Rep. Brandon Creighton and sponsors of House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 50 in support of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state,” Gov. Perry said.
“That is why I am here today to express my unwavering support for efforts all across our country to reaffirm the states’ rights affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union.”
Perry continued: "Millions of Texans are tired of Washington, DC trying to come down here to tell us how to run Texas."
YABUT SOME DAY WE'LL ALL BE EQUAL AND THAT'S FAIR.
Stocks are diving today because GM is going to declare bankruptcy. But I think they should be diving for another reason. A Drudge-linked article just exposed the tip of the iceberg that will probably sink America’s auto industry. Warren Buffett just bought 10% (as much as he was allowed) of Chinese automaker BYD.
I have been harping on this for quite some time. Liberals are worried that union workers in the US might be reduced to a mere 200% or so of the daily wage they’re actually worth, as a result of our domestic woes. That’s silly. Our real problem is the huge, highly motivated, highly capable Asian labor market, which is going to make cushy American union jobs a fond memory.
If Obama were competent, and if our Congress were not dominated by effete liberal kooks, we might have some chance of fixing our internal problems.
But how are we supposed to stop the Chinese and the Indians? We can’t.
They’re smart, they work harder than us, they work cheaper than us, and there are over two billion of them.
And protectionism, our only remaining weapon against them, has proven ineffective and destructive.
YES DOROTHY, MAGIC MULATTOS CAN DO THINGS LIKE THAT.
The Obama administration has come under intense criticism for replacing the term "war on terror" with the emaciated euphemism "overseas contingency operations," and for referring to individual acts of terror as "man-caused disasters."
This semi-official attempt to disassociate the administration from the fierce rhetoric favored by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney has enraged Americans on both the right and left.
Many feel that such vaporous bureaucratese is a self-emasculating action that plunges us into an Orwellian world where words have no emotional connection with the horrors they purport to describe.
Yet, if the intention of the Obama administration is to tone down the confrontational rhetoric being used by our enemies, the effort is already reaping results.
This week, in a pronounced shift from its usual theatrical style, the Taliban announced that it will no longer refer to its favorite method of murder as "beheadings," but will henceforth employ the expression "cephalic attrition."
"Flayings" -- a barbarously exotic style of execution that has been popular in this part of the world since before the time of Alexander -- will now be described as "unsolicited epidermal reconfigurations."
In a similar vein, lopping off captives' arms will now be referred to as "appendage furloughing," while public floggings of teenaged girls will from here on out be spoken of as "metajudicial interfacing."
Yet perhaps the most encouraging sign of all is in Mexico, where vigilante groups have announced that they will no longer use the term "death squads" to describe their activities. Instead, death squads will be identified as "terminus-inducing claques," "free-lance resolution facilitators," and "off-site impasse adjustors."
HEY BROTHER WHAT'S MINE IS MINE AND WHAT'S YOURS IS ALSO MINE.
Everyone now has a sacred cow in the tax code. For my money, the most sacred thing of all is our country and its growth, but the sacred cows have turned into a pack of wolves.
On both the spending and the tax side, the wolves are devouring our children's future.
As my colleague Andrew McCarthy wrote, "Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn't recede willingly before the wheels of progress." Very true.
Somalia, Iran and North Korea are all less "civilized" than they were a couple of generations ago. And yet in one sense they have made undeniable progress: They have globalized their pathologies.
Somali pirates seize vessels the size of aircraft carriers flying the ensigns of the great powers. Iranian proxies run Gaza and much of Lebanon. North Korea's impoverished prison state provides nuclear technology to Damascus and Tehran.
Unlovely as it is, Pyongyang nevertheless has friends on the Security Council. Powerful states protect one-man psycho states. One-man psycho states provide delivery systems to apocalyptic ideological states. Apocalyptic ideological states fund nonstate actors around the world.
And in Somalia and elsewhere nonstate actors are constrained only by their ever increasing capabilities.
When all the world's a "distraction," maybe you're not the main event after all. Most wealthy nations lack the means to defend themselves. Those few that do, lack the will.
Meanwhile, basket-case jurisdictions send out ever bolder freelance marauders to prey on the civilized world with impunity. Don't be surprised if "the civilized world" shrivels and retreats in the face of state-of-the-art reprimitivization.
From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a "distraction" but a portent of the future.
UH, SIR, THOSE SNIPERS WERE NOT CITIZENS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY.
"I share the country's admiration for the bravery of Capt. Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew," Obama said in his first comments on the situation. "His courage is a model for all Americans."
He added that the United States needs help from other countries to deal with the threat of piracy and to hold pirates accountable.
Once upon a time we killed and captured pirates. Today, it's all more complicated.
Attorney General Eric Holder has declined to say whether the kidnappers of the American captain will be "brought to justice" by the U.S. "I'm not sure exactly what would happen next," declares the chief law-enforcement official of the world's superpower. But some things we can say for certain.
Obviously, if the United States Navy hanged some eye-patched, peg-legged blackguard from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would rise to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals, and the network talking-heads would argue that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates' cause, and judges would rule that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. Constitution and that their peg legs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.
Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, which over the centuries did more than anyone to rid the civilized world of the menace of piracy, now declines even to risk capturing their Somali successors, having been advised by Her Majesty's Government that, under the European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live on welfare for the rest of his life.
I doubt "Pirates of the Caribbean" would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in council flats in Manchester and going down to the pub for a couple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of "Aaaaargh, shiver me benefits check, lad."
From "Avast, me hearties!" to a vast welfare scam is not progress.
OBAMA'S NATION DISGRACED BY INACTION. "INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY" MUST SAVE THE NEW AMERICA.
By Abdi Sheikh and Abdi Guled
MOGADISHU, April 12 (Reuters) - Military helicopters flew over Somali pirate lairs and battleships stalked a boat on Sunday in which gunmen were holding an American hostage in a five-day high seas standoff.
Armed with assault rifles and a grenade launcher, four pirates and their captive, 53-year-old U.S. ship captain Richard Phillips, were drifting towards land on a lifeboat out of fuel.
Sailors tend to be take charge kinds of guys. They work hard, take risks for rewards and when ashore might frequent the more macho sides of the port cities.
I can honestly see them being willing to put up a respectable resistance to a handful of skinny rag-heads armed with AK-47s and grappling hooks 350 miles out to sea.
Here’s another tip. When a customer says “thank you,” it’s not okay to snub him just because you’re furious that you ended up flipping burgers for a living. If you think about it long enough, and you won’t, you may eventually realize your status in life is not entirely the customer’s fault.
It’s completely possible that you, yourself, may deserve some of the blame. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.
There’s a kid who works the register at the nearest breakfast joint, and he is so professional, I feel like he shows me up as a customer. This kid is going to end up owning the whole strip mall.
He looks me in the eye and says, “Thank you for your business, sir. Come back soon.” At this point I usually drop my squeeze change purse and my handful of expired Arby’s coupons, and I shuffle out feeling completely outclassed.
Why can’t McDonald’s find people like that? Actually, they did have one. The middle-aged German lady who always smiled and called me sir and ordered me to have a nice day whether I felt like it or not. She’s gone. She probably saved her money and bought a private island.
Now I have to deal with her successor, Unpredictable Hypersensitive Interruption Girl.
The breakfast kid is black. I hope the entitlement pimps don’t get ahold of him and corrupt him before he becomes a self-made millionaire and starts sponsoring conservative candidates.
Our constitutional framework of government can only be understood in the context of the framers' predominantly Christian worldview.
While they believed in man's dignity, they also believed in his depravity and that only if they imposed limitations on government would it be possible to establish a scheme of individual liberties.
Much of our Bill of Rights is biblically based, as well, and the Ten Commandments and further laws set out in the book of Exodus form the basis of our Western law.
Indeed, English legal giants Sir William Blackstone and Sir Edward Coke both believed the common law was based on Scripture.
Though we often hear there were no references to the God of the Bible in the Constitution, the document closes by citing the date with "in the Year of our Lord."
Our ruling class today is dominated by those who no longer believe that our rights are God-given or that our liberties depend on effective limitations on the state.
They are so divorced from true history and American statecraft that they fail to see the irony in their dissociation with and apologies for our Judeo-Christian heritage, which is responsible for making this the freest and most prosperous nation on earth for people of all races, ethnicities and religions.
TARP is one the great misnomers in U.S. government.
So far, the program has had nothing to do with troubled assets and has been used for purposes far afield of the justification — getting such assets off the balance sheets of the banks — presented to Congress when it passed last fall.
The arguments in favor of lifting the embargo are routinely swaddled in talk of realism. The Cold War is over; it’s time to throw away anti-Communist anachronisms. The only way to change Cuba for the better is to “engage it” with trade and tourism and exchange programs.
The funny thing is, if you made the exact same arguments about South Africa in the 1980s, many of the same people would call you not merely an ideologue but a racist for not supporting sanctions.
Indeed, today the anti-Israeli sanctions movement is infested with people who claim we must lift the embargo on Cuba.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the withdrawal of the Red Army from Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO's mission was accomplished. As Sen. Richard Lugar said, NATO must "go out of area or out of business."
NATO desperately did not want to go out of business. So, NATO went out of area, into Afghanistan. Now, with victory nowhere in sight, NATO is heading home. Will it go out of business?
Not likely. Too many rice bowls depend on keeping NATO alive.
You don't give up the March of Dimes headquarters and fund-raising machinery just because Drs. Salk and Sabin found a cure for polio.
Again, one recalls, in those old World War II movies, the invariable scene where two G.I.s are smoking and talking.
"What are you gonna do, Joe, when this is all over?" one would ask.
Years ago, we had the answer.
Joe stayed in the Army. He couldn't give it up. Soldiering is all he knew. Just like Uncle Sam. We can't give up NATO because, if we do, we would no longer be the "indispensable nation," the leader of the Free World.
And, if we're not that, then who are we? And what would we do?
British losses in World War I were greater than America's losses, North and South, in the Civil War. Her losses in World War II, from a nation with but a third of our population, were equal to ours.
Where America ended that war as a superpower and leader of the Free World, Britain ended it bankrupt, broken, bereft of empire, sinking into socialism.
All of Europe's empires are gone. All her great navies are gone. All her million-man armies are history. Her populations are all aging, shrinking and dying, as millions pour in from former colonies in the Third World to repopulate and Islamize the mother countries.
Because of Europe's new "diversity," any war fought in a Muslim land will inflame a large segment of Europe's urban population.
IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE YOU CAN MAKE IT ANYWHERE.
Oh, and it isn't just high earners who get smacked. The new budget raises another $2 billion or so on top of the $4 billion in income taxes with some 100 new taxes, fees, fines, surcharges and penalties to be paid by all New York residents.
There are new charges for cell phone usage, fishing permits, health insurance (the "sick tax"), electric bills, and on bottled water, cigars, beer and wine.
A New York Post analysis found that a typical family of four with an income below $100,000 would pay more than $800 a year in higher taxes and fees.
This is advertised as a plan of "shared sacrifice," but the group that is most responsible for New York's budget woes, the all-powerful public employee unions, somehow walk out of this with a 3% pay increase. The state is receiving an estimated $10 billion in federal stimulus money, and Democrats are spending every cent while raising the state budget by 9%. Then they insist with a straight face that taxes are the only way to close the budget deficit.
Unions have an interest in keeping workers out of a system where their own efforts can affect their compensation and advancement. That makes them less dependent on the union to negotiate for them.
During the campaign, Barack Obama said he would consider an overhaul or "complete repeal" of the merit pay system.
If he follows through, the government's new CEO will soon learn that you get what you pay for.
WE CAN BUT WE WON'T. THERIN LIES THE QUANDARY OF OLD AMERICANS.
In one of its more overstretched spins on a news event involving the U.S. military, the New York Times front page yesterday opined that the hostage stand-off with the Somali pirates "showed the limits of the world's most powerful military."
What it has in fact showed so far is the apparently still-needed distinction between the behavior of the civilized world and of barbarism.
The U.S. aircraft over the small pirate boat bobbing off the Horn of Africa are prevented from turning that boat into floating scrap only out of concern for the American hero of the moment, Captain Richard Phillips.
The Somali pirates holding Capt. Phillips and many other hostages succeed only because, like all criminals confronting the civilized world today, they have reduced the value of human life to zero.
America is not just a cauldron, but a reactor. From all over the earth, men and women have risked their lived to immerse themselves in this great experiment in freedom and individuality, and the results, by any measure, have produced more goodness, more security, more prosperity and more raw happiness than society or combination of societies in history.
Stars, like our sun, are reactors too: the tremendous, monumental energies and pressures they generate would blow them to pieces in a millisecond, but for one thing… the immense gravity that holds these fiery atoms together and strikes the balance of force and pressure that creates all the light and life in the universe.
The American reactor of individuality and freedom of expression would also fly apart too, but for one thing: the deep love of country that has bound it together and liberated the best of the human spirit.
Destroy that love of country and the idea of America – for that is what she is, in the end… simply an idea of freedom and the pursuit of happiness – eliminate that binding love and the reactor will explode.
And when it does, there will be no more light – no more medicine, no more art and poetry, no more iPhones and MRI scanners and jet travel, no more Fifth and First Amendment rights, no more security and peace… in fact, no more hot running water.
Cut those cords of love of and pride in country – as the elites have cut them in every civilization before us – and from your seat on the moon you will see the brightest light in history wink out. The rest of the world will soon follow.
Sean Penn is not only perhaps the most gifted actor of my generation… he also has the courage to come out and openly say what so many in Hollywood really and truly do believe.
And there’s the problem. Because like Sean Penn, almost all of this industry is composed of people whose intellectual, reasoning and analytical skills are fifty miles wide and a quarter-inch deep.
Hollywood’s Chattering Classes despise their Uncle Sam, but they are deeply, deeply in love with Auntie America.
But Hollywood’s Chattering Classes are thoroughly, completely and spectacularly wrong. And therein lies the source of a looming tragedy so great it would take a thousand movies to simply sketch it out… were it not for the fact that if Hollywood as it now exists continues to do what it is doing unopposed, there will be no more movies because there will be no more electricity.
Take it easy on the President. I have every confidence that he has already drafted a strongly worded letter to the Pirates and will mail it as soon as the State Department supplies him with an address. He's in the process of checking with the U.S. Treasury to see if we can afford the postage. All is well.
In his Saturday radio address, President Barack Obama told Somali pirates he is sending Vice-President Joe Biden to meet with them aboard their dinghy to resolve the crisis.
''I will not be held hostage to a situation that was allowed to grow and fester under the previous administration. President Bush never reached out to the Somali pirate community; instead, he arrogantly dismissed them as barbarians and thieves.''
The President said the high seas entrepreneurs mistakenly targeted a U. S. flagged vessel because of dense fog caused by global warming. He has authorized Vice-President Biden to share the Navy’s ship identification technology with pirates to avoid a repeat of the incident.
In addition, the President said he is prepared to meet the pirates at the White House for talks.
''I fully acknowledge that decades of American imperialism have led us to this point,'' the President continued. ''However, this all must come to an end by the Sunday morning talk shows. If that deadline passes with no resolution, I will order the American warships to withdraw, leaving Joe Biden in that lifeboat with the pirates until they come to their senses and beg to be rescued themselves. The choice is theirs.''
THE MAGIC MULATTO SAYS WE AIN'T SEEN NO STINKIN' PIRATES.
freepost wrote:
In less than 100 days, the Obama administration has done more damage to our foreign policy than any administration in history. Obama's contrition has only emboldened the radicals and endangered American lives everywhere.
While Obama "reaches" out to rogue regimes, they only laugh and move forward, knowing that America is weak.
Let's look at a few of Obama's accomplishments: North Korea - launches an ICBM. All Obama can do is say that it is disturbing. After delivering a rediculous and humiliating message to the Iranians, the mad mullahs push ahead with their nuclear ambitions and announce the implementation of over 7000 new centrifuges.
Now, four "pirates" floating in a powerless raft in the middle of the ocean surrounded by American warships, and the pirates act like they have the
upper hand. Why? Because they know that America is weak and with Obama in charge, they'll get away with it.
What did our Secretary of State do? When she first learned of the pirate takeover of the American ship? She laughed uncontrollably.
Now, after she gained some composure she could identify the pirates as "criminals". Where did we hear that before? The Clinton administration considered Al-Qaeda as "criminals" and their failure to wage a war on terror led to 9-11.
Meanwhile, our Commander in chief couldn't be bothered by this attack on an American ship, citing, that "we're talking about housing here".
G-d help us all. These clowns make Carter look like a foreign policy master.
JUST FOR THE RECORD: The magic man was busy arranging to have his favorite Pizza cook flown in to do his magic. "Birds of a feather flock together."
Much of the Tories' "modern conservatism" consists of reassuring voters about what it won't do.
It won't dismantle a failing national health-care system. It won't disavow failing public schools. It won't resist higher tax rates on the "rich." Beyond this bold agreement with the status quo, the party has refused to articulate its own agenda, lest any part go down badly with voters.
At stake is the standing of a free-market system that has flourished since America's founding and made it the wealthiest nation in the history of man.
In his classic "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism," the philosopher Michael Novak noted that capitalism is good because, of all the economic systems devised by man, it is the one that lifts the greatest numbers out of poverty.
Capitalism is itself not selfish, exploitative, unequal; it wants to grow and produce, bringing more services, more creativity, more opportunity, more ferment and movement—more life.
It is not just an economic system, it is a public good.
YABUT BUSH WAS EVIL. THE MAGIC MULATTO IS "CLEAN".
President Barack Obama is seeking $83.4 billion for US military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, pressing for special troop funding that he opposed two years ago when he was a senator and George W. Bush was President.
Mr Obama’s request, including money to send thousands more troops into Afghanistan, would push the costs of the two wars to almost $1 trillion since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks against the US, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Two disturbing items in the news today. First, only 53% of Americans told the Rasmussen pollsters that capitalism is better than socialism. And 30% of Democrats think socialism is better. Big surprise there.
It looks like the liberals have won the education battle.
Socialism has caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, and it has never produced a good standard of living anywhere, and it is the greatest evil mankind has ever encountered.
But a fair number of Americans, especially those who were “educated” after our school system was destroyed by liberals, think socialism is…pretty rad. No work! Free beers! Che T-shirts! If you want to be a lazy, flabby slouch all your life, socialism is the bomb. A lot of people are content to live that way. Clip your own wings and belly up to the trough.
This is how the killing fields in Cambodia happened. People didn’t know, or ignored, the clear and obvious lessons of history. They thought they could take something that had never worked anywhere and somehow make it succeed. And they ended up rounding up educated people, lining them up beside big holes, and machine-gunning them to death.
Here is the lesson conservatives should have learned from the last three elections, especially after seeing the impact of swing voters. The stupid are incredibly dangerous. The stupid make totalitarianism possible. Our kids are stupid, and they’re getting more stupid every decade. Look out.
The poisonous harvest of our most toxic decade, the Sixties, is a bizarre notion that the young are smart. In truth, the young are generally fools. I certainly was.
But back in the Sixties, the left managed to seize on one or two things the old had been wrong about–things like racism and reckless pollution–and convince the young that the old were wrong about EVERYTHING.
Since then we have been producing insolent, unprincipled, overconfident, weak children who think their tiny brains hold the keys to a bright and happy future where everyone eats tofu and and smokes free dope and has sex with no consequences.
It’s amazing; a human being will generally get smarter with age. But our nation, composed entirely of human beings, has gotten dumber. And we’re going to pay.
The U.S. Congress' deception was, and continues to be, a major player in our financial meltdown.
In congressional hearings, before the meltdown, on the soundness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Rep. Maxine Waters said, "Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something that wasn't broke.
Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines."
Rep. Barney Frank, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, said, "These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."
Other congressmen gave similar assurances.
Unfortunately for our nation, the forces pushing for "affordable" housing won the day and saddled us with today's unprecedented financial disaster.
How stupid is it of us to ask those who brought us "affordable" housing to now turn their attention to bringing us "affordable" health care?
“From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need.”
It sounds great, but in practice it’s never worked. The concept was espoused by Karl Marx, who should be honored as the founder of the “holiday” we are about to celebrate. The “holiday” is April 15, Income Tax Day across the United States.
It is the day on which America’s downtrodden masses can truly revel in the knowledge that those Dick Gephardt once called “the winners of life’s lottery” get their comeuppance from the government.
After all, what’s a government for but to make everything fair?
The power to tax, Daniel Webster once observed, is the power to destroy. John Marshall echoed that sentiment.
The Elephant in the Room: Obama vs. United States
The president is contemptuous of American values. And one key nominee prefers the judgment of other countries and global elites.
By Rick Santorum
Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans -helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.
His nomination of former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to be the State Department's top lawyer constitutes further evidence of his disdain for American values.
This seemingly obscure position in Foggy Bottom's bureaucratic maze is one of the most important in any administration, shaping foreign policy in the courts and playing a critical role in international negotiations and treaties.
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE GRAND EXPERIMENT CALLED THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AT HAND?
The book that permanently made me a sadder-- and, hopefully, wiser-- man was Edward Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
To follow one of the greatest civilizations of all time as it degenerated and fractured, even before being torn apart by its enemies, was especially painful in view of the parallels to what is happening in America in our own times.
The fall of the Roman Empire was not just a matter of changing rulers or political systems. It was the collapse of a whole civilization-- the destruction of an economy, the breakdown of law and order, the disappearance of many educational institutions.
It has been estimated that a thousand years passed before the standard of living in Western Europe rose again to the level it had once had back in Roman times.
How long would it take to recover from the collapse of Western civilization today-- if we ever recovered?
Whether the Obama presidency succeeds or fails will depend on his ability to sustain his ideals in the face of the testing crises that will inevitably erupt in far-flung regions where ethnic or religious strife has been a way of life for thousands of years.
And closer to home, Obama will need to cut the umbilical to his hometown posse, whose inefficiency and poor decision-making took the shine off his honeymoon and brought the dispirited Republicans back from the dead.
LOOKING FOR SANITY POPS? YOU WON'T FIND IT ON THE FOX NEWS CHANNEL.
15. Pops in Vienna:
It’s a very mixed up world…at least for me. Despite the past few months, Obama’s approval rating is 66% (CBS - Wash. Post poll) and 59% Rasmussen poll. If Bush had been making all of these gaffs and policy blunders I doubt his approval rating would be more than 10%.
There really must be a lot of Kool Aid drinkers out there.
Yet, how much longer can this charade continue? Surely, the natural forces of the universe will collapse this house of cards.
There are headlines about the need for huge amounts of additional bail out money, our foreign adversaries have been encouraged and both the president and the Congress seem completely inept.
Will the economy cave in first or will we be surprised by an audacious enemy attack from which we’ll never recover?
As one PJ contributor observed we are living in a generation where people expect and demand free stuff; music downloads, video downloads, software, cell phone minutes, etc. I don’t have much confidence in an irate public rising up and taking back our country before it’s too late.
Unfortunately, the Eloi have won and we Morlocks are confined to an underworld, never to see the light of day again.
I am not generally a deficit hawk. A government can run a responsible deficit in a growing economy -- and may have to run one to counteract an economic downturn. But Obama's proposed level of debt is irresponsible.
It makes broad tax increases nearly inevitable.
It expands our dependence on China, America's loan officer.
And it creates pressure for the government to purchase or monetize debt, leading to inflation.
No Republican, even of the moderate variety, could accept a budget that spends America into unsustainable debt by completely avoiding the setting of realistic priorities. And none in Congress did.
Polarization in American politics has its own disturbing momentum, aided by some strident Republican voices. But that does not require a president to make it worse. And it is a sad, unnecessary shame that Barack Obama, the candidate of unity, has so quickly become another source of division.
"After 35 years in America, I never thought I would see this. I still can't quite believe we will sit by as this crisis is used to hand control of our economy over to government. But here we are, on the brink. Clearly, I have been naive."
Yes, Mr. Varney, you have been that at your very best. You and millions of others.
You took freedom for granted, and like millions of others, you just didn't bother to protect its fine contours along every inch of the line.
You never bothered to examine your enemies' premises and take them seriously.
"Our economy", "our workers", "our resources", "our jobs": on and on, every bit of it on collectivist principles that always require main force for their practice, and you didn't take a word or a minute of it for what they were saying to you right out loud.
It is ideas that move the world, Mr. Varney, and what you're calling "naive" was always a supine complacence while these destroyers were on the march, even through those stupid years when almost everybody was saying that "socialism is dead".
If nations perceive nuclear weapons as a symbol of their technical prowess and military capability would they not strive for them? If they see nations in possession of nuclear weapons able to exercise considerably more power in relations with others, would they not wish to join the club? If they view nuclear retaliatory capability as life insurance for their people would they not seek it?
Are there fewer or more nations each day on the verge of nuclear capability? The answers to all of these questions are obvious. Then, if that is the case, how will unilateral nuclear disarmament by the US impact their choices? If we lead the way into passivity and defenselessness, will they blithely follow? Will terminating a purely defensive, non-nuclear, anti-missile system make us more secure? Will the world truly be a better place?
It takes no rocket scientist to know the answers. Certainly a Harvard graduate should be able to figure it out, particularly with the counsel of the alleged "smartest woman on the planet."
By Thomas Sowell
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
I am so old that I can remember when music was musical.
Now that the federal government says that it will stand behind the warranties on General Motors' automobiles, does that make you more likely or less likely to buy a car from GM? If you were a rising young executive with a promising future, would you be more likely or less likely to go to work for a company where politicians can fire you?
We have become such suckers for words that politicians can spend our tax money like a drunken sailor, provided they call it "investment." At least the drunken sailor is spending his own money but people look down on him because he doesn't call it "investment."
Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover's policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR's policy of trying to micro-manage the economy and Neville Chamberlain's policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent.
We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.
The famous editorial cartoonist Herblock could write as well as draw. In one of his books, he said something like: "You too can have the soothing feeling of nature's own baby-soft wool being pulled gently over your resting eyes." I think of that every time I see Barack Obama talking.
It has long been said that uncertainty is the hardest thing for a market to adjust to. No one can generate uncertainty as much as the government, which can change the rules in midstream or come out with some new bright idea at any time, as the current administration has already demonstrated.
We have now reached the truly dangerous point where we cannot even be warned about the lethal, fanatical and suicidal hatred of our society by Islamic extremists, because to do so would be politically incorrect and, in some European countries, would be a violation of the law against inciting hostility to groups.
Perhaps the scariest aspect of our times is how many people think in talking points, rather than in terms of real world consequences.
Barack Obama's favorable reception during his tour in Europe may be the most enthusiastic international acclaim for a democratic government leader since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938, proclaiming "peace in our time."
How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.
What does "economic justice" mean, except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?
Perhaps the way President Obama will reduce the deficit is by making more presidential appointments of people who will pay the back taxes they owe, in order to get confirmed by the Senate.
Liberals seem to think that they are doing lagging groups a favor by making excuses for counterproductive and self-destructive behavior. The poor do not need press agents. They need the truth. No one ever said, "Press agents will make you free."
If I were Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, I would not sign any long-term lease on a home in Washington.
Socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production. Fascists believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of this government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it and then, when their interventions turn out badly, summon executives from the private sector before Congress and denounce them on nationwide television.
PROVING ONCE AGAIN THAT ALL CULTURES ARE EQUAL AND THAT WORDS HAVE MEANINGS..
The Talib bully hits, and hits, and hits. He hits the girl 34 times.
One senses, as one watches him wield his strap, that this is not just a demonstration of pitilessness.
One senses, in fact, that the Talib is deriving pleasure--yes, sexual pleasure--from his beating of this girl, as he hits her hard on her buttocks, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, mapping his territory in a display of violent, misogynist cartography.
His is as much a sexual act as an act of punishment. The Talib is getting satisfaction, a twisted, vile satisfaction derived from a twisted, vile social code.
"Indignity" is the right word to describe the Orthodox newspapers' treatment of the female ministers.
The brutal beating of a girl while a mob of men look on is more accurately termed an atrocity.
The conflation of indignity with atrocity not only overdramatizes the former but trivializes the latter.
MONEY, IT'S NOT YOURS, IT'S OURS. AND IT'S "FOR THE CHILDREN."
Cheer up. Even in these hard economic times, Democrats across the nation are working on plans that will turn some of you into instant millionaires.
There's only one catch. You're not actually going to be bringing in a million-dollar income. But the tax man is going to treat you just as though you did.
That's the message coming out of Albany, N.Y., where a newly ascendant Democratic majority led by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver forced a deal with the Democratic governor to impose a new "millionaires' tax."
The beauty is that to pay this tax, you won't have to make anywhere near a million dollars. If you make even $300,000 a year, the cash-strapped Empire State will consider you a millionaire.
The appearance-of-a-conflict-of-interest crowd isn't happy that Mr. Summers earned $5.2 million last year working for the beneficent hedge fund, D. E. Shaw & Co. He also made a bundle in speaking fees, including $135,000 for a single appearance for Goldman Sachs. That must have been some stemwinder, though we're confident Goldman figures it didn't overpay given Mr. Summers's later White House prominence.
We've got nothing against getting rich, though it is worth noting that Mr. Summers will pay Bush-era tax rates on his Wall Street windfall profit.
So if the man who would still like to be Federal Reserve Chairman is looking to make a gesture of political solidarity with the middle-class masses, here's an idea: Honor your principles, and pay taxes on that income at Bill Clinton-Barack Obama rates.
Mr. Summers could simply calculate his taxes for 2008 based on what he'd pay if President Obama's tax proposals had been law. Thus his top marginal income tax rate would rise from 35% to 39.6%, plus the phase outs in deductions and exemptions, which would make the rate roughly 41.6%.
Mr. Summers could write a check to the IRS for the difference. And of course he wouldn't forget to deduct any charitable giving at only 28 cents on the dollar, rather than 35 or 41.6 cents.
Mr. Obama likes to say it's the "era of responsibility," and if that's true then we assume Mr. Summers will want to lead by example.
Kagan observed even though much of the world simultaneously relies on and resents America’s leadership, that leadership “is good for a vast portion of the world’s population.”
Although other nations demand a multipolar world, none show an eagerness to assume equal responsibilities towards dealing with international crises nor has another nation, except China, committed itself to building a military necessary for playing a larger role.
Nations like France and Russia, Kagan wrote, “want equal say on the major decisions … without having to possess or wield anything like equal power.
They want to increase their own prestige at the expense of American power but without the strain of having to fill the gap left by the diminution of the American role.”
President Obama unwisely gave Europe unearned praise. He is right that the alliance must be strengthened and that Europe must do more to produce a peaceful and stable world. But ignoring history allows one to bask in a fictional past. In recent decades Europe has played no leadership role. Now that it must, it is unhelpful to suggest it has already been so engaged.
“Because if [The Rich] leave, then there will no longer be an Enemy for the Left to stick it to.” Wrong.
The Left will never run out of enemies. It never does.
The Left, like Stalin, will simply change the definition of “enemy” to “anyone whom we believe remotely opposes us, is better off than us, and is happier than us.”
And the Left will not rest even if The Rich leave. On the contrary, it will continue to pursue and hound its perceived enemies even if they take refuge somewhere else.
The reason why Bush was hated in Europe was that he put America first. And that's what we want in a President.......to put America first.
We dont elect him to grovel and bash our country.
Obama looks like a petulant little child when he bashes the country that elected him and the people that voted for this rube just love every nano-second of his America bashing.
This guy is just stump-dumb.
For the 1st time in MY life...I'm ashamed to be an American.
He noted his country's diminished power, with evident satisfaction.
All this can be justified as winning over Europe with a soft sell, if it weren't that he got nothing for it.
Obama pleaded for more troops in Afghanistan, arguing correctly that terrorists emanating from that region pose a more direct threat to Europe.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy responded with no additional troops, 150 MPs, and an offer to take one Gitmo detainee when the detention facility closes.
At that, he pronounced himself much pleased to be working "with a US president who wants to change the world and who understands that the world does not boil down to simply American frontiers and borders."
I don’t think Obama has the muscle to take our guns, but it’s still important to support the NRA and speak out against dishonest reporting.
We are going to be buried in new taxes soon. The seeds of socialism are in the ground, and they are so big, there is probably no way to keep them from growing to maturity.
Our lifestyle is never going to be what it used to be, except perhaps for temporary respites paid for by selling out generations yet to be born.
If the US is going to shrivel and pucker until it resembles Europe, we should at least try to retain the ability to defend ourselves.
Iran has carefully scrutinized the Obama administration's every action, and Tehran's only conclusion can be: It is past time to torque up the pressure on this new crowd in Washington.
Not only is Iran's back now covered by its friends Russia, China and others on the U.N. Security Council, but it sees an American president so ready to bend his knee for public favor in Europe that the mullahs' wish list for U.S. concessions will grow by the minute.
Israel must also be carefully considering how the U.S. watched North Korea rip through "the international community."
The most important lesson the new government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should draw is: Look out for No. 1. If Israel isn't prepared to protect itself, including using military force, against Iran's nuclear weapons program, it certainly shouldn't be holding its breath for Mr. Obama to do anything.
Russia and China must also be relishing this outcome. They will have faced down Mr. Obama in his first real crisis, having provided Security Council cover for a criminal regime, and emerged unscathed.
They will conclude that achieving their large agendas with the new administration can't be too hard. That conclusion may be unfair to the new American president; but it will surely color how Moscow and Beijing structure their policies and their diplomacy until proven otherwise.
That alone is bad news for Washington and its allies.
Instead, listen up and learn—and feel better that your community-organizing President has just organized the world along the transnational principles that we alone will fight the Taliban, go into massive debt to ’stimulate’ exportation into the US market, follow the UN lead on problems from Iran to North Korea, apologize for the neanderthal ‘war on terror’, push the “reset” button on our past terrible policies, borrow and spend well over a half-trillion for ‘cap and trade’ to combat ‘global climate change’—and are to be loved as never before.
As usual, you have said it all. I can add nothing.
I am frustated but have decided that nothing can be done other than prepare our families for some rough times ahead.
We can tea party, send messages to congress, vote them out but in reality little can be done as too many of our fellow citizens seem to want this “change”.
So, in effect, through mere rhetorical puffery Obama has set the stage for the US to STILL do the heavy lifting, yet under his community organizing stewardship we will now be free to feel the love.
But this time around, we will end up further down the (proverbial) toilet.
Hope and change……you gotta hand it to him, he is NOT the genius his followers paint him to be, but he is a master Svengali, the likes of which I have never seen.
“The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out”,
The Fire of the Eternal Blame has been lit and Jeanne Kirkpatrick on August 20, 1984 was one of the first to recognize the altar upon which is has been hung.
On that date, in a speech as a lifelong Democrat to a Republican Convention in Dallas she spoke these words:
The American people know that it’s dangerous to blame ourselves
for terrible problems that we did not cause.
They understand just as the distinguished French writer,
Jean Francois Revel, understands the dangers of endless self- criticism
and self-denigration.
He wrote: “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything
it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”
She also wrote that “they always blame America first”, when she identified the coming generation of a new type of Democrat, one with which she (and I) could never identify. The “Sellout American”, who revels in the bloodsport of trashing his own country to its sworn enemies.
The “Timeshare American” who does not take full ownership of his American identity, but rather, maintains an identity as a “world citizen” who happens to have a domicile here. America is less “home” than it is the hat hanger of the moment…from which one stares out the front window wistfully toward the South of France.
Where elite, white, European descended Americans practice the groveling, bowing, scraping and sniveling at the feet of leftists abroad, Marxists of any stripe and begin an apoplectic fit of rage and apology if we ever dare to protect ourselves from mass murder attempts from folks who have skin pigmentation a shade more sun-kissed than theirs.
The Fire of Eternal Blame resides in their bellies and cannot and will not be extinguished in this generation. This is a generation that has stolen the information stream and has used it to throw truth upon the pyre of their own outlets. Deadwood media engaged in the sacrifice of self-immolation by first carrying the eternal blame torch, then dousing themselves in lies, half-truths, forgeries, fakery and distortion…and now, the last smoldering embers and ashes of their disgraceful existence are to be swept beneath the throw rugs of a New World Order.
They have served their mission. They kept alit the Fire of Eternal Blame. They sold out America. They always do.
Obama finds the same solutions for the world’s problems as for the USA’s problems.
The businessmen and entrepreneurs who built the country and made it stong are very very bad people. It’s shameful. The only solution is to take money from the evil American perpetrators of capitalism and give it to the righteous opressed minorities, be them African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Hamas, Russia, or Europeans.
And along the same line, America has been very very bad about using force to maintain a lawful, but obviously uncivil society. To correct that problem, we must disarm, both internally and externally. Only when the people we used to consider our enemies have power equal to our own will the world be truly safe and “fair”.
If there are a few glitches here and there with Depressions or nuclear mistakes, that’s the price we will have to pay to achieve parity for all of Obama’s children around the world.
Obama is repeating the failed policies of Hoover and FDR, by refusing to let prices fall. Obama, with his intervention to prop up housing prices and Bernanke with his gushers of money to bail out bankrupt banks and businesses are creating a new bubble that will burst even more spectacularly.
"The Fed was the greatest single contributor to the crisis that unfolds before us," Woods writes of today, and "more dollars were created between 2000 and 2007 than in the rest of the republic's history."
Obama, Lee issue 'stern, united' warning to N. Korea
President Obama joined South Korean President Lee Myung-bak at the G-20 economic summit Thursday in calling for a "stern, united" world response if North Korea proceeds with plans to launch a long-range rocket.
The implications are most frightening, from a political standpoint: if most wealth is undeserved, then therefore it can be rightfully taxed (expropriated) and redistributed to those are not so lucky.
Furthermore, most individuals who despise hard work do so not because they are brilliant, but because they are lazy.
Evaluation of a particular person's work ethic is an imperfect but reasonably good indicator of performance.
EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE LATE PROFESSOR, WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD.
I've always been able to make an argument that the UN was a debating forum for better world understanding, even when they often have demonstrated that they don't have our best interests in mind.
But, now I've tipped over on this.
They are a subversive element in our society. They seek our downfall while flourishing within our hospitality. They take our money while slapping us down regularly in their General Assembly. They demand without respect. They need to find a new home for their headquarters.
I'd suggest someplace nice like Kabul or Islamabad. I hear the weather is nice there this time of year and global warming won't be causing any flooding very soon.
Would we at least be able to impose some reasonable conditions on the massive grants and loans for development and other support (or ““conditionalities” as the Commission of Experts calls them)?
The UN experts say absolutely not!
After all, it would be politically incorrect to expect each recipient of our taxpayers’ money to actually have to demonstrate that the money won’t end up in a corrupt dictator’s Swiss bank account because, according to the UN experts’ circular reasoning, such “conditionalities” would “disadvantage developing countries relative to the developed, and undermine incentives for developing countries to seek support funding...”
By the way, we are being asked to entrust some of our money for this support funding to the United Nations Development Programme (“UNDP”), the main UN agency in charge of spending for development projects around the world.
The current president of UNDP’s executive board is Iran’s UN representative.
The rich developed countries foisted their rotten system on the poor developing countries, which are suffering much of the fall-out through no fault of their own, according to the UN experts.
Without citing a single example, the report claimed that “developing countries that have developed good regulatory frameworks, created effective monetary institutions, and succeeded in implementing sound fiscal policies” have been brought to their knees by “defects in one economic system” – i.e., Western-style capitalism.
2. Redistributive “Justice”
Of course, it goes without saying that the villain must pay.
This means even more redistribution of wealth to the developing countries than the hundreds of billions of dollars already set to be transferred from the United States and other developed countries under the UN’s Millennium Development Goals assistance program.
The Commission of Experts issued a preliminary report on March 20 outlining its views on the causes of the current global economic crisis, the impacts on all countries and recommendations to avoid its recurrence and restore global economic stability.
The report contemplates a massive reordering of the world economy involving trillions of dollars of wealth transfers, global regulation, and global taxes, all under the supervision of the United Nations.
The report blends the socialist and Islamic economic perspectives as an alternative to our present capitalistic system. It has four basic themes.
Western-style free market capitalism is the villain. Redistributive justice is mandatory. New global governance authorities are required. Global taxes are also needed.
The only institution that the UN experts believe has broad enough political legitimacy to serve as the global decision making forum and eliminate the abuses of free market capitalism is, unsurprisingly, the body that gave them the platform to air their views on a global stage in the first place – the United Nations.
Standing UN bureaucracies such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Secretariat have been pressing this same message in order to justify their own permanent existence.
They want major re-regulation of the market by governments working in unison through the global decision-making arms of the UN.
Can there be four more frightening words than a political leader claiming to have a plan for “a new world order”?
Not to overstate the case, but world domination is usually the bailiwick of cranks, crackpots and petty tyrants. Hugo Chavez dreams of a new world order. Fidel Castro used to, before 50 years of his socialist utopia reduced his country to penury. It’s not the sort of thing you expect from a responsible figure like Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Britain and host of this week’s summit of 20 leaders who should know better.
Nonetheless, Mr. Brown closed the summit Thursday with just such a declaration. Worse, he announced that he and his fellow utopiasts plan to use their self-declared authority to roam the globe enforcing good.
They agreed to flood the world with another $1 trillion, they intend to close down tax havens, and they want to compel executives everywhere to clean up their act.
Tony Blair has emerged as the leading candidate to become the first permanent president of the European Union after Gordon Brown gave his grudging blessing to the plan.
The former prime minister has stepped up his campaign for the job, which he wants to use to build a bridge between Europe and the new Obama administration.
But The Independent on Sunday has learnt that Mr Brown has accepted that his old rival should be in pole position for the appointment, on the basis that Britain needs to have a key figure in the architecture of the "new world order".
Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1 billion of TARP money. The government insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank.
Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic.
Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He's been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales.
He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with "adverse" consequences if its chairman persists. That's politics talking, not economics.
Think about it: If Rick Wagoner can be fired and compact cars can be mandated, why can't a bank with a vault full of TARP money be told where to lend?
And since politics drives this administration, why can't special loans and terms be offered to favored constituents, favored industries, or even favored regions?
Our prosperity has never been based on the political allocation of credit -- until now.
But enough already – at a certain point you have stop throwing your country under the double decker bus in an effort to get people to like you.
It`s like the American tourist in a British pub who constantly tells everyone he didn`t vote for Bush. The more you apologize, the wussier you look.
So, enough. The US is the leader of the world, not Europe. And the fact is, we're right more than we're wrong, and we do more good on this planet than the rest of these also-ran countries combined (including Belgium).
Now, I know you can't actually say all of that right now - it's simply not good form.
The G-20 also agreed to pump "at least" $100 billion into the World Bank and its regional cousins like the African Development Bank. There's also another $50 billion for something called the Global Trade Liquidity Program, which World Bank President Robert Zoellick said will "provide trade finance to support businesses across the developing markets." Translation: Subsidies for businesses from Bangladesh to Bolivia.
Operationally, this is a tall order for the bank despite its 60 years of experience in shoveling money out the door. As for the other $100 billion, anyone who has followed our editorials on the corrupt uses to which the bank's existing $30 billion annual budget is routinely put can easily imagine that much of the G-20's financial benevolence will never reach its intended targets in poor countries.
As for near-term global growth, perhaps the communique's two most telling measures concern tax and trade policy. On taxes, the G-20 makes a forceful commitment to eliminate "tax havens." The nominal point of this effort is to ensure fairness and eliminate "banking secrecy."
In fact, it looks more like a last-ditch effort by nations whose spending has reached such levels that they've become desperate for tax revenue.
If the real point is to mandate "harmonization" across borders at relatively high levels of taxation, one has to ask where the world is going to find incentives for new economic growth.
A Harley rider is passing the zoo, when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, right before the eyes of her screaming parents.
The biker jumps off his bike, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch. Whimpering from the pain, the lion jumps back letting go of the girl.
The biker then brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly.
A New York Times reporter has watched the whole event.
The reporter says, "Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I've seen a man do in my whole life." The biker replies, "Why, it was nothing, really, the lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt right."
The reporter says, "Well, I'm a journalist from the New York Times, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page . . . . So, what do you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have?"
The biker replies, "I'm a U.S. Marine and a Republican."
The following morning the biker buys The New York Times to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on the front page:
U.S. Marine Assaults African Immigrant and Steals His Lunch
Now imagine, you`re at that reunion, and all those folks still living at home with mom and dad, are now telling you how to run your business.
Welcome to the Group of 20 economic crisis summit.
According to the AFP, "Seldom has a US President faced such a stern first test overseas as the one awaiting Obama."
Yeah – a stern lesson. We`ve got the Russian President saying we need a new currency system. We`ve got a German chancellor saying new financial architecture must be made. We`ve got a French prime minister screaming for results.
True, we've got big problems here, but the last thing America needs is to take advice from countries, who, for the longest time, chose economic principles that crippled their economies for decades.
We may be in a rough patch, but this is not the time for the world`s most winning economy in the history of the world to take counsel from the people who gave us Abba.
No way jack - remember that even in the worst of conditions - we`re still the best. (with the possible exception of the Czech Republic)
And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Hitler.
This melt-down has everything do do with fundamental morality, as does every other facet of life.
Somehow, our nation has gotten out of the notion that “a man’s word is his bond” and has progressed (if that’s the word) to “if it feels good, do it.” Trust is no longer a public virtue–heck there aren’t any virtues any more.
Contracts aren’t worth anything–they’re too easy to weasel out of these days. Marriage having problems? Get a divorce. Pregnant and inconvenienced? Planned Parenthood can help you out there, regardless of your age. Mayhem in our schools; radicals teaching our university students; pay-for-play scandals a dime a dozen; some of the most popular music our kids hear promotes the most vile and disgusting acts; the way I see it, it wasn’t an “if there IS a melt-down” it was only a matter of “when.”
I long to see more men like my father, grandfather, brother and husband: men of their word, honest, trustworthy, men who, when they said they’d do something, they’d DO it, regardless of cost to self.
And I long to meet more women like my mother, grandmother, and sister; intelligent, achievers, passionate, and nurturing.
We’ve lost the prototype of American Manhood, American Womanhood, and most particularly, American Morality. We’ll know we’re on the right track when they start to re-appear in society.
We have lost the distinction between wealth creation, and wealth management. Wealth creation is what Boeing and Microsoft do, or a truly talented artist. They assemble the bits and create something with a higher valuation than those bits. Wealth created.
Any changes in the market value after that creative act are merely wealth management.
I’ve met many people who have degrees in “content management”, but don’t seem aware that without content they have nothing. The money people may screw the idea people every time, but without the idea people, the money people starve.
Business culture has cone to believe that a derivatives trader is morally and economically equal to an airframe designer. Failing to realize that without the airframe designer, the trader doesn’t have any wealth to manipulate. And so we get a carrion crow like Soros. As opposed to someone like Buffett.
Second.
Scope and timeframe. Business culture seems locked into a four-year business cycle. Too many decisions are made that are sensible in short term, and lunacy in the longer term. It’s a failure of vision and scope.
The sort of organizational incest that you’re describing is perfectly sensible from the perpective of an individual exec, responsible to a single generation of a BOD.
Shareholders and directors want short-term profitability, so managers make short-term decisions. Buying regulators is a perfectly good short-term strategy, since by the time it boomerangs, you’ll be gone.
There are very few organizations that either can or will plan for the longer term. Buffett is an exception.
Second-and-a-half.
The American educational system has spent two generations denying that there is any relation between rights, liberties, duties, and responsibilities. Pure, unenlightened self-interest, without a societal context to moderate it. I got mine, screw you.
Combined with a decreasing respect for written law, the consequences are as we see. No jail time, no foul. Jake DeSantis is an honorable man, and I would like to shake his hand.
“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
AN HOUR LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT IN LOOKING FOR SOMETHING THAT WILL NEVER EVER HAPPEN.
Apr 2, 2009 - 10:13 am
19. ~Paules:
The United States has degenerated to a point where the words “capitalism” and “republic” have become largely meaningless.
Corporate executives now find it more lucrative to lobby government than produce genuine profits. We call this condition crony-capitalism.
You ask who sits on these corporate boards? Too frequently people who can’t even read a balance sheet. Like the wives or kids of a politicians for example.
The United States is now run by an oligarchy. Who are they? Our entrenched political class and anyone who can purchase access to them.
As Ayn Rand predicted, we are now ruled by a class of professional looters. They produce naught, but they are highly skilled at collecting their filthy lucre through legislation.
When I graduated from college some thirty years ago, I got my first job with the IRS. At the time the tax code looked like a stack of phone books bound in volumes. You need to understand that every statute in the code was placed there by someone for someone else. Indeed, the standard practice is for the lobbyist to write the law; it’s merely the job of a congressman to insert the provision into some sort of omnibus legislation so that it becomes the law.
Our window of opportunity to restore the republic is closing fast. The citizenry must jerk away from the oligarchs the means by which wealth is redistributed before the condition becomes permanent.
Sacking the tax code, curtailing regulation, abandoning the minimum wage, and placing effective constitutional limits on government would do that. Such a program would restore economic liberty to its maximum potential. L’aissez-faire? You betcha!
In today’s “Age of the Common Man” (spit!) it has become the fashionable view that l’aissez-faire capitalism is too rapacious to be allowed to operate without the benevolent hand of government moderating it’s worst aspects.
Now it is laid bare for all who are willing to see that this benevolent moderation has morphed into an all encompassing leviathan of corruption, special interest, and politics.
Tampering with the market, even when the “goal” is laudable will always, inevitably, produce unintended consequences that will eventually destroy both the free market and it’s regulators.
Like individual people, markets thrive when they are the most free.
You are correct that it is a moral issue. Capitalism is trading goods and services. Both sides percieve value in the trade so it is done freely. Taxes, regulations, subsidies all usurp a measure of this freedom. To that extent they are immoral.
We cant have it both ways. It is either free markets or central planning. Cobbled together Frankenstein policies can only endure for a short time before they lurch out of control and cause more harm than good.
The medieval guild system failed, mercantilism failed, Napoleon’s “Continental” system failed. Only l’aissez-faire capitalism flourished magnificently for a brief time but now is nearly extinguished.
I love your optomism but I fear our technology and civilization have reached their apogee and will soon begin a swift descent.
We are lucky to have seen it. It will be hard to watch the last death-throes of a golden age.
“This is a defining moment, and there is overwhelming empathy with folks who are scared to death about the direction this country is going,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) told POLITICO.
President Obama inherited from George Bush a $500 billion — and growing — annual budget deficit and a ballooning $11 trillion national debt. Obama nevertheless promised us an entirely new national health plan, bigger entitlements in education and a vast new cap-and-trade energy program.
But there is a problem in paying for the $3.5 trillion in budgetary expenditures that Obama has called for in the coming fiscal year. Proposed vast additional taxes on the "rich" still won't be enough to avoid tripling the present budget deficit — and putting us on schedule over the next decade to add another $9 trillion to the existing national debt.
During the Clinton years, we got higher taxes but eventually balanced budgets. During the Bush administration, we got lower taxes but spiraling deficits. But now during the era of Obama, we apparently will get the worst of both worlds —higher taxes than under Clinton and higher deficits than under Bush.
In other words, we — through our government — are spending money that we don't have. We're told the rich will pick up the tab, even though there are not enough rich with enough money to squeeze out the necessary amounts.
Our new demagogues, though, are arguing that this is the only fair course of action.
We need such a Socrates in Washington right now, who would dare tell the American mob the truth of how we are descending into financial serfdom. But in this present mood, the aroused mob would first make him drink the hemlock.
Take the AIG debacle. The global insurance and financial services company is broke and needed a federal loan guarantee of $180 billion to prevent bankruptcy. Some $165 million (about 1/1000th of that sum) had previously been contracted to give bonuses to its derelict executives.
That set off a firestorm in Congress. Politicians rushed before the cameras to demand all sorts of penalties for these greedy investment bankers. Soon, they passed an unprecedented special tax law just to confiscate 90 percent of these contracted bonuses.
Those who shouted the loudest for the heads of the AIG execs had the dirtiest hands. President Obama was outraged at their greed. But he alone signed their bonus provisions into law. And during the recent presidential campaign, no one forced him to accept over $100,000 in AIG donations.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D, N.Y., was even more infuriated at such greed and helped pass the retroactive tax bill. Yet for years, the populist Rangel — who is in trouble over back taxes owed and misuse of his subsidized New York apartments — had tried to entice AIG executives to fund his Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York.
Our attitude toward Britain has taken on an air of the PKO. (polite kiss off) A tinge of arrogance, dismissiveness, indifferent sophisticated airs wrapped in thinly- veiled disdain. Its’ absolutely French in demeanor.
Brown has been repeatedly rapped across the nose with a rolled up newspaper (NYTimes) and has been treated as if he had an accident on the rug. Not sure the administration is aware he is Scottish, they all look alike anyway, you know, now don’t they?
Ponzi’s Pocketbook: Debt, debt and more debt …giving birth to Socialism is a messy affair. Socialism is simply a Ponzi scheme in which one taxpayer needs to be bilked out of his money to pay for the prior taxpayer who was bilked out of his money. This is Bernie Madoff on steroids.
Soros is the proud papa and the American workplace is still suffering the contractions. Our conspiratorial media made it all so much easier with an information epidural and massive doses of hope and change Pitocin to speed along the delivery. Imbeciles like Gail Collins wanted a C section, or perhaps a W section, but that was too much even for the Pelosi, Reid and Frank midwives.
Patty Duke Redux; Many decades ago there was a show featuring a young Patty Duke with the rather incestually tinged notion of “identical cousins”. One was British and one was American. “They laugh alike, they walk alike, at times they even talk alike…you could lose your mind…”. The premise of the show is how the influence of each made them turn more into each other’s persona.
America is becoming Europe…a soft, squishy, feel good Aristocrat…casting rose petal benevolence and lessons of morality to the great unwashed, while feigning an apologia for all that was “inherited”.
Europe, not used to be on the receiving end of this treatment…doesn’t know whether to sit, shake or roll over. (witness Brown, currently on tour as the subject in stupid pet tricks).
They wish to flex their pipe cleaner muscles…atrophied after decades of lack of use. While radical Sharia fanatics kick sand in their faces, and Big Brother has decided to join a commune and contemplate his navel…scrawny Europeans are left to pray that a half century of weakling politics can be transformed by those ads in the back of comic books, so they can stand up to the world’s bullies.
Maybe at the same time, they can order a decoder ring in case Joe Biden shows up there and gives a speech on how we all are gonna think this is so very, very wrong.
Obama is borrowing $1.7 trillion, and with future projected budgets that require perhaps another ca. $10 trillion over the next possible eight years.
The message seems to be that we Americans need new entitlements that we cannot pay for, nor have we earned them with goods and services, but we want all of you abroad to lend us the cash nonetheless.
Odd, as was pointed out a few posts ago, that we will have cradle-to-grave health care due to borrowed Chinese dollars that didn’t go to basic cancer treatment to millions of Chinese who toil at factories.
There is a certain sort of irony in London. Bush was so easily caricatured as the right-wing Texas-slanging cowboy that Euros found it easy to pose as progressive utopian antitheses.
(Never mind that Bush in his second term was good to Europe, or that his positions on immigration, spending, new federal programs, etc. were hardly conservative.)
Now Obama is trumping them all as a far more genuine leftist than any in Berlin or Paris.
The President wants far bigger deficits than they do, wants more trade protectionism to protect domestic unions, wants to embrace cap and trade whole hog, is more eager to engage radical regimes abroad, and will pay for his socialism with big cuts in defense that will make it harder to protect socialist unarmed Europe.
We must keep up the pressure by demanding a globalization that works for everyone, and forge new alliances and new lines of communication across national boundaries. We must develop new, progressive ways to achieve global justice.
That's why, as the G-20 meets in London, an even larger group will meet in Brussels -- a group of progressive politicians, trade unionists, NGOs, academics and figures from major international institutions.
This is the world conference of the Global Progressive Forum (GPF), which will bring together speakers from five continents to develop a new vision of a globalized world which benefits all.
The GPF will take place in the European Parliament and will be opened by Bill Clinton. It will feature debates and discussions on the issues of global governance, trade, financial markets, decent work, migration and climate change, all aimed at coordinating global answers to what are global crises.
It shows that the world's progressives are serious about making a solidaristic social model a reality for all.
Today in America you can take your after-tax income and go to Las Vegas and carouse, gamble, drink and smoke, and as far as our government is concerned that's just fine.
But if you take that same after-tax income and leave it to your children and grandchildren, the government will tax that after-tax income one additional time at rates up to 55%.
I especially like an oft-quoted line from Joseph Stiglitz and David L. Bevan, who wrote in the Greek Economic Review, "Of course, prohibitively high inheritance tax rates generate no revenue; they simply force the individual to consume his income during his lifetime."
China wants a new global currency to replace the inflatable dollar.
The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has said the world financial system needs an "early warning system," which one guesses the rocket scientists at the IMF would provide.
France's Nicolas Sarkozy wants a global "financial regulator." On Sunday the New York Times raised its hand to announce the crisis "has led to a fundamental rethinking of the American way as a model for the rest of the world."
Here's my two cents worth: Beware of real-estate salesmen.
The housing bubble that floated into view in 2007 is turning into the blob that ate the world. Real-estate mortgages and their derivative securities are a significant problem.
That discrete problem, however, has been pumped up to an historic "crisis of capitalism
We live in trying times. We are being tempted to risk our economic freedoms in exchange for a mirage of economic security. We will end up with neither freedom nor security, if we don’t make some hard choices right now.
The truth is we can’t tax, borrow or print enough money to get us out of this jam. We must simply suffer through some tough choices.
America has been living beyond its means for a very long time, and has cut itself off from the very economic activity it needs in order to recover.
Greed in the corporate world and among organized labor, coupled with unbridled consumption patterns by consumers buying houses they can’t afford and relying upon maxed-out credit cards for everyday living expenses, along with government entitlement giveaways with no securities to pay for the same — well, no wonder we have problems.
The flip side of having run up bills and commitments we cannot afford to pay is our artificially constrained ability to generate new wealth and related tax revenues via the creation of new products, development and increased industrial and manufacturing output.
Opportunity is constrained by the double blow of government fiat and environmental activism. To put it another way, some of our own people are pirating as much money as they can from a sinking ship, while other forces in our society continue to poke holes in the ship.
The ship cannot help but sink, taking many innocent lives — those who are living within their means and are not milking the system for all it’s worth — along with it.
I believe it is high time we take a stand and hope that our society comes to its senses.
We can no longer afford to reward corporate executives with exorbitant salaries and bonuses, while they run companies into the ground in order to realize short-term profits.
Relatedly, shareholders need to restrain their urges to fire these same CEOs who don’t deliver dividends that actually exceed the true earnings and value of the company.
Government and private-sector unions can no longer expect returns and guarantees for pensions that exceed the routine fluctuations of the stock market.
The ability of individuals and families to incur debt of any kind must be tied to, and have a ceiling based upon their actual earning capacity.
The basic ingredients of wealth creation are economic freedom — property rights, market-based capital opportunities, and entrepreneurial spirit. As a society, we must roll back the attitudes, regulations and prohibitions impeding economic growth.
Extreme environmental policies that prohibit the use of property and the development and use of natural resources must be rescinded. Excessive taxation and regulation that promotes capital flight and does not reward investment must be eliminated.
And to fuel our recovery, artificial constraints prohibiting our ability to create necessary water and energy supplies, housing stock and infrastructure must be removed.
Do you believe that it is moral and just for one person to be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another?
And, if that person does not peaceably submit to being so used, do you believe that there should be the initiation of some kind of force against him?
Neither question is complex and can be answered by either a yes or no. For me the answer is no to both questions but I bet that your average college professor, politician or minister would not give a simple yes or no response.
They would be evasive and probably say that it all depends.
We all have a moral obligation to pay our share of the constitutionally mandated and enumerated functions of the federal government.
Unfortunately, there is no way out of our immoral quagmire.
The reason is that now that the U.S. Congress has established the principle that one American has a right to live at the expense of another American, it no longer pays to be moral.
People who choose to be moral and refuse congressional handouts will find themselves losers. They'll be paying higher and higher taxes to support increasing numbers of those paying lower and lower taxes.
As it stands now, close to 50 percent of income earners have no federal income tax liability and as such, what do they care about rising income taxes? In other words, once legalized theft begins, it becomes too costly to remain moral and self-sufficient.
You might as well join in the looting, including the current looting in the name of stimulating the economy.
I am all too afraid that a historian, a hundred years from now, will footnote America as a historical curiosity where people once enjoyed private property rights and limited government but it all returned to mankind's normal state of affairs -- arbitrary abuse and control by the powerful elite.
Obama has said he did not know his aunt was living here illegally and believes laws covering the situation should be followed…
This is how the rule of law is destroyed in a nation. One outrage of justice at a time.
Why should it take more than five years to deport someone who is clearly in this country illegally?
And, who on top of that, is illegally receiving public housing, free healthcare and other welfare benefits?
Try to imagine the howls of outrage if any laws were similarly ignored for the relative of a Republican dog catcher, let alone a Republican President.
But our watchdog media will not say ‘boo’ about this.
And eventually, some quiet Saturday morning, we will learn from the back pages of the local newspaper that a way has been found to allow Ms. Onyango to stay in this country so that she can continue to leach off of its taxpayers.
On top of it all, he urges you to keep buying GM cars because the (drum-roll please,) the Federal Gubmint will now be your warranty service.
That's right, when your transmission goes ker-klunk on a dark winding road at night, simply call the White House and he'll send Rahm out with a tow-truck to take care of things.
Call it what you wish, but if you can read English then you can see that this is quite clearly nationalization of the two car manufacturers. It is seizure of corporate assets without any sort of due process.
In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama.
The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.
“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me.
He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
MORE FREE GOODIES FOR THE FOLKS. WONDER IF THEY OFFER A FREE DELIVERY SERVICE OR AT LEAST PAY THE POSTAGE.
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Dr. Hanson, excellent and uplifting article. My only worry about our military is that when the time comes, and it will, when they are asked to fire on their fellow citizens, will the middle ranks remember that they swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and not to the commander-in-chief.
Dr. Hanson, excellent and uplifting article. My only worry about our military is that when the time comes, and it will, when they are asked to fire on their fellow citizens, will the middle ranks remember that they swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and not to the commander-in-chief.
May I ask, VDH…which of your three illustrations, is not under direct and relentless attack?
Have you seen a movie, watched a humanities professor, watched the homemade posters being carried at Berkeley, seen an AP or Reuters report, watched a nightly news program on the alphabet networks, read a major glossy magazine, or perused a major metropolitan newspaper that did not:
1)Slander our officers in uniform
2)Paint them as monsters
3)Portray them as drug-addled, traumatized, psychotic and in need of long term counseling
4)In some intances, incite treason and call for outright mutiny against them
5)Honor, integrity, loyalty…do you witness ANY of the above places holding that in esteem, or in ridicule?
I know what I see, VDH. Do you see the same at the above mentioned places? Which one is winning over the hearts and minds of the society as a whole?
My dear VDH, in those same gathering places where still the vast majority of your countrymen gather to garner their “facts”…to hear the town criers alert them to coming danger or to educate them on important issues of the day…to whom do they look for a “hero” and what is championed?
From my seat in the cfbleachers, VDH…the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the businessman who takes a chance, the little guy who digs his livelihood out of the dirt with his fingernails, the guy who creates jobs in his neighborhood, who takes last for years while his employees go first…when he finally…finally…makes it, how is he portrayed?
He moves his family into a nicer home, buys a vacation place for his family to enjoy …finally…what he has worked decades to build, maybe a bass boat or a house boat…how is he looked upon?
I will tell you what I see, VDH. He is looked upon as “the enemy”. Someone FROM whom, things must be taken. The doctor who worked slavish hours, the CEO who built a small business with nothing more than an idea and a willingess to pound the pavement and sweep his own floors, are under assault. Somehow, IF you make it…you become the “enemy”, you are only worth championing…when you are struggling or failing.(the exception to this, is someone who retains “permanent victim” status, which trumps all other issues.
A “permanent victim” retains “victimhood” even into financial success, as long as they do not “cross over” into Non-Victim Society…or worse, become a Republican)
3)Technology, yes it’s wonderful. It can be harnessed for good and we could…if given the freedom to do so, put creativity into the stratosphere for decades to come.
It can also be used to instantly distort our image to the entire world. In an instant, photoshopped pictures can be sent around the world…giving billions of people an intentionally distorted view of something happening in Iraq or Gaza.
It can be used to intentionally demonize the face of a candidate for the highest office in the land in a national publication.
It can be used to forge documents to make a sitting President less likely to win re-election, which can be broadcast to the entire nation.
It can be used to turn off the credit card authorization firewall so that foreign money and “bundled” funds from a Soros can be hidden in the election of those who wish to represent us.
It can be used by those who mean to harm us, who have been allowed to infiltrate the castle walls and sit in stealth silence…cell by individual cell, waiting to ambush the innocent, while avoiding the conventional rules of engagement. As we have seen above…in those gathering places where the guardians of our information sit…who is being championed today? The brave and honorable protectors you described in our defense? For whom do those town criers weep?
The detainees at GITMO garner more empathy, more concern…than our brave men and women in uniform.
We are under assault from our own information stream, VDH. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. They have breached the walls. Our hands are being tied behind our backs, our communications have been cut off and this was an inside job.
We champion hedonism, not heroism. We champion disloyalty, not loyalty. We champion class and racial warfare, not harmony. And it all stems from the poisoned well where we gather to drink in our information.
PRESERVE AND PROTECT UAW. TO HELL WITH THE PEOPLE.
Mr. Obama might take up the duties of a president. He might try giving the country a coherent auto policy for a change. He could repeal two fleets so Detroit could build its small cars profitably offshore and tame the UAW monopoly in the process. He could dump CAFE or impose a $5 gasoline tax so at least customers would have a reason to buy the cars Washington is forcing Detroit to build.
None of this will happen. Mr. Obama will be content with incoherent policies that poll well -- which means GM, Chrysler and perhaps Ford eventually will need taxpayer subsidies as far as the eye can see -- or until a real bankruptcy sometime after November 2012.
