America, the Silly Nation

By Alan Caruba

As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, we will hear about our Founding Fathers, about those who fought our wars to preserve and safeguard our nation, and other men and women who contributed to the nation’s greatness.

It is good to look back, but future generations will look back as well and wonder how such a great nation became such a silly nation, the object of scorn and ridicule around the world, challenged by every gangster nation that shares the planet; attacked by Al Qaeda, threatened by North Korea, mocked by Venezuela, insulted by Iran, and sustained by the wealth of China and other lenders.

What other republic is governed by fools who voted without reading “climate” legislation whose 1,200 pages of rules and regulations will enrich a few and leave the rest scrambling to pay the light bill? That is, if the light turns on. If passed by the Senate, it will be the largest tax increase in the history of the nation. It exists to “save the planet” from a “global warming” that is not happening.

What other nation would systematically ensure that its vast resources of coal, enough to power plants to produce electricity for the next hundred or two hundred years, not be used because no new plants will be built? Fully fifty percent of our electricity comes from coal, but this nation is about to waste billions of dollars on wind and solar energy—so called “clean” energy—which accounts for about one percent.

If wind or solar was a sensible way to produce electricity, surely utilities would have invested in it long ago. It isn’t. It never will be. Only a very silly nation would shift billions of dollars to such “clean” and “renewable” energy when it was sitting on top of tons of coal.

Only a silly nation would ensure that its other vast, natural and national resource, oil, would be put off limits to all exploration and extraction in Alaska and along our vast coastlines, as well as huge reserves in the nation’s interior. Only a silly nation would do this while listening to its politicians talk about “energy independence.”

Only a silly nation would ignore the vast potential of nuclear power and use all manner of bureaucratic obstacles to drive up the cost of building plants to generate electricity.

Only a silly nation would ignore the security of its southern border as a virtual invasion of illegal aliens pours across, and take advantage of all manner of welfare programs, special education programs for their children, and free medical services. Our prisons, too, are filling up with illegal aliens.

Only a silly nation with twelve million or more of these illegal aliens in its midst would actually be looking for a way to magically make them citizens overnight while ignoring the fact that they having been taking jobs from natural born and naturalized citizens by working “off the books” and sending billions back to Mexico and points south. Amnesty would double or triple the existing population of formerly illegal aliens in America as family members joined them.

Only a silly nation would allow the teachers unions to totally control the quality of education and transfer power to Washington, D.C., away from the States and local communities where it rightfully belongs.

Only a silly nation would spend thousands of dollars per student and, at the same time, ignore the message they are sending with obscene drop-out rates. Only a silly nation would impose a one-size-fits-all system of testing on millions of students.

Only a silly nation would to allow the graduation, year after year, of students lacking the most basic math, science, reading, and other skills necessary to provide the workforce we require.

Only a silly nation would ensure that the costs of a college education were so high that graduates enter the workplace burdened by years of debt.

Only a silly nation would continue to seek negotiations with Iran whose leaders cry “Death to America” every day. Only a silly nation would elect a President who, when the desire for freedom and democracy broke out on the streets of Tehran, expressed respect for the “Supreme Leader” and outrage only after protesters had been shot to death and clubbed into submission.

Only a silly nation would permit itself to literally go broke, along with most of its States, and then vote billions more in a “stimulus” bill while, at the same time, giving billions to failed auto companies and taking government ownership. We own an insurance company as well. This is contrary to the Constitution. It is nationalization.

It was, however, a silly nation that caused the housing mortgage meltdown with government mandates that required banks and mortgage firms to lend money to people who would not normally qualify for them.

It is a silly nation that proposes to provide healthcare insurance to everyone at the same time Medicare is on the brink of bankruptcy. Nationalizing the healthcare system will kill a lot of Americans by rationing health services, but that’s what a silly nation does.

Only a silly nation would raise taxes in the midst of a major Recession verging on a Depression. The last Great Depression lasted ten years because of such foolish actions and ended only because the nation had to gear up for World War Two.

There was a time when mature people led the nation prudently and, when necessary, boldly. What we have now are petulant and indifferent children intent on personal enrichment.

What we have is a President that does not like America..

What we have is a silly nation.

The Lying EPA

By Alan Caruba

June 26, 2009, Investor’s Business Daily
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=480787

“A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?

“This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporter’ arguments.

“On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said was releasing ‘an internal study on climate science that was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency.’”

You can read the EPA document at
http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/DOC062509-004.pdf

All this, of course, makes “official” what this commentator and others, many of whom credentialed meteorologists and climatologists, have been saying now for YEARS.

There is NO global warming. The warming that began around1850 was an entirely NATURAL cycle, a response to a mini-ice age that had begun around 1300. There was and is NO PROOF that the presence of so-called “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide had anything to do with the warming that occurred, nor that human activity contributed to it.

The EPA suppression of an internal document that disputes the assertion that underwrites the Waxman-Markey “Cap-and-Trade” bill that passed the House last week demonstrates the extent to which this present administration will go to impose taxation that will further bankrupt a bankrupt nation. A nation which, in the President’s own words “has no money.”

This bill now goes to the U.S. Senate where it must be rejected in whole or the further destruction of the nation will be greatly accelerated by its lies. The Republican leader in the House called it “a pile of sh-t”, a blunt and accurate assessment.

It is based on the great global warming lie. It is based on the many global warming lies that have been generated by the United Nations Environmental Program; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It is based on the same lies being told over and over again by environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the Sierra Club, and then repeated daily, weekly, monthly in the nation’s brain-dead media.

On a broad spectrum of critical issues, the EPA determines the outcome and then cooks the books to construct a reason to take action. It is an environmental Gestapo that has wreaked havoc with corporations and private citizens.

The lead author of the suppressed report was Alan Carlin, an MIT-educated senior research analyst and 38-year non-political appointee assigned only to perform fact and science-based analysis regardless of who occupies the White House.

The “facts”, the science, never supported the global warming hoax. That is why those who disputed it were first called skeptics and later called “deniers”, echoing the label given those who denied the Holocaust. In some liberal circles, there have even been calls to jail or kill global warming “deniers.”

The New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, calls those who doubt global warming guilty of “treason against the planet.” Krugman, an economist, pontificates about meteorological science while offering economic advice that would further wreck the nation’s already tenuous economic foundations.

The EPA is so boldfaced in its lies that it claims that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” and, of course, it intends to regulate it, but it is an atmospheric gas on which all vegetation depends. Without it, all vegetation dies and then everything else dies.

Carbon dioxide is produced, in part, by the use of energy and any restriction on energy production and use is a restriction on our modern lifestyle and our economy. Its taxation is at the heart of “Cap-and-Trade.” It would increase the cost of everything.

Global warming is the Big Lie that the EPA, the environmentalists, the Democrats and the President are putting forth as justification to unjustly impose a “Cap-and-Trade” tax. It must be defeated when it comes to a vote in the Senate.

Iran's Mullahs Threaten the World

By Alan Caruba

In the more than four decades of the Cold War following World War Two, a cadre of specialists called “Kremlinologists”, academics, diplomats, and military, developed for the purpose of figuring out what the Soviet Union was doing and how best to counteract it. As often as not, they were wrong. The fall of the Berlin War came as a surprise to them, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now we are watching the same thing occur as various “experts” struggle to tell us what is happening in Iran and why.

What I really want to know is why the President of the United States thought it best not to “meddle” with a nation that had taken American diplomats hostage for 444 days, was funding two Middle East terrorists organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas, and striving mightily to become a nuclear power with which to threaten their region and the world.

President Obama’s muted and belated response to the protests in the streets of Tehran by thousands of Iranians was a national and international disgrace. If America will not speak out boldly for liberty and support a popular uprising for democracy, who will?

My friend, Amil Imani, an Iranian-American who has forcefully spoken out for regime change in his former homeland, has posted a petition calling for an end to the slaughter of Iranians who only want what we in America and the West have, freedom.

You can add your name at http://www.petitiononline.com/ai2d2009/petition.html

Addressed to the leaders of the free world, the citizens of the world, and even to the Secretary-General of the useless United Nations, Imani states what we all know. “The mullahs and their mercenaries are wasting precious human life to maintain themselves in power through terrorizing the population.”

Islam is not about democracy. It is a political system called a theocracy. The clerics rule and, in effect, they only answer to Allah. Turkey, an Islamic nation, has maintained secular rule by splitting off Islam from governance. Other Islamic nations hold “elections” but it is understood by their citizens that they frequently are rigged, that those who rule them, secular or not, are corrupt, and protest gets you put in jail or dead.

One Middle Eastern nation that fashioned a working democracy, Lebanon, has been struggling for decades to throw off the dictators that would rule them, whether it is Syria or Hezbollah, a terrorist group of Palestinian terrorists whose sole purpose is the destruction of Israel.

Imani’s petition calls on “the free governments of the world, as well as all other businesses, organizations, and individuals to enlist in a non-violent campaign of ending the reign of terror of the belligerent clerical regime.”

Towards that end he seeks to protect the lives of Iranians through “a comprehensive program of assistance to all democratic Iranian opposition groups, both inside and outside of Iran, in their struggle to accomplish the regime change themselves.”

“Proclaim wide and far, the cardinal reason for taking these measures against the mullah’s reign of terror is to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons, the threat they pose to the region as well as the world, and the stimulus they provide for other nations to develop their own nuclear arsenal..”

There are a number of other proposals in the petition which I urge you to read and sign, but the issue to my mind is the failure of the United States, that is to say our President, to demonstrate any understanding of the fact that one cannot “negotiate” with a “Supreme Leader” intent on having nuclear weapons with which to threaten the region and the world.

That “Supreme Leader” and his minions subscribe to a Shiite myth of a “Twelfth Imam” who can only return to rule the Earth after widespread death and destruction has paved the way.

Little known and underreported have been the discussions underway between Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia as to “strategic” actions they can take to secure the safety of their nations and to bring down the Iranian regime before it achieves nuclear status. Let me repeat that roster. Israel. Egypt. And Saudi Arabia.

America has the misfortune to be led by a President who has been fixated before and since election on a diplomatic resolution to the enmity between Iran and America. He apparently thinks he can talk them out of securing nuclear weapons. That is never going to happen. Israel knows this. Egypt knows this. And Saudi Arabia knows this.

Obama’s willful ignorance and personal arrogance is going to keep the Iranian people enslaved and get a lot of people in the region and beyond killed.

The Iranian mullahs are a pestilence that must be eradicated and removed from power. History teaches this lesson. A nation’s sovereignty is not an excuse to permit its leaders to plunge the world into war.

An Endangered America

By Alan Caruba

“My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!” said Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and our third President. As usual, he was right.

Present day Americans take for granted the story of the American Revolution, but few consider what a fearful undertaking that was when the Declaration was published on July 4, 1776.

Thirteen colonies of the greatest power on Earth at that time, Great Britain, determined to establish a free and independent nation.

With some notable exceptions, we are mostly ignorant of the signers of that document and I would be willing to guess that few Americans realize how long the war for our independence lasted.

It began with a local militia engagement with the British in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. It would end eight years later in 1783 at Yorktown, Virginia. Estimates are that 25,000 Americans gave their lives over the course of the war; some 8,000 in battle and the rest by disease or as prisoners of war.

Eight years is a long time and it is generally conceded that the tenaciousness and will of one man led to victory. His name was George Washington.

“Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty,” said Louis D. Brandeis, a Supreme Court Justice.

What followed the Revolution were the Articles of Confederation that proved a dismal failure. On May 25, 1787, in great secrecy, a group of delegates from seven States, gathered to revise them. Eventually twelve of the thirteen States were represented.

The Constitution they devised was intended to ensure the process of passing legislation was a slow, laborious one, and that the federal government would have only a few, clearly enumerated powers, with all others reserved to the States and the People.

The men who wrote the Constitution feared both the mob and the concentration of too much power in the federal government. The States were and are independent, sovereign republics.

The U.S. Constitution officially became the law of the land when New Hampshire ratified it on June 21, 1788, being the ninth State to do so. The vote was 57 Yeas, 47 Nays.

The poet, Archibald MacLeish, said it best. “There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.”

The American dream is now the dream of billions around the world. It inspires hope everywhere. It draws to our shores those who want to live and thrive in freedom.

We are a nation in grave danger of being deprived of everything so many Americans worked, fought, and sometimes died to maintain.

We are being betrayed by a political and economic socialist theory that is the antithesis of the American system of governance. It killed millions in the last century.

We are being governed by fear as one “crisis” or another is announced and we are being governed by too many men and women in Congress who have heedlessly plunged the nation into unimaginable debt and propose to burden present and future generations with destructive taxation.

The limits on energy in the name of a non-existent global warming that the Congress is enacting are limits on America’s ability to compete in a world where other nations are using energy, not banning it.

America in 2009 must be reclaimed in the name of all those who came before us and in the name of generations to come. So long as we have the right to make our voices heard, we must demand an end to the plundering of the public treasury, an end to public ownership of private enterprises, and an end to the effort to control our lives through the takeover of the nation’s healthcare system.

July 4th is a good day to demand that President Barack Hussein Obama—born in Mombassa, Kenya, raised in Indonesia, and leaving no paper trail in America—resign before he does further harm to all Americans, to the American dream, and to the hope of freedom in the hearts of men and women everywhere in the world.

Betrayed by Congress

By Alan Caruba

Mark it on your calendar, June 26, 2009 was the date that the House of Representatives betrayed every American in the name of saving the nation and the Earth from global warming.

It was the day that 219 Representatives voted for the obscenely misnamed “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.” Only eight Republican members of the House voted for it and 44 Democrats voted against it.

The bill, some 1,200 pages, was not read by those men and women voting on it because they were not permitted the time to do so or have their staffs do it. The co-author of the bill, Rep. Henry Waxman, admitted that even he did not know its full contents.

The vote was not based on science, on economics, or simple common sense. It was an exercise in raw political power exercised by the Speaker of the House and her minions.

The bill puts limits on the generation of “greenhouse gases”, primarily carbon dioxide, setting up an elaborate scheme for the sale and trade of so-called carbon credits that will ultimately be the equivalent of the bundled housing mortgage securities that produced the present threat to the nation’s financial system. It is a get-rich scheme that will benefit a few while penalizing every American with higher costs for electricity.

The limits are justified by the claim that the Earth is dramatically warming due to too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The Earth has been cooling for the last ten years and is predicted to continue cooling for thirty years or more. Carbon dioxide plays no role in the warming or cooling of the Earth.

The bill is a direct attack on the nation’s coal industry. Fifty percent of all the electricity generated nationwide comes from coal-fired plants. The U.S. has deposits of coal sufficient to meet the nation’s needs for hundreds of years. It is cheap and it is abundant. No new coal-fired plants will be built in America in the foreseeable future. Coal that is not utilized here will be exported to China, a nation that is building new coal-fired plants and opening them on a weekly basis to meet its need for power.

The bill also allocates billions for the development of the two worst, most inefficient and unpredictable sources of electricity, wind and solar energy. Presently, these represent barely one percent of all the electricity generated in the nation. There is no way, nor should there be, they can replace coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy as a source of electricity. They are also the alleged source of “green” jobs.

As for “security”, a nation that cannot access its own sources of energy, coal, oil and natural gas, has no security if it must import them from other nations, some of whom are hostile to our values and system of government. The bill puts our fate in the hands of nations that support the goals of Islamic global domination. It puts the nation at the mercy of men like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and explains why President Obama made a deep bow to a Saudi prince earlier this year.

The bill must now go to the Senate where it is hoped that the upper body, though controlled by Democrats, will ensure it does not move on to the desk of the President.

If it passes in the Senate, the beginning of the actual decline of America as a great economy will be dated June 26, 2009.

Without abundant power, electricity for our homes, offices and factories; without gasoline for our cars and trucks, America will become a failed nation.

Drowning in Jackson

By Alan Caruba

The now day-long “coverage” of Michael Jackson’s death continues unabated. It is what I call the “Five Known Facts Syndrome”; the endless repetition of the time and place of his death, the speculation about a drug overdose—medicinal or not, the amount of record sales, ad nauseum.

This Jacksonalia, the complete submersion of the nation into a baleful mourning of the performer’s passing, suggests the low state of our supposed news media. It's the news version of water-boarding.

These are people who constantly tell us that they decide what the news is or isn’t, but they have managed to demonstrate their complete ignorance and complete indifference to events that will sink our ship of state.

The result is seen in this example from the Nielsen Wire report:

“The breaking news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death dominated the web yesterday (and today), causing spikes in traffic and overwhelming social networks such as Twitter and Facebook with bursts of information and updates from millions of users. In comparison, discussions of Jackson far exceeded those of the swine flu scare as well as the inauguration of President Obama.”

While this is going on, Congress is trying to pass the highest tax in the history of the nation, “Cap-and-Trade”, a bill that exceeds a thousand pages and whose co-author admits ignorance of what’s in it at this point. Essentially, it asserts that carbon dioxide, something that every living person exhales, is causing “global warming” and the government must “limit” it and, of course, come up with a crazed scheme of "carbon credits" to force companies to pay for permission to produce or use energy.

Typically, members of the House of Representatives are being asked to vote on it without the opportunity to actually read it. That's not just stupid, it's suicidal.

There are likely only a handful of people in the nation who grasp this concept and it is doubtful that the President is one of them since he keeps babbling about “clean energy” and "green jobs" while finding new ways to ensure there will be no energy and no jobs.

In a similar fashion, the news media has yet to have publish big headlines quoting the President saying, AMERICA IS OUT OF MONEY. This apparently is an unimportant detail as Congress pursues legislation that will require a totally broke nation to borrow more and more and more to pay for things we cannot afford and should not be doing at all.

But, while we're at it, let's also destroy the nation's healthcare system despite the fact that most people like their insurance coverage just the way it is.

So, Michael Jackson is an odd but appropriate symbol for what happens when one indulges in too much spending, too much self-indulgence, while passing off decadent behavior as “entertainment.”

An America led by stupid people, i.e., Congress and the White House, and composed of at least half the population stupid enough to have voted for them, is hanging by a mere thread while everyone pretends that everything’s just fine.

It’s like pretending that Michael Jackson wasn’t seriously deranged even while watching him “perform” or pretending that his odd behavior could or should have been excused by his “talent.”

Michael Jackson is dead.

The party’s over.

And the piper is demanding to be paid.

Michael Jackson: Redefining Weird

By Alan Caruba

We shall now be regaled with over-heated reporting about the life and death of Michael Jackson. The media will have a field day because he was always good for circulation and ratings.

When I think of Michael Jackson, I think of a grown man who, though born black, had a metamorphosis that left him with ghostly white skin. He also had a straight nose thanks obviously to plastic surgery, the long hair of a woman, and he appeared to wear lipstick and other makeup. Normal people do not do these kinds of thing.

He never dressed like ordinary people, not even very famous, but otherwise ordinary people.

In his later years, he always carried an umbrella or someone carried it for him to shield him from the sun.

The revelations of the trial for child molestation were fairly appalling even if he beat the rap. The circus and zoo he maintained on his estate in order to be able to surround himself with children was, shall we say, odd.

His voice was odd. Childlike barely begins to describe it. It did, of course, make him one of the most famous singers on planet Earth since Elvis Presley. I liked Presley. I didn’t like Michael Jackson.

His dancing influenced a whole generation of wannabes, but I always found it spastic and frequently obscene, particularly because he was always reaching for or touching his privates. Normal people don’t do that in public, even if or particularly when performing on stage.

The various show business experts will tell you that all this was the result of his enormous fame, but many performers enjoy such fame without turning into complete freaks though frequently they also abused drugs or alcohol or anything else they can sniff, snort, inject, drink, or ingest by any and all means possible.

Michael Jackson was a very weird person.

Kinky doesn’t even begin to describe him. You won’t hear too many show business reporters or news professionals say that. So I will.

He was one of a kind and for that we can all be grateful.

His death will spawn a dozen books, but I doubt any of them will ever explain why Michael Jackson was such a freak. Frankly, I don’t really care.

Let all the usual show business suck-ups, groupies, hangers-on and---yes, fans---mourn his death. He was, musically, a great talent.

His life, however, was a tragedy and I will not miss his androgeny, the clear evidence of his drug addiction, or the stench of his behavior around children. Everything about Jackson screamed deviation and excess. He was no one's role model.

Save the Earth! Get Rid of Your Refrigerator!

By Alan Caruba

On June 22, Greenpeace USA put out the word that “A new study published today in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences shows that refrigerant chemicals, so called F-gases, are a more dangerous global warming threat than previously predicted.”

Apparently, in order to save the Earth, we must all unplug and get rid of our refrigerators and air conditioners.

The study was authored by scientists from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the United States government agencies, NOAA and EPA, along with a scientist from “the chemical company Dupont.” You don’t suppose that Dupont has come up with a new refrigerant that it would like to sell, do you?

As to anything NOAA and the EPA has to say about the environment, at this point anyone older than a kindergartner knows that virtually everything these agencies say about global warming is pure fiction. They long ago abandoned any pretence about offering science-based information on anything.

“The paper projects that HFC (hydrofluorocarbon) emissions will rise rapidly in coming years and decades, threatening to effectively cancel out some of the hard fought greenhouse gas reductions made through energy efficiency and clean energy deployment,” said Greenpeace.

Why is it that, at the very moment Congress is being asked to pass a huge energy tax called “Cap-and-Trade”, supposedly intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Greenpeace has chosen to begin warning everyone about the chemicals in refrigerators and air conditioners as the next great threat?

“We must aggressively phase out HFCs to effectively combat climate change,” says Greenpeace USA.

Why is it that Greenpeace is lying about greenhouse gas emissions, largely carbon dioxide and methane, both produced naturally by the Earth, as the cause of something that ended ten years ago? The Earth has been cooling since 1998. You’d think that NOAA and the EPA would know about that, wouldn’t you?

Does anyone recall the last time we heard about HFCs? It was the big Ozone Hole scare which you might have noticed no longer scares anyone. It turned out that there had always been ozone “holes” over the North and South Poles. The one in Antarctica is over an active volcano, Mount Erebus, where one might expect the atmosphere to be affected. The Earth’s several hundred active volcanoes no doubt have a similar affect.

The real cost of the Ozone Hole scare was the banning of Freon, the most effective refrigerant and fire retardant ever invented. Freon, invented in 1928, was colorless, odorless, nonflammable, and non-corrosive. It doesn’t get much better than that. It was also a lot less costly than the refrigerant that replaced it.

Let’s see, who sold Freon? Oh yes, I remember. It was Dupont. Could its research scientists have found a new chemical compound for refrigeration purposes? Would that enrich Dupont? Would Greenpeace get a big, fat donation if that happened?

Here’s my suggestion. Don’t believe anything Greenpeace has to say on this subject. Ignore the alleged scientific study by what are possibly the two most scientifically-corrupted government agencies extant in the U.S. today. Forget about global warming because it isn’t happening.

Give your refrigerator a big hug. In hospitals, refrigerators protect life-saving drugs. After the generation of electricity and the invention of the internal combustion engine, refrigeration is one of the greatest life enhancing advances of the modern era.

In my youth, we had something called an “ice box.” It cooled its contents because a man came every few days with a big block of ice and put it in the “ice box.” There was no such thing as air conditioning. Those were not “the good old days.”

Cap-and-Trade Bill: Villainy on a Grand Scale

By Alan Caruba

Supported by outright lies by the President about “clean” or “renewable energy”, and based on the greatest hoax of the modern era, “global warming”, on Friday Congress is reportedly going to vote on the 1,200-page Waxman-Markey “Cap and Trade” bill (H.R. 2454).

It would impose a huge tax on the provision and use of electricity in the nation.

Energy is the most vital resource America has and we have enjoyed abundant and affordable energy for our long history. That will all change if the Waxman-Markey bill becomes law.

There is no “global warming.” The Earth is presently ten years into a cooling cycle and it is predicted to last a very long time.

Calling carbon dioxide “a pollutant” is a lie. All vegetation on Earth is dependent on carbon dioxide. Putting Limits on carbon dioxide emissions is idiocy and lunacy.

For the nearly six months since President Obama assumed office and in league with the majority Democrat Party in Congress, the actions taken to date appear to have a single purpose, the destruction of the nation’s economy.

The Waxman-Markey bill is villainy on a grand scale.

It is no accident that President Obama and his acolytes keep calling for “clean energy”, “energy independence”, and babbling endlessly about “green jobs” as the real jobs of Americans are systematically destroyed. Upon taking office, Obama rescinded the executive order to permit exploration of the nation’s offshore continental shelf for the wealth of oil and natural gas it possesses.

It is no accident that his Secretary of the Interior unilaterally cancelled 77 oil and gas leases or that, on March 25, the House of Representatives passed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 that adds two million more acres of wilderness to the 107 million acres already “protected” by the federal government.

It is estimated that 300 million barrels of oil and 8.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lie beneath these “protected” acres. The government owns 607 million acres of land in a nation founded on the belief in the sanctity and power of private property, the keystone of capitalism.

Even if the bill were to become law, it totally ignores the fact that all the other nations of the Earth will continue to generate “greenhouse gases.” The United Nations Kyoto Protocol, intended to reduce these gases, purposefully exempted China, India, and all undeveloped nations. Its limits are, by definition, meaningless.

The Waxman-Markey bill will, by 2035, reduce the aggregate domestic product (GDP) by an estimated $7.4 trillion. Our present annual GDP is about $14 trillion. It is estimated to destroy 844,000 jobs on average with peak years seeing unemployment rise by over 1,900,000 jobs. It will raise electricity rates 90% after adjusting for inflation. Prices for gasoline and natural gas will rise by 74% and 55% respectively.

This bill will impoverish Americans and destroy the nation.

Out of 307 million Americans, I seriously doubt that more than a relative handful know what Cap-and-Trade means or that it is even being debated, but they, their children, and their grandchildren will, by the actions of this Congress, live in a very different, very costly America.

The Democrats in Congress and the present occupant of the White House, by their actions, must hate America. They pose the greatest threat to its future that has ever existed in our history.

Call, write, fax, and email your representatives in Congress. Let them know you will not stand by idly as they destroy America.

The Democracy Next Door to Iran

By Alan Caruba

There are ample reasons why the predominantly young population of Iran has risen up to denounce “the Dictator” otherwise known as the “Supreme Leader”, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his thuggish, incompetent regime.

The one, though, that the Obama administration and the whole of the nation’s mainstream media have overlooked or ignored is the fact that Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, is a functioning democratic state that has held elections safely and without strife for some time now.

Iraq’s citizens, who suffered grievously for three decades under the rule of Saddam Hussein, have now joined much of the rest of the world by virtue of George W. Bush’s conscious decision to transform that nation and, by extension, the Middle East by force of arms.

President Obama campaigned successfully by attacking the Iraq War and promising to remove U.S. troops as quickly as possible. By some strange contortion of foreign policy, he announced that Afghanistan was “the new front” in a war on global Islamic terrorism whose name he will not speak. Most people understand that the real front is now in Pakistan, long a place of refuge for al Qaeda and the Taliban that are threatening its fragile government.

President Obama has finally articulated a more vigorous response to the Iranian effort to cast off the rule of the mullahs, but his first tepid instinct failed not only the courageous Iranians in the streets, but the history of our nation that has always supported freedom in the face of tyranny.

It is the democratic example of Iraq that is transforming the Middle East in ways we cannot begin to predict, but surely the revolution taking place in Iran is a sign of its success.

The era of the Middle East’s oppressive regimes, of ayatollahs and monarchies, of juntas, and of Palestinian militias armed by the Iranian regime, is on shaky ground in this new century.

The world has made impressive strides toward freedom since the cataclysm of World War Two. Two major nations, Russia and China, are being forced by globalization to extend greater freedom to their people. Africa, however, is likely to remain mired in oppression and poverty for the foreseeable future.

Europe has expanded its membership of free nations since the fall of the Soviet Union. With the exception of Cuba and Venezuela, Central and South America remains free.

It is not too soon to examine President Obama’s Middle East policy.

President Obama has virtually surrendered America’s traditional role of opposing tyranny. At a time when Islamo-fascism is the greatest threat to Western civilization, Obama went to Turkey and to Cairo to apologize for America’s effort to spread and support democracy, claiming an Islamic heritage in America that never existed.

His first six months in office have been a succession of criticisms of America.

His initial response to the Iranian street protests of a rigged election was a promise that America would not “meddle” in Iran’s affairs. It took him a few days to offer a carefully-worded criticism of the mullah’s brutal efforts to suppress the will of the people.

Obama is seeking to set free the worst enemies of the nation and the world from Guantanamo. Few other nations want to participate in this effort. He has halted military tribunals. He ordered overseas interrogation centers be closed. He withdrew charges against the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole.

On June 21, H.R. 1388 was passed in the House of Representatives; an Obama administration plan to allocate $20.3 million in “migration assistance” to Hamas “refugees”, Palestinians who would be assisted to resettle in the United States!

He has facilitated this with an earlier executive order, opening the doors to Gaza’s “conflict victims.” And he has publicly rebuked Israel for building settlements to house its own growing population.

The Palestinians are not “conflict victims.” For sixty years they have been the initiators of conflict with Israel. Do we really want Hamas in the United States? This legislation must be defeated in the Senate.

While Americans are distracted by our economic troubles, we cannot give President Obama a free pass to ignore the freedom movement in Iran, to ease restrictions on Cuba, or to do nothing to stop the flow of illegal aliens across our southern border.

There are things he could be doing if he wanted to support freedom in Iran. He could authorize a clandestine program to assist the dissidents. He could lead a coalition of nations in demanding that the mullahs step aside, and to support a call that Iran’s constitution be re-written to rid it of its seventh century chokehold on democracy. He could offer leadership, but he has not and he will not.

He is shaming America while insisting on a new “crisis” every week for which he insists only the borrowing, taxing, and spending of untold trillions is the answer. He is doing everything in his power to impoverish Americans for decades to come.

Obama can no longer blame George W. Bush because the history unfolding before our eyes demonstrates that our former President was right.

The War on Smokers Continues

By Alan Caruba

We live in the “land of the free”, right? Wrong. We live in a land that is a nation of laws, not of men. That is to say, we don’t live someplace where the “Supreme Leader” can tell us whether we can smoke or not.

Instead, Congress gets together and passes yet another useless law to tell us whether we can smoke or not.

They are doing this, of course, for our own good. Those of us over the age of consent, old enough to serve in the military, and old enough to vote are simply not to be trusted on matters such as whether we choose to smoke or not. And the operative word here is “choose.”

The President, a man who likes to surround himself with “czars”, signed a new law that gives the Food and Drug Administration unprecedented authority to regulate tobacco. Typically, this piece of tyranny is dressed up to look like something else. It is called the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.

Every pernicious attack on freedom is always done on behalf of the “family” or “for the kids.”

I have searched the U.S. Constitution to find where it says anything about the government having the right to prevent people from smoking if they want.

The law does not let the FDA ban nicotine outright, but it will be able to regulate what goes into tobacco products, require the amount of nicotine to be reduced, and do everything short of requiring a skull and crossbones on the package.

This impulse of people in public office to pass laws and regulations to prevent people from doing what they are going to do no matter what the laws says is so base, so vile, and so useless that one need only cast one’s eyes back to the 18th Amendment to the Constitution to understand how wrong it is.

The Amendment banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to its jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is strictly prohibited.” It banned booze. It was passed in 1919.

The 21st Amendment repealed it in 1933 when it was apparent to everyone that people, adults, were going to drink some form of booze no matter what the do-gooders in government said about it. The “experiment” was called Prohibition. It was a failure.

One can only hope that this experiment in crowd control and private behavior will fail, but we can be very sure that tobacco bootleggers from Canada and Mexico will grow wealthy smuggling the real deal into the nation to satisfy the tastes of Americans grown tired of paying exorbitant prices for one of life’s simple pleasures.

The ghosts of Al Capone and the gangsters from the period of Prohibition are probably having a good laugh over this new law.

From Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama: A Horror Story

By Alan Caruba

John F. Kennedy, standing in front of the Berlin Wall, said “Ich bin en Berliner” to declare his solidarity with Western Germany, divided from its eastern half by the compromises with the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Ronald Reagan would later demand, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” as well as declare his solidarity with the Polish people seeking to free themselves from Soviet domination.

I have heard two versions of what President Obama has done in response to the Iranian uprising. One says that he was right to keep a low profile so that the United States would not be blamed for the rebellion against the tyrannical ayatollahs. This, it’s said provides “deniability” in the event the regime successfully puts down the rebellion. The other version says he should be outspoken in his support for the Iranian people.

History will decide whether President Obama has chosen the right course of action, but we know he has already made major efforts to reach out to the “Supreme Leader” and his mullah cronies. Death to the U.S. and Israel has always been the rallying call for the thirty-year-old Islamic revolution. We are the external enemies by which the mullahs assert their right to run Iran. At the same time, by distancing himself from the Israelis, President Obama has let the whole of the Middle East know he has cast his vote for Islam.

In 1979 there were crowds in the streets of Tehran that drove out the Shah. President Jimmy Carter appeared to have been caught off-guard by what happened. So were the U.S. diplomats and the CIA who apparently had no idea how deep the hatred ran for the Shah. The exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini tapped into that hatred. Soon our diplomats were to be held hostage for 444 days, released only when Ronald Reagan took the oath of office and Jimmy Carter was rendered a powerless and defeated one-term ex-President.

Jimmy Carter was incapable of demonstrating the power and the will of the American people to free our diplomats. He blamed earlier decisions regarding Iran as a buffer state against the Soviet Union and a source of oil to the West. Did the CIA “meddle” in Iran’s affairs, engineering the overthrow of a prime minister in 1953? Yes, along with the British we did and, from what I can determine, it was the right decision.

By the time Carter was elected President in 1977, the memories of the 1973 oil embargo were still fresh in the minds of Americans. The members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries used the embargo to punish the U.S. for supporting Israel, re-supplying its military during the Yom Kippur war.

Despite later negotiating a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, it is safe to conclude Carter was no friend to Israel and that animus has deepened over the years. Israel relinquished the Sinai desert, just as it would later withdraw from the Gaza in a vain hope of peace. There's a museum in Cairo devoted to the "victory" Egypt claims it secured in the war.

As Seldon B. Graham, Jr. points out in his book, “Why Your Gasoline Prices Are High”, “On January 23, 1980, President Carter announced to Congress that the U.S. would defend the Persian Gulf area by military force if necessary. Thus, the official energy policy of the United States abandoned USA oil and gave the supply to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).”

Carter had already called for a “windfall profits tax” on U.S. oil companies and Graham calls it, “a death notice for USA oil”, noting that “Many US oil and gas companies went bankrupt because of the Windfall Profits Tax.” During his campaign, President Obama called for a similar tax.

In the wake of that earlier tax, not one single new refinery has been built by U.S. oil companies because (a) they cost well over a billion to construct and (b) there is no way they can be sure another such tax would not be imposed.

Exploration for America's vast reserves of oil have been meager as well. Virtually the entire continental shelf of the nation was put off-limits to exploration and extraction. An effort by the Bush administration to lift the restriction was swiftly rescinded by the Obama administration. Congress still will not let oil companies drill in Alaska's ANWR.

Carter's actions effectively left the United States dependent to a large degree on Middle East oil, although these days the U.S. now imports much of its oil from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.

Denying the U.S. of its own vast energy reserves and attacking its energy producers has been a consistent theme in a straight line between President Carter and President Obama.

President Obama apparently also hates coal, vowing to “bankrupt” any company that attempted to build a coal-fired plant to provide much-need electricity to our growing population. In addition to rescinding the opening of the continental shelf to exploration, one of the first acts of the Obama administration was to cancel leases to explore for oil deposits in states where it is known to exist in large quantities.

Both the Carter and Obama administrations display the weakness liberals have for despots and despotic regimes of every description. In their hearts they see them as an appropriate way to keep people in bondage.

The leaders of many foreign nations have already taken Barack Obama’s measure.

The North Koreans hold him in such contempt they intend to fire a ballistic missile at Hawaii, probably on Independence Day. If he really wanted to show some character and a clear intent to defend the nation, he would destroy it in flight because we have the capacity to do this. He won’t.

Obama’s Democrat majority in Congress is beginning to back away from his disastrous taxing and spending proposals. It is widely rumored that the proposed “Cap-and-Trade” legislation, based on the bogus global warming hoax, will fail in Congress.

Similarly, the panic in the White House as it attempts to cope with a failing economy can be smelled a few blocks away on Capitol Hill. Obama’s constant drumbeat of one “crisis” after another is beginning to wear thin and it is likely too that his healthcare “reform” will fail as well.

Raising taxes in the midst of the worst recession since the days of the Great Depression is not likely to find much favor either.

On Independence Day, nearly 1,500 or more protest rallies, “Tea parties”, will be held in America from coast to coast. Their message will not be lost on Congress though you can be sure the slavish mainstream news media will do what they can to mislead the public into believing they were minor events.

Only they will not be minor events, nor will those that will follow. Americans will be in the streets in the weeks and months that follow. They will reflect the same determination of Iranians who want the freedom we too often take for granted.

In October 2010, Americans will have an opportunity to neuter this narcissist, this pretender in the White House. It is time to prepare for the midterm elections. It is time to take America back from the liberals that are ruining it.

Am I Boring You?

By Alan Caruba

Years ago, beginning around 1984, I became “famous” as the creator of The Boring Institute, a media spoof that literally garnered international attention for its annual list of “The Most Boring Celebrities of the Year.” Until around 2002 I averaged a thousand radio shows and television appearances as the result of the Institute’s spoofs.

Along the way, I became an expert on the subject of boredom and was astounded at the links between boredom and many social problems. It is a frequent factor in various addictions, in crime, as a reason why children drop out of school, why marriages fail, and a host of other problems in people’s lives. It can be an indicator of depression.

You can criticize people in many ways, but telling them they’re boring are fighting words.
We spend a lot of time avoiding boredom because it is such a constant factor in our lives. Watching television is for the most part boredom avoidance. Almost anything that does not require us to actively use our brains falls into this category. Thinking is scary.

So, because I tend to write about certain topics and am increasingly convinced that Barack Obama is just about the worse thing to happen to this nation since the horrid Jimmy Carter, my question is—am I boring you?

Because, if I am, I suspect a lot of other people are bored as well and I suspect that they are the people who voted for Barack Obama. One wag suggested his campaign motto was “This is a great nation and I am going to change all that.”

The rate of change occurring since he took the oath of office in January has been astonishing and it has been bad for America in almost every way. This determined effort to introduce changes swiftly suggests that, if given the normal discussion and debate, most if not all would have been rejected.

Given a rubber stamp Democrat-controlled Congress, however, Obama knows he has a small window of opportunity in which to enact changes that essentially seek to replace capitalism with socialism.

Writing a daily blog as I do, I find myself forced to return to certain themes, not the least of which is the fact that there is no “global warming”, as in a sudden, dramatic warming of the Earth, because the Earth in fact has been experiencing a cooling cycle for the past decade.

The repetition of this simple truth is a response to the daily torrent of lies being put forth from the White House, the Congress, government agencies, some corporations, and the countless environmental organizations all seeking damaging legislation such as “Cap and Trade”, entirely based on lies about “climate change.”

Chief among the lies is that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a “pollutant” responsible for the non-existent “global warming” when, in fact, it plays no role whatever in climate change except to show up in larger quantities hundreds of years after a period of warming.

Imposing limits on CO2 emissions, resulting from of the use of all forms of energy, would raise the cost of everything our economy depends upon to produce goods, to transport them, and to use them. The Big Lie that carbon is a threat to all life on Earth ignores the fact that all life on Earth is based on carbon, including human beings.

Boredom is often a response to too much information. The vast machinery of media in America continues to repeat the lies about the environment and, as a result people “tune out” much of it or uncritically accept it. Recent surveys by all the leading polling organizations demonstrate, however, that most Americans have concluded there is no global warming, rating it last among their concerns.

Recessions are known to last about 18 months and we are approaching that time limit. That suggests America will begin to emerge from this latest recession, the result of the “housing bubble” that burst, but most Americans are still unaware that it was caused by federal government intervention into the housing market by requiring banks and mortgage loan firms to make loans to people who were clearly unable to repay them.

Similarly, government intervention in the automotive market has been part of the cause for the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler by imposing mandates that increased cost, altered design and engineering. The Obama administration just imposed new, higher mileage requirements at the same time as it has interfered in the normal process of bankruptcy, providing taxpayer’s billions to these two companies that are not likely to ever be repaid.

These unconstitutional actions require a daily response but that in turn leaves many Americans confused and inclined to leave such matters to Congress. They have grown bored with the complexity of the issues. So Congress is able to pass legislation involving hundreds of pages that even its members do not read before voting.

A government calling for “energy independence” while shutting off access to the nation’s own vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas is engaged in a vast deception.

A government imposing baseless “global warming” taxes is impoverishing Americans, denying them the capital necessary not just for ordinary expenses, but vital for the growth of our economy.

Our system of government was designed to slow the process by which laws are passed. Government by crisis is an open door to deception and the destruction of the protections the Constitution extends to every citizen. When there are no “checks and balances” everyone is at risk as sacred concepts of private property and contractual law are thrown overboard.

Thus, writers like myself and many others face the prospect that our warnings are ignored by a public grown bored with the many weighty issues that will determine whether the nation emerges from its current economic woes and whether issues such as national security and even national sovereignty are cast aside.

Americans cannot afford to be bored by such matters.

The Turmoil in the Middle East

By Alan Caruba

It sometimes seems like we have been reading and hearing about turmoil in the Middle East for our entire lives, but the facts are otherwise. For most of the last century and earlier, the Middle East was a backwater of age-old Islamic repression.

Things began to change with the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. They had backed the Germans and, already in decay, it didn’t take much of a push to end it. The winners of the war, primarily England and France, met in Versailles where they took out their maps of the region and divided it between them. Nations were created, some with ancient names like Syria and Lebanon, some with new ones like Trans-Jordan. A nation called Iraq was created.

The Saudis got very little for having cast their lot with the English. They would never trust them again and when Americans came knocking with a request to search for oil, they got the nod, not the British.

It was World War Two and its aftermath that really got the pot boiling. The Middle East had not played much of a role. Initially the war had been fought in North Africa with an eye on Libya’s oil reserves and the need to protect the Suez Canal from the Germans.

Shortly after the war’s end, India declared its independence from Great Britain and, at the same time, was partitioned to create Pakistan and Bangladesh for those of its Muslim population that did not want to live with their Hindu neighbors. By 1971, Bangladesh parted company with Pakistan and declared its own independence.

Former UK colonies became independent, but with the exception of Lebanon, nations like Syria and Iraq were controlled by despots and their cronies. Turkey opted for modernity, but sheikdoms such as Saudi Arabia remained sleepy, oil-rich backwaters of the region.

The introduction of Israel into this mix, recognized as a sovereign nation in 1947, was the catalyst for some the troubles that roil the region today. Islam’s argument with Israel is that its existence invalidates Islam’s claim to be the single religion destined to rule the world, let alone the Middle East.

If one believed the ravings of its mullahs, Iran exists for no other reason than to destroy Israel and to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam, a mythical Shiite figure, through massive global death and destruction.

More than sixty years and several lost wars later, Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank have no other purpose than to destroy Israel in the name of Palestine, a non-state entity that exists only as a welfare recipient of the United Nations and other donors. Hezbollah, located in Lebanon, is a client of Iran.

Even if there were no Israel, the endless dissatisfaction of Muslims with their lot in life would ensure that there would be strife. The issue is not Israel. It is modernity and the tantalizing prospect of true democracy for a people that have never experienced it.

The real problem for the Middle East, however, was and is Islam, a political as well as social and religious entity. Until the rest of the world is prepared to admit this, we shall all be forced to pretend that Pakistan has merely been having a few problems since its founding in 1947, that the so-called Palestinians have any legitimacy, that Islam is "a religion of peace."

Similarly, the genocide taking place in the Sudan is based in Islamic intolerance. Other human rights abuses, endemic to the Middle East, exist because the United Nations has been largely captured by its Islamic bloc of member states.

When Iran experienced its Islamic Revolution in 1979, it is doubtful its ruling mullahs ever expected to see Muslims by the tens of thousands in the streets of Tehran in 2009 protesting their brutal oppression.

It took a Green Revolution in Lebanon to expel Syria from the domination of its neighbor state. Afghanistan, as the former Soviet Union learned, should be left to itself, Islamic or not, because its tribes are a friend to neither each other nor intruders of any description.

With the exception of North Korea, the world’s attention has been captured by a Middle East in turmoil, not because Islam offers a better, more just and humane way of conducting political and social affairs, but because it fails on all counts.

The rest of the world has to stand with those brave Muslims in the streets of Tehran and everywhere else they demand what the West enjoys and represents, modernity, freedom, democracy, and a chance for a better life for all who embrace it.

Reasons to Distrust Your Government

By Alan Caruba

In the normal course of events, when voters no longer have confidence in the President, their Senators and their Representatives, they vote them out of office, but there are whole agencies of government that continue on no matter who is in office and, since their budgets and existence depend on the politics of whoever holds power, they bend to serve their policies.

A democracy is most in peril when citizens conclude they can no longer trust their government and there is no better example of that than a recent report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States”, issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is sheer rubbish.

It is typical of the deliberate distortions and outright lies that have been put forth to an increasingly doubting public regarding “global warming.” It is part and parcel of the deceptions perpetrated for decades now by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all of which feature tortured data of dubious quality and, since 1998, have ignored the Earth’s cooling trend.

The increasing reports from around the nation of “freaky” weather, of snow in June, and other anomalies are, in fact, a reflection of this cooling trend and it is likely to last at least thirty years or more.

John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President on Science and Technology, and a man who holds some of the most outlandish and baseless views on climate change, said “This new report integrates the most up-to-date scientific findings into a comprehensive picture of ongoing as well as expected future impacts of heat-trapping pollution on the climate experience of Americans, region by region and sector by sector.”

No it doesn’t. For one thing, the “heat-trapping pollution” to which he obliquely refers is mostly carbon dioxide, a gas vital to all life on Earth and a gas which, in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, could be found in concentrations five times or more higher than today. If CO2 was the great Earth destroyer that Holden, Gore, and others insist, there should be no Earth at all as we know it today.

To call CO2 “pollution” is to immediately invalidate the entire report, but to further insist, as the report does, that it is “primarily human-induced” is not just quite wrong, but a great big LIE. Human activity plays virtually no role whatever in the production of CO2.

This product of the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program is a 190-page piece of loathsome propaganda that predicts more frequent heat waves, more flooding and waterborne diseases, rising water temperatures, more insect infestations and wildfires, and that old standby, rising sea levels with coastal flooding that will no doubt drown Manhattan and other coastal cities.

Hollywood does a better job with such fantasy than the minions of Washington, D.C.

Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, said of the NOAA report “This is not a work of science, but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA.”

This report and the hours of effort that went into it is pure science fiction, predicting outcomes, as all such “global warming” does (now called “climate change”), fifty to a hundred years from now.

Global warming propagandists always focus on a distant and unknowable far horizon, safe in the knowledge that only a future generation will discover their lies. By then, the horrid “environmental” legislation they wish to impose on America will have destroyed its economy and ruined our lives.

It is no accident this report has arrived just in time for a debate on the “Cap-and-Trade” legislation that is nothing more than a huge TAX on all energy use and one that will increase the cost of all energy to everyone by thousands of dollars individually. It will drive industries dependent on large quantities of energy to foreign nations. It is a huge job-killer.

Duke Energy of North Carolina, based on the spurious science of global warming, has asked the regulators of that State for permission to raise electricity prices 12.6 percent. The requested price hike would cost North Carolina ratepayers $496 million. They should change their name to Enron. It’s not being used any more.

Utilities required to include a mix of solar and wind energy, the least efficient and most impractical producers of energy because of Renewable Energy Mandates will be forced to ask for similar increases. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. It is the most affordable way of generating energy. More coal-fired and nuclear plants would ensure that rates would remain stable for many decades to come.

Naturally “Crazy Eyes” Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, was quick to weigh in on news of the NOAA report. “The impact of the climate crisis on the United states and around the world is becoming increasingly severe.” Nonsense! More lies from the Speaker.

The climate is always in a state of change and that change is determine primarily by the Sun, as well as other natural factures such as the oceans, volcanic activity, and the greatest meteorological mystery of all, why clouds behave the way clouds do.

The NOAA report has already been torn to shreds by many of the leading meteorologists and climatologists throughout the nation. It is pure scaremongering and it is intended to further an environmental agenda that is determined to deprive Americans of the energy sources we will need to power our way out of this government-induced Recession and meet the needs of an expanding population.

It is yet another Obama-driven “crisis” and Americans have good and grave reasons to reject the massive global warming deception, “Cap-and-Trade”, and all those seeking to drive us like lemmings over the cliff of an insolvent, bankrupt nation.

Goosed in the Garden State

By Alan Caruba

In December 2005, the headline in the Star-Ledger read “Jersey declares war on Canada Geese: Plan could slash flocks 60 percent.” New Jersey’s largest circulation newspaper reported on “a new federal proposal” intended to reduce the state’s Canada goose population by 57,000 birds over a decade.

“New Jersey has an extreme problem: more Canada geese per square kilometer than any state in the nation.” Back then “anti-geese actions required a difficult-to-obtain federal permit.”

The then-chief of the Bureau of Wildlife Management for the state Department of Environmental Protection worried that the proposals being made “lacked specifics” such as how the reporting was to be done and how the geese should be euthanized. He was concerned that the plan “appears to place administrative burdens on the state without providing the funding to accomplish those tasks.”

This is what happens when the federal government, via the Endangered Animals Act, one of the most idiotic laws ever passed, gets involved with the local problem of too many damned geese. Indeed, by protecting the Canada goose specie, the federal government guaranteed the problem would reach its present status. It guaranteed yet another level of government to address the problem slowly and poorly.

So, four years later, who can possibly be surprised that the Star-Ledger reported on June 16 that “Feds start ‘capture and removal’ of Canada geese in nine N.J. counties”?

“U.S. Department of agriculture spokeswoman, Carol Bannerman confirmed that the ‘capture and removal program’ is under way and will last about six weeks.”

Meanwhile since 2005 the Canada geese population in the Garden State has reportedly gone from an estimated 98,000 to 80,000. As a rule of thumb, one should always be suspicious of government statistics.

A similar program is under way in New York City. Yes, the City! It plans to “trap and gas as many as 2,000 Canada geese over the next few weeks in an attempt to avoid the type of collision that caused an airliner to ditch in the Hudson River in January.”

Ms. Bannerman noted that a single bird “excretes about a half-pound of feces daily.” That’s 40,000 pounds of goose crap every single day in the Garden State.

This is a governmental approach to wildlife that explains a great deal about New Jersey. In 2006, Lisa Jackson, the then-Commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection announced the addition of 8,000 acres to the state’s 121 separate wildlife management areas.

“As the nation’s most densely populated state and the fifth smallest, New Jersey now boasts more acreage for wildlife management areas than New York and even outpaces Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined,” Ms. Jackson proudly announced.

Lisa Jackson is now the Director of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

New Jersey has 80,000 Canada geese! In 2006, with Ms. Jackson at the helm, New Jersey was also home to an estimated 180,000 deer!

This is what happens when the federal and state government combine in an effort to “protect” wildlife instead of permitting towns and cities to take care of the problem on a local basis. By the time all the permits are issued, reporting rules, and codes regarding ways to kill critters are written and approved, the population continues to explode.

There will be no end to this problem so long as we have the Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Environmental Protection, and probably a dozen other jurisdictions involved in what is essentially a local problem of too many damned Canada geese.

The only creatures not being protected are the human ones trying to live in a State that’s literally overrun with geese, deer, bears, coyotes, wild turkeys and the usual thousands of squirrels, raccoons, and opossums. If someone with a huge mortgage and huge property taxes tries to address the problem on their own, they risk fines and jail.

This is the definition of insanity.

Killing Corporate America

By Alan Caruba

All those morons who are forever going on about the evil corporations never notice that it is corporations, great and small, that employ millions of Americans and the best of them do everything they can to ensure their workers are happy, if for no other reason than that it increases productivity. People don’t work just for money. They work for a sense of dignity and self-worth.

The Obama administration appears to be intent on destroying or driving out one corporation after another by any means possible. This amounts to punishing success and crushing it in the meat-grinder of government regulation. The latest victim is Fedex.

A June 9 Washington Times editorial noted that, “Led by Rep. James L. Oberstar, Minnesota Democrat, the House on May 21 passed legislation that contains an almost hidden provision—a mere 230 words—that would hobble FedEx Express. It would do so by completely changing the labor laws under which the company operates.”

“A mere dozen or so workers in just one city could hamstring much of the nation’s overnight delivery service.” The difference between FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) is that UPS is unionized. As such it is governed by the National Labor Relations Act, the terms of which “favor unions such as the Teamsters (and) both have an interest in kneecapping FedEx Express.”

The fact is, however, FedEx Express ships 85 percent of its goods by air. UPS moves 85 percent of its goods by truck.

This means that Americans who are accustomed to overnight delivery face the prospect of losing that remarkable service and, if they are looking to the U.S. Postal Service to provide it, they can forget about it because the USPS contracts with FedEx to carry almost all of its Express Mail and a significant portion of its Priority Mail.

The bad news doesn’t stop there. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the Postal Service has announced that, by October 1, it will decide whether to close or consolidate 3,100 post offices and retail outlets out of 36,700. It is also contemplating eliminating “tens of thousands” of jobs from its work force of 636,000.

The Postal Service, in every respect a government entity, lost nearly $2 billion in the three months that ended March 31. Mail volume is down nearly 15 percent from the previous year.

I wonder why? Could it have anything to do with email? Could it have anything to do with a 42-cent First Class stamp for a service that hasn’t essentially changed since the post office was first organized by Benjamin Franklin?

Now consider what happens if FedEx, the private corporation that moves most of the USPS Express and Priority mail is forced out of business in order to ensure that some useless union can cripple its operation? Who will move your mail swiftly then? Not USPS and not UPS.

This is what your government is doing to you and to the nation.

This is your government that currently owns General Motors in partnership with the United Auto Workers and to hell with the bondholders who lent it money in the belief that they would be first in line to get their money if it went bankrupt. Their contract said so, but a gangster government has little interest in honoring the sanctity of contracts. The new GM ads say it is “leaner and greener” which is another way of saying “smaller and slower.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft Corporation’s Chief Executive Officer, Steven Ballmer, has told the Obama administration that the world’s largest software company would, according to Bloomberg News, “move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.” The U.S. imposes some of the highest taxes on corporations of any nation in the world.

Microsoft which employs more than 95,000 people worldwide draws the bulk of its workers from the United States where 56,552 are based. Higher taxes would reduce its profits by an estimated 10 to 15 percent. One option would be to shed jobs. Another would be to move as many employees as possible to a nation like Ireland or to hire foreign workers to replace them.

Mind you, Obama cannot do this by himself. He needs the help of a Democrat-controlled Congress and he is getting it.

This President and this Congress, minus the powerless Republican minority, are doing everything they can to destroy major elements of the nation’s business and industrial base. Energy producers and providers of oil, natural gas and coal are facing obstacles alongside of those in the nuclear industry. A massive, totally bogus “Cap and Trade” tax will drive up the cost of electricity and cost consumers thousands is in the works.

This is a purposefully induced Depression when the present Recession shows signs of giving way to improving economic forces.

Your Senators and your Representative need to hear from you daily, warning them they will not be reelected if this continues. Get their email address. Use it every day.

Communism Kills

By Alan Caruba

On June 16, a reception will be held to celebrate the launch of the Global Museum on Communism at the Romanian Ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C. Other events have preceded the effort to ensure that the millions of victims of Communism in the last century are not forgotten.

I have no doubt that an invitation was extended to President Obama, though I doubt that he will be among the guests. After all, the man who has appointed some fifteen “czars” to run the affairs of his administration seems to have an affinity for direct rule over accountability to the Congress or the Constitution.

In an excellent, recently published book, “United in Hate”, by Jamie Glazov, the author notes in his preface that, “Throughout the twentieth century, the Western Left supported one totalitarian killing machine after another. Prominent intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw to Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag venerated mass murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, habitually excusing their atrocities while blaming America and even the victims of the crimes.”

Glazov noted that, after 9/11 leftists like “Jimmy Carter, Noam Chromsky, Michael Moore, and Tom Hayden, once again reached out to bloodthirsty tyrants bent on human destruction.” Who can forget Sean Penn’s globetrotting to defend the likes of Saddam Hussein or Hugo Chavez? Inherent in the Leftist view of the world is the embrace of despots.

If you ask people how many have died from communism oppression they tend to have either no idea or a vague notion that it’s been a lot. “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression” is a chilling recounting of the toll that communism has taken.

Here are estimates of the numbers of victims:

65 million in the People’s Republic of China
20 million in the former Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America

These grim statistics include executions, intentional destruction of population by starvation, and deaths resulting from deportations, physical confinement, or through forced labor.

Leftists tend to find reasons to excuse or ignore these atrocities. A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Walter Durante of The New York Times during the rise of Stalin managed to overlook his deliberate starvation policy imposed on the Ukraine. Jane Fonda famously lent herself to the propaganda of the North Vietnamese during the U.S. war to defeat a communist takeover.

A lot of Americans, mostly the younger ones that have passed through our government schools, think that there are no more communist regimes in the world and do not make a connection between them and the repression of the people under their control even as fairly new dictators like Venezuela’s Chavez emerge.

Efforts to rescind restrictions on a communist dictatorship 90 miles from the U.S. border, Cuba, have been initiated by the Obama administration. The response to one of the worst Communist nations, North Korea, has been mostly temporizing and downplaying of the threat they represent to major allies.

It is understandable that the nation’s attention has been focused on the Middle East and the rise of the threat of Islamism, but Communism is still alive and a force in the world even as it tries to present a less threatening face to it. It is a deception.

Since October 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution has spawned the deadliest ideology in all of human history. In less than 100 years, Communism has claimed more than 100 million lives and it continues to enslave one-fifth of the world’s population.

Conservatives understand the threat. They oppose Barack Obama because his life has been filled with Leftists and his calls for the redistribution of wealth, his support for labor unions, his attacks on Wall Street and efforts to secure government control of the nation’s banking system, and to impose a nationalized healthcare system come right out of the Communist handbook for the control of our lives.

A memorial to commemorate the victims of Communism stands just two blocks from the U.S. Capitol building. A museum, much like the Holocaust Museum, is in the works. We must never cease to oppose Communism. We must not forget those who gave their lives in Korea and Vietnam during the Cold War to oppose its spread.

We must not allow our government to yield or fall to its siren call.

For more information about the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, go here:
http://www.victimsofcommunism,org.

Calling the Kettle Black

By Alan Caruba

The effort has been to paint the Holocaust Museum alleged killer as “a right wing extremist” but James von Brunn was, in fact, a left wing extremist, a devotee of socialism mixed with a hatred of Jews and blacks. If one listened to the mainstream news media, the only extremists in America are right wingers.

I was talking with a friend who, like myself, has spent some years in the Deep South and other parts of the nation where people used to be far less circumspect about letting you know they didn’t like “niggers and Jews.”

I can recall separate waiting rooms in bus stations in Georgia and the seating in the back of the bus reserved for people of color. In the 1960s segregation and Jim Crow laws were everywhere in the South and not particularly subtle. At the time, those States voted solidly Democrat.

The election of Barack Hussein Obama in the wake of the nation’s long history of slavery, a Civil War, and the civil rights movement a century later was hailed as a victory for America. Even Obama’s Muslim connections were overlooked despite the shock of 9/11. During the campaign he had to renounce his pastor and longtime friend, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an anti-Semite given to saying ugly things about America.

My friend wondered why Obama was not the greatest recruiting tool for white racists in the post-civil rights movement era. In 2008, however, David Peisner, writing for Esquire magazine, had interviewed leaders of white and black racist organizations discovering that, at least for publication, they had surprising things to say about the black candidate.

The Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970’s, Tom Metzger, was surprisingly sanguine. “The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who’s in there (the White House), but McCain could be much worse.” Having read Obama’s “Dreams of My Father”, Metzger professed to have found a kindred soul, calling Obama a black racist instead of a white one.

By contrast, Ron Edwards, the Imperial Wizard of the Imperial Klans of America, was less philosophical. “All he’s living off of is the color of his skin to get elected. I don’t think America wants a black President.” Erich Gliebe, Chairman of the National Alliance, thought that “Obama might be a better candidate for our cause because he’s racially conscious”, ironically adding that “My only problem with Obama is perhaps he’s not black enough.”

A black racist, Yahanna of the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, was not enthusiastic about Obama. “The disappointment we’re going to suffer from him is going to set us back another fifty years.” Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, however, declared him “the messiah” during Obama’s campaign.

We tend to take the acts of violence by individuals associated with some movement or group and extrapolate them to the entire group. Von Brunn, 88 years old and a serious nut job even by white racist standards, was the first of his kind in years to act out his hatred to call attention to his cause.

Americans have been far more concerned with the prospect of another Islamic attack than the likes of von Brunn. The recent killing of an Army recruiter by a black Muslim convert and the arrest of a Muslim cell, also of converts bent on violence, suggests this remains the primary threat to the nation.

The mainstream media have for decades striven heartily to avoid calling attention to the leftist orientation of the many environmental organizations at work in the nation. The political strife of the 1960s culminating in the attacks by the Weather Underground, a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, acted upon their socialist beliefs. One of them, William Ayers, held the first political fund raiser for Barack Obama.

In a similar fashion, the terrorist acts of the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front are never described in the media as radical leftist organizations, but they most surely are.

Even the most casual review of politically radical groups over recent past decades reveals that they are uniformly leftist and this culminates with ACORN, the alleged community organizers whose purpose seems to be to steal elections for Democrats.

Thus, in concert with the mainstream media, the effort today is to convince Americans that they should fear “right wing extremists” by seizing upon the Holocaust Museum murder. Even the Homeland Security Department under the leadership of Janet Napolitano is putting out this message.

This is a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black. It also demonstrates the power of left wing propaganda and its compliant partner, the mainstream media.

Lincoln said it best. "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."

A lot of Americans—liberals and conservatives, white and black—are coming to the conclusion that a very big mistake occurred when Barack Hussein Obama was elected President of the United States and I suspect a lot of members of Congress are coming to that conclusion as well.