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.

The Real Crisis is Obamacare

By Alan Caruba

President Obama has never met a crisis he didn’t love; particularly the ones that involve spending trillions of dollars. What fun it is to propose programs that involve borrowing or taxing Americans to death.

On June 9, the Associated Press reported, “President Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed budget rules that would allow Congress to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt to jump-start the administration’s emerging health care overhaul.”

Since the stealth heathcare “reform” that Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to foist on Americans during the 1993-94 Congress, this “crisis” has been off the radar screen of Americans who have the audacity to think they should decide whether and how much health insurance they want and to expect healthcare that is not rationed on the basis of how old they are and other factors determined by some faceless government bureaucrat.

Liberals obsess over healthcare options because, of course, they want “fairness” no matter how much it will cost Americans in general and the economy in particular.

To that end, various “progressive” (liberal) groups have gotten together and have launched an $82 million campaign to support President Obama’s healthcare program. The umbrella for this massive public brainwashing is called Health Care for America Now. Why is it that everything Obama wants has to be done “now”? Oh yes, I forgot. It’s a “crisis.”

Health Care for America is directed by Richard Kirsch and has been joined by AFL-CIO, MoveOn.org, and Democracy for America, a group founded by former Democratic National Committee Chairman, Howard “the scream” Dean. The group is essentially a re-branded version of liberal lunatic groups.

An excellent analysis of Obamacare has been published by the Cato Institute in a May 21 Policy Analysis (No. 638) titled appropriately as “Seven Bad Ideas for Health Care Reform. Authored by Michael Tanner, it points out some very ugly truths.

--At the time of rising unemployment, the government would raise the cost of hiring workers by requiring employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay a fee (tax) to subsidize government coverage.

--Every American would be required to buy an insurance policy that meets certain government requirements.

--A government-run plan similar to Medicare would be set up in competition with private insurance.

--The government would undertake comparative-effectiveness research and cost-effectiveness research and use the results to impose practice guidelines on providers, initially in Medicare and Medicaid, but ultimately extending the rationing to private insurance plans.

--Private insurance would face a host of new regulations.

--Subsidies would be available to help middle-income people purchase insurance while expanding Medicare and Medicaid.

--Finally, the government would subsidize and manage the development of a national system of electronic medical records.

According to a June 8 Bloomberg News report, “President Barack Obama wants Congress to consider taxing the wealthy instead of workers to pay for a health-care overhaul.” This is yet one more lie by the Obama administration in the run-up to impose the most vile form of government control over everyone’s lives imaginable.

The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest physician organization, has let it be known that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan.

The promise of the Declaration of Independence that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be rendered meaningless by Obamacare if your life depends on government policies regarding healthcare.

A June 1 Business Week commentary pointed out that “there are only three ways to pay for universal coverage: Raise taxes, cut payments to medical providers, or ration care.” All three are the worst possible options imaginable.

“The Congressional Budget Office estimates that covering the uninsured could add anywhere from $1 trillion to $2 trillion to the federal budget over ten years,” said the BW commentary. “On top of that, government economists expect Medicare to run out of money in 2017 if current spending trends continue.”

Here’s a handy tip regarding estimates by government economists. Multiply them by a factor of ten!

As this healthcare horror awaits its run through Congress, think of it as a massive Medicare, the government program for seniors that cost 3.2 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2008 and which will become insolvent this year! Medicare faces $34 trillion in unfunded liabilities; the cost of services for which seniors are eligible in the future.

According to the Medicare Trustees, the program will require a 134 percent increase in the payroll tax paid by every working American in order to remain solvent!

And this insane Democrat-controlled Congress wants to expand on Medicare while requiring everyone to purchase healthcare insurance, even if they don’t want to. Then it will compete against existing private insurance companies without having to have the funds in place as they must to meet their obligations.

This isn’t healthcare reform. It is the destruction of the best healthcare system in the world. It is the destruction of the nation’s economy. It, along with the tax on energy use, must be stopped.

We are being attacked by one “crisis” after another when the only one that matters is the restoration of the full faith and credit of the U.S. dollar. If the “health” of the U.S. dollar is not restored, nothing else will matter very much.

Obama has Lost his Mojo

By Alan Caruba

The hours and the days speed by. It is almost five months since President Obama was sworn in. A million people gathered in Washington on a bitterly cold day to hear him and to leave behind a mountain of trash.

Granted that in the weeks leading up to the inauguration, first the White House and then the Congress panicked in the face of what looked like a total Wall Street meltdown. A frantic effort was made to secure a blank check for billions to purchase the “toxic” paper, the bundled mortgages that turned out to have no identifiable assets.

Major banks, investment houses, and a huge, international insurance company tottered on the brink of failure. Some did. Some were merged.

Americans, even the most unsophisticated, understood that such an implosion threatened the financial bedrock of the nation, but first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration said that such steps must be taken. Congress went along because they had no choice.

They did have a choice; indeed, a range of choices.

The bailed out automobile companies could and should have been allowed to proceed toward bankruptcy, a procedure which would allow them to reorganize. That would have saved taxpayers $70 billion of their money. The bailout was unconstitutional.

The banking bailouts were unconstitutional too. Public funds, treasury funds, are never to be used to favor one private entity or enterprise over another.

While it is called the Federal Reserve Bank, it is an institution in effect separate from the government that grants it the right to print money, determine interest rates, and exercise oversight over the financial health of the nation. It operates on its own set of imperatives.

Any Economics 101 student would tell you that flooding the nation and the world with dollars backed up by nothing more than “full faith and credit” is reckless and foolish. It always leads to inflation and it undermines the borrowing power of the Treasury. Top lenders like China have made it clear they will no longer underwrite the huge entitlement programs and a spending frenzy that knows no end.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are known as “government entities”, but together they own some fifty percent of all the mortgage loans issued by banking and lending institutions. Their top officers earned millions, but they are the primary cause of the collapse of the housing/mortgage bubble. Why? Because the government required banks and lending institutions to literally make bad loans. It was the law.

So Americans, whether they voted for Barack Obama or not, have arrived at a point where the man whose entire campaign was based on the promise of “hope and change” find themselves rapidly running out of jobs, money, and hope.

As credit froze up, unemployment began to increase and it is getting worse. Despite what the White House says, there is no such thing as “jobs saved” and the only jobs government can generate are government jobs.

A bogus $700 billion “stimulus” bill, promising funding of “shovel ready projects” is moving along at the pace of all government programs, very slowly. It’s not easy to spend that kind of money. The rest of the bill is pure pork. Typically, some of the projects are obscenely stupid. It should more accurately be called the Democrat Reelection Bill.

While the price of a gallon of gas begins to increase along with the prices of food and other necessities, the Obama administration is trying to push through legislation that would tax “greenhouse gas” emissions in the name of a global warming that is not happening. In parts of the United States, there will literally be no summer because the Earth has been cooling for the past ten years. In the first week of June there were record low temperatures in eighteen States.

The “Cap-and-Trade” bill moving through Congress will drive up the cost of energy for all Americans to astronomical levels. It would drive down and drive out manufacturing of every description. When Microsoft Corporation tells the White House it is prepared to move its corporate headquarters and other operations overseas, it is not kidding.

Now the Obama administration is trying to push through “healthcare reform” that is little more than socialized medicine, systems that have failed in Canada and England, forcing people to wait weeks and months for treatment. It would require everyone to purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so. Your personal medical records? Any government bureaucrat could look at them.

Many Democrats are making it known they will not vote for “Cap-and-Trade” and may not vote for the takeover of the best health system in the world.

I predict that neither of these programs will become law and, if they do, Obama will have used up every ounce of trust and good will that has been extended to him. I also predict he will not care because his purpose is to bankrupt the nation and to destroy a Constitution he deems to be filled with too many restrictions on the federal government.

I predict that Barack Obama is just over a year away from seeing the Republican Party regain control of Congress in the same way it did in 1994. The October 2010 midterm elections will leave Obama a lame duck and likely a one-term President.

We cannot know what events will occur to further erode Obama’s vaunted popularity, the product of a mainstream media that has thrown away all journalistic standards, but you can be sure they will happen. Like 9/11 they will be largely unexpected by the general public or like Hurricane Katrina they will be an act of Nature.

On July 4, 2009, there will be 1,145 “Tea Parties” held across the whole of the nation according to the American Family Association. TEA being “Taxed Enough Already.”

Barack Obama makes people nervous.

Popularity is a curious thing. It can disappear overnight.

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100!

Just call me Mr. Popular!

How nice to have had 100 people sign up as "followers" of this daily blog. I am truly honored and delighted.

The Lone Gunman

By Alan Caruba

As the details about James W. von Brunn, the alleged killer of Holocaust Museum security guard, Stephen T. Jones, make their way through the media, we are sure to be told that he was “mentally ill” or at least perceived to be by those who knew him.

A deep hatred of people because of their race or religion is not so much an illness as a choice. It is a choice because it gives purpose to the life of the person doing the hating. It “explains” everything he wants to know about a very complex and often frightening world.

No doubt von Brunn, like so many others, “figured out” that the Jews were to blame for everything wrong in his life and in the world. Why stop there? He also hated Afro-Americans and, one presumes, all people of color. And, largely unreported, he hated Christians. While instantly identified in the media as an instrument of the Far Right, von Brunn was, in fact, a creature of the Far Left.

Reporting on FrontPageMag.com, Ben Johnson wrote that, “A review of his lengthy associations reveals Von Brunn hardly fits the stereotype of a Religious Right, GOP precinct captain. He denounced the Christian faith as a dastardly Jewish conspiracy, a “HOAX” invented by the Apostle Paul to “DESTROY ROMAN CULTURE” from within by undermining its pagan virility. (All screaming capitalization and grammatical errors in this piece appear in the original.) Like others on the racist fringe, the shooter proclaimed clearly: ‘SOCIALISM, represents the future of the West.’” Read the article at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35192

So now von Brunn has entered the annals of the many “lone gunmen” who have sought to change history by acting out their fantasies, their hatreds, their grandiose view that, if they just kill the object of their hatred, they will transform history.

Some, in fact, do. The assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and John F. Kennedy no doubt sent the nation off in directions no one could have anticipated. In the 1960s assassins struck down Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan came within inches of being another assassination victim, but was spared. His would-be killer was, indeed, mentally ill.

I was not surprised that the murder scene was the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. There, where the stories, the memories of millions of innocent people are enshrined and where their suffering and death speak to us from the last century, the museum was a magnet for anyone so consumed with anti-Semitism that one suspects von Brunn wanted to martyr himself for one last chance to act upon his hatred.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum stands as testimony that millions of European Jews did die in Nazi concentration camps. The famed German efficiency was devoted to mass murder of the innocent and let it be said that the anti-Semitism that fueled the Nazi death camps exists still today in Germany, throughout Europe, and in Russia.

It exists in South America in places like Venezuela where the break-in of a Caracas synagogue led solely to the stealing of a computer disk with the names and addresses of that nation’s Jewish families. Time for them to leave, to flee for their lives.

The entire Middle East roils with anti-Semitism. Islam burns with it and that is why no peace was or ever will be negotiated with the state of Israel. The Muslims dare not admit that Jews have a right to their ancient homeland, let alone to live. They speak of Jews as monkeys, dogs and pigs. This is commonplace throughout the Middle East where Islam is the religion of citizen and state. They hold the same harsh views of Christians, Hindus and Buddhists. Islam regards them all as infidels, unbelievers.

We would do well to remind ourselves that the very word “assassin” refers back to Muslim fanatics, active in Persia and Syria from about 1090 to 1272, who were dedicated to the killing of Crusaders.

The Jews are civilization’s canary in the coal mine. When they begin to die from causes other than natural death, it is a signal that something evil is loose in the world and, if history is our guide, it signals that countless thousands who are not Jews will die as well.

The Obama administration has let the world know it intends to turn away from our nation’s historic and spiritual relationship with Israel. His former pastor of two decades, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, just complained that “them Jews” around him would not let him talk with his famed former parishioner.

If things go terribly wrong in America, I am sure that, along with Barack Obama, the blame will fall or be shifted to “them Jews” in his administration.

The lone gunman has done his job though he has inadvertently focused our attention on the evil from which we want to avert our eyes. We do so at our peril.

Time to Demand Obama's Resignation

By Alan Caruba

“In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal…” (Article Two, U.S. Constitution)

Since the President takes an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, a President who acts contrary to the Constitution or is found guilty of breaking the law should be subject to removal.

Constitutionally, removal can be secured by “impeachment for, conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Here’s a question I would pose to you. If the Supreme Court can act within days to approve the sale of Chrysler to Fiat, why can it not act to hear cases filed months ago regarding whether President Obama is a “natural born” citizen of the United States? Why have some lower courts refused to hear such cases citing that the parties bringing them, citizens under the rule of the Constitution, have no “standing” to do so?

The Supreme Court is famous for trying to dodge such cases. The likelihood of impeachment is zero because Democrats control Congress and only one President ever resigned from office and that was Richard M. Nixon. It took an excruciatingly long time to reach that point as anyone who lived through the Watergate scandal will tell you. The nation was shocked to learn that a President engaged in a criminal enterprise while in office.

The question of preserving and protecting the Constitution would be hard to prove except in hindsight, but by then it would be too late for the nation, ruined by excessive, unjustified taxation and borrowing that threatens the collapse of the economy.

I would argue that a President who appoints over twenty “czars” to supersede the powers of the secretaries of various federal departments; people who are apparently exempt from Congressional approval or oversight, and people who apparently do not feel the need to hold press conferences to explain what they are doing, is distinctly unconstitutional.

It will be argued that there have been various such “czars” in the past, mostly particularly “drug czars” whose purpose was to oversee and coordinate efforts to address the nation’s problems with illegal drugs, but the imposition of people to virtually replace members of the President’s cabinet is unprecedented. Cabinet officers must receive the approval of Congress, but these “czars” have not.

Even the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has been reduced to a mere figurehead as various personal envoys of the President have been authorized to act for him regarding sensitive diplomatic affairs, answerable presumably only to him.

What we have is a President who is running the government through an invisible network of people who are not answerable to the citizens of the nation, yet granted powers to determine the extent of the rights of those citizens including how much compensation they may receive.

This is a President who has said during a C-Span interview that the government is out of money, but who is pressing forward for legislation to impose trillions in taxes on all energy use, who advocates the borrowing of tens of billions by the nation for a proposed healthcare “reform”, and who has already signed a so-called stimulus bill of nearly 9,000 items representing $700 billion that he deemed “imperfect.”

The economy does not need a stimulus. It needs the government to get out of the way of the free market system to correct itself and for the nation’s famed entrepreneurial spirit to initiate new businesses and new jobs. We do not “rescue” people who took on too much debt.

He has approved “bailouts” to private companies that should have been allowed to seek bankruptcy protection and he has demanded that the former head of General Motors be fired by its board of directors. He has launched an attack on the Constitutional sanctity of contracts, abrogating the rights of lenders. Banks which received TARP funds are desperate to return such funding to the U.S. Treasury rather than give up control over their affairs.

We have all watched the President in action since January 20, 2009 and what we have seen and heard has been constant criticism of America that has been an affront to our great history and our defense of human rights. He has done this in one foreign nation after another.

A speech in Cairo to the worldwide Muslim community President Obama distorted the facts of American history and conflated the deliberate murder of six million European Jews in the last century with the suffering inflicted on so-called Palestinians by their fellow Arabs; the result of repeated wars on Israel. No such comparison can be made and is by definition obscene.

Within months, “tea parties”, citizen protests, occurred from coast to coast and others are being planned for July Fourth. Not since the advent of the Civil War under threat of secession has a President faced such widespread opposition after taking office.

In State after State, resolutions are being passed in opposition to his proposed legislation and policies. An organization of “Oath-Keepers”, members of the U.S. military, the reserves, the National Guard, peace officers, and veterans, has emerged to say they will not blindly “follow orders” issued by this President that are contrary to the oath to uphold the Constitution they have taken.

This is a President whose Department of Homeland Security has defined as “extremist” anyone who criticizes or disagrees with his policies.

Americans who are fearful of the havoc President Barack Obama has let loose on this nation need to flood Congress with the demand that he be removed from office for his failure to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution. Indeed, to conclusively prove he was constitutionally qualified to run for the presidency.

The White House has to hear from Americans calling on the President to resign.

He and the Democrat-controlled Congress are proposing onerous taxation and reckless borrowing that will destroy the nation’s economy.

Americans cannot afford to let this President hold power until the next election in 2012. They cannot hope that the midterm elections in 2010 will be sufficient to protect them against the damage he will do to them, to their children, and to their grandchildren before they are held.

We cannot even be sure that as the result of the White House takeover of the Census and its close association with ACORN that those elections will not be rigged.

President Barack Hussein Obama must go!

Shootout at DC Holocaust Museum

By Alan Caruba

Our prayers are with the family of the slain security guard killed today at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Anti-Semitism killed six million of Europe's Jews in the last century. The same Nazi criminals killed five million Christians and others designated "enemies of the state."

Anti-Semitism is the refuge of despotism. Its victims cry out from their graves for justice still today and must be heard because they speak for all humanity.

Never forget!

Taxing Cows

By Alan Caruba

Just how crazed is the Environmental Protection Agency? When I say “crazed”, I mean just how far out of touch with reality, with science, with the economy, with common sense, and with the American people is the EPA?

Ever since the Supreme Court made one of the greatest blunders since the Dred Scott case, declaring carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that could be regulated by the EPA, that deranged agency has been pushing a tax on CO2 emissions from cows, pigs, and other farm animals on which we depend for milk and meat at the local supermarket.

According to Encarta, in 2005 there were an estimated 95,848,000 cows in the United States. Presumably, there are comparable numbers of pigs, goats, and other critters that emit belches and farts sufficient to destroy the Earth with the CO2 they emit. Nor should we overlook the six pounds of CO2 that the 307 million Americans exhale daily.

Since there is NO global warming and the Earth has been cooling for the past decade, the proposal that these farm animals be taxed constitutes a criminal act, devoid of any justification.

Since CO2 plays virtually no role whatever in so-called “climate change”, taxing farm animals is a violation of the known science and an assault on the economy in the name of the greatest hoax of the modern age.

It is not, however, a matter of “saving the Earth” so far as the EPA and the rest of the Obama administration is concerned. It is MONEY. And money is POWER.

The proposal, floated in late 2008, would impose a per-cow tax on any farm or ranch with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs that would require a payment of about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle, and $20 for each hog.

Suffice it to say that dairy farmers across the U.S. are being forced to send many of their herd to the slaughter house because the price of milk has fallen to the point where it is unprofitable to maintain them. Owners of even a modest-sized cattle ranch would face additional costs of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. Add a tax on cows and you end up with a nation that has to import more milk than oil.

Taxing farm animals is a great way to bankrupt dairy farmers and cattle ranchers, along with all those who raise hogs. After that, it is only a matter of time before Americans would all have to become vegetarians because the cost of meat would put an end to that part of our diet.

As bizarre as the EPA proposal is, the effort by the Democrat-controlled Congress to impose a Cap-and-Trade bill on the nation in the name of reducing CO2 emissions dwarfs the farm and ranch proposal.

The Heritage Foundation has crunched the numbers on Cap-and-Trade concluding that job losses would exceed 800,000 annually for several years. Durable-manufacturing employment would decrease by 28 percent. Machinery-manufacturing job losses would exceed 57 percent. The same would hold true for textile-mills, electrical equipment and appliance manufacturers, paper and paper product jobs, and jobs involving plastic and rubber products.

Cap-and-Trade isn’t just a job-killer, American Solutions estimates that it would increase gasoline prices by 74 percent, electricity rates by 90 percent, natural gas prices by 55 percent, and add $1,600 a year to the cost of living of a typical household.

The result would be to make the Great Depression look like a day at the park, but minus the hot dogs and ice cream.

This is what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have planned and they want the bill passed before Congress goes home for its summer recess.

At that point, the destruction of the U.S. economy would be complete and there would be no reason for Congress to return.

Does this seem an extreme conclusion to you? No, it is the reality the nation faces.

It's Not the Age of Aquarius. It Never Was.

By Alan Caruba

While watching the Tony Awards Sunday evening, a portion of the show included an excerpt from the revival of “Hair”, a Broadway show devoted to the excesses of the 1960s when words like “hippie” became part of the national vocabulary.

By the 1960s I had already graduated college and served in the U.S. Army. I was a journalist at the time so I had opportunities to observe and report upon various events and personalities of the era. I was in my twenties, but I recall being appalled by the ethos of a new generation that abandoned all the traditional values that most Americans shared at the time.

I thought then and now that the hippies represented an immaturity and irresponsibility that one associates with the worst aspects of adolescence. The Tony Awards segment only reaffirmed my feelings and I found it no less offensive than when the show first offered its view of America, the use of illegal drugs, the so-called sexual revolution, and other justifications for refusing to grow up.

Admittedly, I liked some of the songs and so did much of the nation. When it opened on Broadway in April 1968 several of the songs became top forty hits. A film adaptation was released in 1979. The revival opened on Broadway on March 31, 2009 and was embraced once again by the critics, mostly likely for its anti-war theme which was originally focused on the war in Vietnam and now fits in with opposition to the war in Iraq that helped get Barack Obama elected.

It seems to me that the 1960s marked some invisible line between the America that held strong, patriotic and traditional values, and a unity that has not existed since then. While only a handful of those growing up during that decade became hippies, those that did bequeathed a tolerance for drugs that became a social problem that remains to this day.

The 1960s was a decade of incredible turmoil, occurring as it did when the Civil Rights movement hit full stride. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and not long after Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated by a Palestinian immigrant.

While plunging deeper into the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson let loose a “Great Society” series of programs in the name of helping the poor and the disadvantaged, along with the inevitably slothful members of society who can never be counted upon to work.

Barack Obama is attempting to do the same today, issuing “stimulus” checks and massive government-run takeovers and programs instead of allowing the free market system to correct itself as it always has.

In 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion, a form of license for “free love.” Forced busing in the name of equality became the law, quotas made their way into the workplace and colleges in the name of “fairness”, but consuming everyone’s attention was the Vietnam War.

“Hair” was about not wanting to fight that war, about “dropping out and tuning in” as the drug culture became a permanent part of the American scene, but mostly it was and is about self-indulgence as characterized by letting one’s hair grow long. The musical’s characters pursued the "bohemian" life in New York.

The America in which I had grown up was characterized as a bad place.

I didn’t like much about the 1960s and I had to live through it. The 1970s was no picnic either. It featured the one-term idiocy of Jimmy Carter.

For a brief respite, Ronald Reagan reintroduced a mature approach to the way a great nation must behave, but he was replaced by the feckless Bill Clinton whose Oval Office antics tainted the role of the presidency. A no-nonsense former Texas Governor took over. After 9/11, we got through until now unscathed because he was not inclined to be nice to our enemies. For this, he was vilified by Democrats and those who supported Barack Obama.

The youth-oriented culture of the 1960s has returned in the person of Barack Obama who got elected by opposing the war in Iraq and promising “hope and change”.

The bill has come due for the financial excesses of the previous decade, as much the mark of immature, reckless behavior as anything else by those who came of age in the 1960s.

Obama is the worst combination of LBJ, Carter, and Clinton. Much of the cloying media treat him like a rock star.

The nation is on the threshhold of abandoning the vision of its Founding Fathers and the dictates of the U.S. Constitution. Driving that transformation is a narcissistic man-child and an ideologically besotted Congress that refuses to acknowledge the laws and truths of science, economics, and the reason America came into being; the focus on individual liberty backed up by a limited federal government.

It is not the Age of Aquarius. It never was.

America's Enemies

By Alan Caruba

Listening to President Obama one might think that America doesn’t have a single enemy that could not be turned into a friend if only he was given the opportunity to just talk to them. He is a great believer in diplomacy even though diplomacy has rarely stopped a war if one party was determined to wage it. War doesn’t need the consent of both.

Perhaps because I was born just prior to the outbreak of World War II and grew up aware of terrible things happening in both Europe and Asia, followed by having an older brother who served during the Korean War, plus my own service in the U.S. Army, my attitude about wars has been shaped by a lifetime in which I cannot recall a minute when America wasn’t at war, engaged in a war, or threatened by a war.

To this day I have considerable antipathy for “peaceniks” and war protesters even though, as the ill-fated Vietnam War dragged on, I joined a march or two. If ever there was a wrong war in the wrong place, Vietnam was it. For those unfamiliar with it, it was essentially a civil war into which the U.S. inserted itself due to a “domino theory” that, if Vietnam fell to communism, all the other Asian nations would as well. At the time, the Cold War was still raging since the end of WWII and Chairman Mao was still in charge of China.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t plotting against you, so it’s always a good idea to take a very general survey of those nations who wish us ill.

After a slow start, the U.S. is contemplating putting North Korea back on its list of terror-sponsoring nations. I suspect many Americans with no memory of the Korean War during the 1950s dismiss North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile capability. Not only will this thugocracy sell its WMDs to anyone, but the renewal of the Korean War is never more than 24 hours away. The U.S. is committed to intervene.

Iran, despite being on the other side of the globe, is working toward having its own nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems. As far as the Middle East is concerned, that’s a war just waiting to happen.

Americans seem to have forgotten that Saddam Hussein fought a war with Iran for eight years, settled for a stalemate, and then invaded Kuwait. If ever there was a good reason to fight a war to rid the region of this troublemaker, I cannot think of one. Now the problem has shifted to Pakistan, under attack from an enemy of its own making, the Taliban. Since Pakistan has nukes, it cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of fanatical Islamofascists.

Right next door India keeps a wary eye on Pakistan. Bordering Pakistan to the north is Afghanistan, a nation of tribes that, though occupied over and over again, has resisted all invaders for centuries. Just because 9/11 was planned there doesn’t mean the U.S. needs to maintain a military presence there. The prospect of an effective central government is quite distant despite the money, military manpower, and other efforts the U.S. is making.

So the enemies we can identify include any and all Muslims who support the view that Islam must rule the entire world. There are more than a billion of them.

Russia is no friend to the United States, but Russia is no friend to Europe or China either. Almost entirely dependent on the export of oil and natural gas, its fate rises and falls with the cost of a barrel or cubic foot of both. The fall of the Soviet government and the loss of its satellite nations in Eastern Europe have not significantly brought about a change of attitude in the Kremlin although much of the population would be more than happy to embrace the free market capitalism of the United States.

China is no friend either even though it is highly dependent on its ability to manufacture and export its goods to the United States. Our current economic woes worry the Chinese who own billions in U.S. treasury bills along with the fact that Americans aren’t buying as much of their stuff lately. China has perhaps the largest espionage effort regarding the U.S. of any other nation in the world.

Americans have been slow to respond to yet another enemy, Mexico. The U.S. has been literally invaded by Mexicans though they came looking for jobs and a better life. The result, however, has been enormous financial burdens on all aspects of our society from schools to hospitals to welfare and to crime. There are an estimated 12 million illegal Mexicans and others from south of the border and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leaders, wants to push through another amnesty bill.

The last amnesties only resulted in a greater rush to enter the U.S. Only a handful in public office will address the fact that the Mexican government has openly encouraged this invasion because the money sent home is a significant part of its economy. It is a major trading partner, but it looks to become totally controlled by the narco lords.

We have been slow to say or do anything about Venezuela, led by the dictator, Hugo Chavez. This likely has much to do with the oil that nation exports to the U.S. Chavez, however, is closely allied with Hezbollah which, in turn, is allied and controlled by Iran. Chavez has been buying up a lot of weapons of late and it has nothing to do with defense and everything to do with his bad intensions. Once a democracy, Venezuelans are now totally under the control of their government.

The U.S. just got around to arresting two former members of the State Department who had allegedly been spying for Cuba for thirty years. President Obama wants to lift restrictions on that dictatorship that have been in place for at least 50 years. Since the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s, Cuba has fallen on hard times, but it is still an enemy.

Africa is fairly dormant though Somalia has fallen to the Islamofascists. The U.S. has conspicuously done little to relieve the horrors in Darfur, inflicted by the Muslim Sudanese government. Overall, there is little likelihood that the U.S. will become embroiled in a war in Africa. It too is a significant source of oil.

If there is a common theme to our present threat levels, it is oil and, more precisely, the failure since the 1970s of the U.S. to access the abundant reserves of our own oil in the interior of the nation and from its offshore continental shelf. Since the Obama administration is hell bent on covering the U.S. with wind turbines and solar panels, we shall remain hostage to oil-producing nations.

The enemy that is only beginning to make himself known to Americans is President Barack Obama who has swiftly created an administration that ignores its many cabinet departments in favor of “czars” that have been ceded power over all elements of our nation. They rarely hold any press conferences, nor do they seem responsive to the inquiries of Congress. The only function of the cabinet secretaries appears to be to stand behind the President when he makes various announcements. No wonder he greeted Hugo Chavez with a big smile.

Taking control of automobile companies is unconstitutional. Giving bailouts to them is unconstitutional. Permitting the Federal Reserve to print money without regard to the inflationary impact this will have is reckless. Voting for a “stimulus” bill without reading or even debating it is reckless. Running up the national debt is reckless. Putting the value of the U.S. dollar in doubt is criminal negligence.

Trying to take over the nation’s health systems and to require all Americans to purchase health insurance flies in the face of free market capitalism and cedes control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to the government.

We now have a Homeland Security Department that identifies any American who disagrees with the Obama administration as an “extremist.” This includes people who oppose abortions, oppose illegal immigration, support the Second Amendment right to own and bear weapons, and veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorism is no longer part of its vocabulary, but “man-caused disasters” is.

If Americans don’t besiege and change Congress to reverse these assaults on the economy and the Constitution, this nation will fail and our liberties will be memories.

Weather Malarkey

By Alan Caruba

I have never been able to figure out why people who know that the forecast for the local weather is likely to be wrong by the afternoon of the same day or within 48 hours still believe that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can accurately predict what it will be ten, twenty or fifty years from now.

At the third Conference on Climate Change held last week in Washington, DC., an event sponsored by the non-profit, free market think tank, The Heartland Institute, “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC) was announced. It offers a very different picture from the endless scare campaigns of the leading environmental organizations or, for that matter, from the White House and Congress.

Edited by Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer, two climatologists, it runs a whopping 900 pages that includes 35 contributors and reviewers of climate data. Its final 200 pages are mostly appendices, including a directory of all scientists who signed the Global Warming Petition that, in March, numbered 31,478 of them.

The Petition urged the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. One of those proposals is a nation-destroying epic “climate” bill intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, with an absurd “cap-and-trade” program that is little more than a huge tax on all use of energy by Americans.

Suffice it to say that the original Kyoto Protocols were rejected unanimously by a former Senate when they were first announced and, since they are allegedly directed at saving the Earth from “global warming”, the threat of this calamity ended around 1998 when the Earth began to cool. It has been in a cooling cycle ever since.

Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?

Neither the protocols, nor the current “climate” bill have any merit whatever. Both are based on falsified “scientific” data courtesy of the UN Panel. Bad, inaccurate weather information seems to be the stock-in-trade of environmental organizations and thanks to Anthony Watts, a meteorologist with some 25 years in the forecasting business and chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio, a publication, “Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?” is available from The Heartland Institute ($12.99 per copy for 1-10 copies.)

As Watts points out, “The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”

Until now, however, “no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.” Watts recruited 650 volunteers and their findings are astounding and disturbing.

“We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.”

The report found that 89 percent of the stations, nearly 9 out of 10, failed to meet the National Weather Service’s own requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.

So, based on these monitoring stations, very little of the temperatures reported by the U.S. Weather Service are accurate and, more importantly, provide false data which has been used to underwrite the “global warming” hoax.

Filled with photos of the stations and charts of the data they produce, the conclusion is inescapable: “The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.”

When one considers that during the course of a single day and night, the temperature anywhere can vary widely, the notion that anyone can determine the nation’s or entire Earth’s average temperature based on such stations around the world is literally impossible.

Weather satellites provide a better gauge and, as noted, they have been reporting a cooling Earth since 1998.

The Greens aren’t the only ones who can make predictions, albeit for the purpose of scaring people into believing the bogus “global warming” hoax, I can do that too. I predict that the Greens will unleash an unholy attack on The Heartland Institute’s NIPCC report in order to discredit it.

Now, who are you going to believe? The thermometer your home or apartment uses to determine the temperature outside or the Greens? As for your local weather report, it is useful for perhaps a day, maybe two. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.

For more information, visit www.surfacestations.org.

War! War! War!

By Alan Caruba

“In defense of our nation, a president must be a clear-eyed realist. There are limits to the smiles and scowls of diplomacy. Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation. They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment.” I will tell you who said that at the end of this commentary.

D-Day, 65 years ago, was one of many days throughout history that determined the final outcome of a war. I suspect one can attach a great battle to just about every day in the calendar because the history of humanity is one of constant warfare somewhere, anywhere in the world where two men, two families, two tribes, two empires, or two or more states clashed.

The courage that Americans, joined by Canadians, British, Free French, Polish, and other troops showed on June 6, 1944 preserved freedom for a bit longer among the victors, though all of Eastern Europe had to be written off as the bribe to keep Soviet Russia involved. It would ultimately loose 20 million of its people.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 199,000. People forget that the Japanese emperor and the military, though clearly defeated, refused to concede.

War is the natural element of mankind. Peace is merely the interlude between wars.

Man is the most dangerous creature on Earth and young men, in particular, are either conscripted into armies or will just as likely form gangs to fulfill the desire “to seek the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.”

Every time I hear Barack Obama talk of diplomacy, I can hear guns being cocked or missiles being positioned. He is surely the most naïve President since the days of Woodrow Wilson who get elected promising keep the U.S. out of World War I and then, after committing U.S. troops, he went to Europe to participate in the writing of the Versailles Treaty where the British and the French ate his lunch. They divided up the spoils, punished Germany, and set in motion World War II before the ink was dry.

Wilson returned home with his dream of a League of Nations and the U.S. Senate shot it down, preferring to maintain our sovereignty than to get in bed with the knaves that started WWI.

That fool’s dream of an organization to ensure world peace was revived by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and signed into being by his successor, Harry S. Truman, who probably had little choice in the matter. Its first Secretary General was a Soviet spy named Alger Hiss, a communist who had risen high in the FDR government.

The world has always been a dangerous place because it has always been full of egotists and psychopaths who have seized or gained power in one fashion or another. Alexander tried his hand at a Macedonian empire. Rome laid down some fine roads and used them to ensure their hold on a widespread Mediterranean empire. Attila knocked on the doors of Europe. The Visigoths and other barbarian tribes sacked Rome.

The Church sent forth crusades in response to the military aspirations of Muslims to seize and hold Jerusalem, holy to Christian and Jew. The Muslims or Moors had already spread far into India and northern Africa, up into Spain. Their northern drive into Europe was stopped at Poitiers, France in 732 AD and on September 11, 1683 they were decisively defeated at the gates of Vienna.

In the last century, the Empire of Japan murdered thousands, if not millions in China while waging war to control Asia. In Europe the Nazis redefined barbarism and depravity.

War! War! War! Diplomacy is merely the process by which war may be delayed a bit and the terms of surrender are determined by the winner. Diplomacy has never stopped a despot from pursuing war. It has merely rescheduled it.

In 1986, Osama bin Laden formally declared war on the United States. He is still at war with the United States whether anyone is paying attention or not. And we are not. The Iranians, as crazed as bin Laden, have made their intentions clear by declaring “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel” every single day since seizing our diplomats in 1979 and holding them for 444 days.

After 9/11, George W. Bush did not hesitate to pursue war against bin Laden in Afghanistan and against a man, Saddam Hussein, and nation, Iraq, that were the object of dozens of useless United Nations resolutions as an instigator of wars. Obama’s response has been to denigrate our military achievement in Iraq and demand that Guantanamo be closed down.

Barack Obama is going to get a lot of Americans killed with his poetry about diplomacy.

The lessons of history are lost on this fool. Buchenwold concentration camp and the beach at Normandy are just background for “photo ops” to this greatest of narcissists. He is too busy waging his own war on America while seeking yet another stage on which to strut.

To become a nation in its own right America took on the greatest military power of its time, Great Britain, and won. It fought Barbary pirates. It waged a bloody civil war for its soul and won. It fought Mexico and added territory by winning. It fought Spain. It fought insurgents in the Philippines. It fought two world wars. It fought Communists in Korea. It fought them again in Vietnam. It forced the Russians to back off in Cuba. It fought Communists on the island of Granada and it fought a drug lord in Panama. It fought Iraq after it invaded Kuwait. It fought the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and it again fought a despot in Iraq. We are still in both these places.

On September 10, 2001 Americans thought they were not at war with anyone. They were wrong. The only thing that has kept us from another attack was the policy enunciated in the quote with which I began this contemplation of war and peace. The man who said it is former President George W. Bush. The date was November 19, 1999.

Too Much Sex in the Schools

By Alan Caruba

America is a very different place from the one in which I grew up in the 1940s and 50s. Change is to be expected. Technology transforms the way we live, often in ways we do not initially comprehend. Events alter our perceptions, but one thing does not change. It is morality. The rules of good and bad behavior, right and wrong do not change.

It has always been wrong, at least in the Judeo-Christian culture of Western civilization, for an adult to have sex with a child and particularly with one under their supervision. Our government run schools with compulsory attendance put the vast bulk of our children in the care of strangers.

Fifty or more years ago if a teacher was found to be having sex with a student, the entire community was appalled. The offending teacher would be sent to jail. That is less and less the case these days because school administrators are often at pains to sweep such cases under the rug in some fashion or to ignore children courageous enough to complain of inappropriate behavior. Judges too often lean in favor of the offending teacher.

I will not address whether or not there is more sex between students, but there is sufficient data to suggest this too has been a growing problem for many years. In families where both parents work, the child has more unsupervised time, cell phones permit for private communications, and access to pornography is far more available to young people. This affords greater susceptibility to sexual relations with teachers and peers.

Today cases involving teacher-student sex rate a headline, but those headlines have become a continual series of such stories. My impression is that there is too much teacher-student sex in our schools and it does not appear to evoke as much outcry or concern as in former times.

Worthy of an entire separate commentary (or a book!) today’s children and young people have been increasingly sexualized in terms of the popular media, fashion, et cetera.

A recent World Net Daily story caught my eye. On June 4 the headline was “Teacher rapes girl after predator principal snagged.” In Georgetown, Delaware’s Sussex Central High School, a popular teacher was arrested on charges of allegedly having raped a 15-year-old female student. He had just delivered the spring commencement speech. A year earlier, the same school’s principal faced charges for having sex with a 17-year-old female student.

WND’s David Kupelian wrote an extensive article for Whistleblower magazine in March 2006 that examined the “epidemic of teacher-student sex.” The website has pages devoted to how many cases there have been in recent years at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=39783

People of a conservative point of view tend to be watchful for signs that our society is endangered by failing moral standards, not because we don’t view sex as a natural part of life, but because we know there are rules of behavior a healthy, civil society must apply. Among those rules are those involving protecting youth who are vulnerable if neither parent, nor church, has provided moral boundaries and cautions.

As a good friend points out, it takes parents to raise a child properly, not a “village.”

Schools are part of the “village”, but it is clear they can no longer automatically be trusted to provide protection against sexual predators. And the best protection are parents who explain the rules and why they exist. Parents these days must provide the support and trust a child needs in order to report any sexual advances, inappropriate touching, and similar threats to the child’s present and long term welfare. It’s not a victimless crime.

Along with rape, a crime recognized by every society, there are widespread state laws regarding statutory rape with those deemed too young to make a judgment regarding sex with an older male or female.

The numbers of female teachers accused and arrested for statutory rape has been increasing and, along with male teachers, the need to impose stiff jail sentences and the assurance they never again can teach anywhere needs to be addressed in every town and city in America.

The reality, however, is that our tabloid society has been exploiting cases of teacher-student sex and the message has been that it is not a crime, nor that it endangers and warps the lives of the seduced students despite the defense of “mutual consent”.

We used to be far more watchful and far more outraged. Apparently, we’re not any more.

Editor’s Note: There are two recently published books from Regnery Publishing that concerned parents should read. They are You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How they Can Harm Your Child and 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family.

Commander-in-Cliche

By Alan Caruba

Some of my favorite science fiction villains are the “shape-shifters” like the cyborg from the 1984 “Terminator” movie. Barack Hussein Obama reminds me a lot of those creatures.

All during the campaign, the use of his middle name was decried as a subtle form of racism, suggesting his Muslim roots, but when he took the oath of office, there it was and, in Cairo, Obama stressed those same roots. Salaam Alaykum everyone!

His Cairo speech, however, was met predictably by his Arab Muslim audience with less than enthusiasm and, as always, the endless complaints by people for whom democracy is an illusion and oppression is a way of life.

Our Commander-in-Cliché did not disappoint anyone by saying anything original. “We have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek.” No kidding! Wow! Obama is under the impression that America and the nations of the Middle East “share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

I suppose that explains all the bombings of mosques, the beheadings, the endless turmoil from so-called Palestinians who have refused to accept a two-state solution for six decades or been assimilated into Muslim nations for all that time. For Obama, their situations was one of “occupation” but it doubtful that Obama will ever reference the many Arab “settlements” in the West Bank or the way Arabs have pushed out Jewish and Christian residents from Israeli cities whenever they gained a majority foothold.

For the Arabs, the response to his speech was the very tired claims about the Palestinians (there is not, nor ever was, a “Palestinian” state. Palestinians are stateless Arabs.) The Arab man in the street tended to dismiss Obama as “just a prettier face,” as one Cairo electrician put it. “I don’t expect much from the man.” Both newspapers and ordinary Arabs who had previously welcomed Obama’s election warned against emulating George W. Bush by “lecturing Muslims about democracy.”

Osama bin Laden put out the word that Islam was locked into a very long war with America, democracy, human rights, whatever. The man desperately needs killing.

There is, of course, one genuine democracy in the Middle East and that is Israel. Iraq’s first steps toward democracy were made possible by an American invasion, the removal of Saddam Hussein, and our continued military presence. If we go, democracy is likely to leave with us. That leaves Turkey which has practiced democracy with some success so long as its army can keep Islamists from taking over.

With considerable irony, having stopped in Saudi Arabia just prior to his Cairo speech, a Saudi newspaper warned Muslims against having high expectations. “The Islamic world should not think that Obama is coming to be an ally or a supporter,” said an Al Riyadh editorial.

In Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the guy that runs Iran, said “The nations of this part of the world…deeply hate America because during many years they have seen violence, military interference, rights violations, discrimination…from America.” Not like Iraq under Saddam who invaded Iran and made war for eight years; that guy was a real statesman. In Iran, you can get hanged for just about anything including littering.

As for Israel, Khamenei called it a “cancerous tumor in the heart” of the Muslim world. And Iran backs up that bile by funding both Hamas and Hezbollah, the two Palestinian terrorist organizations. Egypt and Jordan who both signed peace accords with Israel probably disagree.

Obama called the bonds between America and Israel “unbreakable”, but it’s hard to know what this presidential shape-shifter will say tomorrow, so proceed with caution.

For his Middle East Muslim audience, Obama’s speech largely fell on deaf ears. The only things they want is for Israel to go away, for the U.S. to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and for Islam to be the lone religion of the world. With more than a billion Muslims in the world, however, it is doubtful they all agree on any common view of America or the future.

One thing we do know, however, even if Obama does not, is that there are just over two million Muslims in America and one assumes most are happy living here. His deliberate tripling of that number suggests ignorance or his rather odd notion that America is not a Christian nation and is, in fact, a major Muslim one.

Is Obama sincere in his latest appearance on the world stage outside of the White House? He could be just the pathological narcissist we have come to know from the days of his campaign. He could be a Muslim with a secret agenda. It is hard to know anything for sure about Obama except that, since taking the oath of office he has tirelessly worked to destroy our economy in every way possible. Overseas, no one appears to take him seriously.

On June 5, Obama visits Buchenwold, the former Nazi concentration camp. He might just make a connection between that place and Israel’s right to exist on its own terms, not his. In Tehran, Mamoud Ahmadinejad will be busy telling everyone who will listen that the Holocaust never happened.

Fortunately for our Commander-in-Cliché, he gets to strut and fret his stuff upon the world stage again as he pays homage to D-Day on June 6, the 65th anniversary of when Americans continued their tradition of rescuing Europeans from themselves. Now there is very little left of Europe to rescue. It has long since become Eurabia.

No doubt he will deliver another speech filled with hope and change and, well, whatever. We’ve heard it all before. He’s beginning to bore everyone, but worse, he’s beginning to scare everyone, too.

Obama's Magical Muslim Tour

By Alan Caruba

In life as in international affairs the rule is to never show weakness. It tends to awaken a bloodlust and too often leads to the worst outcomes.

In the Arab culture this is especially true. They are a pretty cowardly bunch as people go. Their weapon of choice these days is the suicide bomber; some dimwit who thinks 72 virgins are awaiting him. As 9/11 demonstrated, they have developed the sneak attack to perfection and, not surprisingly, the word “assassin” comes from Arabic. Arabs prefer to wage war on the weak and that usually means each other.

They tried destroying Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. They failed. They were especially unhappy with the protection and friendship America extended, but now they have less reason to be unhappy. They have, they suspect, a Muslim in the White House. A lot of other people suspect that as well.

They have spent decades using their fellow Arabs, the so-called Palestinians, as a wedge to pry loose land from Israel in exchange for a peace that never occurs.

The Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000. Hezbollah made war on them from southern Lebanon in 2006. The Israelis withdrew from the Gaza strip in 2005. Hamas used it as a platform for 10,000 rockets, an act of war punished in recent months. One wonders how Hamas found the time when they weren’t making war on Fatah, another Palestinian group.

Other acts of Arab “courage” include Iraq’s Saddam Hussein using poison gas against an Iraqi village of Kurds. When not slaughtering other Iraqis, he waged war against Iran for eight fruitless years, settling for a truce. Then he invaded Kuwait. And people keep wondering why, after chasing the Taliban out of Afghanistan, George W. Bush decided that the Middle East would be better off without Saddam Hussein. If you ask the Saudis or the Gulf State sheiks, they would agree.

They would also agree that their next big problem is not the United States, nor Israel, but Iran. Iran is composed mainly of Persians, not Arabs, and of Shiites, the minority sect of Islam where the Sunnis are used to calling the shots. Rumor has it the Persians have a low opinion of Arabs.

As for Muslims in general, ask any nation where they have or begin to gain a majority population status and you will discover a combination of antipathy and fear. Arab Muslims always insist on their rules, not yours. They neither trust, nor like each other much.

Israel knows how essential it is to show no weakness. Bibi Netanyahu did not genuflect to President Obama during his recent visit and dismissed U.S. demands about West Bank settlements. Israeli’s have no intention of withdrawing into six blocks of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Lately, they have been practicing nationwide war games in preparation for another attack from Hamas and/or Hezbollah.

The most interesting news out of Israel was Avigdor Lieberman’s statement after a recent three-day visit to Russia. The Foreign Minister said that Israel had no intention of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, adding that Arab nations in the region should be even more concerned about a nuclear-armed Iran than Israel. I have met Lieberman and he is a very soft-spoken man, almost inaudible, but his words have sent a very loud message to the United States, the Arab states, and the world.

“We do not intend to bomb Iran, and nobody will solve their problems with our hands. We don’t need that. Israel is a strong country. We can protect ourselves,” said Lieberman.

We shall see now how Israel’s projection of strength contrasts with whatever President Obama has to say in Cairo. If the Arabs hear a message of weakness from Obama, he will have opened the door for more attacks on the homeland and our allies.

You can be sure that President Obama’s failure to say one word thus far about this week’s Muslim jihadist murder of a U.S. Army recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas, is being examined like the entrails of a chicken or goat for its greater significance, nor is it lost on his Arab hosts that he is not going to visit Israel on this trip.

President Kiss-Up needed to go to Turkey to tell Muslims that America is “not a Christian nation” and one can only wonder what other absurd thing he will say in Cairo, Egypt. If he sounds weak and apologetic, we shall all pay the price for his Magical Muslim Tour.

The US is Committing National Suicide

By Alan Caruba

Growing up as a teenager in the 1950s, I could not wait to get my license to drive and I liked the sporty look of the British MG. These days I drive a Volkswagen. In that short tale can be found the seeds of the end of the American auto industry.

Here’s some history. In 1952, the merger of several British auto companies resulted in the British Motor Corporation. It was the largest of its day with 39% of British output. Despite established dealerships for the various models, a series of poor management decisions resulted in the loss of market share.

By 1968, British Leyland was formed out of British Motor Corporation and became British Leyland Motor Corporation Ltd. In 1975, it was partially nationalized and the government became a holding company. UK market share barely changed and despite brands such as Jaguar, Rover and Land Rover, the government motor company continued its decline.

By 2005, the MG Rover Group went bankrupt, bringing to an end the production by British owned companies. The MG became part of Chinese Nanjing Automobile.

The 1970s were difficult economic times for the United Kingdom and its Labor government (1974-1979), as noted above, created a holding company with the government as the major shareholder. At that point British Leyland employed 159,000 people in its many divisions that included a bus and truck operation.

In 1984, Jaguar Cars became independent once more through a public sale of its shares, but the Leyland truck and bus operation was sold to Volvo in 1988. The Rover Group was sold by the government to British Aerospace that in turn sold it to BMW. Suffice it to say, the British auto industry is now largely owned by companies in other nations or operating as a mere shadow of its former self.

Anyone who thinks that General Motors will revive is wrong. As Larry Kudlow, the radio-TV business maven, recently wrote, “Taxpayers won’t get their money back” and that figure now stands at $50 billion.

Both GM and Chrysler should have been allowed to choose bankruptcy months ago, but the U.S. government in its infinite wisdom has thrown our money down a rat hole created by bad management and excessive labor union demands over the past four decades. Meanwhile, as was the case in the UK, Chrysler is now owned by an Italian auto manufacturer.

The U.S. government now owns GM, AIG an insurance company, and billions in housing mortgages through the government entities of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. Kudlow said, “We’re talking about hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that will never be repaid.”

That news is bad enough, but consider now that the U.S. government has just increased the standards of how much mileage must be achieved from a gallon of gasoline at the very same time it demands that more of that gasoline be mixed with ethanol. Ethanol reduces mileage. President Obama has already made clear that he wants GM to manufacture “green” automobiles. No one will buy them.

The Telegraph, a British newspaper, recently did the math on the price of “green” cars, noting that the present UK models cost the equivalent of more than about $5,000 US than a comparable non-green model. “To benefit from the difference in fuel efficiency, you would have to drive 198,000 miles, the equivalent of driving around the world eight times.” The same will apply to comparable American-made “green” cars.

Here in America, the biofuels industry receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol or biodiesel it produces or about $3 billion a year. The US government requires that 10% of all gasoline be blended with these biofuels whether consumers want it or not. This mandate is scheduled to double by 2015.

Not only will the automobiles cost more and get less mileage per gallon, but the Congressional Budget Office last month reported that “the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10% to 15% of the rise in food prices.” That’s because the main ingredient of ethanol is corn. That is insane.

At the same time, the government refuses to permit exploration and extraction of known oil reserves in the nation’s interior and off its continental coastal shelf despite estimates of literally billions of barrels of untapped oil.

In the Bakken Formation under North Dakota and Montana, there are an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil. And we’re not even talking about the billions of barrels off the coast of California, Florida and other coastal states. The U.S. by some estimates has eight times as much oil as Saudi Arabia, eighteen times as much as Iraq and twenty-two times as much oil as Iran.

There is one, single reason why we can’t get at those oil and natural gas reserves, as well as being denied access to the massive amounts of U.S. coal reserves. It is the environmental organizations that maintain a campaign against energy use in the nation.

The government is to blame, of course, but you can thank Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Environmental Program, among countless others that have fought against any and all development, any and all economic expansion and growth.

This campaign is coming to a head with a “Cap-and-Trade” bill making its way through Congress that would impose a huge tax on “greenhouse gas emissions” by every industry and business that produces or uses energy. It has no scientific justification. Even the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality has released a study demonstrating that the reduction of CO2 emissions would be minimal at best, but such reductions are absurd because there is no global warming.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the midst of a historic economic crisis, at a time when such emissions will continue in other nations around the world, and when such emissions are known to have no effect whatever on a totally bogus “global warming” or “climate change” is a program for national suicide.

Government control of the auto industry is now merely a prelude to its eventual end. Jobs will disappear forever. “Green jobs” are a myth. The economy will suffer a grievous loss. And, if you draw the lessons from the British experiment, you can accurately predict the future of our auto industry.

Only if control of Congress by the Democrats is ended can measures be taken that will permit the nation to turn away from the destruction being inflicted upon it. Vote in October 2010 as if your life, your children’s lives, and your grandchildren’s lives depend upon it, because it does.

Are You Scared Yet?

By Alan Caruba

Listening to President Obama explain why the United States is now the largest stakeholder in General Motors and, one assumes Chrysler-Fiat, I was intrigued by how he can say two opposite things in the same speech.

Both auto companies could have been allowed to proceed toward bankruptcies months ago without any government intervention. A Rasmussen telephone survey reveals that 67% opposed this action. The U.S. Treasury has now been bled of $70 billion to allegedly keep GM from closing its doors, but a normal bankruptcy would have permitted it to restructure without an upper management and board of directors selected by the White House.

The outcome would have assured that GM was not forced to manufacture sub-compact cars that few Americans want even though GM’s European operations already do turn them out. That being the case, why not just import them from Europe in response to whatever sales might exist here? In the meantime, however, most of its brands that appeal to Americans will be shuttered.

If President Obama doesn’t want to run auto companies, he isn’t providing much evidence of it. He fired the former president of GM. The government is mandating that GM manufacture “green cars” that will find a scant market here.

The banking community is so scared of the White House that those who received TARP funds are eager to return them to the treasury.

I confess that every time I hear President Obama talk about “green jobs” I just want to throw something at the TV set. What exactly are these jobs? Are Americans clambering to spend thousands of dollars on solar panels for their homes? No. If there is no significant market for solar panels, how many people can be employed, especially after the government has squandered millions to teach unemployed auto workers to make and install them?

How big a market is there for wind turbines? They are hugely unpopular with their neighbors unless they are positioned in some desolate place far from human habitat. That means that power lines must be built for hundreds of miles to tap the slim returns they provide or use (the wind does not blow all the time, but the turbines utilize electricity because they must be kept turning or they break down.)

If nuclear or coal-fired plants could be built near the urban and suburban centers that really need them, they would provide both employment and the energy the nation requires.

Vice President Biden described green-collar jobs saying, “They provide products and services that use renewable energy resources, reduce pollution, and conserve energy and natural resources.”

Does that sound comparable to jobs that involve making things people really want, need and purchase? Does that describe construction jobs for new homes, new office buildings and other structures, new roads, new bridges and tunnels?

Aren’t oil and coal natural resources? If so, why has the government declared war on the mining and use of coal? Why has it refused to permit exploration and extraction of oil and natural gas from vast reserves in the nation’s interior or along its coastal shelf?

Other than solar or wind that currently provide one percent of all the energy we use daily, how much “renewable” energy do we need or want as opposed to more nuclear and coal-fired plants to meet current and future needs?

There used to be millions of green-collar jobs years ago. They were called farmers. As modern technology (highly dependent on gasoline and diesel fuel) made it possible for fewer farmers—little more than two percent of the population today—to produce enough crops to feed us, feed livestock, and to export to the tune of billions for the national economy, millions migrated to our nation’s cities and learned manufacturing and other skills. They became blue-collar and white-collar workers.

Those that have remained on our nation’s farms get very little credit for their work, must contend with endless regulations from the government’s Agriculture, Interior Departments, and Environmental agencies. Passing the family farm to their children faces obstacles as well.

The economic policies imposed by the White House and Congress are putting people out of work. The so-called “stimulus” bill will waste billions and employment will be temporary at best.

The Recession has just about run its course. They generally last about eighteen months, but the government is repeating every error of the FDR administration during the Great Depression and, in particular, plans to raise taxes at the worst possible time.

Are you scared yet? You ought to be.