Teaching U.S. Kids the U.N. Way

By Alan Caruba

It’s horrible enough to think of the way school children have been deliberately and unnecessarily frightened by the teaching in American schools about “global warming.” Since the 1980s it has been part of the curriculum in schools throughout the nation, convincing a lot of children that the Earth was doomed.

It was difficult enough to grow up as I did knowing that the Soviet Union could annihilate most of the population with nuclear missiles or that their brand of communism could destroy the liberties Americans take for granted.

Ever since Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, the nation’s educational systems, once among the best in the world and answering directly to local school boards, have produced a dismal record of general failure to teach the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. It was taken over by the National Education Association, a union, and a curriculum of liberalism has existed ever since.

American children grew up learning that the Founding Fathers were slave owners. They were forced to learn “fuzzy math” and “whole words”, two systems that left them unable to add or subtract sums without a calculator in hand and to read without some difficulty.

Schools became increasingly dangerous places, often requiring the fulltime presence of a police officer. In sum, schools, i.e. administrators and faculty, increasingly sought to place themselves between the student and his parents as the primary authority.

Now we learn that the Obama administration is imposing “education reform efforts” that will adopt “internationally benchmarked education standards.” They will become national standards. The incentive will be federal “stimulus” dollars. There’s more to learn about this at http://www.edwatch.org/,

It’s worth keeping in mind that “No Child Left Behind” is widely regarded as a failure and that all children do not learn at the same rate. Albert Einstein was deemed a dimwit because, for his first years, he did not speak much to anyone. NCLB became a “teach to the test” monstrosity that eliminated any creativity from the teaching process and produced results that, along with previous “reforms” left American students ranked way behind many other nations.

Instead of expecting children whose first language was Spanish or some other to learn English, bilingual education was introduced at considerable expense that ensures those most in need of learning English would have one more obstacle to overcome. Then schools were saddled with mandates for “special” students with disabilities who often cost local school boards hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet their needs.

What this indoctrination is all about is “a de facto federal curriculum” that will financially reward states that adopt what the DOE wants taught. Here’s where it really gets ugly. As Allen Quist of EdWatch points out, the curriculum will be “internationally benchmarked” which is a way of saying American educational standards will be determined by UNESCO, the United Nations education arm.

In practice this means children will be taught about the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but might not get much or any instruction regarding the U.S. Constitution. As Quist puts it, “American schools used to teach the fundamentals of the United States, including the inalienable, God-given rights of life, liberty and property, as guaranteed by our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Not any more. Our children will be taught that they only have those rights the UN says they have.”

Then, for good measure, throw in the UN’s Earth Charter which includes the “promotion of the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.” It also endorses nuclear disarmament, gay marriage, legalized abortion, and a general curriculum of flat out Earth worship.

The UN is unquestionably the most corrupt international institution on the face of the Earth. President Obama has just ensured future generations of American students will be indoctrinated with its belief system instead of the one our Founding Fathers gave us.

Is it any wonder that home schooling has become such a fast-growing trends among parents who do not want to turn their children over to a system that denigrates American values?

If you think this nation is being sabotaged by the White House, add education to the list of its handiwork.

Where's Obama's Birth Certificate?

By Alan Caruba

It’s the question and/or controversy that will not go away. Where was President Barack Hussein Obama born and why won’t he produce a birth certificate?

Sometime ago I received an affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, by Philip J. Berg, an attorney who briefly gained media attention when he asserted that President Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States and, under the U.S. Constitution, was disqualified from running for or holding the position of President.

The problem Berg presents is that he reportedly was a supporter of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democrat nomination and thus had a very political reason to challenge Obama’s citizenship. The courts, however, appear to have been extraordinarily reluctant to address the question.

Among the Berg documents I have seen is an affidavit attesting to a transcribed conversation between Bishop Kwele Shuhudra, Bishop of the Anabaptists Churches of North America, and Sarah Obama, the President’s grandmother or aunt, who confirmed that she was present when he was born in Kenya. Could she be mistaken? There also appears to be some confusion over which hospital in Hawaii Obama was born; if he was born there. No attending physician has ever stepped forth to confirm it.

Democrat spin doctors are, of course, circling the wagons around Obama who is alleged to have spent nearly a million dollars on lawyers to keep his birth and other public records secret.

The obvious question is why.

The problem for his defenders is that no birth certificate has been made available to the public and the Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth that was briefly shown on an Obama website has raised more questions than answers about its authenticity and has been challenged as a forgery.

Obama’s birth father met his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, when they were students at the University of Hawaii. It is entirely possible that she gave birth to Obama in Hawaii though there is some question whether a ceremony occurred generating a marriage certificate. Obama senior was already married to an African wife at the time. What is known is that Obama’s mother later married an Indonesian in 1965 and Obama spent his early years in Jakarta, starting in 1967.

The reason I am a “birther”, i.e., someone who remains skeptical, is fairly simple. I began my career as a journalist. I was trained to be skeptical and to expect to see documentation and proof that whatever is asserted is true.

This means that I am suspicious when a candidate for president has virtually no paper trail of documents. No journalist has seen Obama’s alleged birth certificate because it is “under seal” in Hawaii at the order of its Governor. Why?

Here’s a list of documentation that, as of 2008, was “unavailable”:

1. Occidental College records -- Not released
2. Columbia College records -- Not released
3. Columbia Thesis paper -- "Not available"
4. Harvard College records -- Not released
5. Selective Service Registration -- Not released
6. Medical records -- Not released
7. Illinois State Senate schedule -- "Not available"
8. Law practice client list -- Not released
9. Certified Copy of original Birth certificate -- Not released
10. Embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth -- Not released
11. Harvard Law Review articles published -- None
12. University of Chicago scholarly articles -- None

What does anyone REALLY know about Obama? They “know” the life story he put forth in two memoirs, one of which was published before he ever ran for a public office. Even here, his authorship of the books has been challenged because the text to an astonishing extent resembles books and articles written by Bill Ayers, a close friend and best known as having been a domestic terrorist, a member of the Weatherman in the 1960s.

Does it matter? The answer is yes. It matters in the most serious way possible. We cannot have someone holding the power of the presidency that does not qualify under the provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

It should be a cause for genuine concern that he continues to stonewall all attempts to determine his place of birth, his citizenship, or any of the other major parts of his life leading up to having first served in the Illinois legislature and then as a U.S. Senator.

The mainstream media have been extraordinarily disinterested in any credible documentation of Obama’s life story. Something is very wrong about that.

Something is bizarre that Time Magazine is putting Obama’s picture on the cover for a twelfth time in twelve months!

Obama’s rise to power has been meteoric. His path there remains shrouded in deliberate obscurity.

Obama’s popularity and approval ratings by both the Gallup and Rasmussen polling organizations have been dropping precipitously. All the spin in the world will not reverse this, but one step in the right direction would be to produce his birth certificate.

Congress Says NO to Energy

By Alan Caruba

Americans are seriously worried over the rising number of their fellow citizens without jobs.

Americans watch the daily cost of a gallon of gasoline as closely as sports scores.

America has so much untapped oil that it boggles the imagination. Much of it is located offshore of the nation’s coastline.

Some states benefit greatly from the oil and natural gas extracted from the Gulf of Mexico. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas receive revenues collected by the federal government for offshore production and of course there are lots of jobs involved.

July marked a year since the lifting of an 18-year-old presidential moratorium (ban) on offshore exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas, but a de facto ban continues for states from Maine to Florida, Washington to California. In Alaska, a federal ban on extracting oil in ANWR makes a joke out of politicians who call for “energy independence.”

Nine out of ten wells in America’s interior are produced by small, independent producers, not the so-called Big Oil companies. They increase the nation’s energy security and expand domestic energy production. They reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil.

The Southeast Energy Alliance recently noted that just one state, North Carolina, could receive up to $577 million annually in revenue sharing payments from offshore energy development if Congress extended its royalty revenue sharing program in the same way it does for Gulf States.

Now multiply that revenue by all the other coastal states that will not permit exploration and extraction. Those same states mercilessly raise taxes on their citizens to meet their budget shortfalls.

In North Carolina alone, offshore continental shelf exploration and extraction would generate more than 6,700 jobs, increase the state’s gross domestic product by $659 million annually by 2030, and generate approximately $148 billion in federal, state, and local revenues.

A Monmouth University poll in June revealed that a clear majority of Americans in five coastal states support offshore domestic energy exploration and production. The states polled were that New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.

Now, while all that oil and natural gas goes untapped and essentially banned from use, Congress is considering a “Cap-and-Trade” act that would increase the cost of all energy, raising the cost to all Americans in the name of limiting “greenhouse gas emissions” said to be causing “global warming.” This especially hits the coal industry, responsible for 50% of all the electricity generated nationwide.

Only there is NO global warming. Thousands of previous records regarding cooler weather are being broken throughout the United States (and worldwide) because the Earth has been cooling for a decade and is predicted to continue cooling for decades.

The “Stimulus” bill passed by Congress allocates billions to “green energy” in the form of wind and solar production which represents just over 1% of the electricity Americans require daily. It is more expensive and less reliable than any other form of energy.

The total disconnect between what Congress says and what it does marks its failure to support the generation of more jobs, more revenue, and greater energy security for the nation.

The answer to America’s energy needs, however, is obvious. Rid Congress of those members who will not permit thousands of energy-related jobs, nor allow Americans access to the energy they require to run their businesses, heat or cool their homes, or operate cars, trucks, trains and planes.

Find out if your Representative in the House voted for “Cap-and-Trade” and vote them out! Tell your Senators today that they are next to go if they vote for it.

Then demand that exploration and drilling in America’s offshore continental shelf and in ANWR must be permitted. Tell the lying Greens wailing about “dirty” coal to take a hike.

It’s not complicated. It’s common sense and it’s about the survival of the nation.

It's Getting Colder Everywhere

By Alan Caruba

There’s an ancient Scandinavian legend that says, “A long time ago, the universe was made of ice. Then one day the ice began to melt and a mist rose into the sky. Out of the mist came a giant made of frost and the earth and the heavens were made from his body. This is how the world began and this is how the world will end, not by fire, but by ice. The seas will freeze and winters will never end.”

Thus begins “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, a book by my friend, Robert W. Felix, published initially in 2005. You can pick up a copy from www.iceagenow.com. While you’re there, pick up “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps” as well. Taken together, both books explain why the Earth, now at the end of an interglacial cycle, is heading into its next ice age and why Darwin got it wrong with his theory of slow, evolutionary mutations accounting for various species being different from one another.

The Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. Homo sapiens, the human race as we know it, have been around for about 40,000 years. We date our modern ancestry back to the Cro-Magnon man who superseded the Neanderthals. The development of agriculture, growing food rather than hunting it, dates back some 7,000 years and civilization in the form of city-states and nations is relatively new; only about 5,000 years.

For all that time, tribes tried very hard to appease the gods of sun and rain to ensure a good harvest. They would sacrifice the spare virgin or offer the hearts of captives. There were elaborate dances and prayers created by the shamans and priests, but humans never quite got the knack of actually controlling the weather or climate because they can’t and never could.

That is until Greenus Homo Sapian came along. This creature who emerged out of the conservation movement hit its stride around the 1970s. Greenus is the Bigfoot of climate, the Satchquatch of weather.

After devoting a decade in the 1970s to correctly predicting that a new ice age was on the way, Greenus, also known as Greens, discovered that they could scare a lot more people by claiming that the Earth was suddenly and dramatically warming.

It turned out to be a fabulous fund-raiser and allowed them to pursue an agenda intended to rid the Earth of as many nasty Homo sapiens as possible. This would be accomplished by getting all kinds of beneficial chemicals banned from use; pesticides, herbicides, anything made from plastic, as well as genetically modified crops that could feed the billions of Homo sapiens.

Mostly, though, the Greens’ enemy were “fossil” or “dirty” fuels that just happened to generate the energy required for all modern society everywhere; coal, oil and natural gas.

The instrument of this “global warming”, according to the Greens, was carbon dioxide, a gas that is vital to all life on Earth. Without carbon dioxide (CO2) not a single bit of vegetation would grow. Remember agriculture? No crops, no food. And, if CO2 was forcibly limited by crazy “Cap-and-Trade” schemes, the Greens could depress the economies of nations.

Carbon dioxide was especially abundant in the atmosphere during the Jurassic period and the vegetation was so thick that lizard-like creatures became giants called dinosaurs. They were the masters of the Earth until something happened and they disappeared. Did a giant meteor wipe them out or was it a cyclical magnetic reversal that corresponds time and again with species extinction and the sudden appearance of entirely new species?

The “global warming” myth originated in the United Nations, an organization seeking to be the single, unelected governing institution for the entire Earth. A conspiracy of alleged scientists was brought together as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988. Ever since, we have been assailed with claims that “global warming” was such a threat to the Earth and mankind that radical changes were required to avoid it.

The Greens, however, are running smack into a brick wall called reality.

All over the Earth, temperatures have been steadily falling. It is getting cooler and colder everywhere.

In a recent, desperate effort, the Union of Concerned Scientists announced that “Global warming made it less cool.” That’s right. It’s getting cooler because it’s getting warmer.

Newborn babes arrive fresh from the womb laughing at this absurdity.

At sites like Iceagenow.com and over at the most excellent www.climatedepot.com anyone with access to the Internet can learn about how weather records are being broken daily around the Earth as it cools. In Al Gore’s hometown of Nashville, cold temperatures broke a record set in 1877 when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

Chicago, Cincinnati, Peoria, California, the Arctic—everywhere!

So, who are you going to believe? The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The Union of Concerned Scientists? The Sierra Club? Friends of the Earth? U.S. government agencies like NOAA? The National Geographic? Newsweek? Time? President Obama? His cabinet Secretaries? The endless succession of “czars” he keeps appointing?

Congress? You better not believe Congress because they are getting ready to pass the “Cap-and-Trade” bill, incongruously named the American Clean Energy and Security Act. It will crush what’s left of the U.S. economy by imposing taxes on all energy use while dolling out billions to the least effective form of energy, wind and solar energy.

As America and the rest of the globe grow colder, do you really want to pay more for the energy to heat your home? All in the name of avoiding a “global warming” that is not happening?

Or will you cast out the liars in Congress who keep telling you that it’s getting warmer when it’s obviously getting colder?

Will you rebuke a President who is lying to you by returning the Republican Party to power in 2010?

It's getting colder everywhere.

Why Some PhDs are Jerks

By Alan Caruba

I was talking with a friend about the latest hot topic involving Prof. Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department.

We both agreed that some of the stupidest people we have ever known were PhDs who too frequently turned out to be over-educated fools.

In this country, we have been taught to revere anyone with the title of doctor, starting with physicians and working our way through the maze of doctors of law, education, music, library science, and the long list of fields of a study that grant these degrees.

These days physicians leave medical school owing about $100,000 on the average and, if the president’s healthcare reform passes, they will never be able to pay it back no matter how long they are in practice. Having to pay $200,000 for insurance against malpractice every year has done more to drive up the cost of medical care than anything else.

I used to work for an institution of higher knowledge, a well-respected institute of technology and, while I came to respect the technical achievements of those pursuing engineering or architecture degrees, I also learned that many of those teaching these ancient skills and modern technologies often displayed all the personal failures of judgment and deportment of those far less educated than they.

The one thing one learns in a college or university is that the admiration which its faculty and deans feel toward themselves. It is their bulwark against the real world where people are actually growing, inventing, making, and selling things.

The problem, as my friend noted, is that PhDs may know a great deal about a particular thing, they are often totally out of their league when it comes to extrapolating that niche of knowledge to practical matters or the great issues of the world.

The recent passing of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for Lyndon B. Johnson is a case in point. A good and decent man, McNamara was a wunderkind of the Ford Motor Company who had previously taught at Harvard. He was one of “the best and the brightest” brought into government by John F. Kennedy.

The re-airing of a C-Span interview with him made clear that he went to his grave knowing that he, President Johnson, and his colleagues had been quite thoroughly wrong about expanding the Vietnam War beyond the provision of U.S. military advisors. One can be very gifted in an area of expertise, but that does not necessarily transfer to real world, real time situations.

Moving forward in time to the present, President Obama has surrounded himself with lots of PhDs and each one is just weirder than the next. Dr. John Holdren, his science advisor, once advocated putting stuff in the food supply that would reduce the fertility rate. His Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, is a Nobel Laureate who thinks painting all our roofs white will stave off global warming. His Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, is hell bent on ensuring that not a drop of oil is sucked out of the vast U.S. reserves, nor a single new ton of coal if he has anything to say about it.

Barely a day goes by when one of these loons says something so stupid that you have cause to fear for the future of the republic.

The reason “Joe the Plumber” made all those headlines during the campaign was that he was not a PhD. He was a working man with a very useful skill and he was smart enough to know that Obama was a…how can I say this nicely? Someone not telling the truth and a Marxist.

Prof. Gates suffers from the hubris that goes with being a Harvard professor. He has made his reputation on the basis of his research about the Negro race in America. Any ghetto homeboy could have told him to be polite to the police officer, but Prof. Gates flew into a rage when asked to identify himself and continued to hurl the racism charge at a police officer who was immediately defended by his Black and Hispanic colleagues.

President Obama, despite saying he was unfamiliar with the details of the incident, could not resist visiting the theme of racial profiling. We are now decades passed the great achievements of the Civil Rights movement but the beat goes on.

America used to be a meritocracy. Now the nation is so heavily into “diversity” that we are dumbing down the standards for everyone from firemen to surgeons.

It’s a good idea to proceed with caution when some PhD advises you on anything more complex than your digital camera. It is said that a little education can be a dangerous thing, but too much education can actually blind those chosen to lead the nation and teach its youth to the lessons of history and to plain old common sense.

First Brat: It's ALL about Him

By Alan Caruba

Ten minutes into the answer to the first question asked at President Obama’s latest press conference, I had a kind of epiphany. This guy should be called the First Brat.

He has all the attributes of a brat. He wants all the attention he can get. He doesn’t take criticism well. He is full of bravado and false promises.

He keeps reminding everyone that he is the President as if the idea surprises even himself. Or as a reminder that he does, indeed, hold a great deal of power, ceded to him by the American people.

There’s no real sense of humility about him. Nothing has been more astonishing or annoying than his World Apology Tour. America may not be perfect, but we are better, more just, more generous than most other nations.

Whatever humility Obama expresses is feigned to further endear him. His wife and children are stage props. Anyone seen or heard of them lately? I love the way he says, “This isn’t about me” when it is ALL about him.

He’s a brat. It’s all Obama all the time.

In a lot of ways, Bill Clinton was too. Clinton, however, was no fool. He understood reality as opposed to wild-eyed dreams of a Democrat-induced utopia where everyone is treated “fairly” and there is no “intolerance”, blah, blah, blah. Even someone like myself who loathed him while he was in office has to admit I secretly felt sorry for him because of his choice in wives.

I cannot work up any sympathy for Obama and cannot even take any pleasure in being found right in my judgment of him as I wrote my impressions during the campaign and the first six months of his term. I said he was a moron and I am sticking with it.

Even the public picked up on it as it became evident he couldn’t go to the bathroom without a set of TelePrompters and instructions.

The nation has had young presidents in the past. Kennedy comes to mind. He was charismatic, an emblem of, as he himself expressed it, a new generation, formed in the crucible of World War II and ready to take on the enemies of America and of freedom.
Kennedy had been tested in many ways.

Barack Obama has not been tested. He has been privileged at almost every stage of his road to power. It shows in the way he smarts over every perceived grievance and it showed in that amateurish, off the cuff remark about the “stupidity” of the Cambridge police who arrested his friend.

Obama is acutely conscious of race, ignoring the obvious fact that a majority of white people voted for him. In this regard, he will be the eternal victim, another aspect of being a brat. Worse yet, he speaks disdainfully of the “rich” and of “profit”, the keystone of a free marketplace.

The need for immediate satisfaction of every whim and, in his case, every policy, is another reason he’s a brat. As one political sage put it, “It took Obama six months to pick a dog, but he wants a Healthcare Bill by next week?”

I am not one for making predictions because they tend to come back to bite you, but I will predict that Obama’s is already a failed presidency. He’s already a lame duck. As one of the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress put it, “We’re trying to save the party.”

The Republicans have played their slim hand of cards quite well. They can smell the blood in the water and all they need now are some appealing candidates; some older guys with good resumes. Youth, it turns out, is over-rated.

Page after Page of Reasons to Hate Obamacare

Here are just a few very good reasons to hate Obamacare:

• Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure!

• Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed!

• Page 30: A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get (and, unlike an insurer, there will be no appeals process)

• Page 42: The "Health Choices Commissioner" will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None.

• Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services.

• Page 58: Every person will be issued a National ID Healthcard.

• Page 59: The federal government will have direct, real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds transfer.

• Page 65: Taxpayers will subsidize all union retiree and community organizer health plans (read: SEIU, UAW and ACORN)

• Page 72: All private healthcare plans must conform to government rules to participate in a Healthcare Exchange.

• Page 84: All private healthcare plans must participate in the Healthcare Exchange (i.e., total government control of private plans)

• Page 91: Government mandates linguistic infrastructure for services; translation: illegal aliens

• Page 95: The Government will pay ACORN and Americorps to sign up individuals for Government-run Health Care plan.

• Page 102: Those eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled: you have no choice in the matter.

• Page 124: No company can sue the government for price-fixing. No "judicial review" is permitted against the government monopoly. Put simply, private insurers will be crushed.

• Page 127: The AMA sold doctors out: the government will set wages.

• Page 145: An employer MUST auto-enroll employees into the government-run public plan. No alternatives.

• Page 126: Employers MUST pay healthcare bills for part-time employees AND their families.

• Page 149: Any employer with a payroll of $400K or more, who does not offer the public option, pays an 8% tax on payroll

• Page 150: Any employer with a payroll of $250K-400K or more, who does not offer the public option, pays a 2 to 6% tax on payroll

• Page 167: Any individual who doesnt' have acceptable healthcare (according to the government) will be taxed 2.5% of income.

• Page 170: Any NON-RESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes (Americans will pay for them).

• Page 195: Officers and employees of Government Healthcare Bureaucracy will have access to ALL American financial and personal records.

• Page 203: "The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax." Yes, it really says that.• Page 239: Bill will reduce physician services for Medicaid. Seniors and the poor most affected."

• Page 241: Doctors: no matter what speciality you have, you'll all be paid the same (thanks, AMA!)

• Page 253: Government sets value of doctors' time, their professional judgment, etc.

• Page 265: Government mandates and controls productivity for private healthcare industries.

• Page 268: Government regulates rental and purchase of power-driven wheelchairs.

• Page 272: Cancer patients: welcome to the wonderful world of rationing!

• Page 280: Hospitals will be penalized for what the government deems preventable re-admissions.

• Page 298: Doctors: if you treat a patient during an initial admission that results in a readmission, you will be penalized by the government.

• Page 317: Doctors: you are now prohibited for owning and investing in healthcare companies!

• Page 318: Prohibition on hospital expansion. Hospitals cannot expand without government approval.

• Page 321: Hospital expansion hinges on "community" input: in other words, yet another payoff for ACORN.

• Page 335: Government mandates establishment of outcome-based measures: i.e., rationing.

• Page 341: Government has authority to disqualify Medicare Advantage Plans, HMOs, etc.

• Page 354: Government will restrict enrollment of SPECIAL NEEDS individuals.

• Page 379: More bureaucracy: Telehealth Advisory Committee (healthcare by phone).

• Page 425: More bureaucracy: Advance Care Planning Consult: Senior Citizens, assisted suicide, euthanasia?

• Page 425: Government will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc. Mandatory. Appears to lock in estate taxes ahead of time.

• Page 425: Goverment provides approved list of end-of-life resources, guiding you in death.

• Page 427: Government mandates program that orders end-of-life treatment; government dictates how your life ends.

• Page 429: Advance Care Planning Consult will be used to dictate treatment as patient's health deteriorates. This can include an ORDER for end-of-life plans. An ORDER from the GOVERNMENT.

• Page 430: Government will decide what level of treatments you may have at end-of-life.

• Page 469: Community-based Home Medical Services: more payoffs for ACORN.

• Page 472: Payments to Community-based organizations: more payoffs for ACORN.

• Page 489: Government will cover marriage and family therapy. Government intervenes in your marriage.

• Page 494: Government will cover mental health services: defining, creating and rationing those services.

A tip of my hat to my friend, Ben Cerruti, for providing this look at the Obamanation called Obamacare. Write, email, fax or call your Senators and your Representative and tell them to vote NO!

New Jersey, We're Number One (Again)

By Alan Caruba

Having been born in New Jersey and lived here most of my life with time out for college and the U.S. army, I must confess I was a bit out of sorts over all the attention that Illinois and former Governor Rod Blagojevitch was receiving or the constant references in the press to that state’s record of corrupt political officials.

I was upset, too, when South Carolina’s governor grabbed all the headlines because he had a paramour in Argentina and, upon discovery, concluded it was just one of those teaching moments in one’s life to learn from while continuing to be governor.

So, naturally, I was delighted to see that New Jersey has once again reclaimed its title as the most corrupt State in the Union. This is a distinction that our elected and appointed officials do not take lightly.

I am pretty sure that, upon election to any office in the state, the FBI immediately opens up a file and then waits for the first informant to walk in the door, usually in response to having been cheated of his bribe money.

According to news reports, various federal officials participated in the arrest of forty people in early morning raids across New Jersey on Thursday, July 23. What caught my eye, however, was that it took ten years to achieve this coup and all of the cases were held together like a string of pearls by a single “cooperating witness”, a failed real estate developer named Solomon Dwek.

Using taxpayer money, Dwek trawled for politicians as well as some rabbis from Brooklyn, offering bribes for fictitious real estate and money laundering deals, netting the mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield, among others charged with alleged criminal behavior.

A longtime columnist for the state’s largest daily newspaper, Bob Braun, opined that “if what the prosecutors are charging holds up in court, this case will go down in the crowded annals of New Jersey prosecutions as the moment when our politicians—and others—were proven, not just to be corrupt, but breathtakingly stupid.”

This raises the question of whether being stupid hasn’t become a de rigueur part of the resume of anyone running for office in New Jersey or anywhere else in the nation these days?

Corruption, greed, I can understand, but let it be said that the Mafia functioned quite well in its earliest days (and probably still) by spotting the kind of talent that avoided calling attention to themselves while reaping fortunes in ill-gotten gains. It wasn’t until flashy characters decided that the money wasn’t enough that they began to attract unwanted attention. This begot mobsters like “the dapper don”, John Gotti, who died in jail as the result of too much publicity and a pal who ratted on him. That’s what happens when you hang out with people of poor character.

The equation is reversed for politicians who thrive on publicity and then use their office to line their pockets.

Braun may have been a bit hasty in pronouncing the guilt of stupidity because, as we all know, people are presumed innocent until sent directly to jail without passing “Go” and picking up $200. That said, he's probably right.

A headline of one sidebar article on the arrests declared New Jersey “The Most Politically Corrupt Place on Earth.” That is pure hyperbole. There are nations in Africa, not to mention, Russia, and much of Asia and South America, that are far more corrupt than the Garden State.

Still, as states go, New Jersey has at last reclaimed its title as probably the most corrupt in the nation. The Republican candidate running for governor, Chris Christie, made his reputation as a district attorney who sent dozens of New Jersey politicians to jail. His opponent, Jon Corzine, the present governor is so rich he had no need to be corrupt although some observers think his former employer, Goldman Sachs, operates in a fashion that Don Corleone and Tony Soprano would admire.

Let me close by saying that New Jersey is home to millions of law-abiding citizens. It is, however, one of the great mysteries why they keep electing people of such poor character, judgment, and probity.

Green Desperation

By Alan Caruba

The environmental movement and, in particular, “global warming”, has become a joke. That is always a sign of decline. Unless you’re a comedian, when people start laughing at you it’s never a good thing.

There are often defining moments in the death of a movement and I think I may have spotted one when the Australian July issue of Rolling Stone featured a naked Miranda Kerr on its “Green Issue” cover, chained to a tree while demurely covering her naughty parts to advance the cause of koala bears. Ms. Kerr is described as a “super model” and terribly concerned that there are only 100,000 koalas left. Apparently, “global warming” has something to do with that.

If you have to use nudity to sell your nonsense, you are scrapping bottom; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals does it all the time.

Back in the U.S. one of the biggest idiots in the U.S. Senate, a former candidate for President, John Kerry, had convened a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which predicted that “massive crop devastation, melting glaciers, water shortages, (and) millions of displaced people…will drag the U.S. military into conflict if global climate change goes unchecked.”

Observers may have noticed that Greens no longer refer to “global warming” much anymore as opposed to “climate change.” This is because (a) there is NO global warming and (b) the climate has always been in a process of change over the past 4.5 billion years. If you wanted to ensure that the U.S. military continued to receive billions for defense, claiming that “rising sea levels” will lead to conflicts is a pretty silly way of justifying it, given the threats to peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

My friend, John Brignell, a British emeritus professor and expert on statistics, maintains a website that features a page devoted to the endless events, trends, and predictions attributed to “global warming.” It is a hoot.

Among the things attributed to “global warming” are acne, a saltier Atlantic Ocean, a decline in the duck and goose population, and, my favorite, why “global warming” is responsible for blizzards and colder winters. http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

A recent story on Discovery.com claimed that the dark-colored sheep of the Scottish St. Kilda islands may fall victim to “rising temperatures”, replacing them with lighter ones. The whole of the British Isles has been experiencing colder weather thanks to a cooling cycle that has been occurring for the past ten years. It’s worse than mere twaddle, a story like this is just one of thousands desperately trying to advance and keep alive the absurd “global warming” theory.

$79 Billion Spent on Climate Change "Science"!

Here in the United States, the Science and Public Policy Institute just announced the publication of “Climate Money”, a study by Joanne Nova that reveals the federal government has a near-monopoly on climate science funding and has spent “more than $79 billion of taxpayer’s money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.”

The study concludes, understandably, that “Most of this spending was unnecessary.”

The entire bogus “Cap-and-Trade” Act languishing in Congress is about selling “carbon credits.” This is just one degree more disingenuous than selling bottled water when the H2O that comes out of your kitchen faucet is as clean and safe as any you will find from an artesian well. Meanwhile, worldwide, the trading reached $126 billion in 2008.

This is why everything about environmentalism is a scam. Can you think of a single good reason to spend $126 billion for the right to emit carbon dioxide when 97% of it comes from nature? The Earth emits CO2 all the time in the form of volcanic activity, the action of the oceans, storing and releasing it. When you exhale six pounds of it every day?

The desperation you’re seeing and hearing represents Green organizations whose entire agenda is devoted to keeping Americans from having access to any form of energy, destroying our economy, and from the bankers like Goldman Sacks who figure to make billions trading carbon credits.

Americans, many of whom are increasingly out of work, losing their homes and cars, putting off vacations, college for their kids, and any prospect of ever being able to retire are growing tired of this insanity. They have more important things to worry about.

Too Much Obama

By Alan Caruba

Even after his first four years in office, the voters still preferred George W. Bush to the effete John Kerry. By the end of the second four years, during which our attention was focused on the war in Iraq, Americans were just plain tired of George W. Bush.

Those not suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome had simply succumbed to the fact that eight years of the same person in the White House, no matter who it was, had worn out his welcome. That’s the genius of the Founding Fathers who established a four-year term and the lesson which led to the 22nd Amendment in 1951 that limited all presidents to two terms only.

The sudden financial crisis just before Bush left office exacerbated the feeling because Americans were told that it would take $700 billion to get us out of the mess. Never mind that Bush had warned against the huge exposure that Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae represented, it was a death blow to the lackluster campaign of John McCain.

It is significant, therefore, that six months into the first year of his term, President Barack Obama has already managed to wear out his welcome. It’s too much Obama. It’s a television commercial played over and over again until the only recourse is to pick up the remote control and hit the mute button.

On Wednesday evening, the President will hold another prime time press conference. He has become the incessant pitchman of Obamacare and the ratings are likely to reveal that almost any other program playing opposite him will garner better ratings.

Americans are increasingly wary of bills in excess of a thousand pages that members of Congress do not read before passing. They have reason to be. The deficit and the debt are predicted to reach astronomical levels unseen in the entire history of the nation. They will be nation-killers if the brakes are not applied, revisions made, and repeals undertaken.

As a longtime practitioner of the arts of public relations it is no surprise to me that the profession is taking notice of the Too-Much-Obama Syndrome. The Ragan Daily News Feed, directed to PR folk, called attention to the July 22 edition of The Daily Beast in which former newsman Sam Donaldson addressed “Obama’s Misguided Media Blitz.”

Having obviously not paid attention to recent polls, Donaldson asserted that “The public wants a health-care overhaul.” No, it doesn’t. It wants to see what can be done to reduce costs, but it likes the present system which is widely seen as the best in the world.

In a post on Rasmussen Reports, Tony Blankley, formerly an editor and columnist with The Washington Times and now a vice president in the Washington, D.C. office of Edelman Public Relations, warned that “All we can know for sure is that the Democrats’ comprehensive health care reform legislation will empower bureaucrats comprehensively to make all decisions, vital and trivial, regarding your health care coverage or non-coverage. The comprehensive power of the federal government will completely and totally extinguish your control over your health treatment.”

Meanwhile, Donaldson is advising Obama saying, “He should insist on ramming through a bill as long as it truly accomplishes the overall goals…” The problem is that is no one knows its goal beyond a government takeover of twenty percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product.

What the public knows is that the President lies. A lot. You may have disagreed with George W. Bush and I frequently did, but I never felt he was deliberately and knowingly lying to me. Liberals, of course, kept repeating the mantra that “Bush lied, people died” but the only people that died in America from the threat of Islamo-fascism did so on September 11, 2001.

Under Obamacare people who are ill will die and we know this from the socialist healthcare programs that exist in Canada and Great Britain.

Politically, we’re told that the passage of Obamacare will determine whether Obama can exert “leadership” within his own party while it controls Congress. Obama recently said, “This isn’t about me”, but it is all about Obama. The dizzying, frightening first six months of his term have been all about Obama. The mainstream media have seen to that.

Now, however, Americans are gathering in greater numbers to protest Obama and his horrid intention to raise taxes in the midst of a recession, to overthrow the Second Amendment, to take control of the auto industry, banks, insurance companies, healthcare, ad infinitum. They did so on July 4th at thousands of “Tea Parties” and they will do so again on September 12 in Washington, D.C.

The televised press conference, a manipulation of the White House press corps which is demonstrating resistance to his charms, is not proof that Obama is succeeding in this quest to control the most intimate and essential element of our lives, our health, but proof that he is failing.

The Senate is beginning to assert its purpose, the slow deliberative final say on proposed legislation. It is controlled by a Democrat majority, but that majority is beginning to read the polling numbers, react to the thousands of emails in opposition to Obamacare, and retreating to a position in which they can avoid the same rejection they are seeing occur for the President.

As of July 22nd, Obama had 1278 days to go in his term. He is visibly aging.

Americans are stirring from their media-induced stupor.

ADDENDUM: After the Press Conference

This was the fifth press conference President Obama has held in six months and the fourth in prime time. The man has a lot to say to America!

It took him eight minutes to reply to the first question. He received eleven questions in all and he lied a lot during the course of the hour. The biggest came early when he said he wanted to "keep government out of healthcare decisions."

The whole purpose is to make government part of all healthcare decisions. In order to do that, it must have all your medical records and, with "reform", it will. Goodbye patient-doctor privacy.

One theme that crept into the answers that followed his Obama's distaste for the wealthy in America; people who through hard work, better, more advance skills, wiser investments, simply earn more than most people. He's also not keen on banks and financial institutions giving bonuses to their highest producers of profit even though that is a standard process and one built into contracts.

Another theme was the "inefficiencies" of the present Medicare and Medicare programs which, he said, can be solved in order to save money. All government programs have inefficiencies and always have. They rarely get fixed. The so-called Stimulus Bill is a perfect example of inefficiency when most of it is directed to help states reduce the amount of money they owe for federally mandated programs. As for creating new jobs, well, forget about it.

President Obama is no fan of Wall Street, yet much of the problem that occurred was due to the failure of federal oversight agencies to do their job. That's how Bernard Madoff was able to defraud people and institutions of billions for years. There's plenty of regulatory law on the books regarding Wall Street. It is not sufficiently and effectively enforced.

I don't know how many people watched, but I doubt they can call on decades of watching government function as I can. What they saw was yet another slick performance by the President, but what they didn't see was the slight of hand that will add trillions more to the national debt and require the rationing of treatment. It means your parents or grandparents, when they get ill, will be denied treatment because it is old people who require the most care. They will be sent home to die. I have seen it happen.

Can Obama pull it off? His own Party is in retreat because they cannot find the money to pay for these "reforms" and they are hearing from too many constituents who don't want any more reform of an already costly "entitlement."

The Nielson Ratings:
Draws 4.1 Million Fewer Viewers Than Third Press Conference

In a continued push for congressional support of health care reform President Obama held his fourth prime time press conference on Wednesday July 22, 2009. The conference was carried live from 8:00PM to approximately 9:00PM on 11 networks. The sum of average audience for those networks was 24,682,519 viewers and had a combined household rating of 16.3. The networks carrying the press conference were ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision*, Telemundo*, BBC-A, BET, CNBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, and MSNBC.

Viewing to last night’s press conference was down 14% from his April 29 press conference and down 50% from his first primetime conference on February 9.

Obama Shows His Muslim Hand

By Alan Caruba

When candidate Obama was courting the “Jewish vote” he donned a yarmulke, went to the Wailing Wall in Israel, and said all the right things. He needn’t have bothered because the American Jewish community, estimated to be approximately 5.5 million, was largely in his pocket. They have voted overwhelmingly Democrat since the days of FDR.

This is, if you think about it, fairly astonishing because his middle name is Hussein, his birth father was a Muslim, and so was his Indonesian step-father who reportedly would take him on occasion to the mosque. It is even more astonishing because he was a member for twenty years in a church whose pastor was close friends with the notorious anti-Semite, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.

Any American Jew paying any attention should surely have harbored some doubts and, six months into his presidency, a lot of American Jews are asking themselves what they were thinking when they voted for Obama.

In an article in The Jerusalem Post, Anne Bayefsky wrote, “President Barack Obama last Monday met for the first time with leaders of selected Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the Middle East no longer has a friend in the leader of the free world. Obama is the most hostile sitting American President in the history of the state of Israel.”

Surprise, surprise. Among the leaders of major Jewish organizations not invited to the July 13 meeting was one from the Zionist Organization of America. As Bayefsky noted, “The oldest pro-Israel group in the United States, with a Washington office second in size only to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was not a voice Obama wanted to hear. This leaves the President willing to engage Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but not ZOA President Mort Klein.”

In a July 21 editorial, The Washington Times criticized the U.S. State Department noting that, in the previous week, it had “delivered a demarche (a protest) to Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, to hold construction on twenty residential units on the site of the Shepherd Hotel, which stands on the edge of an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem.”

Does it strike anyone as odd that the State Department whose policies are set by the Oval Office is upset over a bit of housing in Jerusalem? It was, of course, the kind of Kabuki theatre in which diplomats engage to make a larger point. If the point was that the U.S. has the right to tell the sovereign nation of Israel where it can and cannot build housing it is an entirely absurd notion.

There is some further irony in that Ambassador Oren is the author of a remarkable book, “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present.” Had anyone in the State Department read it, they would have learned that “A full fifteen years after declaring its independence, the United States still faced a devastating threat from the Barbary pirates”, Arabs who preyed on our merchant sea trade and who ultimately were responsible for the creation of the U.S. Navy and Marines to defeat them.

In the early years of America, there was an active movement to send missionaries to the Middle East to convert them to Christianity. Now we just send troops to rid the region of psychopathic depots like Saddam Hussein and fanatical Islamo-fascists like Osama bin Laden.
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So complaining about twenty new apartment units in East Jerusalem is just another way Obama is showing his Muslim bona fides.

He has been on a “get tough” agenda since taking office in late January. The message has not been lost on the so-called Palestinians. The PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, has gone back to demanding idiotic concessions from Israel despite the fact that he and his ragged little bunch of Arafat wannabes are literally propped up by Israel as an alternative to Hamas.

Middle East expert, Daniel Pipes, recently noted that Zionists had founded the Shimon Hatzadick neighborhood in 1891 by purchasing land from Arabs. It changed hands as the Arab/Jewish conflicts occurred over the years. The pro-Nazi Amin al Husseini, Jerusalem’s mufti, put up a building in the 1930s that later served as the Shepherd Hotel. In 1985 an American businessman, Irving Moskowitz, bought the land and rented the building to the Israeli border police until 2002.

What does any of this have to do with the United States? Nothing. It is sheer hubris to say that Israel hasn’t the right to build housing for its growing population in Jerusalem or anywhere else. As for the West Bank, it was captured in 1967 after Arab nations, including Jordan, again attacked Israel.

When we give back Texas, California, and much of the U.S. Southwest to Mexico, the State Department can issue such idiotic demands.

This isn’t just about U.S.-Israeli relations. It’s about the very Muslim Barack Hussein Obama.

Call Him Irresponsible

By Alan Caruba

Is it just me or does President Obama look and sound more desperate with every passing day? He thought he could fool all of the people all of the time and it turns out that he can’t.

Mark your calendar for Saturday, September 12, 2009. That’s when a Washington, D.C. protest march is planned. Led by FreedomWorks, their website says they will be joined by many other national co-sponsors such as the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Tax Reform, Young America’s Foundation, and Tea Party Patriots, to name just a few.

This is why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

I doubt that President Obama will be among the speakers that day, although he has been out on the stump of late trying to convince Americans that things will improve if the government is given control over the nation’s health system. He’s already nationalized part of the auto industry, a major insurance company, banks, and probably little Bobby’s lemonade stand in front of his home.

Obama’s relentless assault on the private sector of the nation’s economy can be seen in the following percentages of the Gross Domestic Product: Healthcare represents 17%, energy is 9.8%, and financial services are 8% of GDP. These are the sectors that have been targeted for takeover by the Obama administration. It adds up to 35% of GDP!

In May, columnist Robert Samuelson, writing in Investor’s Business Daily, asked “Just how much government debt does a president have to endorse before he’s labeled ‘irresponsible’?”

“From 2010 to 2019,” wrote Samuelson, “Obama projects annual deficits totaling $7.1 trillion; that’s atop the $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009”, adding that “By various estimates, Obama’s health plan might cost $1.2 trillion over a decade; he has budgeted only $635 billion.”

Deficits are the annual gap between government’s spending and its tax revenues. The debt is the total borrowing caused by past deficits. As confidence in the U.S. dollar and the credit of the United States decreases, the amount of interest on borrowing will increase.

While it is true that the federal government has run deficits in all but five years, the debt has always remained below fifty percent of GDP.

I submit that NOTHING Obama says about deficits or debt can be trusted and his pet project, the horrid “Cap-and-Trade” program, a tax on energy use—electricity—that will drive up utility rates for all Americans. It will reduce the amount of money consumers will have for their other needs. It will drive manufacturing to other nations.

Cap-and-Trade, a carbon tax, is based on the utterly FALSE assertion that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions contribute to a “global warming” this is NOT happening.

Obama’s proposed healthcare reform is a nightmare. There is no such thing as free healthcare. It is financially unsustainable. This has already been demonstrated in Massachusetts. Utah has just passed a program to institute rationing of healthcare options.

The “entitlement” programs the government instituted in the last century are already facing major financial stress. Social Security will grow by between one and two million new beneficiaries from 2008 to 2032, up from 500,000 a year in the 1990s. The government taxes its benefits. It is not, as originally planned, a “voluntary” program.

More than one million people a year will join Medicare as of 2011 when the first Baby Boomer turns 65.

Nor has the government set aside money to pay military and civil servant pensions or health care for retirees. These unfunded obligations have increased an average of $300 billion since 2003 and now amount to $5.3 trillion.

Because of President Obama’s budgets and the Democrat-controlled Congress, the nation will be faced with trillion dollar deficits for the foreseeable future. It will destroy jobs that will move to other nations and leave future generations with huge financial burdens.

As the Associated Press reported on July 14, “The federal deficit has topped $1 trillion for the first time ever and could grow to nearly $2 trillion by this fall, intensifying fears about higher interest rates, inflation and the strength of the U.S. dollar.”

The GOVERNMENT has done this to us. Obama has exponentially increased the problem.

Only a major reduction in the size of the federal government can provide any remedy. I suggest it begin by ending the Education and Energy Departments, along with the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s a start.

Memories of Apollo and the Moon

By Alan Caruba

It tells us something about our limitations that the latest effort to send a new batch of nameless, faceless astronauts to the International Space Station was delayed several times by nothing more than some inclement weather bearing down on Cape Kennedy.

Oh yes, you can go to the Moon, but only if it isn’t raining.

I recall the excitement that President Kennedy’s announcement created when he said the U.S. would go to the Moon, but the real reason we went was to get there before the Soviet Union. It was about two empires butting heads and, of course, the U.S. won and the Soviet Union is no more.

So there is some irony to be had in the fact that, with the retirement of the current fleet of space shuttles, the only way to get to the Space Station will be via the Russian vehicle, the Soyuz.

There was even more excitement when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Apollo lunar module onto the Sea of Tranquility. “One great leap for mankind,” said Armstrong who thereafter leaped into anonymity, rarely granting interviews because this courageous test pilot is painfully shy. It was left to the ebullient Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step foot on the Moon, to keep the memory alive.

The U.S. has never returned to the Moon. Why?

Because, other than the demonstration of American technological superiority, there simply is no good reason to return. There isn’t a damned thing on the Moon worth the bother. The Moon, it seems, is best left to the poets.

In truth, NASA’s unmanned probes have visited all of the solar system’s planets and the agency has most certainly engaged in a lot of serious science, but it is also true that there is not much reason for humans, so utterly dependent on Earth, to leave.

If a few rain clouds can delay a shuttle, travel to planets where water doesn’t even exist seems an odd, exorbitant, and futile project.

There is a scene in Tom Wolfe’s book, “The Right Stuff”, in which the initial Apollo crew demands that the lunar module have windows. They were all test pilots and they all understood the need to be able to visually orient the craft if anything went wrong. As it turned out, Armstrong had to manually fly the module to its landing on the Moon because its instruments went a bit cockeyed on him.

Another manned flight is estimated to cost somewhere in the area of $100 billion and, considering the way the present administration is running up the national debt, that’s still a lot of money. Strip away the romance of manned flight and the truth is that space probes have long since sent back more information about our little galaxy than putting some human space puppet in jeopardy.

What does the fortieth anniversary of Apollo II tell us?

It says we had more guts, more smarts, more need to prove ourselves to the world in 1969 than we do today.

It says we have an illusive, asymmetrical, new enemy on Earth who’s more interested in blowing up office buildings in lower Manhattan, trains in Spain, and hotels in Indonesia than reaching for the Moon.

In 2009, America needs to prove it will outlast a desert cult, keep pace with the rise of Asian nations, prop up a dying Europe, and get its own people back to work as soon as possible.

The Moon’s not going anywhere.

How Empires Die

By Alan Caruba

I recently read an interesting book by Christopher Kelly, “The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and The Fall of Rome.” Our popular image of Attila is that of a barbaric pagan, but Priscus of Panium set off to meet Attila in 449 AD and, as Kelly relates, “Attila turned out to be surprisingly civilized and a dangerously shrewd player of international politics.”

It’s always a good idea to review one’s assumptions about the world in which one lives, such as the current politically correct view that Islam is “a religion of peace” and that the barbarity of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Arab groups is an anomaly, the result of their incorrect interpretation of the Koran. Their interpretation, however, is quite accurate and the Koran is a call to arms and battle plan for the conquest of the world.

From America’s earliest years, it has had to deal with marauding Arabs and in modern times we have put our troops in harm’s way in the Middle East in Beirut in the 1980s and to drive Saddam Hussein's Iraq out of Kuwait in August 1990.

Following 9/11 we returned in 2001 to drive Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan. They took refuge in the frontier provinces of Pakistan and have since returned to the killing fields of our choosing…if killing one’s sworn enemies can be called a choice.

On March 20, 2003, the Second Gulf War was launched against Iraq and we are now beginning to withdraw troops from Iraq’s cities. A large contingent of U.S. military will remain in Iraq. At the same time, there has been a buildup of troops in Afghanistan. Historically, no empire has ever successfully conquered or subdued the Afghani tribes and, in modern times, the most recent effort brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is generally agreed that the real threat to Mideast stability is Iran and that the shakiest nation in the region is Pakistan.

History teaches us that the emperors of the Roman Empire had to make choices about where they too would place their troops throughout the vast expanse under their control; it surrounded the Mediterranean which they called Mare Nostrum, our sea.

At the end of his book, Kelly asks “What makes great empires endure or collapse? How do governments defend their actions? What causes the breakup of a leviathan superstate? When is it right to go to war, or purchase peace, or pay off an enemy? These are issues of enduring importance.”

When an empire gets too large for its military and financial resources to maintain, it becomes highly vulnerable. An empire, too, depends on its alliances. When they go bad, the empire—any empire—is in trouble.

The Roman Empire fell for many reasons, but chief among them was the relentless arithmetic of demography, the movement of populations of people.

The Romans regarded the Goths and Vandals as “barbarians”, but the Goth tribes were people who were just as challenged by the Huns as the Romans and they were on the move to find more land for their growing population. In doing so, they crossed the Danube to trespass on Roman lands in France, in Spain, and down into Northern Africa.

By contrast, “the Huns seemingly offered no moral or religious justification, however thin or unconvincing. They sought neither to find a new homeland on Roman territory nor to glorify themselves as heroic freedom fighters warring down a harsh imperial regime.”

“The Huns appear more brutal precisely because they had no known motive for their raids beyond the acquisition of booty and captives.” This last observation is particularly important because the rise of Islam can be traced directly to the same purpose. It was, however, masked by Mohammed’s promise of paradise for anyone who fell in battle and servitude for those conquered.

Here’s where the similarities between America and the ancient Romans get really interesting. At the same time the nation engages Islamic terrorism, our national sovereignty—the integrity of our borders—is being challenged as not just thousands, but millions have invaded to take up residence among us. This repeats the pattern that brought down the Roman Empire.

Having forsaken universal conscription, the U.S. depends on an all-voluntary military to project our power. The Romans, toward the end, often allied with the Goths to fight the Huns and, on occasion, allied with the Huns as well. With the exception of the British, Canadians and Australians, our military allies are mostly for show.

Not only is our financial stability at risk, but since the 1960s, the level of decadence in our society has risen, reflected in popular culture and media. Our primary and secondary educational system has become an abject failure.

Recently, while in Russia, President Obama said, “The future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground.”

This ignores the entire history of civilization. It is criminally naïve. The future, just as in the past, will belong to whoever has the greatest military with the financial power and the willingness to use it.

Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

And as John Adams warned, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

Of Mice and Men (and Pest Control)

By Alan Caruba

Among the many books in my office is the “Handbook of Pest Control”, seventh edition, edited by Arnold Mallis. Its contributing editors are a who’s who of the leading authorities on pest control and its encyclopedic text includes thousands of references to the diseases that insect and rodent pests routinely spread in the course of their daily lives.

In one fashion or another for some three decades or more, I have provided public relations services to various elements of the pest control industry; manufacturers of pesticides and my own state’s trade association which is affiliated with the National Pest Management Association.

I tell you this so you don’t think I am evading an obvious bias that favors a profession that dates its history back to medieval times when being a “ratcatcher” was so highly regarded that the Queen of England designated one to keep the castle free of the nasty beasties.

Over the years, these men developed formulas for killing off rodent and insect pests. When you contemplate that the Black Death that swept Europe and England killed a third of the entire population and was caused by a combination of fleas and rats spreading the bubonic plague, the need to control such pests is obvious.

These days, America is experiencing a huge comeback of a pest that had been largely eradicated, the common bed bug. After DDT was banned from use worldwide, along with depriving millions of Africans from protection against malaria, the bed bug returned. Other pest related diseases that have emerged in recent years are West Nile Fever, imported from Africa and spread by mosquitoes, and Lyme disease, spread by ticks.

It is common knowledge that cockroaches spread Salmonella and a variety of other diseases, but probably less well known that termites do more property damage nationwide every year than all the floods and fires combined.

I tell you this because the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Environmental Protection Agency in order to get it to evaluate the effects of 74 pesticides on eleven endangered and threatened species in the San Francisco Bay area over the next five years.

America is on the brink of bankruptcy, but this inane environmental group thinks that pesticides are a greater threat to eleven supposedly endangered species than national insolvency.

While people are losing their jobs and their homes, the environmentalists are worrying about pesticides, not pests. In the San Francisco Bay area represented by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, tucked away in the under-performing $787 billion “stimulus” bill is a provision for as much as $16.1 million to save the habitat of the allegedly endangered Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.

Stay with me just a bit longer. As reported in Pest Control Technology, “As part of the Endangered Species Act, the EPA is required to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services—and sometimes the National Marine Fisheries Services—when they make a pesticide regulatory decision to register or re-register a product.”

The suit, settled in favor of the Center for Biological Diversity, will ultimately require the EPA to ban the use of pesticides anywhere in the entire nation if they are found to threaten “endangered species” which are anywhere and everywhere in the entire nation.

At present this means that “As a result of the lawsuit filed in California, pest control operators in Northern California are presented with serious challenges.” All of the pesticides that are the subject of the proposed injunction are used routinely to protect homeowners, apartments, restaurants, hospitals, schools, as well as warehouses where various food products are stored. The affect on the agricultural use of pesticides and herbicides is incalculable.

To put it another way, the Center for Biological Diversity has put the health of everyone living in Northern California and eventually the entire nation at risk of the many diseases insect and rodent pests spread in order to protect some “endangered species.”

For now, the least protected specie will initially be the people living and working in Northern California if pest control operators are deprived of the pesticides they use. The most privileged specie in the Bay Area will be the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.

Healthcare "Reform" Sanctions Torture, Death

By Alan Caruba

The utter insanity of our leaders in Washington, D.C. is exemplified in Vice President Joe Biden’s statement to a recent meeting of the AARP. “We have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt.”

Just how does one do that? If, as Biden says, the nation is “going to go bankrupt”, how does spending more money achieve solvency? I am not an economist, but I thought one avoided bankruptcy by spending less. It would be more accurate to say that the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress is bent on bankrupting the nation by taxing more and spending more.

The current so-called healthcare reform is a perfect example of how crazed these people are. While on one hand denouncing “torture”, the healthcare bill would institutionalize it.

As Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., an author of several consumer advocacy books, points out, “Water boarding, holding someone’s head underwater until he thinks he’s drowning, is called torture when done to terrorists, but $400 billion in Medicare cuts as part of the new government healthcare ‘reform’ may end up causing a horrible and frightening death for our sickest senior citizens.”

One stated method by which Congress proposes to save money is to deny hospital readmission within 30 days to someone suffering congestive heart failure (CHF). “If not treated rapidly, CHF causes a person to die by drowning in his or her own body fluids. Not okay for terrorists, but okay for our own citizens?”

Dr. Vliet warns that the proposed Medicare cuts will ration surgeries, antibiotics, MRI’s and CAT scans. Canada’s healthcare system already does this and the result is that “patients die because they cannot get treatment.”

Can’t happen here? In the June edition of Health Care News, published by The Heartland Institute, there’s a report that “The Oregon Health Services Commission has drawn up a formal procedure for rationing health care services available to recipients of taxpayer-subsidized coverage.” The commission listed 680 common medical procedures and treatments and ranked them in order of priority. Only the top 503 of the treatments would reimburse physicians.

A June briefing paper from the Cato Institute provides ample warning of what a national healthcare system, based on mandatory health insurance, will hold. Michael Tanner took a look at the Massachusetts reforms passed in 2006. “Health care costs continued to rise much faster than the national average. Since 2006, total state health care spending has increased by 28 percent. Insurance premiums have increased by 8-10 percent per year, nearly double the national average.”

“Program costs,” noted Tanner, “have skyrocketed. Despite tax increases, the program faces huge deficits.” One of the solutions under consideration in Massachusetts is “rationing.” And, of course, “a shortage of providers, combined with increased demand, is increasing waiting times to see a physician.”

Rationing and waiting times are a polite way of saying torture and death.

A July 15 editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, “It’s Not an Option”, revealed that the healthcare reform bill the House passed contains “a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.”

It is on page 16 of a 1,018-page document. “Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice to Keep Current Coverage”, the “Limitation on New Enrollment” section states, “Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.

Investors Business Daily points out that, “From the beginning, opponents of the public option have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public opinion that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington coverage.”

The so-called healthcare reform will not only torture and kill Americans by rationing medical procedures; it will destroy the insurance industry providing coverage to an estimated 120 million Americans.

When my Mother broke her hip, the local rescue squad was there in minutes, transported her to a nearby hospital, and within a day or two, she received a hip replacement. Back home, she recovered from the surgery and was soon mobile again. She was in her 90s at the time and, under the so-called “reforms” Congress is trying to impose on Americans, she would have had to wait…and wait…and wait.

Torture and death. That’s how Congress and President Obama defines “reform.”

Liars and the Global Warming Lies They're Telling

By Alan Caruba

It must be that the believers in “global warming” all live in caves and do not wander out to discover what is really happening on the planet.

The constant and hysterical cries from the global warming crowd claim that we have merely months, weeks and days before we’re toast.

Of course, the “solution” they offer is the appalling “Cap-and-Trade” bill that the Obama gang is trying to rush through Congress. We are supposed to believe that a huge tax on all use of electricity will “solve” the peril of global warming by cutting “greenhouse gas emissions.”

We are supposed to believe it is wise policy to slow or stop the building of coal-fired or nuclear plants to generate electricity.

We are supposed to believe that the vast coal, oil, and natural gas resources throughout the nation are not to be extracted to keep us warm in the coming years of cold weather or to fuel the nation’s vast fleet of cars and trucks.

For many throughout the nation and the world, a walk outside tells them a very different story.

Over at ClimateDepot.com the headlines read: “Baltimore: ‘Record low temp tied, another on the way—a summer without much heat.’” And “Not so peachy: Ohio cold snap takes bite out of local peach crop.” Remember, it’s JULY.

At IceAgeNow.com you will find notices of cold spells in Peru, the coldest May in New Zealand, reports of frost in Canada, and of temperature records shattered in northern Michigan and throughout New England.

AccuWeather.com’s Chief Meteorologist, Joe Bastardi, an expert on long range forecasting, is predicting that “cooler-than-normal weather this summer in the Northeast could point to a cold, snowy winter for the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states.”

Ironically, Bastardi predicts that the cold weather will be “centered over the area from Boston to Washington, D.C.” On September 8, the “climate bill”, aka “Cap-and-Trade” is scheduled for a vote and who knows, the snow could be several feet thick in the streets outside the Capitol? Last year when protesters gathered to demand the coal-fired plant providing energy to the Capitol Building be shut down did so in a snow storm!

Is the Earth cooling? Yes and it has been for a decade. The cooling is likely to continue for several more decades and you better pray it doesn’t turn into a full-fledged new ice age because the planet is at the end of a 11,500 year interglacial period similar to previous cycles that preceded ice ages.

Bastardi attributes his forecast to factors that include “a combination of El Nino and worldwide volcanic activity over the past six to nine months” which he says “may have played a role in causing this trend.”

Not mentioned is the present inactivity of sunspots, solar storms on the Sun that has been ongoing for quite some while. For an explanation of why this is bad news relative to the planet’s overall climate, click here.

The purpose of this exercise is, of course, to point out the obvious. The climate of the Earth, wherever one happens to be is cooling and is likely to continue.

That is why anyone and everyone citing “global warming” is a liar and deserves the contempt, derision, and acrimony of the Earth’s entire population.

This Blog's "Followers" Hit 120!

Your Easy Guide to Democrat Health Reform

This chart, presented by GOP leaders, identifies at least 31 new federal programs, agencies, and mandates that accompany the unprecedented government takeover of health care in America.

House Republican leader, John Boehner (R-OH) said, "This isn't reform; it's a recipe for disaster that will lead to higher health care costs, lower quality, rationed care, and bureaucrats making medical decisions instead of doctors and patients..."

"This new maze of government bureacracy will be funded by a new small business tax that will cost more American jobs."

If you like Big Government, you will love Democrat health reform.

One last thing. DON'T GET SICK!

Borrowing, Spending and Regulating, Oh my!

By Alan Caruba

It sometimes seems to me that the Congress and the White House are determined to put an end to the nation through a combination of exorbitant borrowing and insane spending.

At the end of May, an article in USA Today reported that “The government took on $6.8 trillion in new obligations in 2008, pushing the total owed to a record $63.8 trillion.”

These trillions reflect various retirement benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the new prescription medicine benefits. Then there are programs to aid Americans who have lost jobs, are behind on their mortgage payments, or just want to buy a new car by declaring their old one a “clunker.” When you add in the so-called “stimulus” bill, the bailout of General Motors, and the TARP bailout to financial and insurance firms, it adds up.

Robert Samuelson, a syndicated columnist, asked in May “Just how much government debt does a president have to endorse before he’s labeled ‘irresponsible’?”

While facing $63.8 trillion in obligations, Samuelson noted that “From 2010 to 2019, Obama projects annual deficits totaling $7.1 trillion; that’s atop the $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009.” It doesn’t stop there, however, “Obama’s health plan might cost $1.2 trillion over a decade; he has budgeted only $635 billion.”

Did President Obama and every member of Congress flunk arithmetic in grade school? How can they possibly believe that the actions they have taken and presumably intend to take with regard to an insane healthcare reform and massive tax on all energy use add up to anything than the total financial failure of the United States?

It adds up, according to USA Today, to “an extra $55,000 a household to cover rising federal commitments made just in the past year…” I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $55,000 to spare. The economy has pretty much wrecked any plans I made to earn enough to cover my present expenses.

According to the Investor’s Business Daily, “American families over the last year already lost 8% of their net worth—in part as a result of inept government meddling, past and present.”

The result will be “Near-record deficits increasing at record rates (that) will push the public debt of the U.S. beyond the economy’s plausible capacity to pay—70% of GDP (Gross Domestic Profit) by 2012, heading quickly to 82% of GDP in 2019 and on pace to be astronomically higher soon thereafter.”

As someone who thanks a merciful God for the ability to check my checking and savings accounts’ balances via the Internet, all these enormous numbers and percentages tend to make my head spin. I understand them in the abstract, but I can barely get a grip on them in terms of the vast amounts of money they represent.

There are, however, still other numbers that are strangling the nation’s capacity to somehow get out of this mess.

For several years, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has taken an annual look at the growth and the cost of federal regulations. He deserves to be beatified for this task. They are published in a report titled “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.” On June 3, the latest report made its debut. Here’s a snapshot of how a nation strangles to death on regulations:

Federal agencies issued 3,380 new rules in 2008. Federal regulations ate practically 10% of what the U.S. economy produced last year. At $1.172 trillion, the cost of regulation is nearly equal with $1.2 trillion in income taxes.

Regulatory costs are a huge hidden tax. The federal government spent $2.98 trillion in 2008 and businesses spent more than a third of that amount on regulatory costs.

Crews points out that, “Rolling back regulations would constitute the deregulatory stimulus that the U.S. economy needs.

We’re all on this roller coaster together and there can be no happy ending to the ride.

The Horrid Dr. Holdren

By Alan Caruba

England had “Mad King George” who was probably bipolar and eventually went completely insane around 1810. It would take another ten years before his suffering ended and he passed away, but his powers had passed to the Prince of Wales by then. In those days they knew when people were crazy and even provided an asylum from which we get the word “bedlam.”

As the days and week go by, they might as well post a sign outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where our President conducts the affairs of state. It should simply say, “Welcome to Bedlam.”

One example of the kind of dangerous insanity circulating like swamp gas around the White House is Dr. John P. Holdren, Obama’s science advisor. He is so nuts that even The New York Times reporter, John Tierney, asked “Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor?”

When Bjorn Lomborg published “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, Holdren joined in an attack published in Scientific American that The Economist called “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance.”

In a book that Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man who is now responsible for U.S. science policy advocated that women be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not, not unlike the Chinese one-child policy. Holdren also thought that single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies taken from them and given to other couples.

Holdren thought it would probably be a good idea that the population in general should be sterilized by intentionally putting infertility drugs into the nation’s drinking water or food.

Holdren believed that those who “contribute to social deterioration” should be required by law to “exercise reproductive responsibility” or to put it in its purest Nazi terms, they should be sterilized.

As history reveals, the Nazis began by gassing the mentally challenged and moved on to wholesale genocide for Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and everyone else deemed an enemy of the state.

Holdren, who served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006, holds views that are seriously out of touch with reality and totally out of synch with actual climate data.

Writing in Scientific American, he said, “the ongoing disruption of the earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.”

Virtually no climate scientist believes that “man-made greenhouse gases” have anything to do with “global warming” because (a) there is no global warming and (b) greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide play no role whatever in climate change.

On July 13, the Space and Science Research Center called for the firing of Dr. Holdren and of NOAA administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenko, while denouncing the Cap-and-Trade act, more formally and, in a spectacular act of mass deception, named the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

“These two individuals,” said the Center, “and other agency heads orchestrated and then signed off on the recently released government report, ‘Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.’ This report was a piece of blatant, politically motivated bad science and pure propaganda intended to reinforce the ‘big lie’ that global warming is still a threat to the planet.”

Meanwhile, over at the Environmental Protection Agency, a 37-year employee and analyst who offered a report seriously challenging the accuracy of global warming data found himself literally silenced and then alleged to be mentally unstable.

The Environmental advisor at the White House is Carol Browner, a former EPA Director during the Clinton years, close friend of Al Gore, and someone who shares his radical views on the environment and global warming. She answers to no one, not even the White House press corps who has not been able to get a word out of her. For all we know she is in her office assaying chicken entrails and shiny stones to come up with more environmental advice for the President.

Did I mention that the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, thinks we can save ourselves from global warming by painting the roofs of our buildings white?

There must surely be a few sane people among the mounting number of “czars”, advisors, and assistants, but so far the results of their accumulated advice have been frightening.

The economy is in free fall, the Cap-and-Trade bill in the Senate is based on climate fiction, billions are being given to the least practical form of energy generation, wind and solar, and the White House is talking about “reforming” the nation’s health system.

Every day the White House treats Americans to the Crisis-de-Jour; the latest nonsense being a Swine Flu “pandemic” and a questionable vaccine that will be forced on school children and others.

It’s bedlam!

To learn more about Dr. Holdren, click here

Greening Our Schools and Nation

By Alan Caruba

If those of you who have doubts that the Earth is dramatically warming and that the planet is about to be plunged into the kind of heat that will likely destroy all life, then it must be puzzling that so many people continue to believe that “global warming” is happening when the planet is quite obviously into a decade-old cooling cycle that is likely to last for several more decades.

A large component of this belief is the indoctrination in the nation’s schools in which virtually every subject area has been given a “green” component and textbooks are filled with references to drowning polar bears, disappearing rain forests, rising sea levels, and the usual claptrap about “global warming.” No child could pass through such an avalanche of junk science without becoming convinced of its authenticity.

An example of this occurred when Michael Kundu, “a whale photographer” and school board president in Marysville, Washington, threw a fit after receiving The Skeptic’s Handbook by Australian science communicator, Joanne Nova.

The 16-page booklet is published by The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank headquartered in Chicago. The booklet was sent to all 14,000 public school board presidents, accompanied by a letter from climate scientist, Bob Carter, a professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.

Kunda sent an email to other school board presidents encouraging them “to stuff that junk mail directly into the recycle basket.” I picked up my copy at a three-day climate change conference sponsored by Heartland in March of this year in New York City. The conference featured seminars led by national and internationally leading climate scientists, all of whom demonstrated that the “science” of “global warming” is balderdash.

The vitriol of the school board president reflects the desperation of “global warming” advocates such as Al Gore who keeps revising his End of the World predictions and is now demanding “global governance” to save the Earth. Considering that the hoax was generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this is global governance we can do without.

The “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on energy use that will drive up the rates that utilities charge all Americans, passed the House and is now in the Senate for consideration. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is on record saying that if the Senate doesn’t pass the bill there will be droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening pollution and, one assumes, plagues of frogs and locusts.

Did I mention the desperation surrounding the “global warming” hoax? Yes, I did. The Greens have reason to be desperate because both “global warming” and the economy-killing legislation based on it is in big trouble in the U.S. and increasingly around the world. At the recent G-8 conference, both China and India made it clear they have no intention of destroying their economies in the name of something that is not happening.

You can and should ignore President Obama’s promises of millions of “green jobs” and “energy independence.” The jobs are a myth and, for decades, the U.S. government has made it impossible to access our own vast reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, negating any hope of greater energy self-sufficiency.

The White House just announced its guidelines that will allow “renewable energy” companies, about 5,000 in all, to apply for some $3 billion in government funds—your money. Three billion dollars on wind and solar power that currently accounts for just over one percent of the electricity we use daily! Without subsidies, few of these companies would even exist. Even billionaire T. Boone Pickens has tossed in the towel over his plan to install hundreds of wind turbines.

Meanwhile, back in Heartland’s Chicago, a July 9 news report noted that “For the 12th time this meteorological summer (since June 1), daytime highs failed to reach 70 degrees Wednesday. Only one other year in the past century has hosted so many sub-70-degree days up to this point in a summer season—1969, when 14 such days occurred.” It’s getting colder in Chicago and I guarantee you that it is going to get colder there and everywhere else in the U.S.

It behooves the school board presidents and members around the nation to take a look at the “environmental” agenda being taught in their schools because it is mostly the same kind of lies being told by Al Gore, Sen. Boxer, along with Reps. Henry Waxman, and Edward Markey, the authors of Cap-and-Trade.

Kudos to The Heartland Institute for leading the effort to educate the public, our nation’s legislators, and those responsible for the education of our children in this national life-and-death struggle to demonstrate that real climate science totally rejects this hoax.

The U.S. Weather Service Says...

By Alan Caruba

Below is a recent post by the U.S. Weather Service. I have added some boldface to elements of the text.

· Due to the unusually cool and wet conditions in June…here are some interesting facts to note:

· This June is tied for the 8th coolest on record. The average temperature was 67.5. (That’s) 3.7 degrees below normal…which also occurred in 1897.

· This was the coolest June since 1958…when the average temperature as 67.2 degrees.

· Below average temperatures occurred on 23 out of 30 days this June…or 75 percent of the month

· Central Park has not hit 90 degrees in the month of June this year. The last time this occurred was back in 1996.

· Central Park has not hit 85 degrees in the month of June this year. The last time this occurred was back in 1916. This has only occurred two other times…1903 and 1886.

· The low temperature dipped below 60 degrees eleven times in the month of June. The last time this occurred was in 2003 when it occurred seventeen times.

· It was the second wettest June on record with 10.06 inches of rain. The wettest June on record is 2003 with 10.27 inches.

· There were 19 days this June where there was at least 0.01 inches of rainfall. This has never occurred in Central Park.

One month does not a climate cycle make, but when one considers that the Earth has been cooling since 1998, it is a snapshot of things to come. Given the recent effort by the Environmental Protection Agency to silence one of its analysts whose report debunked the entire rational for the “Cap-and-Trade” bill passed by the House, it is amazing that the U.S. Weather Service is being permitted by the Stalinist Obama administration to actually report some “interesting facts” that demonstrate that the weather for the U.S. is cooling, not warming.

Now let it be said there is a difference between “weather” and “climate.” The weather, no matter where you are on planet Earth is what is happening in a particular place at a particular time.

The climate is measured in decades and in centuries. Clear trends emerge and they are given names like “ice ages” and the past is broken down in a variety of ages from the Paleozoic era to the Cenozoic, to the Mesozoic, the latter including Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, Pennsylvanian, and Mississippian. We are currently in the Holocene era, dating from about 10,000 years ago.

Human civilization such as we know it---cities, agriculture, trade---didn’t show up until 5,000 years ago. Suffice it to say this was long before the Industrial Revolution which the Greens blame for a warming that is not happening.

The cooling being seen now reflects the way that, from around 1300 to 1850, much of Europe and North America suffered through a mini-ice age.

Simple logic and common sense suggests, given the very low sunspot activity of late, that we are headed into a similar climate cycle and the low temperatures in June, not seen since as far back as 1867 and 1903 appear to confirm this.

This is why a Cap-and-Trade bill whose alleged purpose is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, blamed for “global warming”, is a complete and total fraud.

Any Congress that passes this law and any President who signs it is engaged is treasonous behavior because it is a massive tax on the use of energy, the single most essential factor for the revival of our failing economy.

A "Crisis" of Governors

By Alan Caruba

If you can have a pride of lions and a gaggle of geese, then I suggest that the forthcoming July 17-20 meeting of the National Governors Association can be described as a “crisis” of Governors.
This once-esteemed office, a platform from which some launched campaigns to become President, has become a sinkhole of sexual misconduct and corruption; witness New York’s unlamented Eliot Spitzer, New Jersey’s James McGreevey, and now South Carolina’s pathetic, moon-struck Mark Sanford and Illinois’ Rod Blogovitch whose alleged sins involved money.

Because states are sovereign republics and because being governor is primarily a “local” responsibility, the job requires significant administrative and political skills to ensure the state meets those obligations closest to voters. Infrastructure must be maintained. Issues of public safety, health, and education are paramount concerns.

With a few exceptions, today’s Governors are struggling with bloated budgets and huge deficits despite the fact that most states require a balanced budget or at least the semblance of one. Watching Arnold Schwarzenegger announce that California will be paying its bills with IOUs would be comic if it were not so serious.

Watching Governor David Paterson of New York desperately trying to get that state’s legislators to even convene a session reflects the absurdity of watching the House of Representatives vote on trillion-dollar legislation it hasn’t even read.

What, in fact, Americans are witnessing is a failure of government at both the state and federal level. The nation has managed to elect too many people to public office that are so clearly inept, incompetent, and untrustworthy, it poses a threat to the republic.

When the National Governors Association meets this week, we shall have an opportunity to see this group address the challenges facing the nation. Chaired by Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, it is to his credit that he has focused on infrastructure—bridges, roads, tunnels, water treatment plants, the electrical grid, schools and hospitals.

In earlier times, infrastructure was seen and understood to be essential to America’s growth and prosperity. Not so today. It is, generally speaking, vastly under-funded.

The NGA will open with meetings of two committees, The Economic Development and Commerce Committee and the Education, Early Childhood and Workforce Committee. If California is any example—and it is—than economic development has long since been thrown overboard as state-after-state has denied or delayed permits for the building of new plants, coal-fired or nuclear—for the generation of electricity. No energy. No development. As for education, it is a national disgrace.

On Sunday, the Health and Human Services Committee will discuss health care reform. The present White House proposal, unbelievably vague, and whatever will emerge from Congress will add more trillions to the national debt, require everyone to purchase a national, not private health insurance, and end up rationing health services because that is the only way a national system can function. It is a very bad idea that has already failed in Massachusetts.

The Natural Resources Committee will concurrently “examine barriers to American energy independence and security.” I can virtually guarantee you that the Governors of America’s coastal states will resist exploration and extraction of vast natural resources of oil and natural gas from their offshore areas. Others will call for huge expenditures for wind and solar energy that cannot even begin to meet the energy needs of America.

On Sunday afternoon, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, will join others to discuss “emergency preparedness” and, if Hurricane Katrina was any indication, the nation’s and the state’s ability to respond to emergencies is not encouraging. The former Arizona state governor is usually glassy-eyed and phlegmatic when questioned about issues.

Monday’s session will examine energy and the economy. Given how poorly these related areas of concern have been addressed at this point, one is tempted to suggest that the Governors pack their bags and skip that little gab-fest.

The Governors are a microcosm of the entire nation’s ills. Many, if not all, are dependent on federal largess in order to fund the needs of their states and many states send more to the federal government in tax revenues than they receive in return. You could call it a redistribution of wealth.

A growing number of state governments are passing resolutions stating they will not be bound by federal mandates regarding health, education, immigration and other key issues. They are declaring their sovereignty to reassert control over those areas of governance which, until the major shift to federal control at the mid-point of the last century, were their province and their responsibility.

This nation fought a Civil War over the issue of state’s rights, over the right of secession. Now the issue facing California is whether other states have an obligation to bail it out of its financial problems and the answer is no. A host of other incursions of state’s rights, enshrined in the Tenth Amendment, is sparking resistance.

Too much centralized government in Washington, bad management, too much control by public service unions, ignoring infrastructure needs, failure to provide for the provision of energy to a growing population, and the distractions of idiotic issues such as same-sex marriage are combining to destroy a once-great nation.

Rolling the (Swine Flu) Vaccine Dice

By Alan Caruba

As a layman with no special knowledge about communicable diseases, I have nonetheless been struck by the drumbeat of scare mongering coming out of the World Health Organization and our government regarding “Swine Flu.” My reasoning is simple. Ordinary flu kills some 36,000 Americans annually and its victims are frequently the elderly and those in poor health.

I am not against vaccination and routinely get a flu shot every year, but I worry about all those youngsters who are required to receive several vaccinations in order to attend school. This begins in kindergarten and it takes no genius to know that their immune systems are not fully mature at that point.

Barbara Loe Fisher, a co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center is a consumer advocate and author of several books including “The Consumer's Guide to Childhood Vaccines.” She has posted a videotape on the site that is well worth watching.

Regarding the Swine Flu vaccine, she asks “Will we have a choice?” regarding whether we or our children are required to be vaccinated with a hastily created vaccine specific to this form of the flu. Such a vaccine would not be subject to same standards of testing as others because it would be deemed a response to a serious, widespread pandemic. That raises the risk, particularly for children. And is there truly a widespread pandemic?

“What a lot of people don’t know is that true Type A or Type B influenza only causes about 20 percent of all flu-like symptoms that people experience during any flu season.” That means that “80 percent of all flu-like illness in a normal flu season is NOT caused by Type A and B strains of influenza contained in annual flu shots. And vaccine acquired immunity is temporary, while immunity gained after recovering from influenza is longer lasting.”

That’s good news for most people born before 1957. They may be naturally protected and have a lower risk of being infected because they have long lasting antibodies that help them resist infection.

I am increasingly skeptical of the claims being made by the World Health Organization and those in our government regarding Swine Flu. My suspicion is that it is just another type of flu, not unlike the 80 percent of influenza that is not Type A or B. Even if I am wrong, I worry more that the new swine flu vaccine that will be ready in October will not have been adequately tested. In 1976, when there was a similar flu outbreak, the vaccine ended up killing a lot of people.

Originating in Mexico in April of last year, one might reasonably expect to hear of a rising infection or death rate from Swine Flu there, but that is not the case. As of May 2009, Mexico’s health minister noted that there had been 908 tests on suspected cases and, of them, 397 turned out to be the Swine Flu virus. Deaths, however, numbered only 101. “Apparently the rate of infection is not as widespread as we might have thought,” said Jose Angel Cordova, the health minister.

For the past few years, some American doctors have been insisting that every child from six months old to age 18 must get an annual flu shot and some U.S. health officials want the first doses of the experimental swine flu vaccines to be administered in the schools.

In October, the National Vaccine Information Center will hold its Fourth International Public Conference on Vaccination in Washington, D.C. One of the issues will be that of “informed consent” and this is very important for any parent who does not want their child vaccinated against Swine Flu when those new vaccines may very well be unnecessary or represent a risk in themselves.

Out of a world population now exceeding six billion, as of June 2009 there were more than 35,000 cases of Swine Flu involving 163 deaths attributed to it, most of which occurred in Mexico, its point of origination. To this layman that hardly constitutes a global pandemic. It’s more like just another strain of flu virus.

I am beginning to tire of the monthly “crises” being declared by our government, particularly when it is clear that the solutions put forth at this point do not appear to be having any affect. Swine flu can be added to the list.

The Sierra Club versus Electricity

By Alan Caruba

In early July the Sierra Club celebrated the fact that, “Today, 100 of those planned coal plants have been defeated or abandoned.”

They crowed over the fact that a year ago there were plans for 150 new plants and that they had successfully thwarted the provision of electrical power around the nation. As for as the Sierra Club is concerned, “This milestone marks a significant shift in the way Americans are looking at our energy choices. Cities, states, businesses and electric utilities are all moving away from the polluting coal power of the past.”

Today’s coal-fired plants are all equipped with very expensive technology that eliminates the pollution of the past, “scrubbing” their massive stacks before any is emitted. They are not polluting anything, but they are providing affordable electrical energy.

Coal represents just a shade over fifty percent of all the electricity Americans use. It is so abundant here in America that the provision of those 150 plants would have ensured that the nation had a significant portion of the additional power it requires for a growing population and our manufacturing sector.

Why does the Sierra Club oppose coal-fired plants? It says that “carbon dioxide pollution, a main cause of global warming” is the reason, but CO2 is not a pollutant. It is the gas of life because without it not one single blade of grass or any other vegetation grows on planet Earth. Our food supply, crops and the livestock that depend upon them, is the result of CO2.

And, of course, there is NO global warming. The planet has been cooling for the past decade and the science of CO2 demonstrates that it plays no role whatever with regard to major climate trends.

The Sierra Club’s opposition to coal-fired plants is entirely based on a LIE.

It doesn’t stop there, however. As far back as 1974, the Sierra Club has been opposed to nuclear energy as well. They called for “adequate national and global policies to curb energy over-use and unnecessary economic growth.”

“Unnecessary economic growth”? If a nation does not maintain its economic growth it also does not provide jobs. It does not have the means by which to fund defense, infrastructure, and to compete globally in manufacturing and exports. This is an idiotic policy, but not if your aim, your purpose is to attack the most essential element of growth, the provision of energy.

A visit to the Sierra Club website provides ample evidence of its objection to all forms of energy except the least practical and effective, the so-called “renewable” forms such as wind and solar. Even T. Boone Pickens who gambled on the largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle has thrown in the towel, announcing that his $2 billion investment is now, in retrospect, rather foolish given the need to get the power from the farm to where it is needed.

Pickens is now stuck with 687 giant wind turbines, each of which is taller than a 30-story building.

The same may be said of solar power that, like wind, is not dependable and must be located far from the transmission lines and the nation’s urban areas that are most in need of electricity.

At what point will Americans begin to realize that the giant Green organizations like the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and others stand in opposition to the very thing they most desperately need, energy?

At what point will Americans begin to realize that failing to access its own vast natural resources, coal, oil and natural gas, is suicidal?

One hopes it will not be before the economy is so severely damaged that we cannot borrow or fund the coal-fired and nuclear plants that we need to keep us from being figuratively and literally in the dark.

Electing a Moron

By Alan Caruba

It’s not that long ago that former President George W. Bush was being characterized as a dimwit. In truth, because he was not a smooth talker, he often came across as less than a deep thinker. I am not sure the job requires a deep thinker because those who fit that description often turned out to be a disaster. The job’s best description is “leader.”

It is important to remember that the decade in which Bush served was one of consumer confidence, a healthy economy, marred initially by 9/11 and later by the decision to invade Iraq and depose a vicious despot who had warred with Iran and invaded Kuwait. Many Americans grew tired of the war and the subsequent occupation.

Only at the very end of Bush’s term, September 2008, did the nation suddenly encounter the financial turmoil that the mortgage “bubble” generated. It was long in coming and fearful in its immediate consequences. Congress voted a $700 billion bailout program for banks and insurance companies.

Candidate Obama had almost nothing to say about the crisis, but all during the campaign the mainstream media kept telling us that he had a giant IQ. He had already written two books even if both were about himself.

And, yes, he had taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, but few on the faculty have any recall of him. Indeed, his college transcripts, as well as his birth certificate, are all still carefully hidden from public view.

So we have only the last six months by which to judge him by his actions. A delightful blog by Theo Sparks has posted two lists demonstrating that just over half the voters in 2008 elected a moron.

So far on Obama’s watch:

He has doubled the national debt.

Announced the termination of the space defense system the day after the North Koreans launched an ICBM.

Against the advice and urgings for his own CIA director and the prior four directors, he released information on intelligence gathering.

Announced that he would close Guantanamo without having any idea what to do with its detainees, all of whom are hard-core jihadists. Several of those released have since returned to the terrorist trade.

Spent a lot of time in foreign nations apologizing for things about which most Americans take pride.

Told Mexicans that the violence in their country was our fault because some of the guns they use to kill each other had been purchased in the U.S.

Appointed an Attorney General who orchestrated the forced removal and return to Cuba of a nine-year-old whose mother died to give him a life of freedom in America.

Caused panic in New York by authorizing the flight of Air Force One over New York for a photo you can purchase with Photo Shop for less than a dollar. The flight cost $400.000.

Told the Iranian protesters in the streets of Tehran that the U.S. would not “meddle” in the affairs of their nation, but did not hesitate to tell the Prime Minister of Israel that his nation had to stop building new settlements to house its growing population.

Initiated the nationalization of the U.S. auto industry and gave a lot of money to insurance giant AIG without any pre-conditions.

Intends to nationalize the health insurance industry.

Is pushing a Cap-and-Trade bill that would be the largest tax in the history of the nation.

When the Honduran Supreme Court deposed a communist president, he sided, along with Cuba’s Raul Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, with the exiled president.

President Obama, a former community organizer, claimed through a spokesperson that he was unaware of the initial nationwide “tea party” tax protests involving thousands. On July 4, an estimated million Americans participated in still more protests coast to coast.

Among his choice of friends, he was unaware that he started his political career in the living room of a former domestic terrorist, a member of the Weather Underground.

He was unaware that the pastor of the church he attended for twenty years was a racist who hates America.

He was unaware that his own aunt was living in the U.S. illegally or that his brother lives on pennies a day in a hut in Kenya.

Among his first choices for cabinet positions, he was unaware that he nominated a man to be Secretary of Commerce who was under investigation in a bribery scandal.

He was unaware that his choice for Secretary of Treasury was a tax cheat. Indeed, he was unaware that several of his top choices fit that description.

As President and the representative of the American people, he managed to offend the Queen of England, insult the British people by returning a bust of Winston Churchill, and make a deep bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, something no President in history has ever done before any monarch.

It is evident to all that President Obama is (a) incapable of delivering any kind of speech without the use of a TelePrompter and (b) incapable of answering any question from a member of the press in under ten minutes’ time.

So what do we know about the people who voted for him? According the Rasmussen Consumer Index, among Democrats confidence is up from 53.7 a year ago to 79.5 this year. Among Republicans, it has dropped from 99.4 last year to 68.6 today,

Democrats apparently think the economy has improved despite the loss of more than 2.5 million jobs in the first quarter of 2009. Under Obama, the U.S. unemployment rate has risen from 7.6 to 9.5%, the highest in 26 years.

To put it another way, the U.S. has lost 16,000 jobs each day since Democrats passed a multi-billion dollar “stimulus” bill. The nation’s Gross Domestic Product fell at 5.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009.

The stock market is down 3,000 points from a year ago.

This means that Democrats, voters and members of Congress, are either deluded and/or as moronic as the man they elected President.

The only justification for the debacle the President has offered thus far has been to blame everything on George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, his Vice President is candidly telling anyone who will listen that the geniuses Obama selected to advise him are clueless, having failed to grasp the gravity of the situation or offer solutions other than those that will put more people out of work, raise taxes, increase inflation, and further bankrupt a bankrupt nation.

How do I know it’s bankrupt? Because President Obama is on record saying, “We’re out of money.”

When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Unless, of course, you’re a moron.

The Saudis Choose Sides

By Alan Caruba

Bit by bit the news is getting out. First it was a news report of Israelis, Egyptians, and Saudis getting together to discuss their mutual interests and concern. In other words, Iran!

Now The Times (UK) is reporting that “The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.”

This was followed by news of an ABC News interview with Vice President Biden who said, “Look, Israel can determine for itself—it’s a sovereign nation—what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else, whether we agree or not.”

Translation: We hope they will bomb the heck out of Iran’s nuclear facilities because we do not have the guts to do it ourselves. The President then said Biden had misspoken and that no “green light” had been given. Apparently, it’s okay to “meddle” in Israel’s internal affairs, but not Iran’s.

The least likely partners in the Middle East are Israel and the Saudis, but both have a common enemy and the Saudis have always been shrewd in their judgment as to whom to back in a fight. They also prefer having others do their fighting for them. Unless you haven’t checked lately, Saudi Arabia shares a very long border with Iraq and is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, along with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

So now the Saudis are in league with the Israelis, just like they coordinate with the oil-importing United States of America. Why not? We’re too stupid to tap our own extensive national oil reserves, so they are perfectly happy to sell us theirs.

Iran is a direct competitor to the Saudis and cannot be expected to play nice at OPEC meetings. The good news for the Saudis is that the Iranians have so mismanaged their oil industry that they don’t even have a refinery to make their own gasoline. Their equipment is getting old and their income from oil is surely dwindling as a result. It doesn’t help them that the price per barrel is falling of late.

But they sure do know how to make some great long-and-short range missiles and have been hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapon capability for some twenty years or more. While they have poured billions into that little project, they have ignored their own population which has high unemployment and a host of other problems, not the least of which is a shaky hold on power.

A serious international boycott of the current Iranian regime would bring it to its knees. The protests in the streets may have been crushed, but the spirit of protest has not. Iranians are angry with their Supreme Leader and the rest of the stooges in their allegedly elected government.

I have no doubt whatever that the Israelis will choose the day and hour to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. It’s no great secret where they are, but I bet the Mossad has blueprints!

It is ironic that Iran has managed to do what sixty years of Arab warfare on Israel has not. It has brought two antagonists to the table to discuss an even greater common enemy.

The "Secret" Tea Party Protests

By Alan Caruba

An estimated 2,000 “Tea Party” nationwide protests against excessive taxation did not get much coverage in the nation’s mainstream media.

You had to visit World Net Daily to get the story. According to WND, between 3,000 and 4,000 gathered in San Antonio while more than 2,000 gathered in Marietta, Georgia. There were a reported 1,500 in Louisville, Kentucky, and 1,500 in Olympia, Washington. In Reno, 3,000 showed up.

If you Googled for “Tea Party” on July 5th, the day after the many events scheduled for Independence Day, you would come up empty except for a brief story in the Newark, NJ Star-Ledger, “Thousands take part in ‘tea party’ protest against high taxes in Morristown.”

While the Star-Ledger deserves credit for its coverage it was a tad short on its tally of those held in New Jersey, calling it “more of more than a dozen.” According to the Tea Party website, there were 37 such events in New Jersey planned for the day. Many states had comparable numbers.

With the exception of a few local Associated Press stories there was, in effect, a news blackout of coverage turning the tea parties into the equivalent of secret events. Watching television news throughout the Fourth, one would scarcely have been aware of them.

In my lifetime, it is a massive departure from the coverage given the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War protests that dominated the 1960s and 70s.

The failure to provide coverage further exacerbates the growing distrust of the mainstream media.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of people can peacefully gather to protest the Cap-and-Trade bill that passed the House and to oppose the proposed healthcare reforms, along with the many bailouts and limpid “stimulus” bill results thus far, and not generate any coverage among the media is extremely troubling. It makes Rush Limbaugh’s charge that they are now “government” newspapers ring true.

It amounts to a cover-up and a very deliberate one at that. The lack of news of the tea parties would surely cause many to assume they either did not occur or represented only a small number of protesters.

There is no way to estimate how many participated, but it is foolhardy to ignore the numbers which, together, were very likely a million or more.

If the economy continues to tank, there will be even greater participation in these events in the months and years ahead.

Despite the constant media coverage of Obama as singularly blessed with the skills to solve the nation’s problems, a growing number of Americans are not fooled and, indeed, Rasmussen polling that tracks opinions of his performance is now showing that more people disapprove than approve. It has taken barely six months for the disenchantment to set in.

Put all those people at the protests together with all those who share their discontent and you have a huge voting bloc in 2010 that is going to be eager to vote out any member of Congress who participated in these policies.

Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!

By Alan Caruba

Sarah Palin’s stunning announcement on July 3rd that she would step down as Governor of Alaska at the end of the month left all the political pundits gazing into their crystal ball desperately looking for an explanation.

The most obvious answer was the one she offered. She had done as much as she thought she could do for Alaska and now she wanted some time with her family. We are conditioned to never believe what politicians tell us and, in most cases, that is the wisest thing, but Palin breaks the mold in many ways.

The first thing everyone wants to know is whether she will run for President? She is enormously popular with many rank and file Republicans, but probably not with the power brokers within the party. She is, unlike John McCain, a true “maverick” because she actually believes in the major tenets of conservatism, limited government, strong defense, and fiscal prudence.

The GOP has long since strayed from those Reaganesque values and there is no better recent example than George W. Bush. For the life of me, I still have no idea how McCain got the nomination and things got really bizarre when he plucked Palin out of the wilds of Alaska and near total obscurity.

She was, after all, a woman. The last time a presidential candidate selected a woman as his running mate was Walter Mondale who chose Geraldine Ferraro and that turned out to be a Democrat disaster. What was McCain thinking? Of course, that’s what Republicans keep asking no matter what McCain says or does as he seems like some kind of stealth Democrat most of the time.

Palin was an instant hit; a sudden political superstar and, at the same time, also a candidate in over her head when it came to a national election. The press quickly lampooned her as a Moose-shooting rube from the only state less far away from the lower 48 than Hawaii. Even so, she was dynamite on the stump. And she still draws large, enthusiastic crowds to the consternation of Democrats and some Republicans.

Palin suffered from one of the worst political campaigns in recent memory. McCain had no central message, few new ideas, and poor delivery whether delivering a speech or in an interview. The man was painful to watch. He looked old. He sounded old. The contrast with his young running mate made some think the wrong person was on the top of the ticket running for president.

Palin was, by virtually any political standard, unique. Plain-speaking, possessed of a photogenic family and with personal, religious, and political values that rang true with a lot of people who sensed she was the real deal as a conservative.

She also did not appear to have much depth when it came to the major issues challenging the nation. She tended to speak in clichés and still does.

She brought out the very worst in Democrats/liberals. I cannot recall when a candidate was so viciously attacked. The mainstream media parachuted reporters into Wasilla, Alaska in a desperate effort to find anything bad to say about her. On Saturday Night Live, a devastating satirical portrait by Tina Fey turned her into a joke; someone who “could see Russia” from her front porch.

If the GOP could bottle whatever it is she does that drives liberals like New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd insane, we could begin to win some elections again. Citing another hit job, a profile by Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair, Dowd notes that some regard Palin as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, but clearly has not noticed any evidence of this in President Obama.

So why did she quit and what will she do now? I think the girl from Wasilla wants some time with her family while she and they are still young. She has five children and one grandchild. They are Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow and Piper. Unwed, teenage Bristol is the mother of Tripp. This is definitely not the Brady Bunch.

She probably also needs time away from the horrid attacks. I don’t think most of us give much thought to the toll such savagery takes on a public figure. She surely has done nothing to deserve it other than to become a rising star among a fairly dull Republican roster of potential presidential candidates.

Larry Kudlow, the columnist and radio host with a brilliant take on economic issues, thinks she is the new head of the Republican Party and I think he may be right.

And, finally, I keep thinking she would really like to take off the gloves and tear into Barack Hussein Obama. The Alaskan Governor’s office is not the right place to do that. Combine that will a quarter million in legal expenses to defend against spurious charges, and the reason for leaving early seems fairly obvious.

She needs a bigger platform and her new freedom gives her one.

The President becomes more vulnerable to serious criticism with every passing day and, so far, Republicans have been too quiet. Palin is likely to do politically to Obama what she has already done to a Moose.

As California Goes....

By Alan Caruba

As a lifelong resident of New Jersey, one of the most fiscally imprudent states, it may be deemed unfair for me to say bad things about California, but having lived in a state that has “been there, done that” it also endows me with an understanding of what happens when a state is taken over by its public service unions and indulges in stupid environmental policies that have nothing to do with a sound economy.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared an economic crisis last week in order to demand some fiscal sanity that has not been forthcoming from its legislature. By the end of the month, California will be forced to pay bills with IOUs and we all know that won’t work. The U.S. Constitution reserves to the federal government the right “to coin money, regulate the value thereof…” As a form of currency, IOUs are forbidden to California.

A recent issue of The Heartland Institute’s “Budget & Tax News” monthly newspaper had a disturbing article by Jason Sorens and William Ruger, two members of the University of Buffalo faculty who studied the issue of personal and financial freedom in the nation’s 50 States. Their study ranked states on government spending, taxes, and regulations on market transactions and private behavior.

Since Americans pride themselves as a free people, the actions of state government have a direct impact on how much actual freedom they have because “states and local governments regulate workplaces, land use, and health insurance. They tell individual citizens how to educate their children, where they are permitted to smoke, which kinds of firearms they may own, and when they are allowed to buy liquor.” And, of course, they levy taxes.

The five least-free States, from the bottom up, are New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland. New York State’s legislature has been in a complete meltdown, unable and unwilling to tend to business. New Jersey is locked in the run-up to an election pitting an ultra-liberal Governor, Jon Corzine, against a Republican candidate who promises to do a better job of governance, but in New Jersey that is no guarantee of any improvement.

California, ranked fourth from the bottom in terms of freedom, reflects the study’s finding that “Liberal states tend to be nanny states when it comes to issues of personal choice.” Linked to economic freedom, states that impose excessive taxation and regulation tend to chase people and business away.

New Jersey has had more people leaving than coming to live there and, in the 1990s California saw 2.08 million more people leave than moved there from other parts of the nation. According to the U.S. Census, this loss was offset by a net immigration of 2.02 million from Latin America. To put it another way, California imported poverty along with an increase in the social services these new immigrants (many illegal) require.

One of the factors contributing to the population loss was the high cost of housing in California, about 53.1% above the February 1999 median of $129,300 in the rest of the nation, making housing in California less affordable than anywhere else. When the housing bubble burst in late 2008, California’s homeownership rate was only 55.7% as compared to 66% for the entire nation. In more blunt terms, California’s white (non-Hispanic) population has been leaving in droves.

The result of this has been a dramatic increase in costs relative to the rise of its population of illegal aliens. By 2004, a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) that examined the costs of education, health care, and the incarceration of illegal aliens committing crimes in California, concluded it costs Californians $10.5 billion per year. The K-12 education system spent approximately $7.7 billion to school the children of illegal aliens and another $1.4 billion in taxpayer’s money went toward providing healthcare to them and their families, about the same spent on incarcerating illegal alien criminals.

Doing nothing about immigration comes with a big price tag and this is increasingly true of the entire nation that is estimated to have some 12 million illegal aliens. Neither the Bush administration of the passed eight years, nor the new Obama administration will stem this wholesale invasion of the nation, not just burdening taxpayers, but reducing the number of jobs available to natural born and naturalized citizens. Amnesty would double or triple the number of new citizens as family members join them.

Of equal concern are the nation’s energy policies and, in this regard, California is the template for doing everything possible to restrict the development of its own energy sources and reserves.

The state’s oldest oil refinery, the massive 104-year-old Richmond facility was in the process of modernization, but environmentalists sued and a judge ordered Chevron Corporation to stop work for yet another “environmental impact report.” A hundred workers have been laid off and as many as a thousand more may lose their jobs as the project shuts down. That is insanity.

California is highly dependent on imported electricity. As of 2008, its failure to provide for the energy needs of its citizens meant it was short by 23% of the total demand for power. California has been loath to permit the building of coal-fired plants and slow to build those based on nuclear power. California has been a big proponent of wind and solar energy; the least practical means of providing electricity.

Today, California consumes 65% more electricity than it did in 1980. Coal-based electricity imports from other states grew by 60% from 1998 to 2005. Intent on emphasizing “efficient” power use policies, California has discovered that efficiency improvements do not reduce its overall energy consumption and, as often as not, leads to more energy use because people perceive such “efficiency” savings as freeing up more dollars for other energy-consuming devices and activities.

Meanwhile, demands for greater energy “efficiency” have driven up the cost of housing and driven out manufacturing firms because of high energy prices. If the states from which it imports electricity were to reduce or cut off supplies, California would swiftly decline to the status of a third world nation.

Estimates of the amounts of untapped oil off its coast on the continental shelf are in the millions of barrels, possibly billions. A reversal of this policy would generate lots of high-paying jobs and reduce the nation’s dependence on imported oil.

As this is being written, California faces a $21.3 billion deficit. Its citizens have defeated all of the proposed measures to close it, probably in retaliation for the spendthrift insanity of its legislature.

These are the same policies—immigration, education¸ housing, energy—being pursued by the Obama administration and, if California is a template for what will occur nationwide, it portends a very grim future.

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July!

Don't miss the opportunity to listen to "A Born Again American"

Making Bush Look Good

By Alan Caruba

It’s taken barely half a year to make George W. Bush look good to a lot of Americans who experienced “Bush Derangement Syndrome” or, like myself, were critical of several of his policies while President.

I imagine Bush watching the evening news these days and just laughing as he watches Obama just “step in it” every time he encounters the same or some new problem with which Bush dealt.
On the issue of taxes, Bush was a dedicated tax-cutter. On the issue of spending, Bush never saw a spending bill he couldn’t sign until deep into his second term. He even advocated a prescription add-on to Medicare, raising its costs and hastening its bankruptcy.

And, of course, there’s the Iraq War which followed his payback for 9/11 during which he chased al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan. The Iraq War began in 2003 and lasted six years to the point where we are drawing down forces or at least moving them out of the major cities to see if the Iraqis themselves can provide security.

A lot of the problems with the conduct of the Iraq War can be traced to Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense who just flat-out got it wrong too many times. On paper Rumsfeld had terrific credentials, but either he was terribly advised by his generals or he didn’t pay them proper attention or both. Wars cannot be fought “on the cheap” or won with too few troops.

Lastly, in defense of Bush, the housing bubble collapsed in October, one month before the 2008 elections following a long period of general prosperity. Indeed, the timing of the collapse has always struck me as very suspicious.

It followed a September 15th electronic run on U.S. banks that put the Federal Reserve in overdrive to stem its effects. By the time they closed the accounts involved, $550 billion had been withdrawn and, without prompt action, $5.5 trillion would have withdrawn and the economy would have collapsed.

As it is, under Obama’s guidance, the Recession he keeps reminding everyone he inherited is now raging from sea to shining sea thanks to idiotic decisions to throw billions at General Motors and Chrysler, both of whom were going to have to declare bankruptcy anyway, and then taking ownership in GM, an unprecedented action and one that runs contrary to a Constitutional prohibition on dispensing public funds to private enterprise.

Obama wasn’t content with that. Having inherited the panicky TARP funding effort, he allowed them to move forward without any insistence that they be used for the provision of credit. That one act alone would have helped stem the credit freeze that is forcing businesses to lay off workers by the thousands. Instead, the U.S. ended up with a sizeable ownership of banks and insurance companies.

If there is one thing that government is famous for, it’s the inability to run any kind of private enterprise. Amtrak hasn’t turned a profit since it began in 1971. With the advent of email, the U.S. Postal Service is in freefall and, if it weren’t for Fedex, nothing would ever be delivered overnight.

On the foreign policy front, the pathetic North Koreans feel free to fire off missiles, Iran’s president Ahmadinejad feels free to insult the President, and China says it hates us for the profligacy of Obama’s crazed trillion-dollar Cap-and-Trade Act and his proposed trillion-dollar healthcare reform program. If you really, really want to destroy what’s left of the U.S. economy, both of these proposals will shovel the last bits of dirt on what is left.

Obama isn’t just our nightmare. He is the world’s nightmare. He is a patsy willing to sit through a 50 minute diatribe against the U.S. by Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, a photo opportunity ambush by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and top it off with a very demeaning bow to a Saudi prince. He signaled weakness with his Cairo speech. He has come out in defense of the deposed Communist ex-president of Honduras, putting him in the same company as Cuba’s Raul Castro and Senor Chavez.

He’s off to visit the Russians in a week and they will eat his lunch. Since the days of Harry S. Truman, U.S. Presidents have resisted the Russian’s threats, bluffs, and proxy wars. Obama is not made of such stuff and will probably agree to junk the entire U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons in return for as much vodka and caviar the Russians want to sell us.

About the only thing I which we can count on will be Obama’s endless bleating and blaming of George W. Bush for all the problems he has encountered in a job he so desperately wanted.

Obama’s performance rating, according to Rasmussen, is heading south. It took just over a half year to reach negative status and by the end of the year, Democrats in Congress are going to be hiding in their offices and cloakrooms rather than be seen with him.

Gays in the Military

By Alan Caruba

When I served in the U.S. military I knew two closeted homosexuals were serving in my unit. My version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was not to tell because I saw no reason to “out” them and not messing around in other people’s lives has always been a policy of mine.

I was naïve enough to think that, if they wanted to serve and if they remained “closeted”, which is to say as long as their sexual preference did not interfere with their performance of duty, it was not my problem. Fifty years ago being gay meant staying in the closet or paying a price for being open about it. It surely meant not serving in the U.S. Army and these fellows wanted to.

Fast forward to the present when being gay has lost much of its former stigma. Ellen DeGeneres has her own popular talk show. “Will and Grace” was a successful sitcom. “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” was popular for a while. Barney Frank came out of the closet and apparently Massachusetts voters did not care. The level of tolerance is, in many respects, nothing less than astonishing.

But! Gays are now hell-bent to get same-sex marriage as the law of the land. The very idea is obscene and a thorough-going challenge to a rational society. It redefines what is normal and being gay is not normal in a heterosexual world and never was.

In the White House, President Obama met with 150 members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Coalition of the United Church of Christ. He told them that “I believe preventing patriotic Americans from serving their country weakens our national security.” He wants “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repealed.

When the subject has come up with career military professionals whom I have known, they have uniformly opposed integrating gays. The general reason is “esprit de corps”, the need to ensure morale among the troops who must, in battle, utterly depend upon one another.

Having openly gay soldiers and other military share the same living quarters is a cause for concern among their heterosexual, “straight” comrades. It has nothing to do with “patriotism.” It has a whole lot to do with whom you’re sharing a communal shower.

More than 1,000 retired generals and admirals signed an open letter earlier this year supporting the ban on gays serving openly and predicted that a repeal of the current policy would endanger the prospects of an all-volunteer force.

Gays make straights uncomfortable to varying degrees. It’s not just bias. It is human nature. So, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” makes a lot of sense. It did when I served and it does today.

I suspect many gays have served in the military and are presently on active service and, for that reason, I think “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is the wisest policy.

Unfortunately, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is working with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) to draft legislation in the Senate to do away with the current policy. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has announced he will support the legislation and reportedly there are 150 co-sponsors of a similar bill in the House.

At this point, about 10,500 military personnel have been discharged for violating the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy from 1997 through 2008. Around 250 individuals have been discharged this year.

America has fought many wars, most of them successfully, by maintaining a policy that excludes the openly gay from being in the military.

If President Obama thinks he can change human nature or ignore history, he is very mistaken. He should listen to the generals and admirals, but he probably won’t.

Abolishing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will be just another nail in the coffin of America and President Obama has been busy wielding a very big hammer of late.

I'm Still Not Laughing

By Alan Caruba

It’s just too easy to make snide jokes about Al Franken’s rise to the U.S. Senate and I won’t do it.

The facts are that he has been quite successful throughout his life. He is a graduate of Harvard in government studies, so he presumably has read the U.S. Constitution. He proved himself to be a tenacious candidate, waiting for many months for the courts to vindicate his victory.

Minnesota strikes me as a very strange place, politically speaking. They once elected a former professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura, to be their Governor. Votes for Franken kept showing up unexpectedly. I wouldn’t be surprised if some were found at the bottom of a wishing well.

Franken has written some successful books such as “Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fact Idiot”, number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and followed that up with another bestseller, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.”

Aside from the fact that the titles betray a strong malice toward conservatives, Franken has clearly devoted a lot of time to thinking about the central beliefs of liberalism. He will be a reliable, knee-jerk vote in the Senate.

He is best known from his days as a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live, 1975-1980 and again in 1985 to 1995. He would win five Emmy awards along the way. From 2004 to 2007 he was part of the ill-fated Air America Radio that tried to become the first progressive talk radio network, but it was no match for the popularity of Rush Limbaugh or the many other conservative talk show hosts.

Though born in New York in 1951, Franken is a true Minnesotan because his family moved there when he was age four and that’s where he grew up in middle class comfort. Franken absorbed some bedrock liberal values and perceptions of the world, not the least of which is that government exists to help people who cannot help themselves.

Happily married for 22 years, he saw it happen for those in his wife’s family, confirming his belief that more government is probably good government so long as it hands out other people’s money for worthy causes like Pell Grants for college.

The point of this brief biographical sketch is that Al Franken is a true believer in liberalism. I can see him happily performing the duty of being Barack Obama’s footstool.

Despite all the dubious circumstances involving his election to high office he is without doubt the first professional comedian to become a U.S. Senator. We have had actors in Congress and the White House, but the two that come to mind were both conservatives.

I may disagree with everything Al Franken believes, but I will neither doubt his sincerity nor his intelligence.

For my part, I never found much of what he did as a comedian very funny. In fact, I found a lot of it to be downright creepy. I didn’t laugh at it then and I have no cause to be laughing now.

I would not, however, under-estimate him.