Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Stop Al Gore Before He Lies Again..and Again...and Again!
By Alan Caruba
The New York Times once again is Al Gore’s “enabler”, publishing a February 28 opinion editorial, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change”, despite the mounting evidence that global warming was and is a complete fabrication.
In November 2009, the Telegraph, a British newspaper, carried a story, “Al Gore could become world’s first carbon billionaire”, so let us disabuse ourselves of the notion that Gore just wants to save the world.
Heavily invested in the “carbon credits” scam and technologies whose success depend on people believing fairy tales about “clean energy” alternatives such as wind and solar energy, Gore has enriched himself by trumpeting the biggest hoax of the modern era.
It is no surprise that The New York Times published his latest collection of lies. The reportorial record of the Times has been decades of lies about global warming. Whatever patina of respectability it once had has been eroded by its participation in the fraud. Why should it stop now?
There is increasing discussion of whether testimony before Congress by Gore and other global warming advocates constitute criminal behavior that begins with lying under oath.
On February 24th The Washington Times reported on a hearing of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget. “Republican James Inhofe told EPA head, Lisa Jackson, that man-made climate change was a ‘hoax’ concocted by ideologically motivated researchers who ‘cooked the science.’”
“More than that, Inhofe in releasing a GOP report questioning the science used to support cap-and-trade legislation, hinted that such activities may be part of a vast criminal enterprise designed to bilk governments, taxpayers and investors while enriching those making the false claims.”
The global warming hoax has been sustained for decades by reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) an agency of the United Nations Environmental Program. It is responsible for the Kyoto Protocol that required signature nations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases said to be trapping heat. In July 1997 a unanimous Senate resolution rejected the Protocol.
Key players, the scientists who controlled and provided the data to support global warming, Phil Jones, head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, are just two currently under investigation for alledgely deliberately providing and publishing falsified climate data.
Based on thousands of emails leaked last year, it is clear they and others engaged in an effort to suppress any dissenting data from being published in peer-reviewed science journals.
Does that deter Al Gore? The very first paragraph of his opinion editorial claimed that the planet faces “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale preventative measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”
He wrote this knowing that data from weather satellites have shown little warming trend of the atmosphere since 1979!
He wrote that “January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.” Rubbish. He based that on the claim of a single Australian scientist that came from the same garbage can of equally absurd claims put forth for decades.
In a similar fashion, IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers were melting and the countless other claims attributed to global warming were based on inaccurate, often deliberately distorted computer models and from dubious sources.
Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, a leader in the effort to reveal the vast global warming fraud, on February 27 wrote that “this apparent (global warming) consensus misled not only the media and the public, but also the wider scientific community, which had remained largely unaware of the ongoing debate and of the work of many reputable climate experts who disagreed with the IPCC.”
Dr. Singer summed up the entire global warming hoax as based on “temperature data (that) had been manipulated.”
When you use bad data you get bad results. When you use it to enrich yourself, you are engaged in an activity worthy of a criminal investigation.
It was unworthy of The New York Times to lend itself to the continuing lies of Al Gore, but neither it is surprising since the credibility of this once respected newspaper has been trashed by its appalling biases and a succession of reporters who have been found to be plagiarists and fantasists.
About the only thing left in which a reader can put any confidence is the date under the Times banner each day.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
Rules for a Gun Fight
As a former member of the U.S. Army, this made me laugh...a lot. It's so true!
Friday, February 26, 2010
Applying Alinsky: Why Obamacare Makes No Sense
By Alan Caruba
After seven and a half hours of the Republicans trying to introduce some rationality into the discussion of Obamacare, the “reform” of Medicare that actually takes trillions out of the present system and adds millions of people into it, the ordinary American can be excused for being confused, frustrated, and angry.
That’s exactly where President Obama, the Chicago political mafia around him, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want people to be. At one point in the pointless all-day meeting on Thursday, she even claimed that passing Obamacare would create four million jobs overnight! Even for Speaker Pelosi, that’s a new level of insane babble.
Nothing coming out of the leadership in the White House or Congress makes a grain of sense and it is calculated to making the public so hopeless that, in the end, when they manage to bribe their way to a “reconciliation” vote to pass it, the public will feel defeated by all their efforts to date and ripe for more legislative horrors such as Cap-and-Trade.
Those efforts were seen in the heated town hall meetings during the summer, a march on Washington, D.C. in September, the elections of Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey, and a Senator from Massachusetts. In very obvious ways, the public is shouting No! No! No!
Forgotten and unreported in all this are the “Rules for Radicals” by the godfather of all radical community organizers, Saul Alinsky. The President who began his political career as a community organizer and whose entire approach to politics is based on his book, said “It was that education that was seared into my brain. It was the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard.”
Alinsky taught that Americans must be overwhelmed with a never-ending barrage of crisis, emergencies, and unworkable ‘solutions’ that exacerbate problems. This is why Rahm Emanuel, the President’s Chief of Staff, famously said that a crisis should never be wasted.
It may even explain why the financial crisis conveniently occurred in the last weeks of the Bush term and during the campaign for the presidency.
It also explains why the so-called “stimulus” bill has done nothing to create jobs and, in fact, why some ten million Americans have lost their jobs in the past year while billions were allocated to countless political pork projects rather than taking steps to lower the taxes on corporations and small businesses in order to actually stimulate hiring and growth.
Alinsky also preached the importance of intimidation and of ridicule to achieve one’s goals. Though guarded, the President used both at the meeting to discuss Obamacare. Just ask Senator John McCain or Representative Eric Cantor.
Again, because the mainstream media, still in love with a President whose approval ratings now stand at only 44% and heading south, neither vetted him as a candidate, nor analyzed the Alinsky approach that he cites as the greatest influence in his life. The public can be forgiven for not knowing that Alinsky’s book is dedicated to “the very first radical”, none other than “Lucifer” a.k.a. Satan
Now perhaps you can understand why, when the 2,400 page bill was actually put on display during the meeting, President Obama dismissed it as “political theatre” and “a prop”, but it was neither. How can one discuss such a massive bill without, at least, bringing it to the meeting allegedly intended for that purpose?
The bill, however, contains some of the most wrenching and damaging changes to the nation’s healthcare system and the insurance programs involved with it that it cannot and must not be so casually dismissed.
If Obamacare passes, the healthcare system that Americans value will be destroyed and turned into one resembling the failed systems in neighboring Canada and in Great Britain where horror stories of delayed and denied care are routine.
Barack Obama is the apotheosis of Saul Alinsky’s gameplan to destroy the republic and replace the Constitution with an all-powerful socialist central government.
First, we must by drowning Congress in calls, faxes, and emails, make it abundantly clear that we are opposed to Obamacare. We must sway as many fence-sitters as possible.
Then, in November, we must vote out of office those incumbents who have supported and voted for the House and Senate versions of it.
And lastly we must return power in Congress to the Republicans who have been chastened and learned from their mistakes in the 2006 and 2008 elections. The nation’s future depends on it.
(c) Alan Caruba, 2010
We the People
Take five minutes to watch this video. It will remind you what is at stake and why we cannot dare to lose the struggle with the present administration.
How Many "Scientists" Does It Take to Convince You It's Too Warm?
An Australian scientist has analyzed satellite data and concluded that January 2010 was the hottest one in a very long time, maybe ever. This struck the Express, a British newspaper, as a bit odd given the severe winter conditions that fabled isle has experienced.
I keep waiting for Al Gore to emerge from his mansion and make a similar announcement, but he may be hiding out for fear of being dragged before a congressional committee to justify his earlier claims of global warming. There is talk of several laws having been broken by those most closely associated with the global warming fraud; the ones that got rich from it and those who received millions in government grants for their "research."
So, the question is, how many "scientists" will it take to convince you (especially if you live in the northeast) that it's just too warm?
Here's a link to the article:
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/160556
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Accelerating the Speed of Lies
By Alan Caruba
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…”
Who wrote that? The answer is Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf”, published in his1925 autobiography. During World War Two the U.S. government’s Office of Strategic Services, which later would evolve into the Central Intelligence Agency, assessed Hitler’s methods:
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people would sooner or later believe it.”
I have been reading David Kupelian’s new book, “How Evil Works” and thinking a lot lately about lies, lying, and liars. At the heart of great frauds is the lie and it seems to me that Americans have lately been subjected to a surfeit of lies that began with the 2008 election campaign in which a virtually unknown, first term Illinois Senator announced he was running for President.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” is attributed to Mark Twain and the truth of that is more evident than ever because technology has increased the speed with which lies travel. It has, fortunately, also given speed to those who debunk the lies and the result is a dizzying avalanche of conflicting claims.
Being ignorant of the intent of our nation’s Founding Fathers, of the limitations on the federal government found in the U.S. Constitution, of the deliberate separation of powers in our government’s executive, judicial, and legislative branches, and of history in general puts people at a disadvantage to recognize a threat to the nation and their freedom.
Edgar Watson Howe, (1853-1937) a newspaper and magazine editor in the early years of the last century said, “Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.”
I think he was reflecting on the influence of the broadcast and print media of his day, but it is no less true today. Most certainly, the presidency is an enormous platform for the person holding the office to advance policy by telling lies.
A President, however, who is perceived to be a serial liar, soon begins to lose credibility and popularity. President Obama’s credibility and popularity has fallen at an astonishing rate in just over a year in office.
It is worth noting, too, that the credibility of newspapers as a source of objective reporting has been in decline as the Internet has grown, offering an enormous number of news and opinion websites from which anyone can determine the truth or falsehood of public debate.
The English publisher and writer, Ernest Benn (1875-1954) said, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedy.”
We are seeing this play out in the effort to “reform” Medicare by President Obama and the Democrat Party. Even Republicans know that Medicare is in need of some changes to improve the program. Tort reform and the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines are but two improvements that make perfectly good sense to most people.
However, the reform being proffered by the White House is nothing more than a socialist expansion of a government that is already too large and too unwieldy to serve the interests of Americans. It would, as is often pointed out, destroy the best health system in the world and put one sixth of the nation’s economy under the control of government.
In the process of putting forth Medicare “reform” President Obama has told so many lies that it is only with great difficulty that one can keep track of them.
Little wonder that the great historian, Edward Gibbon, wrote that “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”
No greater modern example of this is found in the global warming fraud. Since the 1980s the deliberate distorting of “science” has been the basis for the Big Lie that the Earth’s overall temperature is rising rapidly and that mankind is responsible for it through the use of coal, oil, and natural gas as fuels for industry use and the production of electrical power.
The greatest lies of the modern era, however, have been communism and its baby sister, socialism. The deaths of millions are attributed to Communism as practiced in the former Soviet Union and in the early years of the Peoples Republic of China. Nazism, a form of socialism, led to the deaths of millions in World War Two.
Nations that have embraced socialism are experiencing serious financial crisises these days. These political systems have proven to be failures wherever they have been introduced and imposed.
The greatest domestic challenge to Americans today is the combination of socialism, a system that has been slowly introduced into the governance of the nation since the 1930s, and the recent election of a “messiah” promising “hope and change.”
Beyond and within our shores, the other Big Lie, Islam, threatens our freedoms and it too must be resisted and defeated.
Today, however, Americans need to embrace the U.S. Constitution as never before. It is our shield against despotism and the lies that advance it.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
More Global Warming Coming My Way
In the event you do not see any posts on this blog or on my Facebook page, there's a fairly good chance I may lose electrical power as this monster blizzard arrives Thursday and stays on through Friday.
The Census is Getting Personal
This five-minute video explains that, under the Constitution, the government may only count how many live in a particular place. Today's census, however, asks a lot of personal questions for which they have no constitutional authority. Can you refuse to share personal information? So far, the government has no answer for that question.
Kill Obamacare Now!
By Alan Caruba
Should the Republicans meet with President Obama to discuss their proposals for the reform of healthcare legislation?
No!
As with everything else involved with Obama, the meeting on Thursday is pure political theatre. It has nothing whatever to do with compromise or changes in his proposed healthcare reform.
The Republicans should not be intimidated into believing that failure to meet with the President will paint them as obstructionists. They are in office for purpose of obstructing this legislative monstrosity and the Senate’s Harry Reid has made it clear he intends to pass any bill that the House sends. Speaker Pelosi has said as much too.
Speaker Pelosi, however, is presiding over a House in which many of its Democrat members are in full flight from Obamacare, knowing that a vote for it is a vote to be defeated in the November midterm elections. Looking across to the Senate, they know that Scott Brown (R-MA) was elected primarily for his opposition to Obamacare.
The bill can be defeated in the House and should be. A bit of history: the Constitution was written to facilitate a slower process of legislating so that bills could be reviewed, debated, and responded to in a fashion that reflected the PEOPLE’S preferences. The Founders knew that any government that could pass anything it wanted at warp speed would swiftly plunder and exhaust the treasury as well as run after every fad that came along.
Since the financial crisis in late 2008, the White House and Congress has functioned on the basis of government-by-crisis.
If restoring stability to the banking sector (the TARP bill) wasn’t enough, the Obama administration told Americans that General Motors and Chrysler had to be saved rather than permitted to go into bankruptcy and be restructured. Then Americans were told that billions had to be borrowed and spent to “stimulate” jobs. All of these bills were passed too swiftly for serious analysis and rebuttal.
On February 17th syndicated columnist and radio personality Hugh Hewitt wrote: “When the GOP lost control of the House and Senate, the annual budget deficit was $161 billion. When President Obama’s budget for next year—with no stimulus and no TARP—calls for $1.6 trillion in red ink.”
What the nation needs is congressional gridlock to ensure that this continued rape of the treasury and our future is stopped.
If the Tea Party movement tells us anything, it is that millions of Americans want a return to the strict interpretation and obedience to the Constitution, and to the principles of fiscal prudence, small government, and a strong defense.
The Republican Party has a chance to demonstrate that by boycotting Thursday’s meeting about Obamacare. They need to stand in front of the microphones and cameras and tell people that their healthcare reform proposals were presented weeks ago to President Obama and that he continues to lie to Americans by suggesting he has not seen or read them.
If the GOP fails to meet this challenge, they will find themselves up against third party candidates that will doom them to minority status in the next election and possibly others to come.
They have the party apparatus to win. What they need now is the courage to oppose the Democrats and President Obama until they can regain control of the Senate and House.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
Next time you're bored, try this with your cellphone
Turn off your cellphone and then proceed. Be prepared to laugh...a lot!
Defeat Obamacare Now!
If Obamacare does not make it out of the House, it's dead. Let your State's Representatives know you oppose it. You can call and need not explain anything at length. They will note your opposition and add it to the list of others.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
A Petition Worth Signing
Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana, a physician, has proposed an amendment that would require congressmen and senators to take the same healthcare plane they would force on the rest of us.
They are currently exempt! You know they don't want to give up their present choice of ten different plans.
On Tuesday, the Senate health committee voted 12-11 in favor of a two-page amendment that would require all members and their staffs to enroll in any new government health plan.
You can express your support for Cong. Fleming's amendment by signing a petition on his website at http://fleming.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=55
Sign up! Let others know about this petition. Fight back!
Glenn Beck, Performer and Provocateur
By Alan Caruba
I watched Glenn Beck mesmerize the audience at the CPAC meeting that had begun so well with serious conservative speakers such as former Vice President Dick Cheney. However, it ended as a libertarian fun fest and Beck strikes me as the clown prince of libertarianism.
I find it beneficial when a conservative can demonstrate a sense of humor as he or she discusses the great issues of our day, but I also find it uncomfortable when someone like Ann Coulter presents a “speech” that is more a series of one-liners than a coherent examination of current events.
Watching Coulter forever adjusting her long tresses behind one ear or the other makes me a little crazy because she does it non-stop. Like Beck, she constantly skates between being a serious commentator and a contestant in a state beauty contest.
Beck is, above all, a performer. He made his bones on talk radio, migrated for a while to CNN, and then to Fox News where he is enormously popular. His manner is that of the smart kid in high school who secretly wishes he was the captain of the football team, but has to settle for being able to keep the other kids laughing because he can devilishly imitate Mr. Brown, the math teacher, to perfection.
He’s all googly-eyes and deep sighs. He’s in near constant motion even when he is seated. Every time he starts to choke up and/or tear up, I want him to man up.
He tells us, too, that he was formerly an alcoholic, was once totally broke, and only attended one class for one semester of college. Give him credit for rising above all that, but remember, too, that his primary talent in life is to sit behind a radio microphone or stand in front of a television camera and “perform.”
His specialty these days is to expose the slimy characters surrounding President Obama and that is almost too easy to do. I give him credit for doing what the mainstream press has failed to do from the day Obama, an unknown Illinois Senator, announced he was running to be President after having barely begun his first term in office.
Talk about “audacity”! Obama had written two memoirs before the age of 45, nobody knew who he was and there was literally no paper trail to say where he was born, what schools he attended, etc! But he could deliver a heck of a speech.
Beck, too, is a skilled speaker. On a purely personal level, it gives me the creeps to hear his greeting at the beginning of each show, “Hello, America”, as if all of America was waiting for him to explain communism, capitalism, and the issues that many others are also explaining on air and in print.
His on-air personality is more akin to a tent-show evangelist skillfully working up the crowd to a frenzy so that they will find salvation. I have been to those tent revivals and they are great entertainment, but as a character in the movie, “Elmer Gantry”, says, “I have been saved many times” meaning he has relapsed and attended such meetings many times.
Beck’s followers get to attend five days a week with repeats on the weekends.
Who, though, am I to argue with the enormous popularity of Beck’s books or the sold-out performances of his shows? My problem is that the late great comedian, George Carlin, also sold out entire theatres and wrote a number of bestselling books. But Carlin never pretended to be anything other than a comedian.
Beck turned the final day of CPAC into an orgy of accusations in which Democrats, Republicans, independents, progressives, and everybody else were to blame for the terrible state of the nation. In this deeply conservative event, Beck determined that everyone was the problem. In that, he was and is deeply mistaken.
The nearly million people who showed up in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 2009 to protest Obamacare are not the problem. They were the cure. There are plans for another march on Washington and this time it will be to demand that Barack Hussein Obama quit. That’s right. They will demand he resign!
That is so quintessentially American you just want to cheer!
I only occasionally watch Glenn Beck these days. He's on during my dinner time.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
We Copyright Because We Must
By Alan Caruba
Not that long ago, someone using the name "Eddie Sessions" lifted a commentary of mine, posted here on January 2nd, and apparently put it on some site identified or misidentified with the Wall Street Journal. He used his byline, not mine.
People familiar with my writings immediately spotted something was wrong. The result was a lot of emails asking me to explain and, ultimately, the issue became so intense that Snopes.com even put out a notice about it, correctly identifying me as the author.
I have been writing professionally for longer than many of my readers have been on Earth! It has always been standard operational procedure to put a Copyright (c) notice on anything I write, but the Internet is a different kind of creature and, after a while I stopped doing it, knowing anyone could simply copy and paste anything of mine on the Internet to anywhere else.
Well, I am back to attaching a Copyright notice, Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2010, to my daily posts because it is probably a good idea and it might discourage the "Eddie Sessions" of the world not to put their names on my writings.
Feel free to share what you find here on your own blog or website, or email to friends, but from now on it will bear a copyright notice.
Take Four Minutes to Learn How Green Advocacy Groups Garner millions in public funds
Most Americans are unaware how the leading green advocacy groups feed at the public trough, collecting legal fees and grants from the federal government. It amounts to millions. Take four minutes to learn about it.
A Culture Clash with Islam
By Alan Caruba
The news out of Israel is that its air force has introduced a fleet of huge pilotless planes that can remain in the air for a full day. The Heron TP drones are said to be “primarily used for surveillance and carrying diverse payloads.” I love that last one, “diverse payloads.”
Once again the Israelis have demonstrated their ability and intent to remain on the defense in a Middle East that has resisted their existence since 1948 with wars and campaigns of terror.
Better than every other nation, the Israelis understand the culture of the Middle East and the nature of their enemies. They do not underestimate them. Six decades of seeking peace with the Palestinians, pawns of Iran and the other nations that refuse them citizenship, have taught that there is no way to negotiate peace with them. All past efforts such as the Oslo Accords, withdrawal from Gaza, et cetera, lay in tatters.
History records that the Jews lost their homeland in 70 AD, disbursed into a vast Diaspora, and were unable to reclaim it until 1948. Jews had declared Israel their homeland more than three thousand years ago. Jerusalem was and is their capitol, though holy to Christians and to Muslims.
The harsh reality is that you cannot negotiate with people who want to kill you. This is the lesson of the Holocaust that cost the lives of six million European Jews in the last century. It is a lesson that neither America, Europe, nor other nations around the world have absorbed.
Ever since the advent of Islam, the invention of Muhammad, in 622 A.D., this alleged religion has waged a war of conquest to impose a universal caliphate on the world.
Islam is not a religion of tolerance. It is not a religion of peace. It is opposed to all Western concepts of public and private conduct. It is incompatible with democracy. By all standards of modern thought and behavior it is barbaric.
America has been dealing out retribution to Muslims since the days of Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary pirates. In the modern era, Arabs and Persians have been nursing grudges going back to the Crusades, to being driven out of Spain in 1502. Thereafter in the last century the Middle East was subject to the colonialist designs of England and France after World War One.
The discovery of vast reserves of oil transformed the history of the Middle East, not so much that the lives of its people improved, nor that its monarchs and despots were any less brutal, but that the West had an essential stake there based on its need for oil.
Since 9/11 the United States has spent billions waging war in Iraq because Hussein Saddam threatened Kuwait as well as sharing a long border with Saudi Arabia. It did so in the term of George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. It was always about oil, essential to the U.S. and the West, and there is no good reason to think otherwise.
The irony of this and the current conflict in Afghanistan where no oil exists is that America has now set up an Islamic republic in Iraq and is striving to maintain the semblance of one in Afghanistan. So far the score is one less despot in Iraq and a score of mujahadin calling themselves Taliban or al Qaeda. We are engaged in “nation building” but we are simply rebuilding Islamic nations.
Despite this, the Arabs and the Persians continue to see themselves as the “victims” of America and the West. They would have no oil industry were it not for the West. They would not have the illusion of representative governments were it not for the West. They would have had no hope of joining the march of history were it not for the West.
These “victims” killed nearly 3,000 Americans who were not at war with them on September 11, 2001. They had been waging war against America and American interests from World War Two and all the years since then. They raised the level of bloodletting in the 1980s, in the 1990s, and in the first decade of the new century.
They have killed “infidels” in London, in Bali, in Beirut, in Mumbai, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and they kill their fellow Muslims with abandon in Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, and elsewhere throughout the Middle East and Africa.
In 2007, Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University said, “There are many religions in the world, but as far as I know there are only two that have claimed that their truths are not only universal—--all religions claim that—--but also exclusive; that they—the Christians in one case, the Muslims in the other—are the fortunate recipients of God’s final message to humanity, which is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves—--like the Jews or the Hindus—--but to bring to the rest of humanity, removing whatever obstacles there may be on the way.”
“This self-perception, shared between Christendom and Islam, led to the long struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries and which is now entering a new phase.”
If the escalating threat of an Iran with nuclear weapons worries you, remember, it is a new phase of a very long struggle. People who behead other people, who routinely take hostages, who send their children to die as suicide bombers, and who hold women in virtual bondage are not like us, despite the “diversity” rubbish taught in our schools and preached as political correct everywhere else.
Some cultures—-ours—-are manifestly superior to others. America is proof of that.
(c) Alan Caruba, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Making Vitamins Too Costly for Your Health
By Alan Caruba
At age 72 I have been taking a full range of vitamin and mineral supplements for years. Even I find it amusing to open more than a dozen bottles every morning to extract vitamins A, B, C, D and E, along with zinc, potassium, selenium, and fish oil. On the advice of my physician long ago, I also take a low dose aspirin every day. I also take some herbal supplements.
In early January I fell and broke my collar bone. A month later it was completely healed. I don’t get the common cold, although I do experience seasonal allergies that are controlled with anti-histamine. In sum, I am as healthy as a person of my age can hope to be.
So why have Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) joined to introduce an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that would deny freedom of easy access to these vitamins and minerals that are now commonly available in supermarkets, pharmacies and other outlets at affordable prices?
Why would they conspire to make dietary supplements such as purified fish oil seven times more expensive than it is today?
It is irrational, not to say obscene, at a time when a debate is raging over the costs of Medicare and the various illnesses that afflict Americans to introduce a law that would raise the cost of vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements that are among the best forms of preventative medicine available to the general public.
Who, ultimately, will benefit from such a law? The answer is the pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Steven Joyal, M.D., vice president of science and medical affairs of the Life Extension Foundation, says “This bill aims to further pharmaceutical profits by creating wide-ranging, unprecedented FDA power to reclassify natural nutritional products as drugs.”
I am a free market capitalist, but I also know that many companies engage in “rent seeking”, a term to describe how they use the ability of Congress to pass laws and regulations that improperly and unfairly increase their profits.
The bill, titled that “Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010” is a classic example of how an ever-expanding federal government continues to get between Americans and the freedoms they have come to take for granted. High on the list is the freedom to maintain one’s health; in this case with affordable and easily accessible vitamins and minerals.
The “Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010” has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with increasing the profits of pharmaceutical companies. It does not enhance safety because vitamins and mineral supplements are already manufactured under some of the most stringent restrictions placed on any products sold anywhere in the world.
My friend, Frank Murray, is the author of nearly 50 books on health and nutrition. He is the former editor of Better Nutrition, GreatLife, and Let’s Live magazines. His books have documented how various vitamins and minerals, as well as herbal supplements have preventative and curative affects on a wide range of ailments and afflictions.
His latest book, “Sunshine and Vitamin D” describes the research concerning this vitamin’s ability to reduce or ameliorate cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and a host of other ailments. And that is just one common vitamin!
It is astonishing how vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements can aid the body to resist the many pathogens in our environment, to digest the food we eat, and to enhance many of our mental and physical abilities.
This latest bill in Congress should be defeated. Its two sponsors should be held up to scrutiny to determine how great a role the donations of pharmaceutical companies to their election campaigns played in the drafting and introduction of this bill.
There is not enough scorn that can be heaped upon the bill’s sponsors and any member of Congress that votes for it.
I don’t want and I don’t need a doctor’s prescription to purchase the vitamins and minerals I take daily. Neither do you!
(c)Alan Caruba, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The Multi-Billion Dollar Global Warming Fraud
By Alan Caruba
As the massive global warming fraud implodes, the one aspect of it that has not been explored in depth is the equally massive waste of billions of dollars spent by the United States and nations around the world, we were told, to avoid global warming.
Whole industries such as automobile manufacture had demands and limits put on them. Some states required utilities to buy “carbon credits” to offset their use of “fossil fuels.” The list of things attributed to global warming expanded to the point of total absurdity.
The codification of the fraud into law began with the Kyoto Protocol, an element of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change whose purpose was to fight a global warming that we now know was not happening.
The data to support the fraud came out of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that specialized in distorting climate data in every way possible to emphasize a normal warming cycle and then to minimize any indication of a new cooling cycle dating to around 1998 or earlier.
The IPCC data, released periodically in reports purporting to be the work of some 2,500 scientists from around the world, were actually based the handiwork of a few academic centers such as the Climate Research Center (CRU) at East Anglia University in England, Penn State University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and climate modeling from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Other participants in the fraud were NASA’s Goddard Institute and NOAA, both of whom produced claims, predictions, and questionable data to support “global warming.”
In the U.S. alone, I have heard figures in the area of $50 billion that have been spent on “climate change” over the course of administrations dating back to Clinton. In England, between 2006 and 2008, the government spent the equivalent of nearly $14 million (U.S.) on publicity stunts to convince Brits that global warming was real.
It is legitimate to ask if global warming has not in effect been a criminal enterprise.
The Kyoto Protocol required the nation states that signed onto it to commit to a reduction of four “greenhouse” gas, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride, and two groups of gases, hydrofluorocarbons and perflourocarbons. These gases occur in minimal amounts in the Earth’s atmosphere which is composed primarily of 95% to 97% water vapor!
The cost of accepting this commitment is measured in several ways, not the least of which was the sale of “carbon credits” to utilities and to industrial enterprises that would permit them to function outside the limits imposed. The exchanges created for this purpose prospered but it increased the cost of providing electrical energy and the manufacture of all manner of products.
The limitations, however, did not apply to either China or India, both of which were exempted, as were undeveloped Third World nations.
The climate change fraud also affected major U.S. corporations, none of whom wanted to appear to be opposed to it. However, on Tuesday, February 16th, BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar all announced they were dropping out of the Climate Action Partnership that advocated energy-rationing. Some of the millions squandered on various global warming and “environmental” projects and groups came from the bottom line of corporations across the nation.
At this point, any corporation that speaks of “climate change” in its advertising and other public statements is part of the global fraud that originated in the United Nations Environmental Program.
The carbon emissions limitations also served to justify huge public subsidies for U.S. producers of wind and solar energy, called “clean” energy. Several nations, such as Spain, Germany and Great Britain, invested heavily in these alternative energy sources only to discover that they were massively inefficient and unreliable.
At the same time, the global warming fraud in the United States limited the building of coal-fired plants to generate electricity when, in fact, coal provides 50% of the nation’s electricity needs. Combined with fears of nuclear energy dating back to the 1970s, the United States has essentially starved itself of the energy it needs.
According to a recently released study by the National Association of Utility Regulatory Commissioners, the U.S. gross domestic product would lose $2.36 trillion and American consumers will pay an additional $2.35 trillion for energy if the oil and gas on federal lands remain off-limits through 2030. This constitutes a form of energy and economic suicide!
A British newspaper, the Daily Mail in a recent interview with CRU Prof. Phil Jones, revealed he knew there had been no “statistically significant” warming for the past fifteen years. Little wonder Prof. Jones and the CRU refused to honor UK Freedom of Information requests for the data on which the IPCC claims were based. He and others who provided IPCC data are under investigation.
In essence, the IPCC reports were all fraudulent and all were used to advance the global warming fraud. That is why President Obama’s claim of “overwhelming evidence” of climate change, i.e., global warming is particularly troubling.
It is essential to understand that the “Cap-and-Trade” legislation passed by the House and waiting for a vote in the Senate is based on the IPCC reports and the threat by the Environmental Protection Agency to begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions throughout the nation have no legitimate basis in science.
There are still billions at stake if global warming-related laws, projects such as wind farms or the requirement that ethanol be added to every gallon of gas purchased are permitted to proceed or continue.
Global warming as an issue or basis for any law or expenditure of public funding no longer exists.
It’s long passed the time when the nation’s news media should stop referring to it as anything other than a fraud perpetrated on the people of the world.
Democrats Telling More Lies About Global Warming
Lies, lies, and more lies. That has been the story of global warming...since the 1980s.
These are the some of the Democrats who have been telling them.
Anyone this careless of the truth does not deserve to be in government!
An American Billboard
This billboard is on I-75 just south of Lake City, Florida. It cost $6,500 and will be up for 10 months where an estimated one million drivers will see it each month. Anyone who thinks Americans are going to lie down and roll over for the liberals in the White House and Congress is seriously mistaken.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Tiger Woods Agonistes
By Alan Caruba
On Friday Tiger Woods will give some kind of talk to a select group of friends and close associates at the TPC Sawgrass Clubhouse in Ponte Verde Beach, Florida. The press will be permitted to sit in another room, listen and take notes, but most certainly not to ask any questions.
I have been a public relations counselor for more than four decades and, frankly, I think this is a bad idea. The sooner he answers all those embarrassing and annoying questions, the better. Clear the air!
Let the ink-stained wretches pursue the ritual blood-letting and then get back to hitting tiny white balls into tiny tin cups on some of the most finely manicured and managed pieces of land to be found anywhere in the nation or around the world.
Americans are so accustomed to men of power and acclaim getting into trouble for cheating on their wives or just running afoul of some woman who feels wronged (and it still takes two to tango) that if Tiger Woods just says something to the effect that he has carnally known more women than most men ever will, then we could all get back to more weighty issues.
And, oh yes, he must apologize (probably excessively) for cheating on his wife and repeat that he intends to be a good father to his children. End of story.
I, of course, will be able to return to checking TMZ every hour on the hour to find out if Brad Pitt will leave Angelina Jolie and return to the arms of Jennifer Anniston.
I worry that affairs of state will interfere with Barack Obama’s golf and pick-up basketball games.
I am concerned that, one day, Janet Napolitano will be found by a random Transportation Safety Agency search to be wearing exploding underwear.
While I welcome the Friday confessional, I am inclined to believe that it will not put a quick end to the tabloid and mainstream press (notice how the tabloids are doing a far better job of journalism these days?) as they fearlessly seek out the names of every woman whoever had sex with Tiger in the last decade. That could take a while.
Still, I note that few people are discussing South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, former Governor Elliot Spitzer, former Senator and John Kerry running mate, John Edwards these days. In the age of the Internet and massive overflows of information, these dalliances rapidly lose their power to titillate beyond a month or more.
While I grant that golf is a sport that requires extraordinary skills, it is the element of tightly controlled risk-taking that ultimately makes us hold our breath as the little ball traverses the hills and valleys of each hole.
Transfer that element of risk to the multifold bedrooms where Tiger and his countless conquests have lingered in carnal bliss. When you do, forgiveness will fill your heart with the bright shining light of insight and understanding.
Roll over, Casanova! You have met your match!
The Yucca Mountain Blues
By Alan Caruba
Are you worried about your “carbon footprint”?
Still think “global warming” is real despite the fact that one of its leading advocates, a climatologist, recently said that there’s no significant data to demonstrate any warming since 1995?
Can’t figure out why the White House is still trying desperately to pass the “Cap-and-Trade” bill based on the totally discredited claim that carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere are “causing” the non-existent “global warming”?
Do you increasingly think that you are Alice in Wonderland and now living in a nation where the White House and Congress keep telling you things that are totally absurd?
Let’s put aside the claim that we have to borrow and borrow in order to keep on spending and spending to save the economy when common sense says that is the worst way to end the economic death spiral they have created.
The latest ploy by the White House was a move in the direction of nuclear power to generate the electricity the nation needs for its current and future needs. Since the 1970s, for reasons that defy understanding, several administrations, Democrat and Republican, have done little to encourage nuclear power despite the fact that a nation like France derives most of its electricity from it.
Even so, nuclear provides about twenty percent of the electricity we use while coal provides just over fifty percent. In both cases, neither has anything to do with “greenhouse gases” because the gases play no role in climate change. Indeed, more carbon dioxide, being plant food, would greatly enhance the growth of crops and forests.
“Cap-and-Trade” is nothing more than a tax on energy use. Simply put, it has been cheap, abundant energy that has fueled the economy of the United States since it was founded. The discovery of oil in 1859 also played a major role and, despite the lies, the U.S. has an abundance of oil.
Like nuclear power, however, successive administrations since the 1970s have ensured that U.S. oil companies were kept from exploring for it, extracting it, refining it and selling it to us at affordable prices.
This is in sharp contrast to the endless babble about the need to be “energy independent.”
The talk about support for the nuclear energy industry is welcome, but what the White House is not saying is that his proposed budget has no funding for the nuclear waste facility in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
Congress passed a Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 and amended it in 1987. Yucca Mountain is the only permanent nuclear waste repository in the nation. I repeat, the only one. Why isn’t it in operation? Glad you asked. Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has blocked its completion and use.
So we could build two or a dozen new nuclear plants—a very good idea—but there would still be no place to put the waste despite the fact that the U.S. has spent $9 billion on the first phase to build the Yucca Mountain site. A $13 million tunnel boring machine sits idle at the site.
That has not stopped the White House from wanting to put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for $8 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors in Georgia.
The purpose of all this is to get a few senators to sign on to the passage of Cap-and-Trade, a bill based on a non-existent threat from “greenhouse gases” in order to avoid a non-existent “global warming.” There are two fears; one that the Senate might pass the bill and, two, that the White House might impose it by executive order.
What we are witnessing is yet another really big, really bad idea out of the White House that continues to lie to everyone and anyone who thinks the problem is “global warming” when the problem really is a mad desire to destroy of the nation’s economy.
This has always been the single goal of the environmental movement when the global warming fraud began in the late 1980s. It accelerated with the UN Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The U.S. has never accepted the Protocol and those nations that did have since discovered that it’s been a very costly fraud.
Cap-and-Trade is a fraud. Let your senators know you oppose their vote for it. Any senator that does vote for it should be replaced if they are running for reelection in the November midterm elections.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Shoveling Borrowed Dollars
By Alan Caruba
You will not find much about “shovel ready” projects on the White House website, but there is an entire site, Recovery.gov, that extols the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that was signed into law a year ago.
I generally do not spend much time on federal government websites and especially on those that are the creation of those around President Obama. For example, the White House in November 2009 put out an announcement that Vice President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had “jumpstarted more than 10,000 transportation projects across America thanks to the swift allocation of Recovery Act dollars.” At the time of the announcement, “state agencies reported a total of 10,041 approved.”
As we have learned, news out of the White House has in the past involved state districts that don’t even exist, so I tend not to get too excited by such announcements. The projects mentioned included several stretches of new highway in Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. So far, good news.
The bad news in November was that, while more than $2 billion in federal highway funds had been allocated to California, only $837 million had been awarded for highway projects. “Even more surprising,” reported Eric A. Morris of The New York Times, “only $51 million, or about 2.5 percent of the total, had actually been disbursed.”
While Joe Biden and Ray LaHood were busy patting themselves on the back, Morris reported that “Overall, the U.S. Department of Transportation has managed to disburse only $5.5 billion to the states out of the $30.5 billion in available transportation funds.”
I don’t want to be too hard on the White House because, realistically speaking, major capital investments like highways require a lot of bureaucratic hurdles to jump before they ever begin. These are in place to ensure that the public doesn’t get ripped off and that those undertaking the projects meet fundamental industry standards.
Still, I recall President Obama telling Tom Brokaw on “Meet the Press” back in January 2009 that he had met with several governors “and all of them have projects that are shovel ready.”
Shovel ready became the instant buzzword of 2009 and it evoked visions of crews of newly employed workers drawing paychecks as opposed to the ten million or more (much more) unemployed workers in the nation a year later.
It turns out that a lot of the “stimulus” money went to states that were in serious trouble meeting pension, Medicaid, and other obligations. By October of last year, reportedly the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had received $33 billion, the Labor Department $28 billion, Education $21 billion and the Social Security Administration $13 billion. That accounted for 86% of the spending to that point.
So, in fact, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act essentially authorized the borrowing of more billions of dollars to largely fund various government agencies. If any money falls off the edge of the table and some states get the scraps, well that’s a bonus.
A year later, however, most people have figured out that programs like the Recovery Act and “Cash for Clunkers” are just so much White House smoke and mirrors.
They have figured out that the U.S. simply cannot go on borrowing and spending. And they have begun to suspect that a few tax cuts that would put money back in the hands of consumers and investors would have done a far better job of getting the economy on its feet again.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
The Constitution Needs a New Amendment
By Alan Caruba
The last Amendment to the Constitution took effect in 1992. The 27th said, “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”
I assume this means they cannot vote themselves a raise until a new group of Representatives has been seated (the House being the only chamber that can initiate financial bills.)
Big whoopee!
What is really needed is a 28th Amendment and a text has been suggested.
“Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.”
Amidst the debate over healthcare “reform” the one thing that Congress did not and does not want the public to know is that they exempted themselves from both the House and Senate versions.
Little wonder Congress regards itself as a special and elite class of citizens when you consider that lawmakers have a choice of ten healthcare plans. This is in sharp contrast to the 85% of private companies offering health coverage with one plan, take it or leave it. Anywhere from three-quarters to one-third of the cost of the plans available to those in Congress is subsidized by taxpayers.
In addition, lawmakers are entitled to special treatment at Washington’s federal medical facilities and, for a few hundred a month, access to their own pharmacy, as well as doctors, nurses and medical technicians in an office located between the House and Senate chambers.
Federal health coverage far surpasses the plans available in the private sector and, of course, the millions who are under-insured and at financial risk in the event of a major health problem. For federal employees there is no such thing as a pre-existing condition that keeps many from securing insurance.
In 2000, the National Taxpayers Union published a report on “Congressional Perks: How the Trappings of Office Trap Taxpayers.” It is well worth reading.
Briefly, Senators and Representatives receive “comfortable” salaries and they receive pension benefits that are “two to three times more generous than those offered in the private sector” for similarly salaried executives. Taxpayers “directly cover at least 80 percent of this costly plan.” The pensions, moreover, are inflation-protected, a feature that fewer than 1 in 10 private plans offer.
Most people are aware of the “junkets” that Senators and Representatives take for “fact finding” purposes. The cost of flying Speaker Pelosi and her fellow lawmakers to Copenhagen to attend the recent UN Climate Change Conference was set at more than one million dollars. A bit of research would not doubt reveal that millions of taxpayer dollars are spent to provide lawmakers with the equivalent of paid vacations.
Nor do lawmakers pick up the cost of postage to reply to their constituents as they have long enjoyed “franking” privileges to the tune of millions from the public coffer. They send out newsletters to inform constituents of all the money they have diverted to their district or state. It is regarded by many as an unfair electioneering tool. The public also pays for their office staffs.
There is a raft of exemptions and immunities from tax, pension, and other laws that burden private citizens. I would be remiss if I did not also point out that unionized federal and state workers enjoy 34% higher wages and 70% more benefits than private sector counterparts.
You can be sure that the Founding Fathers feared the growth of government and its blandishments as much as any other abuse of power.
In plain terms, it is an abuse of office and a raid on public funding. It is fundamentally un-American.
It is time for a new Amendment, though it is the least likely to ever be passed by the kindergartners presently running the nation into historical debt and possible collapse.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Iran Still Holds America Hostage
By Alan Caruba
While Americans celebrated Valentine’s Day with chocolates, flowers, and other expressions of love, others with long memories were thinking about February 14, 1977.
In his book, “A World of Trouble”, Patrick Tyler, noted that “On February 14, a heavily armed band of revolutionary guerrillas staged a full-scale assault on the American embassy compound” in Tehran, Iran.
“The young Iranians, some of them wearing the checkered kaffiyehs of the PLO, set up firing positions on the rooftops of neighboring buildings that overlooked the compound. At 10:30 a.m., they opened up with thirty-caliber machine guns, raking the embassy from two directions.”
That was an act of war. It was not, however, treated as such in that it did not provoke a military response until later and it was too little, too late, and so poorly executed it surely marked America as too weak to be taken seriously.
On that day, however, it only took two hours for the “students” to take 66 American diplomats and staff hostage. They would be held for 444 days and released, according to Tyler, only after a heavy ransom was paid.
“This episode would reverberate through the region for decades,” wrote Tyler, “suggesting to potential foes that America would not vigorously defend its interests in the Middle East.”
There are three young American hikers being held hostage as this is written. They accidentally strayed across the Iranian border last summer and currently face charges of espionage which is punishable by the death penalty in Iran. Hostage taking is the lowest form of criminal behavior and Iran thrives on it, whether it is these three or previously, a number of British sailors who were taken at gunpoint.
President Carter’s hopes for a second term were dashed by his tepid response to the hostage taking. At the time it occurred, he had been focused on getting a Camp David agreement between Anwar Sadat of Eqypt and Menachem Begin of Israel. The two received a Nobel Peace Prize, the Sinai was returned, and Carter had his singular achievement. By then, however, he had lost the confidence of most Americans.
The unanswered question about the embassy in Tehran was why it was not shut down in the wake of attacks a few days earlier on the British embassy in Tehran. In its wake, our embassies in Islamabad, Pakistan, and in Libya were attached and torched. When the Iranian revolution unfolded, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, many westerners and Iranians bailed out of Iran, seeing the writing on the wall.
Carter, however, could not conceive that Shah Reza Pahlavi was already in deep trouble in Iran. He had long been a trusted ally of the United States, but anti-Americanism had been on the rise in Iran for years as the result of our interference in that nation’s internal affairs. When Carter paid a state visit in 1977, he had toasted the shah saying that Iran under his leadership “was an island of stability in one of the most troubled regions of the world.”
The shah, however, would flee Iran and, already ill from cancer, suffer the indifference of the Carter administration, more intent on political correctness than compassion for the former ally who had spent billions on U.S. arms and other contracts.
As the Iranians celebrated the 31st anniversary of their revolution, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged that they were on the verge of becoming a nuclear state. Sanctions will not work against a nation that has already committed a serious act of war against the U.S. and for whom the U.N. is a mere echo chamber.
There is something embarrassing about the hope that little Israel will somehow rescue the whole of the West from the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. It is wishful thinking. It will require a preemptive attack with the full military capabilities of the United States.
It is highly unlikely that Barack Hussein Obama will authorize such an action. The Iranian leadership does not respect and does not fear Barack Obama, nor should they.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The Most Duplicitous President
By Alan Caruba
I have lived through thirteen presidencies starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the late 1930s. I have followed the events of their administrations, policies, and lives, and I have read widely in the history of the nation.
I do not think I have ever seen a more duplicitous President than Barack Hussein Obama. And that is saying a lot!
I hold that all presidents must lie and be good liars at that. Having the welfare of the nation in their care and an ever shifting host of threats to America’s interests and defense, all presidents—-and for that matter—-all leaders of nations, elected or otherwise—-lie to ensure the outcome they desire.
When I say “lie” in this context, I mean the shading of the truth, the telling of less than the whole truth, or the withholding of information in one fashion or another that is intended to influence decisions to achieve a particular political or strategic objective. The best presidents dedicated themselves to great enterprises such as the waging of wars of defense or resolving conflicts of one sort or another.
The worst presidents lied to the nation to protect their personal interests and, of course, the classic example is Watergate in which President Nixon engaged in a cover-up of a totally stupid and needless break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, D.C. President Clinton, caught out in a foolish affair with a White House intern, lied to everyone until he no longer could.
President Obama, however, lies all the time and this is now so evident to the members of Congress that there are those in his own party who no longer trust him, even if they will not come out and say so publicly. Most certainly, the Republicans have no reason to trust him, but they have behaved with remarkable civility.
Well, there was one exception when Sen. Joe Wilson of South Carolina was unable to contain himself during one of Obama’s speeches to a joint session of Congress and cried out, “You lie!” He was right, but he apologized anyway.
It would be naïve to believe that all politicians don’t lie to their constituency, but some are more blatant about it than others. For the most part, the press protects them out of some unspoken belief that the people elected them and are in part responsible for the probity or lack of it.
There are ample examples when the lies and behavior become so egregious even this rule of thumb cannot apply and here too there are examples of members of Congress who have been sent to jail, censored, and generally abandoned by the electorate.
Two examples of Obama’s lies presented themselves this past week. One was the announcement that the United States would support launching talks on a United Nations treaty to regulate arms sales. Obama has repeatedly told America’s 90 million-plus gun owners that they had nothing to fear, but this reverses the Bush administration’s position which respected the Second Amendment and all its implications.
All the pretty talk about the Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty is just camouflage for gun control. It is comparable to Obama’s quick flight to Copenhagen to address the UN Conference on Climate Change, returning to the U.S. to tell Congress that there was “overwhelming evidence” to support global warming. He was laughed at when he said that. (To learn more, visit www.ccrkba.org)
The other example of Obama’s deceitful ways is the fact that the Interior Department, despite Obama’s call for offshore exploration and extraction of oil and natural gas in his State of the Union speech, has announced that no offshore energy exploration will take place in the Atlantic until at least 2014.
Obama is the most anti-energy president to hold office since Jimmy Carter who drove the oil industry out of America, leaving the nation vulnerable to oil rich regions such as the Middle East. (To learn more, visit www.ierdc.org)
Lying may not be an impeachable offense though surely it played a role in Nixon’s case and, to some extent, the proceedings against Clinton. A President can only be removed from office on conviction of treason, bribery, or other “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
As of this writing, it seems likely that President Obama will be politically neutered after the November 2nd midterm elections. When even solidly blue states like Massachusetts reject Democrat candidates, the writing is on the wall.
For now, I think we can expect to see Congress find ways to delay or dismiss Obama’s grand schemes to “transform” America. It doesn’t need transforming. It has been doing quite well, with some bumps along the way, without any more socialism, and without any more lies from the 44th President.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Obama's Invisible Homeless and Hungry
By Alan Caruba
The most enduring images of the Great Depression from 1929 through to the beginning of World War II for America in 1941 were those of homeless people, hobo camps, and of soup kitchens to feed the hungry.
During the Reagan years, the media was filled with stories of the homeless as if to refute any improvement in the economy under a conservative president. These days, however, as America’s national debt and deficit continues to spiral out of control, the poor and the hungry remain largely unseen and, most significantly, largely unreported.
About the only thing one can find on the White House website with regard to homelessness are statements about the way “green jobs” will solve the problem. The first stimulus package, however, increased the amount of money that the nation’s food banks received in 2009 so someone involved understood America has a problem.
The New York Times reported “a $100 million windfall of extra food…” Also reported was that “requests for emergency food assistance were up by 30 percent in 2008 over the previous year”, but the financial crisis did not occur until late into the last year of the second Bush term.
As the recession took hold one food pantry organizer noted that “the next layer of people” were showing up; “a rapidly expanding group of child-care workers, nurse’s aides, real estate agents and secretaries who are facing a financial crisis for the first time.”
A recent study by Mathematica Policy Research revealed that in 2009 more than 37 million low-income people were receiving emergency food assistance through a network of pantries, kitchens, and shelters. Recipients represented “a broad cross-section of America, including 14 million children and three million elderly.”
“Approximately 40 percent white, 34 percent were Afro-American, and 20 percent were Hispanic.” Though 36 percent of recipient households had one working adult, ten percent were homeless.”
“Most of the organizations providing assistance in the network were faith-based” and I can recall the outcry when the Bush administration undertook to provide funding to these organizations.
While the media reporting seems limited to official government statistics, currently citing unemployment at 9.4 percent, most observers believe that it is far closer to 17 percent and that figure would actually exceed the Depression era.
There were no safety nets in the 1930s. Ironically, the programs put in place, Social Security, and later Medicare, are now all but bankrupt or soon will be. At the time they were instituted there were approximately sixteen workers paying into the system for every recipient, but now it is down to two workers per recipient and these programs represent both a high level of taxation and an increasing drain on the nation’s economy as demographic changes increase the numbers eligible for them.
Entitlement programs, along with defense, represent half of the nation’s annual budget. The proposed Obama budget is widely regarded as bizarre for the amount of spending it proposes.
In its first year, the Obama administration largely ignored joblessness in order to pursue a vastly expanded Medicare “reform” whose details, whenever they became known, generated a massive backlash from Americans who rightly saw the program as an effort to take over one sixth of the nation’s economy, putting it under federal control.
Political observers all say that the Obama administration will now “pivot” and concentrate on jobs as the major issue this year. The Democrat controlled Congress, however, is doing little to adopt the factors that contribute to job creation.
Virtually all economists recommend a reduction in the tax on U.S. corporations, currently among the highest in the world, rendering them less competitive and unable to expand their workforce.
Beyond that, the great economic engine of small businesses have seen minimum wage requirements increase and a host of other regulations that punish all businesses when they are forced to lay off or fire employees; both discourage hiring. Meanwhile, huge pension and other benefits for unionized government related jobs are bankrupting the states.
The “solutions” of the FDR years did nothing to relieve the Great Depression and are widely seen as having extended it. These same “solutions” are being pushed by the Obama administration, particularly in regard to increased taxation at the worst possible time.
For now the homeless and hungry will remain invisible to most Americans, but the media will be able to ignore it for only so long and then it will have to be addressed.
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