Big Brother, the Internet, and Your Right of Privacy

By Alan Caruba

Most Americans assume that they have a right of privacy guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and, while several of the Bill of Rights imply this right, it is not specifically expressed.

However, it is understood. In a Supreme Court case, Meyer v Nebraska, 1923, Justice McReynolds perhaps said it best:

"While this court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."

So, yes, a right of privacy does exist, but it may not exist for long.

There have been three attempts by Congress to exercise control over the Internet including the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act that would empower the companies we depend upon for access to the Internet to collect information on our activities, share it with the government, while refusing to notify us that our Internet use is being monitored. In basic terms, all our emails, Skype chats, web searches and other activities would be made known to a faceless governmental bureaucracy.

This is being put forward as a means to fight the so-called “war on terror” or to thwart cyber attacks.

Alan Gottlieb, a longtime advocate of the Second Amendment, has just created www.nointernettax.org to alert Americans to yet another threat to our privacy to oppose any kind of an Internet tax.

At the state level, the National Governor’s Association has introduced the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) for the purpose of establishing a “national collection center” to monitor and audit your Internet purchases. All your personal information and Internet shopping choices would be administered by “a trusted third party” or government body. An alternative would enable to subscribe to a national “cartel” tax collection system. It is unconstitution.

It is in essence the imposition of a national sales tax to fill the coffers of states that have demonstrated an inability to exercise prudence in the way they spend the taxes they already collect.

At the federal level, Sen. Dick Durbin has introduced S. 1452, the “Main Street Fairness Act” and has sponsored S. 1832, the “Marketplace Fairness Act.” Any time you see or hear the words “fair” or “fairness” it is a subterfuge for the redistribution of your wealth and the right of the government to know every aspect of your life. The Durbin legislation would require online retailers to pay sale tax on their transactions, thus yield million for state government.

H.R. 1981 is yet another similar piece of legislation. Under the guise of protecting children from pornography, it would require online service provides to, as Gottlieb points out, “spy on your online activities and provide that information to the government. H.R. 1981 “is all about data retention and requires Internet service providers to keep detailed records of your internet activity, your name, address, bank account numbers, and credit card numbers.”

Your privacy would vanish.

This kind of effort at totalitarian control exists at the international level insofar as the United Nations has long wanted to impose a world tax on Internet users with a special emphasis on financial transactions. In February, the U.S. Commission on Social Development introduced this form of taxation to support a “social protection floor.” It is a direct attack on capitalism which the communist-based U.N. justifies as its own version of a redistribution of wealth. Need it be said that the idea is being supported by Russia, China, India and Brazil among a number of nations seeking to control Internet transactions.

As Gottlieb points out, you already pay taxes on the Internet. “It is taxed in the same way that catalogues, mail order and TV sales are.” Indeed, “Every time you access the Internet, you are paying telecommunications taxes.” Online purchases that are not taxed include travel and financial services, vital to the vitality of the economy.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Internet Tax Freedom Act into law. It prevents governments from taxing Internet-only activities such as bandwidth, email, or the imposition of multiple taxes on any kind of electronic commerce. It will expire on November 1, 2012 unless extended by Congress.

Gottlieb notes that there are more than 30,000 state and local governments and 7,600 taxing authorities extant in the nation. As we know, most states are in serious financial difficulties, often as the result of government worker unions with which they have signed contracts that provide bountiful retirement and health benefits.

I recommend that you visit http://www.nointernettax.org/ and learn more and then to take action by writing, faxing or emailing your Senators and Representatives to let them know of your opposition to these efforts.

The United States imposes the highest corporate tax in the world and has an unfathomable tax system that sucks vast amounts of money from its citizens. It is $15 trillion in debt because it will not impose any limits on its spending. If any of the proposed measures are passed, not just more of your personal income be tapped, but your privacy will disappear.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The "What If" of John Edwards

By Alan Caruba

So much in life depends on the “what ifs.” When it comes to American politics, however, the outcomes can be disastrous. It’s a lesson that we need to address more often.

I got to thinking about this as the news of the John Edwards trial continues. For me, it’s not so much if he is found guilty or innocent. After the outcome of the O.J. Simpson trial and the more recent Casey Anthony trial, one becomes inured to miscarriages of justice. Worse off are the poor souls found guilty and serving years behind bars before being exonerated.

John Edwards, though, is emblematic of so much that is wrong with politics in America and a poster boy for why the profession of law is so frequently held in low esteem. Particularly troubling is the fact that he was chosen by John Kerry to be his running mate in the presidential campaign where, mercifully, George W. Bush defeated him in 2004.

Do we really need to be reminded that, were Kerry elected and if he were to have died in office, we would have had President John Edwards in office?

That’s why the trial about whether he misused campaign funds to cover up an affair with Rielle Hunter that led to the birth of a child (while his wife was dying from cancer) is of far less importance than the fact that America could have ended up with a President Edwards.

Let me remind you, too, that it was not the mainstream media that broke the story of Edward’s affair and love child. It was the tabloid, the National Enquirer.

To be candid, I have still not forgotten or forgiven Bill Clinton for debasing the office of President with a tawdry fling with an impressionable intern, Monica Lewinski. And, of course, he lied about it as long as he could. This flaw in his character still troubles me.

As for Kerry, the Senator from Massachusetts sets a whole new standard for stupidity and hypocrisy, but a previous Senator who made it to the Oval Office, John F. Kennedy was likely saved from ignominy by an assassin’s bullet. His philandering has been well documented and the media of his era covered for him.

Edwards strikes me as a particularly loathsome individual. If a jury sends him to jail it will merely be a paragraph in a future history book. Legal experts tend to think that he will be found not guilty of using campaign funds given the complexity of where they came from, whether they really were gifts, and other factors too arcane for me to fathom.

Consider the present situation. If Barack Obama should suffer a massive heart attack this nation and its destiny would be in the hands of Joe Biden, another fool worthy only of late night comedian’s jokes. But Biden is not a joke. He is the proverbial one heartbeat away from being the President of the United States.

Biden’s current status as campaign “attack dog” suits him well, He is capable of saying anything and mostly what he has to say is a tissue of lies. Putting aside Obama’s destruction of the nation’s economy, Biden is sufficient reason to vote for Mitt Romney and whoever he selects as his running mate.

As the pundits frequently tell us, elections have consequences. If Jimmy Carter had not turned out to be such an abysmal failure as President, we would not have had Ronald Reagan. That was Carter’s greatest legacy. Losing reelection was the best thing he did for the nation.

No matter what the jury decides about John Edwards, it will be a reminder of how close this nation came to having a man of dubious character hold a position that put him so close to the presidency.

It also says something about an America in which too many voters preferred a candidate like Edwards with good hair or Obama’s “cool” look.. Too many have either not learned or have forgotten the gravity of the choices we make when the high offices are at stake. The election is not a horse race or a beauty contest. It is often the life and death of our economy and of the men and women we send into battle.

In 2008 the media and a majority portion of the voters elected Barack Obama and we have had to endure someone who is arguably the worst President this nation has ever had. We have to avoid that occuring again. The fate of the nation depends on it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

"Warning Signs" Donation Rally

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A Sunday Thought About the EPA

Forget Homeland Security, Now It's About "Environmental Justice"

By Alan Caruba

It is the nature of any government to seek to expand its authority. The Founding Fathers knew this and gifted Americans with a Constitution that limits authority devolving it to the states and to “the people.” Read the Tenth Amendment. It isn’t working.

The freedoms they sought to establish and preserve for future generations are being eaten away and we tend only to hear about in individual cases when, in fact, it is so widespread we accept the injustices, the inefficiencies, and the enslavement in increments.

After 9/11 it was clear that some reorganization was needed to ensure that various enforcement and other agencies could communicate and coordinate more effectively in order to wage “a war on terror.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created. The sheer size of it should have been a warning.

One of its siblings was the Transportation Security Administration that currently makes taking a flight anywhere a nightmare of intrusive groping and, because one failed bomber used explosive in his shoes, everyone now must remove theirs to get on a flight.

Fifty-seven years ago, the State of New Jersey issued me my first driver’s license. For years all one needed to do was renew by mail, but after 9/11, it was decided that every license had to include a photo. A very high tech license resulted, but it also means that, if you live in New Jersey, every four years you are going to spend a minimum of two hours in your nearest motor vehicle agency standing in line and sitting around for your number to be called in order to renew.

You need bring several documents with you such as a passport, birth certificate, and Medicare card. Just one won’t do. Even though I already have a license with a photo (it was on record at the agency so there was no need for a new photo), I still had to personally prove I am who I am to receive a renewed license. In an age of computerized records of birth and residence, the whole process struck me as overkill.

After December 1, 2012, New Jersey will join eight other States to issue a driver’s license with a gold star in the upper right corner. Without it, I will not be allowed to board a domestic flight or visit a federal building. Do I feel any more secure? Not really. In fact, what I really feel is the tightening grip of the federal and state government on my freedom to drive my car, get on an airplane, or legitimately enter a building in which the work of the federal government is being conducted. This is less about security and far more about authoritarian control.

Environmental Justice

I tell you this because I doubt you are aware that the Department of Homeland Security has added a whole new layer of authority to its portfolio. You thought it was about protecting the nation against acts of terrorism. Now it is about enforcing “environmental justice.”

The DHS has added Green Police to its concerns and, if you think this has nothing whatever to do with some jihadists trying to kill a lot of people as was the case on 9/11, you would be right.

According to a DHS report entitled “Environmental Justice Strategy”, issued February 2012, it is a “commitment of the Federal Government, through its policies, programs, and activities, to avoid placing disproportionately high and adverse effects on the human health and environment of minority or low-income populations.”

This has NOTHING to do with homeland security by the wildest stretch of the imagination and yet it is, according to DHS, federal policy. It gets its authority from Executive Order 12898 and this is the way government expands and expands and expands beyond what citizens expect or request.

The results are always predictable. Ordinary people who just want to be left alone discover that the government has defined the ownership of their land and property as a criminal act.

When Chantell and Mike Sackett found themselves locked into battle with the Environmental Protection Agency that had decided their land was a wetland, they battled the EPA all the way to the Supreme Court which granted them a unanimous decision in their favor on March 12th of this year. This kind of “law enforcement” by the EPA has been common over the years, but Congress has done little to rein in its typical bullying tactics.

Now add to the EPA, the Homeland Security Department with its own Green Police empowered to protect “minority and low-income populations.” This is a deliberate effort to divide Americans from one another, inspiring racial and class warfare. It is a vast reinterpretation of its responsibilities and authority.

Welcome to the Soviet Union of America or the National Socialist States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Cartoon Round Up

Coincidences, Truth, and Propaganda

By Alan Caruba

On April 18th I received an email from the Sierra Club announcing that “We’re endorsing President Obama for reelection. We’ve made too much progress over the past four years to give it all back to Big Polluters.”

Among the Sierra Club’s many projects to plunge the nation back to the golden days of reading by candle light and transportation by horse has been “Beyond Oil.” It praised the President for implementing “the toughest fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks in history.” Never mind that this has driven up the cost of cars and trucks or that the price of gasoline at the pump is headed toward historic highs.

The Center for Automotive Research has warned that overly stringent standards could add $10,000 to the cost of a new car, thereby decreasing sales, reducing production, and thereby destroying as many as 220,000 jobs. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFÉ’s downsizing effect makes cars less safe and contributed to as many as 2,600 deaths per year.

The enemy for the Sierra Club and others like Friends of the Earth has long been coal and oil, but coincidently on the same day, the U.S. Department of the Interior, no friend to either energy source, released its “Global Estimate for Undiscovered, Technically Recoverable Conventional Oil and Gas Resources.”  It is an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey.

U.S. has Largest Energy Reserves on Earth

The estimate, however, excluded data on the U.S. resources. In March 2011, however, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report that revealed that America’s combined energy reserves are the largest on Earth. We sit atop an estimated 163 billion barrels of oil, domestic and offshore. The U.S. accounts for more than 28% of the world’s coal reserves, at least 262 billion tons. Natural gas? We have, conservatively, an estimated 2,047 trillion cubic feet.

The worldwide estimates for recoverable oil are in the billions of barrels but thanks to Obama’s Interior Department fewer leases to explore and extract it on federal owned lands have been issued and some have been reversed. When you add in the fiasco caused by two moratoriums on drilling the Gulf of Mexico, both ruled illegal by the courts, the true intent of the administration is well known and established.

In the wake of Earth Day with all its usual lies about “peak oil”, the “Global Estimate” concluded that the world “holds an estimated 585 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional oil.” In addition, it estimated that were is “5,606 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional natural gas” and “167 barrels” of comparable natural gas liquids.”

For reasons known only to those who set energy policy in the U.S., according to the Institute for Energy Research, “fossil fuel (coal, oil, and natural gas) production on Federal and Indian lands is the lowest in the nine (9) years” that the U.S. Energy Information Administration has issued such reports. It is six percent less than in Fiscal year 2010.

Americans are being deliberately starved of the energy sources we have in abundance.

We are being robbed in the form of higher prices for electricity produced in the most expensive fashion, wind and solar, instead of affordable coal. Not only are gasoline prices up, but the government continues to demand more mileage per gallon of gas.

The result of the environmental organizations propaganda to demonize oil and coal, and the Obama administration’s anti-energy policies, has been the loss of revenues, as well as jobs, from royalties and taxes paid to the government. Meanwhile, Americans have watched the Obama administration loan guarantees to solar industry corporations waste well over a billion taxpayer dollars.

As for wind energy, Reuters reporter Andy Sullivan recently reported that the industry actually “shed 10,000 jobs since 2009 even as the energy capacity of wind farms doubled.” To put this in context, Sullivan also reported that “the oil and gas industry has added 75,000 jobs since Obama took office.”

The Obama administration energy policies have been a thorough-going failure that puts in jeopardy the ability of the nation’s energy industries ability to keep up with demands for more electricity and more fuel for its automotive and truck fleets.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Heartland Institute is Fighting Mad

By Alan Caruba

It’s a pleasant fiction that think tanks are places where scholars spend time in dusty libraries. They are places of great intellectual ferment, but one hardly thinks of them of places were battles rage with infiltrators and propagandists, but The Heartland Institute, a 28-year-old national non-profit organization, is doing that right now.

Having been victimized by a leading advocate of global warming and other environmental inventions, Dr. Peter H. Gleick, who misrepresented himself as a member of its board in order to secure confidential information about Heartland’s donors and then took it a step further by creating a phony “memo” misrepresenting its mission has led Heartland to consider legal proceedings against him.

On April 1, I wrote about “Fakegate”, the name Heartland has applied to L’Affair Gleick.

“One leading voice among the global warming advocates was Dr. Peter H. Gleick whose work in the field of hydroclimatology catapulted him into the top ranks of the scientific community. In 2003 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2006 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2011 he led a new task force on “scientific ethics and integrity” for the American Geophysical Union.


On February 16, 2012 he resigned from the task force citing “personal, private reasons” but the reasons would become very public. On February 20, 2012, Dr. Gleick admitted to having fraudulently obtained documents of a board meeting of The Heartland Institute “under someone else’s name” for the purpose of making known its donors.


Dr. Gleick had also allegedly forged a two-page “strategy memo” purporting that the Institute was engaged in a variety of efforts to fraudulently undermine the claims of global warming scientists. The Institute did not have to, nor ever did engage, in any such efforts. The truth about the global warming claims was sufficient to undermine them.”

One might think the exposure of Dr. Gleick’s effort to slander Heartland would end there, but Heartland understands that it has taken decades of effort to undo the damage done by the global warming hoax and the necessity to take off the gloves in combating the fascist tactics of environmentalists.

Earlier this month, when Oxford University offered Dr. Gleick a prestigious platform to lecture on April 24—despite his confession of improper, unethical and illegal behavior. Heartland called on Oxford to deny him this honor. Oxford declined.

The environmental propaganda machine has been in full throes to “spin” Dr. Gleick’s misdeeds and, most recently, when a group called Forecast the Facts engaged in the tactics of misdirection and deception so common to the Left, Heartland fought back.

As Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and editor of Watts Up With That, noted on April 16th “The Center for American Progress aka Think Progress, a front organization for all things left and ‘progressive’…let it slip (whether by design or accident we don’t know) that they are behind this ‘Forecast the Facts’ outfit.” The Center has a $30 million+ annual budget.

“We always wondered,” said Watts, “who was funding (a) “hate campaign against a local television meteorologist” they deemed a “denier” of the global warming hoax.” Typically, Forecast the Facts attributed perfectly natural weather events, tornadoes, to global warming or climate change. They claimed that the states affected were “dominated by anti-government, anti-science ideologues.”

Heartland has identified Forecast the Facts as “a front group created by the same individuals responsible for politicizing the science and polarizing the debate over climate change”, noting further that the group “has no scientists on staff, no history of participating in the climate change debate, and no credibility.”

“Forecast the Facts is promoting the results of a petition that is fraudulent, based on false claims contained in a forged memo. It is grossly misrepresenting The Heartland Institute’s position on climate change.”

With elegant irony, one of the earliest advocates of global warming, James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia (Earth Goddess) hypothesis, has just come forth to admit he was completely wrong and that he and others who spread fear and panic over global warming were alarmists. In his words, "The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books - mine included - because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened,"

On May 21-23, Heartland will sponsor the Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago. As had previous conferences, it will field an impressive group of scientists and others who have braved the kind of slander heaped on Heartland by Green organizations and groups whose purpose is to mislead the public regarding the science of climate change.

It is refreshing to see how Heartland has declared war on those who have sought to damage its reputation and to deter donors from supporting it, and is fighting back in a vigorous fashion.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Romney Runs the Table

By Alan Caruba

Mitt Romney won the Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, and Pennsylvania Republican primary elections yesterday. A clean sweep or, as they say in the game of billiards, he ran the table.

On November 12, 2011, I wrote a commentary, “If Not Romney, Who?” noting that, even then, the Rasmussen polls all indicated that Romney was the candidate that voters were most comfortable with and whom they believed would be most competitive with President Obama.

I said, “Yes, I think he will get the GOP nomination. Yes, I would vote for him.”

It is clear that a majority of Republican voters have concluded the same thing and, in fact, have now assured Mitt Romney the party’s nomination. It is important to keep in mind that these were individual votes cast by men and women who were not persuaded by all the arguments leveled against Romney.

Individual voters, not men or women, not Hispanics or younger voters, not blocks of voters that can be conveniently identified, but individuals who had listened to the debates, taken the measure of a large number of candidates, and concluded that Romney had the values, the character, and most importantly the experience and judgment to be the next President of the United States.

They don’t care that he is a wealthy man. So were Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, George H.W. and George W. Bush. Wealth has never disqualified a man from holding office and, if you think about it, George Washington was a very wealthy man in his era.

Wealth is just one measure of success, but the values and ideas a candidate brings to the race are the deciding factors. Frequently overlooked in Mitt Romney’s case is the fact that, as a Republican, he won the governorship of a very Democrat State, Massachusetts. Recall, too, that Ronald Reagan won with a significant percentage of Democrats who found Jimmy Carter wanting in his first and last term.

In so many ways, Mitt Romney reminds me of Ronald Reagan. Reagan had lost his first bid to win the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford. He ran again and won. Romney has some of the same character traits that Reagan had and Romney has visibly improved his communications skills, delivering some excellent speeches.

The contrast between Romney and Obama is huge. Republicans know that and many voters from both parties have concluded that. In some very real ways, this is a repeat of the Carter-Reagan race, a failed President versus a man who has served successfully as the Governor of a State, working well with a legislature dominated by the other party.

Mostly, though, the contrast can be seen between Obama who does not like America and Romney who does.

America will reclaim its destiny, its exceptualism, on November 6, 2012. It will elect Mitt Romney.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Afghanistan, the Definition of Madness

By Alan Caruba

Why did George W. Bush invade Afghanistan? Answer: Occurring just after September 11, 2001 in which 2,977 Americans lost their lives, a CIA team was inserted into Afghanistan fifteen days later to begin a campaign against the Taliban who had allied with Al Qaeda and provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden while the attack was planned. A U.S. bombing campaign in Tora Bora followed but bin Laden escaped into Pakistan.

When bin Laden was killed in 2011 by a U.S. Navy SEAL team, he was living in Abbotabad, Pakistan, a mile away from its equivalent of West Point.

The initial reason for the military action ceased to be of any critical importance and the Bush administration pivoted to concentrate on removing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power. Afghanistan became a backwater concern, but in 2002 Bush announced “a Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, intended to be a development plan with security goals. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Insurgent activity in Afghanistan never ceased and military authority there switched to NATO, essentially to protect Kabul. It would be the organization’s first operational commitment outside of Europe. Hamid Karzai became the hand-picked leader of a nation that Transparency International deemed the second most corrupt in the world.

Afghanistan was and is a narco-economy. A result of U.S. involvement and due to a level of incompetance that defies comprehension, billions have been expended on the military and development efforts that found their way into the hands of the Taliban and the corrupt Karzai government.

The previous effort by the then-Soviet Union to exercise influence began in the 1960s. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support its puppet government from an orthodox Muslim insurgent group known as the Taliban. The insurgency drew support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the U.S. Osama bin Laden would create al Qaeda as part of the effort to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.

From 1979 to 1989, the war proved so costly to the Soviet Union that it finally withdrew its troops. The war would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Having learned nothing from history, ancient and recent, the U.S. has just initiated an agreement with Afghanistan to provide support for the next decade. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

According to an April 23 news report, “The partnership agreement ensures that the U.S. will continue to support Afghanistan even after the U.S. ends major combat operations and scales back its development projects over the next two years” and “The strategic-partnership will commit the U.S. to more than a decade of economic and financial support for the Afghan state, which is still battling a resilient Taliban-led insurgency.”

No external entity, from Alexander the Great in 329 BC, to Genghis Khan’s Mongol army in 1221 BC, to the British Empire in 1839-1842, has ever encountered anything but defeat in Afghanistan. Add the U.S. and NATO to the list.

There is, one assumes, some military strategic value to trying to control events in Afghanistan in some fashion. Pakistan, since its founding in 1947, and India have engaged in efforts to exercise influence there with varying degrees of success. The deal that the U.S. has signed with Afghanistan is no more likely to ensure any influence than all previous efforts since 2001. At times, Pakistan has even denied U.S. military transports to provision our troops there.

For those who want to learn the truth of the failure of U.S. efforts, I recommend reading Douglas A. Wissing’s new book, “Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban”, just published by Prometheus Books.

Wissing writes, “Within scant months of Tora Bora, the seeds of American failure in Afghanistan were sown: the U.S. consort with deceitful Afghan warlords and leaders; the American complicity in the revived Afghan opium trade; and the flawed U.S. logistics-and-development schemes that fueled corruption and helped finance the Taliban.”

Wissing concludes his intensively documented book saying, “Decades of American arrogance and cupidity have brought us to this point…but doing more isn’t going to change things. The hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars and millions of ruined lives haven’t made Afghanistan safer or less desperate. As America has upped its bets in Afghanistan, the insurgency has continued to grow in power and in influence.”

When he campaigned for the presidency, Barack Obama characterized the conflict in Afghanistan as a just war in contrast to American efforts in Iraq. By the time he took office, the Bush administration had already negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government.

The latest deal to continue American investment in Afghanistan defies any common sense, any justification. It comes at a time when America is deeply in debt. It reflects the Obama administration’s penchant for spending money it does not have without continued borrowing.

The next administration, assuming Obama’s defeat, must abandon the deal and abandon Afghanistan. Alexander the Great did. Genghis Khan did. The British Empire did. And the Soviet Union collapsed shortly after it did.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

On Fairness and Unfairness

By Alan Caruba

“Expecting the world to be fair to you because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.”

I don’t know who said this, but it is a great piece of wisdom that we should all embrace.

Every time I hear President Obama talk about what is fair or not, I am reminded of how unfair it is to have a President whose personal history remains subject to question and the failure to provide documentation that most Americans are required to show for matters as simple as renewing a driver's license.

I am not given to feeling sorry for myself because I long ago concluded that whatever good fortune comes my way is just that, luck. Hard work helps, but sometimes it too is not enough. We live in a casino called life.

Is it fair, for example, that I was born into the Great Depression over seventy years ago and now, when I should be enjoying retirement, I am living in something the economists call a recession, but is just as bad, if not worse, than it was when I was born.

Despite all the distractions to keep us from confronting massive unemployment, widespread foreclosures, a government rife with corruption, waste, and cronyism, a broken justice system, a President who won’t produce a passport and whose Social Security number is fake.

So what do we do? We all just soldier on trying to pay what we are told is our “fair share” of an unfair system of taxation. We do so when the government is so deep in debt it has to borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends and has imposed a per capita debt of $140,000 on every American, including those born this day.

Kennedy who famously said, “Life is not fair”, would be assassinated in 1963 and next in line was Lyndon Baines Johnson who took the nation into war with Vietnam and 58,000 dead young Americans later he decided not to run for reelection. I still recall the protest marches. The sixties became synonymous with “hippies”, a burgeoning drug culture, and some of the best rock’n roll ever performed.

Then we got Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who finally negotiated something called “peace with honor”, but the war was the first major defeat the nation had sustained. All of which made me wonder why no one in the White House or Pentagon pointed out to President Bush that neither Alexander the Great, the British Empire, nor the Soviets had gotten out of Afghanistan without being beaten to a pulp.

Apparently, a generation or two of voters were not paying attention in school if, indeed, American and world history was even being taught. In 2008 a slim majority elected Barack Hussein Obama, a thorough-going communist with total contempt for the Constitution, America, and its people. That’s not fair.

And how close did we come to electing an environmental charlatan called Al Gore? Or John Kerry whose choice for vice president, John Edwards, is currently in court charged with using campaign funds as a “gift” to his mistress and his illegitimate child, the result of an affair carried on while his wife was dying of cancer?

Does it seem like America has been passing through a long period being led by the sorriest bunch of politicians to whom such power has been granted; Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon of Watergate infamy, Jimmy Carter, the skirt-chasing Bill Clinton, and the sorry likes of the Senate’s Harry Reid and former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi?

None of it is fair. It just is.

America desperately needs to elect a grownup. It needs a man who knows how to read a balance sheet and how to restore the economy.

The Tea Party came into being to protest Obamacare. It now elects men and women to Congress, altering the balance of power in the 2010 elections, and will likely decide the outcome of the November elections.

It is testimony to the way Americans are willing to wage a peaceful revolution for real change, not just some dumb motto meant to cheat and enslave suckers.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Earth Day 2012 - Measuring Cow Farts

This is an example of how stupid the entire cult of environmentalism is. Some "scientists" measured the amount of methane in cow farts by way of saving the Earth from something or other. If you look closely at virtually everything environmentalists say about any subject, you will conclude that it closely resembles cow farts.

Alan Caruba,
Earth Day 2012

Blamer-in-Chief

By Alan Caruba

We teach children to acknowledge and accept blame when they do something wrong. It is an important and useful trait in life. Those who do not learn this remain emotionally stunted children their entire life. I am, of course, speaking of President Barack Hussein Obama and I shudder to think of the continued damage he can do to the nation during his remaining months in office.

As Fox News’ Doug McKelway wrote in August 2011, “Obama has suggested that blame for the stagnant U.S. economy lies in places other than the Oval office. The latest example occurred Monday when the President said, “There will always be economic factors that we can’t control, earthquakes, spikes in oil prices, slowdowns in other parts of the world.”

The greatest slowdown has been at home, the national economy, is the only one of concern to Americans. Three and a half years into his first (and hopefully last term), Obama is still blaming it on former President Bush.

As recently as April 18, Obama returned to his favorite theme. Urging a tax increase on millionaires, Obama said that tax cuts enacted “eight years before I took office” had contributed to a “global economic crisis.”

It is worth recalling the financial crisis occurred in September 2008 in the final months of Bush’s second term.

At the time:
The Dow Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The Unemployment rate was 4.6%

George W. Bush's economic policies set a record of 52 straight months of job growth. So, Obama is not only trying to distract voters from the actual facts, but lying about them as well.

In point of fact the Democrats had taken control of Congress on January 3, 2007, at the start of the 110th Congress

In December 2011, Investors Business Daily opined that Obama was “no longer content to blame President Bush for the country’s economic ills” but was accusing “his Democratic predecessor of being a co-conspirator.” That would be former President Clinton!

In a “Sixty Minutes” segment, Obama had said the economy was suffering from “structural problems that have been building up for two decades.” Most observers concede that both Clinton and Bush43 did a good job in guiding the economy during their terms, but not Obama.

The segment also included his prediction that “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.” The likelihood that Obama can be reelected with 8.6% unemployment, $4 gas at the pump, massive housing loan foreclosures, and a still stagnant economy grows smaller by the week.

Consider the many ways this President has found everyone else to blame for his failures. Oil prices were blamed on the “uncertainty about what’s going on in Iran and the Middle East”, but prices stayed moderate during all the years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite the horrid waste of taxpayer’s money on the various green energy firms that keep failing, Obama blamed the Solyndra debacle on the Chinese who “were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn’t compete.” That was well known before the Solyndra half billion dollar loan guarantee was made, followed by still more to other solar companies.

Even the deficits that have grown under his administration weren’t his fault. In November 2011, he said “Obviously, this (reducing government waste) is even more important given the deficits that we’ve inherited and that have grown as a consequence of the recession.”

The key word here is “inherited.”

Of course it was inherited and Obama knew that as he campaigned to be the President who would solve the financial crisis. In February 2010 he said “If we had taken office during ordinary times, we would have started bringing down these deficits immediately.” Instead, his stimulus program tripled the national deficit in his first year in office

Regarding the debt, Obama in March 2011 said, “I inherited a big debt.”

In April 2011 he said, “much of it I inherited when I showed up.”

In August 2011 he said “I inherited a big debt.”

The message, repeated ceaselessly, is that the increase is not his fault.

No matter what the problem is, it is NEVER his fault.. This isn’t just habitual. It’s pathological. And it bodes ill if he is reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Cartoon Round Up

Genocidal Green Quotes

By Alan Caruba

As Earth Day 2012 occurs on Sunday,  April 22, I offer a selection of quotes from leading figures in the environmental movement that are worth reading so that you can draw your own conclusions.

In 1970, the first Earth Day generated the following quotes:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” - George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” - Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” - New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” - Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” - Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.

Truth meant (and means) little to environmentalists.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.

Many of the environmental movement’s leaders harbored genocidal dreams as the best way to “save the Earth.”

“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” - Dave Forman, founder of Earth First

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” - John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” - An editorial in The Economist.

Al Gore

One could devote an entire column to quotes by former Vice President, Al Gore, but one of my favorites is from his 1993 book, Earth in the Balance. “It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five year period.”

He was talking about the engine in every car, every truck, every tractor, every motorcycle, and every airplane, among other uses. Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an Oscar for his apocalyptic documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

There are, of course, voices of reason who have sought to warn us against the true agenda of environmentalism.

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” --Paul Johnson, historian

And, finally, this warning from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclac Klaus: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world—called communism—and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”

Sources:
1970 Earth Day Quotes:  http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

Green Quotes:
http://pushback.com/issues/environment/ecofreak-quotes/

More Green Quotes:
http://redneckusa.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/in-their-own-words-the-truth-about-their-real-motivations/

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Eco-Communism Celebrated Annually on Earth Day

By Alan Caruba


Sen. Joe McCarthy

I came of age in the 1950s during a period when Joe McCarthy was raising hell about communists in the federal government. He was spectacularly inept, often made intemperate and inaccurate charges, but for the most part he was right. He managed to alienate his fellow Republicans and earn a slap-down from then President Eisenhower. By around 1953 his fifteen minutes of fame were up. His bombastic personality undermined the seriousness of the issue.

McCarthy was all bluster, but the publication of “The Venona Papers: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors” in 2001 revealed that his charges of widespread infiltration of the State Department and even the White House during the Roosevelt and Truman years were true. Venona was the U.S. code name given secret Soviet spy communications that had been recorded during and after World War II. In 1995, the National Security Agency began releasing the documents.

In 2000 Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media wrote about a conference, “Rethinking McCarthy” devoted to the myths surrounding McCarthy that were disputed by journalist M. Stanton Evans, a director of the National Journalism Center. Chief among them was that McCarthy never named any names of suspected communists in government, but Evans revealed a file of material showing that he had. The other myth was that those named had been cleared by congressional committees or were just mildly leftist. They were not.

It is not surprising that Rep. Allan West who recently said that there are some eighty communists in Congress today, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, drew the same response that McCarthy did in his era. Rep. West characterized the response as “A lot of buzz and inaccurate reporting.” Politico.com called him a McCarthyite.

In the run-up to Earth Day on April 22nd—the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union’s first dictator—Brian Sussman, author of the bestselling “Climategate”, has a new book, “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America” ($25.95, WND Books). If you read no other book about the relationship between environmentalism and communism this year, you must read this one.

Sussman has brought together all the relevant facts. “Karl Marx founded a philosophy that inspires dictators and demagogues,” writes Sussman. “Commencing with the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the present, Marx’s tyrannical ideology has been responsible for the documented deaths of more than 110 million individuals around the world.”

“Pollution,” writes Sussman, “never has been Earth’s most troubling foe—Marxism had. And Marxists have always seized upon pollution, both real and imagined, as an effective weapon in their unrelenting war on freedom.”

Americans are the victims of blunders by a succession of presidents, but it was Richard Nixon who kicked off the plundering of the nation by the environmental movement when, in 1970, he quietly signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, followed by the Clean Air Act. “Nixon’s Clean Air Act expanded the ’67 law to autocratically allow the federal government to limit both industrial and mobile sources of air pollution. It set up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Today, the EPA has become a rogue agency, barely controlled by Congress. “Today the EPA is eighteen thousand full-time employees strong, with an annual budget of $10 billion”, notes Sussman.

“From a legal perspective,” writes Sussman, “what Nixon did in signing the Clean Air Act was flatly unconstitutional. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution limits the power of the federal government to the basics, none of which includes regulating the atmosphere.” The EPA engages in the most bogus scientific “research” seen since the days of the Soviet Union

The locus of the environmental movement is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) has been issuing reports that were used to support the global warming hoax and, when it was exposed as a massive fraud, has since changed its message to “sustainability” whose purpose remains the establishment of a global government run out of the UN. It advances every element of the communist movement in its attack on capitalism and the foundation of the freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

We have seen the systematic dismantling of the U.S. Constitution and our economy by our elected representatives, the latest being Obamacare’s effort to takeover one sixth of the nation’s economy while twisting the Commerce Clause to impose a mandate on everyone to purchase health insurance whether they want or need it.

Sussman’s book provides a time-line for the eco-tyranny at work in the nation today. The threat to our freedom and to the position of America as the protector of freedom worldwide is real.

Think about that when you find yourself drowning in the propaganda that will surround and augment the message of Earth Day and the forthcoming UN conference, Rio+20.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Earth Day and the Great "Sustainability" Lie

By Alan Caruba

Americans are paying the hangman for the rope.

It is estimated that since the origin of the global warming hoax in the late 1980s, Americans have seen $50 billion of their dollars thrown down the climate change rat hole.

In a January CNSnews commentary, Elizabeth Harrington noted that “A study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the United States (has been) funding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ authority on alleged man-made global warming, with $31.1 million since 2001, nearly half of the panel’s annual budget.”

“In a Nov. 17, 2011 report, ‘International Climate Change Assessments: Federal Agencies Should Improve Reporting and Oversight of U.S. Funding’, the GAO found that the State Department provided $19 million for administrative and other expenses, while the United States Global Change Research Program provided $12.1 million in technical support through the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSP), averaging an annual $3.1 million to the IPCC over 10 years--$31.1 million so far.”

The forthcoming UN Rio+20 IPCC international conference in June will switch course from the discredited global warming hoax in favor if its fundamental agenda, the imposition of a global government that reflects the UN’s goal of a worldwide socialist economy. The sovereignty of individual nations will be subject to the dictates of a small group of UN bureaucrats.

The theme will be “sustainability.”

There is a reason that the upcoming Earth Day, April 22nd, falls on the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the former Soviet Union’s first dictator. Everything associated with the environmental movement has communism as its basis.

In February, KPMG, a Swiss entity and “a global network of professional firms providing audit, tax and advisory services” operating in 152 countries, held a conference that attracted “more than 600 top CEOs and senior business leaders from many of the world’s major corporations.” It was held in cooperation with the United Nations Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nationals Environmental Programme. Among those attending were former President Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

It issued a report, “Business Perspective on Sustainable Growth: Preparing for Rio+20 and offered recommendations “to scale-up investment in sustainable development, provide strong price signals on resource scarcity and environmental impacts” and “deliver new platforms for public-private collaboration at the international and national levels.”

In other words, the UN is laying the groundwork to ensure that its bogus sustainability agenda will offer enough inducements to the global business community to ensnare them in its control.

In an article by Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post, he characterized Rio+20 saying, “It’s as if the high priests of Occupy the Planet and the Green Apocalypse—having run their old socialist and environmental engines into the ground—have stumbled across a new set of rationalizations and slogans.”

As if the Obama administration hasn’t wasted billions on its green energy agenda, funding one failed renewable energy company after another, the White House Council on Environmental Quality announced in March that it will sponsor its third annual “GreenGov” Symposium September 24-26 in Washington, D.C.

“The Symposium will bring together leaders from government, the private sector, non-profits and academia to identify opportunities to create jobs, grow clean energy industries, and curb pollution by incorporating sustainable practices into the Federal Government’s operations.” If this wasn't so ludicrous, I'd laugh, but these are the lies the Obama administration wants you to believe.

And people wonder why President Obama killed the Keystone XL pipeline, imposed an illegal moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and his administration has issued fewer leases for the exploration and extraction of oil on federal lands than any other.

Throw in the Environmental Protection Agency’s war on the coal industry, and the Interior Department’s limits on access to federal land known to contain uranium deposits for the nuclear energy industry, and you begin to see how our own government is conspiring to leave the United States of America bereft of the energy reserves that we have in abundance!

The nation’s energy needs and its dollar are being weakened in order to eliminate it as the only real deterrent to the United Nation’s, Russia’s and China’s global ambitions.

The Earth has not warmed in fourteen years and it is not running out of energy reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas.

As the global warming hoax is shelved, the sustainability hoax is being rolled out and will be on full display June 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro conference when the usual suspects and charlatans gather to plot the continuation of their socialist revolution.

There is not one single reason why the U.S. taxpayer should be contributing to this communist cabal and conference.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Overthrowing Environmentalism

By Alan Caruba

In 1517 Martin Luther set off the Protestant revolution against the Catholic Church that led to the spread of the then-new movement as a response to the corruption of the Church. It took time for it to establish itself as an alternative and was greatly aided by the invention of printing and spread of literacy, but mostly because ordinary people had grown weary of the Church’s extravagance, poor governance, and resistance to change.

The selling of worthless “indulgences” as a means to wipe one’s sins clean was the final straw.

Environmentalism has become a modern religion and its “cap and trade” scheme to sell worthless permission slips for the emission of so-called “greenhouse gases”—based on United Nations Kyoto Protocol calling for a reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere—is being rejected by many nations .

As it has become common knowledge that CO2 is vital to all life on Earth and plays no role in affecting the climate, ordinary people have concluded that global warming in particular and environmentalism in general is a giant fraud.

No one argues that nations should not attend to the basic maintenance of clean air and water. That view predates the environmental movement, but the stranglehold on nation’s economies and the ability to engage in any form of commerce has reached a breaking point. The fact is, the U.S. has made great strides over the years and there are limits to how “clean” the air and water can or even should be. The EPA wanted to regulate “dust” at one point until Congress put an end to that insanity.

The lies required to maintain environmentalism and its vast matrix of laws and regulations are being publicly rejected and a recent example is a letter sent to NASA administrator by fifty present and former astronauts, scientists, and engineers who work for NASA is a seminal moment, not unlike Martin Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

The NASA employee’s letter demanded that its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe that the claims of NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data.”

It should be noted that the global warming hoax can be dated to testimony by James Hansen before Congress in 1988 and he is still the GISS administrator! His apocalyptic predictions helped launch a U.S. response currently seen in the Environmental Protection Agency power-grab, based on the false CO2 claims, that will eliminate one fifth of the coal-fired plants providing electricity to a large swath of the nation and likely end the building of new comparable facilities.

On April 9th, Rasmussen Reports, a polling organization, release the results of a poll that found that 52% of likely voters “think there’s a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, thoough 31% disagreed." Rasmussen stated that “support for investing in fossil fuels like oil and gas is also at a new high amidst near-record gas prices and the on-going development of the Keystone XL pipeline which President Obama blocked for environmental reasons.”

The following day, April 10th, Rasmussen released results of another poll that found that 44% of likely voters “believe, generally speaking, that the EPA’s regulations and actions hurt the economy. Just 17% disagree.”

On February 21st, Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, was published in The Washington Times in an opinion about EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s testimony before Congress writing that “Over the past three years, the Obama EPA has conducted a scorched earth campaign against fossil fuel producers and users, especially the coal-fired power industry, with multibillion-dollar rules that provide no meaningful environmental or public health benefits.”

The environmental revolution—a Communist agenda—is being resisted piece by piece by scientists and others who no longer will submit to its utterly false “science” and its UN-inspired Agenda 21 plans to impose control over all aspects of life on planet Earth. A June Rio conference will largely abandon the fear-mongering of global warming in favor of “sustainability”, a matrix of controls that will enslave the world’s population with the worst totalitarian precepts since the rise of Communism and Nazism in the last century.

Agenda21 has been at work in America for decades at this point and few have any idea what it represents. It is destroying property rights in America and that’s just for starters.

On Earth Day—April 22nd—the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the dictator who imposed Communism on Russia in 1917, the various elements of the environmental movement will flood the world with propaganda. The connection between these two events should not be ignored.

Environmentalism should be soundly rejected and the emerging movement to overthrow it should redouble its efforts.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Eco-Lies

Editor's Note: All this week in the run-up to Earth Day, this blog will post commentaries exposing environmentalism as the totalitarian ideology it has always been.

By Alan Caruba

As the nation and the world closes in on Earth Day, April 22nd, a tsunami of Green propaganda will overwhelm us with all the usual lies about global warming—now called climate change—and calls to reduce the use of all fossil fuels in order to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions.

This Big Lie ignores the fact that there is no relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and the climate. CO2 reacts to climate change. It does not drive it. The Big Lie ignores the fact that the Earth has been cooling for fourteen years.

The past three and a half years of the having Barack Obama as President have been filled with constant crisis, not the least of which was the nation’s financial crisis which he constantly reminds us he “inherited.” He has not, however, solved it with proven ways to put millions back to work and turn around a stagnant economy.

Instead he devoted his best efforts to a takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy, the healthcare industry. His administration has waged a steady war on access to energy reserves vital to the nation’s economy. The result of these policies are being felt at the gas pump as prices rise to historic highs while billions of barrels of oil in the U.S. remain underground.

His devotion to all the eco-lies was seen in the millions wasted on “green jobs” with his failed “stimulus” and loans to “green industries”, primarily wind and solar power. Other schemes included high-speed trains where none are needed or wanted. To this day Amtrak has never made a profit. And electric cars remain impractical and unaffordable.

His environmental commitment was perhaps best seen and heard when Obama attended a United Nations Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in March 2010. His speech to the delegates and world press contained all the lies associated with “climate change” and the failed policies he was pursuing two years ago and earlier.

“We come together here in Copenhagen because climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people. You would not be here unless you—like me—were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science," said Obama.

Aside from the fact that the climate has always been in a state of change for Earth’s 4.5 billion years, the science employed to frighten people about such change does not bear any resemblance to real science which is an impartial blend of data based on replicable experiments.

Real science does not have a political agenda. The bogus science of global warming was revealed in November 2009 when the world learned that a handful of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “scientists” had systematically distorted the scientific process, conjuring up false computer models that ignored significant elements of climate history. The revelations would be dubbed “Climategate.”

Never one to not criticize America, Obama reminded the delegates that America was “the world’s second largest emitter” of greenhouse gases even though such gases do not function as a greenhouse, trapping and holding heat. If they did, how would one explain the fact that the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since around 1998?

What is the mark of a developing or successful economy? It is the use of energy!

Obama promised that the U.S. would work “to phase out fossil fuel subsidies” and promised “historic investments in renewable energy” and his intention to put Americans “to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings; and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.”

Such a transformation is ludicrous. America runs on oil, on coal, on natural gas, on hydroelectric and nuclear power. The investments in wind and, in particular, solar power, have wasted millions of taxpayer dollars. Combined, wind and solar provide less than two percent of the nation’s electrical power while coal provides nearly half. It has been the use of coal that the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has been determined to reduce or end, falsely claiming CO2 is a "pollutant."

Typically, Obama said “There is no time to waste.” In reality the Obama administration has wasted every opportunity to increase access to America’s vast energy reserves. Even when bragging about oil production, Obama never admits that it is occurring on private land. His administration has virtually shut down access to exploration and extraction on federally owned and managed land.

Environmentalism is the mask of communism, concentrating ownership of all property and productivity in the hands of the government. Even when addressing the need to ensure clean air and water, it has been used as a blunt instrument of power to limit economic development.

These are well established environmental lies and they are Obama’s environmental lies.

The Copenhagen conference came to a hasty end as the world’s leaders fled the city to avoid being trapped there by a massive blizzard. The global warming they all warned against in 2010 was not occurring and is not occurring.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

America Elected an Ignoramus

By Alan Caruba

I do not write unpleasant things about Barack Hussein Obama because he is a Democrat, a far-left liberal ideologue, a confirmed liar, or the sock-puppet of whatever cabal that chose him long ago to be the President. I write unpleasant things because he is all of these things, but also because he is the most stupid man to have ever held the office of President.

As far back as January 2, 2010 I wrote that Obama had “a make-believe life” because there was no proof that anything he claimed in his two memoirs, written by the age of 45, was true. His resume listed “community organizer”, an amorphous term that could mean anything, as his primary occupation. By October 2010 the Washington Times published a commentary of mine that said “millions of Americans are beginning to ask: Is President Obama just a moron?”

Even prior to his election, he had ensured that his entire paper trail of birth certificates, passports, college records, and other items most people can produce in under five minutes were “sealed” from public review, despite the fact that most modern presidents have had to submit their personal records, short of a colonoscopy exam, for examination. Among his first executive orders was one issued on January 21, 2009 to ensure none of these records saw the light of day.

When he finally produced a birth certificate, forensic analysts deemed it a forgery.

So, what really occurred on Election Day in 2008 was that a majority of voters, guided by an adoring mainstream press, elected an enigma. He rewarded their obsequiousness by being the first President since Grover Cleveland to not attend their annual Gridiron dinner.

Since then, anyone paying any attention has had to conclude that Americans elected an ignoramus, based solely on his own words and actions.

Here’s just a quick look at some of them.

Hans Bader, a scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, addressed recent examples of Obama’s ignorance when he mocked Republicans as members of the Flat Earth Society in Columbus’ day for their skepticism of his green energy policies, among which was a hearty endorsement of algae—pond scum, but Columbus’ contemporaries knew the Earth was round, but doubted he could reach Asia via the Atlantic Ocean. Bader noted that Obama “falsely attributed to Muslims the invention of printing and even falsely claimed that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States as a new nation.”

The problem for many Americans, mostly registered Democrats and self-identified liberals is that his gaffes are dismissed despite the evidence that his policies have proved to be huge failures. His “stimulus” program wasted billions without producing any jobs, shovel-ready or not. We still have an 8.2% unemployment rate.

The fate of Obamacare will be decided shortly by the Supreme Court after 26 States brought suit against it as unconstitutional, but Obama, who was the editor of the Harvard Law Review and taught constitutional law, apparently has not read the document, claiming the judges are “unelected” (they are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate) and therefore have no right to pass judgment despite Marbury v Madison that established the Court’s role of judicial oversight.

Obama’s disdain and contempt for just about everyone except Muslims is astonishing. He has insulted just about every element of American society and many world leaders. In ways large and small this has been a constant element of his presidency. After gratuitously insulting doctors, bankers, and the insurance industry, he pushed hard to provide the planner of 9/11 a civil trial without all the protections afforded by the Constitution—in New York City.

Between January and July 2009, Obama sent a bust of Winston Churchill back to the British embassy. He gave the Queen of England an iPod with 40 show tunes, photos of his inauguration, and two of his speeches. Former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was given a box set of 25 DVDs, all in a format that does not work in England. Later, eager to empty Guantanamo, he authorized the transfer of some detainees to a British protectorate, Bermuda, without consultation with the UK.

Obama’s contempt for Catholics has long been on display before the Obamacare demand that they jettison their consciences regarding the sanctity of human life. His nomination of Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic apostate, as Secretary of Health and Human Services earned her a warning from Bishop Joseph Naumann not to present herself for Holy Communion.

His antipathy for Israel and its Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu has been on display from the beginning of his term, at one point admonishing the Israelis for building new housing in their own capitol and at another suggesting they retreat to their 1967 borders, a suicidal notion that Israelis found appalling.

At one point he said, “One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify issues.” His campaign motto was “Yes we can.”

Early on, he sent Air Force One to do a low fly-by of New York City for a photo op, neglecting to tell anyone there and generating 9/11 flashbacks and panics. Then he embarked on a global trip that quickly was dubbed his “apology tour” for an America about which he could little good to cite. At one point, he actually bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. We do not dip our flag to any other and no U.S. President bows to any other state leader, let alone a monarch.

His ignorance has been on display for so long the public hardly takes notice. “I’ve now been in 57 states. I think one left to go,” he said during his 2008 campaign. He referred to “Austrian” as a language when no such language exists; Austrians speak German.

His ignorance of economics is legendary. He referred to a “profit and earnings ratio” when the correct term is price-to-earnings (P/E). He still thinks that, as long as the Federal Reserve can print money out of thin air, the nation can never go broke.

He actually believes the economy will improve if taxes are increased; something that has never before happened in the history of the nation.

Whole books can and will be written about Obama’s ignorance and failures of judgment that Americans will have to live with for a very long time, especially as future generations try to dig out from his tripling of the national debt, the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression, and a housing market that has yet to have rebounded.

Add in gas prices Americans have never seen since gasoline was invented to power our cars and you have a man who is not what he claims to be and is too stupid to be the President of the United States, let along serve as a White House tourist guide.

© Alan Caruba, 2012