Warning Signs

Cartoon Round Up

2012-01-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

Working Into the Grave

2012-01-27T07:44:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Believe it or not, there was a time when, if you turned 65 and retired, you could expect to live in reasonable comfort. Social Security covered a portion of your expenses; your savings account yielded a modest amount of interest, and, if you had made investments, stock dividends provided a safety cushion. Not so anymore.

“More Elderly Find They Cannot Afford Not to Work” was a January 21 headline of an article in The Wall Street Journal, noting at one point that an 87-year-old woman who had retired in 2003 was now earning $7.25 an hour, four hours a week, collecting tickets at a movie theatre in my former New Jersey hometown. I had lived there for 62 years.

Thanks to ever-rising property taxes, I sold my home before prices plunged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. I parked the money in an annuity.

I am fortunate that there is no age limit on the ability to write for a living. The writing trade has always been a tough one. The former market for magazine articles is a shrinking pool paying little for one’s labors. Self-published books, particularly fiction, have flooded the marketplace and mainstream publishers rely on older, established authors with a following. As often as not, bestselling non-fiction is written by people who anchor television news or have some other form of celebrity.

As the Wall Street Journal article noted, “In 1981, Social Security paid 52% of the average worker’s pre-retirement earnings, according to the Social Security Administration.” I turn 75 this year and my Social Security is little more than “grocery money.” Interest on my savings account is a joke.

For too many of my fellow senior citizens, not working is not a choice The Wall Street Journal notes that “The unemployment level among Americans 75 and older—measuring the number of people seeking work—is relatively low but twice what it was five years ago. The rate was 5.6% last year…compared with 2.5% in 2006.”

When I was born in 1937 it was in the depths of the Great Depression. I have lived long enough to be swept up along with everyone else in the Great Depression 2.0.

Naively, I and many others of my generation thought the years of economic growth that began in the 1950s would go on forever. We survived a number of investment “bubbles” and predictable, but short-lived recessions, but this one is different. It has been exacerbated by an ever-growing federal government, job-killing “environmental” regulations, and burdened by “entitlement” programs whose cost understandably keep increasing along with the nation’s growing population of older Americans.

“”Federal spending on Social Security and Medicare is rising,” said the Journal article. “both in total dollars and percentage of the budget. Social Security made up 20% of the federal budget in the 2010 fiscal year, up from 13% in 1962. Combined spending on Social Security and Medicare represents 9% of GDP and is projected to grow to 12% in 2035.”

The nation’s debt now equals its Gross Domestic Product. The U.S. is broke and so are Europe’s nations with the exception of Germany. That is simply not sustainable—something the Congressional “super committee” discovered when it punted on any solution to the nation’s fiscal woes.

Part of the problem is the nation’s aging population. No one anticipated that health care would improve to the point of extending people’s life expectancy from 65 in the 1930s to an average of 78 years today. As it is, both my parents lived into their 90s, I have an older brother in his 80s, and a nephew in his late 40s who just became a father again.

We can thank short-sighted “social justice” programs such as Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s appalling “sub-prime mortgage” programs and “bundled assets” that sank banks from sea to shining sea. The U.S. taxpayer has had to bail out these two “government sponsored entities” to the tune of billions and they keep coming back for more.

In the space of just three years, President Obama has increased the nation’s debt by five trillion in horribly misspent, wasted dollars. Since 2010 when control of the House was returned to Republicans, they have fought against pressures to raise taxes that would suck more money out of the economy and have put forth sensible plans to restructure Social Security and Medicare. Naturally, they have been accused of being heartless.

Any senior citizen who votes for Obama or a Democratic Party candidate is putting themself at further risk of having to work until they die or seeing their savings eaten by illness or other rising costs before that occurs.

Editor’s Note: The author’s editorial services site is here.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Auschwitz: Ignoring History, Predicting the Future

2012-01-26T08:14:00.000-08:00

The gates of Auscwitz - a Nazi death camp

By Alan Caruba

The late Israeli scholar and diplomat, Abba Eban, (1915-2002) said, “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

Similarly, Winston Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else.” In Churchill’s case, he was referring to the U.S. reluctance to become involved in another war in Europe, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 changed that overnight. By 1945, along with our allies, the wars in Europe and Asia were over.

Sixty-seven years ago, on January 27, 1945, elements of the Soviet army came upon the Auschwitz concentration camps to discover a Nazi killing machine, one of several such camps created to exploit forced labor and to systematically kill Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, clerics, prisoners of war, and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Nazi state, right down to children and infants.

The Nazis killed people on such a scale that it is almost incomprehensible. It happened within my lifetime and that of many others, some of whom are among the fortunate survivors. And yet, today, the denial of the Holocaust and the millions of other Nazi victims is an article of faith among Arabs in the Middle East and countless others around the world.

A January 25th Agence France-Presse article reported that “One in five young Germans has no idea that Auschwitz was a Nazi death camp, a poll released Wednesday showed, two days ahead of Holocaust memorial day. Although 90 percent of those asked did know it was a concentration camp”, the Stern magazine poll revealed “that Auschwitz meant nothing to 21 percent of 18-29 year olds.”

It is essential that people in their respective nations know their own and other’s histories. A hallmark of the former Soviet regime in Russia was the way it rewrote history and, in George Orwell’s classic “1984”, a work of fiction about communism, there was a Ministry of Truth in which history was rewritten.

In the United States, since around the 1960s, strenuous efforts have been made to alter the teaching of the nation’s history. The Founding Fathers are often portrayed as slaveholders to downplay their devotion to liberty.

Even they knew that slavery was an abomination, but their task was to create a new nation, one dedicated to liberty. The U.S. Constitution was approved by twelve state delegations in 1787, but in 1861, barely 74 years later it would take a Civil War to put an end to slavery and another hundred years to end the exclusion of African Americans from access to their full rights under the Constitution.

Several generations of Americans have passed through our school systems—literally controlled by the federal government after the creation of the Department of Education in 1979 after being transferred from the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a legacy of Jimmy Carter’s single term. All curriculum taught in the schools comes from the DOE thanks to its control over a national, one-size-fits-all testing system introduced with the “No Child Left Behind” program championed by George W. Bush.

To not know about Auschwitz, whether one is German, American, or any other nationality is a failure on a grand scale because it means that it can be repeated. To not know America’s epic struggle to fulfill its promise of liberty leaves new generations at a disadvantage, as in the case of a fifth of young Germans today, ignorant of their nation’s past.

In today’s world, many worry about the fate of Israel, surrounded by hostile nations and openly threatened by an Iran seeking nuclear weapons. Its independence was declared in 1948, barely three years after the end of World War II. Its first task was to absorb, not only the survivors of the Nazi regime throughout Europe, but those who were forced to flee Arab nations in the wake of the war. Its independence was greeted with the first of several wars against it. The general hostility to Jews that preceded the Holocaust by centuries is a stain on humanity.

So there is cause for concern when one in five young Germans have no idea what went on in Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.

It is a concern when the Syrian dictatorship has already killed 5,000 of its own people to maintain itself.

It is a concern for Iraq, already falling back into an internal conflict after decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the end of the U.S. occupation.

It is a concern for an Iranian dictatorship on the cusp of creating its own nuclear weapons.

It is a concern for Venezuela, held in the grip of Hugo Chavez’s dictatorship, an acolyte of Communist Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

It is a concern for Europeans whose political experiment, the European Union, threatens the financial stability of its member nations with the sole exception of Germany.

It is a concern for Americans who witnessed the unilateral limited nuclear disarmament of the nation and the huge reduction of its military power by the Obama administration, less than the lifetime after the end of World War II.

The world remains a dangerous place. That is the lesson of history.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

SOTU Blah, Blah, Blah

2012-01-25T15:21:00.001-08:00

Does Obama Want to Lose? Yes!

2012-01-25T14:11:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

It seems like a bizarre notion, but does Barack Obama want to lose the election in November?

I think he does!

One is struck by the way Obama has visibly aged in the job. He may well have grown weary being POTUS.

By any rational standard, one would say he wants a second term, but Obama has always operated in a fantasy world where mere words are supposed to translate into reality. And he has repeatedly talked about being a one-term president.

He is, after all, his own invention; the author of two memoirs of a life that had little achievement to point to other than getting elected first to the Illinois legislature and then to the Senate where he lingered a bare two years before running for president.

I raise the question because Obama seems to be deliberately irritating the very people who are supposed to be his “base”; the hard core liberals, the Hollywood crowd, youth, and unions, among others. His partisanship has put Congress into total gridlock.

When members of the Occupy movement showed up in Washington, D.C., one of them threw a smoke bomb onto the White House lawn. Others who have been camped out in a park there are likely to be tossed out if for no other reason than the place is overrun with rats and has become a public health hazard.

The decision to stop the Keystone pipeline is a deliberate offense to the unions that have contributed millions to his campaign. Why? It pleased the environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. Americans, however, understand the pipeline represented both jobs and oil, two things they deem worth having.

Then there are all the vacations Obama and his family takes. They have one thing in common. They are ostentatiously expensive. Obama or Michelle always seem to be going on vacation or returning from one. The characterization may be unfair, but perception is everything.

Americans are very keen on their military and, of all the government programs Obama could have chosen to trim, he’s had the knives out for the Pentagon since he took office. While a war-weary public was likely pleased when he withdrew troops from Iraq (neither Bush, nor Obama had a choice as the Iraqis made it clear they wanted U.S. troops out), the fact remains that the main news out of Iraq these days are bombings as the Sunni versus Shiite conflict has returned. Afghanistan remains a millstone.

Even in the face of a clear threat, it is unlikely that Obama would respond militarily between now and Election Day. The most likely scenario, however, would be an Israeli decision to strike at Iran before it becomes a full-fledged nuclear threat. It must be said, however, that Obama and other NATO nations have positioned some military assets in the Persian Gulf, but would he pull the trigger? It’s doubtful.

The most obvious problem Obama faces is unemployment. It’s variously set at anywhere from 11% to 20% depending on the part of the nation you’re discussing. It still is far too high everywhere and he gives every impression of being, if not indifferent to it, at least in no hurry to address it. Most certainly none of his programs have reduced it. His alleged “stimulus” was little more than a political slush fund that added billions to the national debt and failed.

Every President is subject to “events” and the likely default of Greece and financial troubles of several European nations are likely to impact the national election as Americans try to sort out what effect it will have here. Obama has already presided over the first downgrade of America’s debt rating and we shall surely be reminded of that in the months ahead.

The other event will be the Supreme Court hearing of the case against Obamacare in March. They may not issue a decision right away or they might issue one just before November 6th.

There are two lines of thought about the forthcoming national election. Past Presidents were relieved to leave office despite its power and prestige. (1) Obama may not like being President and (2) he has concluded that he will be defeated. He gives the impression of not caring about public opinion anymore.

The only people publicly defending him seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder. Either they haven’t paid attention to what a disaster his term has been thus far or they just don’t think it’s his fault.

I think he will go through the motions, but I also think a majority of voters no longer believe a word he says anymore.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Stupid Voters

2012-01-24T14:30:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

It’s a comment I hear all the time these days. “The voters are stupid.”

I am not sure that those saying it mean literally that the voters have a low level of intellect or academic achievement, but rather that they mean voters seem prone to making their choices based more on emotion than on a serious examination of the candidate’s qualifications and character.

The best example of this was the 2008 campaign in which a candidate was presented in much the same way companies seek to “brand” their product or service, repeating the same message (Obama’s was hope and change) until it becomes part of the consumers’ decision-making process. It’s why we buy a particular brand of cereal or car. We have come to associate values with it that go beyond the taste or the look.

Barack Obama had served barely two years in the U.S. Senate before he made an unprecedented leap from there to the White House. He was, for all intents and purposes, an unknown quantity with a legislative record—if anyone bothered to check—that was a straight Democratic Party line vote.

In his earlier incarnation as an Illinois legislator, he had voted “present” so many times it was clear he was avoiding taking any position he regarded as politically dangerous; a vote that would come back to haunt him and very few did. The media cooperated in this, avoiding calling attention to anything that might be deemed controversial.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton, whether you liked her or not, was a candidate with a full cart of baggage from her years as the former governor’s and president’s wife, and her years as a U.S. Senator who served, not from Arkansas where she first came to notice, but from New York where liberals thrive. The process of campaigning wore her out and, being the first women to seriously contend to be president, she had even more of a challenge to overcome. Her raw ambition tended to make people afraid of her.

What elected Obama had nothing to do with the slim qualifications he put forth. Few candidates had less to offer. He had never met a payroll. All information regarding his academic records was sealed from view. The press made no effort to ask what passport he had traveled on to Pakistan at one time and did not raise any question about his Social Security number, issued in Connecticut where he had never lived or worked. Famously, he released a “birth certificate” that anyone in Hawaii could attain for the asking, not the “long form” which is deemed credible.

The voters have paid a fearful price for electing Obama; increased unemployment, a huge national debt, a hollowed-out military, billions wasted on “Green” energy, unprotected borders, a Congress in near total gridlock, and a world beyond our shores that perceives an America made weaker by Obama’s three years in office.

I have worked as a public relations counselor for most of my life with earlier years spent as a journalist. I know something about how a product, a service, or an individual is “packaged” to present a positive “image.” What we have all learned since 2008 was that Obama was superbly “packaged” and that the image of an articulate, highly intelligent, well informed candidate was without substance. His inability to speak publicly without a TelePrompter swiftly became a joke.

So, to say that those who voted for him were “stupid” is to misread the new era of politics, one that has more to do with “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars” than with the serious selection of the leader of the nation and the free world.

As they say in advertising, voters bought the sizzle, not the steak.

We are seeing this process continue as the Republican candidates vie for votes. The Gingrich “surge” in South Carolina came after he had two successful debates. It is true that Gingrich is a good debater, but the real question is whether he would be a good president. Questions about his character remain.

Gingrich has been comfortable sharing a couch with Nancy Pelosi to advocate the bogus global warming “theory” or taking money from Freddie Mac.. Now he is trying to appear to be a “real” conservative as opposed to Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and the quixotic Ron Paul.

While his judgment on issues has been called into question, Romney’s character never has. There has never been a hint of scandal in his life. In terms of policy, he was the Governor of one of the most liberal states and he did support Romneycare there. Politics is rarely pretty and even New Jersey’s fire-breathing Governor, Chris Christie, has taken some extraordinarily liberal positions and made some questionable appointments.

There might have been a time when Gingrich was, indeed, a bona fide conservative, but his long years in Washington, D.C., have taught him that “to get along you have to go along” In the end, even his colleagues in the House, for reasons of policy and personality, could no longer support him as Speaker.

From the days of Bush41 until the 2010 elections the Republican Party looked so much like the Democratic Party, voters had an increasingly hard time telling them apart. The Tea Party movement changed that. They and the “independents” are going to decide the 2012 elections that are currently making history with endless debates.

The debates are proving to be a succession of sound bites and vitriol between the candidates. They increasingly demonstrate how the mainstream media, the debate sponsors, are visibly seeking to influence the outcome of the election and they demonstrate that many voters are easily swayed by matters that have little to do with actual policies and issues.

There has been less and less substance with each debate.

I fear that too many Republican voters are having too many mood swings, relying on a moment or two from the most recent debate than on a serious examination—I repeat myself—of the candidate’s qualifications and character. Romney is carefully scripted and a tad robotic, but Gingrich could become the GOP nominee simply because he is entertaining.

Without doubt, President Obama and the Democrats are enjoying the Republican free-for-all and, without doubt, they have concluded that the voters are stupid.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

How to Listen to Obama's State of the Union Speech

2012-01-24T08:33:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The Tuesday morning post of the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” is worth sharing in part. You can read the whole post here.

“Tonight, Americans who tune in to the State of the Union will watch the work of a rhetorical master with a flair for illusion,” says Mike Brownfield. “President Barack Obama will take the to the floor of the Capitol in hopes of laying the groundwork for a political debate on his terms—one where he stands on emotional appeals, populism, and class warfare, not the shaky ground of his crumbling record.”

“And looking right back at him will be the U.S. Senate, which has for the past 1,000 days failed to pass a budget—a total shirking of their fundamental duty to be diligent stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

That about sums up the situation in which voters on both side of the political spectrum, from liberal to conservative, find themselves and for both it is a portrait of failure of spectacular dimensions. Government, as we envision it, is not functioning.

Instead, Americans will have to listen to a great deal of nonsense about “fairness” and Obama’s view that government, as Brownfield warns, “should be the guarantor of equal outcomes and that ‘fairness’ of achievement should be decided by legions of bureaucrats in Washington.”

The Founding Fathers knew that life is not fair and that government can only provide the circumstances under which Americans are provided not happiness, but “the pursuit of happiness” based on a host of factors that include the good luck of being born to good parents, receiving a decent education, and being willing to work hard for a portion of success in life. Even without these factors, many Americans succeed while most just settle.

Joe Wilson, a Republican Representative of South Carolina’s Second District, gained fame at a previous State of the Union speech when in 2009 he shouted out “You lie!” at the president. He has said that “Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.”

That kind of straight talk is rare in politics. Commentators and political pundits are more free to express themselves than politicians and Charles Krauthammer has said that “Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”

I doubt that Americans want to be equally poor, but that is the end result of Obama’s socialist policies.

Most certainly, a large element of the mainstream press has bought into Obama’s policies and the result is a growing distrust and disdain for it. Fox News’ Brit Hume has said that “Fairness is not an attitude. It’s a professional skill that must be developed and exercised.” It is reflected in Fox’s famed “fair and balanced” motto, though any journalist will tell you it is a very high standard to achieve.

We would do well to keep in mind Lincoln’s advice:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

At the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech will be the direct opposite of the values expressed by Lincoln.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Liberal Lunacy

2012-01-23T14:46:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Conservative commentators read what liberals have to say if only to get a glimpse into their current memes on various topics. It is always daunting because one cannot do this without coming away convinced that they are lunatics, devoid of any sense of history or reality, both of which they routinely invent to defend their opinions.

A recent case in point is New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, whose January 22nd, Sunday commentary was titled “Showtime at the Apollo.” Ms. Dowd has been disappointed with Barack Obama for a long time, but she still struggles to find something laudatory while at the same time revealing just how defective he is.

Call it schizophrenic journalism; a liberal writer for a liberal newspaper who is torn between the party line and what she is forced to witness.

“For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.” Eight seconds out of three years is not much to cheer. Dowd was referring to Obama’s “seductive imitation” of singer Al Green and a song that begins “I, I’m so in love with you.” Oh, please!

The event was a fund-raiser at the Apollo Theatre in New York’s Harlem. Dowd noted, however, that “Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah, just a mortal politician.” Surely a columnist who has written about politics for so many years had to know that, but the liberal media was and is too busy spinning fantasies about him.

Blame Bush Syndrome

“The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal”, opined Dowd and then immediately destroyed what little credibility she has by saying Obama had been “dragged down by W’s recklessness.”

One might think we were passed the Blame Bush mantra, but what is spectacular is the way Dowd and other liberals ignore the fact that Democrats had been in control of the 103rd Congress since January 3, 2007.

Liberals hate facts. For example, on January 3, 2007, the Dow Jones closed at 12,621.77. The GDP growth for the previous quarter was 3.5%. The unemployment rate was 4.6%. Bush’s economic policies had set a record of 52 straight months of job creation.

Dowd might well have been unaware that George W. Bush had, on seventeen occasions, asked Congress to stop the recklessness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would cause the September 2008 financial collapse based on trillions in “sub-prime mortgages” the two “government sponsored entities” had pressured banks to make. Then they purchased and bundled them into what would become known as “toxic assets” that nearly destroyed the nation’s banking system.

Dowd quoted Obama’s view of the critiques he’s received, when he said that he didn’t go to a lot of Washington parties and that the Washington press corps “just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix with enough with them”, blaming him for being “cold and aloof.” Obama is cold and aloof. He and the press mix all the time at various White House and other events, but Obama claimed he couldn’t do more because “I’ve got a 13-year-old and 10-year-old daughter.” How lame an excuse is that?

Truman had Margaret. Clinton had Chelsea. Bush-43 had twin girls. Come on!

Anyone with any memory of Obama’s early press conferences can recall what disasters they were the minute he stopped reading from his TelePrompter and tried to answer their questions. He virtually stopped engaging in press conferences after two years.

Referencing a fellow New York Times reporter’s new book, Jodi Kantor’s “The Obamas”, Dowd concludes that the president disdains “the irrational nature of politics.” Well, yes, the failures of Congress are irrational insofar, as a recent report concluded, “Congress ended its least-productive year in modern history after passing 80 bills—fewer than during any other session since year-end records began being kept in 1947.”

Kantor’s book suggests that “they (Barack and Michelle) feel over-assaulted and under-appreciated.”

The obvious conclusion, said Dowd, was that “We disappointed them.” I assume this is irony.

To her credit, Dowd pointed out that “They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics. No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House,” adding that “The Obamas truly feel like victims.”

No, Maureen. The real victims are the millions of Americans out of work, some with mortgages that cost more than their homes are worth, while the price of gas and everything else rises, and their president cannot come up with a better campaign theme than “economic fairness.”

I’d feel sorry for Maureen Dowd and all the other liberal loonies except that it is their political philosophy and programs that have gotten us into this mess.

Feeling sorry for the Obamas is not at the top of my list of political priorities. Listening to them feel sorry for themselves while dining on steak and lobster, vacationing in expensive and exotic places, and demanding that “millionaires and billionaires” should pay more taxes is as pathetic as it gets.

I don’t expect Maureen Dowd and her fellow liberal pundits to stop desperately making excuses for the worst president in the history of the nation. It just reinforces my belief that they are all mentally defective.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

35 Reasons Why Obama Will Lose in 2012

2012-01-22T13:49:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

One could make a very long list of reasons why Barack Obama will lose in the November election. Here’s a short list why Obama has already worn out his welcome among the majority of Americans, including some of those who formerly supported him.

As Obama delivers his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, his theme will be “economic fairness”, but more net jobs have been lost on his watch (1,663,000) then any previous president going back to Harry Truman, none of whom presided over such an economic disaster.

1. Blamed all problems on George W. Bush, not the Democrats who had controlled both chambers of Congress since January 3, 2007 until 2010 when the Republicans gained control of the House.

2. Obamacare: challenged by 28 States as unconstitutional, subject of a Supreme Court hearing in March.

3. Supported passage of Cap-and-Trade carbon regulation legislation.

4. A strong advocate of “global warming”; revealed to be a hoax in 2009.

5. His failed multi-billion dollar “stimulus” program.

6. Admitted there were no “shovel-ready jobs.”

7. Mortgage refinance plan deemed a complete failure.

8. Appointment of White House policy “Czars”, one of whom was a Communist.

9. Failed foreign policy; Israel, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

10. Mishandling of BP oil spill; slow to react, shut down all drilling in Gulf of Mexico.

11. Abortive outreach to Muslims

12. Bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia.

13. Stopped the building of the XL Keystone pipeline. Has opposed offshore and domestic oil drilling

14. The Solyndra “Green energy” bankruptcy whose loan guarantee cost taxpayers a half billion dollars.

15. The “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal.

16. Sued Arizona for trying to control illegal immigration.

17. A rogue Environmental Protection Agency.

18. Highest federal spending since World War II.

19. Highest budget deficit since World War II.

20. Highest federal debt since just after World War II.

21. Increased federal debt more than all Presidents from Washington to Clinton combined.

22. Highest long-term unemployment since the 1930s.

23. Lowest employment (58.1% if population) since 1983.

24. Lowest home ownership rate since 1965.

25. First downgrade of U.S. debt rating in nation’s history.

26. Refused to support the Defense of Marriage Act.

27. Wanted to shut down Guantanamo.

28. Has expressed hostility to banking sector, pharmaceutical companies, physicians, coal industry, oil industry, and other sectors of the economy.

29. Attempted to stop Boeing from building a manufacturing unit in South Carolina.

30. Government takeover of General Motors.

31. Authorized military action in Libya without Congressional approval.

32. Advocates major cuts to Pentagon budget for U.S. military

33. Continues to hide college records, passport and Social Security number information.

34. Not a “natural born” citizen as required by the U.S. Constitution (both parents must be U.S. citizens to be President) and thus he was ineligible to run, ineligible to hold the office, and ineligible to run again.

35. Does not tell the truth.

And Obama gives little indication that he likes America, its values, its history, its military, and its role in the world.

I could go on, but voters who ignore any or all of these factors, keeping Barack Obama in office for another four years, would doom the nation to a Third World status, to default, and the end the greatest experiment in freedom and liberty the world has ever known.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Destroying America by Denying Access to Energy

2012-01-21T14:56:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.

It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue. Our vital transportation sector and all others that utilize petroleum-based products will suffer, too.

While President Obama babbles about millionaires and billionaires, everyone will be impoverished by the loss of jobs and revenue our energy sector produces now and can produce in the future.

This isn’t an “energy policy.” It’s a “no-energy policy” and it is a guarantee of economic disaster.

Obama’s decision to reject a permit for Canada’s XL Keystone pipeline is just one example. It is a job-killer and a revenue-killer. There are thousands of pipelines serving America’s energy needs and the XL Keystone pipeline would ensure that Canada’s own vast energy reserves would flow to America. It is one of our key trade partners and Obama has slapped it in the face.

In early January, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, announced a new 20-year, million-acre ban on uranium mining for federal lands in Arizona, despite the fact that these lands hold the highest-grade of known uranium deposits in the United States. It is an outrage that a new GOP-Congress will have to overturn if the nation is to be assured of sufficient uranium to power its nuclear plants and for weapons development. If the ban remains, these uranium resources would be inaccessible until 2023!

Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that Salazar’s announcement “further compounds a man-made energy crisis that has been planned and executed in Washington, D.C.”

At the same time we are learning of enormous natural gas discoveries that can reduce our energy bills and turn sleeping little towns into boomtowns, environmental organizations have launched a vast propaganda campaign against “fracking”, a technology that has been safely used for more than fifty years. Their claims about dangers to the nation’s supply of fresh water are baseless. Their claims that fracking has caused earthquakes in Ohio are absurd.

Need it be said that the Environmental Protection Agency has turned its eyes on fracking and is working on a report due later this year that will likely call for harsh crackdowns on its use and more regulations to throttle the expansion of natural gas extraction?

The EPA has just released a report of those power plants that top the list of its regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. There is no basis in science to justify the reduction of CO2. Indeed, since it is a gas on which all vegetation depends, much as oxygen is vital to all animal life, reducing it would impair great crop yields and healthier forests.

These regulations are based on the global warming hoax that blamed CO2 for warming the earth. That is utterly false. The Earth is currently in a perfectly natural cooling cycle and the climate of the Earth is almost entirely based on the Sun—solar radiation—along with the actions of oceans, clouds, and even volcanic activity that spews tons of particulates into the atmosphere.

Coal-fired power plants account for fifty percent of all the electricity generated in the United States. Fifty percent! And yet the EPA is determined to shut down dozens of them providing that vital factor in the lives of all Americans and the economy, nor does this take into account the billions that energy producers have spent to upgrade their technology to reduce emissions.

The Obama administration fuel economy agenda, a call for 54.5 miles per gallon ignores simple physics. There is a finite amount of energy a gallon of gas can generate. If you dilute it with ethanol as is currently required, you get even less mileage. The administration is trying to circumvent Congress by issuing standards based on regulating “greenhouse gas emissions”, but there is no need for this. It is a false argument. The Center for Automotive Research says that the proposed new standards would cause the retail price of average motor vehicles to increase by more than $11,000.

Americans and the nation’s future are being victimized by Obama administration policies. The 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, was released on January 12th by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, measures the many factors that contribute to the economic health of a nation—things like property rights, regulatory efficiency, open markets, free trade and labor policies.

Economic freedom is declining worldwide as governments try to spend their way out of the global recession. The United States fell to 10th place. In 2009 it ranked 6th, in 2010 it was 8th, and in 2011, it was 9th.

We are witnessing the deliberate murder of a superpower.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Cartoon Round Up

2012-01-20T16:35:00.000-08:00

Whatever Happened to...?

2012-01-20T07:07:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

In the run-up to the South Carolina primary election on Saturday, it strikes me that the overwhelming coverage of the campaign process has shoved some important stories to the sidelines.

There is noticeably little coverage of the nation’s obscene unemployment problem; one that is comparable to the Great Depression.

With ample good reason, we no longer hear anything about (a) global warming or (b) climate change. We don’t hear “renewable energy” stories in the wake of the Solyndra scandal or the demise of comparable “Green” companies, but Obama’s decision to refuse to permit the XL Keystone pipeline was a reminder that all his talk about job creation is just that—talk.

The rising price of a gallon of gasoline is never mentioned in the news, up from $1.86 when Obama took office to $3.40 now. That sort of thing used to get incumbent presidents defeated in the past.

Events beyond our shores continue whether we are in a primary season or not.

The future of the European Union is still somewhat precarious. Whether the Euro continues as the currency of the EU is an important issue affecting America’s trading partners. The U.S. Sovereign debt rating has already been reduced but now nine EU nations have been put on notice as well.

The Obama/Clinton foreign policy in the Middle East continues to erode. Egypt, a major player, is moving into Islamist—anti-American, anti-Israeli—control. For decades, the Muslim Brotherhood was suppressed as a political force in Egypt and today they have emerged as the biggest player. Egypt is moving out of our orbit of influence.

Iran continues inexorably toward acquiring the capacity to make its own nuclear weapons. Its growing desperation regarding the sanctions is generating a lot of bellicose threats. The entire Middle East is silently praying that Israel attacks and disables its nuclear capabilities. Anything else is morally indefensible.

Following the withdrawal of U.S. troops, Iraq is in shambles once again with bombs going off in its cities and little likelihood it will be able to function as a nation despite its vast oil riches. Libya has lots of oil, too, but it is still struggling to create a functioning government in the wake of Gaddafi’s overthrow. Syria has everyone in the Middle East on edge watching to see if Assad can avoid what appears to be his inevitable overthrow. His late father, though, did just that by slaughtering thousands.

The seemingly endless political debates continue minus Jon Huntsman who is backing Mitt Romney and Rick Perry who has endorsed Newt Gingrich. Pretty soon we shall be calling Romney “Teflon Mitt” because the voters appear to be bored with all the sniping from his opponents regarding his success in the private sector. Newt Gingrich seems to have no idea what capitalism is or does.

Even the calumnies heaped on the Tea Party movement don’t get much attention these days. We have learned, however, that the current Congress has been the least productive, accomplishing less in 2011 than any other year in recent history. Records have been kept since 1947. In light of the disaster called Obamacare, that is probably a good thing.

One trend is noticeable. With the exception of the Keystone decision, any news that might harm the reelection of President Obama is hard to find in the mainstream media.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Keystone Debacle

2012-01-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Future historians may conclude that President Obama’s decision to reject a permit for the building of the XL Keystone pipeline was a key factor in his defeat for a second term in 2012.

One can only hope that, in the course of the campaign, Republicans will focus public attention on the deliberate “no energy” policies of the Obama administration that have thwarted the creation of jobs, the generation of electrical power for homes and businesses, as well as fueling our transportation needs.

The Obama administration policies also meant that billions in tax revenue have been lost. Tapping U.S. energy reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil would also be a major step toward greater national security, freeing the nation from dependence on foreign oil.

In a recent article posted on The Heritage Foundation’s website, Rob Bluey reported that “oil and natural gas production on federal lands is down by more than forty percent (40%) compared to ten years ago.”

“Under the Obama administration, 2010 had the lowest number of onshore leases issued since 1984. The Obama administration held only one offshore lease sale in 2011.”

Following the President’s announcement regarding Keystone, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, Thomas Pyle, said that “Tens of thousands of American jobs died today because of the president’s rejection of the Keystone EL pipeline permit. For more than two years, the administration has delayed, hoping to get past 2012 without having to reveal the president’s true anti-job, anti-energy agenda. Because of today’s announcement, Americans will continue to send $70 billion overseas every day to purchase foreign oil.”

The secret President Obama wants to keep from Americans is that the price of domestic oil is always cheaper than foreign oil. Oil industry expert, Seldon B. Graham, Jr. says that this price deferential is “never reported by the media. The media only reports Wall Street speculators’ guesses of oil prices six months in the future…the U.S. price is always lower than the OPEC price.”

In February 2011, a CNS News article reported that “A new study says drilling on Alaska’s Outer Continental Shelf could make Alaska the eighth largest oil resource province in the world—ahead of Nigeria, Libya, Russia and Norway.”

In announcing the decision on the Keystone pipeline, the President boasted that, under his administration, “domestic oil and natural gas production is up”, but Bluey pointed out that “The vast majority of America’s new oil and gas production is happening on private lands in states like North Dakota, Alaska, and Texas.” Private, not public lands. One result is that North Dakota’s unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, the lowest in the nation.

Who favored the president’s decision?

An environmental organization, Green for All, hailed the decision. Its CEO, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, said, “This project would have helped Big Oil and their allies get richer at the expense of American workers and permanently damaged our environment.” How does it help to kill 20,000 jobs and an estimated 100,000 related to the pipeline?

The Sierra Club, another environmental organization, claimed that the pipeline would bring “toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada to refineries and ports in Texas.” If it was corrosive, it could not be transported by a pipeline, but ethanol which is mandated for use in gasoline is so corrosive it cannot be transported by pipeline and requires fleets of trucks instead. Echoing Green for all, the Sierra Club said, “Thank President Obama for standing up to Big Oil and rejecting the Keystone XL oil pipeline.”

Friends of the Earth, another environmental organization, branded Big Oil as “one of the most profitable and most unscrupulous industries on the planet.” Profits equal dividends for investors in oil companies. Profits equal jobs for thousands of Americans. Profits ensure that more oil can be discovered and extracted…except on federal lands and offshore because of present administration policies.

By contrast, James M. Taylor, a Senior Fellow for Environmental Policy of The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, said, “The Obama administration has confirmed the fears of everyday Americans that it is more interested in paying off environmental extremists and other far-left groups than it is in laying the foundation for a growing economy.”

“The Obama administration’s decision to block construction of the Keystone XL pipeline demonstrates as poignantly as a slap in the face that President Obama is either completely out of touch with the American people or is callously indifferent about our ongoing economic woes,” said Taylor. “I suspect that in the November elections voters will severely punish President Obama for this foolish decision.”

I suspect Taylor is right!

© Alan Caruba, 2012

New Jersey's Conservative Renaissance

2012-01-18T10:24:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

It was quite a sight. The Republican Governor of New Jersey strode into the cavernous legislative chamber in the Trenton statehouse, filled mostly with Democrats, and proceeded to receive one round of applause after another.

Chris Christie is rotund in a way that suggests you wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark ally. Before becoming Governor in 2011, as the U.S. District Attorney he had amassed an impressive record of putting bribe-taking legislators in jail, along with a long list of other criminals.

Moreover, he arrived on the scene to put an end to former Governor Jon Corzine’s fiscal destruction of the State; a feat he accomplished with MF Global, the investment firm that made headlines when it collapsed with unaccounted billions in “lost” customer funds.

New Jerseyeans were sick of governors who made promises they did not keep. From 1994 to 2001, Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican, had held the office until resigning to become President Bush’s director of the Environmental Protection Agency. She was quickly fired from the post.

She was followed by a series of interim governors until James E. McGreevey was elected in 2002. McGreevey, a Democrat, discovered he was a homosexual after his appointment of a boyfriend to a high paying state job was exposed. He resigned, was replaced by a congenial old “pol”, Richard Codey from 2004 to 2006, when Corzine was elected.

In the course of all this, New Jersey, thanks to massive mismanagement became a State famed for having the highest tax rates in the nation. People and businesses had began to flee, reducing its tax base. By fiscal year 2011, the State had a record deficit of $11 billion.

Gov. Christie literally taught a largely Democrat legislature conservative principles. He held town halls all over the State and became famous for his confrontational style. YouTube videos of his slap-downs were viewed by millions of people. They liked what they saw.

In his State of the State speech, delivered on Tuesday, January 17, you would think he was addressing a Republican legislature. He was interrupted with applause and got a standing ovation at the end of it.

“We had spent too much as a State. We had lived beyond our means. And, by trying to tax our way out of it, previous governors and legislators had left New Jersey in 50th place—dead last among the States—in the total tax burden it placed on our citizens. We had the highest tax rate in the nation, the highest unemployment rate in a quarter century, and the largest budget deficit per person of any State in the Union.”

How blunt is that? Little wonder he was talked of as a possible candidate for President in 2012. Gov. Christie decided to finish his first term and has since become a vocal supporter for Mitt Romney.

The real miracle was the way he worked with Democrats to turn the State’s fiscal problems around. “We cut 375 programs in that first fiscal year, saved two billion dollars for the taxpayers and brought Jon Corzine’s budget into balance.” Together, they cut spending in every department of State government.

Then, together, they put a cap on property taxes that had risen 70% in the decade that preceded his election. The legislature imposed a 2% cap on property tax increases. They did the same for arbitration awards. “We must never forget that the root cause of rising property taxes is always excessive government spending.”

His speech turned to a variety of changes he wants. He already has the results to justify them. “Since our administration came into office, New Jersey has added over 60,000 new private sector jobs. Remember, in 2009, the State had lost 117,000 jobs.”

Gov. Christie made national news when he proposed reducing the State income tax rates for every New Jerseyean. “In every tax bracket. By 10%, across the board.”

If the next two years are any indication of the last two, New Jersey’s lawmakers will institute education reforms to loosen the grip of its powerful teacher’s union while improving the quality of education and providing a financial option for parents who want to move their children to better performing or private schools.

He proposed mandatory treatment “for every non-violent offender with a drug problem in New Jersey, not just a select few.” This would empty out the jails and prisons. “We will require you to get treatment. Your life has value. Every one of God’s creations can be redeemed. Everyone deserves a second chance.”

Gov. Christie knows what ails America. “Our economy suffocated under the wet blanket of over-taxation, over-spending, over-borrowing and over-regulation.”

To this writer, a lifelong resident, born and bred in New Jersey, it was very impressive to listen to the stark opposite of the policies advocated by previous governors and the President of the United States. It was pure conservatism, presented without apologies because none were needed. The results have already demonstrated that it works.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The U.S. is on a Suicide Watch

2012-01-17T14:25:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

In 1991, the Soviet Union, arguably the greatest experiment in Communism, collapsed. After Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors moved to shift its Communist economy to one that embraced Capitalism while retaining centralized government control.

Following World War Two, the recovering nations of Europe were rescued from Communism by the Marshall Plan, but adopted Communism-Light in the form of Socialism. The U.S. was already headed in that direction, creating programs that we now call “entitlements.” For most of the nation’s history, such “entitlements” did not exist.

What binds together the financial problems of the West is the common thread of infantile behavior and thought. One might call it wishful thinking. Instead of encouraging people to provide for old age and possible illness, politicians decided to turn government into Big Daddy, the eternal source of money for everything.

Need to go to college, start a business, or plan for retirement? Government would be there to help. All this ignored the need to actually pay for these programs. In the case of Social Security Congress began to dip into its funding to pay for other programs! This is what children do.

One can look around the world and see what a failure both Communism and Socialism have been. Governments spending more than their tax and other revenues have suffered grievously from this path to default and that includes the United States of America. It can be argued that, with few exceptions--the Reagan years come to mind—Presidents have been poorly served by their economic advisors.

Politicians make poor economists because, in America, members of the House must think of getting reelected every two years and Senators every six. Moreover, being politicians, they believe that the more federal largess they can bring back to their State and then brag about is the one true path to reelection.

At the very beginning of the nation, Thomas Jefferson said it best. “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

How many commissions and special committees have earnestly produced reports intended to deal with a government grown too large? At the federal level, some two million or more Americans are employed promulgating a deluge of regulations and pushing paper.

Now President Obama says he wants to streamline the federal government.

The real issue is not “streamlining” government agencies by gathering them together under one roof and one administrator, but the failure to end government departments and agencies that no longer serve a useful purpose and whose removal would also remove countless obstacles to economic growth.

In April 2011, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warned that “the federal government is on track to spend more than $3.5 trillion this year. What most people don’t know is that government actually costs about 50% more than what it spends. That’s because complying with federal regulations costs an additional $1.75 trillion—nearly an eighth of GDP. And almost none of that cost appears on the budget.”

The United States of America, the greatest engine of wealth the world has ever seen, is bankrupt. The national debt exceeds the Gross Domestic Product, the sum total of all revenue generated by goods and services.

The President has asked that the debt ceiling be raised another trillion or so and Congress will comply. That, I submit, is insane.

I also submit that, since Barack Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the nation has been witness to the economic insanity personified in the man and in the Democrat-controlled Congress that was his partner until 2010 when the control of the House of Representatives was wrested away by the Tea Party movement and its support for Republican candidates.

The only constant in life is change. America’s demography has changed. We have, thanks to medical care and other advantages, a much older segment of the population than ever before, but the nation from the 1930s to the 1960s had committed itself to ensure they would have Medicare and Medicaid at a time when people more often than not died in their 50’s and 60’s. We now have an average life expectancy of 78 years. My parents lived into their 90s.

Politics, not economics, continues to make it impossible to revise and restructure both Medicare and Social Security to reflect this reality. Instead, we had Obamacare foisted upon us which took trillions from Medicare and imposes rules that will let elderly heart attack or stroke victims die rather than pay for a level of care to which they contributed during their working years.

If the Supreme Court declares Obamacare unconstitutional it will go away. If we elect a Republican Senate, the repeal already passed in the House will be passed and it will go away.

But America’s economic problems will not go away until Americans insist that the shackles of Big Government be cut loose to enable the growth of an energy industry that can not only make the nation energy independent, but produce billions in revenue as far as the eye can see into the future.

The tax system with its thousands of pages must be revised to a simpler, fairer program. It makes no sense that forty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all.

It’s not that we don’t know what must be done. Conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, The Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and others have spelled out programs that can and will save America, but the nation must be led by a president who understands that Capitalism involves budgeting, planning, hard work, and—yes—risk.

The federal government is running on “continuing resolutions.” It has not had a formal budget since Obama arrived. This is no way to run the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. America is on a suicide watch and we are just an election away from saving it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's "Fairness" is Pure Communism

2012-01-16T13:08:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

It is clear that Barack Obama’s main campaign theme is going to be about “fairness.” This is one of those words like “hope” and “change” that can mean many different things to different people. No one can ever accuse Obama of clarity. He is a consummate sloganeer, but the results of those slogans hardly represent anything resembling fairness. Or success.

The one incontrovertible fact about life is that it is not fair.

Some are born into wealth and some into moderate means and some into poverty. Moreover, some are born with inherent gifts and talents, while others are not. Some are born into “dysfunctional” families where a parent or parents are alcoholics or use illegal drugs, in jail or just gone.

The list of the plus and minuses in life are long and varied; city-born, country-born; the lure of gang life versus the expectation of rising early to do farm chores. Inner city schools versus suburban ones with greater budgets and opportunities. There is no real fairness and those who see the obstacles and overcome them do so because of an innate desire to achieve their goals.

One young man who comes to mind was born to a white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in Hawaii with a black father, Barack Obama Sr., from Kenya who in fairly rapid order divorced her and returned to an African wife he already had. His mother then married another foreigner, Lolo Soetoro, a Muslim from Indonesia, moving to Jakarta with her young son whom he adopted. When that marriage collapsed, she turned the care of her son over to her parents. One might not consider this the most promising beginning in life.

Barack Obama, however, got lucky. His grandparents ensured he attended a private school, Punahou, where he received an above-average education. He enrolled in colleges, eventually making his way to Columbia University and onto Harvard University Law School. Much of the information regarding his academic life remains shrouded. Indeed, we only “know” what Obama told us in two “memoirs” written at an early age about a life of relatively little achievement until politics propelled him into office in Illinois and then to the U.S. Senate where he spent barely two years before seeking the presidency.

Where did fairness play a role in any of this? Was it “fair” to be biracial? Was it fair to secure an education at well-respected institutions to which others were not admitted? So much of Obama’s life seems to hinge on remarkable, impenetrable happenstance and good fortune, but at this point he tells us that he is obsessed with the issue of “fairness.”

In a speech in December he talked of everyone engaging in “fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share.” It sounds nice, but it has nothing to do with hard work, self-improvement, personal motivation, and good values.. We look around us in any office or workplace and can pick out one or two that fit this description while the rest engage in psychological warfare and backstabbing.

For all this talk of fair share and fair play, Americans have lived through three years of Obama and have nothing to show for it beyond massive unemployment, lost homes, dislocation, food stamps, graduating into the world with a national debt that is equal to the Gross Domestic Product.

There are fewer real opportunities, no matter what one’s background or resume may be. It is fair the nation has been saddled with six trillion dollars in new debt since he took office? It is fair that future generations must pay this debt?

Obama is obsessed with what he regards as the unfairness of the income tax system, forever decrying what he perceives as differences in the rate the wealthy pay. In fact, the wealthy pay far more taxes than most Americans and some 40% of Americans pay no tax whatever.

The National Taxpayers Union’s figures for 2009 reveal that the top 1% of taxpayers paid 36.73%, the top 5% paid 58.66%, the top 10% paid 70% to the point where the top 50% paid 97.75%. The rest paid a mere 2.25% of incomes taxes that year. Is that fair?

Obama’s belief in the redistribution of income is hardly fair. Taking money from decent, hard-working Americans and giving it to those who won’t work or came here illegally hardly fits the description of fairness. It is, however, the classic definition of “economic justice” which gave us the 2008 financial meltdown when bad housing loans nearly destroyed the banking system.

As Mitt Romney campaigns in South Carolina for its primary election, a collection of yelping dogs are nipping at his heels, crying about how horrible it was that he was a practitioner of venture capitalism, cruelly destroying jobs, and growing wealthy. Newt Gingrich called it “vulture capitalism.” It is all a distortion of the truth and, worse, betrays a total lack of understanding of capitalism, the greatest job creator in the history of the world.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial, “Bain Capital has been a net job and wealth creator.” Citing just one example, Staples, Romney’s investment enabled the company to grow to a point where it currently employs 90,000 people. Also noted was the fact that some of Bain’s investments did not pan out. That is the nature of capitalism and it is often not fair.

Americans got burned by Obama’s “hope and change” mantra in 2008 and those who fall for his “fairness” mantra in 2012 will suffer a similar fate.

As for me, I am going to cast my vote for a man who made his wealth within and because of a system that rewards risk and the ability to pick more winners than losers.

I am going to avoid a president who has proven to be the biggest loser this nation has ever seen.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama has Failed African Americans

2012-01-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

January 16, 2012 – Dr. Martin Luther King Day.

It is always a difficult endeavor for a White man to write about the African American—Black—population. The suspicion of prejudice always lingers, but it must also be said that many White people, particularly those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, are seriously disappointed with him and, not surprisingly, so are many Blacks.

A quintessential Black liberal, Harry Belafonte, has been quite open regarding his unhappiness with Obama. Belafonte marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights era. In a recent interview he said that Obama had “a splendid opportunity to do more than most presidents would have ever been able to do and he let that opportunity slip away from him,” adding “I think if there was a kind of moral compass serving Barack Obama in the way we had all hoped, the moral force would have helped him make choices.” And where there is no moral force?

Belafonte is, of course, speaking for himself, but a January 2nd Associated Press article by Jocelyn Noveck, “Hollywood Stars less Vocal in Obama Support”, suggests that those who might be expected to be strong supporters of Obama have also experienced second thoughts. Matt Damon, who campaigned for Obama, told Elle magazine, “I think he misinterpreted his mandate.” Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs told Source magazine “I just want the president to do better.”

Black, White, Hispanic, or Asian, Americans have taken Obama’s measure over the past three years, but for Blacks the expectations were likely even higher than the rest of the population.

Forty-four years since the assassination of Dr. King, Blacks in America continue to experience difficulties that reflect a community plagued with social problems.

The Civil Right Act of 1964, passed in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, tore down the century of barriers that Blacks had endured. White Americans took pride in ridding the nation of this stain on its reputation. The election of a Black President was symbolic of the progress that had been made.

In early January, Julianne Malveaux, president of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, wrote an editorial, “African-Americans Lose, While Others Gain.” While unemployment plagues American workers, Malveaux noted that the “African American unemployment rate increased from 15.5 to 15.8 percent,” adding that “the estimate of the African American unemployment rate”, in real terms, was “a whopping 28.3 percent.”

Every President gets blamed for unemployment and Obama took office in the wake of a huge financial crisis that began as former President Bush’s second term was coming to an end. Massive bailouts kept the banking system from collapse, but it must also be said that Obama’s solutions, his stimulus programs, have been judged to have been failures.

Moreover, Obama has added more debt in three years than all previous presidents combined, from Washington to Clinton. As a result, he became the first President to preside over the downgrade of America’s sovereign debt rating.

It is just my opinion, but I believe that among Obama’s legacy will be the likelihood that it will be a generation or more before another Black politician is elected to lead the nation.

It must be said that African Americans have made progress. They will make progress.

Data posted on BlackDemographics.com set the 2010 Black population at 42 million, 13.6% of the U.S. population of 308.7 million.

The statistics regarding America’s African-American population, however, paint a daunting picture. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act at least half of the male Black population nationwide has been in prison.

African American women have 30% of all abortions and, according to the 2010 Census, Black females make up less than 14% of the total population.

From 1974 to 2004, the median income fell 12% for Black men while rising 75% for Black women. Other sources state that African Americans accounted for half of all new HIV diagnoses and, in 2009, just under half of new AIDS diagnoses.

Most certainly these statistics and others do not reflect anything that a Black President could impact in three years, but they suggest that the African American community is in serious trouble and that being a Black President is simply not enough. Still, one is mindful of the political risks his predecessors took to right a wrong.

The Democratic Party's answer has always been to throw money at such problems. It hasn’t worked. Politically, the great irony of Black support for the Democratic Party is that it was the party that fought against the Civil Rights Act and other measures to end the infamous Jim Crow measures in Southern States.

It’s not too soon to question whether Obama will receive the level of support given him by African Americans and by liberals in 2008. I doubt it. He has squandered the greatest opportunity ever given any man.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama Weakens the Military

2012-01-14T17:40:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

“Si vis pacem, para bellum.” If you want peace, plan for war. The adage is attributed to the 4th or 5th century Latin author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus’s tract De Re Militari book 3. This fundamental wisdom is being ignored by President Obama, one of two recent Commanders-in-Chief who never spent a day in uniform, let alone under fire.

In a recent American Thinker commentary by Jim Yardley, he said, “It is apparent that the president, in developing his strategy, used the same extensive knowledge, his superior intellect, and worldly wealth of experience that he brought to his strategy for his $800-billion stimulus, his strategy for providing cost-free health care to millions of Americans, and his strategy for using ‘smart diplomacy’ to defuse not spots around the world.”

Perhaps receiving the Nobel Peace Prize barely months into his first year as President has convinced Obama that he is the man to get all our enemies to join hands and sing Kumbaya. Obama accepted the prize that has gone to other seekers of peace like Yassir Arafat, founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or co-winners, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. The IPCC and Gore have led the greatest hoax of the modern era, global warming, and Arafat rejected every effort at peace offered by Israel by going back on his word and using terrorism to achieve his goals.

There is no question that the announced cuts to the U.S. military budget are, in part, the result of the domestic run up of debt and borrowing the followed the financial crisis of 2008; itself the result of bad government policies regarding the wholesale granting of mortgages to people who could not afford homes, then bundling those bad mortgages and selling them as assets to the banks.

While the economy is showing some small signs of regaining its footing, the government is still borrowing forty cents of every dollar it spends and has shown no real intent to reduce spending.

While this is occurring we have a President who has made clear his antipathy of the role of the military. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial noted that “The Pentagon shouldn’t be immune to fiscal scrutiny, yet this Administration has targeted defense from its earliest days and has kept on squeezing. The White House last year settled with Congress on $450 billion in military budget cuts through 2012, on top of the $350 billion in weapons programs killed earlier,” adding “Taken altogether, the budget could shrink by over 30% in the next decade.”

Following a 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center Osama bin Laden, a still largely obscure Islamic fanatic, declared war on the United States in 1996. In 2001, al Qaeda succeeded, killing nearly 3,000. To underestimate the intent of his successors to destroy the nation would be a grave error. To think that his assassination along with the killing of a relative handfull of other al Qaeda leaders has ended the threat is wishful thinking.

To think that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq will not at some point result in the possible breakup of that nation or the withdrawal from Afghanistan will rid us of the threat of Islamic fanaticsim is still more wishful thinking.

Right now and ever since 1979, the threat of Iran is the largest facing the Middle East and the West. Its leaders have never made a secret of its intent to acquire nuclear weapons, to threaten all other Middle Eastern nations, as well as Europe and America is on a par with the threat the rise of Nazism posed in Germany in the 1930s.

After World War Two, America emerged as a superpower and it took on the role of global policeman. No military prescience predicted the attack on South Korea by North Korea, nor was our strategy in Vietnam successful. We had earlier failed to anticipate the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor despite efforts to keep out of the war that had begun in 1939.

The lesson that should have been learned is that overwhelming military strength contributes greatly to avoiding wars.

President Obama is ignoring that. It is not, however, to say that he is taking Iran lightly. In early January, thousands of U.S. troops were deployed to Israel and senior U.S. military sources say they anticipate they will remain through the year. Obstensively, they are there to participate in joint U.S.-Israeli war games. They will be joined by a U.S. aircraft carrier and, as we know, we have a task force in place in the event the Iranians try to close the Strait of Hormuz through which passes one sixth of the world’s oil supplies.

The U.S. could be energy independent in a decade if the Administration and Congress would remove the obstacles to accessing our enormous reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, but that remains unlikely as this is written.

The decision to reduce the size of our military to 490,000 troops from 570,000 could not come at a worse time. Air and naval assets, we’re told, will be maintained. Holding evacuated or captured territory requires “boots on the ground.” The decision of former President Bush to “surge” in Iraq by increasing troop strength turned a potential defeat into a success. A war-weary America and the current Iraqi regime wanted us out and we are out.

Meanwhile Egypt that underwent “the Arab Spring” has fallen into the hands of a militant, anti-American and anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey has joined the Islamic frenzy, the future of Syria remains unknown, so anyone who thinks that military action anywhere, but especially in Iran, is not a real potential is not paying attention.

President Obama’s claim that “the tide of war is receding” is likely to rank with British PM Neville Chamberlains claim of “peace in our time” after a visit with Hitler.

It is wishful thinking or worse. It is the deliberate effort to ignore the dangers in the world. Shifting military personnel and assets to Asia acknowledges China’s rising power, but U.S. military leaders have warned against a war in Asia for decades. It is doubtful the Chinese want one.

What is not in doubt is that this is the wrong time to reduce our military strength and capabilities. We did that after World War One and paid a price for it. President Obama’s policies put us in the same peril.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- January 16

2012-01-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

I have to marvel that it has been 44 years since I heard the news that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.had been assassinated. I met him once, briefly. It is the rare individual who changes the heart of a nation, but Dr. King did that.

Here are a few quotes. You can read others. If you do, you will discover what an extraordinary person he was.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King was a preacher and the son of a preacher. As you watch the efforts of those to remove religion from our nation's life, remember that.

Cartoon Round Up

2012-01-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

Did You Know Homeland Security is Monitoring the Internet?

2012-01-12T14:39:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

One of the lessons one learns in military basic training is “situational awareness”, a term that reflects the importance of watchfulness in combat. It can mean the difference between life and death. Police practice this as well, looking for people who seem out of place in a neighborhood.

The average citizen blithely ignores this when shopping or just going about their life, though many purchase private monitoring services to protect their homes against fire or theft or put up video surveillance systems to protect their businesses. I doubt there is any public place that does not have television cameras watching.

When it comes to protecting the nation, situational awareness is an essential element to spot a potential individual or group that might pose a danger. There is, of course, the potential for misuse or abuse, but that applies to everything government does.

The upside of such monitoring is contained in a short item from the Heritage Foundation’s January 12 Morning Line dispatch. “His plan was to rip apart nightclubs with explosives, unleash a wave of destruction on bridges, and open fire on police officers—all in sunny Florida. This was the murderous intent of Sami Osmakac, 25, an American citizen from the former Yugoslavia who was determined to spill blood, foment destruction, and bring terror to the United States all in the name of Allah. Fortunately, undercover FBI agents thwarted his efforts, making this the 44th foiled terrorist plot against America."

I am a regular contributor to Harold Wylie’s excellent website, BorderfireReport.net. On a daily basis he gathers news about the effects of illegal immigration and related topics. He recently wrote to say that “my website has been placed on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) National Operations Center Media Monitoring Initiative.” He learned about this during a visit to World Net Daily.com.

Is this a good or bad thing? Candidly, I thought it was a good thing because it suggests that someone at DHS recognized what an excellent “open source” of information Wylie’s site provides.

A government agency that’s “snooping” on Americans is not likely to issue such a notice and the sites listed represent, in government-speak, the opportunity “to collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.”

When one considers the billions the government spends on covert intelligence gathering, this is a far cry from “Big Brother.” Simply stated, DHS thinks that Wylie’s his site is performing a valuable service for their own Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement operation.

The cliché is that “being paranoid does not mean someone is not watching you.” There are so many sources of information available to individuals and groups regarding everything about your life that it bodes well to conduct oneself in conformance with common sense and the law. Meanwhile, your credit rating and other data are easily accessible.

Like millions of others I am on Facebook and DHS monitors both it and Spacebook. The occasional nutcase uses these social networks to announce to the world that he or she has bad intentions. Ironically, even DHS is monitored by a site called Cryptome that, according to a Reuters’ news story “periodically posts leaked documents and was one of the first websites to post information related to the Homeland Security monitoring program.”

DHS monitors Jihad Watch and Informed Comment “that cover issues related to Islam through sharp political prisms, which have sometimes led critics to accuse the sites of political bias.” You and I visit sites daily that have a sharp political bias. It’s called freedom of speech and the press.

Ostensibly, the DHS monitors dozens of websites, forums, blogs, and message boards, for the purpose of managing “government responses to such events as the 2010 earthquake and aftermath in Haiti and security and border control related to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.”

This is not to say that government responses are effective, but I am not disturbed by the fact that it wants the “situational awareness” necessary. The fact remains that our nation’s borders are astonishingly—frightenly—porous and in need of far greater enforcement efforts to stem illegal immigration and the potential for threats to public safety. Then there are the Islamic jihadists that want to kill all of us.

It is very American to be suspicious of government monitoring. Ours is an open society and we want to keep it that way. It is also encouraging to know that the Department of Homeland Security is doing what it can to protect us.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Election Year Reality and Insanity

2012-01-11T12:34:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

There is something about an election year that seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people. Having settled on a candidate, they defame the opponents and the motives of those that support them. This is greatly aided by the charges that fly backward and forward among the primary candidates themselves. It’s not pretty, but it is the way a democracy works.

A conspiracy theory I keep hearing and reading is that Obama will create “an emergency” and declare martial law, putting himself in complete charge. I keep telling people that the nation is filled with millions of people who have taken an oath to protect and preserve the Constitution and they run the gamut from everyone who ever served in the military to law enforcement personnel, to members of the Secret Service. The likelihood that all would stand aside and let Obama have his way is, to my mind, very small.

All this is testimony to the growing fears about Barack Hussein Obama and there is ample evidence for concern as he seems to have very little regard for the Constitution and a decidedly Leftist approach to politics and governance.

By contrast, I have seen so much factual information; hard cold data, to suggest Obama not only won’t get elected, but will likely suffer a historic defeat. To keep the insanity at bay, it would be a good idea to get familiar with some of it.

Over at Big Government.com, Wynton Hall authored “It’s the Math, Stupid! Devastating Facts About 2012." With a great big hat tip to him, here they are:

1. Every day, the U.S. government takes in $6 billion and spends $10 billion. This means that every day the federal government spends $4 billion more dollars than it has.

2. The real unemployment rate is a jaw-dropping 11 percent.

3. Every fifth man you pass on your way to work is now out of work.

4. College graduates are now 34% less likely to find a job under Obama than they were under President George W. Bush.

5, Every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now relies on food stamps.

6. The ravages of the Obama economy now mean that more Americans live under the federal poverty line than at any time in U.S. history since records have been kept.

7. Under President Barack Obama, every fifth child in America now lives in poverty.

No one gets reelected with that level of misery extent in the nation. The days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt are long gone. This is the age of Fox News and the Internet.

Karl Rove, whom George W. Bush called “the architect” for his political acumen, took note of Obama’s inclination to link himself to FDR and to Truman. “In many ways,” Rove wrote in December, “his situation is significantly different than that of his Democrat predecessors. For one thing, a year out from the 1948 election, Gallup measured Mr. Truman’s job approval rating at 54%, whereas Mr. Obama’s is 43%--substantially lower than any president who has won re-election.”

Let me repeat that. “Substantially lower than any president who has won re-election.”

Obama may run against a “do-nothing Congress” as Truman did, but today’s House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, has been active enough to produce 29 bills intended to spur economic growth. Of those pieces of legislation, 21 remain stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate

Indeed, voters may well wish that Obama had done a lot less. After comparing himself to Johnson, FDR and Lincoln in a “Sixty Minutes” interview, even a casual look at his stimulus package has falling flat with voters, 62% of whom, according to an Ipsos/Reuters November poll, believe that they did little more than create more debt. Obamacare is even less popular.

Blue-collar Americans took notice when Obama delayed the XL Keystone pipeline that would have generated 20,000 construction jobs and an estimated 118,000 spin-off jobs.

Kimberly A. Stossel who writes Potomac Watch for The Wall Street Journal, noted in November that, mostly due to the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts, “the Obama administration has done more to kill working-class industries than any modern predecessor, adding that “Among the reasons the GOP regained control of the House in 2010 was the fact that “the white working class surged to give the GOP a record 63% of their vote.”

As Rove noted, “America is not a nation of amnesiacs.” And neither should you be. Keep the facts cited in mind.

Remain calm and come together behind whoever the GOP selects as its candidate.

No desertions.

No faint hearts.

No conspiracy theories.

No third parties.

Just the defeat of Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Ice Age "News" is Wrong--It's Coming Sooner Than Later

2012-01-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

When you consider the millions of words published as “news” about global warming, a massive hoax based on the theory that an increase in the Earth’s levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), a minor atmospheric gas (0.0380%), it boggles the mind that reporters for a respected newswire, Reuters, would still be writing utter rubbish about it.

Just as the “news” about global warming was demolished in 2009 and again in 2011 with the leaked emails of the conspirators behind the fictions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main agency behind the hoax, on January 9, Nina Chesney of Reuters London Bureau, reported about a paper in the journal, Nature Geoscience, that the “Next Ice Age not likely before 1,500 years: study.”

The paper claimed that “Concentrations of the main gases blamed for global warming reached record levels in 2010 and will linger in the atmosphere for decades even if the world stopped pumping out emissions today, according to the U.N.’s weather agency.”

The U.N. does not have a “weather agency.” It has a propaganda agency devoted in its own words to “climate.” The two are not the same. Weather is what is occurring right now and climate is the measurement of trends over centuries.

The authors of the paper based their ice age predictions on “variations in the earth’s orbit and rock samples” and was “conducted by academics at Cambridge University, University College London, the University of Florida, and Norway’s University of Bergen.

These people have to justify their salaries and, just like all the other academics who jumped on board the global warming wagon, they are likely among the last holdouts making claims about CO2. Their conclusions are absurd. This isn’t science. It’s the dying gasp of those trying desperately to keep the global warming hoax alive.

The science—the known facts—aren’t that difficult to understand. Climatologists have established that, over the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence, ice ages have had interglacial periods that averaged about 11,500 years. Then the Earth lapses into a period of extreme cold. The Earth is 11,500 years since the end of the last major ice age.

We are due the onset of the next ice age any day now and when it begins, it will come on so fast that all the manmade CO2 will have no effect whatever. Moreover, CO2 shows up in the atmosphere in a greater quantity AFTER a major climatic event, not before.

There have been periods when there was much more CO2 in the atmosphere; the age of the dinosaurs comes to mind. Indeed, when the last big ice age struck, mammoths were literally frozen in place, waiting to be discovered and dug up centuries later, so intact scientists were able to determine what their last meal was!

I count myself fortunate to have Robert W. Felix, perhaps the world’s leading authority on ice ages, as my friend. I recommend you visit www.iceagenow.info and benefit from the facts. You can also read “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, his book on the topic of ice ages.

In a post on his website regarding the latest nonsense about a distant ice age, Felix cites the fact that Argentina’s Perito Moreno is growing and it is in the southern hemisphere. In addition, glaciers are growing in India, in the Rockies, in California and Washington State. Do you believe that CO2 will stop this growth or have the slightest affect on it?

The assertion that “an increase in ice-sheet volume would not be possible” is a lie. Just like all the other lies published about global warming by the IPCC and all the others that sought to profit from the hoax.

Do not believe these claims. The Earth has been in a perfectly natural cooling trend since 1998. We are at the end of the most recent interglacial period and could tip into a new ice age tomorrow.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Republicans! Stop Looking for a Messiah!

2012-01-09T13:43:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

In 2008 the voters gave the Oval Office to a man who Rush Limbaugh and others mockingly called “the messiah” for his grandiose rhetoric and promises of change. If the first two primaries are any indication, Republican Party voters seem to be looking for their own messiah, a perfect candidate, and no such person exists.

Republicans have to stop seeking their own “messiah” in 2012. Most importantly, the six percent that Rasmussen Reports says are ready to vote for a third party candidate, if one emerges, have got to get their heads screwed on tighter because that’s a margin that could keep Obama in office for four more years. Additionally, Rasmussen reports that 53% believe Mitt Romney is the GOP candidate to defeat Obama.

In recent Wall Street Journal commentary, “Romney Wins but Takes a Beating”, columnist Peggy Noonan wrote “The Iowa results almost perfectly reflect the Republican Party, which, roughly speaking, is split into three parts—libertarians, social conservatives and moderate conservatives,” adding, “there’s no denying the Republicans are in a brawl, and it is becoming ferocious.”

I put the ugly tone of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries squarely at the feet of Newt Gingrich. Angry, resentful, and eager for revenge over his loss in Iowa, Gingrich was still smarting from the attack ads aimed at him. He revealed an aspect of his personality well known from his days as Speaker of the House in the 1990s.

Rick Santorum did well in Iowa, but he brings a holier-than-thou approach to the campaign with his religion-based approach to various social issues. It’s not so much that I disagree with his positions, but there are a lot of independents who do not necessary go to church every Sunday.

Michele Bachmann’s strident tone didn’t help her much and Rick Perry’s punch-drunk approach to campaigning didn’t either. I worry that Ron Paul will try the third party route. At present, he will never get the nomination and his base is a bunch of boys and girls barely out of their adolescence. No Republican grownup takes Paul’s views seriously, nor should they. Jon Huntsman is a spoiled rich kid, a fellow Mormon, who seems to have a personal grudge against Romney.

Talking about Mormons, I am old enough to recall all the talk about John F. Kennedy having been a Catholic and how that would hurt him. It didn’t. What’s really amazing is that Barack Obama’s long association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a black liberation preacher and one who outspokenly condemned the U.S.A., barely put a dent in his run for the presidency.

As for Mormons, many have served honorably in high office since the days of President Eisenhower. It’s time to get off that hobby horse. If anything, I am greatly relieved that for all the talk of flip-flopping, there has not been a whisper of personal scandal regarding Romney. Compare that, please, to Bill Clinton.

At some point, likely after the South Carolina and Florida primaries, Republicans of all descriptions are going to conclude they have a good candidate in Mitt Romney. The party which has generally been run by white shoe, East Coast elites and a healthy mixture of Texas oilmen, has got to get serious about tearing Barack Obama to bits.

This election is not about finding “another” messiah to lead the nation. It’s about electing—frankly—anyone other than Obama and, hopefully, someone who has demonstrated real executive competence in public office and private enterprise.

In Congress the Republican leadership is elaborately polite in their discourse, but the election will not be won in the Capitol Building. It will be won in 50 States whose population has been taking a beating in a terrible economy made worse by the profligate spending and borrowing of the worst President this nation has ever known. By the time November rolls around, I want them to be mad as hell and it will be the party’s job to make sure that happens.

© Alan Caruba 2012

America's Dark Mood

2012-01-08T15:43:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

It is possible for an entire nation to suffer depression? Not the financial, but the emotional kind.

I have not spoken to anyone, however, that has expressed any optimism about the state of the nation and the air is full of conspiracy theories regarding what new action Barack Obama might take. The most popular of these is that he will declare “a national emergency” in order to assert powers that would put him in control of the nation without reference or consultation with Congress.

I would have dismissed such a notion in the past, but Obama genuinely scares me and a lot of other people as well. An example of this was the great surge in gun sales that led up to Christmas. Guns are not generally regarded as the kind of gift you find under the Christmas tree unless you’re a hunter or shooting sportsman.

I cannot shake off the memory of the march on Washington in 2009 when an estimated million Americans gathered there to peacefully protest the pending passage of Obamacare. The President’s chief political advisor, David Axelrod, dismissed the gathering saying, “They’re wrong.” That’s beyond arrogance. It signals contempt for the way a democracy works.

They were not wrong and the Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing in March in response to 26 U.S. State Attorney Generals who filed suit to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional. The manner in which the then-Democrat controlled Congress forced the bill through to passage was scary, along with then-Speaker Pelosi’s statement that we just would have to read the bill “to find out what’s in it.” It was apparent that none of members of Congress who voted for it had bothered to do that.

What’s scary, too, is that Congress has provided the presidency with all manner of virtually dictatorial powers that were intended to be evoked only in the event of a major, national crisis. Even following 9/11 these powers were not used to hamper news coverage, freedom of travel, and other aspects of our lives. 9/11, however, was followed by the Patriot Act and many of us continue to have grave misgivings about some of its provision.

A more recent piece of legislation that permits the President to authorize the seizure, arrest and imprisonment of anyone deemed an enemy of the state is scarier still. Obama says he would not use such powers but modern history is filled with examples of dictators that did.

So, yes, America is in a very dark mood these days. New Hampshire’s citizens are poised to vote for a Republican to be that party’s candidate for the presidency. Adopted in 1945, at the end of World War Two, New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live free or die.” It is my hope that other Americans feel the same way.

Suffice to say that Barack Hussein Obama is not like any other President in the history of the nation. It is more than a little frightening that this unknown quantity was so carefully “packaged” that, along with a mainstream media that were literally enthralled with him, enough voters were found to elect him.

A lot of those voters were young and likely unaware of U.S. history, the Constitution, and the principles by which the nation is intended to be governed. A lot of those young voters, now a bit older, looking for jobs that don’t exist, living at home still, and perhaps also saddled with huge college loan debt may not vote at all or vote for anyone but Obama.

The other group that was instrumental in his victory was African-Americans and one wonders if a majority among them have had a change of heart. I doubt it. A third group was union members and the civil service unions and others have benefited greatly from his Administration despite growing opposition at the state level.

It is worth keeping in mind that there is a hard core of 25% to 30% of voters who are blindly liberal and utterly immune to facts or reality. The “Occupy” movement drew from this group and they quickly wore out their welcome wherever they gathered. If enough liberals are disheartened by their personal situation, they too may not turn out in large numbers to vote.

As for the GOP, it has become fractionalized by its libertarian segment, its evangelical Christian segment, and by what was a cohesive Tea Party conservative segment. They need to set aside their differences to elect a candidate who can defeat Obama and I am inclined to believe that the closer we get to Election Day, they will.

As with any depression, one has to shake it off and find ways to turn dark moods in to bright tomorrows. That’s America’s job. We have done it in the past and we can do it again.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Caruba Reconnected to Google Blogger After a Week

2012-01-08T15:10:00.000-08:00

It has been a long week since I accidently disconnected myself from access to my blogs. I am now reconnected as you can see and intend to post the commentaries of the past week and new ones for 2012.

I appreciate all of the emails and inquiries resulting from this and, even if I do not answer you all, I appreciate your concern and support.

Now! Onward to 2012!

Alan Caruba

Obama's War on U.S. Energy

2012-01-01T14:04:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The Iowa caucuses tell us that the campaign season is now upon us. While we focus on the Republican candidates, there will likely only be one Democratic candidate for president. If you still need a reason to defeat Obama in 2012 consider his administration’s intense effort to deprive America of the energy it needs to function and compete in the world.

If a foreign nation had launched an attack on America to destroy its coal-fired plants, to shut down its coal mines, and to thwart its ability to drill for oil and natural gas, we would be at war with it.

Obama is at war with America. Between the waste of billions squandered on “Green” energy and the attacks on all aspects of the energy industries in America, the one reason to defeat Obama is your ability to turn on the lights, turn on your computer, and ensure that American business and industry has the energy necessary to exist and compete.

Just try to imagine what your life would be without adequate, reliable electricity.

As a Wall Street Journal editorial recently warned, “Last week the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission convened a conference on the wave of Environmental Protection Agency rules that are designed to force dozens of coal-fired power plants to shut down…despite warnings from expert after expert, including some of its own, the FERC Commissioners refuse to do anything about this looming threat to electric reliability.”

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned that “Environmental regulations are shown to be the number one risk to reliability over the next one to five years.”

The editorial noted that “For the first time in U.S. history, net coal capacity is in decline. On top of 38 gigawatts of generation that is already being run below normal levels or slated for early retirement, NERC predicts another 36 to 59 gigawatts will come offline by 2018, depending on the ‘scope and timing’ of EPA demands. That could mean nearly a quarter of all coal-fired capacity.”

It is coal-fired plants that currently provide fifty percent of all the electricity generated in America! The EPA is feverishly trying to force a quarter of that capacity offline. Why? Because the EPA claims that these plants are “polluting” the air. The air in America has never been cleaner. The EPA demand for cleaner air is a bludgeon being used to deprive America of its ability to function.

America has more than 497 billion short tons of recoverable coal (not counting Alaska) or nearly three times as much as Russia, which has the world’s second largest reserve. According to the Institute for Energy Research, “America’s recoverable coal resources are bigger than the five largest non-North American countries’ reserves combined,” i.e., Russia, China, Australia, India and the Ukraine.

The Obama administration delayed the proposed Canadian Keystone XL pipeline that would provide more oil for America’s needs. It imposed an illegal moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. While China drills for oil off the coast of Cuba, access to offshore oil is restricted on both the East and West coasts of America and, of course, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. According to the Department of Interior's 1987 resource evaluation of ANWR's Coastal Plain, there is a 95% chance that a 'super field' with 500 million barrels would be discovered.

Meanwhile, when combined with resources in Canada and Mexico, the total recoverable oil in North America exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels! That is more than the entire world has used in the past 150 years and sufficient to fuel the present needs in the United States for the next 250 years!

The same holds true for natural gas, often accessed by “fracking” a safe process that has been in use for sixty years. The total amount of recoverable natural gas in North America is approximately 4.2 quadrillion (4,244 trillion) cubic feet. That’s enough to last for the next 175 years at current rates of consumption.

In Durban, South Africa the enemies of the United States and all industrialized Western nations recently gathered at yet another United Nations conference on climate change. Its major objective was to deter energy use by Western industrialized nations or, more accurately, to require that the UN receives billions in return for allowing it.

The global warming claim on which the EPA is basing its horrendous rules and regulations is a complete and total lie. There is no human-caused global warming.

The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) attended the conference to monitor its mischief and reports that “Obama and his fellow climate travelers are trying to do an end run around the Senate and stick America with the bill. They are creating side agreements that give them much of what they want from a treaty. These side agreements will not come home for a vote in the Senate or other national legislatures. Previous U.S. Senates have refused to ratify UN climate treaties such as the Kyoto Protocols that called for limits on greenhouse gases.

Global warming claims, the basis for EPA rule-making regarding emissions, have all been refuted and debunked.

Antarctic sea ice is at a near-record extent and is expanding; so too for Arctic ice. The polar bear population is thriving. Sea levels are actually dropping. Global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade and the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998. The frequency of U.S. hurricanes has declined along with the frequency of tornadoes. There is no evidence the Earth is experiencing unusual weather. This list of climate lies is a very long one.

It is all connected, from the halls of the United Nations to the EPA and other U.S. departments working ceaselessly to deprive America of the energy it needs for its very survival.

Obama and his administration must be decisively defeated in November 2012 if the republic is ever to be empowered to pull back from the brink of its destruction.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

How Not to Go Crazy in 2012

2011-12-31T15:25:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Election years tend to create a level of frenzy concerning the selection of the nominees and the outcome. The media feed this in order to keep readers reading and viewers viewing. The history of American elections has always been one of vituperation between the parties, so there is nothing new about this. Indeed, since so much depends on it, the political free-for-all is a healthy exercise.

It can, however, make for a difficult environment in which to go about one’s life; the air filled with charge and counter-charge, polls going up and down, and a general sense that something is very wrong with the way the government functions.

On the bright side, a gridlocked Congress may bring a measure of relief to everyone. Writing about gridlock in January 2011, Marcus E. Ethridge, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, noted that “By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups.” In 2011, we saw what happens when advocates of “renewable energy”, wind and solar power, or electric cars, get priority over the needs of most Americans for reliable energy and transportation.

At the heart of the 2012 election will be the recognition that the economy is still not recovering, that government is seeking to extend and expand its control over our lives, and, even among former supporters of Barack Obama, that he has been a failure of historic proportions.

A Friday Rasmussen Reports said that “Voters right now give the edge to Republicans when asked which political party is likely to win the White House and control both the House of Representatives and the Senate in next November’s election”, adding that “a lot of voters are undecided.” Those voters may actually wait until entering the polls to cast their vote.

Another bad piece of news for President Obama is a new comparative analysis of current voter registration data in key electoral states of Nevada and North Carolina. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, there has been “a drastic drop from 2008 levels when a record-high proportion of young Americans turned out overwhelmingly to cast their votes to elect Barack Obama as President.” This is significant because more than two-thirds of young voters supported the Obama/Biden ticket in 2008.

The President had a low moment following the passage of Obamacare that transformed itself into the Tea Party movement and an even worse one in 2010 when it propelled a large number of Republicans into the House of Representatives, causing its control to change hands. He has had, in fact, only one truly high moment and that occurred when he announced the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. At the time, he typically took complete credit. In a speech at Fort Bragg to returning troops from Iraq, the word “victory” was never spoken.

Americans are not unmindful that the downgrade of the rating of the nation’s sovereign debt, the first in the nation’s history, was announced on Obama’s watch. The rate of "official" unemployment has receded to 8.6% but most Americans are well aware that it is far closer to 11% or more. America continues to experience that longest period of long-term unemployment since the 1930s.

For these and a myriad of other reasons, there is little reason to conclude that President Obama has any chance whatever of being reelected. The widespread contempt for Congress is also a hopeful sign for change. These are reasons to remain calm amidst the din of electioneering in the months ahead.

There is, however, all manner of troubles brewing in the world. Europe will have to find a solution to what will happen if its southern tier of nations elects to default on their sovereign debt. Cracks in the European Union are evident. If it falls apart, it will be very messy, but Europe existed before the EU and would if it disbands.

The Middle East is in the midst of a huge struggle between its fanatical Muslim faction and a population unhappy enough with former dictators to have forced out several in 2011 with the prospect that Syria’s Bashar Assad will fall in 2012.

Iran remains the wild card and its nuclear dreams will likely end with a well-timed and well-executed attack by Israel. Israel saved the world from a nuclear Iraq in 1981 and a nuclear Syria in 2007. An attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities could trigger an internal movement to overthrow the mullahs.

There are other wild cards in the Middle East. The Palestinians show no indication of giving up their dream of destroying Israel. That will not happen. Without Iranian support, both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza will be set adrift. Muslim atrocities in nations such as Nigeria where Christian churches were bombed on Christmas Day will contribute to a growing movement against Islamic terrorism. It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

Even the Russians show signs of tiring of their post-Soviet ruling class led by Vladimir Putin.

America faces a long period of restructuring the socialist programs that began in the 1930s and reached their peak in the 1960s. Should the GOP gain control of Congress and Obama is defeated, real change will occur.

Two other factors signal better times ahead. They are the failure of the global warming hoax and the disdain the “Occupy” movement engendered.

In 2012 Americans will take steps to end the scandals and deprecations of the Obama administration.

We shall ignore the anticipated shouts of racism.

We shall see the Supreme Court disembowel Obamacare or set in motion its repeal by a GOP controlled Congress.

We will select a President and a Congress to put things right.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T08:36:00.001-08:00

Cartoon Round Up

2011-12-30T13:31:00.000-08:00

The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits

2011-12-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

It’s a little known event, perhaps because its participants want it that way, but as the new year is poised to begin, the Grand Panjandrum of Pundits gathered at an undisclosed location for their annual review of all the predictions they made regarding things that did not occur, all the events that did occur—taking them by complete surprise, and to exchange notes on their thoughts regarding 2012.

The philosopher Aristotle had it right when he said “Stuff happens.”

This particularly applied to the third year of Barack Hussein Obama’s extended vacation as President of the United States of America. He ended the year comparing himself to previous presidents whose shoes he is not fit to shine and whose bathwater he is ill equipped to draw.

On January 2, 2010, I wrote that I thought Obama’s life, at least in the chronology and facts that were presented to the public, was a pure fiction, make believe. By then Americans had experienced a year’s worth of ineptitude that left anyone paying any attention astonished. It was just one blunder after another.

Even more astonishing is that no court, no one in Congress, and no one in the Republican Party has dared to say that the man was and remains ineligible to be President. Plenty of other people have said it. My friend, Dr. Jerome Corsi, wrote a whole book about it; two in fact.

The glaring truth that no one wants to address is the fact that his father was a citizen of Kenya and, as such, the terms of the U.S. Constitution which require that only “natural born” citizens—those whose both parents are U.S. citizens—can hold the office of President.

When you add in the serious doubts over the authenticity of his birth certificate—declared a fake by document experts and the dubious authenticity of his Social Security number, issued in Connecticut where he never worked a day in his life, and you have enough evidence to send him packing in less than 24-hours.

Even so, the Democratic Party will put him on the ballot again to run for office in 2012. The legality of this is no more likely to be challenged than it was in 2008, though some are trying. The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits was left to scratch their heads and mumble about the strangeness of this.

There was one thing they agreed upon. Barack Hussein Obama is the worst President the nation has ever had to endure.

No other president even comes close. He is the first to preside over the first U.S. sovereign debt downgrade in American history.

He has been responsible for the highest level of federal spending (25% of GDP) since World War Two and, in a comparable fashion, the highest level of federal debt (67% of GDP) since then as well.

Employment is the lowest since 1983 and long-term unemployment (45.9%) is the highest since the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression.

The rate of home ownership (59.7%) is the lowest since 1965 and the percentage of taxpayers paying income tax is the lowest in the modern era. At the same time, the level of government dependency (47%), those persons receiving one ore more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.

Obama and his economic advisors have achieved this in just three years while others in his administration were authorizing millions in loan guarantees to “Green” companies going bankrupt with alarming predictability or producing heavily subsidized products that no one wanted to purchase. Others we’re told were unaware of a Department of Justice program to run guns to drug cartels in Mexico. Plans to shut down Gitmo were quietly shelved. The Bush-Cheney policies were quietly extended.

Within twenty-four hours of the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Baghdad was besieged by bombings while the prime minister was busy trying to arrest and indict the vice president. You cannot make up stuff like this.

We are now mere months away from the Supreme Court hearing a case regarding the constitutionality of Obamacare. It is normal for judges who have had any previous involvement in a case or those close to it to recuse themselves from participating, but the Obama administration is so marked by a lack of ethics that his former Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now an Associate Justice, has still not announced her decision.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Obamacare, the federal government can require you to spend your money on things you do not want and may not need.

This is why the Grand Panjandrum of Pundits ended in a state of mass confusion and despair. Just like it did in 2010.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Magical Mental Exercise Called Reading

2011-12-28T13:49:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

In 1942 my parents purchased a home in a picture-postcard suburban New Jersey community and the first improvement they made was to have bookshelves installed on the rear wall of the living room along with more in one corner. They had brought a lot of books with them and anticipated reading many more.

The living room was a library. An indelible memory of mine was of both parents reading. My father was a graduate of New York University, having worked his way through while attending night school. Mother occasionally lamented not having attended college, but Mother also taught in the adult school of the community for three decades and authored two books in addition to many magazine columns.

An authority on haute cuisine and wine, she garnered honors from the British and French Sommelier Societies, as well as from Germany. She was profiled in The New York Times. The word for a person like Mother is autodidact; a fancy way of saying self-taught.

Earlier and well into the 1930s through the 1950s Americans devoured books and often spent precious dollars to purchase sets of the Harvard Classics—we had them—and either the Encyclopedia Britannica or Americana—we had the latter. The Book of the Month Club was very successful as was a magazine called Reader’s Digest.

I was reminded of this by a very entertaining new book, “Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America”, authored by Daniel J. Flynn. The introduction begins with a reflection on popular culture, “Stupid is the new smart.”

This isn’t, however, just another lament about the sad state of present-day education or popular culture. Instead, it is a look back at America in the pre-World War Two era up to and beyond when television began to occupy the time many used to devote to reading books. Ironically, Flynn notes that television played a powerful role in popularizing several of the people he identifies as intellectual icons.

“For much of the twentieth century,” wrote Flynn, “there was a concerted effort among intellectuals to spread knowledge and wisdom far and wide. Correspondingly, many regular people took full advantage of the great educational effort. The idea was that America depended on having a well-rounded, educated citizenry.” This was not a new idea because from its earliest years Americans valued knowledge for its own sake.

“Twentieth-century America witnessed a democratization of education, unparalleled in human history,”says Flynn. I mentioned that my Mother taught gourmet cooking in adult schools. This was a phenomenon that began after World War Two. In addition to the GI bill that encouraged returning servicemen, mostly still young, to attend college, adult schools sprang up in communities as a way to quench the thirst for knowledge among the parents of those in college who, because of the Depression and the war, had not had the opportunity to acquire a higher level of education.

Common among the intellectual icons that Flynn identifies as having made learning popular was that all of them came from humble, often hardscrabble beginnings. They were not the children of wealth and privilege. They were people who knew what it meant to work for meager wages, but yearn for great achievement. All were denizens of local libraries and veracious readers. Of those who became members of the faculties of distinguished institutions, their roots gave them a unique advantage whether the topic was history, economics, or literature. They had lived in the real world.

The “blue collar intellectuals” included Will and Ariel Durant, co-authors of “The Story of Civilization” that included eleven-volumes by the time they were completed. Another was Mortimer Adler who authored “The Story of Philosophy” and, in 1940, “How to Read a Book” which became the second best-selling book of that year.

Milton Friedman transformed economics while teaching at the University of Chicago for thirty years starting in 1946. He would win a Nobel Prize. “Friedman understood that economics wasn’t merely about numbers. It was about people.” His book, “Capitalism and Freedom”, challenged many of the New Deal liberal policies when published in 1962. As Flynn put it, the book “highlighted the disconnect between the intentions of do-gooders and the atrocious results of their deeds.”

I can still recall reading Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” some years after it was first published in 1951. Working as a longshoreman, a strike in 1946 gave Hoffer the time to begin writing the book and another in 1948 gave him the time to finish it. It has never gone out of print and it took the reclusive Hoffer from a modest life he greatly preferred to meeting with presidents. The book was about mass movements and was his response to the two worst of the last century, Communism and Nazism. His own lifetime of reading is reflected in this and other books he subsequently wrote.

Flynn ends with a look at Ray Bradbury, best remembered as a science-fiction writer, but like the others of a humble origin, beginning in Waukegan, Illinois in 1920. His books, “Fahrenheit 451”, “Something Wicked Comes This Way”, and “The Martian Chronicles” cemented his reputation. Flynn says that “the threat to the life of the mind comes not as much from people who burn books as from people who don’t read them.”

So, when you’re commuting to work, on a lunch break, or when a hundred or more television channels offer you nothing worth watching keep a book at hand. Some of them will become lifelong companions.

Editor’s note: To keep up with the latest in non-fiction and fiction, visit Caruba’s monthly report at http://www.bookviews.com/
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© Alan Caruba, 2011

Media Whips Up Phony Iowa Primary Frenzy

2011-12-27T13:08:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

We are, once again, witnessing what the media does best, whipping up a public frenzy over an event or, in the present case, the primary elections they are seeking to influence.

The most current example is the forthcoming Iowa caucuses and, as Michael Barone noted in a December 27 Wall Street Journal commentary, Iowa is hardly a bellwether predicting who will be the Republican nominee to oppose Barack Obama.

In “As Iowa Goes, So Goes Iowa” Barone, a respected political analyst, noted that “the Hawkeye State has voted for the eventual Republican candidate only twice—in 1996 for Bob Dole, in 2000 for George W. Bush—and only once was the Iowa winner elected president.”

You would not know that from the 24/7 election coverage of the cable news channels, nor the print media coverage. For Republicans, the greatest concern is that a literal handful of Iowans might vote for Rep. Ron Paul who is to the left of Barack Obama on most issues.

For my part I have tried to ignore Ron Paul as much as possible, but he is getting the full media treatment, including an appearance on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. The views he expresses are pure lunacy. He supports legalizing drugs, shrinking the military, isolationism, and all manner of policies that would incalculably harm the nation.

The whole primary process, along with the many debates, is intended to winnow out the weakest candidates. Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain are already gone. After the Iowa caucuses, no doubt Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman will cease to be serious contenders. Rick Perry has proven himself to be a good governor, but a poor national candidate. Newt Gingrich is waning under close examination.

Mitt Romney is beginning to look like a paragon of experience and rationality.

Insofar as the national media catapulted Barack Obama into the White House, we need to be especially wary of the media’s enthusiasms for one candidate or the other and, at this stage, its “horse race” mentality.

Elections are a study of mass movements, the gathering of supporters coalescing around a particular candidate, and they say much about the national mood.

If the polls are any indication, Obama’s consistently falling approval numbers, despite the occasional blip, suggest that most voters with the exception of diehard liberals are deserting him after three years of crippling national debt, continued high unemployment, flatlining housing prices, his war on energy and the states struggling to deal with illegal immigration. Even liberal news media are pulling back from the adoring coverage he once generated.

Years ago in the 1950s a blue collar philosopher, Eric Hoffer, penned a book, “The True Believer”, that became a national bestseller. Hoffer had devoured the works of great thinkers as he rode the rails during the Depression years, worked in the fields, and became a longshoreman.

Hoffer’s book, still in print, had some insights regarding mass movements that are well worth revisiting. It was written in response to the likes of Hitler and Stalin, but it holds true for the current enthusiasms of Ron Paul’s supporters and those who cling to Obama’s myths.

Well before Obama’s vacuous offer of “hope and change”, Hoffer wrote, “For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power—a slogan, a word, a button. No faith is potent unless it is also faith in the future; unless it has a millennial component”, i.e., a hoped-for period of happiness, peace, prosperity, and justice. Obama has not delivered on any of these.

“Every established mass movement has its distant hope, its brand of dope to dull the impatience of the masses and reconcile them with their lot in life.” Americans, however, may be the most impatient people on Earth.

The utter failure of the Obama administration and the wreckage it has left in its path quickly mobilized a leaderless movement called the Tea Party. Its rejection of Obamacare and other administration policies and programs is the background music to the battle in Congress between those advocating the failed programs of the Democratic Party and the large contingent of newly-minted Tea Party-supported Republicans is evidence of a mass movement that the media continues to disparage.

Even those who do not identify themselves as Tea Party patriots will play an important role in the 2012 elections. Their power is revealed in the Democratic Party’s announcement that it will not seek votes from white, middle class working people, but concentrate instead on those on the government dole, union members, and those who want the status quo.

A national election is an exercise in propaganda, but Hoffer noted that “The truth seems to be that
propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe.” That is Obama’s dilemma and downfall. His endless speeches fall on deaf ears these days and will in 2012.

The 2012 elections will not be decided, nor even influenced by the outcome of the Iowa caucuses. For that we need to watch New Hampshire on January 10, South Carolina on January 21, and most especially, Florida on January 31.

We need more faith in a future without Barack Obama; one that is barely a year away.

We need more faith in the U.S. Constitution and continue to demand that it be obeyed.

We need more faith in our communal past. Hoffer wrote, “It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do it.” America continues to be a work in progress.

Pay no heed to the media’s arrogance, wedded to failed socialist programs. Pay no heed to Ron Paul’s lunacy. Pay no heed to Obama’s lies. We shall win through to a restored America.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

2012's State of the World

2011-12-26T13:40:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

"Only the Dead have seen the End of War" – Plato

For myself and a lot of other Americans, the killing of Osama bin Laden was the highpoint of 2011. A decade has passed since nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on September 11, 2001. He was found in an army town in Pakistan.

Meanwhile the war in Afghanistan grinds on for no explicable reason, but the war in Iraq was declared ended for U.S. troops on December 15. Within twenty-four hours of the last troops departure bombings occurred in Baghdad and the nation began to come apart. The single unifying force in Iraq had been—you guessed it—the U.S. military.

Evil men met their end in 2011, but surely not enough of them. Gone now are Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi, North Korea’s Kim Jung Il. Classic dictators, it is likely that Syria’s Bashar Assad will be overthrown in 2012. The year began when Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the nation he had controlled for four decades. In February Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign.

The “Arab Spring” was declared. It was and is an illusion. In terms of its lack of democracy, the Middle East, the seat of Islam, remains a rebuke to the modern world.

In 1979, the Iranians overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, and replaced him with the even worse dictatorship of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. His passing put Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in charge and bogus elections have made Mamoud Ahmadinejad president. The balance of power in the Middle East will shift dramatically if Iran achieves nuclear weapons.

As regions go, Africa just barely managed to retain a few democratic nations while others remain in the grip of dictators of varying degrees of evil. The northern tier, known as the Maghreb, had been the spark of revolutions from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt. One sign of hope was the succession of South Sudan in July. In Africa, too, the emnity of Muslims toward its growing Christian population continues to spark unrest. In Nigeria, Muslim terrorists bombed churches on Christmas Day. How great an outrage is that?

Not all killer events in 2011 were wars and revolutions. In March, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck eastern Japan killing nearly 16,000 and leaving nearly 4,000 missing. Four nuclear power plants were shut down after technical failures created widespread zones of radiation.

The European Union which was created in the wake of two wars on that continent remains in turmoil after several member nations posed a threat of financial default due to the socialist mismanagement of their economies. Its fate remains unknown, but it well could deconstruct itself in favor of a return to individual sovereignties.

In October, Israel---reviled by most of the world for having the temerity to exist--- returned 1,077 Palestinian terrorists to Hamas in exchange—are you ready for this—for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been kidnapped and held prisoner since 2006. Though not a sovereign nation, Palestine was admitted as a member by UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations, on October 31. Ever since 1948 when the Israelis defeated an attack by five Arab nations the UN has maintained an agency, UNRWA, whose sole purpose is to service Palestinians.

A former Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Mier, said it best. “We shall have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” She could have been speaking of America as well because we are high on the list of Arab hatreds.

As 2011 came to an end, Americans were pleased to see their troops come home from combat in Iraq and would feel the same about Afghanistan. The two wars fought in Iraq have been sobering experiences, reminders of the role of the U.S. as the world’s policeman.

We fight now with a volunteer military and one whose equipment from aircraft to ships to combat vehicles is growing old or being retired at a rate that raises serious questions about our ability to defend the homeland or wage war abroad.

The enduring truth of any year of recorded history has been that tribes, religions, and nations go to war with one another. It is naïve to believe that another war is not just around the corner, most likely in the Middle East and mostly likely with Iran. Israel has been in a state of war, hot or cold, with all its “neighbors” in the Middle East since its founding in 1948. It is being inexorably forced to the decision to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Leadership is a critical factor when war threatens. The nation is in great need of it, but there are few signs it exists in the White House and among the political class in Congress these days.

I began with a quote from Plato. I will end with one from Marcus Tullious Cicero:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The 2012 Check List for America's Survival

2011-12-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Many people make resolutions to start the year, but I think a list of things that must be done to protect and preserve the Republic should be tallied.

1. President Obama must be defeated in 2012 and the obstructionist Democratic Party must lose power in the Senate to ensure both houses of Congress will be Republican and in a position to initiate real change.

2. The Environmental Protection Agency must be reined in with increased Congressional oversight and legislative limits on its rule-making capacity. Having fulfilled its 1970 mandate to clean the nation’s air and water, it should be scaled back to the maintenance of these functions.

3. Americans, despite the administration’s efforts to redefine and distract us, must keep clearly in mind the threat of Islam to the nation and the world. A Middle East in turmoil lays ahead for 2012.

4. To jump-start the economy, taxes and spending must be reduced across the board. A tax on consumption, rather than income would be a good start. Only 49% of Americans currently pay income taxes, the lowest in decades.

5. Obamacare must be repealed should the Supreme Court fail to rule that the Commerce Clause takes precedence over its requirement that Americans must purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so.

6. A serious restructuring of Social Security and Medicare must be undertaken. Older Americans who have paid into the system—it is involuntary—must be ensured their benefits will be paid, but younger citizens should have the freedom and responsibility to structure their own retirement and health plans.

7. Access to the nation’s vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil should be increased and encouraged. Oil companies should be encouraged to build more refineries via tax credits and removal of “environmental” obstacles.

8. Congress needs to identify and fund the repair to the nation’s aging infrastructure.

9. Utilities should be encouraged via tax credits and other incentives to expand the national “grid” for the distribution of electricity.

10. Term limits for Senators and Representatives should be added to the U.S. Constitution in the same fashion the presidency is limited. Salaries, pensions, and perks should be capped. A permanent political class is a danger to citizens.

11. The Federal government should be downsized with the elimination of the Departments of Education, Labor, and Energy, along with the Environmental Protection Agency. These powers should be returned to the individual States. (10th Amendment)

12. The nation’s military which has been significantly reduced in size and structure should be expanded with attention to the upgrade and increase of its naval fleet and aircraft.

13. Congress should reject and rescind all legislation based on “global warming” or “climate change” as the former has been demonstrated to be a hoax and the latter is meaningless insofar as the climate is beyond the control of humans.

14. The United States should significantly reduce its contribution to the United Nations and refuse to ratify any of its treaties.

15. Tort reform should be instituted to reduce the costs of health care.

16. The corporate tax rate should be significantly reduced from its present rate, one of the highest in the world, to increase expansion, new jobs, and competitiveness.

17. Public service unions should be illegal. The federal government does not permit such unionization and neither should states.

18. National Public Radio should no longer be funded. The “government entities” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated.

19. The federal government should be restricted or significantly limited from the acquisition of more of the nation’s landmass.

20. Strenuous efforts must be undertaken to reduce the national debt and deficit. A devalued dollar impoverishes everyone.

These are just a few changes which, if implemented, would go a long way to reducing the ills associated with a federal government grown too large, subject to crony capitalism, and corruption.

As John Adams said, "Let us disappoint the men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country."

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T12:37:00.000-08:00

Alan Caruba

Video - A Random Act of Culture

2011-12-23T17:13:00.000-08:00

Cartoon Round Up

2011-12-23T14:35:00.000-08:00

US Navy's Lesbian Kiss Makes Waves

2011-12-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

For generations of Americans, the most famous kiss between a Navy sailor and a nurse occurred during the celebration of V-J Day in New York’s Times Square on August 14, 1945.

The photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt was published in Life magazine a week later. It said everything you needed to know about the joy with which the nation responded to the end of World War Two and everything about the shared values of the nation.

So, when a photo of a homecoming kiss between Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta kissing her “partner”, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell went public on December 22, it set gay and lesbian hearts atwitter. What the predominantly heterosexual population thought of it was unreported.

According to news reports, “Navy officials said it was the first time a same-sex couple was chosen to have the first kiss. The first-kiss is a Navy tradition for ships returning to port. David Bauer, the commanding officer of the Oak Hill, said the crew’s reaction was positive” and he informed the Associated Press “It’s going to happen and the crew’s going to enjoy it.”

Different times, different values. Perhaps.

But why? The answer is the way the U.S. military has been used by gay and lesbian advocacy groups as a petri dish to force social change. The other location for influencing such change is in our nation’s schools and manifests itself in charges of massive bullying and questionable sex education curriculums, many of which evoke outrage among today’s parents.

When then-candidate Barack Obama promised transformational change in America, it is doubtful that those who voted for him realized that part of that change was his advocacy of gay rights. In June, at a fund-raiser in New York composed of gay, lesbian, and transsexual supporters, Obama touted his efforts to advance gay rights and promised further progress. He stopped short of declaring support for legalizing same-sex marriage.

Earlier, however, in February the Obama administration said it would no longer oppose legal challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), just two months after Congress and the President agreed to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the military’s ban on openly gay service members. Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Congress saying that DOMA, passed in 1996, “discriminated” against gays.

Let that sink in. The Obama administration thinks that the defense of traditional marriage between a man and a woman is “discrimination.” Since the dawn of civilization, the union between a man and a woman has been the keystone of societies everywhere. Even the extension of “civil unions” with expanded rights for gay couples has not been enough for advocates of homosexuality.

Those with short memories may not recall that it was another Democrat President, Bill Clinton, who created an uproar within days of taking office when he let it be known in 1993 that he intended to repeal the ban on homosexuals serving in the U.S. military. At the time, a Pentagon study concluded that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” The study, however, also proposed a policy that came to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” preventing recruiters from screening or discouraging homosexuals from joining.

There were and are still good reasons for the military’s opposition to homosexuals serving. Let it be said that homosexuals have probably always served. When I was in the Army in the 1960s, I and others in my unit knew of gays serving along side us, but practiced a tolerance we took for granted by neither acknowledging it, nor engaging in any action based on it.

At the time, there was no such thing as “gay rights” and, were it not for the incessant demands for them, they would not exist today. Gays and lesbians play on the inherent sense of fairness and tolerance that is a hallmark of American society. The result is that homosexuality is now widely represented in popular culture to the point of being accepted as “normal.” It is not “normal.” It is a sexual aberration involving a very small portion of the overall population, perhaps no more than four percent. Always was, always will be.

The U.S. military is a unique element of our society. The 1993 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law stated that “there is no constitutional right to serve” and pointed out that the military is a “specialized society” that is “fundamentally different from civilian life.” This was and is so self-evident that the present state of affairs is nothing less than astonishing. Homosexuality was deemed an “unacceptable risk” to good order, discipline, morale and unit cohesion—qualities essential for combat readiness.

Suffice to say Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell opened a Pandora’s box of difficulties for all the ranks. Its repeal has not made those difficulties magically disappear.

The photo of two Navy lesbians kissing represents the “progress” that a vocal minority has made, given the support of liberal politicians on both sides of the aisle working against the tide of resistance of majority Americans who are fighting the social implications of “gay rights”, the demands for “gay marriage”, and the influence over young minds passing through government school systems.

It says something about life in America today, one that is very different from America at the end of World War Two.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The UN's Global Warming Absurdity

2011-12-22T13:04:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The 17th United Nations conference on climate change, i.e. global warming, has concluded in Durban, South Africa, coincidently the site of UN human rights conferences that were entirely devoted to attacking the right of Israel to exist. I am sure Durban is lovely place to visit, but the city fathers should consider withdrawing the welcome mat before it becomes inexorably identified with hoaxes and hatred.

Reams have been written about the Durban conference, among which is a report by Lord Christopher Monckton that identifies its various objectives, chief of which is to ensure that billions flow into the United Nations. Suffice to say it was a by-product of World War II in the same fashion that the League of Nations was a by-product of World War I. The latter failed and the former has metastasized into a monster sucking up billions from member nations without materially contributing to world peace or much else.

The Reformation came about in Europe when Luther and others had the temerity to point out that the Roman Catholic Church had become a sinkhole of corruption and immorality. The outcome for the church was a return to its original purpose of propagating Christianity and piety. The transition, however, took a couple of hundred years. One can only hope that it does not take that long to rid the world of the United Nations, a giant bureaucracy whose hypocrisy and lust of global power over sovereign nations knows no limits.

As I am want to say—repeatedly—there is NO global warming and carbon dioxide (CO2) poses NO threat to the planet’s climate, nor plays any significant role—if any—in its natural variability. Reducing CO2 is one of the all-time idiotic ideas and it is the key to the Kyoto Protocols promulgated in 1997. In all the UN climate conferences since then, the effort has been to enrich and empower the UN bureaucracy that keeps loudly saying we’re all doomed.

Lord Monckton points out that the planet has not been warming (it goes through cycles of warming and cooling) “for two decades”, adding that there has been “no recent sea-level rise, no new record Arctic ice-melt, fewer hurricanes than at almost any time in thirty years, (and) no Pacific atolls disappearing beneath the waves.”

The many UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports have been masterpieces of obfuscation and outright lies. As Peter C. Glover, a longtime observer of the IPCC and commentator on climate change claims, recently noted, “”Most damaging of all, the week before the summit, it was revealed that an upcoming UN IPCC report due in February would state ‘climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability’” He defined climate variability as “We haven’t a clue what the climate will do.” And rightfully so!

Recently, my friend Dr. William Gray, an esteemed meteorologist, and his colleague, Phil Klotzbach, went public saying that their efforts over the years to predict the number of hurricanes in the year ahead since 1992 was a complete bust. That kind of academic honesty is very commendable. And, in the case of the yelping pack of so-called global warming "scientists", very rare.

In October, the Science and Public Policy Institute published Dr. Gray’s report, “Gross Errors in the IPCC-AR4 Report Regarding Past & Future Changes in Global Tropical Cyclone Activity.” Suffice to say, it ripped the IPCC claims to shreds and is testimony to why the IPCC is an utterly corrupt generator of the global warming hoax.

At the conclusion of the recent IPCC Durban conference, Canada made it known it would no longer be a party to the Kyoto Protocols, while Russia and Japan made it known they will ignore any extension. China essentially said it intends to ignore them. The U.S. never was a party to the Protocols, the U.S. Senate having unanimously rejected them despite Al Gore’s protests. He was Vice President at the time.

The United Nations is the definition of corruption, of evil.

There are many reasons for the U.S. to stop its funding of the United Nations, but the enormous waste and harm done by its environmental program may well top the list.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Become a Member

2011-12-22T05:02:00.000-08:00

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If you visit http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/ regularly become part of an inclusive, not exclusive club.

Running the USA into the Ground

2011-12-21T13:50:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

I needed a mattress cover so I went over to the local dollar store today and discovered they have them in every size but twin. I returned home. I went online to Bed, Bath and beyond. With a few keystrokes I not only had the exact item I wanted, I also received an email confirmation of the sale and a notice that once shipped, I will be able to track its delivery from the warehouse to my front door.

If only the federal government operated with such efficiency. Instead, we have a government that has been operating on “continuing resolutions” for over a thousand days due to a lack of a budget. An essential job of the executive branch is to produce a budget, but if you don’t have one, you can egregiously waste billions.

Everybody else has a budget, but not the federal government.

As we head into an election year, even more political madness and maneuvering will ensue. As a Wednesday editorial in The Wall Street Journal said:

“The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play. Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.”

Serendipitously, the Journal also ran an opinion by Peter J. Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Securities and Exchange Commission's lawsuits against six top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced last week, are a seminal event. For the first time in a government report, the complaint has made it clear that the two government-sponsored enterprises played a major role in creating the demand for low-quality mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis.”

“More importantly, the SEC is saying that Fannie and Freddie—the largest buyers and securitizers of subprime and other low-quality mortgages—hid the size of their purchases from the market. Through these alleged acts of securities fraud, they did not just mislead investors; they deprived analysts, risk managers, rating agencies and even financial regulators of vital data about market risks that could have prevented the crisis.”

One member of Congress, among many who protected Fannie and Freddie, who will not be indicted, is Rep. Barney Frank who is retiring with full pension and benefits, no doubt more wealthy than he arrived.

A new book by Peter Schweizer, the William J. Casey Fellow at the Hoover Institute is titled, “Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich off Inside Stock tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism that would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.” At this point, the only bipartisan activity in Congress is the way, on both sides of the aisle our elected representatives increase their personal wealth. The book so rattled Congress it is now holding hearings on the extraordinary premise of requiring its members to obey the same laws as the rest of us!

A familiar theme of those of us that comment on government is its size, its waste of public funds, and its general inefficiency. It is a government that sends millions in checks to dead people. It is a government that has turned the process of flying anywhere into a nightmare because of its one-size-fits-all idiotic approach to getting on an airliner. The Israelis accomplish this with far less inconvenience to passengers and their system works.

My contention is that our metastasizing government has gotten progressively worse from the days of the Great Depression and now we learn—if we did not already know—that it was two “government sponsored enterprises” that brought about the mortgage crisis that plunged the nation into a pretty good imitation of the Great Depression.

Now we are forced to watch Congress play political gamesmanship while millions of Americans are out of work.

Now not a week goes by without another “green” enterprise going belly-up, taking our money with it or one of those wonderful electric cars has batteries that are likely to catch fire. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy just released a report that estimates that each of the Chevy Volt cars sold thus far has as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it—a total of $3 billion thus far. We never needed electric cars.

What kind of idiocy throws money away when the U.S. sits atop reserves of oil that are so vast they could end imports?

What kind of President refuses to permit Canada to ship its ample oil to Houston for refining?

Why are we holding our breath hoping that Congress will let us purchase Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era?

Little wonder that the polls demonstrate the record-setting low esteem in which Congress is held. It is running the nation into the ground. To the belated astonishment of everyone, the nation is led by the President whose greatest achievements have been to destroy jobs and plunge the nation into unimaginable debt.

November 6, 2012 cannot come soon enough.

A majority of the electorate wanted “change” in 2008. Let’s give it to Congress in 2012. Let’s support candidates who want to significantly reduce the size of the federal government, restructure the “entitlement” programs, and reduce the debt before it impoverishes the next generation and the one to follow.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Pundits, Primaries and Polls

2011-12-20T13:00:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

In the event you did not read about it at the time, the Prohibition Party met in June 2011 and nominated Jack Fellure as their presidential candidate. The Socialist Party USA held their convention in October, nominating Stewart Alexander. The Constitution Party will meet in April and the Libertarian party will gather in May 2012. The Green National convention will not be held until July.

You are likely to hear a lot about the 2012 Republican national convention at the end of August in Tampa, Florida and the Democratic national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina in early September.

To save you any anxiety involved with the latter, Barack Hussein Obama will be the Democratic nominee unless someone checks the U.S. Constitution which specifically states that only a “natural born” (both parents must be citizens) American can run for or be President.

The nominees of the two major parties will be determined by state primaries and the one receiving the most attention at this point is Iowa’s on January 3, 2012. Why anyone takes this primary seriously defies the imagination. Iowa caucuses have selected the widely known choice of both major parties with few exceptions. It did surprise folks when Mike Huckabee won in 2008, but his run quickly faded. You have to go back to 1972 for the George McGovern choice that surprised voters.

As this is being written, there is an orgy of news coverage of various polls in which the candidates for nomination rise and fall like the tides. There is little substance to these polls that are the subject of intense news coverage.

It is naïve to think that the liberal mainstream media does not try to influence the outcome with its selective coverage. Recall that just a few weeks ago, Herman Cain was the choice and now they’re claiming Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul will run away with the Iowa vote.

President Obama’s poll numbers regarding his performance in office are so low that his prospects of reelection even at this date are doubtful. The economy, as always, will be the deciding factor and it will not significantly improve by Election Day.

Political operatives will pay far more attention to the New Hampshire primary on January 10, followed by the January 21 primary in South Carolina, and January 31 primary in Florida. Despite several dozen other state primaries, the party convention nominations will have largely been determined by the January primaries.

Politics in America is a blood sport. So much money depends on their outcomes that literally millions are spent to secure victory. The federal government has become a giant spigot of income redistribution. It is so over-leveraged that it must borrow forty cents of every dollar it spends. This year’s outlay of campaign dollars will no doubt top a billion dollars.

Self-interest will be the driving factor among the donors with ideology a close second. Despite being castigated by President Obama, Wall Street will predictably be a major donor to the Democratic Party. Rent-seeking corporations such as General Electric will not be far behind.

I would recommend that you not get caught up in the journalistic frenzy over the entire primary process. Obama will be the Democratic Party nominee and Mitt Romney is likely to be the Republican Party’s choice. It is a cliché, but true nonetheless, that in times of economic crisis, people vote their wallet

Suffice to say I will not be voting for the Prohibition, Green or Socialist Party candidates.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

No Newt, Now or Ever

2011-12-19T13:32:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Back in March I wrote about “The Newt-ster” and ended by saying, “I like the Newt-ster. I just don’t want him to run.” I still don’t.

As Speaker of the House and since, Newt’s legislative record has been all over the political spectrum. He has long been known to have various enthusiasms that he later abandons.

Though Newt did get welfare reform, then-President Clinton played him like a fiddle, getting him blamed for shutting down the government. Then the House Democrats finished him off with a plethora of ethics charges, most of which were dismissed, but he ended up paying a fine for one and resigning.

He has been ethically challenged in both his political and personal life. That kind of behavior rarely changes.

His main claim to fame was engineering the return to power in Congress by Republicans after forty years of Democrat rule. He co-authored a Contract with America, organized the Republicans in Congress to get behind it, and power switched hands in 1994. President Reagan who held office throughout the 1980s demonstrated how much can be accomplished by real leadership even with a Democrat-controlled Congress.

I have a major warning to offer regarding Newt Gingrich and I say it as someone who has studied history and witnessed a big chunk of it. Whenever the U.S. has elected an intellectual, it has suffered.

The most notable example is Woodrow Wilson, a former New Jersey Governor and president of Princeton University. His legacy includes the implementation of the income tax and establishment of the Federal Reserve. He wanted the U.S. to ratify the League of Nations, but the Senate rejected it for the same reason it should have rejected the United Nations.

Before him, Teddy Roosevelt, a man of action as well as intellect, was a progressive whose own party would not nominate him and who formed a third party which the voters rejected. This is not to say men of superior intellect have not been President, but the office calls for both leadership and the pragmatic capacity to understand “the real world” as opposed to the world of the mind. It also requires real courage.

Throughout history, men of intellect have concocted some of the worst systems to control the human population which they generally regarded with contempt. Karl Marx comes to mind. Generally speaking, intellectuals distrust the common sense of a humanity unencumbered by idiotic laws. These days the process of control is referred to as “social engineering.”

Obamacare is an example of social engineering and all the wasted billions on Green or renewable energy is another. The pathetic efforts to stamp out the use of the word “terrorism” from government pronouncements as well as the idiotic “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to undermine the Second Amendment are two more. So far as the federal government is concerned, there is no aspect of our lives in which it does not want to interfere or require obedience. Incandescent light bulbs anyone? The volume of water in a toilet? Nutritional standards? It is endless!

Gingrich began his career as a professor of history and his present rhetoric reveals his penchant for lecturing audiences while demonstrating his intellectual prowess. He is an engaging speaker, but behind it is a life spent being on both sides of most issues and often on the wrong side. Since leaving Congress he has been a well-paid “consultant” to anyone seeking to eat from the federal trough.

A glaring example of his willingness to embrace really bad ideas was his book, “A Contract with the Earth” which espoused all the usual environmental claptrap that assists and underwrites the horrid Green legislative agenda to limit carbon dioxide emissions for the real purpose of harming economic growth.

A Wikipedia synopsis describes the book thusly: “’A Contract with the Earth’ is, broadly, a manifesto that challenges those on the right to provide a strategy for repairing the planet and calls on government to embrace the concept that a healthy environment is required for a healthy democracy and economy. This approach, alternately branded mainstream and entrepreneurial environmentalism by the authors, requires that companies should lead the way in environmental issues while governments provide them with incentives to reduce their carbon footprint.” (Emphasis added)

Carbon footprints are an absurd concept conjured up by the same crowd that tried to impose the Kyoto Protocols on nations in 1997. As of the recent UN conference on climate change, most nations have signaled they will, having signed on, ignore it, along with China which was exempted along with India. Canada will drop out. And the Protocols will be consigned to the dustbin of history along with “global warming.”

Newt has never found some absurd intellectual notion that he would not embrace, short of Communism. He was dismissive of the congressional Republican proposals to reduce spending as “right wing social engineering” when many understand that they represent the best way to extricate ourselves from the enormous debt the Obama administration has imposed on the nation and the necessity of restructuring Medicare.

In short, he could just as easily run as a Democrat as a Republican and, if nominated, would be utterly destroyed by Barack Obama and the Democrat machine in the same way Obama dismembered Hillary Clinton’s bid in 2008.

A December 15 poll by Rasmussen Reports found that Gingrich “now trails President Obama by double digits, his second straight weekly decline since becoming the GOP frontrunner.”

If, by now, you have concluded that I distrust intellectuals and most of the ivory tower academicians, you are right. Since the 1960s many of left-wing ideologues---protesters---found their way onto the faculties of the nation’s colleges and universities, and it is why the teacher’s unions have done everything in their power to eliminate the truth about American history from the curriculum.

No Newt now or ever is my slogan and I hope he is rejected by sensible Republicans in the forthcoming primaries.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Leaving Iraq

2011-12-18T13:41:00.000-08:00

March 2003, Baghdad, Iraq, Shock and Awe

By Alan Caruba

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. - John Stuart Mill English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)

Among some foreign policy analysts, the popular conclusion regarding the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is that the U.S. won the war…for Iran.

In practical terms, however, predicting anything about the future of the Middle East these days is likely to leave one looking foolish. Who thought Tunisians would toss out their dictator? Or that Egyptians would demand and get Mubarack to resign? Or that Syrians, after two generations of dictatorship, would turn on the Assad family? Revolution is in the air in the Middle East which is to say that change—rapid change—is the order of the day.

President Obama’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops entirely from Iraq is ignorant of history and dismissive of reality. When the Axis was defeated in World War Two, the U.S. retained troops in Europe to ensure a transition to democracy. Same with Japan. And later, the same with South Korea.

President Obama, so reluctant to admit that the U.S. has ever done anything right and ill-inclined to let it happen, has led to the full-scale withdrawal of U.S. troops and, I suggest, set up a situation in which a newly emerging democracy—a distinct rarity in the Middle East—could be deprived of the time to be fully and securely established.

There were real reasons for invading Iraq twice in recent times; first to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and second to remove him as a dangerous, destabilizing force who threatened all the Gulf States.

Forgotten by most, Iraq under Saddam Hussein engaged Iran in war for eight years from 1979 to 1988. Inasmuch as Iran’s Islamic revolution had taken U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 and held them for 444 days, the U.S. backed Saddam, though officially it took a neutral position.

U.S. policymakers in the administrations following the Carter years regarded Ayatollah Khomeini as a serious threat to the stability of the region and nothing has changed since them. His successors are nothing but trouble.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki found sanctuary in Iran to avoid being killed by Saddam. He is said to have strong ties to the current regime in Iran which is, after all, a very big neighbor with a long common border to the east of Iraq.

On the occasion of the official end of the war and the withdrawal of U.S. military, Maliki’s close ties to Iran were on display at the White House when he brought Iraqi Transportation Minister Hadi Farhan al-Amiri with him. Farhan had formerly been a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The Guards are suspected by U.S. law enforcement of participating in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen billeted there.

Had the invasion of Iraq in 2003 been a limited mission, Saddam might have been toppled and the Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis would have been left to kill each other in the typical Arab fashion of resolving disputes. Also in the mix would have been the Kurds in northern Iraq whom Saddam persecuted and killed throughout his regime.

Eight years later, the tendency of the media has been to focus on U.S. and Iraqi war dead, but there is little mention of the earlier Iraq-Iran conflict with estimates between 500,000 and a million war dead, 1-2 million wounded, and more than 80,000 prisoners. In one 1985 battle alone when Iran launched an offensive to cut the main highway between Baghdad and Basra, it is estimated that the combined total of dead numbered 40,000.

The U.S. still does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, a situation in place since 1979. Iran has declared the U.S. to be its biggest enemy and makes no secret of its intention to destroy Israel. Much of the world is wondering when Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. The failure of the U.S. to support this would be a strategic mistake on the order of the British PM, Neville Chamberlain’s claim to have achieved “peace in our time” after negotiations with Adolf Hitler.

Obama’s “diplomatic” efforts with Iran have been a total failure. The latest embarrassment was his “request” for the return of the drone spycraft that the Iranians brought down, apparently without firing a shot. Obama has worried out loud that U.S. diplomats would be targeted for assassination in Iraq…after bargaining away force protection.

It is no stretch to say that President Obama has been a global diplomatic disaster, routinely offending and insulting other nations out of pure ignorance and indifference. His successors will be mending fences in the Middle East and elsewhere for decades.

In the course of three years in office, Obama has only succeeded in fleeing what he regarded as a “dumb” war. He was elected largely on his opposition to it.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial warned that the failure of the Obama administration to consolidate an alliance with Iraq ignored the Middle East’s upheavals and, in particular, in Iran’s longtime ally, Syria. In the best of outcomes, Iraq could have become an outpost of stability in the Middle East, but Obama’s indifference may contribute to its falling “prey to Tehran’s encroachments.”

In an analysis by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, published in Beirut’s The Daily Star, he anticipates that most of the future violence in Iraq will be between “political factions, even those of the same ethnic and religious group.” The Sunnis are the predominant Islamic sect in most of the Middle East, but the Shiites are the largest sect in both Iraq and Iran.

Al-Maliki heads a loose confederation of many different political parties, but seems to have asserted a very strong level of control over government policies at this point. Ironically, both Saddam and now Al-Maliki must contend with a semi-autonomous Kurdish faction that is pushing for resolution of territorial boundaries, seeking to reverse changes made by Saddam in Arab-Kurdish areas.

Ultimately, everything in the Middle East involves who controls oil revenues.

Iraq’s 2005 constitution promised a hydrocarbon law that would settle issues related to who had the final say of various oil deals. No such law has been legislated to date and the Kurds have pretty much gone their own way. Al-Maliki’s government has declared Kurdish contracts with oil companies illegal, banning companies that have signed them from bidding on oil business in the rest of Iraq.

In the recent history of the Middle East, dating from the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, its nations have been ruled by dictators and monarchs. Such “democracy” as exists is mostly one in which the ruling regime stuffs the ballot boxes and the military determines the winner. Egypt’s recent turmoil is an example. Syria’s ruthless suppression of its people is another. Iran remains a prison state intent on imposing its hegemony over the region.

Can Iraq sustain its fledgling democracy? Nobody knows. If history is any guide the prospect is not good. Only a strong America could have played a role and Obama has chosen to leave.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Christianity's Triumph

2011-12-17T17:07:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

“By far the most important event in the entire rise of Christianity was the meeting in Jerusalem in around the year 50, when Paul was granted the authority to convert Gentiles without them also becoming observant Jews.”

So wrote Rodney Stark, the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. His most recent book is “The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion” ($27.99, HarperCollins).

For Christians in particular, I recommend it if only because so many have a tenuous grasp of Christianity’s real history, as opposed the versions that too often are casually accepted as truth.

The truth is that the rise of Christianity is one of the most extraordinary stories of the past two millennia. Stark not only has the knowledge of his vast subject, but he writes with such felicity that it is hard to put the 500-page book aside for both its revelations and its devotion to the facts.

Despite the fact we live in a society that has at most only 4% who self-describe themselves as atheists, the more active among them have the audacity to demand that Christmas be banished to the privacy of homes or the pews and pulpits of churches. They rebuke religion in general as the source of conflict and wars, but ignore the spiritual support and ethical lessons that Christianity provides along with its promise of salvation.

While Judaism was the bedrock of morality and faith that gave it birth, Christianity made it more accessible and significantly includes the Torah as part of its liturgy.

To ignore the rise of Christianity is to be ignorant of an essential element of Western history. Likewise, to ignore the threat of Islam whose beginning is usually dated around 622 CE and which exploded following Mohammad’s death in 632 CE is to ignore the greatest threat to civilization, past and present. Less a religion than a battle plan for world conquest, Islam preaches death to all “unbelievers.” Take heed!

Stark provides a summation to his book and, even so, I shall select only parts of it in the interest of brevity.

“The first generation of the Jesus Movement consisted of a tiny and fearful minority” of a religion, Judaism, that had already been around for a thousand years or more before the assertion was made that the messiah had come and was a crucified Galilean rabbi who mainly and briefly preached in that area of Israel.

“The mission to the Jews was quite successful: large numbers of Jews in the Diasporan communities outside of Palestine did convert to Christianity.” The Diaspora were the Jewish communities in the Middle East and throughout the Mediterranean nations, including Rome, living in places where pagan faiths were dominant.

“Christianity was not a religion based on the slaves and lowest classes of Romans, but was particularly attractive to the privileged.” Moreover, in its earliest years, women often played important roles. Contrary to popular belief, however, “Paganism was not quickly stamped out, but disappeared very slowly.” Paganism involved the worship of multiple gods as well as a belief in magic.

Despite impressive cathedrals, in medieval times church worship among Christians was largely ignored and, as often as not, the clergy were ill-informed about the faith and sometimes not even baptized.

Despite what is said of the Crusades, they were a campaign to reclaim the holy land from Muslims who had conquered it and they were led by men who knowingly bankrupted themselves and often died in this cause. Though Christianity had been widely observed in the East, the armies of Islam destroyed all but remnants, thus shifting its survival to Europe in the West.

“Science arose only in the West because efforts to formulate and discover laws of nature only made sense if one believed in a rational creator.” Even the misnamed “Dark Ages” were actually times of technological development. Likewise historians have determined that the Spanish Inquisition was “a quite temperate body that was responsible for very few deaths and saved a great many lives by opposing the witch hunts that swept through the rest of Europe.”

Perhaps the greatest surprise was the damage done by Constantine who, having made it the religion of his empire, gave rise to an indolent and hypocritical Church hierarchy initially composed of Roman aristocracy. It fostered a clergy who were ignorant of the faith and indifferent to its mission. Not until the Reformation was competition introduced, forcing the Church to return to piety, as various Protestant sects emerged, and energized Christianity in the process.

Stark concludes that “The claim that religion must soon disappear as the world becomes more modern is nothing but wishful thinking on the part of academic atheists. Religion is thriving, perhaps as never before. More than forty percent of the people on Earth today are Christians and their number is growing more rapidly than that of any other major faith.”

And that, as they say, is the good news.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Cartoon Round Up

2011-12-16T13:25:00.000-08:00

Christmas and Old Age

2011-12-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The older I get, the less I like Christmas. It’s definitely an age thing.

I have sweet memories of waking early on Christmas day, tip-toeing passed my parent’s and older brother’s bedrooms, and down the stairs to see what bounty awaited in front of the fireplace. There were separate stockings, jammed with candies and collectibles, but it was the boxes, clearly marked for myself and my brother that held treasure.

It never occurred to me that older brother with seven years head-start on me was already too old to have the giddy glee that Christmas morning held for me. All this is to say that I really liked Christmas and for all the usual reasons.

As I got older, the magic began to disappear. One Christmas was spent on duty, manning a desk in the headquarters company of the Second Engineer Battalion, Second Infantry Division, accompanied only by a very unhappy Second Lieutenant who had pulled the holiday assignment.

I began to notice things like the sameness of the Thanksgiving Day parade and how commercial it was. One November in 1984 I put out a news release claiming that “The Boring Institute” had analyzed the parade and concluded “it was a ten-year-old video” being replayed with no one noticing.

Thus was born The Boring Institute and an unpaid career as the nation’s expert on all things boring. With a break after 9/11, the Institute has issued an annual list of The Most Boring Celebrities of the Year ever since and did again on December 5th.

Other rituals of Christmas became increasingly annoying, not the least of which was the replaying of certain films that I have long since seen too many times. “It’s a Wonderful Life” was released in 1947! It must, moreover, be said that newer “Christmas” films are often crass, vulgar, distasteful and disrespectful. I mostly hate them.

The lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree used to be good for a few minutes coverage on the news, but the 2011 ceremony became a two-hour television extravaganza. Just light the tree and shut up!

The really annoying aspect of Christmas in recent years are those self-righteous atheists and others who object to a crèche or a Christmas tree on public property and who go around insisting that we all say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Atheists constitute about 4 percent of the population and 98 percent of all the negativity at Christmas time. I cannot begin to tell you what I would like to do to these cretins and killjoys.

In my own hometown, the kids in our schools are literally forbidden from singing Christmas carols lest it “offend” someone. Like who? If Christmas offends you, I recommend you move to Baghdad, Tehran or Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where being found with a Bible is a criminal offence. In short, get out!

I used to love to send and receive Christmas cards. These days, the price of cards and postage at 44 cents is such that it seems a costly affront to the opportunity to say hello to friends and family. I tend to use email now.

Talking about email, the days following Thanksgiving have seen an avalanche of emails from various merchants and manufacturers, all offering great savings on things I neither need, nor want. I miss the good old days of Nigerian gangsters. Now I am deluged by emails in French, Spanish and languages I do not recognize. I spend my days clicking on “delete.”

I shall be happy to celebrate yet another Christmas, but parents are long gone and big brother is in God’s Waiting Room—Florida. Other family members will have to content themselves with a card, email or call. Single by choice, there are no children or grandchildren that need tending.

And, yes, it will be with great relief when Christmas is over for another year. It’s an age thing.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Original Tea Party - December 16, 1773

2011-12-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The modern-day Tea Party is a loose amalgamation of people who came together in March 2009 to protest against passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act otherwise known as Obamacare. There was a large gathering in Washington, D.C. with estimates of several hundred thousand to a million participants.

There had been other events associated with the Tea Party movement and in the 2010 midterm elections the movement was credited with returning power to the Republican Party in the House of Representatives by supporting candidates that associated themselves with the movement. It is, however, not a political party in its own right.

The story of the original Tea Party that occurred on December 16, 1773 is told in a new book, “Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot” (Quirk Books) by Joseph Cummins, a historian who quite coincidently lives in Maplewood, NJ, my home town for more than sixty years until I moved to an apartment complex one town over. Maplewood has a number of homes from the Revolutionary War era so a sense of history pervades the community. Just up the road is Morristown, the site of one of George Washington’s winter headquarters and Jockey Hollow where his soldiers were billeted.

Cummins’ book is a useful and perhaps surprisingl reminder that Boston was not the only site where British tea was dumped overboard rather than pay even the threepense tax on it. There were in fact similar events in Philadelphia, Charleston, New York, and in the other colonies, Chesterown and Annapolis in Maryland; York, Maine; Edenton and Wilmington, North Carolina; and Greenwich, New Jersey.

The Boston event, however, was no small matter so far as the value of the tea destroyed was concerned. More than 92,000 pounds were tossed into the water. “Tall piles of the stuff floated like huge haystacks in the dim moonlight of the bay. And in the days that followed, many British observers wondered if the residents of Boston had gone insane.”

Tea was enormously popular, comparable to our love of a cup of coffee to start the day, and was part of the social life of the colonies. “One third of America’s three million inhabitants drank tea twice a day.” The colonists consumed between 1,200,000 and 2,000,000 pounds a year.

What is perhaps most telling about the Boston Tea Party was that it rapidly spread to other colonies where tea was boycotted or destroyed.

Cummins draws an interesting analogy between our times and then. “See if this story sounds familiar: During a severe financial recession, the government of the world’s most powerful country discovered that its largest corporation—let’s call it Corporation X—is rife with corruption, mired in debt, and facing financial collapse.”

In the case of Great Britain the corporation was the East India Company in 1773, a global commercial empire of its time that had been granted government permission “to mint money, acquire territory, maintain a standing army, enter into foreign wars, and make peace treaties.” The East India Company had shareholders who expected dividends and its fleets of armed merchants carried gold, silver, silk, cotton, spices, and opium across the oceans.

Tea represented a commodity that generated great wealth. Up to thirteen million tons of it was exported to England, largely from India, and by the mid-eighteenth century tea represented almost fifty percent of the company’s income. The import taxes collected by the British government “added up to a rather astonishing six percent of England’s national budget.”

For the first 150 years of the American colonies existence, the settlers were seldom taxed directly by the British crown, unlike the subjects of England and Ireland. As the result of conflicts such as the Seven Years War, the British treasury was low and Parliament decided to levy some taxes on the colonies. The Sugar Act of 1764 was the first. It severely impacted the molasses-rum trade, one of New England’s biggest businesses.

This was followed by the Stamp Act in 1765 that angered the colonists, but “Massachusetts was the first to erupt in angry protests.” Mobs are a useful instrument for a revolution and the men behind the war for independence knew it; in particular, Sam Adams and his co-conspirators that included John Adams, later to become the second President of the new nation. Much agitation for liberty preceded the Boston Tea Party.

The Boston Tea Party was carefully organized and the destruction of the tea from four ships, the Eleanor, Dartmouth, William and Beaver, was undertaken smoothly. What followed, as they say, is history.

The Revolution was a long affair, lasting from 1775 to 1783. Today’s Tea Parties are engaged in what is likely a long struggle to reduce the size of government and secure redress from the imposition of legislation such as Obamacare which will be on the docket of the Supreme Court as 26 States have joined in opposition based on its unconstitutionality.

If the Court should find it constitutional, we could well see a new American revolution as States evoke nullification and refuse to accept or honor the decision. Remember what the first tea partiers knew. They didn’t have, nor did they need “constitutional” rights. They already had “unalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Defining Journalism Downward

2011-12-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

New technologies drive out old ones, either eliminating, altering, or reducing their use. The traditional world of print journalism has felt this rather dramatically as subscriptions have fallen off, though often replaced by either free or paid access to their content.

It is their content, however, that has felt the brunt of change because bad or even false journalism is now subject to instant analysis and exposure. It is journalism’s failures or distortions that now are an increasing part of the news stream.

A recent tweet by a Washington Post reporter asking for some dirt on Newt Gingrich as well as earlier breeches of ethical behavior have taken this newspaper from the glory days of Watergate reporting to the most tawdry political intervention. The Post’s job is to observe and report, not to participate or, in this case, initiate. A reporter deliberately and openly seeking to destroy the reputation of a candidate should be fired. There’s a reason why editorials are restricted to the editorial page.

Rather than having to wait for the morning edition to arrive, people have access to 24/7 cable news channels and Internet sites that can update their content at will. There are the aggregators of news like The Drudge Report that shine a spotlight on news reports that might not ordinarily receive attention.

Many such sites have a distinct political orientation, so one can elect to receive either a liberal or a conservative flow of news.

Most certainly consumers of news have grown increasingly wary of its traditional providers—newspapers—who are seen to have agendas that are widely perceived, with notable exceptions, as liberal. Ditto news magazines. Ditto television network news. Ditto the likes of MSNBC. For those outlets suspected of poor journalism, the blowback is lost subcribers, viewers, and listeners. The marketplace rules!

Most certainly, it was journalists who betrayed the nation into electing a complete cipher, Barack Hussein Obama, to the highest office of the land. There will surely be books written about the way the mainstream news media covered the 2008 election, catapulting an unknown, first term Illinois Senator with a virtually invisible resume into the Oval Office. The coverage was egregious and fawning.

It wasn’t journalism. It was propaganda.

The coverage of “global warming” has further done great injury—and continues to do so—as email revelations in 2009 and again this year demonstrate that it was a concoction of the United Nations Environmental Program and, in particular, its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Simply put, it was a lie from start to finish, but it was a lie that was given substance and support from the domestic and international news media as governments became participants as well.

There has been an unspoken redefining of journalism from objective reporting to active participation, deliberately shaping public opinion whether the core of the content offered is true or not.

This has been particularly evident in the areas of science and business reporting. The recently published “The Bloomberg Way: A Guide to Reporters and Editors” notes that “Economies, markets, companies and industries are little understood, much less appreciated. The public—our readers, viewers and listeners—suffers the consequence of journalism’s traditional ignorance of these subjects and the arrogance of reporters and editors reveling in their ignorance.”

That is a fairly astonishing rebuke by its author Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg’s Editor-in-Chief, but it is also a very accurate one regarding what is surely the most important content any news outlet can offer.

Newspaper’s loss of revenue has reduced the maintenance of foreign bureaus and most such news these days is the product of news syndicates such as the Associated Press and Reuters. The AP has an egregious liberal orientation, harmful to its content.

The lost revenue has greatly reduced staffs in newsrooms. This puts increased pressure on reporters to produce more stories against the usual deadlines. It impacts the quality of the reporting, a process done on the fly in the best of times. Government and other spokespersons have a distinct advantage in shaping or shading the news of the day.

Politics is conducted in a non-stop spin zone. Historically in America, going back to the earliest elections, newspapers have always been enlisted by candidates or parties to advance their message.

Journalism in the broader sense of the word is changing and one of the most unique aspects is the rise of the blogger, often an expert on some aspect of the news such as science, military affairs, energy issues, or just local news. A recent court decision rejected the assertion that bloggers are journalists. Some are. Most are not.

I became a journalist shortly after discharge from the Army in the early-1960s. I went from a rookie reporter to the editor of a local weekly in just under six months because there was no one else to take over the job. I progressed from there to a daily newspaper. The typically low wages journalism provides propelled me into communications jobs for government agencies, a leading educational institution, and into fulltime PR.

I never stopped thinking of myself as a journalist because, ultimately, the only thing that matters is the truth, no matter whether you are providing it or reporting it.

Years later I have come full circle to journalism as a commentator. I still love newspapers, but I know they are dinosaurs, perhaps not doomed, but surely less dominant. Television news is most useful covering natural disasters, local crime, and providing weather reports, beyond that it is thin stuff most of the time.

Good journalism depends on good people, well educated, and skeptical, to report on a very complex world. It will require people with a mastery of specific aspects of that complexity who do not see themselves as “change agents”, but as true reporters.

Instead of pounding out a story on a Remington typewriter, they will so do on laptops and desktops, but real journalism, performed ethically, professionally, and with pride will still be just as exciting. It will still depend on the truth as its most precious commodity.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Wind Power Pipe Dream

2011-12-12T13:24:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Imagine if you will America’s mountain ranges topped by row upon row of wind turbines and America’s deserts and plains covered by solar panels. How ugly is that?

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Wildlife Slows Wind Power”, took note of the slaughter of birds and bats by these Cuisinarts of the countryside. The problem has reached such proportions that “New federal rules on how wind-power operators must manage threats to wildlife could create another challenge for the fast-growing industry as it seeks more footholds in the U.S. energy landscape.”

The wind-power industry is heavily subsidized by loan guarantees and mandates, and like solar power is turning out to be a vast pit of wasted funding that also raises the cost of electricity to communities whose utilities have been required to purchase its output.

It is another environmental pipe dream and one intended to enrich those who go into this dubious business.

Not only uneconomical, it utterly fails to produce sufficient electrical energy to meet the demand of America’s homes, businesses and industry. As the article noted, “The U.S. now has more than 43,000 megawatts of wind capacity, double the level three years ago, generating roughly 3% of the nation’s electricity.”

Three percent!

Try to imagine how many wind turbines it would require to produce anywhere near the nation’s needs. Now consider that the wind does not blow in a constant stream and often does not blow at all.

Consider also that the increase in wind power has occurred within the last three years, precisely the time in which the Obama administration has been in office, throwing taxpayer money at this pathetically inadequate means of generating electricity while doing all it can to shut down coal-fired plants currently responsible for fifty percent of all the electricity generated. Concurrent with this have been attacks on the coal mining industry.

In early 2011 a study sponsored by the John Muir trust of the wind turbines in California found that wind farms are much less efficient than claimed, producing below 20% of capacity more than half the time and below 10% of capacity for more than a third of the time. The report found that the suggested output was particularly low during the times of highest demand.

Unknown to most Americans is the fact that wind power generation requires 100% backup. To maintain electrical grid capacity, the ability to supply customer demand for continuous electricity, every wind farm must have a backup generating facility. Thus, it is coal-fired, gas-powered, nuclear and hydroelectric power generation that ensures a reliable supply of electricity to consumers.

This means that the backup facility must have twice the real rated capacity of the wind farm. The result is more capital is required to ensure this, along with operating and maintenance costs when a traditional power company is forced to include wind power in its inventory. This is a global phenomenon wherever wind power is part of the mix.

The noise generated by wind turbines is such that, especially in rural areas, lawsuits and complaints, also noting lost property value. Such lawsuits have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. Increasingly, direct physiological impacts that include rapid heartbeat, nausea and blurred vision have been attributed to the turbine’s ultra-low-frequency sound and vibrations.

An expert on the detrimental aspects of wind power, John Droz, Jr., has created a website for those interested in the facts. Droz notes that “wind energy was abandoned well over a hundred years ago as it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning, more modern needs of power, even in the late 1800s.” It is an outmoded source of power comparable to plowing farmland using oxen.

Due to intensive lobbying based on the discredited notion that carbon dioxide emissions from traditional power generation plants (with the exception of nuclear power and natural gas) cause “global warming”, this bogus justification is the basis for the wind power industry. Another idiotic rationale is “energy diversity.”

The demand from wind (and solar) power executives for a federal “national renewable electricity standard” would inflict this ridiculous form of power generation upon consumers and it is entirely one of their self-interest. It ignores the nation’s growing population and the need for more electricity generation by means that have a long-established record of efficiency, low cost, and predictability.

Like so much that is based on environmental schemes, it should be abandoned at the earliest possible time.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

WAPO Slanders U.S. Military in Iraq

2011-12-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

I rarely read The New York Times or Washington Post because the reporting is so biased it sickens me. Pick any topic, from politics to science, these and other liberal mainstream newspapers are divorced from the most basic standards of honesty and accuracy.

On Sundays, however, I visit their websites to get a sense of the latest liberal themes and, on the Washington Post site, I found “Civilian killings created insurmountable hurdle to extended U.S. troop presence in Iraq” by Liz Sly. It made me very angry and it should make anyone who lost a father, a brother, a sister or mother who served in Iraq, not just to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, but since 2003 to depose him from power and see him brought to justice in Iraq by Iraqis.

Thanks as well to those who served, but returned with grievous injuries, often from improvised explosive devises—many of which were made in Iran, along with all the others who returned home from the nightmare of fighting an enemy who looked like every other Iraqi.

The point of Ms. Sly’s article was to defame all who served in Iraq and, of course, those who died there. Quoting an Iraqi who lost family members, she encapsulated the theme of her article. “They are barbarians,” he said. He went on to say, “We wish they never had come.” One Iraqi hardly speaks for all Iraqis, of course, but in the context of Ms. Sly’s article, he did.

By the second paragraph, she was citing “a group of Marines (who) went on a shooting spree in which 24 Iraqi civilians were killed” on November 19, 2005. You had to read nine more paragraphs into the article to learn that charges were brought against seven Marines and dropped against six of them. A seventh was acquitted while an eighth will stand trial in January.

You had to read even further before Ms. Sly cites a U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan regarding the period of 2005-2007. Gen. Buchanan is not directly quoted, but Ms. Sly notes that “The vast majority of civilian deaths were the result of Iraqis killing Iraqis.” No kidding!

Iraqis killing Iraqis was endemic to the Saddam Hussein regime. The history of Iraq after he came to power in 1979 until his fall in 2003 is one of mass murder, summary and arbitrary executions, rape, and torture.

For example, in March 15-19, 1988, Saddam authorized the use of poison gas against the citizens of a Kurdish town, Halabja, killing thousands. That same year, he launched an Al-Anfal campaign of extermination against Kurds living in Northern Iraq. Their crime was siding with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran war that had lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. The attacks resulted in deaths estimated to be between 50,000 and 100,000, many of whom were women and children.

Saddam repeated this in April 1991 after having been driven out of Kuwait by allied forces led by the U.S. Uprisings in northern Iraq resulted in estimates of civilian dead ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 Kurds and between 60,000 to 130,000 for Shiites.

When U.S. troops invaded in 2003 several mass graves were found, believed to have been a response to a 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein.

None of this information was unavailable to the Washington Post reporter who quoted a lawmaker, Sami al-Askari, identified as “a close aid to Prime Minister Mouri al-Maliki.” He said, “The image of the American soldier is as a killer, not a defender. And how can you give a killer immunity?”

American troops were and are always subject to U.S. military justice, but those troops often found themselves in fire fights with an enemy that did not wear uniforms. Civilians were killed in the fog of war.

The world shall probably never know how many Iraqis died in Saddam Hussein’s prisons or as the result of campaigns carried out against Kurds and tribes in the south. He had already used weapons of mass destruction, poison gas, and it was widely believed he retained the capacity to use them if invaded. The intelligence agencies of several Western nations were convinced of this, though few were found in the wake of the invasion.

It is a wonder to me that Ms. Sly took the time to report that, according to the Department of Defense, 4,474 American service members died in Iraq, 3,518 of whom were killed in action.

Our military is withdrawing at long last from Iraq. I will not engage in an analysis of the decisions that were made to invade, but the best one was to rid Iraq of a monster called Saddam Hussein who killed far more Iraqis than the American military ever did.

It should not escape anyone’s notice that, in the wake of the Iraq war, the citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and currently in Syria, rose up to rid themselves of dictators. Were they encouraged by the U.S. military campaign and the result in Iraq? Yes.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

America's Communist President

2011-12-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

In his extraordinary book, “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century”, the historian, Dr. Paul Kengor, stated in his introduction that “We now know that American Communists and their masters in Moscow were acutely aware that they could never gain the popular support they needed to enlist the support of a much wider coalition that could help them push their private agenda.”

Most threatening, however, was Dr. Kengor’s discovery that “it was nothing short of stunning to research this book during the presidential bid of Barack Obama and hear so many of the names in my research surface repeatedly in the background of the man who became president of the United States of America. The way in which so many names and themes from the Cold War past aligned and made their way into Obama’s orbit was chilling.”

Obama’s December 8th speech in Osawatomie, Kansas revealed to anyone paying any attention that the President is a Communist. Speaking of the nation’s economic system that has created the greatest wealth for the most people anywhere, Capitalism, Obama said, “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

No one would argue that capitalism is “fair”, nor would they argue that life is “fair.” These are things that never were and never will be, but Obama’s reelection campaign theme will be that Americans are suffering because of Capitalism, because of a lack of fairness.

In a December 8 Washington Times commentary, Jeffrey T. Kuhner wrote, “There is only one problem with the White House’s narrative: It’s completely false. Mr. Obama is not a defender of the middle class but has been its mortal enemy. His policies have impoverished working-and-middle-class Americans.”

Other than the utterly brain-dead liberals for whom facts are meaningless, most Americans understand, as Kuhner pointed out, “His massive stimulus failed to restore economic recovery…his trillion-dollar deficits and skyrocketing debt have mortgaged the future of our children…Obamacare suffocates businesses, stifles job creation, and adds another unsustainable entitlement. It is creeping socialized medicine, which is wrecking the world’s finest health care system.”

Rush Limbaugh denounced the speech as “alien to American ideals and principles…your vision for this country is not rooted in any—not one—American tradition.”

Obama’s history, what is known of it given his extensive efforts to hide the facts that are usually available about a candidate or president, is testimony to the fact that he is a Communist and the only reason this remains clouded to many Americans has been the shameful failure of the Fourth Estate, the liberal mainstream media, to expose it.

He remains in office due to the failure of both the media and the Republican Party to cite the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against anyone holding the office who is not a “natural-born” American. Obama’s father was a Kenyan, a subject of Great Britain. He should not have been on the Democratic Party ballot and he should not be in the Oval Office as this is written.

Many of the known facts about Obama were published in Dr. Jerome Corsi’s 2008 book, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.” Thirty-five pages of footnotes citing the documentation of the facts cited were there for anyone to read. Obama was born into a family of Leftists. As a youngster he was mentored by Frank Marshal Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA.

Of his early college years, Obama said in his memoir that at Occidental, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

Obama’s political career began with a fund-raiser in the living room of two dedicated, self-identified Communists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. As Dr. Corsi pointed out, “The problem is that Obama sought out his relationships with the Alinski organization, the Ayers-Dohrn radicals, the scandal-ridden (Antoin ‘Tony’) Rezko, Reverand (Jeremiah) Wright and black-liberation theology, and Farrakhan and the Black Muslims. At the time he wanted these ties.” In the course of his 2008 campaign he rejected all efforts to tie him to these individuals.

The appointment of the many “czars” to oversee and guide the actions of government departments and agencies became the subject, first of ridicule, followed by the realization he was infiltrating the government with known radicals of different stripes. The one that quickly gained attention was Van Jones, an avowed Communist. When that became known, Jones resigned.

The Osawatomie speech was classic Obama. In the past he has sought to align himself with former presidents and this time around it was Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive. As Americans have sought to peel away the many layers of deceit surrounding Obama, the single abiding factor in his life is Communism. The views he expressed were a combination of class warfare and an attack on Capitalism.

In 2008 Americans, reeling from the financial crisis that all too conveniently began in the final months of the Bush43 presidency, were duped into believing that a man with nothing more than a message of “hope and change” was a messiah that would lead the nation out of its problems.

Obama was and is the first Communist President of the United States of America. We have a President who rails against “millionaires and billionaires”, corporations, Wall Street, and all other aspects of our Capitalist economy.

We have a President and a Democratic Party that have tipped their hat to the Occupy Wall Street radicals.

We have a President and a Democratic Party totally aligned with the unions in America, some of which put the auto industry in jeopardy, others in the public sector that have plundered state treasuries with sweetheart deals for pensions and health plans, and who we have seen thuggishly oppose the restructuring of collective bargaining. It is why a close ally of Obama, Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SIEU), praised the Chinese Communist economic model in a December 1 Wall Street Journal article.

And we now have a President who says Capitalism “doesn’t work” and “It has never worked.” That is utterly absurd, but it reveals his ideology and his goal of fomenting a Communist revolution in America by bankrupting the nation to achieve it.

Obama is a horrid aberration, the result of a combination of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, and the education community to dumb down Americans and make them ready for the Communist America that Obama advocates.

Communism did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is alive and well in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and in Venezuela. The soft form, Socialism, has brought a number of European nations to ruin and threatens the U.S.

In 2010 Americans returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party. We must finish the job in the Senate and in the White House in 2012. If we do not, the America we love will perish.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Cartoon Round Up

2011-12-09T13:19:00.001-08:00

It's Bear and Deer Hunt Season in New Jersey

2011-12-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The last time there was an effort to suspend a bear hunt in New Jersey, Jon Corzine was Governor and Lisa Jackson, the director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was the head of the State’s Department of Environmental Protection. They both opposed the hunt.

Corzine served from 2006 to 2010. It was a bad idea because the bear population had surged and became an even larger problem for folks in the northern counties. Gov. Chris Christie had promised to reinstate the bear hunt when he ran for office. Previously there had been bear hunts in 2003 and 2005. A legal challenge thwarted a hunt in 2007.

As a recent Wall Street Journal article noted, “New Jersey could be considered a bear’s paradise. It has mild winters and an abundance of acorns, berries, hickory nuts and other species favorites.” We might also mention bird feeders and easily accessed garbage cans. Those in bear country tend not to feed the birds and have garbage cans that can survive a WMD.

If you don’t think the sport of hunting is not popular in America, it’s worth noting that of the estimated 7,000 permits issued for this year’s hunt, some ten percent were snapped up by those from out-of-state and the first of some 200 bears killed on Monday, December 5, was taken by Robert Melber of Apache Junction, Arizona. He hadn’t been in the woods of the Delaware Water Gap for more than a half hour before he bagged one.

Need it be said that an environmental group, the Animal Protection League of New Jersey had filed and lost a court case to stop the hunt? Two dozen or so bear-huggers showed up to protest at a weighing station in Franklin on Monday.

To put this in perspective, the Wall Street Journal reported that “New Jersey’s bear population was 3,278 last year, up from 1,447 in 2003 according to DEP estimates.” It further noted that “Bears can live into their 20s and have an average of three cubs per litter, with a female able to give birth to 21 babies over her lifetime.” You do the math.

The deer hunting season coincides with the bear hunt and, in the county of Essex, hunters bagged 339 deer. To put this in perspective, Essex’s county seat is Newark and it is wall-to-wall suburban communities separated in some parts by two large reservation areas, a 2,049-acre South Mountain Reservation and a 408-acre Eagle Rock Reservation. I live within a two minute drive of the former.

There were so many deer in the South Mountain Reservation at one point they were literally killing the ecology. Rarely mentioned is the fact that deer are major vectors for Lyme disease, spread by infected deer ticks. When the ticks migrate they can infect humans enjoying the nature preserve. The county now has annual hunts and over the last four years the program has culled an estimated 1,089 deer.

Deer pose another problem as well. The NJ Department of Transportation says that more than 4,700 deer were killed by vehicles in the first week of November when the males are in rut and looking for love. Last year’s total was about 6,000.

It always strikes me as absurd that animal lovers probably think nothing of having steak or lamb for dinner or taking the family out to a local McDonald’s for a juicy hamburger. These are the same people who look forward to eating a big turkey on Thanksgiving. They no doubt eat a lot of chicken throughout the year. The vegans get a pass as they have to make do with tofu.

Suffice to say that the bear and deer hunters have probably saved more than a few lives and helped to keep the State’s wildlife population to a reasonable level. As is always the case, the animal rights crowd is utterly indifferent to the safety of the State’s human population because facts and logic have nothing to do with their wailing about how “inhumane” the hunts are in their view.

I hope one of the hunters sends a nice bear steak to Gov. Christie. And no, it does not take like chicken. It tastes more like pork.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Looking to the Dollar, Gold, and "Mutti" to Save the World

2011-12-07T12:17:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The most formidable couple in the world during the 1980s was Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher, a conservative and a woman of iron will, must be looking across the Channel with some amusement to see how her German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, is literally the only person keeping the European economy from collapsing and, it must be said, taking England and America with it.

The cover article of this week’s Business Week noted that “Merkel is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. She won a PhD for a thesis on quantum chemistry…though childless, she is known as Mutti, for Mother.” Born in the post-war years, “Merkel’s worldview reflects the German desire for stability. Chaos plagued the German-speaking people long before there was a German nation…Later the hyperinflation of the 1920s and Depression of the 1930s, both of which undermined the middle-class, gave rise to Nazism.”

Plainly said, Angela Merkel is showing the rest of the world why Keynesian economics doesn’t work; that governments with huge “entitlement” programs and a tendency to throw vast amounts of money at their problems invite disaster. If Europe does not plunge into chaos, it will be because she refused to bail it out with the deutschmark.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is moving billions to Europe to ease its lending crisis.

If you read just one book this year, I recommend James Rickards’ “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis” ($26.95, Portfolio Penguin). An advisor to the Department of Defense, the U.S. Intelligence community, and major hedge funds on global finance, he brings more than thirty years’ experience to a book that explains what has gone so terribly wrong and why.

Rickards spells out how the U.S. economic system has been gamed over the years to ensure that “elites captured most of that growth in income and profits.” It is the reason we are just learning that many members of Congress have grown wealthy using insider information, an act that would land anyone else in jail.

“Over time and with increasing complexity, returns on investment in society begin to level off and turn negative…Bureaucracies that started out as efficient organizations turn into inefficient obstacles to improvement more concerned with their own perpetuation than with service to society.”

This is a definition of the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Health, and Energy, along with the quintessential monster, the Environmental Protection Agency. For good measure, include Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage loan agencies.

In a chapter titled “Endgame—Paper, Gold or Chaos?” Rickards looks at the weakness of the U.S. dollar, pointing out that “As the dollar and sterling were trading places in the 1920s and 1930s, there was never a time when at least one was not anchored to gold.”

“Gold is not a commodity. Gold is not an investment. Gold is money par excellence. It is truly scarce—all the gold ever produced in history would fit in a cube of twenty meters (about sixty feet) on each side, approximately the size of a small suburban office building.”

“Today, under Bernanke’s guidance, the United States is trying to do what England did in 1931—devalue…What is happening instead is that all the major currencies are devaluing against gold at once. The result is global commodity inflation, so that beggar-thy-neighbor has been replaced with beggar-the-world.”

Rickards’ book is a warning against what we are witnessing. “Perhaps the most likely outcome of the currency wars and the debasement of the dollar is a chaotic, catastrophic collapse of investor confidence resulting in emergency measures by governments to maintain some semblance of a functioning system of money, trade and investment.”

The two currency wars of the last century led to two world wars. Rickards warns that “The path of the dollar is unsustainable and therefore the dollar will not be sustained.” A return to the gold standard “offers the best chance of stability.”

Rickards recommends that the big banks be required to become smaller and that derivatives be banned because “they serve banks and dealers through high fees and poorly understood terms.” Derivatives are contracts between two parties that define the value of underlying variables. The “bundling” of mortgages that were then sold as assets is an example and, as the financial crisis revealed, their value was dubious at best, criminal at worst.

“The dollar,” says Rickards, “for all its faults and weaknesses, is the pivot of the entire global system of currencies, stocks, bonds, derivatives and investments of all kinds. It is the store of economic value in a nation whose moral values are historically exceptional and therefore a light to the world. The debasement of the dollar cannot proceed without the debasement of those values and that exceptionalism.”

The coming national election will be a choice between a President who does not believe the United States of America is exceptional and whoever the Republican Party selects to help the nation return to its fundamental values.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

This Never Happened at a Tea Party

2011-12-07T06:47:00.000-08:00

"What Were They Thinking?"

2011-12-05T10:40:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The thing I fear most right now is having to write a column about the Republican Party in late November 2012 with the title, “What Were They Thinking?”

Let’s put it this way. No incumbent President since Jimmy Carter has had worse polling numbers than Barack Hussein Obama.

The question—the fear—on the minds of most Republicans these days is whether the Party intends to commit political suicide by choosing the wrong candidate to run against Obama and to add to their present agony, it has a litter of candidates who run the gamut from charisma-challenged to scarily brilliant.

Let’s review the choices.

Jon Huntsman, a former Governor of Utah, is in the race I’m convinced only because he harbors a deep animus for Mitt Romney, a former Governor of Massachusetts and fellow Mormon. Oh? You didn’t notice we have not one, but two, Mormons running? We do. No matter. Huntsman has so far managed to keep his tinfoil hat hidden in a box in the trunk of his car. Fortunately and wisely virtually no one is paying him any attention.

Then there’s Michele Bachmann. Frankly, I don’t want to have to listen to Nanny Michele for four years telling me to clean my plate because there are starving children somewhere in the world. She gained notice leading the Tea Partiers against Obamacare. Good for her. Now please return to the House of Representatives and leave us alone.

Rick Santorum is a very nice fellow and that’s his problem. He’s too nice. He doesn’t scare me or anyone else. In a dangerous world, I want a President who just might blow the hell out of some nation or other. He’s stuck on the abortion issue when the majority of Americans have, for better or worse, moved on.

The Cain Train officially derailed on Saturday, Nov. 4, and saved us from having to further give him any serious attention. I don’t much care that a bunch of dubious women claimed he was a sex fiend. I do care that Herman couldn’t find Ecuador or Chad on the map if his life depended on it. He had no experience working with a legislature or in politics except for losing one race in Georgia. He was and is extraordinarily unqualified to be the President of the United States

It pains me to say this because I love Texans and have many friends who live there, but Governor Rick Perry is not ready for prime time. Granted that Texas is big enough to be a small nation, most people outside of Texas are unaware that its legislature meets in regular session on the second Tuesday in January of each odd-numbered year for a session that is limited to 140 calendar days! Perry is charming and fairly bright, but even I could run Texas by drinking heavily for 140 days every other year.

I will not even linger over Ron Paul because he is a Libertarian and widely believed to have come from another planet. Paul gives “old”, “cantankerous” and “opinionated” whole new meanings when you put those words together in a sentence.

In March of this year I wrote about “the Newt-ster” saying that Newt Gingrich “intellectually, is head and shoulders above anyone else in the race. In terms of pure brain power, he has a real grasp of most issues.” Gingrich has a grasp of every side of every issue because, at one time or another, he has been on it. If, however, you had heard him speak to the Polk County Republican Party in Iowa last week you would know he would wipe the floor with Obama in a debate. For all his flaws—and who does not have flaws—he has an historian’s and working politician’s grasp of issues, big and small. Do I agree with him on all of them? No, but I think he could make the changes needed to turn the nation around and I believe he has a passionate love of America.

Which leaves us with Mitt Romney; old sure-and-steady, a man who has had the political misfortune of actually changing his mind over the years, largely because he ran as a Republican in one of the most Democratic States of the Union…and won!

Romney is an attractive, intelligent, and very well qualified candidate, having succeeded in the worlds of politics and business. Let’s also give him points for having lived a moral life as a good husband and father. He has made it this far without a single major gaffe, but Romney increasingly gives the impression of being robotic. He is locked into his political gameplan and talking points, and it has worked to this point. It may get him the nomination.

Of the two, Gingrich is just more fun to listen to as he speaks extemporaneously, citing Jefferson and Lincoln, quoting the Declaration of Independence, reminding us why the first Americans fought a Revolution. Gingrich has already made some history of his own, wresting control of Congress away from the Democratic Party in the mid-1990s. He could do it again.

The Republican Party made a spectacular mistake in 2008 when they choose John McCain. I think the Iowa primary will give Gingrich a win. I think the New Hampshire primary will give Romney a win. After that, money—lots of it—and organization will make the difference.

What matters above all other considerations is that the Republican Party must have a candidate who can send Obama packing. If that happens, America’s future will begin to improve in the late evening of November 6 when the election results come in.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Spending More has Never Worked!

2011-12-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Ask any financial advisor what to do when you are drowning in debt and they will tell you to spend less and pay down your debt. This is just common sense. However, if you ask politicians what to do, they will advise that the nation spend more and borrow more.

Despite a huge national debt and deficit, the federal government just concluded its biggest spending year with its second biggest annual budget deficit. For fiscal 2011 which ended September 30, the government spent $3.6 trillion, an increase over the $3.52 trillion posted in 2009.

The budget “deficit” is the difference between the revenues that government took in and what it spent. The “debt” is the accumulation of yearly deficits. The U.S. has a debt of $15 trillion and this grows by billions daily due to the interest that must be paid on the amount of borrowing required to sustain its operations. Fully 40 cents of every dollar the government spends is now borrowed.

The Congressional Budget Office noted that the deficit is “greater than in any year since 1945” as World War Two wound down. As a Wall Street Journal editorial expressed it, “The Obama years have racked up the three largest deficits, both in absolute amounts and as a share of GDP, since Hitler still terrorized Europe.”

In the wake of the failed Super Committee, charged with cutting a mere $1.2 trillion over ten years, the editorial noted that “President Obama fiercely resisted even the token spending cuts for fiscal 2011 pressed by House Republicans earlier this year.” He continues to press for higher taxes on “the rich” despite the fact that the rich pay the lion’s share of income taxes already. By Obama’s definition, the rich is anyone earning more than $200,000 a year. By most definitions, that qualifies as middle class, not rich.

We are entering a period that is likely to be called something like the Great Depression Two or 2.0. History usually serves as a guide and, as Hans Bader, counsel of special projects for the Competitive Enterprise Institute has noted, “government spending (and budget deficits) rose dramatically in the Depression under both the Hoover and the Roosevelt administration…(both) increased, rather than cut, spending in the Great Depression.”

It is a dangerous thing to cling to myths about the Great Depression. Bader says “Big government liberalism is a religion, not a school of rational thought. A false understanding of the history of the Great Depression is the cornerstone of left-wing ideology…”

The Great Depression was a series of recessions. In the August 5 New York Times, Bader noted that “In 1937, the Supreme Court upheld anti-business legislation that had been struck down by lower courts, like the National Labor Relations Act, in decisions like National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. That made unions more powerful, led to a wave of costly strikes and discouraged hiring. The increased wages demanded by unions resulted in employers laying off many workers.”

Does this sound familiar? Efforts by States to rid themselves of collective bargaining, primarily with civil service unions such as Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is a reflection of the way they have drained public coffers with wage, pension and health plans that exceed those of private enterprise. Andy Stern, the former SEIU president, just had a commentary published in The Wall Street Journal in which he urged the U.S. to adopt Chinese Communism!

In Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere, unions representing government workers and others in the private sector have spent millions to defeat such efforts to end collective bargaining. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gained national attention for his efforts to curb that state’s teacher’s union demands.

What President Obama calls a “do nothing Congress” is one in which his party controlled both houses of Congress until the 2010 elections. It will live in infamy for imposing Obamacare on a nation that has flatly rejected it.

The Supreme Court will hear the suit brought against it by 26 state attorney generals. If permitted to stand, it will destroy what is widely regarded as the world’s best health system along with the historic interpretation of the Constitution’s commerce clause.

As for spending programs, President Obama’s “stimulus” or his “green jobs” program have been a costly failure along with the administration’s waste of billions in loan guarantees to green industries. Worst of all the administration’s thwarting of the nation’s traditional energy industries, as recently seen in the delay of the Keystone XL pipeline, has cost thousands of existing and future jobs.

It is a “perfect storm” of historic and current errors in judgment concerning the nation’s economy. Americans can only hope that Europe’s financial community does not implode before the November 2012 elections, dragging the U.S. and the rest of the world into another Great Depression.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Cartoon Round Up

2011-12-02T13:22:00.000-08:00

Eco-Absurdity

2011-12-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

Hurricanes seen from outer space

By Alan Caruba

There are no lengths and no depths to which Greens—environmentalists—will not go to advance the greatest hoax of the modern era. It used to be called “global warming”, but when that was exposed as based on falsified computer models put out by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the term “climate change” was adopted to mask it.

Billions of dollars have been wasted on claims of a massive increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere and entire careers, organizations, and government agencies have been financed to advance the hoax.

So much depends on this cash flow that the fraud’s machinery continues to function. Yet another IPCC conference on climate change began on November 30 in Durban, South Africa for the purpose of extending the absurd Kyoto Protocols that some nations signed onto with the promise of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions.” The original protocols exempted China and India. The U.S. refused to participate and many industrial nations have indicated they have no intention of doing so this time around.

As just one example of this BIG LIE, on November 30 I received a news release from the Missouri State University stating that one of its professors was “delivering a message in Washington, D.C. today urging the nation’s leaders to address the moral issue surrounding climate change.”

Oh, so now global warming is a moral issue, too?

As I have frequently noted, climate is something measured in centuries, while weather is forecast in days and, even then, can prove to be incorrect. The definition of the weather is “chaos” as it is subject to change in just hours as various “fronts” shift course. Even the most powerful events like hurricanes are difficult to predict and the U.S. mainland has not been hit by one in years. By the time Hurricane Irene arrived on the East Coast this year, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm.

This and the revelations of “Climategate”, the thousands of emails exchanged by the IPCC meteorologists of the University of East Anglia’s climate center, has hardly made a dent on the frantic efforts to keep the global warming lie alive.

“Michael Nelson, MSU associate professor of environmental ethics and philosophy, is part of the Climate Ethics Campaign, a team of representatives from government agencies, business and environmental organizations delivering a national climate ethics statement to President Obama and Congress.”

Here’s where it really gets absurd. Having blamed global warming for everything, this gang of hucksters assert that “’Missing from the international debate is the deeply disturbing moral and ethical implications of climate change.’ Nelson said ‘Climate change is a real, dangerous and rapidly worsening problem that cannot be driven solely by short-term economics or national self-interest.’”

The level of fear-mongering reaches new heights with the Climate Ethics Campaign claim that “Climate change-related impacts are already harming and killing people here and abroad. Unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, the resulting natural disasters, floods, diseases, illnesses, water and food shortages, and environmental degradation, along with associated rising violence and social breakdown, will injure or kill millions more every year.”

So, there you have it. Either we spend billions on “climate change” or people will die and societies will suffer turmoil. Can you name a single day when the weather somewhere has not killed someone? Do societies experience turmoil because of the weather or because they oppress their population? And can anyone do anything about the weather? No.

I fully expect these charlatans to announce that Santa may not show up on Christmas Eve if we don’t do something about climate change..

The weather, deemed too warm or too cold, continues to be touted as the result of too much CO2 in the atmosphere even though it is a mere 0.038% of the atmosphere and meteorological science has established its impact is virtually non-existent. There is no correlation between its increase and the climate except that it shows up well after any change.

Prof. Nelson, apparently concerned that his job is on the line, said, “We want to urge every citizen to push for policies that reduce emissions and prepare for climate change.”

Some of those policies threaten to further undermine the nation’s economy in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion that CO2 is a “pollutant” and is falsely trying to use the Clean Air Act to shut down every coal-fired plant for the generation of electricity—even though they provide fifty percent of all electricity generated.

These aren’t just bad policies based on utterly false and debased science, but they represent the real threat to the lives of all Americans and to the economy in general.

There is no real “ethical” component to climate change. There is only the need to clean up after a hurricane, blizzard or flood in order to help people get their lives in order again. That is already addressed in part by government agencies like FEMA.

The time has long since passed when the U.S. and other nations should pay any attention, let alone waste any more time and money on the “sustainable” schemes being pushed by the United Nations and the many organizations dependent on this massive fraud..

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Paper Money, Real Debt, and Spendthrift Nations

2011-11-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

As the citizens of the United States and the seventeen member-nations of the European Union look on, a great drama regarding the future of the EU and its currency, the Euro, is occurring.

The essential problem is that both the U.S. dollar and the Euro are just so much paper, despite the promises and guarantees that they will be honored as real money. The trick has been to keep everyone believing there are sufficient real assets to back up those promises.

Since the U.S. dollar is a kind of universal currency to which other nations peg the value of their currencies the problem for everyone is that the U.S. is broke. Its debt exceeds its annual capacity to generate income, otherwise known as its Gross Domestic Product. Every hour of every day it must borrow billions to meet its obligations. Forty cents of every dollar the U.S. spends is borrowed.

There is a reason why television these days if filled with commercials offering to sell gold. Gold has always retained its value though it does fluctuate. The U.S. Treasury’s gold hoard has a value of more than $400 billion these days, but that value is the flip side of the Federal Reserve’s demolition of the dollar which has lost 95% of its value since1913, the same year the Fed was created.

Currently the Federal Reserve has been printing vast quantities of dollars—quantitative easing—that only serves to devalue it. The dollar is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States, but for the first time in our history our credit rating has been downgraded by agencies such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s.

Not that the rating agencies haven’t also been part of the problem. They are famous for telling everyone that the bundled mortgage assets of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were okay right up to the day the 2008 financial crisis occurred and Lehman Brothers collapsed

When the 2008 financial crisis hit, the American taxpayer was tapped to bail out a number of banks, a huge insurance company, and even General Motors. This was followed by “stimulus” spending, all of which drove U.S. debt levels to historic highs. The vast matrix of Federal Reserve central banks, government agencies charged with oversight of financial institutions, and the ratings agencies all contributed to the crisis.

The U.S. went off the gold standard in 1931, in effect exporting deflation around the world. Other nations followed suit. At the time, Americans were experiencing high debt burdens, unemployment, and money hoarding. If that also sounds like 2011, you’re right.

The crisis of 2008 was brought about by the “bundling” of mortgage assets. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two Depression-era social justice inventions, currently own 50% of mortgages, many of which were the result of pressures on banks to make loans to people who clearly could not pay them back. What the banks considered “assets” were phantoms whose collateral could often not be traced.

Ben Bernanke, Fed Chair

Little noted is the role of the Federal Reserve. A government investigation into the causes of the 2008 financial crisis concluded that “The prime example is the Federal Reserve’s pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic mortgages which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards. The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not…”

What the Fed had done, in fact, was to lower the interest rate it charged for lending to banks to very nearly zero.

In his book, “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis”, author James Rickards explains what is actually occurring.

“The United States now has a system in which the Treasury runs non-sustainable deficits and sells bonds to keep from going broke. The Fed prints money to buy those bonds and incurs losses by owning them. Then the Treasury takes IOUs back from the Fed to keep the Fed from going broke.”

We’ve been here before in two previous currency wars, the latter of which led to World War II. The problem then and now is the need for job creation, something that can only be achieved by private enterprise.

The United States government has not provided a good environment for its business and industrial community to invest and expand. It has, as just one example, very nearly the highest corporate tax in the world; beyond that, a vast matrix of regulations makes doing business in America expensive, difficult, and often uncompetitive.

How this will all play out depends in large part on whether Americans are prepared to reduce the size of a government that grew precipitously in the 1930s and the second half of the last century. We must begin to slowly and fairly phase out the “entitlement” programs.

The great question facing Europe is whether the EU disbands and its members return to individual national sovereignty in a response to a continent-wide economic disruption caused by unsustainable debt in its southern tier nations. The EU was a response to a history that generated two major wars in the last century, bankrupting the continent morally, socially, and economically. The road back has been in part due to U.S. aid and protection against the former Soviet threat.

While the possibility of abandoning the Euro was unthinkable bare months ago, it is now an option; a very difficult option because of the vast interconnectiveness of Europe’s and our own banks.

In America the only real hope we have is that in November 2012 we will elect men and women who will turn the ship of state around before the latest currency war sinks ours and the world’s economies.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Desperate Middle East Regimes

2011-11-29T13:36:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The world hasn’t seen this much turmoil since the years leading up to World War II. By contrast even the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991 did not cause this much uncertainty.

The Middle East currently holds the greatest prospect for a hot war as Iran and its close ally, Syria, struggle to maintain control over their populations. Iran’s proxies in Syria and Lebanon, Hezbollah, and, in the Gaza, Hamas, are being told to get ready for a war on Israel. Meanwhile, the Arab League has turned on Syria and is hostile to Iran. Turkey is stationing troops on its border with Syria.

The Syrian dictator, the second generation Bashar Assad, is fighting for his life in much the same way as Libya’s former dictator, Moammar Gadhafi did. In Egypt, the people are occupying Cairo’s Tahir Square demanding that the military step aside for a government composed of elected representatives. An election is being held with the likely outcome that the Muslim Brotherhood will acquire political power there. This pattern will be repeated elsewhere.

The dictatorial regimes of Iran and Syria are using Israel in an attempt to divert the attention of their people from their efforts to remain in power. Anti-Semitism in the Middle East is as rabid as anywhere on Earth; but it is not working its old magic. An all-out war on Israel could, in fact, bring the regimes down, but these are desperate men in charge.

The real news is the covert efforts being used to undermine the military power of Iran and Syria. Iran just claimed it had captured twelve CIA spies. Additionally, Israel’s famed covert service, the Mossad, it also being blamed for recent events that must surely terrify the mullahs and the Assad regime.

DEBKA File, an Israeli news agency, in a November 25 analysis noted an “explosion which wiped out Iran’s entire missile command, including Maj. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, at the secret Revolutionary Guards base in Aghadir near Tehran on October 12.” Apparently it was not so secret!

On November 27 there was a tremendous explosion that rocked Isfahan, home to one of Iran’s main facilities for refining uranium for its nuclear program and Iran’s largest facility for research and development of ballistic missiles. Some reports say neither was affected, but speculation persists that one of them was.

On November 23, an illegal Hezbollah arsenal in Siddiqin housing Iranian-made missiles was blown up. These missiles were intended to be used in a war against Israel, but the explosion was credited to the anti-regime Free Syrian Army. “Graffiti left at the scene of the blast said it was revenge for Hezbollah’s aid to the Assad regime’s crackdown in Syrian cities and promised more.”

The DEBKA analysis concludes that “Both Iran and Hezbollah are gearing up for war” noting that Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Basji military units “began organizing in battle array in the various theaters assigned to them in the country.” The old order in the Middle East has been overthrown in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and is under attack in Syria. There is unrest in Bahrain and Yemen as well.

Both the U.S. and Russia have positioned aircraft carriers off the coast of Syria. A U.S. carrier fleet stands at the ready near the Persian Gulf. It is doubtful Russia wants to be drawn into a conflict. The drubbing it took in Afghanistan led to the downfall of the former Soviet Union. The U.S., bleeding money in all directions, withdrawing from Iraq, and isolated in Afghanistan, is unlikely to engage militarily in a land war, though air power remains an option.

As the DEBKA File analysis makes clear, the U.S. and Israel are having considerable success with covert attacks in Iran and Syria, either directly or by proxies receiving intelligence and other assistance.

When Syria falls—as it surely will—it will leave Iran further isolated. Any admission that it has nuclear-equipped missiles would seal its fate. Its desperation is seen in a recent threat to unleash hundreds of missiles against Israel and, indeed, a northern Israeli city sustained a brief rocket attack from southern Lebanon on Monday, perhaps in an effort to lure it into a response.

The news of the day is an Iranian attack on the British Embassy in Tehran which mirrors the 1979 attack on the U.S. embassy that put the ayatollahs in command and led to the present crisis sparked by Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Iran is running out of friends and its Islamic tantrums only speed the process. This is a rogue nation that does not play by the rules. It seems to be inviting an attack and that fits its apocalyptic view that includes the sacrifice of large portions of its population, chaos, to secure the return of the mythical Twelfth Imam.

No matter how this plays out, it will have a serious affect on the price of oil, a global commodity. It may remind Americans of the failure and refusal to permit access to our own vast reserves of oil and natural gas in Alaska, North Dakota’s Bakken area, and of course the offshore reserves along our Eastern and Western coasts. The delay of the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline will be felt. And then there is the Obama administration attack on coal producers and users.

The fact that a new U.S. oil refinery has not been built since the 1970s is testimony to a massive national failure to anticipate and prepare what is occurring in the Middle East. We are a decade or more behind the curve.

It is a common error to believe that the leaders of Iran and Syria think like their western counterparts. Baghdad is beginning to have more bombings. Pakistan is in a state of panic. In Turkey, a group of NATO and Arab officers have quietly established a command post for possible intervention in the Syrian crisis.

No one in the West, nor Russia or China, wants to participate, but the rabid dogs of war are loose and history has a nasty way of repeating itself.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Pity the Democratic Party

2011-11-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

I actually pity the Democratic Party these days even though I think it has brought the nation to ruin because, as Joseph Curl recently noted in a Washington Times commentary, “Democrats must spend, spend, spend, and spend. It’s in their DNA.”

It got blown away in 1994 after forty years of control of the U.S. Congress when Newt Gingrich saved the nation from forty more. At the very least then-President Clinton had the political savvy to move to the center, earning a second term for himself.

This is not the case with President Obama who is running against a “do nothing” Congress to which he outsourced the writing of Obamacare, the stimulus programs, the budget, and, the most recent failure, the Super Committee which had been preceded by a blue ribbon commission whose recommendations he ignored.

Curl, like others, has come to the conclusion that Obama does not want to be reelected noting that this is the first President in the history of the nation to blame its present problems on Americans! While he campaigns furiously around the nation, he keeps telling voters that they are “lazy”, “a bit soft”, and have lost their “ambition and imagination.”

No, Americans are imagining what another four years of Obama would do to the nation and they don’t like what they see.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is stuck with their “messiah” and having some very serious second thoughts about him. When two top Democratic pollsters and strategists, Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas Schoen, go on record to urge the President to step aside and allow someone else—like Hillary Clinton—to run for the office in 2012, you know the party is in serious trouble.

The media personality, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, gained everlasting fame when he declared early in Obama’s 2008 campaign that he felt “a tingle” go up his leg when he contemplated an Obama presidency. These days, Matthews is telling anyone who will listen that he doesn’t think either Barack or Michelle “like being in the White House.” Michelle made that clear early on, openly saying she hated it.

When the likes of Rep. Barney Frank announces he will not run for reelection, he has joined fifteen other Democrats in Congress bailing out before the 2012 national elections, knowing it will be a political bloodbath for the Party. Watch for still more to opt out as well.

The Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress when Obama took office in 2009 lost the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections and saw a number of governorships go to Republicans. Unlike the Republicans who have numerous aspirants for the nomination, they have none. They are faced with spending millions to elect an unelectable President.

The chairwoman of the Democrat National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is so astoundingly stupid that it is a reflection on the party as a whole. Despite the fact that she drives an 2010 Infiniti FX35, a Japanese luxury SUV, she declared “If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side, we would be driving foreign cars. They would have the auto industry in America go down the tubes.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s EPA just announced it is preempting Congress and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration by imposing a ruling that America’s fleet of passenger cars and light trucks must meet an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a doubling of today’s average of 27 miles per gallon. The reason? Cars and light trucks emit a “pollutant”, carbon dioxide, a gas on which all life on Earth depends in equal measure with oxygen.

The EPA rule, by the way, defies the laws of physics inasmuch as one can only get a finite amount of power from a gallon of gasoline. When you add ethanol to the mix, you get less mileage, all in the name of saving the planet.

The sole reason the Party will offer regarding why voters will desert Obama in November 2012 will be "racism." Debbie Blabbermouth, ignoring the fact that Obama doubled and tripled the national debt and saw unemployment increase, has said, “people don’t like to deal with it, but the fact of the matter is—the president’s problems are in large measure because of the color of his skin.”

A lot of people voted for Barack Obama because he was black (well, actually half black). Now they will vote for whoever the Republican nominee is because Obama has exacerbated all the Democrat programs that have brought the nation to ruin.

As a longtime recovering Democrat who switched to the Republican Party during Ronald Reagan’s era, I almost feel sorry for the Party, but that is but a fleeting thought when I consider that it has saddled us with Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the likes of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, among others (Jimmy Carter!) too numerous to name.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Threat of a Global Financial Collapse

2011-11-26T14:47:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

At present, the amount of the annual Gross Domestic Product, $14 trillion—the value of all the goods and services that generate income—is exceeded by the nation’s debts.

America is presently $15 trillion in debt and it grows daily.

In a November 21 Wall Street Journal interview, Erskine Bowles of the presidential advisory commission on the nation’s debt, said “If you take 100% of the revenue that came into the country last year, every single dime of it was consumed by our mandatory spending and interest on the debt.”

“Mandatory spending in English is basically the entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. That means that every single dollar we spent last year on national defense, homeland security, education, infrastructure, high-value added research—every single dollar was borrowed, and half of it was borrowed from foreign country.”

“That’s a formula for failure in anybody’s book.”

In truth, we are looking at a coming global financial collapse with experts from Credit Suisse to the Deutche Bank, the CEO of General Motors to Warren Buffett, all in agreement that the question is not if, but when.

It will come at a time when there is little, if any, real leadership to be found either in the U.S. or Europe, the most spendthrift of nations facing this crisis.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the most brilliant of our Founding Fathers, said “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” He also said that “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.”

Another Founding Father, James Madison, warned Americans against the concentration of power saying, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.”

Over the years, more and more power has been concentrated in the federal government and it requires the dismantlement and elimination of several of its components. Americans need to say no to the Departments of Education, Energy, along with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These are all functions previously addressed by the states.

You will not find any of these activities specified in the Constitution. Consider when they came into being:

Education was established in 1953, originally as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1979, it was subdivided into Education and Health and Human Services.

The Department of Housing and Urban Affairs was created in 1965.

The Department of Energy was created in 1977.

Thus, between 1953 and 1979, a period of 26 years, the federal government took control of key factors of the nation’s affairs, most if not all are dealt with far better at the state and local level.

To these must be added Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, two government “entities” responsible for the housing mortgage crisis and currently asking Congress for billions more to cover their losses.

The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution specifically says that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it by the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Congress is filled with men and women for whom their position has become a sinecure as they are elected and reelected, some for decades But Congress has proved itself unwilling to govern the financial affairs of the nation. A recent vote in the House rejecting a proposed balanced budget amendment reflects this.

In 2012, the voters will have the opportunity to reverse this failure, electing men and women who will vote for term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and other necessary changes.

We have witnessed what happens when Americans lose sight of the vision of our Founding Fathers and the Constitution they bequeathed to posterity.

We are that posterity.

The present generations of Americans are obligated to save the nation or see it fail.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Cartoon Round Up

2011-11-25T13:17:00.000-08:00

America's Biggest Turkey: Barack Obama

2011-11-24T10:27:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The 2012 national elections will be held on November 6 and I naturally want to get out ahead of all the other pundits and their predictions about its outcome. I cannot tell you who the Republican winner will be, but I can tell you that Barack Hussein Obama will be known as a former President.

He has most certainly turned out to be the biggest loser—a turkey—to hold the office of president. I can look back over my writings in 2008 and say “I told you so!” to anyone who voted for Obama.

It was surreal to watch how the mainstream media went out of its way to ignore the fact that there were virtually NO FACTS to cite regarding Obama-the-candidate. Any candidate who had gone to the extent of hiding the ordinary “paper trail” that all of us leave when we attend school, college, serve in the military, acquire a Social Security card, travel, or simply acquire friends and acquaintances, surely had something to hide.

To this day, no one seems to recall being in college with Obama, though he attended Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. Surely you would think someone would pen a word or two of their memories of him. No student in the classes he taught on the Constitution at the University of Chicago has shared those days. If he dated anyone prior to Michelle, they remain incognito.

Like the fictional Shadow, Obama seemed to be able to “cloud men’s minds” when it came to any recall or inquiry about him.

The appalling performance of the mainstream media to get Obama elected was captured by Howard Kurtz, a columnist for The Washington Post who, on November 17, 2008, reported that NBC News was coming out with a DVD titled “Yes We Can: The Barack Obama Story” and that ABC and USA Today were following suit to rush out a book about the election.

“We seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking,” said Kurtz. “Whew! Are journalists fostering the notion that Obama is invincible, the leader of what the New York Times dubbed ‘Generation O’?” Kurtz asked, “aren’t media people supposed to resist this kind of hyperventilating?”

The confidence I have in my prediction that he will be unemployed as of the afternoon of January 20, 2013 lies in the fact that he has spent the last three years being rebuffed on one policy or another, not the least of which was the Affordable Health Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

Rejected by 26 States that brought suit against it, Obamacare’s constitutionality will be addressed by none less than the U.S. Supreme Court; a decision that may come in the spring of 2012. Given the court’s long record of precedents on comparable decision, it’s toast. Recently, in the electoral battleground State of Ohio, voters resoundingly rejected its mandate requiring everyone to buy health insurance under penalty of a fine.

2009 Inaugural Trash

In March 2010 an estimated one million people representing the Tea Party movement marched on Washington, D.C. to protest against passage Obamacare. They were a sharp contrast to the revelers that showed up for Obama’s inauguration and literally left tons of trash in their wake. We have seen this repeated by the Occupy movement participants.

There’s a term in boxing when a boxer has been hit hard enough to make him groggy, “stepping in post holes”, as he staggers around the ring. It seems an apt term for Obama who is finding fewer supporters and defenders beyond the hard core of liberal Democrats.

From promises to close Gitmo to efforts to try Islamic terrorists held there in civil courts, Obama was rebuffed.

Obama’s promises regarding jobs to be created by his “Stimulus” have proved baseless and costly.

On the numbers alone, Obama has been a disaster for America. Obama has presided over the first downgrade in the nation’s credit rating in its history. Federal spending has been the highest (25% of GDP) since World War II. Federal debt (67% if GDP) has been the highest since World War II.

Long-term unemployment (45.9%) is the highest since the 1930s. Those dependent on the government, receiving federal benefits (47%) is the highest in American history.

Obama’s aggressive anti-energy policies are costing jobs from the Gulf of Mexico to the now delayed Keystone XL pipeline and all points in between. Scandals involving the bankrupt Solyndra, a solar panel company and other “green energy” investments and loans are costing him support. This is true as well wherever coal is mined and where they drill for natural gas and oil.

Americans grew tired of his non-stop speeches and gaffs, with or without the Tele-Prompters that became a national joke. Now they must endure a year of his constant campaigning and his non-stop lies about Republicans and everything else.

His penchant for never accepting blame manifested itself in another punchline, “It’s George Bush’s fault.”

In 2010, voters returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party. Does anyone at this point seriously think that these and other factors point to an Obama victory in 2012?

He will be defeated and by a margin that will astound everyone.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-23T13:34:00.000-08:00

Climategate, Part Duh!

2011-11-22T12:43:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

At what point will it finally occur to the pea-brained legion of journalists, academics, alleged scientists, United Nations propagandists, and others still blathering about “global warming” and “climate change” that there is no global warming and that the climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years on planet Earth?

It would appear that no amount of the evidence of fraud is sufficient to convince them they have either participated or been taken in by the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Perhaps, though, the latest release of thousands of emails between the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change perpetrators may push them toward a rational conclusion and release the rest of humanity from the penalties and costs imposed by the global warming hoax.

It’s not that the IPCC is not relentless in this ugly business. A report released on November 18 by these reprehensible liars predicted “more extreme weather events.”

Well, duh! There isn’t a day that goes by without an extreme weather event occurring somewhere on the Earth. One might consider the weather at the northern and southern poles extreme. Or the heat of the Earth’s deserts? Then throw in the usual blizzards, floods, and droughts—and you have a non-stop variety of “extreme weather events” to which to point.

To put it another way, the whole hoax was working just fine until the Earth began to cool around 1998. So naturally the IPCC had to (1) change the terminology from global warming to climate change, (2) deny that its “scientists” were lying, and (3) continue the pathetic prediction scheme by pointing to “weather events.”

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, “The scientific link between climate change and extreme weather, however, isn’t uniformly clear, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988 to assist policy makers with climate change.”

That’s right, this whole farce has been going on since 1988. At what point will the “enablers” of global warming accept defeat? Not soon if one considers that the IPCC is laying on another climate conference to be held in Durban, South Africa from November 28 to December 9. It will be the 17th opportunity for these deceivers to gather to wine and dine while taxpayers from the many nations they represent pick up the tab.

Here’s the kicker. “Christina Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “the report also underscored the need for governments to take action to reduce emissions.”

What emissions? Carbon dioxide? A trace gas in the atmosphere (0.038%) that has no effect whatever on climate or weather?

Does anyone grasp how costly all the lies about “emissions” have been and continue to be? The Christmas tree to be erected at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. comes complete with the purchase of so-called “carbon offsets” to pay for its transport 4,200 miles across the country from California. Eighty million tons of “carbon credits” were purchased.

Bear in mind, that tree and all others depend on carbon dioxide in the same way humans and other creatures depend on oxygen! CO2 is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. Without it, we all die.

But what is one Christmas tree compared to an entire nation, Australia, whose government just imposed a carbon-emissions tax on everything? The tax will drive existing heavy industry and other generators of CO2 from the nation that can afford to leave and make those who cannot less competitive with global manufacturers and other businesses. Some business will just shut their doors.

This kind of deception is global. The International Energy Agency announced in early November that “dangerous climate change will be essentially irreversible within little over five years.” The news report concluded saying “The IEA uses conclusions from research collated by the United Nations. Most climate scientists agree with the U.N. conclusions, although recent polls show a growing proportion of the public in many countries is skeptical of climate change.”

No, most climate scientists do not agree with the U.N. data because they know how flawed and frequently fraudulent it is. This kind of casual journalistic reference is a lie, along with all the rest of the global warming and/or climate change data from “official” sources like the IPCC and IEA, et al.

In early November the U.S. Department of Energy published “estimates” of global carbon dioxide emissions for the year 2010. Writing in Forbes, James Taylor of The Heartland Institute, took note that the Department concluded that “emissions rose by 6% from 2009 to 2010. This constitutes the largest rise yet recorded.” And then he added that “global temperatures have not risen during the past decade.”

There is no correlation. Never was.

Whether it is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the U.S. Departments of Energy, Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency, all depend on people being too ignorant or indifferent to grasp the truth that everything done in the name of global warming, climate change, or carbon dioxide emissions is a costly, evil deception.

© Alan Caruba, 2011