U.S. Hostages Abroad and High Gas Prices at Home--It's Jimmy Carter Redux

By Alan Caruba

A lot of things that a President cannot control can gravely affect his chances of being reelected. In 1979, the combination of an oil embargo and the Iranians taking U.S. diplomats hostage ended any hope of a second term for Jimmy Carter.

As this is written, there are 19 U.S. citizens being held hostage in Egypt, but you are hearing little to nothing about that in the mainstream media.

The economy is going to affect President Obama’s odds of being reelected this year and Americans who are notorious for gaging the impact of inflation by watching the cost of gasoline at the pump rise are going to blame Obama. An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and a possible conflict will drive prices through the roof.

When Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.61.Averaging $3.50 at present, the price of a gallon of gas is predicted to rise to $4 and even $5 by summertime.

If the U.S. was not dependent on imported oil, we could control our own fate, but for decades every effort possible has been made to drive up the cost of automobiles and gasoline, led by environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, two notorious anti-energy foes, in combination with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Little wonder they are in a full war against the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada or that the Obama administration has been trying to convince Americans it favors opening access to existing and new oil reserves.

Dan Kish, vice president of the American Energy Alliance, recently took note of the political maneuverings over the American Energy and Infrastructure Act of 2012, saying “At the end of the day, the American people don’t care whether federal lands are opened in one large piece of legislation or in separate smaller pieces.”

“The bottom line is that the Federal government currently leases approximately 2.4 percent of the land owned by U.S. citizens, while lands equaling ten times the State of Texas are kept off limits by Federal regulators. With reports coming out that gasoline could approach five dollars a gallon by this summer, we cannot wait any longer to begin tapping these resources.”

If the Obama administration really wanted to create jobs and improve the economy, it would “lift the embargo on American energy,” said Kish, “and open our onshore and offshore resources for robust exploration and development.”

“The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the nation has six times the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia”

In 2010, while oil, natural gas and coal accounted for 78 percent of U.S. energy production, its producers received 11 percent of all federal energy subsidies. By contrast, subsidies to the wind industry increased 10-fold, from $467 million in 2007 to $4.9 billion in 2010.

Closer to the pump for Americans was the deal the Obama administration struck with thirteen auto manufacturers in July 2011 to boost new car fuel economy standards from 35.5 miles per gallon (mpg) in 2016 to 54.5 mpg in 2025.

The claim made was that it would save Americans $1.7 trillion over the lifetime of vehicles and $8,000 per vehicle by 2025. Higher gas prices as the result of increased costs of imported oil and higher automobile prices that will result from this deal will cancel out any alleged savings.

Who wants to be fooled again by this administration?

And what business is it of the federal government how much mileage an auto gets?

The U.S. government has been messing around with the fuel economy program—believe it or not—for forty years. The result was the rise in sales of Japanese auto companies and European imports while Detroit saw General Motors and Chrysler come so close to collapse they had to be bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars.

The culprit has been the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program and Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute calls it “a case study of unintended consequences. If the fuel-saving technologies requisite to meet the new standards are such a great bargain, why do we need a law forcing automakers to adopt them?” Good question!

Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation crowed that “Today’s announcement is the latest in a series of executive actions the Obama administration is taking to strengthen the economy and move the country forward because we can’t wait for Congressional Republicans to act.” That’s right, they blamed by-passing Congress and the deal on Republicans!

Meanwhile, the only thing CAFE standards accomplish is an increase in the cost of automobiles and a decrease in the safety of their occupants as cars are forced to be lighter and more vulnerable in a crash.

In a February 2nd opinion published in The Wall Street Journal, Alaska Governor Sean Parnell welcomed news that Congress might finally be moving in the direction to permit Americans benefit from access to their own oil.

Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) to oil exploration and production would have obvious benefits. “This legislation opens 400,000 acres of the ANWR coastal plain’s 1.5 million acres” that represent “less than three percent of ANWR’s 19 million total acres.”

The other way Americans have been forced to pay more at the pump have been the mandates for the mix of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline. Why? Because its advocates claimed that this would reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but in fact ethanol increases CO2 emissions while at the same time reducing the mileage of every gallon of gasoline. And there is absolutely no scientific justification for reducing CO2 emissions because the mandate is based on the totally debunked global warming hoax.

The cost of building new oil refineries in America was increased exponentially by the Clean Air Act of 1970. There have been no new refineries since 1976. There are currently 149 refineries in the U.S. Requiring them to make different blends for different regions of the nation has done little more than to drive up the cost at the pump. The taxes on gasoline have been a bonanza for the federal government and the states.

The good news is that two new refineries are being developed, one in Yuma, Arizona, and one in Union County, South Dakota. The bad news is that Sunoco Inc has just announced it will continue to exit the refining business due to the lack of profitability. In business for 117 years, Sunoco has been gradually shifting out of refining, reducing its capacity 43 percent since 2009.

Come November, if drivers of cars are shelling out $5 a gallon at the pump, a lot of voters are going to be very unhappy. If our citizens are still being held hostage in Egypt they will be even less happy.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Taking Hostages: Tehran in 1979 - Cairo in 2012

American diplomats, 1979, in Tehran, Iran

By Alan Caruba

As someone who vividly recalls the Iranian “students” who took our diplomats hostage in 1979 and the 444 days it took to get them back, the repeat of this by the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, putting 19 pro-democracy, non-government organization (NGO) Americans on trial on trumped up charges has an ugly repetitive feel to it.

The contempt the Iranian revolutionaries, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, had for America and, I might add, international law and practice that goes back centuries, is everything you need to know about dealing with militant Islamists, whether they are in Iran, Egypt, or anywhere else on the face of the Earth.

Just as then-President Jimmy Carter dawdled while looking for a diplomatic response, this same scenario is now being played out by Barack Obama and it won’t work now just as it did not work then. Carter authorized a failed military operation that, by most accounts, was poorly organized and executed.

What is needed now is a Navy SEAL unit or larger force to go in, rescue our American hostages, and extract them from Cairo. We need direct military action, just as we need direct military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile operations, and the barracks of the Revolutionary Guards.

Just as Jimmy Carter was seen as weak, so too is Barack Obama and, for America and the world, that is very bad news. I don’t care if the Iranian leadership and other militant Islamists don’t like America. I want them to fear us.

Apparently they didn’t get the message when the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the home city to its military college. While bin Laden was right up the street and around the corner, we are supposed to believe that no one in Pakistan’s military or intelligence structure had the slightest idea. He was living in a large walled compound. Short of buying his own groceries, you’d think someone might have noticed. And, of course, now they are angry at us for killing the man behind the murder of some 3,000 of our citizens, including an attack on the Pentagon!

When the Iranians went into the streets in June 2009 protesting the bogus election of Mamoud Ahmadinejad, Obama’s response was that the U.S. “shouldn’t meddle” in Iran’s affairs. A plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to America in a Washington, D.C. restaurant was discovered and some people might call that “meddling” in our affairs.

This hostage-taking needs boots-on-the-ground action now. The only upside to this event is that the longer it goes on, the same disenchantment that resulted in the defeat of Jimmy Carter will be Obama’s fate in the November election.

The fact that Obama has imposed the largest debt/credit crisis that the nation has ever incurred, unemployment levels that rival the Great Depression, a housing market that is still in the tank, and is busy hollowing out the nation’s military capabilities at the worst possible time seems to gone unnoticed by the forty percent or more of Americans that think he’s doing a swell job.

Our present problem is that Obama does not like America any better than our enemies do. He does not like our Constitution, recently blaming the Founding Fathers for the limitations they wisely imposed to avoid a government grown too large and a president with powers beyond those granted.

This nation is in peril from the same gross stupidity that gripped it prior to World War Two until Pearl Harbor occurred in 1941. The war in Europe had been going on since 1939 and the Japanese had invaded China in 1937.

We are in a new, dangerous era with the chaotic situations in the Maghreb of northern Africa where U.S. assistance, via NATO, was provided to overthrow Gaddafi and Obama's swift rejection of Egypt’s Mubarack led to his downfall. There are uprisings in Syria and Yemen. It is the result of massive resentment against dictatorial regimes, but the real problem will be how these revolutions turn out.

That is something we cannot control, but we must do what we can to protect American citizens abroad to protect our national interest and to project real national power.

The Middle East is tribal. With the exception of Israel the “nations” we must deal with are merely armies with a national flag, not modern democratic governments responsive to their citizens. That is why Iraq threatens to break apart. It is why the majority Syrians want to end the minority Alawite tribe’s control. It is why Palestinians are not welcome anywhere.

The President’s top intelligence advisor recently told a Senate committee that sanctions are not working against Iran, but the President wants to pretend they are. The U.S. and the rest of the world are waiting for the Israelis to do to Iran what we and our allies should be doing to end its nuclear threat.

Likewise, if we wait around while the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo makes us look like a bunch of punks it will just get worse for us in Egypt and the Middle East just as it did in 1979.

In Egypt we need to get in, break some furniture, shoot some bad guys, get our people out, and then shut off the billion-plus dollar aid spigot.

No more American tourists, no more American aid, and no more Mr. Nice Guy.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Jimmy Obama

Jimmy Carter Redux

By Alan Caruba

I actually remember watching and listening to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech given 32 years ago on July 15, 1979. It marked a distinct turning point for the president because it addressed the already large loss of confidence in his leadership and judgment. It confirmed most voters judgment.

The address to the nation has since been called his “crisis of confidence” speech. It was, like most of Carter’s policies, a massive failure, and I had the same feeling when I listened to President Obama’s recent speech to the joint session of Congress, an occasion usually reserved for the State of the Union or a declaration of war.

And yet, and yet, we are living with many of former President Carter’s policies that were so wrong then and are so wrong now. If you were around then, I recommend you read the speech and, if you were born since then, it will amaze you how many really bad ideas Carter put forth that you are still hearing today from President Obama.

Jimmy Carter, a largely unknown Democrat former Governor of Georgia was swept into office on a wave of revulsion against the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal. Had that not occurred it is likely he would not have had much of a chance despite his toothy smile and grab-bag of loony liberal ideas. Four years later, voters voted for a conservative former Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. They kept him around for a second term throughout the 1980s.

On that long ago evening Jimmy Carter thought the best way to address the nation’s mounting economic and energy problems was to blame the voters. It wasn’t his fault. It was ours.

But it was his fault.

As Seldon B. Graham, Jr., the author of “Why Your Gasoline Prices Are High”, an oil industry engineer and lawyer, put it, “Globalist Jimmy Carter harmed the USA with a domestic oil windfall profits tax (in 1980), causing a severe recession, (and) loss of half a million jobs…” The windfall profits tax caused US-based oil companies to look elsewhere for oil and to lay off petroleum industry workers here.

Carter, just as Obama, did not understand that profits are what all businesses require in order to expand and invest in their future. It is the same misguided thinking that has Obama saying that “loopholes” in the tax code that encourage oil exploration and extraction should be closed. They are not “loopholes.” They are the same kind of tax policies that are extended to countless businesses.

If we fast-forward to today, we would understand that oil companies annually pay more than $30 billion per year to federal, state, and local governments in order to produce energy in the U.S. Contrast this with the more than a half-billion dollars taxpayers lost when the Obama administration backed a loan to the now bankrupt “green” energy, solar panel firm, Solyndra.

The fact is that America is home to more than 160 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The US is the third largest producer of oil in the world. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal with several centuries’ worth to be mined. The amount of natural gas that can be accessed by fracking technology is incalculable. And the Obama administration can’t even make up its mind about a new oil pipeline from Canada, an economic partner from whom we import a considerable amount of oil already!

We should be energy independent, but Jimmy Carter in 1979 and Barack Obama in 2011 are still blathering away about solar energy. What did Carter want back then?

“I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of the nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.” Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. Reagan removed them. Obama has promised to do the same, but hasn’t.

Carter said, “when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.” We’re still waiting.

In a nation that was the world’s leader in the manufacture of automobiles, Carter proposed “an extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems.” Obama talks about high speed trains that no one wants or needs in the era of airline travel. Created in 1970, Amtrak has never made a profit.

In 1979 Carter said, “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.”

A September 14th Rasmussen poll asking if the nation was going in the right or wrong direction yielded the following analysis: “Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters say the country is heading down the wrong track, showing little change from last week. Since January 2009, voter pessimism had ranged from a low of 57% to a high of 80%. This time last year, 65% said the U.S. was heading down the wrong path.”

If Obama wasn’t a far-Left liberal, wasn’t getting some extraordinarily bad advice from those he brought into the White House, and wasn’t a raving egomaniac, he might pause and stop playing political games to blame Congress and Republicans for the present economic crisis. If in the name of “social justice” the federal government--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--wasn’t in the mortgage business, there would not have been a crisis.

The problem for the rest of us is that Obama’s crisis is our crisis too as jobs melt away and businesses large and small wait to see how much more damage his proposals will do to the nation's economy. His solution was to throw a trillion-dollar “stimulus” at the problem in 2009. He has just proposed a half-trillion dollar solution.

Except for the usual percentage of liberals who think Obama will “stop the rise of the seas”, the rest of the nation is left to wait for next year’s elections. That’s our “solution.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Jimmy Carter Redux

By Alan Caruba

It is inevitable that the current first and, hopefully, last term of Barack Obama will be compared to that of Jimmy Carter’s, 1977-1981. Until then, no sitting President had ever failed to have been reelected since Herbert Hoover in 1932. The stock market had crashed in 1929 and the U.S. was sliding into what would be a decade-long depression.

Carter, a holier-than-thou former Governor of Georgia captured the public’s attention after the sordid ordeal of Watergate, followed by a genial Jerry Ford whom the press relentlessly portrayed as a bumbling fool. Four years later, it was Carter’s turn because his policies were relentlessly liberal with the worst possible outcomes.

The comparisons between Carter and Obama are instructive. When Carter arrived in office in 1977, the nation was recovering from a severe recession from 1973 to 1975. Unemployment stood at 9% and economic growth had slowed. Sound familiar? Only today economic recovery rates are actually less than Carter’s 3.4%.

The second half of Carter’s term was a slight improvement, but was plagued by events that included the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the taking of U.S. diplomats as hostages of the Iranian revolution in 1979. Presidents are elected to deal with such events, but Jimmy Carter had a pure genius for coming to the wrong conclusion or electing to take the wrong course of action.

Much of what we now see as President Obama’s agenda is a reflection of Carter’s. In the same way the Congress continues to refuse American’s access to their own oil and their own coal to fuel economic growth, Carter inflicted a “windfall profit tax” on the nation’s oil industry, thus drying up domestic exploration in favor of seeking it elsewhere. It put oil industry personnel out of work and did nothing to encourage “energy efficiency” initiatives. The tax was repealed in 1988 when prices collapsed as more oil became available worldwide.

Liberals are constantly dazzled by the promise of “conserving energy” when the only real way of doing so is to not use it. This, of course, is never an option. Try getting through breakfast without using energy. Need it be said that Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House? Or that Ronald Reagan ordered them removed? Wind, solar, and biofuels have been sucking billions out of the pockets of Americans in the form of subsidies and hidden taxes on gasoline for decades.

Carter also came up with the Department of Energy which, of course, he thought would save energy. Created in 1977 to lesson dependence on foreign oil, it now has some 16,000 employees and a budget around $24 billion. And we are importing more oil than ever before. Compare that with the fact that the top three U.S. oil companies paid $42.8 billion in 2010 income taxes.

Barack Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up. Carter received it for the Camp David accords in 1978 between Israel and Egypt that greatly eased the tensions between the two nations. The Palestinians hated it. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood for agreeing to it. Carter came away from the experience with an animus toward Israel exceeded only by Obama’s.

When events outside his control seemed to conspire against Carter, those within it sabotaged him repeatedly. In 1977, he returned control of the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama even though most Americans opposed it. The Canal, for all intents and purposes, is controlled by China after they purchased important military facilities at both end of it.

In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This is what happens when America’s enemies conclude that it is weak. The invasion, ironically, would hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, although that is generally attributed to the reduction in oil prices, its single, major export.

The final coup de gras for Carter was the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 after the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. A military operation to rescue the hostages failed and Carter spent most of the rest of his time in the Oval Office, unseen and unlamented until his defeat in 1980.

Carter has not distinguished himself much since leaving office and the debris of mindlessly liberal “answers” to problems they created. He has criticized Israel for practicing “apartheid” even though the Palestinians continue to refuse to seek peace. Meanwhile, Obama’s big move in the Middle East was to throw a longtime ally, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarack, under the bus and seeking an approach to the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama also managed to involve the U.S. in an undeclared war on Libya.

Americans are still suffering from Carter’s incompetence and weakness, and thirty years from now, today’s younger generations of Americans will be paying the price for Obama’s efforts to destroy the nation’s economy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

We Elect Politicians, Not Saints

By Alan Caruba

It’s always a good idea at the beginning of the long political marathon that leads to Election Day to remind ourselves that we are electing a politician, not a saint.

It’s also a good idea to keep firmly in mind that everyone we do elect is a human being with all the flaws and failures of judgment and behavior that comes with that dubious distinction.

When he was campaigning, Jimmy Carter made much of his being a born again Christian and having taught bible studies at his church. He turned out to be a dunce at just about everything else. That toothy grin of his was the predecessor of Barack Obama’s famed dazzling smile.

As various Republicans toss their hat in the ring, they will have been subjected to vigorous and sometimes vicious “opposition research” by Obama’s campaign team and, surprise, by those representing their opponents.

It is one of the great mysteries of our time is that none of them have discovered that Ron Paul, the Libertarian, is not in fact from some distant planet instead of Texas. Few candidates advocate nuttier ideas non-stop than Dr. Paul. If you want comic relief, keep an eye on him. On the subject of nutty ideas, Romneycare is one that candidate Mitt Romney keeps defending and will until he likely loses the nomination. Bad ideas are bad ideas not matter whose name is associated with them.

In her Saturday column for The Wall Street Journal, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan reflected on the continuing popularity of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who keeps being asked if he will run despite constant denials. She even speculated that there might be a draft Christie movement if the other candidates prove to be too boring or inept to defeat Obama.

That’s what makes politics so much fun. It also makes a run for the presidency an expensive effort and one that requires the stamina of an Olympic contestant. Noonan called Christie “normal”, adding that “A lot of people at this point in history think only the abnormal run for president.” And speaking of normal, Herman Cain fits that description and may begin to look very good to voters as time goes along.

Normal or abnormal, the power abrogated to the mainstream press remains intact as too many people rely on what is surely that most biased “reporting” to be found in a presumably free nation. In the tank for any Democrat, readers and viewers will have to look elsewhere for alternative sources of news about Republican candidates.

Having voted since the days of John F. Kennedy, I confess that since my parents were Democrats, I was a Democrat. I paid little attention to the merits of the Democrat candidate, nor any of his promises. I suspect a lot of people vote like that, but as Paul says in First Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

I cast my first Republican vote for Ronald Reagan and have not taken any Democrat candidate seriously since. After Reagan I endured eight years of Bill Clinton including his impeachment for lewd behavior in the Oval Office.

Little did I or anyone else know what a complete looney Al Gore, his vice president was.

Al gave his wife, Tipper, a huge, lengthy kiss before accepting the nomination and I am pretty sure even a lot of Democrats were cringing. We dodged a big bullet when George W. Bush defeated him.

But! George W. helped run up the largest deficit in modern times while President and Obama multiplied it to the point of putting the nation in its worst financial crisis since the end of the Civil War.

This is why the economy is going to be the single, over-riding issue of the 2012 elections and why Barack Obama can spend a billion dollars to get reelected, but will be defeated.

Americans do not elect Presidents who preside over inflation, unemployment, housing foreclosures, Obamacare, open borders, and a lifestyle in office that rivals Arab sheiks.

We have to wait until the end of the month to learn if Indiana Governor Mitch Daniel will run. If he does, he will be the most fiscally conservative candidate and Republican primary voters will grow accustomed to his lack of charisma, his dry wit, his abundance of good sense, and record of good governance.

Add Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty to the field of those making a serious effort. Forget Sarah Palin who will not run and Donald Trump whose run will end the day “The Apprentice” finishes its present season.

That leaves Newt Gingrich and the aforementioned Ron Paul. They are the circus sideshow before you get to the big tent. I don’t even think Newt is running to be elected. I think he’s running to increase the sales of present and future books, dvds, cds and possibly t-shirts.

As for saints, they are very scarce among politicians. Anyone remember John Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards? Or former Senator John Ensign, Republican from Nevada? Or…or…or…all the rest that embarrassed themselves and everyone who voted for them?

The profession of politics calls for the moral flexibility of a contortionist. Former President Harry Truman said it best, "My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Killing the U.S. Oil Industry Since 1980

By Alan Caruba

As President Obama’s term drags into its second half, it is increasingly being compared to the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter. Having increasingly thwarted the ability of the U.S. to access its own vast reserves of oil, successive administrations now burden Americans with billions more in costs at the gas pump.

My “go-to guy” for information about the U.S. oil industry is Seldon B. Graham, Jr., the author of “Why Your Gasoline Prices are High”, a man with more than fifty years experience in the oil industry, first as a petroleum reservoir engineer and later as an oil and gas attorney.

The turmoil in Libya, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the oil cartel, is causing the price of a barrel of oil to rise due to the usual speculation that occurs on Wall Street and around the world by those seeking to cash in on the prospect of reduced oil production and supplies.

What it most demonstrates, however, is the inane and unnecessary dependence on foreign oil that America has imposed on itself  thirty years after former President Jimmy Carter’s energy policies began this insanity.

As Graham notes, “As to the actual price of oil, last week (Feb 13-19) the average OPEC oil was $97.20 a barrel while the average U.S. oil price was $90.13 a barrel. Let’s stop for a minute and savor the fact that U.S. oil was $7.16 cheaper than OPEC oil.”

“U.S. oil is always cheaper than OPEC oil. Most Americans don’t know that.”

There’s a lot that Americans don’t know about their domestic oil industry and for that we can thank a succession of U.S. presidents since Carter who have misled Americans on the subject. We have arrived at the latest President who, like Carter, is doing everything he can to kill the U.S. oil industry when not bowing low to the King of Saudi Arabia.

If America could drill for its own, domestic oil and replace dependence on the Middle East and other foreign sources, “it would save American gasoline consumers an estimated $28 billion annually,” says Graham, “as well as put millions of Americans to work.”

On April 2, 1980, Carter signed the Domestic Crude Oil Windfall Profits Tax, a direct attack on U.S. oil companies. “The result,” says Graham, “was that half a million oil workers lost their jobs. In January 1980, U.S. oil production was 8.7 million barrels a day. Foreign oil imports went from 2.9 million barrels of oil per day in February 1983 to the current 9 million barrels of oil per day.”

You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to understand these numbers. From 8.7 million barrels of oil a day in 1980, U.S. oil production has fallen to 5.6 million barrels of oil a day today. That’s a lot of oil that remains untapped domestically and offshore of America.

Like Carter, President Obama keeps blathering away about “alternative” or “green” energy sources such as ethanol, an additive to every gallon of gasoline that insanely burns a major food source, corn, as fuel. His administration has thrown billions at solar and wind energy producers despite the fact that coal represents half of all the electricity we use daily and despite the fact that both of these "alternative" energy sources have failed miserably in European nations that turned to them.

How crazed are Obama’s oil policies? Steve Maley, an operations manager for a shallow-water Gulf of Mexico oil and gas production company located in Lafayette, LA, noted in a Human Events.com commentary on February 18 that “Obama’s Fiscal Year 2012 Budget proposes to increase the tax liability of energy companies to the tune of $46 billion over the next ten years.”

Maley compared “recent quarter (2Q 2010) oil and gas industry profit (net income) to a sales ratio of 7.1%, versus 8.7% for all manufacturing companies. In terms of return-on-investment, oil and gas usually lag in the S&P 500.” The myth of huge oil and gas profits simply does not stand up to Obama’s State of the Union claim of “huge profits.”

Then factor in the Obama administration’s moratorium on both deep-water and shallow-water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Under the administration’s new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Michael Economedes, an internationally respected expert on the oil industry, notes that “offshore permitting has come to a virtual standstill”, adding that “thousands of companies in the energy sector are nearing the point of collapse after almost a year of inactivity.”

U.S. courts have twice demanded that the Obama administration end its moratorium and continued to be ignored.

The U.S. was an oil and gas producing giant before successive White House administrations declared war on this vital sector of our economy. The industry, representing the potential of millions of jobs and millions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of natural gas, has been stalled by appallingly stupid energy policies since the 1980s.

U.S. dependence on foreign oil producers, mostly state-owned in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and elsewhere, makes us vulnerable to events in far-off places when we could be producing our own oil and natural gas more cheaply right here in places like the Gulf of Mexico, in Alaska’s ANWR, and off-shore of our coasts where estimates are in the billions of barrels and cubic feet of our own untapped energy reserves.

We can thank the environmental organizations whose war on America’s energy sector has been going on now since the 1970s. It is their anti-coal, anti-oil, and anti-nuclear campaigns that will literally leave America at a standstill and in the dark if they are not reversed.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama has a Very Bad Day

By Alan Caruba

“Jan 31, 3:10 PM (ET) - PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge in Florida says the Obama administration's health overhaul is unconstitutional, siding with 26 states that had sued to block it. U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson on Monday accepted without trial the states' argument that the new law violates people's rights by forcing them to buy health insurance by 2014 or face penalties.

Attorneys for the administration had argued that the states did not have standing to challenge the law and that the case should be dismissed. The case is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two other federal judges have upheld the insurance requirement, but a federal judge in Virginia also ruled the insurance requirement unconstitutional.”

See? The system works. That is to say, the one set up by the U.S. Constitution. You remember the U.S. Constitution, right?

And, well, when 26 States all say that a law passed by Congress and signed by the President is unconstitutional, the chances are it is.

When you combine that with the House of Representatives’ call for its repeal, even Democrat Senators (particularly those facing reelection in 2012) are going to think twice about voting against repeal when it gets to the Senate floor.

President Obama is just two years into his first and last term, looking more and more like Jimmy Carter every day, courtesy of the mobs in the streets of Cairo.

For two years he threw trillions of OUR dollars at “stimulus” legislation to generate jobs and failed. Now the most central piece of legislation for him, former Speaker Pelosi, and Harry Reid has been ruled unconstitutional.

There is no way Obama can breath life into that horrid overhaul of Medicare that pulled trillions out of it while adding millions more Americans to it. No where in the Constitution does it say that the government can require you to buy insurance, a hamburger, or even a lottery ticket.

Moreover, as various entities examined Obamacare, it became increasingly clear that it was a monstrosity filled with mandates that would end up killing people who didn’t have months to wait around for an operation or waiting to see the increasingly fewer physicians it would force to leave the profession for lack of adequate compensation.

It is now clear to everyone that Obama was and is totally unsuited and unprepared to be President. Now watch the issue of his real place of birth move to the center of the stage.

The U.S. can survive a “President Biden”, but Obama should never have been let anywhere near the Oval Office.

Not a good day for the Democratic Party. A really awful day for Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

US Middle East Policies

Some of My Favorite Billboards

The following billboards began to pop up shortly after it became obvious to most people that Obama was some kind of terrible mistake that a majority of the voters made in 2008. This being America, they began to express themselves in many ways from town hall meetings to mass marches on Washington, D.C., to some wonderful billboards.

November 22, 1963: Changing History with a Bullet

By Alan Caruba

On November 22, 1963 I was in the office of a human rights organization in downtown Miami, Florida, fresh from service in the U.S. Army.

I was happy that President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev had not gone to war in October 1962 over Soviet missiles in Cuba. My battalion, part of the Second Infantry Division, had been put on alert to invade. A U.S. naval blockade had stopped any new missiles from being delivered and those that had been were withdrawn.

The Cold War had been going on since 1945 and tensions between the U.S. and Russia had briefly and dangerously reached a tipping point. Fortunately, the leaders of both nations pulled back. Elsewhere a relatively small, backwater conflict was going on in Vietnam, but few were paying it any attention.

John F. Kennedy was incredibly popular. He said that the torch of freedom had passed to a new generation and, at age 26, I was convinced his generation and mine were going to solve all of the world’s problems. I was unaware that JFK had so failed to impress Krushchev when they had met in Vienna in 1961 that the Soviet leader had felt emboldened to put missiles in Castro's Cuba.

On November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, Lee Oswald, a leftist malcontent who had spent some time in Russia, shot and killed the President. Within days I had packed and returned home where I would take up a career in journalism.

Anyone who was alive on that day can probably tell you where they were when they got the news. For later generations, it is just a date in the history books.

After Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn into office to serve out JFK’s term and won election on his own, history took a turn for the worse when he escalated the Vietnam War. Some 58,000 young men died in that conflict and President Johnson, after a huge election victory in 1964, announced on March 21, 1968 that he would not run for a second full term. He had served from 1963 to 1969.

Johnson had unleashed a tidal wave of liberal programs such as “the Great Society” and “the war on poverty”, signed the Civil Rights Act into law, initiated Public Broadcasting, instituted Medicare and Medicaid, and increased aid to education.

The nation turned away from liberalism and elected Richard M. Nixon who would serve from 1969 until forced to resign from the presidency in 1974 as the result of the Watergate scandal. The nation swung back toward liberalism and elected a little known governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. He lasted one term and the nation swung back toward conservatism and elected Ronald Reagan. Twelve years later, after Bush 41, it would swing back again and elect Bill Clinton.

For nearly fifty years, America has been seesawing back and forth between conservatism and liberalism without seeming to learn the lessons of the experience.

Liberalism and its many entitlement programs, the expansion of the federal government, the debasement of our educational system, congressional raids on the Social Security fund, and the failure to rein in the “government sponsored entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have brought us to a point of economic collapse not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s..

After November 22, 1963 everything that followed began with a single bullet. It sent the nation careening off on a spending spree that by 2008 took an infusion of billions of public dollars to avoid a banking industry catastrophe. It would be followed by an increase of two trillion in the national debt under a new, young, and briefly popular president.

Did we learn anything from those previous decades? Apparently not.

In 2008, the voters elected a virtually unknown U.S. Senator from Illinois who had barely spent a few months in the Senate before setting out to become the 44th president. Like JFK he was young, charismatic, and eloquent so long as Teleprompters fed him the words to say.

President Barack Obama did not bring a “brain trust” into office with him like FDR or “the best and the brightest” as Kennedy did. Instead, he installed a large group of “czars”, men and women, dedicated socialists and loony environmentalists who mostly bypassed the Congressional vetting process, but who have wielded great power behind the scenes.

Obama’s popularity, like Carter’s, disappeared in less than two years. The recent midterm elections were historic. The Republicans will control of the House and Democrats will have a narrow control of the Senate when a new Congress returns in January. Until then, the political chess game is astonishing as the nation races toward deadlines that include extending the Bush tax cuts and the continued funding of the government.

A remarkable movement, the Tea Party, emerged; leaderless, but composed of millions of Americans determined to take back the power that had been taken from them by a Congress indifferent to their wishes. The damage of the first two years of Obama’s term will take time to repair, but it will be repaired.

History might have been very different had it not been for November 22, 1963, but we shall never know how different.

What we do know is that liberalism, socialism, does not work. It debases fiscal prudence, spreads poverty, and subverts the Founder’s intention of a small central government while shackling the States with unfunded mandates.

For an older generation of Americans, we have lived through a lot of history and, 47 years ago, a single bullet set it in motion.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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The Party's Over

By Alan Caruba

Gray skies are gonna clear up,
Put on a happy face;
Brush off the clouds and cheer up,
Put on a happy face.
Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy,
It's not your style;
You'll look so good that you'll be glad
Ya' decide to smile!

What, may I ask, is there to smile about in an America whose economy is in decline along with many other aspects of life in our nation?

I have been thinking lately about some of the nasty history I have lived through. The difference was that from the end of World War Two until the dawn of the 21st century, the nation was a superpower backed up by a super economy. That was then, this is now.

The party is over.

Americans need to understand what the problems are and what must be done to turn around an economy that is rapidly losing momentum to nations like China and India. We must have new jobs and lots of them. Instead, we are bleeding jobs and government at the federal and state level must take much of the blame.

We have been through bad times before. Many of my readers are too young to remember President Nixon’s Watergate scandal that began with a break-in at the Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972 and ended with Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. You had to have been there to know what it was like to live through two years of slow revelations regarding the role of the president and many of those around him. It was a national agony.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Watergate transpired against the background of the Vietnam War that had escalated under Lyndon B. Johnson who, in turn, had become president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Anyone who has ever lived through a assassination never wants to live through another. So the war raged on with no end in sight and Americans marched, and marched, and marched against it. I was one of them.

Those were not happy times, but then, in response to the Nixon debacle, we elected the biggest dufus to ever hold the office until the 2008 elections and that was Jimmy Carter. As president, he was utterly clueless. The Iranian Islamic revolution occurred on his watch along with an energy crisis. As just one example, it was Jimmy who was the first to put solar panels on the roof of the White House and guess who is re-installing them again? The latest dufus.

Economists cite 47 recessions since 1790 and all were driven by bad governmental regulatory policies. And, no, we have learned nothing from this because the latest one repeats all the errors of the Great Depression; mindless government spending, even more regulation of Wall Street, and the failure to phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

After World War II ended in 1945, the U.S. had recessions in 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960-61, 1969-70, 1973-75, 1980, et cetera. In short, there hasn’t been a decade since the 40s without a recession, but most lasted on average about eleven months.

Some mysterious group of gnomes recently announced that the present recession “ended” in 2009. I think they were all smoking from the same hookah when they came up with that whopper. A look at unemployment and “under-employment” (same thing) figures give no real-world indication it’s over, nor does a growing population on food stamps.

President Obama, a man who never ran a business in his entire life and whose economic advisors fit the same description, has dealt with the present economic crisis by blaming it on George W. Bush. No longer able to do that, he now simply refers to “the last eight years.”

The Blame George excuse ignored several essential facts. The housing mortgage crisis is entirely the result of the “social justice” agenda of progressives, i.e., Democrats, who created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and defended both (are you listening Barney Frank and Frank Dodd) even as this house of cards was collapsing.

Americans must share the blame for buying homes they could not afford from banks who frequently had no choice but to make the loans. The government’s housing policy dates back to 1934, at which time the nation was already into the Great Depression.

The taxpayers ended up owning nearly fifty percent of all mortgages. Banks and investment houses that bought the “bundled securities” took a bath. Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government should be in the mortgage business? It doesn’t!

Then, too, you may remember that George W. Bush got real busy on 9/11 having to make some very tough decisions about a bunch of stateless enemies calling themselves al Qaeda and the Taliban. Okay, he also helped balloon the deficit by signing some very bad ideas such as the expansion of Medicare with a pharmaceuticals benefit. It’s not like he came up with Obamacare; a wholesale disaster.

Once we all get passed the midterm elections, likely to reflect a sweeping rejection of everything Obama and the Democrats represent, we should expect the Republicans to do what they were supposed to do in 1994. There will be a lot of new faces in Congress who, in theory, are beholden only to the people who put them there. In reality, however, they are beholden to the large campaign donors who put them there. That said, much depends on the quality of the GOP leadership expected to take over Congress.

There’s a lot to do, not the least of which is to clear away mountains of regulations that have driven American industry everywhere other than America. We don’t make things here any more and no economy can last very long without a manufacturing base.

Obamacare must simply be repealed. Whole government agencies need to be scaled back or eliminated. We not only can’t afford them, they are counter-productive in vital areas such as education, energy, and of course the environment.

Recently, in my home State of New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie lowered the boom on a multi-billion dollar railroad tunnel linking the State to New York City. He said that the State simply could not afford it. When was the last time you heard a politician say that?

The Secretary of Transportation paid him a personal visit to get him to change his mind about the tunnel. If he does, I’m thinking a lot of federal funds will start flowing to the Garden State. It’s called politics.

Still, it was refreshing to hear a governor, any governor, say “We can’t afford that.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Obama Scenarios

By Alan Caruba

Are we there yet? Living in Obama’s America is like some horrid, seemingly endless road trip with no bathroom breaks.

I have heard a variety of scenarios regarding the months and days that Barack Hussein Obama remains in office. There are countdown clocks available on the Internet for those who have to know how much more horror we must endure.

I have long since stopped watching or listening to the man for the same reason I don’t pay all that much attention to Mamoud Ahmadinejad. Both lie all the time. Both are ideologues who are immune to reality. Both are destined to come to a bad end. I favor seeing Obama live to a ripe old age like Jimmy Carter, getting up every day knowing how despised he has become.

I leave the job of trying to deduce his day to day machinations to those whose job it is to figure out what he’s up to. To them, I recommend some magical chicken bones and shiny pebbles that can be tossed on a piece of black velvet in order to extract a hint of the future from the patterns they make.

I do not maintain a daily Obama Watch. I ignore him. The last time I did this was somewhere beyond the midpoint of Bill Clinton’s first term. As all the stories of his uniformly loathsome behavior toward women spilled into the gutter of American journalism I was long gone into a protective cone of silence not unlike the one in “Get Smart.” After the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that the Republic was safe.

Oddly, George W. Bush never bored me. Any President who will say “Bring it on” is my kind of guy. So, okay, it took longer than expected to get Iraq on track, but things improved measurably once Donald H. Rumsfeld was sent packing. There is something to be said for leaving the conduct of war to the generals.

I’m not bragging because I had Obama’s number before he took the oath of office. Dr. Jerome R. Corsi’s book, “Obamanation”, was and is a masterful piece of research that spelled out what we could expect from him. Since then, books about Obama have become a cottage industry with the latest by Bob Woodward confirming that he always wanted to get the hell out of Afghanistan even when he was saying he didn’t.

All this has spawned another industry of sorts; predictions about how the remaining time until January 20, 2013 will play out for him. These scenarios mostly reflect the wishful thinking of those putting them forth, but they are interesting if for that alone.

There is the assassination theory. This was advanced early on in the belief that some likely KKK member would kill him for sleeping on the white sheets in the White House.

There hasn’t been a presidential assassination since John F. Kennedy in 1963 so these events are rare. There was Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley; four out of forty-four.

There is the impeachment theory. Here again, history does not favor this option. Impeachment has been rarely tried and never successful. The effort to impeach Clinton only served to make him some kind of counterculture hero. Having learned that lesson, a Congress controlled by the GOP should simply do everything it can to thwart any further Obama legislative initiatives, appointments, et cetera.

There is the birth certificate theory in which the courts by some miracle actually allow challenges to Obama’s eligibility to proceed to a point what he is required to produce his long form birth certificate currently in a vault in Honolulu. Was he born there? At this point, it hardly seems to matter. For all we know, he’s still a bona fide citizen of Indonesia. Or Kenya.

There is the resignation theory. This is the thinnest of hopes because being President of the United States is such a cool job that Obama would never give it up. Just consider all the perks. Just consider all the ways he can screw all of us colonialist, imperialist, capitalist Americans? He has surrounded himself with people who can barely conceal their contempt for the nation.

There is the election theory. This postulates that he is a one-term president and, for my money, this is the only one that holds up. His popularity, even among those who voted for him, continues to tank. He has embarrassed the nation with all that bowing to kings, emperors, and union leaders. Not unless the Republican Party nominates a convicted child molester will their candidate lose against Obama.

Not all the Tele-Prompters and speeches between now and Election Day 2012 will help Obama get re-elected. The only exception, possibly, would be World War Three and even then Americans would vote for anyone else because, if there is one thing we know about Obama, it is that he is a coward.

Like Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama will simply have to be endured while the Republican Party, re-energized by the Tea Party movement, plays defense until a new quarterback can be brought into the game.

© Alan Caruba, 2010



Jimmy the Jerk

Our National "Malaise" has Returned

By Alan Caruba

In mid-July, appearing on MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough morning show, former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski said that “there is a sense of pervasive malaise” in America these days. He went on to say that President Obama, the most famous community organizer in the nation, had not yet generated “some sort of organizing idea” to deal with it.

Zbig should know. He was there when Carter, on July 15, 1979, delivered his fifth major speech on the subject of energy. The speech came to be known as one about a national “malaise” though Carter never used the word. The man who did, Pat Caddell, Carter’s pollster, recalled that, at the time, “we actually got numbers where people no longer believed the future of America was going to be as good as it was (then).”

In 1979, “now” reflected the fifteen previous years in which Americans witnessed assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, and a declining economy. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo had put cars in long lines waiting to fill up on gasoline.

At the heart of it was the growing public perception and dissatisfaction with Carter’s judgment and competence. He would become a one-term president. Carter’s greatest gift to America was the election of Ronald Reagan.

If this sounds a lot like today, it is. The issue of energy has been exacerbated by the Gulf of Mexico BP spill and the slow response of the White House, followed by a series of actions that likely worsened its impact on Gulf coast states.

Obamacare, forced on an unwilling electorate, hasn’t generated any confidence either. As of July 19, Rasmussen Reports noted that 61% of Americans expect the cost of health care to rise and 56% want it repealed.

It is a useful exercise to actually read Carter’s famed speech. It is astonishing how wrong he was thirty-one years ago. It is also an example of how an incompetent president’s decisions resonate for decades afterward.

Author and longtime observer of the U.S. oil industry, Seldon Graham, cites the history of the Carter era, noting that “President Jimmy Carter started the ethanol subsidy on November 9, 1978, gave the U.S. oil demand to OPEC on January 23, 1980, and signed the oil windfall profits tax on April 2, 1980.”

This anti-oil policy is reflected by the Obama administration. The courts have twice rejected his irresponsible shutdown of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, but it continues anyway.

Carter’s speech was filled with dire warnings, but in the end he blamed the American people for the trouble the nation was encountering. “It is a crisis of confidence,” he said. “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” History documents that confidence was restored by Reagan’s policies.

In 1979 Carter said that Americans had found government “isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life. Washington, D.C. has become an island.” Today, Washington, D.C. might as well be on another planet.

Carter promised that demand for energy “will be met by our own production” and then proceeded to drive domestic oil production into the ground with his windfall profits tax. As always Big Oil was an easy way to distract people from the reality that it is Big Oil (and Big Coal) that ensures we have the energy we need for transportation and other needs.

In 1980, Big Oil went looking for oil anywhere else than America, despite vast domestic and potential offshore reserves.

In April 2008, the U.S. Geological Service published a report on the projected “Bakken” oil reserves in parts of North and South Dakota, and eastern Montana. They are estimated to represent 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia; 18-times as much oil as Iraq; 21-times as much oil as Kuwait; 22-times as much oil as Iran; and 500-times as much oil as Yemen.

Carter also got the ball rolling on all the wasted millions devoted to developing “alternative”, “clean” and “green” forms of energy such as ethanol and biofuels, solar and wind energy. In the three decades since his speech, none—not one—of these forms of energy have demonstrated the ability to replace the nation’s energy needs provided by coal, natural gas, or oil.

This is the cause of American’s malaise in 2010. It began with Carter’s idiotic energy policies and it continues with Obama’s.

How much longer must we wait to access our own oil? How many more horrid pieces of legislation will be foisted on us by the current administration? The answer lies, in part, with the November midterm elections and the nation elections in 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Billboard of the Day

Imagine how happy Jimmy Carter is to no longer hold the title of worst president.

Iran Still Holds America Hostage

By Alan Caruba

While Americans celebrated Valentine’s Day with chocolates, flowers, and other expressions of love, others with long memories were thinking about February 14, 1977.

In his book, “A World of Trouble”, Patrick Tyler, noted that “On February 14, a heavily armed band of revolutionary guerrillas staged a full-scale assault on the American embassy compound” in Tehran, Iran.

“The young Iranians, some of them wearing the checkered kaffiyehs of the PLO, set up firing positions on the rooftops of neighboring buildings that overlooked the compound. At 10:30 a.m., they opened up with thirty-caliber machine guns, raking the embassy from two directions.”

That was an act of war. It was not, however, treated as such in that it did not provoke a military response until later and it was too little, too late, and so poorly executed it surely marked America as too weak to be taken seriously.

On that day, however, it only took two hours for the “students” to take 66 American diplomats and staff hostage. They would be held for 444 days and released, according to Tyler, only after a heavy ransom was paid.

“This episode would reverberate through the region for decades,” wrote Tyler, “suggesting to potential foes that America would not vigorously defend its interests in the Middle East.”

There are three young American hikers being held hostage as this is written. They accidentally strayed across the Iranian border last summer and currently face charges of espionage which is punishable by the death penalty in Iran. Hostage taking is the lowest form of criminal behavior and Iran thrives on it, whether it is these three or previously, a number of British sailors who were taken at gunpoint.

President Carter’s hopes for a second term were dashed by his tepid response to the hostage taking. At the time it occurred, he had been focused on getting a Camp David agreement between Anwar Sadat of Eqypt and Menachem Begin of Israel. The two received a Nobel Peace Prize, the Sinai was returned, and Carter had his singular achievement. By then, however, he had lost the confidence of most Americans.

The unanswered question about the embassy in Tehran was why it was not shut down in the wake of attacks a few days earlier on the British embassy in Tehran. In its wake, our embassies in Islamabad, Pakistan, and in Libya were attached and torched. When the Iranian revolution unfolded, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, many westerners and Iranians bailed out of Iran, seeing the writing on the wall.

Carter, however, could not conceive that Shah Reza Pahlavi was already in deep trouble in Iran. He had long been a trusted ally of the United States, but anti-Americanism had been on the rise in Iran for years as the result of our interference in that nation’s internal affairs. When Carter paid a state visit in 1977, he had toasted the shah saying that Iran under his leadership “was an island of stability in one of the most troubled regions of the world.”

The shah, however, would flee Iran and, already ill from cancer, suffer the indifference of the Carter administration, more intent on political correctness than compassion for the former ally who had spent billions on U.S. arms and other contracts.

As the Iranians celebrated the 31st anniversary of their revolution, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged that they were on the verge of becoming a nuclear state. Sanctions will not work against a nation that has already committed a serious act of war against the U.S. and for whom the U.N. is a mere echo chamber.

There is something embarrassing about the hope that little Israel will somehow rescue the whole of the West from the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. It is wishful thinking. It will require a preemptive attack with the full military capabilities of the United States.

It is highly unlikely that Barack Hussein Obama will authorize such an action. The Iranian leadership does not respect and does not fear Barack Obama, nor should they.

The Wonderful, Awful 1960s

By Alan Caruba

In the wake of the enthusiasm swirling around Sarah Palin, Barack Obama is likely to turn out to be for conservatives what the later years of the 1960s and early 1970s were for the beginning of conservative political ascendancy.

The early years of the 1960s are remembered now as the wonderful years when a young, handsome, and charismatic President, John F. Kennedy, took the nation into outer space and, along with his beautiful wife, Jackie, brought grace and style to the White House.

“You can tell if you were a liberal or a conservative if you thought the sixties were a good or bad decade,” said former Senator Rick Santorum in 2007.

I was raised a liberal, but I recall the 1960s as a mostly terrible decade, filled with assassinations, the growing involvement in Vietnam, and the strife that accompanied the Civil Rights movement. I remember it for the “hippies”, the drug culture that emerged, so-called “free love”, and the beginnings of the feminist movement. The 1960s turned me into a conservative.

In a book only a political junky could love, “Framing the Sixties”, historian Bernard von Bothmer writes that conservatives see the 1960s “as the beginning of the decline of beloved American values: self-reliance, self-discipline, personal responsibility, strong local communities, and love of country.” For liberals, it was “the peak of the quest for social justice.”

Guess what? Social justice in the form of government programs to spur home ownership, even if one could not afford it, led to the recent financial crisis.

The final years of the 1960s were quite awful, filled with anti-war marches and rioting. The 1968 Democrat convention is still etched into political memory for the turmoil it engendered, ironically in the streets of Chicago. His decisions regarding the war forced Lyndon Johnson to forego a run for reelection.

In 1971, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, revealed how the government had deceived Americans about Vietnam for decades, confirming voter’s suspicions and fears. In combination with the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal further discredited government, forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon. It swung the nation into the embrace of a toothy unknown Georgia Governor, Jimmy Carter, who replaced Nixon’s successor, Jerry Ford.

Carter’s failed presidency yielded the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan whose political ascendancy, along with the conservative movement, had begun in the 1960s. In 1966, he was elected Governor of California. In 1968 he took his first crack at running for President.

Sound familiar? War-weary from Afghanistan after 9/11 and the decision to invade Iraq, the first decade of the new century led voters to first turn Congress over to the Democrats in 2006 and then, in 2008, to embrace a totally unknown politician from Chicago. Young and a gifted orator, he evoked “change” and married it to “hope.”

One year into Barack Obama’s presidency, even his fellow Democrat politicians are fleeing his far Left program of “transformation”, seeing the embodiment of every socialist aspiration for an all-powerful, huge, centralized government. Every candidate Obama endorsed lost and the Democrat lock on Congress was broken when one of the most liberal states elected a conservative candidate to replace JFK’s younger brother, Teddy.

For the conservative movement and its candidates Barack Obama is the gift that keeps on giving.

As someone for whom the 1960s began with service in the U.S. Army, followed by several years as a journalist, I had a first-hand look at the events of that decade and the one that followed. From LBJ to Nixon to Carter, it is hard to describe how disappointed and angry Americans became. The Vietnam War was bad enough, but LBJ’s Great Society was a classic redistribution of wealth sold as a way to end poverty in America. It didn’t. Only jobs end poverty.

By contrast, Barack Obama’s tripling of the national debt will make debtors of everyone including a generation or more to come if government borrowing and spending is not dramatically reduced. Voters understand this, resent this, and will elect candidates who promise to fix it.

There is a factor that is unique to the present administration. Previous administrations were more or less responsive to public opinion. This one is tone deaf and/or indifferent. As Obama put it recently, “I won’t quit”, and he means it.

He is the liberal’s last chance to impose its extreme socialist agenda on America and, if that means lying to everyone every day, he and his fellow conspirators intend to do it.

The Massachusetts election must have come as a shock. The election of Ronald Reagan surely had the same effect as the 1980s dawned.

A combination of factors presage a significant conservative return to power in the months and years to come.

There is significant distrust of the presidency and the Congress. The effort to expand the federal government is being resisted in the voting booth and in state capitols around the nation.

There is anger at the way huge, 1,000-page bills have been either voted upon unread and in haste or kept from public review and voted through the House and Senate using bribery and pressure tactics.

The mood of the electorate is an amazingly swift reversal from 2008. It bodes ill for Democrats and progressives, and that’s good for America.

I Do Not Forgive You, Jimmy Carter

By Alan Caruba

The news of the day before Christmas is that former President Jimmy Carter has apologized for anything he has said or done to offend America’s Jewish community and presumably around the world.

The news was welcomed by the national director of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation league, Abraham Foxman, who said that it was “incumbent for us to accept” the apology, but Foxman does not speak for me or for the American Jewish community.

I do not accept the apology and neither should anyone who holds the state of Israel as the fulfillment of a 2,000 year old dream of return to the land in which Judaism took root and flourished through exiles and dispersion.

My reasoning is that Carter has spoken only with the prospect that his grandson, Jason, is anticipated to run for public office in Georgia in a congressional district with what is reported as “a vocal Jewish population.” It’s politics. It’s not a confession of the heart. Jason hailed the apology as a “great step towards reconciliation”, but I suggest that it is deeds, not words, that matter.

The former President is credited with trying to resolve the Palestinian conflict with the Israelis and gained a Nobel Peace Prize along with the terrorist, Yassir Arafat, but that prize has long since been tarnished and discredited for having also been awarded to the charlatan Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and most recently to President Obama who has done nothing of significance to earn it.

It was Carter’s 2006 book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” in which he compared Israeli efforts to defend themselves against wars and a campaign of terrorism with South Africa's hateful system. Present attacks have abated only with Israel's action against Hamas in Gaza, a part of Israel from which the Israelis withdrew in yet another effort to achieve a peace that is still rejected.

If the so-called Palestinians and the greater Muslim community throughout the Middle East continue to plan war against Israel, an apology by Carter pales in the face of this reality. If the Jordanians and Egyptians could sign peace agreements with Israel, surely other Middle Eastern nations could do the same.

Carter’s apology is cosmetic. It is a Band-aid that ignores Israel’s claim to statehood and sovereignty. Israel became a nation in 1312 BCE (Before Common Era), a thousand years before the rise of Christianity and 2,000 years before the rise of Islam. Jews have had a continuous presence in Israel for the last 3,300 years.

Jerusalem is mentioned more than 700 times in the Jewish Holy Scriptures, but not once in the Koran. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem. The Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem was deliberately built over a site sacred to Jews, deemed the rock where Abraham was commanded by God to spare the life of his son.

Al-Aqsa has twice been destroyed in earthquakes. Jews are forbidden access and restricted to prayers at the Western Wall.

The calumnies and lies about Israel that the former President has lent his name to and the support he has demonstrated for the enemies of Israel cannot be wiped clean by an apology.

A million Christian and Muslim Arabs call Israel home and enjoy full citizenship. They face an Iranian nuclear annihilation with their Jewish neighbors.

It is time for Israel’s enemies to embrace the message of peace on Earth, but a militant Islam forecloses that elusive goal for all mankind and the land where it was first proposed.

Nobel Prize Joke

By Alan Caruba

There was a time when the Nobel Peace Prize meant something. It went to men and women who earned their stature with lives of courage such as Andrei Sakharov who openly opposed the oppression of the former Soviet Union and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave his life for the cause of civil rights.

Giving the prize to Barack Hussein Obama has rendered it a joke.

In office less than a year, Obama has, in the words of a recent Saturday Night Live satirical skit, done “nothing” to deserve what once was one of the highest international accolades anyone could receive.

In addition to men and women of genuine repute, in more recent times the pathetic Norwegian committee responsible for selecting the winners of the Peace Prize has given it to the father of modern terrorism, Yassir Arafat whose Palestinian Liberation Organization continues to make war on Israel when it isn’t also defending itself against Hamas, another Palestinian group equally devoted to the annihilation of a sovereign nation and its people.

Other winners include Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations who presided over one of the worst scandals of that scandal-ridden institution, the Oil-For-Food scheme that enriched Saddam Hussein and who had previously turned a blind eye to the Rwandan intra-tribal massacres. Earlier the award had gone to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, now more famed for the rape of populations they are sent to protect and idleness while others are slaughtered.

Among the Americans who earned the prize in recent times were Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. Carter, a former U.S. President, has disgraced himself by his appalling anti-Semitism and friendship with the most scurrilous figures on the world scene.

Al Gore, a former Vice President, will be written into the history books as having been the leading voice for the greatest hoax, global warming, of the modern era.

Begun in 1901, the Nobel Peace Prize once stood for true achievement. It has long since become a pathetic instrument by a handful of men on the committee tasked with awarding it. The award to President Obama is a blatant effort to influence his decision on the conflict in Afghanistan.

The official reason for the award to Obama was “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Perhaps the committee had in mind his extraordinary world tour at the beginning of his presidency to apologize for what he perceived to be America’s failures.

In reality, the only thing his brief tenure in office has earned him is the contempt of the world’s leaders for his endless posturing, his preference for words over action, and his constant search for the world’s center stage spotlight.

Little wonder that Reuters reported that the announcement was greeted with “gasps of astonishment from journalists” in Oslo.

They aren’t the only ones who are astonished.