On Fairness and Unfairness

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of it is fair. It just is.

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Blamer-in-Chief

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The key word here is “inherited.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Eco-Lies

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

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Karl Marx Preached "Fairness" Too

By Alan Caruba

My father was a Certified Public Accountant and dinner time throughout my youth was filled with horror stories about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as he struggled to keep up with a tax code that just kept growing.

According to Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate for the IRS who heads a staff of 2,000, the American tax system is “a huge convoluted mess.” Despite efforts to determine its length, it is variously estimated to be between 65,000 and 70,000 pages. “We looked at how many changes in the tax law (that) had occurred in the last year alone,” said Olsen, “it was something like 579 changes.” No one can keep up with that volume of changes, not even Ms. Olsen’s office.

As this is being written, President Obama is dominating the news cycle with his message of tax “fairness”, attacking men like Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate, for being wealthy and citing men like Warren Buffett and other millionaires and multi-millionaires who say they should pay more. It is a longtime populist, progressive message and it is a false message.

Chris Edwards who studies tax policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says, “What happens when you raise taxes for higher-income people; they reduce their productive activities—like working and investing and starting businesses—and they increase their unproductive activities—like tax avoidance and tax evasion. So governments really shoot themselves in the foot if they raise rates too much.”

If it were not for “taxation without representation” Americans might still be “subjects” of the British Empire because, as any school child can tell you, the Revolution was fought over this issue and was kicked off in earnest by the Boston Tea Party when a tax on tea enraged the citizens of that time. There were, in fact, some ten other tea parties in the colonies.

The United States has the dubious honor of having the highest tax rate on corporations in the world. And some people still cannot understand why U.S. corporations are shipping jobs overseas and foreign corporations are reluctant to set up U.S. headquarters here.

In a recent opinion in The Wall Street Journal, Amity Shales, a former WSJ reporter and now the director of a George W. Bush Institute project on national economic growth, wrote that “The trouble is that lawmakers (especially at the federal level) insist on discussing fax reform in terms of fairness. Tax competition earns a mention from time to time, but only a mention.” She pointed out, as have others, that “states with no income tax grow faster than those with high income taxes.”

By framing the tax debate in terms of fairness and attacking Mitt Romney’s wealth, President Obama is pandering to his greatest constituency—the stupid among us. He was elected on the basis of a lot of gauzy, vague promises of hope and change, and with the adoring support of the mainstream media.

Obama’s problem is not about fairness or taxes. His problem is 13.9 million unemployed Americans, not counting those who are not looking for work or those working part-time jobs just to make ends meet. As a recent commentary on EconomicCollapse.com pointed out, “The number of unemployed Americans is larger than the entire population of Greece.”

The onerous, insane growth of the regulation industry at all levels of government is crushing the economy. “The U.S. national debt has increased by more than four trillion dollars since Barack Obama took office” and, with the aid of a Democrat-controlled Congress for the first two years of his term, he increased the national debt more than all the presidents combined from Washington to Clinton.

Believing that taxing rich people will close the gap is unbelievably stupid. As a Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out on April 10th, “The Obama Treasury’s own numbers confirm that the tax (on the wealthy) would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45-43 trillion the federal government will spend.”

There is an alternative. It’s called the “Fair Tax” and you can learn more about it by visiting the website of the National Taxpayers Union.

By bleeding jobs through an insane tax system, a federal tax code filled with loopholes that even the IRS cannot keep up with, the highest corporate tax in the world, an idiotic immigration policy toward illegal aliens, and a burden on the fortunate few that still have jobs the United States is digging itself into financial collapse.

The federal government is broke. The states are broke. And with the advent of $4 and $5 gas pump prices—thanks to Obama’s anti-energy policies—the rest of us are getting more broke.

President Obama’s blather about “fairness” is straight out of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and the Communist Manifesto with their emphasis the redistribution of wealth and the end of private property.

© Alan Caruba, 2012.

Portrait of a Failed "Messiah"

By Alan Caruba

“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

If you think this is a psychological profile of Barack Obama, you would be wrong. It is a quote from a profile of Adolph Hitler, prepared for the Office of Strategic Services—the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency—by Walter C. Langer and three others during World War II.

The fact that it rather closely resembles aspects of Obama’s personality we have come to know would be cause for alarm if we were living in the 1930s at the time of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, but this is a very different time and the U.S. Constitution is still a powerful instrument.

Unlike the 1930s, the Internet has provided everyone with the ability to access information that, as often as not, conflicts with that the mainstream media would have us believe.

Still there are similarities. As to Hitler’s success, Langer wrote that the “Realization of a fundamental loneliness and feeling of isolation in people living under modern conditions and a craving to ‘belong’ to an active group which carries a certain status, provides cohesiveness, and gives the individual a feeling of personal worth and belongingness” is as true today as it was in former times.

This may explain the sudden appearance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but OWS quickly wore out its welcome due to its complete lack of organization or mission.

Perhaps its only mission was to implant the thought that the “1%”—the rich—were unfairly wealthy at a time of widespread economic difficulties experienced by the unemployed, those who had lost their homes, and the middle class.

The problem OWS encountered is the general American view that this is a land of opportunity in which anyone can become rich along with the regard people have for those they deem to have become successful because they were innovators and risk-takers or, to put it another way, because they worked for it!

A large body of the American public today has rejected Barack Obama as they have come to know him. While frequently spoken of as having a charming personality and other positive traits, these attributes have been undermined by Obama.

His constant use, indeed, dependence on Tele-Prompters quickly became a running joke. On an organization level, his import of the so-called “czars” to backstop and even replace the traditional role and powers of Cabinet Secretaries created an immediate disquiet as the public learned more about them. They and Cabinet picks tended to share a well-recorded contempt for human beings.

In retrospect, the 2008 election was a masterpiece of the theatrical manipulation of the public’s perception of Obama. He was frequently presented in the context of huge crowds and in ways that portrayed him as “the Messiah” for those seeking an all-wise, all-knowing masterful personality.

Obama’s megalomania was perhaps best revealed when, on June 3, 2008, he said, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Was he taking responsibility or promising to alter the forces of Nature?

It is thus no accident that William Shirer, an American reporter who covered Hitler’s rise, described his public appearances, wrote "A searchlight plays upon his lone figure as he slowly walks through the hall, never looking to right or left, his right hard raised in salute, his left hand as the buckle of his belt. He never smiles—it is a religious rite, this procession of the modern Messiah incarnate. Behind him are his adjutants and secret service men. But his figure alone is flooded with light.”

“We are the generation we have been waiting for,” said Obama. This had a singular appeal to the young and to his generation that found themselves mired in debt. Soon Obama would increase that debt to such an extent that the children and grandchildren of his generation would be paying it off through their lifetimes. They, however, did not know that in 2008.

There were many unknowns during the years of Hitler’s rise to power, but there were many clues, indicators, and demonstrations of where he was taking Germany. Democratically elected, the Nazi Party was quick to impose control over all aspects of life in Germany and especially its media, its newspapers, films and other aspects of its culture. Parenthetically, many Americans are well aware that the mainstream media played a significant role in Obama’s election and routinely engages in furthering liberal fantasies such as global warming and renewable energy which turned out to be an orgy of crony capitalism.

Obama’s over-reach, a reflection of his distaste for the U.S. Constitution and his belief in his own superiority, has recently been seen in his attack on the Supreme Court. It is conjectured that he has been informed through back channels that Obamacare will be declared unconstitutional. If so, the centerpiece of his plan to engineer a government takeover the nation’s healthcare system will be in ruins.

His policy failures are well known to the public and, in particular, to the voters.

What we have come to learn is that he is a liar. He lies even when he does not have to and he lies all the time.

Unlike Hitler in the 1930s when the Nazi party was able to overturn all the normal conventions of the Weimar Republic, Barack Obama has run into the wall of the U.S. Constitution.

Obamacare was already opposed by most Americans and voters were offended when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “We have to pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it.” That’s not how a democracy works.

In 2010 the voters returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republicans. In 2012, Obama will be turned out of office and there is even the likelihood that a Republican President will have both houses of Congress controlled by his party.

Then the business of restoring the economy, rebuilding the military, and reducing the debt left in Obama’s wake will begin.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

President Liar, Year One 2008-2009

By Alan Caruba

After years of hearing liberals tell us that any criticism of President Obama is because he is Black, it seems to me they ought to admit that he got elected because he is Black. In the interest of accuracy, he is half-Black and half-White. I say this because the media has now begun calling the shooter of Trayvon Martin a “White-Hispanic.”

Beyond that, it was apparent to anyone watching and listening to Barack Obama that a moron was running for office; one willing to say anything for five minute’s advantage. He literally lied his way into the Oval Office.

One need only revisit Obama’s campaign and his first year in office to grasp how audacious his capacity for lying was and is.

In June 2008 he was boasting that he was “the only candidate who isn’t taking a dime from Washington lobbyists” at the same time his fundraising team included 38 members of law firms that had earned $138 million to lobby the federal government. He had 79 “bundlers”, five of them billionaires, who tapped their personal networks to raise at least $200,000 each.

On October 24, 2008, Charles Krauthammer wrote “First, I will have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory.” Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, on October 31, 2008, wrote “If Barack Obama is not a Socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.” So, yes, we were warned and, yes, a majority of voters refused to acknowledge the obvious.

An editorial in the January 8, 2009 Daily Mail, a British daily, characterized Obama’s ascent to power as a “Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising over reality” adding that it was a victory for Hollywood, for “a man who is no friend of freedom”, “a victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than family” and presciently, “a victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation.”

Following his election Obama was being either ignorant or deliberately lying when he told a November 2008 Governor’s Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles that “Few challenges facing America—and the world—are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Not one single word of this was true and, a year later in 2009, a cache of emails between so-called climate scientists revealed that global warming was a hoax based on phony computer models Moreover, a perfectly natural warming cycle had already ended in 1998!

Is there anyone who does not know that Obama’s stimulus plan turned out to be a massive and costly failure? The answer is yes and some of them will vote for Obama in November. Lenin called them "useful idiots."

By February 2009, Bradley R. Schiller, a professor of economics, writing in The Wall Street Journal wrote “President Barack Obama has turned fear-mongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package. This fear-mongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics.”

As voters ready themselves to vote in November, it would be wise to revisit the way Obama hid his true past from them in 2008 and since. His college records were sealed, his Indonesian adoption records were sealed, his passport file was sealed and, of course, his official birth records were sealed. He has since provided a birth certificate that an investigation by Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio recently asserted was a complete forgery. His first executive order in office was to put these and other documents off limits to public examination.

As 2009 came to a close, virtually all of Obama’s initiatives were in shambles, not the least of which was his foreign policy and, in particular, his Middle East policy. He alienated Israel and the Arab League refused to provide any kind of peace gesture. Despite efforts to soften the public perception of Palestinians, they are still shelling Israel with rockets from Gaza.

By the time 2009 was history, Obama had given the Queen of England an iPod preloaded with 40 show tunes, bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, praised Marxists Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez, announced he would meet the Iranians with no pre-conditions, announced the termination of the U.S. space program the day after the North Koreans tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, wanted to try CIA agents on charges of torturing terrorists, wanted a civil trial for the mastermind of 9/11, and wanted to shut down Guantanamo. He put a card-carrying Communist and admitted tax cheats part of his administration, and that’s just the short list!

In lieu of the likelihood that Obamacare, to which he devoted his first year in office, will be struck down by the Supreme Court, his open microphone gaff in which he urged the Russians to wait until he is reelected so he can give them more U.S. missile technology secrets and reduce our nuclear arsenal, and countless other deceptions, Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan, described  his tete-a-tete with Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev as “creepy.”

“What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith,” wrote Noonan.

As millions of Americans still struggle with unemployment, the rolls of Food Stamp recipients grow, the mortgage crisis continues, gas prices increase, and much of the world holds Obama in contempt, the lies just keep coming, the class and race warfare is being ramped up, and media chatteratti continue to talk up his chances of being reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Spin is In! Putting a Happy Face on Obamacare's Defeat

Sensing that the Supreme Court will declare Obamacare unconstitutional, a leading voice for the Democratic Party is now trying to put a happy face on the prospect. This is the center piece of Obama's first and hopefully last term. Polls indicate that the vast majority hate Obamacare, but its defeat may be a good thing says James Carville.

Just as its passage was achieved through bribery and political thuggery, now we're told that its defeat is somehow a victory for the Obama and the Democratic Party.

Below is a news story on a Tuesday evening interview:

Carville: A Supreme Court loss will help Democrats

Posted by

CNN Political Unit

(CNN) - While the Obama administration fights to protect the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Democratic strategist and CNN contributor James Carville said a Supreme Court overruling may not be such a bad thing for the president, politically.

"I think this will be the best thing that has ever happened to the Democratic Party," Carville said Tuesday on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer."

He added: "You know, what the Democrats are going to say, and it is completely justified, 'We tried, we did something, go see a 5-4 Supreme Court majority'."

Carville, who gained fame working on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, predicted health care costs will only increase in the future, in which case Republicans will be to blame for leading the drive to expel a federal program designed to help Americans cover those costs.

"Then the Republican Party will own the healthcare system for the foreseeable future. And I really believe that. That is not spin," Carville said.

Republican and RedState.com editor Erik Erikson, meanwhile argued that an overruling would represent more mainstream sentiments than not.

"Both sides, not just the Democrat side, even if the laws were upheld or struck down, there is a 5-4 conservative majority, and historically you see Republicans picking justices who have a greater propensity to gravitate to the left than you see Democrat judges propensity to gravitate to the right," Erikson, also a CNN contributor, said. "This will be an undercurrent issue for both sides, though."

Violent Death in America is an Equal Opportunity Crime

By Alan Caruba

I have had an interest in demography, the study of populations and trends within populations, for a long time. Racial animosities in America have been a factor from the moment white colonists stepped off the boat and were greeted by Native Americans and, not that long after, when the first blacks arrived from Africa where slavery had flourished for centuries.

I lived in the South when Jim Crow laws were on the books and public facilities were segregated. I was a young reporter during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and even met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on one occasion. I have seen the best and worst of what race represents in America.

I would count the initial reporting on the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, as among the worst media coverage in a while because, as the facts begin to emerge after a month, it turns out that there was an eye witness to the incident in which George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, suffered a broken nose and injuries to the back of his head consistent with an attack.

The Black Panther Party issued a reward for Zimmerman’s “capture.” In the meantime, Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson, have been out doing what they always do, stirring up black anger and blaming all whites for what occurred.

Let’s look at the demographic facts. In 2007 the Associated Press reported that “Nearly half of the nation’s murder victims were black and the number of black men who were slain is on the rise.” The other half were murdered white victims.

Murder in America is an equal opportunity crime.

The article went on to note that black people represented an estimated 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2005, the latest data then available, but were the victims of 49 percent of all murders and 15 percent of rapes, assaults and other nonfatal violent crimes nationwide.”

The U.S. Justice Department study found that “Most of the black murder victims—93 percent—were killed by other black people.”

The study also found that 85 percent of white victims were slain by other white people. Of the black victims, 51 percent were in their late teens and twenties.

More recent statistics from 2009, posted on the website of the U.S. Department of Justice show pretty much the same trend. That year, 2,604 blacks were killed by blacks, along with 454 whites, but whites managed to kill each other to the tune of 2,963 victims, while killing 209 black victims.

Nationally by 2010, homicide was the leading cause of death for black young men ages 10-24 and the second leading cause of death for black women ages 15-24.

Overall, between 1974 and 2004, 52 percent of murderers were black, 48 percent were white, while 51 percent of the victims were white and 47 percent were black. If one can spin these statistics to suggest that the killing of Trayvon Martin was racial, be my guest.

Appearing on the Sean Hannity program Monday evening, Zimmerman’s friend, Joe Oliver, calmly defended him saying “he is not a racist.” Oliver is black.

Why Barack Obama felt it necessary to insert himself into the situation before the facts are established was a reminder of an earlier situation in 2009 when he took issue with an incident between Cambridge, Massachusetts police and a black professor who was hauled off to jail for failing to cooperate with them. Always assuming the police are to blame or inferring that Trayvon Martin was killed because he could have looked like Obama’s son, if he had one, is a serious breach of judgment. To say it out loud is even worse.

Finally, lost in all the hasty assumptions and accusations is the fact that Zimmerman was, as previously noted, a neighborhood watch volunteer and this suggests the Sanford, Florida neighborhood had crime problems. Trayvon, we’re learning, had some earlier experiences with the local police, so he was on that evening a subject of concern to Zimmerman who reported his presence to the police and was returning to his car when the shooting occurred.

No one takes any pleasure in the death of Trayvon Martin or any other young black man. It is a tragedy, but it is also one that is repeated far too many times in too many American cities for reasons that cannot be passed off as racism. His death reflects the pathologies that plague too many of America’s black population.

We should be celebrating the black men and women that escape their cultural bondage, embrace middle class values, and ennoble their lives through their personal achievements.

Exploiting his death is a disservice to both America’s black and white population.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Oily Pipeline Lies

By Alan Caruba

The President’s trip last week to Cushing, Oklahoma, was nothing more than the opportunity to stand in front of a stack of oil pipeline sections and lie some more about the Keystone pipeline. His contempt for the intelligences of Americans was on full display.

A pipeline section that did not require his approval or involvement was touted as “a priority.” His delay of the Keystone pipeline from Canada was passed off as based on his concern for “the health and safety of the American people.”

The safety of oil pipelines is well established. There is an extensive network; 55,000 miles of crude oil trunk lines in the U.S. and another estimated 40,000 miles of small gathering lines located mostly in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Wyoming that gather oil from wells both online and offshore and connect to the larger trunk lines.

Obama thinks most Americans are so dumb that a photo and a short televised news report in front of pipeline sections will convince them he and his administration have been leading the effort to ensure domestic oil is available.

He is wrong. He is the stupid one.

By the end of the week, Rasmussen Reports released the results of a poll in which “Voters continue to believe the United States is not doing enough to develop its gas and oil resources, and strongly support offshore drilling. Most also still think going ahead with offshore drilling is likely to bring down the price of gasoline at the pump.” Of those polled, 62% favored offshore drilling.

The Governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, when asked about Obama’s speech, said, “President Obama’s rhetoric is matched with a policy record that is aggressively anti-energy and continues to stifle economic growth in Oklahoma and throughout the nation.” Gov. Fallin said Obama should “reexamine his polices, not deliver more speeches taking credit for the accomplishments of others.”

That, however, is standard operating procedure for Obama. Either he blames anything and everything that goes wrong on someone or something else, or he takes credit where none is due. What is one to expect from a President he was given a Nobel Peace Prize within months of taking office in order to pump up a virtually invisible resume? No doubt the Nobel committee will be giving out free pizzas to all who attend future ceremonies.

In January, when Obama announced the delay of permits to the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada—a major trading partner and ally—Tom Pyle, the president of the Institute on Energy Research, called the decision “unconscionable.”

“With more than 1.7 trillion barrels of recoverable oil under our soil,” said Pyle, “we have enough oil to fuel our present needs for the next 250 years.” The addition of the Canadian oil will further ensure future energy requirements will be met.

It isn’t just the President who lies. Members of his administration do so all the time. During a White House press conference in March Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that oil and gas production had increased on federal lands.

It has declined and increases in oil production have come primarily from privately owned land. On federally controlled lands, oil production since 2010 has dropped by eleven percent and gas by six percent. Revenue from lease sales for exploration and extraction is 250 times less than during the last year of the Bush administration.

This is an administration that re-authorized a moratorium on offshore drilling and imposed an embargo on oilshale development while at the same time wasting billions on so-called green energy “investments.” The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, gave himself an “A” for the job he’s done thus far even as the cost of gasoline at the pump climbs toward $4 and higher.

Secretary Chu’s own department’s Energy Information Administration recently reported that the oil industry paid some $35.7 billion in corporate income taxes in 2009, the latest year for which data are available. According to The Wall Street Journal that is about 10% of non-defense discretionary spending. “All told, the government rakes in $86 million from oil and gas every day—far more than any other business.”

Voters would, indeed, have to be as stupid as Obama thinks they are if they reelect him in November.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Attacking Paul Ryan, But Not the National Debt

By Alan Caruba

The White House and Democrats have been attacking Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, for having the audacity to put forth budget plans, something the Democrats in the Senate have failed to pass for well over a thousand days at this point.

The first words out of Rep. Steve Israel’s mouth, a Democrat from New York, were the pathetic blather about “billionaires.” Most Americans aren’t billionaires or even millionaires and are more concerned about the rising costs of gasoline, food, and everything else than whether the rich pay more taxes. In point of fact, the rich pay the vast bulk of the income taxes and some forty percent of workers pay none at all. If you earn more than $250,000 a year, Democrats think you’re rich.



Harry Reid

 Never mind that most of us are trying to live within our own budget, the Democrats have resisted passing any kind of a budget to address a looming fiscal crisis of their making. That was why voters in 2010 returned control of the House, where all appropriations are authorized, to Republicans. If they had done the same for the Senate, we might actually have had some budgets, but Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has ensured that every effort to address the fiscal mess fails.

The White House and the Senate, despite the Simpson-Bowles Commission, despite the so-called “super committee”, and despite the plans put forth by Ryan, have utterly failed to do anything but spend, spend, and spend. To do so, they must borrow, borrow, and borrow.

In February, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that annual spending over the Obama era had climbed to a projected $3.6 trillion this fiscal year from $2.98 trillion in fiscal 2008; more than 20%. It added up to an increase of about $5 trillion in just four years. This year will mark the highest deficit—the difference between government revenues and government spending—since 1946!

Robotically and moronically, the Democrats keep calling for higher taxes and even the CBO has concluded that the 2012 tax hike (ending the Bush tax cuts) on capital gains, dividends, estates and small businesses would impede economic growth, reducing it 1% the next year and raising the specter of unemployment rising from 8.5% to 9.1%--increasing the jobless to 750,000.

As The Wall Street Journal put it, “the CBO’s facts plainly show that Mr. Obama has the worst fiscal record of any President in modern times. No one else is even close.”

In addition to the tired rhetoric about billionaires and millionaires, the Democrats are also lying about Ryan’s plan as it relates to Medicare, claiming it wants to deprive older Americans of its benefits, but as Ryan points out, “Our budget’s Medicare reforms make no changes for those in or near retirement.” Without reform, Medicare will go broke as will Social Security.

Ryan’s plan “spurs economic growth with bold tax reform—eliminating complexity for individuals and families and boosting competitiveness for American job creators. Led by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, our budget consolidates the current six income tax brackets into just two brackets of 10% and 25%”, the latter for corporations in order to permit them to be more competitive with nations that tax their corporations at a far lower rate than ours”, currently near the highest in the world.

“We reject calls to raise taxes,” says Ryan, preferring to close tax loopholes.

In brief, the Ryan budget would produce savings in federal spending of $5.3 trillion over ten years and reduce the deficit by $3.3 trillion. It proposes a 10% reduction of the federal work force over three years through attrition and it offers reforms to Medicaid, among others to pull the nation back from the brink of catastrophic collapse and default.

You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to know what is wrong with the way Obama and his Democrat trolls are running the government, despite Republican efforts to apply the brakes. They have increased spending to $3.8 trillion despite the fact that the government only takes in about $2.1 in revenue.

In just one term, Obama is on pace to borrow $6.2 trillion. The debt rises by $4.2 billion every day, $175 million per hour, nearly $3 million per minute.

Without a Republican in the White House and Republican control of both the House and Senate, the United States of America—you and I—are headed off a cliff. All the lies Obama tells between now and November 6, 2012 will not change that.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Why Obama Will Lose in November

By Alan Caruba

I received a campaign letter from Michelle Obama the other day. This is especially surprising because I am a registered Republican; hardly a likely prospect to contribute to her husband’s reelection efforts.

“Every day I learn about the challenges and the struggles—the doctor bills they can’t pay or the mortgage they can no longer afford,” said the text. The “fairness” theme, a socialist meme, was expressed. “American prospers when we are all in this together, when hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded, when everyone—from Main Street to Wall Street—does their fair share and plays by the same rules.”

The fact is, however, America has not been prospering for the last four years during which Barack Obama has been President. And everyone knows it. The U.S. sovereign debt rating was downgraded for the first time while he occupied the Oval Office. Federal spending (25% of GDP) is the highest since World War Two. Federal debt (67% of GDP) is the highest since just after the end of World War Two, and the nation has experienced, not only the longest recession, but the highest unemployment since the 1930s.

In the first nineteen months of his time in office, Obama added more federal debt than was amassed by all U.S. Presidents from George Washington to Ronald Reagan.

I have two theories about the November 6 election. (1) That it will be an overwhelming defeat for Obama or (2) that it will be so close we could see a situation comparable to the Bush-Kerry election in 2004. Had Kerry won, the vice president would have been John Edwards who was carrying on an affair during that campaign and who currently faces jail for misuse of campaign funds.

Obama’s Achilles’ heel is, of course, Obamacare. As Robert Bluey of The Heritage Foundation notes, recent polls indicate that 53% of Americans favor repeal and more than half (57%) say that the Supreme Court should strike it down as unconstitutional. Fully 60% of physicians believe the law will have a negative impact on overall patient care.

The Congressional Budget Office revisited Obamacare this past week and concluded that 20 million Americans could lose their employer-sponsored health benefits and 49 million more Americans could become dependent on government-sponsored health care. Projecting through 2022, Obamacare could cost as much as $2.134 billion and the employer-mandate penalties could hit $221 billion.

There’s another reason why Michelle Obama was writing to me last week. As Karl Rove noted in a Wall Street Journal March 14 commentary, “Many of Mr. Obama’s 2008 donors are reluctant to give again” to his campaign. “As the Obama campaign itself reported, fewer than 7% of 2008 donors renewed their support in the first quarter of his re-election campaign, well below the typical renewal rate.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee are burning through current donations so fast that the White House has told this year’s congressional candidates that they will not receive any funding support for their campaigns because Obama needs all the money.

While Obama’s 2012 campaign is already showing signs of stress, other issues will impose great pressure. Unemployment affects most American families either directly or because some member of the family or a friend is unemployed. Even the unemployed vote!

The price of gasoline continues to rise and there is nothing the White House can do to reduce it. Releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that exists for use only in an emergency will not do it and Americans are well aware that this administration has opposed or thwarted every effort to drill for more oil on federal lands. The failures of “green energy” companies that have cost Americans billions in loan guarantees are well known. A President who hypes “algae” as an energy solution will be seen as a fool and/or a complete charlatan.

Recent polls indicate how close the 2012 election may be. Obama has lost ground among female voters. In a head-to-head match-up with Mitt Romney, women voters back Obama 49%, but that is seven points lower than 2008. A Rasmussen poll found that 59% of likely voters asked whether Obama is more liberal or more conservative than they are answered that he was more liberal. Of these likely voters, 65% who are also union members thought Obama was more liberal than themselves.

Polling firms have been asking Americans to self identify themselves as conservative or liberal for decades. In February 2012, Gallup polling revealed “that in every single state with the exception of Massachusetts” conservatives outnumbered liberals. The Battleground Poll conducted by George Washington University in collaboration with Democrat and Republican polling organizations found that 58% of Americans described themselves as “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative”, while only 37% described themselves as “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.”

A conservative campaign message will win in 2012 and this explains why the Republican primaries are all about candidates striving to describe themselves as a “true conservative.”

Even the mainstream media show indications of less Obama support. When even The Washington Post rejects Obama’s lies about U.S. oil reserves, as it did on March 15th, it suggests there may be a growing, wider level of disenchantment with the man they embraced in 2008.

Obama will lose in November. It may be a very close election or it may be an overwhelming rejection, but the polling numbers and the state of the economy will be the deciding factors.

Memo to Michelle Obama: The “fairness” message is not working. The appalling failures—“stimulus” anyone?—of Obama’s first term will ensure that there will be no second term.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Primary Marathon

By Alan Caruba

I have a suspicion that most people have lost interest in the Republican primaries beyond getting a quick update of who won, who came in second, third, and the usual question of why Ron Paul is running at all.

The primaries are a marathon that requires the men who want to be president to endure physical and emotional challenges that would likely kill anyone who lacked the will power and stamina to travel from state to state, give the essentially same speech over and over again, and be interviewed from early morning to late evening, responding to the same questions ad infinitum.

Running a primary campaign is a major business enterprise and, at this point, the only man with experience in the world of business and finance appears to be winning the delegate count needed to challenge the President.

If you’re sick of hearing about the outcome of primary elections, here’s what lies ahead:

March 17 – Missouri
March 18 – Puerto Rico
March 20 – Illinois
March 24 – Louisiana

April 3 – Washington, D.C., Maryland, Wisconsin
April 24 – Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island

May 8 – Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia
May 15 – Nebraska, Oregon
May 22 – Arkansas, Kentucky
May 29 – Texas

June 5 – California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota
June 26 – Utah

And then! There’s the Republican National Convention August 27-30 in Tampa, Florida.

All this provides employment to everyone involved in the campaigns, everyone in the media who provides news coverage, and scores of vendors who will produce all the paraphernalia we associate with elections.

At the center of the vortex will be the candidates and surrounding them will be the endless questions of who’s ahead and who may drop out, et cetera, et cetera.

I do not know why we select our candidates in this fashion. I assume the process has evolved over the many years of the republic. No one seems to have come up with a better way of doing it, but in the end we are selecting a man to lead the nation (and the world) who will wield more power—for good or ill—than can be imagined.

It is a cliché to say that this will be the most important election of our lifetimes, but it is true.

If Barack Obama remains in office the financial destruction of the nation will be completed, the reduction of our military power will continue, the government takeover of critical elements of our economy will continue, and the America that lives in our hearts and imagination will cease to be.

There is no mystery to ending the recession we entered after the 2008 financial crisis; the longest since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Any economist will tell you how to do it. Anyone who runs a business, large or small, will tell you.

There is no mystery to reducing the flow of regulations that throttle innovation and expansion. Entire government departments and agencies need to be eliminated and Congress must be “encouraged” to stop passing massive bills it has not read! Show them the door!

There is no mystery to getting Barack Obama reelected. Republicans and independent voters just need to stay home.

The primary elections are a test of the resolve of American voters to get the real change they need and want.

It is a political IQ test.

They are the marathon we all must run if we are to reclaim and renew the America we love.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Oil, Gas and Lies

By Alan Caruba

Why some people are having difficulty identifying the cause of the present high cost of gasoline at the pump as the direct result of the last three years of Barack Obama’s energy policies is one of those great mysteries.

By “energy policies” I mean his administration’s opposition to access to the billions of barrels of oil on federal lands.

I mean his Energy Secretary’s earlier opinion that high gas prices are good for the economy, abandoned as they climb to and passed $4.

I mean Obama’s lies about the recent increase in oil production when he knows it is occurring on private and state owned land, not federal land.

I mean his opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.

I mean the waste of billions of taxpayer’s dollars on “renewable energy” firms, many of which have already failed, along with the sales of the Chevy Volt, whose production has been discontinued.

I mean two amendments to the Senate transportation bill that would have created new taxpayer-funded subsidies for natural gas vehicles, extended the production tax credit to underwrite wind energy, and revived the Treasury grant program that gives taxpayer money for the installation of solar panels and other renewable technologies.

I mean the impact his policies are having on everyone’s wallet and its drag on the economy as his policies drive up the cost of gasoline and everything dependent on transporting goods anywhere…and that is everything!

Just how dumb do you have to be not to grasp that when Obama took office on January 20, 2009, oil was selling at $38.74 a barrel and the average retail price of gasoline was around $1.90 a gallon. Today, oil is trading at more than $108 a barrel and gasoline is closing in on $4.00 a gallon. As they say, do the math.

In early March, speaking in Nashua, New Hampshire, Barack Obama said, “Let’s put every single member of Congress on record. You can stand with oil companies or you can stand up for the American people.” This consummate liar is using the same pathetic message and damage done by Jimmy Carter---who got voted out of office after a single term as president.

In his 2005 book, “Why Your Gasoline Prices are High”, Seldon B. Graham, Jr, a graduate of West Point, used his fifty years of experience in the oil industry described what happened when, in 1981, Congress passed a windfall profits tax. “It was a death notice for USA oil. Many U.S. oil and gas companies went bankrupt…and those which survived were forced to go overseas to explore and drill in foreign countries.”

At the very time when the Middle East is in turmoil, the Democrats want to repeat the same blunder of 1981.

In a nation that sits atop billions of barrels of untapped oil in federal lands such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, domestic oil reserves in the lower 48 states, the Gulf of Mexico, and the vast untapped reserves off the nation’s continental coasts, the Obama administration has restricted oil companies from exploring and drilling in areas where new reserves of oil and gas are known to exist, shortened lease terms, and has slowed down permit approvals.

That is the equivalent of declaring an energy war on the nation. Moreover, in a virtual secret, the Obama State Department is involved in a deal to turn over seven Alaskan islands to Russia. One of them is the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined and who knows how much oil lies beneath them?

Oil prices are set by the market principles of supply and demand. By aggressively thwarting access to America’s abundant oil reserves, the Obama administration is deliberately keeping prices high and forcing them higher.

As Jack Gerard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a press conference on March 8, “When crude prices are high, the price at the pump is also high. With a 42-gallon barrel of crude oil topping $106, refiners pay more than $2.50 for each gallon of crude they must purchase. Add in the almost 50 cents per gallon on average in gasoline taxes and you have over $3.00 of what consumers are now paying at the pump.”

Simply by announcing his intent to open new areas for exploration and production, President Obama could signal the market and put downward pressure on today’s and tomorrow’s gasoline prices. This is exactly what happened when President Bush lifted the moratorium on the East and West Outer Continental Shelf back in July 2008. It resulted in a 12% decline in the price per barrel.

Why are we paying more? Why are U.S. dollars going to oil-producing nations that do not like America? Why are we competing for oil with China, India and other emerging economies when we have enough oil, gas, and coal to be energy independent for the next century or longer?

The reason is the policies of the present and past administrations going back to the days of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. The answer given by the White House is greedy oil companies and Wall Street “speculators.” It is a lie.

The worst of it, as a recent Wall Street Journal article explained, “Oil can’t go much higher without derailing the economy…at some point, oil prices overwhelm everyone,” wrote Liam Denning. Keeping them artificially high can have no other purpose than to continue the destruction of the nation and the President knows it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

No More Secrets

By Alan Caruba

There was a time when, if my Mother wanted to call my aunt in the same state, it was a “long distance” call. Now we live in a time when everyone is “connected” by cell phones and the Internet. The government deems cell phones so essential it gives them away free to “the poor.”

The explosion of “social networks” has us more “connected” and, to a large degree, it encourages the young and not-so-young to believe that every single thing they do each day is so important that it must be instantly communicated via the Internet.

I am not a Luddite who thinks that cell phones, the Internet, and other modern wonders are a bad thing. Much of my professional life is conducted via the Internet and often with people I have never met face to face. I have friends I have made via the Internet and others from a long ago past with whom I keep in contact via the Internet. Interpersonal communication is a good thing.

While Barack Hussein Obama has been busy transforming our nation into a Soviet-style Socialistic republic, the invention of the Internet and the likes of the late Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and the folks at Google have literally transformed our lives in ways we have only begun to comprehend.

In Egypt, Facebook brought out thousands of very unhappy Egyptians to Tahir square in Cairo where they proceeded to bring down one of the Middle East’s many dictators. The Internet exposed the global warming hoax when thousands of emails between its conspirators were leaked.

It gave the U.S. State and Defense Department folks a nightmare when a very low level Army kid passed countless secret dispatches on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to Wikileaks. Private Bradley Manning is looking at life in prison for that escapade. When I served in the Army, I had a clearance for “secret” materials and thought I was hot stuff until I realized that they gave that clearance to anyone who had a pulse. Apparently they are still doing that.

The fact that so much of what governments do is based on secrecy explains why billions are spent annually on intelligence gathering—spying—on each other. You need only read the teachings of Sun Tzu, written some 2,500 years ago, to learn how essential spying is to any government.

On a personal level, we have entered an era when there are virtually no secrets—as often as not because people share their secrets with friends who share them with friends who share them with friends. Former Congressman Anthony Weiner could write a book on the subject.

So far as governments are concerned, we are in a new era of disinformation—lies—to counter leaks. All this information pouring forth on the Internet has increasingly marginalized the role of the press.

For those who recall Watergate, a 1970s scandal that forced a president to resign, we looked to newspapers to expose wrong-doing, but today the facts are only a computer click away and, as often as not, the press, with exceptions, is actively suppressing information it does not want us to know.

Recently, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio held a press conference to confirm that the birth certificate provided by the President of the United States is, in all likelihood, a forgery. There are serious questions about the legitimacy of his Social Security number, as well as data related to his passport.

The media, for the most part, ignored this story and that makes them part of what is surely the greatest conspiracy of the new century.

The larger question is why Sheriff Apaio’s information has not become the subject of a Congressional investigation. Why are so many Americans, elected representatives, law enforcement authorities, judges, willing to be complicit in a presidency that may have been acquired by deceit and, if so, whose exercise of power in implicitly criminal?

There may be no more secrets about Obama’s claim to hold the highest office in the land, but what good is it if nothing is done to end it?

What good is it if the Democratic Party is permitted to put his name on its ballot once again?

Why do we have a Constitution? Why do we still call ourselves a nation of laws?

This is how liberty dies. Through apathy and indifference.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Heating Up a War of Words

By Alan Caruba

On Sunday, March 4, President Obama addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington, D.C. As February concluded on a Leap Year day, I opined that Israel and Iran were largely engaged in a war of words, noting briefly the military difficulties involved should Israel launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and other targets.

One American general quoted in my commentary estimated it would take a thousand sorties by air to have a decisive impact. That leaves the question of whether, in fact, Israel would have to attack on its own or whether, in fact, Obama’s AIPAC speech was intended to send a message to Tehran that such an attack would include an American component.

Obama emphasized his belief that “sanctions and diplomacy” will achieve an Iranian retreat from its long-stated goal of acquiring nuclear parity for itself, but it is fundamentally Iran’s goal of “wiping Israel off the map” that will determine the outcome of the current war of words.

That war of words heated up considerably on Sunday.

I was reminded of what George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003. “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

What we know is that Iran is hell-bent on putting a nuclear warhead on the tip of a long-range missile and firing it at Israel.

What we know is that Israel must prevent this if it is to survive.

What we don’t know with certainty, despite the President’s speech to AIPAC, is whether America would engage Iran militarily in collaboration with Israel.

In addition to winding down U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he has not had any luck getting the nations of the Middle East to accept his many apologies or diplomatic efforts to reduce any of the conflicts and tensions in the region. Indeed, on his watch, he has witnessed a failed 2009 Iranian people’s protest against its leaders. There have also been insurrections that overthrew Tunisia’s, Libya’s and Egypt’s long-term dictators that took everyone by surprise.

The so-called “Arab spring” is still shrouded in Rumsfeld’s many “unknowns.” Few seem particularly hopeful.

What struck me most forcefully were the words of Israel’s president Simon Peres, a man who has devoted 65 years of his life to establishing, defending, and building Israel. He began by thanking the President “for being such a good friend” to Israel.

The former Israeli foreign minister did not use the language of diplomacy. “Iran is an evil, cruel regime. Iran is a danger to the entire world. It must be stopped and it will be stopped.”

“President Obama,” said Peres, “made it clear that Iran will never become nuclear. There is no space between us.” He concluded saying, “Mr. President, I know your commitment to Israel is deep and profound. We have a friend in the White House.”

If the president of Israel feels this way, it is hard to believe that it is not so.

The problem for myself and many Americans is that we have witnessed how mercurial Obama has been; how inclined to deception he is to get his way even in the face of significant opposition to his legislative agenda and other policies.

This is why my antenna lighted up when I heard Obama cite Israel’s “ability to defend itself, by itself.” By itself? By itself, military analysts are in general agreement that Israel’s chances of effectively knocking out Iran’s nuclear and military assets are relatively slim.

“There should not be a shred of doubt,” said Obama, “When the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”

Coming from any other President that would seem to be a conclusive statement of support, including military support.

But President Obama is not like any other President this nation has ever known.

He has brought America to the brink of financial collapse. He has demonstrated considerable sympathy and affinity with Muslim nations. It is doubtful that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has much faith in his promises.

The “unknowns”, of course, are the secret discussions between the Israeli government and our own at this point.

Unknown, too, is the hubris of the Iranian leadership who believe they are directed by Allah to destroy Israel and to establish and lead a new Islamic caliphate to rule the world. Those are dangerous beliefs, but there is no doubt that Iran’s leaders have been guided by them since 1979.

For these reasons, there remains only the hope that President Obama’s promises are not writ on water.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Religion and the 2012 Elections

By Alan Caruba

The one thing that Presidents from Washington through to modern times have held in common was the belief that religion was a central component of the life of the republic.

Calvin Coolidge, President from 1923 to 1929, said “Our government rests upon religion. It is from that source that we derive our reverence for truth and justice, for equality and liberality, and for the rights of mankind. Unless the people believe in these principles they cannot believe in our government. There are only two main theories of government in our world. One rests on righteousness and the other on force. One appeals to reason, and the other appeals to the sword. One is exemplified in the republic; the other is represented by despotism.”

Ronald Reagan echoed this view saying, “Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”

For Barack Obama, Sundays have often been devoted to playing golf. A self-declared Christian, there are widespread concerns that he was and is a Muslim, given his childhood as the adopted son of an Indonesian Muslim, his mother’s second husband. In the 2008 campaign, he managed to overcome the fact that his spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, led a Chicago church with a doctrine of Black Liberation theology that was frequently highly critical of America.

When John F. Kennedy ran for office, the question was whether his being Catholic would play a role in whether he could be elected. He put that question to rest. Obama had to sever his ties with Rev. Wright in order to seek and win election.

As Mitt Romney closes in on the Republican nomination some liberals are already sniping at his Mormon faith. while Rick Santorum’s emphasis on the strictures of his faith has played an unknown factor in his fluctuating fortunes.

The Gallup organization began systematically tracking religion in 1948, asking Americans to name the major religion with which they personally identified. Back then, two percent (2%) of Americans volunteered “no religion” and another three percent (3%) had an otherwise unidentified religious identity. By the 1970s, the number of Americans with no formal religious identity began to increase, reaching eleven percent (11%) by 1990.

By 2010, sixteen percent (16%) said they had no religious identity or had an otherwise undesignated response. A Gallup analysis noted that “Lack of identification with a formal religious group does not necessarily mean religion is irrelevant in a broad sense in a person’s life. One can remain quite religious, or at least spiritual, while at the same time eschewing attachment to or identity with a formal religion or denomination.”

The Gallup polling demonstrates that eighty-four percent (84%) of Americans, a huge majority, do identify themselves as affiliated in some fashion, formal or not, with a faith of choice.

Drawing on two surveys, the General Social Survey and the National Congressional Study, Mark Chavez, a professor of sociology, religion, and divinity at Duke University, author of “American Religion: Contemporary Trends”, concluded that traditional belief and practice is relatively stable, but that confidence in religious institutions has declined more than confidence in secular ones.

In a March 3rd, Wall Street Journal commentary, Peggy Noonan wrote, “The other day in a seminar at a university, a student of political science asked a sort of complicated question that seemed to be about the predictability of human response to a given set of political stimuli. I answered that if you view people as souls, believe that we have souls within us, that they are us, then nothing political is fully predictable, because you never know what a soul will do, how a soul will respond, what truth it will apprehend and react to.”

The current firestorm over the Obamacare mandate that contravenes personal conscience, a pillar of all religions, has ignited a debate over the separation of church and state. The Constitution specifically forbids “the establishment” of a state religion and, by extenstion, forbids the federal government from coming between an individual’s spiritual beliefs and its demands.

Coolidge also said “We do not need more intellectual power; we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge; we need more character. We do not need more government; we need more culture. We do not need more law; we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen; we need more of the things that are unseen.”

Religion is hardwired into humans. From the Stone Age onward, we have created religions as a means to cope with an often dangerous and indifferent world, and to peer into what Shakespeare called “The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Consciously or not, three years into President Obama’s term, millions of Americans are reexamining their religious beliefs and I suspect this will play an important role in the outcome of the 2012 elections.

Americans may have grown more secular in their general outlook, but there is still that inner voice, their relationship with the faith into which they were born or they embraced—their soul—and the historic distrust of big government that will shape the outcome of the election.

The Founding Fathers believed that only men of “virtue” could lead America and only citizens who practiced virtue in their lives could preserve and protect the republic. They were right.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

It's the Economy, Stupid!

By Alan Caruba

It is interesting to see how intently foreigners are watching the run-up to the 2012 national elections, particularly as regards whether President Obama could be reelected. Hardly a day goes by that I do not receive inquiries from places like South Africa, Israel, or England. Some offer comments on my Facebook page, but the concern is the same, can Obama be defeated?

To borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton’s 1992 race, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That will be the deciding factor as Democrats , Republicans, and independents go to the polls in November. The news for Obama is bad. Unfortunately, the news for millions of out-of-work Americans it is even worse.

On February 28, the National Federation of Independent Businesses and a coalition of business groups were in the D.C. Court of Appeals to argue their challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules regarding greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that there is no correlation between such gases—mainly carbon dioxide—and a non-existent global warming probably won’t even be discussed. A spokesperson for the NFIB said, “For the small business community, the constant churn of costly and carelessly promulgated regulations has become too great a burden to bear.” Guess who all those small business owners will be voting against in November?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) keeps doing something that is unexpected from most government agencies; it keeps telling the truth. In mid-February it issued a report which said that, after three years of Obamanomics, the nation has seen the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Trust a Democrat President to repeat all the errors of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who prolonged the Depression for ten years while he held office.

The “official” unemployment rate has hovered around or exceeded 8 percent and this is expected to continue through 2014. The CBO noted that the level of long-term unemployment—those looking for work for more than six months—is over 40 percent! That is the highest since 1948 when the data was first collected.

Hans Bader, Counsel for Special Projects with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently noted that “The official unemployment rate is going down, but that’s partly because many long-term unemployed people went into Social Security Disability, citing ailments such as depression. Now they have a monthly government check, they are never, ever going back to work, and they are no longer treated by the government as unemployed.” This is governmental slight-of-hand to lower the rate of unemployment while contributing to it.

Writing in OpenMarket.org in February, Bader noted that a good part of the unemployment problem in the nation is a severe shortage of skilled factory workers. “In recent years, government officials have depicted white-collar jobs for college graduates as the way to go,” said Bader who noted that, while seeking to increase spending on colleges, the administration has been “slashing spending on more useful vocational education that could lead to work in manufacturing.”

An indication of how poorly the government solution to the need for skilled manufacturing employees has been is the fact that the private sector has stepped up to solve the problem. The National Association of Manufacturers has endorsed a National Manufacturers Skills Certification System to fill the gap. In partnership with community colleges and trade schools, the program offers “a relatively inexpensive path to meeting the human capital demands of U.S. advanced manufacturers.”

It has not gone unnoticed that Obama’s stimulus billions did not produce any “shovel ready” jobs and wasted public funds on a range of “green” industries, many of whom, like Solyndra, have gone belly up. Overall, the “green” industries involving solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars have proven to be sinkholes of money that generate few jobs compared to the rest of the nation’s manufacturing sector.

Finally, after three years of the most anti-energy administration since Jimmy Carter, the rising price of gas is going to have a devastating affect for Democrats and Obama on public perceptions on Election Day.

To those foreign correspondents asking whether Obama will be reelected, I keep saying that the present economy with its slow “recovery” and the high rate of unemployed, combined with the government’s crushing load of irrelevant and odious regulations, is as good an indicator as any regarding the outcome of the November general elections.

If foreigners are as much concerned with U.S. elections as Americans, all the debates, daily silliness of political news coverage, and largely irrelevant social issues suggest that November will represent, like the 2010 elections, a massive voter movement away from “hope and change” to a Republican candidate that offers an alternative economic policy to four more years of the disaster called Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2012