When the New Left emerged in the 1960s, something else was born that would mark American elites for decades thereafter: the notion that social-democratic Western Europe was far superior to the capitalist United States. Pity the poor American professor whose every junket to a European academic conference was marred by his continental colleagues’ sneering over cocktails about his nation’s shame du jour—Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq—or about American racism, capital punishment, or health care. For much of the American Left, Western Europe was nothing less than an abstract symbol of progressive utopia.

This rosy view was never accurate, of course.

The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the last three decades, social-democratic Europe’s political, cultural, academic, and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history. According to Foreign Affairs, Muslims in Western Europe numbered between 15 and 20 million in 2005. One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to 2 million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.

Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and become part of their new societies, Western Europe’s governments have allowed them to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to sharia. Many of the residents of these patriarchal enclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of their adopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy, look forward to Europe’s incorporation into the House of Islam, and support—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West. A 2006 Sunday Telegraph poll, for example, showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain, 14 percent approved of attacks on Danish embassies in retribution for the famous Mohammed cartoons, 13 percent supported violence against those who insulted Islam, and 20 percent sympathized with the July 2005 London bombers.

Too often, such attitudes find their way into practice. Ubiquitous youth gangs, contemptuous of infidels, have made European cities increasingly dangerous for non-Muslims—especially women, Jews, and gays. In 2001, 65 percent of rapes in Norway were committed by what the country’s police call “non-Western” men—a category consisting overwhelmingly of Muslims, who make up just 2 percent of that country’s population. In 2005, 82 percent of crimes in Copenhagen were committed by members of immigrant groups, the majority of them Muslims.

Non-Muslims aren’t the only targets of Muslim violence. A mountain of evidence suggests that the rates of domestic abuse in these enclaves are astronomical. In Germany, reports Der Spiegel, “a disproportionately high percentage of women who flee to women’s shelters are Muslim”; in 2006, 56 percent of the women at Norwegian shelters were of foreign origin; Deborah Scroggins wrote in The Nation in 2005 that “Muslims make up only 5.5 percent of the Dutch population, but they account for more than half the women in battered women’s shelters.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch advocate for democracy and women’s rights, would no doubt say far more than half: when she was working with women in Dutch shelters, she writes, “there were hardly any white women” in them, “only women from Morocco, from Turkey, from Afghanistan—Muslim countries—alongside some Hindu women from Surinam.” When she and filmmaker Theo van Gogh tried to highlight the mistreatment of women under Islam in the 2004 film Submission: Part I, he was killed by a young Muslim extremist.

More and more Western Europeans, recognizing the threat to their safety and way of life, have turned their backs on the establishment, which has done little or nothing to address these problems, and begun voting for parties—some relatively new, and all considered right-wing—that have dared to speak up about them. One measure of the dimensions of this shift: owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslim youths, Dutch gays—who ten years ago constituted a reliable left-wing voting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly two-to-one margin.

The other major reason for the turn against the Left is economic. Western Europeans have long paid sky-high taxes for a social safety net that seems increasingly not worth the price. These taxes have slowed economic growth. Timbro’s Johnny Munkhammar noted in 2005 that Sweden, for instance, which in the first half of the twentieth century had the world’s second-highest growth rate, had since fallen to number 14, owing to enormous tax hikes.

Government revenues in Western Europe go largely to support the unemployed, thus discouraging work. Over the last decade or so, the overall unemployment rate in the EU 15—that is, Western Europe—has hovered at about 2.5 to 3 points higher than in the United States. In France and Germany, it has ascended into the double digits (and that was before the global financial crisis that began in 2008). Western Europe’s rate of long-term unemployment has consistently been several times higher than America’s, denoting the presence of a sizable minority either permanently jobless or working off the books, often for family businesses, while collecting unemployment benefits.

These two factors—immigration and the economy—are intimately connected. For while some immigrant groups in Europe, such as Hindus and East Asians, enjoy relatively low unemployment rates and healthy incomes, the largest immigrant group, Muslims, has become such a burden that governments have made extensive cutbacks in public services in order to keep up with welfare payments—closing clinics and emergency rooms, reducing staff in hospitals, cutting police and military spending, eliminating course offerings at public universities, and so on. According to a report issued last year by the think tank Contribuables Associés, immigration reduces France’s economic growth by two-thirds. In 2002, economist Lars Jansson estimated that immigration cost Swedish taxpayers about $27 billion annually and that fully 74 percent of immigrant-group members in Sweden lived off the taxpayers. And in 2006, the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise warned that Norway’s petroleum fund—which contains the massive profits from North Sea oil that have made the nation rich—could wind up drained to cover outlays to immigrants. (This in a country whose roads, as a report last year indicated, are in worse shape than Albania’s.)

The last few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. (emphasis added) Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.

The November 2001 general election in Denmark is the most decisive—and successful—rejection so far of a Western European left-wing establishment. Alarmed by a widely publicized study showing that their country would have a Muslim majority within 60 years if immigration rates didn’t change, Danish voters sent the Social Democrats down to defeat for the first time since 1924. The new Liberal-Conservative governing coalition, which voters returned to power in 2005, has introduced the continent’s most sweeping immigration and integration reforms, including rules designed to thwart the near-universal practice in Europe’s Muslim communities of marrying one’s children off to cousins abroad so that they, too, may immigrate to the West. As a result, the flow of new Muslim arrivals has decreased significantly, allowing the government to focus resources on the immense challenge of trying to integrate Muslims already living in Denmark. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen also defended free speech strongly during the 2006 Mohammed cartoon crisis, standing firm while Muslims around the world raged against Denmark and Western leaders begged him to back down.

The rightward shifts in Europe most widely reported in the U.S. have been those in Germany, where Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005, and in France, where Nicolas Sarkozy took over the presidency in 2007. Those developments, as well as the third term that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi won in 2008, were grounded largely in public recognition of the need for economic liberalization. By French standards, Sarkozy’s campaign rhetoric was nothing less than stunning: arguing that “the revolution of 1968”—a sacred event for the left-wing French establishment—had not liberated France but “brought us into moral decline,” Sarkozy insisted that if the French wanted growth, they needed to spend less time in cafés and more on the job.

In brave little Denmark’s backyard, two more countries have moved to the right. In Norway, the Progress Party—which the political and media establishment has smeared for a generation as racist and fiscally unserious—now rivals the Labor Party, architect of the country’s welfare state, thanks to voter concerns about immigration and public services. Though the financial crisis had caused support for the Progress Party to slip a bit, recent Muslim riots and debates about hijab have sent poll numbers skyward again, and the party seems a good bet to come out on top in next September’s parliamentary elections—though it will be in trouble if, as appears likely, other right-of-center parties refuse to join a Progress Party–led coalition. And in Sweden, perhaps the ultimate symbol of social democracy, voters motivated largely by concerns over unemployment and other economic issues unseated the long-powerful Social Democratic Party in 2006. In its place they installed a center-right coalition led by Fredrik Reinfeldt’s Moderates, who promised to help businesses and lower taxes.

But demonstrating a distinctively European species of schizophrenia, many on both the right and the left, while acknowledging the need for welfare-state reorganization, have ultimately resisted it—as if the philosophical leap required were simply too great. In Western Europe, after all, even the mainstream Right tends to be statist. “The concept of the cradle-to-grave welfare state is so deeply embedded in the Danish psyche that even the conservatives don’t dare touch it,” noted NPR correspondent Sylvia Poggioli in 2006. Ivo H. Daalder made the same point in a 2007 Brookings Institution report, writing that “when one talks about the right in Europe, you are talking about a very state interventionist political class that still believes that the government has a fundamental role in guiding how the economy is supposed to be run.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Europe’s new leaders have made relatively modest economic changes. True, Sarkozy has raised state employees’ retirement age (precipitating a transport strike) and ended France’s 35-hour workweek. But from the start, Social Democrats in Germany, whom Merkel’s slim margin of victory forced her to accept as coalition partners, have limited her ability to implement serious economic reforms. In April 2008, Judy Dempsey noted in the International Herald Tribune not only that the coalition had “run its course” but that Merkel herself had been “forced to move leftward,” hiking pensions and “rolling back radical labor reforms, ironically introduced by her Social Democratic predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, which were designed to bring older people back to work by reducing social welfare payments.” And with the onset of the economic crisis, notes German author Henryk Broder, “there is even an ongoing discussion about Enteignung [expropriation] and Verstaatlichung [nationalization], which was unthinkable a year ago.”

As for Sweden, shortly after the 2006 victory, BusinessWeek writers Stanley Reed and Ariane Sains paraphrased Reinfeldt as saying that his “idea isn’t to dismantle the cherished Swedish welfare state. . . . That would be too controversial.” Reinfeldt’s one major innovation has been a “partially successful” effort “to force people off the welfare rolls and into the labor market,” University of Lund social thinker Jonathan Friedman tells me. Reinfeldt’s economic plan has also involved increased privatization, somewhat lower taxes, and encouragement of entrepreneurship—all policies, as Friedman notes, “that were started by the previous government.”

Meanwhile, with the notable exception of Denmark, the new nonsocialist governments have left their predecessors’ disastrous immigration and integration policies almost entirely intact. Sarkozy’s defiant campaign rhetoric about Muslim rioters in the suburbs raised hopes for major change. But though he announced last July that illegal immigration would be a major focus during France’s EU presidency, he has done little even about legal immigration, most of which, in Western Europe, involves the importation of new spouses in arranged, usually forced, marriages. Sarkozy seems to believe that job creation and other economic measures will resolve France’s colossal integration challenges.

Merkel, meanwhile, shone briefly when she insisted that the Deutsche Oper proceed with a 2006 production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that Muslim leaders condemned as offensive. But the heavily hyped “national integration plan” that she introduced the following year rested on such half-measures as an increase in the number of government-sponsored German classes, an effort to encourage immigrants to play sports, and (incredibly) a program that addressed wife-beating—permitted by the Koran and extremely common in Muslim communities—by offering advice on the Internet. Merkel actually described these pathetic gestures as a “milestone”; Broder, more accurately, calls them “make-believe action,” another way to avoid conflicts in her coalition.

In Sweden, says Friedman, Reinfeldt has pursued “a variant of politics as usual” on immigration and integration. Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society, insists that Swedish efforts to encourage employment “will undoubtedly prove ineffective over the long haul” because “the fundamental problem is demographics. Sweden remains Europe’s main importer of Muslim immigrants who are unwilling to assimilate and whose imams order them to detest Swedish culture. So long as the current government is unwilling to tackle this basic problem, everything else will be for naught.”

Sarkozy has undertaken one high-profile initiative, which seems disastrously ill-conceived in a uniquely Gallic way: developing closer, more formal ties between France and the Arab countries from which it receives most of its immigrants. At one point, he even spoke of a “Mediterranean Union.” Haaretz writer Michalis Firillas summed up Sarkozy’s plan tidily in January 2008: “For some, his Mediterranean Union is a containment policy. For others it is neocolonial. But there is also a sense that Sarkozy is betting on French grandeur, that aura of greatness, to bridge the disparate Mediterranean with a new and serious political body. Unfortunately, he may find that there are others with similar visions of grandeur, from Ankara to Cairo, from Jerusalem to Tangiers, who have their own Mediterranean visions.” Indeed, Sarkozy’s scheme appears to be a continuation of his left-wing predecessors’ efforts to bring the Arab world under French influence—efforts that ended up subsidizing the colonization of French suburbs by Arabs who now consider them part of the House of Islam.

Not only has Europe’s move to the right not always had concrete results; it also hasn’t been an across-the-board phenomenon. In Britain, the Tories seem poised to resume power after Labour’s long, slow decline. Yet the ideological gap between the parties has narrowed so much in recent years, and the leadership vacuum is so pronounced, that it’s difficult to imagine a Tory takeover’s having an impact remotely comparable with that of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election. On the contrary, conservative columnist Peter Hitchens recently charged that nowadays “you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.” That elite, alas—as vividly demonstrated last year by the archbishop of Canterbury’s speech contemplating the legitimacy of sharia in parts of Britain—is bent on appeasing fundamentalist Islam.

And Spain, in a move widely seen as capitulating to Islamists, responded to the March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid by voting for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist Party, which had vowed to withdraw troops from Iraq immediately. Zapatero narrowly won reelection last year. As libertarian columnist Antonio Golmar explains, the centrist consensus established after King Juan Carlos’s introduction of democracy in the seventies has been shattered by Zapatero’s hard-left initiatives. These include the Historical Memory Law—which portrays leftist mass murderers during the Spanish civil war as heroic freedom fighters, while stigmatizing many of their innocent victims as fascists—and the introduction in all schools of “citizenship” classes that teach scorn for capitalism and representative democracy.

In response, some Spaniards have lurched rightward toward the national-Catholic, proto-fascist ideology of Franco’s time and become increasingly vocal within the conservative Partido Popular. Consequently, says Golmar, “moderates in Spain are trapped between a far-left administration and their cronies and the revival of the extreme right disguised in conservative and even libertarian clothing.” While America struggles to move beyond the antagonisms of the 1960s, then, Spain has entered an ideological battlefield reminiscent of the years preceding its civil war of the late thirties. There seems little room for those who loathe both the neo-Marxists and the neoreactionaries.

The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.

For establishment politicians, journalists, and academics, these parties serve an exceedingly useful purpose: their existence makes it easy to tar any nonsocialist party with the fascist brush—labeling it racist and xenophobic, equating its leaders with the likes of Le Pen and Haider, and stigmatizing its supporters. No party in Europe has been subjected to more unfair attacks than Norway’s Progress Party, whose extraordinary electoral successes have outraged that country’s socialist elite. Like other parties on what we may call Europe’s respectable right, the Progress Party has expressly distanced itself from parties like the National Front and Vlaams Belang. Yet despite these disavowals, American media have routinely echoed the leftist establishment’s unjust calumnies.

A seminal example was a March 2002 New York Times article by Marlise Simons about Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician who, according to the article’s headline, was proudly gay, and marching the dutch to the right. Though Simons acknowledged that Fortuyn criticized Islam because it offered “no equality for men and women and because . . . the imams here preach in offensive terms about gays,” she nonetheless echoed the Dutch establishment’s characterization of him as a menace to Dutch values, making sure to mention that he had been widely compared with Mussolini and Haider. A few weeks later, Fortuyn was murdered by an environmental fanatic taken in by similar claptrap.

The same kind of incendiary rhetoric that Dutch journalists used against Fortuyn can now be seen in American left-wing coverage of any nonsocialist European party or politician. Typical was Gary Younge’s 2007 piece in The Nation: in europe, it’s the old right that’s full of hate. According to Younge, “the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not ‘Islamofascism’ . . . but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities.” This was nonsense on a breathtaking scale: though the rise of parties like the BNP is indeed distressing, the truth remains that for every act of anti-Muslim violence in Europe, there are—to make an exceedingly conservative guess—100 acts of Muslim-on-infidel violence.

Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to sharia as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly, while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americans have chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed by the European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elite has celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his election as a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real or imagined.

The final question, then, is whether the Western European Left’s condescension toward America, and the American Left’s habit of holding Western Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combination of Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama. Stir in the international financial crisis, which will almost certainly cause a socioeconomic upheaval of untold dimensions in both hemispheres, and it seems reasonable to expect that the old pattern may be broken for good. Meaning that American professors will have a far less stressful time of it at European cocktail parties—at least until sharia comes along and forbids cocktails entirely.

by Bruce Bawer

Bruce Bawer is the author of the upcoming Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom
He blogs at brucebawer.com.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_pim-fortuyn.html

Hat tip: Craig J. Cantoni

The Left Is Making a Mistake in Ridiculing the Tea Parties

The political Left in the United States is making a grave mistake indiminishing and dismissing the anger of the American people. Where it may be commonplace for liberals, Leftists, neo-Marxists and Progressive-Leftists to take to the streets over anything and everything, including a change of wind direction, it is entirely a different story with conservatives and Republicans. Conservatives and Republicans don't march in the streets foranything. The fact that they have now taken to the streets in protest of massive government spending and government's encroachment into our liberties speaks volumes to those who would listen.

An amazing thing happened on the way to America's socialistic demise...a revolution has fomented. Born of a righteous anger centered on wasteful and special interest government spending, lack of honest representation in government, a move toward transforming the United States Constitutional Republic into a Socialist Democracy, excessive taxation and many more constitutionally based grievances, conservatives, traditionalists and Republicans, as well as centrists, independents and Democrats, took to the streets of just about every congressional district to protest a behemoth runaway government run by an elitist and opportunistic political class.

From Chicago to New York, St.Louis to San Francisco, St. Paul to Austin and Miami to Portland, hard-working, taxpaying Americans, who aren't too often moved to taking to the streets in protest, took to the streets to redress their government. What makes this "protest" more important and more potent than any petition drive, any email, letter writing or phone campaign, is that it moved conservatives, traditionalists and Republicans to take to the streets, something that in most every instance and in every circumstance they are not wont to do. The question that is being asked now is this: Will this movement grow and gather strength enough to affect real, meaningful and constitutionally friendly "change" or will conservatives, traditionalists and Republicans fall prey to their traditional boogey-man, factionalism?

The Conservative Challenge

For decades - both in my political life and for as long as I have been writing and publishing - I have contended that conservatives and Republicans - the Right - aren't cohesive. Since entering into the new media publishing and non-profit educational venues I have come to understand that they don't financially support the organizations and publications that carry the water for them; who defend the traditionalist ideology from mainstream media and Leftist attacks. They employ ideological litmus tests for their prospective candidates instead of selecting candidates that would dedicate their public service to preserving their individual rights to pursue their special interests. And it is obvious to anyone but those walking around with eyes wide shut that it takes an act outrageous and egregious to motivate conservatives and Republicans to the streets in protest.

While this analysis may sound harsh (and with regard to the lack of financial support for those who carry the water for conservatism it is meant to be), for the most part there is an underlying philosophical reason for the differences between the pack mentality of the Left and the individualism of the Right. Where the Left leans more toward identifying our populace in the collective (what's good for the country is good for the individual), the Right identifies our populace as individuals who, together, make up the whole (what is good for the individual is good for the country). This individualist philosophy lends itself to self-sufficiency and individual responsibility which leads to a community of people who believe that solutions come from individuals and not government. This, of course, leads to a civically responsible community.

A vulnerability that exists in extreme individualism is that it leads to a community of individuals who always want to be the leader. We've all heard the phrase, "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians." When everyone believes that their way of achieving things is the best, factions develop that impede the whole of the community from being effective in achieving common goals. A prime example of this can be found in the ideological litmus test for political candidates. Instead of supporting candidates that would fight to protect an individual's right to pursue matters important to the individual, factions within the conservative community threaten to withhold support if their individual special interests, the subjects and issues most important to them, are not embraced by candidates.

Using the individualist philosophy in political pursuits instead of measuring candidates on their dedication to preserving and defending the individuals' rights to pursue their individual interests makes it next to impossible to not only come to a consensus on a candidate, but slate a candidate that can beat the Left's cohesive, pack-mentality voting style. Extreme individualism is also the main reason that the Right continually falls to the Left in establishing and funding political action and advocacy groups. It is the primary reason why, even though there are people on the right side of the ideological aisle who have even more money than neo-Marxist financier George Soros, there are no groups like MoveOn.org, America Coming Together, Media Matters, etc. Those ideological groups that do exist on the right side of the ideological aisle are almost always extremely limited in what they can do to combat the Leftists because they are so underfunded.

This is why the events of April 15th, 2009, are so incredible and important in and of themselves. It would seem that the acts outrageous and egregious have occurred at the hand of our government, so much so and for so long that - to borrow a line from a Bob Dylan song, "...the times, they are achangin'."

The Beneficiaries of American Political Apathy

The American Fifth Column - an association of one-worlders, neo-Marxists, Progressive-Leftists, Communists, Socialists and anarchists, to name some of the more notable groups - has successfully intruded into our daily lives by implementing a shadow set of societal laws in "political correctness"; a shadow set of rules antithetical to the United States Constitution. This is true to such an extent that elected officials are basing the creation of legislation on these tenets, tenets directly taken from the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. From hate crime laws, whose definitions are open to ideological interpretation, to the mass redistribution of wealth currently being perpetrated upon the American people by the Obama Administration, to the government funded indoctrination of our children into special interest ideology via the public schools system, the elements of our society that believe government is the answer have infiltrated every avenue of our lives and they have placed the importance of their ideology above even the proper execution of representative government.

But most disturbing is that the American Fifth Column has so successfully employed the tactics of Marxist "community organizer" Saul Alinsky to achieve their goal - the radical transformation of America's social and economic structure - that they have taken control of the US government. Nancy Pelosi's oligarchy in the US House of Representatives, combined withthe almost filibuster-proof Democrat majority in the US Senate, place the Legislative Branch firmly in control of the neo-Marxist wing of the Democrat Party.

President Obama - who has talked unabashedly about "economic justice" and the "arrogance" of the United States, and who is a self-declared"community organizer" in the mold of the Alinsky model, has populated his administration with far-Left ideologues - many from the Clinton Administration - including many members of the biased and agendized mainstream media. It can be successfully argued that the neo-Marxist Progressive-Left has become "the establishment" and traditionalist Americans - those who believe in the sanctity of the US Constitution, in freedom, liberty and personal and civic responsibility - have become the "counter-culture." Enter the tea parties...

Goebbels Would Be Proud

As real, hard-working Americans from all walks of life - rich, poor, religious, non-religious, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, white, black, yellow, brown, male and female - took to the streets to send a message to their elected officials; those elected to office to represent the best interests of their constituencies, not their political parties, perhaps the most organized and vicious threat to our Constitutional Republic took to the airwaves to discredit, diminish and otherwise smear 'We the People': the mainstream media.

Make no mistake, while the neo-Marxists elected to office are a threat to our liberty and freedom, and to our Constitutional Republic, they wouldn't be able to come close to the success they have seen so far if it weren't for the propagandists in the mainstream media. The mainstream media disingenuously and blatantly violated their constitutionally mandated responsibility to act as citizen's advocate by championing the Obama campaign in the 2008 elections. By refusing to ask the tough questions and selectively airing favorable coverage of the Obama campaign, while criticizing the McCain campaign for even the most benign faux pas, they ensured a victory for Barack Obama thus violating the public trust.

True journalism is dead in the mainstream media. It has been replaced by a propaganda dissemination mechanism that would have made Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels envious. With regard to the tea parties two examples stand out... Radio talk show host, Bill Press, on FOX News, April 14th, tried to float the idea that nefarious conservative organizations were behind theorganizing of the nationwide tea party assemblage, saying he "didn't see anything genuine or see anything real" about the protests. He advanced a ridiculous theory that because advocate organizations and politicians decided to get on board with the public outrage that they somehow were pulling the strings of the total of protesters from coast-to-coast.

Press may understand protests on the Left to be funded by nefarious political andideological forces - George Soros, MoveOn.org, America Coming Together,Media Matters, the Communist and Socialist Parties, etc. - but conservatives and Republicans aren't that adept at organizing "march-in-the-street"protests.

Another came from CNN's Susan Roesgen who displayed a level of elitism in her interviewing of tea party protesters in Chicago heretofore unseen throughout the history of journalism. Roesgen questioned one protester whose frustration with Barack Obama's totalitarian governmental style led him to equate it to the political stylings of a young, pre-holocaust Adolf Hitler. Forgetting that fascism exists on the left side of an accurate political spectrum, Roesgen chastised the protester for being "offensive." One must question how offended she was when the same thing was happening to President George W. Bush. Then Roesgen, under the guise of asking a question, lectured and entered into debate with another protester before cutting him off and declaring that the entire protest was orchestrated by FOX News and was, in fact, "anti-government," "anti-CNN" and "not family viewing." This blatant disregard for the public's genuine anger lends credence to the argument that the mainstream media is not only in the tank for the Obama Administration, but that they have reached such a level of elitism, possessing such an agenda-driven arrogance, that they have literally become not only an enemy of the Charters of Freedom but an enemy of the people.

Overthrowing Men Who Pervert the Constitution

According to the recently released DHS threat assessment titled, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic & Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization & Recruitment, my proclivity to actively defend the US Constitution, to actively question a reckless government that has strayed from the principles set forth by our Founders and Framers - principles born of Natural Law and Judeo-Christian values, principles that forged a Constitutional Republic, defines me as a threat to our nation.

According to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (please tell me again what her qualifications for this post are?, because I am angry about the government's abdication of effective representative government, I am a threat to the nation, along with US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and each and every American who turned out for the tea parties across the nation. Both Napolitano and President Obama - for his silence on the matter - consider We the People "the enemy." As of this writing, there are 564 days until the 2010 midterm elections. The questions that remains are these:

Will this truly patriotic movement continue to grow?

Will those who took to the streets on April 15th, 2009, continue to do so until the totalitarian forces of the neo-Marxist Progressive-Left are vanquished once and for all?

Or will conservative, traditionalists, Republicans, concerned centrists and honest Democrats look at their singular achievement and say job well-done as they retreat to the status quo?

To be sure, if the mid-term elections had been held on the day of the teaparties I truly believe most incumbents would have been ousted from office. The anger is that concentrated. But the past holds the truth of the future and it shows that - traditionally - conservatives are hard pressed to maintain cohesiveness over a prolonged period of time. Truthfully, I hope I am proven wrong on this point. The fact is, our nation's future depends on me being wrong.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is credited with having said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." If the Left is smart - and that is truly being questioned by many Americans - they will form a new-found respect for the admiral's words with regard to the events of April 15th, 2009. If the Right is smart, and in their awakening it appears they are, they will realize this needs to be an ongoing effort, that there is hard work ahead, that everyone must act cohesively and that the revolution starts now!

"We, the people, are the rightful masters of both congress and the courts - not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert theconstitution." - Abraham Lincoln

Frank Salvato
april 17, 2009
http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/fsalvato/2009/04172009.htm

Senator Humphrey was not unique in that respect. In fact, our present economic crisis has developed out of politicians providing solutions to problems that did not exist-- and, as a result, producing a problem whose existence is all too real and all too painful.

What was the problem that didn't exist? It was a national problem of unaffordable housing. The political crusade for affordable housing got into high gear in the 1990s and led to all kinds of changes in mortgage lending practices, which in turn led to a housing boom and bust that has left us in the mess we are now trying to dig out of.

There were certainly places here and there where it took half a family's income just to put a roof over their heads. Many such places were in coastal California but there were a few others, here and there, on the east coast and elsewhere.

But, vast areas of the country in between -- "flyover country" to the east coast and west coast elites -- had housing prices that took no larger share of the average American's income than in the decade before the affordable housing crusade got under way.

Why then a national crusade by Washington politicians over local problems? Probably as good an answer as any is that "It seemed like a good idea at the time." How are we to be kept aware of how compassionate and how important our elected officials are unless they are busy solving some problem for us?

The problem of skyrocketing housing prices was all too real in those places where this problem existed. When you have to live on half your income because the other half goes for housing, that's a real downer.

Almost invariably, these severe local problems had local causes-- usually severe local restrictions on building homes. These restrictions had a variety of politically attractive names, ranging from "open space" laws and "smart growth" policies to "environmental protection" and "farmland preservation."

Like most wonderful-sounding political slogans, none of these lofty goals was discussed in terms of that one four-letter word that people do not use in polite political society-- "cost."

No one asked how many hundreds of thousands of dollars would be added to the cost of an average home by "open space" laws, for example. Yet empirical studies have shown that land-use restrictions added at least a hundred thousand dollars to the average home price in dozens of places around the country.

In some places, such as coastal California, these restrictions added several hundred thousand dollars to the price of the average home.

In other words, where the problem was real, local politicians were the cause. National politicians then tried to depict this as a national problem that they would solve.

How would they solve it? By pressuring banks and other lenders to lower their requirements for making mortgage loans, so that more people could buy houses. The Department of Housing and Urban Development gave the government-sponsored enterprise Fannie Mae quotas for how many mortgages it should buy that were made out for people for low to moderate incomes.

Like most political "solutions," the solution to the affordable housing "problem" took little or no account of the wider repercussions this would entail.

Various economists and others warned repeatedly that lowered lending standards meant more risky mortgages. Given the complex relationships among banks and other financial institutions, including many big Wall Street firms, if mortgages started defaulting, all the financial dominoes could start falling.

These warnings were brushed aside. Politicians were too busy solving a national problem that didn't exist. In the process, they created very real problems. Now they are now offering even more solutions that will undoubtedly lead to even bigger problems.

Thomas Sowell
March 18, 2009

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/03/18/false_solutions_and_real_problems

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Red State Patriot: So what should we anticipate next from the Obama Administration?
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A look at Sweden's way

Government health care advocates once sang the praises of Britain's National Health Service (NHS). That's until its poor delivery of health care services became known.

A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, "Delay, Denial and Dilution," written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the NHS health care services are just about the worst in the developed world. The head of the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.

Twelve percent of specialists surveyed admitted refusing kidney dialysis to patients suffering from kidney failure because of limits on cash. Waiting lists for medical treatment have become so long there are now "waiting lists" for the waiting list.

Government health care advocates sing the praises of Canada's single-payer system. Canada's government system isn't that different from Britain's. For example, after a Canadian has been referred to a specialist, the waiting list for gynecological surgery is four to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks.

Toronto-area hospitals, concerned about lawsuits, ask patients to sign a legal release accepting that while delays in treatment may jeopardize their health, they nevertheless hold the hospital blameless.

Canadians have an option Britainers don't: proximity of American hospitals. In fact, the Canadian government spends more than $1 billion each year for Canadians to receive medical treatment in our country. I wonder how much money the U.S. government spends for Americans to be treated in Canada.

"OK, Williams," you say, "Sweden is the world's socialist wonder." Sven R. Larson tells about some of Sweden's problems in "Lesson from Sweden's Universal Health System: Tales from the Health-care Crypt," published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (spring 2008). Mr. D., a Gothenburg multiple sclerosis patient, was prescribed a new drug. His doctor's request was denied because the drug was 33 percent more expensive than the older medicine. Mr. D. offered to pay for the medicine himself but was prevented from doing so. The bureaucrats said it would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicine.

Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden's third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city of 200,000 people, has only one mammography specialist.

Sweden's National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will have no access to mammography.

Dr. Olle Stendahl, a professor of medicine at Linkoping University, pointed out a side effect of government-run medicine: its impact on innovation. He said, "In our budget-government health care there is no room for curious, young physicians and other professionals to challenge established views. New knowledge is not attractive but typically considered a problem [that brings] increased costs and disturbances in today's slimmed-down health care."

These are just a few of the problems of Sweden's single-payer government-run health care system. I wonder how many Americans would like a system that would, as in the case of Mr. D. of Gothenburg, prohibit private purchase of your own medicine if the government refused paying.

We have problems in our health care system but most of them are a result of too much government. More than 50 percent of health care expenditures in our country are made by government. Government health care advocates might say they will avoid the horrors of other government-run systems. Don't believe them.

The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, who published Sven Larson's paper, is a group of liberty-oriented doctors and health care practitioners who haven't sold their members down the socialist river as have other medical associations. They deserve our thanks for being a major player in the '90s defeat of "Hillary care."

Walter E. Williams
March 21, 2009

Walter E. Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist and a professor of economics at George Mason University.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/21/a-look-at-swedens-way/

To illustrate the point, let’s start with a $100 bill, currently the largest denomination bill in general circulation. Most everyone has seen one. I think we can agree that $100 bills are guaranteed to make friends wherever they go, even in foreign countries.

This next little pile of money is $1 million dollars (100 packets $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

While a measly $1 million looks a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet.

And $1 billion ... now we're really getting somewhere!

The next image is ONE TRILLION dollars. That’s that number we've been hearing so much about. How much is one trillion dollars? Well, it's a million million dollars. Or if you prefer, it’s a thousand billion. A trillion dollars is $1 followed by 12 zeros.

You ready for this? It's pretty surprising. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you $1 trillion dollars. Note all those pallets of $100 bills, as far as the eye can see, each pallet being $100 million. Did you notice that the pallets are double-stacked? Look at the size of the person.

The graphic above provides us a glimpse of YOUR personal debt, in such a way to grasp its enormity. Yes, your government’s debt is your personal debt. And the graphic only depicts $1 trillion! Because it's YOUR debt, I feel the need to tell you again who is going to have to pay it off - you, your family, your children, your grandchildren, for generations and generations to come. Let the realization sink in slowly and savor it.

Oh, did I mention that the national debt is far greater than $1 trillion, closer in truth to 11 trillion dollars today. Keep in mind that we’ve only been talking about one trillion dollars, and the Obama Administration’s projected deficit spending (vastly expanding the pre-existing national debt) is expected to add another $7-9 trillion in national debt. Can you imagine 20 trillion dollars?

So the next time you hear someone (politician or lame-stream media) toss around the phrase "trillion dollars", now you know what that ‘empty hat’ is talking about.

Furthermore, it isn't your money that Congress is spending! It never was. The bailout and stimulus money didn’t come from your taxes. It was Chinese or Saudi Arabian or Japanese money, which Congress borrowed (in your name and on your behalf) and then spent/directed toward corporate, bank or labor union special interests or redistributed to expand the welfare state. Even though you didn’t authorize Congress to borrow and spend this money, or to spend it irresponsibly, it was YOU who voted for these people and it was you who authorized them to act in your behalf (and in hindsight to beat you figuratively with a rubber hose). Now that you’re ‘hosed’ financially, in debt beyond comprehension in perpetuity, you can better appreciate their callously inept, or in many cases, willful and reckless decisions.

Congress’ relationship and fiduciary responsibility to us is what Bernie Madoff’s relationship was with his investors. While Bernie Madoff will NOT repay the money he lost in a Ponzi scheme with bad investment decisions and bad market timing, you WILL be expected to repay every penny Congress has squandered and redistributed around the world for decades. Congratulations. You now owe tens of trillions of dollars. While Congress borrows, and uses the money to bail out not just domestic banks, but foreign banks as well, counterparties of Goldman Sachs, you have the remarkable privilege of bailing out Congress. While Bernie Madoff goes to jail, your congressman goes free. Is this a great country or what!

Maybe you’re thinking, “Who loaned us trillion’s of dollars?” The answer is foreign governments, foreign banks and multi-national corporations, all of whom purchased our Treasury Bills (debt instruments of the U.S. federal government). Now you’re wondering, “How do we ever pay them back? What do we export anymore beside wheat and corn? Can we give whoever loaned us the money a state, let's say Nevada, as payment?”

Unfortunately, as a result of the other flawed decisions by the genius’ in Congress, a large percentage of the corn is going into the production of Ethanol. We don't sell corn that much any more, at least not in the quantities we once did, to other nations. As for wheat, large tracts of land have been converted by farmers to grow corn. So we don't grow and sell as much wheat any more either, at least not to other nations. While the United States was once-upon-a-time the breadbasket of the world, that is not so true anymore. As far as giving them Nevada, many countries (and particularly the Chinese and Saudis) already have a legal financial claim to many infrastructure assets in the United States as collateral for the United States national debt (your debt). Isn’t that a hoot! They also have a legal and ethical right to claim a large portion of your wages, for your lifetime, to repay the debt your government owes them. Think of it this way. Congress is going to garnish your wages in the form of draconian taxes to pay the indebtedness to foreign nations that they created. They party, and live like royalty, and behave like rock stars, while you pick up their tab.

How many people do you think grasp the fact that taxing United States citizens and businesses is the only tool our government has with which to pay off loans to countries such as Saudi Arabia, China and Japan? Put another way, this is the money YOU personally owe because of the votes of people like Democrat Harry Mitchell. The Honorable Harry Mitchell is the District 5 representative in the House of Representatives from Scottsdale, Arizona. You can tell he’s looking out for you.

Ask yourself - how many people in the United States pay taxes? Roughly, there are 138 million individual taxpayers in the United States. In addition to personal income taxes, taxes are also collected from payroll tax (FICA), corporate tax, estate and gift taxes, and excise taxes (gasoline, alcohol, tobacco, etc.), just to name a few of the 30+ other sources of taxes extracted from the economy.

It is important that you realize, to actually comprehend, that it is you who personally pay every dollar of these taxes, every tax whether it is levied by the federal, state, country, or municipal governments, even the corporate taxes which are embedded in the price of everything we purchase.

There is nothing you can do to avoid responsibility for this debt - short of moving overseas and renouncing United States citizenship. And until you realize that the grass is not much greener anywhere else, why not enjoy a humorous moment and calculate the interest payments on the national debt - your debt? Let me do it for you.

So I ask you, where is the $450 billion in annual interest (1.25 billion dollars in interest payments per day) on the $11 trillion of national debt already outstanding (that includes U.S. Treasury notes and bonds, Foreign and domestic series certificates of indebtedness, notes and bonds, Savings bonds, Government Account Series (GAS), State and Local Government series (SLGs) and other special purpose securities, going to come from? From you and me of course!

Those numbers are from 2008 and do not include the first dime of spending by the Obama Administration and Congress since the 2008 election; the 11 trillion includes none of the so-called bailout or economic stimulus schemes.

Just today, in a surprise and dramatic move, the Fed increased the amount of money it will create out of thin air, ostensibly to thaw out the still-frozen credit markets (read: we’re not lending any more money to those deadbeats that won’t pay it back) that have cramped lending to consumers and businesses alike.

The Fed went on to say it would purchase (read: you will be purchasing with your taxes) an additional $750 billion worth of government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities, on top of the $500 billion that it is currently in the process of buying. In addition, the Fed said it would buy (read: you will be buying) up to $300 billion worth of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months. That would tend to artificially push down longer-term interest rates on loans of all types - at least that’s the thinking. All of the Fed’s measures would come in addition to what has already been an unprecedented expansion of lending by the Fed. Since last September, the central bank has roughly doubled the size of its balance sheet to $2 trillion from $900 billion (buying up marginal or worthless debts in your behalf) — even before today’s action — in what appears to be a concerted effort to create $10 per gallon milk.

When the spending (running up of U.S. debt owed to the rest of the world) reaches its predictable crescendo, the interest payments alone will be tens of billions of dollars per day - per day.

And you want to send your child to what school? You want to buy what house? Don’t make me laugh. Your congressmen and women have seen to it that it will never happen - never.

Ask yourself: On whom has most of this borrowed money been spent, or going to be spent?

Regardless of the answer, whether based on knowledge or bias, understand that you’re going to pay for it (and there are a lot of ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ in your life and your children’s and grandchildren’s lives that all of you are going to have to forego). This is not change you should be proud of.

Politics: Democrats say Rush Limbaugh is running the Republican Party. Better Rush than George Soros, who is running the Democrats. At least Rush believes in freedom, capitalism and letting you keep what you earn.

The cover of the March 7 issue of Newsweek shows a picture of conservative icon Limbaugh with a piece of tape covering his mouth and the word "Enough!" So much for disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it. Voltaire could never be a contributor to Newsweek.

But David Frum is, and his inside cover story, "Why Rush Is Wrong," savages Limbaugh and praises President Obama in a way that makes one wonder if tingles are running up his leg like they did for MSNBC's Chris Matthews.
Frum describes a debate with, on one side, "the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims."

On the other side, Frum places Limbaugh, with "his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history."

The perfect and athletic Mr. Frum forgot to blame Rush for inciting the Oklahoma City bombing, as many others on the left did.

This is what passes for public discourse these days as the mainstream media see their readers and viewers flee.
Over at MSNBC, where viewership is at microscopic Air America levels, the tingly Matthews over the weekend described Limbaugh as "a human vat of vitriol." He then ran a clip from "You Only Live Twice," where a James Bond villain pushes a victim into a piranha tank. Subtle.

"Do you know what he does?" Matthews says to the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page. "He defends capitalism." Horrors! Hide the children. To which Page responds that "ever since Reagan we've been on a trend of taxing lower-income people and giving breaks to the upper income."

Page et al. rewrite history into a lie agreed upon. The Reagan and Bush tax cuts went to those who pay taxes, to those who pull the wagon rather than those riding it.

They were not given anything. They were allowed to keep their own money. No wealth was redistributed or spread around unlike Obama's plan. The fact is that "ever since Reagan" the rich have borne an ever-increasing share of the tax burden while the poor have been removed entirely from the tax rolls.

A study for the National Center for Policy Analysis shows that from 1986 to 2004, the total share of the income tax burden paid by the top 1% of income earners grew by nearly half, from 25.8% to 36.9%. Over that same time, wrote study author Michael Stroup, an economist and associate dean of the Nelson Rusche College of Business at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, the burden of the bottom 50% of earners was almost halved from 6.5% to 3.3%.

The Tax Foundation has noted that in 2000, a year before the first tax cuts under Bush, roughly 30 million tax returns had no income tax liability. Every dollar those earners made they kept.

By 2004, a year after the second round of cuts was passed, 43 million returns had no tax. It estimates that, in all, more than 25 million Americans have been wiped off the federal tax rolls just by President Bush.

Yes, Rush wants Obama's socialism to fail just as liberals and Democrats wanted Bush's defense of capitalism and freedom to fail.

A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll of 900 registered voters taken Aug. 8-9, 2006, asked this question: Regardless of how you voted in the presidential election, would you say you want President Bush to succeed or not?" Fifty-one percent of Democrats said no, they did not want Bush to succeed.

Another Fox poll taken Jan. 16-17, 2007, asked respondents about the surge in Iraq: "Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed?" An astounding 34% said they did not want the surge to succeed. Among Democratic Party leaders the percentage was probably close to 100%.

If, as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel says, Rush Limbaugh "is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party," it is only fair to ask: Who is his Democratic counterpart?

Our nominee is George Soros, the Hungarian billionaire and former Nazi sympathizer who helped fund MoveOn.org, the radical group that smeared Gen. David Petraeus with its "General Betray Us" ad last fall.

Through his Open Society Initiative and personal contributions Soros has funded many liberal causes and many Democratic candidates with the intent of undermining democracy and capitalism. His ultimate goal is to create a global socialist collective where we hand over our money and/or freedom and sing "Kumbaya."

For our part, we'll take Rush over Soros.

Rush believes in the Constitution and the First Amendment. He believes in freedom of religion and the freedom of speech. He believes in the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms to protect all our freedoms.

He believes in securing our borders and taking the war on terror to the enemy and winning. He believes that traditional marriage between a man and a woman is the bedrock of any stable society.

He believes that taxes should be low and are to fund the constitutional functions of government. He believes that government should work for us and not the other way around.

Rush does not believe, as Soros and the Democrats do, in open borders, confiscatory taxation, redistribution of wealth, a gutted military, appeasing despots or being forced under penalty of imprisonment to pay through our taxes other people's mortgages.

And, unlike George Soros and the Democrats, we will defend to the death his right to say it.

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
March 10, 200

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=321575363666179

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