Thought For The Day
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Irony at its best: 290 people get the Swine Flu and everybody wants to wear a mask. Ten million people irrefutably have AIDS and no one wants to wear a condom.
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.
An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:
I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know. This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere.
This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.
What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.
They end up worse off than before.
This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)
Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?
I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."
Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.
As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?"
(http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ):
"Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."
These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.
Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!
What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?
Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.
And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.
If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.
But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.
You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)
If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.
That's where you are right now.
It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.
If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.
Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.
You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.
This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.
You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.
This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina.
http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html
In case you missed this week's issue of the Army Times, here are the results of the Army Times' poll of Military personnel regarding the presidential election (in percent):
McCain- Obama
Overall 68- 23
Army 68- 23
Navy 69- 24
Air Force 67- 24
Marines 75- 18
Retirees 72- 20
White Non-Hispanic 76- 17
Hispanic 63- 27
Black/African-American 12- 79
Enlisted 67- 24
Officers 70- 22
Somehow we missed seeing this in the New York Times and other mainstream news outlets!! Go figure.
Imagine if Barack Obama were running on a platform of confiscating 75 percent of the income of Chinese Americans as punishment for being too studious. Also imagine if John McCain were running on a platform of confiscating 60 percent of the income of East-Indian Americans as punishment for being too industrious.
Would you vote for either of them?
I assume that you’d say no, because you’d find both platforms to be reprehensible and immoral, even if the confiscation were allowed under the law and supported by a majority of voters. Moreover, I assume that you wouldn’t vote for McCain just because his confiscation would be less than Obama’s.
Okay, if my assumptions are true, we’ve now established three principles:
(1) that it is wrong to vote for a candidate who advocates an immoral policy;
(2) that just because a policy is legal and supported by the majority of voters in a so-called nation of laws, it is not necessarily moral; and
(3) that it is wrong to choose the lesser of two evils.
Having established the three principles, let’s now look at the actual platforms of the two presidential candidates. We’ll focus only on the moral question of confiscation and not on other moral questions, such as war and abortion. The reason for this selectivity is that if the candidates’ platforms don’t pass moral muster on confiscation, there is no need to examine the more complicated questions, for a failing grade on the one question would be reason enough to withhold your vote.
Both candidates advocate confiscatory policies that are similar in kind but not necessarily degree to the hypothetical policies in the opening paragraph--that is, they advocate confiscating money from politically weak or politically out-of-favor classes of Americans for the direct benefit of politically strong and politically favored classes and special interests.
The most egregious example is their policy of sending a bill of nearly $1 million to each American under the age of 18 for the unfunded liabilities of entitlements. In other words, they are planning to confiscate the future earnings of children in order to appease the well-organized members of AARP, many of whom are financially well-off and don’t fall under the Christian precept of helping the poor. As a result, today’s children will face tax rates of 60-75 percent as adults, according to reliable estimates.
If you believe that it would be wrong to confiscate 60 percent of the income of East-Indian Americans and 75 percent of the income of Chinese Americans, then to be morally and intellectually consistent, you must also believe that it is wrong to confiscate the same percentage of future earnings from children.
Granted, McCain advocates the partial privatization of Social Security, but he has said that the much larger unfunded liability of Medicare would not be touched. This makes him the lesser of two evils on this issue but evil nonetheless.
Other examples abound, including subsidies, handouts, tax breaks, protective tariffs, transfer payments, racial spoils, and bailouts for a variety of organized and influential special interests, such as farmers, rent-seeking corporations, teacher unions, ACORN, the NAACP, La Raza, sub-prime borrowers, and Wall Street scoundrels.
Where does the money come from? It comes from the studious, the productive, the frugal, and the law-abiding--from individuals who have deferred gratification, invested their own money in their future, and lived below their means. Outnumbered and out-organized, they are no longer the Silent Majority but are the Pillaged Minority.
The country’s moral compass is so askew that the thousands of empty talking heads on network TV, 24-hour cable news, and talk radio don’t raise a moral objection to the confiscation or point out that Congress has become a huge chop-shop operation, but without the honesty of tattoos, razor wire, and pit bulls. Instead, they treat the thieves with respect.
Recently for example, a young woman said to an empty head that she shouldn’t have to pay college tuition. It didn’t dawn on the empty head to ask her why she thought it was moral to confiscate money from other people for her college expenses, including from people of modest means who don’t attend college.
Without a properly functioning moral compass, we get a nation that thinks like the young woman. We also get housing bubbles and economic meltdowns. The compass will never be fixed as long as we keep voting for candidates who advocate immorality.
By Craig J. Cantoni
Oct. 18, 2008
An author and columnist, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.
It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same
bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s.
Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.
African Village
In the winter of 1996, the Coalition for Improved Education in [Chicago’s] South Shore (CIESS) announced that it had received a $200,000 grant from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. That made CIESS an “external partner,” i.e. a community organization linked to a network of schools within the Chicago public system. This network, named the “South Shore African Village Collaborative” was thoroughly “Afrocentric” in orientation. CIESS’s job was to use a combination of teacher-training, curriculum advice, and community involvement to improve academic performance in the schools it worked with. CIESS would continue to receive large Annenberg grants throughout the 1990s.
The South Shore African Village Collaborative (SSAVC) was very much a part of the Afrocentric “rites of passage movement,” a fringe education crusade of the 1990s. SSAVC schools featured “African-Centered” curricula built around “rites of passage” ceremonies inspired by the puberty rites found in many African societies. In and of themselves, these ceremonies were harmless. Yet the philosophy that accompanied them was not. On the contrary, it was a carbon-copy of Jeremiah Wright’s worldview.
Rites of Passage
To learn what the rites of passage movement was all about, we can turn to a sympathetic 1992 study published in the Journal of Negro Education by Nsenga Warfield-Coppock. In that article, Warfield-Coppock bemoans the fact that public education in the United States is shaped by “capitalism, competitiveness, racism, sexism and oppression.” According to Warfield-Coppock, these American values “have confused African American people and oriented them toward American definitions of achievement and success and away from traditional African values.” American socialization has “proven to be dysfuntional and genocidal to the African American community,” Warfield-Coppock tells us. The answer is the adolescent rites of passage movement, designed “to provide African American youth with the cultural information and values they would need to counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society.”
The adolescent rites of passage movement that flowered in the 1990s grew out of the “cultural nationalist” or “Pan-African” thinking popular in radical black circles of the 1960s and 1970s. The attempt to create a virtually separate and intensely anti-American black social world began to take hold in the mid-1980s in small private schools, which carefully guarded the contents of their controversial curricula. Gradually, through external partners like CIESS, the movement spread to a few public schools. Supporters view these programs as “a social and cultural ‘inoculation’ process that facilitates healthy, African-centered development among African American youth and protects them against the ravages of a racist, sexist, capitalist, and oppressive society.”
We know that SSAVC was part of this movement, not only because their Annenberg proposals were filled with Afrocentric themes and references to “rites of passage,” but also because SSAVC’s faculty set up its African-centered curriculum in consultation with some of the most prominent leaders of the “rites of passage movement.” For example, a CIESS teacher conference sponsored a presentation on African-centered curricula by Jacob Carruthers, a particularly controversial Afrocentrist.
Jacob Carruthers
Like other leaders of the rites of passage movement, Carruthers teaches that the true birthplace of world civilization was ancient “Kemet” (Egypt), from which Kemetic philosophy supposedly spread to Africa as a whole. Carruthers and his colleagues believe that the values of Kemetic civilization are far superior to the isolating and oppressive, ancient Greek-based values of European and American civilization. Although academic Egyptologists and anthropologists strongly reject these historical claims, Carruthers dismisses critics as part of a white supremacist conspiracy to hide the truth of African superiority.
Carruthers’s key writings are collected in his book, Intellectual Warfare. Reading it is a wild, anti-American ride. In his book, we learn that Carruthers and his like-minded colleagues have formed an organization called the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC), which takes as its mission the need to “dismantle the European intellectual campaign to commit historicide against African peoples.” Carruthers includes “African-Americans” within a group he would define as simply “African.” When forced to describe a black person as “American,” Carruthers uses quotation marks, thus indicating that no black person can be American in any authentic sense. According to Carruthers, “The submission to Western civilization and its most outstanding offspring, American civilization, is, in reality, surrender to white supremacy.”
Carruthers’s goal is to use African-centered education to recreate a separatist universe within America, a kind of state-within-a-state. The rites of passage movement is central to the plan. Carruthers sees enemies on every part of the political spectrum, from conservatives, to liberals, to academic leftists, all of whom reject advocates of Kemetic civilization, like himself, as dangerous and academically irresponsible extremists. Carruthers sees all these groups as deluded captives of white supremacist Eurocentric culture. Therefore the only safe place for Africans living in the United States (i.e. American blacks) is outside the mental boundaries of our ineradicably racist Eurocentric civilization. As Carruthers puts it: “...some of us have chosen to reject the culture of our oppressors and recover our disrupted ancestral culture.” The rites of passage movement is a way to teach young Africans in the United States how to reject America and recover their authentic African heritage.
America as Rape
Carruthers admits that Africans living in America have already been shaped by Western culture, yet compares this Americanization process to rape: “We may not be able to get our virginity back after the rape, but we do not have to marry the rapist....” In other words, American blacks (i.e. Africans) may have been forcibly exposed to American culture, but that doesn’t mean they need to accept it. The better option, says Carruthers, is to separate out and relearn the wisdom of Africa’s original Kemetic culture, embodied in the teachings of the ancient wise man, Ptahhotep (an historical figure traditionally identified as the author of a Fifth Dynasty wisdom book). Anything less than re-Africanization threatens the mental, and even physical, genocide of Africans living in an ineradicably white supremacist United States.
Carruthers is a defender of Leonard Jeffries, professor in the department of black studies at City College in Harlem, infamous for his black supremacist and anti-Semitic views. Jeffries sees whites as oppressive and violent “ice people,” in contrast to peaceful and mutually supportive black “sun people.” The divergence says Jeffries, is attributable to differing levels of melanin in the skin. Jeffries also blames Jews for financing the slave trade. Carruthers defends Jeffries and excoriates the prestigious black academics Carruthers views as traitorous for denouncing their African brother, Jeffries. Carruthers’s vision of the superior and peaceful Kemetic philosophy of Ptahhotep triumphing over Greco-Euro-American-white culture obviously parallels Jeffries’ opposition between ice people and sun people.
More of Carruthers’s education philosophy can be found in his newsletter, The Kemetic Voice. In 1997, for example, at the same time Carruthers was advising SSAVC on how to set up an African-centered curriculum, he praised the decision of New Orleans’ School Board to remove the name of George Washington from an elementary school. Apparently, some officials in New Orleans had decided that nobody who held slaves should have a school named after him. Carruthers touted the name-change as proof that his African-centered perspective was finally having an effect on public policy. At the demise of George Washington School, Carruthers crowed: “These events remind us of how vast the gulf is that separates the Defenders of Western Civilization from the Champions of African Civilization.”
According to Chicago Annenberg Challenge records, Carruthers’s training session on African-centered curricula for SSAVC teachers was a huge hit: “As a consciousness raising session, it received rave reviews, and has prepared the way for the curriculum readiness survey....” These teacher-training workshops were directly funded by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Another sure sign of the ideological cast of SSAVC’s curriculum can be found in Annenberg documents noting that SSAVC students are taught the wisdom of Ptahhotep. Carruthers’s concerns about “menticide” and “genocide” at the hand of America’s white supremacist system seem to be echoed in an SSAVC document that says: “Our children need to understand the historical context of our struggles for liberation from those forces that seek to destroy us.”
When Jeremiah Wright turned toward African-centered thinking in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the period when, attracted by Wright’s African themes, Barack Obama first became a church member), many prominent thinkers from Carruthers’s Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations were invited to speak at Trinity United Church of Christ, Carruthers himself included. We hear echoes of Carruthers’s work in Wright’s distinction between “right brained” Africans and “left brained” Europeans, in Wright’s fears of U.S. government-sponsored genocide against American blacks, and in Wright’s embittered attacks on America’s indelibly white-supremacist history. In Wright’s Trumpet Newsmagazine, as in Carruthers’s own writings, blacks are often referred to as “Africans living in the diaspora” rather than as Americans.
Asa Hilliard
Chicago Annenberg Challenge records also indicate that SSAVC educators invited Asa Hilliard, a pioneer of African-centered curricula and a close colleague of Carruthers, to offer a keynote address at yet another Annenberg-funded teacher training session. Hilliard’s ties to Wright run still deeper than Carruthers’s. A close Wright mentor and friend, Hilliard died in 2007 while on a trip to Kemet (Egypt) with Wright and members of Wright’s congregation. Hillard was scheduled to deliver several lectures to the congregants, and to speak at a meeting of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization, which he co-founded with Carruthers and other “African-centered” scholars. On that last trip, Hilliard accepted an appointment to the board of Wright’s new elementary school, Kwame Nkrumah Academy. Speaking of the need for such a school, Wright had earlier said, “We need to educate our children to the reality of white supremacy.” (For more on Wright’s Afrocentric school, see “Jeremiah Wright’s ‘Trumpet.’”)
Wright delivered the eulogy at Hilliard’s memorial service, with prominent members of ASCAC in the audience. To commemorate Hilliard, a special, two-cover double issue of Wright’s Trumpet Newsmagazine was published, with a picture of Hilliard on one side, and a picture of Louis Farrakhan on the other (in celebration of a 2007 award Farrakhan received from Wright). In short, the ties between Wright and Hilliard could hardly have been closer. Clearly, then, Wright’s own educational philosophy was mirrored at the Annenberg-funded SSAVC, which sought out Hilliard’s and Carruthers’s counsel to construct its curriculum.
Perhaps inadvertently, Wright’s eulogy for Hilliard actually established the fringe nature of his favorite African-centered scholars. In his tribute, Wright stressed how intensely “white Egyptologists recoiled at the very notion of everything Asa taught.” As Wright himself made plain, it seems virtually impossible to find respectable scholars of any political stripe who approve of the extremist anti-American version of Afrocentrism promoted by Hilliard and Carruthers.
Ayers’s Pals
An important exception to the rule is Bill Ayers himself, who not only worked with Obama to fund groups like this at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, but who is still “palling around” with the same folks. Discretely waiting until after the election, Bill Ayers and his wife, and fellow former terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn plan to release a book in 2009 entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy. The book will be published by Third World Press, a press set up by Carruthers and other members of the ASCAC. Representatives of that press were prominently present for Wright’s eulogy at Asa Hilliard’s memorial service. Less than a decade ago, therefore, when it came to education issues, Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright were pretty much on the same page.
Obama’s Knowledge
Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright, Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be convincing. For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers. (See “No Liberation.”)
And as noted, Wright had invited Carruthers, Hilliard, and like-minded thinkers to address his Trinity congregants. Wright likes to tick off his connections to these prominent Afrocentrists in sermons, and Obama would surely have heard of them. Reading over SSAVC’s Annenberg proposals, Obama could hardly be ignorant of what they were about. And if by some chance Obama overlooked Hilliard’s or Carruthers’s names, SSAVC’s proposals are filled with references to “rites of passage” and “Ptahhotep,” dead giveaways for the anti-American and separatist ideological concoction favored by SSAVC.
We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the Ayers-headed “Collaborative” to distance itself from monetary issues, all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly, there was dissent within the board. One business leader and experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg proposals as “awful.” (See “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement.
As if the content of SSAVC documents wasn’t warning enough, their proposals consistently misspelled “rites of passage” as “rights of passage,” hardly an encouraging sign from a group meant to improve children’s reading skills. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge’s own evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores. Evaluators attributed that failure, in part, to the fact that many of Annenberg’s “external partners” had little educational expertise. A group that puts its efforts into Kwanzaa celebrations and half-baked history certainly fits that bill, and goes a long way toward explaining how Ayers and Obama managed to waste upwards of $150 million without improving student achievement.
However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It’s time for McCain to say so.
By Stanley Kurtz
Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
------------------------- Response by Red State Patriot:
Redistribution of any right what-so-ever, or income from any family to any ethnic group, because they are an identifiable ethnic group, by any other name is dhminitude, i.e., cultural and institutional subservience of the victim to the recipient. Arguably, this is the core ideology of black liberation theology. Think not? Read the foundation principles of Obama’s church of 20 years, and Reverend Wright:
About Us
We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain "true to our native land," the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community. Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee chaired by Vallmer Jordan in 1981. We believe in the following 12 precepts and covenantal statements. These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They must reflect on the following concepts:
1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of "Middleclassness"
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.
Is this what Obama’s voters of European, Latin American and Asian heritage are naively voting to advance? If so, the magnitude of their historical, economic and religious ignorance is greater than the sum-total knowledge of the known universe.
Message to Senator Obama's probable voters: Get off my back. Call a cab.
Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac execs now offering advice to Obama Senator's links to mortgage giants also include campaign contributions
Campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made to Barack Obama may backfire if the Democratic presidential hopeful wages an aggressive campaign to cast blame on rival John McCain and the Republicans in Congress for the mortgage-related losses that forced the U.S. Treasury to take over the quasi-governmental mortgage giants.
A review of Federal Election Commission records back to 1989 reveals Obama in his three complete years in the Senate is the second largest recipient of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae campaign contributions, behind only Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., the powerful chairman of the Senate banking committee. Dodd was first elected to the Senate in 1980.
According to OpenSecrets.com, from 1989 to 2008, Dodd received $165,400 in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign contributions, including contributions from PACs and individuals, followed by Obama, who received $126,349 in such contributions since being elected to the Senate in 2004.
In contrast, McCain warned of the coming mortgage crisis as he pressed in 2005 for regulatory reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
"For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – known as government-sponsored entities or GSEs – and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market," McCain said on the floor of the Senate in 2005, speaking in favor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005.
McCain pointed out Fannie Mae's regulator had stated the company's quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were "illusions deliberately and systematically created" by the company's senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.
The bill passed the House but was never brought up for a vote in the Senate, largely because of Democratic opposition to change in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulatory structure that remained in place until the Treasury takeover two weeks ago.
As evidenced by the failure to pass the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, the Democrats in Congress have repeatedly fought back Republican Party efforts to reform the two mortgage banking giants.
Instead, Democrats in Congress have sought to preserve the quasi-governmental status of the mortgage giants, seeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as places to locate former top Democratic Party operatives, where they have earned millions in compensation, despite a continuing series of financial scandals. Enron-like accounting manipulation, for example, boosted earnings to a level at which massive executive bonuses could be paid.
In the aftermath of the U.S. government takeover, attention has focused on three Democrats with close ties to Obama who served as Fannie Mae executives: Franklin Raines, former Clinton administration budget director; James Johnson, former aide to Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale; and Jamie Gorelick, former Clinton administration deputy attorney general.
All three Obama-related executives earned millions in compensation from Fannie Mae.
Johnson earned $21 million in just his last year serving as Fannie Mae CEO from 1991 to 1998; Raines earned $90 million in his five years as Fannie Mae CEO, from 1999 to 2004; and Gorelick earned an estimated $26 million serving as vice chair of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2003, according to author David Frum, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
All three have been involved in mortgage-related financial scandals.
In 1998, according to the Washington Post, Gorelick, as Fannie Mae vice chairman, received a bonus of $779,625, despite a scandal in which employees falsified signatures on accounting transactions to manipulate books to meet 1998 earning targets. The moves, in turn, triggered multi-million-dollar bonuses for top executives.
Gorelick was embroiled in another controversy over an alleged conflict of interest when a 1995 memo she authored as deputy attorney general surfaced while she was a member of the 9/11 commission.
The memo, which became known as the "Gorelick Wall," appeared to establish barriers that barred federal anti-terrorist criminal investigators from accessing various federal records and databases that may have assisted them in their criminal investigations.
According to the Associated Press, Raines and several other Fannie Mae top executives were ordered in a civil lawsuit to pay nearly $31.4 million for manipulating Fannie Mae earnings over a period of six years to trigger their massive bonuses.
Raines was also forced in the settlement to give up Fannie Mae stock options valued at $15.6 million.
Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged Freddie Mac had engaged in accounting fraud from 2000 to 2002, imposing a $50 million fine on the company and on four executives fines for amounts ranging from $65,000 to $250,000.
Raines currently advises Obama on housing policy.
Johnson was appointed to head Obama's vice presidential selection committee, until a controversy concerning an alleged $7 millions in questionable real estate loans he received on favorable terms from failed sub-prime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial surfaced and forced him to step down.
WND previously reported a panel chaired by Elena Kagan, dean and professor of law at Harvard Law School, speculated at the June two-day meeting of the American Constitution Society that Gorelick was a possible attorney general cabinet appointment if Obama should be elected president.
The decision by the U.S. Treasury to take over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae could end up costing the U.S. taxpayer as much as $100 billion, although the extent of losses at the two giant mortgage companies remains to be determined.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Freddie and Fannie own or guarantee about $5.2 trillion worth of mortgages.
The riskiest loans held by Freddie and Fannie are known as "Alt-A" and sub-prime mortgages, worth about $780 billion, or about 15 percent of the total portfolio.
The federal government takeover of Freddie and Fannie passes to U.S. taxpayers the contingent liability for failures in the entire $5.2 trillion loan portfolio held by the two mortgage giants.
Over the past four quarters, Freddie and Fannie have suffered losses of about $14 billion, as the mortgage market has been hit by a wave of defaults and foreclosures not seen in the U.S. since the 1930s.
Those that care may want to take note of the Israeli flag near the window.
Stand Behind Sarah Palin
Some claim he made a mistake in choosing the Alaska governor. My bet is the reverse — that she’ll turn out to be a big win. Even if I’m wrong, dropping her now would doom him in November. If McCain lets baseless, sexist smears set his course, he’d turn all the good Palin has already done for him, and should do in the weeks ahead, into a negative, demoralizing the GOP base and losing independents.
Understand: Palin is under attack because she was such a good choice.
Remember the Democrats’ central charge on McCain: “He’s a Bush clone.” By choosing Palin, something George Bush would never have done, McCain showed how really different he is.
The old ground rule for picking a running mate was to help the ticket carry a particular state. But Bill Clinton changed the rules when he tapped Al Gore in 1992. Clinton likely would’ve carried Tennessee anyway, but the choice of Gore emphasized the most important feature of Clinton’s candidacy: He was from a new generation and represented a new outlook.
And so Sarah Palin reinforces the most important aspect of the McCain candidacy: Despite 30 years in Washington, he’s an outsider and a dedicated foe of corruption and conflict of interest in government. He’s the one who stands up against pork, earmarks, and lobbyists and backs campaign-finance reform.
Palin brings the same kind of credentials to the ticket. When she speaks tonight and emphasizes her record of reform and her commitment to bring ethical standards to Washington, she’ll strike a deeply resonant chord throughout the nation.
None of the “scandal” reflects ill on Sarah herself. They’re the kind of family issues that bedevil many American women. That the media accords such prominence to them shows how fundamentally differently we treat women and men in politics.
Should she not serve as vice president because her daughter is pregnant? Or her husband had a DWI 20 years ago? Or her sister married a state trooper, who shocked his 11-year-old son with a Taser, leading relatives and friends to think he should be fired? Or because she exercised her legal right to fire the head of the state police when he saw no reason to fire the trooper?
Palin has an extensive public record — with more executive experience than Barack Obama or Joe Biden (or McCain, for that matter). She should be judged on her record, same as a man. If she is, she’ll survive these charges in great style.
And then the backlash will set in. Tens of millions of women have had to confront life experiences akin to Palin’s.
After years of electing plasticized creations of political consultants, we have the chance to vote for a real person with real peoples’ problems. In standing by her, McCain speaks volumes about his attitude toward women and his empathy for those who face family troubles. His loyalty illustrates not just his decency, but his sensitivity and good sense.
All of which illustrates the most fundamental point of this convention: That John McCain is no George W. Bush.
Free republics are not known to have long life expectancies. At the ripe old age of two hundred and thirty-two, America is definitely showing her age. She is long past her prime, and some are predicting her demise. No, some are PLANNING her demise.
Thomas Jefferson and the other founders of this once-great country believed there was a controlling cabal that was crafting America's servitude. With the assistance of Heaven, they decided to fight those forces. Pastors fought with fiery sermons from the pulpit; newsmen fought with the power of the pen; statesmen fought in the halls of Congress; and merchants fought with the sacrifice of their material gain. Together, they lifted Lady Liberty to her feet and defeated the powers of darkness.
It took the global elite a long time to recover, but they have reemerged with a vengeance. They are now on the precipice of accomplishing what their great granddaddies failed to do: bring the "Liberty or Death" colonists under their power and control.
Sadly, we no longer have the will to resist servitude. Our pulpits are too busy preaching a prosperity gospel; newsmen are in bed with the forces they once disdained; statesmen have been replaced with opportunistic, self-serving politicians; and merchants know no god but money. Hence, it is left to a small--and I mean very small--remnant to sound the clarion call for freedom and independence. Unfortunately, few seem to be listening to their cries.
2010 seems to be a banner year for these designers of despotism. That is the target year for the implementation of the North American Community, which will commercially unite the United States with Canada and Mexico. The global elite suffered a minor setback when the U.S. Senate failed to pass the Bush/McCain/Kennedy/Graham amnesty-for-illegal-aliens bill. But if you think that John McCain is going to let that bill lie on the floor of defeat, you don't understand these people. Should McCain become President, he will do everything he can to implement some kind of amnesty law. Barack Obama will do the same. The reason? It is essential to the designers of despotism that our borders be eliminated.
Yes, I am saying it: George W. Bush, John McCain, and Barack Obama are part of the global elite that seeks America's entrance into an international New World Order. In fact, neither Presidential candidate from the two major parties will offer any resistance to this obstinate and oppressive oligarchy.
Perhaps one day the American people will wake up and realize that they are being led as sheep to the slaughter. I'm just not sure that it will be soon enough, however. 2010 is just around the corner.
There seems to be only one obstacle standing in the way of the globalists: America's citizens are the most heavily armed people in the world. That fact must surely stick in the throats of the globalists like a chicken bone.
Thank God that America's founders put the Second Amendment in the Constitution. Without America's deep-rooted commitment to the right of the people to keep and bear arms, we would have been sold into slavery decades ago.
Without the intellectual understanding of the principles of freedom and the moral resolve to maintain those principles, however, guns, by themselves, will only protect us for so long. In the end, our strength and protection come from God, and not too many people these days seem to be interested in His opinion.
Lady Liberty is walking very gingerly these days, and the path she treads is laden with traps and quicksand. The globalists have their handpicked puppets positioned to take up where The Three Amigos (George Bush I, Bill Clinton, and George Bush II) have left off. The pieces of the puzzle are almost all in place. 2010 just might be the year that Lady Liberty lowers her torch, folds her arms, and falls fast asleep.
For what it is worth, however, I pledge no loyalty to this emerging New World Order. Neither will I let Lady Liberty die without a fight. I will say it again: the battle today is not between conservatives and liberals or Republicans and Democrats. It is a battle between Americans and globalists.
And, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am an American!
By Chuck Baldwin
July 18, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
Liberals are not ignorant, just anti-American – but that’s speculating. Neoconservatives, i.e., liberals who hold relatively few conservative views, such as Newt Gingrich, are simply badly uninformed about some of the issues they publicly address. Because they call themselves conservatives, but in reality are not, conservatives tend to listen to them. As a result, neoconservatives often get elected with the conservative vote. Unfortunately, while well intentioned in many cases, liberals disguised as conservatives do a lot of harm due to their profound ignorance on many subjects. Senator John McCain and President George W. Bush are two prime examples that will resonate in history and folklore forever.
Why is this important? You’ve had questions about rising energy prices, and record oil profits have been brought into question. You've listened to what the politicians and main-stream-media are telling you. You know intuitively that their commentary is sound – all sound. So, what is the truth? First of all, not attempting to be profound, the truth simply is.
Democrats want to implement windfall profit taxes, which ultimately will be passed on to the consumer at the gas pump and raise prices ever higher – significantly higher. The outcome is a foregone conclusion, i.e., politicians cynically win, having found a way to take even more of your money, and citizens lose. Republicans, i.e., neoconservatives, knowing that raising taxes would be a national economic disaster, want instead to punish the speculators who they choose to scapegoat for the rising prices. The similarity between the Democrats and Republicans (neither of whom are conservatives) is their propensity for shifting the blame for their own congressional malfeasance to anyone but themselves, refusing defiantly to take responsibility for the on-going energy debacle. ‘Shifting the blame’ is the single most common character trait of a liberal – every liberal. They, being the typical congressmen they are, would sacrifice their relatives before accepting accountability, even their grandmother.
The energy crisis we face as a nation due to lack of oil, nuclear, coal, refineries, and absence of exploration will never be their fault, just as the loss of jobs and outsourcing of entire industries is not their fault, just as the drunken overspending with earmarks and entitlements is not their fault, just as the abysmal failure of our nation’s public schools is not their fault, nor the open borders, nor the failing Social Security and Medicare systems.
Here is everything you need to know in two articles. The first appeared in the Wall Street Journal in February, 1989 and the second in Investor’s Business Daily on June 23, 2008
Red State Patriot
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The Speculator as Hero
Wall Street Journal
February 10, 1989
This is not a good time for speculators. Last month the FBI and the Chicago U.S. Attorney's office accused more than 100 traders on the Chicago commodities exchanges of systematically cheating investors and the government out of millions of dollars. Lawyers in Chicago have been besieged by floor traders wishing to plead guilty to the charges.
Coming on the heels of the October 1987 stock market crash, popularly thought to be the fault of program traders and portfolio insurers, and amid the popular furor over insider trading, the speculator's stock may be at an all-time low. Even fictional speculators are in trouble. In Tom Wolfe's best seller "Bonfire of the Vanities," bond trader Sherman McCoy is ridiculed by his wife, and is unable to explain what he does for a living to his young daughter. In real life, noted currency trader Andy Krieger, in a widely reported incident in 1987, quit his job after he found himself unable to supply a satisfactory answer to his eight-year-old son's question about what good his job did.
Like Sherman McCoy and Andy Krieger, I am a speculator. I own seats on the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But when my daughters ask me if my job is as important as the butcher's, the doctor's or the scientist's, I answer that the speculator is a hero, and has been throughout history.
Some speculators are discoverers like Christopher Columbus, creators like Henry Ford, or inventors like Thomas Edison. Their job is easy to place on a high plane. My role in the grander order is indirect, relatively invisible and unplanned. The only discoveries I make are the routes that prices will travel. Like hundreds of thousands of other traders, I try to predict the prices of common goods a day or two or a few months in the future. If I think the price of an item will go up, I buy today and sell later. If I think the price is going down, I'll sell at today's higher price. The miracle is that in taking care of ourselves, we speculators somehow ensure that producers all over the world will provide the right quantity and quality of goods at the proper time, without undue waste, and that this meshes with what people want and the money they have available.
Politicians eager to "do something" about high prices often make laws to punish the speculator. A representative incident occurred during the reign of Emperor Diocletian in Rome in A.D. 300. Speculators were withholding scarce provisions from the hordes, hoping to unload when the demand was even more intense. To remedy this, Diocletian set the highest price for beef, grains, clothing and several hundred other items. Anyone who sold at a higher price would be put to death.
The result? As reported by Lactantius in A.D. 314: "Much blood was shed upon slight and trifling accounts. The people brought no more provisions to the markets, since they could not get a reasonable price for them, and this increased the dearth so much that at last after many had died by it, the law itself was laid aside."
Another representative incident occurred during the siege of Antwerp by the Spanish in 1585. Antwerp was then the leading commercial town of Europe. The Spanish decided to blockade the port to force surrender when supplies gave out. Knowing this, Antwerp farmers and bakers produced large amounts of bread. Privateers ran the blockade at great peril to provide needed supplies. Prices began to rise. Speculators, guessing that bread was going to be scarce, contributed to further price rises through shrewd purchases.
But Antwerp politicians thought it wrong for greedy speculators to profit from war. The politicians fixed a very low maximum price to everything that could be eaten, and prescribed severe penalties for violators. The consequence was inevitable. Privateers stopped running the blockades and the supply of grain dried up. Consumers had no incentive to economize. The citizens ran out of all their provisions after six months of the siege and the Antwerpers starved. They surrendered and were quickly annexed.
Let's consider some of the principles that explain the causes of shortages and surpluses and the role of speculators.
When a harvest is too small to satisfy consumption at its normal rate, speculators come in, hoping to profit from the scarcity by buying. Their purchases raise the price, thereby checking consumption so that the smaller supply will last longer. Producers encouraged by the high price further lessen the shortage by growing or importing to reduce the shortage. On the other side, when the price is higher than the speculators think the facts warrant, they sell. This reduces prices, encouraging consumption and exports and helping to reduce the surplus.
Of course, speculators aren't always correct. When they are wrong, their actions contribute to shortages or gluts. Manias such as the Tulipmania, the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi Bubble, gold panics, stock market crashes, and violent swings in the value of the dollar are frequently cited as examples of occasions when speculators contributed to instability and imbalance. But who could do the job better?
Bureaucrats have little incentive to improve, invest or innovate. When speculators are wrong, however, they are punished severely for their mistakes by losses of their own money. If left unchecked, the tendencies of our modern kings (read: government – emphasis added) to interfere with the natural working of the marketplace would lead to destruction. But speculators, searching for profit, send signals to producers and consumers as to the forces of destruction and good.
Traders sent such a signal on October 19, 1987, when they dropped the wealth of the non-Japanese-speaking world by 10% in one day when a modern-day king tried to interfere with the natural order by driving the dollar down one last 5% or so.
Perhaps the most positive impact of our current-day speculators is to check at inception governmental activities that would have an inflationary impact. Governments are prone to spend more money on their activities than they take in through taxes. The consequence often has been substantial inflation, followed by war, revolution and destruction of civilization. Nowadays, however, bond traders are so alert to the long-term consequences of such activities that they immediately send debt yields up significantly at the first sign of inflation.
The increased yields have such a negative and immediate impact on government revenue, business activity, and consumer spending that governments have all but given up trying to sneak increased spending past the market. As a result, the rate of inflation slowed markedly throughout the Western world during the 1980s. At the end of last year the long-term yield on a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond was 8.8% vs. 14.4% on the day after President Reagan was first elected. The great era of prosperity that has accompanied this reduced inflation adds a feather to the speculator's cap.
Granted, speculators are not angels; many are motivated by gambling and greed, and when given the chance will take advantage of the public as much as the next person.
What is the net effect of such evilness? Consider the purchase of one Treasury bond futures contract, the most actively traded futures contract. This is where the U.S. Attorney apparently focused his investigation after the undercover agents suffered huge losses for the government's account in stock market futures during the October 1987 crash.
To buy the equivalent of $100,000 in bonds, an average customer might pay $17.50 in commission (half of a typical $35 commission for one contract's purchase and sale) and $31.25 (one "tick"), the usual spread between the bid price and the ask price. This adds up to a $48.75 transaction cost for each $100,000 purchase.
Compare this with the "gentlemanly" New York Stock Exchange, where market-making speculators have a monopoly on trading in individual stocks. To purchase $100,000 of IBM stock (about 800 shares), the most actively traded Big Board issue, an average customer might pay 40 cents a share in commission costs and a 25-cent-a-share bid-ask spread. This $520 transaction cost is more than 10 times the cost to trade the same dollar amount of futures contracts.
Much of the suspected wrongdoing in Chicago apparently involved unscrupulous futures brokers who misreported customer transactions or gave customers unfavorable prices. But even if a bond-futures broker, for example, stole an additional $31.25 tick on every customer order, the liquidity of the market would still be far greater than that of the less-competitive Big Board. The customer would still be paying only one-sixth of the cost of the same trade in IBM stock.
This example serves not to exonerate crooked futures brokers, but to demonstrate the efficiency of a competitive market. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the speculator gets the job done, governments have attempted to bypass speculators in the name of a higher good.
The intellectual raises his eyebrows at the economic and historical analysis and contemptuously says, "Man cannot live by bread alone." To this I respond that without us, there would be no bread.
I am proud to be a speculator. I am proud that my humble attempts to predict Tuesday's prices on Monday are an indispensable component of our society. By buying low and selling high, I create harmony and freedom.
Mr. Niederhoffer is chairman of NCZ Commodities. This article appeared in the February 10, 1989, issue of The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones and Co., Inc., 1989.
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Just Speculating
Investor's Business Daily
June 23, 2008
Energy: Democrats, in their never-ending search for scapegoats, have had a go at oil company CEOs, industry profits and now oil "speculators." They've looked everywhere but where they should — in the mirror.
The congressional hearings that kicked off Monday to look into speculative behavior in the markets produced all the usual finger-pointing about the doubling in oil prices over the past year to nearly $137 a barrel.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama, seeking to catch a political wave he can ride all the way to the presidency, has announced he'll "crack down" on oil speculation by imposing new limits and regulations on oil traders in the futures markets.
But as emotionally satisfying as going after speculators sounds, this will only make our current oil problem much worse.
Its true there's speculation in the oil market. But then again, there's speculation in virtually every exchange-traded good — from oil and gold to corn and pork bellies. This isn't just acceptable, it's healthy.
Speculators aren't evil. They ensure a liquid market for the commodities we need most. They make money by buying low, when the product is in low demand, and selling high, when demand has grown.
It has been pretty easy for them to make money recently, because speculation in oil has become a one-way bet.
Global oil demand has been growing by about a million barrels a day each year — thanks to surging use in fast-growing China, India, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe. Supply hasn't kept pace. In fact, it's falling at key suppliers including Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria and Russia. So the price rises.
The logical answer to any question about speculation in a market is: What are you doing to boost supply? In the case of Congress and the solution offered by Obama, the answer is nothing.
They would punish people who do economically useful work, but wouldn't add a drop to our oil supply. If they really wanted to break the back of speculation, they should signal that they intend to use every means at their disposal to bring energy markets back in line.
High prices already have curbed demand here in the U.S., the latest data show. What's left is to drill for the literally hundreds of billions of barrels of oil we have here in this country locked up offshore, in Alaska and in vast shale-oil reserves.
Instead, the Democrat-led Congress has pursued foolish energy policies that lead inevitably to higher prices, less supply and declining standards of living for all Americans.
As for speculation, one tell-tale sign of market manipulation is a buildup of inventories kept off the market to keep prices high. That is, as the price runs up, the speculators pull supply off the market.
Is that happening? No. Oil inventories, in the most recent data, are down year over year. No one's hoarding oil.
Claims of surging speculation likewise fall apart on closer examination. It's true that speculative positions in oil have jumped from 37% of all oil traded in 2000 to 70% now. But much of that trading involves commercial hedging and risk-management — not speculation by people out to make a killing.
As the Commodity Futures Trading Commission notes: "There are almost as many short speculative positions as there are long positions." In other words, speculators are betting as much that prices will drop as they will rise.
In short, there's no real evidence that speculators are driving energy prices up. But there's plenty of evidence that Congress' refusal to permit drilling is a big factor keeping supplies down.
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
June 23, 2008
Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
"The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies." Lord Salisbury
Lord Salisbury's rule comes to mind on reading of John McCain's delight at the $40 billion contract awarded the French-led parent of Airbus -- to build the next generation of U.S. Air Force tankers.
The contract could run to $100 billion and is a body blow to Boeing in its duel to the death with Airbus. Two-thirds of all air-to-air refueling tankers are used by the United States. The contract gives a 30-year lease on life to the expiring Airbus A330 and means early death for Boeing's 767, the U.S. model for the tanker.
Congratulating himself for having exposed corruption in the Boeing bid, McCain purred, "I have always insisted that the Air Force buy major weapons through fair and open competition."
If McCain thinks Airbus has prospered through "fair and open competition," he is beyond recall. In its first 25 years, Airbus sold 770 planes but did not make a dime in profit. It was started as a socialist cartel, subsidized by the governments of Spain, France, Britain and Germany, to invade and capture a market owned by Americans who built the planes that won World War II.
Airbus drove Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas out of the business of commercial aircraft and almost took down Boeing. And like indolent buffalo munching grass as they are shot one by one, we let it happen.
Lost U.S. jobs should not be our primary concern, said McCain, "I've always felt the best thing to do is to create the best weapons system we can at minimum cost to taxpayers."
But if McCain thinks cost trumps all in building weapons of war, why not outsource the building of U.S. carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates and submarines to the foreign shipyards that construct America's merchant ships? Why not hire and train foreign sailors as crews?
Why not outsource the scores of thousands of U.S. government jobs handling Social Security checks and tax returns to Bangladesh and India? After all, the neocons want to hire foreign mercenaries to fight America's wars and reward them with U.S. citizenship, as the Romans did in the last days of the empire.
What does it mean to be an American anymore?
It took 20 years to wake up blockheaded Republicans to the social insanity of open borders. Only the collapse of his candidacy last summer jolted McCain into realizing that the 80 percent of Americans who reject amnesty and want a border fence are not all "bigots," as his Tonto, Lindsay Graham, said they were.
Is it going to take 20 more years for Republicans to awaken to the economic disaster they have created and the political ruin they are inviting with this fanatic faith in "free trade," while the rest of the world loots our country through mercantilism?
When Europe imposes a 15 percent value-added tax on U.S. imports and rebates the VAT on exports to the United States, that is not free trade. When China devalues its currency 45 percent, as it did in 1994, and bolts it down to suck jobs and factories out of the United States, that is not free trade. When Japan manipulates its currency, preaches economic nationalism to its people, and shelters its market for TVs, autos and steel, while dumping into and capturing ours, that is not free trade.
McCain admits to knowing almost nothing about economics and is now being advised by my old friend Jack Kemp. In a Wall Street Journal essay bemoaning my views, Kemp concedes, "I'm on the advisory board of Toyota North America and now drive a hybrid Lexus."
Nor is Jack the only pol who has found happiness in a foreign employ. Ex-secretaries of state and Cabinet officers, ex-senators and congressmen, and ex-White House aides are getting rich working for foreigners who are carting off American jobs, American technology, American markets, American factories -- and America's future.
Yet retribution may be at hand for our multinational GOP. In Ohio, NAFTA is a five-letter word with a four-letter meaning, as Ohio lost a huge slice of the 3.5 million manufacturing jobs that vanished under the McCain-Kemp-Bush policy of unilateral disarmament in the trade wars being waged against America. (emphasis added)
Look at the Bush-McCain record: $4 trillion in trade deficits, $2.5 trillion in manufactures alone. One in every six manufacturing jobs, 3 million, gone. With America borrowing $2 billion a day to pay for foreign goods, we have seen a collapse of the dollar, the price of gold quadruple to $1,000 an ounce, oil soar to $107 a barrel (now $140 and headed higher – emphasis added) and gas heading toward $4 a gallon (looking through the rear-view mirror, more likely $7 a gallon – emphasis added).
Where Bush created an average of 46,000 new private-sector jobs a month, Bill Clinton did five times as well, creating 220,000 a month.
Hillary won Ohio denouncing the NAFTA deal Bill Clinton cut. The lady gets it. McCain remains a loyal NAFTA man. Good luck in Ohio and Michigan.
As the Great Peer said, "The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies."
by Patrick J. Buchanan
03/11/2008
Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
Is it just me … Or somewhere in the Bush Administration and Congress, has the word has gone out that it is okay to consider taking action that will harm the United States of America by intentionally restricting long term energy needs? I apologize. That’s probably not as inclusive as it should be. Congress, government agencies and state legislatures have been pursuing anti-American goals that excessively tax, deny or limit energy to American consumers and manufacturing for decades.
As an example, not long ago, the Department of the Interior (DOI) was “priming the pump” of public disinformation by proposing to add polar bears to the ever growing list of “endangered species.” You probably remember hearing something about it. The first thing you and I were NOT told was that the demise of the polar bears was unrelated to their current, robust and thriving numbers. The hypothetical DOI polar bear panic came from nothing more than another computer model projection, not unlike the illegitimate genesis of global warming.
This new polar bear computer model was fed suppositions about the environment for the next 50 years. And because it was based on the bias of the model’s developer, not science that could be replicated in a laboratory environment, predictably the data fed to the computer concluded that, in 50 years, polar bears MIGHT become endangered.
It worked for global warming! The fools bought into it. Why not try again?
Since polar bears have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, the notion that polar bears might suddenly go missing in 50 years seems questionable – no, laughable – no, ludicrous. And look how many people bought into that too!
I can hear you asking, “Do you mean to say there is NO science to support the contention of future polar bear extinction?”
Gather around; you don’t want to miss this. Listen to my words. The irrefutable fact is: the habitat of polar bears is in the open waters of Alaska where geologists believe there are major reserves of undiscovered oil and natural gas. Pause. Are you beginning to see the faint outline of the big picture?
You may also recall that ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, just happens to be in a desolate location in the northeastern corner of Alaska, far above the Arctic Circle, in an area which is believed to contain vast reserves of oil. ANWR began as the Arctic National Wildlife Range in 1960 as the culmination of efforts by Sierra Club environmental activists. In 1980 the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act renamed "Range" to "Refuge," increased the total area of the Refuge, designated a large portion as Wilderness, expanded the purposes, authorized Congress to consider a portion of the coastal plain for oil and gas development, and designated three Wild Rivers. The refuge is huge, something close to 20 million acres.
Within ANWR is the "10-02 Area," which encompasses 1.5 million acres of the refuge's coastal plain. Within the 10-02 Area, 2000 acres or less is needed for oil extraction, an area comparative in size to a USPS postage stamp placed on a football field. If oil is discovered as expected, and still there are no guarantees, less than two thousand acres would be affected, out of 20 million acres, less than one tenth of one percent of ANWR, and probably closer to one-one-hundreth of one percent when all is said and done.
In 1980, the U.S. Congress mandated studies of the petroleum potential and biological resources of the ANWR area, which continue today at taxpayer expense, and the development debate about the 10-02 Area continues. During that time, the active oil field at the North Slope has declined from its peak of 2 million barrels in 1980 to less than 750,000 barrels a day today. In 2007, the US imported an average of 60% of its oil and during certain months up to 64%. That equates to over $330 billion in oil imports. That’s $37.75 million per hour gone out of our economy! Factor in the cost to defend our imported oil, and the costs in jobs and industry sent abroad, the total would be nearly a trillion dollars annually.
So what is the problem? Why hasn't Congress done something to develop ANWR, particularly since no nation on earth has more proven energy reserves? Don't believe me? Look for yourself.
Environmentalists claim the 2000 acres to be developed in the 10-02 Area are an important habitat to the Porcupine and Central Arctic Caribou Herds (which migrates through Prudhoe Bay and has grown from 3,000 animals to its current level of 32,000 animals), as well as many other species. I’m not making this up folks. This is why you don’t have oil from ANWR, or for that matter, nuclear energy in other parts of the country, or petroleum refineries, or coal for energy.
But the footprint of development is not the real issue.
Insidiously, as if in lockstep, we recently learned from a press release that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries Service had accepted a petition from “a California environmental group seeking protection under the Endangered Species Act for an ice seal called the ‘ribbon seal’ that inhabits Alaska’s Bering Sea.”
Anybody with a “low government intelligence warning light,” which typically should be on all the time, would have seen the warning light begin to flash (and alarms begin to sound). Many other lights on my caution panel began flashing, the most worrisome was labeled, “a subversive national enemy has been detected.”
As a one-time resident of Alaska and former Arctic survival instructor, intimately familiar with this area, let me assure you that in short order, maybe only a matter of months, several other varieties of seals, the bearded, spotted, and ringed seals for example, would be proposed for addition to the protection list by so-called environmentalists.
There would be humor in this ignorance if it were not for the huge national threat we face from our nation’s ideologically-driven enemies and state-sponsored religious extremists.
What the seals primarily need protection from is the 50,000 polar bears and other large maritime creatures. Seals are considered a three-course meal by any number of arctic and sub-arctic predators. It’s called “nature.” Human predation is extremely minor by comparison, but environmental extremists trumpet that “they” want all human activity to stop.
Why anyone listens to environmentalists, I have no idea. They want you to die. They would introduce the Andromeda Strain if they could, using "environmentalism" as an excuse for the atrocity. As you would expect, the animals are but a pawn – without real meaning except to those being duped. The animals are being used as a Trojan horse by non-uniformed combatants of foreign nations and anti-American ideologues to get inside the legislative gates of our nation’s defenses – nothing more.
The Endangered Species Act, which once-upon-a-time was used to support recovery of a species such as the bald eagle, has been hijacked for its advantageous use as a strategic weapon. It has been hugely successful.
While our youth fight for our mortal existence in the Muslim Wars in foreign lands, at home we’ve been fighting for decades in a different but equally deadly culture war with legal and political insurgents already entrenched inside the United States. Their most visible goal has been to replace God with government, i.e., to indoctrinate society to view an omnipotent government as if it were god, demanding that we turn to government, instead of faith, for the solution to all of mankind’s self-induced problems. Those who have accepted conversion to secularism, either because they fear molestation in a church and no longer attend, or they don’t understand the gravity of surrendering their liberty, have quietly transitioned from being owners of private property to becoming government property.
Given that environmentalists are willfully denying energy, food, and as many as 750,000 jobs across the nation that would arise from ANWR development, you would think it would be sufficient evidence to convince anyone that is both awake and conscious that these people with environmentalism as a 'cause' genuinely hate the United States and want to facilitate our nation’s destruction.
An analysis of House Democratic and Republican voting records on recent domestic energy expansion bills, making its way around the Internet, reveals that Democrats voted approximately 85% AGAINST and Republicans supported these bills by more than 90% IN FAVOR on average. Here's the breakdown of several important issues -
Think about three quarters of a million jobs for people, many with families, who are currently unemployed and financially struggling. How could these jobs not have been a factor in the severity of the housing debacle and accompanying meltdown of the economy?
What is the only possible outcome of keeping Americans from having access to the oil that powers their once thriving economy, the engine of the planet, and jobs? Prosperty? We’re talking about an economy that now tries desperately to survive with a plastic bag held over its head by our nation’s enemies, foreign and domestic, many of whom are disguised as environmentalists, and many of the remainder are affiliated with communist organizations or beholding to Middle Eastern governments. That would definitely include Barack Hussein Obama.
The jury is not in on John McCain, who has only recently back-peddled on his opposition to off-shore drilling in coastal areas. Importantly, he has consistently refused to support ANWR development - and is adamant in his refusal even today. In my voter's handbook, that makes John McCain the handmaiden of our nation's enemies. The question is simple: Will John Mccain continue to choose his environmental and subversive benefactors over his own nation and fellow citizens? Will John McCain find his patriotism, or remain as he appears today, a legitimate 'Enemy of the State'. The jury should be in soon. Given that past performance accurately predicts future actions, I remain hopeful but not optomistic.
Environmentalists appear to be trying to unceremoniously finish us off by plugging the few holes that remain in the plastic bag.
It’s worth noting that the same thing happened to the ACLU which began as a civil rights watchdog. Now its only use is as a weapon of culture litigation (another plastic bag over the top of the first one) to hinder and obstruct the national interests of the United States. The same applies to the plastic bag that passes as the main-stream-media, people more ideologically aligned with communists, and Muslim terrorists incarcerated in GITMO, than Americans. You can think of other examples, arguably the Democratic Party and a majority of the Republican Party. Let’s not forget the Supreme Court and Federal Judges! It’s hard for liberty to breathe through that many layers of plastic bags, but that’s the idea – the ultimate goal is “lights out” in America.
The two principal political parties today seem to this observer to more closely resemble organized crime families than anything else, having simply taken ethical degeneracy to a national level in the process of seeking self-interest, control and access to taxpayer funds to augment their personal wealth and rock-star lifestyle.
Reducing our much vaunted dependence on oil from the Middle East seems like a good thing to most people, but not to the enemies of the United States, especially the communists and socialists among us, and particularly not to those nations who consistently vote against anything that might benefit the United States in the United Nations. That’s the rub. Their unified goal is to strangle the United States economy, i.e., to bring the USA to its knees – to suffocate its citizens.
If you remember nothing else, it is energy and liberty that powers the United States economy. Faith powers culture. Their combination is the oxygen of the United States of America. Our enemies know they can and will suffocate the United States by denying Americans energy, liberty and faith.
As we go about our daily lives, we should be careful that we are never complicit in restricting any of these essential elements unless you are enthusiastic to name your next child Mohammed. Apparently, regardless of protestations to the contrary, many liberals, both in the United States and Europe, seek that outcome, some of my acquaintances among them.
As far as I am concerned, and I can’t express this more strongly, any United States citizen, including elected politicians, unelected judges, domestic environmental terrorists, and particularly candidates for President, who seek to choke off any potential energy source to United States citizens, are in reality but one despicable thing - determined enemies of the United States of America. This specifically applies to any politician in Congress who advocates or votes for any anti-American forms of environmentalism that limits our nation’s access to any form of energy. Clearly, with actions that speak for themselves, we have many determined enemies of the United States that have infiltrated our political system.
Endangered species listings are not a coincidence. There are no coincidences in politics. One can only conclude that congressional restrictions on developing coal-, nuclear- and petroleum-energy resources, are a reckless, deliberate subversive attack on our economy and the national security of our nation.
Remember that simple fact as you encounter politicians in your daily lives, whose actions identify themselves as environmentalists (an enemy of the United States) in the months and years ahead – particularly at the polls in 2008. Treat them with the respect any enemy of the United States deserves.
Why did this happen. We let it happen. How did this happen? It was a combination of orchestrated foreign and corporate financial influence that pervades Congress and influences every vote, greed, domestic terrorism, religious terrorism, indoctrination instead of education, cultural subversion by organizations such as the ACLU, and the decomposition of our nation’s Christian culture, abandonment of the Constitution, repudiation of the Rule of Law, judicial activism and dissolution of our political system into a criminal enterprise … in other words, the pursuit of self-interest over national interest.
What can we do about it? Nothing, short of civil disobedience which should be a last resort, just as it was 230+ years ago! We can try to elect conservatives (regardless of their affiliation as Democrats or Republicans), who in sufficient numbers will someday be able to begin to roll back the tide. And what if we can’t? Think begin thinking about naming your child Mohammed or Hussein.
And the unique beauty of the United States of America is: It’s up to you.
Red State Patriot
P.S. With crude oil above $142 a barrel, gasoline well past the $4 mark, and record heating oil, natural gas, and electricity prices, we learn today that the Bush administration has halted solar energy development.
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It hasn't quite hit the radar of the liberals in Congress, but as the price of gasoline soars above $4 a gallon (and here in California it's closing in on $5), they're going to be facing a hard choice with no good options. They will be forced to (a) throw the Greens under the bus, and embrace the idea of drilling for oil in America, in ANWR, off the coasts, wherever it may be found, or (b) throw the U.S. economy under the bus, and lose the November election to a Republican landslide, no matter who their candidate is.
If, that is, John McCain can be persuaded to see the light, come to his senses, and make a prime time speech in which he apologizes for being wrong about global warming and climate change, has learned that CO2 is not the enemy, that humans have no identifiable effect on climate, which has always been changing, and humans cannot stop it; and that it is far more important to produce enough energy from all sources, nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, oil, and coal, than to go tilting at the windmills of Greenism to stop the unstoppable climate change, which is entirely natural and organic.
If John McCain can learn that lesson, he can turn the issue of global warming and climate change on its head, and use it to take down his opponent and the Greens and Greenism in the next four months. But it must be done as a frontal attack, a headlong cavalry charge straight up the hill into the face of the enemy; something neither his opponent nor the Greens are prepared for. It would throw them into total panic and disarray.
Last week oil prices spiked $10.75 in one day, a new record, closing Friday at $138.54. Unemployment rose 10% in one month, May, from 5% to 5.5%. The Dow dropped 394 points, the biggest drop in over a year. The average working stiff has seen his cost to commute to work and home again double in less than two years, even as the equity in his house plummeted. And airlines are cutting hundreds of flights, and thousands of jobs. The high cost of not drilling for oil in America is going to savage the economy at every level.
Cybercast News Service (CNS News), in a June 6th article entitled "Lawmakers Split on Drilling for Vast Amounts of Oil in USA," reports that the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management estimates there are 139 billion barrels of untapped, recoverable oil onshore and offshore in the United States. This does not include the vast Bakken oil fields of Montana and the Dakotas, or the enormous shale oil deposits in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, or the oil sands of Oklahoma. CNS interviewed four members of Congress and found the Republicans supporting Jed Babbin's call to "drill here, drill now," while Democrats were opposed.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said, "You've got that right. We can't get it (the oil) because the environmental elitists are preventing that with moratoria saying it would take ten years to get it developed. "Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) also said Congress should deregulate to allow more drilling. "My sense is that the most direct route is for Congress to take direct action and give the American people more access to American oil."
Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) replied, "No," adding that he would "never say never," but that circumstances would have to be "pretty drastic" for him to agree to more drilling. "I am more concerned about global warming and the impact of fossil fuel," he said. House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) told CNS he needs to study the issue more. "I haven't studied enough to make that decision," he said.
But a lot of middle class, working class, and fixed-income Americans have studied the issue quite enough, and they're beginning to get angry, visibly angry, at the inexcusable inaction of Congress. As gas prices continue to rise through the summer, the anger will swell into fury. "Earth to Mike Honda," they'll be saying soon, "For us, your constituents, five dollar gasoline is pretty drastic. Earth to Charlie Rangel, how many years do you have to study to learn what you can learn in a day? If it takes that long, Charlie, are you sure you're smart enough to be a member of Congress?"
Wasn't it Mark Twain who once quipped, "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress - but I repeat myself."
Presently, we import 5.4 million barrels of oil a day from OPEC countries. At $138 a barrel, that's $745 million dollars a day we're "exporting" to Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. At 40 jobs per million dollars (at $50,000 a year per job) that's 29,800 jobs for Americans we are "outsourcing" to OPEC each day, rather than investing that money in American oil production and American jobs. At 29,800 jobs a day, that's 10,877,000 American jobs we are exporting to OPEC each year, and if the price of oil rises, so will the job loss. Democrats have threatened to punish corporations that outsource jobs to other countries, but the Democrats' own misbegotten Green policies are the No. 1cause of outsourcing in America.
At some point, something has to give, and it will either be the U.S. economy or Greenism, the obsessive-compulsive Environmentalist Personality Disorder that will sacrifice the jobs, fortunes, futures, and lives, of three hundred million Americans, in slavish homage to the myth that burning "fossil fuels" is causing climate change, and that by reducing our "carbon footprint" we can end climate change. Nothing is further from the truth. The climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate, long before we could have had anything to do with it.
How we ended up with a majority in Congress, and two presidential candidates, who are so appallingly ignorant of the basics of climatology, climate history, and the ubiquity of climate change, after this debate has already been raging for years, is a complete mystery to me. It is, in my opinion, Congressional malpractice: the willful or negligent failure of most members of Congress to become well informed about the real science and history of climate change and what the effect, if any, of CO2 on the global climate really is, or isn't, before making legislative decisions that profoundly affect the lives of 300 million Americans. And I wonder: can we sue Congress, for Congressional Malpractice?
Can we sue Congress for acting on false assumptions, when, by the exercise of reasonable care and due diligence, they could, and should, have become fully and honestly informed on the global warming and climate change issues, before making bad decisions that adversely affect the U.S. economy and the lives of every one of their constituents? Don't they have that duty? And haven't they breached it? And aren't we paying for it?
There is only one way to rescue America from the rising cost of energy that threatens to overwhelm the U.S. economy. And that is to produce more energy. As soon as possible. In America.
We don't have time to wait for pie-in-the-sky fantasies, such as cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass. A little arithmetic tells us that to replace oil with switchgrass, which according to National Geographic can produce "up to" 1,000 gallons of ethanol per acre, per year, we'd have to produce a billion gallons a day, to replace the gasoline and diesel we consume. That's 365 billion gallons a year, plus another 15% to provide the energy to produce all that cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass, for a total of 420 billion gallons a year. This would require 420 cellulosic ethanol plants producing a billion gallons a year, each, and so far, we don't have one. Not one producer of cellulosic ethanol on a commercial scale. And it would require 420 million acres of switchgrass farms, which would be a 150% increase in American farmland. And would not the adverse environmental impact of converting 420 million acres of wildlife habitat to switchgrass farms be enormous? Where are the Greens now? Why isn't the Sierra Club demanding an Environmental Impact Report?
Congress needs to come to grips with the fact that there is no credible evidence that CO2 causes "global warming. "It has been warmer in the past, when CO2 was lower than now, and the temperature dropped 0.7 degrees last year, while CO2 was rising.
But CO2 is plant food, fertilizer, plants suck it up and grow, and more CO2 in the air means plants grow faster, and need less water. With a growing world population facing chronic food shortages, we need more CO2 in the air to produce more food, not less.
And this means the misguided, misbegotten, delusional era of Greenism has to end. Soon. Now. The delusions of the radical environmentalists have taken us down this dangerous road, and the chickens are coming home to roost. And the chickens are very expensive. Having quarantined 90% of Federal lands from energy exploration and development, and blocked construction of nuclear power, and fuel refineries, it is the environmentalist policies, the Green policies, the Greenism, of the last generation that has put American in the spot it's in, and America can only get out of the spot by rejecting the delusional Greenism of the past, and embracing a rational energy policy for the future.
I'm with Barack Obama. I want "change"...but maybe not the same change Barack Obama wants.
Here's the change I want:
1. Legislation to immediately lift all moratoria on oil and natural gas exploration and development on Federal lands, except National Parks.
2. Legislation to grant a 100% tax credit for all new capital investment in energy production in the U.S. and its territorial waters. If you spent $20,000 to put solar panels on your roof, you get a $20,000 tax credit. If Exxon puts $75 billion into developing new oil production in the U.S., Exxon gets a $75 billion tax credit. This would "send a message" to OPEC that the party's just about over, and it would create millions of new jobs for working class Americans in America.
3. Legislation to fast-track NRC-approved nuclear power plant designs, and to require Green plaintiffs suing to block the construction of nuclear power plants, geothermal plants, oil refineries, or any other energy project, to prove by "clear and convincing evidence" that the proposed project was unreasonably dangerous, or that the harm it would cause was greater than the benefit it would confer.
Barack Obama said recently that he will deliver "$150 billion over the next ten years" to develop alternative energy.
That's way too little, way too late. America needs it now, not ten years from now. We don't need to pass it through the government skim machine.
And Barry Boy is clueless. By granting a 100% tax credit for new capital investment in energy in the United States, we unleash the magnificent ingenuity of the American people, who will pump $150 billion into energy development in one year, not ten, and produce ten times, or a hundred times, as much new energy in ten years as any government-managed program ever could.
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------------------- Response from James Taylor:
I find no fault with your article except to say, but their is more! There are 75,000 dams in the US, 8,000 are 50 feet or more in height, but only 850 of them produce 5mw or more. The Greens will not let us expand our hydro-electric resources even though there is no carbon released. Cheap and abundant electrical energy could end the use of oil for heating which should be a win/win solution. This makes their real goal a little clearer. They are trying to force America to reduce all energy use, renewable or not.
Al Gore stated in 92', that the internal combustion engine needs to be phased out over the next 25 years. He and his liberal following are using global warming as an excuse to restructure our nation, and allow us to be dominated by the rest of the world. Open borders with non-citizens allowed to do as they please while Americans are limited to only so much carbon use each year. If you drive or fly too much, or kept your home too warm in the winter, you would pay a fine and lose your vehicle.
I have also read about some Greens even filing lawsuits against wind and solar farms.
Thanks for all the good work you are doing, James
Energy: The average price for regular gas hit $4 a gallon over the weekend. Gas prices have risen 75% since Nancy Pelosi took over. Where's the energy independence Democrats promised two years ago?
In November of 2006, House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi issued a press release touting the Democrats' "common-sense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices." She accused the oil companies of "price gouging." The price of gasoline when the Democrats took control of Congress was around $2.25 per gallon.
The average price of regular gas crept over the $4-per-gallon barrier over the weekend, as measured by AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. That represents a more than 75% increase in the retail price of a gallon of gasoline on Pelosi's watch. Call it the "Pelosi premium" we're all now paying.
It's a problem driven by domestic supply restrictions imposed by the Democratic Congress in the face of growing worldwide demand. The Democrats preach energy independence while they do everything in their power to prevent it. If the American people truly want change, this would be it.
A Gallup poll released in May showed that 57% of the American people wanted the U.S. to drill in coastal and wilderness areas. The percentage of Americans who bought Pelosi's line about price gouging fell from 34% in May 2007 to 20% in May 2008. It could be a winning issue for the Republicans and John McCain.
More than 15 billion barrels of oil have been sent down the Alaskan pipeline from Prudhoe Bay, some 60 miles to the west of ANWR, over the past three decades, much more than the six months' supply expected in the beginning by those who predicted a similar environmental disaster there.
The local caribou and other critters have thrived. Yet, Pelosi and the Democrats want to to keep ANWR's estimated 10.6 billion barrels of oil off the market and out of our gas tanks.
Buried in a Department of Interior Appropriations bill passed in December 2007 was an amendment proposed by Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., passed by a 219-215 vote in June, that prevented the establishment of regulations for leasing lands to drill for oil shale.
The Western U.S. is estimated to have reserves of a trillion barrels (yes, that's the real number) trapped in porous shale rock, an amount three times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. On May 15, 2008, the Senate Appropriations Committee in a 15-14 party line vote rejected an amendment by Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., to allow oil shale drilling and overturn the Udall moratorium.
The U.S. Congress has voted consistently to keep 85% of America's offshore oil and gas off-limits, while China and Cuba drill 60 miles from Key West, Fla. The U.S. Minerals Management Service says that the restricted areas contain 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
There are 3,200 oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. During Katrina, not a single drop was spilled. More than 7 billion barrels have been pumped from these wells over the past quarter-century, yet only one thousandth of one percent has been spilled.
A study by Louisiana's Sea Grant college shows that there's 50 times more marine life around oil platforms that act as artificial reefs than in the surrounding mud bottoms. Some 85% of Louisiana fishing trips involve fishing around these offshore rigs.
The Flower Garden coral reefs lie off the Louisiana-Texas border. They are surrounded by oil platforms that have been pumping for 50 years.
According to federal biologist G.P. Schmahl, "The Flower Gardens are much healthier, more pristine than anything in the Florida Keys. It was a surprise to me. And I think it's a surprise to most people."
We would suggest that John McCain revisit his reservations about ANWR and run against the drill-nothing Congress. Energy development and the environment are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, we would suggest that the first joint town hall meeting with Barack Obama proposed by McCain be held on one of those offshore Louisiana rigs.
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
June 09, 2008 4:20 PM PT
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WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU DON'T LIKE ANY OF THESE CANDIDATES
Hillary Clinton. John McCain. Barack Obama. Those are our choices for the next president of the United States. Are you happy with that selection? If not, what is your alternative? As the saying goes, “The lesser of two evils is still evil.”
Beyond the presidential race we have congressional candidates, governors, state legislators, county commissioners, mayors, and city council candidates. Are you happy with whom the parties have chosen to offer for election? If not, what’s your alternative?
The real issues of the day are not even being addressed in the campaigns. The falling dollar that will render our money worthless; the rising gas prices that grab the last of our worthless money; the invasion of illegal aliens that are changing our society; the globalization of our economy; assaults on our private property; the loss of American jobs to foreign countries; and now the threat of food shortages.
These are real problems facing every American, yet it is apparently politically incorrect to discuss them. There are no questions concerning these issues during debates, on Sunday morning political talk shows, or anywhere in the news media in relationship to the candidates. It’s not there. Not to be discussed. The powers in charge are picking the issues – no matter how frustrated the electorate is.
Is it any wonder that there are millions of Americans who don’t vote or participate in our nation’s debate because they think it doesn’t matter anyway. The “average voter” increasingly feels that the decisions have been made for them.
College students, just starting out in the world, wide eyed and ready to make a difference, end up just shrugging their shoulders at the selection of candidates and stay home.
Those who hold conservative points of view that our nation should live within the Constitution now believe socialism is inevitable, so why bother going to the polls.
And the poor think they are simply pawns in a vice grip between big money and special interests which control the elections. Why bother? Helplessness now rules the world’s greatest representative democracy. As people stay home or trudge to the polls to unenthusiastically vote to the next lesser of two evils, 93% of incumbents are routinely returned to office – year after year after year.
The instant a candidate is elected and joins the ranks of the incumbents he/she begins the dance. Get the money for the next campaign. How? Special interests groups, corporations and foreign interests flood into their offices to make deals, promote their personal agendas and show the way to fame, fortune and perpetual office – if only the incumbents go along. They have the whole process well in hand. Campaigns become little more than big PR projects, promoted in positive platitudes, specifically designed to assure nothing negative sticks. Just get through it and keep the gravy train running.
Above all, do not talk about controversial subjects like dollar values, global trade or immigration; just stick to issues like health care and the environment – coincidentally, two issues bought and paid for by the special interests. See how it works?
So year after year we officially hold elections and politicians pontificate about how our going to the polls is a revered right; a valued tradition; the underpinning of a free society. And they wonder why there is such division in the nation. How did we end up in such a mess? We voted for these guys. But did we enjoy it? Are we satisfied with the results? Would we like to demand a do over?
Don’t despair. Don’t give up. There is a logical, effective way out of this. But it won’t happen by depending on political parties to lead the way. We have to take things into our own hands. We need an effective, binding form of protest to say NO to bad candidates. There is such a way.
Imagine going into the voting booth and looking down the list of candidates offered. None really appeal. None seem to offer satisfaction as an answer to the issues that concern you. If only there was something else you could do. A write in won’t help. It would take such a difficult, expensive effort. It rarely works.
Then you look further down the ballot. Something new. It says “NONE OF THE ABOVE.” It’s a final choice after the candidates – after the candidates in every category, from president, to congress to city council. What does it mean?
It means you have the power to decide who will hold office – not the power brokers. When the votes are tallied, if “NONE OF THE ABOVE” gets a majority of votes over any of the candidates listed, then “NONE OF THE ABOVE” wins. And that means none of those candidates will win the office. The election will have to be held again and new candidates will have to try to win the public’s support.
Fixing the election process could be that simple. You, the voter, would be completely in the driver’s seat with the power to reject candidates, forcing a new election with new choices. The political parties would be forced to provide candidates the people want -- or face being rejected. They would have to talk about real issues – or face being rejected. Incumbents would have to answer for their actions in office – or face being rejected.
“NONE OF THE ABOVE.” Period. The power of labor unions and international corporations would be broken.
Think of the consequences. No longer would voters have to settle for the lesser of two evils. If all the candidates are bad – none would be able to force their way into office. It would mean that powerful special interests could no longer rely on their money to buy elections. They could buy all the ads they wanted, spend millions on “volunteers” going door to door, and sling their dirt, but if the voters aren’t buying, none of it will save their candidate from being rejected by “NONE OF THE ABOVE.”
Moreover, the power of entrenched incumbents who have been unbeatable because of their massive war chests and party ties would be broken. Picture Ted Kennedy unable to run for office because he was rejected by “NONE OF THE ABOVE.”
However, in order to work, “NONE OF THE ABOVE” would have to be binding. It would have to have the power of law behind it. It cannot be just a “protest” vote that has no other meaning.
“NONE OF THE ABOVE” is completely non-partisan. There is no way to control its outcome. There is no need for a massive campaign chest to support “NONE OF THE ABOVE,” although it could certainly be done. But the option, once permanently placed on the ballot, would always be there. America’s representative system would be restored.
To get the job done, activists in every state would have to begin a campaign to demand that “NONE OF THE ABOVE” be given a permanent spot on the ballot. It would have to be done state by state. Some states have ballot referendums and initiatives using petition drives to get an issue on the ballot so the people can decide. It’s difficult and expensive to do, but popular ideas have a chance.
In other states, “NONE OF THE ABOVE” advocates would have to find a friendly state representative or senator to introduce the idea before the state legislature and then get enough votes to pass it in both houses and then signed by the governor. And if the effort is successful then every one of those legislators is an incumbent who will have to face “NONE OF THE ABOVE” or the ballot for their re-election. They probably won’t be too excited about the idea.
Of course, one of their main objections to the “NONE OF THE ABOVE” idea would be the requirement for holding a new election should it win. Too expensive, our responsible public servants would say as they dismissed the idea. The fact is, such a need would probably not arise often once political power brokers began to understand that they must offer candidates acceptable to the people rather than to the special interests. That’s all they really have to do. It’s all we want.
The fact is, the idea of “NONE OF THE ABOVE” has been around for a long time. Over the years, most states have had some kind of legislation introduced supporting the concept. Nevada actually has it on the ballot – but it is not binding. It doesn’t force a new election. It is just a measure of protest. That’s not good enough to make it effective.
One of the reasons it has not been successful is because there has never been a serious national drive to promote the idea. However, with the growing dissatisfaction voters are feeling with the quality of candidates running for public office, particularly in the presidential campaign, perhaps there has never been a better time to start a national discussion on the issue.
The best part is that “NONE OF THE ABOVE” isn’t a conservative or liberal idea. It’s not a Republican of Democrat proposal. In fact, Republican leadership might see it as a good way to break the back of big labor’s influence over elections. Equally, Democrats could see it as a way to stop the power and influence of the Republican’s big business money. However they want to look at it, the bottom line is that the voters win.
So as we sigh and moan over the choices of Obama, Hillary and McCain, let’s start the debate and as Larry the Cable Guy says, “let’s get ‘er done.” Perhaps by the next election cycle we won’t have to take it anymore!
Tom DeWeese
May 30, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
http://www.newswithviews.com/DeWeese/tom111.htm
Tom DeWeese is president of the American Policy Center
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Keep in mind that we are not talking about associating with those who simply opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
Senator McCain’s communist connections consist of bombing the communists during the Vietnam War and then being shot down, badly injured, captured, and tortured by them. On the other hand, Senator Barack Obama was mentored by an identified Communist Party member in Hawaii who had functioned as a Stalinist agent. That was before Obama developed cordial relationships with communist terrorists who openly supported the communist regime that tortured McCain and killed 58,000 of our fellow Americans.
Can we have some coverage of the contrast between the two candidates on Memorial Day? It’s not just a matter of McCain serving in the military and Obama not doing so. It’s a matter of which side they were on.
McCain was on the American side during the Vietnam War. He personally risked his life and carried out the U.S. policy of resisting the communist military conquest of South Vietnam. Obama had friendly associations with those who had been on the other side and they helped launch his political career in Chicago. Obama can’t solve this problem by occasionally wearing an American flag lapel pin.
Keep in mind that we are not talking about associating with those who simply opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Obama’s friends, such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, cheered for a communist victory and visited Havana, Cuba and Hanoi, North Vietnam to bring that about. Like his comrades in the communist Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden of “Progressives for Obama” wrote a letter urging a communist military victory over the U.S. These were people who actually supported the enemy.
In the case of Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s childhood mentor, we are dealing with someone who was on the communist side long before the Vietnam War. Davis supported Stalinist Russia even after the Hitler-Stalin pact. This relationship may help explain why Obama would leave Hawaii, associate with Marxist professors and attend socialist conferences in college (as he admits in his book, Dreams From My Father), and then associate with terrorists, communists, and socialists in Chicago, where he would launch his political career. Davis was a key influence over the young Obama, filling his head with anti-American thoughts.
Thanks to Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily and his excellent reporter, Jerome R. Corsi, many people are learning the basic facts about these relationships. Corsi covered the release of two reports on the subject through my America’s Survival, Inc. organization.
At our event, an audience member wondered what the media reaction would be if it were discovered that a Republican presidential candidate had been mentored by a Nazi or fascist during his growing-up years. You and I know that it would be enough of a story that the candidate would be forced from the race. The candidate would be peppered with questions about this relationship at every turn. Reporters would be scrambling to dig up more details about this relationship.
But rather than focus on Davis, some in the liberal media are making fun of McCain’s war injuries. Brent Baker reveals that, during a report on the release of McCain’s medical records, Dr. Jon LaPook asserted on CBS News that “people” notice that McCain is “not able to raise his arm” and think “doesn’t that look funny?” Baker asked, “Who thinks McCain’s limitation, caused by an attack on him after his plane crashed in North Vietnam and he was denied medical care, looks funny? In what circles does CBS’s doctor travel?” The answer, of course, is the circle of Obama’s friends, where veteran correspondent Linda Douglass has now ended up. She has taken a job as a press secretary and adviser to Obama and previously worked for CBS News, ABC News, and National Journal.
Significantly, the basic facts of the Obama-Davis relationship were originally disclosed by Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, who talked about Obama coming under the influence of Davis during a speech at the reception of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University.
Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who had moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 “at the suggestion of his good friend [and secret CPUSA member] Paul Robeson,” came into contact with Obama and his family. As Horne describes it, Davis “befriended” a “Euro-American family” that had “migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.”
However, in Obama’s 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, Frank Marshall Davis was identified only as “Frank.” Among other things, according to Obama’s own account, “Frank” told him that blacks had a reason to hate and that he should not believe all of that (expletive deleted) about the American way of life.
When one of Senator Hillary Clinton’s supporters brought up the issue of Davis’s influence over Obama, by circulating an article I had written for AIM about Davis playing the role of Obama’s mentor, he was pilloried by the left-wing blogs. The reaction suggests awareness that the role of Davis in the formation of Obama’s political views could sink the candidate. They are desperate to keep this information suppressed.
Horne is not the only significant figure to talk about the influence of “Frank” on Obama. Dr. Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii, who knew and interviewed Davis and wrote a dissertation on his life and career, confirmed to me that the “Frank” is, in fact, Frank Marshall Davis.
Takara, an Obama supporter, confirmed that Davis was a significant influence over Obama during the three or four years that he attended the Punahou prep school. These would have been the years 1975-1979. She said Obama had been introduced to Davis by his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who considered Davis a “strong black male figure” and thought he exerted a “positive” influence over the young man in his high-school years.
Asked why she thought Obama didn’t identify Davis in his book by his full name, she replied, “Maybe he didn’t want people delving into it.” She said that this could have had something to do with Davis’s lifestyle, rather than his politics. “Frank’s was a place where you could have drinks,” she said.
Yet, Obama has been open about some things—such as his past drug use. It is difficult to understand why he would not name “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis simply because “Frank” drank or hosted people who did. It is apparent that Obama covered up his full name because of the notoriety surrounding Davis’s political views. Remember this was a black communist who stayed with the CPUSA even while others, such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, broke with it.
So how long will Obama’s cover-up persist?
There are many in the liberal and conservative media who want desperately to avoid this subject. The liberals want to protect Obama. The “conservatives” avoiding the subject don’t want to be accused of “McCarthyism” if they mention it. But thanks to Farah’s WorldNetDaily and other new media outlets, the story is coming out and won’t be ignored.
By Cliff Kincaid
May 25, 2008
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-candidates-communist-connections/
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If John McCain were truly a maverick, he would publicly break from the politically correct culture that demands obedience to its global warming narrative. But sadly, he continues to do the opposite.
Liberals have denominated McCain a maverick because he has taken so many positions contradictory to his party's platform and to the conservative ideology that undergirds it. Now that he is the putative Republican nominee, you don't hear much about his maverick nature, but it's certainly not because he's changed his ways in opposing his party.
Last week, he affirmed his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform, even though earlier he stepped back from it to curry favor with conservatives. One wonders what other shoes will inevitably drop should he win the presidency, especially because he has indicated he would most likely be a one-termer.
Will he revert to his visceral revulsion to the Bush supply-side tax cuts? Many supply-siders, after taking McCain to the woodshed on the issue, assure us he can be trusted on it.
If so, their efforts will redound to the benefit of the economy and nation should McCain win the election. But some of these same supply-side advocates insist we shouldn't expect him to move rightward on too many other issues.
Sorry, but I reject that zero-sum thinking, as should my fellow supply-siders; they certainly do in the realm of tax policy. While I will vote for McCain against either Democratic opponent, I don't believe we should abandon efforts to reform the "reformer" on other issues besides taxes. Are we supposed to declare a moratorium on the expression of our principles for fear it could damage his electability?
If conservatives don't make an effort to hold McCain accountable for his liberal proclivities, then no one will, to the guaranteed detriment of the national interest. In fact, pushing him to the right while we still have a chance will enhance his electability.
Which brings me back to the subject that inspired this column: McCain's regrettable upcoming speech outlining his vision to combat global warming.
In a preview of the speech, CNN reports that McCain will say: "We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge."
No, Sen. McCain, the most relevant question is whether political leaders will have the diligence to study this issue and the integrity and courage to stand up to the propaganda of the enviro-bullies. The question is whether you can be a maverick where it counts.
It is not Earth's ecosystem that hangs in the balance, but America's future. Those whose vision isn't blurred by green-colored glasses and the temptation to win accolades from the leftist-dominated culture can see that the global push to "save the planet" is more about destroying capitalism, private property and Western culture than sound, science-based environmental stewardship. Never mind the staggering contradiction that free market economies produce cleaner environs.
Indeed, I hate to break it to some of my fellow evangelical Christians who are falling into the trap along with McCain, but the global warming proselytes don't share your worldview. Do you realize you are jumping in bed with those who are promoting a pantheistic deification of the environment and a diminution of the dignity of human beings created in God's image?
Contrary to the mandated script from the warming zealots, there is plenty of credible dissent in the scientific community about global warming, particularly man's role in it. Much of this dissent comes from scientists in fields related to weather studies. Imagine that.
The fact that the enviro-church fathers have "outlawed" dissenting opinion and slander those offering it tells us something fishy is afoot.
And for you McCain supporters who think the only issues that matter are the war and taxes, not to mention abortion and immigration — all of which are incalculably important — I urge you not to underestimate the gravity of the global warming issue and the potentially devastating consequences of rolling over on it.
If Republicans also acquiesce to this false religion and its required "good works," we are headed toward a path of economic and societal destruction in the name of saving the planet.
It's time for Newt Gingrich to get off that couch with Nancy Pelosi and for John McCain to jump off this insidious global warming train that might as well be armed with enemy bombs and aimed at the heart of this nation and its economy.
David Limbaugh
May 13, 2008
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his Web site at www.davidlimbaugh.com.
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America is in line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proved innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention.
America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one too many one-ounce moisturizers in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA agent removed its mascara, opened it, put it to her nose, and smelled it. Why don't you put it up your nose and see if it explodes? America thinks.
And, as always: Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this harassment is the government's way of showing "fairness," of showing that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice?
Our politicians congratulate themselves on this as we stand in line. All the frisking, beeping and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday.
Another thing: It reduces the status of that ancestral arbiter and leader of society, the middle-aged woman. In the new fairness, she is treated like everyone, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the phone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate shell beneath the removed jacket, praying nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look.
America makes it through security, gets to the gate, waits. The TV monitor is on. It is Wolf Blitzer. He is telling us with a voice of urgency of the Pennsylvania returns. But no one looks up. We are a nation of Willie Lomans, dragging our rollies through acres of airport, going through life with a suitcase and a slack jaw, trying to get home after a long day of meetings, of moving product. No one in crowded gate 14 looks up to see what happened in Pennsylvania. No one. Wolf talks to the air. Gate 14 is small-town America, a mix, a group of people of all classes and races brought together and living in close proximity until the plane is called, and America knows what Samuel Johnson knew. "How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure." Gate 14 doesn't think any one of the candidates is going to make their lives better. Gate 14 will vote anyway, because they know they are the grownups of America and must play the role and do the job.
So: Pennsylvania. As seen from the distance of West Texas, central California and Oklahoma, which is where I've been. Main thought. Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men's Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over . . . the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history.
John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977-92.
Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That's why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country - any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all? Another challenge. Snooty lefties get angry when you ask them to talk about these things. They get resentful. Who are you to question my patriotism? But no one is questioning his patriotism, they're questioning its content, its fullness. Gate 14 has a right to hear this. They'd lean forward to hear.
This is an opportunity, for Mr. Obama needs an Act II. Act II is hard. Act II is where the promise of Act I is deepened, the plot thickens, and all is teed up for resolution and meaning. Mr. Obama's Act I was: I'm Obama. He enters the scene. Act III will be the convention and acceptance speech. After that a whole new drama begins. But for now he needs Act II. He should make his subject America.
Here's some comfort for him, for all Democrats. In Lubbock, Texas - Lubbock Comma Texas, the heart of Texas conservatism - they dislike President Bush. He has lost them. I was there and saw it. Confusion has been followed by frustration has turned into resentment, and this is huge. Everyone knows the president's poll numbers are at historic lows, but if he is over in Lubbock, there is no place in this country that likes him. I made a speech and moved around and I was tough on him and no one - not one - defended or disagreed. I did the same in North Carolina recently, and again no defenders. I did the same in Fresno, Calif., and no defenders, not one. He has left on-the-ground conservatives - the local right-winger, the town intellectual reading Burke and Kirk, the old Reagan committeewoman - feeling undefended, unrepresented and alone. This will have impact down the road.
I finally understand the party nostalgia for Reagan. Everyone speaks of him now, but it wasn't that way in 2000, or 1992, or 1996, or even '04. I think it is a manifestation of dislike for and disappointment in Mr. Bush. It is a turning away that is a turning back. It is a looking back to conservatism when conservatism was clear, knew what it was, was grounded in the facts of the world. The reasons for the quiet break with Mr. Bush: spending, they say first, growth in the power and size of government, Iraq. I imagine some of this: a fine and bitter conservative sense that he has never had to stand in his stockinged feet at the airport holding the bin, being harassed. He has never had to live in the world he helped make, the one where grandma's hip replacement is setting off the beeper here and the child is crying there. And of course as a former president, with the entourage and the private jets, he never will. I bet conservatives don't like it. I'm certain Gate 14 doesn't.
Peggy Noonan
April 25, 2008
URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120906741679842493.html
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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John McCain stated in the Republican debates at the Reagan Library that people can judge him by the company he keeps. Well let's take a little look at the people John McCain considers his "company".
Read on for the facts - instead of promises and disrespect for your intelligence. In fact, let's apply John McCain's admonition and judge every candidate by the company that they keep.
There's Senator Ted Kennedy from the McCain-Kennedy immigration amnesty bill.
Senator Lindsey Graham who once called those opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens "bigots" at a La Raza conference.
Senator Mel Martinez an open borders proponent who favors amnesty and was a coauthor of the Hagel-Martinez amnesty bill prior to the McCain-Kennedy bill. Martinez once called enforcement without amnesty a "harshness only" approach.
Juan Hernandez, a former Mexican government official, a dual citizen and major proponent of rights and amnesty for Hispanic illegal aliens and the end of the sovereignty of America. He currently is working on the McCain campaign as his Hispanic Outreach Director.
Congressman Luis Gutierrez, a good friend of La Raza, who has put forth his own legislation for illegal aliens called the STRIVE act and was involved in formulating the amnesty bills. In addition he personally put forth a bill to give Elvira Arellano permanent residency - this was before she hid out in a church. He also called the police on a group of citizen lobbyists who came to question him on his stance on illegal immigration.
Senator Russ Feingold who was half of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform fiasco.
Joe Lieberman, who together with McCain brought forth the McCain-Lieberman Stewardship bill to fight global warming.
Former Senator John Edwards who along with McCain and Kennedy wrote the McCain-Edwards "Patient's Bill of Rights".
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Lots of Democrats and Republicans (who are really Liberals) working together with McCain. This is the company he keeps and asks us to judge him by.
McCain will state that he is a "Reagan Republican", but nothing could be further from the truth. There's working together and then there is outright "being a member of the other party". Things to watch out for with McCain include the passing and implementation of the "fairness doctrine". Something that would censor and shut down talk radio stations, websites like this one and limit free speech in the United States. You don't think he'd sign it? Just watch him!
Watch the above video and tell me this is someone who really is looking out for the American people and not just some illegal foreigners, big business and future Democrat voters.
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In his March 26 speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, McCain never mentioned the need to preserve American sovereignty. He could have reassured conservatives by stating his forthright opposition to Senate ratification of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty, which provides for international control over billions of dollars worth of oil, gas and minerals and undermines American claims to North Pole riches. But he chose not to.
Instead, as the Washington Post put it, McCain promised “a collaborative foreign policy,” conducted in coordination with other nations. The New York Times said he distanced himself from “unilateralism” in foreign affairs.
“Liberals are going to love this speech,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh said about the McCain address. He said it sounded like the “global test” that liberal Democratic presidential candidate and Senator John Kerry had proposed for U.S. foreign policy in 2004.
Yet, McCain’s new TV ad calls him “the American president Americans have been waiting for.” The public should not be fooled. He is as much of a globalist as Hillary and Obama.
Noting that McCain committed himself to adoption of a new U.N.-sponsored global warming treaty, which would be even more comprehensive and tougher than the Kyoto Protocol, Limbaugh said that “The theme here is that there’s nothing special about America, and that we’re not going to be able to do anything without involving other nations and making them like us and showing them that we intend them no harm and that we want to be good stewards of the planet just as they want to be good stewards.”
The latter was a reference to McCain declaring that “We need to be good stewards of our planet and join with other nations to help preserve our common home. The risks of global warming have no borders.” McCain sounded like another Democrat―Al Gore.
But despite his preference for what appears to be some kind of New World Order, McCain’s prior endorsement of a new Muslim state in Europe by the name of Kosovo could undermine all of his best-laid plans. Recognition of Kosovo could lead to war with Russia and more terrorist problems for Israel.
Scary Rhetoric
Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA commented, “Sen. McCain delivered a laundry list of all things non-conservative.” He said the speech wasn’t conservative or even Republican.
Amanda Teegarden, a grass roots pro-sovereignty activist, was also alarmed. “It is imperative that conservatives listen to this speech―especially if you are concerned about the sovereignty, and the economic survival, of the United States,” she said.
In addition to a new global warming treaty, she noted that McCain’s proposals included open borders in the Western Hemisphere, nuclear disarmament, and a Transatlantic free trade area.
Eberle focused on a segment of the McCain speech that included the statement that “Relations with our southern neighbors must be governed by mutual respect, not by an imperial impulse or by anti-American demagoguery. The promise of North, Central, and South American life is too great for that. I believe the Americas can and must be the model for a new 21st century relationship between North and South. Ours can be the first completely democratic hemisphere, where trade is free across all borders, where the rule of law and the power of free markets advance the security and prosperity of all.”
McCain’s strange rhetoric about “North, Central, and South American life” reflects a view that nation-states are disappearing and being replaced by regional alliances and institutions. He referred to “the powerful collective voice of the European Union,” as if the U.S. response would have to be submersion of our voice in a larger hemispheric entity. But McCain seems to be calling for something beyond even a North American Union (NAU) of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. He talked about “creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish,” as if they would be built on top of the EU and the NAU.
Earlier, McCain had declared, “With globalization, our hemisphere has grown closer, more integrated, and more interdependent. Latin America today is increasingly vital to the fortunes of the United States. Americans north and south share a common geography and a common destiny.” But why should trade with America’s neighbors necessarily lead to a “common destiny?” This implies a political merger of the U.S. with other countries.
Nuclear Disarmament
“We should work to reduce nuclear arsenals all around the world, starting with our own,” McCain said. This appeared to be a call for unilateral nuclear disarmament. He went on to call for the U.S. to lead “a global effort at nuclear disarmament.” This, too, seems to require more reliance on international institutions, in this case the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Indeed, McCain in the past has called for more funding for the IAEA.
McCain added, “We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact―a League of Democracies―that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests.” But as I noted in a recent piece, “McCain, Soros, and the New World Order,” this is a liberal project that is being currently funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros and managed by former Clinton officials. It has nothing to do with democracy but is intended to create another global institution that will eventually help strengthen the U.N.
After calling for the closing of the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay (but not saying where he would put the detainees), McCain declared that “There is such a thing as international good citizenship.” This is the kind of rhetoric we would expect from an advocate of world government. If Hillary or Obama were spouting such silly rhetoric, conservatives would be laughing at them.
It goes without saying that McCain is oblivious to the evidence that the man-made global warming theory doesn’t hold up under serious scrutiny. His proposal for “a successor to the Kyoto Treaty” that “delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner” is potentially very damaging to the U.S. economy. But the proposal pleases the Europeans.
McCain talked about the virtues of the “transatlantic alliance,” which served a purpose during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but went on to say that “Americans should welcome the rise of a strong, confident European Union as we continue to support a strong NATO.” The European Union was devised primarily as a counter to the influence of the U.S. in foreign affairs. It has also proven to be a bureaucratic disaster for the people of Europe. The “strong NATO” has proven to be extremely weak in Afghanistan, where it cannot field enough troops to defeat the Taliban terrorists. Expanding NATO has not resulted in making it stronger.
“The future of the transatlantic relationship lies in confronting the challenges of the twenty-first century worldwide: developing a common energy policy, creating a transatlantic common market tying our economies more closely together, addressing the dangers posed by a revanchist Russia, and institutionalizing our cooperation on issues such as climate change, foreign assistance, and democracy promotion,” declared McCain.
So not only is the U.S. going to move toward common policies for North, South and Central America, but it is going to develop common energy and economic policies with the European Union. Developing a common policy on “foreign assistance” is a recipe for more looting of the U.S. taxpayers. The Europeans have long complained that the U.S. isn’t devoting enough money to “official development assistance,” as the U.N. calls it.
Nightmare Vision
Does McCain’s vision look like an emerging world government? It is certainly a variation of “global governance,” which is the proposal that former Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott makes in his book, The Great Experiment. Talbott calls McCain a “pragmatist” in foreign affairs, just like Obama and Hillary, and says that he expects his liberal Brookings Institution to have influence over a McCain presidency.
On other issues in his speech, McCain talked tough about Iran and Russia.
The big problem for McCain, as we noted in a recent column, is that his vision of a New World Order is incompatible with his support for making the Serbian province of Kosovo into an independent state. Carving Kosovo out of Serbia is a threat to international peace and security. It has split NATO, which McCain says he wants to expand and strengthen. This policy, which has also been embraced by the Democrats, threatens a completely unnecessary war with Russia, which backs Serbian control of Kosovo and wants to aid the Serbs remaining in the province.
McCain spoke about Israel’s survival, without addressing the reality that Kosovo’s independence has energized the Arab/Muslim push for a Palestinian state that could threaten Israel.
While McCain said that the threat of radical Islamic terrorism is “the transcendent challenge of our time,” he seemed unaware how some of those same forces are behind the push for Kosovo statehood. It just doesn’t make sense to fight Muslim extremists in one place, Iraq, while helping them in another, Kosovo, and even giving them their own state.
This is a contradiction that McCain has failed to address.
“We have incurred a moral responsibility in Iraq,” the Senator declared. “It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible, and premature withdrawal.”
This rhetoric strikes a chord with conservatives. Yet, some say that genocide is already occurring in Iraq, in regard to the plight of Christians there. More than half have fled the country since the U.S. invasion, and those who remain are being kidnapped, threatened and murdered. Do we not have a moral responsibility to them? Shouldn’t the U.S. be less concerned about the survival of the Muslim government in Iraq and more concerned about the defenseless and unarmed Christians?
McCain seemed blind not only to the issues that conservatives regard as critical in an election year, but he went out of his way to reach out to liberals and Democrats. The only part of the speech they probably didn’t like was on Iraq.
But if the liberals get beyond their differences with McCain on Iraq, they will not only vote for him but promote his agenda as president. Then, as Rush Limbaugh notes, it may eventually be possible to change the name of the United States of America: “We’ll call ourselves New Europe.” In the process, true conservatism as a political force will be finished in the U.S.
The tragedy of this approach is that it comes from a man who served his country in uniform and risked his life on behalf of the U.S. McCain would have been a natural choice to lead a campaign for restoration of American sovereignty in foreign affairs. He could have been “The American President Americans have been waiting for.”
For reasons that remain largely a mystery, he has chosen to take the U.S. down the road of “global governance,” in which the U.N. and other international agencies, institutions and alliances determine our fate as a nation. It is the same road the Democrats are on. It is a tragedy for our country.
By Cliff Kincaid
March 28, 2008
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/mccains-incoherent-new-world-order/
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In the annals of judicial imperialism, we have arrived at a strange new chapter. A California court ruled this month that parents cannot "home school" their children without government certification. No teaching credential, no teaching. Parents "do not have a constitutional right to home school their children," wrote California appellate Justice Walter Croskey.
The 166,000 families in the state that now choose to educate their children at home must be stunned. But at least one political lobby likes the ruling. "We're happy," the California Teachers Association's Lloyd Porter told the San Francisco Chronicle. He says the union believes all students should be taught only by "credentialed" teachers, who will in due course belong to unions.
California law requires children between six and 18 to attend a full-time day school. Failure to comply means falling afoul of the state's truancy laws, which say kids can't play hooky without an excuse. But kids who are taught at home are less likely to be truants. Their parents choose to spend their time teaching English, math and science precisely because they don't think the public schools do a good enough job.
The case was initiated by the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services after a home-schooled child reportedly complained of physical abuse by his father. A lawyer assigned to two of the family's eight children invoked the truancy law to get the children enrolled in a public school and away from their parents. So a single case of parental abuse is being used to promote the registration of all parents who crack a book for their kids. If this strikes some readers as a tad East German, we know how you feel.
That so many families turn to home schooling is a market solution to a market failure -- namely the dismal performance of the local education monopoly. According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, the majority of states have low to moderate levels of regulation for home schools, an environment that has allowed the option to flourish, especially in the South and Western U.S. Between 1999 and 2003, the rate of home-schooling increased by 29%.
For some parents, the motive for home schooling is religious; others want to protect their kids from gangs and drugs. But the most-cited reason is to ensure a good education. Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of subject. They perform well on tests like the SAT -- and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.
In 1994, a federal attempt to require certification of parent-teachers went down in flames as hundreds of thousands of calls lit up phone banks on Capitol Hill. The movement has since only grown larger and better organized, now conservatively estimated at well over a million nationwide. But what they can't accomplish legislatively, unions are now trying to achieve by diktat from the courts.
If John McCain wants an issue to endear him to cultural conservatives, this would be it. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama rarely stray from the preferences of the teachers unions, but we'd like to know whether they really favor the certification of parents who dare to believe they know best how to teach their children.
Wall Street Journal Online
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120614130694756089.html
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Anyone who thought the drawn-out battle to choose the new generation Air Force tanker aircraft ended with the Pentagon’s decision Friday to go with the Northrop-Grumman/EADS consortium likely has another think coming.
"This won't be pretty," Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., told The Seattle Times Saturday. "There will be a firestorm of criticism on Capitol Hill,” Dicks, whose Seattle-area district depends heavily on Boeing for its economic well-being, warned.
Although the loss of the $40 billion deal is not expected to result in any job losses at Boeing, the contract would have created up to 8,000 additional jobs and kept the 767 assembly line going well beyond 2012 when the last commercial 767 is finished.
It’s an election year in which the economy is in trouble and protectionist sentiments have been expressed by both Democratic presidential nomination contenders. Not only that, the leading Republican contender is remembered as the politician that killed the original contract awarded to Boeing in 2003, so it would seem the tanker issue will have pretty long legs.
"We should have an American tanker built by an American company with American workers," said Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., whose district includes Boeing’s Wichita plant. Leading Democratic presidential hopefuls Sen. Hilary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama have both been trumpeting protectionist policies of late but it’s Republican front-runner John McCain who might face the most scrutiny. It was pressure from McCain that scotched a 2003 award to Boeing for a total of 100 767-based tankers. McCain alleged favoritism in the bidding process and the Pentagon rescinded the contract in 2004.
Now there are allegations the most recent bidding process was changed to favor the Airbus/Northrop Grumman bid. In the end, it may well be the U.S.-first sentiment that dominates the chorus of discontent.
"Obviously, Congress is going to react to the American public," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said. "You can put an American sticker on a plane and call it American, but that doesn't make it American-made." Which aircraft will do the best job for the best price does not seem to figure into the current debate.
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----------------------------- An alternate view by Col. Bob Pappas (USMC, Ret.):
“One can understand the American Pride issue that the plane would be made by a U.S. company; one can understand a backlash attitude given the fraudulent Boeing Lease deal and its $600+ million fine; and, one can understand the "jobs" issues and everything else.
But think for a minute. For decades the U.S. has been selling military products to Europe worth hundreds of billions of dollars, F-4s, F-16s, F-111s, KC-130s. We literally equipped most of Europe for decades. No one complained then, and we were proud to sell our products to our European allies. U.S. products were better and less expensive, and in most cases European nations were not able to manufacture their own products, but things change and we are where we are.
Europeans design and build excellent products, so it should come as no surprise that AIRBUS was a viable competitor. They have the industrial capacity, the technical expertise and it has become "cheap" to manufacture products in the U.S. given the decline of the dollar vs. the Euro. Remember all the foreboding talk? Guess what? Production goes to the place where it is least expensive to build, any surprise that the Gulf Coast got it?
As for Unions vs. Business, both bear the responsibility for jobs going overseas. Both have been greedy; unions want higher wages, more benefits - and companies want more profits. Unions and America loses when jobs go overseas, so the solution is to WORK TOGETHER!!! Some would say, "Fat chance." But, I for one have hope that one day everyone will open their eyes and figure out that it would be better to work together than to die on the vine.
Has anyone thought that rather than blame the Pentagon that is by law required to award contracts to the lowest qualified bidder, and then sit here and yell at one another, that it might just be a good idea to shut up and insist that legislators and administrations work to foster a healthier economic environment in the United States?
Does anyone really believe that taxing businesses into the grave is going to preserve American jobs? That is, unless the government does the Socialist act that certain candidates are advancing.
Anyone have his brains turned on out there?
If we can just keep illegal immigrants from scooping up all the jobs, the contract will be a huge economic boon to the region, foster better relations with our European allies and provide an excellent piece of equipment to the Air Force.”
Excerpted from:
“Dollars Coming Home to Roost”
March 4, 2008
Col. Bob Pappas (USMC, Ret.)
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/challenges.php?id=1386811
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Response from Marty D.: In recent years, there has been a perennial effort in the House of Representatives to favor American companies in defense contracts. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, has tried several times to insert legislation into the defense authorization bill to prohibit the Pentagon from awarding contracts to foreign companies that receive government subsidies, such as EADS. But each time he has been thwarted in the Senate, where Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John Warner (R-Va.) and others have successfully challenged the language.
----------------------
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The presidential race is now down to three superb candidates. Why are they superb? Because, each, in his or her own way, is willing to give Americans what they want. And down deep, most Americans want the same thing.
You might think that Americans want different things, because they differ on Iraq, abortion, and public expression of religion, illegal immigration, gun ownership, taxes, and global warming. You’re right, of course. That’s why there are some differences between the three finalists on these issues.
But on the most important issue, Americans want the same thing.
What do they want?
Regardless of party, they want the president (and the rest of government) to use government power for far more than the protection of life, liberty and property.
They want government power used to remake the world into their narcissistic image, to tell others how to live their lives, and to infringe on the rights of others, especially on the right to keep the fruits of their labor. In other words, they want to use coercion against others, not realizing that others will retaliate by using coercion against them.
In this very important sense, the nation is no longer a constitutional republic based on individual rights and liberty. The Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the neoconservative movement have transformed the U.S. to a nation where political might makes right. The individual is now at the mercy of the will of the plurality, or the collective, or marauding special-interest groups--all of whom are backed by the rule of law, which in turn is backed by armed government agents.
Barack Obama wonders why we all can’t get along. Well, it’s because politicians like him want to do things for some people by doing things to other people. And generally, the people he wants to do things to are the good people in society--the people who defer gratification, invest in their future, lead virtuous lives, sacrifice for their children, and help their neighbors without being coerced to do so by the government.
Coercion has become so accepted that the word “coercion” is not mentioned at all in Congress, in the establishment media, in K-12 schools, in universities, or in any other centers of influence. Instead, people speak euphemistically about the common good, volunteerism, social justice, equal opportunity, fairness, income equality, and other platitudes du jour. Of course, history shows that the greater the rhetoric about the collective, the greater the coercion against the individual.
President Bush says he believes in “compassionate conservatism,” but he really believes in coerced compassion. Sen. Clinton says “It takes a village,” but she really believes in coercively taking the village’s output for her political uses. Sen. Obama says that he wants to put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work in government job corps, but he doesn’t say that millions of other Americans will be coerced to pick up the tab for something that is economic and social folly. McCain says that he wants to stop money in politics, but he has used coercion to limit political speech.
Politicians embrace coercion because the American people embrace coercion. Farmers embrace it to obtain subsidies that raise the price of groceries for everyone else. The elderly embrace it to get free medicine at the expense of future generations. Spendthrifts embrace it to take the savings of the frugal through the tax code. Cities embrace it to take private property for the benefit of developers. Preservationists embrace it to tell homeowners what color they can paint their homes. Anti-smoking zealots embrace it to tell owners of bars and restaurants what they can do on their private property. Arts aficionados embrace it to have their cultural interests subsidized. Sports fans embrace it to have non-fans build their sports palaces. College students embrace it to get cheaper tuition at the expense of those who don’t go to college. The stupid and greedy embrace it to be bailed out of their bad mortgages by those who are smart and financially conservative.
Examples of the use of coercion in our supposed free country could run for hundreds of pages.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain indeed have what it takes to be the president of the United States. For that matter, so does Vladimir Putin.
By Craig J. Cantoni
Feb. 18, 2008
_________________
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An author and columnist, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.
I am over fifty years old. I am a product of American values, observed and experienced in the 1950s and 1960s, and sorely tried in the Vietnam, Watergate, and Carter years of the 1970s, and again in the Clinton years of the 1990s.
This is the timeframe and events that formed my political worldview. I grew up when we still said a prayer and read Psalm 23 at the beginning of the school day. I remember doing the duck and cover in elementary school, to be safe in the event of a Cold War nuclear attack, even though being only 12 miles from NYC, the odds of surviving such an attack or its aftermath was just about a negative number. I remember the pride in America and its flag; the meaning of independence, especially on the Fourth of July. My father's parents were immigrants and my mother was an immigrant, and the old country was just that--the "old" country. Most of my uncles served in the US Army and Navy during WW2, while my father was a foreman in a defense plant. The prosperity,music, and the social fabric of America in the 1950s and 1960s are still a source of inspiration to me. Because of my parents' background, we always helped anyone in need that came our way. My parents would brook no discrimination, even when at the time it was common to discriminate on the basis of skin color. No, the promise of America was for everyone. Sometimes, only an immigrant can appreciate America's true value, as did my parents.
I remember well the Carter years, with its mind numbing cowardice in the face of dangers from the USSR and Iran, and how it caused us to doubt our greatness. And I remember a man named Ronald Reagan, and how he inspired an entire nation to rendevous with its destiny once again, and in an inconceivable turn of events, won the Cold War and knocked down the Berlin War without firing a single shot. His courage and belief in America inspired policies that freed all of Eastern Europe and kept budding Islamofascism at bay, all the while he was opposed and reviled by the Democrats, the America-haters and the Communists worldwide.
I remember the horror of the Clinton years, when a rapist and abuser of women was the Commander in Chief, aided and abetted by a power hungry woman who hated the military. I remember fighting for his impeachment, only to be betrayed by a Republican Senate that had no courage, or that was compromised by stolen FBI files and failed to discharge its lawful duty to remove a lawbreaking President who brought shame to the Oval Office. I remember recoiling in horror and shame when a six year old boy whose mother drowned in an attempt to bring him to freedom from Cuba was removed from a private home under the force of arms and returned to Fidel Castro.
I remember crying tears of gladness when our current President said the words of his Oath of Office on January 20, 2001, ending my personal nightmare, an eight year long nightmare, of having Bill and Hillary Clinton in the White House.
The events of these last seven years are nothing what I expected that cold, clear January morning. The events of September 11, 2001, the invasion of Iraq, the War on Terror, all of them returned me to the patriotic days of my youth. I saw a nation united in purpose for the first time in my adult life, as the nation had been torn since the Vietnam War.
But I saw a Republican President I believed in, and a Republican Party that was my home politically, shift in a slow, determined, unstoppable drift away from its principles, adopting the policies and views of the Democrats, to the point where we now face having as our Presidential candidate, John McCain, an enemy of conservatism, of Republican principles, and of American sovereignty.
As I pondered these things today, February 2, 2008, I have come to a very troubling observation.
We conservatives always had a home in the Republican Party. President Reagan even came here when the Democrat Party became too radical for him in the 1950s. We were the foundation of 12 years of the Reagan Bush era and we fought for the current President to give him eight years, even in the face of a national election being stolen from him.
But when our country was threatened by the prospect of a mass amnesty last May and June, allowing 20 million or more illegal immigrants to become defacto citizens by fiat, we erupted in a display of power that had Washington DC recoiling in terror. We derailed their plan to ensure the Balkanization of America by giving it 20 million more citizens who would not assimilate into the culture, and to ensure a cheap workforce, and to permanently undercut American worker's wages. Together with Global Warming and carbon credits, America could be brought to heel and managed.
We stopped McCain-Kennedy and its cousin, alright. But there was a price to pay for our insolence.
We, the America loving conservatives of the Republican Party, are no longer needed by this party. We are too narrow minded and old school. Flag waving and the supremacy of the American Way are passe. We are not inclusive. We are standing in the way of the elites in Washington DC from making their wet dreams a reality--making America an also-ran, not a super-power. America as a third world country, not as better than anyone else. An America that is afraid to face its Islamic enemies,that worries about what the world thinks about it, strangled in political correctness, surrendering its freedoms on a daily basis in the vain hope for security.
We keepers of the flame of American liberty are now the enemy. When Hillary labelled us the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, we took that has a label of pride. But now the Republican establishment has decreed that we are a conspiracy to be defeated within our own party, as we face the prospect of John McCain being rammed down our throats. John McCain, the Manchurian Candidate, the man who has betrayed every tenet of Republicanism in his quest for power,who has railed against conservatives at every turn, who is bound and determined to grant amnesty to 10% of Mexico's population now within our borders, he is the one being annointed by the elites as our candidate.
His job is not only to become the candidate of choice, but to be the means of the destruction of the power of the conservative base of the Republican Party.
Between McCain, Obama and Hillary, there isn't a dime's worth of difference in their political views. The Republican and Democrat established elites have melded into one entity, and they will win no matter who gets nominated or who wins the general election, especially if McCain is the nominee. All three believe in unlimited amnesty, an open border, cap and trade globaloney, giving rights to Gitmo detainees, and the restriction of free speech and gun rights.
The MSM is their collective cheerleader, actively working to marginalize us as a viable force for the America we visualize.
Many of us will vote Republican in November, only because we cannot, in good conscience, vote for Obama or Clinton. The Republican establishment knows this, and knows because we are principled, we can not do otherwise. Rather than enlist us to help, they are engaged in a policy of containment and neutering, because we stand in the way of their vision of America.
McCain as a candidate will be a disaster. The Republican establishment knows this. But they don't care, because the goal is not to win this election. It is to remove us from the political table, and for them to join with their Democrat brothers in the march toward an America subsevient to global interests. Sovereignty is treated as a quaint, outmoded concept, even by many Republican governors who are pushing the globaloney nonsense that will cripple this nation.
The perfect storm of American politics is converging in a bid to elect one of three horrible candidates, McCain,Obama, or Clinton, to be our next President. The odds are that the Republicans will not only lose with McCain, but they will lose even more of the House and Senate, enough to relegate Republicans to a minority status for decades to come.
Where are the national Republican leaders speaking out against where our party is heading? As one looks over the events of the last 15 years, since the ascension and improbable election of a no good, draft dodging, lying huckster like Bill Clinton to President, we have witnessed a snowballing reversal of American values and fortunes. With Clinton II on the horizon, we face a complete collapse of American values and soveriegnty and freedom with the "CHANGE" that is being promised for the electorate.
That "change" is starting right now for us. By Tuesday midnight, we will know if the fate the elites have decreed for us will become reality, if McCain is our candidate.
In the past few days, the lenses through which I view politics have changed in prescription. I see now that we are the enemy to our own party's leaders, whose leaders have decreed that our nominee will be the anti-conservative, anti-Republican candidate. The other candidates still open to us, Huckster, Romney and Paul each have their own problems with our values.
There are only a few short days to stop the McCain Screwball express. As we fought the impossible fight against McCain and amnesty last year, we have but a few days to influence our fellow conservatives and Republicans not to allow the predetermined outcome to occur.
I offer this screed in an attempt to understand what is going on today, to explain the inexplicable in what is occurring to our party and our chances for success in November against the second ascension of the corrupt Clinton Machine. I wish not to tell my fellow conservative who they should vote for, but I ask them not to vote for McCain.
Others, including the Republican establishment, have decreed for us who are candidate should be. American loving Republicans should reserve the right to make that choice.
by Exit 82
posted blog commentary at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1963918/posts#comment
The upcoming elections are turning out to be odd indeed, with many counterintuitive processes in the offing. Some columnists of greater repute than this humble correspondent have started to pay attention, but have not fully anticipated the possible results. Ann Coulter recently noted:
That helps, but why would any Republican vote for McCain?
At least under President Hillary, Republicans in Congress would know that they're supposed to fight back. When President McCain proposes the same ideas -- tax hikes, liberal judges and Social Security for illegals -- Republicans in Congress will support "our" president -- just as they supported, if only briefly, Bush's great ideas on amnesty and Harriet Miers.
The Democrats are aware of this and face the same issues. Anyone who has been paying attention to politics knows that John McCain has been on the opposite side of the Republican base for years. He has favored gun bans, opposed tax cuts, sponsored McCain/Feingold (which creates a campaign finance system that most favors democrats), and supports the democratic position on Illegal Aliens. In short, much of the far lefts agenda will be successfully promulgated under a McCain administration for the exact reasons that Ms. Coulter ably notes. However, when you take this a step further, you realize that actually more of the far lefts agenda will be successfully completed if McCain is president than if a democrat is president, since many Republicans in congress will be more compliant if President McCain favors a bill. Further, the Democratic Party will not have to accept any responsibility for either the calamitous results of their programs, or the upcoming recession. Neither will they have to take any heat from their base about failing to immediately withdraw from Iraq, a policy which both parties realize is a strategic impossibility at this point, due to the oil economic issues. Likewise, they know that many of their wildest policies will be unpopular with a large segment of the population, so they want to avoid any backlash similar to the one that happened in 1994. With McCain in the White House, the democrats will have carte blanche to legislate their hearts desires, with the immunity and impunity of still having a Republican to blame it all on.
Across the aisle, the Republican base knows that Hillary Clinton has some very strange ideas, and none of her husbands charisma. So, if she were elected president, there would likely be two solid years of her attempts to promulgate terribly unpopular programs, which would be stymied in a closely divided congress, while the international situation and the economic woes can be solidly laid at the feet of the Democrats. After all, if the Democrats control the presidency and both houses of Congress, frustration directed at Republicans rings rather hollow. In all likelihood this is the only foreseeable means by which Republicans could regain control of either house of Congress.
So, in 2008, we may well find ourselves playing a game of "Presidential Hot Potato". Experienced and cagey Democrats may desperately want to lose this election. They may, like Sen. Kennedy, endorse Barak Hussein O'Bama, in the hopes that a wildly left wing black man, with connections to Islam, cannot possibly beat any Republican, that party may shove forward, regardless of how "soft headed" or inept. Likewise, the Republican base may want to "take a dive" here, and let Hillary or Hussein become president, so as to recapture congress in 2010 (Hillary being the safer bet, since Hussein O'Bama is much more likely to do things in foreign policy from which we will never be able to recover). The Presidency in 2008 is a "hot potato" which each parties "base" voters may want their party to avoid.
The result may be something extraordinarily strange and will befuddle all the pollsters. In the general election, we may see core Democrats crossing party lines to vote for McCain, since he is the candidate most likely to shepherd through the legislation of their hearts desires, while simultaneously giving their party political cover from their unpopular agenda. With this going on, the Republican base, combining revulsion for McCain, with some political savvy about losing some battles to win the war, may be willing to cross party lines to vote for Hillary. Since so much is currently at stake in the world, it reminds this author of the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times".
David Roth
Jan 31, 2008
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'Straight Talk' Express Takes Scenic Route to Truth
January 23, 2008
John McCain is Bob Dole minus the charm, conservatism and youth. Like McCain, pollsters assured us that Dole was the most "electable" Republican. Unlike McCain, Dole didn't lie all the time while claiming to engage in Straight Talk.
Of course, I might lie constantly too, if I were seeking the Republican presidential nomination after enthusiastically promoting amnesty for illegal aliens, Social Security credit for illegal aliens, criminal trials for terrorists, stem-cell research on human embryos, crackpot global warming legislation and free speech-crushing campaign-finance laws.
I might lie too, if I had opposed the Bush tax cuts, a marriage amendment to the Constitution, waterboarding terrorists and drilling in Alaska.
And I might lie if I had called the ads of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "dishonest and dishonorable."
McCain angrily denounces the suggestion that his "comprehensive immigration reform" constituted "amnesty" -- on the ludicrous grounds that it included a small fine. Even the guy who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy didn't fall for this a few years ago.
In 2003, McCain told The Tucson Citizen that "amnesty has to be an important part" of any immigration reform. He also rolled out the old chestnut about America's need for illegals, who do "jobs that American workers simply won't do."
McCain's amnesty bill would have immediately granted millions of newly legalized immigrants Social Security benefits. He even supported allowing work performed as an illegal to count toward Social Security benefits as recently as a vote in 2006 -- now adamantly denied by Mr. Straight Talk.
McCain keeps boasting that he was "the only one" of the Republican presidential candidates who supported the surge in Iraq.
What is he talking about? All Republicans supported the surge -- including Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. The only ones who didn't support it were McCain pals like Sen. Chuck Hagel. Indeed, the surge is the first part of the war on terrorism that caused McCain to break from Hagel in order to support the president.
True, McCain voted for the war. So did Hillary Clinton. Like her, he then immediately started attacking every other aspect of the war on terrorism. (The only difference was, he threw in frequent references to his experience as a POW, which currently outnumber John Kerry's references to being a Vietnam vet.)
Thus, McCain joined with the Democrats in demanding O.J. trials for terrorists at Guantanamo, including his demand that the terrorists have full access to the intelligence files being used to prosecute them.
These days, McCain gives swashbuckling speeches about the terrorists who "will follow us home." But he still opposes dripping water down their noses. He was a POW, you know. Also a member of the Keating 5 scandal, which you probably don't know, and won't -- until he becomes the Republican nominee.
Though McCain was far from the only Republican to support the surge, he does have the distinction of being the only Republican who voted against the Bush tax cuts. (Also the little lamented Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who later left the Republican Party.) Now McCain claims he opposed the tax cuts because they didn't include enough spending cuts. But that wasn't what he said at the time.
To the contrary, in 2001, McCain said he was voting against Bush's tax cuts based on the idiotic talking point of the Democrats. "I cannot in good conscience," McCain said, "support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief."
McCain started and fanned the vicious anti-Bush myth that, before the 2000 South Carolina primary, the Bush campaign made phone calls to voters calling McCain a "liar, cheat and a fraud" and accusing him of having an illegitimate black child.
On the thin reed of a hearsay account, McCain immediately blamed the calls on Bush. "I'm calling on my good friend George Bush," McCain said, "to stop this now. He comes from a better family. He knows better than this."
Bush denied that his campaign had anything to do with the alleged calls and, in a stunningly magnanimous act, ordered his campaign to release the script of the calls being made in South Carolina.
Bush asked McCain to do the same for his calls implying that Bush was an anti-Catholic bigot, but McCain refused. Instead, McCain responded with a campaign commercial calling Bush a liar on the order of Bill Clinton:
MCCAIN: His ad twists the truth like Clinton. We're all pretty tired of that.
ANNOUNCER: Do we really want another politician in the White House America can't trust?
After massive investigations by the Los Angeles Times and investigative reporter Byron York, among others, it turned out that neither of the alleged calls had ever been made by the Bush campaign -- nor, it appeared, by anyone else. There was no evidence that any such calls had ever been made, which is unheard of when hundreds of thousands of "robo-calls" are being left on answering machines across the state.
And yet, to this day, the media weep with McCain over Bush's underhanded tactics in the 2000 South Carolina primary.
In fact, the most vicious attack in the 2000 South Carolina primary came from McCain -- and not against his opponent.
Seeking even more favorable press from The New York Times, McCain launched an unprovoked attack against the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, calling them "agents of intolerance." Unlike the phantom "black love child" calls, there's documentary evidence of this smear campaign.
To ensure he would get full media coverage for that little gem, McCain alerted the networks in advance that he planned to attack their favorite whipping boys. Newspaper editors across the country stood in awe of McCain's raw bravery. The New York Times praised him in an editorial that said the Republican Party "has for too long been tied to the cramped ideology of the Falwells and the Robertsons."
Though McCain generally votes pro-life -- as his Arizona constituency requires -- he embraces the loony lingo of the pro-abortion set, repeatedly assuring his pals in the media that he opposes the repeal of Roe v. Wade because it would force women to undergo "illegal and dangerous operations."
Come to think of it, Dole is a million times better than McCain. Why not run him again?
by Ann Coulter
See article at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=24635
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Do you know the story of the Incredible Disappearing Border Fence? It's an object lesson in gesture politics and homeland insecurity. It's a tale of hollow rhetoric, meaningless legislation and bipartisan betrayal. And in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, it's a helpful learning tool as you assess the promises of immigration enforcement converts now running for president.
Last fall, Democrats and Republicans in Washington responded to continued public outrage over border chaos by passing the "Secure Fence Act." Did you question the timing? You should have. It's no coincidence they finally got off their duffs to respond just before the 2006 midterm elections. Lawmakers vowed grandiosely to keep America safe. The law specifically called for "at least 2 layers of reinforced fencing, the installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras and sensors" at five specific stretches of border totaling approximately 700 miles.
GOP leaders patted themselves on the back for their toughness. President Bush made a huge to-do in signing the bill into law. Never mind the lack of funding for the fence and the failure to address many other immediate reforms that could have been adopted immediately to strengthen immigration enforcement, close deportation loopholes and provide systemic relief at the border without the need for a single brick or bulldozer.
On the very day the bill was signed, open-borders politicians were already moving to water it down. Texas Republican Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn pushed for "flexibility to choose other options instead of fencing, if needed." Six months after passage of the Secure Fence Act -- now interpreted by Washington as the Flexible Non-Fence Act or, as I call it, the FINO (Fence in Name Only) Act -- 700 miles shrunk to "somewhere in the ballpark" of 370 miles. A 14-mile fence-building project in San Diego was stalled for years by environmental legal challenges and budget shortfalls. The first deadline -- a May 30, 2007 requirement for installation of an "interlocking surveillance camera system" along the border in California and Arizona -- passed unmet. GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, one of the few Republican presidential candidates to walk the talk on border security, blasted the Bush administration for suffering from "a case of 'the slows' on border enforcement."
More than a year after the law's passage, the citizen watchdog group Grassfire reports that just five miles of double-layer fencing has been built in the first 12 months of implementation of the act. Five lousy miles. The Government Accountability Office claims 70 miles were erected -- but most of that fencing failed to meet the specifications of the law.
Is Congress up in arms? Will there be accountability? Don't make me snort. Instead of demanding that the law be enforced, the pols are sabotaging the law. As part of the omnibus spending package passed this week, House Democrats incorporated Senate Republicans' provisions to remove the two-layer fencing requirements and the specific target list of fencing locations.
GOP Rep. Peter T. King, who sponsored the Secure Fence Act, told the Washington Times: "This is either a blatant oversight or a deliberate attempt to disregard the border security of our country. As it's currently written, the omnibus language guts the Secure Fence Act almost entirely. Quite simply, it is unacceptable."
But so totally, totally predictable.
Republican Leader John Boehner tried to blame the House Democrat majority: "The fact that this was buried in a bloated, 3,500-page omnibus speaks volumes about the Democrats' unserious approach on border security and illegal immigration," he said. "Gutting the Secure Fence Act will make our borders less secure, but it's consistent with the pattern of behavior we've seen all year from this majority." But it's border state Republicans who've been gunning to undermine the law while the ink was still fresh.
To add insult to injury and homeland insecurity upon homeland insecurity, Congress failed to adopt a ban on federal aid to sanctuary cities that prevent government employees and law enforcement officers from asking about immigration status; voted to stall implementation of stricter ID standards at border crossings; and miraculously found enough money to provide $10 million in "emergency" funding for attorneys of illegal aliens.
Next time you hear a leading presidential candidate try to woo you with his nine-point immigration enforcement plan or his secure ID plan or his Secure Borders platform, point to the Incredible Disappearing Border Fence. Poof! That is what happens to election-season homeland security promises. Why would theirs be any different?
Michelle Malkin
December 19, 2007
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/homeland.php?id=1385927
Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
Americans Want New Presidential Blood, not 'Retreads!'
Despite consistent polls showing that 70-80% of Americans want immigration laws enforced and the border secured, most 2008 Presidential hopefuls pay no attention to Americans at all. Candidates like Guiliani, Romney and McCain are nothing but "Retreads" parroting the tired Bush Party Line telling ad nauseum the hardships faced by illegal aliens living in the US, and insist on forcing amnesty for illegals on resisting Americans.
Of course, Retread candidates don't call them illegal aliens--they use "undocumented immigrants" or "unauthorized workers" or some other sympathy-generating politically-correct and politically-expedient term. Even George Bush in Tuesday's SOTU speech still clings to oxymoron terms like "illegal immigrants." (And how can an immigrant--who by definition in federal immigration law 8 USC 1101 has a valid visa--be "illegal?")
Retreads carefully evade mentioning the damage done to middle and low-income Americans by the illegal alien invasion. (Yes Virginia, that's what it really is--an invasion. The 5,000 illegal aliens daily breaking into the US equal a regiment, and each month it's the equivalent of a field army. That's more troops than we have in Iraq or that landed in Normandy on D-Day in 1944!).
George Bush only spoke of "hope and opportunity" and didn't mention the collapsing emergency rooms illegal aliens use for their FREE primary medical care, the public schools buckling to accommodate their children, or the increasing tax burden for illegal aliens forced on middle-income Americans who gain nothing from this illegal alien invasion.
Nor did Bush refer to the increasing social unrest that he promotes by ignoring the wishes of Americans in forcing us to accept his plan of amnesty for these illegal alien invaders. He wants a debate that's "serious, civil, and conclusive." But Americans aren't fooled by this whining and sniveling either. They know that the Retreads' calls for "civility" are aimed only at Americans who disagree with their illegal alien amnesty plan, and their real meaning is "Shut up, because we don't want to hear it. We've made the decision and you have nothing to say about it." Retreads weren't calling for "civility" when 100,000 illegal aliens shut down the Chicago Loop at Friday rush hour waving their Mexican flags demanding "rights" and telling Americans "This is our land--go back to Europe."
It's an outrage that Retreads intentionally malign and defame American men and women whose only "offense" is publicly identifying and discussing the problem of illegal immigration as a historic national crisis. Retreads may fool themselves but they don't deceive Americans. That's why the average American voter is ecstatic that Congressmen Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo have entered the 2008 Presidential race. They know these three statesmen will insist that the immigration issue (both legal and illegal) be recognized and addressed as a top issue in the Republican Party's platform. Three cheers to Hunter, Paul and Tancredo!
Americans demand an acknowledgment and resolution of the illegal immigration issue, and have lost patience with Retreads' repeatedly and arrogantly putting aside their best interests in favor of big business and ethnic lobbies. Politicians like George Bush, Ted Kennedy, John McCain and their cronies will be responsible for civil unrest likely to produce violence and even bloodshed, both from Americans graduating from "frustration" to "anger" as well as from illegal aliens with an inherent disregard for the rule of law. Responsibility will fall on those who continually told Americans (in effect) to "Shut up because we're going to do what we want and not what serves citizens' interests."
While on the surface it may appear that each side of the aisle has a different "master," (Republicans serving global business' demands for cheap labor vs. Democrats seeking the "cheap votes" from ethnic lobbies), the reality is that they're both in bed together. Examination of donor lists of LULAC, MALDEF and other ethnic lobbies reveals the multi-national corporations who traditionally demand that Republicans deliver cheap labor.
In 2008, we must give "the boot" to these "Retreads" who refuse to represent "We the People." These worthless hacks are easy to recognize; unknowns don't achieve Presidential candidacy. These "retreads" who ignore citizens' opinions and interests have a clear track record of easily identified red flags:
Retreads refuse to call the invaders what they are: illegal aliens. Instead, they choose diluted, politically-correct and pandering terms like "undocumented migrants" and "unauthorized workers." Examples include Senator John McCain who "prefers the term illegal immigrant" (1) in precise lock-step with George Bush's 2007 SOTU speech. Similar panderers abound on the opposite side of the aisle: Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry are Democratic Retreads who parrot the snake oil pitch that illegal aliens are valuable "citizens" of the US instead of the lawbreakers they are.
Retreads call for "civil" discussion. Again, John McCain is strict obedience to the George Bush dictates reflected in the 2007 State of the Union address. (1) (Interestingly, McCain's whining to "tone down the debate" followed a Town Hall the previous evening in Sun Lakes, AZ where all who attended rejected the McCain-Kennedy "not an amnesty" bill. If any of the 1500 people in attendance supported the "Godfather of Amensty's" proposal, they remained silent that night.(3) Next morning came McCain's sniveling call for "toning down the debate.")
Retread John McCain has legitimately earned his reputation for arrogance. While organizing and leading "congressional visiting teams" during the May 2006 Senatorial Amnesty passage, I personally saw the self-built shrine in his Phoenix district office lobby. Politicians often display photos of themselves with other important people to impress visitors, but not John McCain. One entire wall of the office lobby is covered floor-to-ceiling with framed magazine covers upon which McCain's picture commands sole place on the cover!
Even I was amazed when office manager Babette Donaldson told of the 100,000-letter backlog of letters on the immigration issue that McCain's Washington office faced. There's no doubt that the prevailing message in those letters ISN'T "Senator, you're doing a wonderful job with your bill giving amnesty to illegal aliens and another guest worker plan that gives workers and their families Medicare coverage" (and why does McCain need to bring non-working spouses and children to get work done "that Americans won't do?")
Voters don't behave like that; they write primarily when they oppose a politician's bills. Yet knowing that he'll want the votes of each of the 100,000 Americans who wrote those letters and e-mails, "Godfather of Amnesty" McCain arrogantly continues to force illegal alien amnesty on Americans.
Newspapers who copy and praise Retreads' behavior should also be rejected as credible sources of accurate reporting. The brave few like Lou Dobbs who are marginalized by the ethnic and open borders lobbies are actually the only sources of what really happens and why. Nearly 8 months after the disgraceful conviction of two honest and brave Border Patrol agents for doing their job of intercepting an illegal alien drug smuggler, no national news network and few newspapers have reported the story the Bush Administration wants hushed up.
Retreads pander to racism with membership in congressional caucuses geared to ethnic bias rather than ideology should be rejected as demagogues and worse. Examples are the Congressional Black Caucus, (Democratic) Hispanic Caucus and (Republican) Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. That such organizations claim "being black is an unwritten rule" or admit non-Hispanics as "associate members" (translated second-class members) would provoke a firestorm of condemnation if practiced by "white" counterparts.<
Can you imagine a "Congressional Anglo-European Caucus" where Black, Hispanic or Asian member of Congress were "associate" instead of "full" status? The clear message sent by members of such caucus groups is "racism is OK so long as 'whites' are excluded" That It's NOT OK must be shouted loud and clear by Americans--black, brown, red, white and yellow.<
Retreads' calls for "civility" are no more than the "Can't we all just get along?" cries of the liberal side of the open-borders lobby. Considering that such liberals established and perpetuate such ethnic caucus groups, the liberals have answered their own question--they don't want to "get along" with anyone and their cries are both hypocriticals as well as whining and sniveling. Their "Can't we all just get along?" brands them as crybabies.<
Reject "white" politicians who accommodate such racists by being "keynote speakers" at racist organizations, extolling racist agendas of groups like National Council of LaRaza, League of United Latin-American Citizens and the like. Again, such disgraceful behavior spans both sides of the aisle: George Bush, John McCain, Ted Kennedy, HIllary Clinton, John Kerry and many others whose lack of integrity or ethnics allow them to obsequiously seek votes at any pandering price.
Americans have had enough of illegal aliens being given our economic and natural resources while "Retread" politicians send the bill to law-abiding citizens. The President and Congress who have refused to enforce our immigration laws are responsible for the overpopulation and urban sprawl that bankrupts every law-abiding American citizen and legal immigrant. These politicians give "cheap labor" to big business and send the subsidy bill to taxpayers.
Let every cheap and pandering Retread politician beware that Americans increasingly and unashamedly reflect the spirit of Howard Jarvis who led California's 1978 taxpayer revolt in shouting "we're mad as hell and we won't take it anymore!"
Spineless politicians ignore citizen outrage at their own political peril, much as did Congressman Jim Kolbe of Arizona, who voluntarily retired rather than face the humiliation of a "voters' pink slip."
The Battle for United States National Sovereignty and Continued Independence
Admittedly I am not a fan of CNN, however I have acquired a growing admiration of Lou Dobbs, who may be the only member of the mainstream media who has spoken out in defense of United States independence. What follows is a link to Lou Dobbs’ June 25th broadcast in which he clearly questions the Bush Administration's willingness to abandon the sovereignty of the United States of America.
It would appear that with unmitigated collusion, and almost complete unanimity, the United States Congress is supporting President Bush’s efforts to merge the United States into a single North American Union government with Canada and Mexico.
What the media portrays as the two major political parties in American politics, apparently both have degenerated into a self-anointed “elite ruling class,” all of similar socialist persuasion who are now working in concert (walking in lock-step) with President Bush. I think the expression is a "toady." It would appear that less than a handful of U.S. Congressmen see their duty as anything but to themselves, their re-election, self-aggrandizement and obtaining personal wealth at the expense of American citizens.
The main stream media (with the notable exception of Lou Dobbs) remains silent on what is a clear and present threat to United States’ national sovereignty. This might come as a surprise were it not for the media’s tiresome daily support of open borders and unrestrained migration of illegal aliens. Christian leaders remain equally silent, supporting their own self interests derived from open border policies above their American citizenship.
It seems hardly an overstatement to say that the United States is on the verge of foresaking its national sovereignty, and ultimately its independence, as the vast majority of our country's elected leaders (Congressmen, Governors, state legislators, county and city governments) sit stunningly silent in apparent tacit approval.
A reasonable person has to wonder if Congressmen themselves are too ignorant to understand the outcome of their own NAFTA and CAFTA legislation. Why does it take “Joe 6-Pack” American to point out that the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), signed by President Bush with foreign leaders, was nothing less than a treaty which should have been ratified by Congress. Equally problematic is that both NAFTA and CAFTA were legislated in defiance of the majority of Americans, the “will of the people.” SPP is a direct outgrowth of the 1994 NAFTA legislation. A less than objective overview of SPP can be found at www.spp.gov.
Is it remotely possible that a hemispheric “one unified North American Union” was intended by Congress from the beginning and legislated under the (dis) guise of “free trade agreements?” To adopt such a cynical viewpoint would give Congress too much credibility in the face of historical fact. Ignorance is more likely the correct choice were it not for Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has quietly introduced a bill, S.3622 to create a "North American Investment Fund" that would tap both U.S. and Canadian taxpayers for the development of public works projects in Mexico.
In either event, the wishes and desires of Americans have not been permitted to figure into the history-altering SPP treaty decisions. What happened to the U.S. Constitution along the way? Has it become mere toilet tissue in the view of government elites? Where are the proud defenders of the United States of America, those war heroes, Senators John “IED” McCain * and John Kerry? Trust between the American people and our government is imperiled by such thoughtless failures of leadership on immigration reform and border security.
Fortunately, there are people like Lou Dobbs who are alert - a few precious souls who are simultaneously both awake and conscious, and concerned (alarmed) about Bush's proposed North American Union.
It would appear Congressional authority has unquestionably been usurped. A treaty, both in form and substance, has been signed and implemented, while being passed off as only a 'declaration and outline of mutual priorities'.
It woud seem reasonable to conclude that any agreement, whether binding the United States in fact or principle, to protect the security of Mexico and Canada is arguably a treaty. In any event, any agreement that permits Mexico and Canada joint regulation of any aspect of United States trade would be foolish at a minimum, but the the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), comprised of North American business leaders, has already begun their joint oversight of trade and security issues.
Numerous provisions of NAFTA and CAFTA, and SPP by definition, subverts and subjugates the authority of Congress to foreign nations. Critics have argued this point before each piece of free-trade legislationwas passed by Congress - both NAFTA and CAFTA. SPP contains within its pages the agreement to share responsibility for the security of all of North America - whether formal or informal, the elements of a mutual defense pact. Has Congress and the President of the United States both decided to share United States sovereignty with both Canada and Mexico, i.e., subjugate United States sovereignty to the trilateral mutual interests of the three nations? Apparently so, and without any voice from American citizens.
Very few citizens have had the opportunity to voice their concerns except as a “letter to the editor?” Few have access to national audiences. What choice do most citizens have but to use the internet and make calls to radio talk shows? The point is, and you know it to be true intuitively, that American citizens are totally ignored today by anyone who is in possession of a national platform.
Congressional office staffers and home district office personnel have similarly adopted the attitude, “repel all boarders.” They will greet you with a warm smile, acknowledge your concerns, and give reassurances that the matter is of “utmost importance” to your elected representative. That is of course, assuming you can get an “appointment” to be heard – which is often very difficult – to the point many simply give up. Congressmen in Arizona even control who will be permitted attendance at their townhall meetings.
There are only two men in Congress who have forcefully spoken out: Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo and Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Both are opposed to President Bush’s vision and unconstitutional implementation of a North American Union. As you heard in the film clip, SPP will have both military and economic implications, which arguably makes SPP nothing less than a treaty, cleverly disguised to prevent public or Congressional debate.
To illustrate the unanimity of this Congressional movement to abandon the United States of America as a sovereign entity, these two men - Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul - plus Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth and Wisconsin Congressman F. James Sensenbrenne, are the only ones in apparent opposition out of 535 Congressmen, 435 House members and 100 Senators.
Reflect on the incredible number of U.S. Congressmen who cling desperately to power but have lost the courage and conviction they once had as Americans, and who can no longer be trusted to defend America's sovereignty and independence. If we needed proof of that assertion, we need look no further than their arrogant daily denigration of our own Armed Forces for personal political gain, and their willingness to commit treason to undermine the successful defense of the United States of America.
A battle for United States’ national sovereignty and independence is coming! How far are you willing to go to fight for your own liberty? It would be a good decision to make now. You will have to make that decision very, very soon.
As you depart from this article, it would be a good idea to watch the film clip one more time to fully grasp the enormous implications of SPP. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueAdeZuns3A
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." —Supreme Court Justice William Douglas
During hearings to investigate the level of care patients receive for mental illness, a delegation of U.S. Senators was visiting a mental institution (asylum) in southeast Maryland. During the obligatory “dog and pony show,” commonly staged for visiting dignitaries, Senator John McCain asked the Director what the criteria was that defined whether or not a patient should be institutionalized.
"Well," said the Director, "We conduct a number of tests, each intended to confirm the validity of the diagnosis. For example, one of the most reliable tests involves offering a patient the choice of a teaspoon, a teacup, or a bucket and asking him or her to empty the bathtub."
“Oh, I understand," said Senator McCain. "A normal person would use the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup?”
"No." said the Director, "Actually a normal person would pull the plug. I could have asked the same question using illegal immigration as your reference. For example, the choices from minimum impact to maximum effect might have been:
“(1) Open borders and blanket amnesty giving citizenship to all regardless of nationality, education, criminal record, or when they arrived or will arrive. If I’m not mistaken, I believe this to be your unstated preference.
“(2) A possible second choice might be a gradual attrition resulting from a reduction of social benefits, and denial of any forms of identification obtained in the United States. Also some have proposed that we require illegal aliens to obtain their guest worker status from an American Embassy in a foreign country within 6 months which would cause them to have to leave, if only temporarily.
“The most stringent choice would of course be:
“(3) Militarize the border for national defense; erect an impenetrable border wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico; eliminate eligibility of any and all illegal aliens for all taxpayer funded social benefits in the United States, including education; void NAFTA and CAFTA legislation; insure that felony crimes committed by illegal aliens would carry 5 times the punishment as any American citizen, without appeal; eliminate anything but emergency (life threatening) medical care; bill the Mexican government for any indigent care rendered. Surely they would be willing to divert some of their oil revenues to provide medical care to Mexican citizens; eliminate eligibility for any bank loan, car loan, revolving credit, vehicle registration, and mortgage loan, ownership of property or employment of any kind. Any illegal alien currently in the United States would be required to obtain United States-sanctioned alien guest worker identification only at a foreign American Embassy and provide DNA, fingerprints and photographs for law enforcement and national security purposes. 200,000 will be readmitted annually from a pool of applicants from those who (a) register before they leave the United States, and (b) have no United States or foreign criminal record when they attempt to return. Citizenship of offspring born in the United States will only be granted to those who obtain United States citizenship before the date of their child’s birth, retroactive to 1950.
“The “pull the plug” response, Senator, would require you to vigourously enforce existing immigration law, to the letter of the law, without pardoning millions of felons, in one fashion or another, who have been victimizing American citizens for more than a generation. Any contemplated immigration reform legislation out of Congress should only have be used to correct obvious flaws in the current immigration law, many of which were enumerated in response (3).
“So, tell me Senator, do you prefer a bed by the wall or near a window? We’ve been expecting you for some time. Do you think Senator Jon Kyl will be along soon?”
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