"Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face." - Thomas Sowell
Freedom and liberty are the foundation of America. This love of freedom requires that freedom for others be just as important as freedom for you. Today this commitment to freedom is being superceded by a constant government expansion that will leave all of us subservient to the power of bureaucrats.
The 19th-century poet Walt Whitman articulated the essence of America's democratic ideal thusly: "... government can do little positive good to the people, [but] it may do an immense deal of harm. And here is where the beauty of the Democratic principle comes in. Democracy would prevent all this harm. It would have no man's benefit achieved at the expense of his neighbors ... this one single rule, rationally construed and applied, is enough to form the starting point of all that is necessary in government; to make no more laws than those useful for preventing a man or body of men from infringing on the rights of other men." [Emphases in original.]
The founding fathers would concur heartily with Whitman's sentiment. Whitman described exactly the kind of polity that the founders desired to establish -- one in which every American, rich or poor, would be equally secure in the enjoyment of his God-given rights and safe from any power that would trespass on them.
To protect individual rights, the founders established a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
How have we arrived at the point where our citizens believe the delusion that democracy is good? How have we arrived at the point where our citizens believe that America is a democracy? They believe that freedom comes from the very source of the corruption destroying that very same freedom. Bizarre! Because it must be realized that in the name of democracy individual freedom is being destroyed in our nation. Democracy is evil. It is no different than the term used in this article, mobocracy. Yet the majority of our citizens brag about the evil they are committing by proclaiming their acts the acts of democracy and thus they see them as good in their delusion. They destroy the rights of others with pride in their tyrannical acts.
What I forsee is that blood will flow as it always flows in the death of our form of republic. The death will bring a return to the standard tyranny that mankind has experienced during most of its existence. We had the greatest freedom in history and we are throwing it away because our citizens do not understand what we had or why it worked. The more democratic we become the more evil we become.
As Mark Hendrickson says "The rule of law lies in tatters." With it freedom will lie in tatters as well.
by Byron York - January 30th, 2010 - Washington Examiner
One cherished goal of legal activists on the left is to punish the "war criminals" who helped shape terrorist interrogation policies during the Bush administration. Some of those activists now work in the Obama Justice Department and have been hoping the Department would find two Bush-era lawyers in particular, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, guilty of professional misconduct -- a move that would likely result in both men facing disbarment proceedings.
The activists are sure to be disappointed in a new report by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, who say a still-unreleased report from the Department's Office of Professional Responsibility "clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the 'torture' memos of professional-misconduct allegations."
The lust by those on the left to punish those on the right is shared by our President and his childish Attorney General. I would not expect this is the end of this matter any more than Obama's difficulties in changing the war against the islamo fascists into a criminal matter will deter them from that goal. They will wait a while and find a new way to try and destroy these people. The left is only at war with other Americans who dare to disagree with their socialist Utopian dreams, not with true enemies of America.
by Ben McGrath - January 30th, 2010 - The New Yorker
By most accounts, the Paul Revere figure of this Second American Revolution is an excitable cable-news reporter named Rick Santelli, a former futures trader and Drexel Burnham Lambert vice-president who stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange last February and sounded the alarm on CNBC about the new Administration’s planned assistance for homeowners facing foreclosure. He proposed a nationwide referendum, via the Internet, on the matter of subsidizing “the losers’ mortgages,” winning both the attention and the vocal support of the working traders in his midst. “President Obama, are you listening?” he shouted, and then said that he’d been thinking of organizing a Chicago Tea Party in July, urging “all you capitalists” to come join him on Lake Michigan, where “we’re going to be dumping in some derivative securities.” It was a delicate pose—financial professionals more or less laughing at debtors while disavowing the lending techniques that had occasioned the crisis—but within a matter of hours a Web site, OfficialChicagoTeaParty.com, had gone live, and by the end of the following week dozens of small protests were occurring simultaneously around the country, invoking the legacy of early New England colonists in their revolt against King George.
Santelli’s rant was delivered at 7:10 A.M., Chicago time, but it was highly YouTube-able, and all the more effective to the alienated masses—“the rabble,” as some have taken to calling themselves—because Santelli was not a known conservative mouthpiece like Rush Limbaugh or Beck or Sean Hannity. The primal narrative of any insurrection benefits from the appearance of unlikely spontaneity. Another early agitator who merits a retrospective footnote is Keli Carender, a.k.a. the Liberty Belle, a blogger and “random woman,” as one admirer says, “from Seattle, of all places.” Carender was a week ahead of Santelli in voicing her dissent; her mistake was choosing the wrong animating metaphor. Borrowing terminology from Limbaugh, she organized a Porkulus Protest in response to the economic-stimulus bill, and tried tagging Democratic leaders with epithets like Porky and Piggy and Porker. (Not the least of tea’s advantages is the ease with which it can be converted into a handy acronym: Taxed Enough Already.) But Carender identified a tactic that would prove invaluable in the months of raucous town-hall meetings and demonstrations to follow: adopting the idealistic energy of liberal college students. “Unlike the melodramatic lefties, I do not want to get arrested,” she wrote. “I do, however, want to take a page from their playbook and be loud, obnoxious, and in their faces.”
Spring brought the founding of the Tea Party Patriots , a centralized Web destination for decentralized malcontents, and the start of Glenn Beck’s side gig as a social organizer, through his 9.12 Project . The numbers nine and twelve referred to a checklist of principles and values, but their greater significance lay in the allusion to September 11th. “The day after America was attacked, we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties,” the project’s mission statement read. “We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12, 2001, again.” The chosen values were inarguable: things like honesty and hope and courage. Only two of the principles (“I believe in God and He is the center of my life”; “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable”) indicated any kind of political agenda. Inclusiveness was the point.
As spring passed into summer, the scores at local Tea Party gatherings turned to hundreds, and then thousands, collecting along the way footloose Ron Paul supporters, goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militiamen, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 “truthers,” neo-“Birchers,” and, of course, “birthers”—those who remained convinced that the President was a Muslim double agent born in Kenya. “We’ll meet back here in six months,” Beck had said in March, and when September 12th arrived even the truest of believers were surprised by the apparent strength of the new movement, as measured by the throngs who made the pilgrimage to the Capitol for a Taxpayer March on Washington, swarming the Mall with signs reading “ ‘1984’ Is Not an Instruction Manual” and “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!”
The starting point for understanding the TEA Party is your belief about the number of attendees at the huge rally on 9/12. To this day the liberals of the Democrat Party and the elitists of the Republican Party refuse to accept a rational estimate of the crowd size. It was at least a million people and probably closer to one and a half million. The naysayers involved in political control of our nation believe it was less than 100,000. If you want to understand why America is losing the ability to talk, you need no more amazing example that the rejection of another's reality from these three forces. Liberal Democrats and elitist Republicans have little in common except their frenzied hope that they can belittle and destroy the TEA Party movement. Doesn't that bizarre partnership itself raise an incredible set of questions about how we are currently governed?
This article, like many on the TEA Party, has some interesting elements of truth. Yet it still misses the point. The point is freedom. Each of these groups are angry because they fear their right to believe something as long as they leave others alone is being compromised by a Utopian minded government determined to tell them what to think and how to act. What has always energized our nation is freedom, and the TEA Party is a group of malcontents who demand that government leave them alone and let them succeed.
That will not sit well with the elitist element of the Republican Party.
That will not sit well with the progressive element of the Democrat Party.
It fits perfectly with the George Washington legacy of our founders. Washington was an impressive man who worked hard, had a brilliant mind, and was a passionate patriot, yet no man small or large ever feared he wanted to tell them how to live. That is what the TEA Party rejects. Anyone who wants to tell us how to live.
This show is awesome. I was told that it was going to be replayed over the weekend, but I have not seen it on the schdule yet. Thanks YouTube and Lucianne dot com for posting this so it can be watched by ALL who love freedom.
by Fred Barnes - February 1st, 2010 (Pub. Date) - The Weekly Standard
Scott Brown’s victory spoils a popular myth. I’m not referring to the one about Teddy Kennedy as an indomitable force in Massachusetts, even from the grave. Yes, the Kennedy myth was rendered inoperative. But so was the fable about a death struggle pitting tea party populists and angry conservatives against moderates and the Republican hierarchy. That myth foresaw conservatives refusing to support candidates with even the slightest of moderate tendencies, dividing the party, and ruining its chances in the 2010 elections.
Republicans won a huge victory in Massachusetts, yet almost as soon as it was won, two things happened on my favorite web site Lucianne.com. Social conservatives started to smear Brown for not being conservative enough in his victory speech and George W. Bush supporters started to rail against all those fiscal conservatives and libertarians who stopped giving Bush a free ride just because he was right on most of the war issues. The response of these groups hold the seeds of future self destruction by Republicans that fueled the myth Fred Barnes claims just ended.
I hope Barnes is right, but knowing the arrogance and self righteousness of the two overlapping segments in the Republican Party represented by social conservatives and "compassionate communists", I would question whether we have weathered that storm. It is more likely we have a breather during which the fear of losing our nation has caused the extremists in the Republican Party to show a little tolerance for what Reagan called those who agree with us 80%. The important question is whether we can use that tolerance to reach out to those closest to us (right center moderates) and not drive them away with the usual hate mongering the Republican extremists are so fond of.
Simultaneously I wonder if the McCain wing of the party has now figured out that reaching out to those closest to us is not the same as reaching out to those on the far left. It seems to me that a lot of Republicans can't differentiate between right center moderates who have been driven out of the Republican Party versus extremists who are from the progressive wing of the Democrat Party (like Feingold and Kennedy).
If you have found common ground with Feinfold and Kennedy, as McCain and Bush did, you might wonder whether you have lost your way or gone even further and lost your mind.
The comment in Fred's article that I found most important is the guidance from Frank Luntz on "opposing earmarks, 'a laser-like focus on wasteful Washington spending,' and 'no tolerance for ethical malfeasance whatsoever—no more Mark Foleys'”. Fear of losing some power by Republicans from cleaning up their own house cost us our entire power base in recent years. I wonder whether the next time Republicans have power the same short sighted bigotry will prevail?
by Steve McCann - January 20th, 2010 - American Thinker
At this point in January 2010, the tenuous, multi-faceted coalition that makes up the grassroots resistance to the radical Obama agenda comprises those opposed to illegal immigration, amnesty, excessive government spending, abortion, gay marriage, taxes, gun control, heath care reform, free trade, foreign entanglements, Wall Street, and those who desire to see every Republican politician hanged. Each group expects the other to agree fully with its signature issue.
It is for that reason that the Left treats the conservative movement with such disdain, knowing full well that this coalition has a potential internal time bomb which can explode prior to any major election. All the Democrats have to do is light the fuse.
I look at the stupidity of the George W. Bush "compassionate conservative" wing of the Republican Party and I am distressed at the potential disaster our nation faces. These extreme big government liberals constantly harangue libertarians and fiscal conservatives about how they are RINOs and should leave the party. Then they wonder why their candidates get defeated.
Interestingly, I am one of those who is trying to spread greater understanding that Wall Street is not the friend of Republicans because it has abandoned capitalism. Yet there is a huge element in the Republican Party that goes ballistic at any thought that Wall Street is not capitalism and that attacking Wall Street is not blasphemy.
Everything in the article is not correct, but it is certainly right about one thing. The Democrats are going to counter attack, and based on history, the conservative coalition will fracture and fold.
by Neil Newhouse - May 4th, 2009 - Public Opinion Strategies
... data shows that fully 16.8% of all voters in the electorate say they used to consider themselves Republicans, and no longer do.
Nothing in polls explains the problems within the Republican Party which traditionally leaves them the minority party. The data simply clarifies the scope of the challenge and provides hints which must be decoded to ever overcome the perceptions that limit Republican power. I would certainly start with the problem that 17%, fullly one third of the votes Republicans need to elect candidates, have LEFT the party.
The challenge is to make sense of the reasons why the consistently largest political group, conservatives (40%), favor a Republican Party that is always less popular than the Democrat Party which is identified with the consistently smallest group, liberal-socialists (20%). How can that make sense?
The data indicates that suburban women are more attracted to the Democrat Party by a huge margin even though they overwhelmingly see themselves as conservative or moderate. The reasons Republicans lose moderate women would be worth knowing. Until Republicans can find a political agenda that attracts moderate women consistently, they will always find their political power to be transitory and fragile.
I do not agree with Karl Rove and George W. Bush that a Christian based turn to socialism, which they call "compassionate conservative" and I call "compassionate communist", is the answer.
I think our challenge lies in the extreme intolerance of the social conservative family values campaign (especially the pro-life movement) and the hypocrisy of Wall Street in selling monopolism (or as others have called it crony capitalism) rather than true capitalism. Both make Republicans seem harsh and indifferent to the consequences of their beliefs to the weak in our society. Bush and Rove chose to soften the issue of the economic theories of Wall Street monopolism by expanding big government welfare to protect against the loss of individual freedom which comes from Wall Street domination of our economy.
My choice would be to attack both of these issues by addressing the flaws of extremism in the current practices in both these two areas.
First, where Wall Street is concerned, until the Republican Party abandons the political favoritism of "capital gains" taxes allowing the rich to pay lower tax rates than the middle class workers, their appears no justice in their constant harping on reduced taxation. What we need to do is to find a credible way to end the mergers and acquisition driven growth of corporate monopolies and oligopolies. Capitalism works through competition. Wall Street hates competition and works to end it. This attitude also fosters the corruption that damaged Republicans the last time they were in power. The Republican Party must embrace real capitalism and foster competition or the nation (and the party) is harmed, not helped, by their agenda.
This requires that we end forever the special favoritism of capital gains tax rates that reduce taxes on investors while allowing higher rates on small business income. This will not happen until we get a broad based acceptance of the error in seeing what Wall Street does as capitalism... when it is anything but capitalism.
Second we must get a fairer definition of abortion enacted into law. The nation overwhelmingly rejects the idea of permitting abortion after viability, yet the pro-life movement refuses to "settle" for getting this passed and forced into law by the simple process of re-defining the point when a child becomes a human from the current birth to a new point, that of viability. Other steps could whittle away at the huge number of abortions if pro-life supporters would get on board. They reject this and demand their agenda of a total ban They refuse to settle for anything less. To date that has resulted in nothing significantly reducing the number of abortions ever getting passed. It has also left most women with the impression that Republicans are intolerant bigots hostile to their rights.
We need moderate women in the Republican Party. If we don't change our views we will lose any majority gained as quickly as we did the last time.
by Andrew C. McCarthy - January 20th, 2010 - National Review Online
One of the great frustrations of the Bush years was the fact that the administration had strong national-defense and counterterrorism policies that it shied away from defending. On enhanced-interrogation tactics, for example, President Bush’s position resonates with most Americans: When the nation is under siege, nothing is more important than getting life-saving intelligence. And, particularly when we are dealing with terrorists who are trained to resist interrogation and exploit our legal system, we must aggressively interrogate them and keep them out of our legal system. The opposing position, espoused most prominently by Sen. John McCain, was counterfactual and incoherent. Senator McCain pronounced both that enhanced interrogation (which he called “torture”) never works (which is patently untrue) and that an interrogator might at most use it in a ticking-bomb situation (the last situation in which you’d want to use it if, in fact, it never works).
Thank you. A writer with common sense. The Islamo fascist enemy is aligning itself with our other natural enemies, global socialists and La Razanist invaders. They demand we surrender without a fight. Yet Obama and the Democrats don't get that. They are gutting our national defense in aid of these same enemies. Those who are afraid to fight against what this writer calls the Beltway bubble are going to lose. Americans want to be free. Having our government assist our enemies through extending them Constitutional rights is not reasonable and will not play, anywhere but among the socialists and their lap dog press.
If the Republican Party had not become gutless, the TEA Party movement would have never gotten going. This movement bypassed both parties and became powerful over the rightness of defending our land and the rightness of not spending our children into poverty. Republicans were confused and fearful of what positions to take and squandered the control they were given.
As the article notes, health care is not the key issue, no matter that it is important. Defeating the enemy trying to kill us is the key issue!
Here's the problem: Most of the representatives of progressivism you see on TV are not really progressives. They are what might be called "Democratists." Most publicly prominent conservatives are not principled conservatives at all. They are "Republicanists."
What that has accomplished is to gut the intellectual discussions within the two parties, leaving everyone with blurry labels. It is almost impossible to find out what anyone truly believes any more. Candidates for each party, from their earliest days, obfuscate their positions so that they can appeal to whatever seems most expeditious for their party in the current election. However they are very careful to leave themselves wiggle room to change their minds if it becomes politically expedient.
This new world of politics is actually encouraging of the worst sort of politicians. Those who truly have no sincere beliefs are much more comfortable and accepting of this environment. They are thus the kind of candidates that quickly become the so-called leaders in both parties and who attract the support of partisan operatives. You can easily recognize these partisan operatives. They are very likable people, masters of schmooze and spout the party line. People like Mary Matalin and James Carville come to mind. Neither of these people could love the other if they really cared about the principles that they espouse. In actuality, the only principle they care about is winning and being important within their community. That each recognizes in the other an unprincipled commitment to the political game is amusing.
What some of these partisan operatives have learned is that you have to pretend sincerity. Any who have switched parties find it difficult to ever be a leader or effective operative in the other party. They are considered traitors. Having picked a party, that is where you must stay.
However you can, like Karl Rove, enthusiastically embrace the political ideology of the other party. Since no one really discusses these issues any more, you can repackage the other party's ideology on specific issues to expand your party's base. Rove found that promoting socialism under the "compassionate conservative" label is completely okay. No matter that it is an insult to the individual liberty that is the core component of both conservative and libertarian ideals in the Republican Party. As intellectual discussions over economic and government theory have ended in favor of the partisan promotion of power, there are more than enough people who accept this totally fraudulent concept as "conservative" simply because it uses the word. That it is not conservative in any way makes no difference. (In case you can't tell I despise Karl Rove and George W. Bush for their promotion of this concept which I have relabeled "compassionate communism" since it is much more communist than conservative.)
The huge programming void has exacerbated this end of political discussion based on philosophies like socialist, liberal, populist, conservative and libertarian.
I agree with the premise of the article. I am also intrigued by the concept mentioned in the article of the potential for the Internet to replace Democrat and Republican oriented cable channels with libertarian, socialist, populist and conservative web casting sites. (One thing that is amusing is the careful way in which Michael Lind denotes his own political bias. He never mentions socialist without the softening term "democratic", as in democratic-socialist. He never calls progressives by their now unpopular label of liberal. These are keys to his political orientation.)
As Lind notes though.
The point is that principled political discussion needs to make the leap from the dying print media and blogs to the audiovisual realm. If it doesn't, then American public discourse in what, despite hype about the blogosphere, remains the most influential medium may continue to consist of fake wrestling matches pitting professional Democratists against professional Republicanists.
by Toby Harnden - January 15th, 2010 - Lodon Telegraph
Telegraph.co.uk is presenting its second list of the 100 most influential conservatives and 100 most influential liberals in America a year after Barack Obama took the oath on the steps of the Capitol to become the 44th President of the United States.
There are links in the article to all five lists that make up the top 100 Conservatives and the five lists that make up the top 100 Liberals. This article linked here is their list of top twenty conservatives. I have added my thoughts on their ranking of the top 9 below.
1. Dick Cheney - "Dick Cheney has emerged as the principal tormentor of Barack Obama in the past year..." -- I am not sure that tormenting Obama is the sole criteria that I would use for conservative influence. However there is little doubt that Obama's socialist movement has been hurt by the consistent attacks of our former VP.
2. Rush Limbaugh - "The king of conservative talk radio – in fact, any talk radio – continues to go from strength to strength." -- I don't listen to Limbaugh myself, though much of what he says I agree with. On issues of social conservatism, I am too much of a Libertarian and too fond of individual liberty to agree with him. Certainly most Democrats and liberal-progressives agree with this assessment by the London Telegraph. They love to hate Limbaugh and therefore want him to be important. Other than Sarah Palin, there is no one who gets as many smears from the left.
3. Matt Drudge - "Establishment journalism types often decry Drudge but many of them are in email contact with him and crave a link that can immediately catapult one of their stories to the top of their newspaper website’s 'most viewed' list." -- More of a Libertarian than a Conservative, there is still no doubt that Drudge is a dominating presence in conservative circles. I read him every day.
4. Sarah Palin - "Rich Lowry of National Review described her as 'an isotope designed to course throughout our politics and culture, lighting up press bias, self-congratulatory liberalism, Christianity-hating secularism, and intellectual condescension wherever they are found'." -- I think Rich got it pretty close. Palin is powerful because she has more character than her detractors. More character by a huge margin. She belongs in the top 5 of anyone's list.
5. Robert Gates - "Firmly in the “realist” school of foreign policy, Gates still considers himself a Republican and his approach and style could well provide the template for presidential candidates in the post-Bush era." -- I certainly hope not. Gates would serve anyone and do anything to be powerful. He was okay with Obama's attacks on the CIA because the CIA did not report to him. Whether it damaged America meant nothing to him as far as I could see. I don't trust him and I cannot imagine how any Conservative who loves America would ever accept his advise again. He belongs in the liberal, if not the traitor, list.
6. Glenn Beck - "His opposition to 'big government' and Obama has seen him adopted by many in the Tea Party movement as their figurehead. There has been talk of a presidential bid, which will do his ratings no harm. 'I consider myself a libertarian. I'm a conservative, but every day that goes by I'm fighting for individual rights,' explained Beck, who has described his show as a 'fusion of enlightenment and entertainment'." -- Beck is probably the number one Libertarian in America today. I would move him higher in this list, certainly above Gates and Cheney. He is not popular with Republican leadership because they are so much in bed with big business, the number one enemy of individual freedom in our nation. Beck is on the side of small business and individual Americans. That will never sit well with the Rockefeller wing of Republicans.
7.Roger Ailes - "Democratic operative James Carville recently said that if Ailes were a Democrat 'I think there would be 67 Democratic senators right now'. There are currently 60." -- With liberals Greta Van Susteren and Shepard Smith, populists Bill O'Reilly and Chris Wallace and extreme left wing Geraldo, who says that Ailes and Fox News are even conservative? Except for Beck, Libertarians don't get much air time on Fox. Is that because Republican leadership doesn't like it? I like Ailes, and he certainly is the only show in town if you are a conservative. Maybe that is why I am annoyed by him. I don't like that there is no reliably conservative news source period. The best we get, Fox, plays it down the middle.
8. David Petraeus - "As commander of the troop surge in Iraq, General Petraeus became one of the most prominent US military officers in recent memory and was closely associated with President George W. Bush. " -- Does that make him conservative? As politically correct as the military is, it is arguable that Petraeus could be a Democrat. I would need to hear a lot more about his political philosophy before I will concede he is conservative. Look how liberal Colin Powell turned out to be. Beware of Petraeus. No one knows if he is conservative.
9. Paul Ryan - "A budget hawk, he is now the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee and is holding the Obama administration’s feet to the fire just as he challenged the Bush administration to return to fiscal conservatism. Undoubtedly a future presidential prospect..." -- What? I have never heard of this guy and the people at the London Telegraph are touting him as the 9th most influential conservative in America and a future President? I would be astonished if he has that much power.
The entire list of 100 is available thru the links at the top of the article. However from this top 9 you can see the list is not credible. Certainly not if the issue is "influence". I asked over a dozen friends, all active in politics in North Carolina or California, and NOT ONE has ever heard of Paul Ryan. These lists are interesting to look at mostly because they tell you what liberals in the press are thinking.
I did find it greatly amusing that Obama's dog Bo was on the list of most influential liberals. I swear he really is on the list!
by James Lewis - January 9th, 2010 - American Thinker
Scientific fraud often ends up killing people. Joseph Stalin's fraudulent "agronomist" Trofim Lysenko caused harvest failures when Soviet agriculture was ordered to follow his bizarre pseudo-science. "Scientific Marxism" killed 100,000,000 people, according to Marxist historians themselves.
The medical truth about the AIDS epidemic, that it was communicated by anal intercourse, especially among men, was suppressed for decades, causing thousands of more young men to die. And now it seems that the global warming fraud, just one aspect of broader EcoFraud, is killing people in the Third World. The proximate cause? A doubling of food prices. Why? Because of the diversion of food crops to biofuels.
Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Srping" and the person most responsible for the ban on DDT, can be personally held responsible for the deaths of close to 100 million human beings. The case for the truth of that is unarguable by any but the willfully ignorant. What she cannot claim is to have saved the brown pelican on the Carolina coast. That is easily disputable.
Yet we still are faced with the environmental movement which Carson fostered supporting stupid-science based programs that destroy human life. The biofuels insanity is a perfect example.
Study after study proves that there is almost no savings in carbon energy usage or reduction of environmental damage from the biofuel programs. NONE! Yet they are still growing even though human beings are dying in the millions from the consequences. Like the catastrophe of the DDT idiocy, the consequences of biofuels idiocy is exempt from any concern by those who are promoting it.
The environmentalists are outraged if you call them what they are, but the truth is they are genocidal monsters.
Climate Change: A new study shows that Earth's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from all sources, including man, has remained unchanged for 160 years. As it turns out, there may be no carbon to offset.
A major tenet of the global warming religion, straight from the Book of Gore, has been that the ability of the earth to handle increasing CO2 emissions is finite and that once the "tipping point" is reached, the earth will warm uncontrollably. Well, another climate domino has fallen — the myth that man-made CO2 is leading to climate catastrophe.
The overwhelming generation of CO2 comes from natural sources. Man is a tiny contributor. Plus there is strong evidence that our planet has had much higher CO2 levels in the past with no bad consequences. In fact, the dramatic period of the Cambrian explosion had extremely high CO2 concentrations, close to 100 times today's levels. If CO2 is bad for the planet, why was it so high during the greatest period of species creation our planet has experienced?
The global warming fanatics are loath to address such clear conflicts with their chicken little theories. However more and more actual scientists are proving the basis for the AGW fallacies are false. The latest to be soundly disproven is the CO2 lie.
Another Editorial from two days ago, Time to re-examine that 'settled'science in the Orange County Register, takes a similar position on the lack of validity of the AGW theorists. It notes scientific articles touting the contributions of "chlorofluorocarbons and cosmic rays" to temperature levels.
Both of these articles subvert the idea that climate change, up or down, is impacted by mankind in anything but a trivial and local way. They also refute compellingly the idea that "global warming" is "settled science" for any but the global socialists who are using fear of this fraudulent theory to gain political power.
About the first decade of what was to be the Second American Century, the pessimists have been proven right.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the United States began the century producing 32 percent of the world's gross domestic product. We ended the decade producing 24 percent. No nation in modern history, save for the late Soviet Union, has seen so precipitous a decline in relative power in a single decade.
The United States began the century with a budget surplus. We ended with a deficit of 10 percent of gross domestic product, which will be repeated in 2010. Where the economy was at full employment in 2000, 10 percent of the labor force is out of work today and another 7 percent is underemployed or has given up looking for a job.
Buchanan is a writer who can often find the worst case scenario to present. How else could you write a book arguing that World War II was a war planned by Winston Churchill and America was deluded in responding to Pearl Harbor?
He is however a writer who does his homework and whose facts must be addressed.
The two issues on which I am find him most interesting are extending the battlefield against the Islamists into Iraq - as well as George W. Bush's socialist expanision of government programs in a nation already facing huge unfunded commitments from Social Security and Medicare. These are critical questions where Buchanan has some good points.
Though I think Buchanan could be right that Iraq was a mistake on balance, I believe he is wrong to not credit three successes to the neocon strategy; Lybia, Lebanon and Iran's current internal revolution. These have to count as major successes that have changed the Middle East dramatically. For that reason I believe that the final answer is not as clear as he tries to imply.
On the issue of Bush domestic policy, my read is that he is much closer to being right than Bush's supporters. This article notes some of the disasters that have occured duing the Bush years in power. Though Buchanan is far more willing to accept the idea that trade balances harm a nation than I, he is correct that you cannot burden the economy with such government incompetence as Bush did and not pay a huge price.
The question with which Buchanan ends the article is sobering only because it really is a question that needs to be addressed. Can we reverse the huge national decline of the last decade? Nothing Obama is doing will slow the decline. If anything he has accelerated it.
by Lloyd Marcus - January 4th, 2010 - American Thinker
A recent article predicted that the tea party movement will fail and fade away because it does not have an official leader promoting a single agenda. I disagree.
After attending a Florida tea party, Rhonda Lochiatto, an elementary school teacher, decided to run for school board. In her own words, "I am tired of the mismanagement of funds that goes on in the school district and of the current policies and procedures that are taking place when it comes to grading, etc."
Rhonda epitomizes what the tea party movement is all about: concerned citizens and true patriots stepping up to the plate and following their passions and gifts to help rescue America from the leftists trying to change her forever.
The TEA Party movement has more passion than any libertarian or conservative movement since the end of the 1970s brought us Ronald Reagan. The backlash at that time was driven by the election of a man who was committed to the global socialist cause. Jimmy Carter was a true believer in socialism and the evils of America whenever America was proud of itself. Carter was never proud of America other than when we criticized our own nation. Carter was ashamed of our nation, just as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Rahm Emmanuel are ashamed of our nation. They all profess their pride in Saul Alinsky, who hated our nation. If they don't share his hate, why would they brag that they admire him?
What I like about the TEA Party movement is that they are willing to get angry and fight. They have rekindled the warrior spirit of our nation. We have become once again Freedom Warriors. Though we don't all share the exact same agenda, each of us agrees with the basic premise that we want to be free and don't believe freedom comes from government but comes from the absence of government.
Here are a few of the various TEA Party organizations that are stirring the movement to fight against the socialism of the modern Democrat Party.
They are not alone. Many others can easily be found. It is not an organization that has a single leader and that is its strength. It is about fighting for freedom, not agendas.
One of the best summations of what the TEA Party movement is all about came from Debbie Dooley, one of the movement leaders. "The tea parties began on February 27th, and in the ensuing tea parties, millions took to the streets protesting the policies of bailouts, higher taxes, socialized medicine, big government spending and government control that President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Sen Reid advocated. Suddenly, millions of ordinary Americans that had previously been inactive politically, began attending Congressional Town Hall Meetings and contacting their elected representatives. The tea parties became a national phenomenon."
That phenomenon is still growing as more people drop the complacency of the 20th century and join the fight of the 21st century.
Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems.
Once again we discover that the only settled science that can be found is in the corruption and criminality of the global warming liars who manipulate the data to get the results that they want. It is settled science they are liars.
Carbon dioxide was not, is not, and will not become a "greenhouse gas", driving temperatures higher. The premise ignores the history of billions of years of our planet Earth, and resonable analysis of more recent data collected.
Why are these global warming fanatics so determined to lie about the data? Is their political agenda driving their corruption of science?
by Monty Pelerin - January 1st, 2009 - American Thinker
The year 2010 is likely to be the pivotal year where pundits stop referring to the recession and begin openly talking about a depression.
Our economic problem is rather simple to describe: There is too much debt relative to income and/or wealth. Below is a single graph that depicts the condition of our economy. It shows total debt of the U.S. as a percentage of GDP from 1870 forward.
The chart below is from the article.
What is clear is that on the only two occassions where we permitted debt to soar our of control, the result was a debt fueled boom followed by a severe depression. Last time that depression only went away when we got debt under control. Why are there so many who think that if we ignore this history it will not be true this time?
Last time it took a World War to get our economy out of the depression. What will it take this time?
