Posts by AlanCaruba:
Obamacare is All About Death and Taxes
January 13th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Prior to the November elections, I received an email that was chilling. It was about the new Obamacare rules. Before I discuss the Obamacare taxes that are kicking in this year and next, I want to share excerpts from it.
The email was from an individual whose son-in-law has a brother who is a surgeon at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. It is ranked high among American hospitals. This is what he related:
“A group of non-doctors, from ‘our’ country’s Department of Health arrived last week at Emory for a two day session and is on their rounds around the country to make sure every hospital fully understands the new rules (which start in December (after the elections) concerning treating all patients over 70 years of age.”
“This group informed the staff Emory and all the doctors present that they will very soon not be allowed to operate on anyone over 70 (no matter how urgent or life threatening the situation is), without first having it approved by a board of eight doctors. Failure to comply will result in a huge financial burden to the hospital and more than likely the doctor will lose his/her ability to practice medicine anywhere in the country.”
“This board is to be established at every hospital in the country and the board members will only work eight hours a day…the DOH group almost got lynched at this point by the doctors who were present. The point that got the Emory doctors so upset originally was that the “Death Board” will be available only 8 hours during the day. And once their 8 hour shift is up, they may have to wait 16 hours to get in touch with them and another hour or two or three to get a decision and permission to operate.”
This is, however, anecdotal. Despite efforts to confirm whether this is a new, official policy, no confirmation could be found and, it should be noted that there have been numerous efforts to debunk what former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin dubbed “death panels.”
If the report of the visit to Emory Hospital is accurate, fears of death panels are true. If you or a member of your family is over age 70, Obamacare could lead to denied service and even death. According to an article in a December issue of U.S. News and World Report, this process, is also likely to include women seeking mammograms to detect breast cancer and even premature babies and infants in need of preventative treatment for a virus. So every American is now at risk if they have life-threatening health care needs.
If this seems fanciful, consider reports out of the United Kingdom where they have had socialized medicine for decades. There, both the elderly and sick babies are at risk of being abandoned by National Health Service hospitals.
Officially called the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obamacare will surely migrate into a bureaucratic death sentence for an American healthcare system once deemed the best in the world.
In the course of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations Congress actually repealed a section of the ACA, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports affecting people who need long-term care. It is likely that as the 2,000-plus pages of ACA are examined in greater detail by Congress, further dismantling will occur. It needs to be entirely repealed, something the House voted for, but which was deep-sixed in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and Obama would surely veto any effort to do so.
Obamacare’s taxes have arrived and they include another investment tax increase for taxpayers with taxable income exceeding $250,000 ($200,000 for singles). There is also another payroll tax increase of 0.9 percent in the hospital insurance portion of the payroll tax. There is a new tax on medical devices of 2.3 percent affecting manufacturers and importers on all their sales. This increase will be passed along to consumers.
There is a reduction in the income tax deduction for individual’s medical expenses and the elimination of the corporate income tax deduction for expenses related to the Medicare Part D subsidy and a limitation of the corporate income tax deduction for compensation that health insurance companies pay to their executives.
These ACA tax increases are in addition to a variety of other deductions that taxpayers have previously been allowed to take; in addition to a death tax increase there was the elimination of full expensing of capital purchases.
The news about Obamacare just keeps getting worse. Actuaries at the management consulting firm Oliver Wyman are predicting that the law’s age rating restrictions could mean a 42 percent hike in premium costs for people aged 21 to 29 when buying individual coverage.
After the Supreme Court ruled that ACA is a tax, the Congressional Budget Office did an update of its scoring of the law and concluded that Obamacare will spend $1.7 trillion over ten years on its coverage expansion provisions alone, including a massive expansion of Medicaid and federal subsidies for the new health insurance exchanges. This translates to federal health spending by 15 percent.
Infants, the young, middle aged and older, all will find their costs for medical care increase or even be denied. There is nothing “affordable” about Obamacare. It is a draconian threat to every American.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Principles of Taxation
January 6th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
“NYSR to Sell Itself in $8.2 Billion Deal” was the lead story in the December 21, 2012 edition of The Wall Street Journal.”
“The New York Stock Exchange, the cornerstone of American capitalism for 220 years, agreed to be sold as part of an $8.2 billion takeover by IntercontinentalExchange, Inc. If regulators and shareholders approve, the combined company would own 14 stock and futures exchanges and five clearing operations that serve as middlemen between buyers and sellers of futures and other contracts, doing more things in more places than any other rival. The takeover also would seal the triumph of electronic trading over ‘open outcry’ floor trading that long dominated financial markets, as well as the push by exchanges to embrace new and lucrative kinds of trading.”
The Internet has transformed the buying and selling of stocks and other financial contracts, but it has not changed the fundamentals of capitalism.
The factors most affecting economic growth or decline remain the same and, as the “fiscal cliff” approaches for every American, it is predicted that its cost will represent an increase of $4,000 for all who still pay income taxes in a nation where an estimated 47% do not, where unemployment remains for 26 million Americans, and the Obama administration, during its first term in office, increased the national debt to $16 trillion, has spent and generally wasted billions in its “bailouts” and “stimulus” programs in addition to the billions lost on “green energy” companies that went belly-up.
In an essay on taxation by a former Secretary of the Treasury, the following fundamentals of taxation were discussed and I will share his observations with you before telling you who wrote it and when.
“The problem of the government is to fix rates which will bring a maximum amount of revenue to the Treasury and at the same time bear not too heavily on the taxpayer or on business enterprises.”
The Obama administration needs a lot of money. It borrows $4.8 billion every day. It has a debt of $16 trillion, $6 trillion of which was added in the last four years. The so-called “entitlement” programs are verging on insolvency in the years immediately ahead. They are not voluntary programs, but maintained by the force of law and Congress has routinely raided the Social Security fund to pay for other things. Obamacare raided billions in Medicare to fund a program that essentially nationalized twenty percent of the nation’s economy (Socialism!) and which included 28 new taxes. Many states have refused to create the “exchanges” it mandates.
“I have never viewed taxation as a means of rewarding one class of taxpayers or punishing another.” So much for Obama’s constant demand for higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” which, at one point it defined as anyone earning $250,000 or more.
“If such a point of view ever controls our public policy, the traditions of freedom, justice, and equality of opportunity, which are the distinguishing characteristics of our American civilization, will have disappeared and in their place we shall have class legislation with all its attendant evils…” That is the point which we have reached with an enormous and manifestly unfair tax code in need of major revision.
“The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities or to find other lawful methods of avoiding the realization of taxable income. The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up; wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; the capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the government nor profit to the people…”
Americans now have a huge, centralized federal government that sucks up and largely wastes vast amounts of taxable income that would otherwise be invested in new enterprises, the expansion of existing ones, and punishes the most productive members of society.
There is a war being waged on capitalism in the nation that rose to the greatest citadel of wealth the world has ever seen. It is being waged by a President who was recently reelected by demonizing a successful venture capitalist whose firm invested in companies that generated thousands of jobs.
“High taxation…is largely borne by the ultimate consumer. High taxation means a high price level and high cost of living. A reduction in taxes, therefore, results not only in immediate saving to the individual or property directly affected, but an ultimate saving to all people in the country.”
The author quoted throughout was Andrew William Mellon who, in 1921, was made Secretary of the Treasury, a post he held until 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt was first elected President. As noted in “The Patriot’s History Reader: Essential Documents for Every America”, Mellon was “the first proponent of the idea that lowering taxes stimulated business and therefore resulted in increased tax revenues.” The essay quoted was written in 1924.
Mellon’s policies were vindicated by John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, but during Roosevelt’s administrations he was demonized at the same time that tax rates were raised to 80% on the highest incomes in 1935 and to 90% by 1940. This is a time period that is also known as the Great Depression.
The current Secretary of Treasury wants to give the President the right to increase the ceiling on new borrowing any time he wants.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The American Way of War
January 2nd, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
The U.S. military has been in Afghanistan since shortly after September 11, 2001. That’s eleven years and it is longer than the time spent in Vietnam, though with less casualties. We invaded Iraq twice, once to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait after he invaded in 1990 and then, in 2003 to depose him in the hope of bringing “democracy” to that nation. After the 2005 elections, Iraq was eager to see us leave, but many observers say it is as wracked with violence today as it was during our occupation.
The American way of war is not working and has not been working since the 1970s.
Armies are not intended to be “nation building” forces. Their job is to kill the enemy and break things until a threat to our national security is ended. We did that during World War II, fighting it in two theatres, Europe and Asia. We won because we inflicted an enormous amount of damage in both theatres of war in just four year’s time.
Empires have invaded Afghanistan for centuries and usually left bloodied and battered, Alexander the Great, the British Empire, and the former Soviet Union are examples. I doubt there is anyone who thinks we should still be there, particularly since we fought the war by shuffling in a new general every year, none of whom were there long enough to grasp what had to be done other than to build up an Afghani security force that is just as likely to oppress the people as the Taliban. The rules of engagement there are a threat to the lives of every American soldier. It is the seventh century in Afghanistan still today.
This is a very bad way to wage war in the 21st century and I suggest we need to go into combat with the intent of waging short, brutal engagements, enough to suppress the existing threat and then leave with the obvious option of returning if that is required.
World War II was one in which we had to occupy Japan to build an entirely new government and we had to aid Europe to ensure the Soviet Union would not be able to go beyond the eastern nations that were sacrificed to keep those in the west free to rebuild.
The Korean conflict, 1950 to 1953, ended in a stalemate, albeit one that allowed South Korea to develop into a modern democracy and economic force. The North has remained a horror story for its people. The U.S. has maintained a fighting force in South Korea ever since the end of the conflict and currently has about 28,000 troops there to support its military. The North is said to have a million-man army. And missiles, some of them long range. UN sanctions have had zero effect.
Let’s understand something. While I served in the Army in the 1960s during the Cold War that had been ongoing since the end of WWII, I was not an officer and received the same basic training as any other soldier. I was fortunate that no shooting war broke out at the time I was in uniform and I most certainly am NOT conversant with the art of war as is taught in our military universities of West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy. What I know of war I have read in history books.
It is said that generals always fight the last war and I suggest we have been fighting the last war for far too long. We essentially lost the war in Vietnam when, after the French withdrawal, we intervened in a civil war. It was a Cold War proxy fight.
The first war against Saddam after he had invaded Kuwait could be said to have been an American mercenary force to keep him from expanding into Saudi Arabia, a strategic ally so far as oil is concerned. Deposing a brutal dictator—one said to possess weapons of mass destruction—was probably a good idea, but I maintain that once he was caught and turned over to the Iraqis, we should have left. One thing is clear. Iraq has slipped back into a period of chaos with constant bombings as various groups within the nation assert themselves.
We may yet have to engage Syria’s equally brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad, along with a number of NATO and Arab League nations. He has, after all, killed tens of thousands of Syrian citizens in his quest to retain power for himself and the Alawite tribe that has run the nation since his father, Hafez al-Assad took over in a coup, ruling for 29 years until his death in 2000. Syria has supported the Iranian-backed Hezbollah which is much more than just a terrorist organization. It controls Lebanon these days. And it threatens Israel in the same way the Iranian-based Hamas does from Gaza. Most importantly, Syria is an ally of Iran.
No nation, however, appears to want to get directly involved and it’s a good bet that most Americans do not. All manner of military preparations are being made, such as moving anti-missile batteries to Turkey, a NATO partner with a long border with Syria. Some U.S. special operations troops are said to be in Jordan.
All this is occurring while the Egyptians have essentially traded one dictator, Hosni Mubarak, for a new one, Mohammed Morsi, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood that has plotted to take over Egypt for decades. Mubarak suppressed them. Morsi has received an inordinate amount of praise for bringing about a cease fire during the recent Israeli conflict with the Palestinians in Gaza and is, for all intents and purposes, backed by President Obama.
None of this has any good long term outcome because we are looking at a resurgent Islamic revolution everywhere in the region and stretching across North Africa. Egypt is receding into an Islamist orbit that cannot be good for the West or for itself.
We live in an age of a war being waged, not always by nation-states, but by organizations such as al-Qaeda and others. Killing their leaders with drones is probably a very good idea and something future American presidents will be doing for a long time. Beyond that, there is a need that our Special Forces are well trained and equipped for their counter-terrorism operations. Get in, kill the bad guys, get out. In larger combat situations another aspect of their mission is securing the support of indigenous people.
I believe that where war is necessary—even a preemptive one—the U.S. should apply it with as much force as possible over the shortest time possible.
Placating or warning other rogue nations like North Korea is not a policy. It is just a way to buy time, but North Korea is backed up by China and we surely do not want to get into a war with that nation. China should be encouraged to end the present regime there, now into its third generation, but I am sanguine about seeing that occur.
All this is occurring as “sequestration” is about to cut deeply into our defense budget over the next ten years, assuming Congress allows it to occur. Our professional, all volunteer military is probably the best in the world, but they are functioning with a lot of older, continually repaired weapons, including our air fleet. Our Navy hasn’t been so small since the end of WWII. It must be said that rotating our soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors through multiple tours of combat is probably not a good idea either. Bluntly stated, our military has been hollowed out in the Obama administration’s first term, a process likely to continue.
The late Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf had some useful advice. “It frightens me when I hear someone propose a hundred-billion-dollar cut in our armed forces without any rationale other than that the money can be used elsewhere…we should be sure that we have made a thorough analysis of what our national interests will be for the next twenty years.”
“We must ensure,” said Gen. Schwartzkopf, “that our forces remain flexible enough to handle unforeseen contingencies. The future is not always easy to predict and our record regarding where we will fight future wars is not the best.”
Nobody wants World War Three, but if a nation like Iran is allowed to acquire nuclear weapons that can be put on the nose of long-range missiles, we are virtually guaranteed a horrendous attack on the homeland or at the very least on Israel and possibly Saudi Arabia as well.
Short wars for the purpose of removing an obvious threat seem to me a very good idea. Invading and then staying around for a decade is a very bad one.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Just How Awful with 2013 Be?
December 29th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
Pundits and experts of every description love to predict and pontificate. That they are often famously wrong doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
The Great Depression began on October 29, 1929 with the stock market crash. On October 17th, Irving Fisher, a professor of economics at Yale University, said, “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” A month later Fisher said, “The end of the decline of the stock market will probably not be long, only a few more days at best.” The Great Depression stretched for ten years, in good part due to the “progressive” policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was elected and reelected to four terms!
Not to be outdone, the Harvard Economic Society issued a number of predictions that were equally idiotic. “Since our monetary and credit structure is not only sound, but unusually strong…there is every prospect that the recovery which we have been expecting will not be long delayed.” It took the advent of World War II to energize the manufacturing sector and increase employment. By the time the war was over the U.S. had, for its time, a huge national debt, but it was far better positioned for recovery than Europe or other war damaged nations.
Every recession since then has had experts predicting upturns just around the corner, but as Obamacare and its hidden taxes kicks in this year and next, when the Bush tax cuts have been allowed to expire, at a time when the nation is $16 trillion dollars in debt (and growing), and when its credit rating—for the first time in its history—was downgraded, a new recession is not going to go away any time soon. And this time Obama will not be able to blame it on George Bush.
Matthew 26:11 says, “The poor you will always have with you”, but there is a strong possibility that most progressives have not read either the Old or New Testaments or, if they did, dismissed them as fairy tales.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “So here is the Great Society. It’s the time—and it’s going to be soon—when nobody in this country is poor.” How did that government program work out? Johnson would be been better served if he had listened to Thomas Jefferson who said, “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” And “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
Like Europe before it, America has succumbed to the siren call of Communism because (a) no one seems to learn anything from history and (b) most people would rather have the government tell them what to do and how to spend what little money they are permitted to keep. When Karl Marx died, most of his obituaries were wrong. The Neue Freie Press in Vienna, Austria wrote “Marx’s scholarship was an imaginative lie, his doctrine despair. The damage he created will pass like a corpse.”
Published in 1997, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression documented a history of repressions by Communist states that included genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines. At the time of its publication, the total stood at 97 million.
Former Soviet premier, Nikita Krushchev, addressing Western diplomats in 1956, said “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” It helps that Americans elected—twice—a dedicated Communist. The history of Communist infiltration goes back to the Russian revolution that took power in 1917. By the 1950s, the U.S. government was shot through with Communists and “fellow travelers”, sympathizers. In the 1960s the subversion of the nation’s schools began in earnest and it should come as no surprise that former domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers, a longtime ally of Obama, transitioned to academia where he became an “expert” on education in America.
Just as liberals would wish away war, there hasn’t been a day since the end of World War II when war has not been occurring somewhere on the planet and the U.S. engaged in them in Korea, in Vietnam, and in the Middle East, not counting peace-keeping efforts and minor engagements. War is the natural condition of mankind, occasioned by the lust for power in the hearts of despots of every description.
In the run-up to World War Two, Frank Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News and a former Republican Vice President nominee said “It is simply unthinkable that we will ever again send overseas a great expeditionary force of armed men.” The year was 1940. So, yes, Republicans can be wrong, too. That same year, Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans, “I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” That changed on December 7, 1941.
You could fill a book about how wrong those making predictions and promises have been, so it behooves us all to view what is being said in the White House, in Congress, and elsewhere as to the direction the nation is taking. Extreme skepticism is the only way to approach the politicians and the “chatterati” on the airwaves.
The nation’s media has already hidden the scandals of ‘Fast and Furious’ and of Benghazi from public view. They make no mention of how an unread, 2,000-plus “Obamacare” was foisted on the nation by a Democrat party-line vote in the Senate on December 24, 2009, Christmas Eve! Obama signed it into law in March 2010.
There’s a reason thousands of Americans have been purchasing guns of all description and laying up stores of ammunition and it may go beyond concerns of gun bans. A lot of patriots think that 2013 could turn very ugly, very fast, with fears of martial law, Homeland Security goons, mass arrests, secret incarcerations, and worse. I have doubts about these scenarios, but they have long been a part of the arsenal of oppressive governments.
The trigger, however, for such scenarios would be the collapse of the U.S. dollar and there are signs—the massive national debt, the continued government borrowing and spending—that suggest this is a very real possibility. If and when that occurs, all bets are off.
What stands between most Americans and those who might wish to engineer the end to the Constitution is the fact that America is home to hundreds of thousands of hunters who comprise, by virtue of being armed, the largest army in the world. A goodly portion of our law enforcement community and our military are going to refuse orders to turn their guns on their fellow Americans and doing so would prove to be unhealthy.
Revolution is never pretty, but Americans did it once and can do it again to protect the Constitution and our rights. In a sharply divided nation, however, the level of resistance is unknown when so many now depend on the government for support. Many will prefer their chains.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
A Failed Congress
December 25th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
This is for all those who voted to reelect Obama or those who stayed home on Election Day 2012 because they found Republican candidates who talked about unemployment and the need for more jobs unappealing.
The blame falls on the Democratic Party that controls the Senate and the White House. The blame falls on the Republican Party that needs to grow a new backbone instead of looking for ways to compromise with an administration bent on the destruction of the nation.
What awaits Americans in 2013 is the largest tax increase in the history of the nation and it is not because the Republicans in the House of Representatives did not propose and pass one plan after another to avoid it.
What awaits Americans in 2013 is the result of the failure and refusal of Congress to reform a huge and horrible tax code that even Certified Public Accountants and IRS bureaucrats cannot fathom and, unless an alternative minimum tax “fix” is quickly approved, the IRS has notified Congress that up to 100 million taxpayers will have to wait to file while it overhauls its computers.
Failing to act on the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowes Commission to reduce government spending, reform the tax code, and save the “entitlement” programs, and ignored by the President, resulted in a “sequestration” program of automatic, draconian reductions that will cut the defense budget at a time when it is our primary deterrent to attacks on the homeland and the protection of our interests around the world.
Across the board cuts will impact all aspects of life in America; reductions in government spending that should have been introduced in a sensible, reasoned manner.
Remember George W. Bush who Obama insisted was to blame for the economy he “inherited”? The roll-back of the Bush-era tax cuts will impose increased taxes on families making between $50,000 and $75,000 that are estimated to take $2,400 from them according to one non-partisan study.
Investment taxes will increase as well. The capital gains rate will increase from 15% to 20% for investors. Dividends would be taxed like regular income, affecting decisions to purchase stocks that aid the growth and expansion of corporations large and small.
An estate tax will impact families seeking to pass on their properties and savings to the next generation.
The Congressional Budget Office predicts the nation could lose 3.4 million jobs in 2013. Meanwhile, jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed are set to expire next year. The maximum 73 weeks in state and federal benefits will fall to 26 weeks, affecting two million jobless Americans now receiving them.
The U.S. has functioned without a budget for the past three years and one that was submitted by the President was soundly rejected by Congress.
Millions of Americans who saved for retirement and those on fixed incomes will suffer as these tax increases occur.
Millions of employers will put their workers on a “part-time” status to avoid Obamacare mandates, reducing their income.
Obamacare was judged to be a tax by a Supreme Court that failed to give weight to the requirement that Americans must now purchase health insurance whether they want to or need to. This directly contravenes the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Some twenty states have refused to set up the insurance “exchanges” required by the law. Others struggle under the current Medicaid mandates.
This is misfeasance—the improper and unlawful execution of an act that in itself is lawful—by a Congress charged with the governance of the nation.
Politics has always been understood as reasoned compromise between those elected to office, but as we have seen in the weeks leading up to the so-called “fiscal cliff”, the President has refused to negotiate in good faith or to compromise. No doubt he plans to blame the Republicans for the ills of the nation.
As a result, Americans will keep or spend less of their earnings and millions more will be thrown into unemployment.
Most are unaware of these realities. While all this occurs, the nation’s debt of $16 trillion continues to grow in a nation whose Gross Domestic Product—the earnings from all its goods and services—stands around $14 trillion. This is unsustainable and it threatens the future of the nation whose credit rating is likely to be reduced.
It is a perfect storm.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Why Obama Should Not Be Allowed to Take the Oath of Office Again
December 15th, 2012By Alan Caruba
If anyone had read any of the many books that have examined President Obama’s life and his many questionable qualifications for office, including a Social Security number that appears to have been purloined from someone else, he should not be allowed to take the oath of office for a second time.
Here are just some of the books I have received and read over the first four years of his disastrous first term:
The Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi
Where’s the Birth Certificate? By Jerome Corsi
Deconstructing Obama by Jack Cashill
The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution And Build an Imperial Presidency by Ken Blackwell & Ken Klukowski
The Post-American Presidency by Pamela Geller with Robert Spencer
The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama’s War on American values by Brad O’Leary
The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama by Paul Kengor
An American Obsession: Race and Conflict in the Age of Obama by Seth A. Forman
If only one half or one quarter of the facts cited in these books were true, Obama has no legal right to be President and is committed to an ideology that seeks to undermine capitalism. He is set to take the oath of office a second time.
Few of these books received any of the attention they deserve in the mainstream media and all of the authors are at risk of being whisked off to jail as enemies of the state if the Bill of Rights continues to be eroded and ignored by the Obama administration.
To those who deride the “birthers” who have raised issues about his eligibility, Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch notes that “Even if born in America, Obama does not quality as a ‘natural born citizen’ under our Constitution, since he was not, as also required under our law to be president, sired by two American born parents. Only his mother was an American at the time of birth.”
Historians will look back at his first term and wonder how 51% of the voters reelected Obama when he added $6 trillion to the national debt (more than all Presidents who preceded him combined.) They will wonder how he got reelected in a nation with more than 26 million unemployed and 47 million on food stamps and other “safety net” programs including 99 weeks of unemployment checks.
They will wonder how his opponent promised to repeal Obamacare was defeated when many states have refused to set up the “exchanges” the law requires be created. Health insurance premiums will increase 25% to 30% on January 1, 2013. At the same time employers of more than 50 people will put most of them in a part-time status to avoid the increase to the cost of doing business, guaranteeing less work and less pay.
I recently received an email from Dr. Orly Taitz, an attorney who has filed many law suits alleging that Obama used “forged IDs, forged short form birth certificate, forged long form birth certificate, forged Selected Service certificate and fraudulently obtained Connecticut Social Security number, which Obama is using in his tax returns and which was never assigned to him according to e-verify.”
Any one of these charges should have been sufficient to keep Obama from taking his first oath of office and should foreclose any opportunity for a second one. If true, they nullify the forthcoming Electoral College decision regarding his right to be declared the winner of the 2012 elections.
This goes way beyond stuffing ballot boxes to steal an election. It is fraud that nullifies the Constitutional requirements–the laws– governing who may hold the highest office in the land.
We must also ask why there has been the failure or refusal of many elements of the nation’s judicial system to respond to the law suits, often declaring that the parties filing them have “no standing” before the courts to allege that Obama has defrauded Americans in order to be elected. Dr. Taitz’s release noted that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is set to rule on one such case just six days before the Electoral College meets.
We are taught in schools that America is a “nation of laws, not of men,” but this attack on our laws, aided and abetted by the Democratic Party that nominated Obama, is the most severe attack on the Constitution in modern times.
If Barack Hussein Obama is permitted to take the oath of office in the face of the documentation offered in the books cited above and the clear language of the U.S. Constitution, it will mark the end of the efficacy of law in America.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
UN Treaties Erode US Sovereignty, Exert Control
December 9th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
Following the end of World War II in 1945, the idea of a United Nations, an international body devoted to avoiding future wars must have had a lot of appeal despite the fact that, not that many years earlier, the League of Nations that emerged after World War I had proven to be a toothless failure.
In the years since, the United Nations has prevented major world conflicts, but it has done little to curb others. It seems to exist to give its blessing to them and the U.S. has long acted as if it could not engage in a war without its permission. From the Korean War in the 1950s to Vietnam in the 1970s, to the wars in the Middle East, the U.S. has ceded its sovereign right to pursue wars in what it regarded as its national interest. Korea and Vietnam were proxy wars during the period of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The wars in the Middle East have been a response to 9/11, first in Afghanistan and later the need to remove the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, who had waged war against Iran and Kuwait. The U.S. actually lent support to the war against Iran because we have technically been at war with Iran since 1979 when our diplomats had been seized and held hostage. Kuwait is an oil-rich nation and, if Saddam had been allowed to take over, he would have turned his attention to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations. In the Middle East, it is always about oil. And now we must add to that equation, the rise of fanatical Islam.
In all the cases cited, the United States has had to do the heavy lifting, the bulk of the fighting. World War II left us the only superpower in the world and the only one with atomic bombs. We put Western Europe back on its feet as a counterweight to the Soviet control over Eastern Europe. When it collapsed in 1991, the balance of power changed, but by then China was already on the rise economically, having embraced capitalism, but retaining Communism as its governmental system. The dictators who ran the Middle East, many of whom the U.S. either tolerated or lent support, ran into a buzz saw of discontent from their oppressed populations.
One of the largest cliques in the United Nations is made up of Middle Eastern, African and other largely Muslim nations. They and others like the Chinese and Russians have no love for democracy or freedom. The result has been the rollout of treaties intended to (1) generate enough income to make the UN financially independent and (2) exert a centralized global control over commerce and the individual lives of people worldwide.
The UN is the center for the entire global warming/climate change hoax and its Kyoto Protocols to reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions. It is the home of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which just finished its 18th conference to continue its intention to transfer money from the developed nations to those that are not. The U.S. Senate unanimously rejected this treaty in 1997 when it was initially proposed.
There is, however, a Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) that is seeking ratification by the U.S. and is supported by the Obama administration. It would give the UN control over offshore drilling, requiring the U.S. to pay half of its royalties to unelected UN bureaucrats who could spend it any way they want. Moreover, it would require the U.S. to make our offshore drilling technology available to any nation that wanted it and to do so for free despite the millions spent to develop it. One fears that a lame duck Senate might ratifies it. The most recent effort to ratify it was rejected in July.
What most Americans do not know is that international treaties trump the U.S. Constitution. They have the same status as constitutional law and must be enforced by U.S. Courts. Thus, our most sacred right as a nation, our sovereignty, is eroded by such treaties. It was the reason that the Congress rejected membership in the League of Nations. We should have done the same with the United Nations, but for decades since we have provided a quarter of its budget while having just one vote in the General Assembly.
There is no doubt in my mind that the worst of the UN treaties is the current effort to exert control over the Internet. This month, representatives of the 193 member countries of the International Telecommunications Union will meet in Dubai to discuss ways to control the international exchange of Internet traffic across countries and how to extract money from it.
Gorden Crovitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal on November 25th summed up the danger this represents. “Having the Internet rewired by bureaucrats would be like handing aa Stradivarius to a gorilla.”
He noted that “The Internet is made up of 40,000 networks that interconnect among 425,000 global routes, cheaply and efficiently delivering messages and other digital content among more than two billion people around the world, with some 500,000 new users a day.” More importantly, “The self-regulating Internet means no one has to ask permission to launch a website, and no government can tell network operators how to do their jobs.”
It is an irony that the Internet had been the platform by which Egyptians came together to overthrow its longtime dictator, Hosni Mubarak, but which has led to the takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood and a new constitution that is based on sharia law; a huge step back to the seventh century that makes women chattel and endorses slavery. One step forward, ten steps back.
Control over the Internet is control over the free flow of ideas and information. It is control over a large portion of the world’s population. Authoritarian nations hate it and seek to control it. Its implementation would turn the world into one large prison camp.
There are other UN treaties that need rejection and the U.S. Senate this week did reject the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which former Sen. Rick Santorum, joined by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) denounced as a “direct assault on us and our families.” It, too, was an attack on our national sovereignty and the rights of parents to determine how their children are educated and cared for. It was signed by President Obama in 2009, but the Senate’s action avoided its ratification. A treaty on small-arms control would render the Second Amendment null and void.
For years conservatives have called for the withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations. That act alone would likely collapse this evil international institution. It won’t happen so long as the current administration is in power.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Is Pearl Harbor Ancient History?
December 5th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
I recall in my youth thinking that the Civil War (1861-1865) was ancient history. As with most children, anything that occurred before my birth was “ancient.” In point of fact, the Civil War had ended just 72 years before I was born in 1937 and there were likely some men still alive who had fought in it or recalled it as youth.
I suspect that the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941, the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “will live in infamy” is ancient history to several recent generations of Americans, many of whom are the aging baby boomers, the children born after our troops returned home, married, and began to raise families after 1945, the year World War II ended.
What I fear most is that the children and grandchildren of those baby boomers may not even know what occurred on that Sunday morning 71 years ago.
The general ignorance of Americans about their own history comes with its own price. Forgetting or never knowing that a long Cold War was fought with the Soviet Union from the end of World War II until its collapse in 1991 has left this nation with a President whose ideology concerning capitalism and centralized government closely mirrors the communist empire America expended blood and treasure to defeat.
While younger generations may have a fleeting grasp of the 1970s Vietnam War, most probably do not even know that, shortly after World War II ended, many U.S. servicemen were called to duty to fight the invasion of South Korea by North Korea, 1950-1953, a communist satellite of China whose troops were involved. I have an older brother who served in the Tokyo-based Supreme Headquarters Far East Command during that war. You can bet he remembers it.
The Korean War ended in a stalemate. Technically, only a ceasefire agreement exists. South Korea went on to become an industrial success story while North Korea still cannot keep the lights on at night. It makes nuclear weapons and missiles to pay the bills these days, in addition to a variety of other criminal activities. The grandson of its first dictator is the new dictator and observers have dubbed North Korea “China’s hidden dagger” because nothing happens there without Chinese oversight and permission.
Pearl Harbor has a special place in American history because it marked the U.S. entry into World War II. The war had been raging in Europe since 1939 and, frankly, a lot of Americans did not want to get involved in a second European conflict since memories of World War I which had ended in 1918 were still relatively fresh in people’s minds. Pearl Harbor changed all that.
Men lined up to enlist to fight World War II. They volunteered in the thousands because they understood the threat to freedom the regimes of the Nazis and the Japanese Empire represented. Similarly, after 9/11 there was a surge of enlistments to fight the rising tide of Islamic aggression.
The Cold War was still active when President Lyndon Johnson decided to increase the numbers of U.S. forces in Vietnam. The war had begun in 1955 against the French for whom Vietnam was a colony. By 1975, after the U.S. had been involved from the 1960s, the death toll topped 58,000 when the U.S. negotiated its way out of what had become an ignominious defeat.
Why did LBJ escalate our participation? He had fought in WWII and spent much of his life in Congress during the Cold War. For him, WWII and the Korean War were still relatively fresh in mind. Like many others, he believed in the “domino theory” that postulated a loss in Vietnam would lead other Asian nations into the Communist orbit. Red China was still very much an enemy at the time. Ultimately, the war was so unpopular that he decided against running for a second term.
It was left to Richard Nixon to extricate us from Vietnam and then to open the doors to China. In doing so he transformed the future for both our nations. He will, however, be remembered for Watergate and for being the only President to resign the office.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are beginning to fade from public memory, despite the 9/11 attack on our homeland.
In 1986 I boarded a boat at Pearl Harbor to visit the Memorial over the USS Arizona, a sunken battleship. As I looked around me, I realized that the majority of other visitors were Japanese tourists! When we disembarked, one by one they would stand in front of the names of U.S. casualties on that day that filled one of the walls. Then they would bow deeply and say a prayer for their souls. We had all come a long way from December 7, 1941.
Do our present youth and perhaps even their parents remember Pearl Harbor? I doubt it.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Doing Their Best to Kill Christmas Cheer
December 4th, 2012By Alan Caruba
The one thing you can count on during the Christmas season is an avalanche of media-driven scare campaigns by environmental and self-appointed consumer protection groups that are intended to ruin it with claims that everything you eat or do has the potential of killing you and your loved ones.
Here’s an example; in December 2011 GreenLivingIdeas.com posted an article by Sanya Kanelstran to let everyone know that, during the Christmas season, “A heart attack can strike at any time in a person with coronary artery disease, but heart attacks are more likely during the festive season and especially between the Christmas and New Year period because of the change in diet and lifestyle around the holidays.” So, happy holidays and try not to die.
The folks at Naturalnews.com posted an item on December 17, 2010 that warned that “Those Christmas-colored snack chips and store-bought cookies, but watch out. Eating them may cause side effects such as hyperactivity, especially in children. That’s because nearly all Christmas-colored foods achieve their colors through the use of artificial coloring chemicals, including Red #40.”
ItsMyHealth.com issued a warning in November by Julie Robotham. “Traditionalists love their roast turkey with all the trimmings on Christmas day, but with food poisoning from poultry more prevalent than ever, it pays to take care with the preparation of raw meat.” Properly cooking turkey or any other meat is sufficient to kill most, if not all, bacteria.
The Internet is filled with these posts and, during the holiday season, you can count on the media to repeat them because scaring people is the stock-in-trade of most reporting. A welcome change from this is Fox News channel’s John Stossel who has devoted his career to debunking food and other claims that do not stand up to the scrutiny of fact-checking.
On a November 29, 2012 program, aired on Fox Business and Fox News, Stossel revisited the lies about finely textured, 95% lean beef. As I wrote in a commentary debunking the lies about “pink slime”, a term applied to this, “This lean beef is routinely added to lower quality hamburger to increase its protein content and its production has long been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It actually improves the nutritional quality of a lot of cheaper hamburger.”
Stossel reported that “What some media outlets call ‘pink slime’ is perfectly safe because it’s just meat. It’s made from the meat that clings to the bones—the parts that the meat cutters missed. An added safety factor to kill any bacteria is its treatment with a tiny ammonium hydroxide gas.” There have been no reports of illness from the consumption of finely textured lean beef. Moreover, the process is also used to protect processed cheese, chocolate, and soda. And it exists naturally in beef!
In May, the Washington Times published a commentary by J. Justin Wilson, a senior research analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom, a group devoted to debunking food and other product scares. In “Funny Food Hypocrisy” Wilson examined the ‘pink slime” campaign waged against finely textured lean meet. Along with a “bug juice” scare campaign, he identified them as “clever hooks adopted by activist food snobs who raised ill-conceived firestorms about lean beef trimmings and cochineal red food dye.”
Wilson wrote, “Contrary to the overhyped reports, lean beef trimmings make meals healthier, safer, cost-efficient and less animal-intensive. Cochineal food dyes, while derived from bugs, are actually all-natural replacements for artificial colors.”
At this time of the year and all year long consumers have to be skeptical of “fashionable prejudices against ‘processed food’”, said Wilson. “These people hoped to turn the ‘yuck factor’ into an irrational boycott.” As for finely textured lean meat, Wilson noted that, “As any butcher will tell you, people have used and eating trimmings in sausages and hamburger for centuries.”
If finely textured lean meat was removed from use and “one estimate says we’ll need to slaughter an additional 1.5 million cows a year.” That’s a lot of cows!
Every year at this time I receive dozens of catalogs from food vending companies offering all manner of delicious items from steaks to nuts. These companies, food producers, as well as your local supermarket are not in the business of killing consumers, nor is there any evidence of widespread food poisoning. The government has an army of inspectors at work to ensure that any reports are swiftly acted upon and, yes, they do track down and close facilities where any conditions warrant it.
Those Christmas cookies are not death traps for the kids and the Christmas turkey is not a mine field of bacteria. That hamburger you eat is as safe as modern technology and processing can make it and that’s very safe. Proper handling and cooking is the key to enjoying Christmas dinner.
My late Mother taught the art of gourmet cooking for over three decades, in addition to writing two cookbooks. She taught me and thousands of her students of the importance of keeping all kitchen surfaces on which food is prepared clean at all times. It’s very good advice and, along with the vast amount of food, meat, chicken, turkeys, and baked goods, you can expect to enjoy a very merry Christmas.
Don’t let the Christmas food killjoys kill your holiday with false food claims.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
America Went Over the Fiscal Cliff Long Ago
December 2nd, 2012By Alan Caruba.
I doubt that President Obama will compromise with the House Republicans on anything that might be done to avoid the January 2nd “fiscal cliff” that kicks in with higher taxes for everyone.
Obama has made it clear that increasing the tax rates on “millionaires” is his goal and he made that clear throughout the campaign. The income that would be generated from the increased rates would generate enough money to run the nation for about a week or so at most. In politics perception often trumps reality. And those “millionaires” are mostly middle class folks earning $250,000 or more.
As Chris Cox and Bill Archer, two veterans of the House, chairman of key committees, now in the private sector, wrote in a November 26 Wall Street Journal commentary, “The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees’ future retirement benefits—already exceed $86 trillion, or 550% of GDP” (Gross Domestic Product, i.e., the total the U.S. earns from the sale of all goods and services annually).
We are so far passed the fiscal cliff that the U.S. is unlikely to be able to borrow its way out of this huge debt. Cox and Archer said that “Borrowing on this scale could collapse the capacity of global capital markets—and bankrupt not only the programs themselves but the entire federal government.”
“When the accrued expenses of the government’s entitlement programs are counted, it becomes clear that to collect enough tax revenue just to avoid going deeper in debt would require $8 trillion in tax collections annually.”
By adding $6 trillion in debt during his first term, it seems to me that Obama’s goal has been to bring the nation to financial ruin. He added more debt that all the combined presidents before him. He squandered billions on bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler, loans to “green” companies, and increases in programs like food stamps. He cut off new sources of income from the energy sector and, with them, the prospect of jobs that would be generated. At one point he advocated developing algae—pond scum—as a new source of energy.
The total amount of earnings from individuals and corporations is not sufficient to cover the debt and operating expenses of a federal government that has been steadily expanding since early in the last century. Cox and Archer noted that “all individuals filing tax returns in America and earning more than $66,193 per year have an adjusted gross income of $5.1 trillion. In 2006, when corporate taxable income peaked before the recession, all corporations in the U.S. had a total income for tax purposes of $1.6 trillion.”
That’s a total of $6.7 trillion available and we have more than $8 trillion per year in liabilities. The U.S. is borrowing $4 million a day to pay the interest owed on its debt and other liabilities.
The tax system of the U.S. was created in 1913 with the introduction of the income tax and hasn’t seriously been updated since 1986, just over a quarter century ago. As Mitt Romney told a fund-raiser during the campaign, 47% of Americans pay no income tax at all. He caught a lot of flack for telling the truth.
On Election Day, responding to exit polls, 63% of Americans said they were opposed to increasing taxes. Two years earlier when the midterm elections returned power to the Republicans in the House where the Constitution mandates that all spending bills must originate, a compromise resulted in the extension of the Bush tax cuts for two years. Even Obama said it would be a mistake to raise taxes during a bad economy. He doesn’t have to compromise now and he won’t.
I have no doubt that Obama will blame whatever occurs regarding the “fiscal cliff” on the Republicans, but a January 2011 article by Paul Bedard in US News and WorldReport spelled out a plan by the House GOP to eliminate $2.5 trillion in spending over the next ten years. It’s not that Republicans haven’t a plan. It’s that Obama’s plan is to raise everyone’s taxes and keep on spending.
As Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and an opponent of all tax increases, wrote in mid-November, “Obama’s present demand is that the top two marginal tax rates be increased to 39.6% plus the 3.8% Obamacare tax surcharge for a top rate of 43.4%. The death tax would also jump back to 55%, capital gains tax would jump from 15% to 23.8%, and the tax on dividends would increase from 15% to 39.6%”, more than double its present rate.
“If Obama follows through on his threat,” wrote Norquist, “and refuses to extend the Bush tax cuts, then there would be an automatic $500 billion tax increase beginning on January 1, 2013, that would total $5 trillion over a decade.”
In plain words, Americans who still have jobs, who have invested in the stock market, and who have any savings, will be impoverished within a decade, if not sooner. The middle class is already paying 50% of what they earn in income taxes, payroll taxes, state taxes, property taxes, and taxes on gas, telephone use, and other levies.
Obama has not talked of cutting government spending, relying on the automatic “sequestration” that would begin in January. His Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, called the effect on the U.S. military “catastrophic” though the cuts would reduce what Norquist calls “the Obama debt machine” and would in theory strengthen the economy.
I say “in theory”, but federal regulations in 2011 added more than $231 billion in regulatory costs to private businesses and state and local governments, adding up to 133 million hours of paperwork, according to the American Action Forum. Tons more regulations are in the pipeline, particularly from the Environmental Protection Agency. When you add in the 28 taxes hidden in Obamacare, it is clear that there will be precious little money left over for anything than the bare necessities of life.
Americans have been ill-served by their government, composed of those elected to exercise good judgment regarding the economy. It has been going on for a very long time and now the bill is coming due.
America is living in the greatest debt bubble the world has ever seen. I suspect most are completely unaware of it.
America went over the fiscal cliff decades ago and now is in free-fall. Life here and around the world is going to get very ugly.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
What the Political Gurus Kept Telling Us
November 26th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
Throughout the year leading up to the November elections, I had a friend who called regularly for reassurance that whoever the Republicans nominated would defeat Obama. I began to keep a file of what the political commentators had to say on the subject. Suffice to say, I ended up convinced that Romney could not lose.
An article by Mark Knoller, CBS News White House correspondent, on December 31, 2010 is a good place to start. “No numbers in the year just ending are more consequential for President Obama than the results of the midterm elections. His party lost seats in the Senate and its majority in the House.” Like many, I concluded that Obama’s reversal of fortune would be reflected in 2012.
By April 2011, however, a Wall Street Journal article noting that Mitt Romney was the early front-runner for the Republican nomination reported that “Some 43% of 1,000 adults polled said they would probably vote for Mr. Obama, versus 39% who said they would likely vote Republican, a five-point lead that is unchanged from February.” I should have paid more attention, but didn’t. I would have voted for the GOP candidate if he was Charlie Sheen.
I paid close attention to Karl Rove’s weekly commentaries in The Wall Street Journal. This is the man George W. Bush called “the architect”, crediting him for his reelection. In late June he wrote, “President Barack Obama is likely to be defeated in 2012…The reason is that he faces four serious threats. The economy is very weak and unlikely to experience a robust recovery by Election Day. Key voter groups have soured on him. He’s defending unpopular policies. And he’s made bad strategic decisions.”
A week later Rove was giving advice to the GOP on how to avoid losing the election, noting that many who voted for Republicans in the midterms “still like Mr. Obama personally.” He advised the GOP nominee to avoid questioning Obama’s “motives, patriotism, or character.” For many Republicans, however, that was the central issue. Rove also warned that “Republicans also must not confuse the tea party movement with the larger, more important tea party sentiment.”
By July 2011, Charles Krauthammer was challenging Obama to “Give us one single structural change in entitlements.” Adding that Obama offered nothing regarding what is now called “the fiscal cliff”. Krauthammer lamented that “The Republicans are being totally outmaneuvered” on issues regarding the economy and tax reform. He was right.
That same month, in the National Journal, Josh Kraushaar said “The race for president isn’t a national contest. It’s a state-by-state battle to cobble an electoral vote majority” noting that polls regarding the president’s popularity did not bode well for him. “In every reputable battleground state poll conducted over the past month, Obama’s support is weak.” Oh, yeah?
By August 2011, Newsmax was reporting that “AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters the nation’s largest labor federation will scale back their involvement with the Democratic Party in advance of the 2012.” Oh, wow, I thought. Is labor deserting Obama? Turns out they weren’t. They were knocking on doors, giving out Obama campaign literature, registering voters, going into neighborhoods—black and Hispanic—that Republicans avoid.
In early November 2011, prior to the Iowa caucuses, Rove wrote “Obama’s prospects look perilous” adding that no president has won re-election since 1989 when people told pollsters that the nation was on the wrong track and based on a Gallup poll “no president has been re-elected a year after having a job-approval rating as low as Mr. Obama’s today—43%–since Gallup began asking the question in 1945.”
The election was just a year away. January 2012 began with a Washington Times news article noting that “Congress ended its least-productive year in modern history after passing 80 bills—fewer than during any session since year-end records began being kept in 1947.” Did it matter to voters? Apparently not.
In February 2012 Wall Street Journal columnist, Daniel Henniger, noticed something else and wrote about it in “Obama’s Maddening, Winning Speech.” “Mr. Obama may not know much about the private economy, but he knows a lot about the uses of human anxiety. Proposing to replace his own bad economy with a virtual substitute ‘built to last’ allows Mr. Obama to place himself outside the White House and on the street making common cause with the genuine economic anxieties of the American people.” Perceptively, he wrote, “If we know nothing else about Barack Obama it is that he can play ‘hope’ like a Stradivarius.”
In a June 2 commentary, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted that “On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year”, but that Obama seemed to have dodged that bullet by telling a crowd in Golden Valley, Minnesota, “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds.” By that time, Romney was hammering away at his campaign theme of jobs, jobs, jobs.
By August 8, Karl Rove was telling readers that “Wednesday’s Gallup poll had President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney essentially tied, with Mr. Obama at 47% and Mr. Romney at 48%. That’s good for the challenger…historically, undecided voters tend to break late for the challenger.” In September Rove said that “youthful enthusiasm for Mr. Obama has waned. In October 2008, 78% of voters 18-29 told Gallup they would definitely vote that year. Now it’s 58%.” The youth vote went to Obama. So did single women, blacks and Hispanics.
In September, Dick Morris, former President Clinton’s political guru, was telling people “Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing!” Like Rove, he pointed out that “the undecided vote always goes against the incumbent.” Both were clinging to this mantra of former elections.
On November 6th, in a sharply divided nation of voters, a sufficient number reelected Barack Obama. Many Republicans, it seemed, stayed home.
Looking back, Daniel Henniger, wondered if “business experience is now a political liability.” He thought that “Mr. Obama’s passage of such a monumental social entitlement as the Affordable Care Act with zero bipartisan votes displayed muscle but was madness for our political system.”
“The Republicans’ self-inflicted wounds, however, pale against the willingness of an American president to use his office to blow up the country itself,” said Henniger. He’d been more right than wrong throughout the long campaign with its uninspiring party conventions and unremitting economic bad news.
In the end it didn’t matter to the Obama voters.
I always wondered how Franklin D. Roosevelt kept being reelected throughout the Great Depression years of the 1930s despite little success turning the economy around, but much success creating Social Security and other programs that put a few dollars in people’s pockets. When World War II began for America on December 7, 1941, the voters kept the incredibly popular president in office until he died in 1945.
There’s something to be said for popularity. It trumps competence in American politics.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Fear, Everywhere, Fear
November 24th, 2012By Alan Caruba
If my emails and the headlines I am reading indicate anything, there is widespread fear among Americans that something terrible has occurred with the reelection of President Obama. Not all Americans, though. Those who voted for Obama appear to remain oblivious despite the threat of a “fiscal cliff” or the new taxes in Obamacare that will kick in on January 2nd.
We have a Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy, Geithner, calling for an end to debt ceilings, apparently believing that America can continue to borrow money to pay for the interest on its escalating debt, now pegged at $16 trillion and growing daily. The U.S. borrows $4 billion a day. Anyone with a credit card knows that their payments increase as they struggle to deal with their personal debt. Eventually they either declare bankruptcy or turn to companies that negotiate a payment to release them.
If America was to default on its debt, the dollar, already in free fall, would be worth nothing. We would be bartering shiny beads and anything else to buy food and other necessaries. We would become Zimbabwe where you need a million of their dollars to buy a loaf of bread.
Writing recently on her Fox Business blog, Gerri Willis spelled out the huge rise in taxes Americans are facing. “All told, next year, total taxes will go to almost 50% for the middle class; the very group that the president says he wants to protect. That means 50 cents out of every dollar earned has to go to the government. Half of everything will go to an entity that didn’t earn that money, and shouldn’t be entitled to all that dough.”
What kind of madness is it that the Teamsters union would impose such senseless rules that it would weaken Hostess to the point of bankruptcy, preferring to let the company die rather than to protect the jobs of 18,500 bakers? Other unions are engaged in attacks on a weakened economy. What kind of nation is it that its government employees are lobbying Congress to not only increase their pay, but to exempt them from the impact of the spending cuts scheduled to kick in?
There is a full-scale attack on the privacy Americans have taken for granted, protected by the fourth Amendment that says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”
On November 14th, the Heritage Foundation asked “Do you trust the government with your computer?” The government has had “13 breaches and failures of its own cybersecurity just in the last six months.” Even so, “the President and his allies in the Senate are pushing forward to regulate America’s cyber-doings, without any clues about how much this will cost or how it will work.”
“It has become the norm with this President—if Congress fails to accomplish his objectives, he goes around it with executive orders and federal regulations. He’s doing it again. Congress did not pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 before the election, so the President has issued a draft of an executive order to put much of that legislation in place without lawmakers voting.”
This is the very essence of tyranny and the President has had four years to perfect it. Are conservative think tanks the only ones paying any attention? It would appear so.
A new proposed law in the Senate would strip Americans of any privacy as they communicate with one another by email. A vote for the law would allow warrantless access to American’s email and is scheduled for a vote shortly. It would allow 22 federal agencies as well as state and local law enforcement to access one’s emails with nothing more than a subpoena. This is totally unconstitutional.
Already $16 trillion in debt, the government is looking for ways to take over the $3 trillion that is held in private retirement plans such as 401(k) plans and IRA’s. A recent hearing by the Treasury and Labor Departments addressed the nationalization of the nation’s pension system. The director of the National Senior’s Council, Robert Crone, warns “It is clear that this is the first step towards a government takeover. It feels just like the beginning of the debate over health care and we all know how that ended up.”
As we move closer to an Electoral College vote confirming Obama’s reelection, whistleblowers are coming forth in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere to reveal that significant voter fraud was a contributing factor, but it receives little or no media coverage. One must ask how 99% of votes in Philadelphia districts went to Obama and ask why nothing is being done to investigate this and other offenses such as the 141.1% of the vote recorded in Florida’s St. Lucie County. That is statistically impossible, but it robbed Rep. Allen West (R) of his seat in Congress.
This isn’t government. It is gangsterism. It is “the Chicago way.”
The monster Homeland Security Agency just graduated its first class of FEMA Corps, kids aged 18-24, recruited from the President’s Americorps volunteers, that will become a full time, paid standing army. Fears of FEMA camps abound and in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, people seeking shelter and food were herded into one that resembled a concentration camp of the Nazi regime and told not to use various means of communication to contact the media or outside community. They went from hurricane victims to prisoners of the government.
In so many ways, the freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution are in danger of disappearing along with the separation of powers it requires.
Little wonder that citizen’s petitions from a growing number of states are called for secession. Or that governors are refusing to set up the Obamacare exchanges required by a law that has taken control of twenty percent of the nation’s economy; their budgets held hostage to Medicaid.
On an individual level, people who have jobs are fearful of losing them. College graduates are fearful of the huge debt they carry for the loans they received. People wonder if they can afford to get married. Married couples fear the cost of having another child. Homeowners fear not being able to pay their mortgages. Seniors fear that their savings won’t last as they live longer.
There is ample reason to fear not only the collapse of the nation’s economy, but the loss of liberty in America.
A Hurricane of Global Warming Lies
November 20th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
At his recent press conference, President Obama, in response to a question, said “You know, as you know, Mark, we can’t attribute any particular weather event to climate change. What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even ten years ago.” That is a flat out lie. The temperature of the Earth has been cooling for at least sixteen years.
The devastation that Hurricane Sandy wrought defies the imagination, particularly for those on the East Coast where so much destruction was inflicted. It mirrored 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and it is only natural for people to believe there has been an increase in hurricanes striking the U.S. homeland, but there hasn’t.
Despite 2009’s “Climategate” that revealed that global warming is a hoax, many still believe it exists. In a letter to Fred Upton, the Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on November 11th, meteorologists and climatologists joined to warn that “Global warming that has not actually occurred can scarcely have contributed much to vast destruction wrought by Sandy.”
Dr. Bill Gray, the nation’s expert on hurricanes, was joined by Dr. Willie Soon, Prof. Fred Singer, and Lord Christopher Monckton, a science advisor to Britain’s former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to say that “Hurricane Sandy was a freak storm, not the type of extreme weather event that climate scientists have said will become more frequent and more severe if we fail to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.”
“After almost 16 years without global warming, there are still a few who implausibly try to blame this non-existent global warming for causing various weather-related disasters in the past two or three years.” The letter advised against holding hearings on the recent hurricane. “With the election behind us, we will have an opportunity to begin again and give this matter the attention it deserves—none at all.”
Writing in Forbes magazine, James Taylor, the Heartland Institute’s editor of Environment and Climate News, spelled out the actual record of hurricane activity in the decades prior to the global warming hoax which began in the late 1980s and since.
“The National Hurricane Center (NHC) provides information on major U.S. hurricanes during the past 100-plus years. According to the NHC, 70 major hurricanes struck the United States in the 100 years between 1911 and 2010. That is an average of seven major hurricane strikes per decade.”
In all the decades back to 1961, the 100-year average remained intact with major hurricanes ranging from as few per decade as four and as many as seven. Not a single decade varied from this.
In the decades since the 1980s when alarmists began warning of a major increase in the overall temperature of the Earth, claiming it would trigger major weather events like hurricanes, nothing changed. In the decades in which carbon dioxide emissions were said to be the cause, the average remained the same.
Taylor examined the preceding 50 years before “the alleged human-induced global warming crisis.” He spelled out the data from 1951 to 1920 that reveals that the 100-year average was unchanged.
Despite the global warming claims “during the past four decades, the time period during which global warming alarmists claim human-induced global warming accelerated rapidly and became incontrovertible, the fewest number of major hurricanes struck during any 40-year period since at least the 1800s.”
In the first two years of this current decade “exactly zero major hurricanes struck the United States.”
Despite this, the calls for carbon taxes are being heard; taxes that would affect all industry and businesses nationwide. Such a tax, already in place in California, would drive large scale manufacturing out of the nation and take with them hundreds of thousands of jobs. It would impact the nation’s utilities and drive up the cost of electricity, the life blood of the nation.
If Americans do not wake up to this threat, do not realize that hurricane activity has not increased, and realize, too, that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998, they will fall victim to the vast matrix of environmental organizations, government agencies, and the mainstream media that continues to spread alarm in the name of global warming and climate change.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Tehran, the Terror Capitol of the World
November 18th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
In ancient times the expression was “All roads lead to Rome.” An impressive network of roads had been built to maintain the Roman Empire, but it eventually broke apart and failed. These days all roads lead to Tehran, the capital of Iran, the terror capitol of the world, and to its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The attacks on Israel were ordered by Khamenei and the support for Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad come from Khamenei. Perhaps inspired by the success of the al Qaeda attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on the anniversary of 9/11, Hamas—a proxy for Iran in Gaza—increased its rocket attacks on Israel.
Among the rockets raining down on Israel is a Fajr-5 that is made in Iran.
It is important to keep in mind that these rocket attacks have been made for a decade. However, following the reelection of President Obama, they increased and it is my view that the Iranians have taken his measure of the four years of his first term and concluded that he would do little to support Israel and that they could increase their efforts to create nuclear weapons with which to destroy Israel and threaten the Middle East and the world.
DEBKA File, an Israeli news agency reported on November 17th that President Obama had called Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to reiterate “his support for Israel’s right to defend itself.” In addition, he called Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi to urge him “to persuade Hamas to accept Israel’s terms for a ceasefire.”
The reality is that there has been no ceasefire from Hamas since it seized control of Gaza from Fatah, as the Palestinian Liberation Organization is also known. The PLO governs the West Bank, an area Israel secured as the result of an earlier war.
Israel is under fire as the direct result of Obama’s actions and statements during his first term. This is what happens when sixty years of support and cooperation are abandoned in an effort to curry acceptance by Middle Eastern regimes and people.
It is useful to consider the record of wars waged against Israel since it declared its sovereignty in 1948. The announcement was followed immediately by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War that ended in July 1949. Military actions were carried out against Israel throughout the 1950s and 60s from Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. There was conflict when Israel joined Britain and France after Egypt announced its intention to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and take over the Suez Canal. The Six-Day War in June 1967 was triggered by Egypt and joined by Jordan and Syria. Israel won a decisive victory, expanding its territory to include the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza.
Another war of attrition followed from 1967 to 1970. In October 1973 Israel was attacked on its holiest day, Yom Kippur, by Egypt and Syria. From 1971 to 1982 led to an invasion of Lebanon in 1978. In 1982, another war was fought with Lebanon which had become a staging area for the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah. More conflict continued from 1987 to 2000. From 1987 through to 2005, a Palestinian uprising known as the Intifada continued. And in 2006 another war with Lebanon was triggered by the abduction of two Israeli reserve soldiers by Hezbollah.
The first Gaza war, December 2008 to January 2009, was waged against Hamas, an Iranian proxy, and now, as the result of months of rocket attacks on Israel, it has been renewed.
The Iranians are within months of achieving their long time goal of creating a nuclear arsenal. On October 19 DEBKA File reported that its intelligence sources had learned that Iran “had finished installing in Fordo the last set of advanced centrifuges for enriching uranium to 20 percent purity” which will give the ability to enhanced these stocks to the 90 percent bomb-making level.
“American experts,” said DEBKA File, “now estimate that this jump would take no more than two to three weeks from the moment a go-ahead order came down from Khamenei.”
Writing in the November 16 Wall Street Journal, Saul Singer said “Even the debate over sanctions and military action against Iran’s nuclear program largely misses the point. The solution is for Iran’s regime to fall, and the key to that isn’t sanctions or even military action. It is for Western governments to star saying to Iran’s leaders what they told Egypt’s Hosni Mubarack, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, ad Syria’s Bashar Assad: You must go.”
Singer said that “There is a reason why Iran is desperately trying—with money, personnel and weapons—to keep Assad’s brutal regime afloat in Syria. What the mullahs fear more is the Arab Spring spreading to Iran.”
Even former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, writing in a recent issue of the Washington Post, said, “The most urgent decision facing the president is how to stop Iran from pursuing a military nuclear program.”
World War II began because the nations of Europe sought appeasement with the Nazi regime. They delayed preemptive action until it was too late. The U.S. and the nations of the world have followed the same path with Iran. The Obama “apology tour” to the Middle East has been a total failure and has brought the world to the brink of a war there that could spread to wherever there are nations with large Muslim populations. And Europe has large Muslim populations.
All this is happening as a U.S. government in gridlock faces a “fiscal cliff” that would require huge cuts to our defense budget at the worst possible time. A profligate Obama regime has increased the national debt to $16 trillion and large numbers of Americans are unemployed. This mirrors the 1930s in which a recession from which the nation could have recovered was so badly botched that it became the Great Depression.
The only option the U.S. and the West has is to join with Israel to destroy or significantly disable Iran’s nuclear program and attack its military capabilities. The Gaza attacks on Israel are part of the Iranian effort to test and “soften up” its defenses, to engage the Israeli Defense Force in a ground war that will deplete its armed forces.
Americans and Israelis embrace life, but our enemies embrace death. They are taught from birth that dying in a holy war—a jihad—opens the gates to paradise.
We are on the brink of a Third World War intended to bring about a new Islamic caliphate, the control of the world by Islam.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
The Climate Change Lies Ramp Up Again
November 15th, 2012By Alan Caruba
Within days of the election, Rasmussen Reports said that, “While there was little talk of climate change during the presidential campaign, the number of U.S. voters who see global warming as a serious problem is at an all-time high.”
A survey reported on November 9th found that, “68% of likely U.S. voters now say that global warming is at least a somewhat serious problem, including 38% who think it is very serious. Thirty percent (30%) don’t see global warming as a serious problem, with 12% who think it’s not serious at all.”
There’s nothing like a devastating Hurricane Sandy and a follow-up “nor’easter” to get people thinking that “climate” is changing, but the simple unadorned fact is that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998. It’s getting colder all over the world.
Meteorologist Tim Kelley says, “Sandy is not an unprecedented storm. The 1938 hurricane was worse and was followed by major hurricanes in 1944 and 1954; three major hurricanes in 16 years. We are fortunate to have gone nearly 60 years without a comparable storm here in the northeast.”
“The alarm and fear of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming is a major distraction,” said Kelley, “and a waste of resources that could otherwise go to helping humanity.” There are some simple truths that most people just don’t get. “Heat on Earth comes from our Sun and is stored in our oceans. Small fluctuations in solar and oceanic cycles draft any impact on climate when compared to the influence of anthropogenic CO2.”
“From a scientific perspective,” says Kelley, “it’s almost unfathomable that we have been duped into believing the scare generated by climate change alarmists.” And, yet, clearly a lot of people have been and continue to be duped.
So, like a zombie, climate change is back after the politicians managed to say nothing about it during the long campaign, plus three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate. It has been around since 1988. The greatest charlatan and buffoon the political class has produced, Al Gore, became the face of the global warming hoax. In 2009 when the emails between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists were exposed, it became clear that they were fearful that the new cooling cycle would end their grants and funding.
Headlines blared regarding the hoax and then they were forgotten, ignored.
No matter how many times the facts are presented, the global warming/climate change liars just produce some new report or study proclaiming that “97% of climate experts agree that humanity is causing global warming and other problematic climate change because of our greenhouse gas emissions.” That was the message of the Doran/Zimmerman global warming poll in April 2008 and published in January 2009.
As Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition pointed out, the survey has been thorough debunked. It doesn’t matter.
Just after the election, Environmental Defense Fund president, Fred Krupp, congratulated President Obama on reelection, saying he expects the 113th Congress to “make global climate change” a top priority.
Friends of the Earth, another environmental powerhouse, expressed similar thoughts. “In his acceptance speech, President Obama acknowledged the ‘destructive power of a warming planet.’ It is ironic that the outcome of a campaign so marked by the silence of both candidates would be definitively influenced by Superstorm Sandy, but history will show that the winds of Hurricane Sandy blew President Obama back into office.”
Surely some voters looked at the hurricane and concluded that it was “proof” of global warming and/or climate change. It was only proof that hurricanes have been occurring before and since the dawn of mankind.
It was proof of the gullibility, the ignorance of simple facts about the climate, that vast multitudes of Americans have been indoctrinated to believe when they attended school and by the constant media exposure of the repeated lies about global warming.
Ignored in the midst of this is the way such lies get translated into government policies that do immeasurable harm to the economy.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute called on President Obama to take reasoned steps
– Suspend and re-open the rule-making process for the EPA’s greenhouse gas emissions regulations and other major Clean Air Act rules designed to close coal-fired power plants and raise electric rates and cancel the revised offshore drilling plan and revert to the much-more-ambitious 2008 plan.
– Open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.
– Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline.
– Stop the EPA from interfering in state regulation of hydraulic fracturing.
– Suspend the Renewable Futures Standard for 2013 so corn prices can stabilize and
– Suspend, for obvious reasons, the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program to “green” energy companies.
That’s the real impact of all the climate change hogwash. Hurricane Sandy left a wide swath of Americans in the dark prior to and during the election. The bunkum about greenhouse gas emissions will impede the steps the nation must take to ensure sufficient energy to keep the lights on from coast to coast.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Israel Will Defend Itself
November 12th, 2012
By Alan Caruba.
www.israelnationalnews.com, 11/11/12
Minister: We’ll Hit Them Till They Say ‘Enough’
Min. Moshe Yaalon says “We will put an end to this. We will not maintain restraint.”
Minister Yaalon said Sunday that Israel does not intend to maintain restraint in the face of the intense rocket attacks from Gaza. “If the terror organizations do not cease their fire we will be prepared to toughen our response as much as necessary, until they say ‘enough!’,” he said.
“There is a complicated war here and in the end we will finish it,” he said. “This is not a one-off move. But we will put an end to it. We do not intend to maintain restraint because the situation is unbearable for us.”
“We will bring quiet to the south even if it takes some time,” he said. “Hamas’s leadership will not get off scot free and as far as we are concerned, the most extreme options are possible.”
Channel 2’s political reporter quoted unnamed senior sources in Jerusalem Sunday who said that a ground operation like Cast Lead is not possible because Israel “does not have legitimacy” to act against Gaza as long as relatively few Israelis are killed and wounded by the terrorists. He added that Mohammed Morsi’s election in Egypt and Barack Obama’s re-election in the U.S. also make the situation more difficult for Israel.
The above is the latest news out of Israel as of Sunday and it describes Israel’s situation as a civil war in Syria rages on its border, and there was an exchange of fire in the area of the Golan Heights, a military acquisition of a long ago war. Syria threatens the stability of the region to include Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon.
It is noteworthy that Min. Yaalon identified the reelection of President Obama as a further complication of their military decisions, not the least of which is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
It seems clear even at this point that Obama is seeking accommodation with Iran despite the fact that it has technically been at war with the United States since 1979. Israel knows that if Iran reaches a point where it can weaponize its missiles with nuclear warheads, they will be attacked.
Moreover, the recent general elections tilted Congress a bit farther from the support that Israel has received in the past as new Senators and Representatives are identified as being in the far Left element of the Democratic Party.
Israel has been under attack since it declared its sovereignty in 1948. It has fought several wars initiated by its “neighbors” and done well in all of them, but the longest war has been one of terror declared by Yassir Arafat when he established the Palestinian Liberation Organization which, like all Arab groups, split into two factions, the most antagonistic of which is Hamas, a surrogate of the Iranians, that has been rocketing Israel from Gaza after Israel withdrew, ceding it to the Palestinians.
The change of government in Egypt only adds to Israel’s problems as attacks have been coming from the Sinai.
None of this bodes well for Israel and conflict is inevitable. The only thing Arabs respect is strength and the willingness to use it.
Unless there are secret U.S. negotiations and plans for the coming attack by Israel, they are likely to face an unprecedented situation in which they cannot count on U.S. support. Despite his promises Obama cannot be counted upon to assist the Israelis and his antipathy toward Israel is well known. Ironically, it is the Saudis who might provide support because they, the leader of the Sunni faction of Islam, fear Iran as much or more.
All this suggests that a cornered Iran, already suffering from sanctions, may strike out, not just at the Israelis, but at the U.S. as well. That may sound like an act of madness, but we are not dealing with rational leadership in Iran.
In the mid-20th century, the world found itself in a similar situation as despots in Europe and Japan initiated World War Two. With the exception of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Twin Towers and Pentagon attack in 2001, the U.S. has not been subject to a foreign attack of a significant size. That could change if war breaks out in the Middle East and spreads from there.
America just paid tribute to the veterans of WWII, Korea, the Vietnam Wars, and those in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “greatest” generation is now passing from the scene. Others are part of later generations that fought to protect our security and national interests.
An entire new generation or two of Americans must rely on a shrinking U.S. military and, if the sequestration cuts kick in, we will have a smaller Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, has called it a potential catastrophe.
The U.S. now has the most inept and timid administration of the modern era. The unfolding story of the Benghazi attack is proof of that and proof, too, that it is prepared and willing to lie to Americans about the facts of the attack; a disgraceful failure to defend our Libyan ambassador and his staff despite earlier attacks on the British and Red Cross in Libya, both of whom withdrew from the battle zone.
As it often stated, elections have consequences.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
More False BPA “Science” By News Release
November 10th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
News releases trumpeting not merely inaccurate, but false, science have become a way of life for Americans and others around the world. There is rarely, if ever, any fact checking done by the editors and reporters who pass along often dangerously false science on a wide range of topics, with many reports designed to alarm consumers.
Such is the case with bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that has been in use for some 60 years to protect the contents of metal food containers and create shatter resistant plastics. In 2011 I wrote a four-part series about the efforts to ban BPA which has been subjected to more than 5,000 studies, none of which has found harm or undue risk in normal use. Its safety was reaffirmed earlier this year by the refusal of the Food and Drug Administration to ban it.
But the anti-chemical drumbeat continues.
A recent study at the University of California-San Diego that purported to show a risk of danger when BPA was metabolized and this finding was announced by a news release issued by the university. It was reviewed and approved by researcher Michael Baker and contained the traditional hype we see when organizations want to whip up public concern when none is warranted. Remarkably, the tactic was exposed in a lengthy article by Jon Entine in Forbes magazine.
News releases trumpeting information that is not merely inaccurate but false have become a way of life for Americans and others around the world. There is rarely, if ever, any fact checking done by the editors and reporters who pass along often dangerously false pseudo-science on a wide range of topics, from chemicals to the climate. But Entine’s article revealed something many has suspected but few have ever admitted.
Baker confessed to Entine that “I have no evidence, none at all, that BPA causes any problems in humans. This was a theoretical exercise, and it would be trumped by what actually happens in the real world. Based on what I know now, neither BPA nor its metabolites are harmful. I am upset that my structural study is misused by some.”
“Misused”? Hardly. More like part of the massive effort by the opponents of the real science regarding BPA and it is designed and intended to frighten people because fear is the most potent weapon that the many advocates of false causes that mask themselves as saving lives or even saving the Earth.
Writing in the National Review, Julie Gunlock noted that reports on Baker’s study, read by those without knowledge of the real facts about BPA, “causes moms like me to gnaw off their fingernails at the thought that we might be poisoning our children with chemicals. But that’s okay; regular moms and dads (already struggling with high food and fuel costs) can just run out and support the cottage industry that has sprouted up in the wake of these terrifying headlines—the BPA-free industry.”
“Of course, what parents won’t hear about is Baker’s mea culpa because if there’s one thing parents can count on from today’s science writers is an absolute dearth of Entine-esque journalism when it comes to BPA.” She could not be more correct.
Science writing today is one of the most debased forms of popular journalism found in newspapers and magazines and BPA is just one example. Consider our food supply.
A recent commentary in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Henry I. Miller, a physician, molecular biologist and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, cited the way Greenpeace, one of the leading environmental organizations, “has always had a flair for publicity” to become “a $260 million-plus per year behemoth with offices in more than 40 countries.”
Dr. Miller warns that the Greenpeace PR machine “is now spearheading an effort to deny the poorest nations the essential nutrients they need to stave off blindness and death. The targets are new plant varieties collectively called ‘golden rice.’ Rice is a food staple for hundreds of millions, especially in Asia. Although it is an excellent source of calories, it lakes certain nutrients necessary for a complete diet. In the 1980s and 1990s, German scientists Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer developed the ‘golden rice’ varieties that are biofortified, or enriched, by genes that produce beta-carotine, the precursor of vitamin A.”
Hundreds of millions of children of pre-school age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, leading to blindness and death within a year for about 70% of those children and Greenpeace is using its multi-million dollar flacking apparatus to ply its nonsense to a gullible and uncritical news media and reduce access to this valuable food source.
Now ask yourself how many children and adults would die from botulism in unprotected cans and bottles of food?
These and countless other examples represent the deep commitment of environmental organizations to limit and reduce billions of human lives which they regard as a nuisance that harms the Earth.
Like golden rice, BPA saves lives. It is just one of countless chemicals that protect and extends life every day.
The real threat is the researchers and agenda-driven scientists intent on advancing the environmental movement’s objective of killing as many people as possible to “save the Earth.” They accomplish this through a media that either approves of this agenda or is just so starved for ratings and financial survival they’ll report any sensational headline available.
The real threat is the debased “science journalism” that aids and advances this agenda.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
America Commits Suicide
November 7th, 2012By Alan Caruba
I had hoped that the majority of voters would elect Mitt Romney, but instead of a man of character they chose charisma.
They ignored four years of failure and deception. In advertising, they say “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” Romney, sadly, lacked sizzle.
Obama’s victory was one of a long line of Progressives from Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Jimmy Carter. It was not new, but it will likely do more damage on top of what his predecessors have done.
It turned out that there were not enough voters from the faith-based communities. You know—the kind of people Obama said “cling to their religion and guns.” There were not enough from a range of population subsets to make a difference.
Like New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg who thought a marathon run through boroughs devastated by Hurricane Sandy was a really good idea, Obama has never had any real sense of how people feel about things that are important to them.
Why should he? He was raised in a communist cocoon in which family, friends, fellow students, teachers, and mentors ensured he would never be exposed to the fundamentals of free market capitalism that has been the bedrock of the nation’s prosperity.
I have written repeatedly that he just does not like America and that this explains his view that our nation is not an exceptional place in which to live.
His mother was attracted first an African and, after being divorced, to an Indonesian, both Muslims. And then she abandoned Obama to the care of his leftist grandparents. His academic life led him from Occidental College to Columbia University, and then onto Harvard Law School, all leftist strongholds and, yet oddly few of his fellow students even remembered him.
On the radio of the 1940s there was a show called “The Shadow” about a man with the “power to cloud men’s minds” who used it to fight crime, but Obama developed the power to so utterly charm people that, like any successful confidence man, he left people impressed with all the exterior aspects of him without few clues about what he stood for, what he believed, and what his true goals are.
Despite four years of his campaign and his first term not enough Americans understood that Barack Obama is as alien to America as if he had come from some very different, very foreign place.
What is most baffling is why a majority of voters looked at the estimated 23 million of their fellow citizens who were out of work or had stopped looking for work, and whose lives along with their own were even further encumbered by the massive debt Obama had run up; currently $16 trillion and climbing, and thought that was okay?
In a nation whose citizens pride themselves on their ability to work to meet the needs of their families, it was and is profoundly disturbing that 47 million must use food stamps or that millions have fallen below the poverty level.
Why did the majority of voters not understand the fearful implications of the erosion of the nation’s military power, not knowing that peace can only be maintained by a navy that keeps the sea lanes open, the marines who are skilled at making a quick entry into a battle zone, the army that can subdue an enemy, and an air force that has no comparison?
The active military and veterans understood what their Commander-in-Chief was doing to them, but the lies about the Benghazi attack that killed a U.S. ambassador and three others were ignored.
Those who voted for Obama were content to believe the cascade of lies Obama told. They ignored the President’s record of failure—the failed “stimulus” that was nothing more than a political slush fund, Obamacare that was forced on the nation by a straight party vote by Democrats in Congress, the bankruptcy of the “clean energy” companies that could not compete even with public funding, and the eruption of Islamic frenzy that saw him abandon friend and foe alike in the Middle East.
It was Obamacare that gave birth to the Tea Party movement. The President, his advisors, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate never understood what the Tea Party was about.
Why would they? The U.S. Constitution was what they wanted to believe it said, not what it really says.
Now Obama has the opportunity to fill seats on the Supreme Court with more progressive judges, thus affecting not just the next four years, but generations of Americans to come.
The abandonment of Israel troubled many, but just as troubling was the Democratic Party convention in which the inclusion of God and Jerusalem in the party platform evoked jeers and derision. It was the same Democratic Party that had, since the end of the Civil War, fought against the calls for equality from America’s black community. Even so, the African-American community continued to support them.
In 2008 Americans voted for Obama in the belief that they could demonstrate to the world that it was post-racial, post-partisan. Instead they got a cold, indifferent, arrogant man who listened only to a small circle of leftist advisors and shadowy, unknown and unseen “czars” in the White House.
Obama was as disinterested in Main Street as he was antagonistic to Wall Street. His constant talk of “millionaires and billionaires” and the need to redistribute wealth may have worried some people, but not enough of those who believe they too can achieve the American dream of wealth and success based on hard work and a measure of risk.
The majority of voters ignored the realities of the nation’s economy. They failed to realize that Obama’s opposition to the vast wealth of America’s energy reserves of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear will only delay the nation’s way out of debt and dependency.
In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”
John Adams, Founding Father and the nation’s second President warned, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Today, conservatives in America are wondering if the 2012 election was a vote to commit national suicide.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Vote to Save the Nation!
November 5th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
No previous election has ever held the fate of the nation in its hands since the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War. If Obama is elected, he will continue his agenda to drive this nation to the point of financial collapse and leave behind millions of Americans without jobs or any hope for the future.
And that includes the liberal retards who will vote for him in an election that is, according to the pundits, too close to call. There is something terribly frightening to contemplate that half the voters will vote to continue his planned destruction and his potential for declaring himself President for Life. He is the classic tyrant.
Any voter who pulls the lever for any candidate who speaks of “climate change”, the replacement for the failed “global warming” hoax, should be soundly defeated. Whether they actually believe the Earth is in peril or whether they are just part of the Congressional candidates for the Senate and the House who spout the “party line”, these men and women must be defeated before they inflict more damage on the economy.
The impact of Hurricane Sandy left millions in the Northeast without the most precious power we possess, electrical power. All life depends on it in our intricately technological society. Beyond that, it demonstrates the raw power of Nature. It demonstrates that it is not the Earth that needs to be saved, it is humanity.
Mitt Romney promises to repeal Obamacare and that is surely a priority. It seizes control of the best healthcare system in the world and it will doom senior citizens to death by denying them the care that a humane, caring society should never deny. To fund it, Obamacare has taken $716 billion from Medicare.
Mitt Romney promises to unleash the vast potential that our vast energy reserves, coal, natural gas, and oil, as well as nuclear power represent. Obama and his administration have sought to deny the billions these represent in wages and taxes.
You cannot “conserve” energy. You can either use it or not. When denied energy, a vast swath of the Northeast returned, literally, to the Dark Ages.
Mitt Romney and a Republican controlled Congress will rein in a totally rogue federal government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency. The power it possesses and intends to expand through unconstitutional and unscientific regulations has thwarted every kind of economic growth for decades, but that process accelerated under Obama and must be stopped. The powers of the EPA must be returned to the governance of the individual states.
The power and prestige of the United States has been deeply wounded during the past four years. Obama has bowed to foreign leaders, has supported despots of every description, and made it clear that he is no friend to Israel, a beckon of democracy and sanity in the Middle East. He would allow Iran to become a nuclear nation by default and that cannot be allowed.
Our military must be rebuilt. The U.S. guarantees the freedom of the world’s seas and oceans, but it lacks a navy large enough to ensure that in both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. Obama has allowed our air power to decline and he has shrunk our army and marine forces. He has presided over the reduction of our nuclear arms.
In the face of the greatest Islamic challenge to the West he has encouraged the “Arab Spring” with a show of weakness and his behavior with regard to the murder of our ambassador to Libya and three of his staff demonstrates his indifference to the lives of those charged with protecting U.S. interests. Worse yet, his lies about the attack in Benghazi, by itself, renders him unworthy of the office of Commander-in-Chief.
In Afghanistan, the lives of American soldiers have become nothing more than a cruel sacrifice in a nation riven with corruption, unworthy of support. There will never been democracy there or elsewhere in the Middle East.
The Middle East is an Islamic cesspool and should be allowed to wallow in its own inherent violence. If our oil reserves had been developed here, we would have no need to rely on imports and a President Romney will set that in motion.
It is a sad commentary on America that half of its citizens have been indoctrinated to accept the lies of Socialism, ceded its sovereignty to the United Nations, and have permitted the federal government to grow so large it represents a threat to our Constitutional freedoms and liberties.
It is a rebuke to America that voters elected a man who is not a “native born” citizen by virtue of having a Kenyan father. The Constitution is indisputable on this. He did not and does not have a legal right to hold the office of President.
It is a sad commentary that the voters in 2008 allowed a man with no paper trail to demonstrate his ability to perform the duties of the office of President. The soaring oratory, provided to him by the ever-present Teleprompters promised “hope and change”, but we have been left without hope of a better future and a change that has the look and feel of a totalitarian government.
If you want to know where America under Obama is heading, one need only look at California, a state so besotted by Progressive politics that it is on the verge of financial collapse after having driven out thousands of its citizens to other states and countless companies, large and small, that existed there. Those who remain are choking to death on taxes and insane environmental mandates. Its agricultural sector has been denied water to irrigate crops.
An administration that would deny the purchase of firearms to Americans as guaranteed by the Second Amendment has ironically become the reason more and more Americans have purchased them, fearing an oppressive government and even anarchy.
I could cite many other reasons to defeat Obama, but there are two that stand out from all the others. He is a Communist. Raised, nurtured, and mentored by Communists; a friend to Communists; an enemy of Capitalism.
He is a LIAR and a pathological narcissist, indifferent to the political process of negotiation and compromise; indifferent to the fate of millions of Americans from the very young to the very old.
He does not like America.
The fate of the nation lies in the hands of “independents” who are uncommitted to either political party. The Democratic Party has become the pawn of Socialists who would turn the nation into a Communist nanny state. The history of all such governments has been the death of millions in Russia, in China, and wherever else they have been voted into power or simply seized it.
The Republican Party seeks to conserve the fundamentals of what has made America a super power in every respect.
A week without power in the Northeast such as I have experienced is a metaphor for what every America will experience if Obama is reelected.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Hurricane Sandy’s Message to America
October 28th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
When Mother Nature demonstrates her extraordinary power, I always hope that people will draw a lesson from it, but this never seems to happen. Hurricane Sandy is just the latest example of the futility and foolishness of thinking that humans can do anything about a hurricane or similar demonstration of who is really in charge. It is the planet; not us.
This suspension of common sense is worsened when our President goes on television, as he did last Friday on MTV, to say “I believe the scientists, who say that we are putting too much carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and it is heating the planet and it is going to have a severe effect.” This is literally junk science, long since debunked by legions of scientists who know that carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the Earth’s temperature. The planet has been in a cooling cycle since 1998.
I keep hoping, too, that lacking the vital lifeblood of our nation–electricity—millions of people sitting around in the dark will ask themselves where it comes from, what generates it, how does it get to their home, and perhaps even why its cost keeps increasing even though the U.S. sits atop enough coal and natural gas to provide affordable power for two hundred years at current consumption rates.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in March of this year electricity from coal has fallen from 50% production to less than 40% by the end of 2011. Other sources include natural gas at 26%, nuclear at 22%, hydroelectric at 7% and “other” was said to be 6%. It should be noted that oil is a transportation fuel and not used to generate electricity. I believe that the amount that solar and wind produces is more likely closer to three percent. It is unreliable and uncompetitive and requires a traditional plant as backup when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun is obscured by clouds and, of course, at night.
Not surprisingly, the environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club are already beating the drums about “climate change”, asserting “unpredictable, extreme weather.” The planet is always in a state of climate change if for no other reason that it is subject to the seasons. Blaming extreme weather on “climate change” is just a code for keeping the “global warming” hoax alive. The only reason President Obama talks about climate change is his hope that a carbon tax can be imposed to raise more money for the government to waste.
Electricity is not magic. Some form of energy must be burned to generate it and then it must be transmitted by a huge, very old grid to consumers.
In January of this year, The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that the reliability of the grid was in jeopardy. Thanks to the Obama administration’s (i.e. EPA) relentless attack on coal, the NERC noted that beyond the 38 gigawatts of electricity capacity that has already been announced to retire, it estimated that another 35 to 59 gigawatts will come off-line by 2018 depending on the “scope and timing” of EPA regulations. If you think the downed lines that Hurricane Sandy will produce are a problem, consider a future in which the electricity they are supposed to distribute will be significantly reduced.
What most Americans don’t know is that coal is the fuel of choice to generate electricity in many other nations of the world. Just five years ago it produced fifty percent of our electricity, but today it is less than forty percent, the lowest share since data began to be collected in 1949. For example, China’s coal consumption grew 9.7% between 2010 and 2011. Last year China consumed 49% of the world’s coal supply. India’s coal consumption increased 9.2%.
While the President blathers on MTV about CO2 emissions, my friend Dr. Jay Lehr, the Science Director of The Heartland Institute, dispatches that nonsense noting that “A simple volcanic eruption will cancel a decade of effort” to reduce emissions.
“Today,” says Dr. Lehr, “it is our government that is attempting to thwart our energy independence by blocking nearly every effort to develop our resources through completely unreasonable restrictions placed on us by the EPA and the Department of the Interior, and horrible policies of the Department of Energy which choose to throw unconscionable sums of money at renewable energy projects …”
Ultimately, while millions of Americans light candles in the dark or hope their flashlight batteries hold out, we have to ask WHY the Obama administration has waged a war on the provision of electricity.
This is a deliberate policy to weaken the nation’s capacity to function at every level and yet we are days away from an election where millions of Americans will vote to reelect Obama and send his Democratic Party minions to Congress.
It is in line with the Obama administration’s deliberate policy of reducing our military capacity on land, sea and air.
The only silver lining in the distress and disruption of Hurricane Sandy may be the awakening of voters to the critical need for more, not less, production of electricity, for improvements to the national grid, for more oil production for our transportation needs, and concurrent with this, the hundreds of thousands of jobs that such efforts would produce and billions it would generate to begin to reduce the national debt, now in excess of $16 trillion.
Long ago, the cartoon character, Pogo, famously said, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”
The enemy, I would suggest, is President Barack Hussein Obama, his many shadowy, unaccountable “czars” influencing energy policies, his Cabinet Secretaries of Energy and the Interior, and the rogue Environmental Protection Agency that is set to unleash regulations that will destroy the economy, aided and abetted by the nation’s environmental organizations.
That’s Hurricane Sandy’s message to America.
© Alan Caruba, 2012