Posts by AlanCaruba:

Obama’s Revenge

November 5th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

The Democratic Party that supported President Obama’s agenda for the past six years was dramatically rejected in the midterm elections and the message for the new Republican-controlled Senate and House is to aggressively take action on stalled legislation to improve the economy and address other issues that have suffered neglect.

The GOP is going to be up against the revenge Obama will take on America in the remaining two years. The midterms will not generate any humility in Obama, only anger and resentment.

Republicans were not elected to “work with” Obama. They were elected to stop his agenda and actions that have been harmful to the nation. The big question coming out of this electoral mandate is whether the inside-the-beltway Republicans in Washington will do what the voters want.

Obama promised a “transformation” of America, a nation dedicated to individual freedom and liberty, and it has taken this long for many to realize that his definition of transformation was an ever-increasing Big Government to control every aspect of our lives:

# the education of our youth who lack knowledge of civics, math, and science,

# the deprivation and reduction of access to vital sources of energy,

# the refusal to protect U.S. sovereignty by ignoring our immigration laws and border security,

# the reduction of our military power to levels rivaling pre-World War Two,

# the failure to resist the growth of Islamic fanaticism,

# the historic and dangerous increase of our national debt,

# the failure to take fundamental steps to revive the economy by cutting taxes and reducing regulations,

# the destruction of our market-based healthcare system.

Obama will take the electoral rejection very personally and, as we have seen in his contempt for working with Congress and his smears of the Republican Party, no one should doubt he will use the remainder of his term in office to wreak as much damage as possible; to prove he is right and the rest of the nation is wrong.

Much of what he will do was put off until after the midterm elections because he knew the level of rejection would be even greater. Now he is free to misuse “executive orders” unless the new Congress takes steps to defund and legislatively stop them. Investigations into the scandals that have become synonymous with his administration must be vigorously pursued.

What can we anticipate?

Obama will do everything he can to leave American vulnerable to increased illegal immigration including a rumored amnesty that would provide work permits and green cards to millions who would compete with jobless natural born and naturalized Americans. He has already refused to spend funds that have been allocated to secure our borders.

When Attorney General Eric Holder exits the Department of Justice expect Obama to nominate someone even more radical and divisive.

In the next two years you can expect the Environmental Protection Agency, already producing more regulations than any other element of the government, to go into overdrive to shut down as many power plants as possible, reducing the production of electricity on which the nation depends.

Obama has done little to respond to the growing global Islamist movement, showing favor to terrorist groups such as Hamas, but his greatest effort has been to provide Iran with approval to advance its nuclear weapons capability, opening negotiations that, if agreed to, would put it within mere months of being able to put nuclear warheads on missiles and in bombs. It would change the balance of power in the Middle East and threaten the rest of the world.

Expect Obama to try to close Guantanamo despite legislation forbidding this action. In keeping with his tilt toward Islam, he has already released five Taliban leaders in exchange for an alleged U.S. Army deserter. Others who were released rejoined the holy war.

He will, of course, do everything he can to protect his namesake legislation, the Affordable Patient Care Act otherwise known as ObamaCare. It must be dismantled before it does even more harm to the nation’s healthcare system. He has waited until after the midterms for Americans to learn that their ACA premiums will rise dramatically. Ultimately, it must be repealed.

In these and many other ways, he can continue to harm our national interests. The one prediction that can be made with certainty is that he will spend even more time playing golf and indulging the many perks of the office.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Obama’s Amnesty Travesty

October 29th, 2014

 

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

People really need to read the U.S. Constitution. It says, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.”

The Constitution makes no reference whatever to executive orders (EO). George Washington started the practice mostly because he had to. Traditionally executive orders have been treated by Congress as having the legal status of legislation, but only insofar as they apply to the management of how the government operates.

The Constitution makes it quite clear that the President has no power to enact laws, but as long as an EO does not unilaterally alter or negate existing legislation or run counter to the Constitution Congress usually accords it legitimacy. Those that do not honor the separation of powers have been struck down by the courts or by legislation that opposed them.

As is widely rumored and reported, if President Obama does attempt to issue amnesty to illegal aliens he would be over-riding or altering existing immigration law. He does not have the power to do that.

Such an executive order would be immediately challenged in the courts and if power in the Senate passes to the Republicans in the midterm elections, Congress would oppose it. With an eye on the 2016 elections, incumbent Democrats might not be willing to go along with an Obama amnesty EO.

Recent polls all demonstrate opposition to amnesty. In a September Investors Business Daily/TIPP poll 73% of the public said that Obama should work with Congress on immigration reform. After the invasion of an estimated 150,000 young people and others from Guatemala and San Salvador earlier this year, comprehensive immigration reform went from 54% approval last year to 48%.

When word leaked that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency had requested bids on a minimum of four million blank work permits and green cards a year for the next five years, there was an outcry in political and immigration policy circles. “There aren’t enough federal employees from here to Pluto to do adequate background checks on 34 million,” said Bob Dane, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

In September, the Census Bureau released new data on the U.S. population finding that the nation’s immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 41.3 million in July 2013, an increase of 1.4 million since July 2010. Since 2000, the immigrant population is up 10.2 million and double the number in 1990, nearly triple the number in 1980, and guadruple that in 1970, which it stood at 9.6 million.

It’s no secret President Obama has wanted to get as many immigrants as possible, especially those from south of the border, into America. He has winked at the laws that determine immigration and citizenship. In 2011 many believed he had “enacted” the Dream Act by EO, but he had not. His administration instead adopted a policy regarding the deportation of illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, granting them the option of applying for two-year work permits. Even conservatives could find some merit in this, allowing them to gain legal status and apply for citizenship.

The amnesty issue would play havoc prior to the November 4 midterm elections, so Obama will wait until after them to announce his intentions. I doubt he thinks an executive order will go unchallenged, but at that point it will not matter to him since he will not be running for reelection in 2016. His indifference to constitutional restraints on his power as President is well known.

On October 22 Iowa Rep. Steve King, a Republican, predicted Obama will “violate the Constitution, break the law and grant executive amnesty.”

“If the President takes this action,” said Rep. King, “ (that) he’s threatened to take we will have abandoned every pretext of the Constitution of the United States and if the American people take that setting down or lying down, then our constitutional republic has been destroyed.”

Rep. King is right, but the Obama EO will be challenged in the courts and in Congress. If that effort is opposed by Democrats in Congress, their midterm losses will barely rival what the 2016 election will hold for them.

© Alan Caruba, 201

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Obama’s War on U.S. Energy

October 26th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

September 19th was an anniversary you did not read or hear about in the nation’s news media. It marked six years—2008—since the first permit application for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was submitted to the federal government. Can you imagine how many jobs its construction would have created during a period of recovery from the 2008 financial crisis? President Obama is universally credited with delaying it.

Thomas Pyle, the president of the American Energy Alliance, pointed out that World War II, the construction of the Hoover Dam, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition all took place in less time. In a September Forbes article, he noted that “Earlier this year a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 65 percent of Americans support building the pipeline, while only 22 percent oppose it. In Washington three-to-one margins are usually referred to as mandates.”

In contrast, in March 2013 the then-Interior Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, boasted “In just over four years, we have advanced 17 wind, solar, and geothermal projects on our public lands.” It is not these projects that Americans depend upon for energy. The opposite is a stark explanation why coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy remain the heart blood of the economy.

The Daily Caller reported in July that the “U.S. Bureau of Land Management is currently sitting on a backlog of 3,500 applications that need approval to move forward on drilling for oil and natural gas on federal land,” just part of Obama’s war on U.S. energy.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, fossil fuels met 82% of U.S. energy demand in 2013.

Petroleum, primarily used for transportation, supplied 36% of the energy demand in 2013. Natural gas represented 27%. Coal represented 20% and generated almost 40% of all electricity. In the six years since Obama took office that is a loss of 10%!

The much ballyhooed “renewable sources” of energy, justified by the false claim that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming or climate change, are a very small part of the nation’s power providers. Wind power represented 1.6% and solar power represented three-tenths of 1%! Hydropower supplied 2.6% making it the largest source of so-called renewable energy.

Politically, it has been Democrats advocating renewable sources and siding with the President’s delay of the oil pipeline and the Environmental Protection Agency’s assault on coal-fired plants to produce electricity. By contrast, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has been busy putting forth legislation to fix aspects of our energy problems and needs.

Some of the bills that were introduced included H.R. 2728: The Protecting State’s Rights to Promote American Energy Security Act; H.R. 3: The Northern Route Approval Act (regarding the keystone XL Pipeline; H.R. 1900: The Natural Gas Pipeline Permitting Reform Act; H.R. 2201: The North American Energy Infrastructure Act; and H.R. 6: The Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act, intended to expedite the export of liquefied natural gas to our allies around the world. The global market is growing at a colossal pace.

These bills will likely all die in the U.S. Senate, controlled by the Democratic Party. The Nov 4 midterm elections can change that if enough Republicans are elected to gain control.

It’s not just natural gas that is helping the economy improve. The Financial Times reported in late September that “The U.S. is overtaking Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of liquid petroleum, in a sign of how its booming oil production has reshaped the energy sector.” Why? “The U.S. industry has been transformed by the shale revolution, with advances in the techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling enabling the exploitation of oilfields, particularly in Texas and North Dakota.”

The only places you won’t find oil drilling are on federally controlled lands. The same holds for coal and natural gas.

This is in keeping with a virtual war on U.S. energy waged from the White House. Consider what we have witnessed:

# Obama has refused to let the Keystone XL pipeline be built.

# Billions wasted on loans to renewable energy companies, many of which like Solyndra and Solar Trust of America went bankrupt.

# Obama made electric cars like the Chevy Volt part of his energy policy, providing subsidies but their high cost and low mileage capacity has resulted in few sales.

# Obama and the EPA advocated a cap-and-trade tax on greenhouse gas emissions when there has been no global warming for 19 years and carbon dioxide plays no role whatever in the Earth’s climate.

# The Obama administration terminating the construction of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada despite nearly $15 billion already spent on this necessary repository.

These are just a few examples, but in the meantime, the U.S. still requires that a valuable food commodity, corn, be turned into ethanol, an automotive fuel additive, that (a) reduces the millage in every gallon and (b) increases its cost at the pump. As Seldon B. Graham, Jr., a longtime energy industry consultant and observer, notes that “Ethanol production peaked in 2011 at 6% of total oil demand.” Favoring replacing imported foreign oil with American oil, Graham says “Americans would have saved $64.7 billion on the oil price since 2009.”

Americans are afflicted by a President and his administration that for political and environmental reasons are costing them trillions in needless, senseless energy costs, loans and subsidies, and efforts to impose laws that have no basis whatever in science.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Killing Confidence in Our Government

October 19th, 2014

 

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

What has been the over-riding theme of life in America since Barack Obama became President in 2008?

It has been the continued loss of confidence Americans have regarding various elements of the federal government. From the Centers for Disease Control, the Veterans Administration, the Secret Service, to the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service, these and other agencies have been tainted in ways that have turned his two terms into a litany of scandals and failures.

Obama is a President for whom politics is the sole reason against which every decision is made.

The latest example was the naming of an Ebola Czar. “Sources confirm to Fox News that President Obama plans to name Ron Klain, a longtime political hand with no apparent medical or health background.” In the past, Klain has served as chief of staff to Al Gore and Joe Biden. Does this make you feel any better about the Ebola threat?

I think that most Americans—not the “low information” ignorant ones—are experiencing a generalized depression about the nation these days. It’s a sense of weariness because our paychecks don’t stretch enough in the supermarket where the cost of food, particularly meat and fish, is soaring.

We wonder about the quality of education our children or grandchildren are receiving. It’s poor when compared to other nations and it undermines a belief in America’s exceptionalism.

In growing numbers younger Americans are choosing not to marry because of the costs involved and because we live in a society that no longer frowns on a couple living together; nearly half of marriages end in divorce. And then there’s same-sex marriage, a concept that was unthinkable not that long ago and for centuries in all societies.

We’re now six years into the Great Recession thanks to a White House that thought that, if the government spent $834 billion on top of the national debt, it would somehow “stimulate” the economy but government spending did not relieve Americans during the Great Depression, generate new jobs or achieve anything else that this tried-and-failed liberal theory was said to do. Who was in charge of Obama’s “stimulus” program? Ron Klain, the new Ebola Czar.

Cutting taxes, slowing and reducing regulations, and generally getting out of the way to allow people to start or expand their businesses works, but the White House went the other direction.

As an October 16 Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “Millions of American families haven’t had a raise in after-inflation incomes in years, but in Washington times are flush…the U.S. federal government rolled up record revenues of $3.013 trillion.” Individual income tax receipts rose by 5.9%, along with payroll taxes and corporate income taxes—very nearly the highest in the world—increased 16% to $321 billion.

Only the naïve or ignorant believe that the government knows how to spend our money better than we do, but liberals—Democrats—do. Their answer to every problem government encounters is more money, but not to repair and expand the infrastructure, roads and bridges, on which the nation depends and not for a military that is currently at low pre-World War Two levels of personnel and old equipment of every description.

Our current Secretary of State, John Kerry, is going around echoing the President, telling people that mankind is doomed because “climate change” is coming and will destroy all life unless billions or trillions are spent in ways that will avoid it. Only no one can avoid climate change because that’s what climate does; it changes with well-known and predictable cycles tied to the Sun’s cycles.

Our military’s mission is now being redirected to addressing “climate change” at a time when, having been withdrawn from Iraq, a new, larger and far more dangerous entity, the Islamic State, has emerged, stretching into Syria as well.

The President recently gave an interview to France’s Canel+ TV Channel and said that the American people need to be better educated about Islam, claiming that the U.S. should be regarded as a Muslim country because of the number of Muslims living here. The truth is that the U.S. has one of the smallest percentages of Muslims of any Western nation, about 1.5% of the population. Americans know everything they need to about Islam. They recently watched two of their countrymen beheaded by the Islamic State.

The President appears to prefer unapologetic liars as his advisors. Consider Susan Rice who came to fame by lying on five Sunday television shows that the Benghazi attack in 2012 was the result of a video no one had seen and more recently said that Turkey had agreed to permit the U.S. to undertake military flights to attack ISIS only to have Turkey deny that within hours. She is Obama’s national security advisor and that is cause enough for concern, but guess to whom the new Ebola Czar, Ron Klain, will be reporting? Susan Rice.

While Obama has been in office the population has been growing by virtue of the millions of illegal aliens that have been entering. This year there was a dramatic virtual invasion of children and others from Guatemala and San Salvador at the invitation of the President. They were quickly dispersed throughout the U.S. and just as quickly schools around the nation began to report outbreaks of the diseases they brought. At the same time, deportations have declined this year.

The President has sent more than 4,000 of our military to Africa’s Ebola hot zone and he did so rapidly as what will be described as a humanitarian gesture, but he has never seen any necessity to dispatch our military to our southern border to stem illegal entry. Indeed, his administration has taken Arizona to court when it passed legislation to address the problem. In the meantime, we are left to wonder what will happen if our soldiers become ill with Ebola?

Indeed, his signature legislation, ObamaCare, is destroying our healthcare system and is a testament to the lies he repeatedly told before the Democrats in Congress passed it in 2009. No Republican voted for it. After the midterm elections, hundreds of thousands will learn that their employers will no longer provide them with healthcare insurance.

Americans are left to wonder how the nation can survive a President who has steadily engaged in programs that have harmed America’s economy—he is the first to have had our national credit rating reduced.

In the process he has ignored the limits imposed on his office by the Constitution. The courts have repeatedly rebuked this.

On November 4th voters will have an opportunity to go to the polls and vote out as many of his supporters, incumbent Democrats and candidates for Congress, as possible.

Our confidence in our government must be restored with new leadership.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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A Supreme Court, Not Supreme Wisdom

October 12th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

I am not a lawyer, but I have read the Constitution and I cannot find any indication that the Founding Fathers intended the guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” in the 14th Amendment to include same-sex marriage.

The idea would have been regarded as an abomination to the men who created the Constitution. To many who regard the institution of marriage a sacred bond between a man and a woman, the decisions of lower courts that have facilitated same-sex marriage are deeply offensive

When the Supreme Court decided not to decide upon appeals from seven states regarding lower court rulings that their bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, they essentially endorsed same-sex marriage. It is now legal in 25 states, paving the way for a total of 30 states that recognize it, but only by popular vote in three of them; the rest had it imposed through the courts.

The same can be said of the Supreme Court’s decision in 1973 that permitted abortion as a legal right. Here again, the 14th Amendment was cited. As one source noted, “The Court summarily announced that the ‘Fourteen Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action” includes “a right to personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy and that “this right of privacy…is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

As this is being written, there have been more than 57,245,810 fetuses aborted since 1973 and, this year, there have been 840,045. Thus, decisions that the Supreme Court makes can literally result in life or death.

One of the most dramatic decisions of an earlier Supreme Court was the 1857 Dred Scott case that ruled that African Americans, whether slave or free, could not be American citizens and thus had no standing to sue in federal court, nor that the federal government had any power to regulate slavery in the territories acquired after the creation of the nation. The Civil War would follow in 1861 and last until 1865, resulting in more than 600,000 casualties, but finally ending slavery in America. Even some of the Founding Fathers had predicted that conflict.

When the Supreme Court has wandered into the area of social policy and culture, it has made decisions that were contrary to the majority of the population. The decision about slavery was about property—the slave–but many regarded slavery as an institution that must be ended.

The Supreme Court, of course, is not one long list of bad decisions. It has done much good and one man is credited with setting it on its course as a co-equal brand of the federal government. That man was John Marshall. I doubt that his name and deeds are even taught in the schools of America.

As a brilliant and very entertaining biography by Harlow Giles Unger, “John Marshall: The Chief Justice Who Save the Nation”, reveals, “Marshall’s pronouncements would ensure the integrity and eminence of the Constitution and the federal government and catapult him into the pantheon of American Founding Fathers as the father of the American federal justice system.”

“He would become the longest serving Chief Justice in U.S. history, signing 1,180 decisions and writing 549 of them, or nearly half, himself.” America was fortunate to have a legal scholar, utterly devoted to the Constitution, in its early, formative years. “Case by case he defined, asserted, and when necessary, invented the authority he and the Court needed to render justice, stabilize the federal government, and preserve the Union and the Constitution.”

Chief among Marshall’s achievements was to assert that the Supreme Court had the right and duty to declare federal and state laws to be either constitutional or unconstitutional. With that it became the third equal but separate branch of government.

Marshall had fought in the American Revolution and had had a distinguished career as a lawyer. As Unger says, “Clouds of doom shrouded the nation in 1800. George Washington was dead. For the first time in their twenty-five year struggle to govern themselves, Americans faced a future without the father of their country to lead them. And they lost their way.”

“Absent their commander-in-chief, the men who helped him lead the nation to independence went mad. Chaos engulfed the land as surviving Founding Fathers—Adams, Burr, Hamilton, Jefferson, Monroe, and others—turned on each other as they clawed at Washington’s fallen mantle.” Jefferson as the third President wanted to rule as a virtual tyrant, but Adams’ appointment of Marshall put a brake those ambitions.

The United States is passing thought a period of governance in which the Congress is so locked in partisanship and so divided that it is barely able to function in the national interest. The current President is losing the popularity he enjoyed when first elected and, now into his second term, he is losing the support and confidence of a majority of Americans. Barack Obama has repeatedly expressed his displeasure with a Constitution that places limits on his power as President.

As Unger notes “Nothing in the Constitution gives a President power to issue proclamations or executive orders with the force of law. Only Congress can legislate, yet presidents have issued more than 13,500 proclamations and executive orders since the founding of the Republic, while the Congress has enacted only about 20,000 laws.”

The Constitution remains supreme above the office of President and, in great measure, we can thank the work of Chief Justice John Marshall.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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President Ebola

October 5th, 2014

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

What does it tell you when Britain and France have stopped flights to and from the nations in Africa where Ebola has become a threat and the United States has not taken a similar measure?

What does it tell you when the President sends 3,000 U.S. troops on a “humanitarian” mission to West Africa? It tells me he has put the U.S. at risk if any or a portion of these troops return after having been infected.

As always history has lessons that cannot be ignored. In 1918 and 1919, there was a pandemic of the Spanish influenza that caught nations by surprise, infecting an estimated 500 million people and killing between 50 and a 100 million of them in three waves. It began in the U.S. in March 1918 at a crowded army camp, Fort Riley, Kansas.

As these troops, living in close proximity to one another, were transported between camps, the disease spread quickly even before they were assembled on East Coast ports on route to France. They in turn bought it to the trenches of war in Europe.

The second wave struck in 1918 at a naval facility in Boston and at the Camp Devens military base in Massachusetts. October 1918 was the most deadly month in which 195,000 Americans died. The Harvard University Open Library notes that the supply of health care workers, morticians, and grave diggers dwindled and mass graves were often dug to bury the dead. There were subsequent outbreaks in 1957 and 1968.

And, at some point, 3,000 U.S. troops will be returning from West Africa to military facilities here at home.

Thus far we have been fortunate to have identified the case of the Ebola victim who had entered the nation from Liberia, but there are few guarantees that more will not be found or deterred. The Oct 4 Washington Post reports that “Since July, hospitals around the country have reported more than 100 cases involving Ebola-like symptoms to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Largely unknown is that 90,000 Americans die annually from preventable infections they acquire while in hospitals!

The concern about illnesses entering the U.S. is particularly true of our southern border which remains porous. Thank goodness Texas has taken measures to tighten its border security, but I am reminded that the Obama administration sued Arizona when it attempted to increase its security against the influx of illegal aliens.

Obama is the President who engineered an invasion of thousands of children and others from Latin America and then distributed them to various states without informing their governors or other authorities of who and where they were. Not surprisingly, in recent months cases of an enterovirus respiratory disease affecting school-age children have been reported around the nation.

Obama has no regard for the sovereignty of the nation or its immigration laws.

This is the same President who has made it clear that he intends to extend amnesty by executive order to an estimated eleven million illegal aliens, but not until after the midterm elections in November. I doubt that he has the constitutional power to do this. I hope the U.S. Congress has the means and the will to negate this.

The U.S. has a healthcare system that is the envy of the world, but the introduction of ObamaCare is already having negative effects on its administration and the former system of privately purchased healthcare insurance. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who had such insurance have lost it and those who signed up for ObamaCare are discovering it is far more expensive.

Perhaps the most under-reported story thus far regarding Ebola is the fact that in 2010, according to The Daily Caller, “the administration of President Barack Obama moved with virtually no fanfare to abandon a comprehensive set of regulations which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had called essential to preventing international travelers from spreading deadly diseases inside the United States.” Among the viral diseases of concern was Ebola.

I want to have confidence in the Centers for Disease Control, but after witnessing the failures of one government agency after another including the Secret Service, I wish I felt better about them.

I have no doubt its staff are seriously concerned and doing what they can to respond to the threat, but I also think they and the rest of us are at risk from a regime led by a man whose incompetence has written a new chapter in the history of the presidency.

I wish that I felt confident that the Obama administration will take such steps as are necessary to keep the Ebola threat from harming the health of the nation such as not issuing visas to those from the affected nations in Africa, but the record to date limits that confidence.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Prepare for a Deluge of Climate Change Hype

September 21st, 2014

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

Despite the several thousands who will participate in a Climate March and the world leaders who will do so in a UN Climate Summit this week, is there anyone who seriously believes that humans have any impact or control over the climate? Or even the weather? The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

In utter contempt for the intelligence of people here in the United States and around the world, a Climate Change Summit will be held on Tuesday, September 23rd, by the United Nations, the source of decades of lies about “global warming” and—since the Earth has not warmed in the past 19 years—the new name “climate change.”

To advance this greatest of lies, the lead-up to the event will be a massive march in New York on Sunday, Sept. 21st. The purpose, as David Rothbard of the think tank, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) says, is an avalanche of “Scary doomsday ‘science’ and the need for ‘urgent international action’ backed by a ‘People’s March’ of thousands of radical Green activists in the streets.” CFACT has released “Climate Hype Exposed”, a report that exposes the global warming campaign’s junk science, wasteful policies, and the threat to freedom and prosperity it represents. You can download it.

What the mainstream media have largely failed to report were the nine international conferences on climate change sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank. The most recent in July featured 64 speakers from 12 countries, all providing science-based lectures that disputed global warming. Heartland’s “Climate Change Reconsidered” reports are filled with the science that debunks the doomsday scenarios.

Numerous Green groups have been making plans to be in New York for the march. More than 750 organizations are sponsoring the People’s Climate March to coincide with the UN summit. Reportedly it will involve 950 organizations. There will be 63 other events in North America, six in South America, 54 in Europe, 10 in South Asia, and 32 in Australia.

They include, of course, the likes of Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, and lesser known groups like the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network that will be there with the message that “industrialization, fossil fuel combustion, land use change and social and ecological exploitation have compromised the planet’s equilibrium in notable and dire ways.”

This is totally absurd, a matrix of lies that ignores the role that industrialization, the jobs and products it produces; and fossil fuel use, the essential element that provides energy in the form of petroleum to power cars, trucks, and other vehicles, as well, of course, coal that provided half the electricity on which our entire way of life depends until the Obama administration unleashed a “war” on it. The other verbiage about “ecological exploitation” is aimed at all forms of development that contribute to the economy, including the building of homes for a growing population.

The UN Summit is, we’re told, “intended to mobilize international political will needed to achieve an ambitious climate change agreement” at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which is scheduled to meet in Paris in December 2015.

The week ahead will be filled with many events; some will be sponsored by major corporations such as Lockheed Martin and Hewlett Packard. Even so, it is the corporations that are a target of the climate change proposals to reduce energy use and the alleged pollution it is said to generate.

A number of major nations will not be represented by their leaders. Chinese President Xi Jinping and India’s Prime Minister, Narenda Modi” will not attend. Both nations have been engaged in building a vast network of coal-fired plants to generate the electricity they need for development. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will not be attending, nor will Germany’s Angela Markel.

President Obama has been trying to convince Americans that climate change is a greater threat to the world than the emergence of the radical Islamic State (ISIS) that has seized a vast swath of land in Syria and Iraq. His response has been tepid, consisting of a few “targeted” air strikes and “no boots on the ground.” It is doubtful most Americans think the ordinary climate phenomena that have been a part of the Earth’s existence for 4.5 billion years pose a greater threat than the barbaric agenda of ISIS.

As the media report the march and other events, along with the UN Summit, it is essential to keep in mind that it is all lies. There is no basis in science to support the claims Greens have made for decades, all coordinated out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Primary among those lies is the assertion that carbon dioxide is responsible for global warming when, of course, there is NO global warming.

Tom Harris, the executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, along with Bob Carter, the head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia, in a recent New York Post commentary flatly stated that “There is essentially zero evidence that carbon dioxide from human activities is causing catastrophic climate change.”

They noted that the Earth’s sea level is not rising in any significant fashion, “averaging about 1 millimeter per year” and that “satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.”

As reported by The New York Times, “The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.” Fuel emissions are not warming the planet. The U.S. Constitution requires that any such treaty would be legally binding only if is approved by two-thirds of the majority of the Senate.”

“To sidestep that requirement,” the Times noted, “President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a ‘politically binding’ deal that would ‘name and shame’ countries into cutting their emissions.”

Ignoring the science and ignoring the Constitution go together for this President, but it will be hard for Americans to ignore the deluge of global warming/climate change lies with which they will be assailed over the weekend and into the week ahead. The mainstream media will see to that.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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What “International Community” is Obama Talking About?

September 8th, 2014

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

The U.S. and Iran have been adversaries since 1979 when it seized our diplomats and held them for 444 days. In the wake of the Cold War, Russia has assisted Iran develop its nuclear program and has joined its war on the Islamic State. The U.S. has joined the conflict, making Iran, Syria and Russia our allies in a world where such relationships are changing so fast it is hard to keep up with them.

A Sept 5 Debka File report regarding recent air strikes by Syria on two meetings of Islamic State officers, noted that “The twin Syrian air offensive coincided with the opening of the two-day NATO Summit…the information about the two Al Qaeda meetings at Raqqa and Abu Kamal could have come from only two sources: U.S. surveillance satellites and aircraft, or Iranian agents embedded at strategic points across Syria.”

The Israeli news agency concluded that the success of the air strikes reflected “the widening military and intelligence cooperation between the United States and Iran in Iraq and Syria.” So maybe there has been a bonus of sorts from the U.S. negotiations with Iran regarding its nuclear program? The other component is the fact that Iran does not want a hostile Sunni Islamic State emerging in Iraq on its borders. It is more likely this is a short-term alliance.

Meanwhile, at the NATO meeting in Wales, Secretary of State John Kerry identified what he called a “core coalition” of ten nations that could help the U.S. go after the Islamic State (ISIL) terrorists. The seven he named were Great Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, and Poland. Of these, only Turkey is Islamic. There was no mention of Iran or Syria, both of whom are playing a significant role in the fight against ISIS.

“There is no containment policy for ISIS,” said Kerry. I suppose that’s better than wanting the ISIS threat to be “manageable” as the President recently said at the same time he said he had “no strategy” at present to deal with ISIS. Meanwhile, on Labor Day Vice President Biden, was saying the U.S. was going to follow ISIS “to the gates of hell” to destroy them.

If there is some confusion in the minds of Americans about what the White House is actually doing or not doing, its mixed messages suggest they have as little idea as the rest of us.

A Sept 5 Rasmussen Reports poll said “Voters show even more support for continued airstrikes in Iraq against the radical Islamic group ISIS despite a second public beheading of a U.S. journalist in retaliation for those strikes. Nearly half now support sending U.S. combat troops to fight ISIS.”

The President is fond of referring to “the international community” but that is essentially a meaningless phrase and has been for a very long time. Individual nations act in their own interest and if that coincides with other nations, they are allies. The result is that, over longer or shorter periods of time, the alliances change in response to various active or potential threats.

During World War II the U.S. was allied with the Soviet Union to destroy the Nazi regime but as soon as the war concluded we entered into a long Cold War until it collapsed in 1991. These days Russia represents a threat to the Ukraine and former Soviet satellite nations in Eastern Europe.

People may regard the United Nations as “the international community”, but in reality it is the most corrupt international community on Earth and its policies are heavily anti-American and anti-Israel.

At a Sept 2 press conference by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, (OCHA) Israel was slammed for “an unprecedented scale of destruction in Hamas” without a word about the thousands of Hamas rockets fired against Israel from Gaza. The OCHA spokesman made no mention of the estimated 200,000 dead in Syria resulting from its civil war or the persecution and slaughter of Iraqi Yazidis, Christians and other minorities. Apparently they lack the attention of those engaged in “humanitarian affairs.”

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is home to 12,000 employees and totally devoted to just one “refugee” group, the Palestinians. As Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted, despite caches of rockets found in UNRWA facilities or the intent of Hamas to destroy Israel, “UNRWA has become so enmeshed in the workings of Gaza that it effectively functions as a support service for the interests of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization that rules the territory.”

Not to be outdone, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, on August 29, accused the United States of “racial profiling” and “the excessive use of force by the law enforcement officials against racial and ethnic minorities” mentioning the death of Michael Brown of Ferguson, MO. Among the nations represented on the Committee are Algeria, Russia, China, Pakistan, and Lebanon, nations where racial and religious discrimination thrive.

Why the U.S. continues to contribute taxpayer dollars to the United Nations defies any explanation. We can function in the diplomatic sphere without it, but it might well fail for lack of U.S. funding.

According to the Heritage Foundation, as of 2012 the U.S. “was assessed 22 percent of the regular budget, which is nearly $567 million in gross contributions…The U.S. is assessed more than 180 other U.N. member states combined and 22,000 times more than the least assessed countries. Together, the top 15 contributors pay over 81.4 percent of the U.N. regular budget. Moreover, under U.N. rules, the 129 member states that contribute less than 1.3 percent can pass the budget over the objections of the countries paying over 98 percent.”

As for the NATO coalition to which John Kerry made mention none of these nations has the military capacity to destroy ISIS that the U.S. possesses. Indeed, the European members are trying to deal with the threat that Russia poses in the Ukraine and form Soviet satellite nations.

Rarely mentioned has been the failure of many NATO member nations to allocate sufficient funding to their military. Several have a serious internal Islamic threat from Muslims who are citizens. The British just announced plans to crack down on any citizen who went off to join ISIS or who may be returning from battles in Iraq or Syria.

There have been vast, complex changes occurring in the Middle East. As former Ambassador Chas Freeman noted in a 2013 speech to the National Council on U.S. Arab Relations, “The simple world of colonial and superpower rivalries is long vanished. The notion that one is either ‘with us or against us’ has lost all resonance in the modern Middle East. No government in the region is prepared now to entrust its future to foreigners, still less to a single foreign power.”

“Americans no longer command the ability to shape trends in the Middle East,” said Freeman, and “Almost no one now expects us to do so…for better or ill, the states of the region have seized control of their own destiny.”

Turns out, most of them are depending on the U.S. to rid them of the Islamic State and even former adversaries like Iran are willing to work with us to achieve that objective. If recent polls are any indicator, we will be back on the Iraqi field of battle with “boots on the ground” and at least half of the population understands why and supports it.

The Islamic State, a self-declared caliphate, is the true face of Islam. It even scares Muslims.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Witnessing a Failed Presidency

September 1st, 2014

 

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

When we elect someone—anyone—to the office of President, it is only natural that we attribute great political skills, intellect, and judgment to that man. We want to believe we have selected someone with the ability to do what must be done in a dangerous and very complex world.

This may explain why Presidents who have presided in times of war are more highly regarded than those that have not. Washington brought the nation into being by patiently pursuing a war with Great Britain, Lincoln saw the Civil War to a successful conclusion, preserving the Union

The last century offered two world wars and several lesser ones, Korea and Vietnam. Voters put Franklin D. Roosevelt in office in 1933 and then kept him there until his death in 1945 just before the conclusion of World War Two. They had no wish to disrupt his conduct of the war with anyone else. It fell to Harry Truman to wrap up World War Two and to pursue the Korean War to repulse communist North Korea’s invasion.

The Vietnam War had its genesis in the JFK years, but it was Lyndon Johnson who committed to it with a massive influx of infantry and massive bombing, neither of which was able to deter the North Vietnamese from uniting the nation. Having lied the nation into the war LBJ concluded at the end of his first term which he had won in a landslide that he should not run again given the vast level of unhappiness with the conflict.

The failure to respond in a strong way to the Iranians who took U.S. diplomats hostage left Jimmy Carter with a single failed term in office. Neither domestically, nor in the area of foreign affairs did he demonstrate strength or much understanding.

After 9/11 George W. Bush used U.S. military strength to send a message to the world in general and al Qaeda in particular. By the end of his second term, a completely unknown young Democrat emerged as the Democratic Party candidate for President by campaigning on a promise to get out of Iraq and offering “hope and change.”

Barack Hussein Obama captured the imagination of the voters. He was black and many Americans wanted to demonstrate that an African-American could be elected President. He was relatively young, regarded as eloquent, and seemed to project a cool, self-composed approach throughout his campaign.

The only problem was that he lacked a resume beyond having been a “community organizer.” He had graduated from Harvard Law School, but all of his academic and other public records had been put under seal so they could not be examined. Twice he ran against relatively lackluster, older men who did not possess much charisma, if any.

In his first term, his “stimulus” to lift the economy out of recession was a trillion-dollar failure. By his second term, however, the singular first term “achievement” was the passage of the Affordable Patient Care Act—Obamacare. When finally ready to enroll people it instantly demonstrated technical and policy problems. Obama began to unilaterally make changes to the law even though he lacked the legal power to do so.

The war in Iraq whose conclusion he had ridden to victory in 2008 and 2012 came unraveled and the Syrian civil war in which he had resisted any involvement metastasized into a barbaric Islamic State that seized parts of Iraq and northern Syria.

Halfway through his second term, it was increasingly evident that Obama did not want to fulfill the role of the Presidency to provide leadership in times of foreign and domestic crisis.

On August 28 Gallup reported “Americans are more than twice as likely to say they “strongly disapprove” (39%) of President Barack Obama’s job performance as they are to say they “strongly approve” (17%). The percentage of Americans who strongly disapprove of Obama has increased over time, while the percentage who strongly approve has dropped by almost half.”

His passion for golf became noticeable in ways that went beyond just a bit of vacation time. The time he spent fund raising seemed to be more of a priority than dealing with Congress. Not only did he fail to develop strong political working relations with members of his own party, his churlish talk about the Republican Party began to grate on everyone.

Though no President cares much for the demands of the press, they play an essential role in a democracy. His administration went to extremes to close off access to its members and by striking out at the press in ways that turned it from one that had gone out of its way to support him in the first term to one that actively, if not openly, disliked him in the second.

One characteristic about Obama had become glaringly obvious. He lies all the time. He lies in obvious and casual ways. In politics where one’s word must be one’s bond, this is a lethal personality trait. He dismissed the many scandals of his administration as “phony.”

Given the vast implications of what is occurring in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world his response was to interrupt his golf game to give a short speech and then return to the greens. In a recent press conference he said he has “no strategy” to address the threat that ISIS represents.

What Americans have discovered is that they have twice either voted for (or against) someone with fewer skills and even less desire to do the job for which he campaigned. This lazyness combined with his radical liberal politics have finally become obvious even to his former supporters.

His statement that he had no strategy to deal with the threat of the Islamic State and that it was perhaps too soon to expect one to have been formulated has led to the conclusion that he was far less intellectually equipped to be President than many had thought.

Now he must be endured and survived.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Shaking, Quaking, and Freezing

August 31st, 2014

 

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

Have you noticed how much earthquake and volcanic activity has been occurring lately?
There was a major earthquake in Napa, California on Sunday, August 24th as well as considerable volcanic activity from Iceland to Papua, New Guinea. August was also a month that set records for colder U.S. temperatures.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there were some 1,097 “low max” temperature records broken in the U.S. between August 1 and August 23, meaning that the maximum temperature during that time period was the lowest it has ever been. NOAA reported that summer across much of the U.S. has been colder than normal.

Most of us, after decades of global warming predictions that became more and more absurd, rising sea levels drowning Manhattan and Miami, an upsurge in hurricanes, forest fires, and every other calamity, have concluded that none of these things have happened in the volume or intensity predicted. In the 70s we were told the Earth would get colder. In the 80’s and 90’s we were told it would get warmer.

A new book is advising us to prepare for a serious cold spell that is not only going to arrive in twenty to thirty years, but will likely stay around to become the next ice age. This time, though, the prediction is based on well-established climate cycles and the behavior of the Sun that was known as far back as Galileo’s day.

The new “normal” is colder weather and this is because the Sun’s sunspot activity has been in a cyclical decline since about 1998, producing the latest cooling cycle for the Earth.
In combination with the earthquakes and volcanic activity, says John L. Casey’s new book, “Dark Winter: How the Sun is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell” ($24.95, Humanix Books, Boca Raton, FL) what we’re really looking at is a repeat of the Dalton Minimum, a solar sunspot minimum that occurred between 1793 and 1830. His earlier book, “Cold Sun” addressed this cyclical phenomenon.

Casey asks “Will we also experience volcanic activity that will add to the solar cooling?” and the answer, given the fifty active volcanoes around the world, is that “We should expect to deal with multiple geological disasters, including volcanoes and earthquakes, during the next solar hibernation.” We have in fact already entered that “hibernation.”

Casey is the president of the Space and Science Research Corporation. It specializes in independent research regarding the coming decades of cold weather. For thirty-five years Casey has been active in science and high tech industries. He has been a national space policy advisor to the White House and Congress, and a former space shuttle engineer, consultant to NASA headquarters.

Casey has formulated a “Bicentennial Cycle of 206 years correlated with near 100 percent accuracy to every major cold-temperature period of the past 1,200 years.” His Theory of “Relational Cycles of Solar Activity” accounts for its effects and those of other solar cycles.

He is not the first scientist to recognize the relationship of diminished sunspot activity and cooling cycles, but he is the first to have synthesized the earlier work of others who made comparable observations. His Relational Cycles theory, however, is more specific than preceding ones, pegging the arrival of significant global cold climate to begin as early as 2024 or as late as 2036. “My math says 2031” says Casey.

Casey’s book is a prediction of a coming ice age that will have devastating effects for all life on Earth, but my readers know I have been writing about this for several years based on Robert W. Felix’s book, “Not By Fire, But By Ice” ($15.95, Sugarhouse Publishing, Bellevue, WA). I have frequently referenced his website http://iceagenow.info, for its daily updates on cold weather events, records established and broken, and reports on volcanic and earthquake activity around the world.

Before I proceed, the reader should contemplate the fact that not one single child entering or returning to school this year has ever lived in a period of “global warming.” The cooling cycle began around 1997.

You do not need to be a meteorologist to know nothing humans do affects or alters the weather. The claim that “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are making the Earth warmer is false.

We have been experiencing this as the Earth has cooled, along with increased volcanic activity and earthquakes, and yet on September 23rd the United Nations will hold a “Climate Change Summit” that will be attended by more than a hundred of the world’s presidents and prime ministers. They will continue the greatest international scientific fraud ever perpetrated.

Despite the cooling cycle that is occurring and which will grow in intensity, the U.S. government has devoted billions to global warming research and, as Casey notes, “not one research dollar has been dedicated to the science and planning needed for the United Sates to be prepared for the only climate change that we can expect—a long and potentially dangerous cold climate!”

The U.S. is not taking the steps necessary for the cold that is coming. It has not only failed to encourage the use of our multi-generational reserves of coal, the Obama administration has declared “war” on it, putting several hundred plants out of business, reducing the amount of electricity the nation needs now and will require. Power plants and refineries cannot be built overnight and the lack of them will severely impact our lives and the economy.

Despite thousands of miles of pipelines that safely distribute oil and natural gas, Obama has refused to permit a new one, Keystone XL, for oil to be shipped to gulf state refineries from Canada. Railroad cars needed to transport food crops in a timely manner are being diverted to transport oil. No new nuclear plants are being built on a scale that will be needed. The “grid” that distributes electricity nationwide is in vital need of repair and expansion.

Cold weather will reduce the amount of crops needed to feed the nation’s human population and the stocks of cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens upon which we depend. This will happen here and worldwide. Famine will be rampant. In countless ways ours and worldwide societies that depend on all manner of technology will be impacted.

Nations and people will fail to prepare for what is coming because (1) they have been deceived by the global warming hoax and (2) we will be leaving behind one of the longest climate cycles other than an ice age, the interglacial warm period. Casey notes that “For the past 11,000 years, we have been living in one of these rare interglacial periods, called the Holocene warm period.”

What we call civilization is the result of the Holocene warm period and, without it, civilization and a global population nearing or surpassing eight billion will be largely decimated as the next, entirely predictable, ice age occurs.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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What is the Difference Between the DNC and CPUSA?

August 25th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

On the home page of the Communist Party USA it says “A better and peaceful world is possible—a world where people and nature come before profits. That’s socialism. That’s our vision. We are the Communist Party USA.”

No, it’s not Socialism which is a watered down version of Communism. Real Communism is the kind that was practiced in the former Soviet Union. It can be found in Cuba and North Korea where the state controls all power and property,and the people have none.

Modified versions exist in China, Russia, Venezuela, and other nations where some aspects of Capitalism are maintained for the sake of their economies. In the West Socialism was incorporated by both the U.S. and Great Britain, and other nations via various social welfare programs.

Capitalism is about profits, innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment. It is about the freedom to acquire wealth. It emphasizes work, not welfare. It is the reason America has a dynamic economic system—when it is permitted to prosper, free from federal interference.

In America, conservatives have always been acutely aware of Communism, but the 47% who still approve of Barack Obama and those who are members of the Democratic Party are the dupes of those whose quest for tyrannical power permits them to tell the most appalling lies, particularly about Republicans.

The Democratic Party is so politically corrupt and devoid of moral standards that it is currently engaged in seeking to harm potential Republican presidential candidates with an utterly bogus indictment of Texas Governor Perry and the slanders leveled against New Jersey Governor Christie. It is a tactic of those who fear a loss at the ballot box.

It is the Democratic Party and its elected officials that have advanced the global warming hoax, now called climate change and the CPUSA website refers to the “Accumulation of greenhouse gases (as) a ‘planetary emergency’” This is what both the President and the Secretary of State are saying, but there has been no warming on a planet that is now 17 years into a cooling cycle.

As for those “greenhouse” gases, nitrogen and oxygen are the most abundant in the atmosphere, followed by nothing more dangerous than water vapor! Carbon dioxide is a very minor gas at 0.04%. And most importantly, the Earth is not a greenhouse. When the Sun’s radiation is reduced due to its own natural cycles, it gets colder.

Tied to the climate change message is an agenda that includes Obama’s “war on coal” and his refusal to permit the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from our neighbor Canada, among other measures to restrict access and use of America’s vast energy reserves. This is an attack on the nation’s economy in the name of “nature” or the “environment.”

The CPUSA wants “No new sanctions on Iran” and the administration’s negotiations with Iran to slow or end its nuclear weapons program have dropped some sanctions to get them to the table, but no one believes that Iran will stop because they are openly avowed enemies of America and Israel.

If you wanted to harm America, you would undermine its southern border so that thousands of illegal aliens could join the estimated eleven million already here. That is what President Obama has done and he is joined by former Democratic Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi who said of the illegals, “We are all Americans.” No, they are not.

The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, continues to push for amnesty for illegal aliens saying “It isn’t about politics at all. They (illegal aliens) essentially have become the backbone of the economy.” The Center for Immigration Studies has documented the many jobs that have gone to illegal aliens, leaving native-born and naturalized U.S. citizens with fewer employment opportunities.

In July Gallup reported that “With thousands of undocumented immigrant minors crossing the nation’s southern border in recent months, the percentage of Americans citing immigration as the top problem has surged to 17% this month, up from 5% in June, and the highest seen since 2006. As a result, immigration now virtually ties ‘dissatisfaction with government’ at 16%, as the primary issue Americans think of when asked to name the country’s top problems.”

The Affordable Patient Care Act—Obamacare—is the perfect example of Socialism in its government control of what once was the world’s finest healthcare system and is being destroyed by a law for which only Democrats in Congress voted.
President Obama has illegally asserted more power than the Constitution grants the executive branch, unilaterally altering Obamacare. It is the reason the House of Representatives is suing him.

For several generations since the last century, Americans have been indoctrinated to accept an ever-growing central government, but even so an August Reason-Rupe survey poll found that fully 54% favored a smaller government providing fewer services. Just 18% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, while 75% disapprove.
Though education is never mentioned in the Constitution, we have a Department of Education and the same applies to the Department of Energy, both created by Jimmy Carter. A Nixon executive order brought about the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency that is masterminding an attack on private property along with the manufacturing, agricultural and energy sectors of the economy.

If one looks at the Democratic Party today, there is often scant difference between it and the self-professed Communist Party USA which twice endorsed the election of Barack Obama, a man whose father was a Communist, whose grandparents who helped raise him were Socialists, and who was mentored in his youth by a card-carrying member of the CPUSA.

We have a President who believes that the problems throughout the world have been caused by America. His disdain for the nation and the military that serves to protect it is on full display. And the Democratic Party twice chose him as its candidate.
If you want to see what Communism looks like, acts and says, watch and listen to the Democratic Party.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Genocide! A Christian Holocaust

August 18th, 2014

 

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

In the last century and now this one, I have lived long enough to have been alive when the Nazis killed six million European Jews and another five million other “enemies of the state” that includes unionists, homosexuals, Seventh Day Adventists, and any others that ran afoul of that hateful and hate-filled regime.

There were genocides in the last and this century. The killing of Kurds by Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator who used poison gas—a weapon of mass destruction—against them is largely forgotten by everyone but the Kurds.

In the 1990s there was a genocide in Rwanda by the Tutsi tribe against the Hutu people. Hundreds of thousands were killed, most by machete. Reportedly rape, mutilation, and the deliberate spread of disease were also used against them. The final body count was estimated by some at well over a million.

In the Middle East, the Islamic Ottoman Empire whose final years were directed from what is now modern-day Turkey was responsible for the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915. The Armenians were a Christian minority and what is occurring in the land claimed by the new Islamic State (IS) reflects the same barbarity that afflicted and killed between 600,000 and 1.8 million Armenians.

In Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Serbs were “ethnically cleansed” between 1990 and 1995. Some twenty thousand were killed.

And now the fanatical Islamic State that stretches from areas of northern Syria through much of northern Iraq, just outside of Baghdad, is waging a systematic and utterly barbaric genocide of the area’s Christians. They are killing Muslims too.
And what is the world doing?

Virtually nothing.

The President of the most militarily powerful nation on Earth has dropped some “humanitarian” aid to thousands of Yazidis, an ancient, little known group driven from their homes in northern Iraq where they have lived for hundreds of years. Thousands of Christians were driven from Mosul. There has been an increase in U.S. air attacks on IS forces, but a far greater effort will be needed to destroy this evil entity.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group, is slaughtering thousands.

The Islamic State is now the most militarily powerful force in the Middle East and one of the most wealthy. It threatens the Kurds who have finally begun to receive weapons from the U.S.

What President Obama should be doing is orchestrating a military coalition just as George H.W. Bush did to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, but the fact is that Europe is fearful of participating because it is now home to a large population of Muslims. And it has economic problems comparable to our own.

In the Middle East, Iraq has just managed to force the former Prime Minister out of office and must now try to get all the threatened Sunnis and Shiites together to fight for its own existence. Much of the U.S. weaponry given two divisions of Iraqi military was abandoned to the IS when they fled from battle.

Meanwhile, one never hears a word about the Saudis getting involved militarily as it has been their preference to let us fight their enemies such as the former Saddam Hussein. The border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia is a long one. They have a real interest is helping destroy the Islamic State and so far its threat has managed to bring together the Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Israelis, as unusual a threesome has one might ever imagine.

One might hardly expect the Iranians to get involved though they have been helping Syria’s Bashar Assad with the provision of weapons. So have the Russians. The fate of the region’s Christians is not likely a priority or concern of the fanatical Shiite Iranians.

There is, in fact, only one nation in the Middle East where Christians and Muslims are safe to practice their religions. It is called Israel.

I can’t help thinking this would be a good time for the Pope to call for a new crusade.

The Christian genocide is continuing and will continue unless some action can be put together to destroy the Islamic State, Boko Haram, and similar groups. It is an Islamic crime against Christians and to some extent against Muslims whom they deem insufficiently devout.

Ultimately, however, it is a crime against humanity. And humanity is doing as little in response to it than occurred prior to the Holocaust and other genocides.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Spectacularly Wrong

August 10th, 2014

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

“A greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum”

The speaker had what one might imagine, given his background, a better insight into Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East than others who had preceded him. He said he was seeking “a new beginning” that was “based on mutual interests and mutual respect” because his nation and those in the Middle East shared “common principles—principles of justice and progress, tolerance and dignity of all human beings.”

He cited “civilization’s debt to Islam” and noted that there were more than 1,200 mosques in his country. He declared that his nation would never be “at war with Islam” and he quoted from “the holy Koran” several times during his speech.

Five years later, noting the Islamic holiday of “Eid-al-Fitr” on July 28, he said “In the United States, Eid also reminds us of the many achievements and contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy,” but the U.S. did not elect its first Muslim-American congressman until 2007. No Muslims took part in our founding.

At one point he cited his nation’s “strong bonds with Israel” calling them “unbreakable.” Noting the Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed, he said that “Threatening Israel with destruction—or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews is deeply wrong” but that he deemed the situation of Palestinians “intolerable” adding that “Palestinians must abandon violence.” Noting his opposition to Israeli settlements, he managed to be on both sides of the issues that divide Israel and its Palestinian opponents.

Turning his attention to Iran, he noted that “For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country”, citing reasons why Iranians felt justified to feel that way. He also pointed out that Iran “has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence” against U.S troops and civilians.”

“It is clear to all concerned that when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point” and that preventing “a nuclear arms race in the Middle East could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path” adding that “No single nation should pick and choose which nations have nuclear weapons.” Presumably he was referring to Israel which would be directly threatened, indeed destroyed, by an Iranian nuclear weapon.

While noting the “controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years” he asserted that “No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any another” despite the fact that the U.S. invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq specifically to impose new governments that would not threaten the U.S. and its interests in the Middle East.

Citing religious freedom, he said that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance” but noted that “Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s”…and fault lines must be closed among Muslims as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence, particularly in Iraq.”

On August 7, after ignoring Iraqi and Kurdish requests for military aid in the form of weapons to fight the Islamic State (IS) for months, in the wake of its attacks on Christians in Iraq. the potential genocide of Yezidi men, women and children driven from their homes, and an attack on Erbil where the U.S. has a consulate and Baghdad where we have an embassy, he authorized “targeted military action in Iraq.”

He concluded by noting that “It is easier to start wars than to end them”, but Barack Obama, speaking in Cairo on June 4, 2009, mere months after having taken office in his first term, said he believed “We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning…”

His new beginning was demonstrated by withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq. The result of that action, combined with doing nothing as the Islamic State of Iraq, Syria and the Levant emerged from the Syrian civil war and severed the northern portion of Iraq, adding it to the portion of Syria it controls, has left a Middle East that faces a regional war with a fanatical Islamist entity.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see how lacking in understanding of Islam, history, and the Middle East Obama he was. His Cairo speech became part of what came to be known as his “apology tour” as he spoke in other nations, making it clear that he thought the U.S. was the cause of many problems in the world and that he was endowed with some special capacity to make things right again at home and abroad.

The irony of the speech is that he was spoken by a man for whom no leader in the Middle East has any respect, putting the Prime Minister of Israel and the Supreme Leader of Iran on the same page together. Add to them the leaders of virtually all other nations. Obama thought he could dictate to Israel and could charm the Iranians to make concessions. He was wrong.

Obama was wrong about the Muslims that have been slaughtering Christians in the Middle East and Africa and he has been largely silent about it. The leader of the Islamic State that has captured a large swath of northern Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, recently anointed himself “Caliph Ibrahim” and told his fellow Muslims that “This is the duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries.”

Obama was wrong that no nation can impose a system of government on another when the history of Islam has been the determination to impose Sharia law wherever it gained power and the history of Communism was the imposition of that system in Eastern Europe and elsewhere like Cuba until the collapse of the Soviet Union freed its subjugated nations, though Cuba has continued to be subject to the Castro dictatorship.

These days, Iran is still playing Obama for a fool while pursuing its quest to build its own nuclear weapons. The Russian Federation has seized the Crimea from Ukraine. Latin American nations are dumping their children into an America that has no real border anymore.

Since he gave that speech in 2009, the Middle East has seen the rise of the Islamic State stretching from Syria to Iraq. Syria remains embroiled in a civil war. The Palestinians are again attacking Israel. Iran is still intent on building its own nuclear weapons. Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have removed former dictators.

If you read Barack Obama’s Cairo speech from start to finish, you cannot come away with any other impression than that a self-deluded fool gave it, a man determined to avoid confronting the enemies of mankind unless an Islamic-inspired genocide requires it.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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It’s about the Money, Not the Climate

August 6th, 2014

 

• By Alan Caruba.

 

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the Irish poet and dramatist, wrote “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.”

These days, when some world leader or politician speaks of the climate—the weather is what is happening right now wherever you are—they are not talking about sunshine or rain. They are talking about a devilishly obscene way of raising money by claiming that it is humans that are threatening the climate with everything they do, from turning on the lights to driving anywhere.

That’s why “global warming” was invented in the late 1980s as an immense threat to the Earth and to mankind. Never mind that Earth has routinely passed through warmer and cooler cycles for billions of years; much of which occurred before mankind emerged. And never mind that the Earth has been a distinct cooling cycle for the past seventeen years and likely to stay in it for a while. If the history of ice ages is any guide, we could literally be on the cusp of a new one.

If, however, a government can tax the use of energy, it stands to make a lot of money. That is why carbon taxes have been introduced in some nations and why the nearly useless “clean energy” options of wind and solar have been introduced even though they both require the backup of traditional coal, natural gas and nuclear energy plants because they cannot produce electricity if the wind isn’t blowing and the sun is obscured by clouds.

Taxing energy use means taxing “greenhouse gas” emissions; primarily carbon dioxide (C02) so that every ton of it added to the atmosphere by a power plant and any other commercial activity becomes a source of income for the nation. The Australians went through this and rapidly discovered it drove up their cost of electricity and negatively affected their economy so much that they rid themselves of a prime minister and the tax within the past year.

Fortunately, every effort to introduce a carbon tax has been defeated by the U.S. Congress, but that it has shelled out billions for “climate research” over the years. That doesn’t mean, however, that 41 demented Democrats in the House of Representatives haven’t gotten together in a “Safe Climate Caucus” led by Rep. Henry A. Waxman. The Washington Post reported that when it was launched in February 2013, the members promised to talk every day on the House floor about “the urgent need to address climate change.”

Check out the caucus and, if your Representative is a member, vote to replace him or her with someone less idiotic.

When you hear the President or a member of Congress talk about the climate, they are really talking about the scheme to generate revenue from it through taxation or to raise money from those who will personally benefit from any scheme related to the climate such as “clean energy.”

The need of governments to frighten their citizens about the climate in order to raise money is international in scope. A United States that has a $17 trillion debt is a prime example, much of it due to a government grown so large it wastes taxpayer’s money in the millions with every passing day whether it is sunny or rainy, warm or cold.

In late July, Reuters reported that Christine Lagarde, the chair of the International Monetary Fund, (IMF) opined in her new book that “energy taxes in much of the world are far below what they should be to reflect the harmful environmental and health impact of fossil fuels use.”

Please pay no attention to the billions of dollars that coal, oil and natural gas already generate for the nations in which they are found. Nations such as India and China are building coal-fired plants as fast as possible to provide the electricity every modern nation needs to expand its economy, provide more employment, and improve their citizen’s lives in every way imaginable.

“For the first time,” Reuters reported, “the IMF laid out exactly what it views as appropriate taxes on coal, natural gas, gasoline, and diesel in 156 countries to factor in the fuel’s overall costs, which include carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution, congestion and traffic accidents.” The problem with this is that the costs cited are bogus.

“Nations,” said Lagarde, “are now working on a United Nations deal for late 2015 to rein in greenhouse gas emissions that have hit repeated highs this century, but progress has been slow as nations fret about the impact any measures may have on economic growth.” As in bad impacts!

Ignore the claims that carbon dioxide affects the climate. Its role is so small it can barely be measured because CO2 represents 380 parts per million. When our primate ancestors began to climb down out of the trees, CO2 levels were about 1,000 parts per million. More CO2 means more crops, healthy growing forests, and all the other benefits that every form of vegetation provides. The breath we humans exhale contains about 4% of CO2.

The fact is that the United States and other nations are being run by politicians who are incapable of reducing spending or borrowing more in order to spend more. Venezuela just defaulted again on the payment of bonds it issued to raise money. They did this in 2001 and one must wonder why any financial institution purchases them.

There are eleven other nations whose credit ratings are flirting with big trouble. They include Greece, Ukraine, Pakistan, Cypress, and in the Americas Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and Belize. Borrowing by such nations is very expensive. A U.S. Treasury Note pays an annual coupon of just 2.5%, but the yields on 10-year bonds issue by Greece reached 29% in early 2012, just before it defaulted.

Adding to problems in the U.S. is the Obama agenda being acted upon by the Environmental Protection Agency whose “war on coal” has shuttered several hundred plants that produce the electricity needed to maintain the economy. In coal producing states this is playing havoc and it is driving up the cost of electricity in others.

The growth of oil and natural gas production in the U.S. is almost entirely on privately owned land as opposed to that controlled by the government. Supporting the attack on energy are the multi-million dollar environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club.

There is no “global warming” and the climate is determined by the Sun, the oceans, clouds, and volcanic activity. Nothing any government does, here and worldwide, has any impact on it, but if nations can demonize the use of energy and tax the CO2 it produces, they can generate more money to spend and waste.

The lies that governments, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund tell about the climate are about the money they can extract from citizens who must be kept frightened enough to pay taxes on their use of energy.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Yes, Sue Our Lawless President!

August 3rd, 2014

 

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

“Today, however, President Obama has taken the concept of discretion and so distorted it, and has taken the obligation of faithful enforcement and so rejected it, that his job as chief law enforcer has become one of incompetent madness or chief lawbreaker. Time after time, in areas as disparate as civil liberties, immigration, foreign affairs and health care, the president has demonstrated a propensity for rejecting his oath and doing damage to our fabric of liberty that cannot easily be undone by a successor.”

That is Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a Fox News commentator, writing in the July 31 edition of The Washington Times.

Americans and many around the world are increasingly fearful of a President who has demonstrated no regard for the checks and balances of our incredible Constitution, the oldest in the world that still functions to protect individual rights and which sets forth the divisions between our legislative, judicial and executive departments of government.

Congress, however, will not impeach President Obama, but the House will sue him on the basis of just one of the many examples of his dictatorial use of executive orders to ignore the power of the legislative branch to pass laws he took an oath to enforce. He has unilaterally and illegally altered the Affordable Care Act 27 times, his signature legislature that former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, told us Congress had to pass “so we can find out what is in it.” No Republican member of Congress voted for this two-thousand-page-plus law, passed late in the evening of Christmas Eve, 2009.

The decision to impeach a President is essentially a political one and Republicans understand that the impeachment of President Obama would be interpreted by nearly half of the voters as an attack on a President they support. There have only been two impeachment actions in U.S. history and both have failed.

The nation is significantly divided regarding the President and Congress has been in gridlock as Democrats the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has refused to let more than 300 House bills sent to the Senate be debated and voted upon.

Suing the President has ample history. It is hardly “a stunt” as Democrats have labeled it. New York Democrat Louise Slaughter called it “preposterous”, but failed to mention that eight years earlier, in 2006, she was a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by congressional Democrats against George W. Bush!

In a 1939 case, Coleman v Miller, the Supreme Court granted standing to members of the legislature to sue. Two years ago, four Democratic members of the House filed a suit against Vice President Biden in his capacity as head of the Senate, challenging as unconstitutional the filibuster. Other Democratic legislators had filed lawsuits claiming standing in 2001, in 2002, in
2006, and in 2007. The judiciary concluded their cases had little merit.

In a July 30 Wall Street Journal commentary, David B. Rivken who served in the Reagan and Bush administration’s Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office, and Elizabeth Price Foley, a constitutional law professor at Florida International University, wrote:

“These barriers between the branches are not formalities—they were designed to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in one branch. As the Supreme Court explained in New York v. United States (1992), the ‘Constitution protects us from our own best intentions. It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.”

“Congress has the exclusive authority to make law because lawmaking requires pluralism, debate and compromise, the essence of representative government…Litigation in federal court is an indispensable way to protect all branches of government against encroachment on their authority,”

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” said President Obama. In April, A poll by PolitiFact of the Tampa Bay Times, revealed that 63%–two thirds—of respondents agreed that President Obama lies at least some of the time on important issues and an additional 20% said he lies every now and then. Only 15% believed the President is completely truthful. Democrats were 39% of the 1,021 registered voters polled. Republicans were 38% and independents were 20%,

The President has lied so routinely that this character flaw is likely to play a role in the forthcoming midterm elections on November 4. When you add in his lawlessness and his leadership failures that have created a far more dangerous and divided world, Americans are likely to vote for change in Congress.

That’s how democracy works and how our Constitutional system works. Suing the President is just one part of it.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Climate Alarmists Never Quit!

July 29th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

In the same way Americans are discovering that the Cold War that was waged from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is not over, Americans continue to be subjected to the endless, massive, global campaign to foist the hoax of global warming–now called climate change—on everyone.

The campaign’s purpose to convince everyone that it is humans, not the sun, oceans, and other natural phenomenon, and that requires abandoning fossil fuels in favor of “renewable” wind and solar energy.

“It is not surprising that climate alarmists, who desire above all else blind allegiance to their cause, would demand all school teachers toe the ‘official party line’ and quash any dissent on the subject of man-made global warming in their classroom,” says Craig Rucker, the Executive Director of co-founder of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). “What is absurd is that any teacher or free-thinking person for that matter would listen to them.”

These days when I am challenged regarding my views about global warming, climate change or energy I send the individual to www.climatedepot.com and www.energydepot.us, two constantly updated websites filled with links to information on these topics. Both are maintained by CFACT.

It’s not just our classrooms where Green indoctrination goes on. It is also our news media that continue to distort every weather event to advance the hoax. Guiding and feeding them is a massive complex of organizations led by the United Nations—the International Panel on Climate Change—that maintains the hoax to frighten people worldwide in order to achieve “one world order.”

On September 23, heads of state, including President Obama, will gather in New York City for what the Sierra Club calls “a historic summit on climate change. With our future on the line, we will take a weekend and use it to bend the course of history” to save the world from “the ravages of climate change.” This is absurd. Suggesting that humans can alter the climate in any way defies centuries of proof they do not.

One of the leading Leftist organizations, the Center for American Progress, focused on the July 14 Major Economics Forum in Paris, offered four items for its agenda. Claiming that “the Arctic is warming two times faster than any other region on earth”, they wanted policy changes based on this falsehood. They blamed climate change for “global poverty” and wanted further reductions in so-called greenhouse gas emissions from energy use. The enemy, as far as they were concerned was energy use.

Mary Hutzler, a senior research fellow of the Institute for Energy Research, testified before a July 22nd meeting of the Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign Assistance, that due to Europe’s green energy (wind and solar) policies, industrial electricity prices are two-to-five times higher than in the U.S. and that, by 2020, 1.4 million European households will be added to those experiencing energy poverty.

There are lessons to be learned, for example, from Spain’s investment in wind energy that caused the loss of four jobs for the electricity it produced and 13 jobs for every megawatt of solar energy. In Germany, the cost of electricity is three times higher than average U.S. residential prices. Little wonder that European nations are now slashing wind and solar programs.

Billions Wasted to Combat Global Warming

In the U.S., the Obama administration used its “stimulus” to fund Solyndra—$500 million dollars—and fifty other Green energy projects that have failed or are on their way to failure. Undeterred with this appalling record, on July 3 the Energy Department announced $4 billion for “projects that fight global warming.”

But there is no global warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for seventeen years and it shows no indication of ending anytime soon. This is the same administration that has waged a war on coal, forcing the closure of many plants that produced electricity efficiently and affordably, and had throughout the last century.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2014 weather highlights showed that, from January to June, the temperature in the U.S. has risen by a miniscule 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the average temperature for the 20th century. NOAA also noted that recorded temperatures for the first half of 2014 are the coldest since 1993 when the cooling cycle began. The exception to this has been California.

Brainwashed for decades about global warming, 20% of likely voters, according to a July Rasmussen poll, still believe that global warming is not over, colder weather or not, 17% were not sure, but fully 63% disagreed!

The results of a Pew Research Center poll in June revealed that 35% of Americans say there is not enough solid evidence to suggest mankind is warming the Earth while another 18% says the world has warmed due to “natural patterns”, not human activity. Pew found that liberals remain convinced that humans are to blame, but the bottom line is that 53% disputed the President’s claims.

That means that a growing number of Americans are now skeptics.

In the months to come we will see marches and meetings intended to further the global warming lies. The good news is that fewer Americans are being influenced by such efforts.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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The Next Great War

July 26th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

In the July 24 edition of The Wall Street Journal there was a commentary, “Wanted: Converts to Judaism” by the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Arnold M. Eisen. I thought to myself that this was an extraordinary time to be suggesting conversion to a faith that is literally under attack in Israel and being attacked by the reemergence of anti-Semitism in Europe. Here in America we are witnessing the most pro-Islamic and anti-Semitic administration in the history of nation.

In the wake of the Holocaust following World War Two what anti-Semitism existed in the U.S. gave way to an era of good will toward Jews. In Europe open expressions of anti-Semitism were out of favor. Eisen’s concern is the extensive inter-marriage between Christians and Jews in which Judaism is often abandoned in our historically Christian society. The news about Jews in the post-war years was largely about the nation of Israel and the wars it fought to re-establish and maintain the Jewish state.

What those wars should have told us was that Islamic hatred of Judaism extends to Christianity as well.

For Americans that lesson was driven home on September 11, 2001, but even the memory of that event has begun to fade to such an extent that Americans have twice elected a President who has never hidden his admiration for Islam, whose father was a Muslim, and who spent part of his youth in the Islamic nation of Indonesia. In office, his antipathy to Israel has been in stark contrast to the decades of support for Israel that presidents since Harry Truman have demonstrated.

A curious trend has emerged in America that runs counter to its entire history. The celebratory elements of Christian holy days, particularly Christmas, came under attack with demands that holiday scenes of crèches and even crosses be removed from public areas. Being religious was not encouraged and the tradition of starting the school day with a prayer was banned.

It is not too far a reach to say that the West, America and Europe, has been abandoning the depth of faith that distinguished it as church attendance fell off and resistance to attacks on the practice of religion declined. Home to some of the most beautiful churches on Earth, those in Europe are too often virtually empty.

This has not been the case in the Middle East and parts of Africa where Islam has awakened from its passive existence due in part to the colonization that preceded and followed World War One. The riches that oil provided have played a role and today a nation like Qatar is funding the emergence of ISIS, the self-declared caliphate calling itself the Islamic State.

Other oil-rich Middle East nations have supported al Qaeda only to discover that they were among its targets. ISIS has turned on Muslims in the area between Syria and into northern Iraq whom they declare hypocrites and apostates. In Mosul, Christians have been told to convert, pay a tax, or die.

While the rockets that have rained down on Israel are dramatic, the attacks on Christians throughout the Middle East have received less attention, but Christian Arabs have been driven from their homelands in the same way the establishment of Israel saw Jews forced to abandon homes in which they had lived for generations.

While Americans, joined by European negotiators, attempt to get Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program, they remain blind to the role Iran has played for decades, using Hezbollah and Hamas, two Palestinian terrorist organizations, to wage war on Israel and, by extension, the U.S. Not a day goes by without the calls, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” There is only one way to end Iran’s nuclear program and that is to destroy the facilities that enrich uranium and plutonium. At some point, it will come to that because it must.

Israel is making it clear to the world that there is only one way to rid itself of Hamas and that is a military operation. Its troops are finding an astounding matrix of tunnels whose only purpose is to attack it.

Utterly devoid of any moral standards, Hamas uses homes, schools and hospitals to hide its arsenal of rockets and Palestinian civilians are forced to act as human shields. The world’s media focuses on the deaths of their men, women, and children, but little notice of the rockets and missiles that continue to be fired at Israel. Meanwhile Hamas has been abandoned by Egypt and most other Middle Eastern nations other than Iran and Turkey.

The so-called Palestinians have been led by men like the late Yassir Arafat and currently by Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, Fatah. Abbas has recently moved his family to a home in Jordan in the face of criticism that he has been too “cooperative” with Israel. On Quds Day last week, an event organized throughout the Middle East by Iran, an estimated 10,000 protesters gathered in the West Bank to protest Israel’s control of Jerusalem, a holy city to Jews and Christians, claimed as well by Islam. It was founded by King David.

Even so, the European business sector was quick to engage with Iran following the news of the negotiations which have been extended and which have granted Iran billions in return for sitting at the table to discuss an end to the nuclear program that it will never abandon.

In 1913, no one in Europe or America would have ever predicted the beginning of World War One in 1914. It began on July 28, 1914. As the historian Charles Emmerson said of the unanticipated war, “Humanity looked into the abyss and peering into the depths, found its own dark, disfigured reflection staring back.”

In 2014, a century later, humanity needs to take a look at the fascistic, utterly immoral objectives and practices of Islam and understand that it is at war with us, with moderate Muslims, and with all other faiths. It’s not “if” will shall have to deal with it military as Israel is doing, but “when.” That day is not far off.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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A Great Plan to Replace the EPA

July 23rd, 2014

By Alan Caruba.

For years now I have been saying that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must be eliminated and its powers given to the fifty states, all of which,have their own departments of environmental protection. Until now, however, there has been no plan put forth to do so.

Dr. Jay Lehr has done just that and his plan no doubt will be sent to the members of Congress and the state governors. Titled “Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency” it should be read by everyone who, like Dr. Lehr, has concluded that the EPA was a good idea when it was introduced in 1971, but has since evolved into a rogue agency threatening the U.S. economy, attacking the fundamental concept of private property, and the lives of all Americans in countless and costly ways.

Dr. Lehr is the Science Director and Senior Fellow of The Heartland Institute, for whom I am a policy advisor. He is a leading authority on groundwater hydrology and the author of more than 500 magazine and journal articles, and 30 books. He has testified before Congress on more than three dozen occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the federal government and with many foreign countries. The Institute is a national nonprofit research and education organizations supported by voluntary contributions.

Ironically, he was among the scientists who called for the creation of the EPA and served on many of the then-new agency’s advisory councils. Over the course of its first ten years, he helped write a significant number of legislative bills to create a safety net for the environment.

As he notes in his plan, “Beginning around 1981, liberal activist groups recognized EPA could be used to advance their political agenda by regulating virtually all human activities regardless of their impact on the environment. Politicians recognized they could win votes by posing as protectors of the public health and wildlife. Industries saw a way to use regulations to handicap competitors or help themselves to public subsidies. Since that time, not a single environmental law or regulation has passed that benefited either the environment or society.”

“The takeover of EPA and all of its activities by liberal activists was slow and methodical over the past 30 years. Today, EPA is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of liberal activist groups. Its rules account for about half of the nearly $2 trillion a year cost of complying with all national regulations in the U.S. President Barack Obama is using it to circumvent Congress to impose regulations on the energy sector that will cause prices to ‘skyrocket.’ It is a rogue agency.”

Dr. Lehr says that “Incremental reform of EPA is simply not an option.” He’s right.

“I have come to believe that the national EPA must be systematically dismantled and replaced by a Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies. Those agencies in nearly all cases long ago took over primary responsibility for the implementation of environmental laws passed by Congress (or simply handed down by EPA as fiat rulings without congressional vote or oversight.”

Looking back over the years, Dr. Lehr notes that “The initial laws I helped write have become increasingly draconian, yet they have not benefited our environment or the health of our citizens. Instead they suppress our economy and the right of our citizens to make an honest living. It seems to me, and to others, that this is actually the intention of those in EPA and in Congress who want to see government power expanded without regard to whether it is needed to protect the environment or public health.”

Eliminating the EPA would provide a major savings by eliminating 80% of its budget. The remaining 20% could be used to run its research labs and administer the Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental agencies. “The Committee would determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were established by EPA without congressional approval.”

Dr. Lehr estimates the EPA’s federal budget would be reduced from $8.2 billion to $2 billion. Staffing would be reduced from more than 15,000 to 300 and that staff would serve in a new national EPA headquarters he recommends be “located centrally in Topeka, Kansas, to allow the closest contact with the individual states.” The staff would consist of six delegate-employees from each of the 50 states.”

“Most states,” says Dr. Lehr, “will enthusiastically embrace this plan, as their opposition to EPA’s ‘regulatory train wreck’ grows and since it gives them the autonomy and authority they were promised when EPA was first created and the funding to carry it out.”

The EPA was a good idea when it was created, the nation’s air and water needed to be cleaned, but they have been at this point. Since then, the utterly bogus “global warming”, now called “climate change”, has been used to justify a torrent of EPA regulations. The science the EPA cites as justification is equally tainted and often kept secret from the public.

“It’s time for the national EPA to go,” says Dr. Lehr and I most emphatically agree. “All that is missing is the political will.”

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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How “Normal” is Bowe Bergdahl?

July 17th, 2014

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

 

There are few military crimes worse than desertion to the enemy short of outright treason by giving them aid and comfort.

So why is the U.S. Army declaring Sgt. Berghdal (he received a promotion from private first class while being either a Taliban captive or guest) a “normal soldier now”? When one’s entire unit declares him a deserter for leaving their Afghanistan based on June 30, 2009—as they did on a show with Fox’s Megyn Kelly—by what stretch of the imagination is he just a normal soldier stationed at the headquarters of Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston?

Fox News reported that former Army Sgt. Evan Buetow who served with Bergdahl as saying “I think it’s very clear he deserted his post. He thought about what he was doing, he mailed some things home, he walked away and we have witnesses who saw him walking away. And if you’re walking away in one of the worst, most dangerous areas of Afghanistan without your weapon and gear, I don’t believe you’re planning on coming back.”

If he is found to be a deserter, the release of five high level Taliban generals to get him back is one more Obama obscenity since it is well known that he has wanted to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center for enemy combatants captured on the field. Having already investigated the circumstances surrounding his having left his unit, the U.S. Army surely knew whether Bergdahl was a deserter at the time the decision was made to swap for him. I suspect, too, that a major ransom was paid the Taliban for his release.

This is, however, a different Army than the past. It, like the other elements of our military has become highly politicized by the Obama administration; one that continues to reduce its size under the cover of sequestration. Many of the military’s top officers have been relieved of command or pushed into retirement. Even officers in the field in Afghanistan are being fired. The effect on the troop’s morale is incalculable.

Fox News reported on July 14 that “Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl could have a tax-free $350,000 dropped into his bank account if the current investigation into his disappearance from his base in Afghanistan was not desertion, and if he is deemed to have been a prisoner of war for the five years he was held by Islamic militants.”

Given the circumstances of his decision to leave his unit, immediately becoming liable to capture, and the reported statements, letters, and other views he held about his deployment and about the U.S. Army, Berghdal is most certainly not “a normal soldier.”

One must ask why Obama thought the announcement of his release merited a White House presentation that included his parents; his father uttered an Islamic phrase that drew a presidential smile. The phrase “bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim” is a common Arabic phrase, considered by some to be a major pillar of Islam and featured prominently in the Koran.

To date, however, Bergdahl has reportedly not spoken to his parents. Why? And how “normal” is that?

If Bergdahl went AWOL in Afghanistan, why are we being told he is free to move around at will? One has to wonder if he doesn’t have some military “minders” with him at all times to avoid a problem that would cause a big scandal. What we do know is that this Army sergeant has hired a Yale University legal scholar to represent him.

I suspect that a major cover-up is going on and that the official Army decision will be that he was a prisoner of war after leaving his unit. A soldier whose return was celebrated in the White House rose garden by the President is not likely to see a day in the brig. At most he might receive a dishonorable discharge for going AWOL. After that both the White House and the Army will hope he sinks into anonymity.

Everything surrounding Bergdahl’s “disappearance” from his unit and his return shouts cover-up. One element is likely to be a very lengthy “investigation”, one that surely will not come to a conclusion before the forthcoming November midterm elections.

Given the honor, loyalty and sacrifice of thousands of U.S. soldiers on duty today, as veterans and as fallen heroes, the Bergdahl story is an offence to them and to all Americans. It is one more chapter in the legacy of a President who has been far more sympathetic to our nation’s enemies than our military.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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It’s Only a “War” if Israel Defends Itself

July 14th, 2014

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

There are many reasons why Hamas, a terrorist organization according to the U.S. State Department, has increased its rocketing of Israel. And it is an increase because Hamas has never ceased from rocketing Israel following it seizure of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority, also known as Fatah.

Hamas is Iran’s Palestinian proxy in the war on Israel in much the same fashion as Hezbollah which controls Lebanon. It lost its support from Syria’s dictator who is engaged in a civil war with Islamists who, controlling a swath of its northern region, have now declared an Islamic State and are threatening Baghdad in Iraq after a swift military victory in its northern and central region. Hamas has also lost the support of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood which has been banned there.

The rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel have generated four conflicts since 2006 during which Israel took military action to reduce them. Israel is only considered to be “at war” when it takes steps to defend itself.

Hamas knows it cannot “win” a military conflict, but as Middle East expert, Dr. Daniel Pipes, noted in the July 11 edition of National Review Online, “The holy grail of political warfare is to win the sympathy of the global Left by presenting oneself as underdog and victim.” The current conflict began when three Israeli teens were kidnapped and killed. This led Israel to round up suspects in the West Bank in the course of searching for the boys. Regrettably an Arab youth was killed in revenge and this was followed by a rain of missiles and rockets from Gaza.

As Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at Israel’s Global Research in International Affairs Center, noted, “There is a tendency to see the Israel-Palestinian arena as somehow set apart from the rest of the Mideast neighborhood, but this is an illusion. Firstly, in the most tangible way, the most potent elements of the Hamas assault on Israeli cities of recent days is made possible only by the movement’s link with Iran.”

The primary reason Israel has not suffered the problems of Syria and Iraq has been its defense forces. “More profoundly, in the simple and brutal logic of the neighborhood, Israel is trying to remind Hamas of the cost of tangling with the Jewish state,” says Spyer. “The objective of this is not to reconquer Gaza, nor to impact on local politics, still less to impose suffering on the Palestinians for its own sake.”

To demonstrate how deeply rooted the hatred of Israel is in the minds and hearts of Palestinians who have never agreed to any terms of peace, David Horowitz, the editor of Times of Israel noted on July 8 that “Gaza could have flourished after Israel wrenched its 8,000 civilians from the 20-plus settlements there in 2005.” Yes, it was Israel that cleared Gaza of its Jewish population to provide a place for the Palestinians to live together!

“Gazans,” said Horowitz, “could have built an island of democracy. Investment could have grown, as it did in the early 1990s, when expat Palestinian investors, believing better times were at hand, fueled a brief property boom. Gaza’s golden beaches could have been a promising tourism draw. If Gaza had become a seemingly stable area, Israel might even have felt sufficiently trusting of the Palestinians as to attempt a similar unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank.”

Instead, “hostility to Israel was so profound that Gazans couldn’t even restrain themselves for long enough to fool us into trusting them.” Instead, in recent weeks “Hamas is firing some of its 100,000-rocket arsenal because it has nothing much to lose anymore—that it has lost the support of Egypt, that it can’t get the money to pay salaries…” Hamas, the Palestinians, and the Sunni-Shiite hostilities of the Mideast all testify to the complete inability of its Arab population to seek peace with anyone, including each other.

As a July 9 Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “Hamas may also believe it can repeatedly go to war against a militarily superior foe because Israel has never exacted a fatal price. Hamas’s aggression serves its political purposes, while Palestinian casualties serve its propaganda purposes.”

“All of this will be condemned by the usual suspects. But Israelis will be denounced for whatever they do, so they might as well act effectively.”

Dr. Pipes noted that, at this point, “Worldwide condemnations of Israel have yet to pour in. Even the Arabic media are relatively quiet. If this pattern holds, Hamas might conclude that raining rockets on Israeli homes is not such a good idea. Indeed, to dissuade it from initiating another assault in a few years, it needs to lose both the military and the political wars, and lose them very badly.”

Israel knows this and will engage in a significant military effort that includes sending troops into Gaza in addition to air strikes.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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