Posts by AlanCaruba:

Mexico is Deliberately Aiding Illegal Aliens

July 13th, 2014

 

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

It no doubt strikes a lot of Americans as odd that a U.S. Marine reservist, Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, a 25 year old California native who had served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, was arrested in March for illegally entering Mexico when he made a wrong turn in Tijuana. Being in possession of registered firearms, about which he informed the customs officials, didn’t help. He is still in jail while awaiting a court judgment.

The fact is that Mexico’s illegal immigration laws are a lot tougher than those of the U.S. Under Mexican law, illegal immigration is a felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. Immigrants who are deported and attempt to re-enter can be jailed for ten years. Visa violators can be sentenced for six-year terms and Mexicans who help illegal immigrants are considered to be criminals.

It doesn’t end there. Under Mexican law, foreigners can be deported if they are deemed detrimental to “economic or national interests”, violate Mexican law, are not “physically or mentally healthy”, or lack the “necessary funds for their sustenance.” This applies to their dependents as well.

Somehow, though, thousands of “migrants” from nations to the south of Mexico are passing through to get to our border and are, in the process, no less illegal in Mexico than here. That has changed, however. On July 9, the Examiner reported that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto had met with Guatemalan president Otto Perez Molina and they held a joint press conference to “officially announce an agreement to make it easier for those making the illegal journey to the United States from Central American, to cross into Mexico.” They will be issued a “Regional Visitor’s Card” that allows them to stay in Mexico for 72 hours, just long enough to make it to the U.S. border. The arrangement will include Belize as well. No doubt it will be extended to San Salvador and Honduras.

I have no doubt this has the blessing of the White House. The result is a deliberate program to alter the demographic map of America, increasing the number of Hispanics. It is an illegal assault on the nation, a “transformation” few Americans could ever imagine.

The popular notion is that it has been Mexico’s rural poor that have been eager to come here. The fifth largest country in the Americas, it has a population of more than 113 million and one of the world’s largest economies as the tenth largest oil producer in the world and the largest producer of silver. Mexico is home to the sixth largest electronics industry in the world and it produces the most automobiles of any North American nation. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have had plants in Mexico since the 1930s and Nissan and Volkswagen built plants there in the 1960s.

Mexico is regarded as a firmly established upper middle-income nation, but somewhere between 35% to 46% of the population, about 52 million persons, are regarded to be living in extreme to moderate poverty. It is that population that represents the bulk of the illegal aliens who enter the U.S. They send remittances back to Mexico estimated to be $25 billion, but that represents 0.2% of its GDP.

In 2004 the Center for Immigration Studies released a study that found that illegal alien households were estimated to use $2,700 in services than they pay in taxes, creating a fiscal burden of nearly $10.4 billion on the 2002 federal budget. That, no doubt, has increased over the past decade. Among the federal costs are Medicaid, treatment for the uninsured, food assistance programs, the federal prison and court systems, and federal aid to schools. Illegals generally lack a level of education and hold jobs that represent low levels of skill.

To put it mildly, Mexico is happy to export its own citizens to become illegal aliens in the United States and now, thanks to President Obama’s policies, so do Honduras, San Salvador, and Guatemala. It’s worth noting that the children of illegals are awarded American citizenship at birth under current law.

In 2005, writing in The Washington Times on “Border policy perplexities, Stephen Johnson, a senior policy analyst for Latin America at the Heritage Foundation, noted that “Mexican oligarchs see free movement northward as a safety valve to relieve pressure from a million workers entering Mexico’s labor force with no job prospects. Rather than liberalize their economy to end corrupt monopolies, strengthen property rights and establish the rule of law, they would rather keep things as they are and merely ship their jobless, poorly educated throngs north.”

With 92 million Americans out of work or who have ceased looking, it is little wonder that there is little sympathy for Mexicans and others who illegally enter the nation. Even so, there is outrage that so many are now children and that President Obama could not stir himself from a schedule of fund raisers to visit the border or one of the detention centers to house them.

According to a 2012 estimate of the Homeland Security Department, there were approximately 11.5 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. by the end of 2011. As reported in The Washington Times in March 2012, “Of the current illegal population, only 14% have entered the U.S. since 2005. That means the vast majority have been in the country for years, putting down the kind of roots that immigrant-rights advocates say should earn them the change to achieve citizenship. Those favoring stricter enforcement balk at that, saying it amounts to rewarding those who have broken the law the longest.”

Mexicans still account for most of the illegal aliens at 6.8 million or 59%. If they were living illegally in Mexico, they would be deported. Moreover, illegals from other nations such as China and from the Mideast are also passing through without the Mexican legal system taking any notice of them.

The current “humanitarian crisis” has sharpened the political divisions between those who want to build a big wall to keep out all illegals and those who want to extend amnesty to those who have been living here for several years. The recent defeat of the House Minority Leader, Eric Cantor, (R-VA) has signaled the growing opposition to policies that facilitate illegal immigration.

What is clear, however, is that Mexico, in addition to its double standard regarding aliens who enter it, is now actively engaging what should be called an act of war.

America is already in deep financial debt. It cannot afford to absorb and pay for thousands of illegal aliens. Laws have to be changed. Fences need to be built and the border needs aggressive patrol. The alternative is to begin referring to the United States of America as the Estados Unidos.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Mexico is Deliberately Aiding Illegal Aliens

International Climate Skeptics Gather in Las Vegas

July 6th, 2014

By Alan Caruba.

 

From July 7 to 9, the ninth International Conference on Climate Change will convene in Las Vegas in a dramatic demonstration that “global warming” was a huge hoax and the claims that “climate change” is responsible for everything are a continuation of that fraud.

As a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free market think tank, I attended its first climate change conference held in New York in 2009 to dispute the “science” advancing global warming. I have been writing about the hoax that gained momentum since James Edward Hansen testified before congressional committees in 1988. From 1981 to 2013 Hansen had been the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Along with other government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA has been producing data that routinely tampers with climate statistics to maintain the hoax that gained an international platform with the creation of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1998.

In June a Pew Research Center poll announced 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” and not human activity. That’s a total of 53% who disagree with the lies about climate change being told by President Obama and a host of politicians and scientists who have received millions to maintain the hoax. The poll also noted that 40% of Americans still believe that mankind is causing the planet to warm. They likely represent the cohort that has graduated from American schools whose curriculum has taught the Al Gore version of science.

Among the participants in Heartland’s 9th conference are Habibulio Abdussamatov, a Russian astrophysicist; Sonya Boehmer-Christiansen, a research analyst from Great Britain; Fred Goldberg, an associated professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden; Madhav Khandekar, a research analyst from Environment Canada; William Kinimonth who worked with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for 38 years; and Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, a chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute. They will be joined by American scientists, longtime skeptics of the hoax, often called “deniers” by those advocating it.

It is doubtful that the U.S. media will give much, if any, news coverage of the conference, but the eight previous conferences have done much to debunk and dispel the deluge of lies about the Earth’s climate.

Leading Heartland has been its president, Joseph Bast, who asks “How can there be a ‘scientific consensus’ on the causes or consequences of climate change when thousands of scientists, economists, and policy experts attend conferences devoted to expressing the opposite theme, that the science is still unsettled and climate change is not a crisis?” In May Bast was joined by research scientist, Roy Spencer, in a Wall Street Journal commentary that debunked the lie that 97% of scientists support climate change, noting that “surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus.”

Heartland has been a sponsor of the Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, a rival to the UN’s IPCC that continues to issue reports filled with claims of climate-related threats to mankind. The Obama administration recently released its National Climate Assessment echoing the IPCC claims, blaming all climate events on humankind. Common sense tells us that that events like Hurricane Arthur are natural and reflect the 4.5 billion year old Earth’s ongoing and ever-changing climate cycles.

Indeed, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for seventeen years, something the climate change advocates are calling “a pause” in their global warming claims. Unknown to most Americans is that the Earth is at the end of its 11,500 year old interglacial cycle, suggesting that we are all in for a new ice age.

The global warming/climate change hoax is rooted in the claim that “greenhouse gases”, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) has caused the warming that is not occurring. Ironically, CO2 continues to accelerate in the atmosphere and, rather than a cause for concern, represent very good news for every piece of vegetation from crops to forests as it is as vital to their existence as oxygen is for humans and all other animals. The Earth has had periods when its presence was much higher.

The conference expects to draw several hundred attendees this year, but those who want to follow its panels, lectures, and discussions can do so via the Heartland website that will live-stream them. It can be followed as well via Twitter @HeartlandInst and on Facebook at Facebook.com/Heartland using the hashtag #ICCC9. Heartland will post the sessions on its YouTube page after the conference ends.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to the skeptics who have courageously disputed the global warming/climate change hoax and to The Heartland Institute that has provided a platform for them to gather to continue their efforts to educate a public that has been deluged by a massive deception.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on International Climate Skeptics Gather in Las Vegas

What Economic Recovery?

June 29th, 2014

By Alan Caruba.

You have to know that the Obama administration has run out of excuses for destroying the U.S. economy when it starts to blame it on the weather.

According to the Commerce Department, the economy based on its Gross domestic product, the value of its goods and services, fell at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.9% in the first quarter of this year. That was the largest recorded drop since the end of World War II in 1945!

The June 20 edition of The Wall Street Journal’s article, “Economy Shrank Rapidly in First Quarter” led off by reporting that “Weather disruptions at home and weak demand abroad caused a contraction in the U.S. economy in the first quarter, renewing doubts about the strength of the nation’s five-year-old recovery.”

What recovery? When the economy stays in the basement for five years you are looking at an on-going stagnation based on too much government interference with growth, the decline of the nation’s middle class, the lack of new start-up businesses, and the reluctance or inability of consumers to spend money, if they have any to spend.

In May writing on his blog, Economic Collapse, Michael Synder pointed to “27 Hugh Red Flags for the U.S. Economy” noting, for example, that according to government numbers, “everyone is unemployed in 20 percent of all American families.” The other indicators include:

# Sales for construction equipment were down 13% in April and have been down for 17 months in a row.

# During the first quarter of 2014, profits at the office supplies giant, Staples, fell by 43.5%

# Foot traffic at Wal-Mart stores fell by 1.4% during the first quarter of 2014.

# It is being projected that Sears will soon close hundreds more stores and may go out of business altogether.

# Existing home sales have fallen for seven of the last eight months and seem to repeating a pattern witnessed back in 2007 prior to the last financial crash.

# The home ownership rate in the U.S. has dropped to the lowest level in 19 years.

You do not have to be an economist to understand that President Obama’s economic policies are flat-out failures that include a “stimulus” that wasted billions of taxpayer dollars without stimulating the economy, nor that having a $17 trillion debt means anything other than a nation teetering on a massive economic collapse.

In May, CNSnews reported that “A record 92,594,000 Americans were not in the labor force in April as the labor force participation rate matched a 36-year low of 62.8 percent, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

This is not my definition of a “recession” although we are told that it ended in 2009. This is a “depression” for millions of Americans. The labor force participation rate has gone from 63.5% to 63.3%, the lowest since 1979, but the Obama administration keeps telling us that it is “improving.”

Consumer spending is down. Exports are down. Employment is barely increasing. The only thing that is up is inflation.

Edward C. Prescott, a 2004 Nobel Laureate in Economics and Lee E. Ohanian, a professor of economics UCLA, writing in the June 26 edition of The Wall Street Journal, noted that the declining GDP rate was “the worst productivity statistic since 1990. And productivity since 2005 has declined by more than 8% relative to its long-run trend. This means that business output is nearly $1 trillion less today than what it would be had productivity continued to grow at its average rate of about 2.5% per year.”

“Lagging productivity growth is an enormous problem because virtually all of the increase in Americans’ standard of living is made possible by rising worker productivity.”

The Obama administration would have you believe that the economic decline in the first quarter was due to a harsh winter. They will be blaming it on a hot summer come autumn.

This is an administration whose main theme these days is the threat of “climate change”, but it has nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with vast government spending and borrowing, an explosion of regulations that have slowed or stopped the creation of new businesses, a “war on coal” that is forcing a decline in the production of electricity, and a widespread perception that the President is the worst to have held office since the nation began.

There is no recovery. There is a return to the factors that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Government entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that bought up all the sub-prime mortgage loans and packaged them as assets are still in business. Credit card companies are reaching out to sub-prime users, signing them up. Nobody seems to learn anything from the past, even if it is the recent past.

If the control of the U.S. Senate cannot be wrested away from a Democratic Party led by Harry Reid and a GOP increase in the U.S. House that was led by Nancy Pelosi until the 2010 elections cannot be achieved in the forthcoming November elections, the President’s continued attack on the economy—which includes a massive increase in illegal immigration—the nation’s economy will remain tenuous.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on What Economic Recovery?

The Obama Presidency Implodes

June 25th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

The first time I heard the term “military advisors” it was being used by John F. Kennedy and they were being sent to South Vietnam. A strong anti-communist, in 1961 Kennedy approved financing an increase in the size of the South Vietnamese army from 150,000 to 170,000 along with sending a thousand U.S. military advisors to help train them. We all know how the Vietnam War ended.

Earlier, the North Korean attack on the South had ended in a stalemate. Technically a state of war still exists. Since 1953, the U.S. has maintained a military force in South Korea. In the wake of World War II, we still have a military presence in Europe and Japan to aid in their defense.

Obama’s announcement that 300 military advisors are being sent to Iraq is too little, too late.

As of this writing Americans are witnessing what happened when Obama withdrew from Iraq and are anticipating the same result when we withdraw from Afghanistan. Yes, we were and are war-weary, but we do not like what we’re seeing in Iraq and the President’s foreign policy failures are compounding by the day.

We are weary, too, after six and a half years of the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. It has taken this long for all the predictions regarding his lack of experience and competence to come true.

The polls taken during the past week provide evidence of this. Gallup’s job approval poll of June 9-15 showed that 42% of “national adults” approved. Over at Rasmussen Reports, Obama’s job approval on June 21 was 48%. Asked by Rasmussen if the nation is headed in the right direction or not, 67% of likely voters said it was not. Reacting to the immigration invasion crisis a Gallup found that 69% thought he was doing a poor job.

Depending on events, polls rise and fall, but the numbers indicate a growing loss of confidence in Obama’s decisions and actions to date. I suspect that what they do not show is a growing sense of the man as utterly untrustworthy and increasingly distant from the demands of the office.

We are witnessing the implosion of the Obama presidency.

All presidencies have a scandal or two, usually relatively minor in the grand scheme of national management. Watergate was considered minor initially and took two years to materialize into the scandal that forced Nixon to resign. Obama, however, has generated directly and indirectly enough scandals for their combined weight to begin being noticed even by those who pay little attention to Washington, D.C.

The worst of the latests has been the revelation of how the Internal Revenue Service was politicized to attack organizations that were deemed to be affiliated with the Tea Party movement and patriotic objectives. The “loss” of Lois Lerner’s emails and others smells of the destruction of evidence Congress has demanded. The one element of the government that virtually all Americans interact with is the IRS.

Other scandals like Solyndra, representing the waste of billions on wind and solar companies, many of which went bankrupt after receiving all manner of grants and loans, did not registered in a similar fashion. The wiretapping of Associated Press reporters’ phone calls likewise did not evoke widespread concern. The failure of the “stimulus” that spent billions without producing an uptick in the economy was seen as just another way the government wastes our money. Even “Fast and Furious” in which thousands of weapons were purchased and transferred to Mexican drug cartels did not evoke more than a short expression of dismay.

Benghazi, however, in which a U.S. ambassador died along with three others, remains an unresolved scandal as much for the lies about a video as its cause as for the tragedy of the abandonment of those killed. The release of five leaders of the Taliban from Guantanamo without letting Congress know has piled on the previous scandals to a point where serious concerns about both Obama’s judgment have arisen.

What remains now is a combination of the President’s increasing use of Executive Orders to create as much mischief as possible along with the perception that he simply does not care what Americans in general and Congress in particular thinks about what he is doing. There is talk in the House of bringing a legal suit against the President regarding his heavy use of Executive Orders to bypass Congress while initiating policies that require congressional inclusion and oversight.

Those of us who pay close attention to what the President is doing know that the ultimate aim of his actions in office has been to harm the nation in a variety of ways from reducing our military to pre-World War Two levels to destroying a large element of the nation’s electrical energy supply by forcing coal-fired plants out of business.

Ultimately, the implosion of the Obama presidency has been the realization that he has put the nation at risk of the world’s bad actors by causing America’s global leadership position to erode. Americans have been accustomed to being a leading military and economic power since the end of World War Two and he has been undermining that in every way possible.

Voter payback is likely to see a major shift of political power in Congress away from the Democratic Party in the forthcoming midterm elections and would enable Republicans to slow or stop further damage to the nation. Failing that, the fate of the nation will be a great risk.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on The Obama Presidency Implodes

Saddam, the Good Old Days

June 22nd, 2014

Alan Caruba

I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but sometimes I miss Saddam Hussein.

Yes, he was a cruel despot. Between September 1980 and July 1988 he pursued an eight-year war against Iran that killed an estimated combined million troops on both sides and achieved nothing. He had ruled from 1979 until 2003 when George W. Bush decided to remove him by invading Iraq, believing as other nations did that he had weapons of mass destruction. Had he not posed a constant threat to neighboring nations, he might still be in charge. He was hanged in 2006, but the U.S. would stay on until our troops were withdrawn by Barack Obama in 2011.

In places where troops have remained like Germany, Japan and South Korea, a long state of peace has existed. At their invitation we have military installations in 130 nations around the world.

“The Great Big Book of Horrible Things” by Matthew White provides a brief review of Saddam’s dictatorship, noting that “Iraq is an artificial country with borders that were drawn to suit the European colonial powers rather than to reflect local allegiances.” He could say the same thing of Syria what owes its borders to decisions made following World War One by the British and French.

Saddam maintained control by propagandizing himself as a great hero and by killing or imprisoning anyone who disagreed. There was no end to the barbarism he imposed. The Kurds were blamed for the loss of the war with Iran and it is estimated he killed anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 Kurds between February and September 1988; some of them with poison gas. In 1991, after an American-led coalition drove Saddam out of Kuwait, the Shiite Arabs of the southern marshes rose in revolt and some 50,000 were massacred. The Kurds were driven into the mountains of the north and American air cover helped them establish an autonomous zone.

Libya experienced a similar dictatorship by Muammar Gaddafi who took power in 1969 until overthrown during the “Arab Spring” in 2011, a revolt that has left a barely functioning nation. Like Saddam he exercised the same repression to control the nation’s tribes.

Not a classic dictator like Saddam and Gaddafi, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a former air force general, kept tight control there from 1981 to 2001 thanks to the support of the military. He was a major U.S. ally. After Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was deposed in the wake of Mubarak’s removal, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, another general was elected to the office of president.

An ongoing civil war in Syria has killed an estimated 160,000 to date and Bashar al-Assad is the son of its previous dictator, Hafiz, who had seized power in 1970 and was elected president a year later, never to relinquish the office until he died in 2000. Al-Assad presently controls about forty percent of the nation, supported by his tribe, the Alawites and military aid from Iran.

What these dictators had in common was a Middle East that did not directly challenge the United States or the West. They were more interested in selling oil. The opposition they encountered was the combination of opposition to the oppressive nature of their rule and the rise of a resurgent Islamist movement that believed their nations should embrace Sharia law.

The war to force Russia out of Afghanistan had led to the creation of al Qaeda and subsequent Islamist groups like the Taliban that divide into Sunni versus Shiite loyalties. The newest of these groups is the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq/al Sham (ISIS). The brutality of the ISIS warriors is the latest horror story, but it is a very old story as far as the Middle East is concerned.

Before we begin to feel good about ourselves as highly civilized citizens of Western civilization, we should address the fact that, in the last century alone, an estimated 200 million people died in its wars, large and small. European history is one of wars with interludes of peace. The West’s technological advancement enabled wars of massive death for soldier and civilian alike.

In his book, “The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War”, David Livingstone Smith, reflecting on the last century, noted that “The frequency of armed conflict across the globe and throughout history is staggering.” Published in 2007, Smith said that “Looking at forty-one modern nation-states between 1800 and 1945, we find that they average 1.4 wars per generation and 18.5 years of war per generation.” It gives a whole new meaning to the term “endless war.”

“We are extremely dangerous animals,” Smith concluded, “and the balance of evidence suggests that our taste for killing is not some sort of cultural artifact, but was bred into us over millions of years by natural and sexual selection.” We are, however, “ambivalent about killing and it is impossible to understand the relationship between war and human nature without taking this into consideration.”

Matthew White notes that the twentieth century has been the bloodiest on record, particularly when you include the millions killed by Hitler, Stalin and Mao, the latter two, who in addition to waging war also killed millions to establish Communism in Russia and China.

Hitler not only waged war but engaged in the genocide of Europe’s Jews, killing an estimated six million and another five million gypsies, homosexuals, unionists, and others that were regarded as “enemies of the state.” In the last century, the Japanese Empire mastered Western warfare and sought expansion, waging war against Russia and China, and engaging in World War Two.

Why did the world break into an unprecedented wave of killing in the last century? White narrowed it down to three reasons: (1) Because they could. (2) Because they wanted to and (3) because everybody else was doing it.

What should we do in Iraq? In my opinion we should bomb the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq to oblivion. ISIS wants to establish an Islamic caliphate from which it would extend its barbaric belief system to the world. If Saddam was still the Iraqi dictator, he would never have permitted ISIS to exist. Now we must destroy it. No troops on the ground, just American air power. We have it and we must use it before ISIS becomes an even greater threat. It’s not about Iraq. It’s about us.

And, yes, we are, indeed, the most dangerous animal on planet Earth. The Romans understood this, saying “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” If you want peace, plan for war,”

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Saddam, the Good Old Days

Iraq Agonistes

June 15th, 2014

By Alan Caruba.



I remember how the Vietnam War seemed to drag on for years without resolution, from Lyndon Johnson’s initial expansion in 1964, after he was elected in his own right through his second term, marked by many marches in Washington, D.C. demanding the U.S. get out. It took Nixon’s and Kissinger’s efforts to secure an end to the conflict in 1973.

The war in Iraq had a similar feel to it. The first conflict, led by Bush41 to push Iraq out of Kuwait had public support and was dramatically short and successful. The second, led by Bush43 began as an effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power and initially the military victory was also swift. In hindsight, the error was staying on, presumably to help establish a democratic government and other institutions in a nation that had never known democracy.

The Iraqis are divided by Islam’s ancient schism, Sunni versus Shiite. Saddam had been a Sunni. He was replaced by a Shiite, Nouri al-Maliki, elected Prime Minister in a nation that is predominantly Shiite.

While Republicans would like to blame the current situation on Obama, the fact is that George W. Bush signed a “Status of Forces Agreement” in 2008 that terminated the American military presence in Iraq at the close of 2011. That said, President Obama shares the blame for the current situation for failing to push for a military presence there. His foreign policy in the Middle East has been to get the U.S. out of Iraq and out of Afghanistan.

This did not go unnoticed by Iran, al-Qaeda, or the breakaway faction, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) which regrouped in Syria as part of the forces seeking to oust the regime of Bashar Assad, its dictator. They took the time to recruit the most fanatical Islamists into their ranks, train them as an army, and, having established a command center in Syria, to then unleash them on Iraq.

While this was going on President Obama never failed to tell Americans that bin Laden was dead and al Qaeda was on a “path to defeat.” In a 2013 speech at the National Defense University, he asserted that “the future of terrorism” came from “less capable” terrorist groups that mainly threatened “diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad.”

He not only learned nothing from the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya that killed our ambassador and three others, he and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, engaged in a lie about it being a spontaneous event triggered by a video no one had seen.

Obama concluded his remarks by calling on Congress to repeal its 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda!

As the June 12 Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Iraq Debacle”, noted, “If the war on terror was over, ISIS did not get the message.”

Obama’s decision not to intervene in Syria after it became known Assad was using poison gas was not just his own reluctance to engage militarily in the Middle East, but reflected the widespread American lack of support for further involvement in the region. Too many years in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the vast costs and loss of American lives was and is a significant factor.

Coinciding with this has been Obama’s view that America is not exceptional, nor that it should continue its role as the leader of the free world. In this regard he is spectacularly wrong. Much of what passes for stability among the nations of the world is influenced by the military power (and the willingness to use it) of the United States—at least until Obama was elected.

His release of five Taliban commanders from Guantanamo Bay reflects his longtime intention to close the site which he deems a “provocation” to Islamic terrorism. They do not need provocation. They are holy warriors, jihadists.

They attacked the homeland when there was no Guantanamo and there had been attacks on our embassies going back to the 1980s. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissed them as no danger to the U.S. One of them was involved in the planning of 9/11 and two are designated by the United Nations as war criminals. Clinton is as delusional as Obama.

Meanwhile, Iraq was ripe for a Sunni-Shiite civil war after the removal of Saddam Hussein. Prime Minister al-Maliki, ruling in autocratic manner, removed many Sunni generals who had fought alongside of American forces and increased the Shiite-Sunni divide in his government. The loss of major cities in the north to ISIS, a Sunni entity, has brought Shiite Iran into the present conflict potentially to protect southern Iraq and its own interests because ISIS exists to create an Islamic caliphate to control the entire Middle East.

ISIS is so radical, so devoted to the most draconian and barbaric aspects of Islam, that it is filling the streets of captured cities with the beheaded bodies of all they deem a threat to their ideology.

The notion that al Qaeda and comparable groups were on the run was either a delusion Obama held onto or a deliberate lie. ISIS is just one among others that include the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Al-Nusra Front in Syria, Ansar Dine in Mali, and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, believes that “however much damage the al Qaeda-type organizations can do to property and lives, they ultimately cannot emerge victorious because their undiluted extremism both alienates Muslims and scares non-Muslims.” That is a long term prediction, but it is the short-term conflict that must be addressed and Dr. Pipes deems what is occurring “a Middle Eastern problem and outside powers should aim to protect their own interests, not solve the Middle East’s crisis. Tehran, not we, should fight ISIS.”

Obama will likely follow Dr. Pipe’s recommendation, leaving the fighting to the Iraqis and whatever aid Iran provides. The hope is that Iraqi forces can regroup to protect Baghdad and push out ISIS or restrict it to the northern section of Iraq. The war may ultimately see Iraq split into sections, one of which will be a separate and sovereign Kurdish one. ISIS, if the Iranians decide to rid the region of them, could face defeat. It would solve their threat to both Syria and Iraq.

Ultimately, this isn’t just a Middle East problem. It is a U.S. and global problem because (1) Islamism is a threat to modern civilization and (2) because two of the largest fields of oil in the Middle East exist in Iraq, the other two are in Saudi Arabia and a fifth is in Kuwait. If Iraq falls, the price of gasoline and all other petroleum products would skyrocket.

After six years of the Obama administration, the U.S. has no friends in the Middle East—the kind that trust us, but it does have interests to protect. It has an enemy in fanatical Islamism. For now, however, it will not put U.S. troops into the Iraqi conflict and that reflects not just Obama’s point of view, but that of most Americans.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Iraq Agonistes

Can the Tea Party Take Over the GOP

June 4th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

“Republicans never, ever win the presidency unless they nationalize the election by campaigning on a conservative agenda—drawing a sharp contrast between the Democrat worldview and the conservative worldview.”

That’s Richard A. Viguerie offering his insight and advice in his new book, “Takeover” ($27.95, WMD Books) and, if you have been wondering why Republicans have been losing presidential elections with candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney, he tells you why. “It is hard for conservatives to understand that establishment Republicans are the enemy.”

By “establishment” he is referring to the inner circle of elites who have been content to work with Democrats they have for decades to make government bigger because they like spending taxpayer dollars just as much and have embraced Big Government by creating the Department of Education, the EPA, and other entities.

Viguerie has been involved in building the conservative political base in America since the days of Barry Goldwater. Starting in 1961 he used direct mail to build and enlarge that base, and he has had to watch a succession of so-called Republicans from Nixon to Bush 41 and 43 campaign as conservatives and then act like Democrats.

“In the short time that George W. Bush was president and the Democrats held the majority in Congress (2007-2008), spending jumped by $700 billion—$4.7 trillion in FY 2006 to $5.4 trillion in FY 2008.”

Significantly, Jenny Beth Martin, president and co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, wrote the foreword to “Takeover”, saying “It is a civil war between limited-government, constitutional conservatives and the progressive, establishment wring of the GOP. And make no mistake: the establishment wing of the Republican Party is progressive, and has been ever since conservatives stymied Teddy Roosevelt’s attempt to reclaim the Republican presidential nomination in 1912 and make progressivism that governing philosophy of the Republican Party.”

The subtitle of Viguerie’s book is “The 100-year war for the soul of the GOP and how conservatives can finally win it.” If you need to learn that history, this is the book to read. If you want to see how conservatives can reclaim the government from both the Democrats and the Republican elites, you need to read this book.

Viguerie reminds us that, when Republicans hewed to conservative principles, they won three landslide presidential elections in 1980, 1984, and 1988, but when they put those principles of small government, fiscal prudence, and a strong military in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, they lost—big time.

When the Tea Party movement spontaneously emerged in response to Obamacare and Obama’s intention to “transform” America, “Today’s establishment Republican leaders did their best to alienate and marginalize the new conservative bloc of the Tea Party movement.”

As of this writing, the day after the June 3 primaries, Tea Party supported Republican candidates, Joni Ernst in Iowa and Steve Daines in Montana had won while, in Mississippi, the race was so close that there will be a run-off between Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel against Thad Cochran.

The good news, as Viguerie points out is that “For over twenty years polls have shown that Americans, by a two-to-one margin, self-identify as conservatives. Today, a record number of Americans—60 percent according to the Gallup Organization’s governance poll—say that the federal government has too much power. This follows on an earlier Gallup poll in which 64 percent of those responding said the greatest threat to freedom in Big Government—and the biggest jump in that fear is among Democrats.”

The result in 2010 was Tea Party candidates, “without any real direction from the national GOP, drew a sharp contrast with Big Government Republicans and with the Democrats on taxes, spending, the growth of government, and especially on Obamacare, to power the GOP to pick up six Senate seats and win historical sixty-three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, recapturing the majority, and making it the largest seat change since 1948 and the largest for any midterm election since the 1938 midterm elections.”

Barack Obama has been a gift to conservatives and we are seeing his approval ratings fall like a rock. “For fifty years I have been saying that to change things and stop the slide to socialism, two things needed to happen: first, things need to get really bad really fast; and second, there needs to be some political vehicle, some means for the people to channel their anger, and to translate their outrage into political action. Guess what: we’re there.”

The forthcoming November midterms can save America from the Democrats and from the establishment Republicans, the elites in Washington who have been happy to expand the government and continue spending money we don’t have.

The bulk of Americans are conservative and, in November, they have to go to the polls and elect Tea Party candidates, regain control of the Senate, expand membership in the House, and provide the means to thwart Obama’s “transformation” of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Can the Tea Party Take Over the GOP

Predicting the Weather? The Climate? You’re Kidding, Right?

June 2nd, 2014

Predicting the Weather? The Climate? You’re Kidding, Right?
By Alan Caruba

With some of the most sophisticated computers and satellites at its disposal, the U.S. Weather Service cannot tell you with any certainty what the weather will be in your area two weeks from now. It’s not that they don’t give forecasts beyond that a good try, but when you have to work with computers that cannot determine cloud formation and cover, significant factors, you have to just make your best guess.

Since the 1980s, following a decade in which an ice age was being predicted, the global warming charlatans operating out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change began to generate predictions of an eminent and threatening period of warming for the Earth and, of course, former Vice President Al Gore became the Predictor-in-Chief for that while also becoming a multi-millionaire doing so.

Then, about seventeen years ago, the Earth began to cool, entering a perfectly natural weather cycle that put an end to the global warming hoax. So the IPCC and the rest of the environmental crowd began to talk about “climate change” instead.

They continued to blame carbon dioxide (CO2)—which they call “carbon pollution”—and the Environmental Protection Agency keeps flogging this lie because it is the basis for its criminal agenda to destroy the economy with hundreds of thousands of regulations over every inch of land and every drop of water in the nation. This week it embarks on its effort to shut down every coal-fired plant in America that provides electricity.

Writing recently in his “blogosphere” at IceCap.us, Joe D’Aleo, a widely respected climatologist, pointed out that “First of all, carbon pollution is ‘soot’ which we don’t have a problem with—the EPA’s own data shows in fact it is well below EPA standards, declining 50% since 1999”

“CO2 which is conflated with soot is a harmless (actually beneficial) gas and every breathe (that) every human emits (contains) 100 times as much CO2 as is in the ambient air. CO2 is critical for plant life and we are at the low end of the scale of CO2 for the earth’s history, just above the survival level needed for plants which require it for photosynthesis—around 280 parts per million.”

So, who are you going to believe? A leading climatologist or a former community organizer, Barack Obama?

It appears that Obama has decided to tell a lot of lies about the climate for the remainder of his second term in office. Having failed to resuscitate the nation’s economy and unable to have any effect on global events as his administration’s scandals mount, Obama has seized upon the IPCC’s lies about the climate to divert our attention from our real problems. They have become the basis for official U.S. policy and behavior.

As the hurricane season from June through November begins, Obama can be found predicting a rise in these storms in the months ahead, but as June arrived, it marked 3,142 days since the U.S. last was hit by a major hurricane. This “drought” of hurricanes is truly unprecedented, dating back to 1900!

Be assured that Obama will be supported by reports from U.S. agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Hurricane Center whose budgets depend on his support. What they won’t tell you is that, thirty years ago, Dr. William Gray, a distinguished meteorologist at Colorado State University found and documented the relationship between the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), commonly just called El Nino that suppresses hurricane activity.

Forecasters are anticipating a strong El Nino this year. It is a phenomenon determined by the ocean and atmosphere in and over the tropical Pacific Ocean. How powerful is it? Its effects are felt around the world, including the Atlantic Ocean where most of the hurricanes that hit the U.S. occur. Its counterpart, La Nina, a cool phase enhances hurricane activity, but that is not going to happen in the months ahead because El Ninos usually last at least 27 months.

If the U.S. Weather Service cannot predict the weather two weeks to a month from now, any predictions regarding the climate—measured in centuries—should be viewed with a very high degree of doubt. It should be noted, however, that the interglacial period between ice ages is about 11,000 to 11,500 years and the current period is reaching its end.

A President using the weather to scare Americans should be viewed with considerable cynicism. Note that Obama keeps referring to the last big storm to hit the East Coast, Sandy, but it was a tropical storm, not a hurricane

The National Center for Public Policy Research has set forth the “Top Ten Reasons Washington Should Not Impose New Global Warming Laws or Regulations.”

There will be dramatic weather events in the months ahead because there are always such events, droughts, storms, tornadoes, floods, forest fires, et cetera. This is how Mother Earth operates and always has.

It comes down to this. If your weatherman tells you it is going to rain tomorrow or in a day or two, bring an umbrella with you. Beyond that, just enjoy the summer.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Predicting the Weather? The Climate? You’re Kidding, Right?

The Difference Between the Real World and Obama’s

May 31st, 2014

By Alan Caruba

I keep wondering what it must have been like to be a young student at West Point listening to their Commander in Chief’s platitudes and ignorance wash over them. West Point is where our nation’s future leaders in war receive an education in how to protect the nation by crushing our enemies, if Presidents and Congress will let them.

Unfortunately for them, this President seems to think that climate change is the nation’s biggest enemy and that a loose coalition of Islamic fanatics is the other. There was no talk of an increasingly aggressive China, a Russia that seized Crimea and would like a chunk of the Ukraine, or an Iran that got out from under some strong financial sanctions and will continue to build its own nuclear weapons no matter what Obama and other negotiators may want.

Meanwhile, the Egyptians have decided they would prefer a military dictator again as their president instead of a leader from the Muslim Brotherhood. Such choices are endemic to the Middle East. Real democracy is rare there. In Syria its dictator, Bashar al Assad, is still in power when, it could be argued, a few hours spent bombing his air force and other military facilities might have cost him his job and saved over 160,000 lives. So now Obama is reluctantly arming his opposition, some of whom could end up being as oppressive as al Assad.

The highlight of Obama’s speech was his announcement that the U.S. would be out of Afghanistan by 2016 except for a small force to train its military. Here’s what I had to say about Afghanistan in November 2009, a few months into Obama’s first term:

“If you look back, you discover that the former Soviet Union had 100,000 troops there and spent ten years in Afghanistan…one day in 1989 they just packed up and went home to Russia. Shortly thereafter the Berlin Wall fell, followed by the entire Soviet government in 1991.” And Afghanistan was deemed by Obama to be a “war of necessity.” Americans in 2009 would have been happy to depart, having been there for eight years with nothing to show for it.

Presidents who do not get the waging of war right end up killing a lot of American troops. Lyndon Johnson knew years earlier that he should have gotten out of Vietnam, but stayed on. And, yes, George W. Bush stayed on in Afghanistan and Iraq after achieving the initial goal of responding to 9/11 and then of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. War is not about nation-building.

The U.S. stayed on in Europe after WWII because the Soviet Union was the new threat there. We stayed on in Japan to ensure it learned how to govern itself without an all-powerful emperor and then because of a threat from North Korea and communist China. Internationally, we maintain a military presence by invitation in many nations because as the only global superpower we are also the only one that stands for freedom.

Obama has made it clear that he does not like our being a superpower. One need only look at the way he has reduced our military to pre-WWII levels.

How bad was the speech? When The New York Times published an editorial about it on May 28, it said “The address did not match the hype, was largely uninspiring, lacked strategic sweep and is unlikely to quiet his detractors, on the right or the left.” How incompetent does Obama have to be to elicit this kind of criticism from one of the greatest voices of liberalism in America?

At this point in his second term with two more years to go, Obama has been a spectacular failure domestically, diplomatically, and on the battlefield he chose. He has told the Taliban when we will leave and they will be back because we are talking about the Middle East. As for the rest of the Islamists, Obama abandoned the phrase “a war on terrorism” early on.

As former Ambassador John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Surrender is Not an Option” said in a recent commentary, “Typically, Mr. Obama made no mention of seeking ‘victory’ in the war against terrorism, a still-foreign concept to him, in a war whose very existence he denies.”

The only victory Obama has ever prized is the winning of elections. He was nowhere to be found the evening our ambassador and three security personnel were killed in Benghazi and the next day he flew to Los Angeles to do more fund raising. When their bodies returned, he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied about a video as the cause of an event that occurred on the anniversary of 9/11.

We have two more years of Obama as President. That cannot bode well for the future, either here or around the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on The Difference Between the Real World and Obama’s

The Regulatory Death of Energy in America

May 29th, 2014

By Alan Caruba.

Before President Obama took office in 2009, the amount of electricity being produced by coal-fired utilities was approximately fifty percent of the total. Today it is approximately forty percent and, when the Environmental Protection Agency regulations take effect as of June 2, more such utilities are likely to close their doors. The basis for the regulations is utterly devoid of any scientific facts.

Environmentalism, as expressed by many of the organizations that advocate it is, in fact, an attack on America, its economic system of capitalism, and its need for energy to maintain and grow its business and industrial base. Electricity, of course, is also the energy we all use daily for a multitude of tasks ranging from heating or cooling our homes to the use of our computers and every other appliance.

The EPA regulations are said to be necessary to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) which the Greens deem to be a “pollutant” in our atmosphere. It is not a pollutant, despite a Supreme Court decision that identifies it as such, but rather a gas vital to all life on Earth, used by all vegetation for its growth. CO2 is to vegetation what oxygen is to all animal life. Humans, all seven billion of us, exhale CO2!

Viv Forbes, the Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, notes that the Earth’s atmosphere “is not a greenhouse” and “does not have a glass roof. It uses convection to redistribute heat very quickly.” The claim for several decades has been that CO2 has an effect on the Earth’s surface temperature, but Forbes points out that “water vapor is a far more effective agent for insulating the Earth and preserving its warmth than carbon dioxide,” adding that “there is no evidence that man-made carbon dioxide is a significant cause of global warming.”

Indeed, even though the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has increased, Forbes points out that “Close examination of past records shows that temperature tends to rise before carbon dioxide content rises, sometimes centuries earlier.” Significantly, at the same time Greens have been crying out against emissions of CO2 from coal-fired utilities and other sources, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle now verging on eighteen years!

The EPA is lying to Americans regarding carbon dioxide and, worse, its proposed regulations will reduce the number of coal-fired utilities and drive up the cost of electricity for Americans.

One of the many Green organizations, Earthjustice, claims that “Climate change threatens the world as we know it—and the chief culprit is fossil fuel burning. To avert ecological disaster, Earthjustice is pushing for a shift from dirty to clean energy to stabilize our climate and build a thriving sustainable world.”

There is literally nothing that mankind can do to “stabilize” the Earth’s climate. While the Earth has been going through climate change for 4.5 billion years, there is no evidence that anything mankind does has any effect on it. The change the Earth has encountered, as mentioned, is a cooling, a far different scenario than the “global warming” claims of the past three decades or more.

Tom Richard, the editor of ClimageChangeDispatch.com, notes that “Arctic sea ice has rebounded to higher and higher levels each year. Antarctica is actually gaining in size and there has been no increase in droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, ‘extreme weather’, flooding, et cetera.”

Reducing CO2 would have zero benefits while, at the same time, the EPA regulations would have a dangerous and totally unnecessary effect on CO2 emissions from plants producing electricity. Other nations around the world are actually abandoning “clean energy”. i.e., wind and solar power, in favor of building many more coal-fired plants to meet their need to provide energy for their populations and their economic growth. China and India are just two examples.

To support its claims of the forthcoming EPA regulations, EarthJustice is claiming that climate change “hits people of color the hardest” and that power plants “disproportionately impact Latino communities.” It noted “the moral obligation of faith community to act on climate change and support carbon pollution limits.” This has nothing to do with the actual facts of climate change and CO2 as noted here and is a blatant political campaign to secure support from these groups.

The reality, as noted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a policy research organization founded by former Senate leaders from both parties, was quoted in the May 26 edition of The Wall Street Journal saying “A 25% reduction (of CO2) with a 2015 baseline might make it impossible for some companies to operate”, noting that the cap-and-trade policies of emissions allowances that the EPA is putting in place “amounts to a hidden tax” on a whole range of electrical generation and industrial plants that produce CO2 emissions. The EPA will likely use the term “budget program” to avoid “cap-and-trade”, a proposal that was rejected by Congress.

Writing in Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin, said that the new regulations on carbon emissions “will have a potentially devastating impact on America’s more than 600 coal-fired power plants” noting that “the move was made possible by Supreme Court decisions that ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had the right to regulate (CO2) emissions, giving the President virtual carte blanche to remake this sector of our economy without requiring congressional consent.”

In July, the Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, will hold its ninth international conference on climate change. Previous conferences have brought together some of the world’s leading authorities on meteorology and climatology to debunk the decades of lies Greens have told about climate change and global warming.

The President has put “climate change” high on his list of priorities and it is an attack on the nation’s ability to affordably and extensively provide the energy needed to meet current needs for electricity and reducing our capacity to meet future needs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on record saying that the President’s bogus “climate change” policy could cost the U.S. economy $50 billion a year and force more than a third of coal-fired plants to close by 2030. The Heritage Foundation says “The plan will drive up energy prices for American families and businesses without making a dent in global temperatures.”

This is a form of regulatory death for the nation and comes straight out of the Oval Office of the White House.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on The Regulatory Death of Energy in America

Murder and Media

May 26th, 2014

By Alan Caruba.

 



Multiple murders by a crazed killer will always generate headlines as they should. The latest occurred on May 23 when a mentally ill young man, Elliot Rodger, killed six and injured thirteen others. Of the six, he stabbed three and used a gun to kill or wound the others. He wasn’t the first to do this and he won’t be the last. These killers of multiple numbers of people all have insanity in common. It’s not about the weapon, it’s about the killer.

In the 1940s when I was growing up, I went to a lot of movies in which killing was part of the stories being told. As television became part of every home in the 1950s, this theme could be seen in many of the shows and movies. Whether it was the good guys, cowboys wearing white hats or police pursuing criminals, both often had to strike down killers.

One can understand why many believe that we live in a society that is a jungle in which we are at great risk of being killed by those we know or by complete strangers, particularly in our large cities. The facts, however, tell another story entirely.

Among the leading causes of death in America, heart disease, according to statistics from 2010, was the primary cause, taking 597,689 lives. It was followed by cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, and accidents. In 2013, there were more than 316 million Americans, but you were more likely to die from old age than diseases and other causes.

Of the list of 16 leading causes of death, homicide was listed as the 15th.

Despite the daily reports of killings and assaults, the reality is that, since the 1990s, crime of all kinds has declined in the United States and current crime rates are approximately the same as in the 1990s.

Based on records maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of crime statistics, defined as four criminal offenses, murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault, the potential of being a victim has been reduced. The U.S. homicide rate, which has declined since 1992 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010 is still, however, among the highest in the industrialized world.

The reasons given for the decline in America include the increase of police officers in the 1990s. On September 16, 1994, President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law. Under the act, more than $30 billion in federal aid was spent over a six year period to improve state and local law enforcement, prisons, and crime prevention programs. Significantly, the prison population has expanded since the mid-1970s, though not all are incarcerated for violent crimes.

In fact, cities like New York and Philadelphia have been leading the way to a reduction of violent crime with the entire nation on track to have its lowest murder rate in four decades. Chicago, often cited for its murder rate, was a safer city in 2013 though it still leads in the number of murders.

All this is good news, but it is obscured by the daily reports of killings that are a staple of what the media regards as news no matter where you live. Coverage of murder trials, along with the endless shows devoted to fictional presentations about murder leads people to believe that life in our cities and elsewhere is a succession of murders, but the statistics tell us a very different, real story.

In states where concealed carrying of weapons is legal, the murder rate is lower than those that do not permit this. Efforts by the Obama administration to put limits on our Second Amendment right to bear weapons only put us at greater risk. The purchase of billions of ammunition by the administration is a backdoor attempt to reduce our access to ammunition. Demands for increased registration of gun ownership, already a standard law in all our states, represent a liberal effort to convince Americans that guns are a major threat. They are a major deterrent.

Our perception of crime and of murder is the result of the news and entertainment media’s constant depiction of this element of life in America, but it does not reflect reality. This is not likely to change, but one can take comfort in the reality the statistics provide.

There is one significant exception that does not appear on the list of the causes of death in America. If you were a fetus in 2012, you were among an estimated 1.04 million killed. Since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, more than 50,000,000 babies have been killed.

There’s a word for this. It’s genocide.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Murder and Media

The Slow, Sure Death of “Climate Change” Lies

May 22nd, 2014

 

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

Even though President Obama continues to lie about “climate change” and employs the many elements of the federal government to repeat those lies, this huge hoax is dying.

Obama is on record saying that climate change “once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present” and is “affecting Americans right now.” Climate change as studied by climatologists is measured in terms of centuries whereas the weather is what is happening today. It has been happening before and since the rise of civilization. Obama’s claim that “climate-related changes are outside of recent experience” and “have become more frequent and/or intense” is a lie from start to finish.

The White House recently released its latest “National Climate Assessment.” It is 841 pages of outlandish claims that reflect the lies generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When you consider that the federal government spends an estimated $2.6 billion annually in grants for climate research, about the only beneficiaries are those “scientists” employed to further the hoax.

The UN’s IPCC was created in 1983 and has issued a series of reports whose sole intention has been to frighten people around the world with claims of global warming that are scientifically baseless.

The Heartland Institute, a non-profit market-based think tank, responded by creating the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and by sponsoring a series of international conferences. The next will be July 7-9 in Los Vegas. That effort began in 2003 in cooperation with the Science & Environmental Project led by Dr. S. Fred Singer and was joined by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

I am an advisor to the Institute, having written about environmental and energy issues for several decades at this point.

Calling on thousands of scientists around the world, in 2013 the NIPCC published the first of a three-volume response to the IPCC’s fifth assessment. This year, it has published a volume of Climate Change Reconsidered devoted to biological impacts, a 1,062 page opus. The NIPCC is an international panel of scientists and scholars with no government affiliation or sponsorship, and it receives no corporate funding.

Writing in the Financial Post in October 2013, Lawrence Solomon, the executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group, noted that “solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.” The Earth’s climate is primarily a reflection of solar radiation or the lack of it. From 1300 to 1850, the Earth was subject to a mini-ice age. While the global warming hoax began in the late 1980s, Solomon noted that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the scientific consensus was that the Earth “was entering a period of global cooling. The media in those years was filled with stories about a pending new ice age.

It was only the intervention of the UN’s IPCC that changed the “consensus” to one of global warming. A cooling cycle that began around fourteen years ago could lead to another mini-ice age or the planet could be on the cusp of a full-fledged one. On average, the interglacial periods of the Earth have lasted about 11,500 years and we are at the end of such a period.

Climate Change Reconsidered II devoted to biological impact features scientific studies that conclude:

# “Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant.” Considering that all vegetation on Earth depends on it, it is not surprising that another conclusion was that the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth.

# As a result, “there is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels and that terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Multiple lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting, and in some cases, evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era.”

# In addition, “rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels to no pose a significant threat to aquatic life and that a modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperate-related events.”

The irony of the latest NIPCC report, of course, is that it responds to the claims of global warming and carbon dioxide’s role at a time when the Earth is cooling. It makes one wish that all the talk about “greenhouse gases” is true enough to help us escape from the present cooling.

One thing we do know for sure is that the Greens talk of climate change has lost its grip on the public imagination and attention. As the cooling cycle continues, people around the world will be far more focused on increased evidence of massive ice sheets at both poles, on frozen lakes and rivers, on shortened growing seasons, and on the desperate need for more fossil fuels to warm our homes and workplaces.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on The Slow, Sure Death of “Climate Change” Lies

The Real State of the Economy–Not Obama’s Lies

May 11th, 2014

 

 

By Alan Caruba.

My Father was a Certified Public Accountant and so is my older brother, now comfortably retired in Florida. I tell you this because I would be hard-pressed to balance my checkbook.

Even so, you do not have to be smart with numbers to know that the real state of the U.S. economy is pathetic these days. You can thank Barack Obama for that because, dear reader, he is utterly clueless regarding America’s economy; how it works, and what it needs to work.

Peter Ferrara, a Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute, specializing on entitlement and budget policy and a contributor to Forbes magazine, is one of the people to whom I go to understand the economy.

In a May 2 edition, in an article titled “What Obama’s Growth Recession Is Stealing From Your Wallet”, Ferrara wrote “Restoring that booming economic growth and prosperity (of past decades) is the core of solving all of our nation’s problems, not income or wealth redistribution, or addressing ‘inequality.’ But President Obama is not on the path of restoration. The latest report on real GDP growth estimates this year’s first quarter at a pitiful 0.01%. This is in the 6th year of Obama’s Presidency.”

The Heritage Foundation’s chief economist, Stephen Moore, writing on May 1st in the National Review, asked, “What happens to an economy when you do just about everything wrong?” Here’s his list:

# Say you spend $830 billion on a stimulus stuffed with make-work government-jobs programs and programs to pay people to buy new cars,

# you borrow $6 trillion,

# you launch a government-run healthcare system that incentivizes businesses not to hire more workers,

# you raise tax rates on the businesses that hire workers and on the investors that invest in the businesses that hire workers,

# you print $3 trillion of paper money,

# you shut down an entire industry (coal), and try to regulate and restrain the one industry that actually is booming (oil and gas).

“We made all of these imbecilic moves,” wrote Moore, “and the wonder of it all is that the U.S. economy is growing at all. It is a tribute to the indestructible Energizer Bunny that is the entrepreneurial U.S. economy that it keeps going and going even with all the obstacles.” I want to argue with his use of “we”, but enough Americans elected Obama twice to justify it.

The Associated Press, much like most of the mainstream press, paused from protecting Obama in a May 2nd article that began “Despite the unemployment rate plummeting, more than 92 million Americans remain out of the labor force.”

As Harvard Ph.D Jerome R. Corsi, a World Net Daily senior staff reporter, noted the same day as the AP article, “The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announcement that unemployment has dropped from 6.7 percent in March to 6.3 in April was partly attributed to some 800,000 workers dropping out of the labor force last month, reducing the labor participation rate to 62.8 percent, a new low for the Obama administration.”

When people stop looking for work, they are not counted as “unemployed.” Dr. Corsi put the actual unemployment rate in April at 12.3 percent! The numbers you read about from the BLS are “virtually meaningless.” They should just drop the “L” from their acronym.

As the Wall Street Journal opined on May 3rd, “The Americans who left the workforce include older workers who retired before they wanted to, millions who have taken disability, and others who simply don’t find the job openings to be worth the cost of giving up public benefits.”

You don’t have to be an economist to know the truth that has finally sunk into the minds of millions of Americans, many of whom are unemployed or know someone who is. Obama has driven the economy into the toilet. He has foisted trillions of debt on future generations. In order to vote for “the first black President of America”, what those voters and the rest of us got was a man with no experience running so much as a sidewalk lemonade stand.

I think those voters will want a change in November when the midterm elections are held. Between now and then, I want the Republican Party to spend a little less time on the Benghazi scandal and a lot more time telling voters their plans to revive the economy because, in the end, that is the single most important issue facing all of us.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on The Real State of the Economy–Not Obama’s Lies

More Obama Climate Lies

May 7th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

The continuing drama of a President willing to lie about the climate continues with the release of a report, the National Climate Assessment. It is a repeat of all the lies that have been generated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The climate report,” said Dan Kish, a Senior Vice President of the Institute for Energy Research, “bears a strong resemblance to the IPCC report, only with less science and more rhetoric.” It is “just another attempt to justify more government intervention in American’s lives and more attacks on affordable energy and economic growth.”

Like Obamacare, the new report is, said Kish, “intentionally confusing and misleading.”

“Throughout his entire presidency,” said Kish, “Obama has promoted policies that have discouraged the use of our vast energy resources, including blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, slowing energy development on government lands and water, and forcing new restrictions on all forms of energy that Americans have used to become the number one economy in the world. Under this administration, even cows are not spared as emission sources that must be controlled in Washington.”

Marlo Lewis, a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writing on Fox News, identified the political agenda of the climate report “designed to scare people and build political support for unpopular policies such as carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and EPA regulatory mandates.” Item by item, he noted the lies put forth by the report.

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity responded to the latest climate report in a comparable, direct manner. Laura Sheehan, a Senior Vice President of the ACCCE, said, “Instead of flying his cabinet members around the world, President Obama and his deputies should take time to visit communities impacted by a much more dangerous threat; this administration’s costly regulatory crusade.”

“The Obama Administration,” said Sheehen, “consistently fails to acknowledge the enormous industry investments and advancements in clean coal technologies, place a wholly unmerited target on our back to achieve political gains; when in reality, America’s coal fleet is responsible for nearly 40 percent of our nation’s electricity and just a tiny fraction of the world’s carbon emissions.”

“Thanks to the industry’s investment of $188 billion, major emissions from coal-fueled power plants have been reduced by nearly 90 percent,” said Sheehan. “The industry plans to invest another $100 billion over the next decade to develop and deploy clean coal technology further reducing emissions.”

Left unsaid is that carbon emissions, as far as the climate is concerned, play a very minor role. Moreover, all those investments have been forced on the coal power industry by ever increasing levels of regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. The cost is passed along to electricity consumers—all of us—as a necessary increase.

An outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s energy and climate policies, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) said, “This report is part of the game the president is playing to distract Americans from his unchecked regulatory agenda that is costing our nation middle class jobs, new economic opportunities, and our ability to be energy independent.”

The report comes at a time when numerous polls demonstrate that climate change is a very low priority for most Americans. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll in January found that “climate change” ranked last on a list of l5 issues when people were asked which ones the administration should make its priorities.

IER’s Kish deemed the climate report “a scare tactic designed to excuse the President’s agenda of centralizing power in Washington and making energy more expensive and jobs harder to find.”

A new report, “Climate Change Energy Power and National Power” by three retired U.S. Navy admirals reviews the Obama administration’s 2010 “National Security Strategy” has just been published by The Heartland Institute. The authors warn that “The U.S. government is defaulting on its responsibility to develop and execute a credible national energy policy. This failure is suppressing the nation’s economy and reducing the U.S. influence in world affairs.” Administration demands that the Navy and other elements of our military use biofuels rather than traditional sources of energy put it at risk to defend the nation.

“The U.S. economy remains dependent on OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) at a time when development of burgeoning natural fossil fuel resources could move the nation toward strategic energy independence.”

What a different nation America could be were it not for Obama’s deliberate attack on the coal industry in particular and other fossil fuels, oil and natural gas.

In the name of reducing emissions that climatologists believe play a minor role in climate change, Obama deliberately ignores the increasing use of coal in Europe and nations that include China, Japan, and India.

The limits the White House wants and continues to impose would constitute less than a faction of a single degree Fahrenheit over the course of a decade or more. In short, nothing.

For pure incompetence, Obama rates highest among all former Presidents, but for pure deceit he ranks as the most dangerous President ever elected.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on More Obama Climate Lies

The Assault on Free Speech

May 6th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

We have been witnessing a growing assault on free speech in America by the Left and too often it is succeeding.

The demand by members of the Rutgers University faculty that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice be disinvited to be the commencement speaker is the latest example and her decision to withdraw, while graceful, was a victory for the Left, the liberals for whom free speech exists only if it agrees with their posturing about equality, diversity, and all forms of “justice” as defined only by them.

Our universities are showing ugly signs of censoring the speech of those they invited to give a speech! Brandeis University recently withdrew its invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights campaigner, because of her criticisms of Islam. In response, she said of the slur on her reputation that, “More deplorable is that an institution set up on the basis of religious freedom should today so deeply betray its own founding principles.”

The forced resignation of the co-founder and CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, because, years before, he had made a donation to the California campaign to support traditional marriage is another example. The Left has led the effort to redefine this ancient institution of the union between a man and a woman while supporting the demands of the nation’s gay and lesbian community.

Tearing down the foundations of our society has long been a major goal of the Left.

The taping of a private conversation between Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and his mixed-race mistress who made it public led almost immediately thereafter to the demand by the National Basketball Association that he divest himself of ownership of the team. Yes, Sterling expressed racist views, but free speech includes saying stupid things; things that are sure to offend someone or some group. Saying them privately is very different from saying them publicly. And that speech is protected by the First Amendment.

An extension of the Sterling affair is the way any criticism of President Obama is almost always attributed to the fact that he is black. He is, in fact, only half black. His mother was white. The grandparents who raised him were white.

There is plenty about which to criticize Obama and none of it has to do with the color of his skin.

The level and intensity of political correctness has been rising for years and I have been worrying about it for a long time, particularly with the passage of “hate crime” legislation that goes beyond actual acts based on hatred and includes expressions that are deemed to be hatred.

Our educational system now seeks to exclude anything—and I do mean anything—that might “offend” someone or some group of people. A recent example of school officials who did not want American flag t-shirts being worn during Cinco de Mayo should be offensive to anyone who loves America. The holiday isn’t even a major one in Mexico, but demonstrating patriotism is surely not an offense. It gets worse, though, when the singing of Christmas carols are prohibited in a school, an offense against the practice of Christianity and the “diversity” that the Left is always demanding.

The genius of America is its inclusion of all manner of minorities, religions, and points of view. We have a Constitution that protects their rights and those of everyone else. Putting limits on free expression is a danger to the nation and that is what the Left has been trying to do for a very long time.

We are all increasingly living in a nation where limits on everything we do, everything we eat, everything we say are being dedicated by the federal government that believes it exists to act on our behalf because, one must assume, it believes it knows best. It does not.

The federal government has been engaging in policies that are reducing our military strength and security, imposing “Green” policies that are reducing access to the affordable and extensive provision of energy, that is annually adding new regulations by the thousands, that is seeking to make more and more of our landmass federal property, that has a tax code that even the IRS can’t understand, that keeps expanding control of our educational system for the purpose of indoctrinating new generations to obey anything it says and does, and now controls your health through a law that requires you purchase insurance you may not want, cannot afford, and is filled with new taxes.

This drift toward socialism is a threat to the freedoms we take for granted. It must be reversed.

One piece of good news is the recent decision by the Supreme Court that prayers at the start of local council meetings may continue, declaring them part of a long national tradition, thus thwarting the effort of atheist groups to keep people from engaging in such prayers if they wish.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” – The First Amendment.

Those rights will exist only so long as the people defend them. Fight anyone or any group that seeks to undermine them. Whether you lose freedom overnight or by its slow reduction, once lost it is likely lost forever.

And VOTE to put people in office that will fight for you and for the rights the Left is attempting to take from you.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on The Assault on Free Speech

Science, Free Speech, and the Courts

May 4th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

The public, after decades of global warming advocacy, now called “climate change”, has begun to conclude that claims of a massive warming trend were dubious and that real climate change is the natural response of the planet to forces well beyond any impact of the human race.

The fact is that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for some 17 years based on lower rates of solar radiation as the Sun undergoes one of its natural cycles, a reduction in the number of sunspots or magnetic storms on its surface.

The May 5th edition of the National Review devotes its cover story to “The Case Against Michael Mann: The Hockey Stick and Free Speech” by Charles C.W. Cooke because the creator of the “hockey stick” graph purporting a massive warming is suing the magazine, commentator Mark Steyn, along with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Rand Simberg. In his suit, filed in the D.C. Superior Court, Mann asserts that “in making the defamatory statement” they acted intentionally, maliciously, willfully, and with the intent to injure Dr. Mann, or to benefit (National Review) and Steyn.”

Mann is asserting a “narrow form of libel that American law prohibits” said Cooke. “As a seminal Supreme Court case, New York Times v. Sullivan, outlined in 1964, using the law of libel, to drag journalists into court for expressing their sincere views on matters of major public importance is entirely inconsistent with our ‘national commitment to principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open.’”

Mann’s feelings are hurt and he believes that any criticism of the questionable science he applied to the creation of his now-famous global warming graph is libel. I believe the court will conclude that using the charge of libel to silence his critics is wrong. That’s what makes the case important, in particular for a basic principle of science, and in general for the public understanding that global warming and/or climate change depends on vigorous debate.

Science depends on being able to reproduce the results of an assertion by other scientists. Suffice to say that Mann’s graph has been extensively disputed and found lacking in the methods used to produce it.

As Cooke reports, the graph “purports to depict global temperature trends between the years A.D. 1000 and 2000” and takes its name from “a mostly flat line of temperature data from the year 1000 until about 1900 (the handled of the hockey stick), followed by a sharp uptick over the 20th century (the blade).” The graph was published in the 2001 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Since then the IPCC has been retreating from its vehement claim that global warming posed a major threat to life on Earth.

In 2009, the leak of many emails between members of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Center and others engaging in the global warming claims revealed that “Mann and his colleagues have processed their data in a way that makes global warming appear more severe than the evidence suggests on its own.” Most damning was Mann’s use of tree ring data and the way other data was ignored in order to make his claims about global warming appear to be valid. “The leaked emails suggest that some members of the IPCC were well aware of these inconsistencies—and even may have sought to conceal them,” notes Cooke.

Aside from the dubious science cited, the issue before the court is whether publicly questioning Mann can or should be deemed libelous. If it concludes that it is, then the most fundamental principle of science will be destroyed and the courts will fill up with similar cases whose purpose would be to censor and silence the debate that is the life blood of science.

Mann has claimed to have been a Nobel Prize laureate, but Cooke notes that the Nobel Committee “explicitly said that he is not.” He has claimed that the National Academy of Sciences and that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit investigations into his conduct and his work “have fully vindicated him “when they in fact have done no such thing.”

Worldwide, people have been subjected to the greatest hoax of the modern era and 17 years of cooling demonstrates that carbon dioxide, a “greenhouse gas” plays no role in heating the Earth. All of the claims about global warming are demonstrably wrong, along with all of the computer models and other “proof” inaccurate to the point of being purposefully deceptive.

At the heart of the case against the National Review is whether a scientist can silence his critics and one can only hope for the sake of science, free speech, freedom of the press, and the truth that Mann loses.

Editor’s note: The testimony of climate scientist Dr. John R. Christy of the University of Alabama before a 2011 U.S. House hearing on climate change addresses how and why Michael Mann and his “hockey stick” became such a prominent part of the IPCC Third Assessment Report in 2011. It is available at: https://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/hearings/ChristyJR_written_110331_all.pdf

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Science, Free Speech, and the Courts

Much Ado about the Ukraine

April 29th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

Events in the Ukraine are now big headlines and the topic of a torrent of commentaries by experts on Russia, the European Union, NATO and related subjects. The whole thing began after protests forced its president to flee to Russia, followed by the Russian Federation’s annexation of Crimea as disputes between Eastern and Western Ukraine broke out.

At the time and still now I thought it was a predictable action and one that did not involve “invading” the Crimea since Russia has for many years had several thousand troops already stationed there to service and protect its military and naval facilities. Rather than wait around for the Ukrainians to resolve their conflict, the Russians took the reasonable, rational action of annexation. Crimea had been a part of Russia for hundreds of years and the Ukraine was as well. The national language there is Russian.

The problems the Ukraine has encountered began with public rejection of its president, Victor Yanukovycha, a fellow who preferred alignment with Russia than the West. Many Ukrainians thought this was a bad idea, but it seems now that many others had no objections. The main objections appear to have been the dismal governance of the nation, replete with major corruption.

The problem Vladimir Putin poses today is the problem that Russia has always posed for any nation on its borders. From the czars to the commissars, it has a long history of imposing control on its neighbors. They were regarded as a buffer zone. Russia had been unsuccessfully invaded by Napoleon and, after being betrayed by the Nazis with whom they signed a deal to split Poland, they wanted territory between them and Europe. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, those satellite nations declared their sovereignty once again, happy to be free and to embrace Western Europe.

NATO, a European mutual defense organization, was created to respond to what was seen as the potential for Russian aggression. As a member, the U.S. is committed to join in their defense. World War Two was followed by over forty years of “containment” by the West. When in 1992 the U.S. Senate ratified NATO expansion to include nations that bordered the former Soviet Union, it set up the present tense situation. Ukraine, however, is not a member of NATO.

Interviewed in 1998, George Kennan, the U.S. diplomat who was ambassador to Moscow in 1952 and who authored the “containment” policy adopted by the U.S., said the expansion of NATO was a very bad decision.

Presciently, he said, “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” adding “It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia and then (the NATO expanders) will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.”

On April 28, the Associated Press reported that President Obama said of increased sanctions on Russia, “We don’t yet know whether it’s going to work.”

Nothing else in the Obama foreign policy regarding Russia has worked since the famed “reset” in his first term so he’s probably right. On a personal level, not just Putin, but most leaders of foreign nations have concluded Obama is too weak and too incompetent to be treated with anything other than the courtesy his office requires.

Thomas Graham, a former senior director for Russia on the U.S. National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007, recently expressed his view of the current situation in the April 28 edition of the Financial Times. He dismissed a new version of “containment” saying “It will not work. Nor will it advance U.S. interests. Economically, Russian is impossible to isolate.”

That’s true, but its economy is primarily dependent on oil and natural gas sales. If the prices of either were to fall, its economy would go with it. As it is, money is fleeing Russia, investment has halted, and its present threatening posture toward Ukraine may make Putin a hometown hero, but in the rest of the world, he is trouble with a capital T. As for Ukraine, its economy it’s even worse. But Russian pipelines runs through it to Europe. That is reason enough for Russia to show some concern for events there.

Whatever Russia does, the West can be counted upon to wimp out, doing little or nothing. In this case, staying out of the internal dispute in Ukraine may be the wisest course of action.

At home we have watched the influence of the United States decline from the day Obama took office. He has made matters worse by engaging in the reduction of our military capabilities. Until Obama leaves office, there is little that can be done to reverse this lamentable trend.

As the White House and the rest of us watch from the sidelines, we will hear a lot of empty rhetoric. Putin will be called a war monger, but he just wanted to protect Crimea. If he can covertly subvert Ukraine enough to gain more influence over its eastern half, he will try.

I cannot weep much for a nation with historic ties to the Nazis and one in which anti-Semitism is still virulent. This is hardly a nation to which the U.S. should be lending millions with loan guarantees for billions.

What happens to the Ukraine is a matter for the Ukrainians to address, not us.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Much Ado about the Ukraine

Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Agenda

April 23rd, 2014

By Alan Caruba

It is a task just to keep up with the conflicts dividing America, so it is no surprise that many Americans are unsure of what occurred during the “Arab Spring” that began in 2011 and its aftermath since then. It is likely, too, that most do not know who or what the Muslim Brotherhood is, but it has been around a long time seeking to control events in the Middle East and North African nations. It also plays an astonishing and frightening role in America.

“The Brotherhood’s peak in the United States came with the victory of Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential election of 2008,” says Walid Phares in his book, “The Lost Spring; U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid” ($27.00, Palgrave Macmillan). “The network, via its front groups, supported the campaign, not as a formal entity, but as a prelude to receiving influence within American bureaucracies and the new administration when Obama took office.”

“The factions within the global lobby had an overarching common interest: to push back against the forces of secular democracy in the Arab world and Iran, and thus against their representatives and friends within the United States and Europe, for the real threat to the Islamists in the East was a secular liberal revolution backed by the West.”

Phares is an internationally acknowledged and respected expert on terrorism, the Middle East, and events that reflect Islamism, the movement to impose strict Islamic law—Sharia—and other cultural restrictions globally, but most specifically in nations where Islam is the dominant faith.

It’s important to know that the Muslim Brotherhood has been around in the U.S. for decades, as often as not working through front organizations like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Student Association, and others. Using petrodollars, it has supported the creation of Islamic studies departments in universities and maintains a communications program to present through the U.S. media its interpretation of events and thus influence public perceptions and opinion.

Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood members who joined his administration after he took office in 2009 were caught completely off guard, however, by the Arab Spring, the name given to a number of revolutions to cast off despots ruling the Middle East. It began in Tunisia, spread swiftly to Egypt, then to Libya, and affected events in other nations of the region. It was led initially by the youth that were connected to one another by communications technology such as iphones and the Internet. They were joined by secular groups, Muslims who did not wish to live under the repression of fanatical Islamists. Swiftly, ordinary Muslims, women, and others joined them.

In retrospect, a nation whose embassies from Lebanon to Tanzania had been under attack by al Qaeda for decades and which had suffered 9/11, an act of Islamic terrorism on its homeland, would seem unlikely to elect a man whose father was a Muslim, who had spent some of the years of his youth in Muslim Indonesia, and whose brother was an active member of the Brotherhood, to be President. But he was. Twice. This represents almost suicidal stupidity.

From the very beginning of his first term, the White House announced that he would take steps to change America’s image in the Arab and Muslim world. Pharas noted that his first interview was with al Arabiya TV on January 29, 2009 to assert that “The United States was the aggressor in the region” and that “the Jihadists were not the aggressors against humanity.”
There was no denying that the U.S., in the wake of 9/11, had been at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2001 and in 2003 had waged a war in Iraq to rid it of Saddam Hussein. Both wars had the intention to introduce and help establish democracy in those nations. By 2009 Americans were war-weary and Obama made it clear in his campaign that he would pull our troops out and talked of shutting down Guantanamo detention center where the worst captured terrorists were being held.

Within two months of taking office, Obama went to Cairo where he identified America as the cause of the ills afflicting the Middle East. “When millions of young men and women hit the streets of Tehran in mid-June 2009, they initially protested voter corruption and the forced reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinijad as president. Later they pushed against the entire regime. The world,” said Pharas, “witnessed a moment in which the regime in Iran was very close to crumbling.” Obama’s response was not to support the democracy movement, saying he did not want to “meddle” in Iranian elections.

This was repeated during the Arab Spring as, time and again, Obama withheld support for the outpouring of desire for democracy in the affected nations, waiting until the Muslim Brotherhood, the only organized faction, was able to seize the movements in order to impose their own control. In Egypt, the people had to fill the streets of Cairo and other cities a second time to oust them from power.

How successfully has the Brotherhood infiltrated the circles of power in the U.S.? Huma Abedin was the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Azizh Al-Hibri serves on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom; Areef Alikhan serves in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) along with Mohamed Alibiary and Kareem Shora who are members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; and Mohamed Magid who is a member of the DHS Countering Violent Extremism Working Group. There are others. Too many others.

Obama made sure that the word “terrorism” disappeared from the government’s vernacular. When soldiers at Fort Hood were murdered by a jihadist, it was classified as “workplace violence” and the whole concept of the “War on terror” disappeared. It was replaced by the charge that any criticism of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups was “Islamaphobia.”

Obama would tell Americans that “I consider it as my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” Instead, we had a President who would seek to make a deal with Iran, the foremost supporter of terrorism worldwide and a nation determined to make its own nuclear weapons to intimidate the Middle East and the world.

We have a President who turned his back on the forces in the Middle East seeking to install democratic governments. That struggle is far from over, but they and the world must wait until Obama leaves office before real progress can be made against the Muslim Brotherhood and the jihadists.

For now, one of the most powerful Islamists in the world resides in the White House.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Agenda

Obama’s War on U.S. Energy

April 21st, 2014

By Alan Caruba

A nation without adequate energy production is a nation in decline and that has been the President’s agenda since the day he took office in 2009. He even announced his war on coal during the 2008 campaign even though, at the time, it was providing fifty percent of the electricity being utilized.

It’s useful to know that the U.S. has huge coal reserves, enough to provide energy for hundreds of years and reduce our debt through its export to nations such as Japan. It increased coal-fired power generation by ten percent in 2013 while Germany’s coal use reached the highest level since 1990. Both China and India are increasing the use of coal. So why is coal unwelcome in the U.S.? Because Obama says so.

On April 15, the White House held a “Solar Summit” to continue promoting subsidies for solar panels and the Obama Energy Department has announced another $15 million in “solar market pathways” to fund local government’s use of solar energy. Its “Capital Solar Challenge” is directing federal agencies, military bases, and other federally subsidized buildings to use solar power.

According to the Institute for Energy Research, “solar energy provides two-tenths of one percent of the total energy consumed in the United States. While the amount of solar electricity capacity in the U.S. has increased in recent years…it still only accounts for 0.1% of net electricity generated…the least among the renewable sources of hydroelectric, biomass, wind and solar.”

So, in addition to the millions lost in earlier loans to solar companies like Solyndra that failed not long after pocketing our tax dollars, Obama is using the power of the federal government to waste more money on this unpredictable—the Sun only shines in the daytime and clouds can get in the way—source of energy whose “solar farms” take up many acres just to provide a faction of what a coal-fired or natural gas powered plant does.

This isn’t some loony environmental theory at work although the Greens oppose all manner of energy provision and use whether it is coal, oil or natural gas. They always find an excuse to oppose mining or extracting it. This is a direct attack on the provision of energy, fueled by any source, that America needs to function and meeting the needs of its population, manufacturing, and all other uses.

The most recent example of this is the further extension of the delay on the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast. That too is part of Obama’s war on energy for the nation, but it may also have something to do with the fact that the Burlington Santa Fe Railroad owns all of the rail lines in the U.S. connecting to western Canada. They haul 80% or more of the crude oil from Canada to the Midwest and Texas, earning a tidy sum in the process. It is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, a major contributor to Democrat causes and candidates. The Keystone XL pipeline could divert more than $2 billion a year and if its delay is not crony capitalism, nothing is.

This is what the Sierra Club is telling its members and supporters as of Monday, April 21:
“Keystone XL means cancer. It means wolf blood spilled. And it’s nothing short of a climate disaster.” It is a lie from start to finish.

Keystone has become a political issue and the announcement by the Obama State Department that is giving agencies “additional time” to approve its construction due to ongoing litigation before the Nebraska Supreme Court that could affect its route brought forth protests from red-state Democrats in Congress who even threatened to find ways to go around the President to get the project approved. Eleven Democratic senators have written to the President to urge him to make a final decision by the end of May. Some of them will be up for reelection in the November midterm elections.

Even Congress, though, seems incapable of over-ruling or overcoming Obama’s war on the provision of energy sources. In early April, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released new data showing that federal onshore oil and natural gas leases and drilling permits are at the lowest levels in more than a decade. Leases to companies exploring the potential of oil and natural gas reserves were down in 2013 from 1.8 million acres the year before to 1.2 million, the smallest area since records began to be maintained in 1988!

We have a President who gives daily evidence of his contempt both for those who voted for him and those who did not. His anti-energy agenda impacts on the creation of jobs, causes manufacturing to delay expansion or to go off-shore, reduces the revenue the government needs to reduce its debts and deficits, and drives up the cost of energy for everyone.

And he is doing this in one of the most energy-rich nations on the planet.

Editor’s Note:
For the latest, updated information on energy visit http://www.energydepot.us/

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Obama’s War on U.S. Energy

Try to Ignore Earth Day

April 20th, 2014

By Alan Caruba

Try to ignore Earth Day, April 22. It won’t be easy. The print and broadcast media will engage in an orgy of environmental tall tales and the usual end-of-the-world predictions. It will scare the heck out of youngsters and bore the heck out of anyone old enough to know that we have had to endure the lies that hide the agendas that have driven the Greens since 1970 when the event was first proclaimed.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is the third planet from the Sun and fifth-largest of the eight other planets that orbit it. It is the only planet in our galaxy that has life on it and it has an abundance of mineral resources as well as water and the fecundity to grow crops and maintain livestock to sustain the human race.

The climate on Earth is entirely dependent on the natural cycles of the Sun. Despite four decades of being told that the Earth was going to heat up due to greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide and methane, we are currently in a cooling cycle and no child born since 1997 has ever experienced a single day of the dreaded “global warming.”

Humans play a very small role affecting the Earth’s climate although, for example, deforestration is one way it has affects it. Other than cutting down trees, another way is to put the government in charge of vast acres of forest. It has a long record of failing to manage them well to the point where diseases and pests render the trees so weak that wildfires wipe out what would otherwise have thrived.

Otherwise, the Earth is and always has a been a very volatile place, subject to a variety of extraordinary natural events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, blizzards, floods, droughts, tornadoes, and earthquakes. The only thing humans can do is clean up and rebuild.

What has mostly changed for humans has been the discovery of energy sources that have transformed and enhanced their lives. Coal, initially, followed by oil and natural gas. All are carbon based, but then, so are humans and other life forms.

The Greens call them “fossil fuels” and some refer to “dirty coal” or seek to demonize “Big Oil.” Between 2007 and 2012, three U.S. oil companies paid a total of $289.7 billion in corporate income taxes. Until the Obama administration took power, coal provided fifty percent of all the electricity Americans used. Completely bogus “science” cited by the Environmental Protection Agency has been used to shut down coal-fired plants and close down coal mines. And, in concert with costly, unpredictable and unreliable “renewable” energy, wind and solar, have driven up the cost of electricity for everyone.

According to a study by the Heritage Foundation, released in March, over the next two decades the EPA’s climate rules aimed at reducing “global warming” (which is not occurring) will cost the economy $2.23 trillion. An estimated 600,000 jobs will be lost. The jobs that would be created by the Keystone XL pipeline have been waiting five years for the White House to approve the project.

As mentioned, it has been the many inventions that utilize the energy sources the Greens want to “leave in the ground” that have totally transformed the lives of Americans and others throughout the world. What Earth Day is really about is not the improvement of life, but limits that will reduce the world’s population. The one thing all environmentalists agree upon is that there are too many humans. This is a form of fascism that goes back to the creation of the communist/socialist economic systems, none of which have provided the level of prosperity that capitalism has. Even Communist China has adopted the capitalist model.

The other agenda Greens agree upon is that the government should own and control every square inch of the nation’s (and world’s) landmass. That is why climate change is part of the United Nations’ intention to become the single world government. It is home to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has clung to the global warming hoax since they invented it in the late 1980s.

Recently, the IPCC released another report claiming “climate change” will melt polar ice, cause the oceans to rise dramatically, generate extreme weather conditions, et cetera. There have always been extreme weather conditions somewhere and the rest of the IPCC claims are just great big lies that have been around for decades.

Along the way, environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth, among countless others of comparable or lesser size have received millions in membership dues, donations, the sale of products, and from the assets that many own. Many, like Greenpeace, enjoy a non-profit status. For example, in 2011, Greenpeace took in $27,465,948 and had assets of $4,653,179. Multiply that against all the others and it adds up to billions.

Green organizations represent a very big business that is constantly at war with legitimate businesses in the energy, manufacturing, and agricultural sectors, seeking to impose laws and regulations that cost them and consumers billions every year.

If you’re a parent take some time to explain to younger children that the Earth is very old and not going to suffer the claims Greens repeat and repeat. As for everyone else, just try to ignore the Earth Day deluge. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Comments Off on Try to Ignore Earth Day