Posts by AlanCaruba:
We Need Zero Tolerance for “Zero Tolerance”
October 13th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
When I was a youngster a prize possession of every boy was a set of toy cowboy six-shooters and, if you were especially blessed, a belt and holsters as well. In the pre-television days we all went to the Saturday matinees to see our heroes and to learn what it meant to be a man.
The ultimate icon was John Wayne and, for me, one of his finest films was his last, “The Shootist.” In that film after he instructed a boy on how to shoot, he responded to a question of why he had become known for his skills, “I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I require the same from them.” The fundamental morality of why he defended himself was self-explanatory.
My generation grew up with many cowboy heroes. By the time television arrived in the 1950s they became a staple of shows featuring Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy, and Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger, a character from radio. Television gave us James Arness in Gunsmoke. There were others. I can’t think of a major Hollywood actor who did not portray a cowboy in films.
The Westerns were miniature morality plays. There were the good guys in white hats and the bad guys in black hats. What passes for films and television these days is often far removed from any moral content or intent. Much of it is just an excuse for exaggerated cartoonish violence.
This a long way of addressing a trend in our schools that is so wrong that it needs to be examined in a serious way. I am speaking of the increasing trend of suspending children for even saying the word “gun” or pointing a finger at a classmate in the fashion of a gun. It is essentially an insane, indefensible attack on Second Amendment rights to own a gun. The schools—teachers and administration—are engaging in their usual liberal indoctrination and, as usual taking it to the extreme.
Last month, in Osceola County, Florida, an 8-year-old was kicked out of class for playing cops with his friends at Harmony Community School and using his finger to similar a handgun. He was suspended for a day. He had never been in detention or suspended before…for pointing his finger!
Also in September, a seventh-grade student from Virginia Beach, Virginia, may be suspended for the rest of the school year for shooting an airsoft gun with a friend in the yard of his home while they waited for the bus to come. Khalid Carabello, 12, and his friend Aidan, were suspended for “possession, handling and use of a firearm.” It was a TOY. He was on the property of his own HOME.
I suggest this isn’t just a matter of two schools using bad judgment and failing to apply the most minimal common sense. This is a national trend and it has to stop. There has to be zero tolerance for “zero tolerance.”
Others agree and the first week of October was designated the National Week of Action Against School Pushout. There were campaigns from California to Florida, Minnesota to Massachusetts involving both youth and adult activists protesting “zero tolerance” policies and, as often as not, racial disparities in school discipline decisions. For example, the Minnesota Minority Education Project found that almost one in five black male students were suspended at least once in Minneapolis schools in 2012 as compared with one in 29 while male students. That’s a trend too.
The latest data from 2009-2010 shows that three million children in grades K-12 lost instruction time in the classroom because they were suspended; so much for school as a learning experience. Now, in addition to an epidemic of absurd psychological syndromes used to justify drugging school children to keep them docile, just arbitrarily suspending students because of some “zero tolerance” policy is the way too many “educators” respond.
Along with the campaign against any representation of guns, there has also been the inclination for school administrators to call the police instead of addressing the problem themselves. In Los Angeles on October 2nd the Youth Justice Coalition held a press conference and a march to protest police profiling of youth and to advocate for funding of community intervention workers and counselors instead of police in schools. This occurred so often that Gov. Brown signed legislation to encourage districts to limit the role of police when addressing conflicts.
This is a nationwide phenomenon. Ramiyah Robinson, a youth leader in North Carolina, said it best. “We demand that youth stop being criminalized and be recognized as individuals with needs.”
Kids grow up in a culture that reeks of violence in a world where violence fills the news of the day. If they want to play cowboy, to shoot airsoft guns, or in one case to own a “gun” that blows bubbles, they are acting out what surrounds them with no harm to anyone. That’s what all children do.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Absent Superpower
October 8th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
I have been reading “The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople” by Susan Wise Bauer. Minus its notes and index it is 681 pages long and when you include them, it’s 785 pages. It is filled with gore. Between 1100 AD and 1453 AD, in Europe, in Africa, in South America, and in Asia, it is a chronicle of constant warfare, usually accompanied by slaughters that seem gratuitous, but were the normal order of the day.
(Note: For history buffs, the Renaissance is a name assigned to a period between the 14th to the 17th century, so the title of the book includes the period known as the Middle Ages.)
It was a period of constant conflict between kings and their nobles, between kings of England, France and Germany, between the Western and Eastern branches of the Church, with Muslim armies and with the Mongols who had conquered China and came close to the gates of Europe, pausing only because of the death of Genghis Khan. Even the fabled crusades were little more than an excuse for looting and pillage. Kingdoms and empires rose and fell everywhere as the tumult continued with only brief periods of peace for a lucky few.
Just as in the past, the threat of Islamic fanaticism looms large again and just as in the past we are seeing its most potent instrument of conquest, terror, being used. From 9/11 to the slaughters in Sudan’s Darfur region, the attacks in Nigeria, and tumult everywhere the Muslim population reaches a tipping point, the headlines are a reminder of its former history. Islam and bloodshed are synonymous.
If one were to look at just the last century, its history would resemble those that went before. Two world wars were fought along with lots of lesser ones. After World War II two major powers squared off, the United States of America and the Soviet Union. For most of my life they would arm themselves, fight proxy wars, and were deterred only by the unprecedented prospect of mutual annihilation by nuclear weapons.
In time the Nuclear Club would grow to include many other nations including France, the United Kingdom, China, North Korea, and, in the Middle East, Pakistan, India, and Israel. Twice Israel destroyed nuclear facilities under construction, first in Iraq and later In Syria.
It is no secret that Iran has spent billions of dollars and several decades since its 1979 Islamic Revolution to have its own nuclear capability. No one in the Middle East and elsewhere wants this to happen, least of all Israel. A fifteen-minute call between President Obama and Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, was heralded only because no American President had talked to his Iranian counterpart in over thirty years.
Since taking office, Obama has made it manifestly clear that he wants to end the impasse between America and Iran. Obama has an almost mystical belief in his powers to negotiate his way to a satisfying solution. Most observers believe that the Iranians are playing him for a fool.
What is astonishing and dismaying is that Obama recently said that the world is more stable now than in the last five years. What world is he talking about?
His foreign policy failures in the Middle East are ceding much of it and the African Maghreb to militant Islamists.
Withdrawing from America’s superpower role since the end of World War II, Obama has managed to render America too weak to even gain the support of our most steadfast ally, Great Britain, when he ventured to threaten Syria over its use of poison gas. The result of that fiasco was a victory for Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation for intervening to initiate talks regarding the removal of the poison gas. No one in the real world thinks this will ever happen.
When one reads history, it is the arrogance and rapaciousness of various rulers that runs throughout the whole of it. They literally slaughtered hundreds of thousands over the years between 1100 and 1453. It didn’t matter if they were Christian crusaders, the Mongol horde, or those leading a Muslim jihad. It is happening today in Syria with well over 100,000 killed by the Assad regime.
The rules today are no different than those in the past. Today Iran is controlled today by a Supreme Ruler, Ali Khamenei who replaced Ruhollah Khomeini. Though the outward trappings of democratic processes exist in many nations, does anyone believe the Iranians believe their elections are not rigged, along with those of many other nations? A functioning democracy requires people accustomed to living in freedom, protected by laws. There’s not much of that in many places throughout the modern world.
The power of the United States came from more than just its military capabilities. Much of the developed world and even those who resent its power understand America is a bastion of democracy and a stalwart for liberty.
Now, however, that moral power is in question. You can thank Obama for that.
Deep in debt due initially to the two wars that followed 9/11 and mostly from the policies of the Obama administration, the U.S. is on shaky ground when it reaches a point of shutdown over disputes between the President and the Republican Party. The issue, of course, is Obamacare. The nation can still easily pay its debts.
Seventeen times since 1976, the government has encountered a shutdown, usually for just a few days. The most recent shutdowns in 1995 lasted from Nov. 13 to Nov 19 and again from Dec. 5 until Jan. 6, 1996.
It feels different this time. We have a President who makes many of us wonder if all the debt he’s piled up has been to ultimately bring the world’s only real superpower to its knees.
If the current shutdown continues too long, the vacuum of power that it would provide might tempt other nations to engage in some very dangerous behavior.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Face of Tyranny
October 5th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The history of civilization dating back some five millennia is one of unrelenting tyranny, rapaciousness, arrogance, and stupidity. The players and the places changed, but the slaughter was unremitting, the suffering broken only by occasional brief periods of peace, good weather and crops. For most of the past, war, famine, and disease killed most people.
During the famous soliloquy of Hamlet, he contemplates taking his own life, saying “There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life–for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office…”
This list of woes neatly sums up the times in which we live as Americans endure many of these same abuses from a President who seems to enjoy displaying his contempt for them. He has plunged the nation into the highest debt in its history, is using the government shutdown as a crisis to divert attention from recent failures, and is flirting with a national default that would create domestic and international havoc…all while blaming the Republicans, the read end game.
As an October 3rd Wall Street Journal editorial noted, however, “House GOP leaders also insist they don’t want a default, and they’ve already passed a bill to prevent it—not that the media have paid any attention. First sponsored in 2011 by California Republican Tom McClintock and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, the Full Faith and Credit Act is essentially an insurance policy against miscalculation. Their bill certifies that U.S. sovereign debt will always be repaid, on time and in full.”
It is beginning to dawn on a lot of people that Barack Obama is the face of tryanny, a man for whom the Constitution, the democratic process and its need for compromise, exist only to be spurned.
Any President who is happy to preside over closing the White House to public tours, who authorizes placing barricades around Washington War Memorial that is normally open 24 hours a day as well as the Normandy, France D-Day cemetery where our soldiers are buried, is more than merely heartless, but represents a level of evil intent never before seen in anyone who has held that office.
The closing of the Normandy cemetery reminded me that history records that resistance to such tyrants has given rise to the rights of those they governed. The brother of England’s Richard the Lionhearted, John, had inherited the throne and through his incompetence in 1203 had lost Normandy, the last remaining possession in Western France the English had conquered.
The ill will that his barons felt, in part from the constant taxation John imposed, led them to renounce their allegiance to the crown of England. In 1215 they assembled at Runnymede, a water meadow on the Thames and presented John with the Magna Carta that spelled out their rights and those of all Englishmen, protecting them and their property against arbitrary arrest and confiscation without due process of law.
King John was actually fortunate. History records that rulers who acted ruthlessly were often assassinated or beheaded. It was commonplace.
The history of the United States records that the colonists, British subjects, had enjoyed self-rule for easily a century before the British crown, George III, seeking to replenish the treasury in lieu of having fought the French and Indian War in 1763 on behalf of the colonies, imposed the Stamp Act in 1765. It evoked such resistance that it was repealed and replaced a year later with the Townshend Acts that imposed taxes on paper, paint, glass and tea imported from England. They were followed by more resistance and led to an altercation on March 5, 1770 that killed a number of citizens and became known as the Boston Massacre.
For a list of what Americans had come to regard as usurpations of power by the king, one need only read the Declaration of Independence.
By then, the governing of the British empire had spawned a bureaucracy that was not only large, but “appallingly inefficient” noted historian Nathaniel Philbrick in his book, “Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, a Revolution.” After the Boston Tea Party, the king sent a flotilla to seal off Boston Harbor and increased the army in America. By then, George III was in no mood to negotiate.
President Obama has said he, too, does not intend to negotiate with the House of Representatives, constitutionally the body of government empowered to authorize all expenditures for the maintenance of the government.
The House has sent any number of proposed measures to keep the entire government funded, but has also expressed its wish to defund or delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act which is widely unpopular. Against the protest of millions it was imposed solely by the Democratic Party when it controlled both houses of Congress.
Modern-day Americans have been enduring what many regard as acts of tyranny and have begun to regard the President as not merely incompetent, but bent on a course of action to destroy the nation. This is the stuff of revolution.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Verbatim “Climate” Journalism
October 3rd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
On September 27 I was reading my Wall Street Journal as usual when I turned the page to read the following headline: “U.N. Affirms Human Role in Global Warming.” There is no human role in global warming and there is no global warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the past seventeen years.
The Journal article began “Stockholm—A landmark United Nations report issued Friday reaffirmed the growing believe that human activity is the dominant cause because a rise in global temperatures and reiterated that a long-term planetary warming trend is expended to continue.”
I concluded that the Journal had fallen into the common error of “verbatim reporting”, another way of saying that the two reporters bylined on the article had done nothing more than take the UN news release regarding the “summary report” of this week’s fifth “Assessment Report” (AR5) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and then embellished it with a few calls to people identified as experts or spokespersons.
This isn’t journalism. It’s public relations. I know because I practiced both of these magical arts for many years. All governments, all institutions, all organizations, and all enterprises of every description practice public relations. The job of journalists, however, is to lend some balance to the claims or to expose outright lies.
Much to its credit, a September 30 Journal editorial eviscerates the article, noting that the IPCC’s latest report is a “flimsy intellectual scaffolding…to justify killing the U.S. coal industry and the Keystone XL pipeline, banning natural gas drilling, imposing costly efficiency requirements for automobiles, light bulbs, washing machines, and refrigerators, and using scare resources to subsidize technologies that even after decades can’t compete on their own in the marketplace.”
Every few years, in order to maintain the fiction of global warming, the IPCC has put out a report that it claims represents the combined wisdom of several hundred scientists and others—in this case 800 of them. I suspect that are far smaller group, a cabal, a coterie, and conspiracy of skilled propagandists actually write the IPCC reports.
Most certainly, in 2009 with the online exposure of hundreds of emails between the so-called climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and others here in the U.S., dubbed “climategate”, we learned that they had been deliberately falsifying the outcomes of their computer models and, at the time, were growing increasingly worried over the obvious cooling occurring.
What was striking about the totally uncritical Journal article was that even The New York Times—long an advocate of the global warming hoax—actually took note of the many scientists who have long since repudiated and debunked it. It reported that “The Heartland Institute, a Chicago organization, issued a document last week saying that any additional global warming would likely be limited to a few tenths of a degree and that this ‘would not represent a climate crisis.’” The Institute has created a website of useful information at www.climatechangereconsidered.com.
As usual, one often has to read a British newspaper such as the Telegraph to get the other side of the story. It, too, took note of the Heartland Institute that, since 2008, has sponsored eight international conferences that brought together leading scientists to rebut the IPCC lies. In addition, it has released “Climate Change Reconsidered II”, a report that disembowels the IPCC’s report. The Telegraph quoted Prof. Bob Carter, a contributor to the Heartland report, who criticized the IPCC for its “profoundly distorted” view of climate science, calling it a “political body” that was “destroying the essence of the scientific method.”
In a commentary posted on the widely-visited website, Watts Up With That, by Anthony Watts, two leading skeptics of global warming, Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger described the IPCC’s AR5 as a “Humpty Dumpty-esque report once claiming to represent the ‘consensus of scientists’ (that) has fallen from its exalted wall and cracked to pieces under the burdensome weight of its own cumbersome and self-serving processes, which is why all the government’s scientists and all the government’s men cannot put the IPCC report together again.”
The IPCC report said Michaels and Knappenberger was rendered “not only obsolete on its release, but completely useless as a basis to form opinions (or policy) related to human energy choices and the influence on the climate.” They concluded by recommending that “The IPCC report should be torn up and tossed out, and with it, the entire IPCC process which produced such a misleading (and potentially dangerous) document.”
For the layman who has little or no knowledge of climate science or meteorology, it is sufficient to know that none of the claims put forth about global warming have come true. None of the claims being made again will come true. Indeed, given the cycles of ice ages, the present cooling could turn into a new one.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Russia Busts Greenpeace
October 3rd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
I must confess I had a moment of schadenfreud—taking pleasure in another’s misfortune—when I read that, in late September, the Russians had seized the Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise, and towed it to the port of Murmansk after Greenpeace personnel had boarded a Russian oil platform, “Priraslomnaya”, in the Pechora Sea.
Russia called the thirty people arrested “pirates” and, if found guilty, they face sentences from ten to fifteen years in prison. Five of them were Russians while the others came from some seventeen nations, including the United States.
Greenpeace is best known for its propaganda tactics, the latest being the trespass of the oil platform, but in 2009, while Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior was docked in Copenhagen, the tables were turned when members of CFACT, a U.S. think tank devoted to debunking environmental claims, boarded it and, while distracting the crew with donuts, hung a banner that obscured the word “Rainbow” with “Propaganda” turning it into the Propaganda Warrior.
A CFACT spokesman said that the piracy charged seemed too severe, but thought lesser charges should apply. Even Russian President Putin said that piracy did not apply, but their actions were reckless. “We can’t help but appreciate the irony. Greenpeace conducts ongoing campaigns for greater government control over individuals. In Russia, they may get a taste of where that leads.”
Greenpeace has incurred the wrath of many with its aggressive, attention-grabbing tactics and, in 1985 French Special Forces sunk the original Rainbow Warrior when it was docked in New Zealand. Ultimately, an international court ruled that France had to pay Greenpeace $8 million. More recently, Greenpeace campaigners who scaled the chimney of the UK’s Kingsnorth coal power plant were acquitted.
While the incidents Greenpeace stages are intended to draw attention to it, most people are unaware of how large the organization is. It has offices in more than forty nations as it pursues its campaigns devoted to global warming, deforestration, overfishing, commercial whaling, genetic engineering, and anti-nuclear issues.
One of its founders, Patrick Moore, became a critic of what he deemed the organization’s scare tactics and disinformation campaigns. In 2005 he said that the environmental movement had “abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism” and was devoted to inventing “doom and gloom scenarios” to advance an agenda that is essentially opposed to many scientific and technological advances that enhance the lives of billions around the world.
Greenpeace says it depends on 2.9 million individual supporters and on foundation grants, but a recent article by Nick Nichols, a retired crisis management expert and author of “Rules for Corporate Warriors”, examined the cost of tax exemptions noting that “three tax-exempt Greenpeace organizations in the U.S. reported $39.2 million in revenue and $20.6 million in assets in 2011.” Other environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council also were worth millions and were exempted from taxes.
Consider the furor of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party movement groups seeking a similar tax exemption, it tells you just how agenda-driven the IRS is when it comes to groups that claim they are charitable or educational. Nichols notes that both New Zealand and Canada have stripped Greenpeace of its charity status.
While Greenpeace and comparable Green organizations enjoy tax exemptions that would otherwise generate millions, they are also engaged in a wide range of activities intended to undermine its economic welfare. From opposing coal mining to nuclear energy, these groups do everything they can to deny Americans the benefits of affordable and vital sources of energy. They continue to claim that global warming is going to destroy the planet despite the growing body of information that demonstrates it is a hoax.
Patrick Moore recently lead a demonstration outside the Greenpeace office in Toronto, Canada, regarding the Greenpeace opposition to genetically modified rice, known as Golden Rice for its vitamin A content. His banner read “Greenpeace’s Crime Against Humanity—Eight million Children Dead—AllowGoldenRiceNow.org.” For lack of sufficient vitamin A, the World Health Organization estimate that up to 500,000 become blind every year and half of them die within a year of becoming blind as the result of this nutritional deficiency that affects an estimated 250 million pre-school children worldwide.
Russia has provided an object lesson in how to deal with these Green “warriors” on oil, coal, and nuclear energy, and other issues that harm people. Having saved Obama from complete humiliation when he proposed bombing Syria, Russia now demonstrates how to deal with propagandists whose love for the Earth excludes the humanity that calls it home.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
A Very Angry America
September 29th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
I have been trying to remember when there was so much anger between the Democrats and Republicans. Or maybe I should say between liberals and conservatives? Or maybe I should say between the Tea Party and the Republican Party? Or maybe I should say those who find the President of the United States a contemptible liar who has diminished a once great superpower to an object of disrespect?
There is plenty of anger to go around. The mood of the nation is one of anger from one end of the political spectrum to the other.
What is one to make of a White House senior advisor, Dan Pfeiffer, who compared Republicans to arsonists, hostage-takers, and suicide bombers? The Majority Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, told Republicans that “There’s no need for conversations” telling them to send over a continuing resolution without defunding Obamacare. He has called Tea Party members of the House “anarchists.”
Meanwhile, Republicans who do not want to see the government shut down are labeled “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). Instead of keeping the spotlight on the Democrats who foisted Obamacare on us, we have been watching the Republican Party tear itself apart.
As the Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberly Strassel put it, “The tragic reality is that this vote isn’t shaping up to be all that perilous for the owners of the law. Nobody is even talking about Democrats. Nobody has put an iota of pressure on them for months. Every camera, every microphone has been trained on the GOP.”
Her colleague, Daniel Henniger, described the fratricide arising from the dispute over defunding Obamacare, saying, “This effort has not, for some time now, been about victory. It has become as RedState’s Erick Erickson put it with his usual eloquences, about shining a light on the ‘cockroaches’ in the GOP. Ted Cruz has spent months berating his own side as ‘appeasers’ who care only about ‘being invited to all the right cocktail parties in town.”
The result has been a GOP in meltdown while the President happily joined in on Friday calling the Tea Party members in Congress—though not by name– “extremists.”
All this has brought to mind Barry Goldwater’s declaration to the Republican Party when he accepted their nomination to run for President in 1964. “Let me remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” He lost by a landslide to the incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson.
I understood what Goldwater meant, but extremism has never played well in American politics. Indeed, the Constitution is constructed so that any form of extremism can be thwarted by the checks and balances that slow any rush toward ill-considered legislation. That, however, did not work when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and imposed Obamacare on everyone.
Those who believe that, even with a Republican majority after the 2014 midterm elections, President Obama would not veto a bill to repeal Obamacare are deluding themselves. Hating Obama is not enough. Understanding how our republic works is essential.
The Tea Party came about initially as a protest against Obamacare and then grew has a grassroots political movement that elected a number of those it supported to the House. It is this bloc of votes that Speaker John Boehner has struggled to work with. In the Senate, Tea Party members include Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Tom Coburn, Marco Rubio, and Pat Toomey.
Obama has many faults, but he has proven himself a master manipulator. The current struggle over Obamacare has played into his hands. That is unfortunate because what the GOP must do between now and the 2014 midterm elections is to focus on defeating those Democrats up for election who have supported Obama.
The general anger against Obamacare will gain in momentum, but if the GOP is seen as a bunch of crazies, it will affect the outcome. That’s the way it played out in 1964.
At this writing the possibility of a government shutdown is fifty-fifty. It will be over quickly, but by then the GOP will have dealt itself a disservice.
Until the GOP secures control of the Senate, the House, and the White House Obamacare will remain the law of the land. That is very bad news for all Americans and the future of America. Meanwhile, it is a good idea to remember that many bad laws have been reversed and repealed.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Global Warming: The bigggest lie exposed
September 22nd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
I will never understand the kind of thinking behind a lie so big that it became an international fraud and swindle. I cannot understand why an international organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) operating under the umbrella of the United Nations, was permitted to issue reports of an imminent threat to the Earth, to mankind, that a freshman student of meteorology would know were false.
At long last the Big Lie of Global Warming has been totally exposed and we can thank The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank that has organized and hosted eight international Conferences on Climate Change since 2008 to expose the lies behind global warming—now called “climate change”—as it became clear that seventeen years of continuous cooling has put a Big Chill on this Big Lie.
I suspect that the Heartland team, led by Joe Bast and including some remarkable, dedicated people, will only get a line or two in some future historian’s account of the deception that began in 1988 before a congressional committee. Thereafter the global warming hoax was given momentum by former Vice President Al Gore who, along with the IPCC, would receive a Nobel Peace Prize!
It helps to have a sense of humor when you are doing battle with hucksters who have the entire world’s media to defend them. The climate “skeptics”—some of the world’s most renowned meteorologists—dubbed their effort the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and, working with the Heartland Institute, have just released a new edition of “Climate Change Reconsidered II.”
It arrives just as the IPCC will release its 5th Assessment Report. The IPCC’s lies will get lots of news coverage. Heartland’s NIPCC report was fortunate to have notice taken by Fox News, but beyond that most of the intransigent U.S. news media ignored it.
As often as not one has to look to foreign newspapers to get the truth. In Great Britain’s The Mail, the headline on September 14 was “Global warming just HALF what we said: World’s top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong.” A leaked copy of the IPCC report revealed “scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong.”
Well, of course, they were wrong. The so-called “science” on which they were based was idiotic. It focused primarily on carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called “greenhouse gases”, claiming they were trapping heat while being produced by all manner of human activity related to generating energy with coal, oil, and natural gas.
Dr. Martin Hertzberg, Ph,D, co-author of “Slaying the Sky Dragon—Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory”, summed it up neatly, pointing out that water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere is a primary factor affecting climate long term and weather short term.
“The determinant of weather is mainly water in all its forms,” said Dr. Herzberg, “as vapor in the atmosphere, in its heat transport by evaporation and condensation, as the enormous circulating mass of liquid ocean whose heat capacity and mass/energy transport dominate the motions of our atmosphere and the precipitation from it, and finally as cloud, snow, and ice cover which influence the radiative balance between the Sun, the Earth, and free Space.”
As you try to wrap your mind around that explanation, just think about the way the Earth goes through regular seasons as well as predictable cycles of warming and cooling. It has done this now for some 4.5 billion years.
To read “Climate Change Reconsidered II”, visit its website. Among its findings, the report notes that “no close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human related CO2 emissions.” Blaming the climate or even the weather on humans is insane. You might as well blame the floods in Colorado on humans instead of the downpours of rain, comparable to 1894 and 1969.
Indeed, the U.S. gives ample evidence of greatly reduced events associated with the weather. There have been fewer tornadoes over recent decades. It’s been eight years since a Category 3 hurricane hit the U.S. Droughts have been shorter and less extreme than the 1930s and 1950s. And sea levels are predicted to increase barely four to eight inches per century and that may be on the high side. There will be dramatic weather events, but there have always been dramatic weather events!
The Heartland’s new report is welcome, but both they and I know that the same deceitful charlatans are still at work in the United Nations, in the United States, and around the world to keep this greatest of hoaxes alive.
The harm the global warming hoax has done and continues to do is best seen in the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to wipe out the coal industry based entirely on the lie that CO2 is a “pollutant.” When the House Energy& Commerce Committee held a hearing on the Obama administration’s climate policies thirteen agencies were invited to testify, but the administration provided only EPA administrator Gina McCarty and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. The latter read a prepared statement that was one long lie about global warming. Presumably he was under oath!
Ms. McCarty, the latest in a long line of environmental fanatics to run the agency, was forced under questioning to admit that current and proposed greenhouse gas regulations are not there to protect the public but to influence “the international community” to reduce their CO2 and other alleged emissions. Not only do the regulations have no basis in science, but they exist to keep the environmental war on energy use going and to pressure developing nations such as China and India. Within the past month, the citizens of Australia rose up and threw out the politicians who imposed a “carbon” tax on them. The new prime minister has shut down the “climate ministry” that existed to enforce it.
And while most of the world wasn’t watching, the United Nations was seeking to impose, once again, an international agreement similar to the failed and defunct Kyoto Protocol to limit CO2 and other greenhouse emissions, based on the BIG LIE! The 44th Pacific Islands Forum, held in the Marshall Islands, was intent on “an ambitious future climate regime to be finalized in 2015.”
That is what must be understood. These people will not give up until they have no other option. They will continue to exploit the ignorance of people regarding the actual science, penalizing them by driving up the cost of energy use, by closing down energy industries, prospective projects, and the jobs they provide,
They sustain the malignant ethanol scam that is ruining engines as this is being written. They are behind the useless solar panel and wind turbine industries that produce so little actual electricity they are a negative drag on the national grid. You, however, are picking up the tab for their mandated use. They practice a form of child abuse to tell children the Earth is doomed if their mother uses a plastic bag to bring groceries home from the supermarket.
The world’s BIGGEST LIE has been exposed and it will have to be exposed again and again until a stake is driven into the evil heart of the “global warming” hoax.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Turning Smokers Into Criminals
September 19th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
America is filled with groups of people clamoring for their “rights” or claiming they are being discriminated against. One group, however, has been successfully silenced and, broadly speaking, turned into criminals. They are people who enjoy a cigarette, a cigar, or a pipe. There is no one left to speak for them, so I will.
A bit of background; my Father smoked a pipe as long as I knew him and, before him, his father smoked cigarette. Both died well into their 90s. My Mother did not smoke but in the lingo of the attack on smokers, she presumably was a “victim” of secondary-smoke. She died at age 98. I have smoked since my days in college, some six decades. I became a cigar smoker while in the army and have thoroughly enjoyed them ever since.
In 2010 I received a book by Michael J. McFadden titled “Dissecting Antismoker’s Brains”, a privately-published examination of the movement to ban smoking. He wrote at the time “If by some chance they eventually succeeded in eliminating smoking from the face of the earth there would be virtually no time lapse before they sank their fangs into Big Auto, Big Meat, Big Soda, or whatever supposedly idealistic cause was out there that would promise them Big Money and Big Power.”
He was prescient because we have all witnessed campaigns against meat and soda consumption, all replete with “scientific studies” which, on close examination are bogus. We have been through three decades of such studies regarding the end-of-the-world claims regarding “global warming” only to learn in 2009 that they represented a cabal of scientists in America and Great Britain who colluded to produce the International Panel on Climate Change reports, based on falsified “science” and manipulated, bogus computer models.
These days the IPCC’s latest assessment reluctantly admits that its claims have failed, given a cooling cycle that began around 1998. Instead of shutting down and disbanding, the IPCC continues its quest to control the use of energy sources, oil, coal, and natural gas, denying it as much as possible to nations and people who depend on them.
McFadden has expanded on his earlier book with a new one, “TobakkoNacht: The Antismoking Endgame.” (Aethna Press, $27.95, softcover) The title is a play on Kristallnach, a 1938 event in Nazi Germany that revealed the depths of that regime’s hatred of Jews, leading eventually to the Holocaust. Smokers are not being rounded up and killed, but they are subjected to bans and meritless increases in the cost of smoking; taxes that greatly benefit the states imposing them while using the power of taxation to denigrate smokers.
McFadden, who has a strong knowledge of statistics, examines how they have been used, often falsely, to impose the agenda of the antismoking forces. “Statistics have a real and valid use in science and public health,” he says, “but when it comes to using social engineering techniques toward the end goal of creating a smoke-free world, they have been destructively abused to create fear and resentment far more than they have been constructively used to share information and enlightenment.”
“TobakkoNacht” is filled with information and enlightenment; the kind that the antismoking campaigners do not want the public to know. It is just over 500 pages long and, as McFadden warns, “A democratic republic that allows its policies to be built on the basis of lies, and a citizenry that accepts those lies as being the norm, is a republic and citizenry in very deep and serious trouble.” It’s not just lies about smoking, global warming, or what we should eat and drink. It is the lies that assure us that the government is not reading our mail and monitoring all our phone calls and Internet activity. It is the lies that lure the nation into wars.
The lies pouring out of the White House and repeated in the nation’s mainstream media have achieved a mass that the President has called “phony scandals” and they include the attack in Benghazi, the role of the National Security Agency, the actions taken by the Internal Revenue Service against Tea Party and other conservative groups, and the greatest fountain of lies, the Environmental Protection Agency.
In page after relentless page, McFadden cites the facts that disprove the lies about the connections between smoking and health. Yes, some smokers do develop lung disease, but many people who do not smoke also fall victim. No, there is no epidemic of heart attacks among smokers. The alleged links between “secondary” smoke and health are non-existent. Many of the diseases cited have a genetic component in which even people who do not smoke fall victim.
The war on smokers depends on the same general ignorance of science that other comparable campaigns use. They cite “amounts” of “toxic” substances, so let me end with a short lesson in reality:
1 milligram = 1,000 micrograms
1 milligram = 1,000,000 nanograms
1 milligram = 1,000,000,000 picograms
1 milligram = 1,000,000,000,000 femtograms
The same hucksters and frauds that tell you that 0.039% by volume of the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere poses a huge threat to all life and those claiming that the presence of arsenic in tobacco smoke is a health threat are dependent on public ignorance. What you are not told is that there is arsenic in potatoes and in eggplants. What they are not telling you is that the earth’s active volcanoes are natural sources of carbon dioxide, along with others, including humans that exhale it.
The anti-smoking campaign is about controlling people and, as far as Big Pharma is concerned, making a ton of money selling nicotine patches and gum. The “scientists” in universities will make their money generating false studies. It’s a scam. It’s a fraud. It has falsely stigmatized everyone who wants to light up and relax.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
My Cold War and Now Yours
September 15th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
I spent the better part of my life during the Cold War that began at the end of World War Two in 1945 and did not end until the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was replaced by the Russian Federation.
On February 22, 1946, George F. Kennan, a junior Foreign Service officer serving in the American embassy in Moscow sent the first of a long series of dispatches to the State Department regarding Soviet intransigence, recommending a policy of “containment” of its expansive tendencies. It became the U.S. policy throughout the whole of the Cold War. Nine Presidents maintained it.
The war wasn’t always “cold.” The U.S. and Russia had fought proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, faced off over the installation of missiles in Cuba, and then carefully avoided Mutually Assured Destruction by nuclear weapons.
The historian, John Lewis Gaddis, author of “The Cold War”, noted that “By the end of the Cold War, there was little left to hope for from communism, and nothing left to fear.” Now it’s America’s turn to be governed by a president other nations do not fear and who is increasingly mocked by bad actors throughout the world.
Barack Obama has sought to “fundamentally transform” America by way of the communist ideology of a strong central government, a people stripped of their weapons to defend against it, extensive surveillance of their communications with each other, control of their healthcare system, and the dependency on government welfare programs that widespread unemployment produces. When you add in a huge national debt, the prospect of collapse is great.
Mentored in his youth in Hawaii by Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out why Barack Obama has brought this to pass. When that is combined with his raging narcissism, pathological lying, and incompetence, you can begin to understand the events surrounding the Syrian crisis.
The most astonishing aspect of the crisis was a September 11th opinion editorial by Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, and top man in the former KGB, the Soviet state security organization.
Keep in mind that the KGB and its successor, the FSB—the Russian Federal Security Service—specializes in disinformation. The editorial sought to represent Russia as a nation friendly to America’s interests. “Relations between us have passed through several states. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together.”
Russia’s interest in Syria, however, is based in large part by the fact it provides the only port in the Mediterrean for its warships. It is also part of its Middle East axis with Iran. Russia has built nuclear facilities for Iran and both continue to provide weapons to the Assad Regime. Acknowledging the use of poison gas in Syria, Putin suggested it was not used by the Syrian Army and then went on to chastise the U.S.
“It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States,” said Putin. Any student of history knows that the history of the Soviet Union was one of military intervention, the invasion of Afghanistan led to its collapse! (Afghanistan is where empires go to die.) Before that, the Soviet Union had used its military power to control its Eastern European satellite nations. As noted, it sought to install missiles in Cuba to threaten the U.S. until it was forced to remove them. In more recent times, Russia used force to put down the Chechen insurgency, as well as seizing two provinces of Georgia.
How quickly we have forgotten that Putin’s Russian Federation has given Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, asylum after he stole and disseminated information about it. His recruitment and protection is a classic example of disinformation and deception.
Commenting in September 11th Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger said, “The White House, Congress and Beltway pundits are exhaling after the president of Russia took America off the hook of that frightful intervention vote by offering, in the middle of a war, to transfer Syria’s chemical weapons inventory to the UN—a fairy tale if ever there was one. Ask any chemical-weapons disposal specialist.”
The events leading up to Putin’s editorial were the most glaring example of President Obama’s manifest lack of fitness for the job. Unfortunately, the only means of recall is impeachment and a sharply divided nation is not going to go there. We have forty more months of Obama’s destruction of America’s economy and reputation.
As Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, noted in a September 12 Wall Street Journal commentary, “We anoint our leaders to rid us of our weariness when resolve is called for, to draw for us the connection between our security and menaces at a seeming far remove. The leaders of the past two decades who sent American forces to Bosnia, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, were not thirsting for foreign wars. These leaders located America, and its interests, in the world. Pity the Syrians, they rose up in the time of Barack Obama.”
The fighting in Syria will continue. Al-Qaeda will continue to expand where it can. The U.S. will likely pull back from efforts to shape events, having failed miserably to date in Libya and Egypt. We are witnessing a Sunni-Shiite conflict as old as Islam, dating back to Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D.
As the historian Gaddis concluded “the Cold War could have been worse—much worse…the world spent the last half of the 20th century having its deepest anxieties not confirmed.” This was due to America’s firm resolution to resist. We have entered the 21st century engaged in a new war with militant Islam. There is no knowing when the end of Islam’s war for world domination will end, but it is likely to last as long as the Cold War.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Middle East’s Peace of the Grave
September 6th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
After both great wars of the last century nations got together to create organizations that would ensure that large conflicts would not occur again.
After World War I, it was the League of Nations. When Woodrow Wilson (who was reelected in 1916 after promising to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe) tried to get the U.S. to sign on, membership in the League was rejected by Congress in the interest of retaining our national sovereignty. The Versailles Treaty that followed the defeat of Germany also set in motion all the elements of that led to World War II and the creation of colonies, new nation-states, in the Middle East by the French and English after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Even as World War II was winding down, Franklin D. Roosevelt had work begun on the creation of the United Nations.
In 2007, in response to a question from New York Times’ editors, then Senator Barack Obama explained how he would resolve the problems in Syria. “I would meet directly with Syrian leaders. We would engage in a level of aggressive personal diplomacy in which a whole host of issues are on the table…Iran and Syria would start changing their behavior if they started seeing that they had some incentives to do so, but right now the only incentive that exists is our president (Bush) suggesting that if you do what we tell you, we may not blow you up.”
“My belief about the regional powers in the Middle East is that they don’t respond well to that kind of bluster. They haven’t in the past, there’s no reason to think they will in the future.”
So, naturally, the President is currently threatening Syria’s Bashar al-Assad with military action and, having decided to let Congress determine whether he should be granted permission to proceed, may be deterred if it votes to deny it.
George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 after putting together a “coalition of the willing” and going to the United Nations to secure a resolution permitting that action. His Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made a presentation to the Security Council in which he presented proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Obama’s Secretary of State has argued forcefully for U.S. intervention in Syria to rid the nation of Assad, but America currently has no international support, including longtime ally Great Britain.
Bush’s intervention in Iraq, March 2003 to April 2009, led to casualties whose estimates range from 110,600 by the Associated Press to more than a million by the Opinion Research Business Survey. The intervention in Libya in 2011 had estimates of casualties of protesters, armed belligerents, and civilians ranging from 2,000 to 30,000.
Even a “limited” military action in Syria would inflict more casualties, adding to the 100,000 that Assad has already slaughtered and is likely to expand the war into Lebanon, home to Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, as well as Jordan and possibly Turkey. Americans are telling their representatives in Congress not to engage our military.
Writing in The Weekly Standard on September 6, Reuel Marc Gherecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor, dissected the problems posed by Syria and Iran, along with al Qaeda. “When it comes to the Middle East, Obama’s presidency has largely been predicated on two ideas: A hegemonic America is a bad thing, and the second Iraq war was a serious mistake.”
“Time has been unkind to Obama,” said Gherecht. “The withdrawal from Iraq has not left that country better off…al Qaeda now boasts, along with Iran and its militant Iraqi allies, that it drove the Americans out of the country.” Hardly a week has gone by since American military forces left that bombs by Sunni militants have not killed Shiite Iraqis.
In Syria, as Assad’s forces have been unable to quell the rebellion, he has turned to the use of poison gas.
In Egypt, Obama originally backed the Muslim Brotherhood’s overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and in Syria in August 2011 he had told Assad he had to go. It took action by the Egyptian military to remove the government led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya remains in a chaotic state between its tribal factions. The civil war in Syria rages on.
“Barack Obama,” says Gherecht, “is now the American everyone in the region loves to hate.”
Worse than that, warning of the need to intercede in Syria, he said “That so many in the West don’t see this, and are unwilling to go to war to stop such an atrocity—to send a clear signal to tyrants elsewhere—only shows how far we’ve come since 9/11. The Middle East’s power politics have again, hit us head on. We are, perhaps, too ‘fatigued’ this time round for the challenge.”
The only peace in the Middle East is the peace of the grave and the region threatens to erupt into a wider conflagration in much the same way World War II followed in the wake of the World War I.
International organizations, the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, the Arab League, and others have proven themselves incapable of a diplomatic resolution to the self-interest of Middle East dictators and monarchies, and the growing tide of Islamic fanaticism.
Barack Obama, with his pathological narcissism, believed that his Muslim upbringing and his Marxist ideology held the key to bringing peace to the Middle East. He has been proven wrong in the same way his domestic policies are bankrupting America and his foreign policies are dragging it into a war he desperately wanted to avoid and now feels compelled to pursue.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Why Syria?
September 4th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Conservatives are asking themselves why liberals, so opposed to Bush’s war against Iraq and its dictator, Saddam Hussein, are so hell bent to get into a war in Syria and its dictator, Bashar al-Assad?
The President’s assertion of a short attack has been called “the Goldilocks” approach to war, offered as a measured, limited response to the use of poison gas that killed over a thousand men, women and children in late August. Wars, however, do not lend themselves to such measures. They have a way of getting out of control, drawing in nations that have no wish to engage in them.
Moreover, there is ample reason not to rush into any military operation until we know whether, in fact, the poison gas was used by Assad or by rebel forces seeking to draw the U.S. and other nations into the conflict. Logically, there was no reason for Assad to use poison gas. All observers were of the view that he was winning the civil war at the cost of slaughtering 100,000 Syrians and turning millions into refugees.
This is not the first time the world has stood aside while such slaughters have taken place. It is an ugly truth, but it is the truth.
Who is rushing to resolve the horror that is Syria? Not the United Nations. Not NATO. Not Great Britain. Not Saudi Arabia. Not the Arab League. Nor has the United States to the point where Obama had to reverse course and ask for permission from Congress.
When you also consider the failure of the U.S. to arm “moderate” rebel forces as promised, it raises still more questions regarding who to arm and why the proposal has proven so resistant to fulfillment.
An element of the Benghazi scandal is the widespread belief that Libya was being used for the covert transfer of weapons, but that does not explain why the Obama administration blatantly lied about those who perpetrated the attack that killed an American ambassador and three security personnel, nor why there was no effort to come to their aid.
It is absurd to say that Assad’s Syria represents a threat to American national security and the hearings on Capitol Hill made it clear that the Joint Chiefs are very reluctant to initiate an attack that, militarily, is not likely to do much to degrade Assad’s ability to wage war. The Syrian operation comes at a time when the nation’s military capacities have been worn down by more than a decade of fighting in the Middle East. Congress would have to make a special appropriation to cover the cost of the use and replacement of missiles.
Americans have been forced to witness a theatre of the absurd as Democratic Party spokespersons from Obama to Kerry, Pelosi to Wasserman-Schultz, defend the attack while supported by RINOs John McCain and Lindsay Graham. Even Republican leaders such as John Boehner and Paul Ryan have had to make the calculation to support Obama in order to avoid having the nation look weak in the wake of his “red line” statements.
The problem, however, is that the U.S. does look weak after its involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Adding Syria to the list will only enforce that perception.
It is more than a perception. It is a reality. A nation tottering on bankruptcy and default is, by definition, weak. A nation that has degraded its military power is, by definition, weak. A nation led by a vacillating, incompetent President is, by definition, weak.
It has taken barely five years for Obama to “fundamentally transform” America into a liberal cesspool of debt, widespread unemployment, and now a debate over whether to use military power to help him “save face” in a world where the fate of Syria is way down on the list of priorities, led by the increasingly desperate need to save America.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Incredible Shrinking President
September 1st, 2013By Alan Caruba.
In 1981 Lily Tomlin starred in a film, “The Incredible Shrinking Woman”, and it seems to me that Barack Obama is starring in the 2013 sequel, “The Incredible Shrinking President.”
A half hour late to his Rose Garden announcement on Saturday, President Obama put the best possible spin he could on his badly timed threat to lob a half-billion dollars’ worth of Tomahawk missiles into Syria as retaliation for the gas attack; one whose perpetrator is as yet known with any certainty.
This is a President who could not put together a coalition of nations to support his proposed action. His predecessor (“It’s all Bush’s fault”) had some forty nations on board for his attack on Iraq. Obama could not get a United Nations’ resolution. His predecessor had some sixteen UN resolutions. He has been told that Congress would have to authorize covering the cost of the action and of replacing the missiles because his administration has cut the Defense Department budget to the bone.
There’s a word to describe someone who would get himself into such a fix: JERK.
Obama will fly off to a G-20 conference where the other world leaders will no doubt treat him like the witless fool he has proved himself to be time after time. What other president would announce a surge into Afghanistan in 2011 at the same time he announces when the troops would be leaving? What other president has managed in increase Russia’s influence in the Middle East while diminishing our own?
France has offered to hold his coat while he engages the U.S. in an utterly futile military attack on Syria, but the British concluded that they wanted no part of it. The whole of the NATO pact nations have made that plain as well. Obama couldn’t organize a weekend camping trip for a pack of Boy Scouts.
While he makes himself look weak, he is also making the U.S. look weak and that is because we have been weakened…by him. When Clinton did this after U.S. embassies were bombed, we ended up with 9/11. Obama’s reaction to last year’s Benghazi attack was to lie about it.
Looming over everything is a massive $17 trillion debt that is largely the result of incredibly inept decisions Obama made since taking office. The “stimulus” that pour billions into non-existent “shovel ready jobs”, the billions wasted on “renewable energy” companies that promptly went bankrupt, the takeover of General Motors that stiffed its creditors, and, of course, Obamacare.
The damage Obama has done to the U.S. will take the effort of several presidents to repair, assuming that the nation doesn’t implode from its debt and the declining value of the dollar. Obama’s solution is to raise taxes. Kennedy’s and Reagan’s was to lower them and thus speed recovery. Obama is a JERK.
In the process of shrinking, it is interesting to watch the way his incessant speech-making has rendered his audience deaf to what he is saying. Not only was he late to the podium on Saturday, but the only thing anyone really heard was that he was calling off the missile attack.
Asking for a vote in Congress was his only option despite his assertion that he could take the nation into war on his own authority. He may well discover that he has united Congress against him despite top secret briefings and other theatrics. By now the members of Congress have learned to be wary of the “intelligence” being provided.
By now the members of Congress are unhappy with a President who has demonstrated he would prefer to govern without them. By now even members of his own party know that Obamacare is a disaster that can cost them their seats. As the midterm elections loom in 2014, it will be every Democrat for himself or herself. It sets him up for a historic rebuke.
In terms of real power, one can see it seeping away and Obama has likely already begun his lame duck presidency earlier than is the customary two years before the next national election. The midterm elections in 2014 could cost the Democrats control of the Senate and the House. At that point, Obama will have plenty of time to play golf.
I have, over the course of his first term, written on this same theme and it has taken some time for me to grasp just how powerful the support of the mainstream media has been in protecting Obama from gaffs and bad policies. I have taken note of the disaffection expressed by some in the liberal media, thinking that it was larger than just a particular columnist or editorial.
I think, however, that Obama has reached a genuine tipping point. Even if Congress were to authorize a missile attack on Syria despite what he admits is a “war weary nation”, it will be discounted as too little, too late.
At that point, like all second term presidents, Obama will feel his power to influence events slip away. No doubt the already has.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Could Syria Spark WWIII?
August 25th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Who recalls that one of the reasons Americans approved the invasions of Iraq was the fact that Saddam Hussein had used poison gas to kill Kurds?
Now we are told that Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s strongman, has used poison gas to defeat the rebels trying to overthrow him, but the attack killed civilians and came in the wake of news that Assad has been steadily gaining ground over the rebels.
The war has seen the slaughter of an estimated 100,000 Syrians. Why use poison gas at this point?
The U.S. was drawn into the Vietnam War with the false assertion that forces of the north had fired on U.S. naval ships, but it later came out that the attack was minor and hardly constituted a reason to make the huge commitment that led to the long war; one that it lost. Lyndon B. Johnson got the nation into that war with what is widely acknowledged to have been, at best, an exaggeration of the incident.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq, while America was still engaged in Afghanistan, was yet another ill-fated decision. Indeed, it can be argued that after driving al Qaeda out of Afghanistan following 9/11 there was no reason for American military to remain. The U.S. began to depart Iraq in 2011 and it has returned to chaos as the Sunni-Shiite conflict grinds on.
Was the poison attack a “false flag” incident intended to draw the U.S. into yet another Middle East war?
Is there any reason to believe that U.S. military involvement in Syria would have a better outcome than Iraq or Afghanistan?
Naturally, though, observers will speculate who might have initiated the attack, but most certainly one can rule out Russia and Iran, allies of Assad. The Israelis have no reason to want to see an expanded war in Syria. Israel has had a de facto peace with the Assad father and son dictators since the 1967 war.
Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, would surely want to see a quick end to the Syrian civil war because all are trying to deal with a humanitarian disaster involving over a million refugees that have fled the conflict, but there is little reason to attribute a false flag operation to them.
Would the rebels—an assortment of Syrian freedom fighters augmented by al Qaeda groups—use poison gas to draw the U.S. and the West into the conflict? The answer to that is yes.
The most striking attribute of the Obama administration has been its failure to make any good judgments about the Middle East other than to get out or “lead from behind.” Much of this is attributable to the foreign policy advisors he has gathered around him; high level appointees of his national security council and in the CIA have a very Islam-friendly attitude that led them to believe that the U.S. could encourage democracy in a region that has no democratic history to build upon. His latest appointment, the new United Nations ambassador is missing in action; no one seems to know where she is.
The fact is that U.S. presidents have been making bad judgments when it comes to war since LBJ. Clearly, the decisions by Bush41 and Bush43 have not been met with success and, just as clearly, Americans do not want to see our military committed to another conflict in the Middle East.
Obama’s decision to support the ouster of Mubarak, the former Egyptian dictator, led to a short term in office by a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood that, in turn, led to massive demonstrations against him and his removal by the Egyptian military. By then the nation was suffering an economic breakdown with hundreds of thousands facing starvation. Only humanitarian support from Saudi Arabia has prevented this. The U.S. continues to dither over aid to the Egyptian military that has been a reliable ally for decades.
Even Turkey that has had a secular government elected an Islamist who has become unhinged by events. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went from being Obama’s touted friend and partner to an offensive anti-Semite claiming Israel was behind Syria’s civil war. Obama has consistently misjudged who to support in the region.
As this is being written, American navel assets are being moved closer to Syria and American military have set up a command post in Jordan in the event an intervention is deemed necessary.
Writing in The Washington Times, Judson Phillips says, “This is Obama’s perfect war. It is perfect because there are no American interests involved, no reason for America to be involved, and no matter who wins the Syrian civil war, America loses.”
Most certainly, whether he decides to get in or stay out, it would come at a time when the Obama administration has forfeited any claim to leadership in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. At this point, that is likely to be seen as Obama’s greatest legacy.
A century ago in 1913, neither Europeans, nor Americans could have imagined that World War I would begin the following year. The situation in Syria reeks of the same uncertainties and outcome.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Egypt’s Islamic Chaos, America’s Islamic Threat
August 17th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The President who, in 2009, said he thought it unseemly to “meddle” in the affairs of Iran when protesters against its regime were being shot dead in the streets of Tehran, announced to the world on August 15, 2013 that he was angered by the killing of civilians in the streets of Cairo as the Muslim Brotherhood was busy burning Christian churches and homes when they weren’t firing on the Egyptian military that was attempting to end its efforts to impose Sharia rule.
Egypt may be thousands of miles away but the intent of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) to destroy America and, of course, Israel is close to home as the President and his national security advisors have misled Americans as to the true intent and threat of the MB.
In his new book, “The Brotherhood: America’s Next Great Enemy”, Erick Stakelbeck reminds the reader that in February 2011, “the Obama administration’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, portray(ed) the Brotherhood as an Egyptian version of the Peace Corps.” At the time the “Arab Spring” protests were in full swing and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was on the verge of being overthrown. Clapper described the MB as a “largely secular” organization that has “pursued social ends” and a “betterment of the political order.” This was and is utter nonsense, a deception.
Clapper is rivaled in his ignorance of Islam by the current Director of the CIA, John Brennan, who is a well-known fan of Arabs and Islam. He routinely refers to Jerusalem by its Arabic name “Al-Quds” and has called jihad “a legitimate tenet of Islam”, extolling Islam as a faith of “peace and tolerance”, of “goodness and beauty””, that has “shaped (his) own worldview.”
The fact is that the Brotherhood has been repeatedly banned in Egypt, starting in 1948. In 1954 the MB tried to assassinate then-president Nasser and, as Stakelbeck notes, “The Brotherhood would be severely repressed in Egypt for most of the next five decades.” So even in a Muslim nation, the threat the MB represented was understood.
The battles in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, and other Egyptian cities reflect the ultimate intent of Islam to dominate the governance of the Middle East and to establish a global caliphate. It is doubtful that most Americans realize the threat it poses more than a decade past 9/11.
For reasons that historians will puzzle over for years to come, Americans elected, not just the first black President in 2008 and, despite a record of foreign and domestic policy failure, reelected him in 2012. They elected a man who makes no effort to hide his deep sympathy and support of Islam.
During his June 2009 speech in Cairo, President Obama, the son of a Muslim and adopted son of a Muslim who had spent four years of his youth in Indonesia, an Islamic nation, had attended an Islamic school and even gone to prayers at a mosque, said “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States of America to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
Stakelbeck noted that “The Obama administration reportedly “insisted” that “at least ten Muslim Brothers (who were then in opposition to the Mubarak regime) be allowed to attend the speech.” Earlier, in January 2009, Obama gave his first formal interview as President to the Arabic-language network Al-Arabiya and, as we all know, in April 2009 at the G-20 Summit in London, the President of the United States bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia “as other Western leaders looked on in shock.”
Earlier, Stakelbeck had described “the bow” as a “shameless act of groveling, performed in one of his first forays onto the international stage” that “signaled that debasing America and exalting Islam would be key elements in achieving his oft-stated goal of improving America’s image in the Muslim world.” We are all witness to how well that has worked out.
“Just thirteen days after Islamic jihadists murdered four Americans in Benghazi; the president stood before the world’s leaders” at the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2012, “and uttered the now-infamous line: ‘The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.’”
Founded in 1928 the Muslim Brotherhood is defined by its hatred of the West and of Jews. Stakelbeck warns that “The MB’s much-deserved reputation for violence, radicalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism is rapidly disappearing in the Age of Obama” and that is why the struggle for a modern Egypt being fought there against the MB requires the full support of the United States as its military strives to drive its members and supporters from its streets. Obama’s response has been to take time from playing golf to denounce the current interim government that removed Muhammad Morsi from office.
What do you need to know about the Muslim Brotherhood? Consider its motto: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” It is devoted to imposing Sharia law on the world, a barbaric system that promotes beheadings, stoning, discrimination against women and other religions.
“The Muslim Brotherhood”, notes Stakelbeck, “is now present in at least eighty countries, and according to one longtime Brotherhood leaders, boasts some 100 million adherents worldwide.”
It has long been active in the United States through a web of front organizations.
A demonstration of its utter contempt for America is a planned “Million Muslim March: in Washington, D.C. on September 11 by the American Political Action Committee “to demand social justice by the U.S. government”, claiming that Muslims “continue 12 years later to be victimized by being made the villains.”
Despite 9/11, despite the murder spree by Major Nidal Hasan of solders at Fort Hood, and despite the Boston Marathon bombing, militant Muslims in America such as AMPAC’s spokesman, Isa Hodge, are claiming that “our government either sits idly by and does nothing to protect our freedoms or it exacerbates the problem with its constant war on terrorism in Islamic countries…” adding “These lies told to the American population have made it impossible for us to do true Dawa”, the practice of proselytizing or preaching Islam.
On September 11 in the nation’s capital, the lies Hodge has spoken will be repeated. Within them is hidden the greatest threat to the nation and the West, to Christians, Jews, and other “unbelievers.”
Stakelbeck warns that “We’ve neutered ourselves as a society and succumbed completely to a suicidal brand of political correctness imposed by the leftist gatekeepers of the media, the government, and academia. We’ve also just about dumbed ourselves down to the point of no return. And the Brothers know it.”
The threat that the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, and militant Islam poses will be like the smoke from an incipient forest fire wafting through the nation’s capital on September 11. Actual fires are burning in Egypt these days and our enemies live and walk among us.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Citizen Journalist
August 14th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
“The beauty of video, especially amplified by the Internet, is to allow a handful of citizen journalists working on a shoestring to end-run the biggest news organizations in the world.”
James O’Keefe, the young man who exposed the corruption within ACORN, an organization whose voter registration program and others were closely allied with the Democratic Party, has written “Breakthrough: Our Guerrilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy.”
Fresh out of college, O’Keefe formed Project Veritas to go after stories that were being ignored by the mainstream press. ACORN gained him national attention when he and a female colleague pretended to be a pimp and a prostitute looking to purchase a home where they could import underage girls for the sex trade. Their hidden camera and microphone recorded the way ACORN employees were unfazed by this and offered advice on how to do it.
O’Keefe was fortunate to secure the late Andrew Breitbart as his mentor and, through him, access to major media personalities and outlets such as Glenn Beck who at the time had a popular show on Fox News. Breitbart was pioneering Internet news gathering and reporting on his own popular website, one element of which was BigGovernment.com.
As PJTV commentator Bill Whittle would note in the wake of the ACORN expose and subsequent legislation that defunded it, “I think the enemy they were fighting against are the media. By not covering the story, not at all…Breitbart showed that the media is no longer merely biased. They’re no longer even ignoring the news. The mainstream media is now in the news suppression business.”
O’Keefe notes that “the New York Times suppresses more stuff, more consequentially, than any other media outlet in the world. Like the Post, the Times tried not to notice the ACORN furor. The newspaper ran its first staff-written article on the subject on September 15, five days after the airing of the initial video and three days after the Post had run its front-page story.” O’Keefe was not even contacted by a Times reporter until two days after its initial story.
The impact of what O’Keefe’s citizen journalism was having was not lost on journalists who make their living within the business. Then executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, would write “Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks) aims to enlist the media; O’Keefe aims to discredit us. But each, in his own guerrilla way, has sown his share of public doubt about whether the press can be trusted as an impartial bearer of news.”
O’Keefe, however, says that “in truth we don’t have the wherewithal to discredit the media. We merely scoop them. They discredit themselves by refusing to cover stories with national implications that much of America already knows to be news.” The current examples of this are the 2012 Benghazi attack and the Obamacare debacle that continues to unfold with illegal delays, waivers, and its hideous implementation by an already tarnished Internal Revenue Service, involved in its own scandal.
As someone who joined the Society of Professional Journalists on April 1, 1979 and maintained membership ever since, I can attest that journalism over the thirty-five years or more that I have practiced it, has rarely been about being impartial. Indeed, it has gotten worse. Before and since, journalism has largely been an enterprise whose aim has been to advance liberal ideas, liberal legislative initiatives, and those espousing them.
The next time you’re reading the daily newspaper, listening to the radio, or watching television, what you’re not likely to receive is news that will do harm to the progressive agenda. You are receiving the liberal interpretation of what the news is and is not. Were it not for O’Keefe’s efforts you would not have known about ACORN, the deep biases within those running the National Public Radio programming, the attitudes uncovered in the New Jersey Teachers Union, and others.
The response to O’Keefe’s guerrilla journalism has been attacks by those in the news industry to discredit him while reporting on his exposes. He has also been subjected to a bevy a legal suits from those afflicted by the truths he reported. “Although I have been called a liar in a thousand different ways, I have not once been sued for libel or defamation. I have, however, sued others for libeling me. Of course, you would not know that from reading the New York Times.
“The beauty of video, especially as amplified by the Internet,” writes O’Keefe, “is to allow a handful of citizen journalists working on a shoestring to end-run the biggest news organizations in the world. When the American people saw our videos, they responded.”
In the aftermath of the ACORN story, O’Keefe reflected that, “There would be no Pulitzers waiting for us at the end of the day, no speaking engagements at prestigious J-schools. Instead we would face a continuing blizzard of legal challenges, a swarm of snippy media critics, and a tsunami of insider outrage at the slightest accusation of impropriety…It can be brutal along the way, but in the end there is something incredibly beautiful about shoving the facts down the throat of the mainstream media and watching them gag on the truth.”
If you are wondering why President Obama, despite questions about his eligibility to hold office, despite scandals growing like mushrooms, despite his outright lies about Obamacare and the Benghazi attack, continues to go largely unchallenged by the mainstream press, O’Keefe provides a pithy answer. “If today’s reporters found themselves in revolutionary France, they would be endorsing the head choppers, and their audience would cheer each head as it hit the basket.”
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Abandoning the Middle East
August 11th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
A map of the U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa tells you everything need to know about Barack Obama’s failed foreign policy. It is worth noting that Britain and France also choose to close many of their diplomatic posts. The West which has had a long history of coveting and controlling elements of the Middle East and the African continent is in retreat.
It is historic and it speaks to the shrinking of their power to intervene and influence events in this vast region of the world. It is also so dangerous that contemplating the outcome is frightening.
Despite President Obama’s belief that “all wars have to come to an end”, the reality is that we are locked into a long war with the forces of Islamism, the most dangerous threat to civilization the world has seen since the last century.
As we have learned, al Qaeda is not “on the run” even if bin Laden is dead. His close associate, Ayman al-Zawahiri, formerly associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, is very much alive and there appears to be an entire new generation of Muslims who have taken up the flag to wage war on the West and to conquer Middle Eastern nations run by a variety of despots and monarchs.
These wars have been going on for a long time. They date back to the establishment of al Qaeda in the 1980s and the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. I suspect the closing of U.S. embassies as Ramadan ends is going to become a standard precaution in the years ahead.
Algeria faced the Islamist threat from 1991 to 2002 and its military was engaged in a bloody conflict with tens of thousands of casualties until the Islamists surrendered. Today it is Syria that is slaughtering its own dissidents along with a flow of Islamists from the region that include Hezbollah out of Lebanon, fighters out of Chechnya, and military assistance from Iran, among others.
President Obama actually thought he could personally reset the relations between the U.S. and Muslim nations, but he was either delusional and/or a poor student of history. No doubt he assumed that the national weariness with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would make it easy to pull out our military forces without any serious consequences. However, this was interpreted as weakness by Islamists and rightly so.
What is surprising and disturbing is that our intelligence agencies and advisors to the President have been so wrong, so consistently. Al Qaeda and other elements of the Islamist movement are not on the run; they are growing in strength and reach.
Like Democrat Presidents before him Carter and Clinton, Obama has engaged in hollowing out the U.S. military, leaving the nation at greater peril in an always dangerous world.
It could be that leaders in the West have concluded that the reach of al Qaeda and related Islamist groups is so vast that it is too costly to maintain the force levels in the Middle East and elsewhere to project power and influence events. Two U.S. carrier groups used to be stationed in the Persian Gulf. Now there is one.
The swiftness with which former dictators in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt were overthrown no doubt took the West by surprise. The ability of the Syrian regime to hold out in its civil war is another example. The military forces in Middle Eastern nations hold the key to the future and they will determine what it will be.
The good news is that there are secular Muslims in the Middle East that do not want to live under Sharia law. The bad news is that they are not organized and Islamists have no problem with killing them. This is a struggle that will play out very slowly.
Meanwhile, the West has been sidelined. It is now a spectator, not a shaper of the outcome.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
A Military in Decline
August 4th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Wars are often unpredictable. The outcome of such conflicts is also unpredictable, but defeat in future conflicts is now being “baked into the cake” and I suspect most Americans are totally unaware of how serious this threat is. You can be sure potential and actual enemies are calculating the odds.
A recent USA Today article noted that the choice between troops and modern weapons would require the Army to shrink to “as few as 380,000 soldiers and the Marine Corps to 150,000 troops. There would also be fewer Navy aircraft carriers and Air Force bombers. Current plans envision an Army of 490,000 soldiers in the coming years, and a Marine Corps of 182,000”, added that “The Army hasn’t been that small since before World War II when it had 267,767 soldiers.”
In January, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a letter to Sen. Carl Levin, the Chairman of the Committee on Armed Forces.
“The readiness of our Armed Forces is at a tipping point. We are on the brink of creating a hollow force due to an unprecedented convergence of budget considerations and legislation that could require the Department (of Defense) to retain more forces than requested while underfunding that force’s readiness.” The letter addressed the “sequestration that has trigged “a cut in operating budgets of more than twenty percent across the Joint Force compared with the President’s budget.”
While “Troops on the front lines will receive the support they need…the rest of the force will be compromised.” The “looming readiness crisis” would force the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines “to ground aircraft, return ships to port, and stop driving combat vehicles in training.” After more than a decade of hard fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Joint Chiefs warned that “We will be unable to reset and restore the force’s full-spectrum combat capability…”
The U.S. military is on life support. In July, The Washington Times reported that Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, told a gathering at the American Enterprise Institute that fewer than one-quarter of today’s youth can qualify for Army service” but what struck me as odd was his view that this makes “the recruitment of women even more important.”
In the long history of the American fighting forces—indeed in the history of civilization—nations have not called upon their women to be front line combat personnel. The feminist movement in America has changed that and the military is under orders to recruit more women in the name of “diversity.”
It does not take an expert in military affairs to know that the demand to include more women in the ranks will degrade unit cohesion throughout of our fighting forces.
The Center for Military Readiness devotes itself to this topic and its findings should be front-page news. Instead, Americans remain unaware of the deterioration of the nation’s ability to train a new generation to defend itself and project its strength.
A recent Pentagon study by the Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Office (SAPRO) fills two hefty volumes. The Center says it “documents the dysfunctional consequences of social experiments with human sexuality in our military over many years” warning that “Failing to see the big picture, the Department of Defense is moving ahead with plans to extend problems of sexual assault and misconduct into the combat arms.”
As someone who has served in the U.S. Army well before women were introduced as part of the fighting elements, it comes as no surprise that, between 2004 and 2012, the number of sexual assault cases among military personnel “escalated from 1,275 to 2,949, an increase of 129%.” This has occurred in a military that has ”more sexual response coordinators (25,000) than it does recruiters (19,000).”
From the chiefs of staff down through all the officer ranks, the pressure has been on to accommodate the very real differences between men and women. It is compromising all elements of military service and is most evident in the area of training. The Center says “It does not matter what Pentagon officials and women-in-combat activists are promising now…incremental pressures to assign women to fighting infantry battalions eventually will drive qualifications standards down.”
The Marine Corps, an elite fighting force, serves as just one example. They reported that obvious differences in physiology should rule out women in combat. “On average, women have 47% lower lifting strength, 40% lower muscle strength, 20% lower aerobic capacity (important for endurance), and 26% slower road march strength. In addition, both female attrition/injury rates during entry level training and discharge rates were twice those of men and non-deployable rates where three times higher.”
“There is no incentive,” says the Center, “for ensuring that tough training standards for elite fighting battalions remain high and uncompromised.” That is the description for a fighting force that can no longer meet the rigors of the battlefield.
Every indicator of how our military’s combat readiness is being degraded is available to those in the Pentagon and in Congress. Double standards in the name of “diversity” will undermine the vital element of survival in combat, team and unit cohesion.
The Center has called on Congress to acknowledge these ancient and present challenges and to shape policy for the military as is its responsibility under Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.
“To truly honor and respect our courageous servicewomen, Congress should take this issue seriously,” says the Center. “The highest priority should be military necessity, not self-interest, political illusions, or ideology that denies differences between men and women.”
An under-funded U.S. military, riven with all manner of social experimentation involving women and gays, is putting the nation and our global interests at risk.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Great Defunding Obamacare Debate
July 31st, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Congress is going on vacation in August and the President will be taking another one in Martha’s Vineyard where the very rich and the extremely rich pass a summer’s day. When both return they will have until September 30 to pass a continuing resolution; the way the government has been funded for many years.
On the table will be the need to raise the debt ceiling to allow the U.S. to borrow enough money to pay off the largest debt in U.S. history. In his first term, Obama borrowed more than all preceding Presidents combined. His “stimulus” package didn’t work and neither has anything else that might pass for an economic policy. The nation has been stuck in a rut of very low, inadequate growth for five years during which Obama spent the first four blaming George W. Bush and the last year blaming the Republicans.
Looming ahead to further exacerbate the nation’s economic decline is the implementation of Obamacare. Nobody seems to like it much. Major unions have written Obama, telling him to “fix” it and hardly a day goes by that we don’t learn some new horrid thing about it. Nearly half the states refused to set up the insurance exchanges it requires. By nearly everyone’s assessment, it is unworkable.
How bad is Obamacare? As far back as 2009 the Democrats in Congress tried to get themselves and their staffs exempted from it.
There is a debate raging among Republicans over whether to defund Obamacare as a way of avoiding its full implementation and driving a stake through its heart until it can be repealed. The White House is, as usual, lying to the public, saying this would “shut down” the government. It would not. The only services that would be affected would be those deemed “non-essential.”
Rep. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, has maintained that repeal of Obamacare is the only solution. It is not the only answer. Defunding its implementation has been an option since it was signed into law. Boehner (R-OH) has been sharply criticized for not putting this option before the House. Now there’s a momentum growing in both the House and Senate to defund Obamacare.
“Republicans in the Senate and Republicans in the House need to stand on this issue, need to refuse to budge,” says Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), “because we will be complicit in Obamacare…if we provide funding for the administration to do that.” Defunding would be a victory for the Tea Party movement that was instrumental in electing Senators Ted Cruz (R-Cruz), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and others.
Leading the effort to defund Obamacare, the Heritage Foundation reports that it is closing in on securing enough co-sponsors of the Defunding Obamacare Act of 2013 to achieve “critical mass in the House”, but notes that “the Washington Establishment is more interested in striking a deal with President Obama on immigration, taxes, and spending than fighting to defund Obamacare.”
The House, which has passed any number of bills to repeal Obamacare at this point, controls the “purse strings” because all laws involving spending can only be initiated there. The bills, however, never go farther than the House.
Obama knows that the last thing Republicans on Capitol Hill want is to be blamed for causing the government to “shut down.” Political pundits recall that when it happened in 1995 everyone blamed then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and the GOP, but what they don’t remember is that, in 1996, the party picked up seats in the Senate and continued its control of the House. That could be a 2014 scenario, but these are different times with different players involved.
The problem the Republican Party has, in addition to a whole bunch of very squishy members in Congress, is a media that will defend Obama and Obamacare by framing the situation as one of intransigence and a blind desire to punish the President who bested them in 2012 by getting reelected.
The bigger problem, however, is Obamacare.
In my opinion, the Republicans in the House will likely not vote to defund it because they are looking ahead to the 2014 midterm elections. It is easier to fuss about the debt ceiling, get a few spending cuts, and use Obamacare as an issue to secure political control of Congress next year. Only then would the GOP be in a position to repeal Obamacare. To politicians on Capitol Hill, it is a less scary scenario. I would never bet on the courage of politicians.
One possible outcome for Obamacare would be something comparable to the fate of Prohibition, the national ban on the sale, production, and transportation of alcohol that was the law of the land from 1920 to 1933. It was enacted by the 18th Amendment and repealed by the 21st due to its unpopularity. It too was unworkable.
The only thing we know for sure about Obamacare is that it will ruin the best healthcare system in the world and it will end up killing people.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Living in a Communist Economy
July 20th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
In the former Soviet Union, the joke was “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” It took over four decades of the Cold War to finally put an end to the lie that Communism as an economic system works. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union came to an end on December 25, 1991. By then Communism worldwide had killed hundreds of millions of people.
Now, it is true that America is not a Communist nation, but by doggedly pursuing the theories put forth by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, as well as the historically failed theories of Keynes, a British economist who believed that the government must pump money into the economy to keep it afloat, Obama has been trying to turn our Capitalist economy into a Communist one,
Calling our economy “Communist” may seem unduly harsh, but under Obama and his predecessors, the government is in charge of the banking sector, the health and insurance industries, General Motors was nationalized, the government is deeply involved in mortgage lending and now controls student loans. Now stand back and ask if the government—the State—is not now more Communist than Capitalist?
Wedded to failed economic theories, Obama has utterly failed to turn around the economy after the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession.
Writing in the August 2012 edition of Forbes magazine, Louis Woodhill said, “If mismanaging an economic recovery were an Olympic event, President Obama would be standing on the middle platform right now, accept the gold medal. Deep recessions are supposed to be followed by strong recoveries, but, under Obama, the worst recession since the 1930s has been followed by the slowest economic recovery in the history of the republic. In a very real sense, there has been no recovery at all—things are still getting worse.”
Obama still has three and a half years to make things ever more worse than they are. A Marxist in every sense of the word, Obama is so wedded to his belief in “redistribution” of wealth, that he spent the first term blaming his failed economic policies in George W. Bush and blathering endlessly about “millionaires and billionaires.” If the government confiscated all their wealth, it would barely pay for its operation for a month, if that.
The way most people experience a bad economy is whether they are employed or not. The self-employed feel it in reduced income, It is always one of the best indicators of the success or failure of whether things are improving or not.
As of July 2013, the United States has been in 54 straight months with an unemployment rate at 7.5% or higher. As Terrence P. Jeffery, the managing editor of CNSnews, recently noted, it is “the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) started calculating the national unemployment rate.”
Under normal circumstances, Obama would have been defeated by Bozo the Clown in 2012, but he has had the support of the mainstream media from the day he started campaigning for the presidency. That is a powerful instrument of influence, but there is nothing to say it will continue what Bernard Goldberg called its “slobbering love affair” with Obama.
In June CNSnews reporter Elizabeth Harrington noted that there is still “a near record 89 million Americans not in the labor force.” The BLS put the number at 89,705,000 in May. “9.3 million Americans have left the workforce during the presidency of Barack Obama.” When broken down into categories, it means that Afro-Americans saw a rise in May to 13.5% or 11,599,000. Even the employer of last resort, the federal government, saw a decline to a mere 20,361,000. In a Communist society, in theory everyone works for the state.
Where the government becomes the source of all good things, it is worth noting that, as of April, the Department of Agriculture reported that a record number of 23 million households in America are now on food stamps. There are, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 115,310,000 households, meaning that one in five is receiving this government handout.
Virtually everyone knows someone who has lost their job and is searching for a new one., but life under Obama has been especially harsh for the newest generation coming out of high school and college. Generation Opportunity, a non-partisan youth advocacy organization announced its “Millennial Jobs Report” for June, specific to 18-to-29 year olds. With the overall unemployment rate at 7.5%, for this cohort, it is 16.1%!
It is worth keeping in mind that a nation—any nation—with a large group of unemployed youths, the prospects for protests and other problems are a historic fact. They have a lot of energy and no place to apply it. They are also easily manipulated.
In addition to bad economic policies, the government is going all-out to impose thousands of new regulations on all aspects of the economy and our lives. Historian Niall Ferguson, writing in a June edition of The Wall Street Journal, cited the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews’ annual survey of the federal regulatory state, noting that “the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936, it was just 2,620.”
This is national death by regulation strangulation and the President recently unleashed the Environmental Protection Agency even more by declaring “climate change” is a top priority. The EPA is in the process of killing coal-fired plants responsible for just under 50% of all the electricity we use. It wants to increase the amount of ethanol in our gasoline, damaging our auto’s engines at the same time it reduces the mileage they produce.
So, if you think we are still functioning in a free market economy, it is as great an illusion as was Communism in the former Soviet Union. When it was no longer defensible, that nation collapsed and was replaced by a truncated former empire, the Russian federation.
If the United States should face total financial collapse, there will be no real freedom left anywhere in the world. Just as any true Communist would want.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
We’re Having a Heat Wave—Again
July 16th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
I am giving thanks this week, despite the heat wave, that I have not read, nor heard, a single claim that it is proof that global warming has arrived and we are all doomed.
By the time the global warming hoax was in its final days, we were being told that mid-winter blizzards were signs of it. Now the charlatans have switched their message, calling it “climate change” and this is so bogus that it defies description.
Of course the climate changes! It has done that from the billions of years before the first man climbed down out of the tree to stand upright; just in time to learn how to run like hell from whatever creature thought he would make a tasty snack.
I live in the Northeast and residents in the tri-state area face an entire week of temperatures in the upper 90s. The National Weather Service predicts the heat index (what it feels like outside) could hit 105 degrees. In 2006, about forty people died from heat stroke in New York during a heat wave from late July to early August. Most lacked air conditioning.
Curiously, the Earth is actually the farthest away from the Sun during our summer months. The way the National Geographic explained it the “Earth’s elliptical orbit means there will be a point each year when the planet is closest to the sun, called perihelion, and a point when it is farthest away, known as aphelion.” The aphelion was reached on July 5.
By contrast in January of this year Australia was undergoing a historic heat wave complete with wildfires in five of its six states. It set new records hitting 104.6 degrees Fahrenheit; summer in Australia runs from December to February. Far to the north, however, this summer has been the coldest on record in the Arctic and it is forecast to get even colder there towards the end of the month.
What I always find interesting is the way much of the population seems to have absolutely no memory of any previous heat wave or, for that matter, a major blizzard. Either way the news media goes bananas, usually seeing it an apocalyptic scenario. No, it’s just a perfectly normal heat wave or blizzard.
It’s a good idea to keep in mind these and other events are the “weather”, not the “climate.” The climate is measured in terms of centuries or, at the very least, decades. The climate is a trend. The weather is what’s happening outside today.
These weather extremes can be quite dramatic. Wikipedia notes that by 1851, half the population of England was living in towns while London had already grown into a major city. “Modern toilets appear on the scene before modern infrastructure, turning the Thames into an open sewer. In June 1858, a heat wave hit London and baked the river into a fetid mess.” A newspaper reported that “Gentility of speech is at an end—it stinks; and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.” The result was that Parliament moved upstream and anyone who could afford it left town.
In June 1976, England sweltered for fifteen straight days of heat in the ninety degrees and parts of the southwest went without rain for forty-five days. Forest fires destroyed trees and crops.
In August 1948 in the northeast, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities saw the temperature hit a hundred degrees and people flocked to air-conditioned movie theatres or to the airy beaches like Coney Island. I am old enough to recall the pre-air conditioned times before they became a common appliance in people’s homes and apartments. Electric fans provided what little relief there was to be found.
You don’t have to live in a city to endure a heat wave. During the Great Depression the 1936 heat wave that hit the Midwest turned farms into dust bowls and farmers lost their summer crops. It is estimated that some 5,000 people died. Chicago was hard hit and as far north as Toronto. The scene was repeated in 1995 in Chicago when an estimated 500 people died from heat-related deaths.
By the end of the week, Al Gore is sure to issue another one of his boring claims that the current heat wave is “proof” of global warming. Ignore him.
© Alan Caruba, 2013