Posts by AlanCaruba:
Are Americans Living in a Police State?
July 14th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
The thing about a police state is that it tends to creep up on you. One day you think the Bill of Rights is intact and the freedoms you take for granted are intact, but the next day you find out that under the National Defense Authorization Act (HR 1540), signed into law by President Obama on December 31, 2011, you can be arrested and detained without recourse to an attorney or the courts.
HR 1540 kills the concept of Habeas Corpus by permitting the detention of U.S. citizens without trail. In 2009 the National Emergency Centers Act, HR 645, was introduced for the establishment of “internment camps.” I have not been able to determine if it was passed and signed into law, nor have I found any explanation why the Congress of the United States either passed or even considered these laws.
The 2001 Patriot Act was justified as a response to 9/11 and revised in 2012. It gives the government unprecedented powers of surveillance and enforcement in the name of deterring terrorism.
One of Obama’s many executive orders permits him to “commandeer” all domestic U.S. resources, including food and water supplies, energy productions, and transportation, even in times of peace, with no congressional oversight. On March 16, 2012, the National Defense Resources Preparedness EO expands on a law from the 1950s as the Cold War was heating up and there were fears of a conflict with the Soviet Union.
President Obama, obsessed with leaks to the press, has now turned the entire federal government into a workplace where employees are expected to report “suspicious activity” of their co-workers. Failure to do so could result in penalties including criminal charges. Though figures differ, by 2010 there were an estimated 2.5 million full-time federal employees.
According to an article by Jonathan S. Landay and Marisa Taylor, two reporters for McClatchy newspapers, the October 2011 executive order mandating the program is “based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.” The program, deemed flawed, “could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.”
As Americans have been learning in airports across the nation, the Transportation Security Authority routinely engages in profiling and highly intrusive physical “pat downs” that many find humiliating.
In 2011, the TSA’s “VIPR teams” conducted an estimated 8,000 unannounced security screenings at subway stations, bus terminals, seaports, and highway rest stops in which Americans were required to show some proof of identity. This is the same administration that opposes voter ID, but not when the police functions of the TSA are concerned.
In bits and pieces, news of activities at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been reported and, when the dots are connected, some very scary conclusions can be reached. Why has DHS purchased 1.6 billion bullets as of March of this year? That is reportedly twenty times more than the amount of bullets expended in the Iraq War. Why is the DHS reportedly sending thousands of heavily armored vehicles and combat gear to cities and towns around the nation for use by police forces that are increasingly being militarized?
One can find a list of actions by the Obama administration that, together, portray preparations for the implementation of a police state as Americans are detained, as per a DHS report, because they are deemed to be potential terrorists because they hold beliefs and ideologies that include:
# “being fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to international in orientation)”
# “anti-global”
# “suspicious of centralized federal authority”
# “reverent of individual liberty”
# “believe in conspiracy theories”
# “a belief that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack”
# “a belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism”
# “impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists)”
# “anti-abortion”
And those are just some of the “suspicious” activities or beliefs that can get you hauled off to a detention camp without the benefit of a trial.
While there have been a handful of incidents where terrorist acts have been perpetrated by those inspired by Islam, they do not justify preparations that clearly suggest the Obama administration anticipates a perceived national uprising against the federal government. Indeed, a number of marches in Washington, D.C. are planned, including one on September 9.
The legislation that has been passed and the executive orders put in place suggest that there are plans in place to ensure that the implementation of a police state can be swiftly imposed on Americans, contrary to all the protections of the Constitution. Indeed, given their existence, are we not already living in a police state?
© Alan Caruba, 2013
When is a Law,. Not a Law? When Obama Says So
July 10th, 2013By Alan Caruba
Obamacare has been showing signs of being so unenforceable, so expensive, and so utterly stupid that Obama’s administration has had to engage in all manner of patently illegal waivers and delays to maintain theirs lies about it.
In the words of the late Chinese Communist dictator, Mao Zedong, Obamacare has been “a great leap forward” to reform healthcare in America. In China, the Great Leap killed an estimated forty million people between 1958 and 1961. There is no way of knowing how many Obamacare would kill when (and if) it is fully implemented.
Presidents are not allowed to decide what part of what laws—or any laws—they do not want to enforce. Michael W. McConnell, a professor of law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Foundation, recently noted that “Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president ‘shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.”
In Clinton v. City of New York, 1998, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.” MConnell cites this, saying “The employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act contains no provision allowing the president to suspend, delay or repeal it.”
Bearing in mind that Obamacare essentially authorizes the government to seize control of one sixth of the nation’s economy, not to mention intrusively getting between a physician and his patient, it is such a legislative monstrosity, so poorly conceived and written, that it has been subject to a series of desperate efforts by the Obama administration to “fix” what is essentially unfixable.
Obamacare’s effect on the economy has already been felt, slowing hiring, moving fulltime employees to part-time status, causing the cost of premiums to skyrocket, and contributing to 54 months of economic stagnation. It has become a political liability to Democrats who will run for office in the 2014 midterm elections.
Just slightly more than half the States refused to set up the “exchanges” in which individuals would select their insurance plans. This has forced the federal government to set up their own and that is not going well. In April the administration announced that workers will not be able to choose plans from different health insurers in the small business exchanges next year.
The IRS announced it would implement the law’s tax credits, subsidies, and taxes in states with federal exchanges even though the Act “clearly, repeatedly, consistently, and intentionally prohibits the IRS from doing so,” according to Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute. “The IRS has literally asserted the authority to tax, borrow, and spend more than $1 trillion contrary to the express will of Congress” citing Section 4980H of the Act that requires it begin after December 31, 2013.
Congress found the Act’s long-term entitlement to be little more than a Ponzi scheme and repealed it. The anti-conscience mandate, objected to by Catholic hospitals and some employers has been granted a partial delay by Health and Human Services (HHS). Poorly written, an error in Obamacare has led to less access to care for children with pre-existing conditions and a 2011 report found that in 17 States insurers are no longer selling child-only insurance plans.
After Obamacare was enacted in 2009, HHS discovered that some of its mandates would raise costs so much that employers would drop coverage rather than face the costs, so HHS began to issue “temporary waivers” and it turned out that more than half of the recipients were members of union health insurance plans.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the expansion of Medicaid was optional for the States that objected because they can barely sustain the costs of the existing program.
Little wonder that the administration has announced that it has postponed the start date of Obamacare’s “employer mandate” from 2014 to 2015. Only it cannot by law postpone it, nor can it issue waivers or any other changes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
A July 7 Wall Street Journal opinion said “The White House seems to regard laws as mere suggestions, including the laws it help to write. We did not elect a king.
Beware what you wish for and, for decades, the Democratic Party has tried to impose socialized medicine on America. Having blessed it as a tax, my guess is that the Supreme Court will revisit Obamacare to find a reason to declare it unconstitutional.
In the meantime, the voters in 2014 may return control of the Senate to the Republican Party and sustain it in the House. They will repeal it. Obama will veto the repeal, but the veto will be over-ridden by Congress and Obamacare will be as dead as Jacob Marley’s ghost.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
It Can Happen Here
June 30th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
“How the Jews Defeated Hitler” is the title of a new book by Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg PhD, subtitled “Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism.” The title is counter-intuitive because, as is well known, the Nazis murdered six million Jews in Europe during the course of a deliberate genocide that has since become known as the Holocaust.
The author is a professor of political science and is chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the book is more than just a history of that horrific period of history. It is not that long ago. I was a child at the time so, within the living memory of the survivors, their children and grandchildren, as well as others like myself around the world, it is living history.
The value of the book is the way it explains how many of the Jews of Europe, particularly those herded into ghettos, failed to grasp what was happening. “It was initially difficult for most Jews to believe that the Germans actually intended to kill them all.”
Another major factor was that the Nazis ensured that they were disarmed and unable to defend themselves, as were others who opposed the regime.
Where resistance fighters emerged, Ginsburg notes that “Germany relied, especially in Western Europe, on the help of local police forces to deal with partisans, and, especially in France and Holland, whose local police were quite helpful.” In occupied France, “The French police helpfully compiled a card index of all the Jews of Paris by name, street, occupation, and nationality.”
Therein lies the fears and concerns of Americans as they slowly come to realize that their government not only knows where they live, but a great deal of information about them courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, right on down to their local law enforcement authorities.
If or when Obamacare is fully implemented, anonymous bureaucrats will be able to “target” selected Americans who are seeking medical care for death simply by denying it. No need to set up concentration camps to kill them en mass. Just as the little girl who needed a lung transplant that was initially denied by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, individuals identified as “patriots” or other enemies of the state could simply be allowed to die.
So, yes, it can happen here.
The focus of the present day animus against Jews in general—extremely active throughout the Middle East and a major trend in Europe—is the nation of Israel. Zionism, the political movement that supports Israel, is a handy substitute for anti-Semitism.
Dr. Ginsberg, however, notes that “In actuality, Israel’s founding was very much the result of the West’s postwar unwillingness to accept Jewish refugees. Governments that felt that even one Jewish refugee was one too many had to find someplace to resettle several hundred thousand Jews.” The State of Israel, like the mythical phoenix, literally rose from the ashes of Europe’s murdered Jews.
“To the Americans and eventually even to the British, the State of Israel seemed the least undesirable alternative. Within two decades of Israel’s creation (in 1948) though, the reasons for its existence were forgotten or had become irrelevant, and new configurations of political forces gave rise to a renewed European anti-Semitic discourse taking the form of anti-Zionism…The European Left loudly proclaims its anti-Zionism by denouncing Israel as a racist and apartheid state and calling for boycotts of Israeli products, citizens, and ideas.” The United Nations is a hotbed of anti-Semitism.
During World War II, however, Jews played leading roles in the partisan efforts to disrupt German aggression, often held leadership positions in the allied military forces and served within them, were active throughout the FDR New Deal administrations, supported the U.S. bond drives to finance the war, and were instrumental in breaking the codes of the Nazis and Empire of Japan. Jews were also the core of physicists and engineers who developed the atomic bombs that speeded the end of the war in the Pacific.
The same authoritarian and leftist forces, whether it is the rise of Islamic ambitions to conquer the world or the efforts of the Left to impose a one-world government via the United Nations or just to undermine the former power and position of the United States as a defender of freedom, are at work today.
You need not be a Jew to fear the growing centralization of power in the federal government.
If you are a gun-owner, you know that the Obama administration and some in Congress seek to amend and erode the Second Amendment in an effort to take your arms away from you; a common goal of fascism.
If you are a member of the Tea Party or a patriot movement, you now know that the Internal Revenue Service sought to deny applications for tax-exempt status needed for fund-raising.
If you fear that your Fourth Amendment right to privacy is being eroded then you know that the Constitution is under attack.
If you are concerned about government by executive order, then yes, it can happen here.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obama’s Enormous Climate Lies
June 22nd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Putting aside Obama’s intention to further reduce our nuclear arsenal as articulated in his June 19 speech in Berlin, he has solidified his position as the World’s Greatest Liar with his statements about climate change, aka global warming, which he called “the global threat of our time.”
Let us stipulate that the global threat of our time is the rise of Islamic fanaticism in its pursuit of a worldwide caliphate. It threatens some six billion of the world’s population that represent other faiths. It is on the rise throughout the Middle East and into northern Africa’s Maghreb. It has cells in South America and it threatens the lives of millions of Americans if the jihadists acquire nuclear arms.
Regarding the President’s call for nuclear disarmament, veteran journalist Bill Gertz observed that “The president is using a new term to support his earlier disarmament call back in 2009 in Prague, and it’s called ‘peace with justice’ which has a very Marxist-Leninist ring to it. All the rhetoric of the communist groups around refer to peace with justice, (and) now the president has employed it for the first time.”
Obama continues to conjure up global warming despite overwhelming evidence that it does not exist. Dubbed “climategate”, revelations in 2009 made clear that a small group within the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were deliberately falsifying their climate models.
There is nothing that humans can or should do regarding the Earth’s climate. It is a force that is so vast and powerful that calls for renewable energy, energy conservation, and a “carbon tax” on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are utterly false, a danger to human life, a threat to global economic development, and the work of scoundrels and charlatans.
At present, there has been no warming for almost seventeen years. The Earth is in a natural cooling cycle as the result of another natural cycle, the reduction of the Sun’s radiation that warms the Earth.
“For the grim alternative affects all nations,” said Obama. “More severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise.”
The President is lying!
In his 2008 speech in Chicago’s Grant Park following his election, Obama said, “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America”
The change has been, not just the election of the first black American as president, but the first president to consistently lie to Americans. The change he has wrought in his first term and is seeking to bring about in his second includes the largest seizure and nationalization of the American health system in our history and a “stimulus” that wasted billions of dollars that accomplished nothing to reduce unemployment and avoid economic stagnation.
Obama’s promise of change has reduced America’s standing in the world as the protector of peace and his decisions have helped advance the spread of the Islamic jihad.
It has produced a war on coal, the energy resource that, prior to his taking office, provided fifty percent of all the electricity Americans use every day. It has reduced access to oil and natural gas on federal lands. Obama will pursue more action in the name of climate change in the form of more regulation of power plants, new subsidies for so-called clean energy, and other big, futile, farcical, and costly government programs
Obama’s administration has given us scandals from “Fast and Furious” to the failure to come to the aid of our ambassador to Libya in Benghazi; the revelation that the IRS engaged in a deliberate program against Tea Party, patriot groups, and even Jewish organizations. It has reduced and degraded the U.S. military with programs to permit homosexuals to serve and women to be in combat units. An outbreak of sexual assaults—26,000 and most men-on-men—in the military has resulted.
In Berlin, the President said, “Our generation must move towards a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late, that is our job; that is our task.”
On June 25, he will announce new executive orders to implement “climate change” mandates in the face of congressional resistance. He says it will be “my vision for where I believe we need to go—a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change, and lead global efforts to fight it.”
Carbon dioxide is not “pollution”; it is, along with oxygen, the other gas most vital to all life on Earth.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Common Core Straight Jacket
June 18th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
American education was based on some very fundamental principles and, from the 1640s until the 1840s, they were, in the words of Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, “real civics, real economics, and real virtues.”
Bast is the co-author of “Education and Capitalism” and in a recent speech at the Eighth annual Wisconsin Conservative Conference took a look at the way an education system that produced citizens who understood the values that existed before “progressives” took over the nation’s school system, turning it into a one-size-fits-all system of indoctrination.
“One-size-fits-all is easier for bureaucracies, but it’s not good for kids. No two kids learn the same way, and no two teachers teach the same way”, but Common Core not only makes this assumption, but enforces it.
The good news is, as Bast notes, that “since the early 1960s, parents and activists have been fighting to return to the country’s education system to what had worked so well for 200 years.”
In a Wall Street Journal commentary by Jamie Gass and Charles Chieppo, they called Common Core “uncommonly inadequate” and documented the way it destroys student academic achievement. Gass directs the Center for School Reform at the Boston-based Pioneer Institute where Chieppo is a senior fellow.
The brain child of Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education, and spelled out in a letter to Hillary Clinton following Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, Gass and Chieppo quoted its stated intention “to remold the entire American system” into “a system of labor-market boards at the local, state, and federal levels” where curriculum and ‘job matching’ will be handled by government functionaries.”
Gass and Chieppo cited the way in Massachusetts Common Core’s English standards “reduce by 60% the amount of classic literature, poetry, and drama that students will read. For example, the Common core ignores the novels of Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ It also delays the point at which Bay State students reach Algerbra I—the gateway to higher math study—from eighth to ninth grade or later.”
Common Core is not a plan to produce a new generation of citizens who understand the values on which the nation was based and built, but rather one that focuses on job skills to the detriment of civics, economics, history, the arts, and traditional values. It is a system for serfs, not citizens. It is yet another example of how progressives view people as mere instruments of the state and how they have used the schools to indoctrinate and train them for that purpose.
“We have a president,” says Bast, “who thinks wealth is created by redistribution, that the producers of the world will continue to produce no matter how high the taxes or how heavy the regulations. High school and college students are taught to think the same way” to the detriment of “honesty, hard work, self-responsibility, faith, hope, and love. Are these things being taught in public schools today?” asked Bast. “Maybe in some, but not in many.”
“As long as government owns and operates ninety percent of the schools in the United States,” Bast warns, “we have no right to expect that fewer than ninety percent of students who graduate will be socialists.” The result of the two Obama elections are testimony to that.
In a commentary on leftist school indoctrination, Bruce Thornton, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor of classics and humanities at the California State University, described the distortions today’s students are being taught in K-12.
“The founding of the United States, then, was not about things like freedom and inalienable rights, but instead reflected the economic interests and power of wealthy white property owners.”
“The civil war wasn’t about freeing the slaves or preserving the union, but about economic competition between the industrial north and the plantation south.”
“The settling of the West was not an epic saga of hardships endured to create a civilization in the wilderness, but genocide of the Indians whose lands and resources were stolen to serve capitalism exploitation.”
This is not what students who attended American schools in the 1940’s and 1950’s learned, but starting in the 1960s these distortions were, as Thornton noted, “married to identity politics, the defining of ethnic minorities and Third World peoples on the basis of their status as victims of capitalist hegemony and its imperialist and colonialist mechanisms.” Feminism added women to the list of victims “sacrificed to the white male structure.”
The result, said Thornton was “a student population ignorant of the basic facts of history, the vacuum filled with melodramas of victimization, racism, oppression, and violence that cast the United States as the global villain guilty of crimes against humanity.”
It’s a noticeable, though small, trend as parents homeschool their children. A report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased 75%, however that still represents only 4% of school-age children nationwide. These children do far better on standardized assessment exams than those in government schools.
The good news is that parents and activists across the nation are fighting back to ensure that school choice, based on a voucher system, and other options that include tuition tax credits, special needs scholarships, and education savings accounts. These empower parents to enroll their children in schools that have demonstrated higher standards and traditional values.
“If we can return to a free-market education system,” says Bast, “we can solve most of our political problems.”
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Continuing Collapse of the Global Warming Hoax
June 16th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
While the nation tries to come to grips with the cascade of scandals involving the Obama administration, a significant phenomenon has been occurring. It is the demise of the global warming/climate change hoax that has driven national and international policies since the 1980s.
Directed from within the bowels of the most corrupt international organization on planet Earth, the United Nations, the hoax originally generated the Kyoto Protocols in December 1997 to set limits on the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The UN’s climate charlatans claimed that CO2 was causing the Earth to dramatically warm. It was a lie. The U.S. Senate unanimously refused to ratify it and, in 2011, Canada withdrew from it.
As reported by Craig Rucker, Executive Director of CFACT, fast-forward to the recent UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, and news that Russia, joined by Ukraine and Belarus, blocked the adoption of the agenda of the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation”, part of the standard fast-tracking toward a 2015 Climate Treaty scheduled to be adopted and signed in Paris. Part of the treaty is a scheme to redistribute the wealth of developed nations to those less developed.
The Russians were fed up with the usual behind-closed-doors proceedings that create such treaties, but no doubt they were well aware that the treaty would empower the UN to govern a large portion of economic activity around the world. All UN treaties require nations to surrender some aspect of their national sovereignty.
There is clearly a backlash against the global warming hoax, particularly from nations that have discovered the costs to their economies that idiotic “renewable” energy schemes and emissions reductions incur. In the real world, they are experiencing longer, harsher winters as the result of the cooling cycle the Earth has been in for the last seventeen years!
Despite President Obama’s incessant claims that the Earth is heating, scientists in both Russia and China have been publishing data from scientific studies disputing the Big Lie of global warming/climate change.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences—50,000 members strong—recently published “Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report”, two hefty volumes with more than 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data on climate change published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.
In May, Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com and a former member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee submitted written testimony to the committee.
“The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim—from A-Z—the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing,” wrote Morano, “and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.”
“There is no evidence,” wrote Morano, “we are currently having any unusual weather.” Weather events such as the Moore, Oklahoma tornado and the sub-tropical storm Sandy that hit the northeast are normal occurrences despite the damage they inflicted.
In The Wall Street Journal in May, Princeton University physicist Dr. William Happer and NASA moonwalker and geologist, Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt wrote that “Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case.”
Literally thousands of scientists around the world have disputed the IPCC “science” and many former “warmists” have reversed their former beliefs. Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, a top Swedish climate scientist, formerly affiliated with the IPCC, said in February “We are creating great anxiety without it being justified…there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic…
“The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that, if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it, we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”
The threat facing Americans is posed by the Environmental Protection Agency that clings to the Big Lie about CO2 and uses it as the basis for a flood of regulations that are doing great harm to economic recovery and development.
The same holds true for the Departments of Energy and the Interior that deny access to the nation’s huge reserves of energy resources and, in the case of coal, act to destroy its mining industry and plants using it for the generation of electricity.
The global warming/climate change hoax continues to be widely taught in the nation’s schools and that should end. Now.
It continues to be reported as truth by the mainstream media and as fodder for Hollywood movies and for television programs such as those on the National Geographic Channel.
Despite the lies surrounding global warming/climate change, the hoax is in its final death throes and has been for many years. That’s the good news.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Living in the Government’s Fishbowl
June 8th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
You have to wonder why all the data gathering by the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, and the FBI failed to identify and surveil the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing? When even the Russians warned national security authorities about the Chechen brothers, Dzhokan and Tamerlan Tsaraev, they were reportedly interviewed and then ignored.
“Are you planning to make bombs to kill infidels?” “No, sir.” “Okay, have a nice day.”
It is useful to recall the extraordinary fear that the 9/11 attacks generated. Americans were ready to accept any means possible to avoid further attacks. The Patriot Act came off the shelf and was enacted swiftly even though most members of Congress barely had time or perhaps even made the effort to read it.
On June 6, an unidentified “senior administration spokesman” said, “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.” The latest revelations about the scope of that intelligence gathering, combined with those about the misuse of data by the Internal Revenue Service, led The New York Times to say of the reassurances being offered—just trust us—“The administration has now lost all credibility”; amending that shortly after to “…on this issue.” Too late. You told the truth the first time.
The Times, along with many conservatives, was wary of the Patriot Act, saying it was “reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.”
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath and affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
S.T. Karnick, the Director of Research for The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based, free market think tank, said, “The audacity of monitoring everyone’s phone calls in hopes of catching a small number of terrorists demonstrated the unconstitutionality and self-contradiction at the heart of the mass government surveillance. There is no probable cause for which to search any particular individual’s call records, merely a probability that someone somewhere used a telephone to assist in the planning or commission of a crime.”
A report in The Guardian, a British newspaper, of the gathering of all phone data was followed on June 6 by a report in The Washington Post that “The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track one target or trace a whole network of associates, according to a top secret document obtained by The Washington Post.”
That document was leaked and if it were not for such leaks to the news media we would not know even a fraction of what the current and past administrations have been doing with regard to the invasion of the constitutionally protected privacy of Americans.
Dr. Yuri N. Maltsev, PhD, professor of economics at the A.W. Clausen Center for World Business of Carthage College, responded to a Heartland Institute invitation to address this issue saying, “Our Constitution is openly and brazenly violated and it reminds me of how Russians, Chinese, Cubans, and many many others lost their freedom and paid dearly with tens of millions of innocent lives.”
Seton Motley, president of Less Government and, like myself, a Heartland policy advisor, also responded to the invitation, saying, “This is just the latest example—but maybe the worst—of the Obama administration’s complete disregard for the Constitution and the freedom from government overreach it guarantees us. Here’s hoping the stunning totality of all we’ve lost will cause us to rise up and demand that it all be restored.”
We have learned that we now all live in a government fishbowl.
In the aftermath of 9/11 the Bush administration did what it thought must be done to avoid a comparable attack, but the Obama administration has turned the Patriot Act into an excuse to ignore the Constitution and impose a potential police state on all of us.
In a June 6 Wall Street Journal opinion by Elizabeth Goitein, a co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, warned that “The most tangible problem is the invasion of American’s privacy. The so-called metadata collected by the NSA includes information about our calls, such as the numbers we call, the numbers of those who call us, when the calls were made, and for how long. This information may seem relatively trivial at first blush. Yet, pieced together, these details can paint a detailed and sensitive picture of our private lives and our associations.”
Add in the information gained from surveillance of our data on the Internet and you have NO privacy whatever.
It is time to increase restrictions on the way the IRS can use the information we are required by law or regulatory fiat to provide. Indeed, it is time to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a Fair Tax. It is time to remove the IRS from the enforcement of Obamacare and to repeal this noxious law.
It is time to overhaul the Patriot Act and to put strong limits on the capacity of the federal government to indiscriminately gather information on every U.S. citizen with massive data gathering systems in the name of national security.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
What We Do Not Know
June 1st, 2013By Alan Caruba.
On January 8, 1959 as Fidel Castro was entering Havana after the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, fled the revolution that Castro had led there was much joy among the Cuban people except for those closely allied with the Batista regime and those who saw Fidel as a communist. Many of them fled and Miami would become an outpost and a hotbed of hatred for Castro.
That year I was a 22-year-old senior at the University of Miami where some wealthier Cuban families sent their sons and daughters for a higher education. I recall discussing the events with a young Cuban, Blas Herero, who was wondering if he should return. I was utterly clueless. Other than reading some articles that portrayed Castro as a liberator, what I knew about Cuba and Castro could have fit nicely in a bug’s ear.
Castro had been actively trying to overthrow Batista since 1953. His brother, Raul, was known to be a communist and Che Guevera was a Marxist. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, Castro was a problem. He was a problem, too, for the Mafia that owned the casinos in Havana that were a major source of income. Batista received his payoff and the skim, overseen by Meyer Lansky, went to the Mafia bosses who had invested in the casinos. Castro would close them down.
Someone who knows a lot about such matters is William Wayand Turner, the author of a new book, “The Cuban Connection: Nixon, Castro, and the Mob” ($25.00, Prometheus Books). Turner is a former FBI agent who became an investigative journalist and author. Among his other books are “Deadly Secrets: The CIA War Against Castro” and “The Assassination of JFK” with co-author Warren Hinkle. Turner has personally interviewed many top Mafia members and many who were with Castro at the time and since.
Castro had more lives than the proverbial cat. He has survived more assassination attempts on his life that are known. He had the kind of luck that’s rare, but many of the attempts, frequently the plots of the CIA and some in collusion with the Mafia, simply were bungled failures.
The most famous effort to overthrow Castro was the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 16, 1961, organized by the CIA and it was a huge embarrassment to President Kennedy and his brother Robert who at the time was the Attorney General. A year later, in October 1962 when I was in the U.S. Army, we all waited thirteen days to learn the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was part of the Second Infantry Division and we were on full alert. Still in my twenties at the time, I was still essentially clueless about what had occurred except for what I heard on television. I was relieved the crisis was over and was discharged shortly thereafter.
It’s what you do not know about what the government is up to that can get a lot of people killed. For example, on June 3rd, President Obama will sign off on a UN treaty which, if ratified by the Senate, would override the Second Amendment and deprive Americans of the right to own guns. A petition by the National Association of Gun Rights is circulating a petition to be sent to our senators to oppose it.
The problems the U.S. government encountered with Castro and his revolution began in April 1959 when the American Society of Newspaper Editors invited him to visit the U.S. President Eisenhower avoided meeting with him by being conveniently absent to play a round of golf in North Carolina. Richard Nixon, the Vice President, was assigned to meet Castro and Nixon who had risen to fame as an anti-communist had a three-hour meeting with him that destroyed any of Castro’s hopes to align Cuba with the U.S. The Soviet Union stepped in to become Cuba’s best friend.
“There are opinions pro and con,” writes Wayand, “as to whether Castro was a communist before his revolutionary victory. Jim Noel, the CIA station chief in Havana, traveled to the Sierra Maestra range, where the revolutionary was based, to see for himself. His take was that Castro was not a communist. Representative Charles Porter, who spent quality time with Castro in Washington, was convinced he wasn’t in the shadow of Karl Marx. The evidence stacks up that when Castro left Washington for home, he was not a believer in communism. This is convincingly illustrated by his vehement reaction to Nixon’s charge that his administration was riddled with communists.”
Fifty-five years later Cuba is firmly a communist nation with an authoritarian government and a captive population just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. For that we can thank Nixon. An irony of history was the fact that many of those caught during the bungled Watergate break-in were CIA contractors who had taken a role in some of the assassination attempts.
It’s the things we do not know about that the government is doing that shape history and which currently are eroding rights that Americans take for granted.
What we are learning today is that the Obama administration has been waging a war on conservative organizations and a growing number of individuals who are coming forward to share their stories of how the Internal Revenue Service has been used to harass them.
What we know is that Obama is abandoning the Middle East to the control of al Qaeda and affiliated Islamist groups.
What we know is that the Obama administration engaged in a secretive program to run guns to the drug cartels in Mexico. An investigation into “Fast and Furious” was shut down by an Obama executive order.
What we know is that the administration has engaged in a hoax to hide the true facts behind the attack that killed a U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, and those who know what actually happened, including the President and the former Secretary of State, are still stonewalling inquiries. Others closer to the event have been silenced.
As Turner’s book makes clear, it is what we do not know that is the real problem.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
May 22nd, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
From its earliest days, even before the Revolution, Americans valued their newspapers and understood they played a crucial role in the issues and events of the times in which they lived. It would take a while, however, before newspapers evolved from highly partisan advocates of the early political factions to their role as watchdogs of government.
A literate population depended on them for news that revealed the increasing futility of dealing with a British monarchy and parliament that found new ways to tax the essentially independent colonies. Newspapers became the glue of the new nation, eagerly read in every state, providing news of Congress and the presidency.
By contrast, authoritarian governments understood the need to keep a tight control over the news and none more than the Third Reich of the Nazi Party and in the Soviet Union.
On May 21st, Kirsten Powers, writing in the Daily Beast.com, borrowed from words of pastor Martin Niemoller, a German who witnessed their rise to power and who framed the manner in which the Nazis targeted, jailed and killed all those they deemed enemies of the state.
His poem, “First they came” was echoed by Powers who wrote “First they came for Fox News, and they did not speak out—because they were not Fox News. Then they came for government whistleblowers, and they did not speak out—because they were not government whistleblowers. Then they came for the maker of a YouTube video, and—okay we know how this story ends. But how did we get here?” The “we” to whom she referred are the nation’s journalists.
“Turns out,” said Powers, “it’s a fairly swift sojourn from a president pushing to ‘delegitimize’ a news organization to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters.”
“Where were the media when all this began happening?” asked Powers. “With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers.”
This is what I and many other conservative observers and analysts of the President and his administration have been saying since 2009 and earlier. “These series of ‘warnings’ to the Fourth Estate,” said Powers, “were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.”
In his book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler demonstrated his contempt for the public. “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” Obama’s 2008 slogan was “hope and change.” He was vague about the change he had in mind, but we have been learning about it since his election.
Hitler and his minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, set up a department that dealt solely with newspapers. An instructive history of the press in the Third Reich can be found on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis controlled less than three percent of Germany’s 4,700 newspapers.” The elimination of the German multi-party political system ended hundreds of newspapers that would offer any opposition to the Nazi Party. What followed in the first weeks of 1933 was the systematic use of radio, press, and newsreels to stoke fears of a pending “Communist uprising.” This occurred in a pre-television and, of course, pre-Internet era, but it was effective when backed up by the thuggish behavior of Hitler’s paramilitary units that were used to “brutalize or arrest political opponents and incarcerate them in hastily established detention centers and concentration camps.”
Not unlike the popularity and influence of Fox News, the well-known Berlin daily, the Vossische Zeitung, was targeted, along with the Berlin Tageblatt. The former employed 10,000 people, but in 1933, its owners, the Ullstein family, were forced to resign and, a year later, sell the company assets. The latter newspaper was owned by the Mosse family that published a number of major liberal papers “much hated by the Nazis.” When Hitler took power, the family fled Germany.
This is not to suggest that Fox News or the Associated Press will suffer a similar fate, but it is no accident that their reporters are being intimidated by an administration that has seized telephone records as a message to their owners and editors to curb any criticism, any investigation of what they are doing.
Asserting that James Rosen, a Fox reporter, engaged in criminal behavior for doing what any reporter would do, seek out information about the government, has outraged many in the press, but whether they will stand firm or buckle under remains the real question. In Germany, the press became an arm of the Nazi regime.
If history is any guide, we have real cause to fear the intent of the Obama administration—one now distinguished by its leadership for having no memory of any steps they have undertaken to oppress organizations that oppose its agenda, mobilizing the IRS and Department of Justice.
We are looking into a tyrannical abyss and it is time to be afraid, be very afraid.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Green Enemies of Humanity, Science, and the Truth
May 18th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Among the greatest liars on Earth today is the international organization called Friends of the Earth (FOE). It has engaged in the most scurrilous fear-mongering for decades, along with Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund, while all the time they pulled in billions in funding.
In May 2012, the Daily Caller noted that “The Congressional Research Service estimates that since 2008 the federal government has spent nearly $70 billion on ‘climate change activities.’” The leading critic in Congress, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) asked at the time, “Which would you rather have? Would you rather spend $4 billion on Air Force base solar panels, or would you rather have 28 new F-22s or 30 F-25s or modernized C-130s?”
“Would you rather have $64.8 billion spent on pointless global warming efforts or would you rather have more funds put toward modernizing our fleet of ships, aircraft and ground vehicles to improve the safety of our troops and help defend the nation against the legitimate threats that we face?’
On May 9th, I received an email from Friends of the Earth that repeated all the lies we have heard for years. Painting with a very broad brush that completely ignores the fact that the U.S. climate has always had highs and lows of temperature, FOE complained that “Last year the U.S. experienced record-breaking weather all over the country. But, the nightly news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC barely talked about what was fueling this extreme weather—climate change.”
What FOE failed to mention was a record that was set in 2012-13; as of May, according to the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, the U.S. had its longest stretch in recorded history—2,750 days—without a major hurricane landfall. The many claims of “extreme” weather are classic fear-mongering. I might also add that, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, the number of wildfires is at a ten-year low. Glaciers are not melting and seas are not rising, unless a millimeter or two worries you.
“Climate change” is the replacement name for “global warming.” Climate is measured in centuries. The weather is whatever is happening anywhere in the nation on any given day. Around the world, however, there has been a significant increase in cold weather and many are still waiting for spring to arrive.
Typical of the hyperbole that is representative of the lies we have heard from so-called environmental organizations, FOE fumed that “the nightly news programs at the major broadcast networks have largely ignored what is fueling this extreme weather—climate change.” Citing a Media Matters for America study, FOE noted that “ABC’s nightly news program did only one segment about climate change last year. Meanwhile NBC’s news show did only four and CBS just seven segments to this critical issue.” Perhaps this is because these notably liberal news organizations have concluded it is not a critical issue?
It gets better, FOE was angry, saying “What’s almost worse is that when these networks have covered global warming, they have often treated climate change as a ‘two-sided debate’ rather than what it really is; an issue in which there is overwhelming scientific consensus.” These are people who do not want to have a debate because, based on the facts, they would lose. As for scientific consensus regarding either global warming or climate change, there is NONE. If anything, leading scientists around the world have been debunking global warming now for years.
One of the leading think tanks in the effort to end the global warming hoax has been The Heartland Institute. It has sponsored several international conferences in which scientists and others have offered papers and addressed the topic. I recommend you subscribe to its national monthly, Environmental & ClimateNews. Its Managing Editor, James M. Taylor, J.D., provides the latest information on the environmental organizations greatest villain, carbon dioxide (CO2).
Two recent dispatches by Taylor noted in one that “Climate models supporting predictions of rapid global warming during the next century have performed miserably predicting global temperatures during the past two decades”, citing a comparison of computer model predictions and real-world temperatures by climate scientist Roy W. Spencer. In another, Taylor noted that “New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, but global temperatures are not following suit. The new data undercut assertions that atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing a global warming crisis.”
Undismayed by the facts, FOE could only cite the taxpayer-funded PBS News Hour that “devoted 23 segments to covering climate change.” When the President is telling everyone that the climate is the greatest threat to the nation, PBS bureaucrats who know where the money comes from can be depended upon to broadcast his lies.
Ironically, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion by Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer on the same day the FOE email arrived. It was titled “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide.” Schmitt was an Apollo 17 astronaut and a former U.S. Senator from New Mexico. He is an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Happer is a professor of physics at Princeton University and a former director of the office of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy.
“The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
No wonder FOE is upset that even the mainstream media networks no longer want to report on a global warming that does not exist. There’s real science and there’s the fulminations and lies of Friends of the Earth.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The President as Sergeant Schultz
May 16th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
How is it that, time and again, the most powerful man on the planet doesn’t seem to have a clue what is happening in his own government? Famed for never accepting blame for anything, the more I see President Obama these days, the more I am reminded of Sergeant Hans Schultz of the TV sitcom, “Hogan’s Heroes”, that ran from 1965 to 1971.
The wonderful Hans Banner the actor who played the prisoner of war guard left an indelible legacy with his repeated denials, “I know nothing. I hear nothing, and I see nothing”; often all three at the same time to avoid being implicated in Col. Robert E. Hogan’s manipulation of Werner Klemperer’s Col. Wilhelm Klink, the camp commandant of Luftwaffe Stalag 13.
Obama’s way of dealing with everything has been to talk it to death and he has been responding to questions from the press, claiming that the accusations are all “a sideshow” or that “there’s no there, there.” It is not working. In the case of Benghazi-Gate, his lies are so blatant that it has gone from an embarrassment to a full-fledged cover-up.
Similarly, the Attorney General, Eric Holder, has relied on claiming ignorance and putting distance between himself and his Department of Justice’s increasing list of scandals, from Fast and Furious that earned him a citation for contempt of Congress in June 2012 for his lack of candor. His latest “I know nothing” testimony regarding the DOJ’s seizure of the phone records of Associated Press editors and reporters makes one wonder why the President continues to retain him in office or, for that matter, why he isn’t in jail for stonewalling about Fast and Furious, an ATF gun-running scheme that got a border patrol and ICE agent killed.
Those of us who follow the President closely know that he has been lying consistently before and since being elected–twice. His two “memoirs” have been picked apart by reporters who have written their own books on the subject. It would appear that Obama picked up the habit of lying early on in life as the son of a Kenyan who had abandoned his mother, the step-son of an Indonesian whom his mother also divorced, and a man who remarkably was a friend or associate of a long list of shady characters you might more likely find in a detective novel.
He dismissed his close friendship with former 60s Weatherman terrorist, Bill Ayers, as someone who lived in his Chicago neighborhood. He had to throw his longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, under the bus when it became known he said many bad things about America over the course of the many years Obama was a member of his church. The man who conducted Obama’s wedding and christened his children said of 9/11, “the chickens have come home to roost” as if it was America’s fault it was attacked.
Even so, this is small potatoes compared to the way the many “renewable energy” companies received billions in government loans and rapidly went bankrupt. It turned out that many of the many of the men who created those companies where major “bundlers” and contributors to his 2009 presidential campaign. Of the most famous bankruptcy, Solyndra, Obama said, “That was not our program, per se. Congress-Democrats and Republicans—put together a loan guarantee program…” Maybe so, but we have not seen such a program lose so much money in such a short time, betting on solar and wind power projects. The taxpayers got stuck with the bill. The number of actual “green” jobs ended up costing over a million dollars each to create.
Of his failed “stimulus” package, Obama said “Apparently there weren’t as many shovel ready jobs as we thought.” Before spending millions to allegedly revive the economy, you are supposed to know such things.
If not Benghazi-Gate, than the IRS targeting of conservative, patriot, and constitution education groups could provide the fulcrum to bring down Obama’s presidency. Despite his denials of knowledge about the program within the IRS to harass and deny these groups non-profit status, vital to raise donations and funding, and the firing of the IRS commissioner, this is a scandal with which ordinary taxpayers can identify, fearful of audits. Imagine now as the realization sinks in that it is the IRS that will be administering Obamacare!
Up to now Obama could count on the mainstream media to ignore much of the blunders, failures and lies that characterized his first term, but the scandals coalescing as his second term begins have a weight that includes the growing unhappiness of the White House press corps who are tired of being lied to or having to listen to press secretary Jay Carney speak to them as if they were a bunch of witless clowns.
It is said that “the fish stinks from the head” and what we are witnessing is an administration whose corrupt political practices have seeped deep into the government agencies for which Obama is responsible.
It is still too soon to know which scandal or combination of scandals will bring down his presidency, but it will only take a few more eye-witnesses and whistle-blowers to turn Obama into the Wizard of Oz, hiding behind the curtain and pulling the levers to fool Dorothy and her pals or, in our case, those of us who still believe laws should be obeyed and power should not be abused.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
How the Greens Pick Your Pocket
May 13th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The famed Boston Tea Party was a protest against “taxation without representation”, but our pockets are picked every day by a plethora of taxes of which most Americans are not even aware.
We get robbed when the federal government thwarts exploration and extraction of energy resources that would greatly reduce those costs. We get robbed when the government (EPA) conspires to force coal-fired plants out of business through excessive regulation or declares that milk is a form of “oil” to be regulated.
One particularly egregious form of robbery is ethanol. In March, a Washington Times editorial pointed out that “only the government could come up with a bubble in a commodity that’s merely speculative…renewable identification numbers are ethanol production credits created by the Environmental Protection Agency to help companies meet federal quotes for the production of a fuel that doesn’t actually exist.”
Not content with requiring the waste of a basic food product, corn, this other supposed source of ethanol requires refineries to purchase a “renewable identification number”, then priced at $1.10, up 500% from the three cents it would have cost a few months ago. The cost is passed along to everyone filling up their tank.
The cost of the corn that is diverted from the dinner table is in the billions and creates worldwide shortages. Before the Renewable Fuel Standard was imposed, corn prices were between $2 and $3 per bushel. The price of corn has since spiked to $7 per bushel and you pay for that at the gas pump and in the supermarket where corn is an integral element of thousands of food items.
Ethanol is justified as reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but it creates more as it is processed for use and it actually reduces the mileage that a gallon of gas provides. Worse yet, it damages the engines of all new cars and trucks. It is so corrosive, it cannot be shipped via pipelines. And the EPA wants to increase the amount of ethanol to be blended from ten percent to fifteen percent!
Not content with that approach to fending off a global warming that has not been occurring for the last sixteen years, the EPA recently proposed a “Tier 3” rule to further lower sulfur content in gasoline that would increase the refining cost of gasoline by up to nine cents per gallon.
Reflecting on Obama administration policies, David Rothbard and Craig Rucker, co-founders of CFACT, a free market think tank devoted to environmental and development issues, recently noted that “All of the above” too often means all of the above ground and little or nothing below the Earth’s surface: wind, solar, biofuels and wood, for example – but little or no oil, gas, coal or uranium. In fact, more than any other in history, the Obama administration is using its executive powers to delay, obstruct, hyper-regulate, penalize and bankrupt the proven energy that is the foundation of modern living standards.”
The fleecing of the American taxpayer defies the imagination. The Institute for Energy Research recently reported that President Obama has spent $11.45 million for every “green job” created. Since 2009, Obama’s first year in office, the Department of Energy’s $26 billion loan program has created just 2,298 permanent jobs. The DOE has squandered billions on so-called green energy companies—solar and wind—whose investors have also turned out to be heavy contributors to his political campaigns. This is borderline criminality.
Since 2008 when the housing bubble burst, causing a huge economic downturn that has created an estimated 26 million unemployed, the Obama administration has gone about cancelling oil and natural gas leases while at the same time putting an embargo on the issuance of new leases on all federally owned lands.
The federal government owns 28% of the land in the nation and a majority of the land in the energy-rich Western states. It also controls oil and natural gas leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf, the submerged area between land and deep ocean.
In sharp contrast, drilling on privately owned lands has proved to be a bonanza. If the full capacity of the nation’s technically available reserves of oil and natural was unleashed, the United States would not only have no need to import oil, but would become an exporter!
Most Americans are totally unaware of what the government is doing, but all are being impacted as the cost of transportation and electricity continues to rise for no good reason other than government policies and the environmental propaganda about “climate change” and “pollution.”
The Greek myth about Cassandra tells of the god Apollo’s gift of prophecy he bestowed on her to win her affections. When she would not become his lover, he punished her by causing anyone to hear her prophesies of future events to interpret them as lies. The gift became a curse.
Think tanks like CFACT and others are telling Americans the truth, but too many remain deaf to it. The result is our present torpid economy and the cost of energy and commodities that have been increased by the lies Greens tell.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obama Breeds Rebellion Among the States
May 12th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The resistance to Obamacare is writing a new chapter in U.S. history. It may well become the most unpopular law since Prohibition became an Amendment to the Constitution in 1919. By 1933, another Amendment repealed it.
Obamacare passed by a straight Democratic party vote on Christmas Eve in 2009. No Republican voted for it and, as one poll recently revealed, a third of Americans are still unaware it is the law of the land. A divided Supreme Court gave it a pass, calling it a tax, but it is a profoundly unconstitutional law insofar as the federal government may not pass a law that requires Americans to purchase something and to fine them if they do not. It is also playing havoc with the economy, delaying recovery as it deters hiring and encourages firing.
Nonetheless, a number of states have gone on record seeking to nullify its enforcement and some are doing the same as regards gun control. Arizona became famous when it passed its own immigration law in response to the federal government’s failure to protect its border with Mexico. The proposed “Gang of Eight” immigration law is facing stiff opposition for its various provisions, most of which do not address the central issue of security on the southern border.
How out of touch is the President? He went to Mexico and blamed the violence arising from its drug cartels on America, saying “Most of the guns used here to commit violence came from America.” He made no mention of the scandalous “Fast and Furious” scheme in which the ATF actually ran guns into Mexico, claiming they would track them. It took an executive order to throw a blanket of silence over it and a compliant media to ignore that scandal.
It is, however, Obamacare that poses the greatest threat to the nation, intruding on the patient-doctor relationship, robbing billions from Medicare to pay for it, requiring states to fund more Medicaid when many are strapped to meet other needs, and putting 16% of the nation’s economy under federal control.
A total of twenty-seven states have filed suit against Obamacare. Two federal judges have upheld its individual mandate to purchase health insurance and two others have ruled that it is unconstitutional.
Twelve states have introduced versions of the Federal Health Care Nullification Act that was drafted by the Tenth Amendment Center. They include Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Alabama, and Maine. All declare that Obamacare is “hereby declared to be invalid, shall not be recognized, is specifically rejected, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect.”
In South Carolina, on May 1st, the state House passed a bill that declares the bill null and void and goes a step further, criminalizing its implementation. Earlier Governor Nikki Haley, in her state of the state address, said that South Carolina does not want and cannot afford Obamacare, saying of the President’s namesake, “not now, not ever.”
The following day, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback sent a letter in response to Attorney General Eric Holder’s opposition to its Second Amendment Protection Act, declaring it unconstitutional; essentially tell him to piss off. “The people of Kansas,” said the Governor, “have clearly expressed their sovereign will.” The same day, Missouri passed a comparable law protecting the Second Amendment.
Not since the years leading up to the Civil War was kicked off on December 20, 1860 when South Carolina voted for secession, has there been such open resistance to the mandates of the federal government by the states on a range of issues. Earlier, in 1832, President Andrew Jackson had threatened to send troops to South Carolina to enforce federal laws.
Nullification, however, will not succeed as a means to rid the nation of Obamacare. To Obama’s dismay, his gun control law failed in Congress when even members of his party joined in voting against it. The fate of immigration reform remains unknown but it will come to a vote soon enough.
The reason why nullification will fail is embedded in the Constitution. The Supremacy Clause states “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be found thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary, notwithstanding.”
That has not discouraged the legislatures of many states from expressing their opposition to Obamacare, intrusions on the Second Amendment right of citizens to bear arms, and to demand the federal government enforce the laws regarding its borders.
There isn’t a constitutional scholar that does not support the Supremacy Clause. The Heritage Foundation has a policy paper on the subject of nullification that says “there is no clause or implied power in either the national or the various state constitutions that enables states to veto federal laws unilaterally.”
The states, though, can express their displeasure and their opposition to federal laws and that is what lies at the heart of the spate of nullification laws that have been passed. As sovereign republics, the states can and do express themselves and, through their elected Senators and Representatives, have the power in concert to repeal obnoxious and injurious federal laws.
That will be the fate of Obamacare.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Cover-Up
May 7th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
I still recall the long months of the Watergate scandal that began with a botched break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, D.C. on June 17, 1972. It was directed by a group of presidential operatives dubbed the “plumbers” inside the White House. No one died, but a number of the operatives, including the Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to jail!
As always, it is not the crime, but the cover-up that brought down the Nixon presidency. It was the testimony of John Dean III, a top aide to Nixon, who revealed the extent of the corruption that existed and Nixon’s complicity.
The initial revelations and subsequent congressional investigations did not lead to a swift application of the law. Indeed, it would not be until August 9, 1974 that Nixon would resign, the first and only President to do so.
Two years would pass and, if one applies this to the Obama presidency, that means he has some twenty-four months left in office, a period of time in which he can do a lot of damage, assuming events play out as they did in the 1970s. Obama’s conduct of the presidency is a stain on the office at this point and his personal conduct an insult to Americans struggling to find work, pay their mortgages, put their children through college, and maintain any faith in their government.
At this writing, there is no way to know what revelations will occur during Wednesday’s congressional committee hearing on the events surrounding the Benghazi attack that led to the assassination of a U.S. ambassador and the three security personnel who gave their lives in the effort to save him.
What is known is that neither the State Department led by then-Secretary of State Clinton, nor the White House did anything to protect the Libyan embassy and ambassador prior to or during the attack. This is a serious dereliction of duty, particularly by the Commander-in-Chief who retired to bed after being informed of the attack and then flew off to a fundraising event the following day.
Unlike Watergate, four Americans died. That is very serious, but the White House has devoted the months since September 12, 2012 to an effort to distract our attention from that fact.
When the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, can dismiss the attack as something that happened “a long time ago” you get a very clear insight regarding either his insipid stupidity or a deliberate effort to stonewall reporter’s questions, or both. In testimony before Congress, Clinton may well have committed perjury. At the very least, “What difference does it make?” displayed a level of indifference that is appalling.
Most certainly, with the exception of Fox News and a handful of others, the lap dog journalists that cover the White House have done their best to avoid the obvious. Indeed, was it not for the on-going investigative work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, the Watergate scandal might have been swept under the rug.
On May 4 Roger Simon, a political columnist for Politico.com, reminded readers that, on October 27. 2012, he asked, “If Barack Obama is reelected, will he face impeachment over Benghazi—a yet more unpleasant and far more wrenching result than to lose an election?”
“It could happen—and in my estimation should happen—the way revelations are playing out over the bloody terror attack that took four American lives and has led to weeks of prevarication and obfuscation.” In Simon’s opinion, “Barack Obama is bloody lucky he’s a Democrat, because if he were a Republican, he’d been in deep trouble right now, close to the brink of extinction. Only his increasingly pathetic loyal media clique can save him. It will be interesting to see if they do so at the expense of their own reputations.”
If history is any guide, those who will testify at the congressional committee hearing now and subsequent ones to occur, will lay the blame at the door of the Oval Office, the Department of State, and even Defense.
There is a lot of malfeasance and misfeasance to go around. Recall that the President, Secretary of State Clinton, and the Ambassador to the UN, were all complicit in spreading the boldfaced lie that the attack was not orchestrated by al Qaeda—on the anniversary of 9/11—but was the result of a video that was alleged to inflame the anger of Islamic terrorists.
I doubt that anyone in the CIA and other agencies of government wants to go to jail for Barack Obama or Clinton.
We are, I suspect, going to repeat a new version of the Watergate scandal and, if Congress and the courts rise to the occasion, we may well have seen the last of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Amnesty Bill is a Massive Multi-Million Dollar Fraud
May 5th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Native-born and naturalized Americans who are currently seeking work are already competing with illegal immigrants—a term that the Associated Press says it will no longer use—or standing in line behind them as they sign up for all manner of welfare benefits. The official estimate of the number of illegal aliens—oops, undocumented aliens—in the nation is estimated to be eleven million, but if the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill becomes law, it will act as a magnet to attract millions more.
As Roy Beck, the founder and president of NumbersUSA, points out, “If Congress passes the Senate Gang of Eight bill, it would be like re-creating ALL of the Top 20 cities in the United States, filling them entirely with foreign citizens and giving them lifetime work permits to compete with America’s struggling workers—in just ten years’ time.”
NumbersUSA analysts spent two weeks reading the 844-page bill, concluding that 33 million lifetime work permits would be given to foreign citizens in the first decade if the bill passes. A revised bill has 867 pages and, according to a Daily Caller article, “contains 999 references to waivers, exemptions, and political discretion”, more even than Obamacare.
That’s a lot of competition for jobs and it will hit those graduating from high school and college the hardest. Right now, the youth unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds is 11.7% and, among them, the African-American cohort’s rate it 20.1% and Hispanics’ rate is 12.6%. An additional 1.7 million young adults are not counted as “unemployed” because they are not in the labor force, meaning that they have given up looking for work due to lack of jobs. Do we really want to add millions of formerly illegal immigrants to the work force at this time?
The Center for Immigration Studies also analyzed the Gang of Eight amnesty bill and discovered that it is essentially a Get Out of Jail card:
The report, by Ronald Mortensen, a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, shows that the token penalties, when they do exist, are not commensurate with the employment-related felonies committed by the majority of illegal aliens, nor are they commensurate with the benefits received by illegal aliens.
Just as unfortunate is the fact that millions of victims of these crimes are ignored while the amnestied illegals are rewarded and even benefit from the so-called penalties, as the monies actually go into a fund that provides services to the very people who paid the “penalties”.
“Illegal aliens will be rewarded for breaking laws for which American citizens are routinely punished,” said Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “For example, an American citizen would face a maximum penalty of ten years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 for using a fraudulent Social Security card, but under this bill the illegal alien would face a $1,000 penalty covering all his many offenses, a penalty which in many cases will be waived. Then, they would be issued a new Social Security number without any past bad credit or arrest records.”
View the full report at: http://cis.org/immigration-reform-amnesty-illegal-aliens-and-their-employers
Dr. Mortensen discovered the following amnesties for illegal aliens and their employers:
Amnesty for the estimated 75 percent of illegal aliens committing Social Security fraud.
Amnesty from returning to home countries for 10 years before adjusting status.
Amnesty for illegal aliens committing Identity theft.
Amnesty for illegal aliens by officially authorizing them to continue committing identity theft by using fraudulently obtained Social Security numbers belonging to American citizens.
Amnesty for illegal aliens who have committed perjury on I-9 forms.
De-Facto amnesty from the token $1,000 penalty, since it effectively pre-pays services provided to illegal aliens.
Amnesty from existing exclusion, deportation, and removal orders:
While illegal aliens would be granted amnesty for crimes they have committed, government employees who discover Social Security fraud, identity theft, or perjury on I-9 forms while reviewing applications for provisional status would be prohibited from notifying victims, law enforcement, etc. with a threat of a $10,000 penalty. This is 10 times more than the $1,000 penalty paid by an illegal alien who has committed felony identity theft.
Amnesty for employers found to have employed illegal aliens or who are currently employing illegal aliens. Moreover, employers may continue to employ illegal aliens, accept fraudulent Social Security numbers, and renew falsified I-9 forms for those who apply for provisional status.
Amnesty for employers who did not withhold and/or submit payroll taxes for individuals illegally in the United States.
Amnesty for employers who violated labor laws by paying unfair wages, who failed to pay wages, etc.
Amnesty for employers who facilitated Social Security fraud and identity theft by providing or accepting false Social Security numbers.
While employers would be held harmless, government employees who find that employers violated the law while reviewing applications for temporary status would be prohibited from notifying the appropriate law enforcement authorities. If government employees do report tax or labor violations, they could face a fine of $10,000.
Thanks to the passage of Obamacare, the amnesty bill would increase the cost of the nationalized health care system. Betsy McCaughey, the lieutenant governor of New York from 1995 to 1998, in an April 29 letter in The Wall Street Journal, warned that “One looming cost is health care. Under the Obama health law, starting January 1, 2014 legal immigrants will be eligible for subsidized private health plans on the exchanges as soon as they arrive in the U.S.”
“The Senate Gang of Eight’s proposed bill will add $100 billion to the cost of Obamacare’s subsidies over the next decade by doubling the number of legal immigrants entering the country with green cards.” Ms. McCaughey noted that, in 2012, 484,072 immigrants entered that way. “The Gang of Eight plan will push it to about one million. About half of those green card holders will be eligible for the maximum assistance with premiums, subsidies and copays, totaling $9,000 per person, and more than 80% will qualify for at least some taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidy.”
Little known or reported is the fact that the Schumer-Rubio bill includes two “slush funds” amounting to $150 million that would be used to fund groups like La Raza and the American Immigration Lawyers Association with taxpayer money.
The prevailing wisdom is that the amnesty bill will create more Democrat than Republican voters and that is precisely its purpose. Its victims will be every native-born and naturalized citizen paying taxes and trying to cope with a healthcare system that will be on life-support soon enough.
The proposed bill is a massive multi-million fraud. If it passes and is signed into law, the further destruction of America will be accelerated.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Pultizer Prize-Winning Bigot?
April 28th, 2013By Alan Caruba,
What kind of idiot would write, “Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men.”
“Whatever bigoted ideology”? This is what Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times wrote on April 21.
Friedman had spent years in Lebanon, first as a reporter for the United Press International from 1979 to 1981. From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon was convulsed by a civil war between its Christian population and Palestinian forces aligned with Syrian-backed Muslims. In 1981 he was hired by the New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon after years of Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel. He also won the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting.
He would serve as the Times Bureau Chief in Jerusalem from June 1984 to February 1988, receiving a second Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the first Palestinian intifada. He witnessed Islamic terrorism first hand and learned nothing from it.
If that is not sufficiently moronic, his column, “How to Put America Back Together Again” was devoted to “healing our economy” and his answer was higher taxes in general and a carbon tax in particular. “We need to raise more revenues, in the least painful way possible.”
No, Mr. Friedman, what we need to do is stop spending more than the nation takes in by reducing spending, fixing the tax code, and reforming entitlement programs, but that is never part of the liberal agenda.
He called for a “‘radical center—one much more willing to suggest radically new ideas to raise revenues…the best place to start is with a carbon tax.” This tax is based on the false assertion that greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, are causing global warming and/or climate change. It would raise the cost of the use of energy for everyone. It would raise revenue for “investment” in more failed solar energy companies and other crony capitalism that has become the hallmark of the Obama administration.
“A phased-in carbon tax of $20 to $25 a ton could raise around $1 trillion over ten years, as we each pay a few more dimes and quarters for every gallon of gasoline or hour of electricity.” This is easy to say if you are a highly paid Times columnist, author, and public speaker. It is also a formula for inflicting pain on an economy that is dependent for its growth on the use of energy; a nation in which its total recoverable oil, along with Mexico, exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels. That’s the equivalent, based on current use, of enough oil for the next 242 years.
He covered his proposal saying “Yes, a carbon tax is not painless. We would have to, and easily can, cushion the poor from its impact.” Nonsense! Even the poor must purchase gasoline and electricity. And the poor to whom he refers includes the millions of Americans who are unemployed because of Obama administration policies that restrict economy growth. Obama isn’t helping the poor; he is increasing their numbers and increasing more government spending and dependency with food stamps and comparable programs.
Obamacare is already causing companies and businesses to not hire and to put existing staff on a part-time basis. It is driving up the cost of health insurance premiums. It will cause hospitals to close and physicians to stop practicing.
This is typical of the pie-in-the-sky liberal answer to all problems; suck more money out of the pockets of Americans in the name of “infrastructure, preschool education, community colleges and research…” Preschool education is liberal code for earlier indoctrination of a new generation raised to believe that America is the cause of the terrorism directed against it.
His column was laudatory of President Obama and his recent budget proposal, the first since he took office in 2009, but America is suffering as the result of his policies and Friedman thinks he is the answer to our problems, not the cause.
How can a reporter look at Obama’s America where one out of every five families is on food stamps, the actual number of unemployed is estimated to be twenty million or more, and see a nation in need of MORE taxes? Little wonder one of his books is titled “The World is Flat.”
A reporter who spent years covering the war between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon and then later reported from an Israel under siege from the PLO, still cannot comprehend “whatever bigoted ideology” is killing Americans and others around the world and should not be writing columns giving out advice on raising our taxes in the name of an utterly deceitful, environmental attack on energy use.
To understand everything that is wrong with liberalism in America, by all means, read Thomas L. Friedman.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Media Overkill and Official Obfuscation
April 21st, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The Boston Marathon bombing was, by any measure, a major news story. It occurred on Monday, April 15. In the days that followed, Americans were surely interested in the effort to find and arrest the two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsaraev, identified as the perpetrators.
With specific regard to television news coverage, why that involved preempting all other news as well as scheduled broadcasting on the major networks, defies the imagination. Even the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion got short shrift. Compounding the 24/7 coverage was the fact that so little was known during most of the week. Reporters began to sound like they were lobotomized.
I knew within moments after the identification of the Tsaraev brothers as immigrants from Chechnya that they were Muslims. I not only didn’t need an expert to tell me that, but as the week continued, the real mystery is why news reporters and anchors were so silent on this obvious fact. Chechens have a long history in the intelligence community as being among the leading volunteers wherever al Qaeda is engaged in terrorism or warfare.
At one point it was reported that “a foreign nation” had aided the U.S. with regard to information about the brothers, but it was pointedly left unidentified. It was, of course, Russia, that not only fought a war in Chechnya but was the victim of some vicious terrorist acts. It has since been reported that Russian counterintelligence had alerted our authorities about Tamerlan some two years ago!
It came out that Boston has a large Chechen community and, given their recent history in Russia, one really has to wonder what geniuses at the U.S. State Department thought it was a good idea to let them in. We are still giving out student visas like candy bars. Is there no place else they can get a higher education? The entry process for Saudis virtually comes complete with a limo to pick them up at the airport.
All this points to a lethal “political correctness” in the press and by the Obama administration that continues to obfuscate the fact that the terrorists, whether lone wolves or in cells, have been almost universally Muslims engaged in an Islamic jihad; one that has been going on since the seventh century.
In the weeks to come it would be a good time to do some reporting on the Muslim-American organizations that often appear to be little more than a protective veneer for the threats that have been around since the 1990s when the initial attack on the World Trade Center occurred. How many of these organizations are little more than a means to collect funds to be sent to jihadists? Why don’t we know more about them?
Indeed, how many mosques are hotbeds of potential terrorism protected as places of worship? Were it not for the cooperation provided by courageous, patriotic Muslims infiltrating and reporting back to law enforcement authorities, we might not be able to anticipate the next attacks.
The President’s warnings that we “not jump to conclusions” did not help anyone come to grips with the latest example of Islamic insanity and it would be well to remember that, even after 9/11, George W. Bush made a real effort, if not to exonerate Muslims in the U.S., at least to ensure they did not suffer collective blame. In the years since, there have been less than a handful of incidents directed against U.S. Muslims. This is, after all, America and we don’t engage in such behavior.
Concluding that the Boston Marathon bombings were the acts of jihadists was hardly a big jump. Contrast this with the deliberate agenda of the Obama administration to eliminate any mention of Islamic terrorism from all aspects of official statements and to install it as a domestic policy to the point where an obviously deranged U.S. Major Nidal Hasan was not cashiered out of the Army before the Fort Hood murders. He has yet to have been brought to trial as the lawyers continue to delay the process.
One thing came out of the news coverage and that was the sophistication and cooperation of our law enforcement agencies from the federal to the local level. It was very impressive and praiseworthy.
On June 16, 2011, I wrote a commentary, “The Terrorist Next Door”, based on a book by Fox News reporter, Catherine Herridge, titled “The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits.”
I wrote: “These days the National Counterterrorism Center must process a daily volume of information ‘between eight thousand and ten thousand reports.’ The threat made ‘sharing data a matter of survival,’ says Herridge. They include ‘at least forty threats and distinct plots.’ Perhaps the worst part of what an army of intelligence analysts determined was that the jihad and the terrorist’s mind set was that “it’s not a generational issue, it’s a forever issue.”
I am inclined to think that America will see an uptick in the number of attacks on “soft targets” by terrorists like the Tsaraev brothers. I also expect the bulk of the mainstream media to ignore or soft peddle the Muslim connection and try to portray the brothers as misguided youths.
After four years of President Obama’s apologies to Muslims in the Middle East and everywhere else, his fumbling of the “Arab Spring” which saw the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt and, of course, the lies surrounding the Benghazi attack, our enemies have drawn their own conclusions about the weakness at the very top of our government.
How naïve were Americans to vote—twice—for Barack Hussein Obama?
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Bloody Boston
April 16th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
In his short statement following the bombing of the Boston marathoners on Monday, the President did not say either “terror” or “terrorist.” This is an administration that has virtually banished these words, but an unidentified “White House official” did say that it was an act of terrorism within hours after the blast.
On June 1, 2009, Abuljakim Muhammed, a Muslim convert from Memphis, Tennessee, was charged with shooting two soldiers outside a military recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas. One died and the other was wounded. He claimed ties to al Qaeda and said the attack was “to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims.”
Later that year, on December 25, a Nigerian on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, attempted to ignite an explosive device hidden in his underwear. It failed to detonate and, when taken into custody, instead of being treated as a combatant in war, he was read his Miranda rights. It is noteworthy that he was already on a government watch list thanks to a warning from his father!
In 2010, a car bomb was discovered in Times Square, New York City. It had ignited but failed to detonate. Faisal Shahzad pleaded guilty to the bomb attempt and ten other terrorism and weapons charges.
Since September 11, 2001, America has been remarkably free of terrorist acts on our soil. I wish I could credit the Department of Homeland Security and the other intelligence agencies we maintain at the cost of billions annually, but it only takes one incident like Boston to remind us that one terrorist can wreak havoc with a bomb or two. Reportedly, New York City detected and deterred sixteen comparable plots since 9/11.
So, in effect, it is now September 12, 2001 all over again.
What we have witnessed from the President and his administration has been a display of weakness in the face of threats from the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. Our current Secretary of State has said he’s willing to speak directly with North Korea’s leaders, a very major concession in the face of behavior that should have gotten a major slap-down.
The bombing should make us ask why this administration is sending airplanes and tanks to Egypt, currently in the grip of an extremist Islamist government whose president is a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. It should make us ask why the administration continues to go through the motions of getting a peace agreement out of the Palestinians when they have spent decades refusing any terms for peace with the Israelis.
More specifically, the bombing has the earmarks of an al Qaeda-inspired attack. In recent times they have been encouraging individuals to undertake such attacks and the information they need to make bombs is readily available from jihadist websites.
Meanwhile, the bombing will ripple out throughout our society, just as the 9/11 attacks did. No doubt it will serve as an excuse to ratchet up what passes for security procedures. DHS is probably adding to a new list of budget requests from Congress. It received $46.9 billion in fiscal 2012. However, it is the FBI that is the lead criminal investigation agency for the Boston bombing and, thankfully, is independent of DHS.
A lot of Americans are going to think twice about attending any event where there are large numbers of people. It’s likely to empty out stadiums and arenas for a while. The crowds at the Macy’s Day Parade and comparable events may be thinner this year.
That’s how terrorism works.
This is not a good time to be telling Americans they have to register their guns in triplicate or that background checks will have any effect on public safety. The recent spate of mass killers all were crazier than Charlie Manson, nor is it a good time for yet another doomed-to-fail plan to address illegal immigration; build a fence and then figure out what else to do.
The lesson to draw at this point is that we are all in for a generation or more of events like the Boston Marathon bombing.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obamacare is Imploding
April 13th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Obamacare—the Affordable Care Act—is both imploding from its own dead weight and conversely exploding in the face of the Democratic Party as we head toward the 2014 midterm elections. You remember the Democrats? They were the ones who, on Christmas Eve 2009 passed Obamacare in the late hours. It’s the bill Nancy Pelosi told us had to be passed “so we can find out what’s in it.”
The bad news for Democrats and worse news for Barack Obama is that, since it was signed into law on March 23, 2010, Americans have had three years to learn what a total socialist time bomb Obamacare is. If you wanted to destroy the nation’s economy, you could not have chosen a better way.
The crescendo of the backlash is slowing mounting. Writing in The Hill on April 6th, Sam Baker reported that “Delays in implementing popular pieces of Obamacare are hurting it with Democrats”, referring to policies they believe “could help build support for the unpopular bill.” Oh? It’s unpopular? Who knew?
For example, wrote Baker, a key program designed to “help small businesses…won’t be in place when voters head to the polls next year.” It would have allowed small businesses to choose from multiple policies for their workers. Obamacare, however, is really designed to ensure that the only party from whom you can get insurance is the government.
I guarantee you that no aspect of Obamacare is going to make it more popular with any but the brain-dead Democrats who remain clueless about Obamacare.
When 33 Senate Democrats cast a non-binding vote, as they did in March, to repeal the law’s tax on medical devices, you can be sure that piece of political theatre was to give them cover, particularly if they will be running for reelection in 2014. Any of the Senators who voted for Obamacare are already in serious trouble. No Republican Senators voted for it.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee noted that “People already don’t like Obamacare, but they’re really not going to like the tax hikes, mandates, fees, penalties, and added red tape bureaucracy that goes into effect over the next eight months. It goes from being an abstract discussion to a real life pain.”
One of my favorite pundits is Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow for entitlement and budget policy at The Heartland Institute, a national non-profit free market research organization headquartered in Chicago. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. In early April, Forbes published an article of his, “Look Out Below, The Obamacare Chaos is Coming.”
Ferrara summed up the dark corner in which the Democrats painted themselves, writing that “The biggest political problem faced by so-called ‘liberals’ and so-called ‘progressives’ in President Obama’s second term is how to prevent voters from holding them politically responsible as the public comes to realize how badly they were lied to during the first Obama term to win passage of Obamacare.”
To call Obamacare “socialist” is to do it an injustice. It is pure communism. Liberals and progressives may not be communists (some are), but they are surely the most deluded political class on planet Earth. No nation that has embraced socialism has ever enjoyed anything close to the wealth generated by the capitalism that made the U.S. an economic colossus in the last century. Now, like much of Europe, we are all deep in debt thanks to socialist programs and policies.
I have previously written about Obamacare’s many pitfalls. What needs to be revisited are the many LIES that Obama told in order to get it passed. Indeed, passage required extensive arm-twisting and bribery among the Democrats who voted for it. Again, no Republicans voted for it.
Obama said, “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it. No one is going to take that away from you”; no one except the many companies who are cutting back on the number of their employees to avoid being ensnared by it. Others are simply not hiring for the same reason. Ferrara noted that “individuals as well could just skip the insurance and pay the penalty at a savings of at least 50% to 75% or more.”
Since millions are likely to pursue this option, that will leave millions more uninsured and, as a bonus for idiotic policy making, it will create what Ferrara calls “a financial death spiral for private insurers.” Progressives says Ferrara, will welcome this because it will leave “all health care to be paid for by the ‘single payer’ government.” This is the same government whose Medicare and Medicaid programs are going broke. That has already been hastened by the way “almost half of Obamacare is paid for over the next decade by draining $716 billion out of Medicare.”
Voters will be reminded that it is not Republicans who came up with this, but Democrats. The result according to the Medicare Office of the Actuaries is that “One out of seven hospitals will leave Medicare in the next seven years.”
Simple access to medical care will become a problem as more and more physicians decide to close their private practices.
About the only good news is a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation that contends that Obamacare is unconstitutional because the bill originated in the Senate, not the House. Under the Origination Clause of the Constitution, all bills raising revenue must begin in the House.” You’d think that Chief Justice Roberts would have known that when he cast a vote for it because he deemed Obamacare a tax. The Supreme Court needs to revisit Obamacare to redeem itself.
Obamacare is the “perfect storm” for the Democratic Party. It will swamp them in 2014.
Am I a Dangerous Extremist? Are You?
April 10th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
If you should suddenly cease to find my commentaries, I will either have passed away or have been detained by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or the Defense Department and taken to an undisclosed location for the crime of having been an “extremist” and a danger to the nation.
In April 2009, the Washington Times published an article reporting that “The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in ‘rightwing extremist activity’, saying that the economic recession, the election of America’s first black president, and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.”
Among those targeted by DHS were “groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” Well, that’s only a few tens of millions of Americans. Little wonder why, on April 5th, we learned that a U.S. Army Reserve presentation regarding “extremist threats within the U.S. military included Catholics and evangelicals!
These two groups represent half of all Americans and some forty percent of active duty military personnel are evangelical Christians. The Catholics and evangelicals were lumped in with “white supremacist groups, street gangs, and religious sects.”
If our current leaders consider Christians a greater threat than Muslims, then they are idiots with a very dangerous agenda.
The April 2009 nine-page DHS report was titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” It defined extremism “as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.”
The last time I read the U.S. Constitution, the Tenth Amendment said that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” The people—that’s you and me.
In pre-Revolution America, a bunch of people rebelling against British taxes got together and threw a great wealth of imported tea into Boston Bay. About ten other groups in other states did the same thing. Extremists! Those men who signed the Declaration of Independence? Extremists! A few disgruntled war veterans! Extremists!
All across America today, states are passing laws to protect gun owners while others are tightening limitations on abortion. Are all those state legislators extremists, too?
Like a lot of Americans, I have begun to have serious fears about the Department of Homeland Security, particularly since neither the DHS, nor any other government agency is permitted to use words like Islamist, Jihadist, or Muslim when describing groups and individuals dedicated to attacking Americans. The murders at Fort Hood by an Islamic extremist, U.S. Major Nidal Hasan, are still officially described as “workplace violence” and those who survived the attack have been denied Purple Hearts. Apparently no one among his fellow officers noticed when he showed up in the PX wearing Arab-style clothing.
You can visit the DHS website and read “Countering Violent Extremism” which says that “Groups and individuals inspired by a range of religious, political, or other ideological beliefs have promoted and used violence against the homeland.” Most have been Muslims. I am still trying to find examples of attacks on the homeland by Republicans, veterans, evangelicals, or for that matter the pitiful remnants of the Ku Klux Klan.
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano had to issue an apology for the April 2009 slur against veterans returning from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to which they were deployed. She said. “We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not—nor will we ever—monitor ideology or political beliefs.” Thank goodness they were not monitoring meetings of the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion. Or maybe they are.
Perhaps every meeting of the various Tea Party groups around the nation are monitored for their distinct disagreement with current government policies. They got their start protesting Obamacare. Many of their members oppose any effort to restrict their right to own and bear arms under the Second Amendment. Others oppose abortion. I’m guessing they would be among the first to be swept up as “extremists” and detained somewhere. And I am a regular contributor to a Tea Party Nation website!
In the wake of 9/11 Americans in general and the government in particular were scared to death of the prospect of more violent attacks on the nation. The Department of Homeland Security was cobbled together from a number of agencies to better coordinate information and a response. It’s worth keeping in mind that the enemy then and the enemy now is still al Qaeda. Our concerns then were such that we deployed our military to Afghanistan and Iraq to deter the spread of the Islamist ideology. These days many nations cooperate to identify al Qaeda leaders and dispatch them.
Al Qaeda in America doesn’t hold Wednesday night get-togethers, but I am fairly confident that our law enforcement authorities are doing their best to keep an eye on its recruitment efforts as they seek to stop further attacks.
What worries me is that the DHS definition of who they suspect of being “extremists” is so broad and so vague that there probably isn’t anyone who does not fall under suspicion.
There’s something paranoid and dangerous in the way they interpret their mission. There’s something scary about an agency that buys a billion bullets and equips itself like a small army. We already have an army and we have a vast law enforcement community nationwide who, frankly, I trust far more.
So the question is, are you an extremist? And for exercising my First Amendment rights of free speech, the publication—press—of my views, my religion, and may even join others “to petition the government for a redress of grievances”, am I an extremist, too?
© Alan Caruba, 2013