Posts by AlanCaruba:
Gun Control is DOA in Congress
April 7th, 2013By Alan Caruba
When I was a teenager I was a magician performing at birthday parties and before local clubs whose adults enjoyed legerdemain as much as the kids. The essence of magic is diversion, distracting the audience to watch the right hand while the left is setting up the illusion. It was a lesson I never forgot as I watch politicians divert attention from their actual agenda and right now President Obama is engaged in that as he goes around the nation asking for more gun control.
The killings in Colorado and at Sandy Hook school were committed by certifiably insane individuals. No background check can determine a person’s sanity. If seeking the advice and care of a psychiatrist and psychologist would disqualify a person from gun ownership than their privacy will have been invaded in ways prohibited by medical ethics and the constitutional right to privacy. Police cannot arrest anyone on the suspicion they’re nuts. The only protection against them is a sane armed gun-owner.
The right to self-defense is as old as mankind. All tyrannical governments seek to disarm their citizens. The Founders of America understood this. Thomas Jefferson said, “No free man shall ever been debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
It has become a cliché to say that Barack Obama has become the greatest gun salesman because, as noted in a December 2012 report by CNSnews.com, “Compared to the number of background checks completed from January through December of 2011, all but two states saw net increases in gun sales in 2012.” Background checks to ensure that those with criminal records are a good idea, but criminals or crazy people can always get their hands on a gun. The Sandy Hook murders were perpetrated by a lunatic using the legal guns purchased by his mother. She was his first victim.
“Washington, D.C. saw the largest year-to-year increase,” reported CNSnews.com, “with sales jumping 49.7%. Wisconsin followed with 45.5%, then New Jersey with 42.5%. New Hampshire with 40.9% and Rhode Island with 39.3%. The largest increases occurred in Georgia, Oregon, New Hampshire, Texas and Montana.
In 2011 gun owners in America outnumbered hunters by 5 to 1. Hunters constitute only 15.9% to 18% of the estimate 70-80 million gun owners. Together they owned an estimated 300 million firearms, about 100 million of which were handguns.
That is one hell of a voting bloc!
The members of Congress know this. Writing in January, Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberley A. Strassel, castigated “the elites” noting that the “one issue on which Congress still resoundingly agrees” is gun rights. The so-called debate over gun-control is led by the most elitist of all, Obama.
“On the other side,” wrote Strassel, “is the reality that any of these proposals must, in the normal course of things, pass Congress. A few quick facts about that body. (1) More than half of its members have an ‘A’ rating from the National Rifle Association. (2) The few members today calling for gun control are the same few who have always called for gun control. (3) The House is run by Republicans.”
“Even were the Senate to summon 60 votes (unlikely), and even if Mr. Boehner to risk the renewed wrath of his caucus by moving such a bill (crazy unlikely), any legislation would fall to members such as Virginia’s Bob Goodlate (who runs the Judiciary Committee) and Pete Sessions (who runs the Rules Committee). Mr. Goodlate is strong on gun rights. Mr. Sessions is from Texas.”
A new gun control law on top of the 1,100 that already exist is dead on arrival in Congress. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, knows this. Even Obama knows this. So why is he going around the nation giving gun control speeches? It is the old magician’s trick of diversion and distraction. Gun control has no priority in a nation awash in debt, concerned about illegal immigration, and even threatened by the insane leader of North Korea.
“The more sweeping any gun proposals,” observed Ms. Strassel, “the more dead on arrival they will be in Congress. Mr. Obama might know that and be planning to take credit for going big while blaming failure on Congress. If so, he’ll have to beat on his own party.”
There are harsh, irresponsible and irrational gun control laws being passed in heavily liberal states, but they can and will be repealed in time as political control passes to legislators who get elected running against them. The Wall Street Journal reports that “This year, five states have passed seven laws that strengthen gun restrictions, while 10 states have passed 17 laws that weaken them, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which tracks and promotes gun-control-laws.
Nothing can be done to stop the crazies, but the vast numbers of gun owners are not crazy. They are, however, worried about a government showing signs of trying to take their guns away. Elections are a defense against such actions.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
A Very Bad Idea–Redefining Marriage
March 30th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
An America that abandons thousands of years of tradition and common sense is an America that has set itself firmly on a path toward decline. That is the central issue of gay marriage that the Supreme Court will struggle to determine. A similar experience in social engineering gave us the federal protection of abortion and the murder of an entire generation of the unborn.
What we are witnessing is the tyranny of a determined minority, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals in America, barely three percent of the population, demanding that their particular sexual orientation should be codified in law by redefining marriage for everyone else. This isn’t about equality. It’s about special privileges and the destruction of marriage as solely between a man and a woman.
Imagine if the court had agreed with the early Mormon Church and established polygamy as the law of the land? In 1890, the Supreme Court ruled in The Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States that “the organization of a community for the spread and practice of polygamy is, in a measure, a return to barbarism. It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity had produced in the Western world.”
The Tenth Amendment states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” If the Supreme Court strikes down the decision of voters in California to prohibit gay marriage, it will have to ignore the Tenth Amendment. At this point in time, 41 States have passed laws protecting traditional marriage.
As one observer noted, if gay marriage is deemed legal by the Supreme Court, what would prevent the North American Man/Boy Love Association from demanding that their claim that sex with children is valid?
A rational society must have rational laws and the Constitution, which limits the powers of the federal government, makes it clear that the states have the right to determine their own response to such issues. Throwing overboard centuries of English law and the Constitution to favor gays and lesbians opens the doors to an “anything goes” society.
As a March 27 Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “The Supreme Court wrapped up its second day of oral argument on a pair of gay marriage cases Wednesday, and the Justices on the left and right seemed genuinely discomfited by the radicalism of redefining the institution (of marriage) for all 50 states.” Make no mistake about it, the demand for gay marriage is radical and would transform our society from one that has respected thousands of years of tradition and practice to one that abandons a religious and cultural norm to one that undermines society.
The cases before the Supreme Court arrive at the same time the nation has reelected a President who made clear that his objective is to “transform” our society from one that became a superpower based as much on its moral leadership as on its military and economic strength. The result thus far has been to impose a huge debt that will impact generations to come, undermines our ability to project strength, and threatens the value of the dollar. The Obama administration is currently trying to deprive Americans of the Second Amendment right to own firearms in the event a tyrannical government should occur.
The result, not surprisingly, has been an increase in the use of nullification by the states as they pass laws making it clear they do not intend to implement Obamacare as in the case of Indiana, South Carolina, and others. Six state legislatures already have bills filed that would prohibit cooperation with any attempt to indefinitely detain people without due process under a provision of the NDAA.
Several states, including Wyoming, will consider blocking any federal actions violating the Second Amendment. Florida, Indiana, and Missouri will look at legislation prohibiting spying by domestic drones. The Tenth Amendment Center has developed a legislative tracking page on its website because of this growing movement to resist federal mandates.
Sexual mores, the devaluation of our currently, and the general decline of moral values has plenty of precedent in history, most notably the decline of the Roman Empire. America fought a Civil War over the moral issue of slavery, ending it. It granted the right to vote to women. It stumbled badly with Prohibition, but abandoned it. All central governments tend to over-reach.
The Supreme Court’s decision on abortion is now being resisted as states begin to pass legislation to limit this practice in order to protect the lives of the unborn.
The President and other politicians who favor gay marriage, supported by a liberal media, will not have the last word. This is not about equality. It is about fundamental morality and, should America abandon that, it will cease to be a great nation no matter what path other nations may take.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
A Carbon Tax Would Destroy America
March 26th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
If you want to know what a carbon tax on emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would do to America you need only look at the destruction of industry and business in Australia, along with the soaring costs for energy use it imposes on anyone there.
“The carbon tax is contributing to a record number of firms going to the wall with thousands of employees being laid off and companies forced to close factories that have stood for generations”, Steve Lewis and Phil Jacob reported in a March 18 issue of The Daily Telegraph, a leading Australian newspaper.
“Soaring energy bills caused by the government’s climate change scheme have been called ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ by company executives and corporate rescue doctors who are trying to save ailing firms.”
The passage of a carbon tax in America would have the exact same results and it remains a top priority for the White House and Democrats in Congress who see it as a bonanza in new funding for the government.
As Paul Driessen says in a Townhall.com commentary, “More rational analysis reveals that dreams of growth are nothing more than dangerous tax revenue hallucinations. They would bring intense pain for no climate or economic gain.”
Too many Americans still believe that CO2 is causing global warming, but CO2 plays no role in climate change and is barely 0.038 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. More to the point, there is no warming and hasn’t been for the last seventeen years as the Earth is in a natural cooling cycle that has prolonged the advent of spring with severe snow storms throughout the nation.
There is no scientific justification for such a tax, but those advocating it don’t care about the science. They care about raising revenue for an ever-growing government to spend and waste.
Driessen points out that “Hydrocarbons (coal, oil, and natural gas) provide over 83% of all the energy that powers America. A carbon tax would put a hefty surcharge on everything we make, grow, ship, eat, and do. It would put the federal government in control of, not just one-sixth of the economy, as under Obamacare, but 100% of our economy and lives. It would make the United States increasingly less productive, less competitive globally, less able to provide opportunities for our children.”
The case for a carbon tax simply doesn’t exist, but there are powerful forces in Congress and the support of the White House to impose such a tax. The power of the environmental movement and its long history of lies about the climate, primarily the global warming hoax, cannot be dismissed or ignored.
In Australia, “The Australian Securities & Investments Commission reports there were 10,632 company collapses for the 12 months to March 1—averaging 886 a month—with the number of firms being placed in administration more than 12 percent higher than during the global financial crisis.” It represents “a record high…led by widespread failures in manufacturing and construction, which accounted for almost one-fifth of collapses.”
Greg Evans, the chief economic economist for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said that “It defies logic to adopt a policy which even the Treasury acknowledges will lower our standards of living and be harmful to national productivity.” Adding to Australia’s struggling companies, the carbon tax and one on mining were showing up as “sovereign issues” in discussions with foreign investors.” Who would want to invest in Australia if these two taxes were destroying the economic strength of the nation?
Politics in Australia is no less a battleground than here in America. Australia’s Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who introduced the carbon tax, just beat back a bid by her Labor Party’s dissidents to reinstall former leader Kevin Rudd who lost to her in 2010 and 2012. Much of the opposition to her comes from the harm being inflicted by the carbon and mining taxes.
Marlo Lewis is a senior fellow in energy and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. During the 2012 campaign, he described a carbon tax as “political poison for the Republican Party.” Mitt Romney opposed it, but ‘the big attraction of carbon taxes these days is not as a global warming policy but as a revenue enhancer. In both parties, deficit hawks and big spenders (often the same individuals) are flailing for ways to boost federal revenue.”
That is precisely the problem afflicting a nation whose Congress and President could not find a reason to cut anything from the federal budget. The result was the “sequestration” that imposed cuts neither party could agree upon.
In a Fox News article, “Here comes Team Obama’s carbon tax”. Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment and author of “Democracy Denied” reported that “The Treasury Department’s Office of Environment and Energy has finally begun to turn over documents about its preparations for a carbon tax in response to transparency warrior Chris Horner’s Freedom of Information Act request. The documents provide solid evidence that the Obama administration and its allies in Congress have every intention of implementing a carbon tax if we fail to stop them.”
President Obama’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, is on record wanting to double or triple the cost of energy, much as his predecessor wanted.
A carbon tax, if enacted, would totally undermine a nation that has a debt climbing toward $17 trillion and millions unemployed in an economy that is struggling to inch its way out of the depths of the financial crisis.
If you wanted to destroy America, you could do it with a carbon tax. Australia is reeling from the cost to its economy and the higher energy costs its people are paying. We don’t want that here.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Americans will Curse Obama for Obamacare
March 16th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Following the sequester debacle in which Obama and his cohorts were swiftly found to be lying through their teeth, his polling numbers have begun to fall and, folks you ain’t seen nothing yet.
As the realities and costs of the Affordable Healthcare Act—Obamacare—kick in, when he leaves office, he will be remembered for inflicting pain and suffering on Americans.
As the various aspects of Obamacare become active, the impact on everyone will reduce their income and increase their costs. In retrospect it will be seen as the largest poison pill any President or political party ever swallowed. Recall that Obamacare was passed December 24, 2009, Christmas Eve, by a straight Democrat party vote, none of whom had even read the legislation.
The House passed the bill with a vote of 219 to 212 on March 21, 2010, with 34 Democrats and all 178 Republicans voting against it. At 2,000-plus pages, it has now been joined by thousands of pages more to implement it. It is a regulatory nightmare.
In January, the author of “Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis”, John C. Goodman, wrote of Obamacare’s impact on your tax bill. “You will join other Americans in paying more than $500 billion in nineteen new types of taxes and fees over the next decade to fund health reform. Some of the new taxes will be indirect and will be passed on to you in the form of higher prices, higher premiums, or lower wages.”
As Americans address paying their 2012 income taxes, here are some of the new taxes that will afflict some or all of them at some point.
# A tax on medical devices. This will cover “everything from surgical instruments and bedpans to wheelchairs and crutches. Even pacemakers and artificial hips and knees are taxes.” If Obamacare is not repealed, it will rake in $20 billion over the next decade.
# A tax on health insurance. Beginning in 2014, there will be a $60 billion tax on health insurance that will be felt in higher premiums. A typical family of four will have to spend nearly $1,000 a year.
# A tax on drugs. If you think prescription drugs are expensive now, some drug makers have already begun to raise prices.
# A tax on medical savings accounts. You will no longer be able to use these tax-free accounts to purchase over-the-counter drugs, forcing people to purchase drugs such as Claritin, aspirin or Advil at a cost that is 30% higher for a middle-class family. Contributions to such accounts will be capped at $2,500.
# A tax on becoming ill. Today’s tax law allows you to deduct medical expenses up to 7.5% of your adjusted gross income. Obamacare increases this to 10%, making your future deductions smaller. It became effective this year for people under 65 years of age and goes into effect in 2017 for those 65 and older. Obama will be out of office by then. He won’t care even if you do.
# Additional taxes. The Medicare payroll tax will increase by almost one-third for some people, rising from 2.9% today to 3.8& on wages over $200,000 for an individual and $250,000 for a couple. An additional 3.8% Medical payroll tax will be levied on investment income (capital gains, interest, and dividend income) at some income levels. The “rich” will pay more, but in effect this impacts most of the middle class.
Benjamin Domenech, Managing Editor of Heartland Institute’s Health Care News, recently reported that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that “Obamacare is going to be more expensive than the Obama administration thought, disrupt the marketplace more than they thought, and be tougher to implement than they thought.”
Recalling that Hillary Clinton was put in charge of similar healthcare changes during her husband’s administration where the effort failed, if she were elected in 2016, you can be sure she would retain Obamacare. It can be repealed only if Republicans control both houses of Congress, so the midterm elections in 2014 are critical.
Domenech reported that the CBO has concluded that the insurance exchanges that are part of Obamacare and are supposed to be up and running by next January will cost more than $1 trillion through 2022, a dramatic increase over the original budget forecast of $814 billion. Incredible disruptive, more employees will be dropped from their existing plans and fewer uninsured people will get coverage. With somewhere between 23 and 26 million Americans already out of work, millions more will join their ranks as companies cut their payrolls.
According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Obamacare will add $6.2 billion to the federal deficit. Recall that in September 2009 Obama promised that “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits—either now or in the future.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said, “This is how a country goes broke.”
For these and a host of other reasons, people will curse Barack Obama as the full impact of his signature piece of legislation, his primary means of “transforming America” begins to affect Americans, some of whom will either be denied or be unable to afford medical treatment. They will die.
Obama has already transformed America from the world’s superpower to a debtor nation whose credit rating has been lowered, whose national defense capabilities have been reduced, and whose governance is guided by the absurd belief that humans cause and control the climate.
Barack Obama has four more years to work his will and future historians will conclude that Americans twice elected a President who hates them and their nation.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Who is Susan Rice?
March 13th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
Having taken the fall for President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the wake of the Benghazi scandal, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice is poised to make her way up the career ladder as the “top contender” for the position of national security adviser to the President.
The proposed appointment as Secretary of State, a reward for going on television and spreading the administration’s outright lies about the Benghazi attack, was swiftly derailed by the backlash to her appearances. If appointed as national security adviser, she will not have to be approved by the U.S. Senate, thus avoiding its oversight and consent.
The obvious question is “What does Susan Rice know about national security?” though she did serve on President Clinton’s National Security Council. As the Assistant Secretary of State on the Africa desk when the Rwanda genocide occurred in 1994, both Clinton and she were missing in action. He later would say it was one of the biggest mistakes of his time in office.
Her area of expertise for many years has been Africa and, in that capacity, even The New York Times noted that in 1998 she celebrated a “new generation” of African leaders, many of whom turned out to be despots after having been rebel commanders.
One example The Times cited was Meles Zenawi, the late prime minister of Ethiopia who she eulogized in September as “brilliant” and “a son of Ethiopia and a father to its rebirth.” The Times noted that “Mr. Meles dismantled the rule of law, silenced political opponents and forged a single-party state.” Others whom Ambassador Rice found little to criticize were Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri K. Museveni of Uganda, all still in power.
Richard Grenell, who served as the spokesman for four U.S. ambassadors to the UN, wrote a scathing commentary which was published by Fox News in November 2012. Referring to the Benghazi attack and its aftermath, Grenell wrote “To veteran foreign policy observers, Rice’s performance that Sunday was one of many blunders over the last four years.”
“The case against Susan Rice has been building for years with little fanfare,” wrote Grenell. “Not surprising, the mainstream media reporters based at the UN have either ignored her mistakes or strategically covered them up.”
“”Rice’s diplomatic failures and silence in the face of outrageous UN antics have given the United States pathetic representation among the 193 members of the world body,” wrote Grenell. “UN members, not surprisingly, prefer a weak opponent. Rice is therefore popular with her colleagues. It may explain why she ignored Syria’s growing problems for months.” Grenell noted that “Rice didn’t even show up for the first two emergency Security Council meetings on the unfolding Arab Spring revolution last year” and “when she actually does show up, she is a miserable failure.”
Even more surprising, given her status as a diplomat, Ambassador Rice is widely described in the most unpleasant terms as abrasive and difficult to work with. Her mentors have been former Secretaries of State, Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton, and if getting along with one’s boss is the key to success—and it is—her pending appointment to the National Security Council is proof of that. Even so, the White House has rolled out word of it to test the waters and see if she draws too much fire.
When she was being considered for Secretary of State—from which she withdrew—Benjamin H. Friedman, a research fellow in defense and homeland security at the libertarian Cato Institute, had some unkind thoughts about her, noting that “she has supported just about every proposed U.S. military intervention over the two decades. The president should nominate someone that occasionally opposes a war.” In retrospect, that would appear to be a fair judgment. Obama ran in 2008 opposing the war in Iraq, but also increased troop levels in Afghanistan in an effort to score a few points before setting in motion the U.S. withdrawal from there. Both wars have proved to be deeply unpopular.
The Rwanda experience no doubt increased Ambassador Rice’s preference for intervention, but the “lead from behind” intervention in Libya has not turned out well.
Indeed, little in the way of foreign policy in the Middle East has turned out well for either former President George W. Bush or his successor, Barack Obama. Moreover, Africa has become a new battleground for al Qaeda and a place where Western interests and workers are now attacked, kidnapped, and killed with increasing frequency.
Ambassador Rice’s rise through three administrations will likely culminate with her National Security Council appointment. It is doubtful that the new Secretary of State, John Kerry, or the new Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, will turn out to be in any hurry to intervene anywhere for any reason. No doubt Ambassador Rice will put her finger in the wind and go in whatever direction it blows.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Bad Science and Bad Journalism are a Bad Combination
March 11th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
On Wednesday, March 6, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee sent out a notice that its hearing on global warming was cancelled due to the chilly weather and a snowstorm that was about to hit the nation’s capital.
The Committee was going to be treated to “a comprehensive briefing on how well scientists understand the climate and humans’ effect on it.” On the same day in 1961, the temperature had hit a record 81 degrees. In 1888, it had been 10 degrees. Anyone who thinks that humans had anything to do with either is mistaken. When it comes to the weather, the only thing that humans do is endure or enjoy it.
Making sense of the weather and climate is something that puzzles paleoclimatologists, climatologists, and meteorologists. For example, none of these folks understand why clouds do what they do. That’s probably because the best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It’s the reason meteorologists cannot predict what the weather will be more than four or five days from now.
Instead, we continue to be the victims of global warming charlatans, some of whom are “scientists”, while other scientists with far more integrity have been engaged in debunking their lies since the 1980s. The only thing we know for sure is that the global warming “scientists” are destroying the public’s confidence in the integrity of climate science.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story on March 9, “In Study, Past Decade Ranks Among Hottest”. It was about a study published in a recent issue of the Journal Science claiming that a one degree temperature variation resulted in 2000-2009 being “one of the warmest since modern record-keeping began.” Their claim is that the planet will be warmer in 2100 than it has been for 11,300 years. That’s about the amount of time since the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Holocene, an epoch of warm weather that gave rise to civilization—about 5,000 years ago. The length of the periods between ice ages is about 11,500 years. Another ice age will kick in any day now.
Predictions such as appeared in Science are utterly bogus. They are based on rigged computer models which have been constantly exposed for their lies. Both the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government engage in this fraud. The study cited was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Climatologists measure changes in centuries, not decades. The article asked whether the alleged hottest decade is the result of “greenhouse gas emissions from human activity—or can it be explained as part of natural, long-term variations in temperature?” Generally unknown to the public is the fact that water vapor is a major “greenhouse gas” and plays a significant role in the earth’s overall temperature. Moreover, the oft-cited carbon dioxide plays no role in the earth’s temperature.
The “Science” study drew immediate criticism. James Taylor, the editor of The Heartland Institute’s “Environment & Climate News”, a national monthly, said “Global temperatures are essentially the same today as they were in 1995, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were merely 360 parts per million.” These levels “rose ten percent between 1995 and 2012, yet global temperatures did not rise at all.” That’s worth repeating, “global temperatures did not rise at all.”
This does not stop the “Warmists” from concocting their “studies” or journalists from repeating their lies in newspapers like The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal article was more cautious and balanced.
As Marc Morano noted at ClimateDeport.com, a leading skeptics’ website, the earth is cooler today than 28% of the past 11,300 years. Yes, cooler. More recently, it has been cooling for nearly seventeen years and it is the direct result of an unusual solar condition. It is supposed to be in a “solar maximum” with lots of sunspots, magnetic storms, but there are few at this time, resulting in less radiation and cooler temperatures for the Earth.
“The new study is also counter to the preponderance of existing peer-reviewed studies,” said Morano, “showing the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warming were both as warm or warmer than today without benefit of modern emissions or SUVs.”
In 2009, one of the nation’s leading climatologists, MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen, wrote, “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in (a) global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.”
“Such hysteria,” warned Dr. Lindzen, “simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing.”
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The World is Not Having Enough Babies
March 10th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
“Today, American pets now outnumber American children by more than four to one.”
When a nation’s population fails to reproduce and replace itself, it goes into decline. That is the theme of Jonathan V. Last’s new book, “What to Expect When No One is Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.” Fertility rates may seem an odd topic in the midst of anemic economic growth, raging debates about entitlement programs, a government in gridlock, and threats from external enemies, but they are critical the nation’s future.
“In order for a country to maintain a steady population, it needs a fertility rate of 2.1” but America’s rate “currently sits at 1.93.” Declining populations have always followed or been followed by Very Bad Things. Disease. War. Economic stagnation or collapse. And these grim tides from history may be our future, since population is where most of the world is heading.”
Yes, the world. It has all manner of implications, not just for the U.S., but for nations like China and Russia where their leaders are urging their populations to have more babies.
“Our modern world has evolved in such a way as to subtly discourage childbearing. It’s not a conspiracy. None of these changes was intended to drive down fertility” which means “that there is something about modernity itself that tends toward fewer children” no matter what nation or region of the world.
In the U.S. one of the factors has been the legalization of abortion in 1973. Last notes that “The widespread practice of abortion culled an entire generation’s worth of babies that otherwise might have been born.” An entire generation! When you add in the use of the contraceptive pill used by 17 percent of American women aged 15 to 44, that’s 10.54 million women and they are predominantly well-educated, middle-class white women who are in their prime reproductive years. Since Roe v. Wade “more than 49.5 million babies have been aborted in America.”
The “pill” in addition to other factors has altered the behaviors that lead to making babies; sex, dating, marriage, and births; not that women stopped having babies. “By 2008, 40.6 percent of all births were to unmarried women.” That alters a society—any society—in which marriage and family are essential elements.
In the United States the cost of having a child is prohibitive. “It is commonly said that buying a house is the biggest purchase most Americans will ever make. Well, having a baby is like buying six houses, all at once.” That tends to make couples stop after having just one.
In creating “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare the politicians failed to anticipate both the falling number of new citizens born and the rising number who are now living well beyond age 65 and requiring much more eldercare costs. These two programs, says Last, “have placed a serious and increasing burden on families, making it more difficult to afford the—also increasing—cost of children.”
As more and more Americans have aged, “By 2010, just 2.9 workers were paying for the benefits of each retiree.” Currently they are receiving $546 billion in benefits. Enrollment in Medicare by 2010 was 47.5 million “and each beneficiary cost $9,828 for a total of $523 billion. In that year, Medicare spent $32.3 billion in benefits than it took in. Forty cents of every dollar the U.S. spends involves Social Security and Medicare. Obamacare took $716 out of Medicare to pay for the new program that expands Medicaid and will add millions more to its rolls.
“Social Security and Medicare were conceived in an era of high fertility. It was only after our fertility rate collapsed that the economics of the programs became dysfunctional.”
The feminist movement encouraged more women to go to college and join the workforce. “Simply put,” says Last, “the more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will have in the course of her lifetime. Women are putting off childbearing until later in life and Last notes that “By 35, a woman has a 15 percent chance of being unable to conceive at all. And by a woman’s 45th birthday, her chances of getting pregnant are nearly zero.” My maternal grandmother married in her teens and had four daughters and one son by her mid-twenties. I have a family photo that shows her with her children. She looks like an older sister!
It is true that the world’s population has hit new heights, but Last points out that “Demographic momentum is a two-way street. Just as it causes population to grow even after fertility rates have fallen below replacement, momentum eventually causes population to contract, even if fertility rates increase.
“The forces of demography,” says Last, “are pushing every nation on earth in the same direction: fewer and fewer children.”
If by now your eyes have glazed over and you need a stiff drink, consider that such fertility rates exist no matter how our politicians struggle to deal with union pension and healthcare benefits, and the programs created to provide “a safety net” for Americans.
Add to this populations migrating to where jobs exist or where wars cause them to flee to safer places. Then there are nations with imbalances involving large numbers of young men and not enough young women to marry. China now has 123 boys born for every 100 girls. Last notes that, “a skewed sex ratio has often preceded intense violence and instability.”
Now compare this relentless arithmetic of demography against the absurd focus of national leaders on the planet’s climate as if anything can be done to alter or affect it.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obscene Government Waste
March 3rd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The one thing the “sequester” did was to get people asking why government spending could not be reduced. Adding to the drama of the automatic cuts was the sky-is-falling, government-services-will-stop, and comparable lies the President and his cabinet secretaries told until it became obvious that the public was not buying it.
What the President did not talk about was the incredible, obscene waste of taxpayer’s money that goes on every day in every department and agency of the U.S. government. Americans are so accustomed to hearing everything described in the billions and trillions, they have lost sight of what these numbers really mean and this is particularly true in light of the nation’s huge, growing debt and deficit.
It’s not like independent organizations like Citizens Against Government Waste don’t keep watch and report the waste. It has gained some fame for its annual “Pig Book”, a list of absurd spending. To its credit, the Government Accountability Office occasionally issues a report on waste when some member of Congress requests it.
Even a casual bit of research turns up item after item that, were Americans not so apathetic and indifferent to government waste, it would result in huge rallies in Washington, D.C. calling for change. There is none.
Here are some examples, a mere handful from the many anyone can discover by simply Googling “government waste.”
# The government spends $1.7 billion for maintenance on empty buildings it owns, although some sources put the figure at closer to $25 billion. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that 55,000 properties are underutilized or entirely vacant.
# The federal government owns approximately one-third of all U.S. land. It does not need more land and it could be argued that it should not own 80% of Nevada and Alaska, and more than half of Idaho. That said, it wants to spend $2.3 billion to purchase more land and the National park Service currently has a backlog of maintenance tasks totaling $5 billion. These include parks that the Obama administration was saying would all have to be closed down because of a sequester reduction of a mere 1.2% of all federal spending.
# Homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano was issuing statements about the sequestration cuts to her department, but according to Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, the department has $9 billion in unspent preparedness funds. How much of that will be spent on purchasing more DHS ammunition? They have already purchased enough to shoot every American five times.
# Republican lawmakers in Congress took the sequester fear-mongering as an opportunity to note, as Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) said, “There are pots of money sitting in different departments across the federal government, that have been authorized over either a number of months or years.”
# Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is a leading budget hawk who identified programs to fund a space ship to another solar system, funds for advancements in beef jerky from France, and $6 billion for research to find out what lessons about democracy and decision-making can be learned—from fish!
# While you’re trying to figure out how to pay your 2012 taxes, give a thought to the National Science Foundation $350,000 grant to Perdue University researchers on how to improve your golf game.
# Not to be outspent, the National Institutes of Health gave a $940,000 grant to researchers who found that the production of pheromones in—wait for it—fruit flies, declines over time. Turns out that male fruit flies were more attracted to younger female fruit flies. The NIH also paid researchers to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they’re drunk and spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing” program on men in South Africa. You can’t make up this stuff.
# For reasons that defy sanity, various elements of the government have spent $3 million for research on video games; $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly; a whopping $500 million on a program that would, among other things, try to figure out why five-year-olds “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom; and grants such as $1.8 million on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.
# Sanity does not apply to the $2 billion given annually to U.S. farmers to not farm their land. Don’t even ask about the Defense Department. It has long been famous for waste.
While all this has been going on, in 2010 the Office of Management and Budget determined that $47.9 billion was spent on fraudulent or improper payments in Medicare and the problem still hasn’t been fixed, though the cost is now up to $62 billion. There’s been $2.7 billion in fraud and mismanagement of the food-stamp program. And on, and on, and on.
And the President of the United States can only talk about tax breaks for the “rich and well-connected” while spending most of his time hanging out with the “rich and well-connected.” The rest of the time is spent campaigning to get higher taxes on all the rest of us.
If you just added up the billions cited in this brief look at waste, the federal government might actually be able to get by without having run up the national debt to more than $16 trillion and running trillion-plus annual deficits.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
How Insurance Influences Healthcare in America Today
February 27th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
“Despite more than sixty years of government efforts—representing the work of both political parties—we are moving further and further away from what we want. Prices are higher, more people are excluded from needed care, more excess treatments are performed, and more people die from preventable errors. Why?”
Why, indeed! Having had the Affordable Care Act (ACA) forced on us by a Democrat-controlled Congress—some of whom had to be bribed for their vote—Americans are beginning to learn that the cost of healthcare is going to increase, people will be laid off, have their hours reduced, or simply not hired at all as the result of this horrid new law.
A February 25 Rasmussen poll revealed that “Most voters still believe that President Obama’s national health law will cost more than official estimates and expect it to drive up the cost of health care in America.” They’re right!
David Goldhill has performed a national service with his new book, “Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father and How to Fix It.” ($25.95, Alfred A. Knopf) Goldhill is the president and chief executive officer of GSN, which operates a U.S. cable television network seen in more than 75 million homes and is one of the world’s largest digital games companies. He came to the issues of healthcare in the wake of his father’s death.
“Although his death was a deeply personal and unique tragedy for me and my family, my dad was merely one of a hundred thousand Americans who died that year as the result of infections picked up in hospitals. A hundred thousand preventable deaths! That’s more than double the annual number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number murdered, twenty 9/11s. Each and every year!”
“All of the actors in health care want to serve patients well, but understandably most respond rationally to the backward economic incentives baked into the system,” writes Goldhill. “At the heart of these perverse incentives is insurance. Unlike with everything else in the economy we rely on insurance as the sole means of paying for everything in health care—from the most routine to the most urgent.”
Noting that “Our massive and failing Medicare and Medicaid programs are already unsustainable and unfixable”, a fact known to anyone paying any attention, Goldhill gets to the heart of Obamacare, whose “central thrust is for ever more insurance to pay for health care.” The result is that “the underlying insurance-based structure of our health care system drives excess treatment, cost inflation, and medical errors.”
There are many myths about healthcare that have become embedded in our society. Goldhill notes that “The factors that most predict your health are your wealth, education, and lifestyle—not your access to health care.” This might seem self-evident, but we live in a nation where we are constantly hectored regarding our lifestyle choices; what and how much we eat, whether we exercise sufficiently, and endless articles suggesting that diseases and illness is predicated, not on our genetic liabilities (if you come from a family with a history of heart disease or cancer), but on the literal invention of new ailments driven by pharmaceutical innovations to “cure” them.
“The ACA (Obamacare) is fundamentally a health insurance bill, not a real piece of health care reform legislation, focusing as it does on the wrapper of insurance rather than on the complex and dysfunctional system inside.”
To understand where we are today, we need to understand that so-called health insurance is “a payment mechanism for health care”, not the health care itself. It influences that nature of the actual healthcare being provided. Moreover, “The U.S. health insurance companies employ over a half a million workers. That’s one worker for every two doctors. The administrative cost of managing our system of health care payments alne is almost $1,000 per American household. For most Americans, their annual share of this administrative cost exceeds the amount of actual health care they use in a typical year.”
“It is estimated that over the next decade the ACA will cost the government at least $1 trillion and the uninsured themselves the same amount,” says Goldhill. It’s worth keeping in mind at this point that the U.S. is $16 trillion in debt already and Medicare is widely understood to be underfunded; in part because $716 billion was taken from it to fund the imposition of ACA on the nation.
“In any given year, the most costly five percent of people account for more than fifty percent of health-care costs, and the top ten percent of people account for seventy percent of costs.” In effect this means that insurance is the mechanism “for moving funds from the many well to the few ill.” As a result, Medicare and the insurance companies become “surrogates” who “negotiate prices and preapprove procedures” and “they increasingly determine your choice of doctors.”
Goldhill notes that “there are plenty of government aid programs—food stamps, welfare, Social Security—in which the government doesn’t determine how we will spend its money, must less the prices of goods and services and from whom we can buy them.”
The kicker is that “health insurers can achieve long term profit growth only if the amount of money spent on health care increases!
Goldhill concludes that “Overall, the surrogates have done a miserable job of regulating the system’s quality, safety, and price.”
That is where we are today and it will get worse in the future. And our lives depend on the present system.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Goodbye to a very GREEN Business Week
February 25th, 2013.
By Alan Caruba.
In late 2010 I let my subscription to The Economist expire and now I am going to do that for Bloomberg Business Week.
In the February 18-24 edition of Business Week, an editorial, “The Right Way Forward on Climate Change”, contained this gem: “Still, the U.S. accounts for about 19 percent of all emissions—emissions that are causing global temperature increases, rising seas, and destructive droughts, floods, and hurricanes, according to a government advisory panel report released last month.”
When a magazine publishes such drivel, you should not read it. There are no rising temperatures worldwide. There is, in fact, a colder world that reflects a cooling cycle that began around sixteen years ago. Glaciers are growing. Snow is falling in increasing amounts and in places one usually does not associate with snow like Arizona. The seas are not rising. Polar bears are not going extinct. Et cetera.
To not know such simple facts betrays either an appalling ignorance or an appalling agenda, the advancement of the global warming—now called climate change—hoax.
The February 25-March 3 edition had an editorial on why the Keystone XL pipeline should be approved. It began “Americans concerned about pollution and climate change have traditionally stood with science, in particular the consensus that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are warming the earth and changing the climate.” There is so much wrong with this short sentence one hardly knows where to start.
First of all, “climate change” is what the climate has been doing for 4.5 billion years on planet Earth. There have been a number of ice ages which properly can be called climate change . When the last one ended around 11,000 years ago, we entered the Holocene.
Pay attention now to this description of the Holocene: “Most recent of all subdivisions of geologic time, ranging from the present back to the time (c.11,000 years ago) of almost complete withdrawal of the glaciers of the preceding Pleistocene epoch. During the Holocene epoch, the sculpturing of the earth’s surface to its present form was completed.”
“Withdrawal of the glacial ice resulted in the development of the present-day drainage basins of the Missouri and Ohio rivers, the development of the Great Lakes, and a global rise in sea level of up to 100 ft (30 m) as the glacial meltwater was returned to the seas. Warming climates resulted in the poleward migration of plants and animals.”
“The most significant development during the Holocene was the rise of modern humans, who are thought to have first appeared in the late Pleistocene.” Those modern humans did not control the climate when they arrived on the scene and they do not control it now. They will never control it no matter how many times Al Gore or the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says so.
We do not sacrifice virgins, tossing them into volcanoes to ensure a good harvest, nor do we do rain dances during a drought any more. Some of us, however, are convinced that we are the first Americans to have ever experienced a drought, a hurricane, or a blizzard.
When a magazine like Business Week employs morons to write its news and opinion, there is no point in subscribing to it in order to have your own intellect reduced by a couple of IQ points. I am thoroughly sick of hearing that all life on the planet is threatened or going extinct. Been there. Done that.
In his weekly column on science topics, the Wall Street Journal’s Matt Ridley noted that, “When the asteroid slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula 66,038,000 years ago, North America took the brunt of the impact, because the asteroid came in from the southeast like a golf chip shot.” Globally, it wiped out all the dinosaurs, along with many bird and other species. Their relatives, the alligators survived. “Mammals reappeared within 20,000 years in North America, “probably from Asia via an Arctic land bridge.”
Right now, countless “environmental” organizations around the world are gearing up to celebrate “Earth Day” on April 22. Is it just a coincidence that it is the birthdate of Communist revolutionary and the former Soviet Union’s first dictator, Vladimir Lenin? I think not.
Business Week, the Economist, Time, Newsweek and countless other elements of the print and broadcast media will have an environmental orgasm, spewing forth the tired, old lies that undergird the greatest hoax of the modern era; one they can no longer call “global warming” because millions of people have concluded the Earth is getting colder, so now they call it “climate change.”
The alleged “consensus” of geoscientists and others that supports the climate change theory barely exists.
As reported in the March edition of The Heartland Institute’s Environmental & Climate News, “Global warming alarmists are attacking the integrity of scientists, desperately seeking to minimize the damage presented by a recent survey of geoscientists and engineers regarding global warming.
“A recent survey of more than 1,000 geoscientists and engineers reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies found that only 36 percent agree with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assertion that humans are causing a serious global warming problem. By contrast, a majority of scientists in the survey believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.”
Meanwhile, here in America, the current administration will continue to flush billions of dollars we do not have down the environmental drain, “investing” in the most uncompetitive and least productive forms of energy ever invented. It is an administration that declared war on coal—a resource that powered fifty percent of all the electricity we use until they came along. Can we—should we—trust people who cannot reduce the nation’s insane debt and deficit by even one half of one percent?
Should we trust people, journalists, charged with the responsibility to bring us the news about economic and scientific topics when they clearly are clueless? I think not.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Rallying Against Enormous National Wealth
February 18th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Did anyone notice that the estimated 35,000 who showed up for the anti-Keystone XL pipeline rally outside the White House on Sunday, Feb 17, were all bundled up against the cold? The temperature was about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. The Earth has been cooling—naturally—for sixteen years.
The pipeline which will not cost taxpayers a dime would be part of the existing 1,200 pipelines that traverse the same route. It would enable oil extracted from Canadian tar sands to be refined in America. Failing that, the same oil will be exported to China.
There are already 170,000 miles of pipeline in America, moving oil and natural gas to fuel our cars and trucks, warm our homes and apartments, and, in the case of oil, to be turned in the zillion uses of plastic and other products such as asphalt to pave our streets and highways.
The people who showed up and shivered through the rally lack sufficient brain cells to make the connection between the warmth to which they retreated and the energy that provided that warmth or the electricity that provided the light by which to read their anti-energy manifestos.
For an hour or two they listened as the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council spokesmen regaled them with an anti-energy, anti-jobs, and anti-wealth message that ignored the 20,000 jobs the Keystone XL pipeline is expected to generate, plus all the other jobs dependent on this source of energy. Not surprisingly, the AFL-CIO’s building and construction trade division has endorsed the pipeline.
In testimony before a House committee, delivery on Feb 13, Daniel Simmons, the Director of Regulatory and State Affairs for the Institute of Energy Research, addressed a hearing on “The Effects of Rising Energy Costs on American Families and Employers.” As far as I can tell there was zero media coverage, but here are a few of the facts he presented.
“The federal estate contains vast energy resources, but the federal government allows energy production on a very small percentage of taxpayer-owned federal lands. The Interior Department has leased just two percent of federal offshore areas and less than six percent of federal onshore lands for oil and gas development.”
“It takes 307 days for the federal government to process a permit to drill, but only 27 days for Colorado and ten days in North Dakota.” Both states are reaping the benefit in terms of jobs and revenue generated while “energy production on federal lands is stagnating.”
In a nation that is $16 trillion in debt with trillion dollar annual deficits this runs counter to anything that makes any sense at all.
Just how much wealth is represented in the energy reserves the Obama administration to which has and will continue to deny access?
“These technically recoverable resources,” Simmons told the committee, “total 1,194 billion barrels of oil and 2,150 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that is owned by the federal taxpayer…the value of the estimated oil resources is $119.4 trillion and the value of the estimated natural gas resources is $8.6 trillion for a grand total of $128 trillion.”
If you wondering why the U.S. is borrowing trillions from other nations and contemplating the sequestration of funds for both domestic and defense when it sits atop enough energy reserves to wipe out our debt, reduce the importation of oil from nations that do not much care for us, and has millions unemployed when our energy industries alone could employ many of them and encourage manufacturing that would employ even more, you are asking the right questions.
Instead, the Obama administration has wasted billions on the most unreliable and uncompetitive energy producers, wind and solar, while promoting electric cars that no one can afford or wants to purchase. At one point the President was ballyhooing algae—pond scum—as a potential energy source! This lies somewhere between criminal stupidity or deliberate harm to the economy. For the record, in 2011, wind power produced 1.2 percent of the energy used in the United States and solar power produced 0.1 percent. Without subsidies and mandates they would not exist.
What is truly astonishing despite all the lies we’re being told about energy, in 2011 the U.S. produced 23.0 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, making it the world’s largest natural gas producer. Naturally, the federal government is dragging its feet on permissions to build gas export facilities.
In 2011 the United States produced 5.67 million barrels of oil per day.
The federal government currently owns or manages 755 million acres of onshore subsurface mineral assets. Offshore it owns or manages 1.76 billion acres of lands and mineral assets. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that state and national coffers could generate nearly $150 billion over a ten-year period if these resources were immediately opened.
Instead, the nation is so badly mismanaged that, while the New Depression lingers on, the Institute on Energy Research estimates the worth of the government’s oil and gas technically recoverable resources are worth $128 trillion, about eight times our national debt!
We are all the victims of the most incredibly stupid Congress and the present administration whose single goal seems to be to impoverish as many Americans as possible so that the few remaining job-holders can be taxed enough to pay for their government benefits.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
What the Sex Lives of California Mice Can Tell You
February 13th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
According to Cheryl Rosenfeld, an associate professor of biomedical sciences in the University of Missouri’s Bond Life Science Center, loading up a bunch of California mice with a mega-dose of bisphenol A (BPA) showed researchers that “What we have observed in those models is that BPA affects male rodents differently from females.”
The February 11 UM news release that announced this was titled “Bisphenol A affects sex-specific reproductive behaviors in a monogamous animal species” with a sub-headline that said “Animal findings suggest that gender may also influence chemical risks for humans.”
So, humans are expected to demand that BPA be banned based on the behavior of BPA-besotted California mice, but not the deer mice on which previous similar research was conducted. As noted in the release, “The two rodent species have contrasting mating behaviors.” That’s right, it depends on the sexual proclivities of the species of the mice involved and one has to make a mighty leap of faith that Ms. Rosenfeld’s research applies to humans.
Rosenfeld’s earlier work received notice in a January 2, 2013 Science Daily article which pointed out that, “Following a three-year study using more than 2,800 mice, a University of Missouri researcher was not able to replicate a series of previous studies by another research group investigating the controversial chemical BPA.”
A synopsis of the earlier study noted that “Rosenfeld’s group extended the studies to include animal numbers that surpassed the prior studies to verify their findings were not a fluke and to provide sufficient numbers of animals to ensure that significant differences would be detected if they existed. However, even these additional numbers of animals and extended experiments failed to reproduce the earlier findings.”
It’s worth noting that Ms. Rosenfeld’s later research involving monogamous California mice represented a dose that is a 1,000 times greater than a human would ingest. This research suggests that the anticipated outcome would demonstrate that BPA is harmful.
It reflects a global propaganda campaign to ban a chemical that has been safely in use for fifty years. This campaign is the subject of my six-part series on BPA that can be found at http://thebpafile.blogspot.com/, a blog I maintain that includes other articles on the subject.
As noted on The BPA File, “In 2011, ‘the German Society of Toxicology released a review of more than five thousand previous studies of PBA exposure that concluded that BPA exposure represents no noteworthy risk to the health of the human population, including newborns and babies. Researchers concluded that BPA is neither mutagenic nor likely to be a carcinogen.”
Five thousand studies! At what point does 50 years of safe use to coat the insides of aluminum food cans, protecting the contents against food pathogens such as botulism, put this campaign by environmental groups and others to rest? How many more studies do we need to demonstrate the safety of BPA in making shatterproof safety goggles, DVDs, and scores of other products we use every day?
In March 2012 an Associated Press health reporter, Matthew Perrone, reported that “The Food and Drug Administration has rejected a petition from environmentalists (the Natural Resources Defense Council) that would have banned the plastic-hardening chemical bisphenal-A from all food and drink packaging, including plastic bottles and canned food.” The petition was rejected because the “petitioners did not present compelling scientific evidence to justify new restrictions…”
How compelling is yet another study that involved feeding California mice 1,000 times more BPA than humans would ever ingest? And how would any rational person conclude that alleged changes in monogamous California mice—but not the polygamous deer mice—could be extrapolated to suggest that humans would be affected?
An August 8, 2011 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, “Postscript to a Panic”, noted a study, “financed by the EPA…involved feeding (human) subjects a BPA-rich diet for 24 hours. Researchers then monitored their blood and urine for traces of the chemical” only to find that “the result was BPA levels too low to detect.”
The sheer absurdity of the campaign to get BPA banned reflects a deeper, more sinister agenda by environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council. It is the belief that the Earth’s human population must be reduced to protect it. Banning BPA would put millions at risk of death from food-borne diseases like botulism.
Given the tenacity with which such groups prosecute their agendas, we can be assured that these obsessed anti-BPA “researchers” aren’t going to go away.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obama’s Carbon Dioxide Lies
February 10th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The utter desperation of the “Warmists”, the advocates of global warming—now called climate change—is evident in a recent “study” reported in the Daily Caller in which “an international team of researchers” concluded that “earthworms could be contributing to global warming.” Earthworms!
That’s how stupid they think the public is.
It is useful to know the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, the object of much fear-mongering by Greens and Warmists. According to Wikipedia, “Air is the name given to the atmosphere used in breathing and photosynthesis. Dry air contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Air also contains a variable amount of water vapor, on average around 1%. While air content and atmospheric pressure vary at different layers, air suitable for the survival of terrestrial plants and terrestrial animals is currently only known to be found in Earth’s troposphere and artificial atmospheres.”
The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is extraordinarily low compared to its other elements. Edmund Contoski, the author of the award-winning “Makers and Takers”, a study of how wealth and progress is created or thwarted, has noted that “Not only is carbon dioxide’s total greenhouse effect puny, mankind’s contribution to it is minuscule. The overwhelming majority (97%) of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere comes from nature, not from man.”
Not only are worms contributing to the CO2 in the atmosphere, but Contoski notes that “Volcanoes, swamps, rice paddies, fallen leaves, and even insects and bacteria alone emit ten times more carbon dioxide than all the factories and automobiles in the world. Natural wetlands emit more greenhouse gases than all human activities combined.” Contoski’s data is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy which also notes that 98% of all the carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed again by Nature.
According to a February 5 Wall Street Journal article, President Obama’s forthcoming State of the Union speech “will lay out a renewed effort to combat climate change that is expected to include using his authority to curb emissions from existing power plants…Mr. Obama is likely to signal he wants to move beyond proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules on emissions from new power plants and tackle existing coal-fired plants…”
There is not a scintilla of evidence that reducing carbon dioxide to avoid global warming has any basis in science, but ample evidence that Obama sees it as a way to reduce the nation’s capacity to generate the energy—electricity—it requires for economic growth. The effort to impose a carbon tax would suck more wealth out of the private sector while fueling the government’s insatiable desire for more funding.
The administration’s efforts to maintain this absurd, baseless notion were on full display when a report was released in January by the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee, claiming that “humans have so altered the composition of the atmosphere that the next glaciation (ice age) has now been delayed indefinitely.” The northeastern states were hit with a monster blizzard in February.
In late December, The Heartland Institute brought together fourteen conservative think tanks and advocacy groups to urge Congress to oppose carbon taxes. In a letter sent to all U.S. Senators and Representatives, they pointed out that a new tax on carbon content of fossil fuels would be a job killer and raise energy costs across the board, “hurting every industry and every consumer.” The letter noted that carbon is already taxed enough and that U.S. carbon emissions are already declining, but the bottom line is that reducing U.S. emissions will have no effect at all on the so-called climate change. Why? Emissions from China, India, and other developing nations are rising rapidly.
The irony of this is that more carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere would contribute to healthier forests and jungles, and most importantly, to increased crop yields that provide food for mankind and livestock, as well as all other creatures that consume vegetation as part of their diet. Carbon dioxide is Nature’s fertilizer for vegetation from a single blade of grass to a giant Sequoia tree.
There is no “consensus” among scientists regarding global warming and many, like those warning about earthworms, have misled Americans and others around the world with the greatest hoax of the modern era.
Since 2008, the U.S. has wasted nearly $70 billion on “climate change activities.” A report by the Congressional Research Service revealed that, from fiscal years 2008 through 2012, the federal government spent $68.4 billion to “combat climate change.” In addition, the Department of Defense spent $4 billion on the same futile, idiotic efforts when, in fact, humans play no role whatever in the changes occurring in the Earth’s climate. The Earth has actually been COOLING since around 1998 and that is entirely the result of less solar radiation. Those billions are an obscene waste of taxpayer funding.
Obama is lying. And he is using the Environmental Protection Agency to advance his lies as they produce more and more regulations whose sole purpose is to shut down existing coal-fired utilities and render impossible the construction of more utilities using coal in a nation that has centuries-worth of affordable coal reserves for the generation of more electricity to serve our energy needs. He is no friend of any other fossil fuel if the delay of the XL Keystone pipeline is any indication.
Energy, indeed, energy independence and the wealth and prosperity that would be generated is within our grasp. The only person standing in the way is Barack Hussein Obama.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Losing the Battle with Islam
February 5th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
“Egypt, the largest Arab state, the second largest recipient of U.S. military air, and our second most important ally in the Middle East, is now in the hands of a hostile regime—an elected one at that—which we continue to treat as a friendly one,” says Raymond Stock in a recent article published by the Middle East Forum.
When President Obama gave a speech in Cairo on January 25, 2009, it was portrayed as an outreach to the Middle East and Islam. Seated in the front row at Cairo University, however, was the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. The speech asked Muslims to define themselves “not by national or ethnic identity, but by their religion.”
What followed was the overthrow of the Mubarak regime and the election of Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood as president, a victory for its 84-year struggle for power in the land of its birth. How radical is the Muslim Brotherhood? In January on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a key figure in Morsi’s government, Fathi Shihab-Eddim, called the Holocaust a hoax cooked up by U.S. intelligence operatives, saying that the six million Jews killed by the Nazis in World War II had simply moved to the U.S.
Such views are widely held by Muslims and reflect Islam’s hatred of Jews, but most Americans remain oblivious to the fact that Islam hates Christianity and all other religions. The official policy of the U.S. is to ignore this and to support the Morsi regime. Morsi is on record saying that Jews are “apes and pigs.” The 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is now just an illusion.
To get some insight into life under Islam in Egypt (and elsewhere) some of the fatwas issued in 2012, legal decrees issued by learned Muslims, one called for the destruction of the pyramids and the Sphinx. Another opposed setting a minimum age for marriage in the new constitution, i.e. pedophilia. A fatwa called for scrapping the Camp David accords and another permitted the killing of any anti-Islamization protesters. Greetings to Christians on holidays such as Christmas and Easter were forbidden.
At this writing, the U.S. is shipping the first four of sixteen F-16s promised to Mubarak and giving the Morsi regime two hundred Abrams tanks in the same package. On January 26, Morsi said this was a sign of support for his rule and it is.
Special Operations Speaks, an organization of Special Ops veterans, has spoken out against this weapons transfer noting that “These modern U.S. weapons are part of a package of military aid to Egypt that was concluded in 2010 with the previous Hosni Mubarak regime. The times and our relationship have changed and not for the better,” cited the “viciously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood” deeming the provision of weapons “liberal foreign policy at its most inept.”
The U.S. is not alone, however, it supporting a regime dedicated, along with the rest of Islam, to the destruction of the West. Morsi is expecting a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, plus $5 billion in emergency aid from the European Union. More billions have been pledged by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Having failed to reach an agreement with Iraq, the U.S. pulled its troops from that nation which is now wracked with attacks and is, in effect, a close ally of Iran. President Obama has announced the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. All the money and military efforts in those nations has come to nothing.
At the same time, al Qaeda has expanded its operations, most recently in Mali, but also throughout Africa, most notably its northern tier known as the Maghreb. An attack in Libya that killed the U.S. ambassador and three others—most notably on the anniversary of 9/11—resulted in the deliberate deception of the American public, suggesting it was a spontaneous act, the result of a video no one had seen. Neither the President, nor his out-doing Secretary of State has been held responsible for this.
The in-coming Secretary of State, John Kerry, favors “negotiations” with Iran when there has been no evidence since 1979 that anything other than a state of war has existed with that nation. The nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, displayed an alarming lack of understanding of the threats to our national security or the rise of Islamic terrorism, a reflection of its jihad to impose Islam on the entire world.
Dr. Peter Hammond, the author of “Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat”, pointed out that Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. What Americans and others in the West do not grasp is that it is a complete, total, 100% system of life. Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social and military components, but it is the religious component that masks the other elements of Islam.
It consistently describes itself as “a religion of peace” when it has been the root cause of all the terrorism in the world since the latter part of the last century and marks the new century as one in which a war to destroy it is the only alternative to being destroyed by it.
The President, the son of a Kenyan Muslim and step-son of an Indonesian Muslim, has consistently demonstrated his support for Islam. One of his first acts as President was to call for the closing of Guantanamo where jihadists are interned. He described the enhanced interrogation used to find Osama bin Laden and to deter further acts of terrorism against America as “torture.” His first television interview was with Al-Arabia, a Middle East television channel. Obama has announced plans to travel to Israel, the first such trip since his 2008 campaign.
America and the West are feeding the alligator, hoping to be the last to be eaten. We are losing the battle is Islam and, unless this is reversed, we shall end up being its slaves.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Enemies of the Constitution
February 3rd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Perhaps the stupidest idea given an airing in a recent edition of The New York Times is Prof. Louis Michael Seidman’s opinion, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution.”
According to his commentary, Prof. Seidman has “taught constitutional law for almost 40 years” and he was “ashamed” it took him that long to conclude that it was an outdated, “bizarre” document.
Apparently President Obama, who was a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, arrived at that conclusion more swiftly. His disregard for the Constitution recently got a slap down from the courts that ruled his recess appointments to the labor relations board were unconstitutional insofar as the Senate was not in recess.
I am not a constitutional scholar, but it should be self-evident that the oldest living constitution in the world has served to create and maintain the greatest republic in the world. Prof. Seidman asserts that Americans have “an obsession” with the Constitution and that is a very good thing indeed. Without it, we would likely have fallen prey to tyranny.
The framers of the Constitution did not spring it on their fellow citizens as a fait accompli, but rather as a new instrument of governance to replace the failed Articles of Confederation. A literate population was able to read the Federal Papers that argued for its various elements. It was submitted to the legislatures of the states for ratification.
We can thank those legislatures for the Bill of Rights because they insisted on amendments that would protect the right of free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and other elements that protect the individual against abuses of power that we take for granted, but which exist throughout the world. It can be argued that the Arab Spring that overthrew a number of Middle Eastern despots are a reflection of those rights as understood by citizens in nations that have never enjoyed them.
We tend to forget that many nations even today are ruled by monarchs and others exercising power that denies their citizens any definition of freedom. The Founding Fathers, having fought a long war against the English monarch and his parliament, were particularly sensitive to that, creating an instrument of governance that deliberately created a system of checks and balances to ensure that no President or Congress could act in a manner contrary to the intent of the Constitution.
The Constitution intended to slow down the process of legislation to ensure it received a full debate and was not subject to the whims of the times. In a January 2011 policy analysis published by the Cato Institute, Marcus E. Ethridge noted that “In the wake of the 2010 elections, President Obama declared that voters did not give a mandate to gridlock. His statement reflects over a century of Progressive hostility to the inefficient and slow system of government created by the American Framers,” adding that “A large and growing body of evidence makes it clear that the public interest is most secure when government institutions are inefficient decision makers.”
The most recent example of this was the 2,000-plus page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). At the time, then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, famously said that “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” That’s the opposite of what the Framers had in mind and is an example of what happens when a political party acts in a tyrannical manner. We are already finding out that Obamacare is causing healthcare insurance rates to increase and will deny healthcare to older Americans and others deemed by bureaucrats to be a burden on the system.
Even so, the Supreme Court which is supposed to protect Americans from abuses of the Constitution, deemed Obamacare to be a “tax” and thus legal. The Obama administration had argued that it was not a tax until it got in front of the Court. The Court had long since dropped the ball, allowing the Commerce Clause to be stretched beyond its intent to permit Congress to justify all manner of legislation and regulation of the nation’s economy.
The Framers had to compromise on the issue of slavery, in effect “kicking the can down the street” in order to get assent from the Southern States. The Supreme Court exacerbated this with the Dred Scott decision that ruled that blacks were property no matter where they were. The result was the Civil War.
The argument that the Constitution is an outdated document ignores the fact that it has been amended twenty-seven times and remains the gold standard of law in America.
There are many enemies of freedom and Prof. Seidman’s opinion is just one example, a reflection of the way some intellectuals hold the rest of us in contempt.
One of the greatest plagues on mankind was the notion of communism, the product of Karl Marx’s hatred of private property—the keystone of the Constitution—and the view that people should be seen as a collective, not as individuals. The Constitution affirms that the power of government resides in “the people” who, as individuals, determine who shall “represent” them and are to be protected against the arrogance of power that spawns the inclination to “rule” rather than represent.
The Framers of the Constitution understood this. It is the only thing that stands between us and a tyrannical government run by Progressives, Liberals, and Marxists.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
How Influential is Conservative Talk Radio?
January 31st, 2013By Alan Caruba.
In the wake of the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama, I began to wonder how influential conservative talk radio is.
Serendipitously, I received a copy of Fred V. Lucas’ new book, “The Right Frequency: The Story of Talk Radio Giants Who Shook Up the Political and Media Establishment” ($18.95, History Publishing Company).
Throughout the 1980s and 90s I was a guest on television and a lot on talk radio thanks to a popular media spoof, The Boring Institute, that offered lists of The Most Boring Celebrities of the Year, the Most Boring Films, et cetera. After 9/11 I put the Institute on hiatus and then ended it.
This was, coincidently, the same era that saw the rise of talk radio and, in particular, the rise of conservative talk radio stars such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others with audiences in the millions. What has me wondering about their influence, however, is the latest election in which Obama gained a sufficient margin to defeat Mitt Romney despite what is arguably the worst economy since the Great Depression, the passage of Obamacare over the protests of millions of Americans, and similar issues that would ordinarily have rendered him a one-term President.
Perhaps the 2008 election was just an anomaly, given the novelty of a Black candidate and the intense support of the mainstream media. But that pattern repeated itself in 2012 and, despite the 24/7 conservative radio chatter, it did not sway voters.
As Lucas noted, “Of listeners to the news talk format of radio, 77 percent voted in the 2008 presidential election, according to the 2010 Talk Radio Research Project conducted by Talkers Magazine, which covers the talk radio industry. That does not mean Limbaugh or for that matter Ed Schultz is the reason certain people vote…it is quite likely that the entertainment value of talk radio—a mixture of satire and commentary—has made ordinary Americans more engaged in politics than they would be if talk radio did not have such a large reach, even if some of those listeners are just tuning in to argue with the host.”
Some statistics are helpful. According to the 2010 Talk Radio Research Project, 81% of all news talk radio listeners are 35 years or older. “Interestingly, just 28% identify themselves as Republicans, while 54% identify themselves as independent.” Politically, 40% identified themselves as either conservative or ultra-conservative, while just 15% identified themselves as liberal or ultra-liberal.” Talk radio is essentially preaching to the choir.
The lack of liberal talk radio suggests that liberals are less involved with the medium and the failure of Air America Radio with hosts that included Jeanine Garafolo and Al Franken was impressive. Lucas said it was “a chaotic mess from its launch with changing ownership, a revolving door of management, and worse yet, a corruption charge.” In 2005 it filed for bankruptcy.
For my part, I make a point of listening to the first ten or fifteen minutes of Limbaugh, knowing that he will spend the next three hours exploring a particular theme on any given day. Where I live on the East Coast, WABC radio provides lots of conservative talk and, in the evening, I watch Fox News, but often do not watch for long. Most of the news I absorb daily comes from Internet news sites and my daily reading of The Wall Street Journal.
Is Rush Limbaugh influential? Obama seems to think so because Rush has now replaced George W. Bush as his favorite bogyman and punching bag.
It’s worth noting that Rush does not endorse candidates and was lukewarm towards both McCain and Romney during the past two elections. Lucus quotes him as saying “I don’t say that I have influence. I was totally opposed to the 1990 budget deal and it still happened. I am not an activist…this is entertainment.”
That, I suspect, is Limbaugh’s great appeal. He is very entertaining. It does not, so far as I can see, translate into influence at the polls because many of Rush’s devoted “Ditto Heads” may, as they did in the last election, decided to stay home.
The Obama White House knows it has the mainstream media in its pocket. They have become little more than a megaphone for its policies and, these days, an instrument of liberal propaganda. The White House political agenda is advanced by a no-holds-barred attack on anyone who oppose their policies and, of late, a deliberate effort to undermine the Republican Party that is still reeling from the 2012 loss.
Obama’s thuggish politics these days involves attacking the leading conservative news outlet. In an interview with The New Republic, Obama continues to denigrate Fox News and Limbaugh, claiming that “the more left-leaning media outlets recognize that compromise is not a dirty word.” This is a President who has demonstrated no inclination to compromise on anything and a disdain for Congress and the Constitution.
The end of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987 that required equal time for opposing political views marked the rise of conservative talk radio. Today it can be heard locally and in syndication from coast to coast. Reagan vetoed legislation to make it the law of the land calling it unconstitutional.
That does not mean, however, that conservative talk radio is influential because it appeals to an older, better educated audience, a demographic that leaves out those under 35 and low income listeners, an increasing percentage of whom are on some form of government dole.
A significant portion of “low information” voters who elected Obama were not listening to conservative talk radio. The popularity of Fox News does not appear to translate into any effect on Congress or the White House. They were all over the Benghazi scandal and it has fizzled.
Despite dwindling newspaper circulation, despite the rise of the Internet as a provider of news, and despite the popularity of conservative talk radio, it would appear that the mainstream media is winning by parroting the daily White House “talking points” and by burying White House scandals such as the Benghazi cover-up. The recent Sunday “Sixty Minutes” interview with the President and out-going Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is testimony to the slavish support of the mainstream media.
It does not help that the Republican Party is struggling to put forth a cohesive and persuasive agenda or that it lacks the kind of leadership that reflects the kind of adulation and support the President continues to enjoy.
The numbers that do listen and watch to conservative talk radio are impressive, but it is not translating into an impact on Capitol Hill and none in the White House. And that is the definition of influence.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Economy is Worse Than You Think
January 29th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Most Americans know the economy is in bad shape even if a majority voted to reelect the man most responsible for making a bad economy worse. And, no, it was not George W. Bush who is responsible for the 2008 financial crash. It was the government with its housing programs that encouraged giving mortgage loans to those who could not afford them and then bundling those “toxic assets”, and selling them to banks who then found themselves in trouble for investing in them.
Another partner in the nation’s financial woes has been the Federal Reserve, a banking cartel given the right to literally print money. The Fed recently released the fact that its holdings in U.S. government debt has increased by 257 percent since President Obama took office! Those holdings are at an all-time record of $1,696,691,000,000 at the close of business on Wednesday, January 23. The other major holder of our debt is China at $1,170,100,000.000.
It’s worth taking a few minutes to see how the policies of President Obama, whether a deliberate effort to ruin the economy or just the result a lack of understanding of how the U.S. economy works, has put the U.S. on the precipice of failure comparable to what is occurring in Europe. It is a global, as well as national problem as the central banks of the EU desperately transfer billions among themselves to stave off a catastrophe that will destroy the wealth of their citizens.
The federal government ran a deficit (the difference between what it owes and what revenues it takes in) of $292 billion for the first two months of fiscal year 2013—October and November 2012—amounting to $4.8 billion of borrowed money every day. The Congressional Budget Office reported that federal revenues rose by $30 billion—a ten percent increase over last year—but spending increased even more, going up by $87 billion (16%).
Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security was about 7% higher–$8 billion than last year. For years, Congress has resisted reforming these “entitlement” programs and Obamacare has only exacerbated the problem. In order to fund its establishment, the Obama administration took $716 billion from the Medicare funds. The Social Security funds have been “borrowed” by Congress for years while the numbers of eligible senior citizens has steadily increased as “baby boomers” come of age.
The call for higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” has fallen hardest on the middle class, in reality increasing taxes on them. The reality is that the middle class taxpayer pays 25% of their income in federal income tax these days, but when you add in 13.3% in the federal Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, it adds up to 38.3%. According to the Tax Foundation, the average state’s income tax rate on the middle class is 4.82% (not all states have an income tax in addition to the federal government.) That brings the total to $43.12% of middle class income drained off to pay taxes.
Add in all the other taxes we pay on gasoline, telephones, and other necessities, and the middle class is being tapped for half their earnings.
The Republican Party, in power in the House of Representatives, has offered legislation to bring some relief to middle class and other taxpayers. It has sent annual budgets to the Senate where they have died for the past three years.
All this has been happening during the first term of the Obama administration. In a January 25th commentary posted on AmericanThinker.com, Steve McCann noted that “As of the end of 2012, the United States has experienced the worst five-year period—which includes, as the end of the final four years, Obama’s first full term—since 1928-1932 and the start of the Great Depression.”
McCann cited that fact that, since January 2008, the employment age population has increased by 11.7 million, yet there are 3.0 million fewer Americans employed. “Factoring in the population growth and 2008 labor participation rate, the unemployment rate for December 2012 would be 11.4% as compared to 4.9% in December of 2007.”
“At the end of 2007, the median household income was $54,489 (inflation adjusted); at the beginning of 2012, it had dropped to $50,020—a decline of nearly 9%.” During this same time, while incomes were eroding, the cost of living increased 20% from December 2007 to September 2012.
There are other stark statistics that the mainstream media tends to under-report. In December 2007, there were 26.5 million Americans on food stamps at a cost of $30 billion. By December 2012, 47.4 million were using this program and the federal government was running advertising to get more to apply for it. During Obama’s first term, food stamp recipients increased at a rate of 11,133 per day!
No matter how one measures the U.S. economy, the news is bad and holds little promise of improving. Economic growth is anemic as Obama increased debt $50,521 per household in his first term, more than the first 42 presidents in 53 terms combined.
An excellent monthly publication, Budget and Tax News, published by The Heartland Institute, is a very good way to gain the information and insight you need to understand these issues.
No need to wonder why Obama wants to increase the debt ceiling and no need to wonder why his policies continue to cripple the economy, whether it’s the failure to approve the Keystone XL pipeline or to rein in an avalanche of economy-killing regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency. Obamacare contained 18 hidden taxes when it was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress that didn’t even read its more than 2,000 pages.
At some point this combination of increased taxes, low employment, and stagnant economic growth has to implode. That outcome can be avoided, but the nation is running out of time.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Destroying the U.S. Military
January 27th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The author of “1984”, George Orwell, once said, “The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”
In the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, among the priorities listed is to “provide for the common defense” of the nation. After having fought a six-year war during the Revolution and replaced the failed Articles of Confederation, the framers of the Constitution, many of whom had fought beside George Washington, well understood the need for a standing army and navy to protect the new nation.
In the nation’s earliest years, Americans repeatedly elected Presidents with military credentials and experience. In addition to Washington they included Monroe, Jackson, Harrison, Tyler, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush41 and 43. FDR had served as Secretary of the Navy.
In recent times, two Presidents, Clinton—a draft dodger—and Obama have had no military experience to draw upon. Over the objections of their generals, both introduced policies to include and protect homosexuals in the U.S. military services. Now the doors have been opened to permit women to fight beside men. The military is not a place where one conducts social experiments. It’s a place where men go in harm’s way to protect the nation.
Today, thanks to the failure of the Congress to address America’s spending and growing debt problems, the U.S. military faces a draconian “sequestration”—massive cuts to the defense budget—that would so seriously decrease the nation’s ability to defend itself and project power globally, that it reminds one of the failure to maintain a strong military that required a massive effort to get up to speed after the Japanese Empire’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 194. The WWII declaration of war included the Nazi Third Reich that threatened the United Kingdom, all of Europe, and Russia.
A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 40% of likely voters “believe the United States spends too much on defense and national security” while only 22% disagree and 32% believe the amount spent is about right. This is a definition of stupidity.
A nation requires a standing army, navy, coast guard, and air force, along with a trustworthy banking system. After the 2008 financial crisis—the result of government policies regarding housing—we had to bail out the banking system to the tune of billions. Today we face the prospect of a military that is flying an aging fleet of airplanes, has a navy that has as few ships in service as we had at the end of World War I, and a volunteer military that requires that support of thousands of civilian personnel.
Out-going Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, has been loudly warning that the result of any spending cuts would be “catastrophic.”
One can argue that we have spent a fortune in treasure and blood in the Middle East since 2001, but only the most foolish would argue that America and the West is not facing the greatest threat in its history since Moslem armies were defeated at the doors of Europe in 732 AD and 1529 AD.
In a recent press conference, Panetta said that the practical results of the proposed cuts in defense would be less training for units not imminently deploying to Afghanistan; less shipboard training for all but the highest priority missions; less pilot training and fewer flight hours; curtailed ship maintenance and disruption to research and weapons modernization programs. He described it as the hollowing out of the defense force of the nation.
Noting that members of our military are fighting and sometimes dying to defend our nation, Panetta said, “Those of us in Washington need to have the same courage as they do to do the right thing and try to protect the security of this country. We must ensure we have the resources we need to defend the nation and meet our commitments to our troops, to our civilian employees, and to their families, after more than a decade of war.”
Courage and common sense are two elements that are missing in Washington these days.
Retired General Paul E. Vallely, U.S. Army, states the case bluntly. “President Obama is working very hard to destroy U.S. military superiority, consciously and unconsciously to the advantage (of) our global enemies in an attempt to seize control over national security and (in) another overt attempt to bypass Congress, the Obama administration may have already made this play as of this writing.”
Joined at the press conference by Army General Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dempsey described sequestration as “a self-inflicted wound on national security”, bluntly saying it was “an irresponsible way to manage our nation’s defense. It cuts blindly and it cuts bluntly. It compounds risk and it compromises readiness.”
Americans are largely unaware that our air fleet is the oldest in Air Force history, worn down by two-plus decades of combat dating back to the 1991 Gulf War. The average age of the fleet exceeds a quarter of a century. The U.S. Navy is a mere shadow of itself. Under normal operations one third of the fleet is in repair, one third is in port for the rest and relaxation of sailors, leaving approximately 90 ships to patrol the seven seas to protect American interests. There are about 800,000 civilians that provide support to our services and nearly 1.4 million in the active-duty military.
We have until March to know whether Congress will take action to repeal sequestration and replace it with the steps everyone with a lick of sense knows must be taken; reforming the nation’s tax code, reforming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to avoid their impending failure, reductions in the spending and borrowing that has imposed more than $16 trillion in debt, and reform of the spiraling avalanche of regulations that are choking the nation’s economic recovery.
How serious is it? Gen. Dempsey warned that operations, maintenance and training will be gutted. “We’ll ground aircraft, return ships to port, and sharply curtail training across the force. (We) may be forced to furlough civilians at the expense of maintenance and even health care. We will be unable to reset the force following a decade of war.”
“Within a year, we’ll be unprepared,” said Gen. Dempsey.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Making Little Murderers
January 23rd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
If anything good comes from the Newtown massacre, it will be a national discussion of the role of various psychological medications that have been foisted on a generation or two of young Americans in the nation’s schools. Particularly dangerous have been a group called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs).
While the White House and other gun-banning groups grab the spotlight by putting the blame on guns, columnist Dr. Jerome R. Corsi recently reported that SSRIs have played a role in “some 90 percent of school shootings over more than a decade…according to British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy, a founder of RxISK.org, an independent website for researching and reporting on prescription drugs.”
A visit to one of Dr. Healey’s websites, ssristories.com, provides more than 4,800 news stories involving some level of violence in which antidepressants are mentioned. SSRIs include Prozac, Zoloff, Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, and Luvox. Others include Remeron, Anafranil, Effexor, Cymbalta, and Pristiq, as well as the dopamine reuptake inhibitor antidepressant Wellbutrin, marketed as Zyban. If you listen closely to television ads for medications to stop smoking and address other problems, you will hear warnings about the way they can cause serious mental disabilities.
In a recent article on CanadaFreePress.com,Tom DeWeese, the president of the American Policy Center, a grassroots activist think tank, he said that “Today more than 7,000,000 children have been labeled, tamped and registered as permanent patients of the school system; 10 to 12 percent of all boys between the ages of 6 and 14 in the United States have been diagnosed as having ADD (Attention deficit disorder). One in every 30 Americans between the ages of 5 and 19 years old has a prescription for Ritalin.” The corollary diagnosis is ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Think of it is millions of tiny time bombs in the schools and banning certain kinds of guns or limiting how many bullets can be in a clip has nothing to do with the mental illness that causes mass murders.
For a decade I was the communications director for the American Policy Center and was appalled to learn how the nation’s educational system had been altered from schools that concentrated on academics to schools whose purpose was behavior modification. In 1965, the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Act opened the doors to a legion of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and “the psychiatric programs and testing needed to validate them.”
DeWeese reported that “To date, there has never been issued a single peer-reviewed scientific paper officially claiming to prove ADD/ADHD exists.”
Columnist Ann Coulter characterized the latest Second Amendment debate, noting that “Consequently, whenever a psychopath with a million gigantic warning signs commits a shocking murder, the knee-jerk reaction is to place yet more controls on guns. By now, guns are the most heavily regulated product in America.”
The gun debate, however, serves to obfuscate the true cause of a rash of murders in America—some of which have been spectacular mass murders such as in Newtown, in the Colorado movie theatre, and on college campuses—the thriving industry of antidepressant medications.
As Dr. Healey points out on his website, “Antidepressants have been recognized as potential inducers of mania and psychosis since their introduction in the 1950s. Since the introduction of Prozac in December 1987, there has been a massive increase in the number of people taking antidepressants.” By way of grasping how widespread they are, Dr. Healy notes that “Before the introduction of Prozac, less than one percent of the population of the U.S. was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression.” That number has risen to 4.4 percent, almost one out of every twenty-three people in the U.S.
Dr. Healey’s index of more than one hundred categories lists the top thirteen as including school shootings and incidents, women teacher molestations, murder-suicides, and even road rage cases.
The collection of 4,800 media reports include a lot of school-related incidents such as one in March 2011 in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a student shot and wounded a member of the staff when his plot to blow up the school with homemade bombs was discovered. In February 2010, a student at the Discovery Middle School in Huntsville, Alabama, killed a fellow student. In November 1999, Kip Kinkel was sentenced for killing to students at his high school in Eugene, Oregon. Now, multiply this with the many other comparable incidents and you have a problem related to psychological drugs that is not getting the attention it should.
The killer at Sandy Hook elementary school allegedly was prescribed Fanapt, one of many such drugs that, instead of inhibiting psychosis and aggressive behavior, tends to initiate it. The psychological side-effects of Fanapt were known to include restlessness, aggression, and delusions along with hostility, mood swings, and panic attack, as well as other behaviors that signal serious problems. Why it is still available is a question, given that its first producer dropped it, was picked up by another, initially rejected by the FDA, then later picked up and mass produced. Its adverse side-effect was said to be “infrequent.”
It’s not the eighty million gun owners in America that are a danger. It’s the legion of “educational psychologists” in our nation’s schools that routinely diagnose ordinary behavior such as a lack of attention or restlessness as psychological disorders and prescribe from a laundry list of medications in order to keep our nation’s classrooms filled with docile, drugged students, some of whom will end up killing their schoolmates, teachers and staff.
When you fill our highly regimented government schools with students who find the curriculum boring or who display the usual energy of youth and then identify them as suffering from non-existent psychological disorders, you get events like the Newtown massacre. There will be more to come.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obama Could Not Pass a Background Check
January 17th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
President Barack Obama could not pass a background check if he was applying for a gun permit or a job. Why has this man been allowed to remain in office or take the oath for a second time?
During the 2008 campaign, it was known that:
His official, long form birth records were SEALED
.His Occidental College records were SEALED.
His Columbia College records were SEALED.
His Harvard College records were SEALED.
His College thesis – SEALED.His Harvard Law Review articles – SEALED.
His Indonesian adoption records – SEALED.
His passport file – SEALED.
His medical records – Unavailable
His baptism records – Unavailable
His papers from his service in the Illinois legislature – Unavailable
His Illinois State Bar Association records – Unavailable
The birth certificate that the White House released is reputed by document experts to be false.
The Social Security number he has used was issued to someone else. He could not pass an E-Verify test. The first three numbers of his Social Security ID are reserved for applicants with Connecticut addresses, 040-049. The number was issued between 1977 and 1979. Obama’s earliest employment reportedly was in 1975 at a Baskin-Robbins in Oahu, Hawaii.
Many of the “facts” he cited in his two memoirs have turned out to be questionable, if not outright lies; particularly as regards his birth father, a citizen of Kenya at the time of his birth.
A job applicant with Obama’s paper trail would not even pass the smell test, but this man was elected and reelected. The role of journalism is to vet the credentials of anyone running for public office, let alone the highest office in the land. Instead, he has been protected against all inquiries and those making them have been called “birthers” or simply ignored.
Obama so routinely lies that keeping track of them would require a team of full-time archivists.
In August 2009 he said, “I have not said I was a single-payer supporter”, but in June 2003, as an Illinois state senator, he said, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care system.”
In March 2006, he said “Leadership means the buck stops here…I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” He is now into his second political battle to raise the debt limit. In July 2011, he said “It is not acceptable for us not to raise the debt ceiling and to allow the U.S. government to default.”
In response to a 1996 questionnaire he said “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages, but in November 2008 he said, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.”
He spent his first term blaming the nation’s economic ills on his predecessor, George W. Bush, saying in July 2008, that “he added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion in debt that we are going to have to pay back. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.” Today, the debt stands at more than $16 trillion because Obama added more to the debt than all previous presidents combined. For the first time in U.S. history, our credit rating was reduced and rating services are warning they will reduce it again.
He has a record of using executive orders to bypass the constitutional powers and duties of Congress. His most recent effort was 23 such orders regarding gun control at the same time Americans are buying guns as fast as they can, fearing the loss of the right to own and bear arms. This is the same President who just signed a law granting him and his family lifetime Secret Service protection.
He used “executive privilege” to cover-up the “Fast and Furious” scandal in which guns were allowed to be purchased and transported for use by Mexican drug cartel members.
He lied about the attack in Benghazi, Libya that killed a U.S. ambassador and encouraged members of his staff to spread the lie that it was “spontaneous” and the result of a video no one has seen.
He and the Democratic Party imposed “Obamacare” on the nation and its passage is already undermining the provision of healthcare services, driving up the cost of health insurance, and causing physicians and the providers of testing and other services to leave the profession and close their doors.
He no longer can blame President Bush, so now he blames the Republican Party that has offered solutions to the nation’s economic crisis that has worsened every day he has been in office. His foreign policy has consisted of apologizing for America and standing aside while one nation after another in the Middle East and northern Africa has fallen under the control of Islamist radicals. He is doing nothing to avoid the sequestration cuts that would harm national defense and a range of other government functions.
He has failed us. Congress has failed us.
It has taken four years for a case challenging his right to hold office and the Supreme Court has scheduled a “conference” in February that might decide to ignore a current case.
The mainstream media has failed us and we only hope the courts will not fail us.
He should not be administered the oath of office for a second time.
© Alan Caruba, 2013