Posts by AlanCaruba:
The Hillary Enigma
May 28th, 2015By Alan Caruba
Does it strike anyone as strange that the only candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination to be the next President of the United States is the wife of a former President? There is no historic precedent for this, no way to measure this against how Americans have selected Presidents in the past.
Like most Americans, I first took notice of her when Bill began his campaign to become President. I recall being struck by the fact that in 1969 as a student at Wellesley College, her 92-page senior thesis was devoted to the community organizer, Saul Alinsky’s book. The title of the thesis was “There is Only the Fight…”: An Analysis of the Alinski Model.” She would request Wellesley to deny access to it.
Alinksy was a Communist. His twelve rules for radicals, unlike the Ten Commandments, are devoid of a moral message. Instead, the message is “this is how you can win.” Hillary would do well to review Rule 7, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” She was already old news when she announced her candidacy and it is becoming older with every passing day as she fails to take questions from the media, participating in totally staged events to look like “one of the people.”
She and Bill are not one of the people. They, like the Bushes, are political royalty. They have both been around a very long time.
Hillary, however, despite the millions of words that have been written about and by her remains an enigma. Other than being farther to the Left than Bill, she is a woman whose “achievements” in life have largely been the result of having married Bill. She would spend eight years in the White House as the First Lady and, pursuing her college dreams of political power, they would move to New York State where she ran and won a Senatorial election.
There isn’t a single Senate bill that she introduced or that is credited to her. She is said to have worked hard and gotten along well with her colleagues, but her Senate years are a blur in her public life. Then she made a bid to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2008 and along came Barack Hussein Obama with whom the voters fell in love. When he was elected, he asked her to become his Secretary of State.
With the exception of the Benghazi tragedy on September 11, 2012, a clear failure of judgment and duty, and about which she lied, her years as Secretary of State reflect her years in the Senate; nothing of any significance resulted, no major treaties, no major anything, except for one more scandal.
So the question remains; who is Hillary Rodham Clinton? What are her fundamental principles beyond the acquisition of political power? And money. Lots of it while uttering nonsense such as she and Bill being “dead broke” when they left office?
What are we to make of her deletions of thousands of emails on her private server—something she was not supposed to use as Secretary of State—and her assertion that those we may never see were of no importance? They’re important if, as is widely believed, foreign governments hacked her private email server and thus had access to information about policies affecting themselves and others. She may not have broken a law, but she surely did not obey Obama White House policy regarding the emails.
Alinski’s Rule 1 is “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have. Power is derived from two main sources—money and people.”
We are told that Hillary has a huge amount of money with which to wage a campaign to become the first woman President. In light of the revelations about the Clinton Foundations, virtual slush funds, and the millions earned by her and Bill to give speeches, there is little doubt of that.
You cannot, however, buy trust and the polls indicate that is seeping away.
Her die-hard supporters probably know as little about her as the rest of us, but it is their trust she is depending on right now. Should she actually receive the Democratic Party’s nomination, the distrust of independent voters, disaffected Democrats, and of course Republicans, will play a crucial role in who is elected in 2016. It is not likely to be Hillary Clinton.
It is not likely because, as we have already seen, she seems to have reached a point where her political abilities have grown tired and out-of-date. These are not the 1990s. A whole generation has been born since Bill was President.
Like her, the Democratic Party seems tired as well. Can you believe there is not another Democrat, a Governor or Senator who could emerge to represent the Party? How devoid of any real leadership has the Democratic Party become if the only candidate they can offer is a former First Lady? That has been her primary claim to fame despite the two offices she has held since the 1990s.
I suggest that Hillary ceases to be an enigma if you just think of the Wellesley student who thought the best topic for her senior thesis was the book by a dedicated Communist, Saul Olinsky.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Barack “Climate Change” Obama
May 26th, 2015
By Alan Caruba.
“Woe to the land that’s governed by a child.” – Shakespeare, Richard III
I have been wrestling for some kind of explanation why the President of the United States, Barack Obama, would continue to talk about climate change and urge the global transition from fossil fuels to wind, solar and bio-energy. I have concluded that he thinks everyone, not just Americans, are idiots.
We know he lies about everything, but these two topics are clearly near and dear to his heart.
My friend, Paul Driessen, is a policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a free market think tank. Among the pundit class he’s ranked very high by his colleagues. Here’s what he has to say about climate change:
“Earth climate always has changed, is always changing, and always will change—but not from fossil-fuel use. Solar fluctuations, deep ocean circulation patterns, and other powerful natural forces have driven climate change and weather events throughout Earth’s history and will continue to do so.”
“President Obama’s hubris is breathtaking. He now thinks an army of regulators can control our planet’s temperature and climate by tweaking emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, a mere 0.04% of the atmosphere.”
“America’s communities do not need to be protected from climate change. They need to be protected from the excesses of authoritarian presidents and bureaucrats.”
Driessen and I look at and listen to Obama and wonder if others too see and hear someone uttering some of the most absurd claims about the climate. Then we worry that this someone is the President of the United States with the power to turn his ignorance into national policy.
At this point we have suffered his initial failure to respond to the recession he inherited from the 2008 financial crisis. More than six years later the economy has barely moved toward a normal rate of growth. Then we were gifted with ObamaCare and the disruption of what was widely regarded as the best health system in the world. And, for good measure, he imposed Common Core on an already weakened educational system. It is being repealed and opposed in many states. For good measure, his foreign policy, if he has one, is widely regarded as a total failure.
How is it a former “community organizer” possesses a seemingly vast understanding of meteorology? Did they also teach that at the Harvard Law School? “Climate change,” said Obama, addressing a graduating class of the Coast Guard Academy, “constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and make no mistake; it will impact how our military defends our country.”
“Our military and our combatant commanders,” the President told the Academy graduates, “our services—including the Coast Guard—will need to factor climate change into plans and operations, because you need to be ready.” For what? For a rainstorm? For snow? Wind?
This is the same President who sees no threat to our national security from Iran whose leaders shout “Death to America” every day when they aren’t also shouting “Death to Israel.” He has zealously been pursuing a deal that would enable Iran, the leading supporter of terrorism, to have nuclear weapons. Meanwhile Islamic State (ISIS) is taking over more territory in northern Iraq and into Syria. Obama might as well be dropping bags of marshmallows on them.
He blamed climate change in the form of “severe droughts” for the rise of Islamism in the Middle East and Africa. Someone needs to tell Obama that there have always been severe droughts somewhere on the planet, and floods, and forest fires, and blizzards, and hurricanes. Even so, in the last eighteen years, there have actually been LESS of these natural events, along with the flatlining of the planet’s overall or average temperature—there has been no warming!
Not content to blame climate change for the rise of terrorism, the White House issued a report that was described as “a doomsday scenario of health, security, economic and political issues.” The thing about climate is that it measured in centuries, not years. As for the weather, while records are maintained, it is usually reported as today’s news with a forecast of the coming week.
So you shouldn’t be surprised that the report blamed “asthma attacks” on climate change!
Suffice to say there isn’t a glimmer of hard evidence to support anything the President is saying these days about climate change.
And this is the same President that wants the U.S. and the rest of the world to give up the use of fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—to “stop climate change.”
IF Obama’s climate change idiocy is just a way to distract Americans from the real problems we have encountered thanks to his failure to address them, then it is purely cynical and political.
IF Obama really believes this stuff, he is unfit to be President.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Memorial Day 2015
May 23rd, 2015
By Alan Caruba.
We need to remind ourselves that Memorial Day is not just another three-day weekend or a day when all manner of sales are offered to those who want to go shopping. It is a day set aside to honor the ultimate sacrifice of those who have fought to defend our nation and take military action in foreign nations. We honor, too, those who suffered wounds and returned home.
We like to think of America as a nation that has gone to war only when we had to, but a new book, “America Invades: How We’ve Invaded or Been Invaded with Almost Every Country on Earth” tells a different story based on history.
As documented by its authors, Christopher Kelly and Stuard Laycock, America, “has invaded or fought in eighty-four out of 194 countries (countries recognized by the United Nations and excluding the United States) in the world. That’s 43 percent of the total. And it hasn’t been militarily involved with just ninety or a hundred countries. It has had some form of military involvement with a spectacular 191 out of 194. That’s more than 98 percent.”
“Most people,” the authors note “would probably agree that much of what America has done around the world has clearly been wise and noble (as in helping liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny.) Some, however, have been wrong and/or unwise. And some of what America has done has been in-between. In some sense, it’s like looking at the history of one’s own family. And, indeed, all of it—the liberations, the fiascos, and follies—is, in some sense, part of the history of every American citizen.”
That’s why it is a good idea to pause on Memorial Day because as an American it is part of your history. “Americans are always hoping for peace but usually preparing for war” says the authors who remind us that “the American eagle is an ambivalent bird holding arrows in the talons of one foot and an olive branch in the other.”
Our natural instinct is for peace. Only aggressive nations, usually led by despots, want war. That is not a description of America. We have not, however, shied from war when the enemy was a well-defined aggressor.
“In the twenty-first century, the United States, though challenged by Russia and China, is the sole remaining superpower. The global responsibilities that we began to shoulder in the twentieth century seem today more burdensome than ever. The cost of being the world’s policeman seems exorbitant in terms of both lives and treasure.”
That’s why we need to remind ourselves that, as a former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has said of America, “We are the indispensable nation.”
We have learned what happens when our President has retreated from the responsibility to deter war. Since leaving Iraq with no U.S. military ground support that nation which was stable at the end of our war there has come under attack by the Islamic State. The President’s efforts to reach a deal with Iran that would allow them to become a nuclear power is causing Arab states to regard the U.S. as abandoning them and could lead to a nuclear arms race in a part of the world that is far from stable.
The U.S. in the wake of World War Two has a vast network of bases and alliances that span the world. Many of those bases were created at the invitation of the host nation. The result, as the authors note is that “The U.S. military, but virtue of its global reach, is almost invariably the first to respond to natural disasters as they occur around the world. If not us, then who will?”
On Memorial Day we honor our sons and daughters who gave their lives when their nation called on them.
“Today the sacrifice of over 218,000 American servicemen and servicewomen is memorialized in military cemeteries in twenty-four different overseas cemeteries in eleven different countries. The boundaries of Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty, therefore, stretch around the world.”
We worry about the emergence of other world powers, but I doubt that Russia which lost 127 million of its people in World War Two or China which is focused on building an economy based heavily on world trade are serious wartime threats.
That does not, however, exclude the likelihood that events may cause the next President to conclude that the only way to put the lid on the Middle East is to return militarily to Iraq and to make it clear to Iran that its nuclear ambitions are untenable and unacceptable.
The ancient Romans knew a truth they share in the phrase, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” If you want peace, plans for war.
About the only thing that is predictable is that somewhere in the world there will be new wars and, given its power and its responsibility, America may well be engaged in restoring the peace.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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My 2015 Commencement Address
May 16th, 2015By Alan Caruba
All manner of people are giving commencement speeches to students graduating from colleges and universities these days. It is doubtful that any will be remembered because the prospects of students depend in large part on the economy into which they are entering, the majors they pursued, their individual ambitions, and capacity for hard work. Then, too, there’s dumb luck which often plays a role.
For those graduating this year, my profound sympathy because the economy could not be much worse short of being declared an official Depression. Out of a total of 330 million Americans, there are currently 93,194,000 Americans who are not in the workforce because they can’t find a job or have given up looking. Even in the field of manufacturing—not something you studied for—the number of jobs have declined by 7,231,000, some 37% since manufacturing peaked in the U.S. in 1979.
U.S. economic growth rate has slowed to 0.2%. In short, it is virtually non-existent. So, with your diploma in hand, unless you majored in the sciences, math or engineering, you are not likely to join the workforce any time soon. Those of you who majored in social work, theatre arts, elementary education, and something called parks and recreation, are going to be at the bottom of the salary scale for the rest of your life.
Of the previous graduates from 2008 to the present who voted for Barack Obama, just 14% have real jobs. You have had the vast misfortune of being born just in time to live through the worst presidency in the history of the nation. If, in fact, you even know the history of the nation.
You are at a further disadvantage because the curriculums of the government schools you attended have been so distorted that you have been led to believe that the Founding Fathers were all slave-owning, white elitists when in fact, many opposed slavery, the labor source of their era, and would have abolished it. However they knew they could not get the Constitution ratified by the southern states if they did. It’s called compromising for a greater goal, the finest and currently the oldest functioning Constitution on Earth.
Depending on your race and sex, you have already been taught to blame anything that goes wrong in your life on whether you are white, black or Hispanic, male or female. If you want to know what’s wrong, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are doing wrong or not doing right—dressing, manners, behavior, addictions, etc.
If you have been raised to believe in God and have spiritual values, you are likely to be mocked, though not necessarily to your face. While still the majority faith in America, Christianity is under attack from many directions, not the least of whom are homosexuals that constitute less than 2% of the population. Their attack on traditional (and biological) male-female marriage that has been part of every civilization going back five thousand years and more will degrade society in many ways.
For many of you, graduation means years of paying off huge loans for the privilege of picking up a degree that, as noted—short of science, math and engineering—will not yield a lot of income. This will impact your lifestyle including possibly having to move back in with your parents. It may mean putting off marriage and a family of your own for a while and your loans will affect being able to secure a mortgage on a home, but everyone is having problems doing that these days.
So, if all this looks and sound bleak, it is because it is. A real commencement speech should tell you the truth but most of them do not. They are generally filled with inspiring talk about the future.
The future you are looking at along with everyone else is fraught with danger. That, however, can be said of every “future” that every American has faced since the nation was established. It took a shooting war with Great Britain just to have a nation and Americans have been engaged in wars large and small ever since.
The threat of Communism faced Americans after World War Two and generations previous to yours waited out and opposed the Soviet Union for nearly fifty years before it collapsed. Communism is still around however in China, nearby Cuba, Venezuela and other nations who suppress their people in the name of the utopian society they claim to have.
The more recent threat is the rise of Islamism, radical Islam as practiced and supported by a significant percentage of the world’s one billion-plus Muslims. It is a cult about Mohammed based on the total domination of the world. Divided between two sects, Sunnis and Shiites, when they are not killing each other, they are killing “infidels”, anyone who is not a Muslim.
It will fall to you and your fellow graduates to fix the nation’s problems and right now its biggest one is that the federal government is too large and we are collectively facing an $18 trillion debt that must be resolved because just paying interest on it makes doing anything else difficult at best.
All of the states are in debt as well as they struggle to pay the health benefits and pensions of civil service workers, active and retired. That often doesn’t leave much money for fixing potholes and other infrastructure needs.
Whatever problems you will encounter, keep in mind previous generations often encountered much worse, such as those in the 1930s during the Great Depression and in the 1940s who fought World War II, and those from the 1950s and 1970s who were called on to fight the Korean War and the war in Vietnam; more recently those who fought the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Respect their sacrifices and their courage.
If you want to see the government grow even larger along with the debt, vote for Hillary Clinton. She’s still mentally and ideologically stuck in the 1990s, plus she has engaged in behavior that would get anyone else put in jail. You have a large choice among Republican candidates and eventually it will narrow to someone capable of tackling the future.
The best I can do is to wish you good luck. You’re going to need it.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Obama’s Economic Disaster
May 6th, 2015By Alan Caruba
Commenting on the rioting in Baltimore, the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henniger was almost to the end of his April 30 text when he said “On Wednesday morning, the year’s first-quarter GDP growth rate came in—0.02%. Next to nothing. For the length of the Obama presidency, with growth significantly below norm, unemployment for blacks aged 24 and younger has hovered between 30% and 40%. That’s the real powder key, not the police.”
Most Americans do not put the state of the economy at the heart of everything else is occurring. Instead they listen to politicians apply the blame to everything other than themselves. President Obama spent his entire first term blaming George W. Bush for the bad state of the economy he inherited, but instead of addressing it, he increased it by imposing ObamaCare, radically altering how many would be hired while others were cut to a part-time status. The bill added a number of taxes as well.
When 2015 arrived in January CNS News reported that “A record 92,898,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in December, as the labor force participation rate dropped once again to 62.7 percent, a level it has not seen in 36 years,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Remember those unemployed young blacks? In March the BLS noted that a record of 12,202,000 black people were not in the labor force. The unemployment rate for black people in March was 10.1 percent, which is nearly double the overall unemployment rate of 5.5 percent. For black teens, age 16 to 19, the unemployment rate was even higher at 25.0 percent, meaning that one in four black teens who were actively seeking a job did not have one.
By the beginning of April, the BLS reported that “a record 93,175,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in March, as the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.7 percent, the lowest level seen in 37 years.”
Also in April, the BLS reported that “a record 56,131,000 women, age 16 years and over, were not in the labor force the previous month, as the participation rate for this group dropped to 56.6 percent—a 27 year low.
It was no surprise that the Department of Agriculture reported that “The number of beneficiaries who receive compensation from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, has topped 46,000,000 for 37 straight months.”
The U.S. Census Bureau started 2015 with news that one out of five young adults—white, black, Hispanic—and ages 18 to 34, currently live in poverty! That’s 13.5 million people, “up from one in seven (8.4 million people) in 1980.”
If all this strikes you as very bad news, it gets worse. In February, the Daily Caller’s White House Correspondence, Neil Monro, reported that “President Barack Obama has quietly handed out an extra 5.46 million work permits for non-immigrant foreigners who arrived as tourists, students, illegal immigrants or other types of migrants since 2009.”
“’The executive branch is operating a high parallel work-authorization system outside the bounds of the (immigration) laws and limits written by Congress (and which) inevitably reduces job opportunities for Americans,’ said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies” which filed the FOIA request the revealed this travesty.
So it didn’t matter to Barack Obama that millions of Americans were out of work while the White House masterminded a secretive program to provide non-Americans access to the jobs that were available.
We are living in the midst of an economic disaster and despite the often rosy headlines the reality is one that Stephen Moore, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, took note of in January in The Washington Times. He identified “hidden indicators” of the true state of the economy as 2015 began:
“The $1 trillion growth gap. This economic recovery is the lowest in 50 years”
“The restless recovery. It’s been 10 years since Americans in the middle class got a pay raise that kept pace with inflation.”
“Inequality is worse. The Gini coefficient (as measured by the Census Bureau), the left’s favorite measure of income inequality, rose each of Mr. Obama’s first four years in office, breaking all-time highs in both 2011 and 2012, and it remains high.”
“The debt has grown by $7.3 trillion. When Mr. Obama entered office the national debt was under $11 trillion. Now it’s more than $18 trillion…it will be $19 trillion when he leaves office.”
The record speaks for itself. Americans are worse off today than when Obama took office in 2009. In the years since then he has totally failed to take the best understood steps to push back against a recession and unemployment. He has expanded the federal government. He has failed to initiate a reform of the nation’s tax code to stimulate investment and expansion.
The nation’s first black President has so poorly served the interests of the African-American population that they are worse off today. He has practiced “equal inequality” by afflicting our other demographic groups, younger workers, woman, and everyone else who has been left unable to afford college and unable to purchase a home and start a family. These years will be seen in retrospect as a desert of opportunity.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Supreme Court to Rule on Same-Sex Marriage
April 26th, 2015By Alan Caruba
In 1973, the Supreme Court looked into the Constitution, found that it approved of abortion and overruled laws banning it. Other laws have since addressed late term abortions and those resulting from rape or incest, but killing human life in the womb has been lawful since then. . According to the Guttmacher Institute from 1973 through 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions occurred in the U.S.
By dismantling the fundamental traditions and beliefs of a nation piece by piece, you ultimate will destroy it. Claiming this is done in the name of “love” or “equality” ignores the greater societal issues involved in marriage; the creation of families with mothers and fathers, and, indeed, the welfare of children raised in same-sex marriages.
Abortion remains a moral issue in the minds and hearts of many Americans and now they are waiting to see how the Supreme Court will rule on same-sex marriage. As Ryan T. Anderson wrote in The Heritage Foundation’s publication, The Daily Signal, “There simply is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that requires all 50 states to redefine marriage.”
“The over-arching question before the Supreme Court is not whether a male-female marriage policy is the best, but only whether it is allowed by the Constitution. The question is not whether government-recognized same-sex marriage is good or bad policy, but only whether it is required by the Constitution.”
Anderson points out that “The only way the Court could strike down laws that define marriage as the union of husband and wife is to adopt a view of marriage that sees it an essentially genderless institution…” Marriage is all about gender and the union of opposites that is blessed by the community when a man and woman enter into it. To legalize same-sex marriage is to degrade the essential element of society, the keystone of family.
What we are witnessing is the current high point in a long campaign to remove any obstacle to being homosexual and the right to marry another homosexual represents an important political goal for GLBT community. For them it’s not about the thousands of years in which all societies forbid the marriage between those of the same gender or the 227 years since the Constitution was ratified.
Clearly the Constitution neither requires nor bans same-sex marriage. The thought of such a marriage would never have occurred to the Founding Fathers and the creation of a new nation had far greater priorities and responsibilities than same-sex marriage. Most such issues such as abortion were left to the states to determine. Even so, when the voters of California voted in 2008 to ban same-sex marriage, the courts there overturned it.
We are witnessing a homosexual juggernaut that will settle for nothing less than their own interpretation of the relations between the sexes.
When the Supreme Court hears the same-sex marriage case on Tuesday, April 28, it will be decided by a Court that is sharply divided between liberal and conservative points of view, but in the legal community, there is no argument that, as federal law states, “Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
That’s why the fact that in late September Justice Elena Kagan performed a same-sex “wedding” takes on tremendous importance. As documented by MassResistance.org, Justice Kagan has a long history of advancing homosexual issues and policies. A 16-page report leaves little doubt that she favors acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism as “civil rights.”
There is no way that Justice Kagan should join other Supreme Court judges to rule on this case. That would run counter to federal law and would be an arrogant dismissal of the most fundamental concept of justice before the bench.
What we have learned thus far is that the practice of same-sex marriage has proven more a threat to the rights of those who are opposed to it for sincere religious reasons than for those demanding their services. If there is any justice left in America, a bakery or florist should be able to say no. Demanding that they act against their faith tells you a great deal of the homosexual mindset when it comes to their “rights.”
I am utterly opposed to same-sex “marriage” for all the reasons the Bible and history provide.
If Justice Kagan does not recuse herself from Tuesday’s case and her fellow justices do not demand that she does, the rule of law and justice in America will have suffered another serious blow.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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The Environmental Insane Asylum
April 21st, 2015By Alan Caruba.
Earth Day was declared in 1970 and for the past 45 years we have all been living in the Environmental Insane Asylum, being told over and over again to believe things that are the equivalent of Green hallucinations. Now the entire month of April has been declared Earth Month, but in truth not a day goes by when we are not assailed with the bold-faced lies that comprise environmentalism.
Around the globe, the worst part of this is that we are being victimized by people we are told to respect from the President of the United States to the Pope of the Catholic Church. Their environmentalism is pure socialism.
Organizations whom we expect to tell the truth keep telling us that “climate change is one of the biggest global security threats of the 21st century.” This was a recent statement by “world leaders” like the G7, a group of finance ministers and central bank governors of seven advanced economies, the International Monetary Fund, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. On April 17 they adopted a report about the “threat” put together by think tanks that included the European Union Institute for Security Studies and the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
When I speak of “climate” I am referring to data gathered not just about decades, but centuries of the Earth’s cycles of warming and cooling. When I speak of “weather”, the closest any of us get to it other than today’s, are local predictions no longer than a few days’ time at best. The weather is in a constant state of flux.
Climate change is not a threat and most certainly there is no global warming. As Prof. Bob Carter, a geologist at James Cook College in Queensland, Australia, has written, “For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco.”
The fact that the Earth is now into the nineteenth year of a natural planetary cooling cycle seems to never be acknowledged or reported. “The problem here,” says Prof. Carter, “is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike.”
In a book I recommend to everyone, “Climate for the Layman” by Anthony Bright-Paul, he draws on the best well-known science about the Earth noting that “Since there is no such thing as a temperature of the whole Earth all talk of global warming is simply illogical, ill thought out, and needs to be discarded for the sake of clarity. The globe is warming and cooling in different locations concurrently every minute of the day and night.”
“Since it is abundantly clear that there is no one temperature of the atmosphere all talk of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is simply an exercise in futility.” A look at the globe from either of its two poles to its equator and everything in between tells us with simple logic that being able to determine its “temperature” is impossible. The Earth, however, has gone through numerous warming and cooling cycles, all of which were the result of more or less solar radiation.
The Sun was and is the determining factor. The assertion that humans have any influence or impact that can determine whether the Earth is warmer or cooler is absurd.
The Earth had passed through warming and cooling cycles for billions of years before humans even existed, yet we are told that the generation of carbon dioxide through the use of machinery in manufacturing, transportation or any other use is causing the build-up of “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere. We are told to give up the use of coal, oil and natural gas. That is a definition of insanity!
Here’s the simple truth that most people are not told: The Sun warms the Earth and the Earth warms the atmosphere.
As for carbon dioxide, the amount generated by human activity represents a miniscule percentage of the 0.04% in the Earth’s atmosphere. There has been more carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere—well before humans existed—contributing to the growth of all manner of vegetation which in turn generated oxygen.
Without carbon dioxide there would be no life on Earth. It feeds the vegetation on which animal life depends directly and indirectly. As Anthony Bright-Paul says, “A slight increase in atmosphere of carbon dioxide will not and cannot produce any warming, but can be hugely beneficial to a green planet.”
The Earth’s atmosphere is approximately 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 0.9% Argon, 0.04% Carbon Dioxide, and the rest is water vapor and trace gases in very small amounts. They interact to provide an environment in which life, animal and vegetable, exists on Earth.
When you live in a Global Environmental Insane Asylum, you are not likely to hear or read the truth, but you can arrive at it using simple logic. We know instinctively that humans do not control the waves of our huge oceans, nor the vast tectonic plates beneath our feet, the eruptions of volcanoes, the Jetstream, cloud formation, or any of the elements of the weather we experience, such as thunder, lightning, and other acts of Nature.
Why would we blindly assume or agree to the torrent of lies that humans are “causing” climate change? The answer is that on Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, we will be deluged with the propaganda of countless organizations worldwide that we are, in fact, endangering a “fragile” planet Earth. We hear and read that every other day of the year as well.
The achievement of the human race and the last 5,000 years of so-called civilization is the way we have learned to adapt to Nature by creating habitats from villages to cities in which to survive and because we have devised a vast global agricultural and ranching system to feed seven billion of us.
As for the weather, John Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, says he cringes “when I hear overstated confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next one hundred years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.”
“Mother Nature,” says Christy, “simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, behind the mastery of mere mortals—such as scientists—and the tools available to us.”
Whether it is the President or the Pope, or the countless politicians and bureaucrats, along with multitudes of “environmental” organizations, as well as self-serving “scientists”, all aided by the media, a virtual Green Army has been deliberately deceiving and misleading the citizens of planet Earth for four and a half decades. It won’t stop any time soon, but it must before the charade of environmentalism leaves us all enslaved by the quest for political control over our lives that hides behind it.
We must escape the Environmental Insane Asylum in which they want us to live.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Avoiding Hillary Misery
April 11th, 2015By Alan Caruba
While we endure the daily lies of President Obama, do we really want to have another four to eight years more of Hillary Clinton’s? It’s not like we don’t have ample evidence of her indifference to the truth and that is not what America wants in a President, now or ever.
The office has already been degraded to a point where neither our allies nor our enemies trusts anything Obama says. Do we really want to continue a process that could utterly destroy our nation?
Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she intends to run for President is predicated not on any achievements in her life beyond having married Bill Clinton. Instead, her message is that America needs a woman as President. Having already elected an abject failure because he was black, one can only hope and pray that enough voters will conclude that America needs to avoid race or gender to be the determining factor.
In 1974 the 27-year old Hillary was fired from a committee related to the Watergate investigation. Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised her and when the investigation was over, he fired her and refused to give her a letter of recommendation. When asked why, he said, “Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee, and the rules of confidentiality.”
She has not changed. Writing about her emails, Ronald D. Rotunda, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, said her admitted destruction of more than 30,000 emails “sure looks like an obstruction of justice—a serious violation of the criminal law. The law says that no one has to us email, but it is a crime (18 U.S.C. section 1519) to destroy even one message to prevent it from being subpoenaed.” The law, said Rotunda, punishes this with up to 20 years imprisonment.
Instead, Hillary is asking voters to give her at least four years in the highest office in the land.
Even pundits like The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, writing in mid-March responded to Hillary saying “None of what you said made any sense. Keeping a single account mingling business and personal with your own server wasn’t about ‘convenience.’ It was about expedience. You became judge and jury on what’s relevant because you didn’t want to leave digital fingerprints for others to retrace.”
“You assume that if it’s good for the Clintons, it’s good for the world, you’re always tangling up government policy with your own needs, desires, deceptions, marital bargains, and gremlins.”
Around the same time as Dowd’s rebuke, I wrote that I thought that the revelations about the emails and the millions the Clinton foundation received from nations with whom she was dealing as Secretary of State would be sufficient for those in charge of the Democratic Party to convince her not to run. I was wrong. I was wrong because I profoundly underestimated Hillary’s deep well of ambition and indifference to the laws everyone else must obey. I was wrong because the Democratic Party is totally corrupt.
It is not as if anyone paying any attention would not know that she is politically to the far Left, a politician who does not believe that the powers of our government are derived from “the consent of the governed.” Throughout her life she has let us know that with quotes such as:
“We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”
“(We) can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”
“I certainly think the free-market has failed.” These quotes are the personification of Communism.
In March, the political pundit, Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said “We are defining political deviancy down.” Referring to the email scandal, she asked “Is it too much to imagine that Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal the record of her communications as America’s top diplomat…?” That was the reason she ignored the government’s rules regarding such communications. Rarely mentioned is the very strong likelihood that her email account had been hacked by our nation’s enemies and thus everything she was doing, officially and privately, was known to them.
“The story,” said Noonan “is that this is what she does and always has. The rules apply to others, not her.” That is, simply said, a criminal mentality. “Why doesn’t the legacy press swarm her on this?” asked Noonan. “Because she is political royalty.”
We fought a Revolution to free America from the British royalty. This was so ingrained in the thinking of the Founding Fathers that section 9 of Article One of the Constitution says “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States. And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” That’s what the foundation did.
Noonan had earlier written a book about Hillary. “As I researched I remembered why, four years into the Clinton administration, the New York Times columnist William Safire called Hillary ‘a congenital liar…compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.’”
“Do we have to go through all that again?” asked Noonan. “A generation or two ago, a person so encrusted in a reputation for scandal would not be considered a possible presidential contender. She would be ineligible. Now she is inevitable.”
Well, maybe not inevitable. We have a long time to go until the primaries arrive and then the election. We have enough time to ask ourselves if we live in a republic where merit, integrity, and honesty are still the standards by which we select our President.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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A President, Not a Potentate
April 4th, 2015
By Alan Caruba.
In 2010, before the midterm elections, President Obama said, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends.”
Instead, it was the Democratic Party that got punished as voters rejected its candidates, rendering it some of its biggest losses since the Great Depression. The Republican Party gained 63 seats in the House of Representatives, recapturing the majority, the largest seat change since 1948.
In November 2014, the voters gave complete control of Congress to Republicans for the first time in eight years as they retained every one of the GOP Senate seats up for reelection and added six more to ensure a Republican majority.
What was apparent before the 2010 election and since has been a President who regards himself and his powers as that of a potentate, a monarch scornful of the Congress in the same way English kings scorned their parliament until forced to relinquish total power and grant individual freedom to their subjects.
In the twenty-two months before Obama’s second and final term ends, I am, I confess, increasingly fearful of what he has in mind for America. The voters have already made it clear they oppose his gun control efforts, his views on illegal immigration and they want ObamaCare repealed.
As this is written, Americans are growing increasingly concerned over the outcome of the negotiations with Iran. Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, has written to Bob Corker (R-TN), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, harshly criticizing the notion that the Senate should have anything to say regarding the negotiations and suggesting that Obama has the authority to lift the sanctions imposed by Congress on Iran. He doesn’t.
A White House that believes it has powers that a simple reading of the Constitution tells them are limited is dangerous place. Obama’s White House has been gaining a reputation for lawlessness and we have seen this in the way the IRS denied conservative groups the right to tax-exempt status to which they were entitled. Then, not so mysteriously, the emails that would reveal this were “lost.”
In the wake of the Benghazi tragedy in which our ambassador and three other staff were killed on September 12, 2012—the anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—the emails of the then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have gone missing along with all the rest of those wiped clean from her personal server. I still recall seeing her stand beside the President when he blatantly lied to Americans and the world that the attack was the result of a video no one had ever seen.
In his book, “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document”, by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) he devotes a chapter to the Fourth Amendment:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not
be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Colonial Americans had watched a famous case in England in which John Wilkes had led the fight to ensure that the King could no longer arbitrarily search and seize the property of anyone. They had fought a Revolution to be free of such tyranny. In the effort to secure the ratification of the Constitution, in 1789 James Madison began drafting the Bill of Rights that several of the states said had to be part of the Constitution if they were to ratify it. It was introduced to the First Congress that same year.
Sen. Lee expresses concern that “for the past eight years, the federal government has relied on an excessively broad interpretation of an excessively broad provision of the USA Patriot Act to collect and, in some circumstances, search through vast amounts of information that most Americans would consider both private and entirely unrelated to national security.”
Noting the intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency that routinely gather enormous information about all our electronic communications, telephone calls and email, Sen. Lee says that “One could argue, however, that that far greater threat to government of the people, by the people, and for the people is the near certainty that those who wield this power will eventually use it to identify and punish anyone whom may disagree with them. This type of abuse could weaken or even destroy constitutionally limited government as we know it.”
That’s what has me worried specifically about Barack Obama. I have no doubt at all that he would and probably has used the vast information gathering capacity at his disposal to “punish” those he regards his enemies.
Consider what he did to Iraq War hero Gen. David Petraeus who he had appointed as Director of the CIA. He drove him from that post and threatened him with jail for an infraction that likely was discovered by monitoring his private communications. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s email server was, according to intelligence experts, likely hacked to the point where our enemies knew exactly what she and the State Department was doing. And she wants to be your next President.
My ultimate concern is that Obama might declare martial law for whatever spurious reason he would give. It would suspend the Constitution and leave us with no rights at all, subject to arrest for resisting his takeover of the nation. It would also mobilize the largest army in the world…America’s hunters and gun owners!
Obama has been working to federalize police authorities around the nation. He has purged the military of any officer that was deemed to disagree with his policies. All that stands between us and him is the Constitution and Congress. And the fact that millions of Americans, thanks to the Second Amendment, are armed in the event he tries to assert dictatorial powers.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Obama’s Virtual War on Israel
April 1st, 2015
By Alan Caruba.
This is hardly the best week to demonstrate his intense hatred of Israel, but since he has devoted 18 months to a fruitless and foolish negotiation with Iran, one can understand why Barack Hussein Obama is in a bad mood. His foreign policy “legacy” is close to being flushed down the Iranian toilet.
On March 31, the Defense of Democracies’ Iran Press Review quoted the Deputy Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, who said, “All should know that we will not allow the inspection of the country’s military and defense industries.” Or, as they say in Farsi, “No deal.”
This week began with Palm Sunday celebrating Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and proceeds to Good Friday which, at sundown, coincides with the Jewish observance of Passover and Christianity’s “last supper.” It concludes with Easter; holy days that occurred in the holy land that was Israel then and now.
Jesus was a Jew preaching primarily to Jews, whose disciples were Jews, and doing so entirely in Israel, the homeland of Jews for more than a thousand years at that time. The ancestors of Arabs in those days would have been regarded as Assyrians or Egyptians. The people called “Palestinians” did not exist until designated as such by Yassir Arafat in the 1960s.
So why is Obama leading a virtual war on Israel by declassifying information about Israel’s nuclear defenses and a purported effort to get the United Nations to declare “Palestine” a separate state?
At what point will it be understood that the United Nations has no power to create states or to grant formal “recognition” to state aspirants and that the Palestinian Authority and/or Hamas does not meet even the most basic characteristics of a state, lacking for example either a capitol or a currency.
As spelled out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, “Palestine” would have to have a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. By contrast, the current president of the Palestinian Authority is now into his eleventh year of a term that, by their own law, is limited to four.
Not only have the “Palestinians” refused statehood and a two-state relationship since the founding of Israel, but they have participated in large wars and small against Israel, beginning with one in 1948 when Israel declared its statehood. Despite 1949 Armistice Agreements, reprisal operations continued through to the 1960s from Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. The Six-Day war occurred in June 1967 and the Yom Kippur War was fought in 1973.
Focusing on the “Palestinians”, the First Intifada, an uprising against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza occurred from 1987 to 1993. It was followed by a Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005. Responding to escalating rocket fire, there was a three-week Gaza War from December 2008 to January 2009 and in 2014, the Israelis had to respond to weeks of rockets again.
Obama has turned to the United Nations knowing that it took the UN seventy years to even acknowledge the January 28-28 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau, the Nazi death camp in which millions of Jews perished. The UN has studiously avoided the subject of anti-Semitism because that would only call attention to the fact that it has been the global platform for anti-Semitism since its founding in 1945.
A perfect example has been its Human Rights Council that has always included nations famed for their own lack of human rights. When it began its March 2nd session since electing 14 new members last fall, it included Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China and Russia. By the end of March, the Human Rights Council had declared Israel the world’s leading woman’s rights violator and followed up with a general condemnation, adopting four resolutions condemning Israel, four times more than any other of the 192 members of the UN.
This is the same UN that in 2014 elected Iran to its woman’s rights commission, that selected genocidal Sudan and other slave-holding nations to its Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations to oversee human rights activists, and whose UNRWA handed rockets found in Gaza schools back to Hamas. By acclamation, a senior post on the US Special Committee on Decolonization was given to the murderous regime of Syria.
The question of whether Israel is guilty of war crimes was raised in the UN when, after weeks of rocketing from Gaza, it defended itself with an air and land war. It followed the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in June 2014. Operation Protective Edge began on July 8 and lasted seven weeks. In the course of it, they discovered over thirty tunnels whose purpose was to provide access to Israel for attacks on its citizens. Apparently self-defense is not a privilege the UN wants to extend to Israel.
In last Saturday’s issue of The New York Times, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, founder of the World Values Network, took out a full page advertisement comparing the deal to empower Iran to make its own nuclear weapons to the 1933 Munich Agreement by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with Adolf Hitler that led to World War II. In the Jerusalem Great Synagogue on the same day, the American-born Chief Rabbi said, “The President of the United States is lashing out at Israel just like Haman lashed out at the Jews.”
No doubt this will be on the minds of Jews, less than 2% of the world’s population, when they sit down to celebrate Passover, remembering their enslavement in Egypt and the exodus that led them to freedom. Jesus celebrated Passover and the Kingdom of God. He would pay for it when the Romans put him to death shortly thereafter.
It is futile to think that Obama will cease from his assaults on Israel in the remaining 22 months of his second and final term in office. Those who know the history cited above must join hands to resist this latest enemy of Israel, this disgrace to America who is already widely regarded as the worst, most lawless President ever elected to that office.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Don’t be an April “Earth Month” Fool
March 31st, 2015
By Alan Caruba.
The annual calendar is filled with days and months designated for the purpose of calling attention to some event, personality, or cause. The U.S. celebrates the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington that fall close together. There’s Mother’s and Father’s Day, Labor Day and Veteran’s Day, Valentine’s, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas.
But who decided that April was “Earth Month” or that April 22 is “Earth Day”?
Why are we expected to worship the planet that was here billions of years before we showed up and will likely be here long after we manage to destroy ourselves with cataclysmic wars. And it is worship that is at the heart of these two events. That alone should tell you how essentially pagan they are.
This Earth Month will celebrate its 45th anniversary, having begun in 1970 and, not surprisingly, its theme is “Our planet in peril.” Our planet is not in peril. It’s been around for 4.5 billion years and short of a rogue asteroid or our getting sucked into a black hole, the planet will be around several billions of years more. The galaxy in which we live is relatively predictable and stable, so the notion that the Earth is in peril borders on idiocy.
Well, idiocy, if you think that it is in peril from us, the human species. This is at the core of the environmental mindset. It appears that merely using the Earth as a place to live is reason enough to hold us responsible for everything that naturally occurs to it.
Environmentalists do not like the human race and will not hesitate to tell you there are too many of us. They do what they can to reduce the population through disease by, for example, banning DDT and any other chemicals that protect us from insect and rodent pests that are major vectors for the transmission of disease.
According to the 2015 Earth Month Network, Inc. announcement “There are literally hundreds of problems and issues plaguing our global environment, i.e., climate change, global warming and their effects; and the continuation of polluting our delicate ecosystem just to mention a few.”
Which is it? Climate change or global warming? There hasn’t been any dramatic global warming in the past 19 years during which the planet has been in a natural cooling cycle, along with the Sun which we depend upon to warm us. So anyone claiming the Earth is warming is blowing smoke up your skirt.
As for climate change, that has always been occurring. Short term it’s called the four seasons. Long term it takes the form of ice ages, major glaciations that have occurred every 140 million years, and other eras such as the Great Permian Extinction, the largest in Earth’s history that wiped out an estimated 95% of every kind of life-form on Earth. It was one of four mass extinctions over the course of the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on Earth. Remember the mammoths? They died a mere 11,500 years ago.
Last year, the Earth Month theme was “Returning to Nature.” Do you really want to return to nature? No electricity. No shelter other than a nice cave. No food except for the animals or fish you would have to catch for dinner. No vegetables or fruits except those you could find wherever you lived. That’s right, no supermarkets! And, if you want to go anywhere, you will have to walk.
Yes, nature sounds wonderful and, in its own way, is wonderful, but the human species has devoted a great deal of time to finding ways to survive it.
I was reminded that April was Earth Month when I received an email from the Saybrook Point Inn & Spa which said this Connecticut site was “excited to offer a special package to honor Earth Day.” It is “a Certified Green Hotel” and you will be treated to a “unique Ecotourism Getaway” that provides an “environmentally friendly stay without sacrificing comfort.” Why would you want to pay them for their special package if it didn’t include comfort and lots of it? Mostly what Saybrook Point wants is your money, just like any other perfectly ordinary inn and spa that isn’t “certified.”
One can be confident that we are going to be regaled with all manner of “environmental” messages and events throughout April, all of which have the same theme: the Earth is in danger from YOU!
Do yourself a favor. Ignore them. Get in your car and go where you want. Go to the supermarket and don’t worry about the plastic packaging or the plastic bags. Set the temperature in your home or apartment to a level of comfort that you like. It’s your life and you pay good money to benefit from all the conveniences of modern life.
Let’s appreciate the Earth, not worship it.
Environmentalism is one of the great scams of the modern era. Its emphasis on “renewable energy” has been a huge, expensive failure. Its claims of disappearing forests are bogus and its demands for the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will only harm all vegetation everywhere. The Earth needs CO2 in the same way you and all other living creatures need oxygen.
Let’s celebrate mankind’s mastery of the Earth in the form of agriculture, ranching, sophisticated shelters from the log cabin to the skyscraper, the channeling of rivers to produce energy and the technology that provides clean water for us. And, yes, manufacturing. You can’t even imagine what the world was like before the discovery of coal, oil, and natural gas.
The Earth is not in peril, only the truth and common sense is.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Terrifying the republican establishment
March 26th, 2015By Alan Caruba.
Would you vote for a man who openly says he would repeal ObamaCare?
Would you vote for a man who openly says he favors a fair tax and wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service?
Would you vote for a man who opposes Obama’s efforts to offer illegal aliens amnesty and promises to secure the borders?
Would you vote for a man who decries a federal government “that wages an assault on our religious liberty”?
Would you vote for a man who wants a federal government that “works to defend the sanctity of human life” and would “uphold the sacrament of marriage”?
Would you vote for a man who defends our Second Amendment rights and condemns the effort ban ammunition?
Would you vote for a man who condemns a federal government that seeks to dictate school curriculums and wants to repeal “every word of Common Core”?
Would you vote for a man who would stand “unapologetically with the nation of Israel”?
Would you vote for a man who has pledged that he would do everything he could to ensure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon?
Would you vote for a man who openly says he would do everything he could to defeat radical Islamic terrorism?
I said I would on May 6, 2013 when he was beginning to get attention. Columnist George Will said he was “as good as it gets” when it comes to being a true conservative in Congress.
I am of course speaking of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who has announced his candidacy to be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party.
I suspect that his announcement probably terrifies the Republican “Establishment” who have managed to serve up some good men, but poor candidates, to be President. When Republican voters stayed home, we got Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Now they want to get the Party faithful to vote for Jeb Bush, but from my vantage point, the real base is ready to vote for anybody else, Sen. Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Walker, and Sen. Rubio come to mind.
First of all, there is no Tea Party in the sense of a political party with its own candidates. What there is are Republicans who believe in the U.S. Constitution, small government, fiscal prudence, strong national security, and all those other values outlined in Ted Cruz’s speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
As Cruz said in an email about his announcement “Washington, D.C. has become completely disconnected from the values of real Americans. That’s why we are now more than $18 trillion in debt, why wages have stagnated, and why our foreign policy is an absolute mess.” That pretty much sums up what Obama has delivered.
Does it surprise anyone that Cruz’s candidacy was instantly attacked, not just by Democrats, but by a number of leading Republicans? Rep. Peter King, appearing on CNN’s “Situation Room” with host Wolf Blitzer, said, he’d “jump off that bridge” when he got to it if Cruz becomes the GOP candidate. He also accused Cruz and Rand Paul of being “counterfeit conservatives.” Nonsense!
The March 24 Wall Street Journal had a lengthy editorial devoted to “The Cruz Candidacy” noting that on most issues with the exception of immigration they found themselves in agreement with him and offered an upbeat view that “The good news for GOP voters is that their field of candidates in 2016 is going to be deep, offering many varieties of conservative leadership” but ending with reservations about “his polarizing style” which was another way of saying he is not a wishy-washy centrist.
We will hear more such accusations and criticisms and, as often as not, they will come from the GOP Establishment.
The GOP Establishment regards real conservatives as unable to secure election, preferring RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, and candidates who move as close to the center politically as possible. It seems to have escaped their notice that the Republicans elected in the last two midterm elections were sent to Washington, D.C. by Tea Party and other serious conservative voters.
It has been a long time since a real conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, was elected President, but it can happen again as serious voters, particularly those who are independents, join with those who find Sen. Cruz a refreshing voice, Will he get the nomination? We are a very long way from the 2016 election, but at least we know it won’t be a boring one!
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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The Death Throes of Common Core
March 25th, 2015By Alan Caruba
Americans are learning the hard way that the federal government should not be permitted to impose one-size-fits-all standards to education. It was never intended to play a role in education and the absence of any mention in the Constitution is proof enough that education was intended to be supervised by the states where the school districts, schools, and parents are closest to the process.
Common Core is going to play a large role in the 2016 elections and that is likely to impact former Governor Jeb Bush the most. At the heart of the unhappiness with Common Core has been its emphasis on testing.
A March 20th Wall Street Journal article, “Bush Faces Test of Exam Policy”, reported that “A Rasmussen Reports nationwide survey in February found that 52% of respondents thought there was too much emphasis on testing in schools and 69% believed there was too much ‘teaching to the test.’”
The transformation of the nation’s educational system began when the Department of Education was signed into law by Jimmy Carter in 1979 and began operating in 1980. It continued with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the name given to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It requires all public schools receiving Title 1 federal funding to annually administer a state-wide standardized test to all students. NCLB was coauthored by Representatives John Boehner (R-OH), George Miller (D-CA) and Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Judd Gregg (R-NH).
President George W. Bush was a leading NCLB advocate and signed it into law on January 8, 2002. Each state was expected to develop its own standards because NCLB did not impose a national one. This year when its reauthorization came up for consideration, it was pulled from the House floor in February. The Heritage Foundation deems it “outdated, ineffective, and prioritizes government standards over the needs of individual students.”
According to Neal McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, “There is no compelling evidence that No Child Left Behind, and federal intervention overall, has produced much good, while it is very clear it has cost substantial money and is unconstitutional.”
In Missouri, circuit court Judge Daniel R. Green, ruled in February that the state’s payment of more than $4 million in membership fees as part of a standardized testing consortium was illegal. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium “is an unlawful interstate compact to which the U.S. Congress has never consented, whose existence and operation violate” Article 1 and 10 of the federal Constitution. It dealt a blow to Common Core.
It’s not just Missouri. In January the Mississippi Board of Education voted to withdraw from the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers consortium which is one of the two tests aligned to Common Core. A full repeal of Common Core standards is under discussion.
By June 2014, two months before its implementation date, 19 states had either withdrawn from the tests or had paused implementation of the standards. Four of the 19, Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Louisiana had completely exited the national standards. Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia never adopted it.
Gov. Bush is beginning to put some distance between himself and Common Core. His spokeswoman, Kristi Campbell, said “There is such a thing as too much testing.” Reportedly “he says the federal government shouldn’t impose particular tests or curricula on states.” Meanwhile, in one state after another, Common Core is being rejected.
On the political front, the Heartland Institute’s monthly newsletter, School Reform News, reported in March that “Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a front runner in the contest for the Republican nomination for president, made bold reforms of elementary, secondary, and college education a prominent part of his proposed 2015-17 budget.”
“The budget, presented on February 3, would remove the cap on the state’s school choice program, eliminate state funding for Smarter Balanced tests tied to Common Core State Standards, and cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin over two years in exchange for greater autonomy for the system.”
On Capitol Hill, four Republican senators including Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Roberts of Kansas have introduced a bill that would prevent the federal government from strong-arming states into adopting education standards such as Common Core and, presumably, NCLB. The bill is called learning Opportunities Created at the Local Level Act. As reported in the Daily Caller.com, it “would limit the federal government’s ability to control state educational standards and curriculums through financial incentives, grants, mandates, and other forms of influence.”
There’s no way to know when Common Core will die or whether No Child Left Behind will suffer a similar fate but the trend nationwide is obvious. Parents, teachers, schools and districts want to determine the best curricula for the children in their systems. They want the federal government out and that is a very good thing.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Is Obama Anti-Semitic?
March 24th, 2015
By Alan Caruba.
President Obama made no secret of his displeasure that Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected to be Israel’s Prime Minister. Only David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and one of the nation’s founders, served longer.
Obama lives in some parallel universe apart from the lessons of history and the realities of what is actually occurring. On May 18, 2009, not long after Netanyahu had been in office and was visiting the White House, Obama was demanding that he endorse Palestinian statehood and freeze the settlements on the West Bank.
Considering that the Palestinians had refused statehood from the day the United Nations endorsed Israel’s independence that has been a fool’s mission no matter who was President or Prime Minister.
As for Obama’s demands about settlements, who is Obama to tell the Israelis in 2009 where and if they can build the housing needed for its growing population? And yet Netanyahu, seeking to accommodate Obama, endorsed Palestinian statehood shortly thereafter and then announced a ten-month freeze on settlement development.
What did Netanyahu get in return? Nothing.
In 2014 when the Israelis responded militarily to months of rocket attacks from Gaza, it contacted the Department of State to request Hellfire missiles and Obama reportedly personally blocked the shipments.
The talks with Iran that have been Obama’s obsession since he took office have continued despite his promise not to “have talks forever.” This has been his pattern of behavior since the day he took office. As Wall Street columnist Brett Stephens observed, “The President collects hard favors from allies and replays them with neglect and derision. This is the mentality of a peevish and callow potentate.”
Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of Congress left the White House deeply angered and his reelection probably stunned them. The Israelis are accustomed to being underestimated.
At this point, Obama has given plenty of evidence that he is both pro-Islam and anti-Israel. Michael Haltman has written a timeline of events, “Obama’s Israel Hatred”, that reflect Obama’s attitudes in terms of the people with whom he associated before his 2008 run for the presidency and the events that followed thereafter.
Unspoken, but widely suspected, is the question of whether Obama is also anti-Semitic. As Haltman points out “Obama has spent his entire life surrounded by haters of Israel, from the former Palestine Liberation Organization, Rashid Khalid to former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Bazinski. Most famously people became aware of Rev. Jeramiah Wright whose church Obama attended and where he was married. Wright has been quoted saying “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me.”
The question of anti-Semitism is complicated by the fact that Obama has surrounded himself with Jews in the White House.
The Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, is Jewish. As is Gene Sperling, the Director of the National Economic Council. Janet Yellen, the Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve is Jewish as is a senior advisor, David Plouffe, as well as a dozen others. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff is Jewish as was his former senior advisor, David Axelrod. At least fifteen other Jews formerly held high office in the administration.
For anti-Semites, that would be “proof” that the White House is “run by Jews”, but that would not only be absurd, it would ignore the Muslims that Obama has put into positions of power and influence throughout his administration. Obama’s Jewish personnel choices all share his very liberal views.
I define anti-Semitism as a serious or general dislike of Jews. It can be either overt or covert. As in most cases in life, you can make your own conclusion based on a person’s actions, not words.
There is little doubt, however, that Obama shares an antipathy to Israel that is widespread among world leaders and many others. After two thousand years, the reemergence of Israel as a sovereign state in 1948 has no doubt baffled and irked those who hold Jews in contempt. Up until the election of Obama Israel had been supported by whoever was in the White House and understood to be an ally.
Now that he is in the final years of his presidency, Obama does not have to hide his antipathy to Israel, nor did he make much effort to do so in this first term.
The White House suggestion that they might take the two-state issue to the United Nations Security Council reflects Obama’s pique over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress opposing the Iran nuclear deal and his reelection. By contrast, his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, is now in the 11th year of his four-year term. Who needs elections in Palestine? And the Palestinian Authority is now linked with Hamas, the Gaza-based terrorist group.
Seeking United Nations involvement is a last ditch effort to harm Israel, but it hardly matters what the United Nations does or does not do because it is the most obscenely anti-Israel international institution.
What troubles most people, irrespective of any real or assumed anti-Israel or anti-Semitic element, is Obama’s pursuit of a deal with the Iranians that would permit them at some point to make their own nuclear weapons. It quite simply makes no sense to anyone except Obama. Iran has made no secret of its wish to “wipe Israel off the map.” Netanyahu left no doubt that Israel would use military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. In the past they destroyed such facilities in Iraq and Syria.
As for the Iranians, they don’t care how the negotiations turn out. They have gotten a respite from the sanctions and had funds that were frozen returned; securing money and time to continue their nuclear ambitions.
As for the destruction of Israel, Iran has both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza as their proxies to threaten Israel, so they can wait for a nuke to finish off the job. And who did the U.S. just remove from its list of terrorist nations and groups? Iran and Hezbollah!
I suspect that once Obama returns to civilian life, we will learn more about his views about race and religion. What we have learned at this point is that he doesn’t like an America that is a world power and the leader of the free world. His policy of retreat has caused allies and enemies alike to distrust him.
Anti-Semitic? Anti-Israel? Regrettably his words and actions demonstrate that this can be said of Obama with relative ease.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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It’s Not “Global Warming.” It’s “Springtime.”
March 19th, 2015By Alan Caruba
After decades of environmental claims that “global warming” would plunge the planet into catastrophic harm to its human and other inhabitants—at the same time blaming humans for causing it—the sheer arrogance and ignorance of these claims always ignores the real power that is represented by the Earth itself and the beginning of Spring should be proof enough for anyone paying any attention.
This year, Spring begins in the northern hemisphere on Friday, March 20 at 6:45 PM EDT. In the southern hemisphere it marks the beginning of Autumn.
Spring manifests itself in ways we take for granted yet it is a combination of many events that should make us marvel if we gave them any thought. For example, where does all the snow go? The U.S. and the rest of the world set records of snowfall levels throughout Winter.
As noted by the U.S. Geological Service, “in the world-wide scheme of the water cycle, runoff from snowmelt is a major component of the global movement of water.”
“Mountain snow fields act as natural reservoirs for many western United States water-supply systems, storing precipitation from the cool season, when most precipitation falls and forms snowpacks…As much as 75 percent of water supplies in the western states are derived from snowmelt.” Snowmelt ensures sufficient water for all of us and for the Earth that depends upon it for the growth of all vegetation.
How do the flowers know it is Spring? In a 2011 article for the Inside Science News Service, Katherine Gammon noted that “Just in time for the birds and bees to start buzzing, the flowers and the trees somehow know when to open their buds to start flowering. But the exact way that plants get their wake-up call has been something of a mystery.” A molecular biologist at the University of Texas, Sibum Sung, has been trying to solve that mystery and has discovered “a special molecule in plants that gives them the remarkable ability to recall Winter and to bloom on schedule in the Spring.”
Nothing on Earth happens by accident. It is a remarkable inter-related system to which we give little thought. The sheer power of all those blooming flowers and trees should tell us something about the power of Nature that dwarfs all the claims that humans have any influence whatever on the events of Spring or any other time of the year.
Then think about the role of the animals with whom we share the planet. In the Spring many come out of hibernation in their dens, while others such as birds make lengthy migrations from the warmer climes to those in the north. The huge migration of Monarch Butterflies should leave us speechless. Spring is a time when many animals give birth to their young.
A sign of the Spring that leaves us breathless is the way it is the season for the aurora borealis. Dr. Tony Phillips of NASA notes that “For reasons not fully understood by scientists, the weeks around the vernal equinox are prone to Northern Lights. From Canada to Scandinavia they provide a great show.
“Such outbursts are called auroral substorms and they have long puzzled physicists,” says UCLA space physicist Vassilis Angelopoulos. They represent “a potent geomagnetic storm.” The equinox in Spring and Autumn is a time when magnetic connections between the Sun and Earth are most favorable.
One book, “Silent Spring”, by Rachel Carson, first published in September 1962, started the environmental campaign against pesticide use for any reason, leading most famously to the ban on DDT in the U.S. What Carson neglected to tell readers was how they were supposed to cope with the trillions of insects that come with the advent of warm weather.
No pesticide use does not mean less mosquitoes, less termites, less flies, less ants, or less of any other insect species and the diseases they spread, property damage, and the damage they cause to crops of all descriptions. And, of course, the much of the pollination of crops and other vegetation depends on insect species.
Carson’s claims of a silent spring bereft of bird species was a blatant lie. Rich Kozlovich, an authority on pest management, noted that “Bird populations were never so high in North America” despite the use of DDT and other pesticides. “Carson’s claim about how the poor robin was going to disappear was not only wrong, she was deliberately lying.”
“Carson was a science writer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and absolutely had to know that in 1960 there were 12 times more robins, 21 times more cowbirds, 38 times more blackbirds, 131 times more grackles, etc., compared to 1941 numbers.”
Spring is a time of renewal in the northern hemisphere and it occurs with enormous levels of natural power. Most people, however, are oblivious to that power as they enjoy the sight of flowers and trees blooming.
I could almost guarantee that you will read or hear about “global warming” or “climate change” being attributed to the arrival of Spring. Do yourself a favor. Keep in mind that those claims, like Rachel Carson’s, represent an anti-humanity, anti-energy, and anti-capitalism agenda of the environmental movement.
Instead, celebrate the seasonal renewal of life on Earth and give thanks for the energy that permits you to control the environment of the structures where you live and work, that provides you the means to get in your car and go anywhere, and that powers every device you use.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Ferguson is NOT America
March 15th, 2015
By Alan Caruba
The wounding of two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and earlier in New York City the assassination of two police officers are disturbing events for all Americans as they represent a hostility that threatens a safe, secure society wherever one lives.
Shooting police is an invitation to anarchy. That there have been protests and parades of late advocating this should be a matter of deep concern to all of us, no matter our race.
Ferguson, however, is NOT America if one looks at its population and the incredibly poor governance they have endured. You get the government for which you vote or when you neglect to vote.
Ferguson is atypical of the nation. As James Langston notes in his book, “America in Crisis”, in Ferguson “the growth of the black population relative to whites is a recent occurrence. In 1990, blacks comprised 25 percent of the city’s population but that percentage grew to 52 percent in 2000 and 67 percent in 2010.”
“The demographic transition was not followed by a corresponding transition in black access to political positions, the police force, union representation, and the like. The recency of the demographic transition likely has altered the city in ways that do not characterize other contemporary major cities in the United States, especially those that are majority black like Detroit or Atlanta.”
As noted in the Department of Justice report of an investigation occasioned by the shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer, local governance was a factor in the lives of its black citizens that has invoked protest and resentment.
“Ferguson,” notes Langston, “is unusual in the degree that the city uses the municipal court system and the revenue it generates as a way to raise city funds. This created a financial incentive to issue tickets and then impose excessive fees on people who did not pay.” For the record, this occurs in other comparable communities.
“Data bears this out. Ferguson issued more than 1,500 warrants per 1,000 people in 2013 and this rate exceeds all other Missouri cities with a population larger than 10,000 people. Ferguson has a population of just over 21,000 people but issued 24,000 warrants which add up to three warrants per Ferguson household.”
This, however, is not that unusual in Missouri. An article by Joseph Miller, published in the March edition of The Heartland Institute’s Budget & Tax News noted that excessive use of traffic fines is not that uncommon in Missouri. “Of the 20 cities in the country with fine collections exceeding 20% of total revenue, 13 are contiguous with one another in a 25-square-mile section” and described this as “a daily burden for local residents.”
What the media has reported regarding the number of blacks killed in police shootings is a bit deceptive. There is no question that “the disproportional number of blacks that are killed in police shootings”, says Langston. “Blacks comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, but represent 32 percent of those killed by police between 2003 and 2009.” That’s more than double the number of whites killed.
Now factor in the greater number of criminal events that bring together blacks and the police responding to them.
Being black in America inherently evokes the historical fact that this nation practiced slavery prior to and since its founding in 1788 when our Constitution was ratified, to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It wasn’t until 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that the discrimination affecting the black community was fully addressed.
Two generations of Americans. black, white and other racist groups, have been born since then and these new generations have no living memory of the Civil Rights movement or the riots that occurred in cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Between 1955 and 1977 there were more than thirty race riots in America. Younger Americans did not experience them. Older Americans recall them and the protests in Ferguson evoked disturbing memories.
As reported in a 2007 study released by the National Urban League, “African-American men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white males. They are nearly as likely to be incarcerated, with average jail sentences about 10 months longer than those of white men.” Between the ages of 15 and 34, the civil rights group noted that “black males are nine times more likely to be killed by firearms and nearly eight times as likely to suffer from AIDS.” The unemployment rates are comparable to those today, eight years later.
A 2007 report by the U.S. Bureau of Statistics noted that, while only 13 percent of the U.S. population, blacks “were the victims of 49 percent of all murders and 15 percent of rapes, assaults, and other nonfatal violent crimes nationwide.” Significantly, “Most of the black murder victims—93 percent—were killed by other black people” while 85 percent of white victims were slain by other white people.”
One might conclude that murder is rampant in America, but the reality is that homicides are at a 50-year low. The peak homicide rate was in 1980. The rate began to grow in the mid-1960s, but steadily dropped by the 1990s. Today’s murder rate is at the lowest point in the past century.
What we are witnessing, however, is the result of cultural issues that afflict the black community. Juan Williams, a Fox News analyst, writing in 2007 noted that “One hard, unforgiving fact is that 70 percent of black children are born today to single mothers.” The school dropout rate is “about 50 percent nationwide for black students.”
“Black youth culture is boiling over with nihilism. It embraces failure and frustration, including random crime and jail time,” wrote Williams.
Ferguson is an example of far larger problems that afflict the black community. Only blacks can solve these problems.
One might have thought—and many did—that the election of America’s first black President was going to make these problems go away. Many blacks have entered the middle class, but the majority encounters the problems endemic to the black community and, until its culture and lifestyle choices change, those problems will be around for a long time to come.
With a black President, a black Attorney General, black members of Congress, black mayors and others demonstrating how different 2015 is from 1965, it is getting a lot harder to blame “whitey.”
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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The EPA Thinks You’re Stupid
March 11th, 2015By Alan Caruba
The folks at the Environmental Protection Agency, starting with a long line of its administrators that now includes Gina McCarthy, think you and the Congress of the United States are stupid. They have been telling lies for so long they can’t imagine that their chokehold on the American economy will ever end.
It is, however, coming to an end and the reason is a Republican-controlled Congress responding to the countless businesses and individuals being ravaged by a ruthless bureaucracy driven by an environmental agenda determined to deprive America of the energy sources vital to our lives and the nation’s existence.
This was on display in early March when Gina McCarthy testified to the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, asking for a nearly $500 million increase in its 2016 budget. The total discretionary budget request would have topped out at $8.6 billion and would reward states nearly $4 billion to go along with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.
The problem is that the Clean Power Plan is really about no power or far more costly power in those states where the EPA has been shutting down coal-fired plants that not long ago provided fifty percent of all the electricity in the nation.
In February 2014, the Institute for Energy Research reported:
“More than 72 gigawatts (GW) of electrical generating capacity have already, or are now set to retire because of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulations. The regulations causing these closures include the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (colloquially called MATS, or Utility MACT), proposed Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), and the proposed regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.
To put 72 GW in perspective, that is enough electrical generation capacity to reliably power 44.7 million homes—or every home in every state west of the Mississippi River, excluding Texas. In other words, EPA is shutting down enough generating capacity to power every home in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
Over 94 percent these retirements will come from generating units at coal-fired power plants, shuttering over one-fifth of the U.S.’s coal-fired generating capacity. While some of the effected units will be converted to use new fuels, American families and businesses will pay the price with higher utility bills and less reliability for their electricity.”
What nation would knowingly reduce its capacity to produce the electricity that everyone depends upon?
Answer: The United States of America.
Why? Because the EPA has been telling us that coal-fired plants produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and it is causing ours and the world’s temperature to increase to a point that threatens our lives. They have been claiming that everything from blizzards to droughts, hurricanes to forest fires, are the result of the CO2 that coal-fired plants produce.
That is a huge, stupendous lie.
In the Senate Committee meeting, McCarthy said, “Climate change is real. It is happening. It is a threat. Humans are causing the majority of that threat…the impacts are being felt. Climate change is not a religion. It is not a belief system. It’s a scientific fact. And our challenge is to move forward with the actions we need to protect future generations.”
Climate change is real. It’s been real for 4.5 billion years and it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that humans do, least of all heating, cooling and lighting their homes, running their businesses, and everything else that requires electricity.
McCarthy said that the EPA’s overall goal was to save the planet from rising sea levels, massive storms, and other climate events that impact our lives. No, that’s not why the EPA was created in 1970. Its job was to clean the water and the air. It has done a relatively good job, but its mandate had nothing to do with the climate, nor does the provision of energy have any impact on the climate.
The reverse is true. The climate has a lot of impact on us.
Regarding the “science” McCarthy referred to, according to a 2013 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there were record low tornadoes, record low hurricanes, record gain in Arctic and Antarctic ice, no change in the rate of sea levels, and there had been NO WARMING at that point for 17—now 19—years.
When Sen. Jeff Sessions asked McCarthy a number of questions about droughts and hurricanes, she either dodged providing a specific answer or claimed, as with hurricanes, that “I cannot answer that question. It’s a very complicated issue.”
Asked about the computer models on which the EPA makes its regulatory decisions, McCarthy replied, “I do not know what the models actually are predicting that you are referring to.” Sen. Sessions said that it was incredible that the Administrator of the EPA “doesn’t know whether their predictions have been right or wrong.”
As for any “science” the EPA may be using, much of it is SECRET.
H. Sterling Burnett, the managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News, reported on The Secret Science Reform Act (HR 4012) introduced by the House Science Committee late last year. The bill would “prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing, finalizing, or disseminating regulations or assessments based on science that is not transparent or reproducible.”
The House passed the Act on November 20, 2014 and it has been received in the Senate, read twice, and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. If it passes the Senate, that will be a giant leap forward in gaining oversight and control of the EPA.
Until then, the EPA’s administrator and staff will continue to work their mischief in the belief that both Congress and the rest of us are stupid. We’re not.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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It’s All Bad News for ObamaCare
March 4th, 2015By Alan Caruba
On Wednesday, March 4, the Supreme Court will hear the King v. Burwell case. It is likely to deliver a death blow to ObamaCare when the decision is announced in a few months. About the only good thing ObamaCare demonstrated is that the federal government should be kept from taking over sectors of the nation’s economy that are working just fine without it.
Health care expert Edmund Haislmaier and legal expert, both of The Heritage Foundation, provided an explanation of the case. “The question before the Supreme Court is whether the Obama administration overstepped its authority in issuing an IRS ruling that conflicts with the ObamaCare statute. The statute allows payment of ObamaCare subsidies only to individuals who obtain coverage ‘through an Exchange established by (a) State.’”
ObamaCare got such a cold reception nationwide that 34 States refused to set up an exchange, forcing the feds to do it. Those exchanges distributed subsidies to individuals participating in them, but the ObamaCare statute “seemingly did not authorize subsidies in such cases.” Suffice to say that ObamaCare health insurance is considerably more costly than what one could have previously purchased on one’s own; thus the need for the subsidies gambit.
The February edition of Health Care News, published by The Heartland Institute was filled with articles attesting to the failure of ObamaCare. Here are a few excerpts from them.
Devon M. Herrick, Ph.D., a health economist and senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, noted “Obama touts the claim (that) millions more people are now covered under health care insurance policies through employer plans. However, research has shown exchange subsidies will cause employers to drop coverage…Mandatory benefits are not free; workers bear the cost in the form of lower wages.”
Dr. Herrick added, “Obama said (in his State of the Union speech that) ‘in the past year alone about ten million uninsured Americans finally gained the security of health coverage,’ but he neglected to mention roughly 6 million were coverage through Medicaid expansion and many of them were finding it difficult to find doctors willing to work for the paltry fees state Medicaid programs pay doctors for treatment.”
An article by Matthew Glans, a Heartland senior policy analyst, noted that “The Health and Welfare Committee of the Tennessee Senate voted on February 5 to reject a bill that would have allowed Gov. Bill Haslam to expanded Medicare under the Affordable Care Act.”
Kenneth Artz reported that “A new study by the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services found half of all providers listed in Medicaid managed-care plans are not available to new Medicaid patients, either because they are not at the listed location or aren’t accepting new Medicaid patients.” Feeling ill? “For doctors who are accepting new Medicaid patients, the average wait time to get an appointment is two weeks, with close to 25% of patient having waits of one month or longer.”
Tom Steward, writing for the Minnesota Bureau of Watchdog.org, contributed to Health Care News noted that “In a significant victory for religious liberty and economic freedom, the American Manufacturing Company received a permanent federal exemption from provisions of the Affordable Care Act that contradict the owner’s religious convictions.”
Sean Parnell, the managing editor of Health Care News, reported that “Rhode Island officials predicted up to 100,000 residents would use the state-created exchange established under the Affordable Care Act to buy health insurance in 2014. Data from the state show only 27,961 people enrolled during the 2014 open-enrollment period, a number that declined throughout the year as many enrollees failed to pay their first premium or later dropped coverage.”
ObamaCare is on critical care because it could die at any time. Not surprisingly, three Republicans, John Kline, Paul Ryan, and Fred Upton, chairmen respectively of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce, have put together a plan to address the likelihood that the Supreme Court decision will put an end to ObamaCare.
As they said in a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, “If the court rules against the administration, as any fair reading of the law would demand, millions of individuals and families will hit a major roadblock. They’ll be stuck with health insurance designed by Washington, D.C., that they can’t afford.”
“What we propose is the off-ramp out of ObamaCare toward patient-centered health care. It has two parts: First, make insurance more affordable by ending Washington mandates and giving choice back to the states, individuals and families. And, second, support Americans in purchasing the coverage of their choosing.”
What a unique idea! Let people choose the health care plan they want and that they can afford. That’s the way it used to be before the Affordable Care Act was passed entirely by Democrat votes because the GOP would not support it. That’s why Congress is controlled by the GOP these days. And that’s why this nation will return to the free marketplace.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Obama Negotiates Israel’s Destruction
March 2nd, 2015By Alan Caruba
The strangest thing about Obama’s efforts to achieve friendly relations with Iran, something he has tried to do since he first took office in 2009, is that Iran has made it abundantly clear since its Islamic revolution in 1979 that it hates America and, in tandem, Israel as well.
In an Iranian naval drill on February 25, Iran blew up a mock U.S. aircraft carrier near the entrance of the Persian Gulf. It was a full-size replica of the USS Nimitz. This is the antithesis of friendship, but just to make their position clear, Iranian Rear Adm. Ali Fadavi, commander of its naval forces, let it be known that “We have the most advanced sea mines which cannot be imagined by the Americans.”
But the Americans—in this case the President of the United States and his negotiators—have been making every concession they can to get an agreement that would limit Iran’s ability to produce its own nuclear weapons. Dr. Norman Bailey, an adjunct professor of economic statecraft at the Institute of World Politics, Washington, D.C., recently wrote that “The U.S. looks set to present its allies with a dangerous fait accompli on Iran’s nuclear program.”
“The most recent deadline of March 24th means only one thing,” Dr. Bailey wrote in a World Tribune commentary. “A deal has been reached between the U.S. and Iran, which will be announced to the other five participants when the Obama administration decides it is convenient to do so.” The other five obviously have nothing to say regarding the negotiations. At one point, the French foreign minister stormed out of the initial meeting proclaiming “This is a fool’s deal.”
It’s worse than a fool’s deal. It is a deal that is predicated on the nuclear destruction of Israel and, after that, the U.S. is next. One might think that Obama knows this and one might be right. People like Mayor Rudy Giuliani have long noticed that Obama doesn’t seem to like America very much.
A commentary by Lawrence Sellin, PhD, a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the U.S. Army Reserve, and tours of service in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Major General Paul E. Vallely, U.S. Army, retired, noted that the nuclear agreement did not include measures that would prevent any cooperation between Iran and North Korea or other rogue states. This has not gone unnoticed by the Israelis. Intelligence Minister, Yuval Steinitz, has noted that “We all know that Iran, Syria and North Korea are very close to each other.”
North Korea has its own nuclear weapons program and, as Dr. Sellin and Maj. Gen. Vallely, warned, “Unless specifically prohibited and enforced within the terms and conditions” of the deal, “Tehran may attempt to sidestep the protocols by ‘outsourcing’ parts of the bomb production process to North Korea, Iran’s long-term partner on everything from launch missiles to guidance systems to nuclear war head technology and other required components.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, a party to the negotiations with Secretary John Kerry, met with a visiting North Korean deputy foreign minister, Ri Gil Song, shortly after February 2014 Vienna discussions. Fars News reported that their meetings were devoted to “bolstering and reinvigorating the two countries’ bilateral ties.”
Anyone recall George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”? It was Iran, North Korea, and Iraq.
In case you are less than confident of Iran’s intentions, in 2013 before the previous nuclear negotiations were concluded, according to the Fars News Agency, the regimes’ outlet run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Massoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, said “America’s interests and all of Israel are within the range of the Islamic Republic and there is not the slightest doubt among Iran’s armed forces to confront the American government and the Zionists (Israel).”
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress on Tuesday. On September 29, 2014, he addressed the United Nations. The message will be the same. Any deal with Iran will be a bad deal for Israel which has been in the crosshairs of the Iranians since they came to power in 1979. This isn’t an “existential” threat. It is a threat that can and will destroy Israel if permitted to occur. Obama’s negotiations will leave Israel no other option than to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
If the U.S. Congress has the means to deter and render Obama’s negotiations null and void, they had better do so. On September 26, 2007, the U.S. Senate passed legislation by a vote of 76-22 designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. The long record of Iran and its state-sponsored terrorism can be found by visiting Wikipedia.
What we are witnessing is a level of insane appeasement comparable to that of the 1930s when European nations refused to acknowledge Nazi Germany’s clear intention to conquer them.
Iran’s intentions are known to Obama and no doubt to our Congress. They are surely known to Israel and the Gulf nations. If history is any guide, these negotiations will put the world on the path to a cataclysm that defies the imagination.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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Green Slander
March 1st, 2015By Alan Caruba
It is a sure sign that the advocates of the “global warming” and “climate change” hoaxes know that the public no longer believes that the former is occurring or that the latter represents an immediate, global threat.
Even though the “climate skeptics”, scientists who have produced research proving false methodology and the conclusions based on it are quite few in number, an effort to silence them by smearing their reputations and denying funding for their work has been launched and it is based entirely on a lie.
Scientists are supposed to be skeptical, not only of other scientist’s findings, but their own. Good science must be able to reproduce the results of published research. In the case of the many computer models cited as proof that global warming was occurring or would, the passing years have demonstrated that none were accurate.
As Joseph L. Bast, president of The Heartland Institute and Joseph A. Morris, an attorney who has fought in several countries to defend free speech, wrote in a February 24 commentary, “The Crucifixion of Dr. Wei-Hock Soon”, of an article co-authored with Christopher Monckton, Matt Briggs, and David Legates, and published in the Science Bulletin, a publication of the Chinese Academy of Sciences “The article reveals what appears to be an error in the computer models used to predict global warming that leads models to over-estimate future warming by a factor of three.” (Emphasis added) Their commentary has been downloaded more than 10,000 times!
“If the work of Soon et al is confirmed by other scientists, the ‘global warming crisis’ may need to be cancelled and we can all enjoy lower taxes, fewer regulations, and more personal freedom.” However, “having failed to refute the article, environmentalists turned to smearing the authors.”
Little wonder the “Warmists” are worried; the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1996. People are noticing just how cold this record-breaking and record-setting winter is.
The attack on Dr. Soon began with a Greenpeace news release that was republished on the front page of The New York Times on February 22nd. Despite its august reputation, The Times’ coverage of climate issues has been an utter disgrace for decades. As public interest waned, it eliminated its staff of reporters exclusively devoted to writing about the “environment.”
Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic and director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted on February 27th that the Greenpeace attack on Dr. Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics claimed they had secured $1.2 million in funding for his research over the past decade and that it came from energy corporations, electric utilities, and charitable foundations related to those companies. The truth, however, is “that the grants were made not to Dr. Soon but to the Smithsonian, which never complained while taking its sizable cut off the top.”
Columnist Larry Bell who is also an endowed professor at the University of Houston, disputed the Greenpeace claim, saying, “First, let’s recognize that the supporting FOIA documents referred to an agreement between the Smithsonian (not Dr. Soon) and Southern Company Services, Inc., whereby 40 percent of that more than $1.2 million went directly to the Smithsonian” leaving “an average funding of $71,000 a year for the past eleven years to support the actual research activities.”
Focusing on Greenpeace and its Climate Investigations Center which describes itself as “a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change”, Bell asked “Do these activist organizations make their estimated $360,000,000 annual funding publicly available?” Bell said “Ad hominem assaults disparaging the integrity of this leading authority on relationships between solar phenomena and global climate are unconscionable.”
In his article, “Vilifying realist science—and scientists”, Paul Driessen, a policy advisor to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), noted that in 2012 Greenpeace USA was the recipient of $32,791,149 and that this is true of other environmental pressure groups that in 2012 secured $111,915.138 for the Environmental Defense Fund, $98,701,707 for the Natural Resources Defense Council, $97,757,678 for the Sierra Club, and, for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, $19,150,215.
“All told,” noted Driessen, “more than 16,000 American environmental groups collect(ed) total annual revenues of over $13.4 billion (2009 figures). Only a small part of that comes from membership dues and individual contributions.” With that kind of money you can do a lot of damage to scientist’s reputation.
They fear that the public may actually learn the truth about “global warming” and the fear-mongering claims about “climate change” does not stop with just the environmental organizations. At the same time The New York Times was printing the Greenpeace lies, U.S. Senators Ed Market (D-Mass), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) joined together on February 25th to send letters to 107 companies, trade associations, and non-profit groups demanding comprehensive information about all funding of research on climate or related issues.
Among the groups receiving the letter were two for whom I am a policy advisor, The Heartland Institute and CFACT, but others include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the American Energy Alliance.
Following The New York Times article, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, sent letters to the presidents of seven universities asking them to provide details about seven professors who are either prominent global warming skeptics.
As Rich Lowrey, editor of the National Review, pointed out on February 27th, that “Science as an enterprise usually doesn’t need political enforcers. But proponents of a climate alarmism that demands immediate action to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for itself.”
This is not fact-finding. It is an act of intimidation.
And it looks like a carefully organized effort to quash any research that might dispute “global warming” or “climate change” as defined by the Greens and by both the President and the Secretary of State as the greatest threat we and the rest of the world faces.
The greatest threat is the scores of environmental organizations that have been exaggerating and distorting their alleged “science” in order to thwart development here and around the world that would enhance everyone’s life. Now they are attacking real scientists, those who are skeptical of their claims, to silence them.
This is what fascists do.
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