The Audacity of Logic

Whay Isn't He Running?

2012-01-21T07:39:00.002-06:00

November 2012

2012-01-21T07:38:00.000-06:00

How Cold Is It?

2012-01-21T07:34:00.003-06:00

Support Our Marines

2012-01-21T07:32:00.003-06:00

The Reason For The Season - Merry Christmas

2011-12-18T22:32:00.000-06:00

Lest We Forget...

2011-12-07T15:25:00.000-06:00

Photography by Jim Giunta

What We Owe the Greatest Generation On the Anniversary of Pearl Harbor

2011-12-07T10:11:00.005-06:00

By Patrick Dorinson

Today, December 7, 2011 marks the 70th Anniversary of the Japanese sneak attack on the United States Naval Base and Army facilities at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaii marking America’s formal entry into the world war that had been raging in Asia beginning in the early 1930s and Europe since 1939.

There will be an official ceremony in Hawaii to commemorate this historic event near the memorial to the USS Arizona, the “pride of the Pacific Fleet” that was sunk during the attack and to this day is the final resting place of 1,177 sailors and marines.

And across America there will be smaller ceremonies in military cemeteries, VFW Halls and at war memorials.

Among those attending will be the remaining members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. They are in their eighties and nineties and although they walk a little slower now and their hair has long since turned gray, when they talk about their experience at Pearl Harbor on that “day of infamy,” the look in their eyes is as clear as if it happened just yesterday.

I know because I recently had the honor and privilege of meeting some of them and having them on my radio program.

Meet Colonel Sam Clower, Pearl Harbor survivor and 34-year veteran of the United States Army and Air Force.

Sam was born and raised in Paducah, Texas where his parents had a small cattle ranch.

In 1939 as the war clouds in Europe darkened, Sam followed the news of the world carefully on the radio at the café across the street from where he worked. He had a good job at the time that paid him $100 a month.

He figured that sooner or later America would be drawn into the global conflict and he wanted to be properly trained so that if war came he would be ready to defend his country.

So he left his job making ice cream at the local creamery and traded his $100 a month job for $21 a month as a buck private in the U.S. Army.

On December 7, 1941 he was stationed at Wheeler Field in Hawaii. At 7:55 am he saw the first wave of Japanese planes fly over as they began the attack and he knew that his country was at war.

When I asked him if he ever doubted the country or its leaders or if he thought America would lose the war, Sam quickly answered with an emphatic “no!”

As I probed a little deeper as to why he was so confident those 70 years ago, he simply said, “We had faith in the country.”

Over the years I have spoken to many of the Greatest Generation some who served overseas and some who served on the home front and when I ask them the same question I asked Sam, I get the same response.

They had faith in the country.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

In today’s America, we don’t seem to have that kind of faith anymore. We seem unwilling to take that step without seeing the staircase first. Then when we see the staircase we make excuses not to take that first step.

But on December 8, 1941 when President Franklin Roosevelt declared, “With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God”, our parents and grandparents took that leap of faith not knowing where it would lead but confident in themselves, their nation and their leaders.

And in doing so they saved democracy.

It has been said that 9/11 terror attacks were our generation’s Pearl Harbor.

Like Pearl Harbor it initially rallied America to a common cause. Flag sales went up and could be seen everywhere. Chants of U-S-A! U-S-A! were heard at sporting events.

But there were no calls from our putative leaders for sacrifice from the citizens to fight this war on terror. No draft of young men to go to war. No rationing of things like meat or sugar or gasoline.

Wars are expensive and yet there was no request for any financial sacrifice from any of us to raise the necessary revenue to fight this war.

We could have it all. We could have war and tax cuts. We could have war and more profligate spending by Congress. We could have war and go into national and private debt not caring how it would be paid back.

We could have war and go on about our lives as if there was no war since we had an all-volunteer military to do all the fighting which we could conveniently watch from the comfort of our living rooms on HDTV’s like it was a video game.

And it wasn’t too long before the partisan armies of our political system, retreated to their foxholes and once again began lobbing insults at each other.

Worst of all as things got tough, we lost our faith in our country and its ability to do what is necessary.

America is built on faith. Faith in ourselves, faith in each other and faith in our ability to overcome all the obstacles thrown in our path.

As we begin the long farewell to the Greatest Generation, we need to rediscover that essential faith.

It won’t be rediscovered in any law Congress passes or any political campaign. You can’t buy it on the Internet. It needs to come from inside each of us.

But time is running short.

Not for us but for those who sacrificed their youth to keep Old Glory flying--folks like Sam Clower and all the others who served in World War II.

When they pass into the great beyond they should be able to tell the 1,177 men who went down with the Arizona that fateful December 7, 1941 and all the others who never made it home that not only did they not die in vain but that America is in good hands.

We owe them at least that much before they take that final step up the staircase that leads to the ultimate reward for their faith--Heaven.

Patrick Dorinson blogs at "The Cowboy Libertarian" and he can be heard on a radio program with the same name on Sundays, from 3-5 p.m. PT on KFBK radio

Does Obama Think It's Beneath Him to Be President?

2011-11-30T22:38:00.000-06:00

By Michael Goodwin

The words cut like a knife. “What the hell are we paying you for?” Gov. Chris Christie asked of President Obama.

The New Jersey Republican has a gift for getting to the heart of things, and his broadside against the president over the debt bomb is Exhibit A. His assertion, framed as a question, makes the case against Obama better than anything heard from the actual candidates.

Christie’s decision not to run remains a disappointment, but he is a valuable player who can help sharpen the fuzzy aim of Mitt Romney, the man he supports. Christie’s consistent theme is that Obama has defaulted on the responsibility to provide presidential leadership during a national crisis.

On Monday, the GOP heavyweight called Obama “a bystander in the Oval Office” for ducking the congressional committee charged with finding $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions over 10 years.

“I was angry this weekend, listening to the spin coming out of the administration about the failure of the super committee, and that the president knew it was doomed for failure, so he didn’t get involved,” Christie said. “Well, then, what the hell are we paying you for? ‘It’s doomed for failure so I’m not getting involved?’ Well, what have you been doing, exactly?”

The questions are rhetorical in that we know what the president has been doing and why. He plays golf and campaigns.

Governing is beneath him.

He doesn’t talk much to members of Congress or his own Cabinet.

They’re beneath him.

His connection to the public consists of speeches before large crowds, and he ducks behind the curtain and into the security bubble as soon as he finishes.

The people are beneath him.

Warped by a sense of entitlement and self-aggrandizement, Obama refuses to take responsibility for finding practical solutions to problems. He prefers the glory of transformation rather than the roll-the-sleeves-up work of reform.

When he can’t get his way, he appoints a czar and ignores Congress.

Democracy is beneath him.

He could have brokered a deficit deal, but doing so would have demolished his campaign slogan that Republicans are to blame for everything. Any deal would give him ownership of the results, and end the fiction that politics are beneath him.

In fact, he’s all politics, all the time. His idea of bipartisanship is that everybody agrees with him.

He’s so bad at the job that the frequent comparisons to Jimmy Carter are unfair to Carter. The former peanut farmer was a terrible president, but he was at least sincere in his starchy disdain for the country.

Obama professes to really, really like America. He just wants to change everything about it.

And when the country says no thanks, he goes off script and the smears come out. We’re “soft” and “lazy” and “bitter” and “cling” to God and guns.

Much ink has been spilled trying to figure out what went wrong after such a brilliant, history-making campaign got him to the White House. Obama smashed the Clinton machine and dispatched John McCain without breaking a sweat. Mount Rushmore was waiting.

But his first day in office marked the peak, and it’s been all downhill since. Deadenders, after blaming George W. Bush, Senate Republicans and the Tea Party, were forced to turn on their own, especially the economic advisers who are gone, Larry Summers and Peter Orszag. They were the problems.

But there are no hiding places in the Oval Office and, after three years, it’s clear who the problem is.

The campaign of 2008 looked brilliant because campaigns showcase Obama’s one real talent — blaming someone else for blocking the way to Utopia.

On that basis, he got the job. But now we know the terrible truth: Actually being president is beneath him, too.

Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist.

Barney Frank Quits!

2011-11-28T13:58:00.000-06:00

Longtime Massachusetts liberal Democratic Rep. Barney Frank says he will not seek re-election in 2012 because of state redistricting that makes it too strenuous to campaign.

I Think This About Says It All

2011-11-22T08:03:00.002-06:00

Finally, Someone Explains The Occupy Protest... Very Well

2011-11-08T17:29:00.000-06:00

By Marybeth Hicks.

Call it an occupational hazard, but I can't look at the Occupy Wall Street protesters without thinking, "Who parented these people?"

As a culture columnist, I've commented on the social and political ramifications of the "movement" - now known as "OWS" - whose fairyland agenda can be summarized by one of their placards: "Everything for everybody."

Thanks to their pipe-dream platform, it's clear there are people with serious designs on "transformational" change in America who are using the protesters like bedsprings in a brothel.

Yet it's not my role as a commentator that prompts my parenting question, but rather the fact that I'm the mother of four teens and young adults. There are some crucial life lessons that the protesters' moms clearly have not passed along.

Here, then, are five things the OWS protesters' mothers should have taught their children but obviously didn't, so I will:

* Life isn't fair. The concept of justice - that everyone should be treated fairly - is a worthy and worthwhile moral imperative on which our nation was founded. But justice and economic equality are not the same. Or, as Mick Jagger said, "You can't always get what you want."

No matter how you try to "level the playing field," some people have better luck, skills, talents or connections that land them in better places. Some seem to have all the advantages in life but squander them, others play the modest hand they're dealt and make up the difference in hard work and perseverance, and some find jobs on Wall Street and eventually buy houses in the Hamptons. Is it fair? Stupid question.

* Nothing is "free." Protesting with signs that seek "free" college degrees and "free" health care make you look like idiots, because colleges and hospitals don't operate on rainbows and sunshine. There is no magic money machine to tap for your meandering educational careers and "slow paths" to adulthood, and the 53 percent of taxpaying Americans owe you neither a degree nor an annual physical.

While I'm pointing out this obvious fact, here are a few other things that are not free: overtime for police officers and municipal workers, trash hauling, repairs to fixtures and property, condoms, Band-Aids and the food that inexplicably appears on the tables in your makeshift protest kitchens. Real people with real dollars are underwriting your civic temper tantrum.

* Your word is your bond. When you demonstrate to eliminate student loan debt, you are advocating precisely the lack of integrity you decry in others. Loans are made based on solemn promises to repay them. No one forces you to borrow money; you are free to choose educational pursuits that don't require loans, or to seek technical or vocational training that allows you to support yourself and your ongoing educational goals. Also, for the record, being a college student is not a state of victimization. It's a privilege that billions of young people around the globe would die for - literally.

* A protest is not a party. On Saturday in New York, while making a mad dash from my cab to the door of my hotel to avoid you, I saw what isn't evident in the newsreel footage of your demonstrations: Most of you are doing this only for attention and fun. Serious people in a sober pursuit of social and political change don't dance jigs down Sixth Avenue like attendees of a Renaissance festival. You look foolish, you smell gross, you are clearly high and you don't seem to realize that all around you are people who deem you irrelevant.

* There are reasons you haven't found jobs. The truth? Your tattooed necks, gauged ears, facial piercings and dirty dreadlocks are off-putting. Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity isn't a virtue. Occupy reality: Only 4 percent of college graduates are out of work. If you are among that 4 percent, find a mirror and face the problem. It's not them. It's you.

Marybeth Hicks is a weekly columnist for the The Washington Times and editor of Family Events, a weekly e-newsletter and blog site for women from the publishers of Human Events. She is the author of Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom (Regnery Publishers, 2011), Bringing up GEEKS: How to Protect Your Kid’s Childhood in a Grow-up-too-fast World (Penguin/Berkley, 2008) and The Perfect World Inside My Minivan–One Mom’s Journey Through the Streets of Suburbia (Faith Publishing, 2006).

Marybeth Hicks is the author of "Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith and Freedom." Find her on the Web at www.marybethhicks.com.

How Did Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' Predict an America Spinning Out of Control?

2011-11-04T08:25:00.001-05:00

By Onkar Ghate

Author, Ayn Rand

Nearly thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand’s novels continue to be wildly popular—"Atlas Shrugged" alone is selling more today than it did when it was first published in 1957 -- more than one million copies have sold since the 2008 elections.

Especially among Tea Partiers, Ayn Rand is being hailed a prophet. How could she have anticipated, more than 50 years ago, a United States spinning out of financial control, plagued by soaring spending and crippling regulations?

How could she have painted villains who seem ripped from today’s headlines?

There’s Wesley Mouch, who in the face of failed government programs screams like Rep. Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts for wider powers.

There’s Eugene Lawson, “the banker with a heart,” who like former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is ever ready with a bailout.

There’s Mr. Thompson, who like President Obama seeks to rally the country behind pious platitudes.

There’s Orren Boyle, who like President Bush says that we must abandon free-market principles to save the free market.

And in the face of this onslaught, what can you do? Should you, like Rand’s heroes, “go Galt,” stop working, retreat to a secluded valley, and try to rebuild only when the country has collapsed?

Rand was asked these very questions in her own lifetime. Her answers might surprise you.

In the 1970s, America was in a deep financial crisis (a new word, stagflation, had to be coined), urban violence was rampant, and power-seeking politicians like President Nixon instituted wage and price controls that led to, among other things, gas stations with no gas.

How, people wondered, could Rand have foreseen all this? Was she a prophet? No, she answered. She had simply identified the basic cause of why the country was veering from crisis to new crisis.

Was the solution to “go Galt” and quit society? No, Rand again answered. The solution was simultaneously much easier and much harder. “So long as we have not yet reached the state of censorship of ideas,” she once said, “one does not have to leave a society in the way the characters did in Atlas Shrugged. . . . But you know what one does have to do? One has to break relationships with the culture. . . . [D]iscard all the ideas—the entire cultural philosophy which is dominant today.”

Now, the fact that "Atlas Shrugged" is not a political novel might surprise you. But the book’s point is that our plight is caused not by corrupt politicians (who are only a symptom) or some alleged flaw in human nature. It’s caused by the philosophic ideas and moral ideals most of us embrace.

“You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded,” the novel's hero John Galt declares to a country in crisis. “Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster.”

He elaborates: “You have sacrificed justice to mercy.” (For example, calls to make homeownership “accessible” to those who could not afford it and then bailouts and foreclosure freezes to spare them when they couldn’t pay.)

“You have sacrificed reason to faith.” (For example, attempts to prevent stem cell research on Biblical grounds, or blind faith that Mr. Obama’s deliberately empty rhetoric about hope and change will magically produce prosperity.)

“You have sacrificed wealth to need.” (For example, Bush’s prescription drug benefit and Obamacare, both enacted because people needed “free” health care.)

“You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial.” (For example, attacks on Bill Gates for making a fortune; applause when he gives that fortune away.)

“You have sacrificed happiness to duty.” (For example, every president’s Kennedyesque exhortations to “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”)

The result? “Why . . . do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality . . .”

This is what "Atlas Shrugged" is asking us to question: our ideals. Rethink our convictions and philosophy of life from the ground up. Without doing so, it argues, we won’t escape further crises.

Strike, the book urges us, but intellectually, since to strike means to reject the fundamental terms of your opponents and assert your own.

This kind of thinking is difficult, Rand held, but necessary to enter the Atlantis depicted toward the end of the novel.

"If Atlas Shrugged" has been on your list of books-I’ve-been-meaning-to-get-to, then consider finding out for yourself how a story published in 1957 so eerily captures the world we live in today and so beautifully presents a road to a brighter future.

Postscript: And if you’re like the millions who prefer reading e-books, I highly recommend the just-released Atlas Shrugged app for iPad: it includes the unabridged text of the classic novel, and offers a glimpse into the backstory of the book and sketches out the essentials of Rand’s original philosophic system, Objectivism.

Dr. Onkar Ghate is a vice president and senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He teaches at the Institute’s Objectivist Academic Center, speaks on philosophy and Objectivism across North America, and publishes scholarly articles on Ayn Rand’s fiction and philosophy. Recently he wrote "A Teacher’s Guide to 'Atlas Shrugged,'” a classroom resource published by Penguin.

The Doorbell

2011-11-01T15:43:00.001-05:00

Power Line Blog held a prize competition for $100,000 for whoever can most effectively and creatively dramatize the significance of the federal debt crisis. Any creative product was eligible: videos, songs, paintings, screenplays, Power Point presentations, essays, performance art, or anything else.

Several entries have gotten a lot of attention and a lot of views or listens. But unquestionably, the one that has most gone viral so far is Doorbell.

Obama and the Destroyers In Zuccotti Park

2011-10-20T08:56:00.002-05:00

By Michael Goodwin

With each passing day, the Occupy Wall Street movement is picking up steam. The growing roster of A-list supporters at home and from around the globe is impressive, if that’s the right word.

Iran’s chief mad mullah, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, loves the protests, the government of China applauds them, and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is positively gung-ho.

Naturally, the American Nazi Party favors the lusty attacks on the “Judeo-capitalist banksters” while the Socialist Party USA and the Communist Party USA are happy passengers on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon.

Oh, and Barack Obama hearts the movement, too.

Because you should judge a man by his allies, our president might want to reconsider the villainous company he is keeping. Despite his claim that protesters reflect a “broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” the people sleeping in Zuccotti Park are not there to help him create middle-class jobs or save the ones that exist.

If they were, America’s crackpot foreign and domestic adversaries wouldn’t be cheering. Their support reveals what the movement is really about.

Plain and simple, the movement is about destroying capitalism, which most protesters see as the enemy. They don’t want to fix the financial system. They want to bring it down.

Movement leaders don’t want the economy to grow, which would mean the Big Bad Banks would be healthy enough to lend and Evil Corporations would be healthy enough to borrow. They want to redistribute wealth, not create it.

They hope banks and corporations go belly-up, except, of course, for those that produce cool stuff they like. The cool stuff, actually, all stuff, should be free because profits are filthy.

For the Wall Street campers, housing grows on trees and storks deliver small businesses. They oppose banks making money on home mortgages and loans to entrepreneurs. Pollster Doug Schoen finds a third are willing to use violence to get their way.

It is bad enough that Obama is trying to recruit this destructive cult for partisan purposes. It is even worse that he is not alone.

Mitt Romney, the probable GOP presidential nominee, foolishly gave credence to the protesters’ distorted vision that American society consists of a few haves oppressing a multitude of have-nots, with nothing in the middle.

“I don’t worry about the top 1 percent,” Romney told a New Hampshire audience. “They’re doing just fine by themselves. I worry about the 99 percent in America. And so I look at what’s happening on Wall Street, and my own view is, boy I understand how those people feel ... The people in this country are upset.”

Yes, yes, about 75 percent of Americans are upset about the economy and the lack of jobs. But it verges on insanity to say that the protesters in lower Manhattan are typical examples of that angst, and thus deserving of mainstream support.

To endorse the radical movement’s sentiments is to deny reality and make the jobs crisis worse. More taxes, debt and regulation would kill the future. If new entitlements are created, it’s game over.

Obama already has made the financial system a pinata. Now that it’s spilled its candy -- Goldman Sachs is losing money, hooray! -- he wants to beat it to death to get four more years. He certainly doesn’t need Romney’s help.

As I noted Sunday, New York City has about 3.7 million jobs, yet fewer than 500 committed leftists are holding the city hostage with their Woodstock tent city. Everybody knows they are torturing the First Amendment, but nobody has the guts to say “Enough!”

Mayor Bloomberg has come up especially small in this emergency. He laments the protesters selfishness in harming local businesses and residents, yet is too timid to forge a solution.

So he dispatches a garrison of New York’s Finest to baby-sit a group of hooligans who occasionally attack them, spew anti-Semitic rants and turn the streets into toilets. And working New Yorkers pick up the exorbitant tab for the stand-off.

Someday, there might be a comic angle to this drama, but not yet. For now, Occupy Wall Street is shaping up as a tragedy that will doom the hopes of millions of Americans who simply want an honest government and a decent job.

Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist.

Have We Forgotten How to Raise Boys Into Men?

2011-10-15T09:26:00.003-05:00

By William J. Bennett

Fashioning men has never been easy, but today it seems particularly tough. Boys need heroes to embody the everlasting qualities of manhood: honor, duty, valor, and integrity. Without such role models, boys will naturally choose perpetual childhood over the rigors of becoming a man—as many women, teachers, coaches, employers, and adults in authority can quickly attest to today.

Too many boys and men waste time in pointless and soulless activities, unmindful of their responsibilities, uncaring in their pursuits. Have we forgotten how to raise men, how to lead our boys into manhood?

In "The Book of Man," I try to chart a clearer course, offering a positive, encouraging, uplifting, realizable idea of manhood, redolent of history and human nature, and practical for contemporary life.

For boys to become men they need to be guided, through advice, habit, instruction, example, and correction. It is true in all ages.

Someone once characterized the two essential questions Plato posed as: Who teaches the children, and what do we teach them? When the older generation fails to properly teach the younger males (and females) coming behind them, trouble surely follows.

Today, for the first time in history, women are better educated, more ambitious, and arguably more successful than men. Society has rightly celebrated the ascension of women. We said, “You go, girl” and they went. We praise the rise of women but what will we do about what appears to be the very real decline of men?

The data shows that there is trouble with men today. In 1970, men earned 60% of all college degrees. In 1980, the figure fell to 50%, by 2006 it was 43%. Women now surpass men in college degrees by almost three to two. Women's earnings grew 44% from 1970 to 2007, compared with 6% growth for men. In 1950, five percent of men at the prime working age were unemployed. Today twenty percent are not working, the highest ever recorded.

Perhaps most worrisome are the cultural indicators. Men are more distant from a family or their children then they have ever been. The out of wedlock birthrate is over forty percent in America. In 1960, only 11% of children in the U.S. lived apart from their fathers. In 2010, that share had risen to 27%. Men are also less religious than ever before. According to Gallup polling, 39% of men reported attending church regularly in 2010, compared to 47% of women.

But you don’t need numbers. Just ask young women about men today, and you’re likely to hear how many believe their males counterparts are more like male children, refusing to grow up. Too many young women today are asking, “Where are the good single men?” Contemporary men exhibit a maturity deficit, and are in danger of falling further behind the more well adjusted women of today.

And so in our time especially there is a need for guidance, and the important role of men for boys is a particularly acute need. Of course there are successes. Every day great boys are raised to be great men, but there are other cases as well.

Confusions regarding manhood abound, including confusion about a proper understanding of virility. Fathers are missing from boys’ lives in devastatingly high numbers. Children are exposed to a dizzying array of cultural signals about what it means to be a man, signals both good and bad. Our society is moving forward so rapidly that it has forgotten much good from the past. And women are beginning to take the place of men in many ways.

As Hanna Rosin points out in her seminal article, “The End of Men,” women have now surpassed men in several categories that reflect economic and cultural standing. In American colleges, for every two men who graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree, three women receive a B.A. Women now dominate thirteen of the fifteen job categories expected to grow the most in the coming decade. This has led some to ask: do we even need men?

So what’s the problem? Increasingly, the messages to boys about what it means to be a man are confusing. They mistake the machismo of the street gangs for courage. They fill the vacancy left by missing fathers with video games, television, and music. Gay culture, with its flamboyant display, often challenges traditional masculinity. Hollywood films glorify male characters who refuse to grow up. Too many men today treat women like toys, easily discarded when things get complicated. Through all these different and conflicting signals, our boys must decipher what it means to be a man, and for many of them it is harder to figure out.

We need to fight back against this culture and send our boys and young men a clear and achievable message of what it means to be a man. The founding virtues – industriousness, marriage, and religion, are still the basis for male empowerment and achievement. It may be time to say to a number of our young men, “Get off the video games five hours a day, pull yourself together, get a challenging job, and get married.” It’s time to bring back men.

William J. Bennett is the author of "The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood. (Thomas Nelson)" Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute. He was U.S. secretary of education from 1985 to 1988 and was director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H.W. Bush.

To Keep America Safe We Must Address Our Intelligence Failures In Iran

2011-10-12T12:46:00.003-05:00

Revelations that Iranian agents plotted an alleged attack to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and blow up the embassies of Israel and Saudi Arabia in the heart of Washington should have surprised neither analysts nor journalists. The only thing certain about the Islamic Republic, after all, is its uncertainty.

More than 30 years after the Islamic Revolution, Iran remains a black hole for American analysts. The unknowns regarding Iranian command, control, and capabilities represent an intelligence failure the likes of which make the Central intelligence Agency’s 2002 false findings regarding Iraq weapons of mass destruction program look like small potatoes.

The first hint about the scope of America’s Iran intelligence woes came in 2005, shortly after the relatively unknown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad surprised analysts by becoming Iran’s president.

Almost immediately, a debate erupted about whether Ahmadinejad had been among the hostage-takers who seized the American embassy in 1979. The debate indicated an intelligence failure, not only about Ahmadinejad, but also about why, after more than a quarter century, the CIA has not parsed every single photograph of the embassy captors to determine the identity of each.

This would enable American officials to issue warrants, prosecute, seize or, at the very minimum, blacklist so that those who abused American hostages would not even now be able to enjoy the legitimacy a diplomatic conference room grants let alone gain visas to enjoy visits to Hollywood Boulevard or even Disneyland.

During his press conference outlining the terrorist plot, Attorney General Eric Holder fingered the Qods Force, an elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), as responsible for the alleged assassination plot. It is ironic that while it is the IRGC that most concerns Western policymakers, American officials know very little about the group. After all, while analysts debate whether Iranian politicians are reformers, pragmatists, or hardliners, there is no corollary debate about the factions within the IRGC.

Both inside and outside government, many analysts argue that many recruits join the IRGC less on ideological grounds and more for the incumbent privileges: higher gasoline rations, advantages in university entrance exams, and job security amidst Iran’s economic woes.

That may be true, but without doubt, others join the IRGC for purely ideological reasons. General David Petraeus, the new director of Central Intelligence, can brag about an achievement as important as the Iraq surge should he illuminate what his predecessors failed to do and force the intelligence bureaucracy he overseas to map out who believes what within the IRGC.

There is no more important question. After all, as the guardians of the revolution, the IRGC will control Iran’s nuclear arsenal.

While pundits might debate Iran’s nuclear program as a whole, what should keep policymakers up at night is their failure to understand who would actually have their finger on the button. Ninety-nine percent of Iranians might be pragmatic, reasonable, and averse to national suicide, but if an ideologue willing to take the fight to America regardless of the consequences controls a nuclear bomb’s launch codes, then neither containment nor deterrence will work, and millions of Americans may be at risk.

Whether the Iranian plot on Washington was a rogue operation or not is irrelevant should the Iranian system allow the same rogues to achieve custody of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

American authorities also remain largely ignorant of Iranian decision-making. Any book purporting to explain Iranian politics comes replete with wire diagrams seeking to explain the relations among Iran’s myriad power centers. That not all wire diagrams match reflect some analytical confusion, but the real danger for Iranian analysis is that such wire diagrams may be increasingly irrelevant.

After all, the IRGC has executed a slow, creeping military coup d’état. While Americans picture the Islamic Republic as a state run by ayatollahs and clerics, a cleric heads only one out of 22 ministries; most of the rest fall to IRGC veterans (or their wives).

Ahmadinejad himself is a veteran of the IRGC. The governorships are stacked with IRGC veterans, and the current parliament is stacked with IRGC veterans. Most of these IRGC members or retirees are veterans of the Iran-Iraq War. When predicting Iranian behavior, what matters most are not the formal networks outlined on wire-diagrams, but rather who served with whom on the frontlines with Iraq. When battle buddies can pick up phones and coordinate among each other, the formal network go out the window and the informal network—one about which the United States has little clarity—become everything.

Analytical ignorance, however, could mask good news. It is not certain that the Islamic Republic can survive. After all, over the 2,500 year expanse of Persian history, the ayatollahs represent an anomaly rather than a natural outcome of Iranian political evolution. Here, filling in another analytical blank becomes essential: In September 2007, the IRGC reorganized.

With threatening regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan gone, and declaring the Americans little more than paper tigers, IRGC head Mohammad Ali Jafari restructured the force to counter-internal dissent more than rebuff external enemies. It was partly because he had assigned one IRGC unit to every province and two in the capital of Tehran that the regime was able to weather the 2009 post-election uprising.

The question analysts should ask, however, is whether those staffing any particular IRGC unit hail from the province in which they are stationed.

If they do not, then that is a sign that behind Ahmadinejad’s bluster lays a country without the confidence to assume that their revolutionary guardians would obey orders to fire on crowds if there was a chance that their family members, neighbors, or classmates were among the protestors. A coherent strategy in such a situation would be to exacerbate Iranian internal divisions rather than cut a deal which would protect the status quo.

It is because of the fortitude of the Justice Department—as well as just plain luck—that the United States was able to avert a bloodbath in Washington, D.C.

Rather than shrug off the incident in the hope of further engagement, the Obama administration should recognize how little the United States knows about the power centers and relationships which matter within our chief adversary in the Middle East. Only when American analysts are able to fill in the blanks will President Obama or his successors be able to craft a strategy which can truly counter the Iranian threat and protect American national security interests.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Facing Execution for the 'Crime' of Being a Christian In Iran

2011-09-28T20:19:00.000-05:00

By Ben Cohen

In 2010, the Iranian regime carried out 546 executions, more than at any other time during the preceding decade, and representing an increase of around 25 per cent on the previous year. Increasingly, execution is becoming Tehran's favored method for dealing with anyone it deems an opponent -- like Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, an Iranian pastor who has refused to recant his Christian faith.

Pastor Nadarkhani's case is another grim illustration of the volatile situation faced by religious minorities living under Iran's Islamist clerics. Even though the state formally recognizes the existence of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, these minorities are under no illusions about their subordinate status.

Since 2009, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole Iran's election to claim a further term as the country's president, the crime of "moharebeh" -- waging war against God -- has frequently been invoked against those who question the Islamic legal codes which underpin the state.

Pastor Nadarkhani's embrace of Christianity, is a prime example of "moharebeh," and carries the penalty of death. This is despite the fact that Nadarkhani maintains he has never been a Muslim as an adult. But an Islamic court has determined that he has Islamic ancestry and therefore must recant his faith.

It's important to note that the persecution of religious minorities in Iran did not begin with Ahmadinejad.

Ayatollah Khomeini, who led Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979, was clear that abandoning Islam amounts to apostasy.

In 1990, Hossein Soodmand, a Muslim who converted to Christianity in 1960 -- nearly two decades before Khomeini came to power -- was executed. Soodmand's fate proved that the Islamic Republic has no hesitation about acting retroactively in the face of such "crimes."

The only way to escape the death sentence, as Pastor Nadarkhani knows, is to publicly renounce his conversion to Christianity. That he has not done so is a humbling display of his courage, for in Iran, the death sentence is the climax of a long punishment that begins in the jails of the regime.

Recent Congressional testimony by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom detailed the torture and abuse faced by inmates whose offense is simply to adhere to a different faith, or to ascribe to an alternative set of political beliefs.

At a human rights summit in New York last week, Ahmad Batebi, a former Iranian political prisoner, gave a chilling account of his own experiences, which included having his head forced into drain filled with excrement, and being compelled to watch his friends beaten senseless in order to secure his confession.

Thousands of Iranians can offer similar testimony, among them many Christians. A recent shocking case involved Vahik Abrahamian, an Armenian Pastor carrying a Dutch passport who served a year in prison, including 44 days in solitary confinement. Abrahamian's family's spoke of the "severe mental and psychological torture" which he'd faced while in jail.

Arguably, the circumstances of those religious minorities who are not defined as "People of the Book" -- a term denoting those faiths which came before Islam's advent -- is even worse.

The 300,000 members of the Baha'i faith, whose religious beliefs crystallized in 19th century Persia, are regarded by Iran's rulers as virtually subhuman. Under Iranian law, the blood of a Baha'i is "mobah," which means that Bahai's can be killed with impunity.

When they are not being killed, Bahai's face discrimination with few parallels elsewhere in the world. In May, for example, the regime's security forces arrested and imprisoned hundreds of Bahai's who were involved in a clandestine university that had been launched only because members of their faith are legally proscribed from attending Iranian universities.

Against this bloodstained background, Ahmadinejad again flew to New York last week to address the U.N. General Assembly. His visit sparked fervent demonstrations outside the U.N. building, with many of those present demanding his arrest; as a head of state, however, Ahmadinejad is free to come and go as he pleases.

Ahmadinejad's annual jaunt to the U.N. General Assembly highlights a painful truth: as public awareness of his regime's depravity has reached unprecedented levels, the outside world has remained utterly powerless to rein him in.

"We have very little leverage in Iran," Rev. Keith Roderick, a leading advocate for the civil rights of religious minorities, told me. "Ahmadinejad is at war with the Christian church there, but our influence has diminished."

Rev. Roderick explained that on the cases of individual prisoners, intervention by Vatican or Swiss Embassy representatives in Iran can be helpful. However, the occasional act of mercy by the Iranian authorities does not change the legal or political fundamentals.

Should the Iranian regime should one day decide that it no longer needs to use its religious minorities for political window dressing, the consequences are too painful to imagine.

Ben Cohen is a political analyst and commentator based in New York. He writes frequently on Iranian and Middle Eastern issue. Follow him on Twitter @BenCohenOpinion.

First Responder: The Untold Story of a True American Hero

2011-09-11T02:16:00.004-05:00

As the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11th draws near, I wanted to make note of this milestone by putting my thoughts down on paper, something I’ve refrained from doing until now. As a former member of the military, and one who has always felt a deep and abiding love for this country, and what it stands for, the events of that terrible day affected me in a way I didn’t think possible. The initial and inevitable sense of unmitigated and raw anger which I first felt, gave way to a profound sense of grief that closed in on me like a dark cloud, a cloud that has prevented me from truly coming to terms with the magnitude of the events of that day.

Except for viewing, initially, the news reports those first few days, I’ve refrained from watching the footage over the past number of years, because the thought of doing so brings back remnants of that malevolent cloud that chokes me with an almost debilitating sadness. I still haven’t been able to watch the movie they made about Flight 93, as many times as I’ve felt that I should, in honor of those forty American heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice.

But somehow, even though I never went out of my way to seek out the news surrounding the events as they unfolded that clear, sunny Tuesday morning, in the weeks and months that followed, I was sure I had heard, in one way or another, most of the stories that circulated, concerning the timelines, persons and circumstances that have now become engraved in our national consciousness. When first I decided to write something, to mark this anniversary, I was at a loss as to what exactly, or possibly, I could say or relate, that hasn’t already been chewed and regurgitated hundreds, if not thousands of times, by talking heads of major news outlets, or mind numbing politicians, trying to sound patriotic, while stumping for votes for their next election.

And then, tonight, a few scant hours before the dawn of this 10th year remembrance, while flipping through the channels on TV, I came across the most remarkable interview, done just about a month ago. It was remarkable for a great many reasons, not least of all because it was the first time I had ever heard the story related, and it was being told by the very person who experienced it, a very remarkable person indeed, who, until now, was totally unknown to me, and whom I have to assume is also unknown to most people.

This person’s name is Major Heather Penney, of the District of Columbia, Air National Guard. On September 11th, 2001, then First Lieutenant Penney, call sign “Lucky,” was one of two F-16 fighter pilots who became the ultimate first responders that fateful fall morning. Shortly after the two inbound airliners slammed into the twin towers in New York, and immediately after the third commercial jet flew straight into the Pentagon, Penney, flying as wingman for Colonel Marc Sasseville, was ordered to take off immediately to meet the threat of the now fourth inbound aircraft, United Fight 93, headed for another Washington target, almost certainly the Capital building.

As remarkable as this story is, what makes it even more poignant is that because the threat of an attack on American soil was seen as such a remote possibility at the time, the 121st fighter squadron at Andrews Air Force base, outside Washington, had no fully-armed fighter jets on standby. The F-16’s that Penney and Sasseville jumped into, and immediately took off in, barely giving the flight mechanics time to remove the flight deck safety pins from various parts of the aircraft, doing it literally as they were taxing down the runway, were only equipped with 105 lead nosed bullets and no other armament of any kind. The two remaining F-16’s left on the ground we’re to be armed with AIM 9 heat seeking missiles, but they first had to be secured from an ammo dump far from the flight line.

While suiting up, and after having received orders to take out any inbound aircraft that posed a threat to Washington, D.C., Penny and Sasseville looked at each other and immediately formulated their plan. They knew they wouldn’t be able to shoot down the jumbo jet with the small amount of lead nosed ammunition they would have on board, so Colonel Sasseville said he’d ram the cockpit, and Penney agreed she’d ram the tail of the inbound airliner. For a few seconds, Penney recounted, she wondered if it would be possible to eject before ramming her fighter jet into the aircraft, but immediately realized she wouldn’t be able to guarantee a solid hit, and promptly dismissed the idea. She resolved herself to the fact that this take off would probably be her last.

We all know now that Flight 93 never reached Washington, as forty heroic passengers assaulted the hijackers in the cockpit and crashed the plane into a field in Pennsylvania. But, the F-16 pilots didn’t learn of the aircraft's fate until later that afternoon, continuing to fly air cover for most of the day, awaiting potentially hostile, inbound aircraft, and the possibility they would have to give their lives to protect our nation’s capital. Later, after the immediate threat of inbound aircraft was not realized, and after having landed and refitted with a full compliment of armament, including air to air missiles, Penney was one of the pilots who escorted Air Force One, with President Bush on board, back to Andrews Air Force Base, in Washington.

Major Penney, now a mother of two little girls, then seeing the smoke billowing from the wreckage of the Pentagon shortly after take off, remembers flying low over the survivors, while using full after burners, before starting her sweep to the Northwest, to let them know she was there and that no one else would enter the airspace she now protected, to hurt them further. When asked later what were the emotions she was feeling at the time, said she was absorbed with the urgent job at hand and had no time for emotions. "It wasn't so much that I kept my emotions in check. It was that they didn't even exist," she said. "There was significant adrenaline. It was really just, dear God please don't let me screw up."

Hearing for the first time the story of Major Penney and her fellow pilots, a story mostly untold till now, I find that dark cloud of despair I’ve felt in the past, slowly lifted, and with it a renewed sense of pride and honor in the 911 generation, one that saw 2.5 million of its members sign up for military duty, in the wake of the turmoil that surrounded this nation ten years ago, with thousands of these brave Americans since having given the last full measure of devotion, and with tens of thousands also having been wounded and maimed.

I pray that the sacrifices these Americans have suffered will never be forgotten, whether it be the innocent lives of people who were going about their daily routine, or the more than 400 first responders who rushed into harms way and paid the ultimate price, or the forty brave passengers who refused to let their plane be an instrument of terror, or the F-16 pilots like Major Penney who ensured the safety of our seat of government in this country by being willing to offer her life in exchange, or the millions of members of this nation’s military and armed forces, who are a shining beacon of hope to the dark corners of the world where freedom fights for a foothold.

The evil that visited us that terrible day ten years past, crashed planes, crumbled buildings and murdered innocents. But, as horrific as the damage was they did inflict, they failed in their task to crash, crumble or murder the spirit of this nation. That resides in the memory of our loved ones lost and in the hearts of its remaining citizens, and with it the resolve to ensure that this particular evil will never triumph, but rather eventually will breathe its last.

-Jim Giunta

To watch the full one hour C-SPAN interview with Maj. Penney, click the link below and then the link on the right side of the page called "Complete File" under the Video Playlist heading:

http://www.c-span.org/Events/September-11th-Interview-Major-Heather-Penney-Fighter-Pilot/10737423885/

Ten Years -- We Are Still Missing the Lessons of 9/11

2011-09-10T09:47:00.002-05:00

By Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser

In recent years and even weeks, the lessons of September 11, 2001 have been lost to constant distraction, the most recent being Mayor Bloomberg’s unfathomable decision to forbid people of faith a role at the tenth anniversary commemoration.

Faith was the impetus for the attack, faith was the instrument for healing, and faith is the only hope we have to defeat the ideology that attacked us ten years ago.

Bloomberg’s stance encapsulates our greatest liabilities as a nation ten years after 9/11. We, now, more than ever, lack the political will, the national skill sets, and the prominent American Muslim leadership willing to identify, engage, and defeat Islamism.

While many Muslims take the bait of victimology preached by supposed Muslim civil rights groups in America, as American Muslims the rest of us cannot continue to deny the connection no matter how unfair between certain interpretations of our faith and Al Qaeda’s brutal attack.

Usama bin Laden did not just represent a handful of militant extremists. He was a standard bearer for an end stage of a global ideology – political Islam (Islamism) – that has buried its roots deep within interpretations of our faith. Islamism is a theo-political construct that believes in the supremacy of the Islamic state and that is the antithesis of what makes America unique and exceptional. It can only be defeated by Muslims who step beyond the distractions and denials and champion an ideological path that binds our identity and faith to liberty and individual freedom.

If American Muslim leaders want to do anything to combat fear of Islamism and any unfair association of all Muslims that may exist, the most effective move would be to form an offensive strategy against Islamists and their ideas from within.

My family came to the U.S. in the 1960’s escaping Syria’s Baathist oppression in order to be free, more free than they ever dreamed of being in Muslim majority nations.

Yet, it is unconscionable that 10 years after 9/11, the United States is still dithering over the root cause of Islamist terror.

Islamists detest the very fabric of American society. September 11 was not the first attack and it was not the last. If we do not engage in a full throated ideological fight we will continue to witness an ever increasing threat to our homeland.

Sadly, the America I know that I chose to serve as a naval officer has spent an uncharacteristically sheepish decade asleep against the greatest existential threat to our survival. We must now develop and implement a coherent tactical plan to defeat the ideological root of militant Islamism- political Islam and the dreams for some Muslims of the Islamic state.

The threat to the United States has grown exponentially in ten years. A report from the Department of Justice in March of 2010 showed that of 228 terror-related arrests 186 of them were Muslim. That is over 80 percent from a Muslim community that represents less than 2 percent of the U.S. population.

What this report does not tell us is that of the 186 Muslim arrests almost certainly all of them were Muslims that believed in and adhered to an Islamist ideology. Since this report we have seen upwards of another 28 terror-related arrests of Muslims including the likes of Faisal Shahzad -- the Times Square bomber -- and Pvt. Naser Abdo who was preparing a second attack on Fort Hood who both claimed to be “Muslim soldiers” fighting for the ummah (Muslim nation).

The threat is increasing because the ideological message has largely gone unchecked. To change that we need to empower reform-minded liberal Muslim leaders. We need the political will from the Administration and Congress to identify political Islam as the problem and devout reformist Muslims and enlightened Islam as the solution. We need our government, media, and academe to have the skill set to not cower when terms like “Islamophobia” are leveled against those who are smart enough and brave enough to call out political Islam as the problem and we need for Muslims to separate religion and state to defeat Islamism. Unless we do that, our “whack-a-mole” approach to security will eventually miss one.

Western pluralistic societies that embrace individual liberty are not in conflict with the faith of Islam as practiced by most Muslims. This is not a war against a religion. We cannot allow our ideological enemy to use faith to tie our hands in this fight. Hear that Mayor Bloomberg? Mr. President? PC police? We must break the shackles of political correctness and step beyond the fear that paralyzes us against matters that happen to touch on faith.

The founding fathers never intended for faith to be sacrosanct and beyond public discourse. Perhaps the greatest outcome of the American experiment is that the U.S. Constitution reclaimed faith from the hands of the monarch and the clergy and vested it in the hands of the people as it was always intended. Now faced with an existential theo-political threat, we are failing that vision and need to rededicate ourselves to our founding principles.

The only way to win is to stop playing defense and create an offensive strategy which empowers liberty-minded Muslims whose identity is tied to Americanism and our Establishment Clause, rather than Islamism, shar’iah, and victimhood. We must tackle the fallacy of the Islamic state and demonstrate to Muslims the religious strength that comes from individual liberty.

We have yet to operationalize these lessons of 9/11. We will not win this struggle and therefore never have true national security without confronting the hard issues of Islamist ideology. Our enemy does not suffer the same malady and in fact utilizes ideology as their primary weapon in this battle.

We must do the same. Our dedication to the concepts of liberty and unyielding belief in the inalienable rights of man as endowed by our creator are the key to our victory.

Dr. Jasser is president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a former U.S. Navy Lt. Commander and a physician in private practice based in Phoenix, Ariz. He can be reached at info@aifdemocracy.org

Fast and Furious Screw Up Hurts Innocent Americans

2011-08-31T15:00:00.002-05:00

By Michelle Malkin

There are now enough Operation Fast and Furious officials playing hide-and-seek in the Obama administration to fill a New York City-style “rubber room.”

Yesterday, the Justice Department announced it was shuffling Kenneth Melson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, out of his job. The disclosure comes amid continued investigations into the administration’s fatally botched “gun sting” racket at the border and spreading outrage over legal obstructionism and whistleblower retaliation by Justice brass. The department’s inspector general is also conducting a probe.

Internal documents earlier showed that Melson was intimately involved in overseeing the program and screened undercover videos of thousands of straw purchases of AK-47s and other high-powered rifles -- many of which ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartel thugs, including those who murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December. Fast and Furious weapons have been tied to at least a dozen violent crimes in America and untold bloody havoc in Mexico.

In secret July 4 testimony, Melson revealed he was “sick to his stomach” when he discovered the extent of the operation’s deadly lapses. Join the club, pal.

Melson told congressional investigators that he and ATF’s senior leadership “moved to reassign every manager involved in Fast and Furious, from the deputy assistant director for field operations down to the group supervisor” after ATF whistleblowers went to the press and Capitol. But according to Melson, he and company were ordered by Justice Department higher-ups to remain silent about the reasons for the reassignments.

In other words: The ATF managers in the know were “effectively muzzled while the DOJ sent over false denials and buried its head in the sand,” as GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, concluded in July.

Melson has been kicked back to DOJ’s main office in a flabbergasting new slot as “senior adviser on forensic science in the department’s Office of Legal Policy.” He may have been “sick to his stomach,” but the federal careerist apparently has no intention of quitting an administration with blood on its hands. And now he’ll be advising others on how to track and handle evidence. Nice make-work if you can get it.

Others on the Fast and Furious dance card of lemons:

* Assistant US Attorney Emory Hurley in Phoenix, who helped oversee the straw-gun-purchase disaster. He’s being transferred out of the US Attorney’s Office’s criminal division and into the civil division.

* Assistant ATF Special Agents in Charge George Gillett and Jim Needles. Moved to other positions.

* ATF deputy director of operations in the West, William McMahon. Promoted to ATF headquarters.

* ATF Phoenix field supervisors William Newell and David Voth. Promoted to new management positions in Washington.

Keep your friends close and your henchmen on the verge of spilling all the beans closer.

There’s been only one visible Fast and Furious resignation: U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke in Phoenix, who quietly stepped down on Tuesday. One of his last acts? Opposing the request of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s family to qualify as crime victims in a court case against the thug who bought the Fast and Furious guns used in Terry’s murder.

The fish rots from the head down, of course. DOJ is run by Eric Holder, the Beltway swamp creature who won bipartisan approval for his nomination -- even after putting political interests ahead of security interests at the Clinton Justice Department in pushing presidential pardons for both big donor Marc Rich and several Puerto Rican FALN terrorists.

Screw up, move up, cover up: It’s the Holder way, the Obama way, the Washington way. And innocent Americans pay.

Michelle Malkin is a New York Post columnist. This column originally appeared in the New York Post on August 31.

No Religion Can Claim Superiority Over Safety and Security

2011-08-31T14:56:00.002-05:00

By Cal Thomas

No religion can claim superiority over safety and security. On Tuesday, Rye Playland, an amusement park near New York City temporarily shut down after an altercation erupted with a Muslim group over the park's headgear policy.

Muslim women in a tour group at Playland were reportedly denied access to several rides because they were wearing hijabs – their traditional headscarves, according to FoxNews.com.

The park's deputy commissioner said, "Our headgear policy is designed to protect the safety of patrons and safety is our first concern...This policy was repeatedly articulated to the tour operator, but unfortunately the message did not reach some of the members of his group."

Since the regulations at Playland were established before this incident with Muslim women and their head scarfs, no one can credibly claim they are being used to discriminate against Muslims, especially since park officials claim to have "painstakingly" told the Muslims about the ban.

Because some of them attempted to board the rides anyway, it can't help but raise a question about whether this was another attempt to force us to lower our guard against those Muslims who mean us harm.

As we have seen at airports and other venues, Muslim activists have deliberately tried to create incidents against the government in order to avoid searches and questions about their behavior and conversations.

I'm not saying this was a coordinated effort at Rye Playland to achieve such ends, just that it fits a pattern of what we have seen since 9/11.

Respect is a two-way street. Muslims have more rights in America than in the countries from which many of them come. If Americans visit those countries they are expected to abide by the laws and religious rules. A similar amount of respect and adherence to our laws and rules should also be expected.

Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated newspaper columnist.

Why Islam is NOT Protected Under the US Constitution!

2011-08-20T10:51:00.000-05:00

By Kevin A. Lehmann

Contrary to conventional stupidity, Islam is NOT protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Is there anyone left in the three branches of government today that can interpret our most sacred document (the Declaration of Independence not withstanding) correctly?

Like in Christendom, where the exegesis and hermeneutics of certain passages of scripture are often skewed to conform to a particular ideology, agenda, or belief system, so too has the clear and concise language of the Constitution and the 27 Amendments progressively undergone exegetical attacks over the decades—depending on which party is in power—to conform to a particular political ideology.

But this is one hermeneutical battle America can ill afford to lose. Our founding principles, i.e. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness hang in the balance. In short—our country’s very survival depends on it.

America faces a grave threat from Islam. Muslims are infiltrating our country in droves and they’re doing it under the guise of “Constitutional Protection.” And like England, if we don’t stand our ground now, it will be too late. Muslims are cunning, crafty and clever. They’re using our ignorance of the understanding of our own Constitution against us, and they are clandestinely and methodically spreading their freedom-snatching tentacles in a quiet and unassuming manner.

Federal, state, and local governments on the other hand won’t acknowledge the imminent threat. They incorrectly claim that Muslims have “Constitutional Rights” to come here, proselytize people, build mosques, and implement shariah in their communities and in the public square. They’re dead wrong! And by and large, Islam is getting away with it just like they have in Europe. Only unlike in Europe and Great Britain in particular, where many local non-Muslim citizens now live in perpetual fear and oppression, it’s not too late to stem the tide, but we have to act now. Time is not on our side. In fact, this may come as a shock, but there are more mosques being built on American soil than Christian churches. We are already well under way to being Islamized.

To understand Islam is to understand sharia. The religion of Islam is nothing short of a totalitarian political, economic, military, social and legal system that’s camouflaged in religious garb. Their mandate (not objective) is to incorporate our country into a global Islamic caliphate.

Sadly, they are making serious inroads towards their tyrannical mandate because America is not resisting. We are all that stands between freedom and a worldwide Islamic caliphate. The United States of America is the world’s last bastion of hope.

Yet, the dreadful message we get from ignorant and incompetent lawmakers is that our Constitution renders us powerless to do anything about it. On the contrary, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence—properly interpreted—actually give our federal, state and local governments justification and authority to stop Islam dead in its tracks!

Here’s How . . .

Islam is NOT a religion in the sense we understand religion. Islam—which stands for “submission” or “surrender”—is about COMPLETE DOMINANCE. It is a totalitarian form of government that controls every aspect of the lives of its adherents. It’s a barbaric form of life. It masquerades as a monotheistic religion rooted in Old Testament principles, but more appropriately follows the thievery and murderous thuggery of it’s founder, Muhammad, a descendent of Ishmael, who came on the scene 600 years after Christ’s ascension. Only their modern day tactics now include recruiting mentally ill, naive and gullible idiots who become suicide bombers. And Western countries indoctrinated with the lies of multiculturalism and political correctness—to their demise—have reluctantly turned a blind eye. But like Communism, Marxism and Socialism, the Constitution of the United States of America empowers us to defeat it.

Given that fact, we must understand our founding principles that (1) Rights come from God alone, (2) Muslims do not have the right to divest us of our Rights, and (3) the purpose of civil government is to secure the rights God gave us.

What are our rights, and where do they come from? The Constitution? The Bill of Rights? No! The Declaration of Independence says:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. —that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men . . .”

So, where do our rights come from? God. And what are those rights? Life , Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Liberty is the very essence of God’s model for civil government. Inscribed on the Liberty Bell is Leviticus 25:10 - “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Do Muslims respect the rights God gave us? Of course not! Sharia stands in stark contrast to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Let’s have a look . . .

1. Life: Islam is a culture of death, e.g., murder, honor killings and suicide bombers.

2. Liberty: Islam is a culture where women are slaves and prisoners, children are sex toys for old men, and conversion to another belief system is seen as a capital offense and met with a brutal death.

3. Pursuit of Happiness: Theirs is a culture of torture and sadism. How many times have we already heard of young Muslim girls in America who, after they talked to non-Muslim boys, were shot to death or run over by their father for allegedly bringing shame to their family? Public wife beating is commonplace. Women who don’t cover their hair are beaten on the spot. They’re often gang raped and mutilated and maimed on their faces, even in their own homes, needing multiple witnesses to testify against their male aggressors.

4. Freedom of Speech: Try criticizing Islam in Saudi Arabia—one of our Arab allies. See how swiftly justice is met with your head as the ornament of of an Opec member’s Mercedes.

For every right God gave us—not the Constitution or its Amendments—the Muslims seek to eradicate.

Do Muslims have the “right” to impose shariah in this country which strips us of our God-given rights? No! God did not give Muslims the “right” to take away from us, the rights He gave us!

Lawmakers tell us Muslims have a First Amendment “right” to build mosques, proselytize, and implement shariah here. But is that what the First Amendment says? No!

See for yourself . . .

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

Now consider the verbiage very carefully. A lot of lawmakers and most Americans make the exegetical error that the First Amendment grants us rights. The First Amendment doesn’t grant any rights to anybody. All it does is prohibit Congress from making laws about religion, speech, the press, or assembly.

Therefore, Muslims do not have a First Amendment “right” to build mosques, proselytize, and implement shariah in our country.

Not only do Muslims claim the “right” to impose shariah in the Muslim communities that are rapidly spreading throughout our country, they also claim the “right” to impose shariah law in the public square. They demand shariah compliant financial institutions, foot baths in public places, and that such abominations as wine and pork be banned from their presence. Moreover, they demand that public streets be closed off for “prayers.”

So it begs the question: Do Americans have any Constitutional protection against the invasion of a foreign law being foisted upon us? Absolutely!

Article VI, Clause 2 of our Constitution states . . .

“This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the Supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Did you get that? Our Constitution and laws are authorized by the Supreme Law of this Land. And anything to the contrary must fall.

The practice of sharia in the United States, at any level directly violates our Constitution. Muslims who therefore seek to overthrow our Constitution or otherwise usurp or circumvent it are guilty of Criminal Sedition. The federal government has the duty to prosecute them for sedition, or deport them.

The Declaration of Independence says the purpose of civil government is to secure the rights God gave us. Muslims seek to take away our God-given rights. Civil government is supposed to protect us from those who seek to divest us of our rights. Therefore it’s incumbent on every American citizen to insist that our federal, state, and local governments immediately STOP the Islamization of OUR COUNTRY—starting with an immediate cease and desist on the construction of all mosques! The purpose of our civil government is to protect our GOD-given rights.

The Declaration of Independence recognizes God as Creator, Supreme Judge and Regulator of the World—our Divine Protector.

In fact, Article VII of our Constitution recognizes the Lordship of Jesus Christ . . .

“Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Seven . . . “

In Summary:

1. Our rights come from God. They predate and preexist the Constitution. Our Constitution doesn’t give “rights” to anybody. So Muslims don’t have “constitutional rights” to come to our Judeo-Christian established country and build mosques, proselytize, and impose shariah.

2. Muslims take away from people the rights God gave them. Since our Declaration of Independence acknowledges that the purpose of civil governments is to secure the rights God gave us, it is the duty and responsibility of civil governments at all levels to protect us from Islamization.

3. Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution—the “Supremacy Clause”—is the silver bullet that makes it unconstitutional for Muslims to practice shariah law anywhere in our Country.

Let me be perfectly clear. Islam is not a friend of America. It is our enemy. The very notion of “Chrislam”—a syncretistic fusion of Christianity and Islam—being promoted by such notable Christian celebrities as Rick Warren, author of the best selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, is an abomination. It’s anti-American, and antithetical to the Christian principles upon which our great nation was founded. It is imperative that you understand the inherent danger of multiculturalism, and the amalgamation of polarizing religions.

Your state senators and congressmen are completely oblivious to the imminent threat that Islam and sharia pose to the sovereignty of our nation. They are uneducated and weak. It’s imperative you demand they get informed very quickly and embrace the fight to stop the spread of mosques and sharia at the local level. The Center for Security Policy issued a report last year entitled: “Shariah: The Threat to America”. Demand they read it and take immediate action to defend your community from Islamization.

Are you curious to know what life is like when your community has been infiltrated with Muslims, especially after they outnumber the local citizens? Click here to listen to my radio show back on March 21st with Tommy Robinson, the leader of the EDL (English Defense League) in England. Since that time, he was nearly murdered and has had multiple death threats against him, his wife and children for having the guts to speak up.

Europe, in the interest of multiculturalism and political correctness, made a grave error. And now they are hopeless to reverse it, especially in England, without a civil and very bloody religious war. An entire country, even with it’s parliamentary government in tact, is now at the mercy of Muhammad and his warriors of death or submission.

Recently exonerated Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders, listed ten steps Western countries must take to stop the Islamization of their countries.

ALL ten steps are mandated by our Declaration of Independence, and consistent with our Constitution:

1. Stop cultural relativism: We must formalize the idea that we have one dominant culture that is based on Judaism and Christianity [Wilders adds "humanism"].

2. Stop pretending that Islam is a religion.

3. Show the true face of fundamentalist Islam. It is a brutal totalitarian ideology.

4. Stop all immigration from Muslim countries. For Muslims who are already citizens, tell them that if they adhere to our values and our Constitution, they may stay as equals. But if they deviate, we will expel them.

5. Outlaw shariah and deport practitioners.

6. Require Muslims to sign legally binding pledge of integration and allegiance.

7. Stop building mosques.

8. Seek reciprocity with Saudi Arabia for Western churches and synagogues.

9. Close all Islamic schools—they are fascist institutions teaching hate.

10. Remove our current weak leaders.

In closing, we are at war with a very evil and cunning enemy. An enemy that seeks to destroy everything that is good about the United States of America; Everything we value; Everything we cherish, Everything our forefathers and successive generations fought and died for, so that we could receive the torch of freedom and pass it on to our children and grandchildren. This is our moment. It is our time to boldly stand up for our God, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our beloved Freedom! Let us exercise our God-given unalienable rights and say “Yes to Freedom!” and “No to Oppression!” We owe it to our children, our grandchildren, and our grandparents.

Until next time . . . Wake Up America!

Kevin A. Lehmann

Why History, Even Recent History Is So Important. PERSPECTIVE!

2011-08-19T10:37:00.000-05:00

Why I Worry About My Generation

2011-08-19T10:14:00.000-05:00

By Nicole Swinford

I sat in the college classroom—a bright-eyed freshman. My notebook was out, my pencil was at the ready—this was it! I was finally in an institution of higher education! I would face bigger challenges, have to work harder—more would be expected in the adult world and I couldn’t wait to get started. As I furiously jotted down notes and punched numbers into my calculator to double check my answers, the girl a few seats down raised her hand.

“Do we really have to memorize all five of those equations? That’s so much work! Can’t you just put them up on the board for us during the test?”

My jaw dropped. What had just happened? Was I back in kindergarten? But I was soon to find that this would not be a singular occurrence. Other students joined in on the plea and this mindset would permeate other classes as well. But apparently more was not expected of us—the professor did indeed write the equations on the board for our test just as requested.

Reality check: college was not exactly the challenge I expected it to be. And I was thoroughly disappointed.

I soon realized that my generation has a problem. We are, as a whole, rather lazy. Many of us simply don’t understand what it means to really work.

But work is an essential part of America. After all, isn’t that what the American Dream really is? That if you work hard enough, you will succeed? That if you work for it, anything is possible. I was under the impression that we were the Land of Opportunity, but now it seems more and more like we are the Land of Entitlement.

Why do we lack this work ethic? The answer is simple: our world is one of instant gratification. With all of technology’s advances, life is considerably easier than what it once was, and many of us, having known no other life, take it for granted—it’s an easy trap to fall into. Work no longer has much value and it is a direct result of the way we live.

Our mindset has two aspects: easy and fast. You only have to turn on the television and watch a few commercials to catch on to this frame of mind. Easy and fast sells, and it is expected.

The problem is that work is the exact opposite of these concepts. It is hard and it takes time. The result is sadly predictable; many of us reject a good work ethic. And there are plenty of distractions to assist us in this pursuit (all of which involve staring impassively at a screen doing absolutely nothing)—television, computers, video games, movies. These activities involve no physical or mental effort. These are instant gratifications. Even our social lives can be conducted without ever actually putting ourselves in a social setting.

However, far from being a minor annoyance, there are much bigger consequences that the future holds for this generation should we as a whole continue in this mindset and these practices.

I beg my peers to consider this: if we remain apathetic in our everyday lives, we will be apathetic in our political lives; furthermore, it is less likely that we will take the time or be willing to do the work to research the actual issues and will end up debating everything on pure emotion.

Lord Acton, a political philosopher and economist, once explained that the reason he did not condone the government feeding, clothing, or caring for the people was because with a loss of responsibility the people would become dependent on the government. Essentially, without any sort of work ethic, without a sense of responsibility, the people will ultimately enslave themselves. Freedom is work. We are not free simply because we are Americans. We are free because men and women worked to make it so. Because they died to make it so. And that work is never over. If we allow ourselves to lose our work ethic, we have given up our freedom. Is this where we are headed?

Thomas Paine told those who originally fought for our freedom, “That which we gain too cheap, we value too lightly.” We would do well to remember those words. This holds true for all that we do, whether it concern something as vast as freedom, or something as specific as our schoolwork. They are linked. What we manifest in our individual lives will take root and grow into everything we do.

So, here is my challenge to my generation: Yes, the world is an easy and fast-paced place to live now and it is only getting more so. We, as the future of America, face an important question: how do we salvage our traditional work ethic?

The answer is simple: we change because we as individuals recognize that we need to (after all, they say admitting the problem is the first step) and we choose to do so. Whether or not we get up off the couch and start working is up to us. These are our choices, our consequences, and our responsibilities.

So, I encourage you: get up and do the work (Who knows? You might be surprised to find what satisfaction a job well done can bring)! It may not necessarily be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

Nicole Swinford is a student at Chapman University in Orange, California.

Is Obama Leaking Details of Bin Laden Killing to Boost His Approval Ratings?

2011-08-15T11:36:00.002-05:00

By Michael Goodwin

Pete King has a reputa tion as a hothead, but the Long Island Republican kept his cool recently when he had every right to lose it. During an interview about King's criticism of media leaks and a film about the Usama bin Laden raid, one of CNN's liberal poodles suggested King was being "a little silly" since there were so many important things happening in Washington.

Whoa, Nellie! My head almost exploded just watching, but King's eyes flashed red only for an instant before he coherently repeated his point: The White House could be leaking secret information, putting lives and future missions at stake, and that's pretty damn important.

So it is, and King, who is already examining Islamic radicalization, is off again to slay more sacred cows. That this battle involves the Hollywood elite makes it all the more delicious.

King's concern started when he saw a drip, drip of sensitive operational details emerging since the May 1 bin Laden killing. Magazines and newspapers had information that, as head of the House Committee on Homeland Security, he knew was supposed to remain secret.

The published details he's worried about include: the name of the courier who was followed to the compound in Pakistan, that retired Pakistani military officers were recruited by the CIA to man an observation post near the compound, where the FBI got a DNA sample from a bin Laden family member, the capabilities of our satellites, the base the helicopters used in Afghanistan and how they evaded Pakistani radar, the names, bases and training sites used by units on the mission, the number of SEALs involved, the weapons and equipment they carried, which Al Qaeda plots we learned of from data seized in the compound, which may tell Al Qaeda which plots we do not know about.

King notes that at least five Pakistanis were arrested after the reports surfaced.

"Nobody in the intelligence world or the military is going to give out that kind of information unless they're told to from above," he told me. He called the leaks "an inside job" and added that the failure of the administration to probe the sources "shows they are involved."

If that were all, it would be more than enough. But the stench from the film project reveals how the raid is being put to propaganda use by President Obama's political team.

A filmmaker is getting favored treatment for a movie scheduled to be released a month before the 2012 election. The film is being distributed by Sony, whose top brass gave Obama a fund-raiser last April.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times first reported that Kathryn Bigelow, director of the Oscar-winning "Hurt Locker," and a screenwriter are getting wide access to defense and intelligence sources. King said he heard from insiders that Bigelow attended a CIA ceremony honoring the SEALs involved in the raid.

King, who lavished praise on Obama for the mission, doesn't begrudge the president getting a legitimate political boost. But he notes that military secrets are held for years or decades and released only when the war is over and there is zero chance the enemy can benefit.

To that end, he wants inspectors general in defense and intelligence to make sure no classified information has been released, to draw up guidelines for what can be released and to make sure the limits are enforced.

Those aims are modest. There's already too much smoke around these leaks for there not to be fire. Let's put it out before the nation gets burned.

Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist.

Obama Is Jimmy Carter 2.0

2011-08-08T12:48:00.001-05:00

By Bradley Blakeman

The evidence is mounting more than ever to suggest that President Obama is morphing into failed Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

The latest comparison was made by dour New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in her column on July 30. This is some of what she said:

"Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already 'neutered' the president," as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.

As one Democratic senator complained: 'The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.' (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: 'We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.'"

Dowd who once loved Obama is now souring on her liberal-media-created sensation and now she believes that the comparison of Obama to Carter is a valid one.

So what are the valid comparisons between the presidencies of Obama and Carter that allow for even a Democratic Senator to allege it?

Management Style

Carter: Ineffective. He was seen as a micro-manager who even had to decide who was allowed to play on the White House Tennis Court.

Obama: Ineffective. He is the ultimate delegator who likes being president but doesn't like the work. He rather sub-contract presidential leadership to Reid and Pelosi on health care and the vice President on spending and the economy and Secretary Clinton on foreign affairs.

Iranian Hostages

Carter: He was paralyzed by the Iranian Hostage Crisis where 52 Americans were held against their will for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, (the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president). During his presidency he was consumed by the crisis and in the end was powerless to end it.

Obama: He ran on a platform of apology to foreign enemy powers for past American "aggression" and pledged to usher in a new approach toward Iran that would bring better relations between the U.S. and Iran.

President Obama has failed to bring Iran around and in fact, today, two American hikers have been held hostage for over a year and a half by the Iranian government

Iran continues to crack down on its people and is accelerating their plans to build nuclear weapons. The country's leadership also continues to arm rebels in Iraq, Syria and other Middle East hot spots and destabilize the region.

Energy Crisis

Carter: In 1979 America faced an oil crisis in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. OPEC reduced production and as a result oil prices shot through the roof and supply was severely curtailed.

Carter, instead of taking on OPEC and demanding increased production, imposed rationing on gasoline, and home heating oil and placed tariffs on imported oil. America literally ran out of gas and what gas could be purchased was paid for at outrageous prices.

Obama: In the aftermath of his sluggish response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico the Obama administration ceased drilling in the Gulf and set in place a moratorium on new offshore drilling. This action was being taken in spite on America's dependency on foreign oil. Gas prices have risen over 120 percent since Obama has taken office.

Economic Crises

Carter: Because of his failure to lead and his failed economic policies of government spending and indecision, the "misery index" ¬- unemployment plus inflation ¬- crested at 20 percent, the highest number since WWII. Add double-digit interest rates into the mix and you have "stagflation." Stagflation is defined as a situation in which the inflation rate is high and the growth rate is low. The result was high prices, high unemployment, low confidence, and low growth.

Obama: There is no doubt that Obama like Carter inherited a recession, however, it is equally apparent that both leaders made their situations much worse by their actions and inaction.

Obama, like Carter, went on a government-spending spree in response to the recession with little to show for it.

Obama promised that if his $800 billion stimulus were passed the national unemployment rate would not exceed 8 percent. Our country's unemployment rate has not dipped below 8% since Obama has been president and has spiked above 10% well after the stimulus was passed.

Instead of dealing with high unemployment, soaring energy prices, a record number home foreclosures, bankruptcies and record setting debt, Obama turned his attention to health care and started a third war in Libya.

The president caused the current self-inflicted crisis on the debt ceiling increase this summer by failing to lead well in advance of the deadline. He could have taken the recommendations of his bi-partisan commission as a starting point to lead on spending and deficit reduction over a year ago when their report was delivered to the White House.

Public Opinion

Carter: At the time of his re-election campaign his approval ratings was below 30% and a majority of Americans felt that America was on the wrong track.

Obama: Today the president's approval rating averages 42% and a majority of Americans believe we are on the wrong track.

The hallmark of the Carter years was the word "malaise." Malaise is defined as "a feeling of uneasiness, indisposition, and distress." All these symptoms existed during Carter's tenure and we can clearly see these same symptoms -- and some additional new ones -- manifesting themselves under Obama's tenure.

President Obama has governed at a time of America high unemployment, low GDP growth, inflation on the rise for consumer goods, falling housing prices, a stalled housing market, home foreclosures and bankruptcies at record levels, high gas prices, 3 wars, and a government that spends too much and takes in too little.

While "malaise" may have defined the Carter years perhaps the word "funk" best describes the the Obama years so far.

Bradley A. Blakeman served as deputy assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001-04. He is currently a professor of Politics and Public Policy at Georgetown University.

Obama Won’t Escape Blame for Credit Downgrade

2011-08-08T09:12:00.001-05:00

By Philip Klein

Standard and Poor’s explanation for why it downgraded U.S. debt is written in such a way that it can be seized upon by all ideological stripes. The statement cites the unwillingness of Republicans to raise taxes and of Democrats to agree to entitlement cuts. And the rating agency’s discourse about the political dysfunction will provide column fodder for Washington pundits who long for the days when both parties would work together to reach compromises. But make no mistake, when all the dust settles, it will be difficult for President Obama to escape blame for this.

Defenders of Obama will attempt to pin the blame on his predecessor, President Bush, and on intransigent Tea Party radicals in the current Congress. But that would leave out the part in between. For his first two years in office, Obama’s party controlled both chambers of Congress – for part of that period, he had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. During that time period, he and his fellow Democrats could have passed his supposedly ideal, long-term, deficit-reduction package -- one that represented a “balanced approach” between spending cuts and tax increases. It also could have delayed the deficit reduction for several years, so it wouldn’t have affected the current weak economy or the “investments” he considers crucial. Forget about actually accomplishing serious deficit reduction -- he didn’t even attempt it.

When Obama came into office, he argued that we needed deficit spending to boost the economy, so he passed a $800 billion stimulus package. Then, in one of his first supposed pivots to the deficit, he convened a ‘fiscal responsibility summit’ in February 2009. But that actually turned out to be part of a different pivot altogether. It was during that summit that then White House Budget Director Peter Orszag declared, “health care reform is entitlement reform.”

And so, for the next 13 months, Obama spent all of his energies trying to get health care legislation across the finish line. The end product was a plan that, according to both the Congressional Budget Office and actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, did not bend the health care cost curve down. Let’s even set aside the argument over the accounting gimmicks that were employed to obtain a CBO score that showed modest deficit reduction. The reality is this: the law used money raised through tax hikes and Medicare cuts that otherwise would have been available for deficit reduction, to instead expand Medicaid by 18 million beneficiaries and create a massive new health care entitlement.

Of course, there’s more. After health care passed last March, Obama punted on the debt for the rest of the year as he awaited a report from his fiscal commission. He then ignored its recommendations and released a budget so ludicrous that within two months, it failed 0 to 97 in the Senate and he himself rejected it. He instead delivered a speech about his deficit reduction vision, which didn’t have enough details for the CBO to score. And then he spent the last few months arguing that he was prepared to offer Republicans a “grand bargain,” but to this day he hasn’t released details of this supposedly awesome deal that Republicans refused, beyond calculated leaks to favored reporters.

But there’s another reason why Obama won’t escape blame for this. Obama was elected president at a time when Americans felt the nation was in decline, and his central job was restore their faith that our best days were ahead of us, as President Reagan did after the Carter era. Whether you think he was dealt a poor hand or not, the bottom line is that the sense of decline has only deepened during the Obama presidency, and the first-ever downgrade of U.S. credit, whatever its ultimate financial implications, is yet another symbol of that decline.

Philip Klein writes for The Washinton Examiner

The Debt Deal and the Threat to America's National Security

2011-08-01T09:51:00.000-05:00

By Amb. John Bolton

Serious questions remain about the national security implications of the proposed deal to raise the federal debt ceiling. With members of Congress essentially being asked to vote immediately to avoid defaulting on the national debt, they are also entitled to immediate and compelling answers to the defense-related questions.

For fiscal year 2012 and 2013, cuts in defense spending remain uncertain, with reductions as much as three percent below last year’s level still possible. Depending on the outcome of further negotiations over the size and allocation of those reductions, these cuts alone may well be quite harmful. The best that can be said is that, for these fiscal years, the issue is still unresolved.

Over the longer term, the outlook is almost certainly much more disturbing. In the deal’s second stage, the yet-to-be-named Congressional Joint Commission will have wide discretion on what to agree on, but if no agreement or only partial agreement is reached, the deal’s sequestration mechanism will be triggered. Broadly speaking, if that happens, defense spending will bear fifty percent of the total cuts, with non-defense spending bearing the remaining fifty percent, up to the amount necessary to raise the debt ceiling by the minimum $ 2.4 trillion required by the deal. This approach risks grave damage to our national security.

There is no strategic rationale whatsoever for cuts of this magnitude. There is, in fact, every strategic rationale to the contrary. While the appropriations process may still be able to decide which specific programs will be cut, this is no consolation. Cuts of this size are effectively indiscriminate.

Defense spending is not just another wasteful government program. Subjecting it to potentially massive, debilitating cuts is rolling the dice in perilous times internationally. Adam Smith himself wrote in "The Wealth of Nations": “the first duty of the sovereign” [is] “protecting the society from the violence and invasion” of others.

Advocates of the deal place their reliance on the Joint Committee established by the agreement to prevent massive defense cuts. This means that the Republicans selected for membership on this Committee have the future security of this country resting on their shoulders. We can only hope that the leadership chooses representatives who understand the enormity of that responsibility.

Deal supporters argue in the alternative that the trigger mechanism, which would come into play if the Joint Committee could not reach agreement on the second tranche of spending cuts (or tax increases), need not be feared. They rest this assertion on three points.

First, they say, “Even if the committee failed to produce a single dollar in savings, the Department of Defense would be on the hook for less than $500 billion over nine years, beginning in 2013.” Unquestionably, however, cuts at this level would be catastrophic. They may not be at the $900 billion level of the Reid Plan, but they are debilitating nonetheless. If that is the best argument the deal’s advocates have, we are in deep trouble.

Second, proponents of the deal argue that out-year defense cuts can be reversed by subsequent Congresses. Of course, the Democrats will argue precisely the same point in favoring their domestic programs, suggesting that the entire second-stage exercise is a sham. Perhaps that is the best we can hope for, but it will mean a debt-ceiling increase in the second-stage without certainty about offsetting spending cuts.

Third, deal advocates say that “the point of the ‘backstop’ is that it never, ever happens.” Unfortunately, every prospect is that the Joint Committee will allocate cuts 50 percent to defense, 50 percent to non-defense. Why should Democrats agree to their favored domestic spending bearing more than 50 percent of the cuts when they know the sequestration mechanism will give them a better deal? Conversely, why should Republicans agree to more than 50 percent of the cuts being taken in defense, when they know precisely the same thing on their side?

Thus, the logic of the negotiating dynamic will mean that both sides of the Joint Committee will not concede more than they would otherwise get under the sequestration formula. That, in turn, brings us back to $500 billion in defense cuts.

This deal may be the best we can get, and in many respects it is far better than we feared. But to have accomplished so much, and fended off so many harmful proposals, to stumble at the last hurdle is a great tragedy. Make no mistake, this deal, by risking massive defense cutbacks, potentially points a dagger at the heart of our national security.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

Hispanics: Why a Speech to La Raza Was More Important Than a Speech to the Nation

2011-07-27T09:30:00.000-05:00

By Douglas E. Schoen

President Obama's most important speech in terms of his long term political fortunes was not his address to the nation last night on the debt ceiling crisis.

To be sure, the President felt a need to reiterate the basic argument he has been making about the superiority of his plan over that of the Republicans and speaker John Boehner. And with Boehner's response it seems pretty clear that both sides have, for the time being, hardened their positions and solidified support with core constituencies.

In short, neither side has changed many minds.

But far more significant was the President's trip to the National Council of La Raza in Washington yesterday where the President spoke on the need for Hispanic empowerment and the need to pass comprehensive immigration reform. With his position among whites weakening and his standing in states like North Carolina and Virginia and Indiana very much up for grabs, the President is going to need to consolidate his hold in states with large Hispanic populations like Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, that he won last time, and add other states with Hispanic populations like Arizona, Illinois and New Jersey, and to be able to get the 270 electoral votes that he needs to win the election.

The President did cancel a couple of fundraisers yesterday, and that was probably reasonable and appropriate, given the ongoing crisis. It wouldn't look particularly good for the President to be raising money from fat cats at a time when he is seemingly making tough decisions on the budget and the deficit with Congressional Republicans and when the nation is facing a legitimate crisis.

But the largely unwritten story of the 2012 election, is the importance of the Hispanic vote. In last 15 years the size of the Hispanic vote has almost doubled, and in key swing states they are the critical group that will make the difference next year. With Obama having gotten close to 70% of the Hispanic in 2008, he needs that level of support or most likely more to win reelection in what by all rights will be closer contest in 2012 than it was in 2008.

The President and his advisors know this-- seemingly the Republicans don't--otherwise the GOP would be more proactive in supporting some form of comprehensive immigration reform. The Tea Party members were elected to stand up for their constituents on fiscal issues, and are certainly doing that, no matter what the political consequences are in next year's congressional election.

The issue of immigration is of huge national importance to our country, and even greater political importance in the short term electoral context. No one, save the President and his advisors, are seemingly focused on it, and this could be the key to whether he succeeds in winning reelection his year.

Douglas E. Schoen is a political strategist. His most recent book is "Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System" published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Washington, It's Time to Put On Your Big Boy Pants

2011-07-22T10:38:00.002-05:00

By Penny Young Nance

Many families in this great country have been forced to look at their monthly budgets and see where they can make cuts. Maybe they can spend a little less on food, eating more vegetables than meat one week or maybe they need to cancel cable or forgo their summer vacations. Maybe they even need to look at the future and cut back on contributing to their retirements or their kid's college savings account. Some folks sadly have to dig even deeper and give up essentials. All of it is painful!

What the vast majority of financially hurting families don't do every month is go on a shopping spree at the mall, take a trip to Vegas, or spend simply open up a new credit card to allow for more debt. And those families who do have debt problems from bad decisions in the past are trying to rectify it by cutting spending and paying off that debt. That's just how a household budget works.

Women, who head up a majority of the household budgets in this country, sit down every week with a calculator and their checkbooks and make really hard decisions. There are sleepless nights and stress associated with these decisions, but they put on their big girl pants and make them just the same.

This is why Americans are so angry with our national leaders. It's not really that complicated. There is lots of talk about T-bills and bond ratings. Yes, we know the global financial markets and Federal Reserve policy are complicated, but the basic principle is not. We as a nation must live within our means. Forgive me if that sounds over-simplified or antiquated.

But again, the average household understands the consequences of not paying debt and spending money you don't have - you get a bad credit rating and then you can't buy even the things you need. They know the answer is not to keep spending or even cut back slightly. Unfortunately, the President has not gotten the memo. He doggedly refuses to seriously agree to spending cuts.

CNS News reported in late 2010 that "in the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion, which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan." That's a lot of money for one president to burden the public. Now he's trying to borrow more money and force our nation to go further into debt by advocating a debt ceiling increase without serious cuts in our spending.

That's why it’s important that the House passed the Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution (BBA). It is time for the nation to force accountability on our leaders and it is why the Senate needs to pass it as well.

Forty-five states have some sort of balanced-budget provision or stipulation in place that says they cannot spend more money than they take in, in most circumstances. Our federal government needs to do the same thing or our leaders in Washington will have to strike useless deals every year so that the government can just borrow more money without ever paying off the debt we currently owe.

A balanced budget amendment is where it needs to start. This kind of Constitutional amendment must be passed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and then be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Philosophically, conservatives and liberals are at an impasse when it comes to government spending but this is no longer about ideological views. This debate is about the very survival of our nation.

A balanced budget amendment increases certainty in the markets and facilitates job growth, which is desperately needed in this country. Our latest numbers of 9.2% unemployment show only part of the story. These figures represent the folks still looking, not the people on welfare or the ones that have taken a part-time job just get to off unemployment.

For both investors and employers, they see no end to the fiscal irresponsibility and spending that has gripped the nation and hence, are uncertain of their own future which leads to no one hiring because they cannot project any kind of growth. The constant threat of tax hikes coming from the White House further unnerves those who would like to expand their businesses. Coupled with uncertainty over the cost of health care under ObamaCare, employers are stuck treading water until Washington gets its act together.

The BBA isn't perfect but it's a good start.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said in a commentary piece that government cannot control itself when spending: "What we've seen since World War II is that the government is profligate and incapable of disciplining itself when it comes to spending. It writes laws that lead to increased spending over time without further congressional action, so-called entitlements such as Medicare and food stamps...Why wait until we lose our AAA credit rating? Some form of balanced budget amendment would improve the budget process and put spending on a lower path."

The Senate needs to follow the House’s lead and pass the balanced budget amendment now and help get our nation back on its feet and the states need to immediately ratify it. This will add a layer of much needed accountability to our national leaders. Washington has a massive spending addiction and they need to go cold turkey. Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee has a remedy in fact - Spenditol (www.spenditol.com). Take a dose of that Washington-made antidote and all your worries will disappear.

The President and Congress must follow the example of many of the families in America who understand that they cannot spend and borrow in endless rotation. It's time gentlemen, to put on your big boy pants and make the tough decisions about government spending. American families are with you.

Penny Nance is the President and CEO of Concerned Women for America.

Obama Owns the Debt-Ceiling Fiasco

2011-07-14T13:53:00.002-05:00

By KARL ROVE

President Barack Obama and Congress face a mess if the federal government hits the debt ceiling Aug. 2. The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, projects that the government will receive $172 billion in revenues between Aug. 3 and Aug. 31, but it is on the hook to spend $306 billion, leaving a shortfall of $134 billion.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama told Scott Pelley of CBS News that "there may simply not be the money in the coffers" to issue Social Security, veterans and disability checks after Aug. 3.

Not so. The $172 billion in revenues collected over the rest of the month can pay the $29 billion interest charges on the national debt, Social Security benefits ($49 billion), Medicaid and Medicare ($50 billion), active duty military pay ($2.9 billion), Department of Defense vendors ($31.7 billion), IRS refunds ($3.9 billion), and about a quarter of the $12.8 billion in unemployment checks due that month.

There will, however, be no cash for highway construction, no checks for federal workers or retirees, no agriculture payments, no open national parks. Interest rates are also likely to rise if U.S. debt is downgraded, adding massively to the deficit and further damaging the economy. This would be a disaster with no political winners.

The president wants a $2.4 trillion debt-ceiling increase to get him past next year's election—and the deal he's proposing is based on promised future cuts paired with substantial tax increases on households earning more than $250,000 a year.

House Speaker John Boehner proposed matching a debt-ceiling hike with substantial spending cuts. The Congressional Budget Office estimates federal spending at $46.1 trillion over the next 10 years, a dramatic escalation from projections before Mr. Obama took office. Mr. Boehner's modest proposal was to trim that back 5.2% over the decade, but the president balked.

Yet the $4 trillion in deficit reduction that Mr. Obama talks about is shy on details. No one who's attended his frequent negotiating sessions knows what his proposal really is.

The president has made a bipartisan agreement even more difficult by declaring certain spending off-limits to cuts. Mr. Obama's "untouchable" list includes his $1 trillion health-care reform, $128 billion in unspent stimulus funds, education and training outlays, his $53 billion high-speed rail proposal, spending on "green" jobs and student loans, and virtually any structural changes to entitlements except further squeezing payments to doctors, hospitals and health-care professionals.

Mr. Obama has offered no evidence since becoming president that he wants to restrain the upward trajectory of government spending. He does want higher taxes to pay for significantly higher federal spending. But he wants Republicans to deliver the tax increases, since Democrats couldn't pass them last year despite controlling both chambers of Congress.

Republicans have wisely declined. Demanding the GOP vote for immediate tax increases that would be offset by vague, future tax cuts conjures up images of Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football. The tax increases would be real—the future tax rate cuts would be imaginary. And Mr. Obama has opposed any serious spending enforcement mechanisms, such as a balanced budget amendment or hard caps on spending.

His tone also hasn't helped achieve a comprehensive agreement. The president's two most recent press conferences, in which he accused the GOP of foot-dragging, convinced Republicans that he was interested in scoring political points and attracting independents, not facilitating a deal. Convening high-profile White House meetings without offering substantive concrete proposals and then having his aides leak madly (and inaccurately) to the press afterward further squandered trust.

There's still time for a deal, but it could come after the Aug. 2 deadline, and after much damage has been done to America's financial standing. Then the key political question will become who gets the blame. By then, it should be obvious that the man who promised to transcend petty politics and legislative gridlock made things worse.

Washington is dysfunctional. And to paraphrase the president's senior adviser, David Plouffe, Mr. Obama owns the dysfunction. The president has not only governed as a liberal—he's governed as an incompetent liberal, thereby reminding voters that electing a Republican Congress and president next year is the only way to change direction.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Happy 4th of July America!

2011-07-05T09:28:00.001-05:00

July Fourth Is a Good Time to Tell Our Military, Thank You for Your Sacrifice

By Dan Gainor

To the Men and Women of the United States Military:

It’s the July Fourth weekend. Many of you are far from home in unpleasant places like Iraq and Afghanistan or off the coast of a hostile nation such as Libya. You are fighting at least three wars, and though bureaucrats don’t call it the war on terror anymore, you still fight that as well. Every day poses a risk, whether on the streets of Baghdad or on duty in Fort Hood, Texas.

At home, your loved ones are grilling, having a beer or playing Frisbee. Our tables are filled with plenty – not just today, but all days. Yes, many Americans struggle even in a good economy, but that fight is nothing like it is in the third world. This nation is still the land of opportunity because you help make it so.

Meanwhile, you eat, sleep, walk and talk Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines. You work long hours, ever alert for the one time something bad might happen. You eat what is available – whether it’s good chow or MREs (un-affectionately known as Meals Refusing to Exit.) Many of you have discovered what life is like on the beach – without the ocean to cool off. Sand is in your shoes, your clothes and even your food.

Yet you are there. You volunteered to be there. Every second you are there, you are doing your part to guard your family, your friends and your nation.

Still that nation and its military are increasingly separated. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the 2011 West Point graduating class that civilians and military were growing apart. “I fear they do not know us,” he told them.

He was right. Those who serve and those who stay in civilian life often come from two separate worlds in this era of a volunteer military. And there is little that bridges the gap. Our media only cover the wars when it is convenient or it makes their side look good. Hollywood is worse, rarely repeating the patriotic films that once filled movie screens coast to coast. The military is not mocked as it was in the Vietnam era. It is too often simply ignored.

These thoughts are very important to me this holiday. I had the honor of visiting the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) late last year as the newly operational carrier was getting shipshape. As I write this, the Bush and her crew are heading into their scheduled deployment to the U.S. 5th Fleet.

Heading into harm’s way as so many have done before. But this time, they are people I know, men and women who I talked to, ate with and whose struggles now seem all too personal.

These incredible men and women average a mere 19 years of age. Yet they command the most powerful weapon in the U.S. arsenal – a nuclear-powered carrier. And that weapon now goes to war. Even on the most powerful ship in the Navy, some may not come back.

So, to those who serve on the Bush or in other parts of our armed forces, I have only two things to say. First, you are not forgotten, not on this or any day.

We remember you each time a man or woman in uniform passes us on the street. We remember you every time we sit at a table with an empty chair and a friend or a coworker or loved one is in some far away land in uniform. We remember you every time we see the flag fly high over a capitol or stadium or when we sing the “Star Spangled Banner.” We remember you when we pray to God to keep each and every one of you safe. And we remember you when the world turns more terrifying and men and women go once more into combat, to protect us and the nation we hold dear.

And yes, we remember you when you come home. We greet you with open arms as you step off the plane or honor the fallen with funeral processions worthy of their sacrifice.

More than just remembering, we give thanks. We pay tribute to those who don’t just fight to protect us, but to those who give their last full measure of devotion and die fighting for us.

There are no words to say for something like that. How do you say thank you to a mother who just lost her oldest son in the mountains of Afghanistan? How do you tell a father how much you appreciate his daughter’s sacrifice, knowing full well this man will never have grandchildren to bounce on his knee? How do you show gratitude to a young husband or wife who will never hold their lost love ever again? How do you thank a child whose mommy or daddy will never comfort them or see them walk down the aisle?

There are no words in any language that could express those feelings. But we need to start trying. America has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for nearly 10 years and eight years in Iraq. Ten years is too long not to say how grateful we are for all you do. It’s time we start.

Thank you.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture.

Islam 101

2011-06-28T08:23:00.000-05:00

In an attempt to polish Islam's image, muslim activists usually quote verses from the Koran that were written in the early days of the Islamic movement, while Mohammed lived in Mecca. Those passages make Islam appear loving and harmless because they call for love, peace and patience. Such is a deception. The activists fail to tell gullible people that such verses, though still in the Koran, were nullified, abrogated, rendered void by later passages that incite killing, decapitations, maiming, terrorism and religious intolerance. The latter verses were penned while Mohammed’s headquarters was based in Medina.

When speaking with people of Christianized/Western societies, muslim activists deliberately hide a major Islamic doctrine called "al-Nasikh wal-Mansoukh" (the Abrogator and the Abrogated). This simply means that in situations wherein verses contradict one another, the early verses are overridden by the latter verses. The chronological timing in which a verse was written determines its authority to establish policies within Islam. Non-muslims cannot afford to be ignorant about the full implications of the Abrogator and the Abrogated Doctrine (al-Nasikh wal-Mansoukh). When Islamic spokesmen say that Islam is a religion of peace and that the Koran does not support such things as human rights infractions, gender bias and terrorism, they are lying. This means that the Western politicians and liberal journalists, who continually spout that Islam is a noble religion of peace, are in reality propagating a deception that they have been deceived into parroting.

This presents problems for naïve people who are not familiar with Islam and the Koran. They don’t know that the surahs/chapters of the Koran are not arranged in chorological order in regard to the timing in which they were written. Therefore, an activist who is out to deceive them can turn to various places throughout the Koran and read verses that sound peaceful, tolerant, reasonable and loving. The impression is that the entire Koran promotes peace, love, equality and tolerance for all. That is far from the truth. Most muslims fully understand that the few Koranic verses that seemingly promote equality, peace and justice are more often than not overridden/nullified by later verses that validate such things as terrorism and legalistic restrictions on routine human and women’s rights.

As 2012 Approaches, We Still Don't Know What Obama Stands For

2011-06-27T14:00:00.000-05:00

By Liz Peek

President Obama has finally agreed to weigh in on the debt ceiling talks. High time too. Much of the time, the Obama presidency drifts in the breeze, with all the gravitas of an inflated beach ball. Mr. Obama has not deigned to touch down on the fiscal crisis confronting our country, the immigration imbroglio, entitlements reform, gay marriage or the states’ crackdown on excessive public service union demands. His opinions on many topics, as he has said regarding gay marriage, “are evolving.”

Why are we surprised? As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama held the slimmest of dossiers; not only did he have but a brief public service career –he left few tracks in the sand. As a state senator he studiously avoided voting on issues that might alienate supporters; he ran for president as a blank slate, and that vagueness worked out very well indeed.

Today it is not working. On many fronts we still don’t know what Mr. Obama stands for. That’s significant, because the Obama political team has made a rare political error. By ginning up his presidential campaign unusually early in his tenure, Americans now see everything he does through the political prism. That makes us suspicious.

For instance, the recent decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan does not hew to a philosophically coherent foreign policy. Instead it seems a response to polls and a good campaign move. The war is no longer popular. It is expensive and most of us don’t really understand what the objectives are. Moreover, we are rightly incensed that the president of a profoundly corrupt country claiming the lives of many of our best young people describes us as “occupiers.” How dare he?

Nonetheless, President Obama’s decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan at the worst possible time – in the middle of next year’s fighting season -- allows little time for the surge he authorized a mere year ago to succeed. That seems, tactically, a poor idea. That the commanders who championed the surge early on have unanimously criticized the move is disheartening.

Releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve appears to be another political gesture. Clearly the biggest obstacle to Mr. Obama’s reelection is unemployment, and a tepid recovery. Since the country has lost faith in the benefits of stimulus programs, and is increasingly alarmed about our $14 trillion national debt, another round of government spending is a non-starter. And since the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates near zero through increasingly controversial quantitative easing programs, monetary policy options are limited.

The hope is that pouring 30 million barrels of oil into the marketplace (60 million worldwide including the release from foreign stockpiles) will dampen oil prices and put a little extra money in the country’s purse, cheering consumers and igniting economic growth.

Trying to energize the recovery is a worthy ambition, but dampening already-sinking oil prices through this quick-fix appears a desperate measure. We have only accessed our emergency stockpiles of oil on two previous occasions – during the 1991 Iraq war and after Hurricane Katrina, when supplies were actually threatened. Where is the emergency today? In the war rooms of Obama’s political campaign.

The Obama administration’s approach is both typical and flawed. Manipulating markets is not the path to restoring confidence. In fact, it is just such intrusions into the business of America that has alarmed investors and employers and arguably dulled the animal spirits needed to bring this country back to life.

President Obama’s response to nearly problem confronting the country has been to go after our corporations. Health care costs rising too fast? Stomp on pharmaceutical and insurance profits. Oil prices too high? Threaten to cut investment incentives for producers. States restive about illegal immigrants? Throw the compliance burden on employers. Environmentalists unhappy about progress? Loose the EPA on utilities and energy producers. Labor unions losing ground? Set the NLRB on Boeing.

The list goes on and on. Rarely a day goes by that President Obama and his team doesn’t skewer another U.S. industry. This does not unleash animal spirits. Quite the contrary.

Data tracked by the National Federation of Independent Businesses show confidence among small business owners at “recession-level” and sinking for the past three months. Rasmussen reported a few days ago that investor confidence had sunk to its lowest level in nearly two years. The index stands at 75, compared to a high in 2004, for instance, of 150. Similarly, the Rasmussen consumer index, at 71, compares to a high earlier this year of 93 and 127 in 2004.

The downturn in sentiment reflects various factors, including higher oil prices and the ongoing turmoil in Europe, but it is also stems from deep uneasiness about how our country is being managed.

Americans are discouraged that our elected leaders seem so unable to solve our biggest problems – our spiraling debt, soaring health care costs, our sagging infrastructure and our dismal public education system.

Certainly, President Obama is not responsible for all of our ills, nor can he be expected to resolve them. However, he can and should be tagged with holding back the natural energies of this country – the ambitions and boldness of our entrepreneurs and employers – who must lead us forward.

Liz Peek is a financial columnist who writes for The Fiscal Times. For more visit LizPeek.com.

Obama's Release of Oil Reserves Just Makes Our Energy Problems Worse, Not Better

2011-06-24T10:11:00.002-05:00

By Sen. John Barrasso

When President Obama said that America hopes to be Brazil’s best energy customer, Americans shook their head in confusion.

Apparently, the White House didn’t understand or care about their concern.

The administration repeated the exact same mistake this week when it irresponsibly released 30 million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

On Thursday, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu explained that this SPR release was “intended to complement the production increases recently announced by a number of major oil producing countries. “ He went on to say that “the United States welcomes those commitments and encourages other countries to follow suit.”

With all due respect, when will America step up and follow suit?

Instead of needlessly tapping into our emergency oil supplies and encouraging other countries to produce more energy, this administration needs to take a hard look in the mirror.

The president has handcuffed American energy developers and made our dependence on foreign energy worse.

First, our Strategic Reserve was created as a safeguard against national security emergencies and severe supply disruptions. President Obama just treated the SPR like it’s his Strategic Political Reserve. While all Americans want gas prices to be lower, tapping the SPR isn’t the answer. The only severe supply disruption today is this administration’s self-imposed shutdown of American energy.

The White House’s claim that the unrest in Libya is the main motivation for their decision doesn’t make sense. After all, Libya ranks 18th in oil production – it’s not exactly Saudi Arabia. While the conflict in Libya has reduced supply into the market, it hasn’t been a “severe” disruption. Rather than tapping the SPR, this highlights the need to develop American energy and stop blocking energy from Canada.

Less than a year ago, this administration said that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has sufficient spare capacity to make up for any loss in American oil production resulting from its new rules that discourage American energy production.

While the president gives occasional speeches about his commitment to all of the above American energy production, he has built a record of opposing it time and time again.

The president has blocked offshore oil and gas production and made it more difficult to produce energy onshore.

After the explosion in the Gulf over a year ago, the administration shut down permitting for nearly a year. While the administration finally began issuing offshore permits again, it’s at a much slower rate. The results are troubling. Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico is estimated to drop 20 percent in 2012 from 2010 levels.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refuses to issue permits for offshore energy exploration in Alaska. This alone could provide an estimated 27 billion barrels of oil. Companies have invested billions of dollars and spent more than 5 years trying to develop these American energy resources. I have cosponsored legislation to fix the EPA’s flawed process for issuing offshore permits.

The administration has aggressively opposed exploration for oil and natural gas on federal lands in the West. In 2009, one of the administration’s first energy-related actions was to cancel 77 existing oil and gas leases in Utah. It has built on its anti-energy stance by throwing up additional regulatory hurdles to onshore production.

The White House has also stifled energy innovation in America – specifically on oil shale development. According to conservative estimates, the U.S. has 800 billion recoverable barrels of oil from oil shale in portions of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. The administration undercut this valuable resource by pulling back the commercial leasing rules that are crucial for this valuable resource coming to market.

I recently introduced the American Energy and Western Jobs Act. It cuts through the additional layers of red-tape on oil and gas exploration and finalizes the commercial leasing rules for oil shale. The bill will provide companies the opportunity and certainty they need to produce American energy on federal lands.

Each day, we witness more examples of how this administration is making our energy problems worse.

Instead of championing foreign oil and using our emergency supplies, the White House needs to take steps to support American energy development.

Republican John Barrasso represents Wyoming in the U.S. Senate. He serves in the Senates as a member of both the Energy and Environment Committees.

U.N. Approves Iran's Disaster Center Proposal Which Some Fear Could Boost its Ballistic Capabilities

2011-06-17T08:36:00.001-05:00

By George Russell

Even as the United Nations tries to use sanctions to block Iran’s developing nuclear weapons program, one of the U.N.’s own organizations has quietly green-lighted the Islamic Republic’s proposal to build a “disaster information management center” that could, some experts fear, advance its ballistic capability.

The decision puts the U.N. seal of approval on a controversial project that the United States has, until now, successfully blocked since Iran first proposed it in 2006.

As if to underscore its victory, Iran this week announced that it had launched its own observation satellite, Rassad-1, which will remain in orbit for the next two months.

The decision to approve the Iran proposal was taken without a vote on May 25 by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the self-described “regional development arm of the United Nations for the Asia-Pacific region.”

Establishment of the center was not mentioned in the ESCAP press release after the meeting where the vote was taken. The release said only that the commission “adopted a set of resolutions on issues ranging from bridging wide development and infrastructure gaps within the region, to cooperation for energy security and disaster preparedness.”

While little-known in the U.S., ESCAP is a major player in Asian development. Its membership includes 62 nations, among them China, India, Pakistan, Russia and North Korea, and its mandate covers a huge swath of territory, from Turkey across the Pacific. There are a sprinkling of Western nations and their Commonwealth allies on the ESCAP roster, including France, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, as well as the U.S.

“This is a very clever move by Iran,” said Elliott Abrams, a former deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush Administration, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “It’s outrageous that a country that has been denounced repeatedly by the U.N. Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency should be rewarded in this fashion.”

Abrams was responding to an inquiry from Fox News, which learned of the unannounced ESCAP decision

“We are trying to make them into a pariah state, and this sends the opposite message,”Abrams said. “ It will require lots of visits to Iran by other governments. And there are always concerns that some aspect of this will help their military or intelligence agencies.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, a Fox News contributor, when informed of the development, said he found the decision “unbelievable. This puts Iran in a very high profile. What technology Iran will get as a result I don’t know, but it would give their people more experience with satellite imagery. It’s like being involved with peaceful nuclear power: just having your people involved gives you more experience that can be turned to non-peaceful uses.”

In New York, a spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon told Fox News that “our records indicate that there was no advance notice to the Security Council Sanctions Committee regarding the creation of the center (nor an ex post facto endorsement thereof), and there were no notifications or requests for exemption regarding the provision of any items to the center.”

The U.N. endorsement of Iran’s disaster center was a diplomatic defeat for the Obama Administration, which strenuously opposed the proposal at the commission’s forum in Bangkok. The U.S. has managed to block several previous attempts by Iran to establish the facility on its territory.

“The United States and our allies have fought hard to prevent the center,” a U.S. State Department spokesman told Fox News. “We did not and do not support this.”

The controversial facility is described in ESCAP records as a “regional center for information, communication and space technology-enabled disaster management In the Islamic Republic of Iran,” to be installed as a “subsidiary body” of ESCAP. Its aim, according to a detailed Iranian proposal supporting their plan, is to enhance early warning of impending calamities, and provide data collection and analysis for disaster recovery, among other things.

The Iranian document cites the country’s relatively low capability in sending and receiving satellite observation data, especially in disaster recovery situations, as a reason to support the institution, in order to fill “gaps” in regional coverage.

In response to questions from Fox News, ESCAP’s Executive Secretary, Noeleen Heyzer, declared that despite the references to space-satellite technology in the Commission’s documents, “the focus of the center is on disaster related information sharing and does not have a role with regard to space or satellite technology.”

A U.S. statement issued at the Bangkok meeting argued that the Iranian proposal “did not clearly articulate a vision for the center, define existing gaps the center would fill, identify the geographic focus of the center, explain how the center would work with existing bodies to avoid overlap and duplication of effort, or set out the human and technological resources needed to operate the center to fulfill its mission.”

The U.S. strategy of opposition at the meeting, was based on “legitimate management concerns,” in the State Department spokesman’s phrase, rather than concerns about Iran’s weapons intentions.

That said, the spokesman agreed that there were “other concerns” about the center, then added, “a lot of those, we can’t get into.”

When asked by Fox News about such issues as technology that might also be useful in Iran’s missile programs, or the possibility that the center could be used as a “cover” for other ballistic missile work that has been banned by the U.N. Security Council, the spokesman declared, “Those are all legitimate questions. But we can’t talk about them.”

One reason, perhaps, is that “disaster management” has become a major theme at many U.N. gatherings around the world, usually with U.S. backing, in part because of the role that climate change has been assigned in wreaking havoc with humanity. In Asia, the suffering has been particularly acute, due to typhoons and the ravages of earthquakes and massive tsunamis. The idea of notion of linked disaster preparedness centers, backed by sophisticated information from advanced satellite observation, is now a mainstay of humanitarian and development relief.

The spokesman in effect said the U.S. had been out-maneuvered by Iran at the Bangkok meeting, as Iranian diplomats “repackaged” their proposals so that they managed to “chip away” at the bloc opposing the idea. Among other things, the Iranians emphasized “gaps” in regional disaster management efforts and offered to pay the entire $50 million cost of the center for its first five years of operation.

The spokesman declined to identify which nations changed sides as a result of the Iranian diplomatic offensive.

In the end, however, the State Department itself stood aside as ESCAP made the decision, because “we do not want to stand in the way of the long tradition ESCAP has of adopting resolutions by consensus,” according to the statement issued at the meeting.

The U.S. instead declared that it “dissociated” itself from the decision. “Dissociation is a practice the United States employs to allow consensus to occur while ensuring the text is not binding domestically,” according to the statement.

Indeed, the State Department spokesman in Washington argued that the diplomatic defeat was actually a victory. He claimed that the U.S. had actually “prevented” creation of the center, because the resolution that allows Iran to “initiate the process for the establishment of the [center]” also calls for an “evaluation” by ESCAP of the need for the facility and the benefit of creating it as a “subsidiary body” of ESCAP—in 2013.

In reply to questions from Fox News, ESCAP’s Hayzer also emphasized that so far the center is not an official Commission “subsidiary body.”

Or, as the State Department spokesman put it, the center “does not exist at least for the next two years,” the spokesman said.

Iran doesn’t see it that way. A proposed timetable for establishment of the center, included in a 28-page technical report submitted by Iran at the meeting, calls for getting all the legal, administrative and regulatory arrangements for the center out of the way by February, 2012.

The Iranian timetable calls for construction, equipping, hiring staff, and everything else to be out of the way in time for the opening of the center in November, 2012—the time of the next U.S. Presidential election.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell.

Would someone again please tell me why we're still a memeber of the U.N. and why we pay them all the money we do AND give them prime real estate in Manhattan?

Tit for Tat

2011-06-13T08:19:00.000-05:00

Now that the LameStreamMedia has finished combing through 24 thousand pages of Sarah Palin's emails, and finding nothing I may add, shouldn't they now be asking to read all the emails from Obama, Biden, Pelosi and Reid? The answer of course, should be, 'Yes' but we all know the chances of that happening are as sure as Genera Electric paying any taxes. Please, let me hear from all the liberal-loons out there who still try to maintain that the LameStreamMedia is fair and impartial. What a bunch of hypocrites. It's also so sad to see how absolutely paranoid the media are of Sarah Palin as a conservative woman, which only goes toward bolstering her appeal to the general public. If the media is telling everyone she's evil incarnate, all the more reason to believe she, and her platform, actually has merit.

The Time To Act IS NOW!

2011-06-09T10:16:00.002-05:00

We better start waking up in this country. Any idiot knows what the problem is, concerning jobs. There are scores of companies out there sitting on BILLIONS of dollars worth of capital, and they are too afraid to use it. Why? Because they are afraid of this inept, bumbling administration, and its track record of targeting business with taxes, regulation and mandates like Obama care, which businesses simply can't figure out what it will do to their bottom line.

Why would a business invest capital to grow their business when they might be the next target of the Oblunder administration? Why would they use money to expand and hire people when they see this administration spending money like it was going out of style, and when they run out, they just print more? Why would business move forward and try to grow when their profits are targeted by an administration who simply wants a larger tax base, so it can throw money at more socialistic entitlement programs that give no incentive to people to help themselves by seeking work, but which also solidifies this administration's power base, and also that of the Democrat Party?

What we need is to let business go about the business of making money, and get the government out of the way so they can do it. Stop attacking the people who provide jobs in this country. But more importantly, this country needs to get its people off the public dole. Not only do we have FAR more government workers than are needed, but we spend more money on entitlements than we have money for. This crapola about taxing wealthy people as the solution to our problems is a fallacy. First, name me one person who ever got a job from a poor person. And second, you could tax EVERYBODY at 100 % and it wouldn't solve our debt problems.

There are only three areas that matter when it comes to addressing the national debt: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If something isn't done to make cuts in these areas, this country is doomed. If you aren't willing to make cuts with a scalpel now, we will be forced to make cuts with a machete later, which will send this country down the drain. The first thing we need to do is totally scrap our current tax code. When the tax code is so convoluted that even the IRS can't explain or understand it, something is radically wrong.

We should enact the Fair Tax Act immediately. If you're not familiar with this, Google it. We should be insisting that Congress pass this before anything else. If we had changed over to this system, before the housing collapse, I'm a firm believer we wouldn't be in as dire shape as we are, and would have been back on track economically by now.

We are running out of time folks. There is a tipping point coming in this country that, after which, NOTHING we do will matter. We better do SOMETHING now, before we reach that point. The current administration has NO VIABLE PLAN to address what is happening to this country, except to tax more and keep spending.

The opposing party at least has come up with a plan, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan. Is it perfect? Maybe not, but it's a start. What has the Oblunder side said in response? They opposed it of course and scared people into thinking it would be our ruin, BUT DIDN'T OFFER ANY OTHER SOLUTION IN RESPONSE. This administration isn't trying to be part of the solution; in fact, they are a large part of the problem.

If you disagree with any of this, then you are saying you believe we are on the right course currently in this country and everything is going to be just hunky-dory. If so, you would be in the 30 percent minority who believe this. If you believe that our current path is a load of crapola, as I do, you then agree we must do something. If you believe the solution is to tax more and spend it on entitlements, you are simply living in la-la land, because it is a known, finite, matter of fact that we CAN’T - read my lips - CAN’T tax enough to sustain the rate at which we are giving it out. Even if you accounted for all the waste and fraud in the system, it STILL wouldn’t be enough. The ONLY solution is to CUT entitlements in a way that would let us pay down our debt. Yes, this will hurt a little, but it’s better than what is coming if we don’t. When we go belly up, like Greece, and Spain, and Ireland, and a few other examples, we will be forced to cut those entitlements out almost completely. WAKE UP AMERICA, the time to act IS NOW!

Protect Yourselves, Ladies, There are Lots of Weiners Out There!

2011-06-09T07:07:00.002-05:00

By Annemarie McAvoy

There are lessons to be learned from the actions of Anthony Weiner for all the women out there.

It would seem that those who aspire to political office have a propensity for getting involved with sexual activity that lands them on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

Weiner has lots of company. John Edwards, former presidential candidate, is facing felony charges for using campaign funds to hide a love child from the media -- and from his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth Edwards.

Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to conceal HIS love child for 14 years from the public, employing his lover, the child’s mother, in his household for all those years right under his wife Maria Shriver’s nose.

Then, of course, there’s also the man known as “Client #9,” former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer, whose sexual preferences with prostitutes were the subject of many media reports and who was ultimately forced out of office.

Finally, there was former President Bill Clinton, who ironically enough, performed the marriage ceremony for Rep. Anthony Weiner and his wife. Is there anyone who does not remember what he was doing with the cigar in the Oval Office?

It seems men who seek higher office or hold a high political office think they are entitled to do whatever they want.

People overlook their flaws and transgressions because they are powerful. They are often very charming too, which is why they have such success in politics.

These men are coddled by their staffs, and adored by their supporters. Many are media darlings too. Politicians get lulled into feeling that they are invincible, and believe that they have a right to do things regular folks would not even be allowed to consider.

The real victims of these men are the women they are involved with, especially the significant others and wives. The public shame and embarrassment of being linked to men who are found to have done unspeakable acts can be almost unbearable.

No matter how you feel about the Anthony Weiner saga, it is a shame that his wife is now being pulled into this sordid story, after less than a year of marriage.

So what can the women out there do to protect themselves from these predators? Do your homework! A little bit of leg-work can go a long way.

The Internet is an amazing tool to check out who we are getting involved with before we get hurt. For example, a quick Google search of a prominent lawyer aspiring to high political office shows an arrest for stalking a former girlfriend. That is a red flag that should not be ignored, and can be found out by a few minutes at a computer.

A quick look at someone’s cell phone, which often has both text messages and Facebook access on them, can be a treasure trove of information.

I’m sure Weiner’s wife is wishing she had been checking his texts before she married him.

Also, investigative firms can conduct background checks on people, and can do actual surveillance. Laptops can be reviewed by forensic experts at investigative firms to see if they are being used for any illicit purposes.

Remember though that whoever you are with they can be cheating, lying, and/or engaging in unsavory activities like Weiner did. Such actions are not limited to the ruling class, so to speak.

So be aware, ask questions, and try your best to find out what the object of your affection is doing when you are not watching him. Otherwise, you too could get burned the way Weiner’s wife has been.

And for the men out there, a little background work on the ladies you are involved with can go a long way to protect you too!

After all, scandalous behavior is not always limited to men.

Annemarie McAvoy is a former federal prosecutor. She currently is a consultant and teaches Counter-Terrorism, Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing at Fordham Law School in New York City.

Group Says E-mails Link FCC to Liberal Group on "Net Neutrality"

2011-06-04T09:48:00.001-05:00

by Peter Doocy

The FCC appears to have coordinated its public message regarding 'net neutrality' with Free Press, a left wing non-profit organization seeking to reform the media, according to e-mails released Thursday.

Supporters of 'net neutrality', like Free Press, think equal access to the internet is a "civil right" and that service providers should be prohibited from charging certain prices for certain speeds. When providers have this kind of control, they say, customers in weaker coverage areas get stuck with weaker service. Opponents of 'net neutrality' say that if service is regulated in this way then content will soon be regulated as well.

In April 2010, a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC did not have any authority to regulate the internet in this way, however the government agency voted to move forward with its 'net neutrality' program in December, just a few months later.

On its website, the Federal Communications Commission lists among its goals: "promoting competition, innovation, and investment in broadband services and facilities," something impossible under 'net neutrality' rules.

Free Press, meanwhile, openly advocates for 'net neutrality' on its website, and describes internet service providers this way: "They want to become the internet's gatekeepers, deciding which sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all-based on who pays them the most." Furthermore, the group has released statements to the press in 2011 with titles like: "Congress Should Improve, Not Dismantle, Net Neutrality Rules," "Boehner's Attack on Net Neutrality Not Based in Reality" and "Free Press Action Fund: Vote to Eliminate Net Neutrality a 'Dangerous Overreach."

E-mails obtained by conservative nonprofit group Judicial Watch highlight the communications between the government and Free Press, which is funded in part by billionaire George Soros.

One message from Free Press to the FCC dated November 2, 2010 is a request for the FCC Commissioner's chief of staff to ask his boss to write an op-ed for the Albuquerque Journal ahead of a November 16 hearing about internet access. "It's a great way to get the word out and to spark conversations in advance of the event," Free Press Associate Outreach Director Misty Perez Truedson wrote to the FCC's John Giusti. Giusti complied, responding one week later, "We're working on the op ed."

Another document obtained by Judicial Watch via its Freedom of Information Act request includes the summary of a phone conversation between FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and former Free Press President John Silver. "Silver emphasized that a strong net neutrality rule is critical to preserving the internet as a vibrant forum for speech, commerce, innovation, and cultural expression," the summary from this November 28, 2010 conversation reads, in part. A few days later, the FCC voted to continue it's 'net neutrality' program, despite the federal appeals court ruling.

Along with these documents Judicial Watch released a statement explaining its concern with everything it found. "The American people should be deeply troubled by the fact that the Obama administration, on issue after issue, seems to be run by shadowy leftist organizations," said President Tom Fitton. "Our government is supposed to be 'of the people, by the people, and for the people', not 'of the Left, by the Left, and for the Left."

A call to the FCC's Office of Media Relations was not immediately returned on Friday.

This is scary folks. It demonstrates the kind of socialistic agenda progressive, liberal-loons, like Soros and Obama have in store for this country. Remember, Nazis were socialists too.
-BF

Anthony Weiner's Troubles Offer Case Study On What Not to Do When You're Caught with Your Pants Down

2011-06-03T08:56:00.000-05:00

By Andrea Tantaros

It’s the story that just won’t go away.

After almost a week, nagging questions still remain over whether or not New York Congressman Anthony Weiner sent an obscene picture of himself to a young college female via Twitter, or if he is the victim in what is turning out to be one of the most bizarre political scandals this country has ever witnessed.

The fact that journalists are still writing about this Congressman turned clown show can be directly linked back to Weiner himself, who, from day one has majorly mismanaged the saga.

From changing his story on whether or not it was a hack or a prank, to his sketchy behavior if it, in fact, was a hack job to the combative media exchanges, "Weinergate" has become a clear case study on what not to do when you’re caught with your pants down.

Let’s review.

While many of us were chowing down on our Oscar Meyer wieners at Memorial Day weekend barbeques, a soft-core pornographic picture was sent via Weiner’s twitter account to his almost 50,000 followers but he didn’t call the police or FBI.

The tweet gets retweeted before getting taken down and what follows is Weiner’s claim that he “cannot say with certitude that the picture isn’t him.”

Oh-kaay.

While jokes and puns galore ensue, the mainstream media picks up on the fact that if Weiner isn’t guilty, he certainly is acting like it. As they challenge him with more questions he continues to deflect calling the incident a “prank.”

On Tuesday he said that he was “not going to allow this to be what I talk about all week,” only to find himself a day later sitting down for one on one interviews with all the major news networks.

By Thursday morning Weiner insisted that he is not answering any more questions about the incident. But when did he actually start answering any questions?

The general rule of thumb when there is a scandal is to get all the information you have out early so that nothing is left behind. John Edwards failed at this when he didn’t tell us that he had a love child whose baby mama he was paying.

Another important rule to follow is to never lie to or try to lawyer the press. Plainly put: don’t parse words or pretend you’re in appellate court by mincing words, toying with definitions or deliberately picking words that appear as if you are trying to avoid a criminal investigation (Hence, his emphasis on “prank” not “hack”). If that isn’t him in the picture, he would have stated that it wasn’t him outright and out of the gate.

His hostile tone with the press doesn’t help. In an exchange with what should be considered a “friendly” media outlet, Weiner lashed out at CNN during a press conference and deflected any tough question as he typically does when talking about policy issues--rudely and sarcastically. Note to Weiner: don’t get your panties in a tangle.

The public may come to agree. His gross mishandling of the past days' events may have cost him a shot at his much rumored bid to replace New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And there's more The Atlantic reports, “If Weiner stepped down from Congress, Republicans would have a realistic shot at putting [his district] in play.”

The best answer for Congressman Weiner would have been to admit it was him (if it was) and explain that he accidentally sent it to all of his followers when he meant to send the picture to his newlywed wife (Huma Abedin an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), and call it a day.

Now it’s too late. His reputation has been damaged and his credibility has come crashing down.

The sooner he admits the real angle to this dangle—that the photo is or is not his wiener, the sooner he’ll get off the front pages of the New York tabloids and we can move on.

Until then, the only one responsible for this pickle is Weiner himself. That, I can say with certitude.

Andrea Tantaros is a conservative commentator. Follow her on Twitter @andreatantaros.

Barack Obama's decision to play golf on Memorial Day was disrespectful and hardly presidential.

2011-06-01T08:28:00.001-05:00

By Nile Gardiner

Can you imagine David Cameron enjoying a round of golf on Remembrance Sunday? It would be inconceivable for the British Prime Minister to do so, and not just because of the usually dire weather at that time of the year. Above all, it would be viewed as an act of extremely bad taste on a day when the nation remembers and mourns her war dead. I can’t imagine the PM even considering it, and I’m sure his advisers would be horrified at the idea. And if the prime minister ever did play golf on such a sacrosanct day he would be given a massive drubbing by the British press, and it would never be repeated.

Contrast this with President Obama’s decision to play golf yesterday, Memorial Day, for the 70th time during his 28-month long presidency. For tens of millions of Americans, Memorial Day is a time for remembrance of the huge sacrifices made by servicemen and women on the battlefield. The president did pay his respects in the morning, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, but later in the day traveled to Fort Belvoir to play golf. The story has not been reported so far in a single US newspaper, but was made public by veteran White House correspondent Keith Koffler on his blog. Here’s Koffler’s report:

The business of memorializing our war dead done, President Obama headed out to the Fort Belvoir golf course today, finding his way onto the links for the ninth weekend in a row.

Obama earlier today laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and met with families of those killed in battle. But he emerged from the day’s solemnity to go golfing for the 12th time this year and the 70th time of his presidency.

The decision to golf on Memorial Day invites comparison with President George W. Bush, who gave up the game early in his presidency and said he did it out of respect for the families of those killed in Iraq.

Does it matter if the president chooses to play golf on Memorial Day, and for the second time in his presidency (he did so as well in 2009)? I think it does, and it displays extraordinarily bad judgment, not only by Obama himself but also by his advisers. His chief of staff for example should have firmly cautioned against it. President Obama is not just any American but Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. The United States is currently engaged in a major war in Afghanistan with over 100,000 troops on the ground, and more than 1,500 have already laid down their lives for their country.

The least the president can do on Memorial Day is spend the whole day with veterans and servicemen’s families while acknowledging their sacrifice. As Koffler points out above, President George W. Bush stopped playing golf out of respect for the families of Iraq War dead. This demonstrated not only good judgment but humility and respect for the men and women who keep America safe. It is little wonder that, as Gallup reveals in a new poll, US military personnel and veterans give Barack Obama lower marks for his job performance than members of the general public. The president’s actions smack of poor taste, as well a lack of empathy and support for the US military, hardly the kind of leadership the White House should be projecting at a time of war.

I wasn't able to post this past weekend, due to computer issues. However, I'd like to thank all my fellow veterans, and active duty military, for their service, but more importantly, to remember those who have gone before us, in service to our country. We all know this usurper in the White House is a sham, and does not have our best interests at heart... unless, that is, it somehow were to improve his golf score. -BF

Credibility Is Obama's Biggest Weakness In Middle East Strategy

2011-05-20T12:43:00.000-05:00

By James Jay Carafano

After Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, the crowd walked away disappointed. Too short, was the rap. Too straightforward.

Yet today that speech is admired for both its power and beauty. It endures as one of the most memorable speeches in American history, in large part because of Lincoln’s incredible accomplishments. His presidential triumphs over adversity—both before and after the speech—added substantive gravitas and resonance to his words.

In comparison, President Obama's address today proved doubly disappointing. It lacked Lincoln’s simplicity and clarity. And the orator himself could offer no real accomplishments to give the speech weight.

Credibility is the big problem with this president’s Middle East strategy. Thursday’s speech had to build on a foundation of next to nothing.

Mr. Obama has promised to negotiate away the Iranian nuclear threat and failed.

He has promised to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian peace and failed.

His 2009 Cairo speech was so vacuous, it promised nothing, so I suppose you could argue he delivered on that one.

Still, it’s hard to take seriously the words of a leader who has so abjectly failed to make good on previous promises.

Further undercutting the president’s standing today is the fact that he spent most of the Arab Spring as bystander-in-chief. Mr. Obama called for Mubarak to step down after it was clear Mubarak had to step down. He turned against Syria when everyone else did. He dumped Libya faster than NBC dropped Charlie Sheen. And he completely ignored the protesters in Iran.

It’s not like he had no chance to get ahead of breaking events in the region. Weeks beforehand it was public knowledge that the so-called Facebook Intifada was scheduled for after prayers on May 15.

If Obama really wanted to lead, to act like a game-changing president, he could have come out and made a strong speech in defence of Israel before the 15th. Instead, he waited sheepishly to see how things unfolded. He “led from behind” with a speech four days after the fact.

Today’s speech provided little evidence that president really gets it on leadership in general or the Middle East in particular. This idea of promoting a “mini-Marshall Plan” for the Middle East is as stale as it is doomed. Just look at Egypt.

As my colleague Ted Bromund notes, “The amounts the administration is talking about -- $1 billion in debt forgiveness, and $1 billion in loan guarantees -- will be swallowed up by the broader collapse of the Egyptian economy. In practice, the administration’s plan is not enough to matter, but enough to create the false impression that the U.S. can simply ride to the rescue of the Egyptian economy.”

Furthermore, you can’t just dump money into un-free economies and expect that act to somehow further the cause of freedom. All that approach does is prop up the powers that be and promote corruption. Again, take a gander at what billions in aid to Egypt accomplished for the people there.

Though he spoke at length, the president failed to adequately address any of the top issues that U.S. policy should focus on in the region. The bulk of speech consisted of warmed over promises and calls for more dead-end dialogue. This was an exercise in cheerleading, not leading.

James Jay Carafano is director of the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies.

Quote of The Year

2011-05-15T08:36:00.002-05:00

"Thanking Obama for killing Bin Laden is like going into McDonalds and thanking Ronald McDonald for the hamburger.

It's the guy cooking the burger that should get the credit, not the clown."

Why Don't We Hear About Soros' Ties to Over 30 Major News Organizations?

2011-05-11T11:45:00.000-05:00

By Dan Gainor

When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio , it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR’s federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets – including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.

Prominent journalists like ABC’s Christiane Amanpour and former Washington Post editor and now Vice President Len Downie serve on boards of operations that take Soros cash. This despite the Society of Professional Journalist’s ethical code stating: “avoid all conflicts real or perceived.”

This information is part of an upcoming report by the Media Research Centers Business & Media Institute which has been looking into George Soros and his influence on the media.

The investigative reporting start-up ProPublica is a prime example. ProPublica, which recently won its second Pulitzer Prize, initially was given millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation to “strengthen the progressive infrastructure” – “progressive” being the code word for very liberal. In 2010, it also received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from the Open Society Foundations. In case you wonder where that money comes from, the OSF website is www.soros.org. It is a network of more than 30 international foundations, mostly funded by Soros, who has contributed more than $8 billion to those efforts.

The ProPublica stories are thoroughly researched by top-notch staffers who used to work at some of the biggest news outlets in the nation. But the topics are almost laughably left-wing. The site’s proud list of “Our Investigations” includes attacks on oil companies, gas companies, the health care industry, for-profit schools and more. More than 100 stories on the latest lefty cause: opposition to drilling for natural gas by hydraulic fracking. Another 100 on the evils of the foreclosure industry.

Throw in a couple investigations making the military look bad and another about prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and you have almost the perfect journalism fantasy – a huge budget, lots of major media partners and a liberal agenda unconstrained by advertising.

One more thing: a 14-person Journalism Advisory Board, stacked with CNN’s David Gergen and representatives from top newspapers, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster. Several are working journalists, including:

• Jill Abramson, a managing editor of The New York Times;

• Kerry Smith, the senior vice president for editorial quality of ABC News;

• Cynthia A. Tucker, the editor of the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

ProPublica is far from the only Soros-funded organization that is stacked with members of the supposedly neutral press.

The Center for Public Integrity is another great example. Its board of directors is filled with working journalists like Amanpour from ABC, right along side blatant liberal media types like Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post and now AOL.

Like ProPublica, the CPI board is a veritable Who’s Who of journalism and top media organizations, including:

• Christiane Amanpour – Anchor of ABC’s Sunday morning political affairs program, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.” A reliable lefty, she has called tax cuts “giveaways,” the Tea Party “extreme,” and Obama “very Reaganesque.”

• Paula Madison – Executive vice president and chief diversity officer for NBC Universal, who leads NBC Universal’s corporate diversity initiatives, spanning all broadcast television, cable, digital, and film properties.

• Matt Thompson – Editorial product manager at National Public Radio and an adjunct faculty member at the prominent Poynter Institute.

Once again, like ProPublica, the center’s investigations are mostly liberal – attacks on the coal industry, payday loans and conservatives like Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. The Center for Public Integrity is also more open about its politics, including a detailed investigation into conservative funders David and Charles Koch and their “web of influence.”According to the center’s own 990 tax forms, the Open Society Institute gave it $651,650 in 2009 alone.

The well-known Center for Investigative Reporting follows the same template – important journalists on the board and a liberal editorial agenda. Both the board of directors and the advisory board contain journalists from major news outlets. The board features:

• Phil Bronstein (President), San Francisco Chronicle;

• David Boardman, The Seattle Times;

• Len Downie, former Executive Editor of the Washington Post, now VP;

• George Osterkamp, CBS News producer.

Readers of the site are greeted with numerous stories on climate change, illegal immigration and the evils of big companies. It counts among its media partners The Washington Post, Salon, CNN and ABC News. CIR received close to $1 million from Open Society from 2003 to 2008.

Why does it all matter? Journalists, we are constantly told, are neutral in their reporting. In almost the same breath, many bemoan the influence of money in politics. It is a maxim of both the left and many in the media that conservatives are bought and paid for by business interests. Yet where are the concerns about where their money comes from?

Fred Brown, who recently revised the book “Journalism Ethics: A Casebook of Professional Conduct for News Media,” argues journalists need to be “transparent” about their connections and “be up front about your relationship” with those who fund you.

Unfortunately, that rarely happens. While the nonprofits list who sits on their boards, the news outlets they work for make little or no effort to connect those dots. Amanpour’s biography page, for instance, talks about her lengthy career, her time at CNN and her many awards. It makes no mention of her affiliation with the Center for Public Integrity.

If journalists were more up front, they would have to admit numerous uncomfortable connections with groups that push a liberal agenda, many of them funded by the stridently liberal George Soros. So don’t expect that transparency any time soon.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture.

Where Are the Jobs, Mr. President? The Jobless Obama Recovery Continues

2011-05-10T08:35:00.000-05:00

By John Lott

There has been no recovery in the job market during the Obama recovery. Despite all the cheerleading by the Obama administration and the media, job creation has been horribly sluggish. The jobs created recently are noteworthy only in comparison to the lack of jobs created during the rest of the “recovery.” In contrast to other recoveries over at least the last half century, job creation has never been more anemic.

When the new employment numbers came out on Friday, Austan Goolsbee, the head of the President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, boasted about "the solid pace of employment growth in recent months" and that "The overall trajectory of the economy has improved dramatically over the past two years." Headlines in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times were equally glowing, trumpeting "solid growth" and "strong growth."

During the 23 months since the Obama recovery started, an average of 23,000 jobs a month have been created. The same 23 month period into the Reagan recovery saw that an average of 285,800 jobs were added each month.

So what about the last three months? Goolsbee brags: "We added more than a quarter million jobs a month over the last quarter." But that number fails to reach even the average monthly job creation rate under President Reagan. Indeed, during the Reagan recovery, 857,000 or 991,000 jobs were created in the two best months, the number of jobs created in those individual months dwarfed those produced during this entire last quarter.

Depending on the measurement chosen -- the survey of businesses (the Establishment survey) or workers (the Household survey) -- between 6.3 and 7.5 million jobs were lost during the recession. Yet, the Establishment survey only shows some 535,000 total jobs created during the recovery, a meager fraction of what would be needed to get back to the recession employment levels. The Household survey paints an even bleaker picture: in addition to jobs lost during the recession, another 304,000 jobs were lost during the recovery. A graph of the changes in jobs shown here illustrates the incredibly flat job growth under Obama.

Why has the unemployment rate fallen if there are so few new jobs? It is simple: because 5 million people have given up looking for work and thus completely left the labor force during the recovery. Just since August, 2 million have left the work force.

Alas, the problem is even worse than these numbers indicate. The jobs created from June 2009 through April 2011 have almost all been temporary service jobs. Of the 535,000 new jobs, 500,000 were temporary jobs. Thus, just a measly 35,000 were permanent jobs. To put it differently, up until this last month, there had been no net increase in permanent jobs during the recovery.

The graphs I provide here show the monthly change in jobs using both measures of the total number of people employed since the beginning of the recession. Doing that shows that the job growth has been extremely flat even during the recovery.

Remember last year was supposed to be the long awaited “Summer of Recovery” for jobs? In May 2009, President Obama even declared that the Stimulus had started working and that improvement in the job market was near. By September 2009, Vice President Biden was declaring: “In my wildest dreams, I never thought it [the stimulus] would work this well.” But the graphs show virtually none of the lost jobs have been recovered.

Mr. Goolsbee has quite often had a tendency to pick and choose the data and time periods to twist the facts around (see here and here), but no matter what, it should be clear: this recovery is not adding many jobs.

John R. Lott, Jr. is an economist and author of the revised edition of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Liberals Whine While Heroes Do Their Dirty Work For Them

2011-05-09T10:14:00.000-05:00

By Michael Goodwin
Years ago, when my young son and I visited a dude ranch in Montana, a local rancher told us he butch ered his cows for meat. My son, Scott, who was only 7, was horrified. "You kill your own cows and eat them?" he asked with urban disgust.

The rancher answered with country logic, saying something like, "Well, how is that different from you eating cows that other people butcher?"

The exchange came back to me after yet another attack on the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation on Al Qaeda terrorists. It's a tiresome refrain under any circumstance, but especially now that the intelligence infrastructure built after 9/11 has paid such obvious dividends.

Indeed, critics can smugly mount their high horse of disgust only because somebody else was willing to do their dirty work for them. At least my son was a child when he showed a lack of knowledge about his hamburgers. So-called sophisticated adults have no excuse not to understand who and what is protecting them nearly 10 years after 9/11.

Numerous reports, including one from former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, that waterboarding started the daisy chain that led to the courier that led to Usama bin Laden's hideout, qualify as a distinctly inconvenient fact for hard-line liberals. They call waterboarding and other harsh techniques immoral and denounce supporters as apologists for torture.

And then they and their families ride the subway or an airplane or walk the street, believing they are safe. By and large, they are safe, thanks to the dedicated patriots whose heroic work does not allow for the snobbery that passes for moral superiority. The reality of war, warriors will tell you, leaves little margin for nuance.

Being forced to hear the hard facts about interrogation was only part of the misery Bin Laden's demise caused the Michael Moore set. The communication and surveillance technology that made possible the raid into Pakistan for the kill mission -- capture was not the goal -- vindicated the black arts of the CIA and Pentagon intelligence, two favorite targets of the professional left.

Then there's the helicopter that crashed, which the SEALs tried to destroy before they left. Pictures show a tail system unlike any other, a feature thought to represent advances in stealth know-how. It's the kind of machine made possible only by a "bloated" Pentagon budget that must now be slashed so expanding entitlements and binge spending can be protected.

Even the praise conservatives showered on President Obama must mortify his party's base. His Dirty Harry "Make My Day" attitude about the killing of Bin Laden earned him a poll vault primarily because Republicans and independents saw a side of him they liked. You might call the raid "American Exceptionalism" in action.

Murmurs from some on the right that Obama is milking the moment for political gain were drowned out by the cheers for him. His dignified silence at Ground Zero was the best speech never given.

Finally, there are the computers and documents the SEALs grabbed, a trove one official called a "mother lode of intelligence." The first piece to be analyzed showed talk of a plot to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with a fresh terror attack on American trains. It's a case of dividends compounded, with justice delivered for the past and a possible future attack thwarted -- making life safer for all Americans, even those who scorn their defenders.

The world is a better place for Bin Laden's death and, as the president said, May 1, 2011, was "a great day for America." It's a pity that some Americans won't honestly acknowledge how that greatness was achieved.

Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist.

Looks Like Maybe Trump Was Right After All

2011-05-05T14:33:00.003-05:00

Will Obama Now Admit That George Bush's Tough Stance In the War on Terror Was Right?

2011-05-03T09:40:00.000-05:00

By Van Hipp

Hallelujah! If one word best sums up the reaction of most Americans in the wake of Sunday night’s news that terror mastermind Usama bin Laden has finally met justice, that’s probably it.

The throngs of men and women who marked the occasion at Times Square, Ground Zero and outside the White House seemingly did so for all of us. And for many of those who lost loved ones in the dastardly attacks a decade ago, have friends or family who have served in our nation’s armed forces in the months and years that followed, or have any personal connection to that fateful day whatsoever, Sunday night’s revelation helped deliver a long overdue sense of closure. Hallelujah, indeed.

Questions about how the world’s top terrorist was allowed and possibly enabled to call Abbottabad, Pakistan home by that country are already being asked. As well they should. But when it comes to the issue of where the credit lies in ultimately bringing down bin Laden, no question is necessary.

The men and women of the U.S. military have always answered the call when our nation needed them most. Such has been the case since we were attacked in 2001 by terrorists seeking to destroy us and our way of life.

Working in concert with our country’s intelligence community, these brave heroes have taken the fight to Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks around the globe while strategically smoking out their leadership along the way. Despite many in the media’s best attempts to say otherwise, it’s an effort that is working and winning. Usama bin Laden’s death at the hands of an American-led operation executed by Navy Seals is pretty compelling evidence to that end.

President Obama should also be commended for signing off on the high-risk military operation that led to bin Laden’s demise and for not wavering when the chips were down. His leadership in the operation made a difference.

As for those in his administration who seem anxious to shamelessly score political points, however, they should tread very carefully. Remember, this is the same Barack Obama who campaigned vigorously in 2008 against many of the methods and tools which led to Sunday’s success.

And sadly, far too many of the actions he’s taken as president suggest Mr. Obama is less interested in delivering justice to terrorist thugs than delivering political correctness to the masses. Dumping the term, "War on Terror,' in favor of "Overseas Contingency Operation" (or is it ‘Man-Made Disasters’ this week?); pledging until just last month to try 9/11-conspirator Khalid Shaikh Mohammed before a civilian jury in New York City; signing orders to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp; and making speeches abroad apologizing for U.S. foreign relations are probably not the best ways to support our troops and convey conviction in the mission.

By the way, there’s one other person who deserves gratitude for helping ensure Usama bin Laden’s downfall at the wrong end of a Navy SEAL’s rifle. I’m thinking of the person who said in October of 2001, “We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail.” It’s also the same person who gave our courageous military members their marching orders as commander-in-chief almost 10 years ago: President George W. Bush.

It’s worth noting, Al Qaeda did not become a nemesis to our nation and the free world during President Bush’s time in office. The fingerprints of the terrorist network were on the 1993 attempted bombing of the World Trade Center that ultimately killed six and the 2000 attack against the USS Cole that left 17 sailors dead and over 30 injured. Both occurred on Bill Clinton’s watch as president.

It was, however, President Bush who led our nation through the aftermath of 9/11 by declaring an unequivocal ‘War on Terror;’ making and honoring every commitment to support it despite the political consequences; and keeping our country safe until the day he left office. Not surprisingly, reports now suggest that the intelligence which helped seal bin Laden’s fate was rooted in enhanced interrogation work and results that took place during President Bush’s administration.

Sunday’s successful operation was a major victory in the ongoing battle to defeat the murderous terrorists who continue to have the United States in their crosshairs. And President Obama’s role with it is an encouraging sign for many reasons. Here’s hoping he’s finally realized his predecessor’s tough stance on terrorism was right all along.

Van D. Hipp Jr. is chairman of American Defense International, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm specializing in government affairs, business development and public relations. He is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Army.

UBL Is now In Hell! But who really put him there?

2011-05-02T08:57:00.002-05:00

As we rejoice over the news that Usama Bin Laden is now feeding the fishes (I love the euphemism the media is using about him being "buried at sea." You have to KNOW that those SEALS just dumped his carcass out the door of that Blackhawk helo like a bag of trash), I'd like to take a moment and reflect back a few years ago. Back to when all the bleeding heart liberals were screaming about how it was illegal for George Bush to capture terrorist scum on the battle field and ship them to Gitmo. How it was illegal to not turn them over to be tried by civilian courts (yeah, that went over really big a short time ago when they tried that guy and the scumbag got acquitted of all the charged except one - a bullshit conspiracy charge), but more importantly how it was absolutely criminal to subject these poor detainees to enhanced interrogation techniques, even if it never endangered their lives, but saved American lives.

Now, of course, we find out that if it weren't for having the intel garnered from those same detainees at Gitmo, probably derived as a result of some form of interrogation, that we probably would still be looking for Usama in some cave on the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, rather than in the heart of Pakistan, living in the lap of luxury.

I’d like to hear these same left-wing liberal slime who had such affection for the poor detainees, tell us now that finding and killing this slime bag Bin Laden wasn’t worth inconveniencing those murdering, terrorist scum we have sitting in Gitmo. These are probably some of the same people who are jumping up and down for joy that their savior, Obama, announced that ‘he’ got Usama, when it was the efforts and courage of the past administration, and some brave Navy SEALS, who actually made it possible - Obama at best being marked down with an assist. Yes, I’m sure these same bleeding heart liberals, along with all the talking heads in the lame-stream media who are now jubilant over the demise of Bin Laden, are conveniently forgetting who and what exactly made it possible for this to happen. Of course, no one ever said liberal, left-wing loons were anything but a bunch of hypocrites.

A List That Explains Most Everything

2011-04-28T10:27:00.000-05:00

The 15 top reasons why we all should vote for Obama and the Democrats:

1. I voted Democrat because I believe oil companies’ profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene, but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn’t.

2. I voted Democrat because I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.

3. I voted Democrat because Freedom of Speech is fine as long as nobody is offended by it or it applies to radical Democrats only!

4. I voted Democrat because I’m way too irresponsible to own a gun, and I know that my local police are all I need to protect myself from murderers and thieves.

5. I voted Democrat because I believe that people who can’t tell us if it will rain on Friday can tell us that the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don’t start driving a Prius.

6. I voted Democrat because I’m not concerned about millions of babies being aborted so long as we keep all death row inmates alive.

7. I voted Democrat because I think illegal aliens have a right to free health care, education, and Social Security benefits paid by American tax payers.

8. I voted Democrat because I believe that business should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. They need to break even and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as the Democrats see fit.

9. I voted Democrat because I believe liberal judges need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who would never get their agendas past the voters.

10. I voted Democrat because I think that it’s better to pay billions to people who hate us for their oil, but not drill our own because it might upset some endangered beetle or gopher.

11. I voted Democrat because while we live in the greatest, most wonderful country in the world, I was promised “HOPE AND CHANGE”.

12. I vote Democrat because I think unions should be allowed to exhort money from everyone to buy Democrat Politicians!

13. I vote Democrat because I believe the federal government can do a much better jobs deciding what medicine and medical treatment I need then me or my Doctor.

14. I vote Democrat because I believe the invading horde of illegal aliens, welfare leeches, criminals and the lazy deserve my money more than I do.

15. I vote Democrat because my head is so firmly planted up my butt, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever have another point of view.

First Posted by Gary DeMar on April 6, 2011

Thanks Gary!

Obama the Tax Hypocrite

2011-04-26T15:01:00.000-05:00

By Kevin McCullough

President Barack Obama is a hypocrite. He is not willing to practice what he preaches when it comes to taxes. And in so doing, he is exposing the lack of importance his own agenda really carries -- even in his own household.

Let me lay it out for you:

In the 2008 campaign, then-Senator Obama repeatedly scoffed at the tax rates for the majority of the small business class of our country. He repeatedly chided those in the tax bracket that included the highest number of small business owners. He declared that these folks would need to do "more" and suggested that everybody should, "do their share."

He also promised that if he were elected president he would increase tax rates for those making over $250,000 per year, that he would force those in that tax bracket to do more, and that it would be the true measure of patriotism for this group of Americans to pay more in taxes.

He spoke in glowing terms about returning the tax rates in his administration to the levels of the Clinton-era, and challenged those earning above $250,000 a year to embrace their responsibility to pay 39% in federal income taxes (not the rate at the time, which was then 35% under President George W. Bush.)

In his debt reduction speech earlier this month he made his fourth attempt at explaining how he would reduce the deficit. He returned to the idea that those in the top earnings bracket ought to pay what he refers to, constantly, as "their fair share." He insisted that he personally didn't need "yet another tax cut." And he scoffed at the notion that any deficit reduction plan ought to include a tax break.

To hear Mr. Obama rail against those who earn big paychecks you could only come away convinced that this was a president who was as committed to using taxes to reduce the deficit as any president we'd ever seen.

And then we saw his tax return.

In 2010 President Obama earned well over $250,000 in total family income.

In fact the Obama household--after every loophole, donation, and tax exempt charitable donation had been deducted --recorded earnings of $1,700,000 and change. To repeat, this wasn't gross earnings, this was adjusted earnings. This is the amount that he the president had a responsibility to pay taxes on.

For those of you who weren't able to quickly do the math, that's $1,450,000 over the $250,000 in income that he wants to tax at 39 percent -- maximum level in taxes we saw during the Clinton era.

From reports concerning the president's tax returns, however, it looks like he paid roughly $454,000 and change in federal taxes. Sounds like a lot doesn't it?

It is... to most people. But on taxable income of $1,700,000 that only works out to be just a tad more than 26 percent. Whoa! Wait a minute... The president--who had a taxable income of $1,700,000--paid how much?

Had President Obama voluntarily paid his taxes at the rate he believes everyone else in his income bracket ought to pay (39%) in federal taxes, he SHOULD have paid $663,000.

But wait there's more... To put the cherry on top of the sundae, President Obama even received a tax refund back from the government of $12,000.

Last week following his deficit reduction speech--or as I like to call it--the Obama 2012 campaign kick-off event--the president made a series of stops across the country pitching the idea of taxing people in his own income bracket at a much higher level than the amount they currently pay.

I wonder how many of those in the audience at each of these campaign stops even had a clue about what President Obama himself has just paid in taxes. Did they know that he's forking over about $200,000 less per year than what he suggests they ought to pay? And that he got a $12,000 rebate to boot?

Like the phony group of "millionaires" who held press conferences after the president's "deficit reduction" speech and declared they wished to be paying more in taxes, let me remind the president, just as I did the millionaires: the IRS does accept donations.

In fact here's the address: "Internal Revenue Service, Washington D.C., 20001"

So Mr. President before you give your next speech and recommend that those in your own income bracket suggesting that they should be "ponying up" and "doing more" when will you be cutting your own check and putting your money where your mouth is?

In my new book, "No He Can't," I carefully examine the hypocrisy of what our current president does vs. what he says in several areas. It is designed to be great reading as we approach the debate over deficit reduction--or as I like to call it, campaign 2012.

Leadership is not created from simply a cult of personality. It is not doing one thing, while saying something else. Real leadership is acting with clarity when crises present themselves. At this moment, it is something the American executive branch sorely lacks.

Kevin McCullough is the nationally syndicated host of "The Kevin McCullough Show." His newest book, "No He Can't: How Barack Obama is Dismantling Hope and Change" is in stores now.

On Easter Sunday and Always, Remember the Sacrifice of Our Military Men and Women

2011-04-22T11:41:00.000-05:00

By KT McFarland

Editor's note: K.T. McFarland has just returned from visiting U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Lent is the season when many Christians offer sacrifice. We give up chocolate, or bread, or steer clear of eating meat on Fridays as a symbol of Christ’s 40 days in the desert. If we make it all the way through Lent to Easter, we’re proud of ourselves, maybe even a little smug and self-righteous for our ability to do without.

Last week I was in Afghanistan and saw what our military men and women do without every day. Things like the sound of their children’s laughter….a peck on the cheek from a loved one while dashing out the door to work…..flopping down on the sofa to relax in front of the TV after a long day…a hot shower….a home-cooked meal…a soft mattress and clean sheets.

But our servicemen and women do without those things for weeks on end, for months at a time. Our active duty forces are in combat for longer periods and with less time at home than ever before. Our reserve forces are being called up more frequently deployed longer.

Our servicemen and women are stretched to the breaking point, and increasingly isolated from the rest of American society. Only 1% of Americans serve in the military in our all-volunteer forces, and it is too easy for the other 99% of us to ignore their sacrifices.

When our forces are deployed overseas, it is 24/7, with no weekends off, no R&R trips away from the front lines. -- Because in modern warfare everything is the front line. You don’t know who your enemy is, because he’s not wearing a uniform. He’s wearing a long, loose-fitting shirt (kamiz shalwar) that could just be baggy….or cover a suicide vest. You could be the target of a sniper hidden on a rooftop, or walk over an IED buried under a harmless looking rock.

Last week I was sitting in a small restaurant at the “Milano”, the recreation center at the ISAF base in Kabul, taking advantage of the great wireless reception to read my e-mails.

In a small table in the corner, a young man in full combat gear sat in front of his open laptop, earphones plugged in and laughing and chatting away. He was skyping with his family; it sounded like he had young children. When he closed the laptop, and took out his earphones, he pressed a hand to his eyes and brushed away the beginnings of a tear. Somehow my "sacrifice" of giving up chocolate for Lent seemed pathetically inadequate.

Whatever you may think about the war in Afghanistan, or Iraq or Libya, remember our military men and women this Easter weekend. Say a special prayer for their safe return, and when you see someone in uniform, give them your thanks.

Kathleen Troia "K.T." McFarland is a Fox News National Security Analyst and host of FoxNews.com's DefCon 3. She served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, and wrote Secretary of Defense Weinberger’s November 1984 "Principles of War Speech" which laid out the Weinberger Doctrine. Be sure to watch "K.T." every Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET on FoxNews.com's "DefCon3"-- already one of the Web's most watched national security programs.

MICHAEL GOODWIN: Obama's Living In Fiscal Fantasyland

2011-04-19T09:07:00.002-05:00

By Michael Goodwin

Elections have consequences, we are told, but the admonition usually refers to how results shape subsequent events. Yet as last week's huge battle over puny budget trims proved, America already is suffering from an election that is still 18 months away.

Blame President Obama. By waiting until Republicans offered a bold plan to address the staggering debt and deficit problems, then countering with a partisan attack that lacked any serious reforms, he signaled that no major changes will happen until voters speak in 2012.

Indeed, he defined his sketchy financial plan in pure political terms, saying it is "an attempt to clarify the choice that we have as a country right now."

Like many of Obama's claims, this one is both technically accurate and not true. Voters have a "choice" only to the extent that they must choose between fantasy and reality.

Obama's plan resides firmly in the fantasy camp. His vision is that America's financial problems can be fixed by raising taxes on 2 percent of the population. Everything else will take care of itself, or Congress will do something about it down the road.

His is not a plan as much as it is a placeholder while he tries to rally his party's ultra-liberal, anti-business base. He is already in cheap populism mode, telling supporters at a Chicago fund-raiser he "reformed Wall Street so you won't get cheated when you apply for mortgages or take out credit cards."

Contrast that with the more realistic vision of Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. While Ryan's plan, passed Friday by the House, is incomplete and far from perfect, his starting point is honesty: The nation cannot continue on its current path because entitlement spending, especially for health care, will take the country over the cliff. No amount of tax hikes can keep up with the explosion of climbing costs and existing debt, or, as Ryan puts it: "We don't have a problem with our budget because Americans don't pay enough taxes. We have problems with our budget because we spend too much money."

He proposes fundamental changes to save nearly $6 trillion over a decade, including making Medicaid a block-grant program so states can administer it more efficiently. He also proposes a voucher program for Medicare for those under 55. Those already in the program or age 55 and above would not see any reduced benefits.

While both Republicans and Obama are guilty of pushing plans they know the other side won't accept, they are not equally guilty with regard to the fundamental problem. As Ryan argues, comparing his plan to what exists now, as Obama does, is "measuring us against a fiscal fallacy . . . against a future that's not going to happen."

Changes are necessary because the current programs will bankrupt the nation in less than a generation. In fact, some economists warn that a debt crisis could happen in less than five years.

The only choice, then, is what the changes are and how we get there. By failing to be honest about that basic fact and refusing to work now to build a consensus, Obama shows he is willing to forfeit the responsibility of leadership and waste the remainder of his term. Even worse, he intentionally distorts the GOP plan to scare voters.

"Under their vision, we can't invest in roads and bridges and broadband and high-speed rail," Obama told the Chicago crowd. "I mean, we would be a nation of potholes, and our airports would be worse than places that we thought -- that we used to call the Third World."

He went on to say: "That's what the 2012 campaign is going to be about."

His hard-line stance is an admission that nothing significant will change as long as he is in the White House.

Which is pretty amazing when you think about it: He's now the candidate fighting to protect the status quo. And Republicans are the Party of change.

True story.

Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist.

Obama Pushes Healthcare Reform…Again!

2011-04-18T07:50:00.002-05:00

By Liz Peek

President Obama is in full campaign mode, now promising to Fix Our Budget Deficits!

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama as Cost-cutter is about as believable as Buffy as Vampire-slayer; meanwhile, the need to rally his liberal base is paramount. Consequently, he has offered up juicy sound bites about hitting up “millionaires and billionaires” and a promise -- not to raise taxes, which might not play well on prime time -- but rather to cut “tax expenditures.”

In other words, we are now being treated to more Obama gobbledegook, from the same press office that came up with “kinetic military action” and “man-caused disasters”. And – this is a president that ran on transparency!

The president’s budget speech should, however, be welcomed by Republicans. President Obama unwittingly gave the GOP a rallying cry for the 2012 campaign. In (finally) putting forth his proposal to narrow our country’s long-term budget deficits, Mr. Obama all but acknowledged that Medicare and Medicaid – which Obama has called the “single biggest contributors to our long-term deficit” -- remain open sores, oozing red ink into the foreseeable future.

Stop a minute for this to sink in. After all the disruptive skirmishing and chicanery that finally paved the way for Obamacare, we now find that we are again going to the mattresses --- over healthcare costs. Does no one else find this a complete and perfect indictment of the cynically titled Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that Mr. Obama sold the nation? In effect, the president makes clear that his gigantic healthcare bill, that divided the country when it needed healing, did not fix the problem. Republicans should fasten onto this virtual admission like limpets.

Remember the promises? “We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of healthcare….This plan will strengthen Medicare and extend the life of that program. And because it gets rid of the waste and inefficiencies in our health care system, this will be the largest deficit reduction plan in over a decade.” Moreover, Mr. Obama touted the cost-saving nature of the bill: “whatever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve and starting to reduce costs…those elements are in this bill.” Most important, the president emphasized that the bill “has to be budget neutral, it’s got to be deficit neutral…”

It turns out that Obamacare did not bend the cost curve, was not budget neutral and in fact added to the country’s swollen government healthcare budget. Is anyone surprised?

What is surprising is that President Obama is now ramping up to make the debate over healthcare a cornerstone of his reelection campaign. This is unexpected because so far Obamacare has not won the president many friends, except from his liberal base. Democrats continue to say the fault is in the messaging – that it was not “sold” properly. Rubbish! President Obama, who early in his tenure was extremely popular, spent months and months criss-crossing the country, giving dozens of speeches that extolled its virtues. Nonetheless, Americans remain neutral at best on Obamacare. They would surely be even more negative except that the large taxes incorporated into the bill have not begun to kick in—those were cleverly designed to become effective only after Mr. Obama ran for re-election.

Republicans need to broadcast what the debate over Obama’s healthcare bill cost the nation. At a time when confidence was shattered by the financial crisis, when businesses were terrified by plummeting demand and needed reassurance, we had instead a president focused on his legacy.

Over the protests of business managers big and small, the president insisted on changing the cost of hiring workers, and flipping upside down existing insurance programs offered to employees. Even as millions of Americans lost their jobs, the president was consumed with the historic nature of his quest.

Economist and former senator Phil Gramm makes the real cost of Obamacare clear. He compares our current recovery to those that followed the other ten recessions that have occurred since World War II. He says that if this bounce-back had kept pace with those of other cycles, GDP would be significantly higher than it is today, and nearly 12 million more Americans would have jobs. As he acknowledges, Obama supporters will argue that this case was unusual because of the depth of the downturn. Mr. Gramm points out that historically “the bigger the bust, the bigger the boom” that follows. The numbers don’t lie. In past recessions, three years after the downturn, real GDP had increased 7.6% beyond the pre-recession level. Today, GDP is only 0.1% higher.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the real cost of Obamacare. Of course, it is not just the health bill that so unsettled the country, and most importantly the country’s employers. Attempts to change labor rules facilitating union organizing, ramped up antitrust and labor prosecutions, extensive new environmental regulations, the monstrously complex financial bill – they all played a role in setting back our recovery. But Obamacare got the ball rolling.

As we head into the 2012 campaign, Republicans should ask voters, why should you give President Obama another shot at fixing the double disasters of Medicare and Medicaid? Hasn’t he damaged our country enough?

Civil War Anniversary -- Are We Still a Nation Divided?

2011-04-12T14:35:00.001-05:00

By Peter Roff

One hundred and fifty years ago today, troops loyal to the newly-formed Confederate States of America opened fire on Fort Sumter, a U.S. military outpost located in Charleston, South Carolina.

In response, President Abraham Lincoln called for the raising of an army of volunteers to recapture federal property in the states that had seceded, prompting four more to leave the union, meaning the battle was on.

Hindsight being twenty-twenty, it is easy to see how things had progressed to that point. For years the Democrats had won presidential election after presidential election by electing northerners sympathetic to the South’s insistence on the preservation, even the expansion of slavery. Even though the period produced some of the greatest debates in its history Congress likewise failed to adequately address the issue – crafting compromise after compromise in an effort to forestall what can now be seen as inevitable. The ensuing war divided the nation as never before, pitting brother against brother and state against state in a costly conflict that was not resolved even after the shooting stopped.

There are those who suggest the nation is once again as divided as it was a century and a half ago. Those who do are either poor students of history or simply engaged in hyperbole. The union is strong and does not show signs of pulling apart as it did in 1861. Yet while slavery (which is and was always indefensible) is no longer an issue there is subtext to the current political debates regarding the size and scope of the federal government, its relationship to the individual states and the freedom of the individual that faintly echoes the concerns of those who engaged in the decades-long political and intellectual argument that dominated the era preceding the Civil War.

There were those who held to the position that the union was a voluntary compact, entered into by the individual states and from which they could withdraw if they chose. The war settled that issue but the growth in the power of the federal state, particularly in the regulatory arena and in its lust for taxes and extravagant way it spends money have revived the idea that the states may need to in a way that places controls on the federal government.

These ideas are varied and include such suggestions as the abolition of the direct election of senators, which would restore the importance of the states as political entities – rather than the voters of the states – in the federal system. They also include a state initiated constitutional convention to offer a balanced budget amendment and a proposal that would allow a majority of the states acting in concert to render invalid actions taken by the federal government.

With all that, unlike in 1861, the nation remains strong and united. These debates, even those that contemplate placing limits on the power of the federal government are vigorous, robust and have energized the public in ways not seen for several score years. There is nothing sinister or un-American about these discussions; they are part of the enduring life blood of the nation. Those who pretend this is not so are merely seeking a shortcut to end the conversation while continuing to increase the power of the central government.

No one can predict how these debates will turn out. The recent budget agreement to actually cut federal spending suggests the birth of a new era may be at hand, one in which the American people retake responsibility for their lives in a way that rejects the cradle-to-grave “Nanny state” European-style socialism toward which the nation has been headed since the onset of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whether or not this is a new trend or an aberration will only become clear after the 2012 national election.

What is clear is that the nation has progressed mightily beyond where it was at the onset of the Civil War, both as a world power and in the way that the equal rights of its citizens are regarded and protected. It was a long, hard road but it has taken us all to a better place.

Peter Roff is a senior fellow at the non-partisan Institute for Liberty as well as a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report

As a footnote, there were over 600,000 casualties in the Civil War, but the only casualty in the first battle at Ft. Sumter - which started the war - was one old mule. Kind of Ironic, eh?

Is American “Exceptionalism” being destroyed by American “Acceptionalism?”

2011-04-06T08:13:00.001-05:00

America was built upon the Judeo-Christian principle that man has been endowed by our Creator God with the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Man, including government, existed under the authority of God.

Life was recognized as the first “right.” Human Life was to be protected as the most precious of creation. Taking of a life, whether by violent act or abortion, was illegal in each state in America. Without “Life,” Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are not even possible. This belief made America “exceptional.” It was understood that someone’s perception of the "Pursuit of Happiness" did not trump another’s "Right to Life."

Today, many Americans have become “acceptional” on the issue of life. Many ACCEPT challenges to the right to life, deferring to convenience, feelings, momentary preference.

“Sovereignty” was recognized as the right of America to exist apart from other nations and people. While we welcomed immigrants, the requirement that immigrants forsake loyalty to other nations, systems, and principles in exchange for acceptance in America was recognized as necessary in order for the “Exceptionalism” of America to continue to exist and thrive.

Today, Liberal Progressivism tells us that we should ACCEPT anyone, any system, any preference. That even those who come to America illegally should receive tax payer support and all the benefits of citizenship, including the right to vote, even if it affects the very existence of America. All should be welcomed even if their intent is to destroy America from within.

“Freedom of Religion” meant that, while America is clearly based upon Judeo-Christian belief and principle, no single Christian Denomination was to be declared as the official one of America. To be American meant that we acknowledge our Declaration of Independence, that we acknowledge the authority of our Constitution as Law, and that we acknowledge the concept of “Freedom of Religion.”

Today, we are told that we must ACCEPT people into America who neither acknowledge the Constitution as the basis of our Legal System nor who believe in the concept of “Freedom of Religion” and allow them an ACCEPTION to these basic principles while they seek to implement their own Legal / Religious system in America.

Leadership in America meant that people, having proven themselves worthy of such position, were given the privilege of serving in a STEWARDSHIP capacity of America, our Constitution, our Laws, our Sovereignty, our Freedoms, our Culture, our Standards. Anyone who failed to live up to this responsibility and honor would be removed.

Today we have “leadership” that states their intention of “fundamentally changing America and the world,” that seeks to “redistribute wealth” within America and around the world, that apologizes for American Exceptionalism or denies its existence. They ignore the rule of law. National sovereignty and borders mean nothing. They have stated that Americans are ready for “Socialism and Communism.” They operate on a belief that what exists in America must be destroyed in order to replace all things American with the new, progressive views. Evil rules in America today.

It is time to recognize that if all things can be American, then to be American means nothing.

The most evil thing one can do is to refuse to call that which is evil, evil.

We must choose between American “Exceptionalism” and American “Acceptionalism?” They can’t co-exist.

Ameritianity.com

'Let Me Go... I Want to be a Martyr'

2011-04-04T11:07:00.001-05:00

Pakistani police identify the 14-year-old boy (left) as Fida Hussain, a Taliban suicide bomber whose vest failed to fully detonate during an attack on a crowded Sufi shrine. The attack left at least 42 dead — and as Fida's wounds were being tended to, he defiantly said, 'Let me go, I want to be a martyr... I want to send all you policemen to hell.'

The religion of peace and love...

President Obama and Libya -- Now the Media Support a President Waging Another War In the Middle East

2011-04-01T13:15:00.000-05:00

By Dan Gainor

Where have all the war protesters gone, long time passing?

They’re mostly backing Obama’s attack on Libya or at least keeping quiet so they don’t aid those evil conservatives intent on criticizing the president. More moderate lefties had once promised a third way. Now we find out that was a typo. It’s not a third way, it’s a third war.

President Obama, who was swept in on a tide of anti-war sentiment and anger over GOP spending, is now running yet another unpopular war and spending more than any president in history. If the GOP tried this, the news media would beat them with their microphones. But because it’s the president with journalists in his back pocket, there is little controversy.

It wasn’t so long ago that Code Pinkers were the darlings of journalism. You could find them across the media landscape. The Washington Post had lovingly huge features on them titled “Protesting for Peace With a Vivid Hue and Cry; Code Pink's Tactics: Often Theatrical, Always Colorful.” “Bring the troops home,” that 2007 story ended. Four years later, we know no one on the left really wanted to send the troops home. They just wanted to send Bush home.

Or there was the Code Pink protester confronting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Capitol Hill hearing. As The Post described it, “an antiwar protester shouted ‘War criminal!’ and waved blood-colored hands in her face.” Who hasn’t seen that picture? The news ran that so often it was like they got royalties. (News outlets are desperate for cash these days.)

Or how about Cindy Sheehan protesting in Texas outside the Bush ranch? She and others were there long enough that they could claim squatters rights. Sheehan is still anti-war, but the crowd behind her has thinned to a bridge game.

Where did that crowd go? There are no major anti-war rallies on the mall. The crazy lefties that flock to an ANSWER event are nowhere to be seen. There aren’t enough liberals singing “give peace a chance” to fill up your average coffee house.

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Libyan troops had “been planting bodies ‘of the people he's killed’ at the site of allied air strikes” media outlets reported it dutifully. Had the hated Don Rumsfeld said as much, the sound of media laughter would have been heard from sea to shining sea.

Yes, a few left-wingers have complained about Obama’s attack on Libya. “Fahrenheit 9/11” director Michael Moore used Twitter to criticize the president, urging “a 50-mile evacuation zone around Obama’s Nobel Peace prize.” But there is no organized resistance because he’s on their team.

The 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal gave journalists the chance to talk about the evils of war and blame them on George W. Bush. The Post did more than 1,700 Abu Ghraib stories and about 800 of those mention Bush. A new scandal involves an alleged “‘kill team’ of soldiers,” and their purported crimes. It was shocking enough that Rolling Stone wrote more than 8,000 words how “U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses.”

One word wasn’t in that report: Obama. The commander-in-chief.

I wonder what the leftover hippies would have to chant about that. Oh, that’s right, they don’t chant, they’re enchanted with Obama.

Some liberals claim the right is echoing Qaddafi by linking the rebels to Al Qaeda. The implication is that conservatives are defending the dictator for political reasons. No sane person would defend that monster. Obama said Qaddafi “denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized innocent people around the world.” He’s right. Qaddafi has funded terrorism, been responsible for the horrific Lockerbie bombing and attacked his own people with jets.

But by that measure, half the leaders in the world should be attacked and maybe more. Qaddafi is an amateur when it comes to butchery and mayhem. There’s Kim Jong-Il in North Korea who has nuclear weapons, blackmails his neighbors and starves his own population by the millions.

Or Bashar al-Assad, who inherited his presidency from his monstrous dear old dad. The Assads back terror both against Israel and American troops in Iraq, repress their own people and shoot them in the street as needed.

The list, while thankfully not endless, is still monumentally long. From Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, to the Castros in Cuba to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, there are plenty of targets to go around. Most on that list would laugh at what Qaddafi has done and consider it minor by comparison. And most of those would be hard-pressed to compete with Saddam Hussein.

You remember Hussein? Started wars. Invaded his neighbors. Oppressed his own people. Gassed his own people. His secret police were widely feared. Human rights groups regularly complained about his numerous violations. His sons were just as evil, raping almost as a hobby. Hussein was even “condemned by the United Nations' top human rights body for conducting a campaign of ‘all pervasive repression and widespread terror.’”

Yet journalists and the left have spent years claiming that was a bad war or a “war for oil.” It’s easy to say the same about Libya, yet here we are, once again, in a new war and the media simply pick the side with the “D” after its name.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture.

Obama's Words Ring Hollow In His Energy Speech

2011-03-30T13:57:00.002-05:00

By Phil Kerpen

President Obama's speech Wednesday can't obscure the fact that his is the most adamantly anti-energy administration since at least Jimmy Carter.

Today, Obama touted a tiny number of permit approvals and said that proves his administration isn’t anti-energy. Give me a break. Between the lengthy, unlawful moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, the de facto moratorium in Alaska that is being challenged by the state in court, the EPA's astonishing regulatory agenda to “skin the cat” of imposing huge energy taxes, and a slew of insane land policies from the Department of the Interior designed to cut off access, this administration bears significant responsibility for surging energy prices.

Consider the words of the man Obama hired as his top adviser on science and technology, John P. Holdren:

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. . . . Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries. This effort must be largely political.”

A president who would hire such a man cannot credibly deny, as he did today, that his administration has been extremely anti-energy.

Obama also touted a so-called Clean Energy Standard, and by "clean energy" he means politically-favored, economically-questionable, and highly-unreliable windmills and solar panels. Of course, the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. You can’t run a modern economy without affordable coal, oil, and natural gas. Countries that have tried -- like Spain, Germany, and the U.K. – have ruined themselves economically. (And of course green groups will sue to block “clean energy” the same way they sue to block everything else.)

The biggest irony of Obama pretending to be pro-energy today of all days is that the Senate is debating whether or not to stop his EPA’s astonishing global warming power grab. As this new web video shows, the EPA agenda amounts to Obama’s same extreme, anti-energy, high-tax effort that was decisively rejected in the past election.

Until Obama calls off the dogs at EPA, fully lifts the de facto moratoria on drilling in the Gulf and Alaska, and green-lights development of our abundant natural resources on-shore, his words will continue to ring hollow, and Americans will continue to suffer as energy prices continue to increase and jobs continue to be lost.

Phil Kerpen is vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity and the author of the forthcoming book "Democracy Denied" (BenBella Books, October 2011) on Obama’s extreme regulatory agenda.

What's Really Behind Obama's New Push for Gun Control?

2011-03-25T09:12:00.000-05:00

By John Lott

Despite the Libyan crisis and ongoing problems with America's massive deficit, last week President Obama decided it was time to focus on gun control. He wrote an op-ed, challenged the NRA to negotiate new gun control regulations, and met with gun control groups.

Of course, Obama's op-ed says he supports gun rights. Yet, he also emphasizes that he doesn't want people to "shout at one another" and supports "reasonable laws." Alas, this is simply positioning for the 2012 presidential election and does not accurately describe his true agenda on gun control.

Obama claimed in his op-ed: “My administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners, it has expanded them, including allowing people to carry their guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.” But he conveniently forgot to mention that he never initiated or supported this legislation. Instead, it was forced upon Obama by a large majority of Congress passing an amendment to a bill that he wanted passed, the “Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2009.” Just because Obama wasn’t willing to veto a bill he wanted hardly shows support for the right to self-defense.

Indeed, Obama has been a consistent opponent of gun ownership. He enacted a ban on the importation of semiautomatic guns because, “The U.S. insisted that imports of the aging rifles could cause problems such as firearm accidents.” He has proposed much more extensive reporting requirements on sales of long guns. Obama’s nomination of anti-gun Andrew Traver to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives threatens imposing many new regulations. Still further, the Obama administration has actively pushed for the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty and continues to make inaccurate statements about the source of Mexico’s crime guns.

And look at the judges President Obama nominated to the Supreme Court. Both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have proven themselves to be adamantly against any protection for individual ownership of guns. The stark reality is if Justices Alito, Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, or Kennedy were to die or retire, the two precedents set in both the Washington, D.C. and Chicago gun bans would be threatened as these were narrow 5 to 4 decisions.

The president's op-ed did not exactly present compelling logic for new gun laws. Everyone is concerned about potential future mass shootings like the incident in Tucson in early January, which left six dead and 13 wounded including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

But we go from his concern that "A man our Army rejected as unfit for service; a man one of our colleges deemed too unstable for studies; a man apparently bent on violence, was able to walk into a store and buy a gun" to a call for more background checks as the solution. Yet, Mr. Obama neither advocates eliminating the military's privacy guarantee nor does he even discuss the objections to making such a change (such as it preventing recruits from talking openly). Instead, he makes vague promises for legislation that would correct “porous background checks.”

Everyone wants a perfect, almost magical solution that will stop criminals from getting their hands on guns. But, unfortunately, background checks do not stop bad guys from getting their hands on guns. Not a single academic study by economists or criminologists has found that the Brady Act or any state background checks has reduced violent crime.

Instead, the Brady Act background checks for gun purchases, in place since 1994, are a problem for law-abiding citizens. Hardly ever do background checks deny guns to criminals. Over 99.9 percent of purchases initially flagged as being illegal under the law were “false positives” – law-abiding citizens incorrectly identified as banned individuals.

Take the numbers for 2008, the latest year with data available. The 78,906 initial denials resulted in only 147 cases involving banned individuals trying to purchase guns being referred to prosecutors. Of those 147 cases, prosecutors thought the evidence was strong enough to prosecute only 105, and they won convictions in just 43. But few of these 43 cases involved career criminals or those who posed real threats. The typical case was someone who had a misdemeanor conviction for an offense he didn't realize prevented him from buying a gun.

Even those who aren't prevented from buying a gun face delays in getting approved. Eight percent of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System checks are "not resolved immediately." Two-thirds of those checks take up to 3 business days, and the rest take even longer, though these further delays can't stop one from obtaining a gun at that point.

Others would greatly add to these errors by banning more people from buying guns. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) proposes that those who have been arrested, but neither charged nor convicted, for illegal drug violations should be denied buying guns. If prosecutors don’t believe that enough evidence exists to charge someone with a marijuana possession, isn’t there a reasonable chance that they are innocent?

The president isn’t alone in pushing for more gun-control. But at least these other politicians, such as Schumer and Mayor Bloomberg, are a lot more forthright about their intentions than Obama. Perhaps that should be so so surprising since Obama will soon face re-election in all parts of the country, including in those areas that he famously labeled as being populated by “bitter” Americans who “cling to their guns, cling to their religion,” not just a smaller Democratic-leaning constituency.

John R. Lott, Jr is an economist and author of ”More Guns, Less Crime” (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Why Are the Media Ignoring Plans By George Soros to Remake the Entire Global Economy?

2011-03-23T15:47:00.002-05:00

By Dan Gainor

Two years ago, George Soros said he wanted to reorganize the entire global economic system. In two short weeks, he is going to start – and no one seems to have noticed.

On April 8, a group he’s funded with $50 million is holding a major economic conference and Soros’s goal for such an event is to “establish new international rules” and “reform the currency system.” It’s all according to a plan laid out in a Nov. 4, 2009, Soros op-ed calling for “a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order.”

The event is bringing together “more than 200 academic, business and government policy thought leaders” to repeat the famed 1944 Bretton Woods gathering that helped create the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Soros wants a new “multilateral system,” or an economic system where America isn’t so dominant.

More than two-thirds of the slated speakers have direct ties to Soros. The billionaire who thinks “the main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat” is taking no chances.

Thus far, this global gathering has generated less publicity than a spelling bee. And that’s with at least four journalists on the speakers list, including a managing editor for the Financial Times and editors for both Reuters and The Times. Given Soros’s warnings of what might happen without an agreement, this should be a big deal. But it’s not.

What is a big deal is that Soros is doing exactly what he wanted to do. His 2009 commentary pushed for “a new Bretton Woods conference, like the one that established the post-WWII international financial architecture.” And he had already set the wheels in motion.

Just a week before that op-ed was published, Soros had founded the New York City-based Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the group hosting the conference set at the Mount Washington Resort, the very same hotel that hosted the first gathering. The most recent INET conference was held at Central European University, in Budapest. CEU received $206 million from Soros in 2005 and has $880 million in its endowment now, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This, too, is a gathering of Soros supporters. INET is bringing together prominent people like former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Soros, to produce “a lot of high-quality, breakthrough thinking.”

While INET claims more than 200 will attend, only 79 speakers are listed on its site – and it already looks like a Soros convention. Twenty-two are on Soros-funded INET’s board and three more are INET grantees. Nineteen are listed as contributors for another Soros operation – Project Syndicate, which calls itself “the world's pre-eminent source of original op-ed commentaries” reaching “456 leading newspapers in 150 countries.” It’s financed by Soros’s Open Society Institute. That’s just the beginning.

The speakers include:

• Volcker who is chairman of President Obama’s Economic Advisory Board. He wrote the forward for Soros’s best-known book, “The Alchemy of Finance” and praised Soros as “an enormously successful speculator” who wrote “with insight and passion” about the problems of globalization.

• Economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of The Earth Institute and longtime recipient of Soros charity cash. Sachs received $50 million from Soros for the U.N. Millennium Project, which he also directs. Sachs is world-renown for his liberal economics. In 2009, for example, he complained about low U.S. taxes, saying the “U.S. will have to raise taxes in order to pay for new spending initiatives, especially in the areas of sustainable energy, climate change, education, and relief for the poor.”

• Soros friend Joseph E. Stiglitz, a former senior vice president and chief economist for the World Bank and Nobel Prize winner in Economics. Stiglitz shares similar views to Soros and has criticized free-market economists whom he calls “free market fundamentalists.” Naturally, he’s on the INET board and is a contributor to Project Syndicate.

• INET Executive Director Rob Johnson, a former managing director at Soros Fund Management, who is on the Board of Directors for the Soros-funded Economic Policy Institute. Johnson has complained that government intervention in the fiscal crisis hasn’t been enough and wanted “restructuring,” including asking “for letters of resignation from the top executives of all the major banks.”

Have no doubt about it: This is a Soros event from top to bottom. Even Soros admits his ties to INET are a problem, saying, “there is a conflict there which I fully recognize.” He claims he stays out of operations. That’s impossible. The whole event is his operation.

INET isn’t subtle about its aims for the conference. Johnson interviewed fellow INET board member Robert Skidelsky about “The Need for a New Bretton Woods” in a recent video. The introductory slide to the video is subtitled: “How currency issues and tension between the US and China are renewing calls for a global financial overhaul.” Skidelsky called for a new agreement and said in the video that the conflict between the United States and China was “at the center of any monetary deal that may be struck, that needs to be struck.”

Soros described in the 2009 op-ed that U.S.-China conflict as “another stark choice between two fundamentally different forms of organization: international capitalism and state capitalism.” He concluded that “a new multilateral system based on sounder principles must be invented.” As he explained it in 2010, “we need a global sheriff.”

In the 2000 version of his book “Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism,” Soros wrote how the Bretton Woods institutions “failed spectacularly” during the economic crisis of the late 1990s. When he called for a new Bretton Woods in 2009, he wanted it to “reconstitute the International Monetary Fund,” and while he’s at it, restructure the United Nations, too, boosting China and other countries at our expense.

“Reorganizing the world order will need to extend beyond the financial system and involve the United Nations, especially membership of the Security Council,” he wrote. “That process needs to be initiated by the U.S., but China and other developing countries ought to participate as equals.”

Soros emphasized that point, that this needs to be a global solution, making America one among many. “The rising powers must be present at the creation of this new system in order to ensure that they will be active supporters.”

And that’s exactly the kind of event INET is delivering, with the event website emphasizing “today's reconstruction must engage the larger European Union, as well as the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia.” China figures prominently, including a senior economist for the World Bank in Beijing, the director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the chief adviser for the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations.

This is all easy to do when you have the reach of George Soros who funds more than 1,200 organizations. Except, any one of those 1,200 would shout such an event from the highest mountain. Groups like MoveOn.org or the Center for American Progress didn’t make their names being quiet. The same holds true globally, where Soros has given more than $7 billion to Open Society Foundations – including many media-savvy organizations just a phone call away. Why hasn’t the Soros network spread the word?

Especially since Soros warns, all this needs to happen because “the alternative is frightening.” The Bush-hating billionaire says America is scary “because a declining superpower losing both political and economic dominance but still preserving military supremacy is a dangerous mix.”

c. He wrote that the U.S. “could lead a cooperative effort to involve both the developed and the developing world, thereby reestablishing American leadership in an acceptable form.”

That’s what this conference is all about – changing the global economy and the United States to make them “acceptable” to George Soros.

-- Iris Somberg contributed to this commentary.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture

NPR Admits It's Packed With Liberals

2011-03-16T11:58:00.001-05:00

By Mike Gonzalez

Times have been tough for NPR in the last six months. Just last week, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller spoke at the National Press Club in Washington. Among other things, she discussed the firing of NPR Senior Correspondent Juan Williams in October. By the end of the week, Schiller herself was out of a job, after a video caught her chief fundraiser making disparaging remarks about Tea Party activists and Jews.

In her speech at the National Press Club, Schiller made sure to emphasize that NPR maintains its commitment to diversity. She meant, of course, racial diversity.

Even casual observers know that the network’s devotion to this cause appears to apply only to the staff’s skin pigmentation not to their political orientation. Something that strikes me as more than passing strange for an organization that inherently deals with politics.

But it’s not just me saying that NPR lacks political diversity—it’s now coming from NPR itself! And this time it wasn’t the result of a sting video, either. The admission came on NPR’s air this past Sunday.

Just look at this the exchange last Sunday between Bob Garfield, host of the NPR show “On the Media,” and Ira Glass, host of “This American Life.” Mr. Glass had challenged Mr. Garfield to conduct an internal audit of liberal bias at NPR and report on it in a week. Mr. Glass added he was sure none would be found (that makes two of us, but I digress). Then the conversation turned to what metrics would be used. Could the absence of conservatives at NPR be a metric?

Bob Garfield: … you and I both know that if you were to somehow poll the political orientation of everybody in the NPR news organization and at all of the member stations, you would find an overwhelmingly progressive, liberal crowd, not uniformly, but overwhelmingly.

Ira Glass: Journalism, in general, reporters tend to be Democrats and tend to be more liberal than the public as a whole, sure. But that doesn't change what is going out over the air. And I feel like, well, let's measure the product.

Sorry, Ira, but you’re wrong. It does change what’s going out over the air. You stuff a newsroom with a bunch of progressives and nary a conservative and you will definitely get a product that at least tilts left. Liberals will not understand, they just won’t “get” at a gut level, what offends conservatives, not just in news selection and reporting but even in cultural programming.

That is why NPR constantly offends conservatives, which is why they don’t want their tax dollars going to it. Anyone at NPR who can’t understand this may not be as intellectual he or she thinks (unless one uses Bertrand Russell’s definition of an intellectual as “a person who pretends to have more intellect than he has”) they are.

And, no, I don’t have to wait a week to prove this point. The examples are seemingly endless.

Monday, on “All Things Considered,” NPR aired a paean to ’60s radical musician Barbara Dane, whom it called “a versatile voice with a political purpose.” The spot included such hagiographic lines as: “Dane has remained a symbol of resistance, someone who isn't afraid to break the rules.”

Barbara may not be afraid, but she certainly did support a regime that terrorizes its own people—Fidel Castro’s in Cuba.

Dane started traveling there when Fidel’s and Che’s firing squads were working overtime. NPR’s “versatile voice” was unstinting in her embrace of the even the most indecent of Castro’s terrorizing techniques.

Let me give you an inside view. I was a child in Cuba then, and the slogan I found most terrifying was “to the paredon,” which I heard communists cry on the airwaves or the street I lived on. Paredon, you see, is Spanish for the walls used by firing squads.

And just what name do you think Dane gave to her product line? Well, Paredon records.

You don’t have to be a Cuban-American to have this sensitivity. Other conservatives have also pointed out today the inappropriateness of the piece on Dane.

Now I ask you, really, NPR? I, and others, found the piece offensive, and typical. Why should conservatives’ taxes pay for this?

Mike Gonzalez, Vice President of Communications for The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator and editor. He spent 15 years reporting from Europe and Asia before leaving journalism to join the administration of George W. Bush, where he helped explain financial and foreign policy.

As a boy of 12, Gonzalez left his native Cuba with his mother and sister, fleeing the Castro dictatorship. After two years in Madrid, Spain, the family settled in Queens, New York, in 1974.

Wow! Liberals at NPR. Who would've thunk?!?

Why Does Obama Wish He Were President of China?

2011-03-14T12:40:00.000-05:00

By Michael Goodwin

First I did a double take. He said what? I read it again and the shock waves followed.

A beleaguered President Obama has told aides it would be so much easier to be the president of China, The New York Times reports.

There are two ways to read the remark, which is attributed to anonymous aides. One is that Obama resents the burden of global leadership that comes with the American presidency. The other is that he longs for an authoritarian system, where he need tolerate no dissent.

Under either or both interpretations, his confession carries a dose of self-pity that means Obama has hit a wall.

He is in over his head, and he knows it.

Even before the horror in Japan, the president faced a litany of nightmares. From Libya to Iran to Afghanistan to gas prices, unemployment and rising debt, Obama is surrounded by serious trouble.

His responses range from halfhearted to wrongheaded. Nothing is working. Unhappy voters already repudiated his first two years and might fire him when they get the chance. It is a moment that brings home the truth of the sign on Harry Truman's desk: "The buck stops here."

Yet my suspicion is that it's not the problems per se that have Obama envying a lower rung on the global ladder. It's that he regards them as endless distractions that keep getting in the way of his transformative agenda.

He is a man of the faculty lounge who wants a blank slate so he can remake the nation into a more perfect place, as he sees it. Remember, he greeted his election with the messiah-like claim that future generations would say, "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

But damn it, the country and the world won't cooperate. Because he has no significant experience that would give him a framework for any other response, he is reduced to vaporous platitudes that dispirit allies and embolden adversaries.

He wants America to be less exceptional and more like every other nation. He's uncomfortable with our status as the No. 1 superpower, as he made clear with his apology tours and by submitting to the lowest common denominator in the United Nations.

He talks about wanting Moammar Khadafy to go but takes no action to make it happen and even signed on to an arms embargo that the State Department says bars our supplying the rebels.

As The Wall Street Journal wrote, the rising slaughter reveals "what the world without U.S. leadership looks like."

Meanwhile, he punts on the budget mess, as if details are beneath him. On soaring gas prices, the purpose of his dreary Friday press conference, his policy seems to be peevishness that he must be bothered.

As shocking as the China lament is, it's not surprising. The desire to sidestep messy reality is the thread that runs through his presidency, starting with the campaign.

As the economy melted down in the fall of 2008 and in the days after he took office, he never changed goals. He promised a health-care takeover, "investments" in education, and a commitment to weaning America off oil and coal.

Come recession and war, he has done his utmost to deliver all three. He has broken the bank and damaged the jobs machine to get them.

Under different circumstances, that dogged persistence might be a virtue. But the problems are getting worse, not better, and yet he won't adapt. His stubborn refusal to face squarely the nation's concerns has created a vacuum at home similar to the one abroad.

And now he confides the Oval Office's crown of responsibility does not fit him. Much of the world shares the sentiment.

Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist.

I think we should start Obama on his way to China... in 2012.

Boxcutters on Flight From JFK -- No, We're Not Safer Than Before 9/11

2011-03-07T15:51:00.000-06:00

By Michael Boyd

Recently a passenger brought box cutters through a passenger screening point and on to an airliner. In response to this, the Transportation Security Administration announced that the screeners responsible would get “remedial training.”

There’s been a lot of coverage of this event, including legitimate outrage that the sloppy TSA employees weren’t fired. What most people don’t realize is that tolerating failure and outright sloppy work has been a hallmark of U.S. aviation security from the beginning. The truth is nobody has ever been held accountable for aviation security failures – nobody. From top to bottom, the TSA arrogantly claims it does nothing wrong.

Poor security planning and implementation has been a hallmark of the Washington bureaucracy, first with the Federal Aviation Administration, and now with its demon spawn, the Transportation Security Administration.

Let’s go back a few years…

“To a trained terrorist, U.S. airports have the security of a Laundromat.”

That was a statement I made to the Wall Street Journal in June of 1997. Lots of folks thought it was humorous. Nobody took it seriously.

Then came 9/11, proving my point, which still, 10 years later, nobody’s taking seriously. One might think that after nearly 3,000 deaths and four airliners hijacked with near-military precision, the U.S. would have implemented a comprehensive overhaul of aviation security. One would think that the people at the top of the aviation security apparatus in place on 9/11 would have been sacked, especially in light of the fact that they had been warned repeatedly about sloppy security by FAA Red Team investigators, and tragically ignored them.

Nope, nothing like that. The people responsible for the failed U.S. aviation security on that tragic Tuesday morning not only have never been held to account, but many of them have been promoted or have found cushy lucrative jobs in private industry. The head of the FAA – which was responsible for airline security at the time – was lauded for her fine work not three days after the tragedy by Norman Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation. That was Jane Garvey, whose performance in front of the 9/11 Commission was the greatest bumbling act since Frank Pantangle’s Senate testimony in "Godfather II."

The former FAA head didn’t have a clue. But nobody called her on it.

Not to worry though. Ms. Garvey went on to be appointed to the Board of Directors of United Airlines. Yup, the same United that suffered the loss of two of its own airplanes, crews and passengers due to failure of Garvey’s FAA. Incredibly, the CEO of United stated at the time that Garvey represented the type of management the airline needed.

That didn’t bother anybody. Not the various “9/11 Family” groups. Not the unions who represented those lost United employees. Nobody. So don’t expect a couple of asleep-at-the-switch screeners to get fired.

Let’s go further. Testing of TSA screeners across the nation reportedly has a 70 percent or higher failure rate. Even Rep John Mica (R-FL), whose committee has oversight of the TSA, has said that screener failures are “off the chart.” But the TSA administrator defends that sloppy performance, and he’s never called to task.

So, why should we expect those box-cutter-blind screeners to get fired?

Remember the incident last year, when a graduate student from China slipped past an unmanned screening point at Newark to kiss his girlfriend good-bye? It shut down a terminal. Caused no telling how much mayhem on the traveling public. -- The TSA employee who was AWOL from his post and who allowed this event to happen was – you guessed it – given “remedial training.”

And as for taking action to protect the public in the future, we have the indomitable Senator Lautenberg (D-N.J.) asking that Homeland Security “review” the circumstances” – which will accomplish nothing, because the TSA and DHS have never called a foul on themselves. But he did call for specific actions to fine infringers like that Chinese kid into financial oblivion.

So, an incident where the TSA lets potential weapons get on an airplane isn’t much call for firing anybody – at least not in the context of the Big Picture, which is to protect the bureaucracy first and the public second.

The TSA is untouchable. A couple months ago, a major network reporter called me regarding a security breach. When I noted we’re no safer than before 9/11, he came unglued. “That’s not true!” he practically yelled. “I’ve been to the TSA briefings!”

Great. A 70 percent training failure rate. Security failures where TSA staff just get “retrained.” And this guy’s defending the TSA to the public. He’s been to the briefings, see.

Here’s the bottom line: professional terrorists are out to blow us to smithereens. And we’ve got the TSA as our first line of defense. Instead of having a professionally-managed, disciplined security apparatus, Congress has given us a 60,000 member DMV from Hell.

But it’s got great remedial training.

Michael Boyd is an aviation expert and president of Boyd Group International

Why Does Mainstream Media Leave George Soros Alone?

2011-03-04T13:10:00.002-06:00

By Dan Gainor

Wisconsin’s battle over the union label continues to resonate nationwide. Lefties complain about conservative funders David and Charles Koch in often obscene fashion, making juvenile plays on their last name and prank calls like troublesome children. The so-called mainstream media are heavily invested in that strategy, calling the Koch brothers some of the “biggest bankrollers” for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

It’s a theme that almost defies reason. The Kochs openly support things they believe in – especially free markets and limited government. To media types, those beliefs are suspect or even audacious. To the left, they’re criminal or anti-American. Both groups claim to question everything.

Everything, that is, except who funds the left. When that gets mentioned, there is either complete silence or cries of conspiracy at the mere mention of the name George Soros. Yet Soros has given billions around the globe for decades to push his own beliefs. His impact on liberal politics here in the U.S. is unparalleled.

Wherever left-wing organizations gather, you can find either him or a pile of his cash. His dollars reach from pro-abortion and pro-drug groups to fringe media outlets and Democratic campaigns.

In just one day last week, while traditional media were going after the Kochs, the Soros Empire swept across the land pushing a hard-left agenda.

Three separate story lines from Thursday Feb. 24, 2011, showed Soros in all his glory. In the first, liberal activists pushed for a Supreme Court ethics code. The second talked of “Tea-Party-like revolts” against spending cuts. The last involved the nationwide union protest in support of the Wisconsin strikers.

Every one of those stories was pushed, influenced and organized by Soros-funded groups. He might have never even lifted a finger. He didn’t have to. He's No. 35 on Forbes’ list of global billionaires with $14 billion, so he just opened his wallet.

The Supreme Court story seemed benign. Who could oppose an ethics code? Only, The Washington Post story wasn’t about ethics, it was about politics. Two separate Soros groups – Common Cause and the Alliance for Justice – organized to attack Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas for their connection to, you guessed it, the Kochs.

According to grant data provided by Capital Research Center, Common Cause has netted at least $2 million from the Open Society Institute (OSI), the primary Soros charity. Alliance for Justice, a coalition of more than 100 lefty organizations, received at least $325,000 from Soros from 2004-05.

According to The Post, “a group of more than a hundred law professors from across the country” was also involved. Sure, there were more than 100, connected to different law schools, but they have the Soros Stamp of Approval. On the letter they sent to Congress, many names are easily linked to King George – a member of the OSI board in Baltimore, OSI advisers, those from groups also funded by OSI, even a former Democrat candidate personally funded by Soros herself.

The article went on to quote Ellen Yaroshefsky, director of the Jacob Burns Ethics Center at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, to say how awful the Supreme lack of ethics is. She is also “cochair of the Ethics, Gideon and Professionalism Committee of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section.” Naturally, the bar association is funded by OSI – both directly and indirectly – for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Of course, The Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith mentioned none of this. Instead, his piece was an attack on the Kochs, naming them 10 times in the story. When the Federalist Society was named, he pointed out how the Kochs fund them. There was zero mention of Soros.

That same day, The Hill wrote about the Democratic “Tea Party movement.” The article cited how “a large coalition of progressive groups announced an ‘emergency call to action.’” That group included MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, USAction, the Service Employees International Union and People for the American Way. In some way or another, every one of those organizations or their foundations gets money from Soros.

Every single one.

Soros may not have phoned them all, or sent them e-mails from his palatial estates. Nonetheless, they did his bidding.

Then we come to the nationwide “union” protest – the so-called “rally to save the American Dream” that got widespread coverage. Around America, pro-union groups rallied to “stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin.” More than half that list of at 43 organizations involved as of Thursday gets money either directly or indirectly from King George. They might all get money from him. No reporter bothered to ask.

There were the eco groups like Green for All (Soros invests heavily in going green); the gay groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force or the typical shock troops of the left like MoveOn.org. Again, most are paid for either directly by Open Society or indirectly through another of his many operations.

And again, the Soros connection went unreported. The Post called it a mix of “labor, environmentalist, anti-war and other allied organizations,” with the obligatory Van Jones quote saying “the American dream is under fire.” Jones, the former White House green jobs czar and 9/11 truther, is now a senior fellow at the Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

A good journalist might question those connections. But there are too few good journalists and too many questions.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture

U.S. Fines 3 Movie Theater Companies Over Child Labor Allegations

2011-03-02T08:31:00.004-06:00

ST. LOUIS -- Operators of three of the nation's biggest movie theater chains have paid more than $277,000 in federal fines over allegations that they violated child-labor laws by letting teenagers work too many hours and use dangerous machinery such as trash compactors, the Labor Department announced Tuesday.

The government said the alleged violations of U.S. child-labor laws by Regal Cinemas Inc., Marcus Theatres Corp. and Wehrenberg Inc. were uncovered as part of a "strategic" crackdown on what the department called the industry's high rate of noncompliance.

Investigators found the supposed offenses to be sweeping, surfacing in 27 theaters in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina and Wisconsin.

Some 160 employees were illegally being required to perform hazardous jobs -- everything from operating paper balers and trash compactors to driving motor vehicles, using power-driven mixers and baking -- in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act's youth-employment provisions, the Labor Department said.

That law identifies 17 hazardous jobs barred for workers younger than 18, including operating and unloading scrap paper balers and paper box compactors unless certain specific conditions are met. The law also restricts the times and hours of employees younger than 16.
According to federal law, workers 14 or 15 may do certain occupations outside school hours, but not before 7 a.m. or later than 7 p.m., or past 9 p.m. from June 1 until Labor Day. Such workers also may not work more than three hours on a school day, 18 hours in a school week, or eight hours on a non-school day and 40 hours in a week when school isn't in session.

It makes no sense to me how they can proclaim a 16 year old can choose to abort, go to a pharmacy and get the morning-after-pill without a prescription, without counseling, and without parental knowledge, but this same person can't run a trash compactor or food mixer because she doesn't have the maturity for the task.

And people wonder why companies move over seas. I guess the movie theater business didn't get the memo to hire illegal aliens instead of young ambitious teenagers.

The real surprise to me is that some government worker, to make this assessment, must have actually got that CLOSE to actual work. My mental portrait of a government worker is someone sitting at their state-of-the-art desk in their $800 ergonomic chairs with a $3000 computer setup (that they have no idea how to use and don't care as long as they can find the solitaire game) complaining about the carpal tunnel syndrome they get from having to intermittently use a keyboard for more than 2 hours without a 20 minute break.

Today's overprotected teenagers... tomorrow's union leaders.

So How Much Do Public Union Workers Really Make?

2011-03-01T14:18:00.002-06:00

By John Lott

President Obama lashed out at Republicans Monday for having "denigrated or vilified" public union employees. Without collective bargaining and the ability to go on strike, he said we wouldn't be able to attract "the best and the brightest to public service." Are public employees simply the best and the brightest? Or are we simply lavishing them with much better employment deals than their private counterparts?

To measure how attractive a job is, economists study how employees vote with their feet -- that is, comparing the rate at which different categories of employees voluntarily quit their jobs.

Over the last six months, private workers have been 3.4 times more likely to quit their jobs than either state and local or federal workers. Indeed, no private industry comes close to the low "quit rate" for government employees. Manufacturing, which has the lowest rate, still faces twice the quit rate as the government.

Firms compete to hire workers not just through offering good salaries and benefits, but also through working conditions and hours. Firms that offer comparably better deals not only find they have more potential workers lining up to get a job, but once an applicant gets the job, they will want to keep it.

Some union supporters claim that this low turnover rate actually demonstrates an efficiency of government. How? Because a low turnover means the government saves money since it doesn't have to retrain replacement workers. But here is the problem: if the saved retraining costs really outweighed the higher salaries and benefit costs, private companies would also volunteer to pay higher compensation.

It appears to me that unions generally try to ensure that their workers don't have to work too hard -- with mandatory breaks guaranteed and rigid protections over exactly what kind of jobs workers can be asked to do. That is on top of getting paid much more.

Take public school teachers. Over 41 percent of state and local public workers are in education. If state and local government costs are going to be reined in, state governments must deal with. By any measure, the government pays public school teachers much more than non-religious private school ones. During the 2007-08 school year, the Department of Education reports that the average public school teacher's salary, even without their much more generous benefit package, was $49,630, 37 percent higher than the $36,250 earned by private school teachers.

As shown in this figure, using data from the Department of Education, public school teachers continue to earn much more money than their private school counterparts. This goes across the board no matter what their level of experience, level of education, age, race, whether they teach in an elementary or secondary school, or where the schools are located. The smallest difference between public and private teacher salaries exists for those with a Ph.D. (about 13%) and the largest difference appears for those who are black or who work in towns (public school teachers make about 57 or 58 percent more).

It is easy to see how public school teacher salaries increase simply by being on the job longer. From 2 years to 29 years of experience, public school teacher salaries just keep rising relative to private school teachers -- going from earning a 29 percent premium during their second to forth years on the job to 49 percent markup when they have been there for 25 to 29 years.

So how do public sector unions get away with this? Simply put, they have a kind of monopoly. Parents pay for public education through their property and other taxes -- whether they send their kids to public or private schools.

Parents must really believe that the private schools are much better than the public ones to be willing to pay the public school taxes and still pay private school tuition on top of that -- effectively paying twice for school. In contrast, private schools that kept paying more and more for teachers would quickly find themselves out of business.

With all this money at stake, public unions’ reactions to proposals to weaken their power and make them more like federal workers are understandable. But still there are some surprises. On Sunday, AFL-CIO's head, Richard Trumka, in a television interview refused repeated attempts to answer questions about whether or not it was innappropriate for union activists to compare Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker to Hilter and other dictators.

A couple of weeks ago, Obama told leaders of private companies at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that they had an obligation to hire more workers regardless of whether it meant they would lose money on hiring them. Alas, this is also his attitude towards public spending.

John R. Lott, Jr. is an economist and author of the just released revised edition of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Planned Parenthood Poised to Take a Very Hard Fall -- And It Should

2011-02-24T07:45:00.000-06:00

By Penny Young Nance

“Seismic political shift.” It’s a common term these days both in the United States and around the world.

Everywhere the status quo is being turned on its head, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Washington’s current budget battle. An almost $2 trillion annual deficit, coupled with a $14 trillion national debt and an election earthquake last November, is turning the process upside down.

All of a sudden, congressional appropriations that have gone unquestioned for decades may get zeroed out, and there is no better encapsulation of this than the fight over taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Simultaneously the crown jewel of the abortion industry and the abortion lobby, the liberal political powerhouse is poised to take a very hard fall.

For decades, Planned Parenthood’s political action committee has contributed millions to, and campaigned for, countless Democratic candidates. Its events often feature the leaders of the Democratic Party as keynote speakers, including the current president of the United States.

How did such a formidable political force become so vulnerable? It didn’t happen in one election.

Longtime abortion proponent Kate Michelman, writing in The Washington Post last year, credited a public opinion shift from pro-abortion to pro-life as the result of two efforts: the “Life, what a beautiful choice” ads in the 1990s, and the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act -- passed by Congress, signed into law by President Bush and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

She makes a good point, but the biggest weapon against the abortion lobby has been technology. As sonograms and ultrasounds become more advanced -- an expecting couple can now see their developing baby 3D in the womb -- the public becomes increasingly predisposed against abortion.

Several years ago, Valvoline Motor Oil aired a television commercial that featured a baby in utero driving a car and shifting gears, complete with NASCAR sound effects. Once popular culture adopts a particular notion or principle, it is almost impossible to roll it back.

For conservatives who often are on the defensive end of such dynamics, this was a welcome change. Surely, every parent and grandparent who has marveled at sonogram pictures over the past 10 years or so has quietly been influenced in favor of a pro-life position.

These people may not write their congressman, they may not march on Washington, and they may not picket a local Planned Parenthood clinic, but they have come to understand what is truly at stake in the debate, and it has shown up in numerous polls in recent years.

So when Live Action comes along with 22-year-old Lila Rose and her undercover investigations exposing Planned Parenthood staff who willingly counsel self-identified sex traffickers, no one is really ready to leap to their defense. Abortion alone makes most people uncomfortable, but abortion with no questions asked, no matter who is willing to pay -- financed by taxpayer dollars?

That can lead to a full cut-off from Congress, and it should. If Planned Parenthood loses its federal funding, that will be a seismic event followed by aftershocks the political world will feel for years to come.

Penny Nance is the CEO of Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.

Personally, I'm glad to see organizations like this get stripped of our tax money. They take our tax dollars to bolster their business, like Acorn, NPR/PBS, and Planned Parenthood, when the majority of Americans do not support the views of these businesses. If they can't stand on their own they should fail, just like any other business. It's time to get them out of our pocket. --BF

Filmmaker is Hijacking the Reagan Legacy

2011-02-21T07:30:00.000-06:00

By Michael Reagan

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rewrote history. He said my father, Ronald Reagan, "cherished a famously close friendship with Tip O'Neill . . . . Ronald Reagan knew politics has always been and always will be about compromise. . . . That's why he was more beholden to simple pragmatism than stubborn principles."

Reid would have us believe that Ronald Reagan was the Great Compromiser. My father did, in fact, practice the art of compromise -- but he never elevated "pragmatism" over principle.

Four years before my father was elected president, he told me how he planned to negotiate with Soviet leaders. He'd let the Soviets "choose the place, the room, and the shape of the table." Dad was willing to compromise on nonessentials. But if the Soviets demanded he compromise his principles, he'd tell them, "Nyet!"

That's exactly what Ronald Reagan did in Reykjavík when Mikhail Gorbachev demanded that he give up the Strategic Defense Initiative. Throughout his eight years as president, my father made many compromises -- but he never compromised his principles.

And what about Ronald Reagan's "famously close friendship" with Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill? Simply not true. Dad wrote about his repeated attempts to reach out to House Speaker Tip O'Neill in his autobiography.

Dad once invited O’Neill to the White House for dinner. They shared a pleasant evening and Dad thought he'd made a friend. He was wrong. "I picked up a newspaper," he wrote, "and read a story in which Tip really laid into me personally. . . . Some of his remarks were pretty nasty. I was not only surprised, but disappointed and also a little hurt."

Dad called O'Neill and said, "I thought we had a pretty fine relationship going."

"That's politics," the Speaker replied, "After 6 o'clock we can be friends; but before 6, it’s politics."

People interpret that to mean that Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill were great friends after 6 o'clock. But Dad wanted a good working relationship with O'Neill during business hours. The Speaker wouldn't have it. Dad recalled that O'Neill "could turn off his charm and friendship like a light switch and become as bloodthirsty as a piranha."

In the end, Ronald Reagan could not work with Tip O'Neill. He had to go over the heads of the Democrat Party leadership to get his agenda passed. So much for the "famously close friendship" of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill.

Harry Reid's rewrite of history is part of a concerted Democratic effort to recast Ronald Reagan as a liberal icon. That's right, a liberal icon.

My first inkling of this strategy was when I heard that Barack Obama was studying a biography of my father. A few weeks later, I was surprised to hear a gaggle of network commentators (including CBS' Jeff Greenfield, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, and ABC's Christiane Amanpour) remarking on Barack Obama's "Reaganesque" State of the Union address.

Then I saw Time magazine's "Obama ♥ Reagan" cover (February 7, 2011) which depicts Ronald Reagan with his arm around Obama. Clearly, someone had put out the memo: "Obama's the new Reagan! Pass it on!"

A far more insidious rewrite of history is Eugene Jarecki's new HBO propagandamentary “Reagan.” Disguised as a "biography" of my father, the film is a clever attempt to hijack my father's legacy.

Jarecki buries the truth about Reaganomics under deceptive images of unemployment lines. In fact, Ronald Reagan accomplished an economic miracle. He cut the misery index (the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate) from a Carter-era high of 21.98 to a 1986 low of 7.7.

Ronald Reagan's policies produced 96 consecutive months of continuous economic growth, from 1983 to 1990. Reaganomics produced 16 million jobs and cut African-American unemployment from 19.5 percent in 1983 to 11.4 percent in 1989. The Reagan tax cuts fueled an economic boom that nearly doubled federal revenue.

There's not a word of that in Jarecki's film. Instead, he repeats the tired canard that Reaganomics transferred wealth from the poor to the rich. He also makes the ridiculous claim that the Reagan tax cuts caused today's deficits. Think about it: If the Reagan tax cuts increased revenue, how could they increase deficits? Jarecki is equally deceptive about Iran-Contra, AIDS, Afghanistan, Middle East oil, and the end of the Cold War.

In an interview with the far-left website Mediaite, Jarecki reveals his motives behind the HBO film. "America really needed the kind of tough love that Jimmy Carter, however clumsily, tried to show. . . . Reagan, instead, came along and said 'Have another drink, and forget.' . . . Reagan, by making us forget, caused us to be unprepared, and then with his policies, deepened the problems."

Jarecki goes on to suggest that Barack Obama, "a far better communicator" than Carter, should revive Carter's "message about sacrifice." In short, Jarecki wants Obama to use Reagan's communication style to sell Jimmy Carter's vision of a post-prosperity America.

That's Jarecki's hidden agenda. He hijacks Republican icons to promote his Carterite agenda. He calls himself a "Republican" for the same reason the wolf wore sheep's clothing -- then he laughs behind his sleeve.

Eugene Jarecki is rummaging through the tomb of Ronald Reagan, looking for a legacy to steal. Thank God, we caught him red-handed.

Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan and a political consultant. He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com. Portions of this column are adapted from his book “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin's Press).

Robot Hummingbird Spy Drone Flies for Eight Minutes, Spies on The Bad Guys

2011-02-18T10:57:00.005-06:00

Aerovironment - A robot hummingbird demonstrates precision hovering and independent flight. The two-wing, flapping aircraft carries its own energy source, and uses only the flapping wings for propulsion and control.

Pentagon researchers have taken robots for a science fiction spin, building a robotic hummingbird that's ideal for covert surveillance.

A year and a half ago, we saw our first look at the hummingbird drone from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a teeny robotic spyplane inspired by the mid-air dexterity of the hummingbird. But now we've got a video of the drone in action, much more capable and with the ability to do its acrobatics for much longer.

The drone, built by AeroVironment with funding from DARPA, is able to fly forwards, backwards, and sideways, as well as rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. Not only does the 'bot resemble its avian inspiration in size (it's only slightly larger than a hummingbird, with a 6.5-inch wingspan and a weight of 19 grams), it also looks impressively like a hummingbird in flight.

But that's not vanity -- it's key to the drone's use as a spy device, as it can perch near its subject without alerting it (supposing that area has a population of hummingbirds -- the usual reaction to seeing a hummingbird here in midtown Manhattan is something like "OMG you guys look at the hummingbird!!!!!!," which is not necessarily an ideal situation for a spy-drone).

The drone can currently fly for about eight minutes, impressive considering that range was only 20 seconds a short two years ago. But the engineers aren't satisfied, branding the current drone a prototype and continuing to work on it. Within a decade, says AeroVironment's project manager, this drone could easily be counted on to carry out complex and difficult reconnaissance missions.

In Egypt, Power of the People Could Prove Fleeting

2011-02-15T14:57:00.002-06:00

By Robert Hardaway

If the recent events in Egypt confirm anything, it is that the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting what you want.

The protesters wanted Mubarak brought down and they succeeded . . . in ushering in a military junta. It’s hardly surprising that the first acts of the junta included abrogating the constitution, dissolving parliament and ambushing demonstrators in Tahrir Square with wooden clubs.

The military multitasked, all the while maintaining the power structure of the dictatorial Mubarak regime. There was little question the junta would enforce the hated Emergency Act, which allowed security forces to arrest without formal charges and to suppress public demonstrations.

It takes at least six months to prepare for elections and allow political parties to organize and campaign. So when Mubarak agreed he would step down in September, the protesters could have demanded that the September elections be conducted under international supervision in order to allow political groups to prepare. (Even in the United States, a presidential election can take up to a year to conduct nominating conventions, primaries, and campaigning.)

But the people demanded Mubarak’s immediate ouster in full knowledge that a military coup would be the inevitable result.

The naïveté of those nursing the notion that such a junta with absolute power will give it all up to allow free elections is breathtaking in its scope. Certainly history supports no such unrealistic expectations.(Note the longevity of the military junta in Argentina in the 1980s, the military dictatorship of Napoleon following the French Revolution, or the dictatorship of the Proletariat after the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1917).

There was never any secret that if Mubarak fell immediately, the power vacuum could only be filled by one of the two most organized and disciplined groups in the country -- either the Muslim Brotherhood or the military.

Given that the military is now bloated with the hardware needed for suppression (including the world’s most advanced tanks in the U.S. arsenal), bought with more than $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid, there was never any real possibility that the power vacuum would not be filled by a military junta.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has managed to outrage nearly everyone, from our allies in Saudi Arabia who remain alarmed at the perfidy of the U.S. government, to the throngs in Tahrir Square who will forget neither the inexplicable assertion of Vice President Biden early in the crisis that “Mubarak is not a dictator,” nor the indecisive and opportunistic change of tune by President Obama only when it looked like the protesters might actually prevail.

Perhaps the salient lesson to be learned by these sad events is that a voter with a rock in his hand is worth 1,000 in the voting booth. While it is true that the 100,000 or so protesters who filled Tahrir Square (representing less than 1 percent of more than 80 million Egyptians) accomplished what the remaining 99 percent could not, the notion that those who took to the streets in order to usher in a military junta represented the will of the entire nation is only slightly less breathtaking than the notion that any group other than the military would seize power if Mubarak left immediately.

Certainly, this was the lesson that protesters learned in 2002 when their street demonstrations managed to convince Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein that he was safe in defying UN arms inspectors -- a decision that resulted in war when the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441, authorizing “serious consequences” if Saddam continued to defy UN weapons inspection.

The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly authorized the use of military force against Iraq by a vote of 77-23. (This was the same month that a New York Times poll revealed that 67 percent of Americans supported going to war against Iraq).

It could be suggested that history never repeats itself; rather it’s the historians who repeat themselves.

We’ll see.

Robert Hardaway is Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College Of Law, and the author of seventeen books on law and public policy.

Egypt: A Fuse On The Brink of Igniting

2011-02-09T07:24:00.007-06:00

Just wanted to make sure that when the defecation hits the rotating oscillator (shit hits the fan, for the less then politically correct among us) that you read it here first. I’m referring to the mess in Egypt. Some liberal-loons have been making noise concerning the situation in Egypt. They see the poor down-trodden Egyptians as freedom fighters and rally to their cause. They equate Hosni Mubarak with the devil and the Muslim Brotherhood as Egypt’s savior.

Here’s the way I see it. Is old Hosni a tyrant? Probably. Is he a dictator? Pretty much. Has he kept the peace with Israel for over thirty years? Hell yes. Are the Egyptian protesters freedom fighters? Not by any definition an American would equate it with. Is the Muslim Brotherhood some benevolent peace-loving political action committee? Not on your life.

Sure, Mubarak took U.S. money and ruled with an iron fist over the people of Egypt for thirty years. But, he kept the peace with Israel and kept out the religious fanatics and radicals from gaining a strong hold in Egypt. And now that the people of Egypt are protesting his rule, the left-wing media and all the progressive liberal whackos see the “poor people of Egypt" as freedom fighters and have actually, in some cases, equated them with the colonists fighting for their rights in 1776. Really?

I highly doubt that the colonists thought stoning an adulteress was acceptable. Nor cutting off the hands of a thief. Or cutting out someone’s tongue for blasphemy. Or pronouncing a sentence of death over anyone who decided to leave their religion. Or honor killings. Or just the plain, old, everyday subjugation of women in general. This is what the majority of Egyptians condone, as the majority believe in, and would follow, Sharia Law. And, make no mistake about the liberal-loonies who try to convince the world at large that the Muslim Brotherhood does not believe in promoting Sharia Law, or the death and destruction of Israel, or that of the decadent Western world and its ideals. Anyone who doubts this just hasn’t done their homework. The leaders and people whom the Muslim Brotherhood consist of, or who they look to for spiritual guidance, are on record as having professed these views, unequivocally.

As I said, I wanted to be one of the first to tell you, and having you read it here first, that if some how the Muslim Brotherhood gains even a small foothold in the political landscape in Egypt, eventually you will end up with a second Iran.

Do I feel sorry for the people of Egypt? Maybe. But, I would rather have them controlled by a Mubarak, then let loose on the world by the Muslim Brotherhood. Until Egyptians, and the rest of the Middle East, do away with 15th century beliefs and values, and waken to the dawn of civilization that the rest of the world has long since embraced, I don’t want them in any position to dictate or impress their violent, archaic, dogma and beliefs on any country or people.

Al Gore Explains 'Snowmageddon'

2011-02-03T12:41:00.002-06:00

Turns out that all this snow and stuff is...drum roll...global warming! Of course you knew that was coming - but you have to read Al’s blog for the pure comedic value.

“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”

Thanks for the science lesson Al. Warmer air ‘collects moisture’? ‘Like a sponge?’

I love this bit...’until it hits a patch of cold air’. Yep, that’ it. All this warm air was minding its own business, and wham, like hitting a pothole, it hit a small, insignificant ‘patch’ of cold air. Silly me, I thought a giant Arctic air mass was pushing south in Texas.

....and this man was a hop skip and a jump away from being president!
Enjoy thye article below.

By Gene J. Koprowski

If the planet is warming, why is a third of America locked in a deep freeze, with record-low temperatures as far south as the Mexican border, where the thermometer in Ciudad Juarez plummeted Wednesday night to a bone-chilling 9-below zero?

Self-proclaimed planetary climate czar Al Gore thinks he has answer.

"As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now, and they say increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming," Gore write in a blog post. The Nobel Prize-winning former vice president was responding to a question posed by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who wondered on air why global warming was such an urgent science policy priority when the New York City area had become a “tundra” this winter.

Gore also indicated that he believes a rise in global temperatures is creating “all sorts of havoc,” from hotter dry spells to colder winters and ever more violent storms. This is even endangering certain species of animals and leading to forest fires and floods.

But not surprisingly, some climate-change skeptics are a bit hot under the collar over Gore’s “scientific” explanation.

“Gore’s statement actually indicates a deeper problem -- lack of precise predictions,” said Dr. William M. Briggs, a statistician and climate scientist. His research shows that there are no increased weather problems because of global warming, Briggs told FoxNews.com.

“He’s saying that anything bad that happens must be because global warming caused it. Activists like Gore are great at identifying events after the fact as being caused by global warming, but terrible at predicting them beforehand,” Briggs said.

Meteorologist Art Horn agreed, noting the extensive history of devastating weather over the millennia -- none of which he connects with global warming.

“If one actually studies the history of weather over the last 2,000 years, you see massive storms, amazing heat, brutal cold waves, devastating droughts, terrible floods and disastrous hurricanes -- none caused by global warming,” he told FoxNews.com.

“Gore has no appreciation for large natural variability in weather,” Horn said.

Other scientists were quick to leap to Gore's support, arguing that the extreme cold weather is a logical, expected outcome for our warming planet.

“It’s not hard at all to get temperatures cold enough for snow in a world experiencing global warming,” meteorologist Jeffrey Masters told FoxNews.com. “There will still be colder than average winters in a world that is experiencing warming with plenty of opportunities for snow.”

The contretemps over global warming and winter weather -- and the bickering among scientists about man's effect on the climate -- has had a profound impact on public opinion around the globe.

A January poll by Rasmussen Reports indicates that Americans are still more inclined to believe global warming is primarily caused by long-term planetary trends, although the gap narrowed a bit this month. But Americans don't blame global warming for this winter’s weather.

Skepticism is very clearly increasing overseas; a poll released this week by the Office for National Statistics in the U.K. indicated that the number of climate skeptics there had nearly doubled during the last four years. The proportion of people who said they were “not very concerned” about global warming now numbers more than one in five, the U.K. government said.

But many still argue that global warming is real, and the ultimate cause of the wretched weather. One environmental consultant pointed FoxNews.com to an article that detailed a polar bear's nine-day swim to find an ice raft for refuge -- due to global warming’s impact on the environment of Alaska.

Others take a less anecdotal approach, and say that pure science supports Gore's global-warming argument.

“It’s basic atmospheric physics,” said Meg Wilcox, a spokeswoman for Ceres, a national network of investors and environmental organizations. “Warmer air holds more moisture. This fact is apparent when you see water vapor hanging in the air after turning off a hot shower. When warm air holding moisture meets cooler air, the moisture condenses into tiny droplets that will fall as precipitation, rain or snow, depending upon atmospheric conditions.”

Warm air meets cold air seems simple enough. So why can't scientists agree?

If it all seems confusing and contradictory, other experts say, the real blame lies not with the climate, or with science, or even scientists or former politicians, but with the incompetent media for failing to provide critical context for readers.

“The last 2,000 years is full of incredible weather events that dwarf what we see today,” said Horn. “Nature isn't cooperating with the global warming camp and theory.”

He points to a New York Times story from the 1970s, which said the planet was getting so cold that humanity was in danger of starving to death. The article argued that the world’s weather would soon be so frigid that it could no longer permit the cultivation of crops for food. The Times’ headline on August 8, 1974, was simple enough: “Climate changes Endanger World’s Food Output.”

“First we were told the world was cooling. Then it was getting hotter,” Dan Gainor, a spokesman for the Media Research Center, tells FoxNews.com. “Then cooling again. Then hotter. Now it’s just climate change -- so they can’t be wrong no matter what change occurs

MICHAEL GOODWIN: The New York Times' Sloppy Defense of WikiLeaks and Its Journalistic Standards

2011-01-31T08:52:00.002-06:00

By Michael Goodwin

On Sunday, in its magazine section The New York Times today offered what it calls the backstory on its publication of the stolen WikiLeaks documents. It includes the intriguing fact that the White House didn't try very hard to deter publication, but the report by executive editor Bill Keller mostly reads like house propaganda and a Pulitzer application.

There is a laugh-out-loud moment. It comes when Keller writes that "it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news."

It's hard to imagine he believes that. Certainly nobody else does.

The upshot of Keller's piece, which appears in the magazine section and an e-book, is that you'll have to look elsewhere if you want truth or honest introspection. For that, I recommend "Gray Lady Down," a book that gives the backstory of what has gone wrong at The Times itself.

Author William McGowan has compiled a timely indictment of how the paper lost its way. He catalogs well-known mistakes and the cheerleading and other none-too-subtle ways it puts its thumb on the scales of key stories.

He shows how its news coverage of President Obama, gay marriage, immigration, the military, the Duke "rape" case, radicalized Muslims, the Ground Zero mosque, and the war on terror are riddled with omissions, distortions and biases.

McGowan blames "an insular group-think" for turning the paper "into a tattered symbol of liberal orthodoxy," adding, "How deeply compromised its principles have become are questions inextricably entwined with the Times' ideological commitments."

As someone forever grateful that The Times gave me my start, I read "Gray Lady Down" with anger and sadness. Great Times editors, led by the legendary Abe Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb, created a model of integrity and fairness for American newspapers.

But the golden age of standards is but a memory in today's Times. As a friend says, the paper is like a rebel from the 1960s that refuses to grow up.

Witness Keller's attempt to justify his ties to Julian Assange, the anti-American anarchist behind WikiLeaks. To convince readers he treated Assange like any other source, Keller repeats a reporter's churlish description of the cyber-outlaw: "He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn't bathed in days."

But Keller is stuck with the fact that the Times was a partner with Assange and foreign newspapers in recklessly revealing American secrets about Iraq, Afghanistan and our diplomats around the globe. It negotiated both with the Obama administration and Assange. When the White House flagged materials it thought too dangerous to publish, The Times gave that information to WikiLeaks -- in effect, flagging it for someone eager to damage America.

Keller also reveals his personal bias. He writes that, at the request of the Obama White House, "we agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed."

Yet when President George W. Bush had made the same request about key anti-terror programs, Keller writes, "we were unconvinced by his argument and published the story" even though Bush warned The Times would "share the blame for the next terrorist attack."

Bush was right, and that burden still exists. But it's not likely Keller loses sleep over it.

As McGowan argues, the liberal group-think shuts out serious consideration of other views. On routine stories, the result is just lousy journalism.

But because Keller sees his options on national security as simplistically binary -- either a free press or a government veto -- he fails to recognize his duty to exercise voluntary discretion. In a time of war, that is unforgivable.

Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist.

Obama's State of the Union Speech -- Like a Bland Bowl of Rice Pudding

2011-01-27T08:28:00.002-06:00

By Liz Peek

President Obama’s State of the Union speech was blandly pleasant – rather like a dinner composed entirely of rice pudding.

The audience left feeling full, but quickly craved substance. His mission was to convince the country that his recent volte face is sincere – that he really does understand the business community’s unhappiness with our excessive red tape and uncompetitive tax regime, that he gets the nation’s frustration with our sorry schools and out-of-control malpractice lawsuits, and that he is a willing partner in reducing our budget deficit.

At the same time, he has to convince the folks who elected him in the first place – the unions and the tort lawyers who provided the bulk of his campaign funds – that he won’t step on their toes.

Mr. Obama walked a fine line in his second official speech addressing the state of the country, which is why, perhaps, it lacked fire.

Of course, it was hard to generate the kind of energy that used to derive from warring sections of the house jumping up and down in coordinated blocks like pistons in a well-tuned engine. The audience was slow to rise to their feet and to break into applause – they lacked guidance. Sitting all jumbled up with members of the opposing party, they were confused. I’m taking bets that we won’t see date night again any time soon.

Perhaps the speech also fell a bit flat because it lacked conviction. Of course, it it hard to get impassioned about sentences like “We are part of the American family.” Or “We measure progress by the success of our people.” Even extolling the virtues of our great nation, as in “no workers are more productive,” the president sounds like someone reading off a catalog of shoe styles.

President Obama warms to certain topics naturally; he is genuinely excited about green energy, and about raising the number of kids who go to college. Unfortunately, he dulls our enthusiasm for these laudable goals by casting them in a “winner and loser” manner. He cannot extol clean energy without vowing to remove tax subsidies for oil companies. He won’t promise more college grads without celebrating the destruction of the student loan industry. The jury is still out on whether the government is doing a better job of processing loans to students than private companies did.

Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who had the unenviable job of responding to the president, lived up to his role as chief worrywart, correctly alerting Americans that we face a budget crisis.

Mr. Ryan is a thoughtful and dedicated legislator who is genuinely determined to bring down our budget deficits. He correctly tagged the Obama administration as author of some of the stupider spending hikes of late -- such as the 25% increase in outlays for domestic government agencies. He is right – “the fiscal challenge is now a fiscal crisis.”

Unhappily, he will not sell Americans on the Republicans’ ability to turn around our country unless he can weave into the budget narrative greater opportunity and promise. Mr. Obama does that very well.

Over the next two years, the competing visions for the country’s prospects will become all too clear. For all the cosmetic changes of the past month, Mr. Obama remains a community activist at heart. He truly believes it is up to government to fix our problems.

Republicans, on the other hand, want to find solutions in the private sector. Given our budget crisis, we have to hope the country will recognize the limitations of the former approach, and embrace the latter. More important, let us hope that Democrats will team with Republicans in a serious way to address some of the dire issues confronting this country. Does that sound like even more rice pudding?

Liz Peek is a financial columnist who writes for The Fiscal Times.

Some Cowboy Advice on the State of the Union

2011-01-24T10:41:00.002-06:00

By Patrick Dorinson

Well Mr. President this year’s State of the Union marks the halfway point in your administration and from the look of all the White House folks moving to Chicago it's also the beginning of your 2012 re-election campaign.

Your amen corner in the mainstream media has once again fallen in love with you as you move to the center. And judging by her latest columns, even former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has rekindled her love affair with you. Don’t tell Michelle.

And the folks at the alphabet networks, NBC, ABC and CBS are pouring on the coal to change the narrative of your presidency from one of failure to one of resurrection.

Be careful not to read too much into the resurrection thing. It only happened once before in history.

As I read the newspapers and watch the wizards of Washington, oracles of academia and blabbering brigade of political pundits on cable news shows, it looks like you are getting a whole lot of unsolicited advice on what you should say in your State of the Union.

Most of it is bunk because they are not your audience. They just want to go on TV after the speech and say you took their advice.

No Mr. President your audience is a restless nation that despite what [Treasury Secretary] Timmy Geithner says is still mired in a deep economic funk. They are out of work. They are scared of the future. And frankly Mr. President they don’t know if you are up to the job.

Economists say that housing is facing another wave in home foreclosures. The price of oil is almost at $100 a barrel getting us closer to $4 a gallon gasoline jeopardizing an already fragile recovery. Upon further review Christmas sales were weak and not what they originally appeared. And as the New Year begins many states are facing insolvency if they are not there already.

And that is just for starters.

Last year as you so ably said you took a “shellacking.” If you don’t want the next “shellacking” to be more personal so that you have to move back to Chicago, you should stop listening to the fancy pants advisers you have and start listening to the American people.

So before you mount the podium in the venerable House chamber Tuesday night and turn on Mr. TelePrompter, I thought it might be time for some old fashioned cowboy advice.

Too much debt doubles the weight of your horse and puts another in control of the reins.

I gave you this piece of advice in 2009 and you chose to ignore it. And now the deficits and debt are growing quicker than a cat with his tail on fire. Too bad you listened to Larry Summers and not this old cowboy. If you had maybe you wouldn’t be standing in front of Speaker Boehner Tuesday night.

You have piled on some much debt your grandchildren won’t ever be able to repay it.

You better have a message of cutting spending and fast. I hear you are going to ask for more spending. I would advise against that but since you didn’t take my advice before my guess is you’ll ignore it again.

By the way, that was a great party for our Chinese creditors. -- It’s always nice to have a visit from the ones controlling the reins.

When your head’s in the bear’s mouth is not the time to be smacking him on the nose and calling him names.

Don’t use the speech for any partisan cattle crap as much as it would make Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean happy. The pack of Republican bears in the House chamber won’t take too kindly to that nor will the Tea Party folks back home. Kill them with kindness.

And if you feel compelled to throw a partisan elbow, remember what my mother used to say. An Irishman is someone who can so cleverly tell you to go to hell that you’ll want to buy a ticket.

When there’s a drought everybody is dry. When it rains, everybody gets wet. Mother Nature makes no distinctions.
The recession got everybody, Democrats and Republicans alike, wet—it made no partisan distinctions. Reach out to the Republicans and let them know if America fails we all fail. Make the speech about the nation and don’t use the personal pronoun “I” too much.

The both of you are on probation for the next two years so you better get together and start fixin’ what needs fixin’ and get done what needs gettin’ done.

Sorry looks back. Worry looks around . Faith looks up.

You can’t change the November election results and you can’t worry about the next election even if you’re getting ready to raise $1 billion to get re-elected.

So start putting a little more faith in the American people to turn this country around and a little less in an intrusive big government to do so. The only way government makes money is to crank up the printing press.

Finally, word is that in your speech you are going to talk about competitiveness.

So here is my last piece of advice: Get government out of the way so that Americans can compete.

Do that and you might just get re-elected. Don’t do that and you can start looking for a place for your presidential library.

Good luck…you’re gonna need it.

Patrick Dorinson blogs at The Cowboy Libertarian. He lives in California.

Your Tax Dollars at Work, Again

2011-01-18T12:32:00.005-06:00

It seems the federal government can't even build a viable fence to keep out illegal aliens, but they want the responsibility of running our healthcare system, being in charge of 1/6 of our nation's economy. What's wrong with this picture?

Less than 18 seconds. That's how long it took two young women to climb a U.S.-Mexico border fence that costs millions of dollars in taxpayer money.

In a video shot by filmmaker Roy Germano, two women show how easy it is to reach the top by climbing the fence's concrete-filled steel pipes in less than 18 seconds.
The video - which asks the question "Is it worth the expense?" - highlights the price of the barrier, which costs taxpayers on average about $4 million per mile of border fence.

2 Girls Quickly Conquer Border Fence: MyFoxHOUSTON.com

Real Independence Day: The Meaning of the Second Amendment

2011-01-14T12:46:00.002-06:00

This was poignant when it was written, and still is today, in light of all the liberals clamoring for our guns.

by Richard J. Davis, D.D.S., June 1994

There is no national holiday on April 19 (or April 18), though the Boston Marathon is run around this time. When I was in college in the East, this meant not only mid-spring but mid-term, and when exams were finished, the anniversary of Paul Revere's ride seemed a perfect excuse for a party. Though I've celebrated this date habitually over the years, the party spirit has faded a bit with age, and I've begun to reflect a little more on those events and people of 1775. What went on in the minds of these small-town farmers that made them stand up and challenge the army of "their" government — coincidentally, the most powerful one on earth at that time? Were they pushed to it accidentally, or had they already drawn the line beyond which they would stand and fight?

It's a question that may relate to today more than we realize. Our government is, at least for now, undoubtedly the most powerful in the world. It holds power that those Massachusetts farmers couldn't have imagined. It intrudes in our lives to a degree that would have astonished and appalled them. Are we drawing a mental line of how far we'll let it go? Are we waiting until somebody unintentionally pushes us too far? Are we past standing up for our rights all together? It's hard to tell.

There are several movements, both within and without the government, aimed at disarming the American population. The argument seems to be that we are so civilized that we have no good use for such things as firearms. In 1775, the goal of the British troops marching on Concord was similar — to disarm the colonists. They weren't after individual personal weapons; they were after cannons and large stores of gunpowder rumored to be at Concord. (With the limited technology of the day, cannons were the largest technological advantage the British had over the colonists.)

The government today has numerous large technological advantages over the civilian population. There remain a substantial number of heavily regulated, registered weapons in private hands, but the closest thing to technological parity is the common semiautomatic weapon available to the general public. It is this class, mislabeled "assault weapons," that currently comes under the most vigorous attack from gun-control advocates both inside and outside government. The usual attack centers around the "fact" that they have "no sporting uses."

Ignoring the inaccuracy of this "fact," the truth is that the Second Amendment makes no reference to "sporting uses." In fact, it seems most unlikely that "sporting uses" were a consideration for those who framed the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, even the National Rifle Association skirts timidly around the real issue, as if it were too much for Americans to deal with. The point of the Second Amendment is to give American citizens the capability to assemble rapidly as an armed militia for their own collective defense. This has generally been thought of as defense against an invading foreign enemy, but recent events in Los Angeles and Waco clearly point out that other situations might also create such a need. To the Framers of the Bill of Rights, the most recent "foreign enemy" was the perceived tyranny of their own government — in England, but, nonetheless, at that time (1775), their own. A great concern of the writers of the Bill of Rights was that the own government they were then forming might eventually become tyrannical, and that the citizens needed protection from that possibility — hence the entire Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment.

There are past examples of armed citizen resistance to the perceived tyranny of the U.S. government: the Whiskey Rebellion, Shays' Rebellion, and most notably the War Between the States. The fact that none of these was successful does nothing to alter the principle of armed resistance as a last resort. The fact that a large number of citizens exercise their Second Amendment rights unquestionably admits the possibility of future armed resistance and can properly be a sobering thought for those in government. The amount of support for gun control within the government (those sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment) perhaps indicates that this is indeed the case. As the existence of our nuclear missiles served as a brake to Soviet ambitions for 45 years, so a well-armed populace must serve as a brake on those in government who might abuse their authority.

The removal of firearms from civilian hands removes this restraint from government. However small the actual possibility of revolt, whatever the theories that we are "too civilized" to need or want firearms, the fact remains that the ultimate guarantor of political power, here as anywhere else in the world, is the possession of (and willingness and ability to use if necessary) firearms. Without that, not only is resistance to unjust laws or abuse of power impossible, but enforcement of just laws is impossible.

Does this mean that we need to plan for armed resistance? Hardly. The odds are far less, even than in 1860. Only massive public support for resistance would give it a chance of success, and such support could well prevent the need for resistance through political means. Only a blatant usurpation of power in excess of authority might try to override such resistance, and the coup attempt in Russia illustrates that massive resistance can succeed even with little or no violence.

Maybe we do need to give more thought to where we draw the line. How much power do we really grant to the federal government? If the power is accumulated gradually enough, it may not be blatant enough to inspire massive resistance. In that case, a smaller group might be suddenly and accidentally pushed beyond its limit and provide the tragedy of a Lexington — like spark, with violent, armed resistance the final result. In either case, without the Second Amendment, we lose much of our option to resist. Even the most massive nonviolent resistance becomes fatally or near-fatally weak without the threat of armed resistance to back it. Two old quotes come to mind: "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" and "Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's time we paid a little more attention to where we stand before it's too late.

Here on the Eastern Shore, guns are a way of life. People like to hunt, people like to shoot, and people like to collect guns out of historical or aesthetic interest. Most small towns could easily arm an infantry company out of private collections, and small cities could probably arm a regiment — possibly including automatic or other heavy weapons. There are no militia groups, but organization could occur around fire companies, fraternal organizations, gun clubs, and even veterans' organizations if the provocation were severe enough.

I doubt I will ever have to stand and literally fight for my rights. I hope I don't. If it's going to happen, I hope it happens after my lifetime, after my children's lifetimes, and, if and when they arrive, after my grandchildren's lifetimes. I suspect that's about as many generations ahead as we're capable of worrying about.

At the same time, I wonder if that isn't what those Massachusetts farmers felt in 1775. No doubt, resistance to the British Army looked as hopeless to them as resistance to the federal government does to me. But if it does come to lining up on the village green, I hope I'll have the courage to stand with my neighbors — and they the courage to stand with me — to make sure America stays a free country of free people.

We celebrate that freedom on the Fourth of July, but those words of July Fourth were created by the actions of those men in April 1775. In my mind, that's the real holiday, in the original sense of the word.

Richard J. Davis, a Freedom Daily subscriber, is a dentist in Hurlock, Maryland. This essay originally appeared in the January 1994 issue of Chronicles (Volume 18, No. 1), published by The Rockford Institute, 934 N. Main St., Rockford, IL 61103. Reprinted by permission.

Never Say, "This Can't Happen Here"

2011-01-12T14:09:00.002-06:00

As liberals clamor for stricter gun control, or out right bans, please take a moment to watch this video.

So Much For Global Warming

2011-01-12T08:00:00.003-06:00

A map of snowfall in the United States yesterday revealed 49 states had snow on 1/11/11 and only one did not.

From the southern snow storm heading north, which is affecting air travel, to the current storm in New York City, and flurries out west, there's plenty of white stuff going around.

The one state without a flake? It's the Sunshine State...Florida. Locals are celebrating the fact, though interestingly, parts of the state saw snow just days ago.

Even Hawaii has snow, in Mauna Kea on the Big Island. So much for global warming.

Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Worse

2011-01-11T14:19:00.000-06:00

If things weren’t bad enough in Tucson, now they have to deal with the fruitcakes from the Westboro Baptist Church, who plan on picketing Thursday at the funeral of that sweet little nine year old girl who was killed on Saturday. These are the bastards who picket soldiers funerals, gleefully thankful for their deaths, to help punctuate their warped beliefs.

I hesitate to refer to these brain-donors-before-death as members of a church, because in reality they are nothing more than a family (who almost assuredly are well in-bred) of miscreants who are so far removed from Christianity as amoebas are from human life.

It isn’t clear yet, but it appears they also have plans to picket at all the funerals for the other five people killed in Saturday’s rampage. There are a few biker groups who plan on trying to put up a human barrier between these vermin and the parents of this little girl, so they don’t have to see them.

Arizona’s Governor and the legislature are planning on rushing a bill to be signed that will force them to stay 300 feet away from the funeral. I say it should be 300 miles. Though, if it was my daughter whose funeral they were picketing, I’d want them a lot closer; I’m a good shot, but why take any chances?

Where is a crazy guy with a 9mm and an extended magazine when you really need one?

'Band of Brothers' Inspiration Dies at Age 92

2011-01-10T14:00:00.002-06:00

PHILADELPHIA -- Richard "Dick" Winters, the Easy Company commander whose World War II exploits were made famous by the book and television miniseries "Band of Brothers," died last week in central Pennsylvania. He was 92.

Winters died following a several-year battle with Parkinson's disease, longtime family friend William Jackson said Monday.

An intensely private and humble man, Winters had asked that news of his death be withheld until after his funeral, Jackson said. Winters lived in Hershey, Pa., but died in suburban Palmyra.

The men Winters led expressed their admiration for their company commander after learning of his death.

William Guarnere, 88, said what he remembers about Winters was "great leadership."

"When he said 'Let's go,' he was right in the front," Guarnere, who was called "Wild Bill" by his comrades, said Sunday night from his South Philadelphia home. "He was never in the back. A leader personified."

Another member of the unit living in Philadelphia, Edward Heffron, 87, said thinking about Winters brought a tear to his eye.

"He was one hell of a guy, one of the greatest soldiers I was ever under," said Heffron, who had the nickname "Babe" in the company. "He was a wonderful officer, a wonderful leader. He had what you needed, guts and brains. He took care of his men, that's very important."

Winters was born Jan. 21, 1918 and studied economics at Franklin & Marshall College before enlisting, according to a biography on the Penn State website.

Winters became the leader of Company E, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division on D-Day, after the death of the company commander during the invasion of Normandy.

During that invasion, Winters led 13 of his men in destroying an enemy battery and obtained a detailed map of German defenses along Utah Beach. In September 1944, he led 20 men in a successful attack on a German force of 200 soldiers.

Occupying the Bastogne area of Belgium at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, he and his men held their place until the Third Army broke through enemy lines, and Winters shortly afterward was promoted to major.

After returning home, Winters married his wife, Ethel, in May 1948, and trained infantry and Army Ranger units at Fort Dix during the Korean War. He started a company selling livestock feed to farmers, and he and his family eventually settled in a farmhouse in Hershey, Pa., where he retired.

Historian Stephen Ambrose interviewed Winters for the 1992 book "Band of Brothers," upon which the HBO miniseries that started airing in September 2001 was based. Winters himself published a memoir in 2006 entitled "Beyond Band of Brothers."

Two years ago, an exhibit devoted to Winters was dedicated at the Hershey-Derry Township Historical Society. Winters, in frail health in later years, has also been the subject of a campaign to raise money to erect a monument in his honor near the beaches of Normandy.

Winters talked about his view of leadership for an August 2004 article in American History Magazine:

"If you can," he wrote, "find that peace within yourself, that peace and quiet and confidence that you can pass on to others, so that they know that you are honest and you are fair and will help them, no matter what, when the chips are down."

When people asked whether he was a hero, he echoed the words of his World War II buddy, Mike Ranney: "No, but I served in a company of heroes."

"He was a good man, a very good man," Guarnere said. "I would follow him to hell and back. So would the men from E Company."

Arrangements for a public memorial service are pending.

This man epitomized the spirit of the "Greatest Generation," and he and the soldiers of Easy Company were, without doubt, true American heroes. We should consider ourselves extremely lucky they were the kind of men they were, as it was only through their sacrifice and dedication we won the Second World War - without them, we all probably wouldn't be here today. As a veteran, I salute Maj. Winters and all the soldiers of the Greatest Generation.