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The Western Fan-Dance Over Ukraine

Saturday, February 26th, 2022

A Fan-dance of Unity, Strength and Virtue

As Western leaders posture in endless pouty, moralistic denunciations of Vladimir Putin and the Russians, I think it’s past time to look this dragon in the teeth, but also assess the countless Western Weasels who will do nothing substantial. Germany is perhaps the most useless of all the European NATO members, now strangled by their dependence on Russian gas and oil, particularly the former, and has said they will not go along with sanctions targeting SWIFT.  You see, the Russians expect payment for their fossil fuels, and SWIFT is how those payments are made.  The same is true of the US, the most useless in NATO overall, which is still buying a lot of Russian oil daily.  When SWIFT sanctions were used on the implacable Iranians, they immediately returned to negotiations. What Western nations are doing now is a fan-dance of epic proportions. They’re virtue-signaling while doing absolutely nothing of consequence. Their “rules-based international order” is a hoax, and it’s in shambles.

One former Polish Former Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said plainly in an interview with Deutsche Welle that the Western nations have disgraced themselves by their unwillingness to take even these purely financial measures against the Putin regime. All of it was perfectly summed up in one of Sikorski’s retweets of Ukraine’s foreign minister:

Therein lies the unvarnished truth, and it goes for all the fake, pontificating morons in power on both sides of the Atlantic, who like to regard themselves as experts in foreign affairs and diplomacy: They like to posture as the guarantors of freedom and human rights, and as guardians of the memories of past atrocities, but when it came time for them to actually do what all their posturing promised would be their stance, they defaulted to what would cause them the least immediate economic pain.

I understand the tendency of politicians to do what is expedient with respect to those who elected them, such that imposing sanctions that wind up costing your own populace economic pain may not be popular, but Kuleba is correct: These are cowards of the worst sort. It’s easier to try to fake their alleged virtue by pretending to do something.

At the same time, if you look at the situation in the United States, the Biden administration has been entirely unwilling to place sanctions against Russian energy. The reason is simple: We consume an incredible amount of Russian oil each day.  Given that Biden’s administration is only too happy to effectively place sanctions on the American oil industry, it seems preposterous on its face.  If Biden’s administration were even mildly serious, they’d dump the stoppage of the Keystone Pipeline, they’d get rid of their various bans on fracking, they’d permit the restarting of exploration on public lands, and they’d generally get out of the way of American oil production, such that in short order, we’d need no Russian oil.  This would in turn cripple Putin, drop prices for American consumers, and American companies rather than the Oligarchs in Russia would profit. Hundreds of thousands of good-paying American jobs would spring into existence, and we would quickly eliminate our reliance on foreign oil, which would crush Russia.

When you consider the idiocy of the policy, and realize how these simple steps are fundamentally all that is required to cripple Putin, one wonders why they’ve not been(and will not be) undertaken.  The answer remains the same as ever:  This is how they’re paying Putin for getting rid of that pesky Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. All of these left-wingers now controlling the Western governments, from Germany to Italy to France to Canada to the US, each and every one, has been involved in one way or another in profiting from the long-run corruption that had been the hallmark of Ukraine governments until Zelenskiy arrived.

If a few Ukrainians die, and Putin gets some spoils, it’s a small cost to pay in exchange for ridding themselves of dangerous reformer President Zelenskiy.  Some will suggest that the motive is something simpler and more political, for instance that the Biden administration is now captive to the hard-left de-growth movement in the United States, and while there’s an element of truth to that, we know they’re perfectly willing to throw their hard-left under the bus for the sake of electoral salvation, knowing their hard-left really has no place else to turn with their vote. It’s much the same game as RINOs like McConnell and Cornyn and Graham use on their own conservative voters: If they can stave off primary challengers, in the general election, it’s not as though a conservative voter in Texas is going to opt for the latest Democrat lunatic to run for the Senate.  They’re stuck, as ever, between the lesser of two evils, and this is how these monsters always manage to retain power.  It’s the strategy Abbott is trying to use to stave off a strong challenge by Allen West. He needs desperately to avoid a run-off, because if it becomes a two-man race, there’s a good chance Abbott will be beaten.  His approach is to win by foreclosing on conservative challengers in the primary next week. (I suspect it’s also the reason FoxNews pre-empted Mark Levin’s Sunday show this week, which was to feature West among the guests.  Paul Ryan, now on the board of FoxNews, absolutely detests Allen West.)

In any event, that’s the nature of the Washington game with captives bases.  They know their most hard-core voters will default back to them in every election.  This is why I do not believe this idea explains the failure of the Biden administration to do that which would clearly punish Putin most effectively, while earning him general good will with voters in an election year.  No, there is something much deeper here, and I think the nexus between Hunter, Burisma, Ukraine and Vlad the Invader, along with similar associations with Clinton, Schiff, Pelosi, Romney, Kerry, and several others does a much better job of explaining the situation. The only motivator greater than pure greed for money and power is the absolute necessity to avoid any legal liability, particularly of a criminally corrupt sort. Seeing Zelenskiy silenced is a convenient outcome, the people of Ukraine be damned.

NATO has become largely a virtue-signaling organization, from recruiting to their world-facing side. Here’s a video of their most recent fan-dance:

If this doesn’t convince you that they’re not serious about defending the West, I don’t know what will. This whole exercise in Ukraine is pointless, because they don’t mean to do anything effective.  More, most of them will be happier when Zelenskiy is gone. Welcome to the greatest show on Earth.

Update: Reminder, remember when Obama told Medvedev to communicate to Putin that he’d have more flexibility after the election?  Obama was re-elected, and then Putin took Crimea.  Think about it.  Now Biden is in office, and Putin attacks Ukraine.  Peter Schweizer told us that Biden is compromised. Do you still wonder about our Western fan-dance?

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Posted in Featured, National Security, News, Party of Davos, Politics, Ukraine | Comments Closed

Going to War With the President We’ve Got

Friday, February 25th, 2022

Shall we go to War with the President we’ve got?

Donald Rumsfeld once [in]famously remarked that “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” This remark was accurate, even though it was widely and wildly criticized by leftists who have no understanding of national defense. The sentiment is easy enough to understand: You do not always get the luxury of preparing endlessly for war. Sometimes, the need to go to war supersedes your ability to abstain from or delay it for more ideal conditions or state of readiness.  Sadly, this is sometimes true of presidents as well. If the United States were to be attacked suddenly by nuclear strikes originating in Russia, for instance, it really wouldn’t matter who the president at the time might be.  That president would be expected to respond with equal or greater ferocity, irrespective of party or politics.  The problem we now face as a country borders on the galactically absurd.  We have in the Oval office a foolish, apparently dementia-addled old man, who is apparently not in good control of his bowel, never mind his mouth or intellectual capacity. He ought to be removed under the 25th amendment, come what may, but the people who’ve been using him as their meat-mask have no intention of seeing that happen.  We are in mortal danger, but under this President, Joe Biden, we cannot risk any unnecessary wars.  It is the height of unconscionable madness to permit it. I realize that sometimes, a country must go to war with the president in charge at the time, but this is not that situation, and I condemn any who would suggest otherwise.  No, we must not now go to war with the president we’ve got.

Ukraine is under attack by a hostile, monstrous actor.  Vladimir Putin is despicable, but he also has the advantage of owning the superior forces over the terrain in question.  It’s not a matter of caring, because any person can look in horror at the Hell Putin now imposes on the people of that stricken nation and understand the misery they now suffer.  It’s a matter of practical reality.  We are in no position to do anything unless our answer is a nuclear first strike against Russia, but that’s an intolerably bad option for all of the obvious reasons.  We have no significant bases nearby from which we could operate the number of air sorties needed to put up any sort of sustained defense of Ukrainian airspace, though it is possible we could park an aircraft carrier battle group in the Black Sea.  That’s an extraordinarily risky proposition when you intend to poke the Russian bear within easy reach of their air assets.  We are poorly positioned, and Putin knows it. He’s been watching and assessing NATO for decades.  He knows our NATO allies have barely maintained their responsibilities in the alliance.  He knows they’ve all been cheating.  He knows they are all incredibly weak, and weakened more by their oppressions of their own populations as part of their COVID responses.  He knows they’ve repressed their own dissidents, and he can legitimately throw the political dagger of “hypocrisy” at them with no trouble.

He also knows that America is now weak, with obviously weak and ineffectual leadership that is more concerned with punishing their own countrymen than in prosecuting a war in a country most of the corrupt US leaders would sooner see destroyed, in part to hide their corruption over decades. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Mitt Romney along with their adult children and many others in the DC cocktail-party circuit would be only too happy if Ukraine’s current leadership came to an obscure and quiet end.  Between 1999-2014, the Clinton foundation carted over $10 million dollars from the oligarchs there.  They’ve used it as their personal piggy-bank for more than two decades, laundering money in and out of that small and easily corrupted country.  Their current president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is apparently an actual reformer, and none of them can tolerate that, particularly Putin, who has used it as the base from which to compromise Western politicians, particularly Americans, none of whose names are Trump.

The only question in Washington DC is how to play it for maximum waggage. (As in wag-the-dog.) None of the people now in charge in DC have any intention of rescuing Zelenskiy.  The truth is that they want him gone for all the same reasons Putin does. He can’t have Zelenskiy or his reformer government burning his purchased assets in Washington. It’s better to make it all just go away, and to bury any evidence or witnesses with it.  Others had suggested that the Russian “Invasion of Ukraine” narrative had been an entirely invented story line to give Biden a moment to talk and act tough to distract from the massive failures of his administration, but as facts on the ground now demonstrate, the threat was always very real.  Maintaining an Army in the field is expensive, and the larger the force, the more expensive and difficult it becomes. When it was clear that Putin had more than one-hundred-thousand troops deployed along the borders of Ukraine, it became clear to me that this was more than idle bluffing.

It could be observed that the pronouncements from both the White House and the State Department seemed almost to goad Putin into attacking.  On the one hand, they made threats that all parties knew were idle, while on the other, they openly admitted their inability and unwillingness to do much to stop it. “You’d better not, or we’ll kick your ass, even though we’re in no position to do so, and really don’t have the resolve to do so,” they effectively blustered and admitted at once.

There’s one other issue I’d like to tackle, and it’s with those who seem to be insisting “we MUST do something.” This element doesn’t seem to like that the vast bulk of the American people seem understandably to have no interest in doing much about the situation in Ukraine.  Polls seem to suggest that something like thirty percent of Democrats and twenty percent of Republicans believe the US should have any significant role in Ukraine.  To this element in our country, I suggest they take a look around and smell the crap they’re shoveling.  One, a radio host I have always liked, pointed out for the second consecutive day that after all, ours is a volunteer military, as if that means something to the argument for going to war, and he’s right, it does: A volunteer military requires the people to follow orders just like a conscripted military, with the difference that what makes that volunteer force viable is their understanding that their chain of command will not make frivolous or futile use of them. It’s one of only a couple of times in my history of listening to Mark Levin that I very nearly turned him off. I know there are dolts who have come to believe, inexplicably, that the killer Putin is some sort of good guy in disguise, but I’m not one of those, and Mr. Levin ought to be more careful before he begins to conflate America First patriots with these.

I don’t know what’s in Mr. Levin’s head when he says a thing like that.  I was a volunteer too, when I was fortunate enough to have a great commander-in-chief in President Ronald Reagan.  Neither was he without flaws.  Eight days before I reported for Basic Training, 241 servicemembers – Marines(220), Sailors(18) and Soldiers(3) – were slaughtered in Beirut.  When I went through boot camp, the mostly Vietnam combat veteran drill instructors all believed we were inevitably going to war.  We believed it too.  They drilled us like it, and they trained us with a vigor and intensity prior classes that year probably hadn’t experienced.  They were tough as nails, maybe more than usual, because they believed we trainees would be called upon to go to Lebanon.  That call never came, but I believe to this day that every one of us who graduated that training cycle were beneficiaries, because they more scrupulously got rid of the duds, pushed us to the physical, emotional, and intellectual limits, making us better soldiers.  The point is that President Ronald Reagan did not send in more Marines, Sailors, or Soldiers.  In point of fact, he pulled them out.  When that was the result, I remember that the sentiment in the military community was not all that happy about it.  Nobody wants to see their fellow servicemembers slaughtered, particularly to no purpose, and definitely without punitive response.  At the time, it didn’t sit well, even though it was potentially our necks on the line had Reagan sent more troops instead of withdrawing them.

In the longer run, however, I came to take a more mature view of what Reagan did, or more properly, didn’t do.  He evaluated the terrain, he looked at who we faced, and what the probability would be that more troops would merely make for more concentrated targets, far from home, to be attacked by small groups or individual suicide bombers where the mission was already murky and hadn’t borne the expected fruit. He looked at our allies in the region, and how he might augment and support the mission, and finally decided there wasn’t an attainable military objective that could be reasonably achieved without unreasonable losses.  In short, President Reagan made an entirely rational choice.  He likely wanted retribution against them as much as any of us. He wrote the hundreds of letters to wives and mothers and fathers and children.  He knew the unambiguous costs. Strangely, I would later intersect with Reagan’s foreign policy again, in April 1986, when a Berlin discotheque was bombed, killing US Servicemembers.  It was a strange turn of events that led my unit to serve briefly as replacements in Berlin in September of that year. Reagan did exact a punishment on the bad guys in this case, being Ghaddafi and his ring of terrorist henchmen, within ten days sending a bombing raid to Tripoli that nearly got the “Colonel.”

My point in all of this is that it’s very easy to look at the situation in Ukraine and desire to be able to put a stop to it. The sickening truth is that when we pretended, starting with President George HW Bush, that there was some “peace dividend” to be obtained from the end of the Cold War, it was foolishness, and an instance of utter stupidity that only anti-military pukes like the Clintons could love.  They exploited it, too.  Rather than realizing that the “peace dividend” from the ending of the Cold War was peace itself, we pretended that we could reduce our defense spending.  Adjusting for inflation, to spend at our Cold War defense-spending peak in 1986, a year in which we spent an astounding $295 billion, in today’s dollars, we should be spending roughly $1.2 trillion.  Instead, in 2019, we were spending roughly $740 billion.  At the turn of the century, after two terms of Clinton, we had fallen to $320 billion when we ought to have been closer to $500 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, and the percentage of GDP expended on our military had fallen from 6.63% in 1986 to 3.11% in 2000.  Even now, we’re only slightly better, at 3.41% of GDP, as of 2019, so that we’re at slightly more than half as much military spending as a percentage of our GDP than we had been in 1986, a time when many, myself included, believe the US Army was at or near its peak in training and morale. (See stats here.)

Europe is far worse. Trump was not only right about European nations’ contributions to NATO, but their underlying defense expenditures are cratering. Since Trump left, they’ve fallen off a cliff, with reports that the German Army couldn’t deploy sufficient forces to repel successfully much of anything.  In short, Europe has left themselves virtually defenseless, with the brief exception of the period of Trump’s presidency, with only new NATO member Poland substantially upholding the promise of expending at least two percent of their national GDP on defense.  The United States has been bearing the burdens of defending Europe for most of a century now, yet we cannot get them to pay to defend themselves, and there is no will under the current administration in Washington DC to hold NATO’s feet to the fire. In 2020, Germany barely attained 1.57% of its GDP in defense spending, and that was after extensive prodding from President Trump. When he took office, the Germans were spending roughly 1.1% on defense.  In short, don’t look to Berlin for help.

This is the realistic assessment of the terrain in Europe: NATO has fallen into severe disrepair, from the end of the Cold War, until Trump came along to prod them beginning in 2017, but has since fallen back into the same rut, with the blame naturally being placed on CoVid19. At this point, the United States should be telling NATO: “That’s it. We’re cutting you off. We’re bringing home our troops unless you get to your spending goals AND make up for all the years of shortfalls within the decade.”

Of course, we’re no more likely to get that from this administration that we are to have a competent president, never mind commander-in-chief. More, this administration is incapable of waging an effective war of any kind, anywhere, at any time. They’ve diverted our military into concerns with all things “woke,” and if you think this is Ronald Reagan’s military of 1986, technology notwithstanding, you need your head examined.  Quickly.  Yes, of course we still have some good war-fighters in our military, but they’re now a pathetic minority within the ranks, and in the officer corps, they’re getting pretty thin as the service academies have been infiltrated by more and more social justice schlock, as modern “education” theories take precedence over what had traditionally worked.  I would like you to watch the first six and one-fourth minutes of this episode of Bannon’s War Room. In those first few minutes, he presents what he calls his “cold open,” and in it are various clips, including three recruiting ads, one for NATO, one for the Russian Army, and one for the US Army.  If you don’t see the problem, again, you need your head examined:


Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been reporting to you the state of our nation, and more generally, or our globe in one way or another for more than a decade at this web address. While my posts have been more infrequent in recent years, it’s not for a lack of concern.  People are foolishly insisting now that “we must do something,” but look at the state of our country.  I ask them: What would you have us do?  We have feckless leaders, corrupt and intransigent to the suffering and travails of the American people.  We have a military that, but for a brief reprieve under Trump, has been diminished and demolished, it’s morale wrecked along with its ethos.  We have a corrupted Justice Department that behaves as the hitmen for the government mafia.  We have an FBI that actively plots to entrap citizens, in shenanigans of that agency’s complete contrivance and invention.  We have a Department of State that openly plots against elected presidents it does not like, and we have an intelligence community that actively seeks to surveil and undermine a president it did not and would not obey.  We have an opposition party that barely musters any sort of fight against any of this, in large measure because they’re not really opposed.  We have public health officials who collude with big pharma to poison the American people and hide the data. We have whole segments of the population committed to destroying the country from within, including local officials, many bought-off by globalist pigs like Soros and Schwab.  You actually expect, in this condition, and in this state of being, that the remarkably few American people who realize what is going on, to volunteer their children into a war on behalf of this? Of this???

Do not tell me that we must go to war with the President we’ve got. I’m heartbroken at what I’ve seen thus far from Ukraine, like any other compassionate, thoughtful human must be.  I know that Putin’s mission is to exterminate Zelenskiy and his entire cabinet. His intention is to expunge them from the face of the globe.  Worse, the scumbags running Washington DC have every reason to help him do so.  There’s too much evidence of their corruption over in that tiny country.  There’s too much evidence of how they were controlled from the Kremlin. They don’t want to save Zelenskiy or Ukraine.  They want to bury Zelenskiy and his cabinet, they’re willing to burn Ukraine to the ground to do it, and they’re helping Putin carry it out.  Meanwhile, the American economy is spiraling into a stagflationary period that will make the Carter years look like a boom.  (It was once a joke that Jimmy Carter was thankful to Obama, and then Biden(but I repeat myself) for knocking him from the top of the “worst president’s ever” list, but nobody’s really laughing any longer. We’re in freefall, and every sensible person knows it.)

In the midst of all of this, those of you who wish to “do something” need to get a grip on your emotions, and understand what we’re really up against now.  We’re fighting for the survival of this country, right here, right now.  That great wealth or influence might offer insulation to some is no excuse for the indifference in the sentiment contained in the idea that Americans are somehow defective if they don’t wish to rush off to war against Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.  We know it’s another nasty set-up, just like all the ones deployed against us here at home.  We know the score.  We know, because every damned “conspiracy theory” (or most of them) of the last two decades have been proven mostly true.  We know Zelenskiy is the good guy.  We know.  Meanwhile, we listen to buffoons like Lindsey Graham, whose military experience consisted of walking papers around a Judge Advocate General’s office, pontificate about the privations we will suffer due to this crisis.  It’s not enough as it is, you see; Goober would have us suffer more.

Now I have to endure a berating monologue from a radio host I have long supported because I’m in no hurry to see my younger, ill-prepared brethren in uniform sent off to do something somewhere? For what purpose? To what end? For the sake of the need to “do something?” No sir.  I will not support going to war with this class of criminals who run our country. I will not support the spilling of so much as one drop of their blood on behalf of these cretins.  They’ve spent decades demolishing the country, and it’s not just the Democrats, though they’re today the mob bosses in charge.  When we had a president who was not part of their mob, they tried, like the gangsters they are, to take him out in any way that they could.  They used their vast criminal enterprise, posing as lawful suits at the bar of corrupt courts, undermining the integrity of our election, all because Trump had to go.

Years ago, I counseled young people to serve a term of enlistment in the military if their life plans were not firm after finishing high school. I told them it was the best thing they could do for themselves, while also serving their country.  It was true in my time, but it hasn’t been for most of a half-generation.  Even in Trump’s time, the military was already thoroughly undermined from the top, ever since Obama purged the Generals now more than a decade ago.

I truly do feel terribly for the Ukrainian people.  I know that like most ordinary people everywhere, they simply want to be left to live their lives, mostly in peace.  I know their current president is a reformer, and if it were possible, I would try to rescue he and his countrymen from the Russians.  The problem is that it is not currently possible.  More, the people running this country don’t actually want it saved.  I am as powerless to change that today, in the here and now, as any other American.  Shall we overthrow this government so that we can retroactively spend the defense dollars we should have spent, and undo all the stupidity and malfeasances of the last three decades? How will that help Zelenskiy?  More, we didn’t raise a credible effort to overthrow this government when it conspired against the President we elected. We didn’t raise a credible effort to overthrow this government when it obviously conspired with various state and local officials and NGOs to steal our presidential election and elections for lower offices.  It’s not merely Joe and Kamala who are illegitimate. Chuck Schumer is illegitimate in his leadership position, because neither Mark Kelly nor Rafael Warnock, among others, actually won their races.  Nancy Pelosi is illegitimate, because there were at least a half-dozen closely contested races that were likely impacted by the same cheating.  Do you really believe John James lost his Senate race in Michigan?  I don’t.

No, Mr. Levin, don’t tell me we should spill blood or treasure, no matter how strongly we might feel about it, for the sake of Ukraine or President Zelenskiy.  Until we spill all the blood and treasure needed to rescue our own fallen nation, don’t dare speak of it to me. You haven’t earned the right.  If you wish to characterize me as America First, as though it were a slur of some kind, so be it. I’ll stand by it. Don’t worry, I won’t burn any of the autographed books that fill half a shelf, in part not only because I hate book-burners and wanton, pointless destruction, but also because, with the way things are rapidly heading, I may need them soon for that purpose to cook my supper. Shall we go to war with the president we’ve got?  Respectfully, that depends on the contextual meaning of “with,” sir.  With him in Ukraine?

Hell no.

 

Editor’s Note: I’ve been a big fan of Mark Levin for a long time, and in the past, I’ve contributed to the Landmark Legal Foundation, of which he served as President for several years.  I don’t mean here to personally attack Mr. Levin, but I fail to understand his point of view on this particular issue. I always feel badly when I find myself at severe disagreement with the Great One, but on this point, I will not demur.  Our country cannot now defend itself, and its leaders prevent its agents and officers from defending even our Southern border.  They file suits at law against states, like my own, who attempt to enforce the laws of the United States, and even when ordered by courts to do so, effectively play a stalling game, and a game of “you can’t make me” with federal judges who dare to rule against them, up to and including the Supreme Court. So long as we have a lawless government, I support only wars of immediate existential circumstances for the United States. I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States, and it does not expire, no matter who now has claimed the authority to ignore it.

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Posted in Breaking, Donald Trump, Featured, Joe Biden, National Security, Obiden, video, War, War Room | Comments Closed

Deaths From Global Warming Hoax Soar

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Political Hoax Engulfs Globe

The Canada Free Press has published an article that aptly makes the case that the Global Warming Hoax is now responsible for a growing number of winter deaths among Europeans and others who have succumbed to the cold due to the expense of heating their homes, particularly amongst the elderly.  This makes perfect sense, as the elderly on fixed incomes struggle to pay for their medicines, heat their homes, and buy groceries.  The UK and others in Europe have been closing down coal-fired power plants, driving up the cost of electricity, and generally diminishing the standard of living. We will soon experience this same phenomenon here in the US, even in summer, as Texas will lose three coal-fired plants this year, to be shut down in accordance with EPA mandates.  Instead of freezing to death, our elderly will bake in their homes come high summer, and you can bet the death toll will rise here too.

This is all the result of a logically and scientifically bankrupt notion of “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” that is being pounded into the heads of your children at your local public schools, despite the fact that much of these theories have now been debunked, and the science upon which these government actions have been taken demonstrated as biased and fraudulent.  Much of this is based on the mistaken theory that Carbon Dioxide(CO2) drives temperatures, when it now turns out that the opposite may in fact be the case.  Rather than exhaling and adding to Global Warming, it seems, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is highly dependent upon the temperature of the oceans, since they sequester a large amount of the world’s CO2.  As temperatures rise from any cause, the oceans’ carrying capacity for CO2 rises.

The question remains: While we experienced some minor warming over the last two centuries, the cause of that warming remained unclear.  We actually experienced a “little ice age” that tapered off through that period, leading to another question:  What is the actual “normal” mean surface temperature on planet Earth?  That turns out to be a rather more difficult question to answer, particularly because there are overlapping cycles that may even have a cosmic source, such as our solar system’s relation to the spiral arms of the Milky Way.  What this implies is that our climate may indeed be dominated by factors well outside of human control or influence, and that our contribution to any alleged “climate change” is incidental to the natural processes at work.

Naturally, the biggest single driver of climate on Earth is our own Sun.  It too goes through cycles of activity and relative inactivity in terms of sun spots, solar flares, and other phenomena that directly affect the way our world is heated, just ninety-three million miles away.  Meanwhile, right here at home, the masterminds who wish to command us have been looking for excuses to control our activities, and in the 1970s, they happened upon the climate as a good excuse.  First, they said we would go through an ice age, when during the latter half of that decade, parts of the country experienced record snowfall, blizzards, and cold spells.  When the cycle began to reverse in the 1980s, they quickly went off in search of a new bogeyman, and of course they found one:  Human activity, they alleged, was causing the Earth to warm.

According to their most ludicrous predictions, Florida should by now be under water, along with all of Louisiana, and other coastal regions globally.  The polar ice caps should be all but non-existent, and yet the polar ice has returned with a vengeance, leading some to wonder what was all the fuss all along.  The human policy tinkerers are never discouraged, because they keep ginning up new science to support their claim of the week, and of course the ruling by the EPA that they can now regulate CO2 means they will.  This has spawned shut-downs of coal-fired plants, and driven up energy prices globally.  This is the result of an Obama administration unrestrained by the doubt now cast on the questionable science, forging ahead with its regulatory scheme because in truth, none of this is about the environment. No, it’s about you.

What better way to claim the authority to regulate all human activity than to claim dominion over the question of Carbon Dioxide, and the various energy sources that produce it?  All life requires energy, and modern civilizations require gobs of it, but by shutting down energy production, not only do they restrain and restrict your individual endeavors, but also the enterprises that allow you to sustain yourself.  Businesses require energy, and to make it more expensive is to reduce the productive capacity of the entire private sector.  More, since government is the single largest energy consumer by far, its weight adds to the cost.  There’s no desire or even real concern for the environment among policy makers pushing this garbage.  They’ve always viewed it as the method by which to regulate our lives.

Meanwhile, real people are losing their lives around the globe to this miserable policy, predominately in Europe and North America. It’s a terrible shame, but then we’re talking about politicians who have little of that, and as they posture as saviors of the planet, as the death toll from their schemes increases significantly, at some point we ought to ask the question: “For whom are we saving it?”  After all, they are discouraging human reproduction by every available means, and the elderly are being baked, euthanized, frozen, starved.  If we’re not reproducing, and we’re shortening our life expectancies, the population will at some point begin to shrink.  They’ve been after that goal since Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, and yet not a single one of their dire predictions has ever come true, so instead, they’re now imposing them.

At some point, as Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security scours lines in airports and other venues for those who would carry out “man-caused disasters,” at some point she might be inclined to turn the focus on government. Slowly now, at first, but in escalating fashion, the ultimate results of these policies will be a disaster in human terms.  We must regain control over this runaway government, and we must begin to tear it down.  It’s maniacal policies are now poised to kill us faster than any “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” ever could.

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Environmental Hoaxes, Law, Media, News, Politics, Sabotage | 9 Comments »

Britain Isolated From Europe

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Should Britain Feel Left Out?

Reuters is reporting that the EU has effectively isolated Britain, and they way they tell it, it’s a disaster for Britain.  From my point of view, it may lead to that country’s salvation.  Insofar as I can determine, what happened  may look like a British set-back according to Reuters, but for the life of me, I cannot see how.  If British Prime Minister David Cameron were smart, he’d play this up, and seek to withdraw entirely from the Union.  As the Reuters article makes clear, Britain has never been fully accepted by other EU members because they’ve neither joined the common currency nor accepted the Schengen Treaty that provides open borders between signatory nations.   The assessment is that Cameron had been “constrained by domestic politics,” but I view that as a victory for the people of Britain.  Rather than getting drawn even deeper into the quagmire of the EU, Britain may yet find itself able to maintain its sovereignty.

This is part of the problem the US faces with its Euro-entanglements.  Also mentioned in the Reuters piece is the fact that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was making his presence known during the flurry of meetings and negotiations happening across Europe throughout the week:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had spent several days in Europe before the summit. The United States, like all of Europe’s trade partners, had been watching the accelerating debt crisis with profound concern, worried for their own economies and banks.

No! This is the thing about which I have been warning you for some time, with the Euro currency teetering on the brink of total collapse: The United States has extended itself to cover Eurozone banks to an extent that is reckless and dangerous.  Geithner was on hand to try to lend his assistance in shepherding the process along.  In the end, what came out of it was what Sarkozy had wanted all along.  There will be a new intergovernmental agreement among nations of the Eurozone as a sidebar to the main EU treaty.  This effectively cuts Britain out, but it also gives Britain every justification in breaking all bonds with Brussels.

What is at stake is the notion of tying the budgets of EU nations to some sort of formal, centralized process, by means of which they hope to get control of the staggering debt.  They have extended and leveraged and borrowed in every conceivable fashion, and yet they still look to do more.  The single currency has been a problem even before its official beginning, since the manner in which it was created was based on some rather generous calculations of the value of the original members’ currencies, and because no budget discipline was installed at the time.  Think of this as an incremental approach to a single central government for the entire zone.

In meetings with the head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, and euro zone finance ministers the conversation was all about the two-year-old debt crisis and how to resolve it. The issues: the role of the ECB, how far should or would it stand behind countries to buy them breathing space, the scale of the euro zone’s rescue fund, the part to be played by the IMF, and should the EU let private bondholders off the hook.

This should cause further concerns for Americans, because the IMF will get much of its funding from the US Federal Reserve, drawing the US even further into the Euro-debacle.

On Monday, Nicolas Sarkozy insisted that Britain is needed as part of the Eurozone trading bloc, but it’s hard to imagine how this remains that case, and Sarkozy admits as much, in stating:

“We did everything, the chancellor and I, to allow the British to take part in the agreement. But there are now clearly two Europes,” Sarkozy said in an interview with the French daily Le Monde.

This is a typically continental view of the issue, but it’s clear to me that Angela Merkel and Germany will bear the brunt of the strain.  Nevertheless, it’s my view that as dire as some would like to make this out to be for Britain’s sake, I’m unmoved by their insistence that Prime Minister Cameron has made a mistake:

“I think that’s a shame because we need our British friends in Europe,” he said, arguing that Cameron’s centre-left predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would not have made “the same mistake”.

I think it was a terrible mistake for Britain to tie their nation to this mess in the first place, and I think that was true of Germany as well, but while the British have maintained some independence, the Germans have not, and now they will pay.  If this all goes as badly as it seems that it may, Merkel and Sarkozy may be looking for non-extradition countries to which they can flee.

Apparently, I’m not alone in my dim view of the Euro, as one Telegraph writer points out the real reason for the Europeans’ anger toward Britain:

No, they aren’t really angry with us for opposing the new Treaty for Fiscal Union. The reason our brother and sister Europeans are so chronically enraged with the British is that we have been proved completely right about the euro. For more than 20 years, British ministers have been coming out to Brussels and saying that they just love all this single-market stuff, but that they doubt the wisdom of trying to create a monetary union. And for more than 20 years, some of us have been saying that the reason a monetary union won’t work is that you can’t do it without a political union – and that a political union is not democratically possible.

We warned that you would need a kind of central Euro-government to control national budgets and taxation, and that the peoples of Europe wouldn’t wear it. Now look. It wasn’t the Anglo-Saxon bankers who caused the trouble in the eurozone, Sarkozy mon ami. It was the utter failure of the eurozone countries – starting with France, incidentally – to observe the Maastricht rules. It was the refusal of the Greeks to control their spending or to reform their social security systems. In Greece and Italy, the democratic leaders have been effectively deposed in the hope of appeasing the markets and saving the euro; and what makes the leaders of the eurozone countries even more furious is that it doesn’t seem to be working.

Boris Johnson is absolutely right about this.  It’s damned-well time somebody said it.  Britain shouldn’t fear being cut out of Europe at this point.  They should call it “Independence Day” and celebrate.  In my view, the sooner they can dis-entangle themselves from the entire fiasco, the greater their chances of avoiding at least some of the calamity that will ruin the continent.  I only wish our own leaders here in the US would do the same.

Note: In the US, by mid-afternoon Monday, the Dow was off more than 200 points, or roughly 1.7%, on fears about the continuing European crisis.

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Posted in Business, Economics, European Union, News, Politics | Comments Closed

Warning: Euro May Trigger Global Collapse

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

What Democracy Really Looks Like

Over the last week, I’ve been watching events unfolding with growing concern, and while I truly hate the idea that I might inadvertently offer myself up as just one more “Chicken Little,” I must in all candor tell you that because the sky is not falling now, do not assume it will not fall tomorrow.  We’ve listened to the media talking heads, the pundits, the analysts, the economists, and even the politicians, and virtually all of them have made rosy predictions and hopeful prognostications for the immediate future, and your federal government feeds this view with its own phony numbers, endlessly amendable and adjustable statistics, and a common lie that consists of telling you: “It’s all going to be just fine.”  As I’ve reported to you within the last few weeks, more downgrades were coming, and banks moved Euro liabilities under cover of FDIC, but now the downgrades are here.  There will be more.  When the Euro falls, it may very well take the United States with it.  The time to prepare has very nearly expired, and there will be no turning back.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am now going to tell you the truth, and I will place no bunting of red, white and blue around it, because you deserve to know it all lest you be left penniless and homeless and starving in the streets, unable to defend yourself from the cold, never mind the brigands that will likely swarm our cities:  If the Euro collapses, the blow-back may not merely damage our economy, but thoroughly destroy it, and there is absolutely nothing we can do but deepen and worsen the results by more delaying tactics.  Businesses are scrambling to come up with options if the Euro collapses, but the truth is that many of them are now in a position from which they will not recover.   The choices you make now may mean the literal life or death of you, but it’s important that you know how we arrived here so that if ever there is a chance to arise anew, you will already know the answer.  Even now, the statists of Europe are seeking ways to loot you. One world government will come riding in on the back of this nightmarish trojan horse.

It is a truism that few wish to acknowledge that one cannot consume more than one produces without eventually becoming subject to the sort of collapse we now face.  It goes for nations as well as people,  and just as people can hide the growing disparity between their financial underpinnings and their lifestyles for a time, nations can do so, and for even longer and to a greater degree because they can pilfer the value of the few still producing among their citizens.  The problem is that just like individuals, even nations and unions of nations run afoul of nature’s basic truism requiring one to produce at least as much as one consumes.  Herein lies the sickening truth of the impending Euro collapse, and the collapse of all those who have tied themselves to the Euro, including the United States.  For far too long, far too many of us have lived without producing while others camouflaged their bankruptcy, willingly or [more often] unwillingly carrying their burdens.  No nation can survive that.  No people can sustain that.

The single currency of the European Union was advertised to make them more competitive as a trading bloc with the United States and Asia.  In truth, that’s not the whole story.  The Euro was also devised as the means by which to buy a little more time before the welfare states of Europe failed.  No rational person ever thought otherwise, and every politician from Rome to Madrid to London to Paris and Berlin has known this for two generations or more.  Your politicians right here in the good ol’ US of A have known it too, and yet when they had a chance to do something to change it, they instead accelerated it.  You might ask: “Why?”

The answer has ever been the same, and it is the endless pursuit of power at the cost of any and every principle.  This ambition has blinded mankind almost from the very start of the first civilizations.  In our modern society, if you think politicians are the greatest bribe-takers, I urge you to think again: Modern politicians are the greatest source of offers in bribery but the greatest recipients are we the people.  You wonder who is guilty?  He who offers a bribe is powerless in the face of rejection, but he who accepts that bribe is guilty for all his days.  In small increments, and in bits and pieces, the people of Europe were convinced to surrender their liberty in exchange for small bribes.  Over time, the bribes became so large that to maintain them demanded more and more from the producers, until the relative few producers began to join the gravy train.  While they bribed your silence and your complicity with the get from your neighbors’ pockets, be assured that they have been busily lining their own.

The Euro was concocted to hide this.  All those nations whose fiscal problems are now manifest have always been unstable, and it’s because successive generations of politicians in those nations have been carrying out this sort of bribery of its citizenry from time immemorial.  The French revolution was a Marxist affair, though not known by that name in those days, and nations such as Greece, Italy, and Spain haven’t been fiscally responsible for centuries.  The disease is not heritable, but it often visits subsequent generations, because it is born of a bad idea that is passed from one to the next.  That idea is statism.  Statism is the ruin of mankind, and always has been, because its fundamental claim is that man exists to serve the state before himself.  Whether statism took the form of Monarchy, Theocracy, Democracy, or some brand of Totalitarianism, it has ever been the bane of human existence, and yet no idea has more staying power among people than this one.  It plays upon one of mankind’s greatest weaknesses:  The temptation of covetousness and envy, born ever of sloth.  It is enabled  by the deadliest sins against nature, or nature’s God.  It offers the false promise of a life without discomfort, effort, or pain, but in the end, it returns only misery.

A little more than a century ago, this idea began to catch on even in  America.  It has slowly grown as a cancer, and it has spread its tendrils through every community, on every level, and in all things.  We’ve been hiding it, too.  This disease has its own fuel, and the Federal Reserve provides it, and not surprisingly, has been providing it for most of the time in question: Easy money.  Low interest rates and plentiful credit has made this possible.  Consider the individual who runs up a pocket-full of credit cards, and struggles to make the monthly minimum payments.  That’s our nation.  Just as a weak-minded, or necessity-driven person can quickly run into debt to a dangerous level, so too can a country, and just as the easy availability of credit can act as an inducement for an individual, so does it work as a great temptation to nations.  Nations fall when they permit politicians to bribe them with credit.  Look around you: How many votes have been bought by a budget that is nearly two-thirds entitlement programs?

As has been reported this week, our own Federal Reserve loaned out over $7 Trillion at impossibly low interest rates.  That’s half the GDP of the United States, in loans.  Yet you may rightly ask:  Where does the Fed get the money?  Answer: It loans it into existence, i.e., it prints it.  Only the promise of the debtor to pay gives it any value, but if that debtor defaults, well, the value of the dollar is diminished accordingly, but even if the debtor makes payments, there is always risk attached, and that risk is shown in inflation.  This is why the Credit rating of the US Government has been such a big deal:  It is the single largest debtor, and substantially so. As our government looks less and less likely to be able to repay its debts, while it continues to borrow money at an increasing pace, what do you suppose will happen to the value of your money?  Why did Thanksgiving dinner cost an average of 13% more this year than last?  Next year’s will cost 20% more, or worse.

This is the real truth of this situation, and unless and until you are ready to confront it, and to reject the myriad bribes from politicians, you are going to see things grow much worse.  Perhaps most frightening, they may have successfully engineered not only the collapse of the Euro, but also the Dollar, and every other major currency on the planet, but what they will offer as a “fix” is a global currency that will make of us all slaves to the same masters.  They will offer you more bribes, or at least threaten to take away the ones you currently enjoy, all so you will go along.

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake about it:  With the current crisis ready to explode in Europe, and with the state of our own economy, under the willfully absent leadership of Barack Obama, we are waiting on the edge of collapse.  This may be a most un-Merry Christmas, and it only promises to worsen.  If we somehow survive as a nation, it will be surprising, but it will only have been possible if we reject calls for a global currency even at the expense of the bribes we are now so accustomed to taking that we believe them to be our entitlements.  From now until then, you can spend your time in contemplation: Do you prefer life as a slave?  Many of your neighbors will say “yes” without flinching.  Somehow, somewhere, we must find the strength to say “No.”   Prepare, my friends, and by the strength of your preparations may the republic endure.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Breaking News, Business, Economics, Emergency Preparedness, European Union, Federal Reserve, News, Politics | 14 Comments »

Greece Seeing Runs on Banks – Escalating

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Making a Withdrawal - Of Everything

We’re seeing the beginning of the end for Greece.  The runs on banks area escalating even now.  People are beginning to panic as they realize their life savings are at risk, and they’re withdrawing the money so they can stuff their mattresses.  The problem is, hyper-inflation, which may be just around the corner, will turn their mattresses full of paper into worthless kindling.  There’s no point in pretending otherwise, as the Greeks have looted their own government and monetary system to the extent that it’s probably unrecoverable.  Greece is going down. Back in the 1980’s, as I listened to the first debates about the formation of the EU, I listened to opponents.

They worried that they were getting suckered into a bottomless pit of debt with the Mediterranean countries, that were well-known for their fiscal and monetary unreliability.   I feel badly for Europe, but guess what?  Our Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund have managed to link us to the same fate. Here are some tidbits from Bild via ForexCrunch:

“I come here to immediately pick up my pension € 300. Who knows what else happened today. My money is safe only when it is at home” said Pensioners Evagelos Dimitros age 73.

The head of an Athens bank branch told BILD: “More and more Greeks who still have some money come to get it from the bank. In my office there are a total of 5,000 customers, 2,500 of which either have their money transferred abroad or hoard it at home. If this continues, there will soon be no more money.”

This is a warning and an alarm bell ringing for all of Europe.  This is the beginning of the collapse of the European single currency, whether they realize it or not.  The British should jump ship from the EU Titanic if they wish to save themselves.  The Germans may be left holding the bag, and Italy is on the verge of following suit immediately.

Ladies and gentlemen, through a string of bad decisions, and suicidal policies that have promoted the growth of socialism, we have a true calamity coming.  Even now, as the  European heads of state meet to discuss what to do next, it seems they will fail to avert this crisis. Of course they will.  There’s no way around it.  Neither big government, nor even big, big, big government can fix this in any way but one: Slash spending.  Until the member governments are willing to do that, there’s no hope.

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Posted in Business, Economics, Politics, Update | 3 Comments »

European Union Headed For Collapse?

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Beginning of the End?

In the UK’s Parliament, David Cameron is trying to stave off a revolt of the conservative party, as at least 60 members are aboard with the idea of putting up a referendum on leaving the EU.  As a way to head them off, Cameron is hoping to exact some EU treaty re-writes that will return some autonomy to the UK in the matters of social laws and employment.  At the moment, he doesn’t seem to be making any headway, and a revolt against his proposal seems likely.  At the same time, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has told Cameron that he’s sick of the UK telling the rest of the EU what to do, since the British “hate the Euro.”  If you haven’t figured out what’s at the root of all of this, let me help to explain:  The EU is on the brink of complete and utter destruction, and the Eurozone is likely to fails, since neither Greece(immediately) nor Italy(just over the horizon) seem likely to stave off default on their sovereign debt.  Yesterday, I related to you the story of Angela Merkel of Germany chastising Italy over its debt-to-GDP ratio, as she’s looking over the immediate horizon and can see the trouble brewing in Italy, but now France has joined in the pressuring of Italy.  The EU is in deep trouble just now and it looks like the beginning of the end.

Some see this as empowering the US, but any such bubble will be short-lived, as while power in Europe is likely to become decentralized in the short run, in the US, a collapse of our markets and our banking system may not be too far away as I reported Saturday and Sunday.  Our current state of economic and financial affairs leverages strongly against any lasting leadership role, because we’re in debt very nearly on par with Italy, and if we fold, the rest of the world will follow.  The problem at the moment for the US is that we’ve stuck our necks out on behalf of the Europeans via the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund to an extent that we are now firmly tied to their fate.  If they fall, so will we, but the question remains: How far, and how fast?

If we had wise political leadership, they would demand that we stop sticking our neck out on behalf of the Eurozone.  Yes, if they fail, it will hurt us too, but the more we increase our stake, the greater our eventual losses, and the greater the damage will be here at home.  If the EU winds up dissolving at some future date, it will be a potential boon to American economic might, but in the short run, it will have dire effects on our capital markets.  The point to be understood is that I can’t imagine a way that Europe fetches this one from the fire, as the UK’s reluctance signals.  If the British do not wish to stick their necks out, I can’t imagine a reason on Earth that we should be so-inclined.

Domestically, we have weak leadership in the only House in government that would be able to stop any of our further involvement. John Boehner’s not going to stick his neck out in opposing what’s being done with the European derivatives from the Bank of America and JP Morgan, just as he wouldn’t stick his neck out over the debt ceiling negotiations.  In the end, Boehner will capitulate to the Democrats just as he did in July, and much like David Cameron is having to do with members of Parliament in London, Boehner will be trying to herd his members in Washington DC who can see the elections of 2012 directly in front of them, and know they cannot support these kinds of deals any longer.

What all of this is likely to mean on Wall Street at the open on Monday is anybody’s guess, but one thing’s for certain: The volatility we’ve been seeing these last several months is likely to continue, and one of these days very soon may be the worst day on Wall Street in 80 years.  I’m not trying to instill fear or panic, but I want you to know what’s going on in the world around you.  With Europe on the brink, the Middle East ablaze, and our own nation in a severe downturn, it’s only natural to wonder when the bubble will burst.  Washington has been trying to conceal all of this from you for so long that I think they may have forgotten it’s fake.  You can’t support the markets with direct injections of cash as was done through TARP, the bail-outs, and QE2 without eventually arriving at the day when it all goes belly-up.  Having been linked to Europe so thoroughly, we are more vulnerable than ever. Our political leaders have neither the competence nor the will to extricate our nation from the grip of a global calamity.  In the case of at least one individual, I believe it’s being engineered.  Prepare, ladies and gentlemen, prepare.

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Posted in Business, Economics, European Union, Federal Reserve, Foreign Policy, Politics | 5 Comments »

Another Downgrade on the Horizon?

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

Worse This Time?

Leave it to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch to publish their fears of another credit-rating downgrade for the US government.  On Saturday, I brought you the story of how this very company is shifting some of its European derivatives over to its depository arms so that they will be insured under FDIC.  It’s a stunning development that an analyst for this very institution to  tell us they expect another credit downgrade, tells us something about how they believe that will work out for the American tax-payer that will now be on the hook for trillions. They don’t think it’s going to turn out well, I can assure you, but you can expect all sorts of hand-wringing excuses when the meltdown occurs.

In his dire analysis, Ethan Harris writes:

“We expect a moderate slowdown in the beginning of next year, as two small policy shocks—another debt downgrade and fiscal tightening—hit the economy. The “not-so-super” Deficit Commission is very unlikely to come up with a credible deficit-reduction plan. The committee is more divided than the overall Congress. Since the fall-back plan is sharp cuts in discretionary spending, the whole point of the Committee is to put taxes and entitlements on the table. However, all the Republican members have signed the Norquist “no taxes” pledge and with taxes off the table it is hard to imagine the liberal Democrats on the Committee agreeing to significant entitlement cuts. The credit rating agencies have strongly suggested that further rating cuts are likely if Congress does not come up with a credible long-run plan. Hence, we expect at least one credit downgrade in late November or early December when the super Committee crashes.”

Of course, part of the problem is that everybody is waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Europe stands on the verge of a complete meltdown, and our Federal Reserve has gotten us so deeply tied to the success or failure of Europe at this point that if Europe goes down, we will likely fall down too.  Several outlets are reporting that a number of European banks are on the brink, and that this will trigger a sell-off and panic unlike anything we’ve seen in a long time.

At the same time Germany’s Angela Merkel is chastising Italy over its debt of 120% of GDP, I wonder if she’d do us a favor and look at the US, which isn’t far off from that ratio itself, and tell Obama a thing or two while she’s at it.  Merkel is among those who are urging further austerity measures, and she’s right. The trouble is that leftists never tire of pitching their best Keynesian plans at these sorts of problems, pretending that if only they can borrow and print a little more liquidity, the problem will solve itself.  Naturally, that’s nonsense, and while everybody knows it, the spenders will never, ever admit it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we stand on the precipice and wonder why this is happening, but anybody who has ever learned the hard lessons of running on credit must begin to see the simple truth of the matter:  You cannot consume more than you produce on an indefinite basis.  This entire fiasco is the result of runaway governments spending our future into oblivion.  While we’re at it, we must also rein in the Federal Reserve as the policies now in force are merely multiplying the trouble.  One year ago, as they began to plan out QE2(Quantitative Easing, Round 2,) Sarah Palin warned the world.  She was mocked by Krugman, the purveyor of Alien Attacks and other nonsense dressed up as economics, while she was being berated for her stance by a host of others, but in the end, who has been right?  We mustn’t permit ourselves to suffer under this comfortable illusion any longer: There is no alternative but to dramatically slash government spending.  We must do it now, or there may be no tomorrow.

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Posted in Business, Crony Capitalism, Economics, Federal Reserve, News, Politics, Sarah Palin | 5 Comments »

Sarah Palin Is Right: Obama Is Trying to Offload Blame Again

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Fighting Hypocrisy

In another instance in which the former Alaska Governor takes President Obama to task, on Wednesday evening, she fire off another Facebook note entitled: Now He’s Blaming Europe.  She points out the hypocrisy of Barack Obama’s claim that Europe is scarring the world by failing to confront their economic and financial problems:

“This of course is coming from a President who has done nothing to deal with our own country’s enormous debt crisis and who is in fact eager to incur even more debt with another useless stimulus bill (now called a “jobs bill” though the last stimulus failed to produce the jobs it promised, which is perhaps why Harry Reid doesn’t seem too eager to bring this new bill to a vote despite the President’s demands to “pass this bill”). Yes, Europe has serious debt problems, but for President Obama to be lecturing our allies about not being “quite as quick” in dealing with a debt crisis is downright hypocritical.”

It’s true. Obama should be the last person to speak derisively of the efforts of others to confront the sovereign debt debacle, with his own vast contributions to it.  In real terms, the Obama administration has done exactly nothing about our own debt problems, other than to propose tax increases, which should be a clear sign to the American people that he isn’t serious about the matter.  This president has gone back and forth on a number of related matters, but what he’s been unwilling to do is to actually cut spending.

In describing the actions of President Obama to date, she points out that he’s been less than sincere in his efforts, and reminds us that the current administration relies upon the tactic of always placing blame elsewhere, for any problem, no matter how clearly responsibility lies with them:

“It’s about time the President showed some leadership and took responsibility rather than campaigning on blaming everyone else for the financial mess his policies have exacerbated.”

Indeed, first he blamed Bush. Then he blamed the Tea Party.  His sycophants blamed Palin too.  He blamed Republicans. He blamed evil corporations until he was called out on his own crony capitalist connections to the Solyndra affair, among others.   Now that the American people aren’t accepting these narratives so willingly, he’s had to  move on to another bogeyman, and now it’s Europe.

This wasn’t the only thing Governor Palin noticed.  She also took note of the trial balloon being floated as a joke about postponing elections:

“Between President Obama’s hypocritical lecture poking our allies in the eye again and one Democrat governor’s call to postpone lawfully mandated elections for two years, I suppose nothing should surprise concerned Americans anymore. But that doesn’t mean we have to accept these misguided memes. 2012 can’t come soon enough.”

I think it’s important to recognize that Sarah Palin is one of the only people in the political sphere who continues to take on the ridiculous actions of President Obama and his administration.  We need to focus on just how awful Obama’s so-called “leadership” has been.  As usual, Governor Palin knocks it out of the park.

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Posted in Barack Obama, News, Politics, Sarah Palin | 5 Comments »

So What Should We Do?

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Ready to Resist?

One of the things revealed by the ongoing story about Governor Beverly Perdue(D-NC) is that she’s speaking for the core constituency of her party.  They are tired of hearing from Tea Party patriots, and frankly anybody else who dares to question their actions, laws, policies, and regulations.  It’s symptomatic of the terror the left now feels, and the truth is that while some have attempted to paint her statement about suspending Congressional elections as a joke, most Americans sense of distrust of government and politicians has been heightened to an extent that even if she had been joking, none seem to consider it a laughing matter.   More than just the left, however, it’s both of the parties in the form of a permanent political class that shares a basic contempt and disdain for the American people.

What any relatively attentive person should have realized long ago is that many politicians hold we voters in contempt,  all the while seeking our support for their re-election campaigns.   Governor Perdue is expressing a frightening contempt for the American tradition of self-governance in the most fundamental sense.  Without elections, and without politicians being held accountable for their actions, the United States suddenly looks like any other banana republic, magnified and multiplied by our sheer size.   The more one listens to this, the less it sounds like a joke:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-govx9CdOA]

If you can’t understand the audio, here’s what she said:

“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover.”  “I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.”

The question I receive from comments on this site and from emails is almost always the same:  One part outrage, and one part frustration; outraged that an elected official could even consider such a thing, joking or not, but also frustrated with the fact that these entrenched politicians are not easily removed.  “What shall we do, Mark?” This is the same question I receive again and again, and it’s as though some people have adopted the idea that  we can either do nothing, or we can mount some sort of armed revolt.  Let me suggest that until something changes, neither of these is the correct answer.  Doing the latter cannot be justified until such time as we run out of all other options.  The best option we have is immediately before us:  We must engage and become involved.  Some will pull an Obama-to-CBC on some of you, but the fact is that I don’t think that would work on you.  I think you are open to reason, so let’s consider this carefully, and let me offer you this:  The moment they actually suspend an election, then does the question of violence become reasonable.

Otherwise, what we must do is stop waiting for the Internet, single-click solution.  You can’t send emails as a proxy for writing letters.  Typing a few outraged words isn’t enough. Clicking the “send” button simply won’t suffice.  You can’t place phone calls as a substitute for showing-up.  You must speak to your elected officials, at their offices in DC and in their districts, and in your statehouses and legislatures, at town hall meetings. Sending them emails is great, but you should take the text, paste it into a file,  and snail-mail the contents to them also.  Most importantly, you need to talk to your neighbors and show them what these people are trying to do, and show them the sorts of trial balloons they are now floating.  If you are sincere in wanting to prevent the sort of tyranny these leftists intend to install, you’re going to need to take every available step in a peaceful form to oppose them.   The time for a bunch of posturing is over, and we can’t afford violence, so rather than claim that “there’s nothing we can do,” and in dejected, frustrated impotence, shrug our shoulders and walk away, we still have the freedom to become involved.  We should for once begin to make full use of it.  We shouldn’t even entertain talk about “ammo box” until you’ve fully utilized the “mail box,” the “soap box,” and the “ballot box.”

It’s time we clear something else up, while we’re at it:  There are a few Democrats who are of the old school, who do not believe in this sort of big-government takeover we’re seeing across the board.  Remember that while you and they may disagree on many things, there are some Democrats who are every bit as outraged by this as you are, and for precisely the same reasons.  At the same time, be careful of those establishment Republicans of the permanent political class who would quietly agree with the sentiments expressed by Perdue, Orszag, and others.  What Orszag contends, and Perdue’s alleged “joke” expresses too, is that “gridlock” is obstructing business in Washington.  Here’s the answer:  Gridlock is the result of the American people deciding to obstruct the big-government reflexes of progressives in both parties.   We are demanding gridlock, until such time as we can get the people in power to reverse course and rescue the country, its economy, and its people.

In truth, this is what Obama’s speech to the Congressional Black Caucus was all about:  He’s trying to exhort them to oppose you.  He’s trying to get them up and out to face off with you.  Don’t fall for that sort of confrontation.  Violence plays into their hands, but not yours.  Instead, focus on what these people are doing, and talk to your neighbors, your family, you church congregations, and get them on the same page.   Chances are, they’re already in agreement with you, but our culture has been one in which we’ve been led to remain quiet.  The Tea Party is the first harbinger of the sort of people we must become.  If you want to defeat the statists, we will do it peacefully, and at the ballot box.  From now until then, don’t expect it to get any better.

Even on the local level, these politicians deserve an electoral comeuppance in the form of finding themselves on the sidelines in the future.  This is also a great way to develop the next generation of state and national leaders and legislators: At the local level, find people worthy of your support and put them in.  City Councils, Mayors, County Commissioners, Judges, School Boards, Sheriffs, and anybody else must be made eligible for replacement if they cross these lines.   You mustn’t fear them.  You mustn’t permit them to scare you into quiescent, silent submission.  The idea in this issue must be to continue to wake up our less-attentive fellow citizens, while simultaneously helping them come to grips with what is going on.  There should be no confusion among the people on our side:  We must defeat the statists at the ballot box in 2012, and for all the years thereafter, or we will see the country fall.  It will happen within our lifetimes, and maybe sooner than that.  If you want to preserve your country, it’s going to require you to lead.  Politicians who fit within our ethical, moral, and philosophical worldview are great, but we must get them into office to affect any change.  That starts by evaluating their records, rather than a reflexive reference to the “D” or the “R” adjacent to their names on our ballots.  Don’t fall for the trap that these things are happening only on the state or national level.  We’re seeing arrogance among public officials at all levels.  Consider this story from Peekskill, NY, where citizens have been prohibited from clapping, and where the public comment section of City meetings have been eliminated, or this one from Quartzite, AZ, where citizens took action to remove their mayor from office, who had attempted to enforce martial law.

These situations are dangerous in their meaning, but the hopeful view is to be derived from Quartzite, AZ.  Don’t ask what you can do, when the answer is already in front of us.  These politicians, at all levels, are terrified because you’ve discovered the first bits of their game.  There is much more yet to be uncovered, perhaps in your own community, or in your own statehouse.  They’ve run us into the ground, almost all of them, and it’s time we begin to look at all of them as suspect unless they have a lengthy record of defending liberty and upholding their oaths of office with scrupulous dedication.  When a sitting governor in a state in this union proposes that we should suspend elections, there should be no shortage of outrage, but particularly among the people of that state, there should be no ambiguity.  Elections are not theirs to suspend, but yours to exercise, and I hopefully look to the people of North Carolina to sit her down at the next opportunity.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are not helpless, and we have no need of violence.  If you’re reading this, you already possess everything you need to begin your own campaign of opposition, and join with others already in progress.   Slowly but surely, the worst thugs and tyrants in our midst have begun to unmask themselves.  It’s not a crazy conspiracy theory.  It’s not an urban legend.  It most certainly isn’t a joke:  We now have people who run wide swaths of our governments at all levels who view us as irrelevant, or worse, as the obstacle to their continued power.  They will not go away simply because we wish it, or because we dream or hope for it.  Instead, we will be the people who pick up their fumbles and run them back for touchdowns at every opportunity.  We must educate our friends, family, neighbors and parishioners about the truth of the matter.  “Duck and cover” is no longer a viable response. You will need to begin to make some noise, and organize starting in your own communities, and working along to stop this cold.

They’re frightened.  They know you’re onto their game, and they’re not quite ready yet, which is why they now float such trial balloons as “jokes.” The Tea Party and you constitute the counter-insurgency upon which they hadn’t planned.  You’re outraged? Good!  Now that you’re sufficiently motivated, and know where to begin, let us get started and bring along friends.

Update: Now Governor Perdue is claiming it was sarcasm. Yeah.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Call To Action, Politics, Tea Party | 5 Comments »

Who Is Behind “Americans Elect”?

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Who's Behind This?

A friend sent me an interesting Youtube video a couple of days ago, and I’ve been spending some time watching it and thinking about it.  It’s a video from PBS consisting of an interview by Judy Woodruff of Doug Schoen and Elliot Ackerman, two of the principals of this group.  As I listened to them, this all sounded very enticing on its surface, but the longer they spoke, the more I began to wonder about who is behind all of this.  It seems like an effort to circumvent the ordinary electoral process, and when I think of that notion, the first thing that leaps into mind is George Soros and his effort to take over the Secretaries of State who oversee elections in all of our fifty states. I’m always a little wary about third party movements and similar efforts, because I always wonder who is behind them.  Before leaping into any such effort, it’s worthwhile to see what we can learn about such an organization.

Sometimes, it’s quite obvious, like in the case of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, but other times requires a good deal of investigating.  This case is not so obvious because they’re not mentioning any particular candidates, but instead a process of direct nomination skipping the two-party system.  Watch this fascinating video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXPLYCPJnWU]

My curiosity got the better of me, and I immediately went out in search of answers.  I knew a little about Doug Schoen, but not enough to be thorough, and I had never encountered Elliott Ackerman before.  I started by going over to the AmericansElect.org website, and looked for an “About Us” or “Who We Are” page, and I found one.   It’s here:  Who We Are  Study this list.

Now understand that I don’t believe in guilt by association, but I want us to be careful and thorough.  Elliott Ackerman is the son of Peter Ackerman, and Joanne Leedom-Ackerman.  Douglas Schoen is a long time insider.  Also on the list is Carla Hills, former US Secretary of Housing and US Trade Representative.  As you look through the list, there is no shortage of movers and shakers, or those with direct ties to the elite.  This is a rather funny list of people to be working on a well-funded “grass roots” organization, isn’t it?

Speaking of funding, where are they getting all of that money?  Judy Woodruff asked directly, but Elliot Ackerman side-stepped the question.  We can come back to this in due course.

What is curious about this group is the number of connections it has with another group.  Just for the sake of curiosity, I compared the folks listed on the Who Are We page for Americans Elect to another group: The International Crisis Group.  So who what do these two groups have in common?  Well, Douglas Schoen and Carla Hills, but also an interesting tidbit: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is part of this group.  As we remember from above, that’s Elliot’s mother.   This is a happy coincidence, with father and son working in one group with Doug Schoen and Carla Hills, along with many other elites, and wife and mother working in another group with Doug Schoen and Carla Hills, along with many other global elites.

Now while young Mr. Ackerman wouldn’t tell us who is contributing to the Americans Elect group operations, it could be interesting, for comparison only, of course, to take a look at who is funding ICG.  According to Wikipedia:

“Philanthropist George Soros who is chairman of the Open Society Institute is on the Board of Trustees.”

Isn’t that just the most amazing thing?  Just like clockwork, in walks the villain.  Now of course, since the young Mr. Ackerman declined to tell us who is bankrolling Americans Elect, we’ll have to leave that to our imaginations for the moment.  Ahem.

Now I don’t mean to tell you anything in particular about Americans Elect, but before a single person involves themselves with this organization, I would encourage them to ask the leadership to disclose who has funded their operations to date.  In short, I believe in full disclosure, particularly if an organization’s stated intention is to elect the next President of the United States.  In that spirit, here’s a little more about Pappy[Peter] Ackerman:  Founder of Americans Elect Used Tax Shelter Scheme

Just imagine:  Soros funds Obama.  Soros funds others.  Soros funds all sorts of things.  To be honest, when I heard Doug Schoen say the word “openness” while he and the young Mr. Ackerman refused to disclose the name(s) of donors, my antennae were immediately raised.  Remembering Schoen has urged Obama to decline renomination, I was further intrigued.  This is the signature maneuver of a Soros operation, and while all of this could be simple coincidence, as you know by now, in politics, those are actually damnably rare.  Watch out for this group.  There are a couple of ways this could go, and I’m wary about most of them.  While there is no direct tie to Soros as yet, the single degree of separation for so many of the key people certainly makes me wonder.  I could see this being used to exploit people to the detriment of the country, which is generally the trend with anything in which this elite jet-set is involved.

Thanks to my friend Carl who helped chase down some info for this article!

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Posted in Election 2012, Politics | 32 Comments »

Peter Orszag: We Need Less Democracy

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Grabbing Power

Ordinarily, when a liberal says something like this, you almost wonder if they’re kidding, before realizing that they’re indeed serious.  In a column titled Too Much of a Good Thing, in the New Republic, Peter Orszag, formerly Obama’s OMB Director, actually makes the case that we are hampered by too much democracy.  His problem is that our constitutional system (not really a democracy) is too slow to react, and the deliberations and negotiations are simply too cumbersome.  In this sense, he tells us, the constitutional impediments to autocratic, dictatorial actions are simply too great.  I hate to bring up bombastic notions about historic dictators, but honestly, Orszag is all but begging for it here.  In the interests of not debasing this discussion more than his proposition has done on its face, let me simply suggest that Mr. Orszag hasn’t learned the first thing from the history of the last century of human experience.

What he proposes is a system that not only operates in a dictatorial fashion, but automatically without reference to any sort of future restraint by the people.  If you think government is overbearing and monstrous now, wait until Mr. Orszag gets his wish.  One could almost imagine that Orszag had been joking, and in fact, it would be comforting to believe that, but given that today, another politician of the same philosophical persuasion suggested we suspend elections for two years, in jest of course(?), one may begin to wonder just how serious these people may really have become.  I’d be less than responsible if I didn’t tell my readers that I believe that while they may wish to make jokes of these instances, they are completely serious.  In Orszag’s case, what his suggestion comes down to is much like the nonsensical, anti-constitutional plan passed through both houses and signed into law by the President on the debt ceiling issue: They want automatic triggers, and more unelected commissions and panels, none of which are provided for as part of the legislative or executive process in the constitution, but which certainly accomplishes their goal of being able to disclaim responsibility when your taxes are raised and your entitlement programs are cut.  Not only is this an awful idea, but it must also beg the question: For what purpose do we need the elected politicians if our government is to be placed on perpetual auto-pilot?

You see, what they really fear is the effect you are having for the first time in a generation or more.  Suddenly, people have begun to question everything government is doing, and rightfully so.  As they question it, they also begin to make demands of their elected representatives, and this is causing serious consternation for those in power: If they don’t begin to produce results for you, they may be out of their jobs, and so as a hedge against this, what they hope to do is put in place a suicide machine of big government that will run on auto-pilot whether you elect to replace them or not.  Imagine a world in which no majority you can construct in Congress will have the ability to negate, repeal or otherwise overturn the acts and laws of previous Congresses.  This is the actual goal and desire of every statist in either party in Washington DC, and it is also the blunt intention of Governor Perdue’s call for suspending elections, that had been “a joke.”

While there’s nothing funny about the North Carolina governor’s jest, it’s likewise true that Orszag’s proposition is no less dangerous. We mustn’t permit out elected officials to consider for one moment that this is an acceptable solution.  We must not allow them to believe that by forming some commission, or some automated calamity of “triggers” that law can be allowed to run the country without reference to the rights or the will of the people.  This isn’t merely a bad idea.  It’s a demagogue’s attack on our system of law, and it strikes at the very heart of our constitutional principles. Considering what this would produce, based on passed examples alone, it can be concluded that no good can come of it, unless you hold as the good to reduce the people of the country to the status of slaves to the state.

That some governor from North Carolina would even joke about such things is frightening enough, but that a former official in the administration of our current president believes this is a viable solution should cause every reader to shudder at the true meaning: They wish to finally make you completely irrelevant to the governance of this country. They will permit you the illusion of self-governance inasmuch as you will still have elections (maybe,) but those elections will have little meaning in law.  When faced with such proposals, it’s time to honestly consider the character of those who now lead our nation, and what else their mindset may yet heap upon us.  It has begun to take the form of tyranny, and not one soul should be laughing.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Politics | 14 Comments »

Ann Coulter Gets Emotional, er, um…”Annoyed”

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Gotcha Ann!

I have to laugh at the establishment.  Ann Coulter had hung all her hopes on Chris Christie.  This afternoon, on the drive home, I listened to Hannity talking to Ann Coulter who seemed on the verge of a complete meltdown.  I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of breakdown I was hearing, and when Hannity told her she was being too emotional, Coulter responded:

“I’m not emotional, I’m annoyed…”

Apparently, Coulter had so thoroughly lost her perspective that her usual precision failed her:  Annoyance is an emotion, Ann.

I also had to laugh, because the same woman who had taken part in criticizing Sarah Palin’s tone of voice was now at least two octaves above any note ever to emanate from the former Governor of Alaska.

There are few things funnier than when somebody gets back as good as they’ve given, and Christie was asked this evening after his speech if he intended to run for President.  He referenced a video montage on Politico, and indicated it was a clear “no.”

If you want to hear Ann Coulter screeching a bit:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUZgoIRXCYQ]

It’s time for Ms. Coulter to grasp reality. Notice Coulter’s insistence that Hannity should look at what Christie does, and not what he says.

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Posted in Breaking News, Media, Politics | 6 Comments »

Election Seasons are Fluid

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Is Time Really Up?

It’s funny how some people get hung up on imaginary deadlines.  You can bet the media loves to create them, but what should you and I make of them? For months now, we have had the media and establishment DC-insiders try to tell us when Governor Palin should get in, or when it was too late, and all the rest of their game.  Worse, from my point of view, among some supporters, there’s an impatience that while understandable enough, always seems to gravitate toward the theme that “she must jump in NOW!”  Ladies and gentlemen, please permit me to suggest that there’s nothing to be gained from an entry now.

Today, in the blog section of the New York Times Online, the headline proclaims that “Palin is on the Verge of a Decision about Presidential Run.”  Well, knowing that, we should…do what?  The author of the piece again pumps up the expectation game, and again seems to push her toward entering sooner rather than later, and then another piece appearing in the Washington Post Online relegates Palin to “second tier status” based on a CNN poll that shows Palin over 20 points behind Obama in the head-to-head, which is at significant variance with that Marist/McClatchy poll of last week that finds Palin within 5 points of Obama.  So while one side tries to encourage her entry, the other side tries to dissuade her.   Both publications are establishment outlets.  When one observes the establishment presenting conflicting narratives, what you can guess with some confidence is that they’re hoping is to make something stick.  What neither of them suggests is that she should wait.  It’s either “jump now” or “go away.”

I’m not offering advice, but I’ll be honest: I like Governor Palin’s strategy of waiting.  Having waited this long in what seems a strategy to let some of this sort itself out, now that this strategy is beginning  to pay off, it’s no time to accept an arbitrary notion about some date on a calendar.  Late September?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Middle October?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Elections seasons are fluid, and the most successful candidates remain adaptive and flexible.  If you wish to succeed, you must adjust your plans to suit the situation on the ground.  I think the message to take from Governor Palin’s refusal to be trapped into some arbitrary time-table is this:  She wants to remain flexible to make her announcement when it will have the most impact.  A candidate committed to victory should do no less.

Be patient, my friends. Election seasons are fluid. Circumstances change.  Who would have predicted Perry’s verbal melt-down, excepting me and a few others, even three weeks ago?  Things change.  The unexpected happens.  People and situations are not perfectly predictable, or we wouldn’t bother with elections.  Our preferred candidate should do her best to remain flexible, and not getting pinned-down to a certain date or range of them is a great way to keep her options open.

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Posted in Election 2012, Politics, Sarah Palin | 5 Comments »

Breaking News: Random House Delivered a Letter from Palin Attorneys

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Breaking!

Breitbart has the story: Governor Sarah Palin Sends Letter to Crown/Random House – Warns not to destroy documents ahead of potential defamation suit.

That’s right, save all those emails over there at Random House!  Oh, and I can think of a few bloggers who are probably puckering right now too.  Do you know what I’m saying folks?  I can think of around a half-dozen of them or more who are probably scrubbing their sites right now if they’re smart.  It won’t save them, since they don’t own the servers, but it should be interesting nonetheless.

Yep, justice is coming for smear-mongers.

Update: Another story at ABC Update 2: Actual letter at ABC: Letter

Related posts: Palin-Hate Blogosphere … Media War on Sarah Palin Runs into Reality

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Posted in Breaking News, Media, Politics, Sarah Palin | 12 Comments »

The Virtue of “Quitting”

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Keeping Her Word

One of the constant smears leveled at Sarah Palin is that she “quit” her office as Governor of Alaska.  The word “quit” is used in the form of a smear, in order to paint her as less-than-committed, but the truth of the matter is that in resigning her post, what she actually did was a magnificently honorable act, rarely done in politics.  How many times have you wondered if Barack Obama shouldn’t simply do the honorable thing in the name of the country, and step aside?  The problem is that would still leave you with President Joe Biden, so it would not offer much relief.  More importantly, however, we must consider the nature of the alleged “quitting” and why Governor Palin left her office early.  She wasn’t hounded from office, or anything of the sort, except that what tore at her was the fact that each day she remained, costs were being inflicted on the people of her state, counted in all the wasted dollars spent handling the various FOIA requests, and all the bottled-up legislative work that hung in the balance.  Governor Palin could have stuck it out, but what would have been the cost to the State and the People of Alaska?  We’ve had numerous politicians under fire for actual wrong-doing who wouldn’t resign, relying upon tax-payers to bear the costs of their defense.

In truth, it is the willingness of our current president to see your money wasted while trying to stave off investigations into his conduct and the conduct of his administration in a number of issues that permits him the luxury of avoiding the “quitter” label.  Visitors logs?  Fast and Furious? Solyndra? The list goes on and on,  but measuring his character, we now know he will never yield the office, no matter how badly he’s run it, and no matter how much it costs the people of America to sustain him in it.  Even as some members of his party now murmur that he should indeed “quit” in the interests of his own party by refusing his renomination, Obama stubbornly rejects such suggestions on the basis that his personal claim to official power supersedes the interests of his party, the tax-payers, the voters, and frankly anybody else who gets in his way.

Contrast this with the facts of Governor Palin’s resignation.  She had already said, some years before, that she would rather quit the office than ever let the people of Alaska suffer needlessly for her sake.  Many politicians make such oaths, but few ever live up to them.  After her Vice Presidential run in 2008, she returned home to Alaska to find that the war against her from the national stage had been moved to a field of battle in Alaska.  The war against her raged on, with a single purpose: Her adversaries had seen her powerful potential on the national stage, and this was a preemptive strike against her, with the ultimate purpose of the attack being to destroy her, that she could never return to do battle against the machine in Washington DC.  If the people and the state of Alaska needed to be ruined in the process, they considered it as mere collateral damage in a necessary campaign.

All of it was politically motivated, and it was hampering the function of the state.  Alaska was losing millions, but worst of all, the harsh national politics had been imported into the state and this was obstructing the legislative agenda.  The simple fact was that Sarah Palin had become the focus and object of the debate.  This was a war to destroy her, and if it meant sinking the state of Alaska with her, the political forces from outside the state were happy to oblige.  Realizing that the attacks upon her were causing the state to bleed money and that her legislative agenda was being obstructed for the sake of national politics, Palin decided to step aside and remove herself from the equation.  No longer would Alaska be attacked for the sake of the war on Sarah Palin.  What Palin did in resigning was to isolate herself from the state so that its business could go on under the leadership of her successor, Lt. Governor Parnell.  As a result, the people of Alaska would no longer be made to suffer as proxies in the battle to destroy her.  Rather than hunker down and weather the storm as most politicians will try to do,  she did the most shocking thing and met their immediate demands.  As she has written:

“The reaction to my announcement was instructive. The same people who had wanted nothing more than to throw me out of office were suddenly outraged that I was obliging.”

Some will insist on gaining the political advantage of using the term “quitter” for its negative connotations.  This is to tell a lie, and further a smear, and while some are only too happy to do so, I believe in justice, so let me tell you what this really had been:  Governor Palin possessed the strength of character to act in the best interest of her state and its people despite the costs to her own short-run political power.   She must have known when she resigned her office that she would be called a “quitter.”  She must have known how this would be used against her in any future political endeavor.  What she did was to put her faith in the good sense of the American people to recognize the truth.  She always believed in the values and wisdom of the American people to ultimately sort out what was real and what was merely another political falsehood.

In my favorite book, Atlas Shrugged, the protagonist is John Galt.  His act of “quitting” and all those who followed him was portrayed by the villains as an act of abandonment and cowardice.  One after the other, all the best and most virtuous people “quit” and disappeared, leaving behind all the trappings of fame and fortune for the sake of an idea, knowing that by the rules they had been fighting, they could never succeed or win.  Instead, they “quit.”  In so doing, they rescued the world, because without them, upon whom the villains had relied to keep the world going, evil was starved out of power. As they quit, they joined in an effort to undermine the broken, evil system from the outside in a way they could have never accomplished from within.  In isolation, what they found is that their power had been magnified by their absence.

Is Governor Palin’s position now any different? The great shellacking of the left in 2010 was largely a result of the determined efforts of Sarah Palin and all those Tea Party patriots who answered her clarion call to clean up Washington by sending in new blood.  The Tea Party responded magnificently, and they began in earnest the process of that critical reform.  In this way, Sarah Palin has been a far more effective leader for the nation than she could have been in her office of Governor.  What she must have discovered is what John Galt knew:  In walking away, you will find liberation if you have the wisdom to make use of it.

At the end of the story, there comes a moment when the so-called “quitters” realize the way has been made clear, and they decide to return to the world at large.  I can only imagine that Sarah Palin now looks to see if her way is now clear, and whether there is an opening through which she may now re-emerge.   I believe that evidence has come in several forms, including the results of 2010’s elections, and the progression of this electoral season.  At this moment, the Republican field is being shown to have few shining lights. Herman Cain’s ascension to the top of the Florida GOP straw poll is just the latest example.  What all of this demonstrates is that the Emperors have no clothes.  The people we’ve been told are the “front-runners” have been such only for the apparent lack of better choices.  There is a vacuum into which others may attempt to leap, but in truth, we all know that there’s only one person who will satisfy this lacking, and it isn’t the governor of a very blue state.

Those who suggest Palin had “quit” understand little about her governing philosophy.  She had always believed that no single personality is more important than the business of responsible governance.  When she resigned her office, it was in recognition of this fact and obedience to her conscience on the matter.  Most politicians will fight on because to hold power is the end-all, be-all of their existence.  Their egos come before all else, and the narcissism implicit in their behavior drives their decision-making.  It is always all about them.  Governor Palin is not that kind of leader, and her resignation was the indisputable proof.  She thought it better to stand aside, or as she put it, “to pass the ball.”  You may be forgiven if you have bought the superficial narrative about “quitting,” but it’s time to accept the truth of this story: What she did, she did out of her firm commitment to Alaska and Alaskans.

Many Americans claim to want leaders who exhibit the strength of character to put the interests of the country before their own political careers.  Governor Palin made precisely that choice, to her own political detriment, but to the immediate benefit of the people of her state.  “Passing the ball” to Sean Parnell, the media circus and the political smear campaign followed her, leaving her successor to run with the ball unobstructed on behalf of the people of Alaska.  Knowing this now lays the question upon your intellectual table:  Did you mean it when you said you prefer your leaders to put the interests of the people ahead of their own, or was that mere posturing on your part?  Politician after politician makes this sort of promise, but damnably few of them live it.  What of you?  When you lamented the state of politics and the general moral bankruptcy of so many politicians, did you mean it?  Did you understand what you were asking of them?  Having watched politics for so many tiresome years being played out with always the same essential ending, have you become too cynical to recognize that in the person of Sarah Palin, there had finally been a politician who had actually lived according to that premise which is for so many just more high-minded talk never to be followed by actions?

I long ago decided that Sarah Palin was anything but a “quitter.”  I realized it was just one more example in a long string of smears, where virtues are twisted into vices.  In much the same way that my favorite heroes in literature had their best and highest virtues turned upon them, so it is true of Sarah Palin.   I recognize in her a politician who did not abandon her oath, but instead, in the most thoroughly rational and honorable way, she kept true faith and allegiance to it.  What her example should actually teach us is how lacking in honest virtue our current leadership in Washington DC has been, as they fight to maintain their power without any concern for how it hampers the nation and its people.  Instead, they cling to power like so many ticks to the hound, embedded and draining the lifeblood of the nation. As a group, they could exercise no greater virtue than to “quit,” but don’t expect that spectacle any time soon.  The vice that is their compulsive grasping for power forbids it, and all the while, the nation suffers mightily at the hands of their intransigent incompetence.  There is great virtue to be found in that rarest of  politicians who puts the interests of the whole people ahead of her own, but for a change, and in justice to all our finest declarations about the virtues we wish to see in our leaders, we should recognize it and honor it.  Sarah Palin isn’t a “quitter.”  She kept her word.

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Posted in Media, Politics, Sarah Palin | 11 Comments »

The Palin-Hate Blogosphere

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Actual Avatars In Use By Nuts

It’s difficult to imagine people who are moved to such thorough hatred, and who spend so much time making so much of the imaginings they cobble together, yet this is the nature of Palin-Hate, 2011.  On Twitter, Facebook, and in the blogosphere, there is a tiny but cacophonous chorus of weak-minded people who pursue every rumor, and every piece of gossip they can dig up about Sarah Palin, her family, and her supporters. Dis-satisfied with reality, they’ve gone off in search of their own, and there is no end to the vile hatred driving them.  As Stephen Hanks demonstrated Thursday,  there’s no rational rhyme or reason behind their wretched behavior, and nothing turns them from their religion of rage.  They are nearly as relentless in their propaganda as it is impotent in its effect.

In writing a blog, you learn a bit about your audience, and one of the tools for this is a list of the sources from which viewers arrived.  Links to your site are posted in various places by people with various motives, and the engine that serves up your site tallies them, giving you an idea about your audience.  One thing that happens is that you can back-track to the public pages on which links to your site have been posted.  It is through this method that I first discovered the tiny universe of Palin-haters who write blogs composed of nothing but venom.  There are only two things that prevent them from entering the realm of comic relief, the first being the hate with which they are consumed, and the second being the fact that there are real people who are the objects of their attacks.

What you quickly discover is that most of their traffic is made up of their own group, and few others.  You will find that the author of one Palin-hate blog posting comments with regular and reliable frequency on the posts of another of the same mind.  It’s a circle of hate, and most of them seem oblivious to the fact that except for the occasional passerby, they’re talking almost entirely among themselves.  The shrill conspiracy theories and the verbose ad hominem attacks circulate around their universe, gaining a momentum born of and constructed by pure, seething hatred.  More, when they discover a fellow Palin-hater not yet part of their circle, they invite them in.  When Stephen Hanks accosted Bristol Palin last week, once his Twitter identity became known, it prompted some from within that vile universe to invite him to their sites, as if inviting a long lost friend over for a football game and a beer.  Instead, the opposition he received apparently caused his subsequent “Twitter-cide,” because @sickofpalin(Hanks’ username) is no longer in existence.

This morning, I toured one of these sites.  I would almost feel badly for the woman who authors it, if she wasn’t such an obnoxiously despicable person.  She used the incident with Bristol Palin as the launchpad for an all-out photographic assault on the Palin family, particularly and specifically its women.  In looking around her site, I noticed that she’s not very smart, frankly, and she tends to comment on subjects in which she has no demonstrable expertise.  To read an economic critique of Governor Palin authored by a woman who demonstrates in each sentence that she understands nothing of the subject matter is a rare treat.  Any who had obtained a passing grade in introductory college economics could have debunked her every claim within a couple lines, but her audience, similarly illiterate, consumed the worthless information and proclaimed the author a genius.  None of them had the foggiest notion about the subject at hand.

The fact of their ignorance served as no obstacle, because the object isn’t to tell a truth, or provide real information, but to create a wellspring of defamation, upon which they can draw for the sustenance of their hate-fueled souls.  What you come to understand as you read their commentaries is that they have nothing else.  Literally.  These are empty people.  They are so shrill because the echo in the vacuous chambers of their small minds provides them the company no decent people would ever provide.

Let me tell you how juvenile they really are:  Most of you are familiar with O4P and C4P.  They refer to the commentary section of C4P’s articles as the “Pee-Pond.”  I kid you not.  This is the nature of those childish haters who sneer while they smear.  Reading their remarks, one almost expects at any moment to encounter the question “I know you are, but what am I?”  They brag about getting on the inside of the “Pee-Pond” and using that venue to plant seeds of doubt about Governor Palin.  They pass rumors faster than any grapevine you’ve ever encountered.  If no delicious rumor presents, they simply make one up.  If no new smear is readily available, they invent one, and then urge each other on.

This may be the lesson about this loud but tiny segment of indecent people:  They have no real reach, and no real voice, but they make a ready audience for the purveyors of Palin-hate.  One could sabotage these buffoons in a month if one wished to do so, but why bother?  Their every syllable is a damning indictment and refutation of their own character.  As Mark Twain remarked famously:

“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

With every post, and every new conspiracy theory concocted about the Palins, they remove all doubt.  Don’t sweat these people. They’re their own worst enemies.

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Posted in Media, Sarah Palin | 2 Comments »

Leading By Default?

Saturday, September 24th, 2011

Can I Win Without Speaking?

After the FoxNews/Google debate, it had begun to crystallize in the view of many Republicans is that Rick Perry isn’t the candidate many had hoped.  Capturing the straw poll in Florida on Saturday, Herman Cain reached new heights as Perry’s slide down hill has accelerated.  Bachmann has peaked and begun to taper off, while Gingrich, Paul, Santorum and Huntsman continue to struggle in the middle-to-low single digits.  This leaves Mitt Romney out front, not because he’s such a great candidate, but because to date, his chief opponents have grossly underperformed.  This begs the question most conservatives want most to ask: Is Mitt Romney capable of carrying the conservative banner into battle a year from now?  Most conservatives seem to believe the answer is a firm “no,” but it nevertheless leaves Romney in the position of the last candidate standing.  He’s done nothing revolutionary or proactive to seize the lead or stay at or near the front of the pack, but instead seems to have landed in the lead by default.  If we’re to defeat Barack Obama in November 2012, it’s going to take a stronger candidate than Mr. Romney has been to date.

When you examine his debate performance, the best you can say about Romney is that he hasn’t gotten into serious trouble, but he has flipped and flopped to the extent that most conservatives are looking elsewhere.  Mr. Cain’s straw poll victory on Saturday demonstrates the point:  While Romney doesn’t spend much energy on straw polls, knowing he will not win them in front of a conservative audience that constitutes the base of the party, and the overwhelming majority at straw poll events, he believes it’s better to avoid energetic participation and score poorly than to engage fully and still score a a small proportion of support.  He realizes the infinitely larger black eye that embarrassment would confer on his campaign.

What this demonstrates, perhaps more than anything, is Mr. Romney’s complete lack of courage for a fight.  He’s not even willing to make his pitch to conservatives, and that means he knows he cannot win their support except by virtue of being the only candidate remaining.  His unspectacular campaign mirrors his less-than-thrilling debate performances inasmuch as while he says nothing particularly offensive, he also fails to inspire even a tepid response.  In short, Romney’s strategy is to cruise carefully while avoiding clear debacles, and hope to survive to lead at the end, knowing that the anti-Obama sentiment prevailing among Republicans will be enough to carry him through the nomination.  That may be a suitable strategy for winning the nomination, but it’s unlikely to win the Presidency in 2012.

In Thursday night’s debate, Romney got into a battle with Perry who was busy criticizing the former Massachusetts governor’s health-care plan, and challenged him on changing between what he had said in his book and what he has been saying on the campaign trail about the plan’s possible application for the entire nation.  Romney said:

“I said no such thing”

and that “Romneycare” was merely:

“a state plan for a state.”

The problem with this statement by Romney is that he knew it to be untrue.  While in paperback, the idea that his health-care reform plan might have national application was omitted, the fact is that in his original hard-bound book, No Apology, it was clearly stated:

“We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country.”

Either Romney was lying, or he hadn’t read any but the paperback version of his book.  That puts his jab at Perry into better context:

“I actually – I actually wrote my book, and in my book I said no such thing.”

What Romney sought to imply about Perry’s book is that he hadn’t written it himself, and while that may very well be true, it calls into question if Mitt remembers writing his own.  This illustrates the problem with Romney too, because for all intents and purposes, he’s just another well-polished, glad-handing politician who is at least vaguely conservative, but to the conservative base, this speaks volumes about his lack of credibility across the board because it strongly implies a basic dishonesty in Romney’s approach and his policy positions.

This is the likely cause of Herman Cain’s runaway Florida GOP Straw Poll victory on Saturday.  In addition to the poor or at best fair performances of the two alleged front-runners in the Thursday night debate, combined with his own compelling performance, Cain suddenly looks a good deal more attractive to voters than to these two.  Better, if Cain continues to press forward, there is some chance that Romney will be forced to abandon his strategy of winning by default.

The top five in the Florida GOP Straw Poll:

  1. Cain: 37%
  2. Perry: 15%
  3. Romney: 14%
  4. Santorum: 11%
  5. Paul: 10%

This result is a testament to Cain’s strong performance in Thursday’s debate, but it also speaks volumes about the lack-luster performance of the supposed front-runners.  If Romney pursues his current course of avoiding engagement much longer, he risks falling into single digit territory particularly if there is a later entry into this race.  Perry is self-destructing, and while he does so, Romney plans to capitalize mostly by doing exactly nothing.  We Republicans should ask ourselves if that is the sort of candidate we expect to defeat Barack Obama as well as restore the nation now floundering economically under the weight of programs of the same sort Romney has himself implemented in his own state.  Perhaps this is key: When asked during the debate if he thought Obama was a socialist, he vacillated to avoid a direct answer.

With a general election on the horizon that promises a billion dollars of Obama campaign cash, we simply can’t afford another nominee who will not engage fully in this fight.  Romney may win the nomination by default, but he can’t win the general election that way, and the conservative base of the party knows it.  If he won’t speak the truth now, talking to the base of his party, will he ever?  If not, how does he intend to distinguish himself from Barack Obama?  These are the questions Mitt Romney must answer, but chances are that like most everything else, he’ll take a pass and hope to win by default.

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Posted in Election 2012, GOP Candidates, Politics | 4 Comments »

Rediscovering America With Sarah Palin

Saturday, September 24th, 2011

America's Last Frontier?

The TLC series Sarah Palin’s Alaska gave us a view into a place of wonder most have never seen and experienced.  As one of America’s last wild places, it’s clear that there’s something to be learned by all of us in the beauty of Alaska and the rugged individualism that necessarily prevails among its people.  When Columbus set sail in search of a westward passage to the East Indies, he stumbled upon something wonderful when he found the New World.  What he discovered was a land of nature’s plenty, and a place ripe for the expansion of civilization in which to thrive and develop.  What those who followed him to this this new world realized is that all of nature’s beauty and resources can be harnessed to support our existence and growth.  In October, we mark the time of his arrival in the New World, but many Americans have forgotten its significance.

In our modern era, we’ve become so consumed with the notion of preserving the natural beauty that we’ve hobbled people in their ability to grow.   What Sarah Palin offers are the lessons she had learned as a leader in Alaska.  Because it’s still a largely wild place, vast in every dimension, and largely untouched by human development, she understood the necessity of preserving that natural beauty while recognizing the necessity of developing the resources and carving out a place for people to  produce and prosper.  In this sense, what Palin and her generation of Alaskans have done is to continue the mighty task of taming the frontier, but what she reminds us through her works in Alaska is that the founding, growth, and prosperity of our country had rested upon the idea that we can forge our own destiny.  What Palin’s TLC series offered us was a golden opportunity to learn about Alaska’s growth, but what a Palin presidency offers us is the chance to rediscover America.

This is perhaps America’s greatest challenge:  We have generations of people who have never learned what America had been from its discovery, through its development, and to its eventual founding and growth.  America was the place in which a person could prosper on the basis of individual efforts and ingenuity.  America was a place where their work ethic and their integrity mattered, because merit still mattered.  These traits were critical because reality seemed much more cruel to those who did not exhibit them.  In that sense, Alaska is still such a place.  What Sarah Palin did while Mayor of Wasilla was to begin confronting these issues to the inestimable benefit of the people of that city.  Things most of us in the rest of the country take for granted, such as grocery stores and roads to support the customers who would frequent them had been rudimentary and incapable of sustaining growth, but by the time she left that office, the rational plan of development she had instituted began to pay dividends to every person in Wasilla and the surrounding region, who had previously relied upon a distant Anchorage as the only source of their provisions and the central place to engage in commerce.

As Governor of her state, Sarah Palin continued the trend of development, while working to protect the natural wonders of her state.  A leader must recognize both the beauty and the bounty, and develop a plan to preserve one while fully accessing the other.  That can be a difficult challenge, but in a vast wilderness like Alaska, there are many more difficulties than most of us in the lower forty-eight states know, given the extremes of the climate and all the considerations it imposes.  Few things can be built easily or cheaply in Alaska, yet Palin managed the continuing development of energy resources for which our country now cries out in agony.  What Americans are now discovering is that reality remains as capable of cruelty as it had ever been, but we’re now much less prepared to confront it.  Sarah Palin’s example leads on the path out of our nationally stagnated wilderness.

What Palin may recognize more thoroughly than any other politician is that such development and growth relies upon the commitment, diligence, and industry of those who are to carry it out and ultimately enjoy its benefits.  Few politicians ever really build anything, but the very best among them establish the legal and moral groundwork for those who will.  Sarah Palin knows this, because she learned in her career that spouting politicians promise much, but in the end, it is the people who must deliver.  Nobody can give you lasting wealth.  You must earn it.  Nobody will provide you a life-long prosperity.  You must produce it.  Her recognition of this simple truth calls to mind a memory of an America in its youth.  It reminds one that all we take for granted today had been built by our predecessors, and they had all been individuals trading their labor and their lives for the proposition that their children would live more fruitful lives.  Shamefully, too many have abandoned that idea, out of fear and out of desperation.  It is that philosophical continent which must be conquered anew.

This has been the inheritance of our generation, and yet too many among us seem to think our prosperity appeared one day as if by magic.  Palin knows that none of these things we enjoy popped into existence at the whimsical demand of some politician or bureaucrat in Washington DC, but instead resulted from the efforts of millions, each devoted to their own interests, but trading their labors in exchange for the best efforts of others.   That is the heart of capitalism, and its simplest expression.  Sarah Palin has seen how capitalism cultivates freedom when carefully tended and nurtured, unobstructed by bureaucracy and overbearing government.  She has conquered that ground many times before in her political career, but now the nation needs to see this example and follow her lead.

What Sarah Palin may teach this struggling nation is that our country is still one of plenty, and that we still have our resources, but despite all the wonderful opportunities America still provides, nothing is more important in realizing them than the vast, untapped human potential of its people.  Neither Alaska nor America can be a land of opportunity without people of a mind and spirit to make use of all the gifts they provide.  Many Americans have somehow lost the ability to recognize the opportunities before them, and more have lost the will to pursue them when presented.  One of the key reasons for this depressions lies in the fact that government has now become the main obstacle to opportunity, prosperity, and even the human spirit of discovery and growth.  Palin’s example is that of an entrepreneurial explorer, and if we learn from her no other lesson, this one will have been key to understanding the root of our troubles.  We may always celebrate Columbus’ voyage to the New World, but history may yet record that it had been with Sarah Palin that we finally rediscovered America.

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The War on the Palin Family Continues

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

What Hate Looks Like

It’s absolutely ridiculous.  I don’t know which is worse: The haters who spew their venom at Sarah Palin and her family, or the media outlets that justify it.  Most of the American people have begun to catch on, and even some of those on the left have expressed increasing disdain at the endless attacks on them.  I’ve never been supportive of the notion of attacking politicians’ families, particularly their children, but others in the media justify it behind the absolute shield of “journalism.”  More, the moment a politician’s child crosses the legal boundary into adulthood, all bets are off, and no hold are barred.  Worse yet, there are those who have used an infant as the basis for attacking his mother.   Despite the repeated debunking of conspiracy theories and vile garbage directed at the Palin family, there are still those who carry out their own holy war against the Palins, and not all of them are in media.  Yesterday, a boorish sort of oaf saw Bristol Palin in a public place, and could not restrain himself.  He’s accosted Newt Gingrich in a similar fashion by his own description, but this time, rather than go after the politician herself, this vile hate-monger decided to attack her eldest daughter as a target of opportunity.

I hate to be the one to provide the video, because Hanks’ behavior was so lewd and cowardly, but at the same time, we must be willing to confront evil, and to confront it, you must know it(Profanity and Explicit Language):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S18gsZ37QXY]

Stephen Hanks is that sort of vile hate-monger, and he’s the sort of dirt-bag who carries his hatred of life into action via bombastic public verbal assaults on any public official with whose policies he disagrees, and clearly, he’s quite willing to extend this to family members, making him the sort of villain who should be cast out of civil society.  I can tell you that I’ve learned almost nothing about him, and except for his Twitter Profile:

stephen hanks

@sickofpalin Los Angeles, CA
My hate of all things Palin runs deep. I’m against the takeover of this Country by religious fundamentalist i.e.: Donminionst, NAR and young earth enthusiast.

What motivates people to hatred?  It’s my contention that such vile, disgusting people are generally incapable of dealing with the implications of some facet of their own lives.  I have no idea what drives Hanks’ hatred.  I really don’t care.

I’m not sure we can allow Hanks’ pretense that what ensued was unplanned, but it was clear from the footage I’ve seen, courtesy TMZ, that his hatred is real.  I have a daughter roughly Bristol Palin’s age.  Would he hesitate to verbally accost her too?  What this seems to reveal is a man so consumed with his hate-fueled, political agenda that he is unable to rationally partition his political views when in civil society among others.  This apparent absence of a self-filter that most rational people possess may indicate he’s dangerous, or it may simply indicate he’s a fundamentally broken person.  Unfortunately, given this incident, we already know that much about him.  In fact, his Twitter profile says enough to make the matter clear.

Since he admits doing something similar to Newt Gingrich, one must assume that he’s targeting people.  This guy may well need to be in the database of photos that security officials review in preparation for political events.  In reviewing the video, it may simply be that this guy is a bully, and full of himself, or something…

What you learn about these Palin-haters is that they don’t really have a reason for their hatred that they are willing to express, so they dress it up in all sorts of lame excuses about religion, and what they perceive as “religious intolerance,” but one must ask rightfully:  Is this not its own form of religious intolerance?  Hanks says during his brief dispute with Palin that he doesn’t believe in a hell.  My bet is that he’s lying about that, because he seems to inhabit his own personal hell or create one wherever he goes.

What sort of coward must one be to accost a young woman for the fact of who her mother is?  Who does such things?  Who carries out such vengeful attack?  I’ll tell you: The rabid left hates.  It’s what they do and what they know.  It is what consumes and drives them.  Andrew Beitbart has been busy exposing the sort of vermin who continue to invent new smears and conspiracy theories about the Palins, but what this latest incident makes clear is that some people are so incapacitated by their hatred that rage takes over and they become driven by their worst emotions.

What we know for certain is that Hanks’ hatred extends to women, to conservatives, and since she is both, particularly to Sarah Palin, and this latest attack was merely the expression of the deeper hatred he admits in his own Twitter profile.  It really doesn’t matter what the particular cause of his hatred may be.  Anybody who walks around with such a chip on his shoulder is dangerous, if not in a physical sense, then at the very least in the sense that they pollute everything they touch with the stink of their irrational motives.

Thanks to Bristol Palin’s courage, we now have a fuller picture of the form of such hatred.  She could have walked away, refusing to acknowledge his garbage, but in standing up for herself as well as her mother, maintaining her composure in the face of sheer evil, she’s revealed a few things that we all ought to know that have wider implications:

  • The rabid left are bullies; they spout and spew but all they have is hate
  • Standing up against evil is a necessary if unpleasant duty of those who oppose it
  • The women of her family are cut from sturdy cloth and are cool under withering attack

Much will be made of this in an attempt to dissuade Governor Palin from running.  It has always been my contention that this sort of thing is the worst she will face, because while she is more than able to defend herself, she also worries about her children like any parent does and should, whether they’re five or fifty years of age.  Bristol herself forshadowed a bit of this when in an interview she was asked if she thought her mother would run, she responded that the Palins could live in a cabin and still people would talk about them. She was right:  This sort of hatred never seems to take a holiday, especially if its target happens to be a Palin.

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Posted in Media, Politics | 14 Comments »

Thinking About The Presidency

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Too Much Power?

One of the features of the 20th Century and continuing in even more grand form now is the extent to which the office of President of the United States has come to represent the country at large.  Given the development of mass media, it’s not surprising, but in truth, I’m not sure it’s been entirely healthy.  We speak of presidents as “running the country,” but none of these characters, neither the worst nor the best of them, ever really run the country, or at least, that’s not what our founders intended.  The President and the federal establishment are supposed to be as remote in our daily lives as they are from most of us in geographic terms.  The notion of the President “running the country” is illusory in most respects, and a testament to the fictions propagated by government in collusion with media that we perceive things in this way.  We shouldn’t regard our government as such a fundamental part of our daily lives, but over time, people now view the presidency in this light.  It is time that we begin the discussion about returning the government and our elected politicians to their rightful place, but the trouble lies not only with the temperament of our presidents, but also with the character of the presidency.

Our present constitution was established in part to create a stronger federal government than had existed under the Articles of Confederation.  That government was considered insufficiently weak by those who saw flaws in its ability to bind the country together in issues of taxation and expenditure, particularly with respect to a common defense.  This left the presidency, merely an instrument of Congress, in a state of impotence, incapable of responding to changing conditions, or coordinating the new nation’s defense.  This was intolerable, and there were significant problems even collecting revenues.  Provisioning for the Army was unreliable, and there was little of centralized form in the execution of law.  The United States was at this time more like a version of the present day United Nations, or European Union, in the sense that it was strictly a treaty among the separate and sovereign states, with little of their powers delegated to the confederation except as pertaining to warfare and foreign policy.  Some critics today would suggest that it had certain advantages over our existing constitution for precisely these reasons.

The anti-federalists argued that much as our Articles of Confederation had perhaps been unduly weak as a reflex against the tyranny of the British empire, in much the same way, the proposed constitution was likewise unnecessarily and even dangerously powerful as a reaction against the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation.  Patrick Henry and George Mason were among the most notable critics, and there can be little doubt that he considered the new constitution to contain too many weaknesses, loopholes they thought, through which despots could arise.  The anti-federalists had three central objections:  There was no “bill of rights”; there would be a centralizing tendency; the government would take on an aristocratic character.  While the new constitution was ultimately amended to quiet critics on the matter of a bill of rights, the other two objections have come into sharper focus as it is clear that the history of the 20th Century is one of the centralizing of power, and the death of the concept of citizen legislators, resulting in a permanent political class that rules seemingly in near perpetuity.  The anti-federalists worried about the presidency created in the new constitution arrogating to itself new and terrible powers not specifically proscribed in Article II.   Some would argue with good cause that they had been correct, since at varying times throughout the course of our country, successive presidents have tended to accumulate more power than their predecessors.

This is the curious problem that now confronts us:  We must elect a President who will exercise the power of that office to slowly, wisely return such excessive power to its proper jurisdiction, either in the Congress, or within the several states, but perhaps most importantly, with the people.  Of course, this will not be done without the will and legislative commitment of Congress, but the truth is that a new President, properly inclined, will be able to change and diminish not only the role of the President, but also of the Federal Government generally.  Our nation has become too focused on and dominated by Washington DC.  This is why our federal budget has exploded out of all previous bounds. This is why we are beset by a regulatory nightmare in our small businesses, in our homes, and in almost every other facet of our lives.  We must begin the process of deconstructing the federal establishment to a degree that permits us to function as a nation again without daily reference to Presidential, Congressional or judicial whimsy.

The office of President of the United States was created to remedy an over-weak central government, but it has been so thoroughly enlarged in its power that we must elect a person with the character and temperament to practice self-restraint in the exercise of powers not explicit in the Constitution.  We need a leader who will slowly, carefully devolve as much power as is prudent back to the states and the people.  Our current economic morass is evidence of the accumulation and centralization of power in the hands of those who run our federal government, and they have become a blight upon our economic future, and indeed, our lives.  One need consider only those EPA regulators who have banned inhalers for Asthma drugs.  Some people will die because they will have been unable to afford the new inhalers, but the regulators are unelected, and frequently unaccountable, and they create new rules by which we are governed without respect to how those rules may harm us.  President sign executive order implementing what are essentially de facto law, with the stroke of a pen.  Somewhere along the course of the last two-hundred years, we have lost contact with the stern warnings the anti-federalists about the arrogation of power and the aggrandizement of the presidency, never mind the general growth of a permanent political class that no longer much cares for the will of the people, or even the constitution to which they’ve sworn to uphold.  These are also questions we must ask the GOP candidates for nomination, because we will soon lose our country if we don’t reduce the reach and scope of the U.S. Federal Government and its powers.  It’s time to tear down this leviathan, before it kills all of us.

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Romney Bickers With Perry; Perry Stumbled; Cain, Gingrich Shined

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Bickering Between Perry and Romney

As expected, the spectacle at center stage between Perry and Romney bickering over their respective interpretations of their books became a recurrent theme.  Perry took the first real shots at Romney, looking much too aggressive, and coming across as too eager to hammer his opponent.  Romney battled back, but as a Texan, I became  embarrassed for my Governor.  He looked confused at times, and ill-prepared.  By contrast, the stars of the show were Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, the first revealing his fight with stage four colon and liver cancer, and expressing his strong support for Israel, and his 9-9-9 plan, with Gingrich providing the real wit in the crowd.  Bachmann was flat, while Romney was wooden.

Cain had many great lines, but among his best was this gem:

“Ronald Reagan said we’re a shining city on a hill. We’ve slid down that hill.”
Gary Johnson had one of the funniest lines of the night:
“My next-door neighbors two dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this current administration.”
The rest was  fairly standard. Aside from Cain and Gingrich, the remainder of the field sounded tired.  Romney’s rhetoric was particularly flat, and Perry came out too aggressively, and sounded confused by the end.  He has shown in two successive debates that he has a problem holding himself together for more than an hour.

Perry’s worst moment may have come when he seemed to double down on his compassion argument for the in-state tuition to illegal immigrants.  That was astonishing and drew some extended booing from the crowd.
This field needs something that’s missing.  I have my own ideas. What are yours?

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Posted in Election 2012, GOP Candidates, Politics | 18 Comments »

The Media War On Sarah Palin Runs Into Reality

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Confronting Media Lies

If you thought the disgusting bilge being pushed in the media about Sarah Palin wasn’t awful enough, more astonishing is what Andrew Breitbart discovered when he came into possession of an email from Joe McGinniss that reveals something about the character of all those involved in writing, publishing, and marketing this trash:  They appear to be morally bankrupt people who will chase dollars over truth at the expense of anyone and anything.   In particular, Breitbart exposes how Random House published McGinniss’ book allegedly already knowing that virtually all of the salacious charges he wrote were substantially false and unproven.  It is a scathing indictment of the mindset of those who constitute much of the establishment media.

We’ve seen how media can create false narratives designed to damage and smear, but few politicians in memory have been subjected to the level of pure slander that has been aimed at Sarah Palin.   It’s not unusual for politicians to do or say things that come back to haunt them, but when people are reduced to fabricating stories and salacious details, there’s something that has gone wrong, not merely with the media, but also those who consume the news.  It’s a deeply disturbing cultural trend that one can get away with saying or writing virtually anything about others without any evidence, or any proof of one’s allegations.  To see the media do this suggests that we have a serious problem in journalistic ethics, but to see that it has begun to happen in the wider culture, particularly through the publication of Internet-based smears says something about the moral base of the country.

Much like the caricature Tina Fey created of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, the problem with so much in media is that most of it simply isn’t true, but that seems to pose no moral  obstacles to those who are intent upon a campaign of personal destruction against Palin.  From McGinniss’ own email to Jesse Griffin, who Breitbart describes as a publisher of a “low-rent and now-defunct anti-Palin blog,” as provided by Breitbard, it’s clear there’s something wrong when an author seems to have known his allegations were lies.  Let’s cover a few of them, from Breitbart’s piece, in McGinniss’ own words:

“No one has ever provided factual evidence that:

  • a) Todd had sex with a hooker, or with anyone else outside his marriage.
  • b) Sarah had an affair with Brad Hanson, or anyone else.
  • c) Track was a druggie who enlisted in the army to avoid a jail term. Or that he vandalized Wasilla school buses.
  • d) Willow was involved in the vandalism of the empty house in Meadow Lakes. Or that Sarah rushed back from Hawaii to put the lid on that.
  • e) Trig is not Sarah’s natural born child.
  • f) Bristol was promiscuous as a high schooler and drank and used drugs, or became pregnant again after Tripp’s birth.”

Consider all of this in light of the salacious garbage that’s been floating around in media for weeks about this.  If McGinniss knew all of this, how is it that he or his publisher could go forward with the book?  What’s worse is that knowing this, there are any number of little gossip-mongers and muck-rakers still pushing this garbage all over the internet.  People speak of hate in politics, but what sort of hatred could be more virulent than the sort that permits people to run with such stories they know to be untrue?

I haven’t the capacity to describe the infamy of such thinking.  Imagine the mind of the ordinary person who propagates such complete trash?  What sort of hate must burden and consume them that to convey such information presents no apparent ethical difficulty?  One can’t help but wonder if these sorts weren’t the too-infrequently exposed note-passers who sprouted to spread rumors in the classrooms of our youth, fertilized and tended by an obsessively obnoxious culture to become blossoming toxic weeds in adulthood.

There should be no controversy in the suggestion that any who become purveyors of such vile filth are awful.  To realize there are people who do so, despite knowing it had been a falsehood, should provide us every justification on earth to cast them aside as pariahs. It makes no sense to argue with this kind of vile hatred.  There isn’t a cure.  They have no shame.  It’s up to us to recognize their handiwork and call it out.  Andrew Breitbart has done what the big media won’t: He’s exposed the lies and the liars who spread them.  In the McGinniss email, there is mentioned a “Patrick” in association with Jesse Griffin.  I think I’ve identified their new on-line hang-out and have forwarded that information to Breitbart through one of his people, although I suspect he’s already aware of their current disposition.  My small blog is neither equipped nor staffed to further research the matter, but I believe exposure of these haters is long overdue.  They propagate wild conspiracy theories of the sort described in McGinniss’ email.  They have even been to this blog to look for new fodder for defamation, but finding none, they returned to their happy little site to cast aspersions on this author.   Mr. Breitbart has a demonstrated ability and determination to handle them properly, and if he didn’t know where they landed before now, he soon will.

Let me state it clearly: They are filth.

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Posted in Media, Politics, Sarah Palin | 4 Comments »

The Other Side of Class Warfare: Taking Society Down

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Society's Lowest Common Denominator

One of the most divisive and intractable problems we face in the U.S. is the growing poverty in our society.  More people are connected to the governmental umbilical cord than ever in history, and there are complaints emanating from all the usual sources that the wealthy segment of our society doesn’t pay enough for the privilege of their wealth.  I look at this from a completely different perspective, based in reality, and not in some grand socialistic dream about the good in humanity.  I know that humans are fallible and imperfect, and easily fall into a destitution of spirit even more readily than they do into a poverty of material things.  Encouraged to do so, many people are more than willing to live from the efforts of others and to subsist without reference to their own sloth.

I realize that what I am going to tell you will cause many to hurl derision in my direction, but it’s time that we tell the truth about who the real free-riders in our society have been.  Our country cannot thrive so long as the free-riders of whom we ask exactly nothing can collect by virtue of their unwillingness to contribute anything.  Our “welfare” system is becoming the largest segment of a rapidly growing government that rests not on a poverty of material things it provides, but on the grotesque destitution of spirit of those among those who these programs were intended to assist.

First, I’d like to address the question of entitlement programs, and differentiate among them on the following basis: Social Security, a program I think has thoroughly impossible problems, has been promised on the basis of individual contributions over a lifetime of work.  While it is clear that some substantial reform is necessary, and many  have been misled about the nature of the program, it is not the program I wish to discuss.  Instead, I’d prefer to focus on the massive programs for which there is no connection between benefits paid and the manner in which they are funded.  This includes the myriad programs that fall into the category widely regarded as “welfare,” and includes everything from public housing to Medicaid, among the more well-known, but includes also Pell Grants and Home Energy Assistance, and extends now even to Internet Service and Cellular Phones.

Over the last number of days, I’ve been verbally hammered via email and on the phone by those who have become disheartened at the things they now witness in their daily lives.  It’s not merely that these programs exist, or that they now provide every imaginable need, but that the recipients no longer appreciate them as a gift of a generous society.  Instead, they now view these benefits as a primary means of existence, and a right to which they are entitled to exercise.  Imagine subsisting in the belief that society owes you a living, based on no more exhaustive claim but for your existence.  It is to say “I’m here, so pay for me.”  If this seems stunning to some Americans who are less familiar with this sub-culture of economic dependency and moral depravity, it shouldn’t.  We have allowed our politicians to create a system in which they are rewarded with votes by providing material goods to people who produce nothing, owe nothing, and more, are being conditioned to believe that they possess an endless right to the wealth of those who produce the wealth of the nation.

Ladies and gentlemen, there can be no doubt that by permitting government to become the great dispenser of benefits, we have built a monster that has taken on a life and a force from which we may not escape.  We have such stellar intellectuals as Elizabeth Warren, a candidate for Senate in Massachusetts, and a former Obama White House flunky, who tells us a few things that ought to disqualify her from any office anywhere on the planet:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’  No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

Do you understand her claim?  She is saying that society enables people to become rich.  This is a lie.  If society enables people to become rich, why aren’t we all rich?  Why? What’s the difference between one person’s wealth and another person’s poverty?  She doesn’t explain that, but she does continue to make absurd statements that reveal her poverty of understanding  of both economics and human nature:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.”

This bizarre and reckless politician is telling you that the roads came first.  She is plainly asserting that roadways came before commerce.  They did not.  Commerce was the reason the roads were built, and the people who were engaged in that commerce are the ones who built the roads.  If there was nothing to protect, we would not need police.  This asinine would-be Senator actually believes that “the rest of us paid for” all of these things.  She is lying.  Find for me the total number of dollars paid for any roadway by those who do nothing but take from this system?

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

This is pure sophistry.  There is no instance in which her narrative is true.  We cannot  afford any more of this notion.  The people who have paid for those products are most frequently the people who had a hand in producing them.  This is a serious problem.  She is an advocate for free-riders who actually insists on bolstering the notion that free-riders are the great virtue in our system who somehow provide the ability of the rich to become richer, while nevertheless providing exactly and precisely nothing.

This must stop.  We must begin to strip such power from politicians. We must challenge this nonsense at ever turn.  We must begin to say “No” and mean it, not merely to these politicians, but also to the people who have become dependent upon them.  It simply ludicrous to suggest that the infrastructure depends on the payments of people who don’t pay, while people who do pay are compelled at gunpoint to build and provide  it.

We have a real problem, and this insufferable leftist demonstrates it quite well: The poverty we face is in intellect, philosophy, and spirit, and we can no longer afford the luxury of all of these programs.  We must end the welfare state before it ends us.  With each day it continues, it increases its own numbers as more people give up the will to earn their existence as they find themselves increasingly surrounded by those who will not.

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Posted in Business, Culture, Economics, Politics | 23 Comments »

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