The only constant in the life of individuals and nations is change. Since the beginning of the last century, the process or rate of change has accelerated with the invention and availability of a myriad of machines, technologies that have altered the lifestyle of Americans as well as of millions around the world.

Let me put it in personal terms. When I was born in the late 1930s, my Mother washed the family laundry by hand and hung it out to dry on sunny days or in the basement of our home if it was raining. We were not poor. We were middle class. My Father was a Certified Public Accountant and we lived in a spacious suburban home in an upscale New Jersey community. Mass produced washers and dryers would arrive after the end of World War Two.

The differences between lower economic classes, the middle class, and upper classes were well defined back then. All, however, generally held the same values regarding societal institutions such as marriage, religion, national pride. Those values have eroded since the 1960s and Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, whose new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” ($27.00, Crown Forum) tells you how and why.

Murray takes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22,, 1963 as the starting point, noting, for example, that “Not only were Americans almost always married, mothers normally stayed at home to raise their children. More than 80 percent of married women with children were not working outside the home in 1963.”

“Part of these widely shared values lay in the religiosity of America in 1963” and Murray compares this to a 1963 Gallup poll in which “Only one percent of respondents said they did not have a religious preference, and half said they had attended a worship service in the previous seven days. These answers showed almost no variations across classes.”

“The racial differences in income, education, and occupations were all huge, noted Murray. “The civil rights movement was the biggest domestic issue of the early 1960s…” By 1963, “Poverty had been dropping so rapidly for so many years that Americans thought things were going well.”

The changes in values that many Americans deplore today were coming. “The first oral contraceptive pill had gone on the market in 1960 and its use was spreading widely.” Murray points out that “The leading cohorts of the baby boomers were in their teens by November 21, 1963, and, for better or worse, they were going to be who they were going to be. No one understood at the time what a big difference it could make if one age group of a population is abnormally large. Everyone was about to find out.”

“This book,” wrote Murray, “is about the evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever known.”

The culture that Americans shared uniquely and in contrast to much of the world, warns Murray “is unraveling” as “America is coming apart at the seams—not the seams of race or ethnicity, but of class.”

Murray defines the new upper class “as the most successful five percent of adults ages 25 and older who are working in managerial positions, in the professions (medicine, the law, engineering and architecture, the sciences, and university faculty), and in content-production jobs in the media.”

“As of 2010, about 23 percent of all employed persons aged 25 or older were in these occupations, which means that about 1,427,000 persons constituted the top 5 percent. Since 69 percent of adults in these occupations who were ages 25 and older were married in 2010, about 2.4 million adults were in new-upper-class families as heads of households or spouse.” That’s a very small slice of 330 million Americans.

They are not the “millionaires and billionaires” that President Obama is always blathering about. They are the new “establishment” that determine much about the nation’s culture, economy, and future.

To boil down Murray’s extensive research and reporting, that top 5 percent are largely isolated from the rest of the population because they tend to live where their counterparts live and interact mostly with one another in all aspects of their lives. They are the new “elite.”

“Rolling back income inequality won’t make any difference in the isolation of the new upper class from the rest of America.” They are wealthy by most standards and Murray expects them to become wealthier over time. Thus, all the talk of “fairness” and “a fair share” is meaningless.

“Fairness” as many point out, is just another word for “class warfare.” It has always been the siren call of communism.

Efforts in America and in Europe to create “fairness” in the form of our “entitlement” programs and the extensive European socialism have reached a point where they threaten to collapse our own and the economies of many European nations.

Murray says “We have been the product of the cultural capital bequeathed to us by the system the founders laid down; a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with one another. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we have loved about Americans will go away.”

The system, of course, is free-market capitalism, deregulation, and lower marginal income tax rates, all within the context of the U.S. Constitution. It is under attack by the President of the United States and a cohort of civil service and industrial unions, along with liberal members of Congress.

It is why the Republican primaries have been, in part, a desperate effort to educate Americans to the reason America is in peril and why Americans must strive to restore the values that were shared on November 22, 1963.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

It seems like a bizarre notion, but does Barack Obama want to lose the election in November?

I think he does!

One is struck by the way Obama has visibly aged in the job. He may well have grown weary being POTUS.

By any rational standard, one would say he wants a second term, but Obama has always operated in a fantasy world where mere words are supposed to translate into reality. And he has repeatedly talked about being a one-term president.

He is, after all, his own invention; the author of two memoirs of a life that had little achievement to point to other than getting elected first to the Illinois legislature and then to the Senate where he lingered a bare two years before running for president.

I raise the question because Obama seems to be deliberately irritating the very people who are supposed to be his “base”; the hard core liberals, the Hollywood crowd, youth, and unions, among others. His partisanship has put Congress into total gridlock.

When members of the Occupy movement showed up in Washington, D.C., one of them threw a smoke bomb onto the White House lawn. Others who have been camped out in a park there are likely to be tossed out if for no other reason than the place is overrun with rats and has become a public health hazard.

The decision to stop the Keystone pipeline is a deliberate offense to the unions that have contributed millions to his campaign. Why? It pleased the environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. Americans, however, understand the pipeline represented both jobs and oil, two things they deem worth having.

Then there are all the vacations Obama and his family takes. They have one thing in common. They are ostentatiously expensive. Obama or Michelle always seem to be going on vacation or returning from one. The characterization may be unfair, but perception is everything.

Americans are very keen on their military and, of all the government programs Obama could have chosen to trim, he’s had the knives out for the Pentagon since he took office. While a war-weary public was likely pleased when he withdrew troops from Iraq (neither Bush, nor Obama had a choice as the Iraqis made it clear they wanted U.S. troops out), the fact remains that the main news out of Iraq these days are bombings as the Sunni versus Shiite conflict has returned. Afghanistan remains a millstone.

Even in the face of a clear threat, it is unlikely that Obama would respond militarily between now and Election Day. The most likely scenario, however, would be an Israeli decision to strike at Iran before it becomes a full-fledged nuclear threat. It must be said, however, that Obama and other NATO nations have positioned some military assets in the Persian Gulf, but would he pull the trigger? It’s doubtful.

The most obvious problem Obama faces is unemployment. It’s variously set at anywhere from 11% to 20% depending on the part of the nation you’re discussing. It still is far too high everywhere and he gives every impression of being, if not indifferent to it, at least in no hurry to address it. Most certainly none of his programs have reduced it. His alleged “stimulus” was little more than a political slush fund that added billions to the national debt and failed.

Every President is subject to “events” and the likely default of Greece and financial troubles of several European nations are likely to impact the national election as Americans try to sort out what effect it will have here. Obama has already presided over the first downgrade of America’s debt rating and we shall surely be reminded of that in the months ahead.

The other event will be the Supreme Court hearing of the case against Obamacare in March. They may not issue a decision right away or they might issue one just before November 6th.

There are two lines of thought about the forthcoming national election. Past Presidents were relieved to leave office despite its power and prestige. (1) Obama may not like being President and (2) he has concluded that he will be defeated. He gives the impression of not caring about public opinion anymore.

The only people publicly defending him seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder. Either they haven’t paid attention to what a disaster his term has been thus far or they just don’t think it’s his fault.

I think he will go through the motions, but I also think a majority of voters no longer believe a word he says anymore.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.

It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue. Our vital transportation sector and all others that utilize petroleum-based products will suffer, too.

While President Obama babbles about millionaires and billionaires, everyone will be impoverished by the loss of jobs and revenue our energy sector produces now and can produce in the future.

This isn’t an “energy policy.” It’s a “no-energy policy” and it is a guarantee of economic disaster.

Obama’s decision to reject a permit for Canada’s XL Keystone pipeline is just one example. It is a job-killer and a revenue-killer. There are thousands of pipelines serving America’s energy needs and the XL Keystone pipeline would ensure that Canada’s own vast energy reserves would flow to America. It is one of our key trade partners and Obama has slapped it in the face.

In early January, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, announced a new 20-year, million-acre ban on uranium mining for federal lands in Arizona, despite the fact that these lands hold the highest-grade of known uranium deposits in the United States. It is an outrage that a new GOP-Congress will have to overturn if the nation is to be assured of sufficient uranium to power its nuclear plants and for weapons development. If the ban remains, these uranium resources would be inaccessible until 2023!

Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that Salazar’s announcement “further compounds a man-made energy crisis that has been planned and executed in Washington, D.C.”

At the same time we are learning of enormous natural gas discoveries that can reduce our energy bills and turn sleeping little towns into boomtowns, environmental organizations have launched a vast propaganda campaign against “fracking”, a technology that has been safely used for more than fifty years. Their claims about dangers to the nation’s supply of fresh water are baseless. Their claims that fracking has caused earthquakes in Ohio are absurd.

Need it be said that the Environmental Protection Agency has turned its eyes on fracking and is working on a report due later this year that will likely call for harsh crackdowns on its use and more regulations to throttle the expansion of natural gas extraction?

The EPA has just released a report of those power plants that top the list of its regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. There is no basis in science to justify the reduction of CO2. Indeed, since it is a gas on which all vegetation depends, much as oxygen is vital to all animal life, reducing it would impair great crop yields and healthier forests.

These regulations are based on the global warming hoax that blamed CO2 for warming the earth. That is utterly false. The Earth is currently in a perfectly natural cooling cycle and the climate of the Earth is almost entirely based on the Sun—solar radiation—along with the actions of oceans, clouds, and even volcanic activity that spews tons of particulates into the atmosphere.

Coal-fired power plants account for fifty percent of all the electricity generated in the United States. Fifty percent! And yet the EPA is determined to shut down dozens of them providing that vital factor in the lives of all Americans and the economy, nor does this take into account the billions that energy producers have spent to upgrade their technology to reduce emissions.

The Obama administration fuel economy agenda, a call for 54.5 miles per gallon ignores simple physics. There is a finite amount of energy a gallon of gas can generate. If you dilute it with ethanol as is currently required, you get even less mileage. The administration is trying to circumvent Congress by issuing standards based on regulating “greenhouse gas emissions”, but there is no need for this. It is a false argument. The Center for Automotive Research says that the proposed new standards would cause the retail price of average motor vehicles to increase by more than $11,000.

Americans and the nation’s future are being victimized by Obama administration policies. The 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, was released on January 12th by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, measures the many factors that contribute to the economic health of a nation—things like property rights, regulatory efficiency, open markets, free trade and labor policies.

Economic freedom is declining worldwide as governments try to spend their way out of the global recession. The United States fell to 10th place. In 2009 it ranked 6th, in 2010 it was 8th, and in 2011, it was 9th.

We are witnessing the deliberate murder of a superpower.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

In 1991, the Soviet Union, arguably the greatest experiment in Communism, collapsed. After Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors moved to shift its Communist economy to one that embraced Capitalism while retaining centralized government control.

Following World War Two, the recovering nations of Europe were rescued from Communism by the Marshall Plan, but adopted Communism-Light in the form of Socialism. The U.S. was already headed in that direction, creating programs that we now call “entitlements.” For most of the nation’s history, such “entitlements” did not exist.

What binds together the financial problems of the West is the common thread of infantile behavior and thought. One might call it wishful thinking. Instead of encouraging people to provide for old age and possible illness, politicians decided to turn government into Big Daddy, the eternal source of money for everything.

Need to go to college, start a business, or plan for retirement? Government would be there to help. All this ignored the need to actually pay for these programs. In the case of Social Security Congress began to dip into its funding to pay for other programs! This is what children do.

One can look around the world and see what a failure both Communism and Socialism have been. Governments spending more than their tax and other revenues have suffered grievously from this path to default and that includes the United States of America. It can be argued that, with few exceptions–the Reagan years come to mind—Presidents have been poorly served by their economic advisors.

Politicians make poor economists because, in America, members of the House must think of getting reelected every two years and Senators every six. Moreover, being politicians, they believe that the more federal largess they can bring back to their State and then brag about is the one true path to reelection.

At the very beginning of the nation, Thomas Jefferson said it best. “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

How many commissions and special committees have earnestly produced reports intended to deal with a government grown too large? At the federal level, some two million or more Americans are employed promulgating a deluge of regulations and pushing paper.

Now President Obama says he wants to streamline the federal government.
The real issue is not “streamlining” government agencies by gathering them together under one roof and one administrator, but the failure to end government departments and agencies that no longer serve a useful purpose and whose removal would also remove countless obstacles to economic growth.

In April 2011, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warned that “the federal government is on track to spend more than $3.5 trillion this year. What most people don’t know is that government actually costs about 50% more than what it spends. That’s because complying with federal regulations costs an additional $1.75 trillion—nearly an eighth of GDP. And almost none of that cost appears on the budget.”
The United States of America, the greatest engine of wealth the world has ever seen, is bankrupt. The national debt exceeds the Gross Domestic Product, the sum total of all revenue generated by goods and services.

The President has asked that the debt ceiling be raised another trillion or so and Congress will comply. That, I submit, is insane.

I also submit that, since Barack Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the nation has been witness to the economic insanity personified in the man and in the Democrat-controlled Congress that was his partner until 2010 when the control of the House of Representatives was wrested away by the Tea Party movement and its support for Republican candidates.

The only constant in life is change. America’s demography has changed. We have, thanks to medical care and other advantages, a much older segment of the population than ever before, but the nation from the 1930s to the 1960s had committed itself to ensure they would have Medicare and Medicaid at a time when people more often than not died in their 50’s and 60’s. We now have an average life expectancy of 78 years. My parents lived into their 90s.

Politics, not economics, continues to make it impossible to revise and restructure both Medicare and Social Security to reflect this reality. Instead, we had Obamacare foisted upon us which took trillions from Medicare and imposes rules that will let elderly heart attack or stroke victims die rather than pay for a level of care to which they contributed during their working years.

If the Supreme Court declares Obamacare unconstitutional it will go away. If we elect a Republican Senate, the repeal already passed in the House will be passed and it will go away.

But America’s economic problems will not go away until Americans insist that the shackles of Big Government be cut loose to enable the growth of an energy industry that can not only make the nation energy independent, but produce billions in revenue as far as the eye can see into the future.

The tax system with its thousands of pages must be revised to a simpler, fairer program. It makes no sense that forty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all.
It’s not that we don’t know what must be done. Conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, The Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and others have spelled out programs that can and will save America, but the nation must be led by a president who understands that Capitalism involves budgeting, planning, hard work, and—yes—risk.

The federal government is running on “continuing resolutions.” It has not had a formal budget since Obama arrived. This is no way to run the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. America is on a suicide watch and we are just an election away from saving it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

“Si vis pacem, para bellum.” If you want peace, plan for war. The adage is attributed to the 4th or 5th century Latin author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus’s tract De Re Militari book 3. This fundamental wisdom is being ignored by President Obama, one of two recent Commanders-in-Chief who never spent a day in uniform, let alone under fire.

In a recent American Thinker commentary by Jim Yardley, he said, “It is apparent that the president, in developing his strategy, used the same extensive knowledge, his superior intellect, and worldly wealth of experience that he brought to his strategy for his $800-billion stimulus, his strategy for providing cost-free health care to millions of Americans, and his strategy for using ‘smart diplomacy’ to defuse not spots around the world.”

Perhaps receiving the Nobel Peace Prize barely months into his first year as President has convinced Obama that he is the man to get all our enemies to join hands and sing Kumbaya. Obama accepted the prize that has gone to other seekers of peace like Yassir Arafat, founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or co-winners, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. The IPCC and Gore have led the greatest hoax of the modern era, global warming, and Arafat rejected every effort at peace offered by Israel by going back on his word and using terrorism to achieve his goals.

There is no question that the announced cuts to the U.S. military budget are, in part, the result of the domestic run up of debt and borrowing the followed the financial crisis of 2008; itself the result of bad government policies regarding the wholesale granting of mortgages to people who could not afford homes, then bundling those bad mortgages and selling them as assets to the banks.

While the economy is showing some small signs of regaining its footing, the government is still borrowing forty cents of every dollar it spends and has shown no real intent to reduce spending.

While this is occurring we have a President who has made clear his antipathy of the role of the military. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial noted that “The Pentagon shouldn’t be immune to fiscal scrutiny, yet this Administration has targeted defense from its earliest days and has kept on squeezing. The White House last year settled with Congress on $450 billion in military budget cuts through 2012, on top of the $350 billion in weapons programs killed earlier,” adding “Taken altogether, the budget could shrink by over 30% in the next decade.”

Following a 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center Osama bin Laden, a still largely obscure Islamic fanatic, declared war on the United States in 1996. In 2001, al Qaeda succeeded, killing nearly 3,000. To underestimate the intent of his successors to destroy the nation would be a grave error. To think that his assassination along with the killing of a relative handfull of other al Qaeda leaders has ended the threat is wishful thinking.

To think that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq will not at some point result in the possible breakup of that nation or the withdrawal from Afghanistan will rid us of the threat of Islamic fanaticsim is still more wishful thinking.

Right now and ever since 1979, the threat of Iran is the largest facing the Middle East and the West. Its leaders have never made a secret of its intent to acquire nuclear weapons, to threaten all other Middle Eastern nations, as well as Europe and America is on a par with the threat the rise of Nazism posed in Germany in the 1930s.

After World War Two, America emerged as a superpower and it took on the role of global policeman. No military prescience predicted the attack on South Korea by North Korea, nor was our strategy in Vietnam successful. We had earlier failed to anticipate the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor despite efforts to keep out of the war that had begun in 1939.

The lesson that should have been learned is that overwhelming military strength contributes greatly to avoiding wars.

President Obama is ignoring that. It is not, however, to say that he is taking Iran lightly. In early January, thousands of U.S. troops were deployed to Israel and senior U.S. military sources say they anticipate they will remain through the year. Obstensively, they are there to participate in joint U.S.-Israeli war games. They will be joined by a U.S. aircraft carrier and, as we know, we have a task force in place in the event the Iranians try to close the Strait of Hormuz through which passes one sixth of the world’s oil supplies.
The U.S. could be energy independent in a decade if the Administration and Congress would remove the obstacles to accessing our enormous reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, but that remains unlikely as this is written.

The decision to reduce the size of our military to 490,000 troops from 570,000 could not come at a worse time. Air and naval assets, we’re told, will be maintained. Holding evacuated or captured territory requires “boots on the ground.” The decision of former President Bush to “surge” in Iraq by increasing troop strength turned a potential defeat into a success. A war-weary America and the current Iraqi regime wanted us out and we are out.

Meanwhile Egypt that underwent “the Arab Spring” has fallen into the hands of a militant, anti-American and anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey has joined the Islamic frenzy, the future of Syria remains unknown, so anyone who thinks that military action anywhere, but especially in Iran, is not a real potential is not paying attention.

President Obama’s claim that “the tide of war is receding” is likely to rank with British PM Neville Chamberlains claim of “peace in our time” after a visit with Hitler.

It is wishful thinking or worse. It is the deliberate effort to ignore the dangers in the world. Shifting military personnel and assets to Asia acknowledges China’s rising power, but U.S. military leaders have warned against a war in Asia for decades. It is doubtful the Chinese want one.

What is not in doubt is that this is the wrong time to reduce our military strength and capabilities. We did that after World War One and paid a price for it. President Obama’s policies put us in the same peril.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

The Founding Fathers, authors of the Constitution, were obsessed with any form of government that could become too powerful, too willing to use force to oppress citizens. They had cause. They had fought a long war against the greatest power of their age, ruled by a king with nearly absolute power. They fashioned an instrument designed to ensure that the President could not rule by edict and defused power among three branches of government.

We have a President currently running for reelection against Congress, Wall Street, Republicans, and the right of citizens to be free of an overly intrusive government.

Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution says: All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in the Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

All appointments of the President must be approved by the Senate while it is in session and the Senate, even over the Christmas and New Year’s vacation has remained in session, if only in a pro forma, technical manner. Every three days it has been convened to assert its powers.

Even so, President Obama has announced several “recess” appointments, all clearly a challenge to the Senate and all clearly a tyrannical power grab. He appointed Richard Cordray as the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new function that puts government between the lender and the citizen. In theory, all loans in the future will be subject to government approval. This is Communism, not Capitalism.

In addition, he appointed three members to the National Labor Relations Board, intended to arbitrate disputes between unions and corporations. None of them have appeared before a Senate committee for vetting. It was this board that demanded Boeing shut down its new factory in South Carolina, one of many “right to work” states that empower workers with the right to determine whether they want to join a union or not.

Neither Obama, nor any president who preceded him can make appointments without the “advice and consent” of the Senate. (Article II, Section 2). As recently as the first week of the year, referring to the Senate, Obama asserted that “I have an obligation as President to do what I can without them.” He has no such obligation. Those are the words of an incipient tyrant.

These actions put me in mind of Niccolo Machiavelli, famed as the author of “The Prince”, a book of advice to Lorenzo de Medici who was the ruler of the former republic of Florence, one of many city states in Italy. Born in 1469 and died in 1527, Machiavelli living during the early years of the Renaissance, a period that saw the flowering of literature, science, art, religion and politics. Historians consider it a bridge between the Middle Ages and the modern era.

The renaissance was a period of social and political upheaval, one in which the various princes ruled so long as they could protect their principalities against wars by others seeking to expand their powers. “The Prince” is largely seen as advice on how a prince may have to resort to the methodical use of brute force and deceit to hold onto power, but it was more than that. It was a guide to ruling people with a minimum of oppression.

“It should be borne in mind,” Machiavelli wrote, “that there is nothing more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes in a state’s constitution.” Obama is engaged in an attack on the U.S. Constitution.

Of princely power, Machiavelli wrote, “The people are everywhere anxious not be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles are out to dominate and oppress the people. These opposed ambitions bring about one of three results; a principality, a free city, or anarchy.” The Constitution ensures a free nation with limited federal powers and is a guard against anarchy.

Evidence of Obama’s narcissism and drive for complete power is ample. He is on record as saying the Constitution is composed of “negative” limits on power. Others regard the Constitution as the ultimate protection against the unlawful use of power. This is particularly evident in the Bill of Rights which was appended to the Constitution because several of the first States would not ratify without it.

In his advice to Lorenzo de Medici, Machiavelli raised the question of “whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. Within the context of the time, he said, “it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.” In the run up to Christmas, Americans bought guns in record numbers which suggests there is considerable fear of Obama and the results of his policies over the past three years.

We have witnessed and been victimized by a Democrat-controlled Congress that forced Obamacare on an unwilling public. We have seen the rise of Islamic fanaticism as the result of his failed policies toward Iran and the Middle East. We have had record breaking debt imposed on us by his failed “stimulus” policies. We have seen continued efforts to reduce our military power and to thwart access to our ample energy resources of oil, natural gas, and coal.

It is a long list of usurpations of power that endanger the nation domestically and internationally. Whether it was done out of stupidity or a deliberate effort to harm the nation can be debated, but the most outstanding attribute of Obama has been his continual lying and Machiavelli notes that “the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived.”

In this effort, Obama has been greatly aided by the mainstream media with a few notable exceptions. The trust that once reposed in the nation’s print and broadcast media has been eroded and will be hard to regain. The trust given Obama is long gone by all but a few ignorant and lazy citizens content to have their lives ruled by an over-reaching executive branch of government.

The election process will rid us of Obama and likely many of those Democrat legislators who have supported his policies. The House is controlled by the Republicans and the Senate is likely to follow.

Meanwhile, we must guard against the present occupant of the White House. Americans waged a war against oppression in the past and will, if necessary, do so again.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

To understand how the Environmental Protection Agency operates, one must first understand that it lies all the time. Its “estimates” are bogus. Its claims of lives saved are bogus.

It thrives on scare-mongering to a public that is science-challenged, but the science remains and the EPA must be challenged to save the nation from the loss of the energy it needs to function. It must be challenged to unleash the huge economic benefits of energy resources—coal, oil, and natural gas—that can reverse our present economic decline.

The latest outrage is the MACT rule—an acronym for “maximum achievable control technology” intended to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. The rule is 1,117 pages long. Its purpose is to shut down coal-fired power plants that generate over fifty percent of all the electricity used daily in the United States of America.

The value of the total benefits asserted by the EPA is alleged to be $6 million. Not billion, but million. The MACT rule would force 14.7 gigawatts—enough power for more than eleven million households—to be “retired” from the power grip in the 2014-15 period when the rules take effect.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works says, “The economic analysis of the Obama EPA’s MACT paints a bleak picture for economic recovery as it will cost $11 billion to implement, increase electricity rates for every American, and, along with the Cross-State rule, destroy nearly 1.4 million jobs.”

MACT is all about mercury in the environment of the nation. On May 25, 2011, the Wall Street Journal published a brief opinion piece by Willie Soon, a natural scientist at Harvard, co-authored by Paul Driessen, a senior policy advisor for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. It was titled “The Myth of Killer Mercury.”

Here are a few of the facts it offered.

“Mercury has always existed naturally in the Earth’s environment. A 2009 study found mercury deposits in Antarctic ice across 650,000 years.”

“Mercury is found in air, water, rocks, soil and trees, which absorb it from the environment.”

There is “200,000,000 tons of mercury naturally present in seawater” that “has never posed a danger to any living thing.”

“U.S. forest fires emit at least 44 tons (of mercury) per year; cremation of human remains discharges 26 tons; Chinese power plants eject 400 tons; and volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers and other sources spew out 9,000-10,000 additional tons per year.”

“Since our power plants account for less than 0.5% of all the mercury in the air we breathe, eliminating every milligram of it will do nothing about the other 99.5% in our atmosphere.”

This is the same EPA “logic” that insists on reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere when all life on Earth depends on it as plant food for all vegetation. More CO2 mean more crops for humans and livestock, healthier forests and jungles, and food for the Earth’s wildlife population.

In a foreword to “Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry”, Dr. Jay Lehr, the Science Director of The Heartland Institute, wrote, “This administration is pushing an unprecedented radical environmental agenda.”

The EPA, along with major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and others, have engaged for decades in a massive propaganda effort to convince Americans they are imperiled by the nation’s air and water. It is a lie. As the author of “Regulators Gone Wild”, Rich Trzupeck notes, “Though our world is actually cleaner than ever, most Americans are convinced it is dirtier.”

“Toxicity,” wrote Trzupeck, “is a matter of dose, as sober scientists have observed since ancient times. A particular compound may kill you if you drink it, but a few parts per billion of the same compound can have no effect at all…one can find toxic air pollutants in the parts-per-billion level in human breath.”

The EPA’s latest rule, which will no doubt be subject to lawsuits, is a killer MACT. It is not about mercury or other trace gases. It is about deliberately depriving the nation of energy which in turn means less jobs, less growth, and a third world lifestyle being imposed on Americans by the radical environmentalists inside the Obama administration.

Remember that when you are in the election booth on November 6, 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

Election years tend to create a level of frenzy concerning the selection of the nominees and the outcome. The media feed this in order to keep readers reading and viewers viewing. The history of American elections has always been one of vituperation between the parties, so there is nothing new about this. Indeed, since so much depends on it, the political free-for-all is a healthy exercise.

It can, however, make for a difficult environment in which to go about one’s life; the air filled with charge and counter-charge, polls going up and down, and a general sense that something is very wrong with the way the government functions.

On the bright side, a gridlocked Congress may bring a measure of relief to everyone. Writing about gridlock in January 2011, Marcus E. Ethridge, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, noted that “By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups.” In 2011, we saw what happens when advocates of “renewable energy”, wind and solar power, or electric cars, get priority over the needs of most Americans for reliable energy and transportation.

At the heart of the 2012 election will be the recognition that the economy is still not recovering, that government is seeking to extend and expand its control over our lives, and, even among former supporters of Barack Obama, that he has been a failure of historic proportions.

A Friday Rasmussen Reports said that “Voters right now give the edge to Republicans when asked which political party is likely to win the White House and control both the House of Representatives and the Senate in next November’s election”, adding that “a lot of voters are undecided.” Those voters may actually wait until entering the polls to cast their vote.

Another bad piece of news for President Obama is a new comparative analysis of current voter registration data in key electoral states of Nevada and North Carolina. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, there has been “a drastic drop from 2008 levels when a record-high proportion of young Americans turned out overwhelmingly to cast their votes to elect Barack Obama as President.” This is significant because more than two-thirds of young voters supported the Obama/Biden ticket in 2008.

The President had a low moment following the passage of Obamacare that transformed itself into the Tea Party movement and an even worse one in 2010 when it propelled a large number of Republicans into the House of Representatives, causing its control to change hands. He has had, in fact, only one truly high moment and that occurred when he announced the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. At the time, he typically took complete credit. In a speech at Fort Bragg to returning troops from Iraq, the word “victory” was never spoken.

Americans are not unmindful that the downgrade of the rating of the nation’s sovereign debt, the first in the nation’s history, was announced on Obama’s watch. The rate of “official” unemployment has receded to 8.6% but most Americans are well aware that it is far closer to 11% or more. America continues to experience that longest period of long-term unemployment since the 1930s.

For these and a myriad of other reasons, there is little reason to conclude that President Obama has any chance whatever of being reelected. The widespread contempt for Congress is also a hopeful sign for change. These are reasons to remain calm amidst the din of electioneering in the months ahead.

There is, however, all manner of troubles brewing in the world. Europe will have to find a solution to what will happen if its southern tier of nations elects to default on their sovereign debt. Cracks in the European Union are evident. If it falls apart, it will be very messy, but Europe existed before the EU and would if it disbands.

The Middle East is in the midst of a huge struggle between its fanatical Muslim faction and a population unhappy enough with former dictators to have forced out several in 2011 with the prospect that Syria’s Bashar Assad will fall in 2012.

Iran remains the wild card and its nuclear dreams will likely end with a well-timed and well-executed attack by Israel. Israel saved the world from a nuclear Iraq in 1981 and a nuclear Syria in 2007. An attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities could trigger an internal movement to overthrow the mullahs.

There are other wild cards in the Middle East. The Palestinians show no indication of giving up their dream of destroying Israel. That will not happen. Without Iranian support, both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza will be set adrift. Muslim atrocities in nations such as Nigeria where Christian churches were bombed on Christmas Day will contribute to a growing movement against Islamic terrorism. It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

Even the Russians show signs of tiring of their post-Soviet ruling class led by Vladimir Putin.

America faces a long period of restructuring the socialist programs that began in the 1930s and reached their peak in the 1960s. Should the GOP gain control of Congress and Obama is defeated, real change will occur.

Two other factors signal better times ahead. They are the failure of the global warming hoax and the disdain the “Occupy” movement engendered.

In 2012 Americans will take steps to end the scandals and deprecations of the Obama administration.

We shall ignore the anticipated shouts of racism.

We shall see the Supreme Court disembowel Obamacare or set in motion its repeal by a GOP controlled Congress.

We will select a President and a Congress to put things right.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

Many people make resolutions to start the year, but I think a list of things that must be done to protect and preserve the Republic should be tallied.

1. President Obama must be defeated in 2012 and the obstructionist Democratic Party must lose power in the Senate to ensure both houses of Congress will be Republican and in a position to initiate real change.

2. The Environmental Protection Agency must be reined in with increased Congressional oversight and legislative limits on its rule-making capacity. Having fulfilled its 1970 mandate to clean the nation’s air and water, it should be scaled back to the maintenance of these functions.

3. Americans, despite the administration’s efforts to redefine and distract us, must keep clearly in mind the threat of Islam to the nation and the world. A Middle East in turmoil lays ahead for 2012.

4. To jump-start the economy, taxes and spending must be reduced across the board. A tax on consumption, rather than income would be a good start. Only 49% of Americans currently pay income taxes, the lowest in decades.

5. Obamacare must be repealed should the Supreme Court fail to rule that the Commerce Clause takes precedence over its requirement that Americans must purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so.

6. A serious restructuring of Social Security and Medicare must be undertaken. Older Americans who have paid into the system—it is involuntary—must be ensured their benefits will be paid, but younger citizens should have the freedom and responsibility to structure their own retirement and health plans.

7. Access to the nation’s vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil should be increased and encouraged. Oil companies should be encouraged to build more refineries via tax credits and removal of “environmental” obstacles.

8. Congress needs to identify and fund the repair to the nation’s aging infrastructure.

9. Utilities should be encouraged via tax credits and other incentives to expand the national “grid” for the distribution of electricity.

10. Term limits for Senators and Representatives should be added to the U.S. Constitution in the same fashion the presidency is limited. Salaries, pensions, and perks should be capped. A permanent political class is a danger to citizens.

11. The Federal government should be downsized with the elimination of the Departments of Education, Labor, and Energy, along with the Environmental Protection Agency. These powers should be returned to the individual States. (10th Amendment)

12. The nation’s military which has been significantly reduced in size and structure should be expanded with attention to the upgrade and increase of its naval fleet and aircraft.

13. Congress should reject and rescind all legislation based on “global warming” or “climate change” as the former has been demonstrated to be a hoax and the latter is meaningless insofar as the climate is beyond the control of humans.

14. The United States should significantly reduce its contribution to the United Nations and refuse to ratify any of its treaties.

15. Tort reform should be instituted to reduce the costs of health care.

16. The corporate tax rate should be significantly reduced from its present rate, one of the highest in the world, to increase expansion, new jobs, and competitiveness.

17. Public service unions should be illegal. The federal government does not permit such unionization and neither should states.

18. National Public Radio should no longer be funded. The “government entities” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated.

19. The federal government should be restricted or significantly limited from the acquisition of more of the nation’s landmass.

20. Strenuous efforts must be undertaken to reduce the national debt and deficit. A devalued dollar impoverishes everyone.

These are just a few changes which, if implemented, would go a long way to reducing the ills associated with a federal government grown too large, subject to crony capitalism, and corruption.

As John Adams said, “Let us disappoint the men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country.”

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

“By far the most important event in the entire rise of Christianity was the meeting in Jerusalem in around the year 50, when Paul was granted the authority to convert Gentiles without them also becoming observant Jews.”

So wrote Rodney Stark, the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. His most recent book is “The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion” ($27.99, HarperCollins).

For Christians in particular, I recommend it if only because so many have a tenuous grasp of Christianity’s real history, as opposed the versions that too often are casually accepted as truth.

The truth is that the rise of Christianity is one of the most extraordinary stories of the past two millennia. Stark not only has the knowledge of his vast subject, but he writes with such felicity that it is hard to put the 500-page book aside for both its revelations and its devotion to the facts.

Despite the fact we live in a society that has at most only 4% who self-describe themselves as atheists, the more active among them have the audacity to demand that Christmas be banished to the privacy of homes or the pews and pulpits of churches. They rebuke religion in general as the source of conflict and wars, but ignore the spiritual support and ethical lessons that Christianity provides along with its promise of salvation.

While Judaism was the bedrock of morality and faith that gave it birth, Christianity made it more accessible and significantly includes the Torah as part of its liturgy.

To ignore the rise of Christianity is to be ignorant of an essential element of Western history. Likewise, to ignore the threat of Islam whose beginning is usually dated around 622 CE and which exploded following Mohammad’s death in 632 CE is to ignore the greatest threat to civilization, past and present. Less a religion than a battle plan for world conquest, Islam preaches death to all “unbelievers.” Take heed!

Stark provides a summation to his book and, even so, I shall select only parts of it in the interest of brevity.

“The first generation of the Jesus Movement consisted of a tiny and fearful minority” of a religion, Judaism, that had already been around for a thousand years or more before the assertion was made that the messiah had come and was a crucified Galilean rabbi who mainly and briefly preached in that area of Israel.

“The mission to the Jews was quite successful: large numbers of Jews in the Diasporan communities outside of Palestine did convert to Christianity.” The Diaspora were the Jewish communities in the Middle East and throughout the Mediterranean nations, including Rome, living in places where pagan faiths were dominant.

“Christianity was not a religion based on the slaves and lowest classes of Romans, but was particularly attractive to the privileged.” Moreover, in its earliest years, women often played important roles. Contrary to popular belief, however, “Paganism was not quickly stamped out, but disappeared very slowly.” Paganism involved the worship of multiple gods as well as a belief in magic.

Despite impressive cathedrals, in medieval times church worship among Christians was largely ignored and, as often as not, the clergy were ill-informed about the faith and sometimes not even baptized.

Despite what is said of the Crusades, they were a campaign to reclaim the holy land from Muslims who had conquered it and they were led by men who knowingly bankrupted themselves and often died in this cause. Though Christianity had been widely observed in the East, the armies of Islam destroyed all but remnants, thus shifting its survival to Europe in the West.

“Science arose only in the West because efforts to formulate and discover laws of nature only made sense if one believed in a rational creator.” Even the misnamed “Dark Ages” were actually times of technological development. Likewise historians have determined that the Spanish Inquisition was “a quite temperate body that was responsible for very few deaths and saved a great many lives by opposing the witch hunts that swept through the rest of Europe.”

Perhaps the greatest surprise was the damage done by Constantine who, having made it the religion of his empire, gave rise to an indolent and hypocritical Church hierarchy initially composed of Roman aristocracy. It fostered a clergy who were ignorant of the faith and indifferent to its mission. Not until the Reformation was competition introduced, forcing the Church to return to piety, as various Protestant sects emerged, and energized Christianity in the process.

Stark concludes that “The claim that religion must soon disappear as the world becomes more modern is nothing but wishful thinking on the part of academic atheists. Religion is thriving, perhaps as never before. More than forty percent of the people on Earth today are Christians and their number is growing more rapidly than that of any other major faith.”

And that, as they say, is the good news.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

 

WesternFront America