During his two terms, Dubya’s number one objective seems to have been to import enough illegal aliens so that, by comparison, his pitiful English does not sound so atrocious.

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By TexasFred (Original publication here)

Ladies and Gentlemen, recently a man named Steve Herr made a comment that went like this:

I have a simple message to everyone who is applauding the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding the 2nd Amendment: I am perfectly willing to not only let you have a gun but as many guns as you want. There’s just one catch. You must prove to me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you are a member of “a well-regulated militia,” as provided by the full wording of the 2nd Amendment. If you cannot, or will not, do this, then you do not get to have a gun.

That is the best solution in the world.

—Steve Herr

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A John McCain supporter recently challenged my criticism of the candidate’s position on amnesty and posed the following question, in part:
 

Are we going to insist on a strict application of the law? Are we going to increase government spending and expand police powers to root out people who have done what immigrants have done for generations? Wouldn’t we be better to set a timeline and give permanent resident status to those who have become Americans while focusing on those who come here for less admirable reasons?

 
My response was as follows:

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(Satire)

Until quite recently, the advantages of being underfunded (poor) were under appreciated in these quarters. To me, poor has always meant less material goods, less influence, less party time, less everything.

Which is not cool by any standards.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the food line the other day.

Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) shouted “Bank Failure” at the top of his socialist lungs while standing in line at mortgage giant IndyMac. Apparently, IndyMac has its stirrups entangled in some shady loans and, perhaps, some good old-fashioned fraud, and Schumer was being a good soldier by playing town crier.

Or should that be village idiot?

In any event, alerted to the deteriorating conditions at IndyMac, the federal government arrived in Pasadena last Friday to take over the joint and calm the unease that crazy Charles had unleashed.

Of course, cynics will immediately spot the insanity in all this.

How in the hell are bureaucrats from the federal government, which is trillions of dollars in debt, and ringing up hundreds of billions of additional debt each year, going to help? What in the world do these freaks know about fiscal responsibility and frugality?

Nonetheless, the fed took over the reigns at IndyMac and immediately strutted their stuff by renaming the bank. It’s now Indymac Federal Bank, a much safer and more secure handle for an institution that handles scores of billions of deposits by unwashed masses.

Somehow, the new name and the knowledge that the federal government had taken over did little to quell the angst of IndyMac customers.

Quite the opposite, in fact, as the fed takeover precipitated a major run on IndyMac Federal Bank, with some customers arriving as early as 1:00 AM and camping out overnight in order to withdraw their assets before loony bureaucrats could give their money away to illegal aliens, homeless beggars, or scalawags like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who continues his urgent search to find $16 billion with which to balance the state budget.

Particularly vulnerable among IndyMac Federal Bank clientele were well-heeled blokes with more than $100,000 on deposit, the maximum amount covered by FDIC insurance.

Pity the poor devil with $110,000 in an IndyMac savings account. Such a chap or chapess had to endure the indignity and outrage of sleeping on the ground overnight just for ten thousand dollars.

What has our once great nation come to?

In my case, the IndyMac Federal Bank run finally gave me a reason, albeit a meager one, to appreciate my poverty ever so slightly

Namely, there was absolutely no reason for me to get out of bed at midnight to begin an overnight vigil at IndyMac Federal Bank.

Instead, I slept in until noon, and then went on-line to verify that the fed had not plundered that small fortune in my vacation savings account which, as it turns out, will not be wasted in decadent frivolity in Honolulu on New Years Eve, but will instead be used to fill my jalopy with the best gallon of gasoline that $5.00 can buy!

All of which goes to prove that the quip attributed to Mae West, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better!” may be vastly overrated!

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Think about it.

Just south of the most prosperous, technologically advanced, and sophisticated nation in the world, sits Mexico, a third-world failure.

Mexico is riddled with corruption, illiteracy, and poverty. It is a nation that cannot, or will not, feed, educate, house, and provide medical care for its own citizens.

Owing to the fact that America is, and has been for decades, the financial, educational, and cultural envy of the entire world, why has the Mexican government failed to capitalize on Mexico’s close proximity to the great United States of America?

After all, US firms outsource scores of millions of dollars of labor to India and China and other nations thousands of miles away from our shores and business centers. Doing so is costly, inefficient, and inconvenient.

Why are those lucrative opportunities not outsourced to Mexico, which is so much closer to the US and, presumably, more easily controlled and managed?

The short answer: English!

Unlike India and China, third world Mexico has failed to make English instruction a major priority in that nation’s backward educational curriculum.

Instead, the Mexican government prefers to ship its illiterate peasants across the US borders for American taxpayers to support.

It is time for the working class in Mexico to arise and revolt!

Mexicans citizens must DEMAND that Spanish be outlawed in Mexico and be replaced with English only!

Make it pronto, Pancho!

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I received my stimulus check yesterday. It was $600 and I put it into my checking account and immediately paid a bill that accounted for half of it. I have serious doubts that it did anything to stimulate an economy that is undergoing a crisis of confidence in its financial and government institutions.

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I try to avoid making commentary out of commentaries of news items. I also try to avoid using the word “I” in my columns overmuch, but the reader shall see how that worked out. This is actually a commentary on a commentary of a commentary on a news item, if that makes any sense at all.

Last Friday evening I had the honor of joining Mr. Hannity and Mr. Colmes on their Fox News television program. They, along with the urchinesque Tamika Mallory (Director of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network) and I, analyzed the July 11 New York Post column by the Post’s D.C. Bureau Chief, Charles Hurt.

In his column, Mr. Hurt addressed civil rights activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s recent on-air sotto voce claim that he wanted to castrate Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama. The comment, supposedly made during a time Jackson did not know his lapel microphone was live, was subsequently “heard around the world,” as it were. Jackson later apologized (equivocally, some suggested) and his apology was ever-so-magnanimously accepted by the candidate.

Hurt’s claim is that Jackson knew his microphone was live and “somewhere, deep down, he wanted the world – and Obama – to know how much he wants to ‘cut his nuts out.’”

A daring statement; hence the analysis in which I was invited to participate.

Neither Hannity nor Colmes nor Ms. Mallory nor I actually believed that Jackson had done this intentionally – but it did make for some lively speculation. The core message this columnist tried to convey is that while it illustrated the seething hatred Jackson probably does have for Obama, more importantly, it illustrated the hypocrisy of both men and race politics in America.

It was surprising to see how many people were puzzled that Jackson would have animas toward Obama. I would have been astounded if he did not. The perception of Jackson as a person of prominence and power in the eyes of black Americans is his very life. Suddenly, this was threatened by an upstart, just-add-water sage who captured the Democrat presidential nomination after a half-hour or so in the U.S. Senate. He is more articulate and far easier on the eyes than Jackson, he usurps Jackson’s message, his audience, and then has the nerve to remind him of the credibility he lost (with the 2001 revelation of his love child with a Rainbow Coalition staffer) by chastising black men who don’t raise their children.

Far be it for me to excuse anything Jesse Jackson says or does, but colloquialisms for castration are quite often used figuratively in many sections of our culture. Jackson might well have been speaking to “castrating” Obama in the arena of politics or his general credibility.

“It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is ‘merci beaucoup.’”

• Sen. Barack Obama

Well, of course they do. European countries are geographically situated like our states. What choice do they have?

That night I would have far more relished discussing Sen. Obama’s admonition that Americans learn Spanish as a second language. I found it a bit disconcerting that the television news outlet that has broken every big Obama story wasn’t on this one like white on rice. That issue alone – properly packaged, which is what it seems to be all about these days – could easily cost Obama the presidency. Last week at a campaign event in Georgia, Obama not only made the above declaration, he also pooh-poohed the notion that we have a problem with immigrants not learning English and scolded Americans for their lack of multi-lingual skills.

“Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.”

• Sen. Barack Obama

Make sure my child can speak Spanish?

Forget the fact that we have a radical element in America that is vigorously denying the necessity for immigrants to English. Obama points to Europe. Let’s examine that for a moment. Look at the shape Europe is in culturally; ask yourself why we’re moving in that direction and who wants us to do so. It sure isn’t conservatives. Europe opened the door for the wretched refuse of Africa and Asia. Many were Muslims; now there is real concern when radical Islamists take to European streets in numbers. The far Left answer to incursion always seems to be accommodation: Let the scum in. Cater to them. Short term sacrifice for long term… sacrifice.

Wait a minute…

The fact is that people have been emigrating to the U.S. and emulating American culture for decades because we are all that and a bag of damn chips. It’s far Left invertebrates and puke-gutted Bolsheviks like Obama and his puppet-masters who seek to convince us otherwise, and to compromise America on every level possible. Obama’s assertions are treasonous propaganda based on perverted, flawed logic. There is every reason for émigrés to the U.S. to learn English. For the European, travel means speaking another language. It is analogous to a New Yorker discovering that folks in New Jersey speak a completely different tongue. Unless a European plans to work in a hometown factory or vineyard for their entire life, the only way to successfully interact with the people they will meet is to learn other languages.

People in Europe and in other parts of the world learn English for the same reason. For the last hundred-plus years, America has set the standard in commerce, politics science, and a host of other areas. In order to remain competitive, people found they had to learn English. There is no reason Americans should be made to feel guilty about this. Obama’s comparison of Europeans to American tourists visiting a densely-populated, extremely diverse continent is beyond disingenuous.

This is what we get, however, when we rashly look to the political left. The Democrat Party is no longer one we can use when we’re miffed at Republicans, like a child playing one parent off of the other. Had Ronald Reagan not come along and infused our citizens with confidence, our economy with stability and our enemies with fear, Bill Clinton would have been voted out in 1996.

Until Democrats either take their party back from the far Left, or Americans realize that the party has been compromised to the degree that it no longer even approaches viability, our spirit, culture, economy and national security will remain in the gravest danger.

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Those who favor amnesty for the 12-38 million illegal aliens currently in the United States have fashioned a new plea for sympathy that goes something like this:

Let’s make illegal aliens LEGAL, so they will no longer have to live in the “shadows.”

Political “leaders” like Barack Obama and John McCain are actually trying to sell amnesty with this illogical message.

As is the case with ALL arguments in favor of illegal aliens, the “bring them out of the shadows” nonsense is nothing but recycled snake oil.

To begin with, illegal aliens are NOT forced to live in shadows. Each and every last one of these free loading criminals is free to obey U.S. law by getting the hell out of America and returning to Mexico.

Now!

And take your freaking shadows with you!

Secondly: In recent years, millions of illegal aliens marched boldly through the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and other American cities to DEMAND amnesty.

Many stupidly waved Mexican flags and carried Spanish banners to publicize their idiotic demands.

Even to the most unsophisticated observer, it was obvious that these renegade monsters were not inhibited and were certainly not timidly hiding in shadows.

The real solution to dealing with these miscreants:

Secure the borders militarily, deport all illegal aliens currently here, and enforce existing immigration laws.

In other words, let’s have a “surge” at the border and in the barrios to rid America of this third world parasite!

johnlillpop@yahoo.com

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While some might be undecided on who to vote for this coming Election Day, for others it’s a no-brainer. Although the news media would like us to believe otherwise, there is still an enormous political gap between the Left and the Right.

“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my lords, that where laws end, tyranny begins” — William Pitt

The American people must wake up to the the facts. The Democratic Party has moved well to the left of liberalism, and Barack Obama is — by his record — as far left as one can get in the party.

Sorry America, but we can’t afford an Obama presidency. It would be political and social mayhem having a Democrat House, Senate, Supreme Court and Executive branch. For many decades the United States would be held under the sway of a very unjust, destructive force. Our citizenry would have to deal with the extreme rulings of a Supreme Court gone wild. There would be no more checks and balances.

Liberal judges would change our country’s disposition. Even if Americans were roused from their lethargy and subsequently voted in a Republican president and Congress, it would be too late. They would not be able to neutralize the highest court of the land.

Once a liberal Supreme Court is installed, all traditional values will be null and void. Everything will change to satisfy the progressives’ mind-set. Nothing would be sacrosanct, from the war against terror to the right to bear arms, late-term abortion and the varied definitions of marriage.

America needs a Republican president who will appoint judges to the Supreme Court without a litmus test. Only then can liberalism’s hold of our federal benches be defeated. Our country might then be spared from the dictates of a black-robed oligarchy.

Senator John McCain is not trying to run as a Ronald Reagan conservative. He is a maverick. Yet, even his worst critics understand that our nation would be much better off in the hands of President John McCain than President Barack Obama.

Given this dire grim warning, be aware: Democrats will weaken our economy with their tax policies. A progressive president in the White House will lead to more social and political changes. Many of Obama’s policies would become irreversible. “Change” for the sake of change without collective wisdom is unwise.

Obama claims that he is for change. Indeed, he changes his own political stances with each passing day. Which Barack are Americans voting for? He is so com se comsa. With his gifted, articulate tongue, he speaks disingenuously to perfection.

Image crafting doesn’t have its risks for Obama. Most Democrats trust that if he is voted into office, anything he says that is contrary to what he stood for during the campaign will be shelved. As soon as he is sworn in as president, he will revert right back to his radical liberalism.

Democrats are not grumbling about changes they’ve heard Barack make in his political positions. They understand the game of posturing and pandering to the general electorate. The Rev.Jeremiah Wright had twenty years to mold his protégé.

Senator John McCain, however, can prevent this tragic wayward turn. He will not raise taxes or weaken the economy. He will reduce big government spending.

McCain is a promise-keeper whose presidency will ensure that America will win in Iraq. The new democracy will become a rich Arab nation, free from radical Islamic rule. The Iraqi people will always know that America stood behind them.

Contrary to the propaganda of our own press, we are a humane people who want to help uphold Iraqi sovereignty. Our troops have given their lives to save people who once lived in fear of a hideous despot named Saddam Hussein. As a result, we have reaped many as yet-unquantified dividends. Every day that we spend in Iraq, we are protecting our homeland as well as bringing stability to the Middle East. We’ve won many hearts and minds in Iraq. Our troops have been both protectors and ambassadors of goodwill and freedom.

We will need another strategic plan for Afghanistan. America can put their faith in a war hero who has served in the military. John McCain’s family is steeped in a patriotic history and tradition. They have served their beloved country well. It should come as no surprise that the sons of John and Cindy are military men.

McCain will be a good steward of our recourses. Under his leadership, nuclear power and newly developed oil fields will become realities. There will be many different energy strategies employed to help our nation back on its feet.

Gas prices will begin to tumble to meet the needs of the consumers’ pocketbooks as soon as the word is heard that we are taking care of business. There will be no years of waiting to see fuel prices come down. It is the Democrats who have long promoted doing nothing about finding new oil reserves, building nuclear plants and developing the alternative energy sources they claim to adore. Vote them out!

McCain is a man thinking about America’s future. On all levels — whether environmental, social or political — he is able to weigh in. McCain has been blessed with the wisdom of that comes with age and experience.

There will always be those who vote their party line, no matter how irrational a candidate’s flip-flopping appears to be. Barack Obama has served three years in the Senate (two of them campaigning for President) and was a Chicago street organizer. Has half of America lost their minds? It begs an answer to address his obvious lack of experience and qualifications. There is no substance there, just words

The sober, sound minds of our country will understand who is best qualified to lead the greatest nation in the world. Let’s pray there are enough of them. Here, there is no doubt. John McCain is for me.

 ——————————————————————————–

Marie Jon’ is a political/religious-based writer and founder of www.DrawingClose.org — a sister website to RenewAmerica. Marie extends her hand of welcome; visit DrawingClose and receive your free gift of salvation by taking an online Bible study. Join Christians from all over the world by becoming a free member of GO Fellowship. The website is a nondenominational gathering of believers.

Marie’s writings have appeared on many sites, including The New Media Journal, ChronWatch, and ABCNews, to name a few. She is a regular columnist for CapitolHillCoffeeHouse, The Daley Times Post, RenewAmerica, The Conservative Voice, Newsbull, GreatAmericanJournal.com, Radiofreewesthartford.com, Conservativecrusader.com, RightSideNews.com and WesternFrontAmerica.com.

Marie brings a refreshing and spirited point of view that is reflected in her writings, as well as genuine and spiritual insights regarding God and his teachings as they pertain to our modern society. Marie is a nurse, a lay student of the Bible, and a patriot. She is an advocate for American troops serving abroad, as well as the Blue and Gold Star Mothers of America and their families. Marie has appeared as a guest with political talk show host Bruce Elliott on WBAL-1090 AM (Saturdays 5AM-9AM EST).

© Copyright 2008 by Marie Jon’

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I reject as absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt.
Cogito ergo sum. (I think, therefore I am).

– René Descartes

Today’s column continues my review of Dr. Benjamin Wiker’s admirable and timely opus, “10 Books that Screwed up the World and 5 Others That Didn’t Help.” Here, I will do a critique on the very influential French philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) and his famous treatise, “Discourse on Method” (1637).

One of my earliest memories of Descartes was more than 20 years ago when I first read that lion of positivism, progressivism and liberal jurisprudence, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in his famous 1897 essay, “The Path of Law,” wrote:

To an imagination of any scope the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas … [A] hundred years after his death the abstract speculations of Descartes had become a practical force controlling the conduct of men. … [T]he world is governed to-day by Kant [more] than by Bonaparte

Ten years ago, I used Holmes’ prescient quote in my apologetic against Judge Richard A. Posner, a comprehensive law review article I wrote on the history of law titled, “The Inseparability of Law and Morality.” In that opus I lamented just how prevalent and entrenched the ideas of Descartes (and other philosophers) have become in American culture and on Western civilization in modern times.

In his chapter on Descartes, “Discourse on Method,” which is subtitled, “… of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Searching for Truth in the Sciences,” Wiker wrote:

Descartes attacked skepticism, but only by denying reality. He confirmed the idea of the immaterial soul against the pronouncements of the crass materialists of the day, but only by recreating us as insubstantial ghosts trapped in clattering machines. He proved God’s existence, but only by making it depend on our thinking Him into existence. By his good intentions – if indeed they really were good –he fathered every flavor of self-congratulatory solipsism, led us to believe we are no different from robots, and made religion a creation of our own ego.

Prior to Descartes’ criticism of skepticism, philosophers going back far as Socrates had in one form or another been ultimately concerned with God and/or truth. Descartes attack on skepticism feigned as an apologetic for God, ended up denigrating God; reducing God as an egotistical product of our own imagination, thus shattering the God-paradigm in classical philosophy that existed for millennia.

Descartes’ refutation of skepticism was a treatment worse than the illness because he was able to craftily hide his huge ego and present his sophistic arguments as merely a series of suggestions. However, Descartes, like most philosophers and intellectuals, wasn’t the least interested in philosophizing in a vacuum or in vain. Philosophers and intellectuals, like modern day demigods, want their ideas to be applied and celebrated throughout the world. Descartes, as the father of modern philosophy, was no different than the ancients or from contemporary philosophers and intellectuals.

In brief, Descartes’ method was to doubt everything. Below is a summary of Dr. Wiker’s ideas on the philosophy of Descartes and how his ideas have been disseminated in modern society and culture throughout Western civilization:

• Descartes, through the creation of “subjectivism” encouraged imagination to become entirely separated from reality.

• Tradition is not a guide to reality because “the very same man with his very own mind, having been brought up from infancy among the French or the Germans becomes different from what he would be had he always lived among the Chinese or among cannibals.” “All is shifting sand,” said Wiker of Descartes.

• Descartes’ subjectivism applied to all things including God: “The confusion of true wisdom about God with whatever one happens to think about God.” We define God (and everything in the world) by our own thoughts.

• Reality is defined by what we think it to be. We are disembodied ghosts trapped in a machine we call a human body. In fact all of nature and existence is merely one type of machine or another.

• Descartes’ dualism devolved into monism (just machines are left over after the ghosts die). Human life became reduced to mere mechanism.

• Descartes singular statement of philosophy is stated in Part IV of his “Discourse”: “[D]uring the time I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it was necessary that I, who thought thus, be something. And noticing that this truth – I think, therefore I am [cogito ergo sum] – was so firm and so certain that the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were unable to shake it, I judge that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.”

What is the apotheosis of Descartes’ ideas particularly upon Western civilization? Wiker remarks: “Even if such a method doesn’t lead to insanity it certainly leads to narcissism, the morbid condition of believing that I sit in god-like judgment of everything else but nothing stands in judgment of me.”

As Descartes said in Part I one of his “Method” that even among “the most excellent minds who have ever lived … there is nothing about which there is not some dispute” in philosophy, “and thus nothing that is not doubtful.” On this point, Wiker says of Descartes, “Where there is disagreement, there is doubt, and where is doubt, throw it out.”

If philosophers from Socrates to Einstein viewed the accumulation of knowledge as a precious reservoir to be preserved for posterity, Descartes ridiculed knowledge (and tradition) as garbage to be discarded upon the ash heap of history. In America during the turbulent 1960s the Hippies’ philosophies, “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” “Go with the flow,” “Don’t be judgmental,” “Create your own reality,” were all an obeisance to the nihilistic skepticism of Descartes 250 years before Nietzsche.

Wiker attacks Descartes’ singular statement of faith, cogito ergo sum and turns it on its head: “So we should say, ‘I am, therefore I can think,’ rather than, ‘I think, therefore I am.” The common sense point is this: reality exists before our thinking, so that our thinking depends on reality … First, our thinking depends on the reality of our own existence. If we don’t exist, we cannot think. Second, our thinking correctly depends on our properly conforming our minds to what really exists.”

In the end, Descartes, like many narcissists, so-called “intellectuals,” academics and scholars, doubted everything but his own method. Descartes deified subjectivism (perception is reality) and made it alone the standard of truth. Therefore, I think Descartes stole our humanity and reduced all civilization to an accidental conglomeration of cogs, springs, pistons, nuts, bolts, wheels – nothing more than machinery. Man was merely a ghost trapped inside this dreadful machine we call a human body. This was a precursor to Darwin’s evolution theory that would come to us more than 200 years later.

In Part V of his “Discourse,” Descartes, as the father of modern dualism, contradicted the Judeo-Christian understanding of man – body, soul, spirit contained in a body and viewed man “[as] two entirely different and independent entities, a ghostly soul banging around in a ghastly machine. The result of Descartes’ dualism according to Wiker is that humans have become “a walking philosophical bipolar disorder.”

What are the consequences of Descartes ideas upon society, culture and civilization in modern times? Wiker cites some grim policies that are directly related to the subjectivist philosophy of Descartes:

Harvest fetal embryos to prolong your life and destroy whatever you don’t need just like according to a 2005 report in the British newspaper the Observer in post-Soviet Ukraine poor pregnant women were being paid about $180 for their fetuses which abortion clinics then sold them for about $9,000. The tissue was being used for beauty treatments.

This is the legacy of that Italian philosopher Machiavelli who separated morality from politics (I’ll speak on him next week). This is also the legacy of French philosopher Descartes who devolved human life to a mere mechanism and who taught us that God is not real and we can do whatever we want without fear of Judgment Day.

It was inevitable that the skepticism of Descartes would betray itself when skepticism questioned whether skepticism was a valid perspective at all. I’m convinced it was the diabolical and illogical ideas like those propagated by Descartes (skepticism, metaphysical subjectivism, dualism) that caused that great Roman orator and statesman Cicero to lament: “There is nothing so absurd that it can’t be said by a philosopher.”  Print This Post

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Two years ago, Senator Barack Obama called the loss of 3,100 Americans (at the time)in the war on terror “wasted lives.”

Unfortuately,the liberal Democrat does not have the same concern about lives lost here at home to illegal aliens.

As documented in a report by Joseph Farah and titled “Illegal Aliens Murder 12 Americans Daily,” illegal aliens murder an average of 4,380 Americans each year.

And that does not include the 4,750 Americans killed by drunken illegal aliens every year! That, by the way, equals 23,725 “wasted lives,” since 9/11. (And about 2,000 more than the “surge” that President Bush has ordered)

Go here:

Really concerned about “wasted lives,” Obama? Then work to secure our borders, enforce existing laws, and deport all criminal illegal aliens now residing in America!

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In fact, McCain said the following about his own political leanings: “I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold,” McCain said. NYT

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

johnlillpop@yahoo.com

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There are two states on opposite sides of the nation where, if something really stupid can be proposed, they represent the most fertile ground. I speak, of course, of New Jersey and California.

I happen to know a lot more about New Jersey since I am born, raised, and still residing here in my old age despite all the hype about retiring in Florida. I hold a degree from the University of Miami, Coral Gables, so I have fulfilled my Florida quota, but if you want a front row seat to idiocy, there is no better place than my home state or California.

In early July some of the Democrat heavy hitters who run New Jersey joined U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. in an event to lambaste the notion of actually permitting the exploration and extraction of oil way, way off the coast of New Jersey. On the podium was Governor Jon Corzine and both of New Jersey’s Senators, Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez. If mendacity has a particular odor to it, the stench of this event is probably still lingering over Belmar.

“We are really talking about something that is irrelevant to the overall dependency on oil,” said Pallone. “What we need to do is (to) be moving to alternative energies and most importantly (to) conservation.” Referring to the effort in Congress to permit the use of our own national oil and natural gas resources from the continental shelf and elsewhere, Pallone said, “I can’t think of an idea whose time is less appropriate than this one.”

Meanwhile, anyone filling up their automobile gas tank that day was paying out $4.00 per gallon for the privilege. In fact, there was a rumor going around that quite a few Americans were upset over the failure of Congress to permit some—any—degree of energy independence.

That might account for the historic single-digit disapproval rating for Congress that was announced shortly after Pallone and his pals got through bloviating about the evils of oil.

How does one go about achieving “conservation” of oil if, at the same time, the entire nation depends on it to get anywhere?

By conservation, one must assume that Pallone and the rest of the Democrats mean leaving it untapped and thus requiring Americans to import it from other countries.

Pallone raised the tired bogyman of an offshore oil mishap that would harm the pristine beaches of New Jersey, but failed to mention the many offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico that withstood Hurricane Katrina without a single mishap. Indeed, they fared much better than the city of New Orleans. Meanwhile, Sen. Menendez raised the specter of California beaches—he’s from Jersey City—allegedly destroyed by a spill long ago. I personally have been to the beach in Santa Monica and all I saw was a lot of people enjoying it.

Sen. Lautenberg, a man who, if reelected, will be 548 years old by the end of his next term complained that, “A plan to drill here is no plan at all. It’s a handout, simply a handout to the oil companies. It’s a terrible idea. And drilling will do nothing to cut today’s gas prices.” Apparently, like the entire Democrat Party, the Senator has never heard of the immutable law of supply and demand.

He’s also wrong about cutting today’s prices. If these morons had gathered to announce that leases had been granted to explore and extract oil from offshore New Jersey, the price of oil in the world’s mercantile exchanges would definitely respond. Every time a new reserve of oil is found, the price of this global commodity reflects the potential of a new supply. The price per barrel drops.

The newspaper report of the event did not quote Gov. Corzine, but he is so in the tank for “alternative” energy that the prospect of offshore oil must keep the man up at night. Let’s assume he thinks the idea of oil rigs offshore (most would be completely out of sight of land) is a very bad idea.

So why is Gov. Corzine a vocal proponent of vast fields of wind turbines whirling their blades around (but only when the wind is blowing) in full sight of beachgoers? Corzine is positively crazed for wind farms, particularly if they are located offshore.

One proposal in March of this year envisioned the construction of up to 118 wind turbines “rising hundreds of feet above the water.” The project costs are estimated at more than $1 billion and, for the record, there are no offshore wind farms operating in the United States. One such proposal that would have spoiled the view from the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts was opposed by that famous family and a coalition of local residents.

So the Democrat political equation is oil rigs, bad. Wind turbines, good. Only you can’t run your car on wind power. In fact, wind and solar power combined provide less than 5% of all the electricity generated in America.

The issue facing Americans these days is oil, oil, oil. We have lots of it if Congress will just let the oil companies explore and drill for it in desolate places like ANWR or difficult places like the ocean deeps.