Well, this is gonna be quite a year and, at 91 years old, I really must pace myself for the November election battles. I'm going on an extended study vacation and will be putting the blog into a state of suspended animation. Think Ted Williams.
I am honored to have been able to share this site with some talented bloggers and contributers. Thank you, Rhod, Opie, Toaster, Sig, LL, and my longtime blog buddy, DC.
I encourage you to visit the following blogs. You won't be disappointed.
Note from Nickie:I try to keep some things private, but leave it to Sig94 to let da cat outa da bag. Here's his painful expose...
Although disbanded upon the direct orders of Nickie G. and under not very subtle threat (I found a pair of varicose vein support stockings on my porch this morning), the reporters of GNN have remained faithful to our select audience.
We have diligently researched all the rumors (and started a few of our own) on the reasons why Nickie recently disappeared from GNN circles, leaving a trail of broken hearts, desperate fans and dented Louisville Sluggers.
This is a spirited and accurate post from Karen at The Spinster's Point of View. If you haven't visited her blog, get over there. It's always an entertaining read.
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Obama speaks repeatedly on the cost of insurance premiums rising at a rate twice that of general inflation. It's all due to the mean and evil practices of the insurance companies and we must call a halt to their nefarious and predatory ways. But what about higher education? That too has a rate of inflation twice that of the rest of the economy. Is Obama calling out universities and vilifying them for their predatory practices? Of course not. He's dealing with this by offering to foot the bill for people who can't pay back their student loans.
What I want to know is why college tuition is rising at such a rate. Health care premiums rise because the cost of health care itself rises; but what about education? What costs are rising so fast that the universities have to increase their tuition at such a rate. They should already own all of their building. They make the students buy their own books. On campus students are charged extra for housing and the kids have to buy their own food. So what on earth is causing the universities to have to increase their tuitions at such a rate? Can it be, could it possibly be, the salaries the colleges pay their professors?
If we want to talk about predatory practices, colleges are a good example.
You are forced to take classes you don't want and don't need in order to satisfy the individual college's requirement -- and you have to pay the college for this priviledge. That sounds remarkable like racketeering to me.
If you transfer from another school, the classes you didn't want to take don't transfer to the new school and you must take more useless classes to replace the last batch.
You have to buy ridiculously expensive text books which you find when you try to sell back at the end of the year are actually worthless because of a new addition.
You have to fight with 4,000 other students to get the class you do want only to find when you get there that the teacher doesn't speak English. Or at least you think he doesn't. It's hard to tell if what he is speaking is a foreign language or just so heavily accented that it's indecipherable.
You have to pay for the privilege of this up front and there is no refund for a class given by a professor you can't understand.
When all is said and done you have paid $160K - $280K for an education that will qualify you for a $30,000 per year salary.
Forget banks, forget credit cards, forget insurance companies, let's go after the institutions of higher eduction for robbing us blind and using our money to indoctrine the children.
Please visit the JoyTiz Blog where she answers the question "Who is George Soros?". If you tend toward paranoia, stay away from this post. It'll shake you.
“Democrats have a Nazi collaborator, literally—international financier George Soros—funding their phony grassroots organizations.” - Ann Coulter
In a 1998 interview with Steve Kroft, George Soros acknowledged forging documents and pretending to be Christian to save himself from the Nazis, for which he feels no guilt or sorrow. “I was fourteen,” Soros said. “My character was made them.” Regarding his participation in confiscating valuables from innocent Jews, and serving death camp warrants, Soros told Kroft, “It created no problem at all.” Soros has no sense that he shouldn’t be there; he felt he was a mere spectator. Soros rationalizes his behavior: “If I didn’t do it, someone else would.”
Thus, it makes perfect sense that Soros is the de facto head of the Democratic Party in America now that it is a foaming-at-the-mouth, rabid, left-wing Democratic Party. As David Horowitz and Richard Poe put it, “Soros and his Shadow Party did not invent the politics of demagoguery and racial division. They are merely practicing and expanding the politics familiar on the Democratic Left.” (The Shadow Party) There is seldom any originality among the left wing.
Syrian FM warns if war breaks out, "it will take place inside your cities."
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem on Wednesday warned Israel that if war were to break out between Syria and Israel, it would be fought “inside your cities.”
“Israel must stop being the neighborhood bully. Don’t test our determination,” Moallem said during a press conference in Damascus where Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos was also present. “One day you threaten Gaza, the next day you threaten Lebanon, then Iran and now Syria.”
Moallem warned that if a war between Syria and Israel breaks out, it would be “total and take place inside your cities.” His words were a reaction to a statement by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who said at the Herzliya Conference on Tuesday that if an agreement with Syria was not reached, the two countries might be dragged into a “forceful confrontation that may deteriorate into all-out war.”
“In the reality of the Middle East, we will conclude such a war and then sit and negotiate, talking about the exact issues we have been debating with the Syrians for the past 15 years,” said Barak.
Moallem said Syria “assesses that such a war will break out, we must not rule out such a possibility. I would say it would be a total and expansive war, whether it begins in South Lebanon or in Syria.”
Trying to calm the atmosphere, Moratinos said he had just returned from a visit to Israel and left with the feeling that Israelis had “a will for peace.” He said he did not hear “the drums of war” while he was here. Moratinos promised that Spain would “continue to do its utmost so that peace talks in the Middle East will be renewed as soon as possible.”
Moallem’s bellicose remarks followed quick on the heels of reports that the United States is returning its ambassador to Syria, after five years when the American representation in Syria was only by low-level diplomats. Moallem confirmed that the US asked Syria to approve the nomination of Robert Ford as ambassador.
“The United States presented us with a nominee for ambassador,” he said. “This is an issue of American sovereignty and it is Syria’s right to examine the nomination.”
He did not say whether Syria approved or denied the nomination.
The IRS has placed a bid for sixty of these Remington Police shotguns. I guess the quail and grouse are becoming very aggressive once they receive the audit notices.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to purchase sixty Remington Model 870 Police RAMAC #24587 12 gauge pump-action shotguns for the Criminal Investigation Division. The Remington parkerized shotguns, with fourteen inch barrel, modified choke, Wilson Combat Ghost Ring rear sight and XS4 Contour Bead front sight, Knoxx Reduced Recoil Adjustable Stock, and Speedfeed ribbed black forend, are designated as the only shotguns authorized for IRS duty based on compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory, certified armorer and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.
Submit quotes including 11% Firearms and Ammunition Excise Tax (FAET) and shipping to Washington DC.
What Obama Isn't Saying The apolitical politics of progressivism.
Obama has in his White House a Harvard law professor, Cass Sunstein, who recently coauthored a book that sets forth the idea and some techniques of rational administration. The book is entitled Nudge, and it shows how people can be nudged to make a rational choice when they cannot be openly persuaded to do so; for example, children in a school cafeteria might by careful placement of choices be gotten to select grapefruit rather than marshmallow. Similarly but on a grander scale, Obama wants to nudge the American people to approve the health care that is rational for them to choose.
"I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”
The words are those of President Barack Obama speaking to Congress on health care reform on September 9, 2009. They contain the secret of his appeal—and the cause of his first-year failure.
His appeal from the first has been to be beyond ordinary politics. Ordinary politics is partisan politics, and to be beyond it is to be nonpartisan or, as sophisticates say, postpartisan. Obama has the cool of a nonpartisan, quite unlike the late Edward Kennedy, who was a paragon of partisan heat and sweat. But beyond politics is not just a mood, it’s a place and a situation. Obama’s aspiration, the goal of his politics, is to put the country in a situation that no longer requires parties, when at last partisan rhetoric has accomplished its task, advocacy is inapt, sympathy and zeal are no longer needed, and postpartisan cool is correct.
Postpartisan cool is not, however, the mere sign of an intellectual fad such as postmodern relativism. One can see Obama’s aspiration in the first Democratic president, Thomas Jefferson, who founded not only the Democratic party but also the idea of party government in America. After forming the first publicly avowed party against the Federalists, he proceeded to announce in his first Inaugural Address that “we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” “Republicans” meant Democratic-Republicans, later Democrats. Yet the best word to describe Obama is progressive, for -nonpartisanship in politics is inherent in the idea of progress.
What every progressive wants is to put the particular issue he espouses beyond political dispute. Obama wanted, and as his first State of the Union address showed still wants, to put health care beyond politics so that he can be the last president to be concerned with it. He did concede in that speech “philosophical differences” between the parties, “that will always cause us to part ways.” But he did not say what these differences are and seemed to assume that they would only infect “short-term politics” by serving the ambitions of party leaders. True leadership in Republicans would require them to cooperate in the reform despite their ambitions and their philosophy. Once the bill is enacted, health care need only be administered by experts whose main task will be to adjust (i.e., expand) its extent and to cover its costs. The principle will have been decided. It becomes an entitlement that is no longer open to political controversy; it is secure from second thoughts prompted by reactionaries.
But what is the principle? Obama acts and speaks as if there were no question of principle, but of course there is one, and it is perfectly obvious to the public: Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere? A government takeover does not require the single-payer system of Canada and Britain; it follows easily enough from the government’s guarantee of health care to all. This general guarantee is quite different from regulation or particular requirements on private parties because it gives the government responsibility for the result and permits, even demands, that it interfere to make health care available to all. “Available to all” is a phrase that at the least creates pressure to make the best health care equally available. This is government takeover in principle if not in administration—which is not to say that a decentralized administration would make no difference.
Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called on President Barack Obama to form a White House commission to help save the press Tuesday night in an impassioned speech at the Aspen Institute.
“I personally encourage the president to establish a White House commission on public media,” the legendary newsman said.
Such a commission on media reform, Rather said, ought to make recommendations on saving journalism jobs and creating new business models to keep news organizations alive.
At stake, he argued, is the very survival of American democracy.
“A truly free and independent press is the red beating heart of democracy and freedom,” Rather said in an interview yesterday afternoon. “This is not something just for journalists to be concerned about, and the loss of jobs and the loss of newspapers, and the diminution of the American press’ traditional role of being the watchdog on power. This is something every citizen should be concerned about.”
Rather, who has been a working reporter for more than six decades and currently hosts “Dan Rather Reports” on HD
Net, pointed out that there are precedents for such national commissions, which have been used to help other at-risk industries.
Corporate and political influence on newsrooms, along with the conflation of news and entertainment, has created what Rather called “the dumbing down and sleazing up of what we see on the news.”
It has also thinned the amount of investigative and international journalism. The latter loss of correspondents covering America’s two foreign wars, Rather opined, is both a critical detriment to the nation and a disservice to our troops.
Tears welled in the lifelong reporter’s eyes as he discussed the dwindling number of war correspondents.
“I feel particularly strong about coverage of the wars,” he said, noting that covering the war in Afghanistan is his top priority on his HDNet program. “No apologies, both as a journalist and as a citizen I just can’t stand to leave those guys out there, fighting, dying, bleeding, getting torn up and say, ‘Look, it’s page 14 news.’ Or ‘Sorry, not on tonight’s newscast.’ It’s an example of the problem, that and not having the watchdogs.”
The free press, as established by the First Amendment to the Constitution, ought to operate as a public trust, not solely as a money-making endeavor, Rather argued, and it’s time the government make an effort to ensure the survival of the free press. If not the government, he suggested, then an organization like the Carnegie Foundation should take it on. Without action, he predicted, America will lose its independent media.
“If we do nothing more than stand back and hope that innovation alone will solve this crisis,” he said, “then our best-trained journalists will lose their jobs.”
I'm not suggesting that Jewish people are exclusively pro-Obama. Some of the most strident opposition to Obama comes from American Jews. Having said that (sincerely), I am continually SHOCKED at the support Jewish people lavish on Barack Hussein Obama. Obama has shown continual hostility toward the State of Israel and his programs harken back to dark days for Jews. Why would Jewish people support a pro-Muslim/closet Muslim?
Let's look at it from the perspective of a woman who fled Soviet Russia:
The following is reposted from Svetlana Kunin "Perspectives of a Soviet Immigrant" (No. 6) (Source: IBD)
As someone who experienced real government-approved anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, I am amazed by the obliviousness of American Jews, the most fervent supporters of left-wing politics.
They support a party that is obsessed with pitting one group against another, and that incessantly plays on envy and hatred for bankers, rich people, big business and doctors.
They fail to notice that the success of Jews, as well as other minorities, in the sciences, business and arts is directly correlated to their freedom from oppressive, centralized control. American Jews who support big government do not understand what their ancestors escaped from.
Persecutions of Jews throughout history all have one thing in common: a centralized power that manipulates and directs people's anger away from themselves onto an easy target.
No matter how much Jews align themselves with the power structure and work for noble causes, they will remain an easy target.
As they said in the Soviet Union pertaining to Soviet Jews: They don't beat your record; they beat your face — meaning that no matter how much you try to assimilate, no matter how many good deeds you do, the centralized power can direct populist anger toward you and crush you when it suits them.
When the Bolsheviks took power after the 1917 proletarian revolution, their first steps were to take control of the banks and the media.
Of course, it is not fair to compare our current American democratic leaders with the Bolsheviks.
Yes, they both use the same slogans in their speeches.
Yes, they both stir up envy and class warfare to distract from their failures.
Yes, both political movements sought control of the banks as the foundation for their new egalitarian vision.
And yes, they are both opposed to free speech, as was made clear by the reaction of American leftists to the recent Supreme Court decision.
But you would never find a Czar anywhere in the Soviet government.
There is nothing like a Sharia winter-spring fling to warm the cockles of an old Saudi'sheart; love amid the sand and wrinkles so to speak. It sure beats jump starting the old family goat.
A 12-year-old Saudi girl has unexpectedly given up her petition for divorce from an 80-year-old man her father forced her to marry in exchange for a dowry.
Despite support from human rights lawyers and child welfare advocates, the girl and her mother, who originally sought the divorce, withdrew the case on Monday in a court in Buraidah, in Al-Qasim province, Saudi newspapers said on Tuesday.
The girl told the court that her marriage to the man was done with her agreement, Okaz newspaper reported.
According to reports, the girl's father, who is separated from her mother, arranged her marriage to the 80-year-old in exchange for a dowry payment of 85,000 riyals ($25,450).
[...]Saudi Arabia has no law against child marriage, and clerics and religious judges justify the practice based on Islamic and Saudi tradition.
I wonder if Mohammed was actually born in the mountains of West Virginia; it would explain a lot.
The girl is writing a book about her experience; it will be called, "Bride of Viagra-stein."
Do you remember back during the campaign for president when Barack Hussein Obama was the darling of Europe? Remember the Nazi style rallies in Europe when "The One" paraded himself in front of adoring Europeans?
The blush is definitely off the rose, ladies and gentlemen. The U.S.-EU summit has been held in one form or another since 1991 and no U.S. president has skipped a meeting in 17 years, until now. The U.S. State Department has confirmed that President Barack Obama canceled his trip to the U.S.-EU summit scheduled for May 24-25 in Spain.
Now we need to ask ourselves why.
Is it because Der Spiegel wrote that Obama is Finished?
Is it because European leaders make fun of Dear Leader in the press?
Is it because Barack Hussein Obama is not really all that welcome to return to France and England?
I'm not sure, but allow me to speculate, relying on other analysis as well.
By canceling his attendance at the U.S.-EU summit, Obama is sending a message that his willingness to talk to Europe will no longer be the default setting. (You don't love me -- well I don't love you either!)
The last time a U.S. president did not attend the summit was in 1993. It's one of those things you go to if you're the President. Even Pres. GW Bush attended when he was ticked at the Franco-German opposition to the Iraq War.
Obama’s campaign promise to engage Europeans in a joint effort in Afghanistan has largely fallen on deaf ears in Europe. So maybe this is his way to PUNISH the Europeans since we know that nobody can get anything accomplished anywhere in the world unless He is personally involved. (Obama Prediction: The Olympics in Rio will be a bust)
The US State Department said officially that Obama isn't going because — Obama never planned for the meeting. (huh?)
One other possibility is that Obama feels he's in trouble at home (no kidding) and plans to spend his time selling his domestic agenda. (he may be selling but the American People aren't buying)
The Europeans are not fools. Who in their right mind would take the executive team of Barack Hussein Obama and Joe (Slow Joe) Biden seriously? Certainly not:
Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, any of the Europeans, South Americans, or the Eastern Europeans (who he betrayed). The Russians consider him a pariah, and I have a hard time arguing with their logic. The Queen of England won't invite him back anytime soon - and he has yet to insult the New Zealanders.
The only bright shining spot on the planet is AFRICA, where both the despots and the people are still very proud of Barack Hussein Obama (based on race and his willingness to give them free money courtesy of the US Taxpayer).
Investor's Business Dailys provided a handy little chart to explain much of what's going wrong at the White House.
Market:With the economy posting its best gain in six years, you'd think stocks would rally too. And so they did on Friday — for about an hour. Then it was all downhill. Why? Ask Lincoln.
It was old Abe who said you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.
To which we'd that add you can't fool the stock market very much any of the time. It simply has too much going for it: millions of investors all over the world poring over every scintilla of evidence that could influence market direction.
And that includes government policy as well as market and economic conditions. And right now, the market seems to be saying: "It's the policies, stupid." Specifically, the socialistic policies that the Obama administration keeps pushing at Americans who know that's not the way this great country was built.
It isn't just the efforts to socialize medicine or nationalize the car industry or control banks or punish both consumers and industry for climate variations that have little to do with it either. It's every initiative that comes out of this White House.
We got another raft of them in last Wednesday's State of the Union address. Sure, there were good ideas here and there, and we made a point of highlighting them in this space Friday. But most of the others will do little to strengthen the country or the economy, and we're surprised the president's more experienced advisers allow them to be advanced.
But maybe that's the problem. Such advisers are few and far between in this White House. The chart below, which we've run before, shows that this crew has less real-world experience than any other administration since at least Teddy Roosevelt's.
"Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The goodwork which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor, of course, must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether "democratic behavior" means the behaviour that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use that word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men must be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal....As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get [the people] to practice, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is, of course, that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you...
The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the center of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waste measurement...The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which [the people] refuse to accept....Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to [the people] for thousands of years.
...What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement toward the discrediting, and finally the elimination of every kind of human excellence - moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And it is not pretty to notice how "democracy"...is now doing for us the work of the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods. You remember how one of the Greek Dictators sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level.
The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus tyrants, in a sense, could practice "democracy". But now "democracy" can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite off the tops of the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks...
From "The Screwtape Letters" (C.S. Lewis)...letters from a senior devil to his trainee. Here Screwtape is addressing all the junior devils at a banquet of souls.
Please bear with me as I take you on trip that, for me, seemed like yesterday and only lasted twenty-five minutes but brings our Nation full circle back to its founding.
There is a bridge connecting two counties - two burroughs - of New York City, it is part of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It was built in the 1930's and is scheduled to be replaced within the next few years. I haven't been on this bridge in decades. We used to travel to see relatives in Brooklyn when I was a kid (my parents are both from Brooklyn) and would drive over this bridge to get there.
It is the Kosciuszko Bridge. It is named for General Thaddeus Kosciuszko (1746 - 1817), an eighteenth century Hero on two Continents.
Thaddeus Kosciuszko was born in Poland on February 4, 1746, son of Ludwik and Tekla Kosciuszko. He attended school in Lubieszow and then the Cadet Academy in Warsaw before continuing his engineering studies in Paris, France. By the time Kosciuszko arrived in America from Poland in 1776, he was a skilled engineer who came to offer his services to the American colonies in their struggle for independence.
On October 18, 1776 Kosciuszko was commissioned as Colonel of Engineers by the Continental Congress and began his outstanding service of fortifying battle sites, many of which became turning points in America's fight for independence against the British.
Shortly after arriving in Philadelphia in 1776, Kosciuszko read the Declaration of Independence and was moved to tears because he discovered in this single, concise document everything in which he truly believed. When he discovered that Thomas Jefferson was responsible for drafting the Declaration, he felt compelled to meet him. A few months later, while moving south with the Continental Army, Kosciuszko stopped in Virginia to meet with Jefferson. After a very warm reception, the two men spent the day comparing philosophies and eventually became the best of friends.
In the early days of the war, Kosciuszko helped to fortify the Philadelphia waterfront at Fort Mercer. Shortly after, he was transferred to New York, where he helped with fortifications along the Hudson and planned the defense for Saratoga. The Battle of Saratoga became known as one of military history's most famous struggles for independence and proved to be a turning point in the war.
In 1778, Kosciuszko was made chief engineer of West Point, New York. This fortification became known as the American Gibraltar because it was unable to be penetrated by the British Army. Eventually West Point became a military academy, as suggested by Kosciuszko to General George Washington.
In 1783, Kosciuszko was appointed Brigadier General and was awarded the Cincinnati Order Medal by General George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. Washington also presented Kosciuszko with two pistols and a sword as gifts for his outstanding service to America.
After the colonies won their independence, Kosciuszko returned to Poland in 1784 to help his own country win independence from the surrounding European powers. Kosciuszko was wounded in the failed revolt and taken prisoner by the Russians.
Upon his release from prison, he returned to America on August 18, 1797, which he considered his "second home." He received a hero's welcome when he reached the Philadelphia waterfront along the Delaware River. Afterward, he secured a residence at 3rd and Pine Streets, which is now the Kosciuszko House, a national memorial to this hero of the American Revolution.
There is something about liberty that ignites a flame in men's souls. It compelled Kosciuszko to cross a continent and an ocean to join ranks with strangers; but he felt a common bond with men who gave everything they had for liberty.
The quest for liberty is unlike other causes which draw bloody-minded opportunists or hate-filled fanatics. Liberty draws those who love freedom and the chance it affords to those who want to live by the dictates of their conscience, unfettered by intrusive, over-zealous government and the greedy fools who profit from it. This is the way God intended us to live if we would but allow Him to direct our conscience. This is why men have been drawn to our shores for centuries.
But as a Nation, we have abandoned that ideal.
Yet another Polish Patriot who loves America as well as his own land has spoken. As a Friend of America, as an incredibly brave man who stood up to the power and might of the Soviet Union, as a lover of freedom, the words of Lech Walesa should resonate with everyone who loves liberty.
These are hard words to hear from a good friend for Lech tells us:
American is no longer the political and moral leader of the world.
America is becoming socialist
We have now entered the ranks of the grasping, gasping herd of nations, you know .... the countries we used to make fun of. The countries we would read about in the morning paper over coffee and tsk tsk all the way to work, glad and proud that we weren't "like that." Guess again. We're like England after the end of WWI.
The media has ignored this message, we're not surprised. It is because we are turning into a socialist, atheistic country that we are no longer leaders. Leaders need values. Leaders need to be able to provide direction, make decisions based on those values. And leaders need courage to make hard decisions. Attack the values and everything else falls apart.
Lech was in Chicago to support Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate, Adam Andrzejewski.
I wonder if Lech and other Poles weep for us.
War allows government to take power. We all sacrifice our liberty for the sake of the 'common good' in a crisis situation. However the rules never go back to pre-war conditions once the war has passed.
I recall a situation following September 11, 2001 when a senior member of the US Administration told me that the 'War on Terror' would be a never-ending war, because there would always be terrorists "out there". This provided a justification for the "Patriot Act", which in itself provided an assault on the Bill of Rights. We really didn't need a Patriot Act because good investigation would yield the same results as actions utilizing the Patriot Act power would, without a need to stretch the Bill of Rights to the breaking point. However good investigators are hard to come by and the Federal Government had no interest in promoting skill sets that operated within the bounds circumscribed by the Constitution.
The consolidation of power that we see within the Federal Government is not necessary and BOTH political parties are promoting it. Party factionalism between Republican and Democrat is just a little stupid when you take a look at both of them. They BOTH promote a massive central government with out-of-control spending. True, the Barack Hussein Obama Administration has taken it all to an obscene level as he merges General Electric with the Federal Government, takes over car companies, banks and works hard to make us all central government slaves for jobs, healthcare, food, etc.
The founding fathers limited government for a reason when they wrote the Constitution. They FEDERATED government to diffuse power among many so it would not become centralized. State's Rights more or less went away in the mid-1800's and they continue to erode to the point where it's difficult to see where one state ends and the other begins. (California is still the state of fruits and nuts)
Both parties have betrayed us. Both have promoted big government. Both have laughingly worked to erode liberty. And you have to give them credit. They've been effective.
Where we go from here is anyone's guess, but the trend isn't pretty. "The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face." - 1984
An Atlas reader, Chuck, has a student in the eleventh grade in an Ohio High School. Her government class passed out this propaganda recruiting paper so students could sign up as interns for Obama's Organizing for America (OFA is the former mybarackobama.com site.)
Obama is using our public school system to recruit for his Alinsky-inspired private army. Organizing for America is (and I quote) recruiting in our high schools to "build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda" ............of national socialism.
This is incredible. And evil. Suffer the little children -- enlisted like SS youth. This is no accident. Obama is poisoning our public school system. He acts as if it's his own private breeding farm. Once again academic learning and achievement is hopelessly abandoned, and supplanted by radical leftist activism from the leftwing Alinsky indoctrinators in the perversepublic school system.
Children must be advised to expose this ugly propaganda. Children must tell their parents how they are being used and manipulated. Parents, warn your kids. Better yet, home school.
Check out the recommended reading list page 4:
Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky
The New Organizers, Zack Exley
Stir It Up: Lessons from Community Organizing and Advocacy, Rinku Sen
Obama Field Organizers Plot a Miracle, Zack Exley, Huffington Post
Dreams of My FatherChicago Chapters, Barack Hussein Obama
This internship program is geared towards the 2010 elections. Using our kids as their goons. Can you imagine if the Republicans attempted such a fascist stunt?
And what will these "interns" be force fed? The mother's milk of the left -- anti-war agitation, anti-capitalism, Marx, Lenin, Ayers, Ellie Light activism, LGBT agenda promotion, global warming, pro-jihad, and illegal immigration. For starters... (Click on the images below to get a sample of our future)
Unfortunately we have to get the latest news on the global warming scam from the Brits as American newspapers are nowhere to be found. From the UK Telegraph:
Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures The IPCC is beginning to melt as global tempers rise, says Christopher Booker
It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming. Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself. Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.
Lies and damned lies. Al Gore's gonna rot in hell for this; maybe even get some quality rot time in a federal prison as well. The ADW scam is falling apart and the newspapers here in the States can't be bothered.
Last week I reported on "Glaciergate", the scandal which has forced the IPCC's top officials, led by Dr Pachauri, to disown a claim originating from an Indian glaciologist, Dr Syed Husnain, that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. What has made this reckless claim in the IPCC's 2007 report even more embarrassing was the fact that Dr Husnain, as we revealed, was then employed by Dr Pachauri's own Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). His baseless scaremongering about the Himalayas helped to win Teri a share in two lucrative research contracts, one funded by the EU.
There should be grand juries and their equivalent organs of criminal inquiry springing into action all over the world. You should be able to walk across the Atlantic on the subpeonas alone.
[...] Dr. North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.
The IPCC needs to be RICO'd out of existence. For all intents and purposes it is a criminal enterprise that supports a vast, world-wide extortion racket. And on June 26, 2009, the US House of Representatives joined their ranks by passing H.R. 2454, the infamous cap and trade legislation, so they too can use our tax dollars in another environmental shell game.
[...] Professor Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who wrote that in all his 60 years as a scientist he had never seen "a more disturbing corruption" of the scientific process, and that if the IPCC was "incapable of following its most basic procedures", it was best it should be "abandoned".
The centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report was Michael Mann's notorious "hockey stick", the graph purporting to show temperatures in the late 20th century soaring at an unprecedented rate – later exposed as a statistical artefact. Another new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion by A W Montford, brilliantly tells the bizarre tale of how Mann's colleagues, calling themselves "the Hockey Team" and now at the heart of the IPCC, managed to resurrect the discredited graph for inclusion in its 2007 report. Montford's book, if inevitably technical, expertly recounts a remarkable scientific detective story. And of course, it was incriminating leaked emails between members of the Hockey Team that were at the centre of the recent "Climategate" scandal at the University of East Anglia.
Compared to the IPCC and our own government, Bernie Madoff is a piker, a shlemiel. He can't hold a candle to the thieves we elected as national legislators. But the American press still holds fast to the AGW fairytale which would cost billions and destroy what's left of the American economy.
But they will report on some Baptists trying to rescue children from the hellhole known as Haiti. Only they'll call them kidnappers.
