No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-eighth."

Why is Thanksgiving on a Thursday?

It is for two reasons: To separate it from the Sunday Sabbath. And to set it on the weekday when Early American ministers often gave religious lectures.

In 1939 that last Thursday designated by Lincoln was the fifth Thursday in November, and would have shortened the Christmas shopping season substantially during the great depression. So president Roosevelt,  under pressure from the National Retail Dry Goods Association and other business interests, declared Thanksgiving the third Thursday in order to extend the shopping season. The federal Congress then passed a joint resolution in 1941 making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November in order to clear any conflicts with state calendars.

The famous Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City – originally known as Macy’s Christmas Parade - was not the first such parade in the nation. In 1920, Gimbel’s department store in Philadelphia held the first. The first Macy’s parade in 1924 featured animals from the Central Park Zoo, but the roaring lions frightened many children and thus did not appear in later parades. 3 million people attend the New York parade annually, while 44 million watch it on television.

The top turkey-producing state is Minnesota with 50 million birds, followed by North Carolina, Arkansas and Virginia. 270 million turkeys are raised in the US each year. But the National turkey Federation says that only 20% of all turkeys are consumed on Thanksgiving.

Three towns in America are named after the bird – Turkey, Texas, Turkey Creek, Louisiana and Turkey, North Carolina.

The wild turkey even was proposed as the national bird over the soaring, stately bald eagle by none other than Benjamin Franklin who called the turkey “a bird of courage”.

It is probably a good thing it was not chosen. Most turkeys cannot even fly. And somehow the turkey's hideous profile does not inspire nation-building confidence.

One final fact: Turkey eggs have two yolks.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

Enviros’ Windmill Dream… or Nightmare

The most crucial issue facing America today is energy. Energy is the source of our wealth because it is the element that allows us to do the work needed to create wealth. Therefore our energy supply will determine our future.

Al Gore and his friends have created a fantasy world in which the planet allegedly is heating up because of our oil and coal use, when in fact the statistics show that we are in a cooling period. No mind. That is just an Inconvenient Truth.

Gore now is urging a conversion of our entire energy infrastructure. Here are recommendations from Gore's own website (in italics), with common-sense rebuttals:

Immediately commence a clean energy plan that includes efficiency, generation, transmission, and transportation.

Energy Efficiency: A national upgrade to eliminate waste, save money, and improve comfort. Make every bit of energy we produce work harder for us.

Rebuttal: This is the same boilerplate that environmentalists have been spouting since the 1970s. Yet our economy today is producing twice as much wealth per unit of energy consumed (is twice as efficient) as it was in the 1950s not because Al Gore instructed us how, but simply because our capitalist system naturally gravitates toward efficiency.

Renewable Generation: Accelerate the ramp-up of clean, renewable electricity sources through policies that support increased private and public investment in technologies that work, like wind, solar, and geothermal.

Rebuttal: The “public investment” that Gore is talking about are the massive government subsidies needed to keep sources like wind power alive. Otherwise, wind power will die like ethanol did. Ethanol production worldwide is shutting down after only a few years because it does not work. Ethanol is being produced in America only because of government subsidies.

Wind power is another completely inefficient source. Think of it this way. “Economies of scale” are a fact of life. For instance, if you needed to bake 1,000 cakes every day, you wouldn’t make the batter one cake at a time and then bake the cakes one at a time. You would make all the batter at once and then bake the cakes in a large-scale oven. Because it is more efficient.

So imagine you have a 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor. Gore says that if you break that down into 1,000 separate 1-megawatt windmills, that it would be cost-effective. Yet we know from economies of scale that, just on a conceptual level, the opposite is true, that you would be investing much more in capital in hardware and labor for all those separate generating units, and actually producing much less electricity per dollar invested.

But wait, there’s more.

Here’s a trick question: If you need to install 1,000 megawatts of electrical capacity, and each windmill generates 1 megawatt, how many windmills do you need?

Think about this before answering. Take a minute.

One-thousand, you say?

Well, yes, if the wind blows 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, which it does nowhere in the world.

If the wind only blows 12 hours a day - as  it does in many places - you would need to install… two-thousand windmills. If the wind only blows 8 hours a day – as it does in many places - you would need to install… three-thousand windmills. If the wind only blows 4 hours a day – as it does in many places - you would need to install… six-thousand windmills.

See how inefficient wind energy is? If we listen to Gore, wind energy will consume all of our energy investment capital and leave us with only a fraction of the energy that we need.

In Texas in the Spring of 2008, 1,100 megawatts of wind power simply disappeared from the grid because the wind stopped blowing. Is this the type of energy system we want? Do you want your lights going out in the middle of the day? Or your computers?

And if solar panels are so great, like Gore thinks, why doesn’t every home have them?

Answer: Because they do not work. In fact, after the hugely excessive electricity consumption at Gore’s own Nashville mansion was revealed to the public in 2007, he installed solar panels and other “energy-saving” devices. After he installed them, his electricity consumption increased 10 percent!

So why should we listen to Gore?

Unified National Smart Grid: Modernize transmission infrastructure so that clean electricity generated anywhere in America can power homes and businesses across the nation; Build national electricity 'interstates' that move power quickly and cheaply to where it is needed; Establish local smart grids that buy and sell power from households and support clean plug-in cars.

Rebuttal: Hey Al, there is not one single household or business in America that is lacking electricity today because our power grid is outdated.

Yet Gore wants some big new expensive power grid. Why?

Because he wants to appear as if he has some magical answer to all of our problems, which he doesn’t. He simply wants to throw money at energy, and then catch it himself, along with all his enviro friends. This whole ‘green energy’ movement is about one thing: Making people like Gore richer and richer while the rest of us get poorer and poorer because energy costs will skyrocket as a result of Gore policies.

And where would all the capital come from for that new grid?

Gore doesn't have it. He thinks it will magically appear because he says so.

Automobiles: Transition to efficient plug-in cars that 'fuel' with clean electricity. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in vehicles also provides a key source of electricity storage.

Rebuttal: Here’s the truth about electric cars: Electric-powered vehicles actually pollute more than gasoline-powered cars. Because the pollution is created at the electrical generating plant, not at the car’s tailpipe. And electricity is a highly-refined resource that should be used not for cars, but for applications for which there is no alternative like electric motors, light bulbs, computers, refrigerators etc.

Electricity loses much energy in its production. Think of it like this:

If you took a typical car like an efficient Toyota Corolla with its gasoline-powered engine and put in 10 gallons of fuel, the car would go X number of miles.

If you took that out of the Corolla, hooked it up to spin an electrical generator, put in 10 gallons of fuel and then ran a plug-in electric car of the same weight as the Corolla over the same route on the electricity that is produced by that 10 gallons of fuel, it would only run a fraction of the number of miles.  Because you lose lots of energy when you convert to electricity.

Gore ignores this reality, as does the entire enviro movement.

Electric cars do not work. They are huge energy hogs. Unless you want to drive to work in a golf cart in which case a gasoline-powered golf cart would be more efficient than an electric one.

Obama now is promising $150 billion over 10 years for ‘renewable’ energy. Yet if wind power is so efficient, it wouldn’t need the subsidy. This $150 billion really is nothing more than a transfer of taxpayer wealth to people like Gore and his environmentalist friends to further demagogue us on the subject of energy. Gore testified before Congress that ‘global warming’ would cause the seas to rise 17 feet, and then elsewhere he said they would rise only 2 feet. Which is it, Al? Because there is not one shred of evidence anywhere on the planet that sea levels have risen even one millimeter because of ‘global warming’. None. Zero. Zip.

We must build nuclear power plants for reliable, abundant electricity.

Yet millions have been frightened about nuclear power and radiation by the enviro movement.

So remember this:

*The United States detonated an atomic bomb 1,700 feet above the city of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 destroying the city and killing 150,00 people. The fearmongers said that the radiation from the blast would make the city uninhabitable for 10,000 years. They were wrong. People moved back into the city within one day of the blast, and have lived there continuously since.

*Three Mile Island in 1979 was called the worst nuclear accident in American history.

How many people died at TMI? Zero. Jimmy Carter even went right inside the reactor building after the accident. It was deemed the most dangerous place on the planet by the fearmongers in the enviro movement. Carter is alive and well today.

*Millions of American service personnel have served on and around nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines over the last 50 years with no sign of any problem.

Gore is an intellectual who would never be involved in something like the oil industry because that would require him to get his hands dirty, which intellectuals never do. Therefore he is feeding us pie-in-the-sky about windmills and ethanol so as to take down the oil industry and to build up Gore & Friends with the money that they are addicted to. This will lead us to disaster.

GOP Must Expand Web Presence

One of the big stories of this election cycle - and of the 2004 cycle as well - was the increasing importance of the internet.

Conservatives are way behind on this subject, and for good reason. Conservatives tend not to be media-oriented people. They tend not even to want to be involved in media and public affairs to the extent that liberals do in order to dominate other people’s lives.

Republicans generally want three things in life: To be left alone; to be allowed to contribute to society primarily by improving themselves on their own terms; and to create a world in which people understand that they are better off creating their own destinies rather than relying on the government. This was the intent of the Founding Fathers of our nation.

Conservatives tend to work hard and do not have the time to sit on the internet and build up a presence. Liberals devote more of their time to political activism because that is what they live for. They have come to dominate much of the internet because many are activists who sit around all day on the web, or they work for well-funded groups that give them plenty of time and money to hang around and manipulate public opinion via the internet.

But if conservatives continue to allow liberals to dominate the internet as they have dominated our media, conservatism will lose. Republicans must increase their use of the internet as a medium of their own.

Conservatives probably would even not be much interested in running for office if it were not for the express purpose of restraining the liberal impulse to take all of our power as individuals and give it to an expanding government. And liberals right now are in the process of continuing to do that as they have for 50 years.

In many states, the conservative presence is shrinking, and independents are growing and trending toward the left because those are the opinions that they hear through their local newspaper, through their friends, through the entertainment industry, through the national media etc. Even once-conservative small towns are becoming more liberal because they get CNN and The Today Show and Oprah Winfrey and NBC News on cable and on satellite TV.

As I developed my own website, I sought to contact people associated with the Republican party across the nation by visiting county GOP sites. What I found was a hit-or-miss proposition. Many counties have no Republican party internet site, or an insignificant one, or an outdated one with old news on it. This must change.

I believe that for starters that every single county (or congressional district) in America must have a dynamic, uniform Republican website. And to accomplish this easily and cheaply, the following steps could be taken:

The Republican party should establish a single “template site” that could be downloaded free by Republican county organizations all across the nation. This could also include state organizations to unify all party sites. Those counties (or congressional districts) without sites, or with moribund sites, could take advantage of this new and more dynamic site, explained below. Even those counties with well-established websites should convert over to the "template site" in order to create a single Republican network that connects all counties. Established sites could simply cut-and-paste their information onto a new site.

It would work like this:

Imagine you are the Republican chairman in mythical Smith County with no web presence. Rather than hiring a web designer and webmaster, the Smith County GOP official could go to a national Republican site and download a “template site” free of charge.

That’s pretty easy.

The “template site” would have several different functions and sections:

1) Like any website, it would offer blank pages for Smith County officials to create their own site and to update it on a regular basis as they see fit (every day, every week, when news is made etc.). It would consist of a Smith County home page, news pages, events page, elected officials page, opinion page etc.

And importantly, it should list e-mail addresses not only for all local officials but for all citizens who wish to be engaged in the political process. These e-mail addresses are crucial because they would start to connect Republicans/conservatives in each county to each other, and connect them to others across the nation. Many Republicans are isolated on the web.

In my research I noticed that many elected GOP officials listed on county websites do not even have an e-mail address and are probably not even on the web. This must end. They must join the 21^st century if we want to get back on top again. Computers and internet connections are cheaper and cheaper these days and everybody should have one.

2) The second part of the “template site” is the critical part. It would consist of a few designated pages that could be downloaded each day from the national server. These pages would offer a section of national news, links and commentary of interest to Republicans. It would be updated by midnight every day 7 days a week.

So each time these designated pages are downloaded onto the Smith County site (hopefully at least 5 mornings a week), it would refresh the Smith County site with the latest national news and commentary. It might include a column by George Will, Bill Sammon, Bill Bennett or Brent Bozell, or even commentaries gleaned from regional and local websites about issues in various states and localities.

These designated news pages would play an important role. They would:

*give the people of Smith County an impetus to visit the Smith County website every day as a source for national news rather than going to other sites which may be liberal (CNN, NBC, Reuters, links from Drudge etc.). One of the problems with many local sites is that they don’t change much from day to day or even week to week, and so there is little impetus for people to visit them or even to pay attention to them. A fresh download every day of high quality news and commentary would give people a reason to visit and would spark more participation.

*give access, through links, to a wide variety of national conservative news from a huge source… the entire internet… all boiled down to a few designated pages.

For instance, on my website I have links in one section to all sorts of interesting material like a Heritage Foundation study about the reality of poverty in America that shows that “poor” people in the US are much better off than they ever have been, and much better off than most people think;

*give Smith County officials a reason to more aggressively update their own website because more people would be visiting it; and

*provide another way for Republicans/conservatives to interact via the internet.

3) One of those designated pages could list perhaps 50 separate one-page essays of point-by-point verified, factual arguments in favor of Republican positions like “Why Raising the Minimum Wage is a Bad Idea” or “The World Is Not Really Running out of Oil” or any other subject. People in Smith County could print out any essay they wish in any quantity (1 copy or 27 copies or 200 copies) to learn from, or to give to other people to show them the conservative position explained concisely in just one single page.

Many independents across America only know what the liberal media tell them and do not have a conservative point of view explained to them. And they do not want to take the time, or have the time, to listen, for instance, to conservative radio. A simple sheet of facts one page long on an issue like the minimum wage could sway people because the Republican position always is based in fact and not in emotion like the liberal position.

4) Another advantage of the “template site” is that anyone in America could visit a central directory and look up any county in America, log onto it and read what is going on there, or contact the people there.

5) All pages of the official “template site” nationwide would have the same masthead, so as to generate a sense of continuity and uniformity. (“Freedom and liberty” etc., in red, white and blue, and “GOPCounties.com” or whatever the template system is called). Local officials then could create their own local graphics on their pages.

Crisis of Confidence in New Prez

There are highly exaggerated expectations about Barack Obama as president. Millions actually think that the seas will part and that the sun will shine every day. They are in for a shock and a psychological crash after the euphoria of the election. All those liberals who were experiencing their once-in-a-decade bout of happiness and optimism now will quickly slide back into their customary depression and rage, and for good reason.

They say there’s only one chance to make a good first impression, and in the two days following Obama’s unsmiling acceptance speech in Chicago (where was that crowd of 1 million that the media predicted?) the stock market tumbled 486.01 points on Wednesday, November 5 - the biggest post-election drop ever - and 443.48 points on Thursday, November 6. If that’s our first impression of the confidence inspired by a President Obama, then God save us all.

The media tried to cover for Obama as they will do every day until he dies. They said that the bad stock market is “baked into the Wall Street pie”.

But Obama was supposed to be uplifting and confidence-inspiring, was he not? He was supposed to represent “change”? At least the markets could have given him a token lift. But they didn’t. They tanked. This is telling and this is what conservatives have warned about. No confidence in a far-left figure.

In the minds of the liberal left and the media, of course, Obama inspires confidence. But in the real world, where hard work creates products, wealth, profits and jobs, there is not much. This is the world inhabited by the 58 million 'little people' who voted against Obama, like Joe the Plumber.

Obama has a tough road ahead because the American economy is in a major realignment and needs a business-friendly climate to adapt. And looking at Obama's past, it is not encouraging. He has an F rating from the National Taxpayers Union. His home state of Illinois is heavily Democrat and 45^th in job creation out of the 50 states while Massachusetts, with its 90% Democrat legislature, is one of 5 states doing worse.

Meanwhile Obama has promised to raise federal taxes on businesses on top of the second highest federal corporate tax rate in the world (35%) after Japan. This already is causing, and will further cause, job-creating business to relocate to places with lower rates, including… get this… Europe.

Hasn’t Obama learned the 1st Law of Economics: That when you tax something there will be less of it, and when you subsidize something there will be more of it? This is like the law of gravity. So if you tax business more you will have less commerce and fewer jobs.

Duhh...

But that 1^st Law certainly was not mentioned in the books Obama read growing up like Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

Meanwhile Obama promised a middle-class tax 'cut'. If he doesn’t outright cancel it – the most likely outcome - what will really be a tax 'credit' next April 15 was said during the campaign to be set at a mere $500 for each taxpayer. But here's the hitch: That will happen as long as there’s a $500 'subsidy' to the 50 million people who pay no federal income taxes at all. In today’s world that $500 is not a big wad of cash. It is not going to transform anyone’s life like a better job or a permanent job would.

Yet that money is going to come out of the pockets of business and The Evil Rich whose wealth concentrations in banks, stocks, bonds and other investment instruments provide the crucial capital that business needs to expand. And when rich people spend their money, it creates jobs too in homebuilding, vacation resorts, expensive cars etc. When George HW Bush signed into law a luxury tax on yachts in 1990, it cost 25,000 jobs in the yacht-building industry. The tax was repealed in 1993.

So all in all, it appears that Obama’s policies will be directed not at creating new wealth by cutting business taxes and encouraging enterprise, but at creating more poverty by subsidizing poorer people while drawing crucial investment capital out of business.

On Friday, November 7, Obama met with his circle of economic advisers. This included people like Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Time-Warner chairman Richard Parsons and investor Warren Buffett along with government and education officials. He even included the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. What the heck was he doing there?!

So what is wrong with this picture?

First, Google is an information company. Time-Warner is a media firm. Buffett is an investor who plays the markets. Government officials are government officials. (Why was a left-wing political figure like Villaraigosa in a meeting about the economy, particularly coming from a city that is getting routinely poorer by taxing and spending itself into hardship?) And education officials are overwhelmingly leftists who favor wealth redistribution.

Who is missing from this equation?

How about CEOs of steel manufacturers, home builders, pharmaceutical companies and energy production facilities? How about an assortment of small-businesspeople from Oregon, Iowa and Maryland? Or executives of regional employers and mid-sized manufacturing firms? Because these are the people and the companies that actually create the nation’s wealth.

Because wealth is created not by shifting information around (Google), playing the markets (Buffett), publishing magazines (Parsons) or dreaming up theories in faculty lounges, but by taking resources from nature and giving them value by turning them into products that people want and need like electricity, furniture, cars and lamps.

That is why America was so rich 50 years ago. With Europe and Japan ruined in the 1940s and 1950s as a result of World War II, America was manufacturing 50% of the world’s finished goods. Today with globalization, that number is 22%. That is why the middle class is shrinking. Today America has the richer and richer Googles and Hollywoods and Warren Buffetts of the world, yet our nation is getting poorer because there are more and more socialist obstacles to wealth creation like enviro laws, taxes, bureaucracy and regulation.

Obama even had in his economic pow-wow  David Bonior, a far-left, pro-tax, pro-union former Democrat congressman from Michigan; and Jennifer Granholm, the present pro-tax, pro-union governor of Michigan, the state with the worst economy in America after decades of extremist union demands gutted the auto industry.

Michigan’s unemployment rate today is 9% and more than 1 million people have left the state over the last 10 years. Yet Granholm keeps ramming through tax increases and big-government job-training programs, further sapping the state’s economy, while belligerent union activists in 2006 actually scared one company away, Toyota, which wanted to build a non-union engine plant in Michigan.

Barack Obama sees manufacturing as the realm of conservatives and Republicans who are willing to work hard and get their hands dirty, while Obama’s media and university friends sit around their newsrooms and faculty lounges criticizing everything except their own non-productive selves. Meanwhile Oprah Winfrey sits on her couch accumulating billions babbling in front of a TV camera.

How much wealth does Winfrey actually create?

Zero. She lives off the overall wealth of the nation. She is an entertainer.

If you want to open a wealth-creating factory, coal mine or nuclear power plant today in America, you will face endless opposition from environmentalists, bureaucrats, unions, anti-growth obstructionists and intellectuals. If you want to start a newspaper or TV station or magazine preaching environmental purity and socialist redistribution of the wealth, nobody would have any legal grounds to oppose it. Obama's allies are in the camp of the latter.

And that is the real crisis that America faces today.

21 Steps to a New Conservatism

After the loss of the White House in the November 4 election, conservatives must begin rebuilding and planning for 2010 and beyond, by taking the following steps:

1)    We must first look back. We must be thankful for many great election results for our movement since the time of Ronald Reagan including Reagan in 1980 and 1984, Papa Bush in 1988, the recapturing of Congress in 1994, George W. Bush winning in 2000, the midterm election of 2002, and Bush re-elected in 2004. We cannot win everything but our movement faltered in 2008 and we could have won this one even in the difficult political climate of the times. We need to rebuild the movement with force and vigor.

We need to recall that one recent survey showed that 34% of Americans still describe themselves as conservatives while only 22% say they are liberal. America still is a center-right nation.

2)    We must recall that conservatives were dispirited at the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Yet in 1994, Republicans rejoiced when they took back the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years because Clinton overreached with the gays-in-the-military issue and a national health-care plan.

3)    We must recognize that Obama will overreach too because he probably will govern as a radical and an ideologue. Do not think of him as invincible; that's all spin. He was supposed to win this election in a landslide, yet the final results show only a 6-point popular vote victory (7 million votes), which is a modest win. Meanwhile Democrats have not achieved their hoped-for victory of 60 US senators, while their lead in the House increased by only 18 seats. They could see big losses in 2010 or 2012.

4)    We must remember that despite the endless media cheerleading for Obama; the media trashing of conservatives for the last 50 years; the media trashing of Bush and the GOP over the last 8 years; the Iraq war; the economic meltdown; McCain’s often hapless campaign; relentless Obama obfuscation and pandering; and certainly some voter fraud, Obama still only won a modest victory. This is telling. After all the hype, Americans still were not convinced about this guy or about his ideas.

5)    We must remember that many people have overly-high expectations of Obama. One woman caught on tape at Obama’s victory rally was saying that Obama was going to buy her gas and pay her mortgage. Many people probably believe this because Obama mesmerized them. When people see what real results he provides, many are going to be very disappointed. At best, things might improve slightly for millions, and things easily could get much worse. Conservatives must prepare to take advantage of this.

6)    We must reach out to voters with clear and unequivocal explanations of how jobs and wealth are created, explaining that they are not created by government, but by establishing a hospitable business climate with low taxes and low regulations, and with environmentalist interference reduced. Enviros are endangering our energy supply. We must explain how. Many areas of this website explain this phenomenon.

7)    We must stop talking about trying to attract moderates to our movement and focus on rousing the conservative base which always wins elections. McCain took many moderate positions over the years, yet independents abandoned him in droves for Obama. At the same time, 20% of conservatives abandoned McCain for Obama in one poll.  So McCain lost on both ends, as conservatives could have predicted.

8)    We must note that even with Obama’s big win, Florida, Arizona and California on election day passed conservative traditional-marriage state constitutional amendments. This was a political earthquake that should give conservatives a huge morale boost. California is a very liberal state but still supported this legislation. And with its reputation as a bellwether and trend-setter, this type of question could move across the nation, firing up conservative sentiments along the way. Such questions on ballots over the next 2 to 8 years can bring conservative state legislators, US congresspeople and US senators into office

9)    We must unabashedly stand for military strength and readiness. Obama actually said at one point that he would strengthen the military (which he won’t) because he knows that that stand would garner him many votes. Obama even voted for the conservative FISA anti-terror legislation probably because he knew that if he voted against it, he would jeopardize his chances at the presidency.

Ronald Reagan used the strong American military as a backdrop in his campaign to bring down the Soviet Union... without firing a shot.  Isn't that better than a European-type continental war?

10) We must note all the conservative positions Obama took in order to seem palatable to the electorate. In at least one point in the campaign he said he favored the following: Offshore oil drilling, nuclear power, clean-coal technology, 2nd amendment gun rights, tax cuts for the middle class, keeping troops in Iraq until the job is done, building up the military, and FISA terrorist eavesdropping legislation. He even professed himself to be a practicing, believing Christian. This sounds like George Bush!

11)   We must not see the Democrats as monolithic. They are a bunch of squabbling factions and their media friends often are nutty left-wing fabricators who will say and do anything for their cause, like creating the fake George Bush National Guard documents of 2004 that ended up killing off the career of Dan Rather at CBS and probably backfired enough to elect Bush. Remember that the media are much more unpopular than Republicans ever were.

12)   We must realize that after all the hype about massive voter turnout for Obama, 6 million fewer people voted in 2008 than in 2004! So all this hype that Democrats put out about their huge voter registrations was more nonsense. This extends to everything they say and do. Most of it is pure baloney. This is tremendously important because it once again exposes the Democrat media machine as full of hot air.

13)   We must recall that with only 2 exceptions in all of American history (1938 and 2002), the party that was not in the White House always has gained seats in Congress in the first election after the presidential election. So Republicans can expect gains in 2010.

14)    We must recall that President Bush has done an excellent job of defending our homeland from terrorism and that current economic crisis is part of a cyclical pattern and not his fault. We also have won in Iraq and that will benefit America in the long run.

15)   We must recognize that the stock marked plunged 486.01 points the very day after Obama was elected, the biggest post-election drop ever. This is just the first sign that Obama is not the reassuring figure that he holds himself out to be. He could end up undermining the economy in a very significant way if the economy has no faith in him, paving the way for financial whiz Romney in 2012, or Bobby Jindal or Sarah Palin. Or Rudy!

16)  We must recognize that Obama’s political positions of the past point to him mishandling the economy. Jimmy Carter mishandled a bad economy after he was elected in 1976 and in 1980, Reagan drubbed him in the election when the economy was much, much worse.

17)    We must recognize that even Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose, two big liberal media figures both admitted that they did not really know who Barack Obama was. If Obama ends up alienating the public with strange decisions that seem uninformed  or erratic, he will lose big-time in 2012.

18) We must recognize that we have had bad presidents before and survived. And we will survive this one.

19) Medvdev in Russia already challenged Obama the day after the election with the threat of installing missiles pointed at American ally Poland. If Obama makes a bad decision on defending Poland, his whole presidency could be marred from the start.

20) Despite media brainwashing, rational people still recognize that conservative ideas are the "right" ideas and the only ideas for creating a better economic future. Even those crazy Euros have decided that. One of the few Euro nations with a booming economy is Ireland, which lowered its tax rates to attract business and enterprise.

21) And finally we must always remember that our freedom is based in our belief in God and an indebtedness to Him for the rights that He has given us, and is made possible only by an adherence to the piety, morality and virtue necessary to a culture of liberty and prosperity. This is what the Founders based our nation on and it has kept us free for longer than any other nation in history.

Dude, That’s Some Good Smoke…

 Note: The following is not a spoof to cheer up depressed conservatives. It is true.

Up here in La-La Land, also known as Massachusetts, voters went overboard in the usual way over three significant ballot questions. These questions give a pretty good indication of where this state is going with its 85% Democrat legislature, Ted Kennedy and Mike 'The Souvlaki King' Dukakis.

Question #1 asked if residents wanted to eliminate the state income tax. Massachusetts, of course, is one of the most highly-taxed states in the union. But public employee unions, whose salaries come out of tax receipts, put up huge amounts of money to defeat the measure, outspending the Committee for Small Government by 100 to 1.

Always remember that taxes for liberals are actually spelled W-A-G-E-S and tax increases are called ‘raises’. So all the do-nothing bureaucrats in the 400 Massachusetts divisions, agencies and bureaus chipped in to make sure that they would not possibly risk not getting any future raises. They helped defeat Question #1 by 69% to 31%. This comes on the heels of the legislature’s smug and intentional refusal in recent years to roll back the state’s income tax to 5% as promised, oh, about 10 years ago when it went up to 5.9% to get more money for all our crucial government programs.

Our thoroughly revolutionary Massachusetts liberals also approved vital Question #2, a life or death issue raised by the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy, which saw voters approve the decriminalization of weed by a vote of 65% to 35%.

With the Massachusetts economy in free fall, it’s good to know we can toke up legally when toiling at our dishwasher gigs.

Dude! Good smoke!

Question #3 was yet another trek down the memory lane of a once-proud state, the economic heart of America for 200 years. Today, thousands of skilled and educated people are leaving Massachusetts every year because the state is another worker’s paradise with crushing anti-business taxes and regulations, sky-high energy costs imposed by environmentalists, declining job opportunities, companies closing up or moving out, and poverty rising daily.

But that didn’t stop the animal-rights kooks from getting Question #3 on the ballot, to ban greyhound racing. They claimed the dogs were being abused, which means that dog racing nationwide, along with horse racing, probably are on the agenda after this job killer is implemented up here in our Socialist Seventh Heaven.

With unemployment increasing weekly, Question #3, which passed 57% to 43%, is expected to throw about 1,000 people out of work.

Note to RedState readers: Don’t waste your time visiting Massachusetts unless you want to come as a Peace Corps volunteer. Bring food and blankets!  It is quickly becoming a serf state full of rich liberals, overpaid state workers including public schools teachers and turnpike toll collectors (average annual salary $70,000), a rapidly shrinking middle class, and everyone else poor and more than willing to rake leaves or shovel snow for the elites in exchange for a lump of coal.

Or if you just want to get stoned, pay a lot in taxes, and watch your neighbors who used to work at the dog track rent a U-Haul to head south, come on up to Beautiful Massachusetts! The state where the American Revolution was born!

Obama’s Real Agenda

Barack Obama made sure to express many conservative views during his campaign. If he had not, he would not have been elected. He expressed the following ideas in big public forums at least once: That he favored offshore oil drilling, nuclear power, clean-coal technology, the 2^nd amendment, FISA anti-terror legislation, keeping troops in Iraq until the job is done, keeping the military strong, tax cuts for the middle class, and that he was a practicing Christian.

This sounds like George Bush.

Yet in other interviews he said he was going to “bankrupt” utilities that built coal-fired power plants, that he supported the Washington DC gun ban, that he was going to pull troops out of Iraq in 16 months no matter what, and that he was going to substantially cut back the military. Meanwhile, in order to cover for Obama, his party insistently has voted against, and will continue to vote against nuclear power, offshore oil drilling, onshore oil drilling, the military buildup and most forms of terrorist detention and surveillance.

So his victory is suspect. If you say anything to get elected, you’ll get elected.

Precisely how Obama will govern is open to question. The suspicion that he will govern from the far left is well founded.

Meanwhile praise is coming from every quarter for his smashing victory even though it was only a modest 6.5 points in the national popular vote. A ‘landslide’ is 15 or 20 points. Obama received no big mandate. And remember that Obama’s modest victory came only after relentless media attacks on Bush and all Republicans over the last 8 years; relentless all-out media cheerleading for Obama; zillions of expected new voters (they didn't show up, as usual); the explosion in the Obama-net (formerly known as the internet); the Iraq war; the economic meltdown and a mediocre McCain challenge.

Obama should have won by 30 points if there is so much confidence in him.

There is not.

Now a few media commentators are comparing Obama to the transformative figures of Reagan and FDR. Those media might take a breath before launching into this sycophancy. His chances of even approaching anything in Ronald Reagan’s ballpark are slim to none unless he does things that he has to date shown no propensity to do.

His comparison to FDR, however, may prove prophetic. In 1938, after 5 years with FDR in the White House, the economy was in much worse shape than on the day of FDR’s inauguration because FDR took a left-wing approach to the economy, spending huge government monies on make-work jobs that did nothing to improve the situation. Obama apparently may try the same in a new stimulus package.

Obviously Obama is facing major economic challenges, and it will be up to him whether he wants to govern as a partisan in order to push a leftist agenda, or if he wishes to accommodate the common good and to seek to have a place in history – and a second term. Because the economic woes he faces are immense and the public has unrealistically high expectations.

While America has faced great economic trials before - particularly bad economies in the 1930s and less so in the 1970s - those economic troubles existed as the American economy was expanding throughout the 20^th century.

Today we live in a globalized economy, and competition is fierce. The last 8 years in particular have seen huge shifts toward India and China and other less-developed nations where labor is cheap. So unless Democrats make dramatic moves toward pro-growth, capitalist tax and spending policies here at home, international competition is going to continue to sap our economy and Obama will be out in 2012. Think Jimmy Carter.

Already there are many signs that the American economy is in irreversible decline in some areas. The Northeastern United States and the Upper Midwest, once our economic heart, have been gutted. The Northeast is now very liberal with anti-business policies in many states. One caller from Vermont told a national talk-radio program recently that her state representative actually told her that Vermont liberals are intentionally discouraging economic growth, and thus the template is clear: For those who want to leave Vermont, liberals are saying “go ahead. That will leave a more pristine state behind for us who remain.”

Meanwhile, Michigan, an economic giant for decades, is in economic free-fall. The unions savaged the auto industry with outrageous wage demands that have proven themselves to be unsustainable. General Motors today is America’s largest single purchaser of Viagra meaning that, under union contracts, GM’s health insurance not only covers every worker’s and every retiree’s direct needs, but indirect ones too. And that is just one corner of one part of the unions’ ultimatum.

This is happening as the South has risen economically by dint of two facts: Air conditioning has made Southern summers livable for the masses, while historically low taxes and regulations have made the economic climate more hospitable for companies fleeing unions, taxation and regulations in the liberal North.

The state with the strongest economy in America today, by the way, is Evil George Bush’s Texas.

Obama has a poor record on economic matters. His home state of Illinois is 45^th of the United States in job creation. He has an F rating from the National Taxpayers Union. And two members of his economic transition team, Democrats David Bonior and Jennifer Granholm, both are influential political figures from Michigan, the state with the worst economy in the country.

So we must watch closely how Obama deals with the economy. Bill Clinton in January 1993 entered office with a very strong economy inherited from George HW Bush. We are all supposed to remember the Bush Recession and how Clinton turned it all around. But that is false. Statistically the Bush Recession ended in March 1991, and Clinton took office almost two full years later when the economy was in the early stage of a huge and unstoppable upswing.

Since Clinton did not have the economy to worry about, he used his time in office to try and push the nation to the left, which was his real agenda. The very first issued he tackled was to try to legitimize homosexuals in the military, which the country didn’t much care for. That is one of the reasons that the Congress turned Republican in 1994 for the first time in 40 years.

Despite the loss of Congress, Clinton used the strong economy as a backdrop to focus on remaking the country in a liberal/left mold in every way, to appoint people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, to loose the environmental movement and the trial lawyers on America (the ‘hot coffee’ lawsuit against McDonald’s was 1995, and a sign of the rise of the asinine Democrat trial lawyer), to cut back military spending to the point that fighter jets and helicopters did not have spare parts, and to sleep at the guard post while China stole our nuclear secrets.

That was the real Clinton memo – to undermine the social constructs and the vigilance and the military might of America. And 9/11 was the result.

Thus what Obama does on economic policies is only the crust of the pie. He may be forced to go to the right, perhaps to postpone a capital gains tax increase if the stock market continues tanking, which it did immediately after Obama was elected. Or he could cut corporate income taxes to try and generate some jobs if things get really grim. But that would be a last resort.

He very well might stay left and pray that, like FDR, nobody will notice that his own policies are killing us, and then try and talk us through the next election.

He certainly will go left on bailing out the car companies with $50 billion rather than asking the unions to give back some of the loot that they have sucked out of the industry. And his $300 billion 'economic stimulus' is another payoff to voters that we don’t need with more than $1.2 trillion in deficit spending already this year.

We really need to keep our eye on how Obama deals with the social, legal and moral issues. Coming from the hard left, expect him to move to advocate embryonic stem cell research (which is a legitimization of abortion); to loosen all abortion laws; to strengthen the homosexual movement and unions; to sign ‘hate crimes’ legislation so as to threaten anyone criticizing gays; to move against the 2^nd amendment in any way he can; to seek to shut down conservative talk radio with the Fairness Doctrine; to seek government mandates on ‘equal pay’ issues; to push radical environmentalism and its purely harassing lawsuits over guaranteed energy sources like nuclear power and oil; and to heavily subsidize windmills and the people invested in them like Al Gore (i.e., shift $150 billion in tax dollars to Gore & Co. over the next 10 years, as he said he would).

He also will strengthen the rights of criminals in courts; close down the Guantanamo detention facility and release its prisoners; make nice with various terrorist organizations; fold his tent if Russia threatens Poland or Ukraine; and block oil drilling everywhere in the United States.

They say that Obama has his hands tied by the economy. But he may end up using the economy in the opposite way that Clinton did - as a decoy to distract attention from the real ways that he intends to reshape the country. How he balances out the various competing pressures in his Democrat party to go left on every issue will determine if he get’s re-elected, and if the Democrats remain in power in the Congress.

Remember 1994.

Is the US Going in The Wrong Direction?

Time and time again, we are told that Americans believe that our nation is on ‘the wrong track’. Even before the recent financial crisis, this was said to be true. So let’s consider how we got to this ‘wrong track’ idea in the first place..

First, the media have been emphasizing and cultivating ‘wrong track’ for years for one reason only: In order to smear Bush. Negative news about anything and everything, especially the Iraq war, have been repeated over and over and over.

If Obama, Gore or Clinton had been running the country over the last 8 years with the exact same conditions, the media would have been painting a much rosier picture, just as the media will do that if Obama is elected, accentuating positive news at every opportunity.

In one poll in Upstate New York, consumer confidence jumped 10 points between October 2006 and December 2006. In the interim, a Democrat US congress had been elected. So nothing really changed except the perception, fostered by the media, that the Democrats were going to fix everything.

And despite the dreadful state of the economy in Massachusetts, the liberals in the media always manage to pin everything bad on Bush despite the fact that the state legislature is 85% Democrat, and its policies are decimating economic growth and opportunity. Businesses are closing or leaving, environmentalists have driven the cost of energy through the  roof, regulations and taxation are strangling the companies that remain, and thousands of skilled and educated people pack up and depart the state every year.

Let us now look at these ‘wrong track’ pronouncements that were being made two years ago.

In 2006, the housing market was booming, oil prices were low, unemployment was at historic lows, inflation was completely under control and the national outlook was generally pretty optimistic and peaceful.

What was troubling in 2006 was that the Iraq war was out of control, and so the media used it to agitate the public and to create the ‘wrong track’ scenario. The media simply spun the story of Iraq as a lost war, and that things could never get better. This was used to negatively color opinion about everything. In 2006, there also were growing concerns about rising health-care costs and about jobs leaving the country and going overseas, which persist today.

In comparison, the Iraq war today has disappeared as an issue for one reason - we have won it, and so the media do not wish to talk about it because it would make Bush look good. Oil prices were a source for end-of-the-world commentary in the summer of 2008, but they too have receded as an issue. Now the financial crisis is being used as a way to agitate the public on 'wrong track' just in time for the presidential election.

Let’s look back further. During the booming 1980s, Americans were reported to have been disturbed about Ronald Reagan’s tough tactics against the Soviets, agitated by the media to think that Reagan was going to start a world war.

It didn’t happen. We got world peace instead.

Europeans were agitated by the media in 1984 that Reagan’s drive to install American missiles in Europe to counter Soviet missiles pointed at Europe was going to lead to Armageddon.

Instead, through strength and resolve, Reagan policies led to the fall of the Soviet Union, much to the dismay of the media who were certain that Soviet communism was a permanent fixture on the world scene. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, three years after the media savaged “naïve” Ronald Reagan for imploring, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, the media could nary accept that this could be happening under the rule of the cowboy-actor that they had disdained for years.

In the 1990s, since we had a Democrat president in Bill Clinton, the media portrayed it as a wonderful, carefree era. And in fact the booming economy, inherited from Reagan and Bush, was performing well.

But there were many crises brewing that the media declined to report on. The dot.com boom and the tech bubble, two financial balloons, were getting set to collapse. Environmentalists were growing in strength, thanks to Clinton policies, and blocking our energy resources. Clinton was gutting the military, with spare parts for helicopters and jets in short supply (remember that?). Democrat trial lawyers were digging into every aspect of American life, profiteering for themselves and making life difficult for regular folks who were afraid of being sued over anything. In case you've forgotten, the case of the female who sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot happened in 1995.

And worst of all, terrorists were roaming America plotting 9/11, undetected by a complacent Clinton, while Bill himself was chasing Monica Lewinsky around his desk as if nothing whatsoever was wrong.

Yet the media acted, and still act today as if all was well in the 1990s. It was not.

So today we have upwards of 80% of Americans allegedly telling one poll that America is on the wrong track. Yet if Obama is elected, that number will magically drop to 40% by Spring even if nothing changes. Just watch.

Because the media template today is that somehow we must throw Republicans out of office because the country is on 'the wrong track'. Even up here in Massachusetts, where Democrats run the state lock, stock and barrel, the media template is that somehow Republicans are causing all the problems. And the ignorant populace believes it.

But how about the following 'wrong track' issues that are never discussed because they can be traced to the Democrats:

*How about our disastrous public schools? Is there any media big media exposes that the schools are on ‘the wrong track’ and that we have to completely overhaul the schools?

No, the media template is that we have to continue to give them more and more money in order to enrich the teacher unions and the Democrat party that run them.

Yet public education is the biggest ongoing crisis in our country. The schools are getting worse and worse and everyone knows it and everyone knows that the Democrats and their union friends are wholly responsible.

*How about taxation? Don’t most Americans believe that the 50% of their income that many are paying to federal, state and local governments is far too much, that we are on the ‘wrong track’ on taxation?

Of course they do, but taxes are never mentioned in ‘wrong track’ discussions because it might remind people of the Party of Taxation… the Democrats. And it might remind them that they are being overtaxed in the first place.

*How about our popular culture like Hollywood decadence and our television, music and films? Have they not degenerated into meaningless drivel that is literally harming our society?

Yes.

Wrong track?

Naaah. Wrong track only refers to stuff Bush does, not things from Hollywood liberals who donate heavily to the Democrat party.

*How about our rate of abortion, AIDS, promiscuous sex, sexually-transmitted diseases, adultery and other forms of degeneracy? Wrong track?

Naaah. That is part of America’s socialist anything-goes culture. If it feels good, do it. Europe has lot of that stuff. We should be more like Europe! They have fast trains and national health insurance!

Is our nation indeed on the ‘wrong track’?

That depends on what you think of as ‘wrong track’.

Consider that today in America people are living longer lives than ever; that “the poor” are well subsidized and often have air conditioning and own their own homes;  that we have clamped down on terrorist cells; that we have conquered many diseases; that clean air and water are everywhere thanks to advances in technology; that we have an abundant supply of cheap electricity; that we have abundant and inexpensive food; and mostly that we live in peace and freedom.

Yes, things sure are rotten around here.

We should never let the media tell us what to think. There are always things that are wrong, always have been, always will be. What the media want is for American to ignore the good things in America, and particularly to ignore all the really rotten things emanating from the political left – bad schools, over-taxation, degenerate culture and the rest - that they never wish to address.

The media agenda is to make us unhappy like they are, and to elect more Democrats who ultimately will make our underlying problems worse. What we should be most thankful for, however, is our freedom. Because although the media are doing their best to control our thoughts, we must start to  fight back and to show America where we really are on ‘the wrong track’.

Creeping Creepy Holiday

Halloween is coming around again and nobody seems to be suggesting that it offends anyone as many suggest every year that Christmas does. No, Halloween is a pagan, nondiscriminating celebration of ghoulishness and death, and so, being an increasingly liberal nation that embraces nondiscriminating ghoulishness and death over righteousness and piety, Halloween has become a member in good standing in our national pantheon of holidays.

Once upon a time, school children made scary stuff starting around mid-October. No longer. Like all holidays legitimate or otherwise, Halloween came earlier this year. We hardly get past Labor Day anymore when the fake pumpkins, the cheap costumes and those big bags of candy start to appear on store shelves. September is barely out by the time we start to see lawns festooned with gravestones, cobwebs, witches, mummies, skeletons, demons, owls, spiders and all the rest. Halloween stores have become big business. And the really scary part is that increasingly they are catering to adults, not just kids.

At a time when genuine Christian church attendance is falling - replaced by faux churches populated by leftist political activists - and faith in the morality and virtue of our Founding Fathers is on the decline, Halloween is creeping in on little cat feet. Under the radar, Halloween has been incrementally promoted by the media, by the entertainment industry, by atheists, on college campuses, by the urban left, by the pagans and the wiccans and the nature worshippers. Aw heck, it’s just fun in our stressed-out lives, they tell us.

Hardly…

The rise of Halloween is a reflection of our decline into a childish, dressed-up hobgoblin fest of masks and costumes. Public schools have become bastions of fright, while city parades are conducted “for the children” on the public dime with no apparent call for separation of church and state – the pagan and atheist church of Halloween, that is.

Halloween today is an extension of another potemkin village - Hollywood - which is a place that has psychological problems that are almost beyond comprehension. And for very good reason. Because when you put on a mask, whether in a Hollywood film or on Halloween night, you are avoiding the most important question in life: Who am I?

Halloween? Hollywood? Those words are eerily similar, aren’t they.

On Halloween, increasing numbers of normal people are joining oddballs, freaks, self-haters, nihilists, satanists and myriad other practitioners of witchcraft, juvenile play-acting and other dark arts. Anyone who has seen or heard about the dreadful spectacle of New York City’s Halloween parade through the heart of Greenwich Village can witness cultural decline firsthand. They don’t call it ‘gay Christmas’ for nothing.

And to think of Halloween as anything but darkness is foolish. The Halloween celebrated in America today originated as a pagan Celtic festival of harvest. October 31 was seen as the day that the dead could threaten the living. Bonfires were built and masks and costumes were worn to mimic the evil spirits or to placate them. Irish immigrants brought Halloween to America, much to the consternation of the Puritans already here.

Halloween now is the second most popular holiday in America for decorating after Christmas. Salem, Massachusetts, famous for its witch trials, is called the Halloween Capital of America while Anoka, Minnesota bills itself Halloween Capital of the World.

Halloween offers a time for people to get outside their daily lives. For the kids, that is supposed to be fine, but in the developing picture, it is troubling because it is including increasing numbers of adults. It is not an escape into high culture or into God-ly contemplation of our place in the world, however, but simply a really low-rent diversion. Halloween is being pushed by the secular left which wishes to use it as a way to further separate us Americans from our Christian roots, ostensibly in the name of fun.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Today, a new phenomenon has developed. Young girls are taking the opportunity of Halloween to dress provocatively, all to the delight of the sexualized culture that thinks of Halloween as yet another opportunity to avail itself of another masked pleasure. Which is what the entire 'pleasure culture' of the left is based on – escape from our true selves into a childlike world without difficult decisions to make or serious responsibilities to undertake. This all is rooted in the big-brother socialism that promotes holidays like Halloween as we cede our power as individuals to government.

The buildup to Halloween today is a months-long process of anticipation for the Big Evening (or evenings) when adults now are allowed to become the children that socialism wishes for them to be. Those costumes and pumpkins may look like the harmless vestiges of an ancient past, but today they are the hallmarks of a rudderless society that is drifting farther from its progressive and freedom-loving roots to one that hides behind disguises in order to escape the hard work of finding out who we really are.

Really Safe in Europe

A young gunman in Finlandentered his trade school recently in Kauhajoki and killed ten people and then himself. The gunman had been questioned the day before by police over a YouTube posting in which he had been seen firing gun. The attack included some sort of bomb which ended up burning several of the dead.

This was the second such killing in Finland within the past year. The Kauhajoki killer was said to have been fascinated by the 1999 Columbine massacre at a Colorado high school.

The YouTube posting included a message that said that “whole life is war and whole life is pain. And you will fight alone in your personal war.”

Finland has a relatively high rate of gun ownership owing to its rural hunting traditions. The gun purchase laws were changed after last year’s killing, with the minimum age raised from 15 to 18, but other laws remained unchanged.

Whenever a crime like this is committed with a firearm, like the spate of killings at American high schools and colleges over the last decade, the gun-control contingent rushes to proclaim that gun ownership must be restricted while ignoring the truth at the heart of the issue: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

What was known about the Finnish gunman?

That he was fascinated with the Columbine killers.

And what influenced the Columbine killers?

A Hollywood movie called Natural Born Killers starring ‘pacifist’ and ‘environmentalist’ Woody Harrelson.

The Colorado police even knew that the Columbine killers had posted death threats on the internet, but had done nothing. This is an example of politically-correct law enforcement declining to act on solid evidence for fear of…. pick a reason… invading someone’s karma, being judgmental, or any other of a myriad of leftist rationales.

Look at the statement from the Finnish killer: “Whole life is war and whole life is pain. And you will fight alone in your personal war.”

Where do we see this type of dark dialogue?

Certainly not in a Christian church. We see it in atheist pop culture, where kids learn that Western man is evil, that life is pain, that we are all in some sort of war. This comes right out of the playbook of left-wing nihilism from the bottomless violence of Hollywood and rock music, to depressed, suicidal youth spitting rage at 'the establishment', to a sense of hopelessness which all are manifestations of a God-less culture. Modern-day environmental paganism adds fuel to the fire telling us all that the world is coming to an end, with only man to blame.

So when a kid reflects all this in his thinking should we blame the gun?

Obviously not.

In what has come to be known as the Virginia Tech Massacre of April 2007, Cho Seung-Hui was well-known as a crazy man on campus. He wrote violent plays and was diagnosed as extremely troubled. But a judge decided he wasn’t crazy enough to have his name listed on a database that would have barred purchase of a gun. So he bought a gun and killed 32 people.

Normal people outside of the bubble of Virginia Tech would have picked up on Cho Seung-Hui. But these days, the laissez-faire attitude on the political left, and particularly on college campuses, is that any behavior is acceptable and who are we to judge. Many people at Virginia Tech knew about Hui, but nobody acted. They all were intimidated by the atmosphere of political correctness, afraid to pass judgment in a case where Hui should never have been able to buy a weapon, the exact type of restriction that gun-rights advocates favor.

What we have in all of these killings is a knee-jerk reaction from the political left that guns must be controlled. Yet the major media and the eggheads never question the leftist cultures in Hollywood and at Harvard that allow these pathologies to fester in the first place.

The Founding Fathers, in appealing to what is called Natural Law for our freedoms, believed that each person has the right to defend himself or herself. But when gun ownership is restricted among law-abiding citizens while criminals and crazy people have easy access to weapons of destruction, it puts the good people on an un-level playing field as they were on the 'gun-free' campus of Virginia Tech.

It is time to level that field, both physically and intellectually.

When a liberal tells you how wonderful and peaceful Europe is with its strict gun laws (Finland is an exception), you might remind them that Europe was the birthplace of fascism and communism; that Europe was destroyed twice in world wars in the twentieth century alone with 70 million killed; that 40 million were executed by their own governments in Germany and Russia; that Eastern Europeans and Russians were subjected to decades of slavery, deprivation and starvation under Soviet rule; and that only the United States was able to prevent the communists from conquering Western Europe after World War II.

Yes, us gun-toting, Bible-thumping Americans came to the rescue again. As usual.

Death in India  

An angry mob of fired workers at an Italian-based company in India attacked and murdered the CEO of the firm. The company, Graziano Transmissioni, which makes car parts, is located in a suburb of Delhi. The action was the culmination of a dispute between workers and management.

Lalit Kishore Choudhary was the victim. He was the married father of one.

The incident follows another in which thousands of violent Indian protestors halted construction work at a factory that was going to produce a world economy car called the Tata. The company has halted work on the Tata plant and seems poised to withdraw its investment.

These are examples of violent socialism at work. Some of the protestors involved at Graziano were believed to be outside agitators.

India followed the Soviet socialist model for decades after its independence in 1947 and was famous for its huge bureaucracy and its widespread poverty. Now that India has been making big economic gains under capitalism since 1992, leftist/communist agitators, often representing different causes (worker rights, land reform etc.), are trying to kill the transition because they do not want prosperity. They do not want it because they do not control it.

The Indian actions are intended to dry up outside capitalist investment in that nation, and it is working. Just a few incidents are having a huge impact and scaring investors away. This is part of the worldwide socialist movement to condemn capitalism and to return people to the poverty and bureaucracy of state socialism.

Much of the world has fallen into socialism/communism and many nations are becoming much poorer as a result. China is using capitalism only as a way to prevent total economic disintegration. Communist North Korea collapsed shortly after its founding in the 1950s while capitalist South Korea is one of the richest nations in the world. Meanwhile nations that are thriving under capitalist growth and prosperity are being threatened all over, like Georgia was threatened by the Russian invasion in August. 

Europe has a highly entrenched socialist bureaucracy and the dismal economic stats to accompany it. Growth is low, unemployment is high and the population is pessimistic. At the same time, all Europeans are addicted to the 'pleasure culture' of socialism where they work fewer and fewer hours, retire young, collect welfare for decades at a time, hang out at cafes criticizing America, decline to to take on the responsibility of marriage and family, and are refusing to even have children, leading to a huge population crisis in Europe.

The Indian violence is a typical tool of leftist agitators all over the world. They launch guerilla war against established governments, murder CEOs, interrupt business through labor actions, steal whatever they can, and generally seek to undermine capitalism in any way possible. Think of the American Mafia which is closely allied with the Democrat party though labor unions and urban political machines. These agitators know well that people overall will suffer economically, but that is of no importance. Their main goal is to entrench a powerful government clique that holds the power and the money, a clique of which they are part.

The United States was built as a nation free from an overbearing, taxing government. Our nation has been a model for the world, stopping world wars and genocide, distributing huge amounts of wealth to the needy and serving as a beacon of liberty. But leftists here are doing incrementally the same as they are doing in India. More taxes, more government, more regulation. There is no violence right now, but labor unions often have often used violence in the past. And in 2006 a vocal faction of the auto worker union in Michigan scared away a non-union Toyota engine and transmission factory, killing the possibility of thousands of jobs in a state with almost 9% unemployment.

Environmentalists in America are using a similar modus operandi to thwart the economy and to hide their real identity which is leftist and anti-capitalist. And the occasional use of arson by American environmentalists against car dealerships, housing developments and ski areas is an offshoot of the international violence of anti-capitalism.

Meanwhile Democrats in America are cheerleading our current economic problems and are trying to talk down our economy so they can then 'save' the nation with government handouts and programs that they control, as they do in poor cities across America. Hillary even is suggesting some "Great Depression era type of entity" to deal with the housing crisis, in order to instill more fear.

In summary, leftists are using every tool in the book to take control of the economy.

That is why we must be on guard for their tactics.

That Didn’t Take Long

On August 18, 2008, pro-American Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf resigned his presidential  office after a contentious 9-year tenure in which he seized power militarily and twice suspended the nation’s constitution.

On Saturday, September 20, 2008, terrorists said to be associated with Pakistan’s al Qaeda network set off a massive truck bomb filled with an estimated 1,300 lbs. of explosives outside the Marriot Hotel in the capital city of Islamabad, killing 53 and leaving a crater 25 feet deep in the street. The Marriott was a well-known gathering place for foreigners and the Pakistan elite.

The local arm of the Afghani Taliban movement also has been implicated in the attack, and it is theorized that they are working with al Qaeda.

Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said that the attack was an attempt to destabilize Pakistan’s fledgling democracy under the new president Asif Ali Zardari, who just hours before the blast had given his first speech to parliament since assuming office.

Zardari is the widower of twice-prime minister Benazir Bhutto (1988-90 and 1993-96), who was educated at Harvard, and who died in an assassination December 27, 2007 while campaigning for parliamentary elections on behalf of her left-of-center Pakistan Peoples Party.

Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was once prime minister of Pakistan who was removed from office in a 1977 coup and hanged in 1979. Corruption charges have shadowed the Bhutto family for decades.

Musharraf had been under attack from the Western press for years for his authoritarian rule and for his alliance with the United States and President Bush. Several attempts had been made on his life, and he is said to be in danger if he remains in Pakistan now that he no longer is in power.

But the vacuum left by Musharraf is going to be a tough one to fill, and one can only suspect that Zardari, as a leftist, may decide to play human-rights softball and will not have the will to confront the terrorists, or the support of the military to fight the extremists who inhabit Pakistan’s tribal areas and who permeate its society.

Zardari is said to be preparing to move Pakistan closer to real democracy, which of course should be encouraged. But Pakistan is a very dangerous place and this blast coming within hours of Zardari’s first speech to parliament obviously is an open challenge to his power. It didn't take long.

Many pro-Western rulers with strong arms have been criticized relentlessly in the American and world press and run from office and replaced by much worse. The Shah of Iran was the best example, the most pro-Western and, in the long run, pro-democracy choice among three vying factions in Iran, the others being communist and fundamentalist Islamic. The latter seized power in 1979, and the world has not been the same since.

Zardari should see this explosion as a wake-up call not to play patsy with the terrorists in Pakistan’s midst. Like the Democrat party in America which seems to think of Islamic radicals as a minor force to be dealt with as merely a criminal matter, Zardari is likely to underestimate the strength of the radicals in his midst. If he does not take them very seriously and does not gain the confidence of the Pakistani military, he may find himself suffering a fate much like that of the Bhutto family whom his leadership is representing posthumously.

It's a Boondoggle Coming… and Going

The mess that has produced the current financial crisis has been years in the making. For decades now university propagandists, the media, liberal politicians, social activists, economics professors and even business school titans have turned away from economic reality and to politically-correct sloganeering to cultivate the idea that the private financial system is a tool for social engineering, including a 'right' to home ownership.

Meanwhile conservatives always have cautioned that home ownership is a privilege for the thrifty and the industrious, and that ownership entails heavy responsibility.

No mind. The mantra from the left was that somehow home ownership must be made available to as many people as possible and we'll worry about the responsibilities later. Because at its core, socialism ultimately rejects the idea of personal responsibility and accountability in favor of nanny-state caretaking.

Legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, passed into law in 1977,  is defined on Wikipedia as "a United States federal law that requires banks and thrifts to offer credit  throughout their entire market area and prohibits them from targeting only wealthier neighborhoods with their services, a practice known as 'redlining'. The purpose of the CRA is to provide credit, including home ownership opportunities to underserved populations and commercial loans to small businesses."

Notice the class-warfare language: "...and prohibits (banks) from targeting only wealthier neighborhoods."

Everyone knows that banks have always lent in poorer areas, but cautiously. And for good reason. But anyone with  immigrant parents or grandparents knows that lesser neighborhoods have always been served by banks.  How else did these neighborhoods come into existence? Then legislation like CRA simply became a bludgeon to threaten banks to open up their vaults to all. Banks caved in rather than risking becoming targets of 'discrimination' suits that could be ruinous.

This was the type of intimidation that has led to the current crisis. Of course there are other factors, but laws like CRA were the basis for the negation of lending standards and disciplines by those stingy 'conservative bankers'. And this negation blossomed, the same way that taxation has incrementally crept into all phases of the American economy.

Legislation like CRA has been ruinous to many institutions including Delta Financial Corporation, a New York City-area lender that had on its board  Maggie Williams, who served as chief of staff for Hillary Clinton in her first term as First Lady of the United States. Williams served until Delta went bankrupt in December 2007.

Delta offered mortgages "to subprime, or less creditworthy borrowers,” said one news report.

Williams went on in January 2008 to become Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, just as James Johnson of failed Fannie Mae and failed Lehman Brothers went on to join the Obama campaign

Is there a connection between mandated lending, failed institutions and the Democrat party?

And by the way, which Wall Street hedge fund employs Chelsea Clinton?

Don't expect any congressional witch hunts in this crisis. There are too many Democrats involved!

Myriad other mandates and regulations essentially told the banking community that the 'shelter' in 'food, clothing and shelter' meant home ownership, not just a roof over your head.

In other words, over-regulation...

Add to this the idealist liberal mantra that every citizen is entitled to everything and you have the current housing crisis.

The fact is that millions of people at all different levels of income never are ready for home ownership - the mortgage payments, the upkeep, the taxes and insurance. It is a complicated process, risky, often stressful, and expensive too. Of course there are rewards in home ownership, but only for the wise and the diligent.

Meanwhile many simply have preferred to take the less risky path of renting. None of them today are losing their domiciles and all their equity for failing to pay the mortgage. Hey, not bad.

Owning a home is no guarantee of anything. The recent drop in housing values proves that. And the forced loan-making by government fiat, along with the politically-correct attitudes among those inside the contemporary banking industry combined to cook a toxic stew of irresponsible lending best summed up in the so-called NINJA loan – no income, no job.

No problem.

This could very well be the beginning of the end for responsible people in America who work hard to attain their dream. Today, the government is going to enter the mortgage market to the tune of $700 billion and buy bad assets to give the banks liquidity to loan again. Along with $200 billion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $85 billion for AIG and $29 billion for Bear Stearns, you would think we had money to burn.

Of course, the system has reached the point where there is not much option except massive government intervention. The credit system had sand in the gears and the government is the only institution with the wherewithal to free it up quickly.

Now that the government is going to buy all these mortgages, however, the Democrats are not about to stop. No siree. After causing much of this mess in the first place, they are now demanding that any authorization from Congress include additional financial assistance to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosures and other giveaways. In other words, after the giveaway culture undermined the mortgage system, the Democrats are using this opportunity to try to give away more cash and buy more votes.

It is likely that the final tab to the government will be less than $700 billion because sales of the bad mortgages assets could net the government a good return in the long run after the market improves. That would be nice. But we should never forget where this crisis came from in the first place.

This fiasco should teach us to stop thinking about the free market as someplace where some people get stuff for free and then, when they fail to live up to their responsibilities, they get more free stuff. This is the road to ruin.

Dangerous Precedent in the UK

A jury in the UK has decided that Greenpeace vandals were justified in damaging a coal-fired power plant because the plant is contributing to so-called ‘global warming’.

The Kingsnorth plant damage was excused by the jury under the 1971 Criminal Damage Act which states that there can be a “lawful excuse” to damage a building if it prevents a greater damage somewhere else. The original law was to be applied, for instance, to a case where a window might be broken to allow firefighters into a building to extinguish a fire, preventing the greater harm the fire might cause.

Enviro activists have repeatedly targeted Kingsnorth because a next-generation plant nearby is expected also to burn coal. Environmentalists claim that coal burning is causing so-called ‘global warming’.

The British government backs the new power station. The UK Environmental Secretary will decide later this year if the plant will be built.

The trial lasted 8 days and took testimony from American James Hansen of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) who spoke about the danger of so-called 'climate change'.

The damage was incurred when Greenpeace activists painted the name 'Gordon' on a plant chimney, part of a bigger slogan that never got completed. Gordon Brown is the UK prime minister.

$60,000 was spent to remove the graffiti.

This verdict should send a warning. This is the type of extremism that enviro activists have inflicted, often much more grossly, on private property, all in the name of their cause.

But this is outright trespassing and vandalism, while the whole cause of ‘global warming’ is merely a theory that has been disputed by tens of thousands of scientists worldwide. A recent global cooling trend has added fuel to that argument.

If conservative pro-life protestors burned an abortion clinic in the name of saving lives, there would be outrage. And while such an action would have an immediate cause-and-effect impact on the evil of abortion, it would never be tolerated and the government would step in to prosecute.

Yet environmentalists seem to believe that their causes are always just, no matter how obtuse, and they manage to get public sentiment on their side through media saturation on issues like so-called ‘global warming’.

Greenpeace activists said that the verdict “marks a tipping point” for the climate-change movement.

But this is more bluster from the left. In every field, socialism destroy jobs, wealth and prosperity  through zealous enviro rules, over-taxation and oppressive regulation. And now they are taking direct and destructive action. In the US, enviro extremists have burned housing developments, ski area facilities and car dealerships.

If this verdict is allowed to stand, it will embolden other activists to take their campaigns underground and to violate private property rights worldwide in the name of ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’, whichever term is fashionable for the moment.

Americans should be on guard for this type of extremism. It can only lead to destruction down the road, and chaos in our economy.

Today many major enviro activists are finally admitting that nuclear power is a safe, clean alternative to coal-fired power plants. Perhaps the protesters could channel their energies into proposing solutions like nuclear power rather than destroying property and cheering at their exoneration.

September 11, Seven Years On

September 11 is a new anniversary date in American history. For days leading up, newsreels and documentaries recount the tragic events. 9/11 induces somber reflection.

That day changed America and it should have. But then again 9/11 never should have happened. Despite repeated warnings from within and without, a laissez-faire attitude among certain elements in the governing classes led to death and destruction.

It is enlightening to watch the documentaries and to realize how easily these hijackers accomplished their deadly feat. It seems improbable to even contemplate the whole thing.

But it happened.

One of the heroes of 9/11 was British-born Rick Rescorla who became an American citizen, fought in Vietnam and then became security chief for Morgan Stanley, the brokerage firm that had offices in the World Trade Center’s South Tower, the first to fall on 9/11. In 1992, Rescorla warned about the potential for a truck bombing of the Trade Center garage by terrorists. It happened February 26, 1993.

When it failed to bring the buildings down, Rescorla repeatedly warned about a future attack from the air. On September 11, 2001, he died evacuating Morgan Stanley employees.

A minor player in the 9/11 drama was a ticket-counter employee at the airport in Portland, Maine who saw a disturbing hatred and anger in hijacker Mohammed Atta’s eyes as Atta boarded a plane for Boston - to connect up to a flight to Los Angeles - for the mission of a lifetime. But the ticket-taker dismissed his suspicions because in politically-correct America, no one is to be profiled, not even angry-looking Middle Eastern males in their 20s. Had America been on alert from the 1993 bombing, and had our intel agencies and police forces been on guard, such a feeling about Atta could have led to the tip that nixed the whole operation, or at least part of it.

But the American government under Bill Clinton did nothing after the 1993 attack. They tried the World Trade Center terrorists in civilian courts, treating them as mere criminals. In that venue, the trial revealed lots of information publicly that was helpful to the terrorist network, for instance showing that the US government was tracking bin Laden’s satellite phone calls. The calls stopped immediately.

After 1993, Bill Clinton could have asked his CIA and FBI to cooperate on terrorism. But his deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick was busy constructing the famous ‘wall’ between the two agencies, further weakening information gathering and sharing. In the meantime, Clinton repeatedly refused to retaliate against terrorist attacks against American interests in the Middle East and Africa. Or even to show much concern.

After all he was busy feeling up Monica Lewinsky in his office.

Just picture that. It is shocking.

Meanwhile, post-1993, the nineteen 9/11 hijackers infiltrated into the US, took flying lessons, moved about freely, took dozens of test flights on commercial airlines and noted each detail, and prepared for an elaborate mission that would have been rejected by Hollywood movie-makers as far too improbable for audience belief.

Of course, the attack itself happened under George Bush’s watch, and Bush bears some minor responsibility. But it was the long-term climate of apathy from 1993 to 2000 that allowed the attacks to occur, leaving Bush blind.

Today the Democrats are playing the same old tricks that led to 9/11. Bill Clinton, knowing his legacy has been irrevocably tarnished, has managed through his friends in the media to shift the spotlight from his failures. The New York Times has revealed every bit of anti-terrorist intel they can. Democrats nationwide wring their hands over the well-being of each militant that we capture. Errors in Iraq and Afghanistan are magnified. Victory is marginalized.

Every terrorist suspect at Guantanamo Bay is defended by liberals, and extended rights that in terrorist nations amount to the lopping off of a head. Our military is disparaged and hounded in the media. President Bush is relentlessly defamed and the Republican party, which has kept us safe from further attacks once deemed inevitable, is classified as a repressive arm of the Old World Order.

Meanwhile elite media ‘experts’ with names like Ford Fessenden of The New York Times appear periodically in the 9/11 documentaries to recount every detail that went wrong that day. This is to shift the spotlight from the fact that it was the media, the Democrats and their friends in the Clinton White House that allowed 9/11 to happen.

There are people who want September 11 to fade into history. Because whenever the events of that day are replayed, people are reminded that the world is a dangerous place. And that always redounds to the benefit of Republicans who care deeply about national security while Democrats  see only political opportunity to weaken the nation as they have since the 1960s.

Freddie, Fannie Symptomatic of Bigger Problem

The government takeover of taxpayer-sponsored The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. and The Federal National Mortgage Association is a symptom of a much bigger problem.

George Washington, along with all rational economists, warned that business must be regulated to some degree by government, but that the government never should set wages or prices. What has happened with Freddie and Fannie is exactly what Washington warned about.

By establishing taxpayer-guaranteed agencies that purchase mortgages without adequate government oversight, the government has essentially decided to backhandedly set the prices on mortgages. How? By guaranteeing them with tax money, the agencies have been allowed to buy loans that never would have been purchased without government backing. In other words, whatever the rate, we'll buy the loans. Any rate is acceptable. So the government is in effect setting the price. It is whatever price a borrower wants to pay or a lender wishes to charge.

Two major crises have gripped the housing market in the so-called mortgage meltdown. In the first, too-low mortgage rates set in the period after 9/11 by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged millions of people to take out loans which they could not afford to repay. This shows that the 'conservative banker' approach maligned by liberals in fact is correct: Don't lend money to every Tom, Dick, Mary, Sue and Harry.

Second, banks have been required for decades now by Democrat policy to lend money for houses in areas that were “redlined” (restricted because they were poor areas) by private banks. When those loans subsequently were made to poor people with low documentation of income or no documentation, those loans have gone south at a much higher rate than the rest. Purchased by Freddie and Fannie, they have added greatly to those agencies’ woes.

In related news the Big 3 automakers General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are seeking a $25 billion low-interest (4.5%) federal loan to tide them through the current economic slump.

But again this is nonsense because it amounts to a subsidy for the auto worker unions.

Why can't the unions give something back to the industry in wage, benefit and pension concessions?

Because unions never give an inch, that's why, and when the car makers default or ask for loan forgiveness, the taxpayers will be paying the freight while the unions continue to draw wages, benefits and pensions that most Americans would envy. Which is exactly why the car companies need the loans. These unions wages are slowly strangling the auto industry while workers live high on the hog.

Next time a Democrat tells you that we should loan money to whoever wants it, tell them that that idea has led us to the current disaster. The tab for Freddie and Fannie is now estimated at $200 billion. It will go higher. Much higher.

The taxpayers are again going to bail out government-sanctioned economic folly. Once Freddie and Fannie are straightened out and sold to the private sector, we should never make the same mistake again. And the auto companies should be instructed to re-negotiate with the unions and straighten out their own problems.

Why AIG Failed

Why did the insurance giant AIG fail?

The average observer would say that AIG was a big, capitalist insurance company that got in over its head.

Which is true. But the reason that happened is that the financial wizard who founded the company and ran it well for many years was forced from his post in 2005.

Who forced him out?

Eliot Spitzer did, the former governor of New York State who resigned in February in a prostitution scandal.

Before Spitzer was elected governor in November 2006, he was the state attorney general for 8 years. And Spitzer is a hard, crusading leftist who abused his post to pursue, harass, intimidate and prosecute private-sector businesses all over the state, especially Wall Street and New York City financial firms.

His tactics were well known to have targeted and hurt many good and honest people, which is a tactic of leftists everywhere, just as many in the media are trying to destroy Sarah Palin simply because they don’t like her.

One of Spitzer’s targets was AIG founder and CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg who was forced from his post as a result of Spitzer’s prosecution only to be exonerated after this action by Spitzer was seen for what is really was: An anti-capitalist witch hunt.

This happened many times over with Spitzer.

In fact this entire housing collapse is overwhelmingly due to the influence on our economy of socialism and people like Spitzer.

For instance, who would say that our universities, public schools, news media, entertainment industry, the arts etc. are the quality they were 50 years ago?

No honest person would.

So why is business any different? Go into any business institution today from your local bank to any major American corporation and you will often find Democrat/liberal presence and influence, sometimes heavy influence. It may not appear so on the surface, but it’s there. Often it is very subtle and sneaky.

Today, if you said you were a proud “conservative banker” operating on old-fashioned principles, you would be tarred with a big, nasty brush. Because to the media, the very word “conservative” is an epithet, even though it is the way banks stay in business - by being cautious in their lending practices.

Today, banking is politically-correct, liberal, feminist, postmodernist, metrosexual etc. And one of the mantras of these liberals today is that you loan money to whoever needs it according to socialist theory, that that is the “responsible” thing to do. No money down, no documentation on your income or your ability to repay.

Wall Street has many, many liberals and leftists in its ranks. Don’t ever believe otherwise. The former chairman of Goldman Sachs is far-left New Jersey governor John Corzine.

Then the government comes along and says banks must lend money to poor people, that you can’t “redline” certain neighborhoods. Those poor people, of course, would not ordinarily qualify for loans, but the modern, politically-correct banker says that that is not germane, just as the ‘new math’ says two plus two is whatever you think.

Then the government establishes secondary mortgage market agencies that will buy the loans that you made to the poor people, and will guarantee them. Then Democrats like Franklin Raines take over as CEO of one of those agencies, Fannie Mae, cooks the books, retires with more than $50 million, watches Fannie Mae drown, and joins Barack Obama’s campaign.

By the way, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are just welfare organizations disguised as mortgage agencies.

The fact is that capitalism needs to be and should be regulated. What has shredded our productive capitalist system is constant and intentional attacks by people like Spitzer, cronyism by Clintonites like Raines, the watering down of our financial system by leftist infiltration and government intervention, and government mandates to lend to anyone who wants money.

This last factor - easy credit - is a hallmark of socialist theory. And when “conservative bankers” try to stop it, they will be harassed by figures like Spitzer or required by the government to make loans they know cannot be repaid. Then when they make the loans, they pawn them off on the same government agencies that forced them to make the loans in the first place.

This is the real heart of the current economic crisis.

Democrats Use Words to Destroy

On Wednesday, October 1, Democrat Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada publicly said the following:

"We don't have a lot of leeway on time. One of the individuals in the caucus today talked about a major insurance company. A major insurance company -- one with a name that everyone knows that's on the verge of going bankrupt. That's what this is all about," Reid said prior to the Senate's approval of the $700 billion bailout bill.

This statement caused a panic on Wall Street with some big insurance companies seeing their stock price dive. Insurance companies already were under stress from bad loans that they had purchased in securities packages, as well as from their investments in troubled firms like Lehman Brothers, Wachovia and Washington Mutual.

After Reid’s comments, MetLife fell 16% after a 14% drop the day before, leading MetLife to issue a rebuttal statement specifically citing Reid’s comments. Other major insurers fell anywhere from 6% to 15% in share value.

A Reid spokesman responded that "Senator Reid is not personally aware of any particular company being on the verge of bankruptcy. He has no special knowledge about (a bankruptcy) nor has he talked to any insurance company officials" and that Reid “regrets any confusion his comments may have caused.”

Confusion? No special knowledge?

The question is: Is Reid fit to be a United States senator or is he too reckless? What are his real motives? What can the Senate do about people like Reid who cannot control themselves at a time of crisis in the financial industry?

This case is a reminder of the incident involving US senator Charles Schumer, another Democrat, this time from New York State, who publicly released a letter questioning the solvency of California’s IndyMac Bank, writing that Office of Thrift Supervision regulators were “asleep at the switch” over IndyMac’s “reckless” behavior.

Eleven days after the release of the letter, and after a run on its deposits sparked by the letter, IndyMac was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Schumer, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, was singled out in an OTS letter for sparking the run and killing off IndyMac. “In the following 11 days (after the release of the Schumer letter), depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts,” said an OTS statement.

The statement included a quote from OTS director John Reich: “Although this institution (IndyMac) was already in distress, I am troubled by any interference in the regulatory process,” a reference to Schumer’s actions.

Schumer tried to blame the whole thing on the Bush administration, as Democrats always do. But  in fact Schumer and Reid well know that words and letters from people at the highest levels of the federal government will reverberate around the financial markets in a time of tension. So we must start to look at their motives.

Are Schumer and Reid trying to destabilize the markets to insure that Obama wins in November?

It certainly looks that way. But this is not the first time that Democrats have sought to undermine American progress. They do it all the time, in every arena.

In April 2007, the same Harry Reid said about Iraq: “I believe that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week.”

Yet now, in October 2008, we are seeing clear victory in the Iraq war just as we will see a victory over this financial crisis as long as Americans do not succumb to fear and to the tactics of people like Reid and Schumer who are talking down our economy and the Iraq war for political gain.

In the latest Iraq victory the US military reported killing Mahir Ahmad Mahmud Judu’ al-Zubaydi, a senior Al Qadea leader on October 3, 2008. Al-Zubaydi is suspected of masterminding many of the deadly bombings that were rocking Baghdad at the time that Senator Reid was ready to wave the white flag.

So we must consider whether Democrats are willing to think about the long term on the economy or the war, or if they simply wish to exploit every opportunity for political advancement. After all, the war in Iraq, which has been very hard on the military and on the nation, finally has turned the corner. And it accidentally turned into a very fortuitous thing for America – a ‘shooting gallery’ for US forces, drawing top terrorists from around the globe to one place where many have been slaughtered.

If the US military suffered big losses of its top leaders as we have inflicted on al Qaeda, the Democrats would have been ten times as eager to throw in the towel. Yet when Al Qaeda loses hundreds or even thousands of front-line fighters and commanders, Democrats barely seem to notice. This is part of their strategy to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.

In another case, on May 17, 2006, another Democrat, US congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania  declared on national television that eight of our US Marines were “cold blooded killers”.

Murtha was commenting on an incident in Haditha, Iraq in which those Marines, following official rules of engagement, counter-attacked against an insurgent ambush on November 19, 2005, killing 24 Iraqis, including some civilians. Murtha was suggesting that the Marines were engaged in some kind of revenge killing of civilians.

In other words, Murtha was playing judge, jury and executioner before any Marines were even tried, denying our service men the same basic constitutional rights that Democrats like Murtha wish to grant to terrorist detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

If Bush had declared a single one of those terrorists guilty before trial as Murtha has done with our Marines, people like Murtha would have sought to impeach him.

After an investigation of the Haditha incident, six Marines were exonerated of any wrongdoing, one Marine officer had charges dropped, and Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt of Pennsylvania was exonerated on 3 counts of unpremeditated murder.

Murtha has shown no remorse for his outrageous statement, however, and the family of Sharratt is asking Congress to investigate Murtha, who has served 26 years in the House of Representatives.

Sharratt also is filing a lawsuit in federal court in Pittsburgh, claiming that Murtha’s statements were false and reckless and were repeated throughout the US media and the world media to the detriment of Sharratt and his fellow Marines. Ironically, Murtha was once a Marine.

Sharratt, who happens to live in Murtha’s congressional district, also is suing Murtha for slander. Another Marine, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, also is suing Murtha,

So from Reid to Schumer, and from Murtha to John Kerry’s unfounded accusations against our troops in Vietnam in 1971 testimony before the US Senate, we have many blatant examples of Democrats shooting from the hip, defaming conservatives, undermining our military and sending Wall Street into a panic and banks into insolvency. Yet they are never penalized, just as Ted Kennedy has never been penalized in any way for drowning Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick.

Why have not Reid, Schumer and Murtha at least been been reprimanded? After all, these are the same people who make laws for the rest of us such that anyone who makes any vaguely suspicious statement about liberal special-interest groups like blacks, gays or women are singled out for political persecution.

In his 1971 testimony, Kerry accused our soldiers in Vietnam of atrocities. But Kerry had no personal knowledge of those atrocities; he simply was repeating what he had heard. Meanwhile Murtha got his information from a false report in Time magazine while Reid had only heard about a major insurance company going broke, but did not have personal knowledge.

How can we trust these people when they play so fast and loose with the truth?

The Democrat party has a way with words and they use words to target their political opposition because liberals are people of words and finger-pointing and accusation.

Here's another example. When the insurance giant AIG failed recently, no media mention was made as to why: Because the left-wing attorney general of New York State, Democrat Eliot Spitzer – who ultimately became governor and then resigned in a scandal – went on a witch hunt against capitalist Wall Street figures like AIG founder Maurice Greenberg.

Greenberg was forced out of his company in 2005 and AIG subsequently was mismanaged and failed. Charges against Greenberg ultimately were dropped.

Yet there has been no apology from or prosecution of Spitzer, just as there have been no apologies, nor any accounting for the reckless behavior of Democrat figures like Schumer, Reid, Kerry and Murtha who have acted against the interests of the American economy and military in the interest only of their own political fortunes.

In April 2005, as Republicans were seeking to institute stronger oversight for Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored enterprise, Schumer said, "Things are good in the housing market. Why should we entertain radical change?"

In other words, the military and private-sector capitalist firms are incessantly targeted by Democrats at the same time that government firms are free to do what they wish and are protected by the same Democrats. And when they collapse, we all pay the bill and Democrats get off scot free.

This must end.

The Dog That’s Not Barking

Floods in the Midwest. Tornadoes in Carolina. Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike. Wildfires in California.

What is the common element in all these stories?

It is the dog that is not barking.

Which dog?

The dog called ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’.

Because just two years ago, each of these natural catastrophes would have been linked somehow to ‘global warming’. Today they are not. Things change.

In the orgy of ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ hysteria that swept the nation starting in 2005 - particularly with Al Gore’s movie and his Nobel Prize – we saw a media blitz rarely seen in our history. Magazine covers, news programs, documentaries, school indoctrinations and doomsday predictions were everywhere and they were universal: Man is killing planet earth.

Reporters managed to slip references to ‘global warming’ into many news stories no matter how off-message (i.e., “The tulip festival was rained out, some say because of global warming…”) Time and Newsweek covers showed us shrinking glaciers, while enviro groups raised untold millions on the mythology of wandering polar bears and submerged cities.

Now fast-forward to 2008. How many times during this presidential campaign have we even heard the words ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’?

Practically zero.

Even after this year’s hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and wildfires?

Practically zero.

Gore did manage to sneak the lie that “sea levels are rising” into his speech at Obama’s Denver acceptance without so much as a hint of question from media elites.

Yet there is not one shred of evidence anywhere on the globe that sea levels are rising.

So what has happened to the mythology of ‘global warming’?

It has become passé, that is what has happened. And this is the worst fate of all.

Since its inception, the enviro movement has promoted one smash-bang end-of-the-world scenario after another – the world is running out of oil; nuclear power will kill us; radon gas lurks in every basement in America; acid rain is killing all the lakes in the United States; the hole in the ozone layer is getting bigger; and finally, the biggest, most extravagant lollapalooza of all, that the planet is irrevocably and  unprecedentedly heating up and that man is causing his own demise.

This was accompanied by catastrophic scenarios about rising sea levels, shrinking ice sheets and baking farm fields unable to produce food.

And every word of it a lie.

It is important to remember that environmentalists are “passive” people. They create no wealth making cars or manufacturing furniture. They work in offices producing apocalyptic pamphlets; fly off to remote world locations to study the latest concocted evidence about this catastrophe or that; give speeches alerting the populace to their latest end-times scenario; and spend inordinate amounts of time garnering contributions to keep themselves employed and to keep all those cocktail party/clambake/gala dinner fundraisers fueled and running in order to get… more money.

Thus the Armageddon of ‘global warming’ has served them well. They raised a lot of cash and turned a lot of heads. For a while anyway.

But many, including Nikitas3.com, did not swallow the bait. Repeatedly it has been pointed out on this website that the phenomenon of ‘warming’, which, along with cooling, has occurred periodically throughout history, is simply part of a natural pattern of global climate shifting that has been observed for millennia.

Problem is that liberals always overplay their hand, and they simply inundated us with too much fearmongering. They then overstepped their bounds big time by using totalitarian techniques, i.e., believing that if they repeated the words ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ often enough like a propaganda loudspeaker in Tienanmen Square, that the public would come to universally embrace it.

The public did not.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. even claimed that anyone who challenged the idea of ‘climate change’ was guilty of “treason”

The public has resisted this type of blatant fascism.

Al Gore claimed that the science of ‘global warming’ is “settled.”

It is not. And any rational person knows that.

After a while, the fascination with this type of hysteria begins to dim. People have seen Gore’s movie, they have heard the pleadings of environmentalists, they have imagined the worst, and they have decided that it does not add up. They look at the global climate, and for every piece of evidence that seems to point to ‘warming’, rational folks see another piece that points to a cooling planet.

One of Gore’s worst PR disasters was an over-hyped ‘warming’ prediction given in New York City on the coldest day in years.

Gore now is on a crusade to sign up more ‘warming’ alarmists though a TV ad blitz that directs people to his website. Financed by his ultra-rich backers who helped him amass him his $100 million fortune, the website is attempting to further influence debate. It would be interesting to find out how well this campaign is succeeding.

One thing’s for sure: If it is not going well, Gore will never admit it.

Perhaps there is another smaller wave of ‘warming’ hysteria coming down the pike. But major ‘climate change’ legislation failed this year in the US senate, and is a sign of the times. People pay attention to these enviro extremists when things are good because they don’t have other things to worry about.

When the economy sputters and gasoline rises to $4 a gallon, people have better things to think about than an unproved theory promoted by people with only their own interests at heart.

Calif. Train Wreck Raises Old Questions

The recent wreck of a Southern California commuter train, killing 25 passengers, raises some old questions not necessarily about rail safety, but about how America should approach rail transit.

A total of 135 people were injured, including 81 in critical condition. Many bodies were said to have been crushed into the metal of the train’s interior.

The accident happened after the Metrolink commuter train apparently missed a red stop signal and entered onto the main line where it hit a Union Pacific freight train head on. The accident happened on a curve as the UP train was emerging from a tunnel.

The passenger train was said to have been traveling at 40 MPH.

The crash was the deadliest in the United States since September 22, 1993 when an eastbound Amtrak Sunset Limited train hit a misaligned bridge over Big Bayou Canot near Mobile, Alabama, killing 47.

Metrolink is a Los Angeles-area commuter service that carries 45,000 passengers daily.

The issue in this crash is: What should be the role of railroads in contemporary American life?

Most citizens do not know that America has the best, most dynamic and most efficient railroad system in the world, carrying freight. Europeans, whose railroads move primarily passengers with big government subsidies, are amazed at the efficiency of American freight service at no cost to the taxpayer. Europe suffers from high levels of truck congestion on its highways because its railroads move so little freight.

Our system carries 25% of America’s freight, or 1.8 trillion ton-miles of freight per year (one ton of freight moving one mile is one ton-mile) and requires no government subsidy but actually employs about 250,00 people and pays taxes to the government. The Big Four major Class 1 freight railroads in America today are Union Pacific and BNSF operating mostly west of the Mississippi; and CSX and Norfolk Southern in the East.

The industry generates gross revenues of about $40 billion annually including The Big Four, regional railroads and short lines.

While some passenger train tracks are owned and maintained by Amtrak, like those between Boston, New York and Washington, many Amtrak trains and some commuter trains run on tracks that are owned and maintained by freight railroads.

Which raises the question: Whose rails are they anyway?

And which is the best use of these rails?

Today, Amtrak is demanding more and more in subsidies (it needs $5 billion and more just for essential infrastructure improvements) to move a very small number of people. Amtrak sells about 22 million tickets per year, while American airlines sell about 750 million tickets, and the private American intercity bus system sells about the same number as the airlines. And the fuel savings of Amtrak are little. It has about the same fuel efficiency as cars on trips over 70 miles.

So Amtrak is hardly the essential tool of American transit that it portrays itself. While Amtrak is valuable in congested areas like the Northeast corridor (Boston to Washington) and between some other big cities like Los Angeles-San Diego, its long-distance, cross-country trains only exist because of political pressures to “serve” certain states and congressional districts. They are very inefficient trains that require the highest levels of government subsidy per ticket and run exclusively on private freight railroad tracks, causing delays for the Big Four which already are carrying record amounts of cargo.

On those long-distance runs - which carry relatively few Amtrak passengers because most long-distance traveler fly - Amtrak trains are supposed to have precedence over freight trains even though Amtrak runs on their tracks.

But freight railroads have their own business to tend to, and cannot always accommodate Amtrak. This is why so many long-haul Amtrak trains have such a terrible on-time record; because they are repeatedly held up by freight train movements.

In the case of the Metrolink crash, Metrolink was running on the same tracks as Union Pacific. Since Metrolink is a local commuter service and covers short distances, it certainly has a high level of precedence over Union Pacific freights on the same tracks.

But the question remains: Should subsidized passenger trains run on the same tracks as profit-making non-subsidized freight railroads like Union Pacific? Is this not causing delays on UP and the other crucial freight lines, causing the freight railroad industry to lose valuable time and efficiency? Which is the best use of their tracks?

Are not the freight railroads more valuable to our economy in moving cargo efficiently and without subsidies?

The only conclusion is that it is time to get rid of long-distance Amtrak trains, reduce Amtrak subsidies, ultimately sell Amtrak to the private sector and limit commuter train access to busy freight train tracks.  Perhaps these commuter lines can build their own tracks, or buses can be used for the Metrolink passengers just as efficiently.

Hurricane Hype

The mild outcome of Hurricane Gustav should give us all pause. From the dire warnings as the storm formed in the Gulf, to the mass evacuations, to the cancellation of the first day of the Republican National Convention schedule, the whole thing was a product of the hair-trigger response that nervous-nellie America is on today thanks to our contemporary media.

One week before Gustav hit, Rush Limbaugh warned on his radio show that this storm was brewing and that  it was going to hit during the GOP conclave in Minnesota. And from that moment on, the welfare of the people of the Gulf Coast took a back seat to media cheerleading that the hurricane would disrupt the Republican convention. And so it did.

Not only did it do that, but leftists like Michael Moore welcomed it, as did a former chairman of the Democrat party. They both suggested that God was punishing the Republicans.

Talk about mean spirits!

Republicans have been playing defense on this convention-cancellation type of nonsense for decades and it is time for it to end. Intimidated by the media, they have been ignoring the absurdities of liberals like Al Gore telling 30 million TV viewers in Denver that “sea levels are rising” (which they are not) and knuckling under to the media barrage about everything from Katrina to the price of gasoline.

Did any feminists stop their whining because of Gustav? No.

Did the Democrats stop handing out Other People's Money because of  Gustav? No.

Did gays stop having wild sex because of Gustav? Hardly.

Did any politicians in Barack Obama’s Chicago interrupt their corruption because of Gustav? No.

Were football games, drag races, baseball matches or Labor Day barbecues canceled because of Gustav? No.

The only thing that really needed to be stopped was the Republican National Convention, which Nikitas3.com said was unnecessary and represented the GOP again caving in to the media (see editorial below posted Friday, August 29).

The Hurricane Hype also got intensified for another reason: Because Obama’s polls continue to slip. After his boilerplate speech before 80,000 in Denver, Democrats began realizing that Obama’s messianic persona and theatrical hyperbole are not winning Americans over. By Labor Day, one poll, Zogby, had McCain 2 points up.

So Dems needed to pull every trick in the book to switch the subject, from trashing John McCain’s vice presidential pick Sarah Palin to ginning up Hurricane Gustav in order to marginalize the GOP convention.

Palin's announcement that her unmarried daughter is pregnant can hardly be a positive development. But the daughter will adhere to the principles of her Christian upbringing by bringing the child to term and marrying his/her father.

Remember what Obama called such  a child... "a mistake"... as if to suggest abortion. Some news outlets even reported that Bristol Palin would keep the child, suggesting it is but one of several options rather than the right thing to do.

It is time for the Republicans to get some backbone. When asked breathlessly by some Ancient Media inquisitor if the convention would be cancelled, they should have replied from the start: “No, we have business to attend to.”

After the fizzling of Gustav, the GOP is continuing its convention. And this Hurricane Hype is going to backfire on Democrats. They know that Obama is losing momentum and that Sarah Palin may be the next Ronald Reagan, this time in a skirt. This terrifies the “big tent” Democrats who may find that their tent is shrinking because they are not speaking to the American people, but only to each other.

List of Deadly Sins Grows by 7

The Seven Deadly Sins, listed by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th Century, now has been expanded by the Vatican to 14.

Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti has declared that the new Sins include pollution, genetic engineering, accumulation of wealth by the few at the expense of the majority, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice, according to the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

Said the Monsignor, “New sins have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.”

And while this certainly may not seem overly significant, it is, because it represents the ongoing usurpation of history by people with a modern-day agenda that leans to the political left.

The seven original sins are pride (belief in one’s own abilities without recognizing the grace of God); envy (jealousy of others’ traits or abilities, status, money or circumstance); gluttony (wants beyond one’s needs); lust (a desire for pleasure of the body); anger (the rejection of Christian love in favor of wrath); greed (a desire for material wealth); and sloth (the avoidance of physical and spiritual work). These Sins refer to individuals.

The Church offers Virtues to combat those original Sins including prudence, temperance, courage, love and faith, along with humility, abstinence, chastity, patience and diligence.

But beware. The new Sins no longer are personal, but are political and social in nature and they reflect the trend in our media-centered world to reject simple and straightforward concepts of law, justice and goodness - as in the Ten Commandments - in favor of endless new interpretations that micromanage every aspect of life with specific details, all wrapped in the cloak of socialist idealism.

In fact the expanding list of Sins is much like the expanding interpretations of, say, freedom of speech, in which myriad individual examples of expression (cursing, pornography, gratuitously treasonous speech etc.) are defined and re-defined - always with a leftist political bias - while watering down the straightforward and original intent of that freedom.

That “pollution” would become a deadly new Sin is totally relative. What is “pollution”? Is “pollution” acceptable to allow people to have a higher standard of living? Is burning wood to cook food in a poor nation exempt? Or will nuclear power in wealthy nations be seen as “pollution” even though it actually produces much less pollution per person and per meal than burning wood?

Just watch how this new Sin is manipulated to work against the interests of the advanced nations, particularly in the capitalist West.

Is “genetic engineering” a bad thing?

Apparently, according to the new list. But just ask billions of poor people around the globe whose food supplies have been vastly increased by genetically-engineered crops.

This demonization of genetic engineering will be used a bludgeon against the advanced nations and against the use of modern science for the common good, i.e., another criticism of the West and its technologies.

What about the accumulation of wealth, ostensibly by “the few”? Go to any communist nation and you will find a few leaders at the top with Swiss bank accounts and all the luxuries while the people live in misery. Will they be criticized?

No, this new deadly Sin will be used as a selective tool against rich people in the Western capitalist nations, where their wealth is part of higher living standards for all. This will happen while giving a pass to the ultra-rich socialists like the Hollywood elite whose gross displays of wealth are among the most appalling examples of selfish materialism ever, with TV shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous glorifying them.

Yet these elites will be forgiven their genuine greed for one reason only: Because they preach the socialist ideology that the new Sins codify.

Drug dealing? That always has been a sin, according to sensible people.

Yet whoever has said that drug dealing is a good thing?

Liberal leftists in America and Europe, that’s who. Law enforcement in America has been fighting drugs for generations, while liberals have been promoting drug use and drug dealing. Remember the 1960s, anyone?

And who is financing drug dealing around the world except, among others, marxist Castro in Cuba, the communist guerillas in Colombia, and Hugo Chavez, the leftist dictator in Venezuela. Will they be singled out for criticism? No.

Abortion and pedophilia? Conservative Christians and other decent people always have known these to be the worst of sins. Yet leftist groups around the world have been normalizing abortion and pedophilia for decades. The far-left American Civil Liberties Union has been aiding and abetting the North American Man-Boy Love Association, a pro-pedophilia group, for years now. And who supports unfettered access to abortion but the Democrat party in America. Will they come under new scrutiny? No.

And what about the new Sin of “causing social injustice?”According to the worldwide media and intellectual classes, it is only capitalism and Christianity that cause social injustice while worldwide socialism/communism fixes it.

Yet socialism/communism in fact is the leading cause of social injustice in the world, with its accompanying poverty, corruption and denial of individual rights and private-property rights in return for the well-being of a few at the top of these societies.

In the increasingly liberal Catholic Church, with its billions in Vatican wealth, its huge pedophilia scandal, and its all-too-frequent support of worldwide socialism, this declaration of new Sins is a politically-correct feint that will put the church in the good graces of the worldwide media, which is exactly the point. Forever and ever now, Monsignor Girotti will be seen as a superstar. His statement accompanying the declaration of the new Sins even mentions “globalization”, the free-trade bugaboo to socialist protectionists.

That Girotti included abortion and pedophilia in his declaration is two things: First it is only an obvious restatement of ideals that Christians historically have accepted (although today, it might be seen as a belated cover for the Catholic pedophilia scandal). But more important, it is a dodge to make the world believe that the Church is being even-handed with this new list.

But this is nonsense. Because liberals know that abortion rights are not threatened anywhere in the industrialized world, while every day, “corporate polluters” and “genetic engineers” are under threat of prosecution and media harassment. This trend will continue with the blessings of the church.

Ditto pedophilia. The socialist left worldwide supports the lowering of the age of sexual consent, which has been gradually introduced to societies in Europe and places like the Philippines, where the age is 12. And this personal trend will be conveniently ignored in favor of the new political Sins of 'global warming', 'globalization' and other imminent 'crises' like genetically-engineered food.

So really this new declaration is a sly political calculation that is intended to institute new taboos that are political in nature, and not personal. This is like Democrat lawmakers in every state in America ignoring our social bedrock of existing laws while seeking to pass more and more politicized laws in order to give themselves legitimacy and power and to micro-manage every aspect of life in a way that they favor. And this is the great travesty of this declaration.

What it really is intended to do is to offer the world a new politically-correct, leftist agenda legitimized by the Catholic Church, much as churches everywhere in the Western nations slowly are marginalizing biblical teachings in favor of subjective notions like “peace" and "social justice” and environmentalism, which are political and economic ends, not spiritual ones directed at uplifting society person by person. And this trend has only one closing scene and that is to increase the power of worldwide environmentalism/socialism at the expense of faith and justice, hope and temperance, and all the other Virtues.

Women Lie, or Do They?

In a book published recently by St. Martin’s Press in New York, author Susan Shapiro Barash said that females lie “more cleverly and successfully than men” on an array of subjects from overspending to infidelity.

“Women lie as a survival technique, but also to get what they want,” Barash writes in Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie.

Barash claims in her survey of 500 females conducted through internet questionnaires that 75% lie about how much money they spend, 50% lie about the realities of motherhood, while 60% had cheated on their husbands while using what Barash called the “betterment lie”, that their husbands were better off not knowing the truth, for instance, that she had fallen for another man.

More than 80% of the surveyed females were said to engage in “beneficial lying” by telling tales about themselves that were not true so as to cover up an aberrant behavior.

Barash also claims that urban females use what is called the “competitive lie” about money and family in order to make themselves look better, while some females lie to themselves, as Hillary Clinton did, in denying that her husband was having an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Others lie to save face at times when their reputations could be damaged.

Interestingly Barash’s book emerged around the time that ultra-feminist Gloria Steinem told an audience while stumping for Hillary Clinton that John McCain’s status as a prisoner of war for five-and-a-half years in North Vietnam - during which time he was repeatedly tortured and even heroically refused early release so that he could remain in solidarity with his fellow prisoners - was no qualification to be president. “I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification for president? I don’t think so,” said Steinem.

This type of contempt and sarcasm is utterly uncalled for and shows Steinem for what she is; dishonest, disrespectful, uninformed and untrustworthy.

Steinem continued: “Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and had been a POW for eight years. (The media would ask), ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive',” said Steinem to laughter, apparently referring to women being blamed for everything that goes wrong(?!)

This is simply nutty agitprop.

In another part of the speech, Steinem said that Hillary Clinton’s First Lady role might finally lead people to admit that “say, being a secretary is the best way to learn your boss’s job and take it over.”

Come again?

She also said: “I am so grateful that she (Hillary) hasn’t been trained to kill anybody. And she probably didn’t play war games as a kid.”

Yes, that is a good thing, Ms. Steinem.

She added: “A majority of Americans want redemption for racism, for our terrible destructive racist past, and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive. I don’t think as many want redemption for the gynocide” (referring to mass killing of women, allegedly in some parts of the world).

The Clinton campaign repudiated Steinem’s anti-McCain remarks, but should have repudiated all of feminism if Steinem, and Ms. Barash, really mean what they say.

All this talk about women lying and Steinem’s hallucinatory speechifying really comes out of one thing and that is chaos, which is a disordered way of thinking among people on the liberal/left side of the political spectrum where Clinton and Obama reside.

Because modern-day feminism, reflected by both of these examples, really is a trip into a psychedelic world in which all common sense is jettisoned in favor of a radical, intellectual paradigm where “women” are alternately loved and hated, maligned and praised in a topsy-turvy and extremist universe of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, the type of world you enter when a female - or anyone else, for that matter - starts to think about herself for too long as they do in our universities, in feminist think tanks, and in Manhattan salons.

What we are witnessing is a New York-centered narcissist complex, where feminists deign to speak for all women without even considering that maybe their weird interior monologue is revealing certain types of “women” for the loonies they are, unchecked by any manly presence in their lives and in their brains. Steinem’s rambling was a sterling example of the output of feminism today… paranoid, fantastic, irrational and irrelevant to the lives of ordinary women across the fruited plain.

Perhaps this would be a good time to reflect on who “women” really are, versus these "females" in Senator Clinton's New York.

A “female” is a Steinem-type liberal who may lie like heck, act emotionally and disrespectfully, act selfishly, expect instant gratification, talk crazy and be easily swayed by socialist idealism. Think Barbra Streisand or Rosie O’Donnell.

“Women”, on the other hand, are conservative in nature, are honest, work alongside men rather than confronting them, and think like a mature man's mind does with a desire to be rational and realistic, to see the “big picture”, to think long-term, and to seek self-interest only when it coincides with the common good. And by the way, real women love their husbands and children. Think Laura Bush or Margaret Thatcher.

The bombast coming out of New York City today is an unnerving mix of anger, hysteria, and self-infatuation, all reflected in the conflicted persona of the modern-day feminist. This is why feminism loses its appeal after about age 25, when most real women decide they’d rather be married to Gary than to Gloria.

The Clinton campaign's repudiation of Steinem is the real story here, but it did not go far enough. Whatever happens on the Democrat side, they are going to have to deal with the extremists in their party, people whom Democrats have been cultivating for decades and now will have to reckon with if they indeed ascend to power. And dealing with fringe liars and fruitcakes may be more than even the most hardened Democrats are prepared for.

RIP WFB

William F. Buckley, the founder of modern American conservatism and its owner’s manual, National Review magazine, died February 27 at the age of 82.

Mr. Buckley laid the paving stones in the 1950s for the rise of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, a decade in which the nation’s intellectual classes and media publicly were sneering at conservatism in favor of utopian socialism.

Born the sixth of 10 children to wealth in New York City, Buckley swam against the tide of so many sons of privilege by upholding the ideals of Christianity and capitalism.

He was educated in England, France and New York. He was drafted into the Army in 1944 and worked briefly for the CIA after his discharge.

Buckley went on to Yale University, graduating in 1950. He then wrote his seminal work God and Man at Yale, a scathing review of political correctness, false scholarship and other leftist tendencies that predominated at the school. A typical biased media critique, this one in Saturday Review, said that the book “has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night.”

Buckley was one of the few who defended Senator Joseph McCarthy for alerting the nation to the presence of communists in America.

In 1955, he founded National Review.

Throughout his career, Mr. Buckley confronted the leftist establishment through his newspaper columns, On the Right, and his television show Firing Line. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1965 and received 13.4% of the vote. He is noted to have quipped that if he had won, he would have demanded a recount.

With the rise of Ronald Reagan, Buckley and his wife became celebrity political superstars. He continued to serve as editor of National Review until his retirement in the early 1990s. His last Firing Line show was taped in 2000.

Mr. Buckley also loved sailing and the harpsichord, and wrote many other books including a series of popular spy novels with the protagonist Blackford Oakes.

He did not coddle Republicans when they became too liberal, however, falling out with Nixon over wage-and-price controls, with Ford over his refusal to meet with Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and with Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker, whom he disdained.

Buckley’s brand of conservatism rejected anti-Semitism, and the type of individualism propounded by Ayn Rand. Buckley occasionally surprised his supporters by favoring Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal Treaties, and the legalization of drugs.

Buckley truly represented rebellion, not in the faux-1960s style in which adherence to a new leftist establishment was falsely labeled “rebellious” but at a time in the 1950s when he set sail against the overwhelmingly liberal tide of the New Deal established 20 years earlier.

William F. Buckley’s fearlessness, candor and certainty set the mold for the rise of the new conservatism in America. These qualities, which run counter to the group-think, deceptions and squishy vagaries of socialist thought, allowed Buckley to establish a new paradigm that focused on that which is real, not ideal. And that is his great legacy. He will be missed. But of course he always will be with us.

Passing the Prime-Time Trash

Flipping through the channels, as is a habit of Nikitas3.com in order to gauge where our culture is going,  I recently came across a prime-time network TV show that was shocking in its vulgarity. I don’t know the name of the show, but the so-called “star” was named Charlie Sheen, son of far-left Hollywood activist Martin Sheen.

Shown on CBS, I stopped surfing when I heard a female character call a male character a “goofy, clueless bastard”. Since it was only 7:43 in the evening on a Thursday, I realized that this language was being used in prime time when children could be watching.

The next few minutes of this program were eye-opening for those of us who do not subscribe to this trash on a regular basis. In it, the Sheen character admitted that “I slept with Miss Pasternak”, a reference to the teacher of a young boy who was to appear in the next scene of this so-called sitcom. Audience titters abounded.

When the young boy arrived a moment later, the Sheen character said to him, “Go to school and we’ll act like this never happened”, in reference to the sexual relation with the boy’s teacher.

The boy responded dryly, “Like the Cub Scouts all over again,” followed by uproarious audience laughter.

In a scene a few moments later, several jokes were exchanged about a piece of rubber novelty-store dog excrement, and shortly thereafter, a busty “Miss Pasternak”, cleavage well exposed,  made some joking references to the hand of God being on her and directing her to the caddish Sheen. And that was all I could take.

Over and over again, we are told by “the media” that low morality, pornography, adultery and the resulting social chaos are just harmless fun, and that it does not hurt anyone, and heck, who would want to be prudish like those silly Christians who attend church on Sundays. Yet if you look carefully, you will notice the elite billionaires in the media and elsewhere across liberal America typically maintain their marriages and their families intact because they well recognize the dead end in the social disintegration that they are suggesting to millions of  “other people” out there in TV land with shows like the one mentioned above.

And this disintegration abounds in our society - in our schools, in our media, on the internet, in the behavior of Bill Clinton - and is implied in our rewritten history books that refuse to even acknowledge the existence of God or the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.

The Catholic Church, turning more liberal every day, practically has been consumed by two waves of scandal involving homosexual pedophilia among only about 1% of its priests. And while thousands of good Catholic children were brutalized, this same church today is moving ever closer to the liberal/gay positions on loosened morality, marriage and other social issues. This obvious contempt for the ruined lives of their own children shows an ostensibly Christian faith drawn into the tempest and consumed.

In a recent report in The Oregonian newspaper, out of Portland, Oregon (the report can be read in full at

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf/base/news/1203227713317430.xml&coll=7 

reporters Amy Hsuan, Melissa Navas and Bill Graves exposed a labyrinthine process in which public schools  “pass the trash”, or simply shift around teachers that sexually harass or molest young students, much like the corrupt Catholic Church did with its offending priests over a period of 30 years.

The report starts with the case of Kenneth John Cushing, a Salem, Oregon public school teacher who was charged with repeatedly touching girls’ buttocks. Cushing signed an agreement to resign, while officials at the Salem-Keizer school district agreed to cover for Cushing in any reference requests.

Cushing’s deal was one of 47  – called “passing the trash” - that the paper was able to confirm. Said the report: “During the past five years, nearly half of Oregon teachers disciplined for sexual misconduct with a child left their school districts with confidential agreements.” The report says that districts “promised cash settlements, health insurance and letters of recommendation as incentives for a resignation.”

Now just a minute! Are we fully understanding what is being done here!?

This is what is being done: The school districts are using taxpayer funds to pay off the offenders to get them out of the districts.

Said the Oregonian report, “Oregon public school officials say an educator suspected of sexual misconduct gives them few options. If they fire the educator, they may face a costly legal battle with teachers unions lawyers. Putting an employee on paid leave is also expensive because the commission takes, on average, nearly 16 months to complete investigations.”

Sixteen months?!

In the private sector, of course, employee manuals cover sexual harassment for pages at a clip, all at the urging of leftist/feminist groups. Someone accused of harassment  in the private sector is taken to the HR office, asked a few questions and fired on the spot if there is good reason to believe the allegations. No severance. No sweetheart deals. No recommendations. Yet in a leftist bastion like public education, action hardly can be taken without union intervention and massive bureaucratic stalling.

In the Cushing incident, the teacher eventually ended up at a private all-boys school in New Hampshire where the headmaster expressed satisfaction with Cushing and said he would remain employed there.

 The key point here is this: The American educational establishment, both public and private, is liberal, and it protects its employees against offenses that routinely are prosecuted in the rest of the private sector.

So what do these two cases -- the prime-time trash on CBS and “passing the trash” in public schools – have in common? It is this: Most of the entertainment industry and most  schools are owned lock, stock and barrel by the liberal left. They perpetuate trash that reaches into our living rooms every evening, and protect trash that may be teaching in our schools.

That the Sheen character in the TV sitcom is said to be having a sexual relationship with a schoolteacher is only expected. Art indeed imitates life. But life imitates pop culture, too, and the moral destitution of this entertainment-education complex (like the military-industrial complex we are warned about day after day) needs to be protested.

With homosexual activists at the University of Massachusetts placing gay pornography in a window where passing children were said to be able to view it, and with UMass officials unwilling to take action, we see a society sinking deeper into the abyss.

That Sheen would appear in a profane, smut-laced prime-time “comedy” is in itself scandalous. And the “writers” who create this nonsense recently went on strike and should have stayed that way. That Americans would be "missing" this stuff during the strike is a sterling example of how our society has traded virtue for a cheap suit. And the materialist leftists among us who have invaded our churches, our schools and our living rooms are only too willing to sell them that suit, at a handsome profit, that is, and in exchange for our souls.