Monday, September 30, 2013

Video: Justice Scalia on Capitalism, Socialism, and Christian Virtue

Video: Justice Scalia on Capitalism, Socialism, and Christian Virtue:
Earlier this month, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave a lecture at the Lanier Theological Library, in which he explored the values of capitalism and socialism and their relative consistency with Christianity and the common good. While not asserting that either system is inherently “more Christian,” he does comment on the extent to which Christian principles are able to participate in each. He states:
Read more on Video: Justice Scalia on Capitalism, Socialism, and Christian Virtue…

The post Video: Justice Scalia on Capitalism, Socialism, and Christian Virtue appeared first on Acton Institute PowerBlog.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

The Renewable Fuel Standard is Another Taxpayer-Funded Bailout

The Renewable Fuel Standard is Another Taxpayer-Funded Bailout:
by Ken Blackwell: We’re all paying more at the pump. It’s hurting consumers and dangerous for the fragile economy. And, it’s because of a Washington handout to corn farmers and big Wall Street banks – all disguised as a measure to promote renewable energy and clean-burning fuels.

The Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) mandates an ever-increasing floor of ethanol be mixed with gasoline. The bill, which was expanded under President Obama, ensures a baseline level of demand for ethanol, distorting the market and sending the price of corn substantially higher. That’s because gasoline refiners have to purchase ethanol, regardless of the price.

So, corn prices tripled, which has factored its way into the prices of other agriculture products. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the impact of the RFS is so broad that ethanol subsidies account for 10-15 percent of the rise in overall food prices. In terms of the overall economy, the RFS is expected to cause a decline of $770 billion in GDP in 2015 alone. That’s real economic activity, which translates to real jobs and incomes for Americans throughout the country.

And, hardly anyone in Congress or the Obama administration thinks the current law is working. The Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by leftist environmentalists, said that it does not “foresee a scenario in which the market could consume enough ethanol […] and/or produce sufficient volumes of non-ethanol biofuels to meet the volumes of total renewable fuel and advanced biofuel as required by statute for 2014.” So, in other words – Washington has once again imposed unachievable burdens on the private sector.

But what may be worse than this indirect subsidy to corn farmers is the way that big Wall Street banks are exploiting it at the expense of consumers. That’s because if a gasoline refiner cannot meet the demands of the RFS, it can purchase credits, called renewable identification numbers (RINs), in a “marketplace.” But unlike transparent marketplaces like Amazon, the market for RINs is opaque and dominated by speculators with no interest except driving the price higher.

The New York Times recently reported that, “the price of the ethanol credits skyrocketed 20-fold in just six months.” A credit that went for 7 cents at the start of the year traded for $1.43 in July, according to Bloomberg. And that price is simply passed along to consumers at the pump – a large factor keeping gas prices above $3 per gallon nationwide for 1,000 consecutive days.

But Congress has approached the RFS from a weak position, intimidated by powerful lobby groups who like these handouts. Though the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fred Upton (MI), has assigned four members to find a solution, just one – Rep. Steve Scalise (LA) – has called for full repeal. The others – Reps. John Shimkus (IL), Lee Terry (NE) and Cory Gardner (CO) – are calling for “reform.” Such reform could even get attached to the must-pass bill that will raise the debt ceiling. According to recent reports, that could even include a one-year delay to the RFS mandates.

While a one-year delay will certainly help the stagnant economy, it does little but push the can down the road. As long as the RFS exists, it will damage the economy. Congress is just debating the degree to which they will let that happen. Conservatives in Congress need to stop trying to save the RFS – and repeal it in its entirety. Doing that will relieve some of the pain at the pump, stop the increase in food prices and save Americans $770 million in economic activity in 2015.
----------------------
Ken Blackwell is a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, an undersecretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a former Ohio Secretary of State and State Treasurer, and former Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and a contributing author to the ARRA News Service.

Tags: RFS, Renewable Fuel Standards, mandates, Taxpayer-Funded Bailout, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, ethanol mandates, repeal, Ken Blackwell To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!

Are Americans Stupid?

Are Americans Stupid?: By Alan Caruba

On the conservative side of the political spectrum, we frequently refer to liberals as “low information voters”, a nice way of saying they are stupid. From their point of view, however, we are the stupid ones. And not merely stupid, but evil.

The divide between conservatives and liberals can be seen in the outcomes of the many polls and surveys that are announced on a daily basis. The numbers are depressingly the same; ranging from 40-40% or 50-50%, depending on how many respond that they don’t have an opinion. There is, moreover, what I call the “thirty percent syndrome” of reliable liberal responses no matter what the issue may be. They are the hard core.

There is, however, a critical difference between stupidity and ignorance. All of us are ignorant about something or many things. I surely am. I am in awe of people who can make things or fix things. I appreciate it when someone demonstrates expertise that informs me about a topic.

If you Google “Americans + stupid” you will discover that the subject of whether Americans are stupid generates a significant number of news items and articles. For example, in late February, Reuters reported on a speech Secretary of State John Kerry gave to students when he was visiting Berlin. While discussing America’s virtues, such as tolerance of other points of view, he said, “The reason is, that’s freedom, in America you have a right to be stupid.”

Kerry, who I have always regarded as a dim bulb, inadvertently spoke a truth about the way those currently in high office, the President, his Cabinet members, and staff regard Americans. Those who oppose their policies and legislative agenda are “stupid” and, if the President is to be taken at his word these days, Republicans are “extremists” and other pejoratives. He is a master of the propaganda technique of repeating a lie often enough until it becomes “truth.”

I find it depressing to find that so many of our elected representatives display their ignorance on a daily basis. It is depressing to know that officials appointed to positions of great responsibility in our government see it only has an opportunity to impose some ideology or agenda that is disconnected from science or from any facts that support their machinations.

Let me say that I have long regarded Barack Obama as stupid. His incompetence manifests itself daily. He cannot speak without the assistance of a Tele-Prompter. He has zero experience with the way people make a living or run a business. He has zero experience regarding military affairs and appears to have no knowledge of history. His lack of knowledge about economics has left the nation with the highest debt and deficit in its history, and millions unemployed.

Obama is currently campaigning to make the low information voters believe that Republicans in Congress want to “shut down the government” and this is patently untrue. Speaker of the House, John Boehner, now daily repeats that Republicans in the House do not want to shut down the government, but are addressing whether to defund Obamacare. There’s a difference, but Obama and his minions will repeat and repeat and repeat the lie. In truth, most Republican leaders in Congress know that defunding is a fool’s dream.

The single greatest example of stupidity in America today is the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—a law that is increasing unemployment, forcing others into part-time, unemployment, and denying physicians the right to practice medicine while stripping patients of their privacy, and will ultimately deny care to some judged ineligible due to age or a previous condition.

On September 17, Jonathan Jacobs, the director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics and chairman of the Department of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was published in The Wall Street Journal. “As Education Declines, So Does Civic Culture.”

Noting the “laments from graduates” that emerge with student loan debt and “wondering if their studies have prepared them for jobs and careers” Jacobs expressed the opinion that “A less familiar but even more troubling problem is that their education did not prepare them for responsible civic life.”

That is a very nice way of saying that, by the time many reach college, they are poorly prepared for that level of “higher” education and too often pick up a diploma because colleges and universities these days are frequently just giant sausage factories that exist to process students through while squeezing every dollar out of them. The problem begins, however, in kindergarten with a thoroughly dumbed-down educational system.

Jacobs acknowledges this saying, “The trouble begins before college. Large numbers of high school students have faced so few challenges and demands that they are badly unprepared for college.”

“Even after three or four years of undergraduate education, many students,” said Jacobs, “still cannot recognize reasoning when they encounter it.”

Reasoning is a cognitive function that employs facts and analysis. Much of what passes for political discourse from the White House and Democratic politicians these days is based on emotion no matter what the issue may be; whether it is gun control or invading Syria.

Conservatives are denigrated for actually pointing to the Constitution and suggesting that what is being proposed is forbidden by it. If, however, the intended audience has never read the Constitution and has a warped or inadequate understanding of American history, that kind of demagoguery works.

“A great many graduating students have little idea of what genuine intellectual exploration involves,” said Jacobs. They have passed through all phases of the educational system lacking the capacity to think through, not just the issues of the day, but have failed to acquire the most basic skills. He noted that employers frequently discover that “many college graduates can barely construct a coherent paragraph and many have precious little knowledge of the world—the natural world, the social world, the historical world, or the cultural world.”

These college graduates are often the sons and daughters of a generation of college graduates who likewise were regurgitated into the world with a comparable lack of knowledge and skills.

How many times has Jay Leno gone onto the street to ask people questions about events and personalities, only to demonstrate how abysmally ignorant they are? This kind of street theatre is repeated all the time in YouTube videos. A recent one asked people to sign a petition to have Karl Marx run for office!

“The cost to America of failing to reverse the trend toward trivializing education will be more than just economic,” said Jacobs. “It will be reflected in social friction, coarsened politics, failed and foolish policies, and a steady decline in the concern to do anything to reverse the rot.”

The late comedian, George Carlin, once said, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” I thought of that when I heard that Barack Obama had been reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2013
Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

Spending binge before shutdown?

Spending binge before shutdown?: Washington Post:

As Congress fights over the budget, an agency spends $562,000 on artwork


It’s “use it or lose it” time as agencies make a blitz of expensive decisions in an attempt to spend their allotted funds by Sept. 30.
This should be an embarrassment to the Democrats, but probably will not be.  It is an example of the fact that there are large potential saving in every aspect of government.  The sequester has not stopped the bleeding and Nancy Pelosi's suggestion that there is nothing left to cut looks ridiculous.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

The Government's Endless Orgy of Spending

The Government's Endless Orgy of Spending: By Alan Caruba Thursday, September 26, 2013
This appeared here and I would like to thank Alan for allowing me to publish his work. RK
I frequently marvel that a loon like Nancy Pelosi could have become Speaker of the House and is currently the House minority leader. Recently she said, “The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make. It’s really important that people understand that. We cannot have cuts just for the sake of cuts.
This is dishonesty on a galactic scale. It also provides an insight into why, short of the mandatory sequestration that went into effect last year when Congress could not come to any agreement on any cuts, the government continues to spend money in ways that are just short of criminal.
In July, a Rasmussen poll determined that 62% of likely voters thought the government should cut spending in response to the nation’s economic problems. That percentage was actually down from the previous month’s 65% and was the lowest support for reduced spending since August 2012.
That same month, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that 83% of Americans disapproved of the job performance of Congress. Approval of President Obama’s job performance was closely divided between 45% approval and 50% disapproval.
There are any number of think tanks and citizen’s organizations that keep tabs on government spending, but their periodic reports and news release seem to have no impact whatever. That’s something that members of Congress and others inside the Beltway know.
At a time when Republicans and Democrats will lock horns over raising the debt ceiling and the President thinks that any effort to defund the Affordable Care Act is the result of the Republicans “messing with me” and not a reflection of how widely disliked Obamacare is, it is instructive to look at just a few of the ways public funding is being regularly and routinely squandered in ways that are obscene.
As just one small example, one good way to save taxpayer dollars would be to shut down the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is spending $5.7 million on a project to develop card games, videos and other “educational” programs “to engage adult learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change.” The Climate Change Educational Partnership (CCEP) was established by Congress in 2009 and, to date, it has already spent $46 million on the “threat” of something that doesn’t even exist, global warming.
One of the NSF’s grants went to a study of what motivates workers, love or money? It cost $179,784. Another NSF grant, $2.25 on Tasmanian Devil facial tumors. This is an animal native to an island off the coast of Australia nowhere else. Part of another a half-million dollar grant was used to develop a video game the stimulated a high school prom. The NSF funded $350,000 to Purdue University to study how golfers could improve their game.
The NSF may take top honors for insanely wasteful programs and projects, but there is hardly a single department of the government that does not do the same thing. All that whining and wailing about sequestration was really about having fewer dollars to waste and fewer people with which to waste it.
For example, the Transportation Security Administration lets 5,700 pieces of unused security equipment sit in storage in a Dallas, Texas warehouse. Worth $184 million, it costs the TSA $3.5 million annually to lease the space.
As Obamacare expands the role of the Internal Revenue Service and we learn how some of its administrators targeted, denying or delaying, a common tax-exempt status to conservative groups routinely granted to all manner of other kinds of organizations, let us not forget the $4.1 million the IRS spent in 2010 on a lavish conference for employees.
The Department of Agriculture awarded a $149,000 grant to researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey to study how to eliminate the “freshman 15” extra weight that these students pack on when they can eat anything and as much as they want.
Morocco must have one heck of a good lobbyist because the Labor Department spent $1 million there to improve “gender equality” in the workforce there. The State Department spent $450,000 to develop “green jobs.”
Dave Ramsey, who advises people on radio, TV and in print on how to manage their personal finances, has said, “The fact is that government can get out of debt the same way you get out of debt. You quit borrowing money. You quit spending. You balance the budget. But to do all of that, you’ll need to make some sacrifices.”
The only reason sequestration went into effect was because a blue-ribbon panel of members of Congress could not agree to any reductions in spending.
Now we must endure a few weeks of meaningless political haggling to increase the debt ceiling while the government continues its orgy of senseless spending on projects and programs like those noted above.
© Alan Caruba, 2013

Quotations of the day

Quotations of the day:
….. are from Thomas Sowell on medical costs, free lunches, free red tape, etc.
1. If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system?
2. Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences.
Politics deals with the same problem by making promises that cannot be kept, or which can be kept only by creating other problems that cannot be acknowledged when the promises are made.
3. There is no free lunch– even though politicians get elected by promising free lunches. A free lunch in medical care is one of the most dangerous illusions of all.
4. Do you seriously believe that millions more people can be given medical care and vast new bureaucracies created to administer payment for it, with no additional costs?
Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free red tape. Bureaucrats have to eat, just like everyone else, and they need a place to live and some other amenities. How do you suppose the price of medical care can go down when the costs of new government bureaucracies are added to the costs of the medical treatment itself?
And where are the extra doctors going to come from, to treat the millions of additional patients? Training more people to become doctors is not free. Politicians may ignore costs but ignoring those costs will not make them go away. With bureaucratically controlled medical care, you are going to need more doctors, just to treat a given number of patients, because time that is spent filling out government forms is time that is not spent treating patients. And doctors have the same 24 hours in the day as everybody else.
When you add more patients to more paperwork per patient, you are talking about still more costs. How can that lower medical costs? But although that may be impossible, politics is the art of the impossible. All it takes is rhetoric and a public that does not think beyond the rhetoric they hear.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Muslims need to confront Muslim evil

Muslims need to confront Muslim evil:
With this weekend’s massacre by Muslim terrorists at a mall in Nairobi, Kenya, and Muslim terrorists killing about 80 Christians at a Christian church in Pakistan, most people wonder what, if anything in addition to a continuing war on terror, can be done to minimize the scourge of Islamic terror.
The answer lies with Muslims themselves. Specifically, it means that Muslim religious leaders around the world must announce that any Muslim who deliberately targets non-combatants for death goes to hell.
I arrive at this answer based on something that I have long believed about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.
I readily acknowledge that the situations are not the same. The Jews of Europe were not annihilated by Catholics in the name of Catholicism; whereas the Christians, Muslims and Jews who are massacred by Islamic terrorists are murdered by Muslims in the name of Islam.
I also readily acknowledge that many of the attacks on Pope Pius XII for his alleged inaction and even collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust are animated by individuals who hate Western religion generally or hate the Catholic Church specifically. Pius XII was not “Hitler’s Pope,” as one best-selling book on Pius XII is titled.
Moreover, Pius XII lived in Italy during World War II, in a fascist dictatorship that began as Hitler’s ally and ended up being the target of Nazi atrocities. This was not the case with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, who lived in the safety of a free country 6,000 miles away from Germany, did nothing to save the Jews of Europe and even sent a boatload of Jewish refugees from Hitler back to Europe. Yet the critics of Pius are silent about Roosevelt.
Nevertheless, Pius could have done more to at least slow down the Holocaust. And I say this recognizing that Italy’s Catholic clergy saved many Jews, and that Pius, to his credit, had to be aware of this. What he could have and should have done was to announce that any Catholic – and any Christian for that matter – who in any way helps in the murder of innocent Jews is committing a mortal sin and will not attain salvation. In other words, he or she will go to hell.
This would have had no impact on the many Germans and other Europeans who had no belief in God or religion, but it would have had an impact on many who did.
I believe the same thing regarding Muslim terror. Muslim leaders – specifically, every imam in the world who is not a supporter of terror, the leaders of the most important Sunni institutions, such as the Al-Azhar Mosque and University in Cairo, and religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and the in Gulf states – must announce that any Muslim who participates in any deliberate attack on civilians goes to hell.
This must be announced as clearly and as repeatedly as, for example, Muslim condemnations of Israel.
Just as the promise of 72 virgins animates many Muslim terrorists, the promise of hell would dissuade many Muslims from terrorism.
Whenever non-Muslims ask Muslim organizations about Muslim terrorism, these organizations trot out the various anti-terrorism statements they have issued. But these are largely useless because: a) they are usually issued by Western Muslim organizations; b) even when they are issued by Middle Eastern Muslims, they almost always include condemnation of “state terrorism,” which is Muslim-speak for condemnation of any use of force by Israel; and c) these statements usually also condemn non-Muslim terror, as if Christian or Jewish or Buddhist terrorism is as great a threat to humanity as is Muslim terrorism.
Therefore the statements that need to be made by every Muslim teacher, school, mosque and organization that does not support Muslim terror must be unequivocal. They need to state that any Muslim who targets any civilian for death – whether that civilian is Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu or of no religion – goes to hell.
In addition, there need to be large Muslim demonstrations against Muslim terrorism. I understand that Muslim clerics who would organize such demonstrations in the Muslim world might be risking their lives. But what about Muslims in America and Europe?
There have been huge Muslim demonstrations against cartoons depicting Muhammad and any other perceived “insult” against Islam. But I am unaware of a single demonstration of Muslims against Muslim terror directed at non-Muslims.
And if morality doesn’t persuade Muslim leaders to issue such a statement and organize such demonstrations, perhaps self-interest will. To just about everyone in the world outside of academia and the media, Islam is not looking good. Muslim leaders should be aware that with Muslims burning Christian churches and Christian bodies in Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Egypt and elsewhere, and the regular massacring of innocents by Muslim terror groups, the protestations by Muslim spokesmen that “Islam is religion of peace” are beginning to wear thin. For a religion that seeks converts, this is not a positive development.
On the other hand, perhaps not that many Muslim religious leaders do believe that Muslim terrorists are going to hell.

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Shocker: New EPA Coal Regulations Might Not Actually Be About The Environment

Shocker: New EPA Coal Regulations Might Not Actually Be About The Environment: DRAGLINE QUEENSHere’s another data point to suggest that the Obama administration’s environmental agenda may have more to do with politics than the environment. The EPA has announced tough new carbon regulations for new coal-fired power plants. These are regulations so extreme they couldn’t pass a Democrat supermajority in Congress, so the Obama administration is pushing ahead...

Top American in Vatican: Deny Communion for Pelosi

Top American in Vatican: Deny Communion for Pelosi: The Vatican's highest-ranking American said that Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and other Catholic politicians who support abortion should be denied communion.

CAIR Receives Millions From Foreign Muslim Donors, Hides Donations Using Network of Shell Organizations…

CAIR Receives Millions From Foreign Muslim Donors, Hides Donations Using Network of Shell Organizations…: I’d be more surprised if they didn’t take money from fanatical overseas Islamists. Via Daily Caller: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) conceals donations from overseas through a series of shell organizations, according to documents from court actions involving the Muslim advocacy group. Since its founding in 1994, CAIR has presented itself to American Muslims [...]

The Problem Is Obesity Not Hunger (Thoughts On The Food Stamps Debate)

The Problem Is Obesity Not Hunger (Thoughts On The Food Stamps Debate):
Throughout history, politicians have fabricated crises to justify their own solution to the crisis they themselves dreamed up. History is strewn with non-existent crises – the population bomb, global cooling, resource depletion,  freon destroying the ozone layer, and so on  – that threaten destruction unless the government acts. The U.S. “hunger crisis” is the latest in a long line of such relics.

The current hysteria over the House bill to cut food stamps by $40 billion over a decade  (see Krugman, Free to Be Hungry) will be framed against America’s “hunger crisis” fabricated by the powerful “hunger lobby.”  Democrats will use the “hunger crisis” as a cudgel to beat those who favor cuts in food stamps into bloody submission. How can any decent person favor cutting aid to hungry families, who, according to the crisis mongers, constitute one out of six of our neighbors? Few politicians have the fortitude to withstand the onslaught and the “crisisists” will likely win. A non-crisis will be “solved,” as real facts and real crises are ignored.

Facts are the enemy of the “crisisists.”  Therefore, we hear few of them, and the facts we hear are distorted beyond recognition. In this case, the facts speak for themselves: The United States, and increasingly the affluent world, has a crisis not of hunger but of obesity. The hunger crisis is a clever fabrication to serve political and commercial interests. If the hunger lobby’s facts are true, our hunger rates equal those of the poorest African and Asian countries.

A quick review of the real facts:
Fact 1: More than one of three Americans is obese.  
On the other hand:
Fact 2: One in a thousand adults and one in ten thousand children do not eat for a whole day on an average day.
Fact 3: Almost a third of a million Americans die annually of obesity. Obesity is the second leading cause of preventable deaths.
On the other hand:
Fact 4: Deaths from hunger (due primarily to eating disorders) are too rare to be recorded in mortality statistics.
(Readers can check my sources: Journal of American Medical Association, USDA Economic Research Service, S-9, West Virginia Health Statistics Center.)

go to forbes.com

Common Core: A Lesson Plan for Making Compliant, Non-Thinking Citizens

Common Core: A Lesson Plan for Making Compliant, Non-Thinking Citizens:
Common_Core
“A fool with a tool is still a fool.  A fool with a powerful tool is a dangerous fool.”—Michael Fullan, international school reform authority, on the powerful “tool” that is Common Core
As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there are several methods for controlling a population. You can intimidate the citizenry into obedience through force, relying on military strength and weaponry such as SWAT team raids, militarized police, and a vast array of lethal and nonlethal weapons. You can manipulate them into marching in lockstep with your dictates through the use of propaganda and carefully timed fear tactics about threats to their safety, whether through the phantom menace of terrorist attacks or shooting sprees by solitary gunmen.  Or you can indoctrinate them into compliance from an early age through the schools, discouraging them from thinking for themselves while rewarding them for regurgitating whatever the government, through its so-called educational standards, dictates they should be taught.
Those who founded America believed that an educated citizenry knowledgeable about their rights was the surest means of preserving freedom. If so, then the inverse should also hold true: that the surest way for a government to maintain its power and keep the citizenry in line is by rendering them ignorant of their rights and unable to think for themselves.
When viewed in light of the government’s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost to Americans—in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process, etc.—the debate over Common Core State Standards, which would transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, becomes that much more critical.
Essentially, these standards, which were developed through a partnership between big government and corporations, in the absence of any real input from parents or educators with practical, hands-on classroom experience, and are being rolled out in 45 states and the District of Columbia, will create a generation of test-takers capable of little else, molded and shaped by the federal government and its corporate allies into what it considers to be ideal citizens.
Moreover, as Valerie Strauss reports for the Washington Post: “The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core’s ‘college and career ready’ performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college.”
With so much money to be made and so many questionable agendas at work, it is little wonder, then, that attempts are being made to squelch any and all opposition to these standards. For example, at a recent public forum to discuss the implementation of these standards in Baltimore County public schools, one parent, 46-year-old Robert Small, found himself “pulled out of the meeting, arrested and charged with second-degree assault of a police officer” simply for daring to voice his discontent with the standards during a Q&A session with the superintendent.
Even calling this event a forum is disingenuous, given that attendees were not allowed to stand and ask questions. Instead, attendees were instructed to write their questions on a piece of paper, which the superintendent would then read and members of a panel would answer. In other words, there would be no time or room for debate, just a one-sided discussion. And this is what life in our so-called republic of the United States has been reduced to, a one-sided monologue by government officials who neither care about what “we the people” have to say, nor are they inclined to hear us out, just so long as we pay their taxes and abide by their laws.
“Don’t stand for this. You are sitting here like cattle,” shouted Robert Small to his fellow attendees as he was being dragged out of the “forum” on the Common Core standards. “Is this America?”
No, Mr. Small, this is no longer America. This is, instead, fascism with a smile, sold to us by our so-called representatives, calculating corporations, and an educational system that is marching in lockstep with the government’s agenda.
In this way, we are being conditioned to be slaves without knowing it. That way, we are easier to control. “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude,” writes Aldous Huxley. “To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”
The purpose of a pre-university education in early America was not to prepare young people to be doctors or lawyers but, as Thomas Jefferson believed, to make citizens knowledgeable about “their rights, interests, and duties as men and citizens.” As Jefferson observed, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
Yet that’s where the problem arises for us today. Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights, largely due to an educational system that does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Many studies confirm this. For instance, when Newsweek asked 1,000 adult U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29% of respondents couldn’t name the current vice president of the United States. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why America fought the Cold War. More critically, 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6% couldn’t even circle Independence Day (the Fourth of July) on a calendar.
A survey of American adults by the American Civic Literacy Program resulted in some equally disheartening findings. Seventy-one percent failed the test. Moreover, having a college education does very little to increase civic knowledge, as demonstrated by the abysmal 32% pass rate of people holding not just a bachelor’s degree but some sort of graduate-level degree.
That Americans are constitutionally illiterate is not a mere oversight on the part of government educators. And things will only get worse under Common Core, which as the Washington Post reports, is a not-so-subtle attempt “to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum.” One principal, a former proponent who is now leading the charge against Common Core, quickly realized that Common Core was not about educational reform as President Obama would have us believe. Rather, it’s about pushing a curriculum wrapped around incessant pre-testing, testing and test prep that teaches students how to take tests but not how to think, analyze or learn.
As with most “bright ideas” coming out of the federal government, once you follow the money trail, it all makes sense. And those who stand to profit are the companies creating both the tests that will drive the school curriculum, as well as the preparatory test materials, the computer and software industries, and the states, which will receive federal funds in exchange for their cooperation.
Putting aside the profit-driven motives of the corporations and the power-driven motives of the government, there is also an inherent arrogance in the implementation of these Common Core standards that speaks to the government’s view that parents essentially forfeit their rights when they send their children to a public school, and should have little to no say in what their kids are taught and how they are treated by school officials. This is evident in the transformation of the schools into quasi-prisons, complete with metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, and surveillance cameras. Equally arrogant are school zero tolerance policies that punish serious offenders of a school weapons policy the same as a child who draws a picture of a gun, no matter what the parents or students have to say about the matter. The result is a generation of young people browbeaten into believing that they have no true rights, while government authorities have total power and can violate constitutional rights whenever they see fit.
Yet as Richard Dreyfuss, Oscar-winning actor and civics education activist, warns: “Unless we teach the ideas that make America a miracle of government, it will go away in your kids’ lifetimes, and we will be a fable. You have to find the time and creativity to teach it in schools, and if you don’t, you will lose it. You will lose it to the darkness, and what this country represents is a tiny twinkle of light in a history of oppression and darkness and cruelty. If it lasts for more than our lifetime, for more than our kids’ lifetime, it is only because we put some effort into teaching what it is, the ideas of America: the idea of opportunity, mobility, freedom of thought, freedom of assembly.”

Bipartisan Corporate Welfare

Bipartisan Corporate Welfare:
On June 7, the Senate Banking Committee voted to back FredHochberg’s second term as president of the U.S. Export-Import Bankwithout bothering to ask the Obama administration about the futureof that expensive, inefficient New Deal–era agency. The vote, inwhich 28 Republicans joined 54 Democrats in supporting Hochberg,was not a good sign for anyone hoping that the GOP’s latestpromises of fiscal restraint would prove more trustworthy than allthe broken promises before.
The bank, also known as “Ex-Im,” provides taxpayer-backed loans,loan guarantees, and insurance to foreign companies, such as AirChina, to buy products from some of the richest U.S. exporters,such as Boeing. It is a textbook example of Washington’s bipartisancorporate welfare. Yet only two Republicans, Sens. Tom Coburn(R-Okla.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), voted against Hochberg. In anonline statement Toomey explained his reasons for withholdingsupport. “I opposed his nomination due to serious concerns that theEx-Im Bank is using taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to help somecompanies at the expense of other U.S. companies,” he said. “Theway to help U.S. exports is to reduce the tax and regulatory burdenon businesses, not to pick winners and losers.”
This was not the first time, of course, that Republicans havefailed such a test. Last year they voted to reauthorize the Ex-Imcharter through 2015 and increase the bank’s portfolio (andtaxpayers’ exposure) to $140 billion from its current limit of $100billion.
That increase followed a four-year expansion of the bank’sannual lending, from $12.6 billion in 2007 to $32.7 billion in2011. In 2012 Ex-Im provided an unprecedented $35.8 billion intotal authorizations—up more than 9 percent from the year before.The number of Ex-Im clients has jumped from 23 in 2008 to 59 in2012, while the number of companies whose products were purchasedwith bank-backed funds grew from 647 in 2007 to 789 in2011.
What are we getting for all this money and risk? A more levelplaying field for U.S. exporters who often find themselvesoperating in hostile political or legal environments, bankadvocates claim. Free marketeers might reply that it’s not thefederal government’s role to help private companies make money inunstable markets.
But far more important is the fact that all those Ex-Im Banksubsidies are a drop in the vast ocean of global trade. Accordingto Census Bureau data, U.S. exports supported by the Ex-Im Bankrepresent less than 3 percent of total exports. In comparison tothe whopping $2.2 trillion in U.S. goods and services exported lastyear, estimated exports backed by the Ex-Im bank amounted to arelatively skimpy $50 billion.
So the Ex-Im Bank manages to be both pointless and ineffective.Even young Sen. Barack Obama denounced the program in 2008 as“little more than a fund for corporate welfare.”
The theory underlying export subsidies is what Reagan budgetdirector David Stockman described in his 1986 book The Triumphof Politics as “a mercantilist illusion, based on theideological position that a nation can raise its employment and GDPby giving away its goods for less than what it costs to make them.”The truth, Stockman explains, is that “export subsidies subtractfrom GDP and jobs, not expand them.”
The idea that export subsidies will create jobs and increase GDPis yet another example of the single-entry bookkeeping mentalitythat has larded the federal budget with so many subsidies andpayments to special interests. The idea here is that if thegovernment helps a foreign company get access to a loan in exchangefor buying an American product then the U.S. company will makeprofits and create jobs. This account fails to take intoconsideration the opportunity cost. What might the return on thosedollars have been if they were put to work somewhere else in theeconomy or even left in the pockets of taxpayers?
Back in 1981, when he was fighting to get rid of the Ex-Im Bank,Stockman documented that it bestowed about two-thirds of itssubsidies on a handful of giant, profitable manufacturers: Boeing,General Electric, Westinghouse, and the like. Little has changedsince then, and what has changed has mostly been for theworse.
Ex-Im’s own data show that bank activity is highly concentratedin a few industries—primarily aviation, gas and oil exploration,and manufacturing. The aircraft industry alone benefited from $11.5billion worth of loan guarantees in 2012.
Boeing was the recipient of almost 50 Ex-Im Bank deals worth$12.2 billion (including insurance, loans, and guarantees). Thisone company, with its army of lobbyists, brought in roughly 80percent of Ex-Im’s loan guarantees.
Ex-Im’s defenders argue that it is profitable and that itsdefault rates are extremely low. But the profits and low defaultrates are only a product of the way the bank measures its ownperformance.
A May 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) reportexplains that Ex-Im doesn’t actually count up its own defaults.Instead, the bank currently uses economy-wide historical defaultand recovery rates to calculate program costs, which may not beaccurate in predicting default rates in the future, the GAOwarns.
And the bank’s alleged profit is almost surely an accountingillusion. “The government’s official accounting ruleseffectively force budget analysts to understate the cost ofloan programs…by excluding, or not factoring in the cost for marketrisk,” Jason Delisle and Christopher Papagianis wrote in March 2012at the economics and public policy research blog, e21.
The underestimation of market risk can be attributed to ruleslike the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, which require budgetestimates to discount expected loan performance using interestrates on risk-free U.S. Treasury debt rather than rates that matchthe actual riskiness of the loan itself. Citing a November 2011study by MIT finance professor Debbie Lucas, Delisle and Papagianisnote that the bank’s lending activities, when measured by theprivate sector’s fair market accounting, cost taxpayers $200million in 2012.
The continued existence of the Ex-Im Bank does not bode well forAmerican capitalism. A few select companies benefit from thisunhealthy marriage between private industry and government, butmost don’t. When China Air gets a loan guarantee so it can buyBoeing planes at what is effectively a discounted rate (due to theadvantageous borrowing conditions), Delta Airlines, which doesn’tget the same deal, suffers from unfair competition. The free marketis needlessly and gratuitously distorted.
Such special favors create bad incentives, moral hazards, andinefficient outcomes. Last September, the bank’s inspector generalissued what should have been an eye-opening report about theinstitution’s poor management, lack of systematic portfolio riskmeasurement, and perilous overconcentration on the airlineindustry. The report recommended that the bank put itself through astress test to weigh its exposure to risks and other market shocks,limit its loan concentration, and be subjected to more oversight byCongress to avoid exposing taxpayers to future bailouts. Returningpresident Hochberg has rejected these suggestions, illustrating hisdisregard for U.S. taxpayers.
More than a century ago, the French economist and polemicistFrederic Bastiat noted that many economic fallacies persist becausethe beneficiaries of government actions are easily visible whilethe victims are harder to identify. The Ex-Im Bank is a classicexample. All the subventions to the organized clients ofRepublican and Democratic lawmakers may be satisfying for thosereceiving them, but they represent an unfair benefit to a fewwinners at the expense of the rest of us. 

Liberalism, a Job-Killing Machine

Liberalism, a Job-Killing Machine: “The problem isn’t just ObamaCare, though. It’s the entire regulatory assault on employers coming out of Washington — everything from the EEOC” — the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission hits companies hard when employees claim age, race or sex discrimination — ”to the Dodd-Frank monstrosity. Employers are living in a state of fear.” – Bob Funk, [...]

Pat Condell: The Danger of ‘Progressive’ Feminism

Pat Condell: The Danger of ‘Progressive’ Feminism:
British writer, political commentator and comedian Pat Condell riffs on “progressive” feminists’ virtual silence and their silence about Islamic misogyny. As always, Condell hits the nail on the head. A few examples:
“Women who are quick to condemn inappropriate language on Twitter … but at the first sign of a crescent moon seem to magically evaporate, like fairies in the mist.”
“Women who confidently challenge everyday sexism, but who are struck deaf and dumb in the presence of Islamic misogyny don’t seem to realize that this in itself is misogynistic.”
“If you want to be culturally sensitive to Islamic misogyny, you can’t be a feminist.”
“I believe the liberation of women from Islam is as urgent a political cause for all humanity as was the abolition of slavery.”
“For the life of me, I can’t understand why every woman on earth doesn’t oppose it [Islamic mistreatment of women] with all her heart and soul.”
“If you accommodate Islamic misogyny, you legitimize it, you invite it into your own life and the lives of your children, because it’s coming your way.”
And why do liberal feminists behave in such a seemingly hypocritical behavior, according to Condell? Because their “stupid progressive politics have got the better of their common sense.”
Yet, I have a hunch that even some non-Islamic, non-”progressive” people reading this article will be offended that I posted it. Musn’t be too politically “incorrect” [honest], you know. As George Herbert Walker Bush would say, “wouldn’t be prudent.”
The post Pat Condell: The Danger of ‘Progressive’ Feminism appeared first on Independent Journal Review.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Examples Of How Political Correctness Is Destroying America

Examples Of How Political Correctness Is Destroying America:

If you say the "wrong thing" in America today, you could be penalized, fired or even taken to court.  Political correctness is running rampant, and it is absolutely destroying this nation.  In his novel1984, George Orwell imagined a future world where speech was greatly restricted.  He called that the language that the totalitarian state in his novel created "Newspeak," and it bears a striking resemblance to the political correctness that we see in America right now.  According to Wikipedia, Newspeak is "a reduced language created by the totalitarian state as a tool to limit free thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, peace, etc. Any form of thought alternative to the party's construct is classified as 'thought crime.'"  Yes, people are not usually being hauled off to prison for what they are saying just yet, but we are heading down that path.  Every single day, the mainstream media in the United States bombards us with subtle messages about what we should believe and what "appropriate speech" consists of.  Most of the time, most Americans quietly fall in line with this unwritten speech code.  In fact, most of the time we enforce this unwritten speech code among each other.  Those that would dare to buck the system are finding out that the consequences can be rather severe.  The following are 19 shocking examples of how political correctness is destroying America…
#1 The Missouri State Fair has permanently banned a rodeo clown from performing just because he wore an Obama mask, and now all of the other rodeo clowns are being required to take "sensitivity training"…
But the state commission went further, saying it will require that before the Rodeo Cowboy Association can take part in any future state fair, "they must provide evidence to the director of the Missouri State Fair that they have proof that all officials and subcontractors of the MRCA have successfully participated in sensitivity training."
#2 Government workers in Seattle have been told that they should no longer use the words "citizen" and "brown bag" because they are potentially offensive.
#3 A Florida police officer recently lost his job for calling Trayvon Martin a "thug" on Facebook.
#4 "Climate change deniers" are definitely not wanted at the U.S. Department of the Interior.  Interior Secretary Sally Jewell was recently quoted as making the following statement: "I hope there are no climate-change deniers in the Department of Interior".
#5 A professor at Ball State University was recently banned from even mentioning the concept of intelligent design because it would supposedly "violate the academic integrity" of the course that he was teaching.
#6 The mayor of Washington D.C. recently asked singer Donnie McClurkin not to attend his own concert because of his views on homosexuality.
#7 U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer is calling on athletes marching in the opening ceremonies at the Winter Olympics in Sochi next year to "embarrass" Russian President Vladimir Putin by protesting for gay rights.
#8 Chaplains in the U.S. military are being forced to perform gay marriages, even if it goes against their personal religious beliefs.  The few chaplains that have refused to follow orders know that it means the end of their careers.
#9 The governor of California has signed a bill into law which will allow transgendered students to use whatever bathrooms and gym facilities that they would like…
Transgendered students in California will now have the right to use whichever bathrooms they prefer and join either the boys' or girls' sports teams, thanks to landmark legislation signed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday.
The law amends the state's education code, and stipulates that each student will have access to facilities, sports teams, and programs that are "consistent with his or her gender identity," rather than the student's actual biological composition. A male student who self-identifies as female could therefore use the girls' bathroom, even if he is anatomically male.
#10 In San Francisco, authorities have installed small plastic "privacy screens" on library computers so that perverts can continue to exercise their "right" to watch pornography at the library without children being directly exposed to it.
#11 In America today, there are many groups that are absolutely obsessed with eradicating every mention of God out of the public sphere.  For example, an elementary school in North Carolina ordered a little six-year-old girl to remove the word "God" from a poem that she wrote to honor her two grandfathers that had served in the Vietnam War.
#12 A high school track team was disqualified earlier this year because one of the runners "made a gesture thanking God" once he had crossed the finish line.
#13 Earlier this year, a Florida Atlantic University student that refused to stomp on the name of Jesus was banned from class.
#14 A student at Sonoma State University was ordered to take off a cross that she was wearing because someone "could be offended."
#15 A teacher in New Jersey was fired for giving his own Bible to a student that did not own one.
#16 Volunteer chaplains for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department have been banned from using the name of Jesus on government property.
#17 According to a new Army manual, U.S. soldiers will now be instructed to avoid "any criticism of pedophilia" and to avoid criticizing "anything related to Islam".  The following is from a Judicial Watch article
The draft leaked to the newspaper offers a list of "taboo conversation topics" that soldiers should avoid, including "making derogatory comments about the Taliban," "advocating women's rights," "any criticism of pedophilia," "directing any criticism towards Afghans," "mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct" or "anything related to Islam."
#18 The Obama administration has banned all U.S. government agencies from producing any training materials that link Islam with terrorism.  In fact, the FBI has gone back and purged references to Islam and terrorism from hundreds of old documents.
#19 According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against criminals because it has a "disproportionate" impact on minorities.
It would be hard to overstate the power that all of this relentless "thought training" has on all of us.  And young people are particularly susceptible to the power of suggestion.  If you doubt this, just check out this video of a little boy praying to Barack Obama as if he was a deity

It would be a huge mistake to underestimate the power of the mainstream media in America today.  As I mentioned the other day, Americans watch an average of about 153 hours of television a month.  When Americans go to work or go to school, the conversations that they have with others are mostly based on content that the media feeds them.  And about 90 percent of what we watch on television is controlled by just six gigantic corporations.
But the media is not the only source that is telling us what to think.  The truth is that the messaging that comes from all of our major institutions (the government, the media, the education system, etc.) is remarkably consistent.  The establishment wants to control what we say and how we think, and they have a relentless propaganda machine that never stops working.
The way that we all see the world has been greatly shaped by the thousands of hours of  "thought training" that we have all received over the years.  Understanding what is being done to us is the first step toward breaking free.
The post Examples Of How Political Correctness Is Destroying America appeared first on Freedom Outpost.

The Intransigence of Progressivism

The Intransigence of Progressivism: Peter Berkowitz, RealClearPolitics
As we head into autumnÂ’s debt ceiling showdown and with both sides braced for more bruising battles over the budget, progressive pundits and politicians have resumed their condemnation of conservatives as the anti-compromise camp. Among the benefits that accrue to progressives for hurling this accusation is that it deflects attention from the intransigence woven into the very fabric of contemporary progressivism.In the liberalsÂ’ telling, the Republican Party has been overrun by extremists who reject compromise on principle, preferring to lose politically than yield an inch on taxes,...

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Global Warming: The BIGGEST LIE Exposed

Global Warming: The BIGGEST LIE Exposed:

By Alan Caruba

I will never understand the kind of thinking behind a lie so big that it became an international fraud and swindle. I cannot understand why an international organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) operating under the umbrella of the United Nations, was permitted to issue reports of an imminent threat to the Earth, to mankind, that a freshman student of meteorology would know were false.

At long last the Big Lie of Global Warming has been totally exposed and we can thank The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank that has organized and hosted eight international Conferences on Climate Change since 2008 to expose the lies behind global warming—now called “climate change”—as it became clear that seventeen years of continuous cooling has put a Big Chill on this Big Lie.

I suspect that the Heartland team, led by Joe Bast and including some remarkable, dedicated people, will only get a line or two in some future historian’s account of the deception that began in 1988 before a congressional committee. Thereafter the global warming hoax was given momentum by former Vice President Al Gore who, along with the IPCC, would receive a Nobel Peace Prize!

It helps to have a sense of humor when you are doing battle with hucksters who have the entire world’s media to defend them. The climate “skeptics”—some of the world’s most renowned meteorologists—dubbed their effort the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and, working with the Heartland Institute, have just released a new edition of “Climate Change Reconsidered II.”

It arrives just as the IPCC will release its 5th Assessment Report. The IPCC’s lies will get lots of news coverage. Heartland's NIPCC report was fortunate to have notice taken by Fox News, but beyond that most of the intransigent U.S. news media ignored it.

As often as not one has to look to foreign newspapers to get the truth. In Great Britain’s The Mail, the headline on September 14 was “Global warming just HALF what we said: World’s top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong.” A leaked copy of the IPCC report revealed “scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong.”

Well, of course, they were wrong. The so-called “science” on which they were based was idiotic. It focused primarily on carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called “greenhouse gases”, claiming they were trapping heat while being produced by all manner of human activity related to generating energy with coal, oil, and natural gas.

Dr. Martin Hertzberg, Ph,D, co-author of “Slaying the Sky Dragon—Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory”, summed it up neatly, pointing the water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere as a primary factor affecting climate long term and weather short term.

“The determinant of weather is mainly water in all its forms,” said Dr. Herzberg, “as vapor in the atmosphere, in its heat transport by evaporation and condensation, as the enormous circulating mass of liquid ocean whose heat capacity and mass/energy transport dominate the motions of our atmosphere and the precipitation from it, and finally as cloud, snow, and ice cover which influence the radiative balance between the Sun, the Earth, and free Space.”  As you try to wrap you mind around that explanation, just think about the way the Earth goes through regular seasons as well as regular and predictable cycles of warming and cooling. It has done this now for some 4.5 billion years.

For those who want to read Climate Change Reconsidered II, there’s a website to visit. Among its findings, the report notes that “no close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human related CO2 emissions.” Blaming the climate or even the weather on humans is insane. You might as well blame the floods in Colorado on humans instead of the downpours of rain, comparable to 1894 and 1969.

Indeed, the U.S. gives ample evidence of greatly reduced events associated with the weather. There have been fewer tornadoes over recent decades.  It’s been eight years since a Category 3 hurricane hit the U.S. Droughts have been shorter and less extreme than the 1930s and 1950s. And sea levels are predicted to increase barely four to eight inches per century and that may be on the high side. There will be dramatic weather events, but there have always been dramatic weather events!

The Heartland’s new report is welcome, but both they and I know that the same deceitful charlatans are still at work in the United Nations, in the United States, and around the world to keep this greatest of hoaxes alive.

The harm the global warming hoax has done and continues to do is best seen in the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to wipe out the coal industry based entirely on the lie that CO2 is a “pollutant.” When the House Energy & Commerce Committee held a hearing on the Obama administration’s climate policies thirteen agencies were invited to testify, but the administration provided only EPA administrator Gina McCarty and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. The later read a prepared statement that was one long lie about global warming. Presumably he was under oath!

Ms. McCarty, the latest in a long line of environmental fanatics to run the agency, was forced under questioning to admit that current and proposed greenhouse gas regulations are not there to protect the public but to influence “the international community” to reduce their CO2 and other alleged emissions. Not only do the regulations have no basis in science, but they exist to keep the environmental war on energy use going and to pressure developing nations such as China and India. Within the past month, the citizens of Australia rose up and threw out the politicians who imposed a “carbon” tax on them. The new prime minister has shut down the “climate ministry” that existed to enforce it.

And while most of the world wasn’t watching, the United Nations was seeking to impose, once again, an international agreement similar to the failed and defunct Kyoto Protocol to limit CO2 and other greenhouse emissions, based on the BIG LIE! The 44th Pacific Islands Forum, held in the Marshall Islands, was intent on “an ambitious future climate regime to be finalized in 2015.”

That is what must be understood. These people will not give up until they have no other option. They will continue to exploit the ignorance of people regarding the actual science, penalizing them by driving up the cost of energy use, by closing down energy industries, prospective projects, and the jobs they provide,

They sustain the malignant ethanol scam that is ruining engines as this is being written. They are behind the useless solar panel and wind turbine industries that produce so little actual electricity they are a negative drag on the national grid. You, however, are picking up the tab for their mandated use. They practice a form of child abuse to tell children the Earth is doomed if their mother uses a plastic bag to bring groceries home from the supermarket.

The world’s BIGGEST LIE has been exposed and it will have to be exposed again and again until a stake is driven into the evil heart of the “global warming” hoax.

© Alan Caruba, 2013
Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

Obama refuses to negotiate…

Obama refuses to negotiate…:
with Congressional Republicans.
As though he ever did. But he knows the MSM will preserve the fiction of his constant amiable efforts to reach out.
And what a vile piece of work Nancy Pelosi is.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Is this still the America we thought we knew? »

Is this still the America we thought we knew? »:
The fascinating issue of America’s character arose in a “Ricochet Podcast” featuring the sagacious Norman Podhoretz.
Hosts Peter Robinson, Rob Long and James Lileks interviewed Podhoretz on a range of issues, but primarily American foreign policy.
Long lamented that President Obama has been making a consummate mess of America’s foreign policy, most recently in Syria, yet polls don’t seem to reflect that Americans are as atuned to Obama’s incompetence as one might expect – and hope. Nor do Americans seem to be bothered by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denunciation of the United States in an op-ed for the New York Times.
Long asked Podhoretz: “Has this ever happened before?”
Podhoretz responded that something along these lines has happened before in America. During the Cold War, there were many on the left who had no appetite for keeping the defense budget in sync with the Soviet buildup and no appetite for confrontation with the Soviet Union, which they believed was here to stay and so must be accommodated.
But, cautioned Podhoretz, “it’s much worse now … than it was then.” He continued: “My deepest fear … is that there’s been a radical transformation in the American people, not just under Obama but building. … I was absolutely certain that somebody as far left as Obama could never be elected and certainly not re-elected, because the America I thought I knew would not tolerate this, and of course, I was magnificently wrong, and … I haven’t made up my mind whether this was a temporary glitch … or whether it signified some real change in the American character. I think Obama was even to the left of (George) McGovern, and McGovern … won … one state (and the District of Columbia) in 1972 against an unpopular president. And that was the America I thought still existed, and if it does, it’s a sleeping giant, and one can only pray that it will awaken in time to make a difference.”
That is the question. Has there been some real change in the American character or at least some change in Americans leading to their rejection of or mortal apathy toward the American idea?
Isn’t that what Mitt Romney was getting at with his comment about the so-called 47 percent? Wasn’t he expressing his fear that when as many Americans are receiving more from the government than they are contributing to it, we may have passed the point where we can preserve America as a uniquely productive free-market dynamo committed to the goal of maintaining equal opportunity and equal protection under the law?
What with the steady coarsening of our culture, the generations-long America-bashing, liberal indoctrination occurring at all levels of American education, the steady march toward socialism (including the formerly unthinkable current path to socialized medicine), the nationally suicidal but preventable level of entitlements, the accelerated expansion of the welfare state and the accompanying demonization of wealth, the wealthy and producers, the increasing racial and economic strife and the election and re-election of the extraordinarily leftist Barack Obama, we would be irrational not to be concerned about America’s future.
But is the demise of great “empires” organically inevitable? Do the forces of success ultimately corrupt them internally and prevent their survival?
Personally, I don’t believe that the American character has yet fundamentally changed or that our demise is inevitable. We have a choice, but we are, admittedly, approaching the tipping point beyond which we may be powerless to prevent our implosion.
Though too many able-bodied people are receiving government benefits, I believe that most people haven’t given up on themselves and would prefer to be working. Though the administration is sending the signal that they are all victims, many are far from accepting it.
In response to Podhoretz’s question, I do believe the situation with President Obama is unique – or can be.
As my brother has opined with his Limbaugh theorem, Obama has been able to position himself as an outsider fighting the very failed policies he has implemented and thus to avoid personal and electoral accountability for them.
Interestingly, Obama’s policies are decidedly unpopular with today’s American people – not merely those of decades ago. Though they re-elected him and continue to give him far more support than he deserves, it was his policies they rejected in the 2010 elections, when the GOP “shellacked” Democrats in the congressional races. Republicans also retained control of the House in 2012, despite Obama’s re-election. And all indications are that Democrats are going to be thrashed again in 2014 – precisely because of Obama’s policies.
Notwithstanding many troubling signs in our culture, we are seeing evidence the public rejects what Obama has been selling but just refuses to reject him.
So I believe there is reason for much hope, assuming the GOP can overcome its disunity, return to its core principles and navigate through the pitfalls of dealing with Obama’s demagoguery on budget issues and the like between now and 2014 and then on to 2016 – and providing we can avoid going all the way over the financial cliff with Obama’s obscene spending and his virtual war on domestic energy, capitalism, producers and the entire economy.
Republicans need not panic or change their own character based on the erroneous assumption that Americans reject America’s founding principles and conservative principles. They just need to inspire the nation’s enthusiasm again by articulating their ideas as if they actually believe in them and as if they reject the liberal conclusion that we are destined for decline and permanent malaise.

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Krauthammer's Take: Iran Stringing US Along »

Krauthammer's Take: Iran Stringing US Along »: Iran is playing for time, Charles Krauthammer said tonight.Appearing on Special Report, Krauthammer declared that Iran is “just stringing us along” by promising that it doesn’t wish to develop nuclear weapons, citing the Middle Eastern country’s plutonium program as evidence.“The Iranians can see they are near the finish line. . .they have maybe a half a year, a year to get there. They can forestall the Americans, engage in negotiations, the Israelis can’t strike and they go nuclear,” Krauthammer said.

Todd: It’s not the job of the media to carry WH messaging »

Todd: It’s not the job of the media to carry WH messaging »:

Did anyone tell the New York Times?

What role should media outlets play in dealing with political messaging from the government?  A couple of stories over the last 24 hours raise that question, which NBC’s Chuck Todd attempted to answer in regard to ObamaCare.  TPM titled the clip in question, “It’s Not Media’s Job to Correct GOP’s ObamaCare Falsehoods,” which is the […]
Read this post »