Not Ready for Rushmore

Not Ready for Rushmore

The heady early days of the Obama administration are already coming to a close. In the beginning, there was "The One," and he was going to save us all. He ran for president presenting himself as a personality, more like Brittney Spears than Abraham Lincoln or JFK. But as he transitions from candidate to executive his cult of personality is losing members by the day, yet he is only two weeks into the actual job we hired him for.

Before he was inaugurated it was suggested that he be carved into Mount Rushmore, beside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt, or perhaps carve TR into a likeness of Obama. After all, went the story, he would certainly prove to be more important to that dead white guy.

OK, maybe those stories were exaggerated, or at least premature. But schools and streets have already been named after him, and Barack has become a very popular name for babies worldwide. All this over a man of little or no accomplishment, other than the mere fact of his election. That was no mean feat by itself, considering his meager beginnings, being the son of a Kenyan student and a young and apparently confused girl.

The sustaining power of the Obama euphoria is credited, in a piece by Peter Berkowitz in today's WSJ, to the obverse of Bush Derangement Syndrome, (BDS) in which:

At first glance, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria could not be more different. Hatred of Mr. Bush went well beyond the partisan broadsides typical of democratic politics. For years it disfigured its victims with open, indeed proud, loathing for the very manner in which Mr. Bush walked and talked. It compelled them to denounce the president and his policies as not merely foolish or wrong or contrary to the national interest, but as anathema to everything that made America great.

In contrast, the euphoria surrounding Mr. Obama's run for president conferred upon the candidate immunity from criticism despite his newness to national politics and lack of executive experience, and regardless of how empty his calls for change. At the same time, it inspired those in its grips, repeatedly bringing them tears of joy throughout the long election season. With Mr. Obama's victory in November and his inauguration last week, it suffused them with a sense that not only had the promise of America at last been redeemed but that the world could now be transfigured.

In fact, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria -- which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed -- are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason.

Meanwhile, reality must intrude into the ruminations of those in thrall to this passion. Just as BDS will fade with time, Obama euphoria must yield to the facts and acts that are so much more persistent than campaign rhetoric. Indeed, Obama's poll numbers are already coming down to Earth. A mere two weeks in, two of the young president's top nominees have had to decline their designations, and Obama's "stimulus" plan has had to go back to the drawing board, as a less than compliant political class has revealed more than a little friction between Obama's leftist wish list and political reality.

In a campaign, it is possible to appear to be all things to all people. When faced with the realities and ambiguities of power, one must choose a side. Even in a political atmosphere as one-sided as obtained two weeks ago there are interests and proclivities that supersede mere love. Compromise in a political process can appear to some as indiscretion, or even betrayal. Not for nothing are awards for accomplishment made to wait for the aftermath. The president's poll numbers will continue to decline so long as fewer than one in five Americans approve of the way things are going. Obama himself has noted that he needs to succeed in banishing the economic storm we are sheltering from, or he could be facing a single term presidency. We shall see.

Demographic, and Immigration, Insanity

One of the very best of the Euro-Blogs, The Brussels Journal, has a series on the impending destruction of our culture by the forced infusion of Islamic culture upon the West. While this subject is well covered in Mark Steyn'e latest book, "America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It", today's installment of the series of posts in the Journal is stellar. A taste:

Question: What are these people doing in Europe? Who invited them? Who let them in? Who let them stay? What has allowed them to even dream about moving to Europe, let alone realizing a colonization plan?

In Great Britain alone, intelligence agencies are tracking 200 terrorists plots among Pakistani Brits, of whom some 2,000 are under observation. More than 400,000 Pakistani citizens of Great Britain travel every year to Pakistan – a country of 12,000 madrassas and, as of mid-2005, 55 terrorist training camps.

Why are there a million (1) Pakistanis in Great Britain? Just what has been going on in the brains of the British ruling elites these past 40 years? What has been going on in the brains of the ruled British people?

What are these people doing in the United States? We know how they came and who and what let them in, but why? The stock answer is: the left, to gain new voters; the right, to get cheap labor. But it’s not the real answer, except if this be a society of madmen.

For the rest of the story, read the whole thing.

More on the "Stimulus" Plan

More on the "Stimulus" Plan

As time goes by we are seeing many more members of the commentariat analyzing the so-called "stimulus" bill and finding more and more things wrong with it. In fact, the House today voted in favor of the bill with every single congressional republican voting against, with about a dozen democrats also displaying clear vision. Mona Charen has a lucid essay on the reason democrats are going along with Obama:

Certainly President Obama seems supremely confident that the federal government, in his own capable hands, can tackle everything from job creation to education to global warming. All that is needed is to set aside "stale" partisan arguments and salute smartly.

President Obama was a teenager when some of the smartest liberals in America (dubbed the neoconservatives) were beginning to have doubts about the power of government to do good. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, Aaron Wildavksy, and many others observed the effects of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" initiatives and became sobered up. (A few, including Moynihan, returned to the liberal fold but most did not.) They noticed the waste and the ineffectiveness of huge government programs, but above all, they were chastened by the law of unintended consequences -- that the unforeseen or indirect effects of government policy were usually more damaging and more important than the desired effects. Minimum wage laws are a good example. Intended to help the poor earn a living wage, they instead discouraged hiring of the low-skilled. Rent control was supposed to make it easier for the poor and middle class to afford apartments but wound up making low-cost housing less available.

[snip]

It was, or should have been, frightening news that the United States is now $10.7 trillion in debt, sporting a $1.2 trillion deficit. As Mark Steyn noted, your pocket calculator doesn't have enough spaces to input one trillion dollars. The Democrats' solution is to make our deficit $2 trillion with a "stimulus" package. The Congressional Budget Office (run by Democrats) reports that -- all talk of "shovel ready" projects notwithstanding -- only about 25 percent of the new spending in the package would actually be spent by 2010. And it defies common sense to believe that transferring $100 billion from the federal government to the states to help with Medicare reimbursements will stimulate economic activity. Nor will $200 million to rehabilitate the National Mall in Washington, or $500 million to install new bomb detectors at airports, or $400 million to NASA to conduct climate change research (which several other agencies are already studying), and on and on.

We are, not to put too fine a point on it, about to send another trillion dollars of our money into a rat hole. Permanent tax cuts, for individuals and businesses, have been proven to stimulate the economy. They worked under Kennedy and Reagan. But to point this out now is like shouting into a whirlwind.

Peter Ferrara has more details in The American Spectator on the pork within the bill. You can read the 76 page "Recovery Report" (.pdf) congressional democrats produced to outline the bill, but Ferrara gets some of the more egregious items listed, as in:

The massive $825 billion package is not even targeted on programs to stimulate the economy. Instead, it is laced with runaway government spending for increased welfare, overgrown bureaucracy, pork, political payoffs, and other waste. That runaway spending is causing record smashing deficits of $1.5 trillion or more, equivalent to over 50% of the entire federal budget for fiscal 2008.

For example, the "stimulus" package includes $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts to help "the arts community throughout the United States." Wouldn't want our economy to get behind in the international arts competition. The government is going to borrow $50 million out of the private economy to spend on this, which will result in a net loss of economic output rather than a net gain.

Another $2.1 billion is for Head Start, another program not previously known for stimulating the economy. A further $2 billion is to be spent on Child Care Development Block Grants, which provide day care. We are going to revive economic growth through the federal government spending billions on babysitting, rather than tax cuts for capital investment. A similar initiative involves $120 million to finance part-time work for seniors in community service agencies.

Then there is $500 million to speed the processing of applications for Social Security disability claims. This has already created one net new job in the employment of a person within the Obama Administration assigned to figure out what this has to do with stimulating the economy.

Another $6 billion goes to college and universities. We already spend hundreds of billions on these schools, and such education provides valuable long-term benefits. But this is not a means to spark a booming economy in the short term. The same is true of the $13 billion in Title I grants "to provide extra academic support to help raise the achievement of students at risk of educational failure or to help all students in high-poverty schools meet challenging State academic standards," as the congressional report accompanying the bill explains. Ditto that for the $13 billion in IDEA, Part B State grants to help pay for "the excess costs of providing special education and related services to children with disabilities."

Then there is the effort to stimulate the economy by increasing welfare spending. There is $20 billion for increased food stamps, including lifting restrictions on how long welfare dependents can receive food stamp benefits. Another $1.7 billion is to be spent to help the homeless, not previously in our history a significant source of economic growth. Another $1 billion goes for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program, to help low income families pay their heating bills, a worthy objective that has nothing to do with stimulating the economy. Still another billion goes to the Community Services Block Grant to support "employment, food, housing, health, and emergency assistance to low-income families and individuals." Another $200 million goes for senior nutrition programs, such as Meals on Wheels. Then there is an additional $200 million for AmeriCorps, to help satisfy "increased demand for services for vulnerable populations to meet critical needs in communities across the U.S." Another $5 billion is devoted to public housing. None of this increased welfare spending has anything to do with promoting economic growth. Rather, it retards growth by inducing more dependency on government.

Another $87 billion is to be spent on Medicaid, a welfare program already costing roughly $400 billion per year. Those funds would be spent in part on "family planning services," meaning contraception. Reagan created a 25-year economic boom in part by cutting top marginal income tax rates. Liberal Democrats are now going to try to do it by passing out condoms.

Medicaid is one of the major entitlement programs projected to explode to overwhelming costs in the future. Obama is assuring the more conservative Blue Dog Democrats that he will address runaway entitlement costs as soon as next month. But to start let's increase those costs by almost $100 billion right now.

Then there is the funding to maintain and expand bureaucracy and overall big government spending. The "stimulus" package includes $2.5 billion for the National Science Foundation, $2.0 billion for the National Park Service, $650 million for the U.S. Forest Service, $600 million for NASA, $800 million for AMTRAK, $276 million to the State Department to upgrade and modernize its information technology, $150 million for maintenance work at the Smithsonian Institution, $209 million for maintenance work for the Federal Agricultural Research Service, $44 million for repairs and improvements at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Department of Agriculture, and $245 million to upgrade the information technology of the Farm Service Agency. Borrowing money from the private sector to spend on these bureaucracies will not provide a boost to the economy. It will likely again produce a net loss of output.

A shocking provision provides $1.1 billion for so-called federal comparative effectiveness research in regard to health-care services. The congressional report explaining the stimulus bill says:

By knowing what works best and presenting this information more broadly to patients and healthcare professionals, those items, procedures, and interventions that are most effective to prevent, control, and treat health conditions will be utilized, while those that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.

But a government bureaucracy in Washington is never going to know what "items, procedures and interventions are most effective to prevent, control and treat health conditions" for each patient, regardless of how much federal research is done. This is what doctors are for. This bureaucratic initiative is really laying the foundation for the eventual health care rationing to be imposed under the new Obama "universal" health care entitlement program, which is coming soon. I told you so, in previous columns.

To call this spending economic recovery stimulus, however, is an abuse of the English language.

Another abuse is to be found in the $4.2 billion provided to the Neighborhood Stabilization Fund, which provides the funds to local governments to purchase and rehab vacant housing due to foreclosure. The congressional report accompanying the stimulus bill states, "Up to $750 million may be used for a competition for nonprofit entities to enhance the funding included under this heading through capitalization of the funds." Reportedly, this funding is intended to be siphoned off to ACORN, the far-left, rogue, lawbreaking organization prosecuted across the country in the past couple of years for voter fraud. ACORN has also used violent intimidation tactics in the past to pursue its goals, and was heavily involved in housing programs in the past that led to widespread bad loans.

Another $79 billion is to go the states to maintain their runaway government spending, particularly for such spendthrift jurisdictions as California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. High state government spending is also not a source of economic growth.

Then there are other items in the "stimulus" package that may involve desirable government spending, but do not involve stimulating the economy, and should be subject to the normal budget process. These include $3 billion for health care prevention and wellness programs, such as childhood immunizations and other state and local public health programs, $2.4 billion for projects demonstrating carbon capture technology, $17 billion for Pell Grants, $1 billion for Technology Education, $1.9 billion for the Energy Department for "basic research into the physical sciences," $650 million for digital TV coupons to help Americans upgrade to digital cable television, $100 million to reduce lead-based paint hazards for children in low income housing, $400 million for "habitat restoration projects" of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, $1.2 billion for summer jobs for youth, $2 billion for Superfund cleanup, and others.

A massive power grab, a Trojan Horse, or however you characterize it, Peter Ferrara sums it up quite nicely:

Now what we have is not only a stimulus bill that will not work. What we have is a fraudulent bill that is not even focused on stimulus at all, but on runaway spending for liberal, big government spending programs, meaning more welfare, overgrown bureaucracy, pork, political payoffs, and waste.

I couldn't say it better than that.

Stimulate This

Stimulate This

Now that the stimulus bill is moving into final form, details are leaking out. Since most of the money will not be spent until the second and third year, it is not really a stimulus bill. It is rather more a Trojan horse bill, since it will contain quite a few special passengers. In the words of the president's chief of staff, “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.”

Now reports are beginning to emerge, and one of the most insidious little bombs is the "decoupling" provision for utility rates. What this means is there will be no further link between electric rates, say, and the amount of electricity you use. That means that, as we are forced (or choose) to use more efficient appliances and our electrical use goes down, the rates will go up to compensate. Then, when or if we buy electric vehicles, the rates will remain high. Or presumably we can ask our legislators (nicely) to pass a new law setting special rates for electrical vehicle use. But even that is dependent on the utilities installing new electric meters, so that the "special" use can be rated on the lower, politically correct rate for electric vehicles. But then the gasoline tax and road use taxes will be piled on the electric rates.

While we are on this subject of Obama "calling for forty million meters to be installed" it might be interesting to look into the Federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, which directed state utility commissions to install the new meters. But since Bush signed that legislation, Obama has "called" for exactly the same thing, so as to get the credit. "Utilities are planning to deploy more than 40 million smart meters throughout the country from 2007 through 2010, according to a report published by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission." But now that Obama wants it, and money has no real value any more, it is now for the government to pay for them, with their usual crack efficiency and timeliness.

This is pretty clear, we are getting screwed by this stimulus plan. It is the un-stimulus screw - no stimulation, no kisses, no lube.

If you have a head for details, or you think I'm kidding, you can read the report (.pdf) summarizing the bill. Not to worry, it is a mere 76 pages.

Our New Era of Responsibility

Our New Era of Responsibility

Our new president has proclaimed a "new era of responsibility" in his inaugural address. As Orwell defined Newspeak, the import of the words are exactly the opposite of what the words mean. Not to blame Barry for everything, since the situation predates Obama by decades.

Our nation's attempt to create an idiot proof society has cast us adrift from our moorings. We used to be a nation with a "can do" attitude. It was We the People who got things done, each of us, as well as all of us. Everyone believed they could make a difference, at the very least in our own lives. That valuable but not enough treasured ethic is dying, and almost dead. Our new president is going to accelerate the demise of the best of the American spirit.

This thesis is explored in today's Wall Street Journal by Philip K. Howard. A few quotes:

America achieved greatness as the can-do society. This is, after all, the country of Thomas Paine and barn raisings, of Grange halls and Google. Other countries shared, at least in part, our political freedoms, but America had something different -- a belief in the power of each individual. President Obama's clarion call of self-determination -- "Yes We Can" -- hearkens back to the core of our culture.

Americans don't feel free to reach inside themselves and make a difference. The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices. All around us are warnings and legal risks. The modern credo is not "Yes We Can" but "No You Can't." Our sense of powerlessness is pervasive. Those who deal with the public are the most discouraged. Most doctors say they wouldn't advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can't even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.

The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom -- where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree. Daily life in America has been transformed. Ordinary choices -- by teachers, doctors, officials, managers, even volunteers -- are paralyzed by legal self-consciousness. Did you check the rules? Who will be responsible if there's an accident? A pediatrician in North Carolina noted that "I don't deal with patients the same way any more. You wouldn't want to say something off the cuff that might be used against you."

And so today we witness a high school coach being indicted for homicide for denying a player water for fifteen minutes.

All this law, we're told, is just the price of making sure society is in working order. But society is not working. Disorder disrupts learning all day long in many public schools -- the result in part, studies by NYU Professor Richard Arum found, of the rise of student rights. Health care is like a nervous breakdown in slow motion. Costs are out of control, yet the incentive for doctors is to order whatever tests the insurance will pay for. Taking risks is no longer the badge of courage, but reason enough to get sued. There's an epidemic of child obesity, but kids aren't allowed to take the normal risks of childhood. Broward County, Fla., has even banned running at recess.

So no little babies get hurted, all the others must stand around and become wimps. There is the other, related problem with the feminization of the American boys and men, but that is another, related problem. The radicals who want manly men to disappear use the courts to get their way in the schools.

The new legal order doesn't honor the individuality of human accomplishment. People accomplish things by focusing on the goal, and letting their instincts, mainly subconscious, try to get them there. "Amazingly few people," management guru Peter Drucker observed, "know how they get things done." Most things happen, the philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote, through "the usual process of trial and error by which we feel our way to success." Thomas Edison put it this way: "Nothing that's any good works by itself. You got to make the damn thing work."

Modern law pulls the rug out from under all those human powers and substitutes instead a debilitating self-consciousness. Teachers lose their authority, Prof. Arum found, because the overhang of law causes "hesitation, doubt and weakening of conviction." Skyrocketing health-care costs are impossible to contain as long as doctors go through the day thinking about how they will defend themselves if a sick person sues.

The overlay of law on daily choices destroys the human instinct needed to get things done. Bureaucracy can't teach. Rules don't make things happen. Accomplishment is personal. Anyone who has felt the pride of a job well done knows this.

But the "Hope and Change Express" promises us more rules, more bureaucracy, more destruction of personal responsibility and accomplishment. Less pride, more debt, more taxes.

When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school -- you name it. Law has poured into daily life.

That gets the flavor of the problem. I am not sure that I agree with Phil Howard's prescription for getting us out of this mess, but I know that we are under a desperate assault by rules and laws, and ultimately lawyers. Now that the Leftists, beholden, nay, in thrall to the lawyers, are in charge of at least two of our three branches of government, no matter that you believe we should to roll back the tide, we are certain to see the tide oncoming for quite a while.

But never be despondent! History shows that, in retrospect, everything works out for the best. The problem is, we may not live long enough to see things work out. So I have come around to the proposition that I hope for Obama's presidency to fail - to fail big, and to fail fast. Only by complete failure, and I am talking failure on the scale of a Carter, total, abject, undeniable failure, will the electorate come to understand that we need to throw all the bums out, and elect a new majority. Not an ideological majority, that would not be a zero base approach. What we need is to throw out the incumbents, whose minds and souls are poisoned from their well worn habits of taking from us and feeding their own.

Only a huge failure of our government can save us from that government. Think about it, discuss it. This is not going away by itself.

Intellectual?

Intellectual?

I have no idea where this "Obama is an intellectual" trope came from, but it is absolutely untrue. An intellectual is a person who exercises his creative and mental powers over all else. He writes, he may teach. He is surely not a pol. Let's get this trope off the table. A pol is a person who bends others to his will, his quest for power, not a man who convinces others with his ideas. Name a single new or unique idea our new leader has had, I dare you. Not an intellectual by a long shot.

While we are at it, how are we to know that this guy is so smart? I have not seen any testing on him that impresses me more than the work done to quantify the IQs of Bush and Kerry. If he is smarter than either of those, I have not seen any evidence of it - just unsubstantiated statements. And he clearly has no intellectual achievements to compare to Bill Clinton's.

Not that this means anything. Great leaders are men such as Reagan and FDR. Oliver Wendell Holmes admiringly and famously said of FDR that he had a "first rate attitude, second rate temperament." (Churchill said about the same thing substituting "attitude" for "temperament") Few would call Reagan a deep thinker, but his thinking had clarity. This nuanced thinking we get from pretenders like Kerry, and now maybe we will get much of the same from "The One," drives me to distraction. It may be possible that Obama is capable of clear thinking, but as Rush and others say, liberals will never tell you what they believe, because you would then reject them.

It is the liberal propensity to call republicans idiots. Remember, Kerry was supposed to be some sort of a genius too. Only when he lost did the Left admit that he was a dork who ran an incompetent campaign, and research revealed his IQ to be about the same as G.W.Bush's. They said that Clinton was a genius, but at least they had a leg to stand on with that one, Rhodes Scholar and all. But he did too much of his thinking with his little head. Then they called G.H.W.Bush an idiot and a tool, Reagan an idiot and a fool, but before that Carter was called a genius nuclear engineer! All he ever did in that line was to grease the machinery in a nuclear submarine, but to the leftist media in this country, they do not need much to get off and running. Leftist guys are smart, righties are dumb. Don't you get it? This is a universal truth of the Left. Read Trotsky or Goebbels.

No. I believe that the guy who becomes president is always the guy who is an absolute genius at utilizing the tools that exist to claim power over others. That makes them smart enough to be our rulers, that's all. Any claim to higher intelligence on broader matters requires evidence - evidence that is lacking on all our presidents since Jefferson, sadly.

I rather think that Obama is a pragmatist, and when his liberalism fails him, he will change horses rather than becoming irrelevant like Carter. Time will tell. We are in deep trouble if he is an intellectual, who has pondered and decided to go all ideological on us. If so, we might just have a revolution on our hands real soon. Remember, if one and a half percent had voted the other way, we would be making fun of president McCain right now. There is scant support for another bailout, government health care for everybody and much higher taxes. Keep piling it on, and we the people will push back come election day next.

Letter From Britain to America

Letter From Britain to America

The following letter has been attributed to British sources, but I have been unable to discern its provenance. In any case, it is too good to ignore, so I reproduce it here, sadly without attribution:

Obama’s Victory

A victory for the hysterical Oprah Winfrey, the mad racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, the mainstream media who abandoned any sense of objectivity long ago, Europeans who despise America largely because they depend on her, comics who claim to be dangerous and fearless but would not dare attack genuinely powerful special interest groups.

A victory for Obama-worshippers everywhere. A victory for the cult of the cult. A man who has done little with his life but has written about his achievements as if he had found the cure for cancer in between winning a marathon and building a nuclear reactor with his teeth.

Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising over reality.

A victory for Hollywood, the most dysfunctional community in the world. Victory for Streisand, Spielberg, Soros and Sarandon.

Victory for those who prefer welfare to will and interference to independence. For those who settle for group think and herd mentality rather than those who fight for individual initiative and the right to be out of step with meager political fashion.

Victory for a man who is no friend of freedom. He and his people have already stated that media has to be controlled so as to be balanced, without realizing the extraordinary irony within that statement. Like most liberal zealots, the Obama worshippers constantly speak of Fox and Limbaugh, when the vast bulk of television stations and newspapers are drastically liberal and anti-conservative. Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer said that just as pornography should be censored, so should talk radio. In other words, one of the few free and open means of popular expression may well be cornered and beaten by bullies who even in triumph cannot tolerate any criticism and opposition.

A victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than the family, for those who prefer teachers’ unions to teaching and for those who are naively convinced that if the West is sufficiently weak towards its enemies, war and terror will dissolve as quickly as the tears on the face of a leftist celebrity.

A victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation. A victory for intrusive lawyers, banal sentimentalists, social extremists and urban snobs

Congratulations, America!

Mars Gets More Interesting

Mars Gets More Interesting

A report getting play recently shows that Methane is being emitted from underground sources on Mars. Since there is no evidence of volcanic activity on the red planet, it is supposed that a biological source is possible, if not probable, for this basic building block of life as we know it. As principal investigator Michael Mumma, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said, "Suppose we put a probe into a fissure at one of the release sites site and we could get measurements from some extant life form," he said. "We could then sequence the life form and see if it had the same origins as Earth life. What could be more compelling?"

Lisa Pratt of Indiana University, who was part of a team that identified a microbe two miles down in a South African gold mine that lives entirely without drawing energy from sunlight said, "Mars just got a whole lot more interesting." Pratt called the methane find "a breathtaking discovery."

On another note, I recently saw a documentary about Venus, which has the hottest weather in the solar system. It was claimed that excessive heat is present on the surface of Venus due to the atmosphere being predominately made up of carbon dioxide. At the time I just chalked this statement up to the AGW hysteria current in Western scientific circles. What I found very interesting about that in regard to the latest findings about Mars is that, along the way, it is revealed in the articles on the methane discovery on Mars that the atmosphere of Mars is also predominately carbon dioxide. See the Goddard article which states "Mars today is a world of cold and lonely deserts, apparently without life of any kind, at least on the surface. Worse still, it looks like Mars has been cold and dry for billions of years."

Mars has no globally warming greenhouse effect, yet the ambiguity is never mentioned in any of the reports I have read. Imagine that!

Another Transition Stumble, Test

Another Transition Stumble, Test

Another stumble from the messiah-in-chief involving his pick for Treasury Secretary will test the degree of Teflon there remains on our last hope to save the world. So far Obama's pick for Commerce had a commercial problem, and now his pick to assume management of our tax system has a problem with, among other things, failing to pay taxes. He may have also employed an undocumented alien as household help. In the past, illegal maids (recall Zoe Baird, BJ Clinton's first pick for attorney general), or even providing shelter to an indigent illegal immigrant (recall Linda Chavez, Bush's original nominee for Labor secretary), have sunk cabinet nominees.

Lesser men have folded under similar circumstances. But Obama is made of sterner stuff. Plus, Geithner has two aces in the hole. One, of course, is the democrats, who want so much to recreate the nation in their own image that they will do nothing to impair the lubricant in the governmental canal that Obama is sliding into. Then we have the republicans, who seem to fear the alternative to Geithner. They have no faith in Obama, and seem to believe that this nominee is the best they will get from the new president. In that they are probably right.

What seems to have been lost here is the most simple of qualifications for public office - propriety. Congress, more than the other branches, is drunk with power. I do not use the cliche loosely. They seem to be literally drunk, no longer concerned with consequences, lurching forward with no regard to law or the constitution. They vote trillions of dollars in "bailout" funds with no regard to pretending, even, that they have a way to "pay" for it. Deficits? They don't need to worry about no stinkin' deficits. One trillion? Two? What's the difference?

What good is the rule of law when the lawmakers are lawless? Geithner is only the latest in a litany of lawless moves by the people in power. It will be a litmus test for Obama. We shall see if he sticks with his nominee, or throws him away, like Richardson, Ayers, or Wright. It would be a test for Congress as well, except there is little doubt that the democrats will confirm any nominee the chosen one wants.

Dane Dahl on Islam - Why They Fight

Dane Dahl on Islam - Why They Fight

In the not too distant future, Moslem extremists hope to involve you and your loved ones, as well as a vast number of other innocent victims in a man-made catastrophe: an organized and violent calamity of biblical proportions that is based on teachings that were deliberately added to the Koran, decades after the faith was founded.

Disregarding the social, economic, and political factors that serve as underpinnings for Islamic terrorism, I will address the more fundamental issue: the religious teachings that sanction violence against non-Moslems and AGAINST ALL WOMEN. Here are seven verses from the Koran. These scriptures have been translated into modern English.

…murder, crucify, or cut off the hands and feet of non-Moslems - Chapter 5 Verse 33 - The Koran
…create terror in the hearts of non-Moslems …cut off their heads - Chapter 8 Verse 12 - The Koran
…and fight non-Moslems until Allah’s religion is the only one - Chapter 8 Verse 39 - The Koran
…of all the loot you plunder from non-Moslems, 20% belongs to Allah and to Mohammed. - Chapter 8 Verse 41- The Koran (Author’s note: Loot included kidnapped female sex-slaves.)
…Take as many as four wives from the women you are sexually attracted to - Chapter 4 Verse 3 - The Koran
…God has made men superior to women… Virtuous women are obedient. If a woman becomes disobedient, beat her. - Chapter 4 Verse 34 - The Koran
…When it comes to marriage, Allah makes it legal for you to take as wives, women whom your right hand possesses. - Chapter 33 Verse 50 - The Koran (Author’s note: This verse talks about the “loot” non-Moslems call… kidnapped female sex-slaves.)

Most people in the western world have never heard of these astonishing scriptures, but they are in the Koran … along with a relatively short list of others, just like them. This is important because not all Moslems are the same; there are two very different types. Militant Moslems view these verses as commandments from their god – a primitive desert god, from an ancient land of heat, sand and scorpions. Militant Moslems think these teachings apply to life in the Twenty-first Century and they try to use them, regardless of the suffering and mayhem they create, whereas moderate Moslems ignore such verses because they were uttered a long time ago, when the Arabian peninsula, from whence Islam came, was a wild and savage place.

Historians tell us these terrorist teachings are part of a cluster of ferocious beliefs that were deliberately added to one specific part of the formerly peaceful and tolerant Koran. These startling changes were made, decades after Islam was first founded in the Arabian city of Mecca. By the time of these changes the original (and real) prophet of Islam was dead. Thereafter the religious headquarters was uprooted and moved to the city of Medina. In its new environment, with new leadership at the helm, Islam mutated; it turned cruel and predatory.

The historical record reveals that Islam didn’t simply fall from the sky as a full-blown religion, but rather evolved from a persecuted sect of Jewish-Christians. The first Moslems lived in the city of Mecca; they were actually part of a larger group of Jesus’ followers called the Ebionites.

Ebionites were peace-loving disciples of Christ, who shared their wealth with fellow believers, and taught that a man should marry only one wife.

In fact, women were much more independent in the Ebionite Jewish-Christian days of Islam. They were more influential too. I say this because my research has determined that the first prophet of Islam may have been someone other than Mohammed: I believe the first prophet was a very special Arabian princess named Khadija the Pure. Khadija was Mohammed’s first and only wife for twenty-four years. Khadija was fifteen years older than Mohammed. She was considered to be fabulously wealthy, and she was Mohammed’s employer, before she became his wife.

Mohammed on the other hand, before he became Khadija’s employee, was an impoverished youth who had been raised as an orphan. Ultimately Mohammed worked his way up to a position as Khadija’s business manager. With time, Khadija grew fond of Mohammed. She even married him. However, Khadija was a liberated woman. In fact, Khadija was the one who initiated the marriage proposal to Mohammed! And after their wedding, she never allowed Mohammed to take other wives, or have other women in her house.

Throughout her lifetime, even though Khadija had already converted to Christianity, Mohammed’s first and only wife for twenty-four years remained an important Arabian princess in the ruling family that controlled worship in the Kabba Temple, with it’s pantheon of more than three hundred pagan gods and goddesses. Clearly, in the early days of Islam, Khadija was a person of great influence in Arabian society: and clearly Mohammed, her husband… was not.

After Khadija’s untimely death from a terrible illness, Islam was hijacked by a cartel of corrupt men, headed by Mohammed himself. The faith was abruptly relocated to the city of Medina and new beliefs were added to the Koran; at the same time, old beliefs were deleted or relegated to unimportance, and the religion was changed beyond recognition. In the end, Islam abandoned many of its Ebionite Jewish-Christian teachings. Women suffered the most: they became the focus of repression, scorn, and violence.

Today, although moderate Moslems are loath to admit these ideas, and many of them are terrified to voice criticism of their militant Islamic brothers, because of fear that violence will come to them and their families, the fact remains that these added teachings are not the original beliefs of Islam; they are amendments: They are the terrorist teachings of Islam.

In the near future, militant Moslems hope to unleash a Jihad: a Moslem holy war upon the non-Moslem world; not only upon Israel, the United States and Western Europe, but also throughout parts of Asia, including India and maybe even China, and Japan. Because the terrorist teachings of Islam sanction treaty breaking, deception, and war, as well as looting, murder, kidnapping, terrorism, and human slavery (including sexual slavery), so long as these crimes are directed against non-Moslems, there is no limit to the things these fanatics can do. But the scariest part: Militant Moslems will do everything… in the name of their primitive desert god.

Once victory is attained in this violent holy war, these fanatics believe Allah will bless them with harems of kidnapped sex slaves taken from destroyed cities and nations, as well as enormous fortunes of loot plundered from the non-Moslem world. They believe this because of the terrorist teachings that were added to the Koran. These terrorist teachings even say ransoms paid to Moslem terrorists, to redeem stolen property (like hijacked oil tankers and cargo ships) as well as kidnapped men, women, and children, are part of the Islamic loot these vicious criminals are entitled to receive.

These same terrorist teachings even allow Moslem men to force their kidnapped female sex slaves to marry them in Moslem wedding ceremonies, and bear children for them: whether the women want to or not. Terrorist Moslem teachings mandate only two requirements: The women must come from Christian or Jewish backgrounds, and secondly, if the unfortunate women resist, these same terrorist teachings say the Moslem husbands must beat them, and imprison them in their own homes.

If the Moslem fanatics die while committing these crimes against humanity, as an eternal reward for their cruel deeds Islamic extremists believe their fierce desert god will admit them to paradise and bless them with luxurious palaces filled with riches and populated by seventy-two virgin brides, who are exquisitely beautiful, yet modest enough to struggle to control their unbridled lust to have sexual intercourse with a dead Moslem terrorist.

With these stinging indictments against terrorist Islamic doctrines entered into the record, it is important to remember that the majority of Moslems are moderate, decent people who love God and practice acts of charity and kindness to their neighbors, both Moslem and non-Moslem. Such moderate Moslems recognize these violent teachings as obsolete and out of place in the Twenty-first Century. In the author’s opinion, in spite of enormous cultural and ideological differences that exist between the non-Moslem world and the followers of Islam, it is with this moderate Moslem majority that any long-term resolution to the Islamic terrorism issue will ultimately be negotiated.

However, given the massive population increases taking place in the Moslem world, at a time when poverty, chaos, criminality, and religious fanaticism are burgeoning, the numbers of Moslems worldwide who declare themselves militant is increasing; the influence their growing networks of terror cells exert on Islamic governments throughout the world has reached crisis levels. Because of the terrorist teachings of Islam, modern civilization faces a nightmarish future; the attacks on Mumbai, India, the World Trade Center in New York, and the subway bombings in Spain and London are simply previews of things to come. In this ferocious Jihad, nuclear and biological weapons are almost certain to come into play.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: The road before us will be long and dangerous and terrifying; the United States and Europe and Asia must be resolute… and take courage. We must work together to neutralize militant Islamic movements… and if necessary… wage war against the governments that sustain them. At the same time, the non-Moslem world must also nurture moderate Islamic states and establish strong alliances with them. The very survival of our civilization depends on it.

Are you are interested in learning more about an array of Islamic topics including:
1. Who are The Seventy-two Virgins of Islam and how did they become part of militant Moslem dogma?
2. What role did the Ebionites and Khadija the Pure play, in founding the original (peaceful) religion of Islam?
3. What role does militant Islam play in modern human slavery?

Visit The Moslem Institute website: TheMoslemInstitute.com

Dane Dahl
Author and Historian

Defectors from IPCC Report Speak

Defectors from IPCC Report Speak

A United Nations climate change conference in Poland got a surprise from 650 leading scientists who scoff at doomsday reports of man-made global warming – labeling them variously a lie, a hoax and part of a new religion.

Their voices will also be heard in a U.S. Senate minority report quoting the scientists, many of whom are current and former members of the U.N.'s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

About 250 of the scientists quoted in the report have joined the dissenting scientists in the last year alone.

In fact, the total number of scientists represented in the report is 12 times the number of U.N. scientists who authored the official IPCC 2007 report.

Here are some choice excerpts from the report:

* "I am a skeptic ... . Global warming has become a new religion." -- Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

* "Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly ... . As a scientist I remain skeptical." -- Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called "among the most pre-eminent scientists of the last 100 years."

* Warming fears are the "worst scientific scandal in the history ... . When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists." -- U.N. IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning Ph.D. environmental physical chemist.

* "The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn't listen to others. It doesn't have open minds ... . I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists." -- Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the U.N.-supported International Year of the Planet.

* "The models and forecasts of the U.N. IPCC "are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity." -- Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

* "It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming." -- U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

* "Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapor and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will." -- Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

* "After reading [U.N. IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet." -- Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an associate editor of Monthly Weather Review.

* "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" -- Geologist Dr. David Gee, the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer-reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

* "Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp ... . Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact." -- Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch U.N. IPCC committee.

* "Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined." -- Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, Pa.

* "Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense ... . The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning." -- Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

* "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another ... . Every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so ... . Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver's seat and developing nations walking barefoot." -- Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

* "The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds." -- Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

The report also includes new peer-reviewed scientific studies and analyses refuting man-made warming fears and a climate developments that contradict the theory.

Adapted from an article on WND Scientists abandon global warming 'lie'

Economic Maelstrom

Economic Maelstrom

The news is all around us - there is no need to reprise it here, other than to say that economic disaster seems to be right around the corner. Today it was leaked that CitiBank is advising their larger clients that massive inflation is the better of two probable scenarios that impend, the other being civil unrest accompanied by worldwide wars. Many financial pundits on the margins are foretelling hyperinflation. American Express reports that the most wealthy of their cardholders are slowing down their spending the most. And the federal government has gone on a spending bender that has never been seen before. What is a person to do to try to sort this all out? What does the future hold?

In times of unrest, first principles are the first to go, when they should be the firmament upon which any logical analysis should be based. So allow me to set a few first principles out. First, we can always assume that people in power, when threatened, have the propensity to do almost anything to keep it. Second, it is always the first reaction of humans to see impending disaster whenever the unusual threatens to occur. And third, even though it may be difficult to see it while events transpire, everything always works out for the best, as all new realities have their winners. Even the Black Death ushered in a period of exceptional wealth and learning, which we now call the Renaissance.

There is no way to know what to do right now. Many are recommending stockpiling gold and ammunition, canned goods and commodities. I say that anyone who is just beginning to do that has not been paying attention for the last decade or more. (Full disclosure - I have been following that advice since 1973.) In our (or any) urbanized and interdependent world, planning for a short period of unrest is prudent, but believing that you can put up enough of anything to provide for security in a prolonged, or even permanent realignment of economic forces is foolish. If things really change, you had better adapt to the new reality fast, since your canned goods will go off on you in a couple of years on the outside, and ammunition runs out pretty fast if baddies want what you've got.

But the first principle that must sustain us in these (apparently) dark times is the fact that crisis begets opportunity. If Paulson and his fat cat friends are about to take a tumble, that makes room for whomever has the brains, luck, and determination to ascend to power positions that succeed theirs.

So, the Zero Base Thinking approach to these troubled times is about the same as the correct approach to most everything else: stay on the balls of your feet, and be able, and willing, to move in whatever direction promises opportunity. Don't get bogged down in any prediction of what the future might hold, but stay aware of what is happening. Be ready to move quickly, but remember that people say and do things to feather their own nests, not yours. Doom and gloom may get pundits an audience, but that does not make them correct, or their predictions true. If America is akin to Weimar Republic then that would have to mean that we are a very minor participant in the world economy. That may sell papers and attract viewers, but the size of the audience is no metric of truth. Like AGW (the global warming fraud) popularity does not make for good prognostication. How many know that global climate has been cooling for years, and no warming has occurred for over a decade? Lies that feed fears move faster than truth, now and forever.

It Is Time for a Republican Renaissance

It Is Time for a Republican Renaissance

Now that the smoke of the election is clearing, it has become obvious that most of the predictions were wrong. There was no movement in favor of the young Obama, there was no great increase in the number of voters.

What happened was that many conservatives refused to vote for McCain. He was hardly a republican, and he was no conservative.

Of course there was a propaganda campaign by the media elites, but that does not tell the story. Few conservatives were swayed by Katie Couric or David Brooks. And the young new voters did not make the difference. New voters were no more of a factor than they are every four years. The negativity of the campaigns were not the problem. Even in this most negative campaign in living memory, both sides gave as good as they got.

McCain lost because very few voters voted for him. They refused to vote for a liberal who is against a few social issues the liberals usually support. They failed to support a stand against generational change. They denied victory to the candidate who was old enough to be the other guy's father, a man who stood for very little. A maverick with no mandate and no coherent idea of how to move the nation forward.

Even so, McCain could have won if he had merely voted against the bailout. Instead he voted for the most bloated power grab ever seen. He voted for government, against people. That was unforgivable. At least Obama ran on a pro-government platform, so his vote for the bailout was consistent.

For the conservative side in our national debate to get back into power, they need to get back to first principles. The republican party may be the vehicle to get us there, or it may be some other party. First principles of a winning platform include:

- A party which will stand for our unalienable rights;

- A party which will stand for what the Constitution actually says;

- A party which will stand for smaller and more limited government;

- A party which will stand for Judeo-Christian morality and which is not so cowardly that it will not take on the baby killers and sexual anarchists;

- A party which will find a way to give people the freedom to educate their kids as they see fit;

- A party which will stand for an actual border to our country, and for living within the law;

- A party which will smash our terrorist enemies;

- A party which can find a charismatic leader who can eloquently communicate its platform to the electorate.

This may be a tall order, and it may be a while in coming. The republican party may well be too bound up in recovering its power from the ashes of yesterday, and thus be unable to return to first principles. If so, it will be a long time in the wilderness for conservatives.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

The Same Old Change
By Victor Davis Hanson

We will likely see a lot of political "readjustments" come January, once President-elect Barack Obama and many new Democratic congressmen assume office, and the Republican administration leaves.

Take the filibuster. For much of the Bush administration, out-of-power Democratic senators defended it as a hallowed tradition of American politics. But as the ruling majority, they will soon probably redefine the filibuster as a sort of nihilism practiced by bitter Republicans to obstruct the Obama agenda. Of course, when in power, Republicans themselves once deplored the filibuster as fossilized obstructionism.

Remember all the trouble President Bush has had with court appointments? The Senate Democrats for the last eight years stalled confirmation hearings, denying the president the traditional prerogative of selecting qualified jurists who shared his philosophy.

Much to these same Democrats' dismay, beleaguered Senate minority Republicans may soon agree with the past use of such roadblocks and learn to impede simple up-and-down votes on judicial nominees. To them, such tactics will be reinvented as necessary to stop Obama-appointed liberal judges from flooding the courts.

Recently, Democrats called for unity and an end to the politics of personal destruction against our new, shared President-elect Obama. So let us hope that New York publishers will now refrain from publishing any more foul novels like Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," whose characters debate the wisdom of assassinating George W. Bush.

Let us also hope that when Barack Obama is nearing the end of his term, filmmaker Oliver Stone does not offer the electorate a damning mythic film called "H" that emphasizes the wild college days of President Barack H. Obama when, decades ago, as he freely admits, he used both hard drugs and marijuana.

Public financing of campaigns was a liberal given for over a quarter-century. Democrats argued that conservative big money and national big politics always made a toxic brew. Then the suddenly cash-rich Obama renounced that old liberal gospel, rightly betting that his Democrats could out-raise even fat-cat Republicans.

Now with Democrats enjoying the advantages of incumbency -- but fearful of wounded conservatives determined never again to be outspent -- will majority liberals become born-again supporters of public limits on fundraising in the upcoming elections of 2010 and 2012?

Most polls reveal that American voters believed that their media was biased in favor of Obama. The popular journalist Chris Matthews even bragged that it was his job responsibility to see that President-elect Obama succeeds.

So when a few disgruntled Obama administration officials leave government to cash in with tell-all memoirs about the president's shortcomings -- and some always do -- will journalists, as they did with the numerous Bush tell-all apostates, praise them for their voice-in-the-wilderness candor? Or will they, as Republicans once did to their own defectors, blast them as crass publicity-seeking turncoats?

When fickle and self-interested Europeans once opposed strutting cowboy George Bush, they were praised as sophisticates. Now if they resist renewed calls from hip and cool Barack Obama to shoulder more responsibilities -- and they will -- are they to be suddenly scolded as unappreciative and self-centered?

Abroad, we were told that it is time to change the policies of George Bush that were unilateral and offensive. For example, pushing missile defense on Eastern Europe was said to be needlessly provocative to Russia. But will that still be true if President Obama decides to support it?

There are lessons here for everyone. Polarized Republicans and Democrats justify the means by which they practice politics by their self-described exalted ends. The only constant is they'll each do anything when out of power to regain it -- and anything while in power to retain it. All candidates say almost anything to get elected and call it idealism. Then when in office, they renege on what they promised and call it realism.

The media, meanwhile, should be careful not to abandon fairness and discretion for short-term political advantage. When the wheel turns -- and it, too, always does -- what you did or said will come back to haunt you.

Obama and his giddy Democratic majority sound like they think they will now be novel exceptions to these iron laws of politics, as if they really believe their hype that they are the "change" we have been waiting for, with cosmic power to stop the planet from heating and the seas from rising.

But the only real difference from the past old politics is that the present avatars of "hope and change" apparently don't believe that the age-old adage -- "The more things change, the more they remain the same" -- will really apply to them as well.

Guest Post by Victor Davis Hansen.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Obama on Obama - A Game Changer?

Obama on Obama - A Game Changer?

If your toilet is stopped up by something really big and smells really bad, you'll probably need a plumber. Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, diagnosed the trouble, and yesterday we learned what it was. It smells really bad.

The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan.

The interview explains a lot, beginning with the attempt, abetted by a mainstream media that no longer tries to hide its slavish obeisance to the Democratic campaign, to destroy Joe the Plumber and shut down discussion of the implications of what the candidate said.

Mr. Obama doesn't think much of the Constitution, or even of the Supreme Court justices who have rewritten it over the years to accommodate notions of "social justice." The Warren Court, which wrote finis to public-school segregation with its unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, has been decried since as radical, but it wasn't radical enough. Earl Warren only pretended to be a soldier of the revolution.

One of the "tragedies of the civil-rights movement," Mr. Obama says, is that the Supreme Court did not address redistribution of wealth, probably because of the inherent difficulty of achieving such goals through the courts. The Supreme Court did not break from the restraints of the Constitution and "we still suffer from that." Mr. Obama is not "optimistic" that the Supreme Court can achieve redistribution of wealth - of taking from the workers to give to the deadbeats - but he obviously thinks he knows how to do it. A president with a compliant Congress, which he expects to be in January, can do it through legislation and "administration."

The Barack Obama of this interview clearly does not think much of what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us: "The Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on to this day. The framers had that same blind spot ... the fundamental flaw of this country."

Mr. Obama is a gifted politician, with the smarts to understand that this could be the "game-changer" that leaves his campaign, almost picture-perfect until now, in ruins. He understands that he has to fly under the radar for now. That's why his campaign apparatus moves swiftly to dismiss questions about the Obama paper trail, such as it is, and to crush anyone bold and foolish enough to inquire into the real Barack Obama.

Joe the Plumber learned the hard way what happens to such questioners, and when a television reporter in Florida asked Joe Biden whether his running mate is a Marxist economist, good old Joe, usually eager to talk about everything, acted as if the interviewer had accused him of serial killing or child molesting. Some things just aren't to be talked about, not now. Not Barack Obama's radical notions about redistributing the wealth - which is, after all, the essence of Marxism. Not about how he intends to replace fundamental American values with values that most Americans, if they knew about them, would regard as alien and hostile.

If John McCain wants to change the game over the next seven days, he'll have to break through the media screen to spell out, clearly, often and in detail, the implications of what Barack Obama actually means when he talks about how to redistribute the wealth. To redistribute wealth, you first have to confiscate it from those who earned it with hard work, and the way to do that is with confiscatory taxes. Then you give it to those who didn't earn it. Such explanations, made with cool detachment, once would have been the work of the newspapers and even the television networks. But not this year. Mr. McCain can expect real grief from the media when the polls tighten.

There's nothing ambiguous about Mr. Obama's radical views, as revealed in this interview. He clearly thinks the Constitution was a "tragedy," that the men who wrote it were not the revolutionary heroes plain Americans regard them to be, and their work must be corrected by the surviving radicals of the '60s and their progeny. Anyone who listens to this interview, available on YouTube.com, understands why Michelle Obama was never proud of her country until she thought the opportunity was at hand to destroy the country to save it, and why Barack Obama could spend 20 years comfortably listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright exhort God to damn America.

Guest post by Wes Pruden of the Washington Times

Separation of God and State

Separation of God and State

McCain is a man of action and accomplishment, Obama a man of "charisma" and pretty words, whose only real accomplishment has been his remarkable self-advancement. And Obama's policy outlook, so far as it can be discerned from the usual electoral pronouncements, consists of the same snake oil the pre-Clinton Democrats had been selling continuously since they chained the Great Society to America's ankle: that is, a constantly expanding Nanny State. I am hardly reassured by Obama's last-lap rhetorical reassurances: you don't send a man to Washington with a trillion dollars of candy-shop promises on medicare, education, government job-creation, "spreading the wealth" -- especially when the economy has just tanked.

I wish that were the worst I could say about the man, who has survived nearly two years of campaigning for President without serious cross-examination from either the media or his media-chastened opponents. A man who, should he win the election and serve one term, will have been President of the United States longer than he has held any steady job.

In my world, you don't humour a politician who presents "Change," "Unity," and especially, "Hope," as hypnotic mantras, with the power of enchantment over very large crowds. And you especially don't humour such a politician at a time when both country and world are unstable, and hard decisions will have to be made.

Deeper than this: Obama has presented himself from the start as a messianic, "transformational" leader -- and thus played deceitfully with ideas that belong to religion and not politics. That he has done this so successfully is a mark of the degree to which the U.S. itself, like the rest of the western world, has lost its purchase on the Christian religion. Powerful religious impulses have been spilt, secularized.

In this climate, people tend to be maniacally opposed to the sin to which they are not tempted: to giving Christ control over the things that are Caesar's. But they are blind to the sin to which they are hugely tempted: giving Caesar control over the things that are Christ's.

"Faith, hope, and charity" are Christ's things. They apply, properly, outside time -- to a "futurity" that is not of this world. They must not be applied to any earthly utopia. A Caesar who appropriates otherworldly virtues, is riding upon very dangerous illusions. Follow him into dreamland, and you'll be lucky to wake up.

Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama

Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama

By SHELBY STEELE July 22, 2008

A few weeks ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson made something of a fool of himself. There he was -- a historical figure in his own right -- threatening the castration of Barack Obama. It was sad to see.

If I have often criticized Mr. Jackson, I have also, reservedly, admired him. He is a late 20th century outcropping of a profoundly American archetype: the self-invented man who comes from nothing and, out of sheer force of personality, imposes himself on the American consciousness. If he never reached the greatness to which he aspired, he nevertheless did honor to the enduring American tradition of bold and unapologetic opportunism.

But now -- not looking old so much as a bit lost within the new Obama aura -- it is clear that Jesse Jackson has come to a kind of dénouement. Some force that once buoyed him up now seems spent.

Mr. Jackson was always a challenger. He confronted American institutions (especially wealthy corporations) with the shame of America's racist past and demanded redress. He could have taken up the mantle of the early Martin Luther King (he famously smeared himself with the great man's blood after King was shot), and argued for equality out of a faith in the imagination and drive of his own people. Instead -- and tragically -- he and the entire civil rights establishment pursued equality through the manipulation of white guilt.

Their faith was in the easy moral leverage over white America that the civil rights victories of the 1960s had suddenly bestowed on them. So Mr. Jackson and his generation of black leaders made keeping whites "on the hook" the most sacred article of the post-'60s black identity.

They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To argue differently -- that black development, for example, might be a more enduring road to black equality -- took whites "off the hook" and was therefore an unpardonable heresy. For this generation, an Uncle Tom was not a black who betrayed his race; it was a black who betrayed the group's bounty of moral leverage over whites. And now comes Mr. Obama, who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.

Mr. Obama's great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America's racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.

So it is not hard to see why Mr. Jackson might have experienced Mr. Obama's emergence as something of a stiletto in the heart. Mr. Obama is a white "race card" -- moral leverage that whites can use against the moral leverage black leaders have wielded against them for decades. He is the nullification of Jesse Jackson -- the anti-Jackson.

And Mr. Obama is so successful at winning gratitude from whites precisely because Mr. Jackson was so successful at inflaming and exploiting white guilt. Mr. Jackson must now see his own oblivion in the very features of Mr. Obama's face. Thus the on-camera threat of castration, followed by the little jab of his fist as if to deliver a stiletto of his own.

And then Mr. Obama took it further by going to the NAACP with a message of black responsibility -- this after his speech on the need for black fathers to take responsibility for the children they sire. "Talking down to black people," Mr. Jackson mumbled.

Normally, "black responsibility" is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites. When Mr. Obama uses this language, whites of course are thankful. Black leaders seethe.

Nevertheless, Mr. Obama's sacrifice of black leverage has given him a chance to actually become the president. He has captured the devotion of millions of whites in ways that black leveragers never could. And the great masses of blacks -- blacks outside today's sclerotic black leadership -- see this very clearly. Until Mr. Obama, any black with a message of black responsibility would be called a "black conservative" and thereby marginalized. After Obama's NAACP speech, blacks flooded into the hotel lobby thanking him for "reminding" them of their responsibility.

Thomas Sowell, among many others, has articulated the power of individual responsibility as an antidote to black poverty for over 40 years. Black thinkers as far back as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington have done the same. Why then, all of a sudden, are blacks willing to openly embrace this truth -- and in the full knowledge that it will weaken their leverage with whites?

I think the answer is that Mr. Obama potentially offers them something far more profound than mere moral leverage. If only symbolically, he offers nothing less than an end to black inferiority. This has been an insidious spiritual torment for blacks because reality itself keeps mockingly proving the original lie. Barack Obama in the Oval Office -- a black man governing a largely white nation -- would offer blacks an undreamed-of spiritual solace far more meaningful than the petty self-importance to be gained from moral leverage.

But white Americans have also been tormented by their stigmatization as moral inferiors, as racists. An Obama presidency would give them considerable moral leverage against this stigma.

So it has to be acknowledged that, on the level of cultural and historical symbolism, an Obama presidency might nudge the culture forward a bit -- presuming of course that he would be at least a competent president. (A less-than-competent black president would likely be a step backwards.) It would be a good thing were blacks to be more open to the power of individual responsibility. And it would surely help us all if whites were less cowed by the political correctness on black issues that protects their racial innocence at the expense of the very principles that made America great. We Americans are hungry for such a cultural shift.

This, no doubt, is what Barack Obama means by "change." He promises to reconfigure our exhausted cultural arrangement.

But here lies his essential contradiction: His campaign is more cultural than political. He sells himself more as a cultural breakthrough than as a candidate for office. To be a projection screen for the cultural aspirations of both blacks and whites one must be an invisible man politically. Real world politics, in their mundanity, interrupt cultural projections. And so Mr. Obama's political invisibility -- a charm that can only derive from a lack of deep political convictions -- may well serve his cultural appeal, but it also makes him something of a political mess.

Already he has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste.

John McCain is simply a man of considerable character, poor guy. He is utterly bereft of cultural cachet. Against an animating message of cultural "change," he is retrogression itself. Worse, Mr. Obama's trick is to take politics off the table by moving so politically close to his opponent that only culture is left to separate them. And, unencumbered as he is by deep attachment to principle, he can be both far-left and center-right. He can steal much of Mr. McCain's territory.

Mr. Obama has already won a cultural mandate to the American presidency. And politically, he is now essentially in a contest with himself. His challenge is not Mr. McCain; it is the establishment of his own patriotism, trustworthiness and gravitas. He has to channel a little Colin Powell, and he no doubt hopes his trip to the Middle East and Europe will reflect him back to America with something of Mr. Powell's stature. He wants even Middle America to feel comfortable as the mantle they bestow on him settles upon his shoulders.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win" (Free Press, 2007).

A Complete Transformation?

A Complete Transformation?

In yet another stupendously pompous and arrogant statement, that is what Barry O is promising now. In a speech in Michigan today, he claimed that he would preside over "a complete transformation of our economy." Clearly, this man can not stop at merely promising to bring one billion of the world's poor up to middle class status, now he will deliver us a new economy to fund it with.

It would be funny if it were not so dangerous. OK, so this guy slipped between the cracks when the Clintons tried to rig the game to get Hillary nominated, and instead rigged the game in a way that snuck this underqualified lightweight into the nomination. And the smart money says that the deal is over, no way Hillary gets into His place. But is there no adult supervision in the democrat party? Are they really gonna allow Obama to be their nominee?

Don't they realize that this means that he might actually become The President of The United States of America? For the next four years? Four years in which either SOME responsible party attacks Iran, or we all face nuclear blackmail on an international scale with more dire repercussions than we can even imagine at this point?

I am no Hillary supporter, far from it. But given that, no matter how impossible it looks like right now, Obama might actually get elected, and I fear for my nation. If Obama, Pelosi, and Reed are the ruling triumvirate during the next four years, the damage that might be done, especially internationally, might just really be terminal for our way of life. This threat against our economy is the cherry on top.

If Bush chickens out from his final responsibility, and forces Israel to attack Iran's nuclear sites alone, just imagine what the next two weeks under an indecisive Obama administration looks like. When does he commit the entire force and will of the USA to the battle? After Iran mines the Straits of Hormuz? After the first nuke goes long and explodes in the Mediterranean? Or does he wait until the loonies in Teheran finally obliterate the Hebrew presence on planet Earth in pursuit of their looney end-times prophesies? And even then, does Hussein order retaliation on his brothers? EVEN THEN??

No, yet I am certain that all of Western Civilization has a dog in this fight, and the bottom line is that Obama must be defeated. I can't have who I want in the White House, but either McCain or Clinton are far to be preferred to the untested one, who has gone so far beyond flip-flopping that he can most properly now be called what he is, LIAR, willing to say anything, anything at all, if it will please the audience he is standing in front of at that moment. At least we know that Hillary has been there for eight years, and understands the stakes and the game. Faced with a dire situation, I believe she would act. She might act a tad too slowly, but so did Golda Meir, and nobody calls HER a softie. But would Obama? How do you, how could you know?

I call on the Democrat Party to stop this thing before it is too late. Any Democrat nominee has a chance in November. Even Barry O would have a chance? Anything might happen at the last moment of a campaign that ends up electing the wrong guy. It is now up to the leadership and the super-delegates to do the statesmanlike thing, and do what is in the best interest of this country. Nominate Hillary Clinton, so that we can choose between two people who at least qualify for the job. It would be a big surprise, but I can still hope, can't I? The next few years are too critical to trust to a man who has done no thing in his life that recommends him to the White House. He did not even want the job two years ago, but now his handlers have gotten him to the very brink of success - POWER. Every voter must think it over again if he is still willing to vote for Obama.

Oil Prices Are Variable

Oil Prices Are Variable

While we suffer through oil prices that are historically higher than ever, we tend to forget some basic principles. Zero Base Thinkers never forget that the common knowledge is always wrong, but we are in the minority. Pundits have taken to declaring that "gas prices will never get back to where they were," but this flies in the face of proven reality.

Petroleum, as indeed all commodity prices, have historically followed a boom and bust cycle. Historically petroleum prices tend to cluster around about twenty dollars per barrel, or a half a buck a gallon, as can be seen here. These prices vary upward during extraordinary periods of history, especially geo-political events concerning the Middle East, where much of the world's oil is produced. That describes the recent times pretty well, but is not a prediction for the future. With the prospect of a deal between Syria and Israel becoming more real by the day, that pressure on oil prices might just be moving further away. If only some resolution of the Iran situation could be found, there would be no reason that we might not see twenty dollar oil again.

It is hard to go up against such clear thinkers as Michael Medved, but believing that oil prices will never go down would make us marks ready to buy stock in the Brooklyn Bridge. Others say that oil prices might go down to $80, but that might well be not ambitious enough. History should reassert itself, as Frank Fukuyama found, to his dismay. Before you buy yourself a hybrid car or a subcompact, prudence dictates waiting for events to unfold.

Obama Admits His Lack of Experience

Obama Admits His Lack of Experience

Back a couple of years ago Barry Obama admitted the truth, that he is too young and inexperienced to run for president. In a video that his campaign wishes they could destroy, the candidate makes his painful lack of understanding and experience clear to all who would listen, available on this video on You Tube.

In the video Obama says that he has "ruled out" running for the top job, and is quite candid about his reasons. But like his pledge to abide by public financing, the minute he saw advantage in going against his own word, he did so.

It is rare that any candidate is caught in such an admission. It is the very requirement for the job of president of The United States that the person be self absorbed and power-mad, so they rarely make such candid statements about themselves. But this guy did! Check it out.