Enemies of the state: Administration smears some opponents, arrests others

During President George W. Bush's two terms, you couldn't drive far without seeing a particular bumper sticker: "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." Now that Democrats control the White House and Congress, the left treats dissent as the lowest form of treason. When the left agitates over government policies, it's considered righteous anger. When the right - and much of the center - agitate, it's painted as the rantings of the criminally and violently insane.

With Obamacare signed into law, Democrats have stopped congratulating themselves long enough to notice that the American people aren't cheering on the sidelines. According to a CNN poll released last week, 58 percent oppose President Obama's handling of Obamacare, while Gallup shows him this week with a 46 percent job approval, his lowest yet. A CBS poll released after the House of Representatives passed Obamacare showed Speaker Nancy Pelosi's favorable rating at 11 percent and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's at 8 percent, higher only than Beelzebub's.

Aware that their "reform" is rejected by most of the American people and that they will face serious consequences in November, the Democrats have decided that the best defense is a good offense: Attack those who oppose Obamacare. It doesn't seem to bother most Democrats that that pernicious strategy puts them in the weird and politically untenable position of attacking most of the American people.

Over the past week, a parade of Democrats have accused members of the Tea Party movement and other opponents of Obamacare of threatening them. There may be an infinitesimal number of looney tunes who have engaged in that kind of unacceptable behavior out of hundreds of millions of Americans. But the Democrats have dishonestly extrapolated from a few claimed incidents to taint all those who reject Obamacare as wild-eyed wackos.

If this sounds familiar, it's because the Democrats have shown a disturbing pattern of demonizing those who disagree with them. A year ago, Mr. Obama's Department of Homeland Security issued a report for law enforcement called "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." It suggested that anyone who opposed abortion, illegal immigration and oppressive taxes, supported gun rights or served in Iraq and Afghanistan should be singled out for special attention. Why? Because such people might burst into a spasm of violence at any time. There was no mention of being on the lookout for potential violence committed by Islamic jihadists, even after actual acts of violence committed by an Islamic jihadist in Little Rock. (The Fort Hood shooting happened later.)

In other words, if you go to church, believe in protecting innocent life, own a gun or defend your country, the Democrats consider you a potential enemy of the state. It was no coincidence that the Homeland Security report was issued just as the Tea Party movement was gaining real national traction.

Not surprisingly, then, once they had passed their widely unpopular health care bill, the Democrats moved quickly to delegitimize opposition to it. Their defiant move in the face of overwhelming popular resistance gave them another excuse to equate big-government progressives with good patriots and small government advocates with potentially violent nutcases who must be watched.

As if on cue, this week, Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of Justice's Joint Terrorism Task Force carried out raids against a purported "Christian militia group" in the Midwest. According to reports, nine people have been charged with plotting to kill police officers with "weapons of mass destruction." The indictment describes the group as an "anti-government extremist organization" and the FBI special agent in charge, Andrew Arena, cast it as "radical and fringe." That may be, but the description has a conveniently familiar ring to it.

Interestingly, the head of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Dawud Walid, rushed to announce the raids at a CAIR banquet at about the same time the story became public. "We salute the FBI for breaking up a militia that was seeking to harm American Muslims," he said. It's curious that he would know that at a time when the FBI still had the investigation under seal. (We're still waiting to hear why Homeland Security and the FBI chose to use the descriptive word "Christian" when they seem unable to use the word "Muslim" in connection with Islamic extremism.)

It's mind-blowingly coincidental that these raids on a supposedly "Christian" militia group would come at the exact moment that Democrats were trying to change public opinion on Obamacare by claiming persecution by their opponents. They have cast Tea Partiers, conservatives, independents, Christians and militia members as all cut from the same unstable, volatile cloth. How can anyone take their opposition to the Democrats' agenda seriously when they're toting guns and being raided by Homeland Security and the FBI? They're all nuts, don't you know?

The Democrats handle dissent by isolating it, smearing it and delegitimizing it in order to crush it. The warning should be clear: If you have small-government, traditional values, you may be considered by your own leadership to be an enemy of the state.

SOURCE

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United States of Argentina

When White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel last year advised "never waste a good crisis," he likely was thinking ahead to President Obama's economic stimulus program and health care plan. After swelling the federal deficit by passing the stimulus at a cost of nearly $1 trillion, Democrats in Congress signed off on Obamacare, with a price tag, according to Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., of $2.3 trillion in its first decade alone. With federal spending exploding at such a rate, it's no wonder that Moody's Investor Service recently warned that it would downgrade the U.S. government's credit rating if it concludes "the government was unable and/or unwilling to quickly reverse the deterioration it has incurred."

What the United States government will do in the future may be in question, but we need not look far to find past examples of countries unwilling to get their finances in order. Consider Argentina. In 1914, it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and its living standard exceeded that of Western Europe until the late 1950s. Then President Juan Peron squandered his nation's prosperity by introducing a host of redistributionist economic and regulatory policies, nationalizing utilities and foreign investments, and pumping up the national debt. What followed was three decades of political instability, growing dependency, and economic stagnation.

There was a brief period of privatization and booming foreign investment in what the American Enterprise Institute's Mark Falcoff called Argentina's "go go" 1990s. But that was negated by the return of political leaders espousing Peronist principles who created a downward economic spiral by breaking contracts with foreign utility companies that had invested heavily in Argentina. Today, the country has lost its international credit standing and an estimated 10 percent of the population has moved abroad to escape the stifling taxes, regulation and inefficiency. To make matters worse, President Cristina Kirchner recently attracted attention for firing the president of the country's central bank. His sin was refusing to go along with her inflationary spending policies (Argentina's inflation is 17 percent) and challenging her demand that he hand over $6.6 billion in bank reserves.

Besides sending federal spending skyrocketing, Obama has, like so many of the politicians who ruined Argentina, dramatically increased government regulation of business, nationalized major sectors of the economy, and imposed a lengthy list of tax increases. America today is no more exempt from economic reality than Argentina was in years past. Make no mistake, these actions will eventually drain the life from this nation's economic vitality, just as they did in Argentina.

SOURCE

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The welfare system penalizes efforts to get ahead

Until you earn about $40,000 a year, you’re pretty much stuck in poverty, an economist’s numbers show. In fact, until you get past $40,000 a year, any raise or higher paying job you get might actually sink you deeper into poverty. Take a look at this story from economist Jeff Liebman, who now works in the Obama Administration:

The poverty trap is still very much a reality in the U.S.

A woman called me out of the blue last week and told me her self-sufficiency counselor had suggested she get in touch with me. She had moved from a $25,000 a year job to a $35,000 a year job, and suddenly she couldn’t make ends meet any more. I told her I didn’t know what I could do for her, but agreed to meet with her. She showed me all her pay stubs, etc. She really did come out behind by several hundred dollars a month. She lost free health insurance and instead had to pay $230 a month for her employer-provided health insurance. Her rent associated with her section 8 voucher went up by 30% of the income gain (which is the rule). She lost the ($280 a month) subsidized child care voucher she had for after-school care for her child. She lost around $1600 a year of the EITC. She paid payroll tax on the additional income. Finally, the new job was in Boston, and she lived in a suburb. So now she has $300 a month of additional gas and parking charges. She asked me if she should go back to earning $25,000.

Take a look at this chart by economist Clifford Thies, via Greg Mankiw’s blog.



From the green dot, you can see that earned income rises… for a while. Then there’s this screwy wavy line. That’s the mother making a little more, but earning a little less.

$40,000 a year is about $19 an hour. Over 40 percent of Chicagoans don’t earn that much.

There aren’t that many jobs out there that make $19 an hour. Bank Teller? $13.33 an hour. Office clerk? $15.60. Retail salesperson? $11.80. Security guard? $16.14. (Statistics via Chicago Rehab network).

Our tax incentives work… initially. Then they only serve to hurt people. They say the poor don’t work hard enough, but that single mother sounds like a pretty hard working person to me. The story goes on to say that she got a weekend job, to try to make ends meet. Except after childcare and gas, it didn’t help at all.

So if working harder means people might actually earn less, how is it that we expect people to work harder?

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

Obama's road to economic ruin : Obama's monstrous health bill needs to seen as part of a comprehensive attack on the US economy. Therefore the markets are also examining Obama's tax policies, regulatory proposals, insane views on energy production and pricing plus his borrowing and spending programs. But it is not just the financial side that is considered, there are also the political aspects. And they ain't pretty
Paul Krugman's Keynesian views: more snake oil : According to Krugman saving is 'a bad thing'. In fact, the more Americans save the worse the economy will be. But if Krugman were right then those countries with very high savings ratios would be permanently depressed while countries with no savings would be booming. Yet statistics show that it was those countries with the highest savings rates that had the highest growth rates
U.S. government, on its way to bankruptcy, part 2 : The U.S. government is out of control, a government that has committed to obligations so big, that unless policies change, it will literally bankrupt the United States and create mass poverty
The Democrats' anti-tax lunacy : The Democrats' opposition to tax cuts borders on the hysterical. Apart from their insincerity (the only kinds of tax increases they support are those their fabulously super rich supporters can easily avoid) there is the utter bankruptcy of their so-called economic arguments
Obamacare: the other tax shoes begin to drop : Obama's brilliant healthcare legislation is a job killer that will cause taxes and costs to leap. It will stunt economic growth and worsen the economic downturn by making too costly to hire people while simultaneously providing financial incentives to sack a number of employees. Well done, Obama!
Banned in Britain for "Hate Speech" - Unless You're the Daughter Of a Mass Murderer : Britain's Labour Government recently celebrated 50 years Castro's dictatorship, including mass torture, murder, slave camps, drug running and terrorism. To stress its support for the sadistic Castro it invited Che Guevara's daughter to the celebrations. She in turn praised her father's vicious crimes and his sadism
Sabotaging the US-Israel relationship : The leftwing mainstream media is lying again about Israel. These politically motivated liars mislead viewers and readers by failing to provide the full historical context and demographic projections for Israel's capital and the so-called settlements

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ELSEWHERE

Medical society files lawsuit to block ObamaCare: "With the president’s ink barely dry on the health care overhaul’s final fixes, a group of nearly 5,000 American physicians is filing suit to stop the mammoth new law dead in its tracks. ‘I think this bill that passed threatens not only to destroy our freedom in medicine but to bankrupt the country,’ said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. The Arizona-based medical coalition filed suit on March 26, arguing that congressional reforms illegally coerce individuals into buying insurance from private companies.”

Obama regime to permit oil exploration off Virginia coast: "President Barack Obama is to announce on Wednesday a plan to permit exploration for oil and natural gas off the coast of Virginia as a way to create jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Obama, who wants Congress to move a stalled climate change bill, has sought to reach out to Republicans by signaling he is open to allowing offshore drilling, providing coastlines are protected.”

The rich can’t pay for ObamaCare: "President Barack Obama’s new health-care legislation aims to raise $210 billion over 10 years to pay for the extensive new entitlements. How? By slapping a 3.8% ‘Medicare tax’ on interest and rental income, dividends and capital gains of couples earning more than $250,000, or singles with more than $200,000. The president also hopes to raise $364 billion over 10 years from the same taxpayers by raising the top two tax rates to 36%-39.6% from 33%-35%, plus another $105 billion by raising the tax on dividends and capital gains to 20% from 15%, and another $500 billion by capping and phasing out exemptions and deductions. Add it up and the government is counting on squeezing an extra $1.2 trillion over 10 years from a tiny sliver of taxpayers who already pay more than half of all individual taxes. It won’t work. It never works.”

A new economics?: "You probably missed it. But a new school of economics was unveiled last week shortly after health care reform passed the House of Representatives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepped to the podium in the House chamber and said the legislation will ‘unleash tremendous entrepreneurial power’ and create millions of jobs. ‘Our economy needs something new, a jolt,’ she said. And she and her Democratic colleagues had just delivered it.”

Obamacare starts squeezing the private sector: "The news on healthcare reform this week is that right off the bat, the major corporations are discovering they will be losing stunning amounts to taxes as a result of Obamacare. Caterpillar, the first to speak out, reported it will take a one-time write-down of $100 million in order to account for the elimination of a federal tax refund it has been receiving for providing drug benefits to its retired employees. In the following days, AT&T, Verizon, 3M, Deer & Co., and AK Steel Holdings announced they would take similar write downs. AT&T’s new tax bill will come to over $1 billion. The news is a body blow to major companies hoping to recover profitability and add jobs. If all this sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly what Republicans predicted would happen if Obamacare became law.”

CIA says ACLU-backed plan endangered Gitmo officers: "A team of CIA counterintelligence officials recently visited the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and concluded that CIA interrogators face the risk of exposure to al Qaeda through inmates' contacts with defense attorneys, according to U.S. officials. The agency's "tiger team" of security specialists was dispatched as part of an ongoing investigation conducted jointly with the Justice Department into a program backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The program, called the John Adams Project, has photographed covert CIA interrogators and shown the pictures to some of the five senior al Qaeda terrorists held there in an effort to identify them further."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Germany's "Democratic Party" in the 1930s

In my various writings I am much indebted to readers who send me interesting links and, occasionally, interesting books. One regular and generous correspondent has just sent me a copy of a recent book: Living with Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich.

To understand what the book is about, you need to know that the German electoral system both then and now is/was run on proportional representation lines. There was nothing like the "First past the post" voting system that prevails in most Anglo-Saxon countries. In other words, the number of seats in the legislature that a party gets reflects roughly the proportion of votes cast that the party got in the most recent election. This invariably leads to a parliament in which MANY parties are represented, unlike the two-party system of the USA. It is very rare for any one party to get a majority of the seats available and governments are therefore usually formed by alliances between different parties. Israel and most of Europe has such a system to this day.

And in interwar Germany, politics were dominated by various flavours of Leftism. There was very little support for much in the way of conservatism. And the parties could be ranked in their degree of Leftism -- from Communist, to Nazi, to Social Democrats to Liberal Democrats. The Social Democrats were equivalent to the Labor parties that one finds in the Anglosphere, strongly allied with the Labor unions, and the Liberal Democrats saw themselves as "progressives", quite similar to the Democrats in the USA today. And it is that latter group that the book concerns.

So how did the German "Democrats" go in Hitler's Germany? Did they furiously resist Nazism, as the rhetoric of modern-day Democrats would suggest? No way! Like the FDR Democrats in the America of the 1930s, they got along with Hitler to various degrees. There were a small number of highly principled ones who fled Germany but most did little more than mutter and got by quite well under Hitler. Some even made distinguished careers under Hitler. Most thought that Hitler was too rough and too extreme but they appreciated his basic Leftism and went along with him willingly.

Conventional history since the war has focused on the small number of German "Democrats" who fled Germany but this latest book shows that they were highly atypical. If you want the details, you will have to read the book. It is a large and comprehensive work so you will be left in no doubt at the end of it about how easily "Democrats" can drift into Fascism. With the passage of Obamacare, many American conservatives would say the the drift concerned is now well underway in the USA.

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Shunning the party of whiners

We're not yet a nation wholly of whiners, but some of our congresspersons are working on it. Democrats who should have been taking a victory lap spent a week cowering in fear of the contents of a tea cup. No wonder real men — mostly but, by no means all, white — are shunning the Democrats.

The polling gurus are finding that millions of the white men who helped put Barack Obama in the White House are leaving the Democrats in great numbers, and this could lead to really bad news in November. Gallup finds that white male support for a Democratic Congress has fallen 8 percentage points since last summer, while the support of women has remained remarkably steady. White women who voted for Mr. Obama continue to support him, but only 38 percent of white men support him now. Unless the president and his party find a way to reverse this trend they must prepare for an epic bath nine months hence.

Accomplishing such a turnaround would require first of all for Democrats to pipe down about what a tough life they have. Life is real, often hard, and, as Damon Runyon famously said to a whiner at the poker table, "three out of three people die, so shut up and deal." Democrats in Congress who got their way in the health care "reform" debate are frightened now that the people they abused are angry and determined to do something about it. With the help of the compliant "mainstream" media, they have created the specter of a tsunami of hate, bigotry, racism, slander, rock-throwing, spitting, irritable bowel syndrome and seven-year itch. Sarah Palin has got the Democrats particularly spooked.

What the Democrats actually got were dirty looks, catcalls, and cries of "shame!" They accused their constituents of hurling naughty words, including "the N-word" (which has become more terrible than the A-bomb in modern usage) as well as sticks, stones and occasional bricks. Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, who betrayed his anti-abortion allies who believed him when he vowed never, ever, to vote for legislation to make taxpayer-funded abortion easier, even insists that his life was threatened by unidentified evildoers.

Exaggeration is the coin of politics, of course, and it turns out that nearly all of the threats of mayhem, dismemberment, death and rudeness cited by frightened Democrats were merely manufactured for effect. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, who said he was spat upon at the Capitol, on drying off changed his story. He told The Washington Post that, umm, well, actually the heckler was, ah, "the man who allowed his saliva to hit my face." Anyone who has sat in the front row at the theater knows that drenching spittle, unpleasant but innocent, often accompanies dramatic speech. An examination of videotape finds no evidence that anyone at a certain Tea Party rally actually shouted the "N-word" at black Democrats, and the coffin that was supposed to have been left on his lawn to threaten another Missouri congressman was actually displayed at a prayer vigil against abortion down the street.

Incivility is the name of the game in modern politics, and the Internet has made the gratuitous insult as American as the banana-cream pie so tempting to smash into the face of someone who deserves it. But anyone who expresses a public opinion must expect dissent, colorfully expressed. Occasionally a threat is real and should be denounced and if need be punished. But the vilification of Barack Obama is no more passionate than the vilification of George W. Bush. Extremes beget extremes. Alec Baldwin promised to leave the country if George W. was re-elected president in 2004, and by 2008 Sean Penn was screaming that Republicans should "die in agony from rectal cancer." (What is this Hollywood obsession with the southern terminus of the alimentary canal?)

What most Democratic whiners don't understand — and what some of their betters understand very well — is that people get mad when they're ignored and punished by consequences imposed on them. Barack Obama understands it, and is contemptuous of the backlash, as anyone knows who saw the curl of his lip and heard the disdain in his voice when he celebrated the signing of Obamacare.

The Democrats know they have shoved an unwanted and despised health care "reform" down the throats of Americans, and they understand that arrogance, like elections, sometimes invites consequences. Once upon a time the liberal establishment — now the terrified whiners — didn't have to worry about consequences, since it had silenced the great unwashed. But the unwashed have found their voice, and they're not giving it up.

SOURCE

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Winston Churchill an unlikely adviser for General Stanley A. McChrystal in the Afghan conflict

GENERAL Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, has found an unlikely adviser in the continuing struggle against the Taliban. This new counsellor is British, a former journalist, soldier, writer, painter and politician. He is also dead, and the last time he was anywhere near Afghanistan was in 1897.

Winston Churchill has come to the aid of the Allies. McChrystal is said to listen to the writings of Churchill on his iPod during his daily eight-mile jog. A recent visitor to Nato headquarters in Kabul found the American general immersed in Churchill's first book, his account of the struggle to pacify the tribes of the North West Frontier at the end of the 19th century.

Next on the general's reading list, it was reported, is Churchill's The River War, describing the reconquest of the Sudan that ended in the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

Barack Obama, fresh from his first presidential visit to Afghanistan, is no admirer of Britain's colonial past, and his own writings echo with anger at the iniquities of imperialism. Yet Britain's last great imperial leader offered an extraordinary insight into the nature of warfare in the region, Islamic fundamentalism and the history and character of Afghan tribal society.

In 1897, at the age of 23, Churchill was attached as a soldier-journalist to the Malakand Field Force, the British expedition under the splendidly named Sir Bindon Blood, dispatched to put down the rebellious Pathan tribesmen of the North West Frontier, on what is now the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Churchill described his impressions of this land "where every man is a soldier" in a series of vivid newspaper reports, which were incorporated into The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published a year later. Churchill's time among the border tribes was also recalled in his autobiography, My Early Life.

The Young Winston was only on the North West Frontier for a few weeks, but like most journalists he swiftly considered himself an expert on the Afghans in general, and the Pathans in particular. His prose is typically rich and colourful, his generalisations lofty and patronising. He shared the peculiar British reverence for the Pathans as a noble warrior race: "the ferocity of the Zulu are added to the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer". He never set foot in Afghanistan itself.

Yet Churchill was a natural historian, and for all their imperial arrogance, his words carry unmistakable relevance to Afghanistan today. "Tribe wars with tribe. Every man's hand is against the other and all are against the stranger... the state of continual tumult has produced a habit of mind which holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity."

Churchill was fascinated by the fabulously complex web of feud and counter-feud among the Taleban's ancestors, the conglomeration of tribes and sub-tribes and the total absence of central authority. "Such a disposition, combined with an absolute lack of reverence for all forms of law and authority, is the cause of their frequent quarrels with the British power."

Churchill reserved a special disdain for Talibs, the religious students who would later form the core of the original Taliban. He called them "a host of wandering Talib-ul-ulms [who] live free at the expense of the people".

Yet his attitude towards Islamic fundamentalism was far more nuanced than that of his contemporaries. Later in the Sudan he did not merely dismiss the Dervishes following the Mahdi as lunatics, but sought to understand the "mighty stimulus of fanaticism" that thrived, as it does today, in the "fearful fatalistic apathy" in much of the Muslim world.

Despite deploying the latest military technology, British imperial Forces were at a severe disadvantage when faced by rebels armed with long-handled jezail muskets, able to shoot and kill at a distance, and then disappear. "The weapons of the 19th century," wrote Churchill, "in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age."

The IED, the remote-controlled improvised explosive device planted at roadsides in Afghanistan to such devastating effect, is the modern equivalent of the jezail; the Taliban's "asymmetric tactics" are directly descended from the long-distance sniping of a century ago.

Above all, Churchill realised that pacifying the rebel Pathans was a matter of culture, politics and persuasion, not compulsion. The more an outside army sought to impose order, the more ferocious the Afghan response. For this society to develop and progress, he predicted, any government would have to first tackle "the warlike nature of the people and their hatred of control".

Brute force of arms, he knew, was not only insufficient and probably ineffective, but also likely to foment greater antagonism. After experiencing the wild borderlands firsthand, Churchill laid out the options for dealing with a country like Afghanistan: imposing the rule of law at the barrel of a gun, pulling out and leaving the tribes to their stone age bloodletting or working through and with the tribal system. As General McChrystal recently told Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic magazine, "the third choice - Churchill's choice - is really the only one we have".

One can see Churchill's choice reflected in the allies' changing policy in Afghanistan: in the determination to recruit and train Afghans for the army and police, in the greater willingness to talk to elements within the Taliban and the distribution of hard cash. On his brief visit to Bagram this week, Obama spoke of the progress made in "good governance, rule of law, anti-corruption efforts".

David Miliband, too, has suggested that Britain's past in Afghanistan might usefully be recruited to the present. "Imperial strategists sought and secured a saner and more sustainable objective: a self-governing, self-policing, but heavily subsidised Afghanistan where the tribes balanced each other and the Afghan state posed no threat to the safety of British India."

That sounds like the sort of solution Churchill would have applauded, yet he also knew that any policy reliant on raw force would have its limitations in a land saturated by centuries of violence. As a 23-year-old journalist, Churchill looked on, as Blood's British Forces laid waste to the rebel villages "in punitive devastation", and wondered whether peace would ever be possible here.

"At the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert," he wrote. "Whether it was worth it... I cannot tell."

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Australian government death panel condemns man to death: "Robin Stevens is dying of prostate cancer and he can no longer get the drug that was helping him. If he had breast cancer, he would still be eligible for Taxotere, a chemotherapy drug. His wife Angela says the powerful breast cancer lobby has ensured women have access to the "gold medal" treatment, but men don't have the same benefit. His doctors have written to state and federal politicians, saying that without Taxotere, his cancer - which has spread to his bones - will "increase and overwhelm him".

Break up the banks: "Big banks are bad for free markets. Far from being engines of free enterprise, they are conducive to what might be called ‘crony capitalism,’ ‘corporatism,’ or, in Jonah Goldberg’s provocative phrase, ‘liberal fascism.’ There is a free-market case for breaking up large financial institutions: that our big banks are the product, not of economics, but of politics.”

How China can rule the world -- maybe: "Martin Jacques’ new book, ‘When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order,’ is causing controversy. Is it possible that China will ‘rule the world’ in the near future? Perhaps, but only if it’s able to successfully transform from an industrial-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, and then transform even further to an innovation-based economy.”

Obamacare blowback dumbfounds disbelieving Democrats: "Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO), found a coffin in front of his house meant to symbolize Obamacare-aborted babies (but according to many Republicans may symbolize Carnahan’s political future.) This is nothing compared to the millions who believe they live in a land of property rights finding bulldozers in front of their homes with slick-talking politicians and their rich developer buddies shoving eminent domain documents in their faces. What’s good for the law-abiding is good for the lawmaker. Others who voted for Obamacare decry the threats filling their voicemail, mailboxes and inboxes. But that’s nothing compared to the monumental mound of laws that threaten all citizens with fines, arrest, prosecution, imprisonment and even death by trigger-happy law enforcers for failing to conform to every whim of the law creators. What’s good for the law-abiding is good for the lawmaker.”

Obamacare dystopia: "Ask yourself this: If you impose a sudden 35 percent tax on something, are you likely to get as much of it? Go on, take a wild guess. On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all its employees warning that the company’s costs ‘will increase in the short term.’ And in the medium term? Well, U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription-drug plans and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile. So far just three companies — Deere, Caterpillar, and Valero Energy — have calculated that the loss of the deduction will add a combined $265 million to their costs. There are an additional 3,500 businesses presently claiming the break. The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person. The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person. So we’re roughly doubling the cost of covering an estimated 5 million retirees.”

Minutemen give up: "The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which posted hundreds of civilian volunteers along the U.S.-Mexico border over the past five years, has disbanded, citing what it called "rising aggression" in the country and decisions by lawmakers in Washington who have "pushed amnesty down our throats." "The mental attitude of many Americans is turning meaner … and we are concerned that this could cause problems," MCDC President Carmen Mercer told The Washington Times on Monday. "You see aggression surfacing even at the tea party marches. We just did not want to deal with the liability anymore."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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What thrills the Left may scare away the center

Now that Obamacare is the law of the land, Democrats promise to take on global warming, card check, immigration and a regulatory crackdown on banks. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi would say, Democrats have kicked through the door. Now they are contemplating what to plunder.

Rep. Henry Waxman, whose tiny heel landed one of the first blows against the door of public opinion and Republican resistance when he introduced the House version of Obamacare, now has his boot pointed at the corporations disclosing upfront costs of the health program he helped create.

Waxman wants AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, 3M and many other companies to explain why they told shareholders to expect smaller profits and employees to expect changes in benefits.

Waxman, who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wants their internal e-mails to review even before the executives come in to take their whippings.

Chairman Waxman, whose ego is a much larger thing than the law, will not be mollified when he's told that Securities and Exchange Commission accounting rules require the write-downs in the same quarter that a tax change is enacted.

While Waxman is re-educating corporate America, President Obama showed what the new Democratic boldness looks like with the recess appointment of union lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board.

Becker's nomination came up eight votes short of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate because he is known to Hill staffers as "human Card Check" for his opposition to secret ballots in union certification elections. Becker, who works for the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO, has argued that if the laws pertaining to organizing nonunion workplaces couldn't be changed, the NLRB could simply act as if they were.

Now, Democrats believe that the time has come to be bolder still. They mean to convince the American people that the party so long associated with dithering has become a party of steely resolve. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

This may thrill liberal voters who spent much of Obama's first year in office complaining about his unwillingness to get rough with Republicans. And it may lessen the effect of having the Right fully mobilized against the president's agenda.

But it will also scare the dickens out of regular Americans. Neglecting the center and taking a "by any means necessary" approach will convince moderates that the Democrats are irresponsible with their new power -- and drive many independent voters away from the party even if the economy improves.

More HERE

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The new electorate

Voting is so central to the American system that three of the last five amendments to our Constitution deal with voting (Amendments 23, 24 and 26). Amendment 26, for instance, extends the vote to eighteen year olds.

But the American political Left (a.k.a. progressives) wants to extend the vote well beyond American teenage citizens. In hopes of creating instant Democrat voters, Al Gore's Citizenship USA program rammed through grants of citizenship by waiving qualifications. At WorldNetDaily in 2001, Kenneth R. Timmerman reported:

Citizenship USA was an initiative of Vice President Al Gore that was ostensibly part of his National Performance Review to "reinvent" government. Internal White House memos, obtained by the House Judiciary Committee in 1997, showed that the vice president was well aware that the effort could be perceived as a "pro-Democrat voter mill."

On March 28, 1996, White House aide Doug Farbrother e-mailed Gore detailing his efforts to get INS to waive fingerprinting and background checks "to make me confident they could produce a million new citizens before Election Day."

Gore then wrote Clinton: "You asked us to expedite the naturalization of nearly a million legal aliens who have applied to become citizens." The risk, Gore warned, was that "we might be publicly criticized for running a pro-Democrat voter mill and even risk having Congress stop us."

But why bother with granting aliens citizenship? In the Socialist Republic of California, San Franciscans want illegal aliens to have the vote. (If they can vote for office, shouldn't illegals be allowed to run for office, too?) In "The Threat of Non-Citizen Voting", Hans A. von Spakovsky of The Heritage Foundation notes:

Florida is not unique. Thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in some states, and tens if not hundreds of thousands in total may be present on the voter rolls nationwide. These numbers are significant: Local elections are often decided by only a handful of votes, and even national elections have likely been within the margin of the number of non-citizens illegally registered to vote.

Yet there is no reliable method to determine the number of non-citizens registered or actually voting because most laws to ensure that only citizens vote are ignored, are inadequate, or are systematically undermined by government officials. Those who ignore the implications of non-citizen registration and voting either are willfully blind to the problem or may actually favor this form of illegal voting.

On January 5, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (the most reversed circuit in the nation) ruled: "Incarcerated felons should be allowed to vote in Washington to ensure that racial minorities are protected under the Voting Rights Act." The plaintiff was one Muhammad Shabazz Farrakhan.

On July 1, 2008 in The Nation, leftwing commentator Katrina vanden Heuvel expressed her sympathies:

In the twenty-first century, the other America is behind bars, literally and figuratively: with one of every 100 Americans in prison, we are establishing a perverse parallel America--a predominantly nonwhite one--and making it permanent by stripping those consigned there of the right to vote. It's a hopeful sign that a growing number of states are re-enfranchising ex-felons. Vermont, Maine and Puerto Rico never deny citizens the right to vote and even allow prisoners to vote from jail, while sixteen other states as well as the District of Columbia allow citizens to vote who are on probation or parole or who have been released from prison. Recognizing the right of ex-felons to vote would grant them the power to contest this status for others and help reintegrate them into society.

Ms. Vanden Heuvel never explained the necessity of allowing psychopaths, rapists, murderers, domestic terrorists and their like to take part in democracy. Do they have special insights on, say, the public option that the law-abiding don't?

Rachel La Corte of the AP reports: "an estimated 5.3 million people nationwide are ineligible to vote because of felony convictions." This cohort is a potential treasure trove of support for Democrats, as John Lott demonstrates that felons overwhelmingly vote Democrat. (What can we conclude from this fact about Democrat politicians?) From the Timmerman link above: "[M]ore than 80,000 aliens had fingerprint checks that generated criminal records, but they were naturalized anyway."

The Left sold your birthright for a mess of votes, and never batted an eye. Everything the Left has done vis-à-vis elections has been to expand the electorate; they couldn't care less about the integrity of our elections. In Ohio, a judge has ruled that a park bench can be used to fulfill the residency requirement for voter registration. The Left's latest assault on electoral integrity is universal voter registration, which would trample all over states' rights and create voter registration chaos.

The "new electorate" consists of convicted felons, illegal aliens, and citizens who should never have been naturalized, but were. The "new electorate" also consists of citizens who commit election fraud. What does this mean for democracy in America?

SOURCE

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Bloodsuckers

In the latest example of government's overreaching power and repudiation of the Constitution, Democrats have passed a bill that once again forces the productive to pay for the non-productive. We were told that 30 to 40 million people don't have, or don't want, health care insurance. Hence, they will now be forced to buy it against their will if they don't have it, or get it free if they can't afford it, in order to enable President Obama and Speaker Pelosi to construct a legacy for themselves. The predilections of the American people notwithstanding, these tyrannical glory-hounds have decided that public opinion is the least of their concerns.

The fact that workers are already paying about 50 percent of their earnings in taxes every year is of no interest to those who live by sucking the blood of the ambitious. Make no mistake about it: The government's hands just went even more deeply into our pockets.

All responsible citizens recognize the need for taxes to pay for services that provide security, infrastructure, school financing, etc. In addition, most people are decent enough to open their wallets a little wider when the need arises; Americans are the most generous people on earth. Yet they're the last people on earth you want to mess with if they feel like they are being treated unjustly. It is that spirit of righteousness, etched into our national genetic code by ancestors who struggled against tyranny, that sets us apart from the majority of the planet, most of whom genuflect obsequiously in the presence of their masters. That's not the American way!

It is this very spirit that has made the Tea Party movement a magnet for Americans who have become incensed at the level of arrogance being evinced by the Obama administration and those Democrats who have abandoned any concept of integrity in order to become slavishly devoted to "his highness." Repudiating their constituents, renegade Democrats have given the middle finger to the people who pay their salaries, their very generous health plans, and their stunningly generous pensions.

Thanks to the Tea Party patriots and millions of other freedom-loving Americans from sea to shining sea, this recent move toward an ever-expanding socialist state will be dutifully and publicly addressed in the November election. As Justice Brandeis, another sagacious member of the Supreme Court, once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Is the health care bounce history?: "Pollster Scott Rasmussen’s latest sample suggests that Barack Obama’s approval rating bounced slightly upward when the House passed the health care bills March 21 and has since subsided. Rasmussen’s approval index, subtracting the percentage strongly disapproving from the percentage strongly approving, was -21 on March 20 (reflecting interviews conducted March 17-19), dropped to -10 on March 23 (interviews conducted March 20-22) and today is back up to -16 (interviews conducted March 25-27). Strong approval topped out at 32% on March 25 and is back down to 28%, just a little above the level in the month before passage of the bills March 21. Strong disapproval is at 44%, the highest it’s been."

Supreme Court may weigh coverage mandate: "The same Supreme Court justices whom President Obama blasted during his State of the Union address this year may ultimately decide the fate of his crowning achievement as more than a dozen states have called on the courts to strike down the health insurance mandate of Democrats' health care overhaul - a move that would threaten the entire law. Legal scholars are divided on the merits of the cases, and even Congress - through its research service and its budget scorekeeper - has said it's an open question whether the provision could pass constitutional muster. The mandate, which doesn't take effect until 2014, is central to Democrats' goal of insuring about 32 million more Americans."

Case against 3 SEALs weakens: "Cracks are beginning to appear in the military's prosecution of three Navy SEALs accused of striking a most-wanted terrorism suspect they had captured in Iraq. Maj. Gen. Charles Cleveland last week signed grants of immunity for five Navy colleagues of the accused. Some of those five, three enlisted men and two officers, are expected at trial to flatly contradict the prosecution's key witness, according to a Navy source close to the case, which centers on the September 2009 capture of Ahmed Hashim Abed".

Bigger danger of healthcare bill: The arrogance of Congress: "We may never fully know the damage that will be done by the massive healthcare bill Congress passed on Sunday, but one thing is certain: It will lead to lower-quality care at higher costs. Dozens of new health boards will come on line in the next few years, as bureaucrats gradually take control of our healthcare system. Who knows how many bright college students will decide to avoid medical careers because they don’t want to follow orders from these bureaucrats? As alarming as some of the bill’s provisions are, what’s more dangerous is the arrogance this Congress demonstrated.”

Wishful thinking on health care: "How an issue is framed is crucial to how it is decided. Advocates of the package of health insurance regulations, taxes, and mandates known as ObamaCare managed to frame the issue as ‘reform versus the status quo.’ But to call the Obama-Pelosi-Reid plan (OPR) ‘reform’ is to beg the question by assuming precisely what needs to be proved: namely, that the legislative package would actually reform — that is, improve — the medical system.”

“Seeing” red at reconciliation over medicine cabinet tax: "‘They won’t be so opposed to it once they see what’s in it.’ That’s the rationalization House leaders gave skittish Democrats to get them to walk the plank on Obamacare Sunday night. But one of the first things millions of Americans will ’see’ is an effective 40 percent tax hike on the over-the-counter medicines – from an antihistamine such as Claritin for allergies, pain relief medicine such as Tylenol or Excedrin, Pedialyte to prevent their kids from becoming dehydrated when they are sick, and even prenatal vitamins if they are expecting another one.”

Governor Moonbeam vs. eMeg: "The obvious question is why anyone would want to be the next governor of California. But three viable candidates — two Republicans and one Democrat — are defying logic by offering themselves for this post. One Republican, state insurance commissioner and former tech executive Steve Poizner, is running on a systematic right-wing platform of massive spending cuts, new personal and business tax cuts, and, for dessert, another effort to ban access to public benefits for undocumented workers and their families. The second GOP candidate, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, is running far ahead of Poizner, floating her campaign on an extraordinary sea of early money. … she is reportedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a library of negative information to use against her general election opponent, a guy named Jerry Brown. That’s right, Edmund Gerald ‘Jerry’ Brown Jr., who is, on paper, the least likely person imaginable to become the frontrunner for governor of a state that is so passionately disillusioned with politicians.”

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Socialized medicine

As I noted recently, I am now no longer updating my SOCIALIZED MEDICINE blog. Now that Obamacare has been passed and signed, I take to heart President Reagan's comment that the nearest thing to eternal life is a government program. I hope that is wrong as it applies to Obamacare but I am not counting on it.

The horror stories about Britain's socialized medicine system are so frequent, however, that I feel I have to draw attention to them. So I have decided that I will lead off my postings for each day on my EYE ON BRITAIN blog with the latest stories about that. Few days go by without such stories. The post I will be putting up later today has FOUR such stories -- four in one day!

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Obamalypse for Israel

There is an Obamalyptic tone at the White House. The president put the all the chips he owned in domestic politics on the table for a health care bill opposed by more than 60% of polled voters, and now he has thrown all his foreign policy chips into the pot in order to humiliate a close American ally for whom the American public has overwhelming sympathy. One has the sense that the Obamoids fear that their tenure in power will be brief and that they want to do the most to alter the world before the peasants march on the castle and burn them out.

As Jackson Diehl put it in a now-viral meme on the Washington Post blog, the White House treated Netanyahu like an “unsavory dictator who had to be kept at arm’s length.” He was sneaked in the back door; there was no photo opportunity, and no final statement.

Although the Israeli government has clamped a blackout on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s meetings with President Obama and aides David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, the content has leaked out through various channels. Israel will either stop housing construction in its capital city per Obama’s orders, or the United States will offer a final version of a “peace agreement” between Israel and the Palestinians and shove it down Israel’s throat.

I have independently confirmed the substance of the following report from the Debka website:

A high-ranking US official categorized the current crisis in US-Israeli relations as the most acute in 54 years, ever since 1956 when President Dwight Eisenhower gave David Ben-Gurion an ultimatum to pull Israeli forces out of Sinai – certainly more serious than the impasse over the Madrid conference between the first President Bush and Yitzhak Shamir in 1992.

A US presidential notice condemning Israel and predetermining the shape of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement would be tantamount to a US diktat and put the lid on negotiations, direct or indirect, because Israel would be dragged to the table in handcuffs to face an Arab partner who would accept nothing less than the terms Washington imposed in advance on Israel.

Such a notice would put a clamp on the close dialogue which has historically characterized US-Israeli ties – to the detriment of Israel’s international standing.

[Jackson Diehl in] The Washington Post laid the blame for the crisis squarely on President Obama, whom it accused of treating Netanyahu “as if he were an unsavory Third World dictator, needed for strategic reasons but conspicuously held at arms length.”

The WP went on to say: “Obama picked a fight over something that virtually all Israelis agree on, and before serious discussions have even begun. ”A new administration can be excused for making such a mistake in the treacherous and complex theater of Middle East diplomacy. That’s why Obama was given a pass by many when he made exactly the same mistake last year. The second time around, the president doesn’t look naive. He appears ideological — and vindictive.”

What is the administration thinking?

First of all, as I explained earlier this week, the administration envisions a strategic alliance with Iran to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, in which Iran will be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons — just as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Zbignew Brzezinski proposed in a 2004 report for the Council on Foreign Relations.

Second, Rahm Emanuel — who ushered the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to the infamous 1993 Rose Garden handshake with Yassir Arafat — appears to think that he’s doing Israel a favor by forcing a settlement. The American left is still stuck on the Oslo fantasy of the earl 1990s; the Israeli public, after having tried Oslo and gotten Intifada and terrorism, knows better.

Obama’s gamble is enormous. So far he has gotten a free pass on foreign policy as the inheritor of a mess left behind by the Bush administration, while domestic problems — above all the 20% rate of under- and unemployment — took precedence. But Israel is the single most emotional issue in foreign policy, and the Gallup Poll reports that American support for Israel is at the all-time high reached briefly during the First Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s Scud rockets rained on Tel Aviv.

“[Former Secretary of State] James Baker said, ‘Screw the Jews, they don’t vote for us,’ and Obama is saying, ‘Screw the Jews, they’ll vote for us anyway,” a prominent American rabbi said this week. The mainstream Jewish organizations, who overwhelmingly supported Obama and share his domestic agenda, are in such a state of shock over the outcome of Netanyahu’s visit that it will take them some days to begin to blink.

The world is a radically different place than the liberal Jewish majority imagined it was, and Obama is a radically different man. It is quite possible that they will throw Israel under the bus for fear that an open attack on Obama at this time would contribute to a Democratic debacle in November. However Jews vote, they are less than 3% of the electorate, but a collapse of US relations with Israel would energize evangelical and other Christian voters against Obama.

Netanyahu is in a bind: never since 1956 has the United States put a gun to the head of an Israeli government, and that was over the joint Anglo-French-Israeli occupation of Suez, not about urgent Israeli security concerns. Creating a Hamastan within easy rocket range of Tel Aviv and Israel’s major airports would threaten Israel’s existence. Hamas rocketeers firing behind a human shield of civilians (just as Hamas has done in Gaza and Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon) would leave Israel the choice of reoccupying territory at the cost of many civilian casualties, or permitting ordinary life to become intolerate. That is precisely what Israel has said.

As Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren told Charlie Rose March 19, “Keep in mind the Israeli people are going to be asked to make extraordinary risks here. We withdrew from Lebanon. We withdrew from Gaza, we got rockets. To create peace with the Palestinian we`re going to have to withdraw from territory that is immediately adjacent to our major population state centers. We have to be assured that when we do that we`re not going to get Gaza again, we`re not going to get Lebanon again. We want to be assured that we`re going to have real peace.”

The future of Israel well may be fought out in the November elections. This is not a drill. This is the real thing. Obama is exposed and vulnerable. If the Democrats are not punished for shifting America’s foreign-policy loyalties away from Israel and towards Iran, Israel’s long-term security position will deteriorate.

SOURCE

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Rising Anti-Semitism on the Left

by Gary Bauer

Not content to divide his party in his year-long effort to pass socialized health care, President Obama has spent the last ten days fomenting intra-party discord on the contentious issue of Middle East peace.

The Obama administration hasn’t stopped berating Israel about the “settlements” issue since it came to power 14 months ago. I was glad to see pro-Israel Democrats bravely stand up to the administration’s attacks this week.

But I fear the Obama administration’s over-reaction to what amounts to a municipal zoning decision is indicative of the growing anti-Semitism on the Left. The president’s heavy-handed approach to Israel is leading his party away from its historic support for the Jewish State.

No, I am not accusing the president of being an anti-Semite. What I am contending is that Obama’s Israel policy is getting its largest cheers among Muslim special interest groups and the anti-Semitic left. His policy reflects the anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel of those he has closely associated with all his life, and of those with increasing prominence in the Democratic Party.

Obama spent significant time with radical Muslim activists during his time as a community organizer. And it is not unreasonable to wonder how much of his long-time pastor Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Jewish vitriol he absorbed. The list of his past associates and advisors -- including Rashid Khalidi, Ali Abuminah, Susan Rice and Robert Malley -- is a who’s who of prominent Israel-bashers.

The ancient hatred of Jews will find a home wherever it can, and it has done so as easily on the radical right as on the radical left. But in recent years anti-Semitism has become a more consequential force on the Left.

In 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a Campus Anti-Semitism report announcing that anti-Semitism is “a serious problem” on many American university campuses, those bastions of political liberalism.

Anti-Semitism has become a staple of bloggers on leftwing websites like the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos and MoveOn.org. Former Clinton administration official Lanny Davis wrote in the Wall Street Journal of his dismay at the anti-Semitic “hate and vitriol” against Joe Lieberman, for whom Davis was campaigning, in his 2006 primary campaign against Ned Lamont. Davis recounted some of the attacks, and concluded that “bigotry and hate aren’t just for right-wingers anymore.”

The Left’s growing anti-Semitism is discouraging in part because the party many radicals associate with has been home to Jews for nearly a century. And Democrats have historically been some of Israel’s greatest defenders.

This week many Democrats spoke out against the White House’s over-reaction to Israel’s decision to build more housing for its growing population. New York Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner said, “The appropriate response was a shake of the head – not a temper tantrum. Israel is a sovereign nation and an ally, not a punching bag. Enough already.” Other Democrats issued similar statements reaffirming the U.S.-Israel bond.

A February Gallup poll put American public support for Israel at 63 percent, its highest in nearly 20 years. And only 15 percent of Americans side with the Palestinians.

Gallup noted that “Since 2001…there has been a more dramatic shift in partisan attitudes: a 25 point increase in sympathy for Israel among Republicans and an 18 point increase among independents.”

Sadly, the Democratic Party’s historic support for Israel may be fraying. A majority of self-identified Democrats no longer support Israel. Democratic support for Israel has decreased since Obama took office, from 54 percent last year to 48 percent this year. Gallup also found that more Democrats have a favorable view of autocratic Russia, and nearly as many have a favorable view of Communist China, than have a favorable view of Israel, America’s only dependable ally in the Middle East.

Jews have been a reliable Democratic constituency for decades. And 80 percent of American Jewish voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama in 2008.

But that support may be weakening among those for whom a strong and secure Israel is important. As Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Many American supporters of Israel who voted for Barack Obama now suspect they may have been victims of a bait and switch.” That was in July. I wouldn’t be surprised if those suspicions have turned into reality for many pro-Israel Americans.

Part of Obama’s problem is that he seems to misunderstand the Jewish claim to Israel. In his Cairo speech last summer, Obama promoted the radical Muslim narrative that modern Israel is a “guilt offering” for the Holocaust. The Jewish presence in Israel has been constant for thousands of years, not 70. And it’s founded in God’s benevolence, not European guilt.

The Obama administration’s ridiculous demand this week that the settlement decision be reversed and that Israel make a “substantial gesture” toward the Palestinians has only emboldened the Palestinians to demand the same as preconditions to “peace” talks.

And the administration’s apoplectic response to Israel’s creation of new homes to serve a growing population in its capital city may already have had deadly consequences. An Israeli was killed by a Gaza rocket fired by Palestinian terrorists this week, the first such death in more than a year.

Earlier this week, I wrote a letter to President Obama, challenging his administration to end its rhetorical assault on Israel and to turn his efforts to the real security threat facing the U.S. and Israel – the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. Many other conservative leaders have signed on. You can read it here:

I and my friends in the Democratic Party disagree on many issues. But we have always agreed on the importance of a strong alliance between the United States and Israel, against communism during the Cold War and against radical Islam now. I hope those friends can convince the current Democrat in the White House to return to his party’s noble tradition of supporting Israel.

SOURCE

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ARE AMERICANS STILL AMERICANS?

by Dr. Jack Wheeler

That's the question and the bet of our day. Conservatives and TeaPartyers bet yes, Democrats and moonbat moochers bet no. The Republican Party establishment wants to bet yes but hasn't got the guts to go all in.

Understand this and you understand American politics today. Who wins the bet determines America's future.

What made Americans Americans was their commitment - unrivaled in human history - to individual liberty. This commitment was enshrined as the founding principle of America in the Declaration of Independence:

That every human being and specifically every American has a moral right endowed by his Creator, by what is required by his nature to be fully human, to his own personal life, his own personal liberty, and the pursuit of his own personal happiness - and that no government has the moral right or legitimate authority to violate this individual right.

Further, that the very purpose of government, what legitimized a government's very existence, was to secure and protect this individual right - and whenever a government becomes destructive of this right, those governed by it have a moral right to alter and abolish it.

The Declaration of Independence is the most truly revolutionary document in political history. It is the most profoundly moral document as well. And to confound the long line of philosophers who claim there is an unbridgeable abyss between moral behavior and pragmatic self-interested behavior, it is also the most practically successful document in history. America's prosperity dwarfs any historical comparison.

The truth of America's founding principles were "self-evident" to the Americans who created our country. They are no longer to an increasingly large fraction of Americans today. The stated purpose and clear goal of Democrats is to increase that fraction. The claimed purpose and alleged goal of Republicans is to reduce it.

For decades upon decades now, Americans on the whole have been slowly and progressively becoming less American, less independent and responsible for their own lives, more dependent on government programs and demanding of others to be responsible for them.

We have now reached the point where between 40 to 50% of people in this country are so unwilling to be responsible for their lives and freedom, so demanding of their supposed right to mooch off taxpayers, that they still maintain a firm support of a president who believes that God should damn America.

We have reached the point with the passage of ObamaCare that we are justified in terming those who continue to support President Zero and the Pelosi-Reid Democrat Party AINOs - Americans In Name Only.

In one sense, we can be glad that ObamaCare passed in the House last Sunday, March 21, and signed into law by President Zero two days later - because it forces the issue. America must now choose between freedom or fascism, there is no other choice, nothing in-between.

"Give me liberty or give me death," proclaimed Patrick Henry in 1775. "Live free or die," said Revolutionary War general John Stark, which New Hampshire adopted as its state motto. That was a real choice at the birth of America. Now it is again.

The next seven months are going to be the ugliest this country has experienced in our lifetimes. Any and all opponents of ObamaCare will be branded as terrorists - indeed they are already. The Democrats will look upon their ObamaCare victory as a template, and attempt to ram through via bribes and corruption passage of amnesty for illegals, a carbon tax, a VAT tax, and every other major item on their Marxist Fascist agenda.

More here

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Goodwin Liu's America

Chinese Communism coming to America



By Theodore H. Frank, president of the Center for Class Action Fairness.

President Obama's nominee for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is Goodwin Liu. I oppose the nomination of 39-year-old Berkeley Professor Goodwin Liu to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and I urge the Senate to reject it.

In 2005, Goodwin Liu spoke out against the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court because of Roberts’s support for “free enterprise,” “private ownership of property,” and “limited government”—demonstrating nothing more than the bubble that a twenty-first century left-wing law professor lives in that would treat such fundamental principles of America as “code words” worthy of condemnation.

This alone is sufficient, by itself, to disqualify Liu from this new position to which he has been nominated. The man who speaks out against private ownership of property does not deserve a lifetime Article III appointment.

Mr. Liu should also be rejected by the Senate because he stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the courts. The judiciary, in Liu’s words, is not bound by the text of the Constitution or the commands of the legislature, but by “socially situated modes of reasoning” and “culturally and historically contingent meanings of particular social goods in our own society.”

It is a view of judicial supremacy: Where legislatures have failed to affirmatively act in ways that foster the “evolution of welfare rights,” courts are to step in and act as both a legislature and an executive branch to allocate funding to schools or otherwise “leverage” the expansion of existing social programs.

Goodwin Liu’s America is a land in which “justice” means judges remedying “societal discrimination” regardless of the consequences on innocent people; where 20th century immigrants to the United States are “responsible” for the crimes of 19th century slave-owners; where states would not be allowed to exercise the will of the people in punishing murderers with capital punishment; where racial quotas are not only not forbidden, but required.

America is a better and freer nation than Goodwin Liu thinks. Yet in the current state of the Ninth Circuit, his rigid ideology will further tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.

The Ninth Circuit is a court that was one vote away from striking down the Pledge of Allegiance; regularly abuses the law to disregard states’ wishes to impose capital punishment; has ordered California to release 25% of its prisoners; has forbidden Los Angeles from enforcing laws against sleeping on sidewalks; has said it has seen no reason why animals should not be allowed to sue the federal government; held an ex-police officer could sue his employer for firing him for running a porn site in his uniform; said that gun manufacturers could be held civilly liable for the shooting sprees of the mentally ill.

Congress should be insisting that President Obama take steps to rectify the imbalance already present on the Ninth Circuit, rather than exacerbating it. No justice would be better than this injustice.

SOURCE

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CBO report: Debt will rise to 90% of GDP



President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president's budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

"An additional $1.2 trillion in debt dumped on [GDP] to our children makes a huge difference," said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "That represents an additional debt of $10,000 per household above and beyond the federal debt they are already carrying."

More HERE

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The Freedom Factor



The raging debate over Obamacare is not exactly all about health. It's really about freedom, or lack thereof. It's simple when you cut through all the overheated rhetoric: The anti-Obama folks believe the president is imposing a massive federal presence that will erode personal freedoms. The pro-Obama crew supports a huge federal apparatus to impose "social justice," believing that is the government's moral responsibility.

The personal freedom issue is pretty clear, as well. We have less of it today than we did this time last year. In an aggressive power grab, the feds now control the health care industry, and the IRS has increased its already enormous power, as it will enforce Obamacare mandates. In addition, your private medical records will no longer be private. They will be accessible by federal bureaucrats. If that doesn't make you queasy, nothing will.

And then there's higher education. The president wants the feds, not private lending institutions, to distribute college loans, and it looks like that will happen.

And then there's the banking industry. The Obama administration seeks tough oversight rules and wants to call major shots in the financial world. Federal regulation could strangle some banks and force most of them to do exactly what the government wants.

And then there's the energy industry. The president wants to mandate how private business consumes energy and to dish out financial punishment if federal rules are not followed. That's the cap-and-trade deal.

In addition to the direct intrusion on business and private behavior (through health insurance), the redistribution-of-wealth train is roaring toward its next destination. That would be a national sales tax like they have in Europe. The president well understands the huge debt that is piling up because of all the federal spending. He has to raise more money. Wealthy Americans are going to get hammered by income tax and capital gains hikes, but there are simply not enough rich folks to counter the red ink. So get ready for a proposed new tax on stuff you buy.

Not since the early days of the Vietnam War has there been such a stark divide between liberal and conservative Americans, between Republicans and Democrats. The battle lines are clearly drawn: individual freedom versus federal power. Take your pick.

SOURCE

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Roots of Russian Anti-Americanism

On Tuesday, The Heritage Foundation hosted a public discussion on Russian anti-Americanism, which has risen since 2000. So, what are the root causes of anti-Americanism, how do they affect US-Russian relations, and how should they be addressed?

Helle Dale and Dr. Ariel Cohen, both senior research fellows at The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies and Davis Institute, as well as Daniel Kimmage, a senior fellow at the Homeland Security Policy Institute, agreed that the Russian government uses anti-Americanism to create an external enemy, to unite domestic support, and to bolster the authoritarian regime.

Dr. Cohen stressed that by and large, Russian national television networks are state controlled. “Talking heads” appear on government TV channels spewing anti-American propaganda, and often clear falsehoods, such as the US Government being behind the 9/11 attacks or the US Government financing the Bolshevik coup of 1917.

The Government of Russia denies American broadcasters access to Russian TV channels and radio waves.

More HERE

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China's military expanding

The commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific said Thursday that the buildup of Chinese armed forces is continuing "unabated" and Beijing's goal appears to be power projection beyond Asia....

He also disclosed for the first time in the testimony that China is moving ahead with a new anti-ship ballistic missile capable of attacking aircraft carriers hundreds of miles from China's coasts.

China also will deploy its own aircraft carrier by 2012 and currently has more than 60 submarines, he said.

China is "developing and testing a conventional anti-ship ballistic missile based on the DF-21/CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile designed specifically to target aircraft carriers," Adm. Willard said in his prepared statement.

The new missile is designed to hit targets at extended ranges from the Chinese mainland, and other anti-access weapons include a large number of submarines, new integrated air- and missile-defense capabilities and cyberwarfare and anti-space weapons, Adm. Willard said, noting "all of which we have been monitoring very closely for some years."

More HERE

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ObamaCare puts up huge roadblocks to new hospitals

Because of the new health care law, Dr. John Dietz has an empty building that he's not sure what he's going to do with. Dietz is part owner of the Indiana Orthopedic Hospital. "It is an expansion of our hospital that is three-quarters finished; it had three operating rooms for outpatient surgery," he said. "Now it can't be used for that purpose. We'll have to figure out an alternative for it."

Dietz and his fellow investors put $27 million into that new building. Under the new law there are a host of bureaucratic hoops that physician-owned hospitals must go through to expand.

• The hospital must apply to the Department of Health and Human Services and can do so only once every two years.

• It must then wait for a period for members of the community to provide input.

• It must be in a county where population growth is 150% of the population growth of the state in the last five years.

• Inpatient admissions must be equal to or greater than the average of such admissions in all hospitals located in the county.

• Its bed occupancy rate must be greater than the state average.

• It must be located in a state where hospital bed capacity is less than the national average.

• Once a hospital meets all of those conditions, it is prohibited from expanding more than 200%.

More here

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Who wins in health care mess? The IRS

The biggest winner from the passage of Obama’s health care reform bill is not the American people but the Internal Revenue Service. The new bill will require the IRS to hire almost 17,000 new employees.

I don’t know a single person who enjoys dealing with the IRS, but thanks to Obamacare, the IRS will become 12 times more intrusive than it already is. Currently, Americans must deal with the IRS for an annual tax return and all the revisions required if it is not completed to their satisfaction. Under Obamacare, the IRS will be checking every month to see if we have health insurance acceptable to them, not to us. The IRS will levy fines if our insurance is not acceptable.

The Democrats have definitely become the party of government control and socialism. Obamacare heightens the control of the federal government in a major way. It is a government takeover of 18% of the American economy.

Not only is the government ruling over us in a much greater way, but also we have to pay them to rule over us. Our taxes will pay the 17,000 new IRS workers to reign over us. This seems to be the only way that Obama can create new jobs....

More here

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Obama’s legacy and the Iranian bomb

The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy.

There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small "sacrifice" of the billion Muslims in the world.

The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime.

Finally, Iran could use its nuclear weapons without ever detonating a bomb. By constantly threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation, it could engender so much fear among Israelis as to incite mass immigration, a brain drain, or a significant decline in people moving to Israel.

These are the specific ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons, primarily against the Jewish state. But there are other ways in which a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger the world. First, it would cause an arms race in which every nation in the Middle East would seek to obtain nuclear weapons.

Second, it would almost certainly provoke Israel into engaging in either a pre-emptive or retaliatory attack, thus inflaming the entire region or inciting further attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas.

Third, it would provide Iran with a nuclear umbrella under which it could accelerate its efforts at regional hegemony. Had Iraq operated under a nuclear umbrella when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein's forces would still be in Kuwait.

Fourth, it would embolden the most radical elements in the Middle East to continue their war of words and deeds against the United States and its allies.

And finally, it would inevitably unleash the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, nobody knows the extent of the harm a nuclear-armed Iran could produce.

In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.

In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"

But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"

Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain's financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain's enduring legacy.

So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.

If Iran were to become a nuclear power, there would be plenty of blame to go around. A National Intelligence Report, issued on President George W. Bush's watch, distorted the truth by suggestion that Iran had ended its quest for nuclear weapons. It also withheld the fact that U.S. intelligence had discovered a nuclear facility near Qum, Iran, that could be used only for the production of nuclear weapons. Chamberlain, too, was not entirely to blame for Hitler's initial triumphs. He became prime minister after his predecessors allowed Germany to rearm. Nevertheless, it is Chamberlain who has come to symbolize the failure to prevent Hitler's ascendancy. So too will Mr. Obama come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.

SOURCE

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It's Tea Partiers and Republicans against the elitist Democrats

America’s current political war is less a struggle between the Left and the Right than one between populism, represented, however imperfectly, by the “big R” Republicans, and the elitism of President Obama.

Obama is so extremely elitist as to blithely torture, and possibly destroy, the Democratic Party itself.

An article in the March 15th New Yorker, “Obama’s Lost Year,” by George Packer, contains a telling detail about the White House decision-making process, noting that “… the surest way to win Obama over to your view is to tell him it’s the hard, unpopular, but correct decision.” Key word? Unpopular.

Small "r" republicanism neatly is summed up by the Wikipedia: “Citizens choose their leaders and the people … have an impact on [their] government.” Republicanism is the antithesis of elitism, of which monarchy is the extreme form. Our president is, in spirit, a modern monarchist.

The Gallup poll invariably shows that about 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, while 20 percent are liberals, and 40 percent are independents.

A pattern can be traced back to our national beginnings. About 40 percent of colonial Americans favored the American Revolution, 20 percent were loyal to the Crown, and 40 percent were uninvolved, according to historian Robert Calhoon in his “'A companion to the American Revolution.”

Behold a law of nature, “the 40-20-40 rule,” and call it “Bell’s Postulate,” after Jeffrey Bell, author of the defining modern classic, “Populism and Elitism.”

By placing himself in opposition to the popular will, and treating this opposition as a virtue, Obama aligns himself with the spirit of monarchy. He takes it as a virtue to thwart the consent of the governed.

Our “Mr. President” makes inappropriately deep, cringe-worthy, bows to the Emperor of Japan and the King of Saudi Arabia because … Obama is, if not exactly the King of America, the crown prince of an elitist/monarchist faction self-styled as “Liberal.”He knowingly sacrifices his, and his political party’s popularity and legitimacy, on the altar of elitism.

Thousands of Tea Party Patriots descended upon the Capitol March 16th to oppose the health care bill. Hundreds of thousands flooded the Capitol Switchboard in protest. Millions will assemble to petition the government for the redress of grievances on April 15.

Meanwhile, the White House launches elitist salvo after salvo, including more bailouts, cap and trade (under which, in Obama’s own words, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”), proposals to gut teacher accountability, and to expropriate the Internet. Obama’s elitism intensifies daily.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen may have written the most important book for this moment, “In Search of Self Governance.” Rasmussen summarizes by saying “Americans don’t want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. They want to govern themselves. The American desire for – and attachment to – self-governance runs deep.”

What is at stake today is identical to the stakes of the American Revolution itself. It is a battle between those who respect republicanism and those who reverence elitist rule.

From our very beginnings, only 40 percent of us supported republican principles and could accurately be called populists. Another 20 percent were monarchists in support of centralized command and control; they were elitists.

The prospects of the original revolutionary republicans often were dire. Thomas Paine, on a drumhead by firelight in Gen. George Washington’s camp wrote: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

Against ferocious odds, the republican minority prevailed against the elite-supported monarchist faction. Against ferocious odds, republican forces have continued, and will continue despite tactical setbacks, to prevail against resurgent elitism.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

US House passes “health reform” amendments: "The House of Representatives cleared the final hurdle in Congress’ overhaul of the nation’s health care system, passing a health care reconciliation bill by a 220-207 vote. The amendment bill, which included the fixes made to the Senate version of the health care bill, will now go to President Obama for his signature. The Senate passed the legislation this afternoon by a 56-43 margin after defeating 41 amendments offered by Republicans.”

Bond markets reflect the true cost of Obamacare: "Not many people noticed amid the Democrats' struggle to jam their health care bill through the House, but in recent weeks United States Treasury bonds have lost their status as the world's safest investment. The numbers are pretty clear. In February, Bloomberg News reports, Berkshire Hathaway sold two-year bonds with an interest rate lower than that on two-year Treasuries. A company run by a 79-year-old investor is a better credit risk, the markets are telling us, than the United States government. Buffett's firm isn't the only one. Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Lowe's have been borrowing money at cheaper rates than Uncle Sam."

Poll: 79% Say U.S. Economy Could Collapse: "The latest Fox News poll finds that 79 percent of voters think it’s possible the economy could collapse, including large majorities of Democrats (72 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and independents (80 percent). Most American voters believe it’s possible the nation’s economy could collapse, and majorities don’t think elected officials in Washington have ideas for fixing it. Just 18 percent think the economy is "so big and strong it could never collapse." Moreover, 78 percent of voters believe the federal government is "larger and more costly" than it has ever been before, and by nearly three-to-one more voters think the national debt (65 percent) is a greater potential threat to the country’s future than terrorism (23 percent)."

Gas up $1 a gallon on Obama's watch: "Gas prices have risen $1 since just after President Obama took office in January 2009 and are now closing in on the $3 mark, prompting an evaluation of the administration's energy record and calls for the White House to open more U.S. land for oil exploration. The average price per gallon across the U.S. hit $2.81 this week, according to the Energy Information Administration. That was up from $1.81 the week of Jan. 26, 2009, just after the inauguration, and marks the highest price since Oct. 20, 2008. Gas prices have been on a roller-coaster ride over the past decade, dropping to near $1 after President George W. Bush's first year in office"

Average Americans' words harsh for Obama: "Certain robust public perceptions about President Obama have surfaced among average citizens rather than so-called "wingnuts" and "lunatic fringe." A Harris Poll released Wednesday found that 40 percent of Americans say Mr. Obama is a socialist, a third think he's a Muslim, a quarter think he was not even born in the U.S., is not eligible to be president and is a "domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of. Among other things, the poll also found that three-out-of-10 Americans think Mr. Obama "wants to turn over the sovereignty of the U.S. to a one-world government." About an equal number - 29 percent - said he had "done many things that are unconstitutional" while 27 percent said "he resents America's heritage."

GE Exploits Reagan Legacy to misrepresent itself: "In response to GE's recent announcement of its sponsorship commemorating the Centennial Celebration of President Ronald Reagan's birth, today the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research is criticizing GE CEO Jeff Immelt for exploiting Reagan's legacy to curry favor with conservatives. "I'm outraged over Immelt's shameless exploitation of President Reagan's historic presidency to improve GE's reputation among conservatives. Reagan is the champion of conservatives because he fought for liberty and limited government. In contrast, Immelt uses GE's vast lobbying resources to expand the size and role of government in order to create markets for its products and loot Americans of their liberty," said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., Director of the Free Enterprise Project. Borelli notes that GE is an aggressive supporter of cap-and-trade legislation"

No ObamaCare for Obama: "President Obama declared that the new health care law "is going to be affecting every American family." Except his own, of course. The new health care law exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well. A weasel-worded definition of "staff" includes only the members' personal staff in the new system; the committee staff that drafted the legislation opted themselves out. Because they were more familiar with the contents of the law than anyone in the country, it says a lot that they carved out their own special loophole."

Moscow: US-Russia nuclear deal has some worried: "A sweeping new bargain to slash the offensive nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US — what they used to call the ‘balance of terror’ — appears almost ready for Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama to sign. Unofficial sources say the signing may take place as early as April 8, in Prague, Czech Republic, the venerable eastern European capital in which Mr. Obama launched his campaign for a nuclear weapons-free world just one year ago. Experts say the new agreement, designed to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, will reduce strategic nuclear warheads by one-quarter, to around 1,600 on each side, and halve the number of delivery vehicles — missiles, bombers, and submarines — to 800 for each country.”

They fly first class … on your dime: "“Will you and your family put off a vacation this year because you can’t afford it? Too bad, because you have paid for some terrific trips — for government bureaucrats. The Washington Times reports that last year $13 billion in tax dollars was spent to pamper ‘public servants’ on trips that double as vacation junkets. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, frequently sent employees overseas on first- or business-class airplane tickets that cost taxpayers up to $10,000 each … Likewise, agencies spend millions sending employees to private industry trade shows that just happen to be in resort locations such as Las Vegas. The Department of Commerce spent $7.5 million on conferences of this sort in 2007.”

Is WikiLeaks being tailed by the government?: "For those unfamiliar with document hosting site WikiLeaks.org, here’s a little primer for you. WikiLeaks acts as the internet’s Fort Knox for the whistle blowers of the world. … According to tweets from Wikileak insiders, members of their editorial advisory board are being tailed by State Department and CIA officials, and have been shown ominous photos taken secretly during their production meetings.”

Why the mainstream media panders to statism: "It stands to reason that the mainstream media is supportive of statism. It loves things that cause drama. Murders get ratings and so do government actions. The health care takeover is just one example. It isn’t big news that people can take care of their own needs if government steps aside. However, the resistance and opposition to this scheme has the possibility of getting very dramatic and messy.”


My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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