CART WILLIAMS

Curmudgeonly, crusty & cranky.
Always on the right, seldom if ever wrong
yet hardly ever dangerous.


On a mission to impose a hundred and
eighty degree course correction on a confused and
divided nation headed in the wrong direction.

It is almost as if this administration assumes a nuclear Iran is a done deal, and is now more worried about scrambling to come up with plans B and C.

Dissimulation?

We are to believe that outreach to the Iranian mullahs and Islam in general, in the Al-Arabiya interview, the Cairo speech, and the video sent to Ahmadinejad explain the popular uprising against a theocratic radical Islamist dictatorship — rather than the intrinsic desire for freedom among millions deprived of freedom by a 7th-century ruling Islamist clique, not to mention the presence of a still vibrant Shiite-majority democracy next-door in Iraq?

The world gave him everything he wanted–instead of what he needed–and it destroyed him. Something for me to think about if I ever feel life has cheated me.

They didn't read it and you won't either. But, it might very well be the end of civilization as we know it. Hyperbole? Maybe, but take a look here:

Table of Contents of HR 2454

If that doesn't get your eyes crossed, click on some chapter headings and go to the "meat" of the bureaucratic nightmare.

This will take several hundred thousand new government functionaries to decipher what it really means. It will take several thousand new court cases to fight for interpretation. It will employ thousands of lawyers and lobbyists on both sides of the arguments. All of that is unproductive overhead which contributes not one damn thing to the good of society or your standard of living.

I have a theory about the crowds of public “mourners”. It’s easier to participate in something like this than in something that actually matters.

They don’t have to educate themselves about issues, wrestle with their own values, be involved for more than an afternoon or evening — everybody had seen and/or heard Michael Jackson.

They just vent all that emotion and then, voilà, life moves on.

It’s not surprising when you consider, “Eighty-one percent of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed in a Pew Research Center poll … said getting rich is their generation’s most important or second-most-important life goal; 51% said the same about being famous.”

We’ve heard of innocents killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the last decade, America has lost thousands of heroes in noble causes and thousands of innocent bystanders who were denied the simple joys of life through no fault of their own.

Those deaths are tragic, and we're hard pressed to think of more than a handful of names to put with the long line of the dead.

Every channel says this is a sad day for America. I agree. But not for the same reasons.

But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors.

You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being.

All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment.

From here it is a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your children won’t decide when they’re in school where they will go or what they will do for a living.

They will wait for the government to tell them where they will go to work and what they will do.

Mr. Obama cannot replace his sentence with 10 paragraphs, and he can't escape it, either.

Because history dictated it. History wrote it. "He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror."

The Obama people want, "He was the president who gave all Americans health care," and, "He lessened income inequality," and, "He took over a failed company," and other things.

Democrats deny this eventuality, but health planners will have no choice, given that the current entitlement system is already barreling toward insolvency without adding millions of new people to the federal balance sheet.

Earlier, a physician asked Mr. Obama if he would subject his own family to the restrictions of a national health plan, even if specialists recommended treatments that weren't covered.

The President was noncommittal: "And you're absolutely right that, if it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care."

Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief.

Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history."

Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion."

A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality.

The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans.

It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers."

"That translated into lower prices (the interest rates paid by borrowers), which eventually translated into extraordinary and unseemly growth, culminating in bankruptcy and a federal bailout.

Formerly rich states, they are now known for job losses, booming deficits and debt, wage stagnation, out-migration and laughing-stock legislatures.

At least Americans have the ability to flee these ill-governed states for places that still welcome wealth creators.

It's hard to miss the irony that he's pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years -- California, New Jersey and New York.

A decade ago all three states were among America's most prosperous.

California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts.

All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

These states have been models of "progressive" policies that are supposed to create wealth: high tax rates on the rich, lots of government "investments," heavy unionization and a large government role in health care.

Our political process is broken. We keep electing assholes from both parties. We used to have statesmen. Now we have incompetent politicians who award themselves lavish salaries and benefits.

They are overpaid buffoons (Think Barney Frank) who decry the salaries paid to CEOs who have to meet a payroll and make money for the stockholders.

What do our politicians (of both parties) do? They spend spend spend. They tax tax tax. They borrow borrow borrow.

What do we do? We keep electing them.

While running up the biggest deficit in the history of this country. Black is white. Up is down.

I know that because Justice Sotomayor has assured me that I could never, with all the legal training in the world, be as good a justice as someone of her race and gender.

Eric Holder, thank God, taught me, a mere typical white person who clings to my guns, that I was cowardly in keeping silent about race.

Michelle reminded me that Princeton must have been something like Guantanamo for once tormented poor souls like herself and Justice Sotomayor stranded on an Ivy-League atoll-always forced to look over their shoulders as they endured all those nasal-voiced Buffys and Brents scurrying around in their V-neck sweaters and Gucci shoes on their Friday-night way to Nantucket or the Hamptons.

With the April rain the planet stopped heating up and the oceans receded. Gone are the days when hot streaks in Phoenix were proof of Bush’s global warming, or falling bridges in Minnesota or subway crashes in DC revealed rightwing neglect of the people’s needs.

Medicare can already be painstakingly slow. Appealing to it takes patients an average 21 months according to a 2003 Government Accountability Office report (17 months involve administrative processing).

A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain's Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years.

These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars.

Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.

When the Heritage Foundation did its analysis of Waxman-Markey, it broadly compared the economy with and without the carbon tax.

That gloomy prospect looms, not because socialism is more efficient or more just, but because ceding control over their actions to others allows individuals to escape, evade and even deny personal responsibilities.

People are afraid to be free; the state stands in loco parentis. The breaching of plausibly acceptable fiscal limits in the first half of the new century will determine how the basic conflict between welfare dependency and liberal principles will be resolved.

Negotiating, bargaining, compromising, cooperating . . . all are useful for short-term gains, but completely expendable in the long term.

Deals made can be broken in the name of Islam; compromises can be reversed; bargains recalled; and negotiations terminated. Stalling for time through semantics or overt lies while upgrading yellowcake to weapons grade material is good in Allah's sight so long as the end product is used to smite the enemies of Islam.

Our Kumbayatic Apologist-in-Chief could see that only if his speechwriter scrolled it up his teleprompter. The concept is too simple, too clear, too real to get past the paranoid filters and Chicago mentality of his I'm-too-cool-to-fail mindset.

He cannot hear the laughter of the Kims, the Ahmadinejads, the Assads, the Sauds over the siren call of his legacy lullaby. He cannot see the danger of Islam's insect mentality, lost in the ripples of his Narcissus pool. He cannot understand that world leadership and political campaigning are not interchangeable synonyms, and that speechmaking and socialism do not produce strength and wealth.

The Great New World Experiment is about to collapse into rubble because the democratic process has finally selected a government which cannot see the jungle for the ferns; which fails to understand that Islam wants only conquest, not cooperation; which believes that the people exist to serve it, not the other way around.

According to page 114 of the Kennedy bill, a similar array of choices would not be available to other Americans in the future. Instead, they would be shunted into health insurance plans under the straightjacket of whatever the government decides is a "basic" plan.

The goal would be to restrict care for the general public in order to control costs, while making sure Congress gets the gold-plated attention it's accustomed to.

Ultimately, the rest of us would be asked to trade a private insurance company as gatekeeper for a government gatekeeper.

I suppose if he and Ahmadinejad had a Community Organize-Off, Obama would put up a credible showing (although his peeps might end up in the morgue).

But the world’s leaders aren’t welfare moms and college interns waiting in growing wonder for the Obama Communication Magic to rock their world.

They’re armed and mean, and virtually all of them have, unlike Obama, spent their entire adult lives dealing with crushingly real things, as opposed to compiling c.v.’s and doing the occasional scribbling from air-conditioned offices, while other, less presentable people wove plans around them and their special talents.

This doesn’t mean I think Obama is a babe in the woods, brimming with elevated intentions. I have had to conclude that he is cynical and hard-headed, about the most personal and concrete elemenets of politics.

He’s more elegant than the average political machine guy, but a political machine guy he is. Principle is for brainless middle-class chicks, and maneuver is what you do with tire-irons, checkbooks, and dirty cops.

All free peoples of the world watch their ordeal, and can only wish them success, while owing them a great deal of gratitude for risking their lives for the innate and shared notion of human freedom and dignity.

We in the United States ask the government of Iran—as well as its military and security forces — to recognize the universal appeal of freedom that flourishes among its own remarkable people, to stand down and renounce its serial use of violence and coercion-and to ensure a truly free election where the voices of all can be at last fully heard, so that Iran can once more properly reenter the family of law-biding nations”.

-Ronald Reagan

"Duh!"

I believe that in order to reduce costs, we must give the public incentives for preventing chronic disease, increase the reimbursement for office visits, and implement medical malpractice tort reform. With these changes, I am certain that we can provide more adequate insurance coverage for all.

That the needs of the nation, or the people they serve, might be different from their own; or that doing the right thing is often different from doing the popular thing, are foreign and dangerous concepts. The only reality they know--or care about--is the one inside themselves.

In reality, they paved the way for a candidate like Obama, who initially was so attractive because the same leftists who once adored Hillary began to find her to be too obvious and coarse. Instead, they dropped her and swung over to the unknown, tabula rasa candidate on whom they are able to project their own fantasies without any intrusion by harsh reality.

The antics of the Clintons during their run in power seem almost benign and innocent by comparison.

I know Obama’s handouts are masking our problems, but like I always say, borrowing against future taxpayer earnings to pump up the economy is like eating your own leg. You’ll stay alive, and you may feel better, but you won’t gain weight.

Let’s set aside the fact that two years prior to Obama’s election the Democrats controlled the U.S. Congress, and thus were well-positioned to do something about the impending crisis. Your political philosophy, is essentially …

… Bush did it. I guess it was Bush who forced Obama to let Nancy Pelosi craft behind closed doors a $787 billion stimulus that doesn’t stimulate, or it was Bush who forced Obama to stand for absolutely nothing on the foreign stage and to bow to Saudi kings, or Bush who forced the appointment of a tax cheat to oversee the IRS (and dozens of other cheats in other organizations), or Bush who forced the gutting of our missile-defense structure while North Korea sends missiles over Hawaii, or Bush who forced Obama to violate a law that The One himself co-sponsored and to seek to fire summarily an inspector general investigating an Obama supporter, or Bush who forced Obama to put the census in direct control of the White House, or Bush who forced Obama’s attorney general to drop the clearest case of voter intimidation in 40 years (intimidation that benefited Obama, naturally), or Bush who forced Obama to claim that unemployment would not exceed 8 percent, or Bush who forced Obama to sign legislation ’saving’ the UAW, only to have the UAW’s cash cow collapse anyway, or Bush who forced a sitting president for the first time in memory to go after INDIVIDUALS within the media who have the temerity to criticize him, or Bush who forced Obama to appoint an unintelligent racial tribalist to the Supreme Court, or Bush who forced Obama to claim the United States is one of the largest Muslim countries in the world ….

The list is long, and getting longer.

And re:corruption, you’re just plain ignorant. It’s not that the series of Democratic perfidy is a weekly occurrence.

It’s that it’s a near-daily occurrence.

For instance, just yesterday fraudsters Robert Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff were again in the news, and both were big Democrat/Obama donors. Not that someone like you would know this, since you seem to have an MSNBC mentality.

Dear Professor;

I sincerely hope that is an exaggeration, you are one of few political observers who can, and do, make total sense of what we are seeing these days. I can think of no one else who has contributed so much clear political analysis for so long. Frankly, I wonder how you have time to do anything else. I sometimes see glimmers of cogent thought from some others, but to my mind you stand head and shoulders above the crowd.

Re Iran; sir, do you really believe it will make any difference if the Persians rearrange their theocracy with yet another bloody revolution? They will, IMHO, still hate America, we will still be the ‘Great Satan’, and thus be blamed for all their combined, and eternally dwelt upon, social and economic misery, that we alone are responsible for the failure of their return to a 5th centurey Caliphate.

Perhaps more importantly, the mullahs will still try to export terror and death to the non-believer. Rape, pillage, and plunder is will still be the order of the day for Islam. The west will learn the hard way to rue the day when the Iranian bomb becomes a reality.

To my untrained mind, a few salient points need to be made and remade for the leftard liberals; was it not the Ayatollah who taught the Iranians how to clear a minefield by marching a herd of school children in front of the troops? To assuage the grief for parents who lost children in this manner by assuring them their kids had died a martyr’s death for Allah seems cruel in the extreme to me.

These and other things we have witnessed from the Iranian brand of Islam lead me to believe that when people possess such a polar opposite ideology to our Western moral compass it will be impossible for a meeting of minds to ever happen.

It seems they will acquire a nuclear device, no longer a matter of ‘if’, but simply, ‘when’. They will either use it themselves, or export it to some other equally lunatic group. Imagine such a device in the hands of Hezbollah or al Qaeda, both of whom possess a wealth of homocide bombers standing at the ready?

All his indoctrination allows rationalizing his serial positions in destroying a democratic Republic.

Destroying America by “Blame and Shame” for trumped up Marxist inspired Utopian perfumed subversion that is now succeeding–a parasite that has been living in the free air of America for the last 60 years.

To survive America needs to employ the strength of individuals that accept responsibility for their actions.

This keystone value has been slowly destroyed over the years. Primarily by the success of America and the loss of “insight” on what truly makes America great.

That process of destruction and the added burden of “Great Society” Utopian thinking by PC politicians is sinking America in the mud of history.

Can it be turned around. BHO could overplay his hand–by doing so sweep away the veils than now cover the end result of his actions. Tragic failure and no ability to correct it.

Nothing in the past of America deserves the infection of the Marxist inspired and led MSM idiots.

It seems to be historically proven than Journalists and Academics have the needed personalities that can be subverted and are useful idiots for subversion.

The MSM are truly a dumb moronic subset of Americans awash and steeped in the subversion of historical facts that has been going on in the Educational Institutions since the 1950’s. A fossilized residue of Marxist Global domination objectives. The infection in America was stronger than the USSR who started it.

All began after tremendous effort by the Communists to find people within the US to topple America from inside. We are looking at those generational people now in leadership positions.

Not knowing who vdh was and still betting on “presidential speech” writers is a dip stick comment that indicates “motor” failure from the get go. America does not deserve this type of “leadership”.

America does not deserve what is happening to it now.

However it is due to lack of vigilance and the lack of understanding by Americans since WWII of how fragile American values are.

Perhaps having been raised in this childlike academic exhibit where “intelligence” is easily available via teleprompter explains our President’s malleable “command” of convenient but untrue history.

But at least we can all feel blithely happy in our bubble-like imaginary group-politic, rather than smell the approaching dictatorial evil that is immediately comprehensible to anyone who dares speak its name.

I can only commiserate. On a much smaller scale. I’m only a middle-aged nobody living in the small-town midwest. In every attempt to talk to elected officials, letters-to-the-editor, contacting local media begging it, just once, to indulge in real investigative journalism and reporting, I am greeted with stultifying patronization each time.

I cannot remember a time when tears frequented my daily life. But my heart literally is breaking as I watch my country being destroyed from within and, now, I shed them everyday. This is killing me.

I very, very much appreciate your lucid writing and try at all times to glean what might be a peak at where this country is heading. At present, I am deeply worried and I gather you are too.

We know the boilerplate: The President outlines the problem, punctuated with those awful “them” and “they” and “some” and “others” who as extremists stand in the way of all good things and present “false choices”, but remain unnamed. (Sort of like the tropes in 1984).

Then the standard references come to “the mess we inherited”, the “prior administration”, and “what we found.” These are the prefaces to his reluctance to … (fill in the blanks: run the private sector, spend massive amounts of money, take over health care, raise taxes, etc.). Then he pauses, takes a deep breath, and in fact outlines ways to take over GM, regulate compensation, run up massive deficits, nationalize health care, and plan record tax hikes.

Then he finishes with variations on the old campaign formula “this is the moment”, “hope and change”, “yes, we can”, “we will not be deterred.”

I don’t see how they can assume such a thing any more.

From the trivial like the treatment of the Churchill bust or the DVD gift to Gordon Brown, to the profound like the serial apologies, voting present on Iran, and deer-in-the-headlights stance on Korea, they must assume that the “European Rapid Deployment Force” is now their primary bulwark against the foes of civilization.

Abroad

I think the Europeans, who, remember, caught Obamania quite early, thought they were going to get more of the bipartisan American security shield, albeit with a charismatic multicultural veneer that would resonate with their citizens: no more Texas. No more Christianity.

No more twang. No more nuclur. No more Iraq. But same old NATO. Same old bad cop to their good cop. Same old wide open Ami economy. Same old chance for triangulation. And?

As we are seeing in the Middle East, in the case of Israel, with Turkey, on the recent Iranian upheaval, and during the South America visit, Obama is clearly to the left of Europe.

He sees himself more as multicultural prophet born out of the Third World, foe of colonialism, angry at past imperialism, skeptical of capitalism, eager to showcase his non-traditional ancestry and tripartite nomenclature.

By coming from the West, but separating himself from the history of his own country, Obama has become a citizen of the world, who polls far higher, as intended, in the Middle East, than does his own country.

At no point does he suggest that the fact his father left Kenya for the U.S. and fathered at least one son who would grow up American rather than Kenyan was a great gift, as we see with the ordeal of many of the Obama half-siblings in Africa.

Yes, he talks about change in America, but never tells the world exactly how an America of many races and faiths never descends into the hatred and violence we see most elsewhere in diverse societies.

Even more perverse, he has no problem twisting Israel’s arm.

Until Obama. He is bigger than freedom and democracy; he is The One.

The only questions for Americans are how quickly Obama will bankrupt us and how and what will be the cost, in blood and suffering in America and around the world, for his contempt for America and its allies because of his feckless mishandling of foreign policy.

No rational person can believe that the way to bring order to such fiscal disorder is to have the federal government, which cannot pay for the programs it operates right now, to increase the number of programs it will fund.

Of course, when we speak in terms of Washington funding programs we’re really talking about the American taxpayers shouldering the cost.

I believe that. The international community believes that.

One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged "presidential communications."

The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig's office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure.

Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a "new era" of openness, "nothing has changed," says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases.

In an editorial yesterday, the paper staked out a position of such utter confusion that it can only be termed bizarre.

Here are the final three paragraphs:

More violence against the Iranian people will only highlight the government's illegitimacy and desperation. If the authorities want to resolve this impasse peacefully--that must be the goal--they should call a new election, monitored by independent Iranian observers.

Before last week's results were prematurely and improbably declared, a runoff was expected between Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Moussavi. As a first step, authorities should set up a commission representing all major candidates to examine the election data and jointly determine a face-saving and credible way forward.

Some in Washington, meanwhile, have been complaining that President Obama hasn't been tough enough in his criticism of Iran's government. He may have to speak out more forcefully in the days to come.

But given its history with Iran, the United States must take special care not to be seen as interfering. That would only give Iran's hard-liners a further excuse to blame the United States for their own shameful failures.

Let's take this from the bottom, starting with the paper's comments on Obama.
This paragraph is remarkable for its own flocculence.

The Times implies, without quite saying it, both that it approves of Obama's evasions ("the United States must take special care") and that it would approve if he took a different approach ("he may have to speak out more forcefully").

It's hard to know whether to describe this as a posture of total deference to the president or of complete indifference to the underlying subject.

The paper even refrains from criticizing the one Obama statement that has drawn expressions of disapproval from almost everyone else: his claim, on Tuesday, that there's not much difference between incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi. If this is true, the Times's call for a new election doesn't make much sense. Not that it makes much sense either way.

There is so much wrong with this idea that it's hard to know where to begin, so let's pick one telling detail: the paper's insistence that the new election be "monitored by independent Iranian observers."

Why not call for monitoring by international observers, common practice when corrupt Third World regimes hold elections? In this context, "independent Iranian observers" is a contradiction in terms anyway, given that all Iranians live either under or inside the regime's heel.

As we've noted earlier this week, even an "honest" Iranian election would be a sham, given that only candidates approved by the regime-controlled Guardian Council are permitted to run. (This year the council rejected more than 100 prospective candidates for every one it approved.)

And what if the regime decided to make the revote only a travesty of a sham rather than a mockery of a travesty of a sham--that is, what if it steals the election for Ahmadinejad again, but in a less obvious way? The Times seems to think such a result would be desirable.

The editorial's penultimate paragraph calls for "a face-saving and credible way forward," not a fair and just one. This is consistent with the antepenultimate paragraph, which we'll repeat for emphasis:

More violence against the Iranian people will only highlight the government's illegitimacy and desperation.

This statement is flatly false. More violence would do many things beside "highlight the government's illegitimacy and desperation." Most obvious, it would inflict pain, injury and death on innocent people who are heroically standing against a criminal regime.

It could succeed in achieving the regime's goal, which is to suppress dissent by terrorizing the population. In short, violence is part and parcel of the regime's illegitimacy. The Times, however, expresses concern only that it highlights that illegitimacy.

Making this even more strange, yesterday's Times editorial is a substantial weakening of the paper's own position in a Monday editorial that highlighted the regime's illegitimacy:

The elections are another potent reminder that there can be no illusions about Iran's government and its malign intent. That is a hard political fact. From "there can be no illusions" to "determine a face-saving and credible way forward" in 72 hours.

Judged by today's psychological standards, these 18th century fathers sound harsh and unfeeling. Yet to see the Founding Fathers as flesh-and-blood dads, to glimpse their struggles to rear their children at a time of grave uncertainty and peril, is to appreciate their service and sacrifice anew.

Founding a nation meant more than winning a war. It also called upon the nation's Founders to pass on the passion for freedom, educational excellence and civic virtue to their children and grandchildren.

Some of the analogies we've drawn are a stretch. But here's one that matches perfectly: When the body begins to recover, doctors gradually withdraw external support and make sure the patient doesn't become addicted to medication.

Our economic doctors should permit America's uniquely effective immune system to take over as companies and financial institutions deleverage their balance sheets.

Before the Obama Administration Euro-fits the U.S. economy, Americans need to know that this model saps economic dynamism and is nearly impossible to fix.

For decades, Europeans have been frustrated with low growth, chronic unemployment and fading competitiveness. The answers tend to come from the right, and successful center-left politicians have embraced market reforms (think Tony Blair).

On the Huffington Post earlier this week, columnist Robert Kuttner bemoaned the left's collapse in Europe: "American progressives used to look longingly to Europe, with its stronger trade unions and its more comprehensive social protections.

Of late, the winning political formula in Europe is simple: Promise to ease heavy tax and regulatory burdens and shake up stagnant economies. The welfare system is seen as broken.

France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi took this path to power. In the largest economy, Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel looks poised to defeat a divided left in September's elections.

That must be news to the voucher students who are reading almost a half-grade level ahead of their peers. Or to the study's earliest participants, who are 19 months ahead after three years.

Parents were also more satisfied with their children's schools and more confident about their safety. Those were among the findings of the Department of Education's own Institute of Education Sciences, which used rigorous standards to measure statistically significant improvement.

Rather than let the Hungarian Revolution triumph, in November 1956 Nikita Khrushchev ordered in the tanks. In August 1968, Leonid Brezhnev sent in tanks again to crush Prague Spring. In 1981, Moscow ordered Gen. Jaruzelski to smash Solidarity.

Those communists did not shrink from massacre to keep what they worshipped: power.

In June 1989, Beijing, rather than let hundreds of thousands of dissidents occupy Tiananmen Square, waited for nightfall and sent in tanks and rural troops, avoiding the fate of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe.

soxconn

Representative Bachmann is absolutely justified in her concern. The census was pulled under the executive branch, 5 billion dollars was allocated to ACORN, a community organizing entity and Obama's power agenda seem based on exceptions, errors and excuses, i.e. a type of moral relativism that people seem apathetic about.

freedomrules1776

"They will be in charge of going door to door and collecting data from the American public," she said. "This is very concerning."

ACORN has applied to help recruit workers to help conduct the census. Republican lawmakers and some public interest groups have expressed concern over their involvement.

ACORN staffers have ben indicted in several states on charges of voter registration fraud stemming from the organization's efforts to register voters last year.

Mrs. Bachmann, who is in her second term in the House, has become a lightning rod for criticism from Democrats and liberal talk show hosts for her unapologetic conservative views.

She said she considers that "a badge of honor."

But the Obama-Waxman-Markey legislation has it backwards: By reducing energy availability, their proposals would kill jobs, reduce purchasing power, shrink the economy, and raise the cost of every fuel we use.

All of which would have almost zero impact on global warming.

America cannot go forward successfully with this kind of thinking.

According to a 1999 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimate, the emissions cuts the Kyoto Protocol would have required in 2010 were likely to reduce America's GDP by $275 billion to $468 billion, or $921 to $1,565 per person, and of course Kyoto does not apply to fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.

An April study by Charles River Associates tells us that if the Obama proposal to reduce CO2 emissions becomes law, it will have a serious impact on the availability and cost of energy.

"Petroleum used in transportation and industrial production accounts for 44 percent of energy related CO2 emissions; coal accounts for 36 percent, and natural gas for 20 percent."

Unfortunately the popular modern energy priorities--corn based ethanol (which government subsidizes at 51 cents a gallon for the 36 billion gallon production the Congress has required by 2022) instead of reducing carbon emissions increases them over time...

By 2025, just 16 years from now, the cost of natural gas would rise 56%, electricity 44% and motor fuel 19%. Annual household purchasing power would annually decline by an average of $1,827. And America will lose 3.2 million jobs.

President Obama has said not a single word in acknowledgment of this new reality--paralyzed, perhaps, by the fear that in speaking the truth, he would antagonize the regime with which he dreams of negotiating.

Most of the devastation was wreaked by the Congressional Budget Office, which on Tuesday reported that draft legislation from the Senate Finance Committee would increase the federal deficit by more than $1.6 trillion over the next decade while only partly denting the population of the uninsured.

The women on the front line with their loose colorful scarves had opened their arms, ready to be killed, while others were beaten by the Basij on the side of the road.

People want to be heard and supported by the rest of the world. They were sending messages to the West with their cameras. They were calling on Obama and Sarkozy to demand that the Free World not recognize this government. I saw a few women shouting: "Now it's your turn to support democracy and human rights."

If I pop up in your Speed Date emails, click “ignore.” It has to be a computer glitch.

As long as the choice was between reform and the status quo, the public was likely to go with the reformers.

But if the debate is whether to go with costly, unnecessary reforms or with common-sense changes, then Republicans have a chance to appeal to fiscally conservative independents and Democrats and win this one.

Mr. Obama's plan is intended to "guarantee" health insurance for all. Whatever the truth of that, its outlays -- larded atop Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security -- guarantee that Congress will become more like the states' clown shows. But they are expensive clowns.

Obama has not had to cope with any attacks, yet.

Now it’s beginning to look like he’ll have to settle for just being the worst of the 20th century.

Barack Hussein Obama is well on his way to not only matching President Carter’s ineptitude but surpassing it.

Worse, it took Carter nearly all of his four-year term in the White House to create the international crises, the economic chaos and the domestic havoc he left when he returned to Plains.

Steyn says these words should not be interpreted "as a battle cry: We'll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death.

Steyn adds, "Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his 'lifestyle choices' get a pass while theirs don't.

One half of that alliance is pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists and the other half is homophobic, misogynist theocrats.

Or it may fail to do so and be weakened or overthrown.

"These elections are an atrocity," he said. "If [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?" The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

The President who spoke those words was France's Nicolas Sarkozy.

The administration has tried to make small, quiet moves to extend benefits to gays and lesbians. The State Department has promised to give partners of gay and lesbian diplomats many benefits, such as diplomatic passports and language training.

But Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's promises left out financial benefits such as pensions. Obama's move could make that shift.

"If it doesn't include health insurance, if he doesn't talk about the military and about the (Justice Department) brief, I think it will fall short," Socarides said in an e-mail late Tuesday. "Right now, people are looking for real action."

Now we’ve become so ‘nice’ that those suffering repression around the world don’t even have a model to aspire to.

How can a man NOT be influenced consciously or unconsciously, mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, William Ayres, Rev. Wright, Sol Alinsky, and Michelle (I was never proud of this country) Obama?

Obama must have contempt for a free capitalistic democracy. That’s how he was trained.

The alternative is a venal totalitarian government which we’re seeing develop as Obama throws money around to manipulate people in a way not seen before in my experience.

But why do prosecutors, courts and judges seem to be under his thumb? Congress is unpredictable.

A resurgent North Korea, Chavez in Caracas, Peru and Bolivia’s self-styled Mini-Mes, Ahmadinejad, Pakistan on a brink of going over or not, a Russia that wants empire again, coming events could well be much worse than the 1930s.

We’ve long talked about the troubles Munich brought to the world and very little real knowledge or insight as to what the next such event shall bring.

Applying the same “all are equal” philosophy to the wider world — doling out favors to thugs while shortchanging high achievers– fails for the same reason. Thugs have infinite greed, but high achievers have finite, limited resources and finite, limited tolerance for getting ripped off.

Whatever happens now, Ahmadinajad will blame the unrest on Jews, the CIA blah blah blah (thanks for apologizing for ‘53 Mr President — your timing couldn’t be better).

If he stays in office, Ahmadinajad will consolidate his base and quash dissent. At that point, talking him out of developing nukes will be futile, if it isn’t already.

Unfortunately for Obama, this degree of political unrest ups the ante on allowing Iran to gain nuclear power status.

We don’t expect the likes of David Shuster to let little things like facts to get in the way of his opinions.

Obama means to shove healthcare down America’s throat since stoopid Americans obviously don’t know what is best for them. He was soundly booed at the AMA yesterday and rightly so.

In all my life, I have never seen a President grab sooo much power, so quickly and wield it like a sledgehammer at the American public. This move with ABC is a statist action and Hugo Chavez must be grinning ear to ear over the actions of his comrade in arms…

Each day we are served up a fresh hell in headlines concerning Obama:

Obama seeks to ‘give government new powers to seize key companies’Federal Reserve to gain power under plan Obama blocks access to visitor lists… Developing

And Sarah Palin charged Letterman with "sexually perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity."

On Monday's show, Letterman said, "I'm wondering, 'Well, what can I do to help people understand that I would never make a joke like this?' I've never made jokes like this, as long as we've been on the air, 30 long years."

Then consider the American Jewish community, which still overwhelmingly supports Obama despite his egregious displays of disrespect toward Israel, its history, its moral position and its fundamental right to national defense. And there are large segments of the Christian community – Catholic and evangelical – that either lie to themselves about Obama's depraved, militant position in supporting even partial-birth abortion or compartmentalize it into artificial irrelevance.

And how about rank-and-file Democrats who consider themselves fiscally conservative? Partisan loyalties notwithstanding, how can they sit by idly as they watch Obama's spending horror show unfold? How can they delude themselves into believing this obscene and insane spending – guaranteed to financially, and maybe politically, enslave our children – can ever be justified?

I don't quite understand how people, especially religious people, can place their trust for salvation in a fellow mortal, but history shows they do, and present-day America shows they are.

From MSNBC's Chris Matthews' admitting Obama sends a thrill up his leg to audience members' fainting at his speeches to young girls' kissing his statue like brainless bookends, the trend continues unabated.

Even some not entranced by his supposed charisma are indirectly affected by it, evidenced by their unbounded willingness to give him the benefit of every doubt.

Then the nation will have rationed care, controlled by a bureaucrat and paid for at rates totally unrelated to factors like costs or efficacy. MRI, PET, CT and similar will drop from our common medical lexicon. Surgery will be for the fortunate few and new technology pharmaceuticals will evaporate in the dusty research labs.

The White House’s refusal to officially question the result or even condemn the brutal suppression of opposition protestors, is undermining America’s standing as a global power, and is little more than a face-saving, cynical exercise in appeasement that will all end in tears.

Hmm. That's an argument that disproves any hope of GM being run in a "nonpolitical" matter. On the contrary, the administration might have to intervene regularly just to protect the company from 535 legislators.

Since workers inevitably end up taking personal calls or emails, the thinking goes, it's only fair that they pay for the privilege. What's next?

Maybe a per-cup tax on office coffee, or targeting furtive visits to ESPN or Hulu on the office PC? As one wag put it on the Journal's Web site, "It's like charging for the use of the company washroom."

There was no booing, just a lot of laughing and applauding.

So if you’re a Republican female with a family, you can be called a slut and your kids whores and that’s OK with people today.

Oh, sorry, Letterman thought he was calling Palin’s 18-year-old daughter a whore, not her 14-year-old daughter. My, that does make a difference, doesn’t it?

Americans should be ashamed of themselves.

I do know that when Don Imus made an off-the-cuff racial comment, he was thrown off the air.

But call a sitting governor of a large American State a slut and her daughter a whore, and people laugh and applaud.

Letterman should be forced to reseign, no two ways about it. If any standards still exist on the public (yes, that’s right, public) airwaves, Letterman should be held to the same standards as Imus.

That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled."

Huxley imagined this would be done partly by drugs and partly by propaganda. He was partly right and partly wrong.

Yes, drugs are responsible for a certain amount of deadening of the American consciousness, but nowhere near as significantly as video games, the Internet and the entertainment industry in general. These sources of distraction along with the steady blare of propaganda have turned modern man into as willing a slave as ever existed.

Huxley said the modern dictatorship would gain power "by bypassing the ...rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery.

This is the danger: That actually people may be... happy under the new regime, but... they will be happy in situations where they oughtn't to be happy."

.....NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE FREE WORLD WOULD HAVE PASSIVELY TOLERATED THE SYSTEMATIC RAPE AND BETRAYAL OF THEIR LAND BY UTTERLY CORRUPT AND TRECHEROUS POLITICIONS, ALL OF WHOM ARE GUILTY OF TREASON !!

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BRITAINS BALLS??

Posted by: johnathon

DEATH OF DEMOCRACY

You Brits better hurry up and surrender or we'll beat you to it.

Countless quangos and bureaucrats impose a code of political correctness upon us that the Liberals or Labour have no will to reverse. Environmental zealots and health and safety obsessives demand absurd restrictions.

More useless public bodies spring up every year. Their employees travel first class on the gravy train while we pay for their tickets.

Parliament always seems to legislate to restrict our freedoms, never advance them. Laws to say you can’t smoke, can’t drink, can’t hunt, can’t make jokes.

Elections only affect the speed at which we travel in the wrong direction. Gordon Brown used to be a control freak.

"...But our foreign trading partners said unto Him, "Wait a minute. Your dollar is not worth a pile of camel dung! You will have to pay more..."

And the people said, "Wait a minute. That is unfair!!"

And the world said, "Neither are these other idiotic programs you have embraced. Lo, you have become a Socialist state and a second-rate power. Now you shall play by our rules!"

And the people cried out, "Alas, alas!! What have we done?"

But yea verily, it was too late. The people set upon "The One" and spat upon him and stoned him, and his name was dung.

And the once mighty nation was no more; and the once proud people were without sustenance or shelter or hope.

And the Change "The One" had given them was as like unto a poison that had destroyed them and like a whirlwind that consumed all that they had built.

And the people beat their chests in despair and cried out in anguish, "Give us back our nation and our pride and our hope!!"

But it was too late, and their homeland was no more..."

We are going to "streamline" healthcare. We're going to make it "more efficient." We're going to "manage" it. And that way we will generate the trillion dollars a year it will take to fund it.

If that language translates to anything other than "we are going to cut your access to healthcare drastically" then you aren't paying attention. It means rationing, clinics, limited specialists, low compensation for medical professionals and no surgery/MRI/oncology/dental when we need it.

You simply cannot provide modern medical technology to five times as many people for significantly less money than you are now spending providing ludicrously partial payment for service to the over-65 folks today. Lots more people without an influx of fresh loaves and fishes will not allow for the same level of repast for the whole gathering.

Finally, our president is a product of a multicultural education: Facts either cannot be ascertained or do not matter, given that the overriding concern is to promote an equality of result among various contending groups. That is best done by inflating the aspirations of those without power, and deflating the “dominant narratives” of those with it.

In 1920, Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) party adopted "economic rights" in its platform. And Stalin entrenched them into the Soviet Union's constitution.

Doing so establishes the principle that the individual's life belongs to the collective, which, in essence, hands the government the power and the moral sanction to do whatever it wants with that life.

The declaration (of the United Nations) deserves moral condemnation and rejection.

The only human rights are individual rights -- which have made possible the freedom and prosperity that we currently enjoy, but risk losing. Rather than allow political power lusters to destroy the remnants of individual rights that still protect us, we should be eternally vigilant in protecting and restoring our inalienable rights.

As for those countries which still blatantly violate individual rights, we should morally condemn them and boycott them -- not treat them as civilized members of the "world community." That's what should have been done fifty years ago.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=210