So, go and share the following article with as many people as possible. Better yet, get involved. Join the Tea Party movement, or find local, state, and national politicians who share these ideals and help them get elected. Write, call, and e-mail your elected officials and tell them your concerns, politely and respectfully of course, but most importantly get involved. These steps won’t cure all of the nations ills but they are a beginning.

Socialism’s Greatest Lie: Government Can Give You Everything for Free

Socialism’s greatest lie is that it promises the people something for nothing, services and programs of all kind that will either be “free” or more affordable than the free market variety. But just like the ads promising you a free iPod or a chance to make millions from home while you yawn, socialism is not something for nothing, instead more often it’s nothing for something.

The idea that the government will take care of you is appealing, entire nanny states have been built on that proposition. But the government can’t take care of you, it can’t even pay its own bills without you. It can’t run a television station, a toll bridge or even an off track betting service, or any venture that in private hands would be profitable, without using taxpayer funds to prop it up.

A legitimate enterprise never needs to fool its customers into thinking that they will receive something for nothing. It is only the scammers that need to do that. What a promise of something for nothing really indicates is a venture that is run by people who are incapable of hard work, who get by on tricking others out of their hard earned money. And that in short is what socialism looks like, with its monolithic bureaucracies where incompetence is the order of the day, its offices upon offices that never need to produce their results or show their books, and its embedded corruption that insures the money never goes where you think it does.

The promise of free health care though is far more devilish than a free iPod, because it doesn’t simply promise people a gadget, but promises that the government will keep them alive. And because government free offers not only tend to cost a lot, but have a way of being universal and with no opt-out clause available, they’re a scam in which participation is not optional to individual foolishness, but mandatory to everyone.

Free or cheap health care of course is appealing, but there is no such thing as “free” or “cheap” because everything the government does is paid for twice over. Everything you get from the government you pay for, either directly through taxes and fees, or indirectly through rising costs and black market prices. Taxes of course are the most obvious way in which you wind up paying more for the same services that the government provides you with.

Taxes are a fool’s credit card, in which he spends and spends without thinking about the cost, until suddenly the bill comes due, and he simultaneously agonizes over the cost without connecting it to all the spending. Those who supported Obama and his proposals, without realizing their cost while complaining about their taxes are paying with a fool’s credit card at the ballot box, incapable of even understanding what the bill means when it comes due.

But politicians are generally smart enough to assure voters that they won’t be paying for the program directly. No, they assure us, the rich will pay for it. Big business will pay for it. Or we’ll just borrow more money instead of raising taxes. If the regular fool’s credit card is Visa, this indirect form of payment is Washington D.C., Idiot’s American Express card. Because paying indirectly just adds a few layers of expenses between the taxpayer and the bill.

Raising taxes on big business and “the rich” is popular, but big business and the upper income tax bracket will ultimately pass down the cost to consumers in the form of high prices on goods and services, in the form of job cuts and outsourcing. Socialism’s trickle down poverty approach insures that taxing the rich will still tax the poor and the lower middle class, it will just do so indirectly.

Less available products and jobs don’t come with a tax bill. The tax is an invisible one in which depressing business, trickles down to the lower and middle classes who end up with fewer and more expensive product and service choices and fewer job opportunities. To balance this out, governments will begin offering tax breaks to businesses, and since something has to give, taxpayers end up footing the bill for business tax breaks impelled by business tax hikes. Governments find this convenient as the route between the government and program and higher individual taxes has become too indirect for most people to realize why their taxes are going up, and because this allows politicians to claim credit for saving jobs and benefiting from the donations sent their way by business lobbyists.

It would have been cheaper and simpler for individual taxpayers to see a direct tax hike, instead of the complicated way in which the government moves around money, while the politicians still benefit from covering every angle for a problem that they created.

And then of course there’s the loan package. If you don’t want to raise taxes on anyone, you have to borrow money, which is the Lunatic’s MasterCard, because while taxes remain the same, the amount of debt being carried rises, and that debt has to be paid off. So instead of actually paying for a government service through higher taxes, the public takes on a huge load of debt, whose rising interest rates are far more expensive than direct taxation would be. But politicians don’t care since they can keep passing the fiscal football until they’re out of office. At which point the next set of politicians look at the debt figures and their own polls, and keep on doing the same thing, until the entire public has been reduced to a sharecropper society, working to pay off a debt to foreign lenders. A debt that they can never pay off because politicians keep borrowing more money to cover the cost of a constantly expanding government and a population that keeps consuming more government services.
But directly or in-directly, in any of these ways, the free or cheap government program quickly turns out to be mind-blowingly expensive. And there is a simple reason for that, because while government is officially non-profit, which seemingly suggests that by cutting out the profit motive, the government would be able to offer the same services at lower cost—the joker in the deck is that government programs are administered much less efficiently than their free market equivalents.

While free market companies have to be efficient because profit motive requires cutting expenses, government programs don’t have to be efficient, they just have to “be”. A corporation has to increase the value provided to its customers and shareholders to remain competitive. The best way to do that is by cutting expenses. By contrast government programs don’t have to increase the value provided to customers, as they are non-competitive, and while the public may be government’s unofficial shareholders, the politicians insulated them from the actual bureaucrats who run the programs. And the bureaucrats are the “expenses”, which allows them to save themselves from ever being cut.

And where free market businesses may cut staff first and customers second, health care unions along the lines of SEIU or the California Nurses Union insure that staff can never be cut without triggering a shutdown of all health services. By centralizing health services, health care unions gain a great deal of power that makes them effectively unstoppable. Jobs are padded and expanded. Unions win concessions at the expense of the people the government programs are provided for. That means teacher’s unions gain, while schoolchildren lose out. Nursing unions gain, while patients lose out. In the balance between a union and a customer, the union always wins because it wields more clout and brings more money to the table. And that means there is no way to control staff expenses without a prolonged political battle.
Furthermore government programs are not actually non-profit, they just appear that way. A common argument made by socialized health care advocates is that the public should not be spending money on health care that will be used to fund some CEO’s yacht. But the thing is that under government health care, the money is still being used to fund someone’s yacht. It might be the yacht of top health care advisers who pull down six figure salaries, it might be the yacht of allied non-profit executives who frequently pull down six and seven figure salaries, it might the yacht of a health care union bigwig, or finally it might be the yacht of the CEO of a medical contractor who wins the chance to provide the government with surgical tubing, at twice the cost, thanks to some help from his buddy, Senator X or Congressman Y, whose campaign fund he just happened to donate to. But either way there way there’s always a yacht. And you’re always paying for it. The difference is that with the government there are a lot more yachts and you have no way to opt out of paying for them.

The profit motive in government programs frequently takes the form of corruption, with no bid contracts and sweetheart deals, jobs for the sons and daughters of the donors to Senator X and Congressman Y. Sure the program itself is non-profit, until you look at how much it cost to build that hospital vs how much it should have cost. It’s non-profit until you look at that nice house that Company Z helped Senator X pick up in exchange for his off the record chat with the Chairman of the Department of Y that insured that Company Z got the contract, and the taxpayers got screwed.

This is not non-profit, it’s a kleptocracy. And a kleptocracy is for profit, the profit is just under the table. The more government expands, the more the kleptocracy grows. Naturally the kleptocracy just loves the idea of expanding government programs. Why shouldn’t it? Free market companies make money by selling products to consumers. The kleptocracy make money by exchanging government contracts for donations, favors and payoffs. Externally a kleptocracy may look like it’s booming, but in reality it’s rotten to the core, and nothing is done well anymore. Doing anything requires knowing a friend of a friend in the government. Because the only way to do business under a kleptocracy is to be part of it. Or be its victim.

The result of all this is that government services are actually fantastically more expensive than their free market counterparts, the way you pay for them however is often indirect, which makes them seem cheap or free. But like a credit card whose payments don’t come due right away, it feels good to spend the money if you don’t realize the connection between the bill and the money being spent.
Government health care means that you’re actually paying twice for the same program. Once for the cost of the basic resources that make up the program, and once for all the government inflation of the actual cost of the program. The government cannot actually cut the basic costs of of the resources of the program, which may be the staff, the supplies, the facilities and the administration of the program. Government administration is more expensive than its free market counterparts. Government contractors that provide the supplies and facilities are invariably much more expensive, because of corruption. Government staffing tends to be a more expensive and lower quality operation dominated by unions and bureaucracy. 

Since the government cannot reduce the actual base costs of the resources, and in fact inflates them, the result is a more expensive government program. What it can do however is hide those costs directly in your taxes, in indirectly someone else’s taxes or in the national debt, which will trickle down to you anyway but at a higher cost. Essentially this makes socialism into a three monte card game, in which whatever card you pick, you lose. The only question is how much you lose.

Nothing from the government is ever free. The only question is how much you lose.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/18583

*Note: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), is the source of this proverb, not as widely believed Samuel Johnson, c.f. “Hell is full of good intentions or desires.”

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Since President HopeNGrovel’s inauguration Americans have seen two distinct approaches to American foreign policy; alienate and marginalize our allies whilst  negotiating with and placating our enemies. People around the world have seen American allies like Britain, France, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Japan treated rudely at arms length while dictators and tyrants are warmly greeted as ‘partners among the community of nations’ like Hugo Chavez, Manuel Zelaya, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Qaddafi, Vladimir Putin, North Korea-with many more on the way no doubt. So, why is Obama ruining our relationships with our allies and embracing our enemies? There’s no other way to sugarcoat it; the diplomatic goals of Obama and his minions are to build down America, weaken its alliances, mitigate its standing around the world, and give legitimacy to the world’s tyrants and dictators. It’s gotten so bad that he’s starting to make Jimmy Carter look like Teddy Roosevelt.

Take this assessment of Obama’s recent diplomatic visit to Japan;

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/22/us-media-ignores-obamas-muffed-japan-visit/

According to the mainstream Japanese weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun the visit was termed “miserable,” and “the worst US-Japan summit meeting in history” by Japanese insiders. Worse, the Japanese government was so upset at the visit that it retaliated at various points issuing slights right back to President Obama during his stay on Japanese soil.

As if this snub towards our allies in Japan wasn’t bad enough, try the following. Well, I don’t think any Revoistas(or anyone else with a spot of common sense) are really surprised at the following news. 

Obama to meet with Myanmar rulers

SINGAPORE | President Obama on Sunday will become the first American president in more than 40 years to attend a meeting with the repressive rulers of Myanmar, marking a dramatic shift in the U.S. approach to bringing change to a regime that responds brutally to dissent, locks up journalists and political opponents, and has kept itself largely walled off from the Western world.

Formerly known as Burma, Myanmar has for years played the role of skunk in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, known as ASEAN, repeatedly preventing the group from attracting participation from the United States. But Mr. Obama came to office promising to extend an open hand to rogue states in the hopes of changing the dynamics.

“The policies of the international community have not in two decades produced positive results,” said Jeffrey Bader, a special assistant to the president for national security. “One definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome. Twenty years is long enough.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced in February that the U.S. was reviewing its policy toward Myanmar, saying that neither sanctions nor engagement – the preferred policy of Myanmar’s neighbors – had nudged the military rulers toward democratic reforms. The new American policy was announced in late September, described as a carrot-and-stick effort, with the U.S. agreeing to talk to the junta and to relax sanctions if conditions are met.

The outreach to Myanmar has come in a series of steps, starting with a visit by Sen. Jim Webb, Virginia Democrat, in August, followed by the recent trip by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt M. Campbell, the first by a high-ranking U.S. official since then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright went to the country in 1995.

Now comes the meeting in Singapore, which the U.S. has touted as the most dramatic display of its change in policy. Host Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said he expects concerns about Myanmar to be discussed at the ASEAN session, though Scot Marciel, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said he does not anticipate any direct talks between Mr. Obama and junta Prime Minister Gen. Thein Sein.

Mrs. Clinton told the Voice of America on Friday thatthere were signs of slow change in Myanmar, but that planned voting next year “will not be legitimate unless they engage in a dialogue with the people of Burma and create the atmosphere for free, fair and credible elections.”

The meeting could produce some jarring imagery for Mr. Obama, who during a debate with then-presidential rival Mrs. Clinton, said he would be willing to meet – without precondition – with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. “I would,” he responded. Mrs. Clinton said she would not. “I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes,” she said.

The potential political downside to Mr. Obama’s approach became evident in April at a Summit of the Americas meeting. In front of photographers, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez mugged and posed as he handed Mr. Obama a copy of “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” a book by Eduardo Galeano that charges U.S. and European economic and political interference in the region.

The White House tried to downplay the significance of the encounter, calling Mr. Chavez a publicity hound. Ambassador Jeffrey Davidow told reporters, “I think the fact that our president shook his hand and smiled doesn’t constitute a new relationship.”

Critics of the new approach to American policy on the old and vexing problem of Myanmar say it similarly risks giving that country’s leaders an opening to obtain an air of international legitimacy. And, they say, it provides the junta something it has not earned – enhanced diplomatic leverage against its increasingly imposing neighbor, China.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/15/obama-to-meet-with-myanmar-rulers//print/

 

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Gary Locke and Hu Jintao's toast to Americans, "Suckas!!!"

Former Washington state Governor Gary Locke(pictured above, on the left with his BFF-Chinese President, Hu Jintao) is now our Secretary of Commerce under President Obama. He knows his way around corridors of power in Washington DC, after all he was a lawyer for Davis, Wright, and Tremaine who represented China in areas of trade.  Locke was also inextricably involved with the Clinton Administration and something called ‘China-gate’.  Just to refresh your memory, here is a brief mental spritzer…

Remember the Chinagate scandal, where the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee raised gobs of cash from communist Chinese operatives? (This is perhaps the worst fundraising scandal in U.S. history, and Judicial Watch was one of the first to get on top of it. Check out the first three related lawsuits listed on this page.)   

Well, the Clinton Chinagate scheme had a focus in the Clinton Commerce Department. One of the key figures in Chinagate is none other than former Clinton Commerce official and DNC fundraiser John Huang. You may recall, when deposed by Judicial Watch in its Chinagate litigation, Huang took the fifth more than 2,000 times in connection to the scheme, although he did eventually plead guilty to violations of campaign finance laws.

In the midst of violating all those campaign finance laws in the 1990s, Huang also found time to raise money for another key Democratic rising star, Gary Locke.

Huang personally stroked a $1,000 check for Locke and also co-sponsored fundraising events that netted $30,000 in 1996 alone.

Of course, when criticized for his connections to Huang, Locke quickly yanked out the race card. (Liberals always seem to have the “race card” handy in their breast pocket, don’t they?)

In 1999, Locke told a group of Asian American journalists that the Chinagate scandal will have a negative impact on Asian Americans seeking top-level appointments in the U.S. Government. “If they have any connection to John Huang,” Locke lamented, “those individuals will face greater scrutiny and their lives will be completely opened up and examined – perhaps more than usual.”

We can only hope.

There is little doubt that there was a plan by the Chinese Communist government to influence our politics with campaign cash. The Clintons were happy to play along. And it looks like Gary Locke may have been, too.

There were lots of other sordid bits about Buddhist monks, thefts of sensitive US technology, and bribe money from  Chinese Communist operatives, but let’s not dwell on past unpleasantness. No, let’s focus on the present. After reading the following information you’ll likely be speechless, lose sleep at night, and wake up in cold sweats. Note: I posted this at 4:45 AM.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/15/inside-the-ring-2059116/?page=3

Obama loosens missile technology controls to China

President Obama recently shifted authority for approving sales to China of missile and space technology from the White House to the Commerce Department — a move critics say will loosen export controls and potentially benefit Chinese missile development.

The president issued a little-noticed “presidential determination” Sept. 29 that delegated authority for determining whether missile and space exports should be approved for China to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

Commerce officials say the shift will not cause controls to be loosened in regards to the export of missile and space technology. Eugene Cottilli, a spokesman for Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, said under new policy the U.S. government will rigorously monitor all sensitive exports to China.

Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said restoring Commerce Department control over the sensitive experts is a “step backward.” “It’s as though Commerce’s mishandling of missile-tech transfers to China in the 1990s never happened,” said Mr. Sokolski, a former Pentagon proliferation specialist. “But it did. As a result, we are now facing much more accurate, reliable missiles from China.”

Mr. Sokolski said he expects the U.S. government under the new policy to again boost Chinese military modernization through “whatever renewed ‘benign’ missile technology” is approved.  “It was foolish for us to do this in the 1990s and is even more dangerous for us to do now,” he said.

Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, which monitors export control policies, said he was surprised by the decision to shift responsibility back to Commerce — a change that Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush did not make.

“It is shocking that it would be delegated to the secretary of commerce, whose job it is to promote trade, rather than to the secretary of state or the secretary of defense, who have far more knowledge and responsibility within their organizations for missile technology,” Mr. Milhollin said.  Mr. Milhollin said a similar delegation of power would have been criticized in previous administrations. “In fact, the delegation turns the present law upside down because Congress passed it after finding that the Commerce Department had improperly helped China import U.S. missile technology in the 1990s,” he said.

Edward Timperlake, a Pentagon technology-security official during the George W. Bush administration, said he agrees that the new policy likely will loosen export controls on dual-use technology that could be used to boost China’s large-scale missile program.  China’s military recently displayed new long-range and cruise missiles during a military parade in Beijing marking the 60th anniversary of communist rule.

“It looks like we’re going to have Loral-Hughes part two,” Mr. Timperlake said of the policy shift.

The issue is that this will renew the pattern and practices of the Department of Commerce in the 1990s, when sensitive technology flowed under the rubric of space cooperation and, tragically, the Chinese ICBM force was fixed and modernized,” he said.

Mr. Timperlake said the new policy is “greenlighting engagement with China in very bad areas that will negatively impact United States’ national security.”

 

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Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary(1905-1916) made that famous statement about the ‘lights going out in Europe’, prior to the start of World War I. Needless to say, we know the consequences of World War I were felt throughout the 20th Century. After reading the following article, I can’t help but think we may be experiencing something similar in the next four years under the Presidency of Barack Obama. Some may think that idea is hyperbole, but I really can’t remember when a US president and administration did so much to undermine democracy c.f. Honduras, our allies c.f. Poland, Czech Rep., and human rights movements across the world c.f. the Dalai Lama’s rebuff. I hope not and I still believe that there are just enough good, decent, honest Americans working to save America that we might escape another ‘Dark Ages’. For as bad as things may become here at home, if the following article is any indication our allies and the millions who look upon America as a bastion of hope and force for good may see the ‘last best hope for peace’ greatly diminished under President Obama.

US funds dry up for Iran rights watchdog
Obama White House less confrontational

For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran’s most infamous human-rights abusers.

But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer’s disputed presidential election, the group received word that – for the first time since it was formed – its federal funding request had been denied.

“If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,’’ said Rene Redman, the group’s executive director, who had asked for $2.7 million in funding for the next two years. “I was surprised, because the world was watching human rights violations right there on television.’’

Many see the sudden, unexplained cutoff of funding as a shift by the Obama administration away from high-profile democracy promotion in Iran, which had become a signature issue for President Bush. But the timing has alarmed some on Capitol Hill.

“The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center is at the forefront of pioneering and vitally important work,’’ said Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, in a statement yesterday. “It is disturbing that the State Department would cut off funding at precisely the moment when these brave investigations are needed most.’’

Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington-based think tank, said, “It is a shock that they did not get funding.’’ A reason, he asserted, may be that “the Obama administration is so focused on engaging Iran that they don’t want this information to get in the way.’’

The State Department said it is keenly focused on human rights in Iran.

The job of doling out money to groups seeking to influence Iran has been shifted from the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau to a lower-profile division, its US Agency for International Development. USAID spokesman Harry Edwards did not provide an explanation of why funding was denied for the Human Rights Documentation Center, widely seen as the most comprehensive clearing house of documents related to human rights abuses in Iran. He said the government’s funding priorities have not changed.

“US government priorities for the region continue to include support for civil society and advocacy, promoting the rule of law and human rights, and increasing access to alternative sources of information,’’ Edwards said. “Applications submitted to USAID are thoroughly reviewed against the evaluations criteria outlined in its solicitations.’’

The State Department has always been tight-lipped about who receives democracy funding for Iran, out of fear that the groups’ associates would be targeted in Iran. It is unclear how many other groups have lost their funding under the Obama administration.

Obama officials have argued publicly for a less-confrontational approach than Bush, in the belief that the Bush administration’s vocal support for democracy activists made them targets in Iran and stirred up fears of regime change.

The Obama administration has emphasized other forms of assistance, such as aid for software programs that help activists communicate on the Internet anonymously. It also has continued funding for exchange programs. In the coming months, for instance, the administration hopes to bring Iranian lawyers to major cities in the United States, including Boston, to talk with American lawyers about their concept of law.

Formed by two exiled Iranians in 2004 with a $1 million grant from the State Department, the center made its home near Yale’s campus, where it attracted Yale law school professors to its board. The board also includes the dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow.

The group has published 12 reports in English and Persian about the forced confessions of detained bloggers and journalists, the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners, and the Iranian government’s campaign to assassinate dissidents abroad. Although the State Department has been the group’s main source of funds, the Canadian government granted it money to research human-rights abuses in the wake of the disputed election this year.

Currently, the group is working to develop a list of all those who were arrested following the election and a list of those responsible for alleged abuses in prison. But without additional funding, the group will shut down in May when its funding runs out, Redman said.

The group is not affiliated with any political party in Iran. It attracted controversy during its early years, however, when one of its founders and current board members, Ramin Ahmadi, gave a workshop in Dubai on tactics of underground political resistance to Iranian citizens who had secretly traveled there.

Since then, the Iranian government has accused Ahmadi of being an agent of the United States, and some of his trainees were arrested. Ahmadi, a medical doctor in Danbury, Conn., still vocally supports the opposition movement, joking at a recent panel at Yale Law School that he could sneak audience members into Iran if they wanted to join.

But at least three other groups that received funding under Bush’s democracy program for Iran have been told they would not receive funding this year, according to Roya Boroumand, founder of the Bormound Foundation, which works against the death penalty in Iran. Boroumand said her group does not get State Department funds, but that she is in contact with other organizations who do, and all are worried.

“If the rationale is that we are going to stop funding human rights-related work in Iran because we don’t want to provoke the government, it is absolutely the wrong message to send,’’ she said. “That means that we don’t really believe in human rights, that the American government just looks into it when it is convenient.’’

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On NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ this past weekend President Obama stated something shocking and disturbing;

“I think you actually put your finger on what this argument’s really about, and it’s an argument that’s gone on for the history of this republic, and that is, what’s the right role of government? How do we balance freedom with our need to look after one another? . . . This is not a new argument and it always invokes passions.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27330_Page2.html

There are a number of ways one can interpret Obama’s statement. One interpretation is that it was just one of many innocuous statements President Obama has made over the past several months.  Another interpretation is more troubling: that President Obama wants Americans to sacrifice our God given individual rights mandated in the US Constitution for the ‘needs’ of others through a marginalization of the US Constitution.  However vague ‘needs’ means, perhaps I need to review my copy of the US constitution but I can’t recall where it specifically states that the government has the authority to restrict individual rights for collective ‘needs’.  Or does it? Does the US government have the power to restrict individual rights to support collective ‘needs’?  Do we as  Americans ’need to look after one another’? Where and when do concepts of ‘volunteerism’ enter into this discussion?  As far as my reading of the US Constitution, of the powers granted to Congress, the ‘need to look after one another’ is NOT defined or mentioned. Nor is it mentioned among any of the amendments.  So where exactly did Obama get this peculiar idea that US constitution allows the government to ‘look after one another’? Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted his statement and am making this unneccesarily complicated. He could have meant something else entirely. Why should I assume that he meant something nefarious or statist? What does Obama’s statement mean to you?

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If one wants to get an idea of where Obama and his cabal of leftist ideologues and Chicago thugs will take the US socially and economically, then I suggest a look at what is happening across the Atlantic and read the article below to get an idea of what their European counterparts are doing.  The potential for real damage to the US airline industry, which is reeling already, not to mention the US economy is quite real if the American Clean Energy and Security Act aka Waxman-Markey aka Cap & Trade actually passes.

For a refresher on the initial costs(keep in mind these are merely the primary cost increases) of Cap & Trade:

Passengers face new tax to halt rise in air travel

Tens of billions of pounds will have to be raised through flight taxes to compensate developing countries for the damage air travel does to the environment, according to the Government’s advisory body on climate change.

Ticket prices should rise steadily over time to deter air travel and ensure that carbon dioxide emissions from aviation fall back to 2005 levels, the Committee on Climate Change says. It believes that airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting Britain’s commitment to an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050.

The Times has learnt that it may challenge the Government’s decision to approve a third runway at Heathrow, suggesting that this would be inconsistent with that commitment.

The committee was established under last year’s Climate Change Act. It has a strong influence on government policy and proposed the 80 per cent target accepted by ministers.

It says that initially the cost per passenger of compensating for climate change would be small but would rise over time and eventually reach a level that would put people off flying.

Industry estimates suggest that the average passenger would pay less than £10 extra per return ticket when aviation joins the EU emissions trading scheme in 2012. This would depend on the price of allowances to emit CO2, which is expected to rise over time.

The committee proposes a global cap on aviation emissions, with airlines required to buy allowances, and that the revenue generated should be given to developing countries to help them to adapt to climate change — for example, by building flood defences to cope with rising sea levels.

In a letter to the Government published today, the committee says that an increase in global temperatures is inevitable and that developed countries must pay for the consequences. It says that the EU trading scheme does not go far enough and could result in airlines making windfall profits.

Under the scheme, airlines will be given free carbon permits covering 85 per cent of their emissions and will have to buy permits for the remaining 15 per cent. The committee says that they should have to pay for all their emissions. This would more than double the cost to passengers.

The Greenskies Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, estimates that the EU scheme would add £4 to the cost of a return ticket from London to Madrid and £18 for a round trip from London to Los Angeles. These would rise to £10 and £40 if the committee’s proposal was accepted.

David Kennedy, chief executive of the committee, said: “A global scheme could raise tens of billions of pounds a year. You can still go on holiday abroad but there isn’t going to be room for massive increases in flying.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6826794.ece

In a way I envy Britain. In less than ten months(at the most), Britons will be able to and likely vote out an entire class of venal leftist politicians be they Labour or Scottish Nationalist Party. In the US we’ve have to wait until Nov. 2010 to vote out the lower level buffoons and Nov. 2012 for the grand buffon to be voted out. It’s the silver lining that keeps me tolerating these self-loathing blowhards even as they inflict catastrophically stupid policies based upon inconclusive information, like those described above upon the nation.

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Remember how the MSM and Left mocked the idea of ‘death panels’ put forward by opponents of socialized medicine like Gov. Palin? No? Let me refresh your memory…

Palin doubles down on ‘death panels’

“Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin defended her claim that the Democratic health care proposal would create “death panels” in a statement Wednesday night slamming President Barack Obama.

“Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system, these ‘unproductive’ members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care,” Palin wrote in a note on her Facebook page.

“The provision that President Obama refers to is Section 1233 of HR 3200, entitled ‘Advance Care Planning Consultation.’ With all due respect, it’s misleading for the president to describe this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients,” she continued…”

All nonsense right? Just hyperbolic ramblings of another ‘looney toon’ red state right-winger, no? If you were a member of  the Jon Stewart watching cognoscenti, you’d have know all along that it’s pure rubbish!!!

Uh-oh…

Sentenced to death on the NHS

Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors have warned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6127514/Sentenced-to-death-on-the-NHS.html

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.

“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients.”

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.

The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.

Developed by Marie Curie, the cancer charity, in a Liverpool hospice it was initially developed for cancer patients but now includes other life threatening conditions.

It was recommended as a model by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government’s health scrutiny body, in 2004.

It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.

Under the guidelines the decision to diagnose that a patient is close to death is made by the entire medical team treating them, including a senior doctor.

They look for signs that a patient is approaching their final hours, which can include if patients have lost consciousness or whether they are having difficulty swallowing medication.

However, doctors warn that these signs can point to other medical problems.

Patients can become semi-conscious and confused as a side effect of pain-killing drugs such as morphine if they are also dehydrated, for instance.

When a decision has been made to place a patient on the pathway doctors are then recommended to consider removing medication or invasive procedures, such as intravenous drips, which are no longer of benefit.

If a patient is judged to still be able to eat or drink food and water will still be offered to them, as this is considered nursing care rather than medical intervention.

Dr Hargreaves said that this depended, however, on constant assessment of a patient’s condition.

He added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.

He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.

“It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway.”

He added: “What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying.

“It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking.”

He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.

Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, said: “Even the tiniest things that happen towards the end of a patient’s life can have a huge and lasting affect on patients and their families feelings about their care.

“Guidelines like the LCP can be very helpful but healthcare professionals always need to keep in mind the individual needs of patients.

“There is no one size fits all approach.”

A spokesman for Marie Curie said: “The letter highlights some complex issues related to care of the dying.

“The Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient was developed in response to a societal need to transfer best practice of care of the dying from the hospice to other care settings.

“The LCP is not the answer to all the complex elements of this area of health care but we believe it is a step in the right direction.”

The pathway also includes advice on the spiritual care of the patient and their family both before and after the death.

It has also been used in 800 instances outside care homes, hospices and hospitals, including for people who have died in their own homes.

The letter has also been signed by Dr Anthony Cole, the chairman of the Medical Ethics Alliance, Dr David Hill, an anaesthetist, Dowager Lady Salisbury, chairman of the Choose Life campaign and Dr Elizabeth Negus a lecturer in English at Barking University.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “People coming to the end of their lives should have a right to high quality, compassionate and dignified care.

“The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) is an established and recommended tool that provides clinicians with an evidence-based framework to help delivery of high quality care for people at the end of their lives.

“Many people receive excellent care at the end of their lives. We are investing £286 million over the two years to 2011 to support implementation of the End of Life Care Strategy to help improve end of life care for all adults, regardless of where they live.”

 The lessons from this are clear: Socialized medicine leads to rationing, rationing leads to denying care which in this case means death panels.  

 

 

 

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“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” Michelle Obama, 2008.

Little did I know how prophetic Michelle Obama’s infamous quote really was.

Last week, I posted about the Obama administration using the National Endowment for the Arts(NEA) to enlist visual artists in their agitprop campaigns. Well, now we have the the Obama administration via their well funded lackeys provide agitprop literature to their marxist useful idiots with the new book, ’50 Ways YOU CAN HELP Obama Change America’ by Michael Huttner and Jason Salzman, Polipoint Press. The book shown above is real, if you’re curious click on the link below for the book’s website. I’m still investigating the authors, so if I find out any information about them I’ll list it here. Frankly, it’s stuff like this which creeps me out on numerous levels. It has all the characteristics of cultist idolatry, statist propaganda and communist agitation techniques blended together. It will be telling to see how many copies of this book are sold. That will give us an idea as to how many brainwashed fanatics are out there.

http://50waysyoucanhelpobama.com/

While these and other events, actions, initiatives, and people in the Obama Administration are troubling the best advice I can give is from Thomas Jefferson, best stated and emphasized by the ‘Guardianship’ statue by the  great American sculptor, James Earl Fraser at the National Archives:

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Shhhh, no one must question our Dear Leader, Obama!!!

A brief history lesson: Glavlit(along with other agencies like Goskomstat) was the official Soviet agency that censored all media in order to protect supposed ‘state secrets’ of the Soviet Union from being released. Its mandate allowed it to control all speech within the Soviet state. ABC and NBC will of course claim to be independent corporations exercising editorial control over content on their networks. However, it is clear from the article below that they have voluntarily become propaganda wings for the Obama administration. More frighteningly they’ve not only forgotten that speech is consitutionally protected under the 1st Amendment they’ve started deciding which types of speech are acceptable and which ones are not.

Who needs an official ban on free speech when the MSM enacts a flawless unofficial one?

Our democratic republic has never been in greater danger than now…

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/27/abc-nbc-refuse-air-advertisement-critical-obamas-health-care-plan/

ABC, NBC Won’t Air Ad Critical of Obama’s Health Care Plan
The refusal by ABC and NBC to run a national ad critical of President Obama’s health care reform plan is raising questions from the group behind the spot — particularly in light of ABC’s health care special aired in prime time last June hosted at the White House
By Joshua Rhett Miller

The refusal by ABC and NBC to run a national ad critical of President Obama’s health care reform plan is raising questions from the group behind the spot — particularly in light of ABC’s health care special aired in prime time last June and hosted at the White House.

The 33-second ad by the League of American Voters, which features a neurosurgeon who warns that a government-run health care system will lead to the rationing of procedures and medicine, began airing two weeks ago on local affiliates of ABC, NBC, FOX and CBS. On a national level, however, ABC and NBC have refused to run the spot in its present form.

“It’s a powerful ad,” said Bob Adams, executive director of the League of American Voters, a national nonprofit group with 15,000 members who advocate individual liberty and government accountability. “It tells the truth and it really highlights one of the biggest vulnerabilities and problems with this proposed legislation, which is it rations health care and disproportionately will decimate the quality of health care for seniors.”

Adams said the advertisement is running on local network affiliates in states like Louisiana, Arkansas, Maine and Pennsylvania. But although CBS has approved the ad for national distribution and talks are ongoing with FOX, NBC has questioned some of the ad’s facts while ABC has labeled it “partisan.”

“The ABC Television Network has a long-standing policy that we do not sell time for advertising that presents a partisan position on a controversial public issue,” spokeswoman Susan Sewell said in a written statement. “Just to be clear, this is a policy for the entire network, not just ABC News.”

NBC, meanwhile, said it has not turned down the ad and will reconsider it with some revisions.

“We have not rejected the ad,” spokeswoman Liz Fischer told FOXNews.com. “We have communicated with the media agency about some factual claims that require additional substantiation. As always, we are happy to reconsider the ad once these issues are addressed.”

Adams objects to ABC’s assertion that his group’s position is partisan.

“It’s a position that we would argue a vast majority of Americans stand behind,” he said. “Obviously, it’s a message that ABC and the Obama administration haven’t received yet.”

Dick Morris, a FOX News political analyst and the League of American Voters’ chief strategist, conceptualized the advertisement and said its purpose was to “refocus” the debate on health care reform.

“I feel the whole debate on health care reform needed to be refocused on the issue of Medicare,” he told FOXNews.com. “Most of the debate had been on issues of socialized medicine and cost. I felt that the impact of the legislation in cutting the Medicare program and enforcing rationing needed to be addressed.”

Morris, a onetime advisor to former President Bill Clinton, said he was particularly troubled by ABC’s decision not to air the spot.

“It’s the ultimate act of chutzpah because ABC is the network that turned itself over completely to Obama for a daylong propaganda fest about health care reform,” he said. “For them to be pious and say they will not accept advertising on health care shuts their viewers out from any possible understanding of both sides of this issue.”

So, after reading this, I’m sure one of the many questions you’re asking yourself is this; “What’s in it for these companies?” From the list below of the largest lobbying groups by donation amount, the answer as it relates to GE’s subsidiaries NBC and MSNBC is glarlingly obvious not to mention how it relates to ObamaCare.

Et tu, GE?

Source:  OpenSecrets.org

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We're all living in a happy socialist society!!!

Before, during, and after the Russian Revolution in 1917, visual and performing artists sympathetic to the ideals of Marxism and the Russian Bolshevik movement enthusiastically used their talents to help the Communist state and larger international movement of communism. Soviet artists became willing propagandists for the state, using new styles and visual designs to support and promote the Soviet state.  The result were images like the one shown above; visually startling but propaganda nonetheless. 

It was an unholy alliance between artist and state, one that is apparently being re-born….

The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?

by Patrick Courrielche

I recently wrote a critique of the art community’s lack of dissent in the face of many controversial decisions made by the current administration. Entitled “The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident,” one of the key points argued in the article was the potential danger associated with the use of the art community as a tool of the state. Little did I know how quickly this concern would be elevated to an outright probability.

Sometime between when I finished the critique and when it went live online, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Now admittedly, I’m a skeptic of BIG government. In my view, power tends to overreach whenever given the opportunity. It’s a law of human nature that has very few exceptions. That said, it felt to me that by providing issues as a cynosure for inspiration to a handpicked arts group – a group that played a key role in the President’s election as mentioned throughout the conference call – the National Endowment for the Arts was steering the art community toward creating art on the very issues that are currently under contentious national debate; those being health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation. Could the National Endowment for the Arts be looking to the art community to create an environment amenable to the administration’s positions?

Before arguing why I see this as a gross overreach of the National Endowment for the Arts and its mission, a brief background on the conference call is needed.

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

I learned after the conference call that there were approximately 75 people participating, including many well respected street-artists, filmmakers, art galleries, music venues, musicians and music producers, writers, poets, actors, independent media outlets, marketers, and various other professionals from the creative community. I suppose I was invited because of my work in creating arts initiatives, but being a former employer of the NEA’s Director of Communications was probably a factor as well.

Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans.

It sounded, how should I phrase it…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me.

The people running the conference call and rallying the group to get active on these issues were Yosi Sergant, the Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons.

We were encouraged to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these “focus areas” as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign, and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues. Throughout the conversation, we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to “shape the lives” of those around us. The now famous Obama “Hope” poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election.

Obama has a strong arts agenda, we were told, and has been very supportive of both using and supporting the arts in creative ways to talk about the issues facing the country. We were “selected for a reason,” they told us. We had played a key role in the election and now Obama was putting out the call of service to help create change. We knew “how to make a stink,” and were encouraged to do so.

Throughout the conversation my inner dialogue was firing away questions so fast that the NRA would’ve been envious. Is this truly the role of the NEA? Is building a message distribution network, for matters other than increasing access to the arts and arts education, the role of the National Endowment for the Arts? Is providing the art community issues to address, especially those that are currently being vehemently debated nationally, a legitimate role for the NEA? I found it highly unlikely that this was in their original charter, so I checked.

The NEA published a book entitled National Endowment for the Arts: A History 1965-2008 early this year. Combing through the 40+ year history of the NEA, I could not find a single instance of the agency creating or supporting a national initiative that encouraged the art community to address current issues under contentious debate.

The NEA was created by the Congress of the United States and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 as “a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.” The issue of health care is curiously absent from this description on their website.

So I’d like to start a little debate and ask you, the reader, the same question. Do you think it is the place of the NEA to encourage the art community to address issues currently under legislative consideration?

And before answering, let me give you my take.

The NEA is the nation’s largest annual funder of the arts. That is right, the largest funder of the arts in the nation – a fact that I’m sure was not lost on those that were on the call, including myself. One of the NEA’s major functions is providing grants to artists and arts organizations. The NEA has also historically shown the ability to attract “matching funds” for the art projects and foundations that they select. So we have the nation’s largest arts funder, which is a federal agency staffed by the administration, with those that they potentially fund together on a conference call discussing taking action on issues under vigorous national debate. Does there appear to be any potential for conflict here?

Discussed throughout the conference call was a hope that this group would be one that would carry on past the United We Serve campaign to support the President’s initiatives and those issues for which the group was passionate. The making of a machine appeared to be in its infancy, initiated by the NEA, to corral artists to address specific issues. This function was not the original intention for creating the National Endowment for the Arts.

A machine that the NEA helped to create could potentially be wielded by the state to push policy. Through providing guidelines to the art community on what topics to discuss and providing them a step-by-step instruction to apply their art form to these issues, the “nation’s largest annual funder of the arts” is attempting to direct imagery, songs, films, and literature that could create the illusion of a national consensus. This is what Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent.”

Now, if you are for the issues being pursued by the current administration, you may be inclined to think favorably of what I am labeling “overreach.” What a powerful weapon to fight those that are opposed to our ideas, you may think. For those in this camp I ask you this – will you feel the same when the opposition has access to the same machine? If history is any indication, the pendulum swings both ways. Is persuasion what the originators envisioned when they brought the legislation that created the NEA to the floor of Congress?

As a member of the art community for the past 14 years, I raise these questions only after careful consideration. Many of those on the call are from my hometown. My position here should not be construed as a personal attack on the call participants. Many of those on the call worked tirelessly on the Obama campaign and are proud of their victory. They look at this as an opportunity to be involved directly with the White House, which is an exciting prospect to many in the art world whose experience with the government may be limited to paying taxes and voting.

But the art community must put this excitement aside and ask itself about the proper role of government agencies created to promote the arts. And if put in the wrong hands, could a message machine built by the NEA be used in a nefarious manner not currently foreseeable?

In an attempt to recapture the excitement and enthusiasm of the campaign the organizers of this conference call have entered murky waters, a strait that the NEA cannot afford to swim. Previously shackled with the controversy over the Serrano and Mapplethorpe images of 1989 that escalated to a debate over its very existence, the NEA needs to stay far away from any questions of impropriety.

There is no shortage of problems within the art community that the NEA could tackle. Museums across the country have been hit hard by the financial crisis. Their trusts and portfolios have seen massive declines. Donations, attendance, and memberships are down. Many have had to reduce exhibition hours due to staffing and budget reductions. And countless art galleries, the lifeblood and revenue stream for many artists, have closed or are on the brink of closure. Rallying the art community around these issues seems a more appropriate use of its resources.

I’m not a “right-wing nut job.” It just goes against my core beliefs to sit quietly while the art community is used by the NEA and the administration to push an agenda other than the one for which it was created. It is not within the National Endowment for the Arts’ original charter to initiate, organize, and tap into the art community to help bring awareness to health care, or energy & environmental issues for that matter; and especially not at a time when it is being vehemently debated. Artists shouldn’t be used as tools of the state to help create a climate amenable to their positions, which is what appears to be happening in this instance. If the art community wants to tackle those issues on its own then fine. But tackling them shouldn’t come as an encouragement from the NEA to those they potentially fund at this coincidental time.

And if you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. “This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely… “

Is the hair on your arms standing up yet?

Edit: They’ve been standing up since Nov. 4th, 2008.

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The leaders of two nations united by common venality.

I’m sure two things jumped out at you as you started to read this article, the subject of the article; Britain, and the date of its publication; Wednesday, April, 15, 1998. So why am I posting this 11 year old article about another nation? What could the past twelve years of British events tell Americans about the next four years in America or God forbid, eight years? I once believed that many trends start in the United States and eventually work their way to rest of the world. However, in the case of the election of the Obama administration, it appears that it is the other way around. I hope this article serves as a warning about the potential dangers and ideological challenges facing the US. Only the names and places have been changed.

You see, while the MSM is comparing President Obama to the reincarnation of Lincoln, Jesus Christ, and Gandhi, he reminds me a far more flawed, earthly, and venal person, Tony Blair of the Labour Party, the British version of the Democrats in the US. Like Obama, Tony Blair promised hope and change for the people of Britain to get elected, eventually being voted into 10 Downing Street in the face of hugely unpopular Conservative government. Britons thought they were getting a centrist (albeit left of center) government. What they got was horde of mendacious and ideologically driven politicians who attempted to recreate Britain along left-wing ideological lines. The result after 12 years of Labour rule is the marginalization of British history, culture, and values in schools and the media. Children indoctrinated to self-loathing multi-cultural ideologies at the expense of truth. A government that censors unpopular opinion at the expense of free speech best seen in the denial of entry of Geert Wilders. It’s military undermined and underfunded to the point that it has reached its breaking point.  A nation where military hospitals were all closed to save money rather than recognize that returning soldiers have unique medical and psychological needs. A nation and its people literally being invaded by immigrants seeking to take advantage of its generous benefits system while some of those same immigrants preach hatred, violence, Sharia Law, and revolution against that same government and people that allowed them refuge c.f. Anjem Choudary/Omar Bakri/et al.. A nation that saw its version of the Democrats spend that nation into bankruptcy, its gold sold at market low prices, and its politicians steal from its nations citizens in various scandals. That’s all before you get to the nameless, faceless bureaucrats of the European Union that British Parliament has ceded authority and sovereignty to. 

I could go on, but if you want to get an idea of where Obama and Democrats will take the United States, look at the Democratic analog in the United Kingdom, Labour. Go and read the British newspapers to get a sense of the problems facing Britain and it likely won’t be hard to trace a direct parallel between what has happened in the nation formerly known as Great Britain and what will likely happen here in the United States of America. There are more than a few parallels. While I think this article is prophetic for the US, I do disagree with one point: Where as Tony Blair and Labour were not truly ideological, Obama and his administration are very ideological. Frighteningly so. Still, enjoy the article and in my opinion a likely preview of what Obama will subject the United States to. It’s important to learn the lessons of history to prevent repeating the same mistakes.

‘Cool Britannia’ Looks More Like Fool Britannia
By Philip Bowring

Published: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 1998

LONDON: Asian and European heads of government arriving for the Asia-Europe summit meeting earlier this month were greeted with the latest bit of sloganeering from the Tony Blair public relations machine: Out with fuddy-duddy traditions, in with modern Britain’s symbols.

No more Rule Britannia. Now it’s Cool Britannia, and Her Majesty’s diplomats will be delivering the message of the New Britain to the world.

Also on display was the Blairite Britain enshrined in a “bouncy castle” of small inflatable domes erected on London’s Horse Guards Parade. This exhibition, dubbed “powerhouse::uk” was supposed to represent the best of modern Britain. Critics suggested it showed a nation obsessed with style that confuses trendiness with modernity.

It may not matter that old British brands, such as Rolls-Royce, are being sold off. But there is scant sign here of new ones to replace them, or of anything to reverse the decline of British manufacturing know-how.

The “new” Britain on display was a combination of presumption and tackiness that, after less than a year in office, is the hallmark of the Blair administration. Asians were left wondering how the nation ever managed to acquire an empire, and Europeans whether Britain would ever be ready to join the single currency.

Summit participants got a look at Britain, but most Britons were barely aware that Britain was the host of the most important gathering of leaders likely to assemble here for many a year. The start of the meeting made the front page of only one of the five so-called quality British newspapers. The broadcast media were no better, and the tabloids mostly ignored the summit meeting entirely.

Maybe they believe that Britannic “cool” is so sweeping that Messrs. Chirac and Hashimoto, Zhu and Kohl will make a habit of spending springtime in London.

It is true that the Asia-Europe summit meeting was more symbol than substance. But one might have expected that, with Asian turmoil, EMU progress and China’s Zhu Rongji making his first foreign trip since being appointed prime minister, the British media might have been able to turn their attention away from parochial issues, reheated scandals and the late Princess Di. But no.

Mr. Blair cannot directly be blamed for this. Trivia, sensationalism, phony scoops and falling standards of news judgment have blighted the British press for several years.

However, Mr. Blair is very much in tune with a narrow, parochial and self-absorbed media culture. Ambassadors of Cool Britannia much feted in Downing Street turn out to be drug-crazed and abusive pop stars who disgrace the nation overseas.

The Blair obsession with image, with form over substance, adds to the media’s sense of importance. Media manipulation and news management are natural goals of
government. But Mr. Blair and his right-hand men have taken it to new heights. Ministers have even found themselves on the receiving end of policy directives from Mr. Blair’s press secretary (and former Robert Maxwell protégé) Alastair Campbell.

There is a direct link between this media-driven system and the presidential style of government that Mr. Blair has adopted.

Given Labour’s huge majority, Parliament is more than ever a rubber stamp, and ministers are more than ever subservient to Downing Street. Personalized populism, exemplified by Mr. Blair’s exploitation of the Princess Di cult and driven by the tabloid media, is replacing both institutional power and grassroots participatory democracy.

The presidential trend might have some merits were it accompanied by an American-style separation of powers. But the lack of checks and balances has contributed to a string of sleazy episodes of influence peddling and jobs for the boys remarkable for a government still so young.

“In just 11 months it has notched up an aggregate of venality, Tammany and perfidy which the Tories took years to put on board,” said the leftist columnist John Pilger in the New Statesman.

A recent example found Mr. Blair himself intervening with the Italian prime minister on behalf of the business interests of Rupert Murdoch. Though Mr. Murdoch is the largest media owner in Britain, these are not British interests. Mr. Murdoch’s use for commercial ends of politicians’ assumptions about his media’s influence is natural. Mr. Blair’s conniving has been shocking but is perhaps the inevitable consequence of an administration preoccupied with media presentation.

The episode was especially striking for Asian leaders now being lectured by the West about cronyism and improper government-business links.

It fits with New Labour’s evident lack of ideology or core values. It may be good politics in terms of photo opportunities, political horse-trading or the fickle judgments of financial markets to follow most of Margaret Thatcher’s social and economic policies, or to be President Bill Clinton’s poodle on Iraq. It certainly makes sense for Britain not to be at constant war with Brussels.

There is scant sign, however, of an administration with the sense of purpose to deal with a real crisis when one arises or to institute radical changes in which it really believes. The Blair government is mostly about appearances.

Meanwhile, two of Britain’s larger contributions to the world are under threat at home. Parliamentary government is in decline. And the BBC World Service, once the global voice of the English language, is being eroded to pay for more trendy, trivial domestic programming. Cool Britannia? Fool Britannia.

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So although the following column about Obama is nearly a year and a half old, it is clearly not out of date. From Obama’s speech in front of San Francisco millionaires and billionaires where he declared that ‘small town America is bitterly clinging to guns and God’  to the most recent gaffe over his friend Professor Gates, Spengler’s column is in fact very relevant and prescient in its analysis of Obama and the likely fate of the United States in the next four years.

Obama’s women reveal his secret
By Spengler

“Cherchez la femme,” advised Alexander Dumas in: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama’s women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man – least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father – can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world’s 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama’s mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother’s revenge against the America she despised.

Ann Dunham died in 1995, and her character emerges piecemeal from the historical record, to which I will return below. But Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it, and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage  as she declares:

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.

The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama’s face are not new to the candidate’s wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of “blackness” at Princeton University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.”

Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. “I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,” she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, “She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.” Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

“Frustration” and “disappointment” have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama’s choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother’s milk.

Michelle Obama speaks with greater warmth of her mother-in-law than of her husband. “She was kind of a dreamer, his mother,” Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. “She wanted the world to be open to her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because sometimes dreams don’t pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like most of us don’t in this country.” How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to raise her children on the thin fair in pursuit of a political agenda.

“Naivete” is a euphemism for Ann Dunham’s motivation. Friends describe her as a “fellow traveler”, that is, a communist sympathizer, from her youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice. Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama, Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero’s student visa was revoked in 1967 – the fact but not the cause are noted in press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed, was the motivation.

Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most radical of all Third World governments. Sukarno had founded the so-called Non-Aligned Movement as an anti-colonialist turn at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Before deposing him in 1967, Indonesia’s military slaughtered 500,000 communists (or unfortunates who were mistaken for communists). When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediate following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history.

Dunham’s experience in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local cultures against the encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, “Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds”. In this respect Dunham remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke into popular awareness with Margaret Mead’s long-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which offered a falsified ideal of sexual liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the supposedly repressive West. Mead’s work was one of the founding documents of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at the left-wing fringe of American universities.

In the Global South, anthropologists went into the field and took matters a step further. Peru’s brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerilla movement was the brainchild of the anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, who headed the University of San Cristobal of Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru, between 1962 and 1968. Dunham’s radicalism was more vicarious; she ended her career as an employee of international organizations.

Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a majorpolitical force until the nationalism of a Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama’s methods. “A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is,” wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world’s biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis’ cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power’s portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Since the Ronald Reagan boom began in 1984, the year the American stock market doubled, Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of rising wealth. Even the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness. America’s success made it a magnet for the world’s savings, and Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last forever, as I wrote recently [1].

Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion’s Seed . Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.

This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for richer are poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm – “Great Awakenings” – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.

Be afraid – be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word “hope”, they instead hear, “handout”. A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as “something for nothing”. Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America’s standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America’s standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.

“Evil will oft evil mars”, J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama’s father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals – and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.

Note
1. Obama bin lottery Asia Times Online, January 29, 2008.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html

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After reading the following Op-ed by Gov. Palin I can’t even find something sarcastic or funny to write about in comparing the differences between our President and the Gov. from Alaska. Humor is a tremendous coping mechanism in the face of adversity. However, just thinking about the differences in character between Gov. Palin and the POTUS makes me want to weep for what a bunch of frustrated gullible Americans and the MSM did to their own nation by voting a crooked, inexperienced third world leftist and his cadre of corrupt bureaucrats into the Presidency.  Read the following and decide for yourself…

Palin on stimulus: ‘More dependence on Washington’
“Shovel ready or digging a hole?”
By Gov. Sarah Palin

“Some question my decision to accept job-ready stimulus funds, while leaving on the table for discussion other funds that grow government. Washington dollars are tempting, but we must consider whether they create sustainability, help develop our resources, reduce dependency on Washington, and all without mortgaging our kids’ futures.

Under federal law, I must certify that every stimulus dollar will create new jobs and stimulate the economy. I take that charge seriously. Accordingly, I’ve requested $514.4 million for capital projects that legitimately create new private sector jobs. Shovel-ready projects are certifiable because they put people to work and grow Alaska’s private-sector economy.

Unfortunately, a disproportionate percentage of the federal package available to Alaska would increase government operations. It’s a stretch to certify that more spending on more bureaucracy actually grows an economy.

When stimulus money runs out in two years, who will pay for the expanded government programs, when Alaska currently has a budget shortfall of over a billion dollars? My administration will not willingly and knowingly dig a hole for Alaskans to fill under this enormous, debt-ridden, Washington spending plan. That’s why public discussion on budget increases must happen through open, transparent legislative hearings so everyone is aware of the cost.

Read the rest here.

*Apologies for nicking the title of another post (by another James, no less)

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No, he didn't lose a contact lens or drop some money...

Upon seeing this picture, and yes, that’s our fearful new President bowing before Saudi Arabian King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, I think I can safely speak on behalf of Thomas Paine and the rest of our anti-monarchist Founding Fathers by stating, “What the *#&! was he thinking!?!”

For those who believe that it’s a photo taken out of context, here’s the video:  (Go to the :50 second mark for the lowlight…)
watch?v=S60U-hl35Gw

For what its worth, the proper protocol for US Presidents (and other officials) who act as official representatives of the United States and for individual American citizens, (who bow to no one) when greeting royalty is a simple handshake and slight  forward nod of the head, not the near prostration that President HopeNGrovel performed. I’ll also go one step further and state President HopeNGrovel’s obeisance was deliberate and intentional and not some faux pas as evidenced by the contrast of protocol when he met the Queen the day before: watch?v=XMgleXRUux0

Of course, another interesting aspect of this incident will be whether the MSM criticizes President HopeNGrovel, in the same fashion that Former President Clinton was criticized for partially bowing to the Japanese Emperor Akihito, some one who resembles an actual human being ( See NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/19/we…a-bow-bow.html ) and whose country is vastly more advanced socially and politically than Saudi Arabia where King Abdullah reigns. That’s the same King from Saudi Arabia where women’s rights are non-existent, religions other than Islam are not tolerated, gays are executed, and you can be executed for converting to another religion among many medieval offenses. Not to mention they’re actually executing witches-watch out for those Jinn…

To be fair, I wasn’t thrilled when former President Bush went strolling around Washington holding hands with the Saudi King, but the symbolism of a US President kow-towing to a Saudi King in my opinion, is worse. Far worse, and there are those around the world, particularly the Middle East who will understand the powerful symbolism and message of a US President bowing before the His Royal Highness King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques:

“America has submitted.”

Update: Here’s how the Saudi’s are highlighting the kow-towing in one of their major English newspapers:

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