The View From 1776
A New 4th of July Declaration of Independence
The 1776 Declaration was a resolution to throw off the tyranny of big government.
Suppression of Dissent
The deep, dark secret that President Obama dare not allow the public to know is that Al Gore’s hypothesis of global warming is a man-made threat to the well being of society. Officials daring to observe that the emperor is wearing no clothes will be punished as heretics.
The Obama administration’s urgent drive to enact economically crushing “green” legislation is not science. It’s a pagan religious jihad.
Making Sense of Healthcare Nonsense
Parsing the Health Reform Arguments
Government Motors Will Drown in CAFE
Read Alan Reynolds’s analysis.
An excerpt:
General Motors is likely to become profitable only if it is allowed to specialize in what it does best—namely, midsize and large sedans, sports cars, pickup trucks and SUVs. The company can’t possibly afford to scrap billions of dollars of equipment used to produce its best vehicles simply to please politicians who would rather see GM start from scratch, wasting more taxpayer money on “retooling” to produce unwanted and unprofitable subcompacts and electric cars. The average mileage of GM’s future cars won’t matter if nobody buys them.
Politicians are addicted to CAFE standards because they create an illusion of doing something sometime in the future without voters experiencing the slightest inconvenience in the present. Tighter future CAFE rules will have no effect at all on the type of vehicles we choose to buy. Their only effect will be to compel us to buy larger and more powerful vehicles from foreign manufacturers. Americans will still buy Jaguars, but from an Indian firm, Tata, rather than Ford. They’ll buy Hummers, but from a Chinese firm, Tengzhong, rather than GM. The whole game is a charade; symbolism without substance…
The bottom line is that CAFE standards are totally unenforceable and ineffective. Regardless of how much damage the rules do to GM and Chrysler, Americans can and will continue to buy big and fast vehicles from German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indian car companies. CAFE standards might just be another foolhardy regulatory nuisance—were it not for the fact that they could easily prove fatally dangerous for any auto maker overly dependent on the uniquely overregulated U.S. market.
Do You Believe Obama's Plan Will Reduce Healthcare Costs?
Frank Madarasz emailed this epigram attributed to Milton Friedman:
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Criminal Suppression of Evidence
President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and other leaders of the Democrat/Socialist Party are guilty of criminal suppression of evidence that makes the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill unnecessary, as well as ferociously expensive for all of us.
Judge Sotomayor's Indefensible Decision
In addition to the fact that the original decision in the New Haven firefighters’ case was not in compliance with Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the City of New Haven, Connecticut, is guilty of blatant perjury. White firefighters were denied their clear rights to promotion in response to local political extortion.
The Origin of President Obama's Fascist State Corporatism
The origin of President Barack Obama’s programs is to be found in the pages of Stuart Chase’s A New Deal.
Spiritual Disciplines
Breaking the strongholds of darkness depends upon developing spiritual disciplines in our lives.
If the Supreme Leader Wants It, Who Are We To Question it?
At the time the House voted on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, there was only one copy of it available on the House floor. No one outside the committee had read the 1,200-page bill, and, only hours before the floor vote, the committee had dropped a 300-page amendment into the hopper.
See High Theater: Cap-and-Trade Sneaks By.
Democrat/Socialists Declare War on the American Economy.
Perspective on the Estate of Marriage
Read David P. Goldman’s It Takes a Congregation, on the First Things website.
What The Democrat/Socialist Congress Is Doing To You
Passage of the destructive Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill will cause huge cost increases to all of our manufacturing industries, which will be passed on to us as consumers. This air-head “green” legislation amounts to imposition of the largest tax increase in our history, as well as the permanent loss of millions of productive jobs.
Among other things, it guarantees accelerated exporting of manufacturing jobs to China, India, and other Asian nations. Spain’s decisively negative experience shows that creation of “green” jobs means only that government will grow ever larger, ever more intrusive, and ever more tyrannical.
A Socialist Preview
If you want to see what President Obama’s proposed budgetary policies will do to the nation, read about what those same polices have already done to New York, New Jersey, and California, states that formerly were paragons of prosperity.
Democrat/Socialist Foreign Policy Sensitivity
In the 2004 presidential campaign, Senator John Kerry castigated President Bush for his alleged unilateral, cowboy diplomacy. In the 2008 campaign, President Obama promised a foreign policy that would listen to the concerns of other nations. All of that now appears to be nothing more than propaganda to con liberal-progressive-socialist voters.
The Great Depression: An Overview
Read Hans F. Sennholz’s excellent summary of the Federal government’s socialistic, state-planning policies, first under President Herbert Hoover, then under President Franklin Roosevelt, that turned an ordinary recession into a decade of unremitting misery.
More Grist For The Darwinian Mill
Darwinian evolution is very far from proved.
Wall Street Journal: 10; Fed Chairman Bernanke: 0
Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke is an ardent believer in Keynesian economics, which means that he is far out in left field when his expectations are matched against reality.
Krugman's Intellectual Waterloo
Paul Krugman, New York Times socialist flack, is repeatedly on the wrong side of history. His record ranges from being a paid consult to the scandal-drenched Enron Corporation, to advocating, in a 2002 Times editorial, the Fed’s creating a housing bubble.
Obama: An Interim Report Card
Read Michael Barone’s appraisal.
President Obama's Betrayal of Secular Jews
Errol Phillips sent me this article from Jewish World Review.
Will America’s secular Jews ever abandon their love affair with socialism and cease their support for the Democrat/Socialist Party? By definition, I fear, not until they return to the religion of their forefathers.
Evolutionists Admit That What's Missing is Solid Evidence
The latest “missing link” discovery reveals vast canyons of missing evidence to prove Darwin’s contention that humans evolved from apes.
Also missing is honest investigative reporting by the media.
The Role of Paradigms
A people’s generally understood conception of a good society is what determines the nature of a nation and what makes it a cohesive and enduring body.
ObamaCare
It’s either the triumph of hope over experience, or a cynical scam. Either way, we will pay much higher state and Federal taxes. Anyone who truly believes the President’s assertion that there will be no increase in costs to provide a multi-trilion dollar new welfare-state benefit is out of his mind.
Read Daniel Henninger’s retrospective on Medicaid, the forerunner of ObamaCare.
Ivy League Realism
The social justice views of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor have deep roots.
Will Liberal-Progressives Ever Learn From Experience?
As predicted at the time by leading economists, on both sides of the political aisle, President Obama’s stimulus program was unnecessary and will in the end do more harm than good.
Paul Krugman, the New York Times’s socialist shill, proves to be the real shaman advocating voodoo economics.
Read The $787 Billion Mistake, by Lee E. Ohanian, professor of Economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at UCLA.
U.S. occupies GM, establishes secure 'Green Zone
Read Scott Ott’s (aka ScrappleFace) take on the Obama administration’s takeover of GM and its handover of bondholders’ legal rights to socialist labor unions.
Socialized Medicine
President Obama is pushing us toward a Canadian-style socialized medical system, while Canada is backing away from its version, encouraging privatization of medical care.
Why? Because the necessity to ration medical care under a nationalized, single-payer system forces the sick to wait dangerously long times for treatment.
President Obama Listens Respectfully to Every Nation But Israel
He fails to honor previous commitments to Israel and imperiously issues diktats. Read Charles Krauthammer’s views on the subject.
A Glimpse of Glory
The transfiguration of Jesus recorded in the Gospels is a miniature preview of the Glory of Jesus’s future return.
Courts Too Deferential to Congress?
I’m indebted to Professor Thomas Emerson for sending me the link to this article. Read Judicial ‘Activism’ Isn’t the Issue
Liberals and conservatives both show too much deference to Congress, by Jeff Rowes.
Dr. Tiller's Murder
No matter how reprehensible his career of murdering a claimed 60,000 late-term babies, murdering Dr. Tiller was wrong.
Read Tiller, Long, Bonhoeffer, and Assassination on the First Things website.
Business Managed by Government
The President say he has no interest in running Government Motors (the former General Motors). But Federal micro-meddling will be inescapable.
Read about Barney Frank’s directive to the Federal bureaucrats now “running” GM.
Psychology of the Green Religion
Freud sought to resolve the guilt arising from the conflict between our sexual desires and Judeo-Christian morality. The green religion of environmentalism believes that guilt is a therapeutic emotion.
Read George Will’s essay on the subject.
Germany Demurs
Read Merkel for the Fed.
A White Male Judicial Activist
Ideas and opinions of the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas give us a picture of the legal realism concepts to which Judge Sonia Sotomayor was exposed in her studies at the Yale Law School.
A Club to Wield in Class Warfare
One of liberal-progressivism’s perennial “bloody shirt” rallying issues is the claim that the rich are stealing from the poor. It’s not true.
Read Has Rising Inequality Destroyed The Middle Class?, by Thomas F. Cooley, economics professor and dean of the NYU Stern School of Business.
Judicial Activism: the Driving Force
Judge Sotomayor’s nomination for the Supreme Court again confronts us with the specter of judicial activism.
Climate Campaign Propaganda
In the ongoing struggle by liberal-progressive-socialists to gain complete power and control over the daily lives of everyone on the planet, facts don’t matter.
Harvard vs. Hillsdale
What is the Law?
Using her own criteria, Judge Sotomayor cannot claim that her legal opinions are correct. Robert T. Miller, associate professor at the Villanova University School of Law, explains.
Why the Steepening Yield Curve?
Investors are beginning to look ahead, anticipating surging inflation.
Do You Really Want to Follow Jesus?
Jesus’s ministry sets out the path for us.
Why The Fed Will Not Be Able To Prevent Higher Inflation
As former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in post-meltdown testimony to Congress, no group of bureaucrats, no matter how intelligent or how well informed, can accurately predict the timing of economic turns or determine the correct theoretical equilibrium rate of interest.
Pravda Welcomes the United States Into the Marxian Socialist International
Read, in the English edition of the journal that was the Soviet Union’s official news organ, American capitalism gone with a whimper.
Bond Investment Guru Predicts Dollar to Lose International Reserve Status
Interest rates have begun to rise, and there is little the Fed can do about it without triggering further rapid decline in the exchange value of the dollar.
Little Green Men
Transforming the economy with creation of so-called green jobs, much lauded by Al Gore and his acolytes, is a figment of imagination in liberal-progressive-socialist brains. The enormous costs to the economy and to our original Constitutional liberties are all too real.
Impartial Justice Under the Law?
Read Read Identity Politics And Sotomayor: The Judge’s Thinking Is Representative Of The Democratic Party’s Powerful Identity-Politics Wing, by National Journal’s Stuart Taylor.
My Sentiments Exactly
Dennis Bucholtz is a retired dye-making trade worker who labored in the auto industry, but not as a member of the socialist, syndicalist UAW. Much of his retirement income depends upon his investment over the years in GM bonds.
Where's David Axelrod?
If real substance is to emerge from the vacuity of the President’s policies, it presumably will come from Mr. Axelrod, his behind-the-scenes campaign manager and PR crafter.
Presidential Power and Torture
My early 1950s LSU Constitutional law professor, Walter Berns, gives us historical perspective lacking so far in the “hate Bush” political vendetta.
Gitmo Solution
Treat terrorist detainees as fetuses, which gives us the option to kill all of them and gain the world’s admiration for supporting “choice.” Read the full story by ScrappleFace (aka Scott Ott).
Inflation Risk is Imminent
President of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank disagrees with Chairman Bernanke and the Reserve Board majority.
Are We Next?
The credit rating for UK national debt is now under review for possible downgrading. Our turn will come.
California to Become U. S. Treasury Subsidiary?
Voters having rejected big tax hikes, California looks to the U. S. Treasury for bailout funds. If GM was too big to fail, California seems also to qualify.
Certainty Clears the Mind
The Wall Street Journal reports that, “Obama said new government rules on fuel efficiency will give auto makers “clear certainty” at a time when their business is enduring a “historic crisis.” That brings to mind the aphorism attributed to Winston Churchill: “Depend upon it, sir. The clear and certain knowledge that a man is about to be hanged wonderfully concentrates his mind.”
With GM. Chrysler, and Ford already in financial difficulty, if not at financial death’s door, the added cost burden of producing “green” automobiles that very few people want to buy sounds uncomfortably like the death knell.
The Goddess Reason is a Drug Abuser
Since the ill-named French Enlightenment of the 18th century, liberal-progressives have prided themselves on their clear-headed, entirely rational focus on facts. Unfortunately, it’s often delusional. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, liberal-progressivism is a neurosis.
Read this link from Maggie’s Farm website.
Turns out, it’s not the facts, but what feels good to liberal-progressives.
President Obama Votes for George W. Bush
On a large number of central campaign issues, the President has quietly abandoned his campaign pledges and adopted his predecessor’s policies.
Life and Death
President Obama, faced with widespread protest against his strong support for abortion, said in his speech at Notre Dame University’s graduation exercise, “In short, we must find a way to live together as one human family.”
Abortion, however, is death, not life.
Abortion is the murder of a human being, too often just as a matter of convenience for a life style of sexual promiscuity.
Abortion kills the traditional family social unit. It is not just coincidental that our staggeringly high rates of illegitimate births first became so at the time of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.
Abortion kills personal responsibility. The availability of abortion has led far too many young men to father a large number of children with different women and then abandon mothers and children.
Public Employees' Unions to Nation: Drop Dead!
In the real world, everyone acknowledges the necessity to cut back on work hours and wage increases until business costs come back into line with lower prices at current demand levels. Not so public employee unions. (See also Andy Stern’s Go-To Guy).
Public employee union leaders, seemingly unable to read the daily newspapers, have announced that there is no need for any sort of cutbacks. Before the election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister, a popular expression to summarize labor-union selfishness was, “Pull up the [life boat] ladder, Jack. I’m aboard.”
Preview of the United States' Disastrous Future
New York City, President Franklin Roosevelt’s model demonstration socialist city during the 1930s’ Depression, provides a picture of what the liberal-progressive welfare state already has done to destroy the economic and moral fiber of a community and of the economic disaster that lies ahead.
Earmarks and Socialism
New Deal socialism exacerbates the damage done by Congressional budget earmarks.
Federal Reserve: Guilty As Charged
Treasury Secretary Geithner admits it.
What's Wrong With the U.S.?
Read Mark Thornton’s assessment on the Mises.org website.
Is There a Small Glowing Ember of Christianity in the President?
Under all the two-faced, empty rhetoric of his campaign crafted by his handler David Axelrod, maybe the President really feels guilty about betraying the Judeo-Christian focus on life. Read Can Barack Obama Be Converted on Abortion? on the First Things website.
Correlation is not Cause
Much of the reported increase in global temperatures has occurred during the time that Al Gore became obsessed with the man-made greenhouse gases hypothesis. Is his obsession the cause of global warming?
The Wages of Liberal-Progressivism
Current distress in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida foreshadows what is happening to the United States under the President’s stimulus program and his socialist take-over budget.
Obama Backlash?
Jeff Lukens discusses how and when the President’s admirers may change their minds.
Forbidden Discussion
In the liberal-progressive-socialist religion, evidence (or lack of evidence) that calls into question any of its tenets is to be dismissed as non-scientific.
The Fed Plans Deliberately to Steal Your Savings
The Federal Reserve’s policy target of 2% annual inflation, recently proclaimed by Vice Chairman Donald Kohn, will reduce the purchasing-power value of your savings 15% every decade. Inflation is, in the liberal-progressive-socialist religion, believed to be essential to insure full employment. Because of it, thirty six years from now, when you hope to bequeath something to your children or grandchildren, your savings will be worth only half what they are worth today.
What the Fed’s socialist planners are doing in reality is supporting the Democrat/Socialist Party’s labor union voting bloc. Unions have cost-of-living adjustment clauses in their labor contracts, so they don’t suffer from inflation. The vast majority of American workers, who are not unionized, are paying for non-competitively high union wages and gold-plated health and retirement benefits with inflation, which amounts to an unlegislated tax on everyone but the labor unions who supply the money and free manpower to elect Democrat/Socialists.
Read John Tamny’s Forget Inflation Targets, Go For Dollar-Price Stability on the Forbes Magazine website.
Hillary Clinton, Racist Fellow-Traveler
Secretary of State Clinton’s praise of Margaret Sanger was an endorsement for the doctrine that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust.
When The Government Runs the Economy
When Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd call the shots, government regulators demand that nominally private companies lie to the public.
Retrograde Sensitivity
ScrappleFace describes the new interrogation techniques.
Oil Price Main Recession Culprit?
Onset of the worldwide recession correlates with the timing of oil price increases, but that’s only part of the story.
Prosecute Nancy Pelosi for War Crimes
If war crimes were committed by the Bush administration officials who rendered legal and policy opinions regarding interrogation techniques for Islamic terrorists, then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her House committee colleagues are equally guilty. They were briefed in detail, but raised not a single objection.
What a New New Deal Means For You
Socialism, the motivating ideology of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, is the opposite of the political state envisioned in the Bill of Rights. Socialism requires that your individual liberties be subordinated to the needs of the political state.
America is Bad; "The One" is Good
The President seems to regard himself as a community organizer who is not a part of the community he is now engaged upon organizing. From a far off region of socialist perfection, he has come to redeem us, which explains why his wife had never been proud of the United States until its voters elected her husband.
Read Dorothy Rabinowitz’s Obama Blames America.
Ideological Civil War
Democrat/Socialists started the ideological warfare in Congress with their slanderous attacks that blocked the 1987 Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert Bork. Now they are upping the ante by considering criminal prosecutions against Bush administration officials for legal and policy opinions about interrogating captured Islamic terrorists.
Government-Imposed Uncertainty Deepens The Recession
Repeated Federal interventions in the economy make businessmen fearful of what the government may do next. And that fear prolongs recessions.
High Class Greed
Greed is an equal opportunity vice not confined to bankers and businessmen on whom liberal-progressive-socialists attempt to pin exclusive responsibility for the financial collapse created by the Fed’s flooding the economy with phony fiat money.
A Jackboot at Home, an Olive Branch Abroad
President Obama seems intent upon cramming stifling socialist programs down our throats domestically, while he relies upon pretty-word diplomacy with foreign nations that have vowed to destroy us.
German Editor Agrees
Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, writes that President Obama’s popularity with European street mobs availed nothing in his diplomatic discussions with European leaders.
Quote:
The point here is an old one, variously ascribed to Talleyrand, Palmerston or De Gaulle, about nations having everlasting interests rather than eternal friends or enemies. In today’s language: [national] interest beats affection any time.
President Obama may not be a fool, but his worshipful political supporters were badly fooled by the messianic character of his campaign rhetoric promising a transcendent reordering of political and social life through the vapid vagueness of “hope” and “change.”
European leaders’ indifference to the President’s street popularity is a hopeful sign that the sovereignty and national interests of the United States are not subject to the street-mob demonstration pressures so dear to the hearts of liberal-progressive-socialists and anarchists, that the Constitution is not necessarily to be interpreted by mob opinion or by international or foreign law.
Popularity and Foreign Policy
The President’s left-wing supporters will be disappointed that the departure of George W. Bush is not sufficient to gain the full support of EU nations. In the real world, foreign policy is much more complicated.
Piracy spurs Obama calls for cargo-ship reductions
Scott Ott (aka Scrapple Face) reports on latest efforts by THE ONE to transform the nature of humanity and the world (tomorrow the universe).
Jesus Was and Is Real
At Easter, the celebration of our Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection, Marie Jon reminds us that the gospel accounts of Jesus’s ministry were not mythological figments, but accounts written mostly within 30 years of the resurrection by eye witnesses who endured savage persecution and horrific deaths to testify to the Truth they had personally experienced, what they had seen with their own eyes.
1819: Our First Housing Bubble
Our present economic plight is far from unprecedented. As philosopher George Santayana famously observed, those who don’t know (or have forgotten) history are condemned to repeat it.
A Review of Subprime Meltdown Doctrine
Thomas Woods’s new book looks at all of the explanations - from the liberal-progressive side to the conservative side - and weighs them against empirical data.
Divisiveness Thy Name Is Obama
A columnist for the Washington Post, one of the most liberal-progressive journals in the nation, says that the President is failing to deliver on his promises, while preparing to spend the nation into oblivion.
What To Expect When Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barney Frank Pick High-Tech Winners and Losers
You can be sure that strengthening labor unions will be high on the list of criteria, along with boosting Democrat/Socialist states like California and Michigan. You can bet that the high-tech picks of these liberal-progressive-socialists will be no more productive than were the synfuels efforts bankrolled with many millions of taxpayer dollars by President Carter’s Energy Department.
Read Forbes columnist Peter Huber’s expectations.
The President's New Paper Tiger
Read Bret Stephens’s foreign policy analysis: Obama’s Unreality Tour and The Nuclear Illusionist: Obama’s ‘moral authority’ won’t deter Tehran or Pyongyang.
Political Dangers Ahead
Even if we soak “the rich” until they drown, there won’t be enough real income to pay for the President’s proposed socialist statism.
Basic Socialism
Is the Obama administration moving to take control of the banking system directly and by intimidation?
Not The Economy, Politics
Max Borders argues that the President’s motive is, not ending the recession, but using it as an excuse for truly radical restructuring of American society and further deformation of the Constitution.
If the President’s goals become reality, most of the remaining checks and balances of the 1787 Constitution will effectively have been eviscerated, leaving a nation driven by Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority, ravenously confiscating other people’s money.
New York Times Sums Up the Recession
In a single sentence, the New York Times, of all sources, succinctly states what went wrong.
Quote of the Day
From the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web:"
To be sure, America has made some racial progress. But the dream of equality will not be truly and fully realized until President Obama’s political detractors treat him with the same respect George W. Bush’s detractors showed him.
President To Fire Reid and Pelosi For Incompetence?
Scott Ott (aka ScrappleFace) wonders why the President, having fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner for incompetence, doesn’t apply the same standards within government.
Government as the Agent of Prosperity
A reader asserts that, in the chicken-or-egg-first debate, prosperity is not possible without organization of the economy by government.
A Response to Simplistic Atheism
Read R. R. Reno’s review of David Hart’s new book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale Press).
AIG Employees' Side of the Story
The President, Congress, and the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut have damned AIG’s bonus recipients, without any consideration of fairness, and without even a gesture in the direction of due process of law. Their motto is, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”
Another Straw In The Inflationary Wind
Inflation may be encroaching earlier than expected upon the President’s budget. Investors, at home and abroad, already are worried about the disrupting impact of the President’s proposed massive increases in Federal deficit spending as he works to extend socialistic management of the economy by Washington bureaucrats.