When freedom reigned

eThis cartoon from 1948 has a great message. From a time in America when "isms" (communism, socialism) were seen to be dangers to our precious way of life.

Today our government is embracing socialism -- what a difference 60 years makes.

Please take 10 minutes to watch this. And pass it on. It reminds us of some simple truths: America's strength is in its free market that embraces entrepreneurship and individual liberty and innovation.

America's strength is NOT Pelosi and Obama's vision of class warfare, wealth redistribution and runaway entitlements.



h/t: Mark Hillman

The revisionists diss Reagan -- again.

As many of you know, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And do you know what? In all the hoopla surrounding the celebration yesterday -- not one person at the commemoration event in Berlin mentioned the role of Ronald Reagan.

Can you imagine that?

Tom Brokaw -- like many commentators -- yesterday was quick to laud the role of Mikhail Gorbachev -- the darling of the media and the Nobel Committee. Gorbachev did, of course, play a pivotal role in changing the Soviet Union and opening it up to the West. But what most analysts have missed is that Gorbachev didn't get their alone. He didn't so much as jump as was pushed -- by a resolute Ronald Reagan who was unwilling to compromise with the Soviet state and kept up a relentless pressure that broke the back of the Soviet economic system.

Ronald Reagan deserves much of the credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall -- and don't let any revisionist historian tell you anything different. Reagan's force of personality -- the force of his conviction that the Soviet Union was a system that could not stand against the march of freedom -- made it clear to Gorbachev that the Soviets could never prevail. In the face of liberal pressure to "stand down" and to give in on Star Wars and other strategic initiatives, Reagan stood fast.

The result is history. Only today that history is told with a liberal bias that sees to minimize Reagan's pivotal role.

Don't believe it. Berlin owes a huge debt of gratitude to Reagan.

Here is Reagan's famous "Tear down this Wall" speech of 1987. What other leader would have the courage to make this speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate?

The real goals of ObamaCare: You money and your life

Finally, some honesty from the left as to their motivations for health care reform.

It should burst the bubble of those who think this is good public policy -- you know, those people who live in Fantasia.

I've argued incessantly that ObamaCare is a naked power grab that is part of an overall wealth redistribution strategy that the President has clearly stated is central to his Administration's goals.

Here, from the Wall Street Journal, and out of the mouth of a left-wing activist, some truth:

The typical argument for ObamaCare is that it will offer better medical care for everyone and cost less to do it, but occasionally a supporter lets the mask slip and reveals the real political motivation. So let's give credit to John Cassidy, part of the left-wing stable at the New Yorker, who wrote last week on its Web site that "it's important to be clear about what the reform amounts to."

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind."

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

This explains why Nancy Pelosi is willing to risk the seats of so many Blue Dog Democrats by forcing such an unpopular bill through Congress on a narrow, partisan vote: You have to break a few eggs to make a permanent welfare state. As Mr. Cassidy concludes, "Putting on my amateur historian's cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted."

No wonder many Americans are upset. They know they are being lied to about ObamaCare, and they know they are going to be stuck with the bill.

The purpose of ObamaCare is to create a permanent dependent class of Americans who will support government forever -- because they have no choice in the matter. It's anathema to the Founder's vision for this country. But it is happening before our very eyes. And it will be very difficult to roll back.

We are under attack from within!

Radical Islam and the American left

From David Horowitz comes an important piece entitled "Our Brain Dead Country". Horowitz cites the "unholy alliance" between the American left and radical Islam. It is hard not to to draw the conclusion that many on the left are aiding and abetting the enemy -- with the ACLU and myriad other liberal interest groups challenging our efforts to fight against Islamic extremism. The result has been to systematically weaken our vigilance against the terror threat. Since the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, the leftists have been organizing to make the government the enemy, while protecting those who seek to destroy us.

"A Muslim fanatic with an Internet site praising Islamic suicide bombers as defenders of their comrades is a Major in the U.S. Army with access to military intelligence and lethal weaponry. And it’s not as though the army didn’t know that he was a Muslim fanatic and supporter of the Islamic jihad against the West. He was under investigation for six months because of his rantings. He did not want to be deployed. He wanted to be discharged.

But despite his identification with America’s enemies, the army kept him in its officer corps. How in God’s name was this possible? But it was. And so, after calling America the “aggressor” in Afghanistan and Iraq, this Muslim jihadist traitor army officer picks up his semi-automatic weapons and heads for the center at Ft. Hood where soldiers are being deployed to fight the jihadists in Afghanistan to conduct his massacre. Yet this morning the Fox News Channel chiron says “Investigators search for a motive in the Ft. Hood killings.” Is everybody out of their mind?

The Ft. Hood killings are the chickens of the left coming home to roost. Already the chief political correspondent of The Nation has decried even mention of the fact that the jihadist killer Hasan is a Palestinian Muslim. According to The Nation this is “Islamophobia.” This fatuous attempt to protect America’s enemies carries on The Nation’s 60-year tradition as the leading fifth column collaborator with America’s enemies — defender of the Rosenbergs, defender of Hiss, defender of their boss Stalin, defender of Mao, defender of Castro and now defender of Islamic terrorists. But The Nation is only the tip of an iceberg. The fifth column formed out of the unholy alliance between radical Islam and the American left is now entrenched in the White House and throughout our government. And in matters like the Muslim jihadist Major Hasan our military is its captive.

The Fort Hood massacre is the first of the preventable atrocities we have been warning about on our websites since 9/11 — the atrocities which are apparently necessary for Americans to wake up to the threat that confronts us. We have a vast internal threat in this country in the form of this unholy alliance between the anti-American Left and radical Islam – whose Muslim Brotherhood network extends through our universities, our government and our military. It is “politically incorrect” to recognize this fact. You can be barred — as I have been — from speaking at universities for even talking about it. The embargo of discussion of the Islamo-fascist threat puts every American (including the infidel collaborators) at risk. Hasan had semi-automatic weapons. But they weren’t nuclear. That possibility is just around the corner unless we undergo a sea change in our attitudes and marshal the intelligence and the courage to recognize the threat."

H/T: Donald Douglas

Why is the earth warming? The sun! (duh)

I bought a copy of the National Review last night and in included a DVD entitled "Unstoppable Solar Cycles -- the Real Story of Greenland". Its put out by the Idea Channel -- a non profit educational organization. Anyhow, I took 10 minutes to watch it today, and I think it makes a pretty powerful case about climate change. Yes, the earth is warming -- but it is the latest in a cyclical pattern of warming and cooling that has been going on for thousands of years. The eminent scientists on this video argue that the main source of the warming is (gasp) the sun, and the variations in solar cycles that has virtually nothing to do with CO2 emissions.

In fact, one of their key points puts the basic assumption of climate change on its head: it is because the earth has warmed that we have increased levels of CO2 -- not the other way around. More CO2 is created by a warmer, more fertile planet -- which is why CO2 levels have increased during this latest warming period that began in the mid 1800s. It is thus NOT the case in that increased CO2 caused by man has effected the ozone layer and has lead to global warming. This is a pretty interesting take that has been completely shut out of the climate change discussion.

Of course there hasn't been much of a real discussion on climate change -- much less a debate. And that is what is most disturbing to the scientists interviewed on this clip. They clearly understand that the man-caused climate change movement is dominated by politics -- and that the religion that has been created around global warming is quite divorced from scientific reality. Al Gore is the most obvious example -- claiming that the world will perish in the near future if man doesn't change his ways. This is an extreme, alarmist view that ignores the fact that the last fifty years of industrial activity is but a nanosecond in geologic time, and that the trends that impact the earth's climate are much bigger than we are.

After viewing this video you come away feeling like the global warming proponents are arrogant in the extreme -- to think they know definitively the cause of climate change. And arrogance is definitely part of it, as Gore and his comrades want very much to change the way you live. Its all part of their plan to green you into submission.

Check out the video below -- its 10 minutes and worth watching:

Political correctness: the real threat to America

There is a pernicious disease in America that even the massive health care bill can't cure: Political correctness. We have become deaf, dumb and blind to obvious threats in our midst because we are too worried about offending some minority group.

There is no question in my mind that when all the evidence is in, it will turn out that authorities knew about Malik Hasan and his radical views for months and did little to nothing about it.

Why? Because Hasan is a Muslim, and in the past eight years since 9/11, the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the ACLU and other liberal interest groups have bludgeoned the government into submission. The Democrats in Congress -- including Jack Murtha and others -- tried and convicted Marines for violence against innocent Muslims in Iraq in the press, and failed to apologize when charges were dismissed. The din to close Guantanamo was buttressed by dozens of lawsuits seeking redress for the U.S. government's abuse of detainees -- even as the abuse charges were found to be false and misleading. Civil society in the U.S. has been under attack -- not by terrorists but by their liberal defenders who see a government bogeyman behind every tree.

There is no question in my mind that the Fort Hood shooting is a terrorist attack and is a direct result of the U.S. Army and FBI using kid gloves to deal with a very real threat. To avoid an ugly confrontation, the FBI apparently didn't act quickly enough on information that Hasan had posted writings on an Islamic website that were supportive of suicide bombings against Americans, and may have had links to the Mosque that provided support to three of the 9/11 hijackers. But the FBI has been cowed into submission on this kind of thing, and in the absence of a "smoking gun" they are loathe to act.

Well, they have a smoking gun now, and 13 dead soldiers and civilians to show for it. So now they are all over it.

Too little, too late.

And how is the mainstream media covering this? With typical political correctness -- even going so far as to claiming that Hasan is the victim of Post Traumatic Sress Disorder (PTSD). The only problem with this analysis, of course, is that PTSD is for those who have actually served overseas and in combat. Hasan has never been deployed. Maybe he caught it second hand from someone else, but to think that his actions are linked to PTSD is a joke. But anything to avoid looking at the very real possibility that Hasan is a (gasp) Muslim and might in fact be a radical (gulp) Islamic terrorist. No, it just can't be that. Islam is a religion of peace, after all!

Check out Bill O'Reilly on the media bias -- this is a fantastic summary of the bankruptcy that now inhabits the so-called "journalism" taking place at the NY Times and Newsweek, among others:



As always, Donald Douglas is doing a great job on following the Fort Hood attack. Check him out here.

Pelosi bill squeeks by...Senate next

As you wake up this morning to your morning coffee and paper, you will find that Congress stayed in session into the wee hours of the night to pass their massive tax-spend-and control health care bill -- the one that requires all Americans to by coverage or do time in jail (yes, you read that right).

The outcome was -- frankly -- no surprise, since voters in 2006 and 2008 chose to give a huge majority to the Democrats. When I said after the 2008 election that "elections have consequences", this is what I was referring to. Those who voted in protest over George W. Bush got more than "hope and change". They gave all of us a government focused on radicalism, wealth redistribution and pernicious regulation.

But there are slivers of good news. The vote was razor close -- 220-215, with 39 Democrats voting against it. My Congresswoman, Betsy Markey, who I am actively working to unseat did herself a huge favor by voting "no". Other Democrats in swing districts got the message of the tea parties and the elections last week and voted against it. All Republicans -- with the exception of Joseph Cao, a first-termer from a liberal Louisiana district -- voted no as well. It was a good showing given the massive advantage that Pelosi has with a Democrat in the White House, able to hand out political favors like Halloween candy. I'm encouraged by the tightness of the vote -- because it will mean even rougher sledding in the Senate.

The Democrat's majority in the Senate is big but soft -- and it will take 60 votes to get this disaster to President Obama's desk. You can forget about the talk earlier this year of using "reconciliation" to pass this (a provision to pass "spending" bills with just 51 votes). Harry Reid has to know that in this political environment that will never fly. 60 votes is going to be pretty hard to get -- given that Joe Lieberman has already come out against it. It will be clear to other swing state Senators up for election next year that they will be in trouble if they support this bill that is increasingly unpopular with their constituents. In its current form, the Pelosi Bill has no chance of getting through the Senate and becoming law.

The true test now is to see what compromises Harry Reid will make to get the 60 votes he needs. He'll need to buy off Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins of Maine -- two liberal Republicans who are on the record as wanting health care reform, and might vote for something less intrusive and punitive. The result is likely to be a heavily watered down version of what the House passed -- with luck it will contain tort reform and more of the concepts that Republicans have been pushing.

But also know this: some bill is likely to become law this year. The election results in 2008 ordained that. The key is to keep up the pressure on the Senate to water this down to be a harmless as possible. The close House vote shows that this can be done.

I will post soon a list of Senators to contact.

Keep up the pressure -- it really DOES make a difference!