Thomas Sowell's Dismantling America, parts 1 and 2

Part 1

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers-- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.

How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

Jeremiah Wright said it with words: "God damn America!" Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.

Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government-- people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world.

Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.

Part 2

Many years ago, at a certain academic institution, there was an experimental program that the faculty had to vote on as to whether or not it should be made permanent.

I rose at the faculty meeting to say that I knew practically nothing about whether the program was good or bad, and that the information that had been supplied to us was too vague for us to have any basis for voting, one way or the other. My suggestion was that we get more concrete information before having a vote.

The director of that program rose immediately and responded indignantly and sarcastically to what I had just said-- and the faculty gave him a standing ovation.

After the faculty meeting was over, I told a colleague that I was stunned and baffled by the faculty's fierce response to my simply saying that we needed more information before voting.

"Tom, you don't understand," he said. "Those people need to believe in that man. They have invested so much hope and trust in him that they cannot let you stir up any doubts."

Years later, and hundreds of miles away, I learned that my worst misgivings about that program did not begin to approach the reality, which included organized criminal activity.

The memory of that long-ago episode has come back more than once while observing both the actions of the Obama administration and the fierce reactions of its supporters to any questioning or criticism.

Almost never do these reactions include factual or logical arguments against the administration's critics. Instead, there is indignation, accusations of bad faith and even charges of racism.

Here too, it seems as if so many people have invested so much hope and trust in Barack Obama that it is intolerable that anyone should come along and stir up any doubts that could threaten their house of cards.

Among the most pathetic letters and e-mails I receive are those from people who ask why I don't write more "positively" about Obama or "give him the benefit of the doubt."

No one-- not even the President of the United States-- has an entitlement to a "positive" response to his actions. The entitlement mentality has eroded the once common belief that you earned things, including respect, instead of being given them.

As for the benefit of the doubt, no one-- especially not the President of the United States-- is entitled to that, when his actions can jeopardize the rights of 300 million Americans domestically and the security of the nation in an international jungle, where nuclear weapons may soon be in the hands of people with suicidal fanaticism. Will it take a mushroom cloud over an American city to make that clear? Was 9/11 not enough?

When a President of the United States has begun the process of dismantling America from within, and exposing us to dangerous enemies outside, the time is long past for being concerned about his public image. He has his own press agents for that.

Internationally, Barack Obama has made every mistake that was made by the Western democracies in the 1930s, mistakes that put Hitler in a position to start World War II-- and come dangerously close to winning it.

At the heart of those mistakes was trying to mollify your enemies by throwing your friends to the wolves. The Obama administration has already done that by reneging on this country's commitment to put a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and by its lackadaisical foot-dragging on doing anything serious to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. That means, for all practical purposes, throwing Israel to the wolves as well.

Countries around the world that have to look out for their own national survival, above all, are not going to ignore how much Obama has downgraded the reliability of America's commitments.

Iraq, for example, knows that Iran is going to be next door forever while Americans may be gone in a few years. South Korea likewise knows that North Korea is permanently next door but who knows when the Obama administration will get a bright idea to pull out? Countries in South America know that Hugo Chavez is allying Venezuela with Iran. Dare they ally themselves with an unreliable U.S.A.? Or should they join our enemies to work against us?

This issue is too serious for squeamish silence.

Damn.

We are so screwed.

This is what we get for electing a know-nothing, done-nothing radical who never grew out of his college Marxism - with a giant racial chip on his shoulder to boot.

At least somebody is telling the truth

WASHINGTON (CNN) – A leading fiscal mind on Capitol Hill and a one-time Obama Cabinet pick sounded the alarm Sunday over the projected long-term financial challenges the country faces.

“This deficit is driven by us,” New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg candidly said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union when asked about the federal government’s projected $1.42 trillion operating deficit for the 2009 fiscal year.

“You talk about systemic risk. The systemic risk today is the Congress of the United States,“ the Ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King, “that we’re creating these massive debts which we’re passing on to our children. We’re going to undermine fundamentally the quality of life for our children by doing this.”

“Now you can’t blame that on [former President] George [W.] Bush,” Greg said, noting that using the Obama administration’s projections the budget deficit for the next ten years is $1 trillion per year. And Gregg said that during the same ten-year period, public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product would increase from 40 percent - which Gregg called “tolerable but still too high” - up to 80 percent.

The figures, Gregg told King, “mean we’re basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country. And you just can’t do that. You can’t keep running these [federal] programs out [into the future] and not paying for them. And you can’t keep throwing debt on top of debt.”

“Standards of living will drop if we keep this up,” Gregg also said.

After repeated promises from the White House that the final health care reform bill will be deficit neutral, Gregg said a Democratic plan to avoid otherwise automatic Medicare cuts without having a funding source for the projected expense of $250 billion over the next decade was “gamesmanship.”

Asked about criticism leveled Sunday by former Republican-turned-Democrat Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania that Republicans were being obstructionist in the health care reform debate, Gregg replied, “Well, I suppose he has to call us something now that he’s left the party.”

Responding to the Democratic charge that the GOP is “the party of ‘no,’” Gregg pointed to Republican health care reform proposals including his own and another co-sponsored by Republican Sens. Tom Coburn and Sen. Richard Burr, as well as a bipartisan proposal put forward by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Robert Bennett (R-UT).”

Gregg said the versions of health care reform voted out of the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee would amount to “a huge expansion of government.”

“You’re talking about taking the government and increasing it by $1-$2 trillion over the next ten years,” Gregg said. He added that he thought growing government at that rate would have a “very debilitating effect” on the overall economy and the ability of Americans to get health care in the future.

At one point earlier this year, Gregg, who is not seeking re-election to his Senate seat in 2010, was President Obama’s choice to head the Commerce Department. But the fiscal hawk removed himself from consideration because of differences with the new administration on several policy issues.

I do not believe that it is any longer possible to deny that what Obama and the congressional leadership are doing to the nation is deliberate.

This is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the United States of America so that they can rebuild a new nation (United Socialist States of America) from the rubble.

If the American people were truly awake to what is going on and were it is heading they would flood Washington DC and pack the Capitol with their bodies to the point were congress could not physically meet and form a quorum to enact any of the administration's legislative agenda.

They would keep this up until the 2010 election.

But this will not happen. The vast majority of the people, even conservatives, are not aware of how dire the situation is. The fact is that we are a hair's breadth away from losing the nation.

It is possible for a nation to go so far down the path of socialism that it cannot turn back without an abject collapse, as in the case of the USSR and Eastern Europe, or a violent revolution.

If Obama and his allies in congress are not stopped soon the US will reach that point.

Disguises are abandoned

Speaking of "unmasking" isn't it interesting how many masks are falling by the wayside these days.

I mean people who pay attention have known that the base ideology of the Democrat party has been a form of watered down Marxism for decades. Yet now with B. Hussein Obama at the helm the party is nationalizing large chunks of the American economy and making the most serious attempt to socialize health care ever (Hillarycare started out seriously but became a farce with not even one Democrat Senator voting for it).

Those same people who have been paying attention have known for years that the mainstream media has been biased in favor of the political left yet with the rise of Barack Obama they have moved from bias to open advocacy.

Now we have Hollywood rising to support and defend child-rapist Roman Polanski and while we can be sure that not every actor, director or producer is OK with what Polanski did we note that not one Hollywood personality has even attempted to raise a voice of condemnation to counter Polanski's highly visible support. Where is the counter petition asking the Swiss to hurry up and send the criminal back to face justice?

It's starting to remind me of that scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when the Death Eaters appear in the Dept. of Mysteries and reveal their true faces to Harry and his friends.

If the trend continues the next thing we'll see is the National Education Association admitting that they don't give a rat's ass about educating children (beyond left-wing political indoctrination) and that their real agenda is just the promotion of radical left-wing politics.

We should also take a moment to acknowledge that the National Organization of Women took its mask off back when Bill Clinton was shown to have done everything from have sex with an intern young enough to be his daughter (in the Oval Office, no less) to commit forcible rape in a hotel room and their response was "boys will be boys".

The Manhattan to Washington corridor "Republican" establishment has revealed their true nature by their attacks on Sarah Palin. If the left keeps on being honest about what they really are we might get to the point where we can have an HONEST political debate in this country!

President for life Obama

Bruce Walker, writing on American Thinker, doesn't think that there is much danger of Obama attempting to stage some kind of coup:

Some conservatives have begun to openly wonder if Obama is going to seize power in America. Would he want to do this? Perhaps so (a scary thought, but he has promised change.) No one dreamed that Carter, the worst president of the last century, wanted or planned to seize power. Clinton wanted to win power, but the worst anyone expected of Clinton was Huey Long bossism.

Obama rose in politics through the thoroughly corrupt one-party government of Chicago. His spiritual advisor sounds like a rabble-rousing storm trooper. His intellectual mentor, Saul Alinksy, like the Bolsheviks and Nazis, believed in state terrorism. If Obama wanted to follow their leads, could he? I believe not.

Once it became clear that Obama was acting without any pretense of constitutionality, he would need muscle to back him up. Yet the greatest source of that muscle, the United States Military, loathes Obama as much as he loathes them. He would need intelligence, yet his maltreatment of the CIA ensures that those operatives would toss more bananas peels in front of him than real information should he make an extraconstitutional move.

Obama would also need the police, yet the President’s comments about a Cambridge policeman, a member of what has to be among the most politically correct force in America, shows the natural antipathy between Obama and law enforcement officers. The police, “pigs,” to the crowd that Obama belonged to as a community organizer, cannot be a solid support of any seizure of power.

What about the civilian national security force promised by Obama during the campaign? Conservatives are much more likely to be veterans and own guns than leftists. The creation and coordination of a real civilian army would also profoundly antagonize all state and local police forces.

You can go and read the rest, but this is the meat of his argument.

I don't put the threat of some kind of attempted seizure of power by Obama very high on my list of things to worry about, but I don't discount it either. What Mr. Walker doesn't understand is that the military and police would cooperate with an Obama dictatorship if it were legally enacted by a lawful act of congress.

All it would take is something like a major terrorist incident, especially one involving nuclear terrorism, to cause congress to declare martial law.

You will remember that right after 9/11 Chris Matthews wrote an op-ed piece in which he lamented the fact that Bill Clinton had never been given a chance to lead by a 9/11-type incident during his presidency. Left-liberals would love nothing more than to have one of "their guys" in charge during a massive crisis and would load him down with as much power as possible in order to let him shine with his inspired leadership.

Imagine this scenario. Terrorists manage to construct a couple of gun style (like the Hiroshima bomb) nuclear bombs using the nuclear material from four Soviet era warheads. They set them off in widely separate areas like Manhattan and San Francisco at 12:30 EST on a weekday when there would be plenty of people in the downtown area of both cities. The dead and injured would run into the hundreds of thousands - if not a million or more - and the property damage would be in the hundreds of billions.

The nation would panic.

If someone wrote Obama a good speech and if his teleprompter functioned correctly when he addressed the joint session of congress (which would be meeting in a virtual session as the actual members would be in various safe locations around the country while Obama was flying around at 33000 feet in Air Force One) they would quickly sign off on a declaration of martial law and the suspension of constitutional protections.

Gone for the duration would be the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

The armed services would follow their orders because they are sworn to do so and because the American military culture is built from the ground up on the principle of civilian control.

Police would follow their orders to avoid being stripped of their badges, guns, pensions and benefits.

The key would be that the declaration of martial law would have to come up for congressional review periodically. At first it would probably be every six months. As long as the illusion of the whole thing being temporary was allowed to stand the majority of people would hunker down and try to wait it out.

As for elections there would be no need for Obama to worry. With the only operational media being under his control and with the votes being counted by federal officials there would be little danger of enough of his political enemies being elected to hamper his plans.

Of course there would come a point when it became impossible to even pretend that he was anything but a despot, but by the time we reached that place how much effective resistance could be mounted by a disarmed and demoralized population or by a military whose leadership had been packed with handpicked Obama loyalists?

Do I believe that this is likely? No. But I don't think that it is impossible either.

After all this is the kind of thing that Obama's political heroes did.

Why not, it got him elected?

From The Washington Times:

Facing the first real rough patch of his presidency, President Obama and his supporters are once again resorting to a tried-and-true tactic: attacking George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In his White House press conference last week, Mr. Obama referred to the Bush era at least nine times, three times lamenting that he "inherited" a $1.3 trillion debt that has set back his administration's efforts to fix the economy.

With the former president lying low in Dallas, largely focused on crafting his memoirs, Mr. Obama has increasingly attempted to exploit Mr. Bush when discussing the weak economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the difficulty closing the military prison at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

As he took power, Mr. Obama promised a "new era of responsibility" that would transcend partisan politics.

"For a guy who campaigned on taking responsibility and looking forward, he spends an awful lot of time pointing fingers and looking backward," said former Bush deputy press secretary Tony Fratto, who has begun defending the previous administration.

The problem with Obama's "poor pitiful me - look what I inherited" line is that the bulk of Bush's trillion dollar deficit is due to the massive spending in the closing days of the Bush presidency which Barack Obama supported and voted for as a Senator.

Since taking office Obama has increased the "Bush debt" by several orders of magnitude and is attempting to increase it even more.

Mr. Obama, if George W Bush spent too much money then wouldn't the answer be to spend less not more?

As for the wars. Iraq - we won and now we are withdrawing on the schedule that the Bush administration worked out with the Iraqi government. Afghanistan - during the campaign you said that was the "real war", the only one we should have been fighting all along and that if we made you president you would focus on Afghanistan and win the war that mattered.

Well you're the president so show us what you got. . .

And as for the "difficulty closing the military prison at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay" perhaps you are finding it "difficult" because you now are beginning to realize that president Bush was right to create a place under US control but off US soil where these filthy subhuman savages could be warehoused.

So all this pissing and moaning about "difficulty" in closing Gitmo is just you thrashing around in your incompetent empty-headed way trying to avoid admitting that you were wrong and Bu$Hitler was right.

The job of President of the United States calls for a person of integrity, intelligence and experience. Barack Hussein Obama is nothing but a Marxist gutter street agitator whose only real skill is taking a disorganized rabble of worthless parasitic ghetto trash and training them (like Orwell's sheep) to bleat in unison for more handouts and bigger government.

Putting a creature such as this in the Oval office and backing him up with a congress run by the sorry likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can have no other conceivable result than the mess we find ourselves in now.

The tide is turning

PRINCETON, NJ -- Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.

This is one time the US is lagging behind Europe. In the UK the majority of the public now realized that global warming is a hoax designed to remove what little wealth and freedom they still retain.

Why are Americans being slow on the uptake?

Simple, America is a richer country with a stronger economy. As long as the American people felt confident of their own economic situation they were willing to pay the dollars and cents price for the self esteem boost of "being part of the effort to save the planet from the danger of man made global warming".

However when they are frightened of things like not being able to pay the mortgage or buy groceries the thrill of being on the front lines in the battle to preserve human civilization from a non-existent threat just isn't worth the cost.

I have said all along that global warming was the best hobgoblin that the left had ever come up with to terrorize the population into surrendering their wealth and liberty. I have said that they would not abandon global warming - regardless of the evidence against it - until they found a replacement hobgoblin.

I submit to you that the global financial crisis is that very replacement hobgoblin. The government has managed to bury its tentacles more deeply into the private economy due to the economic meltdown than it ever could because of global warming. As this fact becomes ever more apparent to the left it will allow global warming to die a quiet death unmourned by any except the environmentalist lunatics who externalize their own self loathing into a belief that their entire species is a "cancer on the earth".

It was THE JEWS!

WASHINGTON: Charles Freeman Jr., President Barack Obama's choice for a major intelligence post, has withdrawn his name and blamed pro-Israel lobbying groups for his decision, saying they had distorted his record and campaigned against him.

Freeman had come under sharp criticism for his past statements about Israel as well as his association with the Saudi and Chinese governments.

Freeman's withdrawal Tuesday from consideration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council came just hours after Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, vigorously defended him and said his comments had been taken out of context.

In a message to colleagues and friends, first posted Tuesday evening on Foreign Policy magazine's Web site, Freeman blamed pro-Israel groups for the controversy, saying the "tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth."

Joshua Block, a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, said Tuesday that his organization had not taken a formal position on Freeman's selection and had not lobbied Congress members to oppose it.

A former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Freeman had in recent years questioned Washington's steadfast support for Israel. He had also been deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. His critics unearthed past statements that seemed to indicate at least partial support for the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Critics in Congress also questioned Freeman's financial ties to China because he had served for four years on the board of the China National Offshore Oil Corp., a state-owned company. He also led the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington-based group that receives financial support from the Saudi government.

In the intelligence post, Freeman would have been in charge of producing all U.S. intelligence estimates, documents that represent the consensus judgment of the government's 16 intelligence agencies.

Opposition to Freeman's appointment had been building on Capitol Hill, and several lawmakers said they had been lobbying the White House to withdraw its support for Freeman. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Freeman's "statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration."

But he has to withdraw because of the evil Jewish conspiracy.

Once again we must ask ourselves what is the source of the mutual magnetism which draws Barack Obama and people like this together.

Healing our international reputation?

Mark Steyn in NRO:

There is a great deal in Mr. Steyn's piece to mull over and here are a few thoughts of my own.

British prime minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African-American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy’s anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President.

The president’s guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office.

And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill.

In return, America’s head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of “classic American movies.”

Evidently, the White House gift shop was all out of “MY GOVERNMENT DELEGATION WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT” T-shirts. Still, the “classic American movies” set is a pretty good substitute, and it can set you back as much as $38.99 at Wal-Mart: Lot of classics in there, I’m sure — Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Sound of Music — though this sort of collection always slips in a couple of Dude, Where’s My Car? 3 and Police Academy 12 just to make up the numbers. I’ll be interested to know if Mr. Brown has anything to play the films on back home, since U.S.-format DVDs don’t work in United Kingdom DVD players.

It could be worse. The president might have given him the DVD of He’s Just Not That Into You. Gordon Brown landed back in London a sadder but wiser man. The Fleet Street correspondents reported sneeringly that he (and they) had been denied the usual twin-podia alternating-flags press conference. The Obama administration had supposedly penciled one in for the Rose Garden, but then there was that catastrophic snowfall (a light dusting). This must be the first world leaders’ press conference to be devastated by climate change. No doubt President Obama could have relocated it to a prestigious indoor venue, like the windowless room round the back of the White House furnace in Sub-Basement Level 5. But why bother? Some freak flood would have swept through and washed the prime minister and his DVD set into the Potomac and out to the Atlantic. And by the time the Coast Guard fished him out, the sodden classic movies wouldn’t work in any American DVD player any better than in the Brit one.

He did, however, get to give an almost entirely unreported address to Congress. U.S. legislators greeted his calls to resist protectionism with a round of applause, and then went back to adding up how much pork in the “Buy American” section of the stimulus bill would be heading their way.

I would make a modest prediction that in 2012, after four years of the man who was supposed to heal America’s relations with a world sick of all that swaggering cowboy unilateralism, those relations will be much worse. From Canada to India, the implications of the Obama ascendancy are becoming painfully clear. The other week Der Spiegel ran a piece called “Why Obamania Isn’t the Answer,” which might more usefully have been published before the Obamessiah held his big Berlin rally. Written by some bigshot with the German Council on Foreign Relations and illustrated by the old four-color hopey-changey posters all scratched up and worn out, the essay conceded that Europe had embraced Obama as a “European American.” Very true. The president is the most European American ever to sit in the Oval Office. And, because of that, he doesn’t need any actual European Europeans getting in the way — just as, at his big victory-night rally in Chicago, the first megastar president didn’t need any megastar megastars from Hollywood clogging up the joint: Movie stars who wanted to fly in were told by his minders that he didn’t want any other celebrities deflecting attention from him. Same with world leaders. If it’s any consolation to Gordon Brown, he’s just not that into any of you.

What Mr. Brown and the rest of the world want is for America, the engine of the global economy, to pull the rest of them out of the quicksand — which isn’t unreasonable. Even though a big chunk of the subprime/securitization/credit-bubble axis originated in the United States and got exported round the planet, the reality is that almost every one of America’s trading partners will wind up getting far harder hit.

And that was before Obama made clear that for him the economy takes a very distant back seat to the massive expansion of government for which it provides cover. That’s why he’s indifferent to the plummeting Dow. The president has made a strategic calculation that, to advance his plans for socialized health care, “green energy,” and a big-government state, it’s to his advantage for things to get worse. And, if things go from bad to worse in America, overseas they’ll go from worse to total societal collapse. We’ve already seen changes of government in Iceland and Latvia, rioting in Greece and Bulgaria. The great destabilization is starting on the fringes of Europe and working its way to the Continent’s center.

We’re seeing not just the first contraction in the global economy since 1945, but also the first crisis of globalization. This was the system America and the other leading economies encouraged everybody else to grab a piece of. But whatever piece you grabbed — exports in Taiwan, services in Ireland, construction in Spain, oligarchic industrial-scale kleptomania in Russia — it’s all crumbling. Ireland and Italy are nation-state versions of Bank of America and General Motors. In Eastern Europe, the countries way out on the end of the globalization chain can’t take a lot of heat without widespread unrest. And the fellows who’ll be picking up the tab are the Western European banks who loaned them all the money. Gordon Brown was hoping for a little more than: “I feel your pain. And have you ever seen The Wizard of Oz? It’s about this sweet little nobody who gets to pay a brief visit to the glittering Emerald City before being swept back to the reassuring familiarity of the poor thing’s broken-down windswept economically devastated monochrome dustbowl. You’ll love it!”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”? Oh, perish the thought. The prime minister flew 8,000 miles for dinner and a movie. But the president says he’ll call. Next week. Next month. Whatever.

1. While it is certainly possible that the little messiah's unwillingness to hold a formal press conference with Prime Minister Brown was purely a matter of ego, Obama's distaste for sharing the limelight, I think the reasons go much deeper.

Almost the first thing Obama does after taking the oath and entering the Oval Office for the first time as President (the first was ordering the thermostat cranked up to 84 degrees) was order the bust of Winston Churchill which was given to President Bush by the British government after 9/11 to be boxed up and returned to the Brits. Add to that his incredibly shabby treatment of Mr. Brown during his recent visit and you see a pattern of calculated insult aimed at the United Kingdom by this president.

The question then becomes why. Why would our new president choose to show such disrespect to our nation's oldest and closest ally? The only reason which I can come up with is that Obama wants to punish The UK for being George W Bush's staunchest ally in the war on terror.

The Obama campaign wanted the American people to believe that the only reason that America was hated around the world was because of the "bumbling cowboy" Bush and that the sophisticated and brilliant Obama would heal our damaged image. It would seem that Obama is only worried about improving America's image in certain select quarters. How else to explain spitting in the face of the United Kingdom while giving 9 billion dollars of gun money to Hamas to enable them to murder even more Jews.

2. Mr. Steyn has hit the nail on the head when he says that the economy is taking a distant backseat to Obama's socialist agenda. In fact I think that Obama is intentionally driving the economy down in order to intensify the crisis atmosphere. After all the people might insist on actually reading the legislation if they hadn't been whipped into hysteria by things like rising unemployment and a plunging Dow.

3. The leaders of Europe are very aware of the fact that the comfortable socialist hyper-secular welfare states that they have built for themselves are only possible because the United States is there to back them up economically and militarily. All of the things which make us distasteful to European elites, our dynamic individualism, capitalism, militarism and even our religious faith all combine to make the US the kind of economic and military superpower that a decadent and defenseless Europe must rely upon to guarantee its continued existence.

This dependence creates resentment which the European "man in the street" does not need to hide but which Europe's political leaders have to hold somewhat in check. This creates a "tightrope" situation in which Euro Leaders must pander to the anti American mob on one hand while remaining firmly attached to the US with the other.

This was seen in the 1980's when President Reagan was deploying Pershing and cruise missiles and ERW's (neutron bombs) to Europe. European political leaders knew that the USSR's strategy was to win by intimidation and that a viable means to strike back from European soil would make any Soviet invasion of Western Europe vastly less likely. However the European citizenry was up in arms over "cowboy" Reagan's "escalation" of the Cold War. Elected leaders in Europe had to appear "gravely concerned" for domestic public consumption while having their ambassadors deliver notes to the White House urging Mr. Reagan to hurry up with the damn missiles because they were damn tired of living under the threat of 50 thousand Russian tanks parked on their borders.

Today what the European leadership wants is to be able to go before the cameras in their own countries and bloviate about how the global financial crisis proves the failure of capitalism while the US cuts taxes and spending and puts its own economy into overdrive - consequently lifting them out of what could eaisly become a global depression.

But that seems unlikely to happen this time. Obama is truly a man of the radical socialist left. He is not going to "waste this crisis" by passing up the oppurtunity to transform America into the kind of nation his Marxist college professors told him it should be. He is not going to pass up the chance to punish the "white power structure" as his angry bitter wife and angry bitter pastor want him to.

So the Europeans watch and worry. So should we.

If conservatism could speak

Too good not to bring to your attention:

Mike Church asked me to prepare a talk for his national radio program. He asked me to give the speech that I would have given had I been invited to speak at CPAC on the state of conservatism in America today. My initial reaction was: Who cares what I have to say about the state of American conservatism?

I wondered, instead, what Conservatism (incarnated as a principle or an ideal) would want to say to the members of CPAC. Here is the result of my thought experiment:

Something beautiful, sad, unexpected, and miraculous happened today at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Conservatism appeared at the meeting and spoke for nearly ten minutes.

Dressed in a brilliant white gown, Conservatism blinded all of the conference attendees, panel members, celebrities, and speakers when she appeared at the main entrance in a flash of light. Conservatism made her entry right at the end of a heated panel discussion: Bipartisanship ... Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Many CPAC members fell to their knees and begged forgiveness as Conservatism made her way to the podium. "Compassionate Conservatives" were turned into pillars of salt as she walked through the crowd. Religious bigots, who last year had made theological nitpicking the center of the presidential campaign, were struck deaf and dumb.

Conservatism stood at the podium, lifted her shining arms, and the entire building shook. This is what she said:

"Thank you for inviting me here today. I am rarely invited anywhere these days. Of course, this does not bother me ... nor does it matter in the least. I exist in principles of truth. I do not die and my principles do not change. You ignore me at your peril ... not mine."

At this early point in her speech, several leading members of the Republican National Committee, all of whom were sitting in the back of the room, tried to crawl beneath their chairs to an emergency exit. Conservatism blinked. The RNC members were turned into tiny white mice.

"You ignore me at your peril not mine," Conservatism repeated. "There seems to be some confusion in this room about who and what I am. I will make it clear for you: I am common sense. I am the truth of the market and the real world. I survive in even the most evil of regimes. I existed in the black market under Soviet communism. I existed with the maquis in France under fascism.

"I am not compassionate, I am patient. I am hard work and its eventual reward. I am the unreserved sharing that comes from a freely created surplus -- not confiscation through bureaucratic intervention and force.

"My enemy is not socialism. Given time, I always overcome the power of the state ... because I am the free collective power of individuals acting to buy and sell, and to provide goods and services, from one to another. My enemies are sloth, greed, bigotry, ignorance, lawlessness, and ... fate."

Conservatism shivered slightly as she mentioned the word "fate." The walls of the convention center trembled and ceiling tiles fell like rain on the audience. She continued:

"My right hand is freedom. The freedom to think, to act, and to speak the truth."

Conservatism raised her right hand and several members of the Main Stream Media who were reporting on the conference melted like wax.

"My left hand is private property. The absolute right to keep or trade such things as human beings invent, create, cultivate, and harvest by the sweat of their brows."

Conservatism raised her left hand and nearly every elected Republican official in attendance hid his or her face in shame.

"But this is not why I have come here today. As I said, I have nothing to fear. No policy or legislation can harm me. You may stand by as industries are socialized and economies bankrupted ... but this does not harm me. You may even convince yourselves that a little socialism is good for America; that no child is left behind when the central government controls education; that the elderly, no matter how wealthy, should not have to pay for their medications; or, as some in this country believe, that the government owes them medical treatment and a home. You may even allow liberals to drive me away for years, perhaps even a few decades. But they cannot destroy me.

"America will invite me back. I live without America; but America cannot live, for long, without me. As some in this room understand, government cannot, over an extended period of time, feed all of you, clothe all of you, house all of you and heal your wounds. I can.

"Government does not inspire you (although it may try to force you) to achieve, to create, to invent, to explore, to invest in the future. I do.

"I hope that this much is clear: I am not here on my behalf. I do not need even CPAC's support or acknowledgment. My principles exist whether or not they are recognized by this, or any other, audience.

"I do not need to be here to defend myself. I am here because of my heart ... for my heart ... my heart is the Constitution...." Conservatism wept and the earth shuddered beneath her. "I am here for the Constitution. I am here because America is breaking my heart."

There was a stunned silence in the room. Many members of CPAC remembered who they were, and why they had gathered, and they began to cry too.

Conservatism's voice rose like thunder:

"You have not done enough to protect and defend the Constitution. You have broken my heart. And because of this ... America will suffer."

There was a flash like lightening. A deafening clap of thunder rocked the auditorium. Conservatism vanished. And the members in attendance at CPAC asked themselves, "Have we done all that we can do to protect our Constitution and to preserve our republic?"

Audio version.

Larrey Anderson is a writer, a philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. His latest award-winning novel is The Order of the Beloved. His memoir, Underground: Life and Survival in the Russian Black Market, has just been released.

Jindal looks to 2012

From CBS:

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate, has suggested his state may not be interested in all of the roughly $4 billion allotted to it in the economic stimulus package to be signed by President Obama today.

"We'll have to review each program, each new dollar to make sure that we understand what are the conditions, what are the strings and see whether it's beneficial for Louisiana to use those dollars," Jindal said, according to CBS affiliate WWLTV.

Jindal is scheduled to give the response to the president’s not-exactly-a-state-of-the-union address next Tuesday.

Louisiana reportedly faces a possible $2 billion budget shortfall next year. It has been allocated $538,575,876 for infrastructure spending in the stimulus package, and the White House predicts the bill will create 50,000 jobs in the state.

Governor Jindal is doing the right thing politically for a man who is looking toward a possible 2012 or 2016 presidential run but the right thing for the state of Louisiana (funny isn't it how what is good for Republicans is generally good for the country while the opposite is usually true for Democrats).

The "strings" which will come attached to this money will have the effect of rendering state governments more powerless and concentrating more power in Washington. States which wish to retain whatever sovereignty they have left after over a hundred years of power grabs by Washington should say "no thanks" to any "gifts" from D.C. especially as long as this administration is in power.

In order to be "fair and balanced" CBS decided to balance the wisdom from Mr. Jindal, who is intelligent courageous and a true leader, with a statement from someone who is the governor's polar opposite:

As WWLTV notes, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has said he’ll take any money that Louisiana turns down.

I simply remind everyone of the calm and competent way that Governor Jindal dealt with the first hurricane to threaten Louisiana during his administration with the panic and incompetence which were the best that Nagin could do in the face of Katrina (remember also Nagin's massive sense of entitlement as he went about whining that someone should come in and do his job for him).

But back to our discussion of an actual man.

Gov. Jindal is taking advantage of not only the unity of Republicans in opposition to the massive and misnamed "stimulus bill" but of the fact that a majority of independents and a large minority of Democrats also oppose the legislation.

If Governor Palin of Alaska wishes to capitalise on her popularity with a 2012 run of her own she needs to climb on board and reject Obama's Trojan horse. She should point out that developing Alaska's oil reserves would provide ample tax revenue for the state and provide thousands of jobs, as well as moving America toward energy independecne, if she were only allowed to proceed with plans to extract the oil in an environementally safe way.

The GOP lacks the power in the federal legislature to stop any of the left's destructive programs however every legislative battle which is fought represents a teachable moment for the public. Republican governors like Palin and Jindal represent the "bench" from which Republicans should draw their next presidential candidate (please G-d, no more Senators!). Those governors who have White House ambitions need to take the lead in explaining to the public why the left's program is bad for the nation.

It really is an ill wind that blows no good. Carter gave us Reagan and Clinton gave us a Republican legislature. Obama may well give us a House and Senate under control of not just the GOP but the conservative wing of the GOP after 2010 and Palin/Jindal or Jindal/Palin in the White House in 2012.

This tells you everything you need to know

From Human Events.com:

Democratic staffers released the final version of the stimulus bill at about 11 pm last night after delaying the release for hours to put it into a format which people cannot “search” on their home computers.

Instead of publishing the bill as a regular internet document -- which people can search by “key words” and otherwise, the Dems took hours to convert the final bill from the regular searchable format into “pdf” files, which can be read but not searched.

Three of the four .pdf files had no text embedded, just images of the text, which did not permit text searches of the bill. That move to conceal the bill’s provisions had not been remedied this morning at the time of publication of this article. (You can find the entire bill on the House Appropriations [http://appropriations.house.gov] website.)

So, what are they hiding? A lot.

We searched the bill randomly -- the only way possible -- to see what’s being hidden from the public and the members of Congress who will be voting on the bill today. We found one provision that may be a good example of why the Democrats are desperate to stop any exposure of what is in this bill. Like this gem:

SEC. 1607. (a) CERTIFICATION BY GOVERNOR -- Not later than 45 days after the date of enactment of this Act, for funds provided to any State or agency thereof, the Governor of the State shall certify that: 1) the State request and use funds provided by this Act , and; 2) funds be used to create jobs and promote economic growth.

(b) ACCEPTANCE BY STATE LEGISLATURE -- If funds provided to any State in any division of this Act are not accepted for use by the Governor, then acceptance by the State legislature, by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be sufficient to provide funding to such State.

This provision --– apparently aimed at conservative governors such as South Carolina’s Mark Sanford who does not want the federal money -- would overturn state laws and constitutions, intervening directly in the state’s government to give the legislature the power to overturn a government’s decision.

This provision probably violates the US Constitution, a matter which will be of no concern to Congressional Democrats.

This act -- to strong-arm state governments and a governor’s ability to control the state budget -- is Chicago-style bipartisanship.

This bill is so bad that even the Associated Press analyst report today concludes that the bill will not jump-start the economy.

The example that Human Events found is bad, but it is far from the worst this festering turd of a bill has to offer. Like the undoing of welfare reform and socialized medicine, to name just two examples.

Human Events does report one bright spot, however:

Roll Call is reporting that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) will likely not be able to travel to Washington for the vote. This causes a conundrum for Reid, as it would bring the vote total down to 60 -- the number needed -- but no Republican wants to go on record as the 60th vote. Reid may try to get around Senate rules to enable Specter, Snowe and Collins to avoid being Vote #60 for the stimulus bill.

Would it not be supremely satisfying if this steaming bucket of legislative sewage failed to make it into law because old Ted was too busy getting ready for his appointment with Satan's backyard barbecue to show up for the vote?

Might it possibly be that the one true act of service to his country this murdering old drunk will ever perform involves dying a painful death?

Would that all left-liberals would render such service to their nation.

A RINO grows a pair

WASHINGTON -- New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg withdrew from consideration as Commerce secretary Thursday, saying his differences with the Democratic White House ran too deep.

The announcement was a fresh embarrassment for an administration rocked by a number of setbacks. While his recent predecessors each lost one or two early cabinet nominees, Mr. Obama has lost three less than a month into his term. And Mr. Gregg's withdrawal comes two days after a bank rescue plan was widely panned by financial markets and lawmakers from both parties, partly because of its lack of detail.

Mr. Obama was able to celebrate this week a victory with a congressional agreement over his economic-stimulus plan, but his goal of attracting widespread bipartisan support has faltered, and the Gregg move means his cabinet can no longer claim a trio of Republicans.

It is a mark of just how destructive and far left-liberal (sorry, redundant) that Mr. Obama's ideas are that he can't even get the usual RINO suspects to sign on to them. Yes, the two Senators from Maine and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter voted for the giant "fund-the-left pork bill" but those three are special cases, being so stupid that they don't realize that they are members of the Communist Party of the USA.

And speaking of RINO's we note with some amazement that even Crazy John McCain and his detestable little butt-boy Lindsey Graham aren't busy assembling one of their "gangs" to aid the left in passing their "let's turn America into Venezuela" bill.

Too loony-left for John McCain to stomach? That's like getting kicked out of the SS for being too antisemitic.

The three RINO's in the Senate who voted for the Socialism Bill sealed their fates. The Democrats in their states will prefer to have real, as opposed to faux, Democrats representing them and Republicans will not turn out to save the jobs of people who use their position as a platform from which to stab them in the back.

And the Republicans who managed to maintain party discipline and stand together on principle have fired the first shot in both the 2010 congressional elections and the 2012 presidential race. By remembering who they were and what they were sent to Washington to do (hint, it wasn't "reach across the aisle" and be "bi-partisan") they have taken the first step down the road to recovering their credibility with conservative voters.

The next step for them will be resisting the Orwellian "Fairness Doctrine" which the left longs to reimpose on talk radio in order to silence the one portion of the mass media which hasn't gone beyond mere bias and become a voluntary extension of the White House press office.

The GOP has its work cut out for it over the next two years. We need to support them when they do the right thing and beat them without pity when they drift off the reservation. Only by standing together on firm conservative ideas can we hope to drag the nation back from the edge of the cliff which Obama and his minions are determined to push it over.

The door has been opened

Here is an editorial from the Washington Times on the socialized health care measures which are embedded in the "stimulus bill".

Secreted in the House version of the stimulus bill the President is trying to rush through Congress is the germ of a major overhaul of the American health care system. One provision causing increasing concern is the future role of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, who will be in charge of collecting and monitoring the health care being provided to every American.

Think of it, a centralized, federal database tracking your every visit to a health care provider - where you went, who you saw, what was diagnosed and what care was provided. Chilling. The immediate concern is privacy - traditionally these matters are between a doctor and patient, but now the federal bureaucracy will interpose itself into that relationship. The bill contains some boilerplate, assuring everyone that the records will be held in strictest confidence, but given the weakness of database security these days, that can be considered more a hope than a guarantee.

The purpose of the database is to help increase health care "quality, safety and efficiency." The first two goals are commendable, but what does efficiency mean?

The word is omnipresent in that section of the bill, but not defined. For guidance one can consult tax-impaired former HHS nominee Tom Daschle's 2008 book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis, which seems to have inspired that section of the legislation.

In it he discusses various approaches to reducing the costs of health care, including restricting the types of expensive treatments available to seniors and people with severe maladies. According to Daschle, Americans consume too much expensive health care. Thus one way to drive down costs is to limit the availability of or access to certain costly services. To many this sounds like denying care. But therein lie the efficiencies, making sure that providing health care is tied to a return on investment for society. If it costs too much to treat you, and you are nearing the end of your life anyway, you may have to do with less, or with nothing. You just aren't worth the cost.

Daschle's book recommends, and the bill appears to institutionalize, a body free of political influence to make the hard choices regarding how these efficiencies will be realized - what care will be limited, and who will be denied what services. Naturally politicians would prefer to stay clear of these critical decisions, but do the American people really want questions this important to be free of oversight?

One would think that the hard questions are the ones most in need of transparency and accountability, and not be buried in bureaucratic secrecy. It brings to mind Hannah Arendt's observation about the banality of evil. What nondescript GS-11 will be cutting care from Aunt Sophie after her sudden relapse before he or she heads to the food court for some stir fry?

There is no telling what metrics will be used to define the efficiencies, but it is clear who will bear the brunt of these decisions. Those suffering the infirmities of age, surely, and also the physically and mentally disabled, whose health costs are great and whose ability to work productively in the future are low. And how will premature babies fare under the utilitarian gaze of Washington's health efficiency experts? Will our severely wounded warriors be forced to forgo treatments and therapies based on their inability to be as productive as they once might have been? And will the love between a parent and child have a column on the health bureaucrats' spreadsheets?

Consider the following statement: "It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified."

This notion is fully in the spirit of the partisans of efficiency but came from a program instituted in Hitler's Germany called . Under this program, elderly people with incurable diseases, young children who were critically disabled, and others who were deemed non-productive, were euthanized. This was the Nazi version of efficiency, a pitiless expulsion of the "unproductive" members of society in the most expeditious way possible. The program was publicly denounced in 1941 by Clemens Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Muenster, who said in a sermon, "Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbors, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids...unproductive - perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live?"

The efficiency-based approach to health care reform is a betrayal of the compact between those who are most capable of work and those who are least capable of defending themselves. And we have come a long way from what was supposed to be a "targeted, timely and temporary" stimulus bill.

It is, or should be, a well known fact that the first state mandated murders in Nazi Germany were not committed against Jews. The victims were the sick and disabled.

There came a point after the machinery of the Holocaust began to operate at full speed when Germany could be declared judenrein (cleansed of Jews), but not before it had been "cleansed" of people had lost limbs in combat during the First World War.

The road which begins with rationed medical care can only end with a physician administered lethal injection.

Those nations with socialized medicine who do not routinely euthanize those considered "too expensive to treat" have not avoided the charnel house, they simply haven't gotten there yet.

In the meantime they practice euthanasia by neglect by withholding treatment outright or by maintaining waiting lists which are so long that people die while standing in line.

Time to think about buying that vacation home in the mountains

WASHINGTON (AP) - Economic stimulus legislation at the heart of President Barack Obama's recovery plan is on track for final votes in the House and Senate after a dizzying final round of bargaining that yielded agreement on tax cuts and spending totaling $789 billion.

Obama, who has campaigned energetically for the legislation, welcomed the agreement, saying it would "save or create more than 3.5 million jobs and get our economy back on track."

The $500-per-worker credit for lower- and middle-income taxpayers that Obama outlined during his presidential campaign was scaled back to $400 during bargaining by the Democratic-controlled Congress and White House. Couples would receive $800 instead of $1,000. Over two years, that move would pump about $25 billion less into the economy than had been previously planned.

Officials estimated it would mean about $13 a week more in people's paychecks when withholding tables are adjusted in late spring. Critics say that's unlikely to do much to boost consumption.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

It's bad enough when illiterate jurors issue damages awards in the billions of dollars because they don't grasp the difference between a million and a billion. Now it turns out the Democrats don't know the difference between a million and a trillion.

Why not make the "stimulus bill" a kazillion dollars?

All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies. Or as I call it, a trillion dollars and change.

The stimulus bill isn't as bad as we had expected -- it's much worse. Instead of merely creating useless, make-work jobs digging ditches -- or "shovel-ready," in the Democrats' felicitous phrase -- the "stimulus" bill will create an endless army of government bureaucrats aggressively intervening in our lives. Instead of digging ditches, American taxpayers will be digging our own graves.

There are hundreds of examples in the 800-page "stimulus" bill, but here are just two.

First, the welfare bureaucrats are coming back.

For half a century, the welfare establishment had the bright idea to pay women to have children out of wedlock. Following the iron laws of economics -- subsidize something, you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it -- the number of children being born out of wedlock skyrocketed.

The 1996 Welfare Reform bill marked the first time any government entitlement had ever been rolled back. Despite liberal howling and foot-stomping, not subsidizing illegitimacy led, like night into day, to less illegitimacy.

Welfare recipients got jobs, as the hard-core unemployables were coaxed away from their TV sets and into the workforce. For the first time in decades, the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate stopped spiraling upward.

As proof that that welfare reform was a smashing success, a few years later, Bill Clinton started claiming full credit for the bill.

Well, that's over. The stimulus bill goes a long way toward repealing the work requirement of the 1996 Republican Welfare Reform bill and rewards states that increase their welfare caseloads by paying unwed mothers to sit home doing nothing.

Second, bureaucrats at Health and Human Services will electronically collect every citizen's complete medical records and determine appropriate medical care.

Judging by the care that the State Department took with private visa records last year, that the Ohio government took with Joe the Plumber's government records, that the Pentagon took with Linda Tripp's employment records in 1998, and that the FBI took with thousands of top secret "raw" background files in President Clinton's first term, the bright side is: We'll finally be able to find out if Bill Clinton has syphilis -- all thanks to the stimulus bill!

HHS bureaucrats will soon be empowered to overrule your doctor. Doctors who don't comply with the government's treatment protocols will be fined. That's right: Instead of your treatment being determined by your doctor, it will be settled on by some narcoleptic half-wit in Washington who couldn't get a job in the private sector.

And a brand-new set of bureaucrats in the newly created office of "National Coordinator of Health Information Technology" will be empowered to cut off treatments that merely prolong life. Sorry, Mom and Pop, Big Brother said it's time to go.

At every other workplace in the nation -- even Wal-Mart! -- workers are being laid off. But no one at any of the bloated government bureaucracies ever need fear receiving a pink slip. All 64,750 employees at the department of Health and Human Services are apparently absolutely crucial to the smooth functioning of the department.

With the stimulus bill, liberals plan to move unfirable government workers into every activity in America, where they will superintend all aspects of our lives.

Also, thanks to the stimulus bill, the private sector will gradually shrivel and die. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of servicing the bill's nearly trillion-dollar debt will shrink the economy within a decade.

Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

The new liberal version is: There are those who look at things and ask, "Why on earth should the government be paying for that?" I dream of things that never were funded by the government and ask, "Why not?"

Miss Ann sees the same thing in the "stimulus bill" as I and so many others do.

The sad fact is that this hideous piece of legislation has nothing to do with reviving the economy. What it represents is the far left's attempt to gain back all the ground they have lost since the GOP took control of the legislature in 1994.

The last I heard calls coming in the the congressional switchboard were running several hundred to one against passage of this monstrosity. If congress disregards the will of the American people and passes this - as they certainly will - the people will not forget or forgive.

Teach your children well

Our friend the White Trash Republican left a comment on my post about the current state of affairs which contained this thought:

One bright spot- Everyday has now become "a teachable moment" for my younguns, but so sad they are having to witness this.

I agree, but we must be careful to learn all the lessons the past has to teach us or we risk falling into the same errors again.

Let us never forget that the "Greatest Generation" who survived the Great Depression and defeated Hitler and the Empire of Japan also made colossal and ruinously expensive mistakes, some of which are with us to this very day.

Let us remember that it was this very generation which elected FDR and demanded the passage of his New Deal which turned a serious recession into a Great Depression. It was the "Greatest Generation" who gave us the Social Security Ponzi scheme which will bankrupt the federal government within the lifetime of most of the people reading this post (if it isn't already bankrupt).

We should also keep in mind that the Greatest Generation's determination to stay out of another European war led America to stand passively on the sidelines while Hitler rose to power. It caused America to join England and France in inaction when Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles, which America was a signatory to and had as much right and responsibility to enforce as any other nation, and rearmed the Rhineland. This cowardly determination to avoid another war caused the civilized nations of the world to throw away their last chance to stop the Nazis while it could still be done easily and cheaply and set up every grim and terrible event to follow.

America's current situation has some striking similarities to its circumstances in the years preceding WWII. The nation is facing economic hard times and the government's solution is to ram through a massive program which will do almost nothing to solve our economic troubles but will push the nation hard and far to the left. It seems that not an hour goes by without someone discovering some new bit of stealth socialism which has been crammed into this massive piece of legislation. The latest being socialized medicine (full story here) which will ration health care in the US and bring us to the point of practicing euthanasia by neglect by denying treatment to those deemed "too old" or who otherwise fail a cost/benefit analysis designed to determine whether their lives are worth the cost of treating them.

[Note to any young diabetic. Make sure you go to college and study something the state will consider to be an essential skill so that you can earn enough National Ministry of Health "life value points" to justify your insulin ration.]

We are currently fighting a war in Iraq which the majority of the population feels was a mistake and which the current president campaigned against. This once again sets the nation up to stand by while madmen (in this case the Iranian mullahs) become an international threat (in this case by acquiring nuclear bombs).

It does seem that we are poised to repeat the dreadful errors of the past. Once again the government is responding to economic difficulty by legislation which will make the economy worse but will grow the size and scope of the federal government. Once again we are experiencing an upsurge of isolationist sentiment at exactly the point in history when interventionism would prevent a future holocaust. Once again American politics at the highest level has degenerated into a sordid personality cult which has accorded semi-divine status to a demagogue whose only real talent is telling the people want they want to hear.

It would seem that too many of the current generation of adults have failed to learn from the errors of the past and are therefore doomed to repeat them in the present. Perhaps if we are diligent to explain to our young ones what mistakes are currently being made, and exactly why they are mistakes, while the tragedy is unfolding before their eyes they will truly learn the lessons.

And then, perhaps, they will be able to construct something enduring upon the rubble of America's first failed experiment in self government.

The handbasket is nearing its destination

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged to provide up to $5.7 trillion more if needed. The total already tapped has decreased about 1 percent since November, mostly because foreign central banks are using fewer dollars in currency-exchange agreements called swaps. The Senate is to vote early this week on a stimulus package totaling at least $780 billion that President Barack Obama says is needed to avert a deeper recession. That measure would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.

If you've ever been curious about why I don't blog nearly as much as I used to just read the story excerpted above.

It takes a psychic toll to comment upon news which is so relentlessly grim. Imagine that someone you love dearly were dying a slow and painful death from cancer. Would you be eager to describe their symptoms and catalog their suffering in a daily blog?

The nation has already come so far down the road to socialism that it would be difficult to avoid completing the journey under the best of circumstances. The fear and despair caused by another Great Depression would, I fear, be the catalyst the left needs to take America beyond the "soft socialism" of Western Europe and into the kind of totalitarian socialism seen in the Cuba of the Castro brothers or that which is taking shape in the Venezuela under Chavez.

If the Administration and the congressional Democrats keep to their present course we are headed for the absolute collapse of the American economic system, hyperinflation and an unemployment rate which will reach, or even exceed, 20 percent.

Such wreckage would be the perfect opportunity for the left to declare the idea of free minds and free markets upon which the American experiment in Republican self government is based a failure and institute a planned and directed economy for a planned and directed population.

The tools which the tyrant will use have already been forged and embedded within our law and custom. Our legislature no longer allows the unconstitutionality of a bill to act as any obstacle to its passage, nor the executive to its signing. Large segments of the judiciary feel free to simply invent law out of thin air, using if necessary foreign law as a framework for its rulings.

The groundwork for disarming the population has already been laid in the network of gun control laws which infest our nation at the federal, state and local level. And the government is now promising to take up the issue of censorship of the one media in which a voice of opposition can still reach a mass audience, broadcast radio (fear not bloggers, they'll come for the Internet next).

And the nation's law enforcers have already given ample evidence that they will not stand with their fellow citizens and refuse to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws by their past refusal to stand with their fellow citizens and refuse to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws. Unless I was asleep the day that every uniformed officer on the NYPD called in sick and said that he wouldn't feel well enough to come back to work until the Sullivan Act was repealed.

The only wild card is the US military and I strongly suspect that the most they will do in resistance to the new order will be to quietly let it be known to the regime that it would be "counterproductive" to attempt to use military personnel in preforming gun confiscation sweeps or to track down and destroy underground radio transmitters (and those who are transmitting on them).

I do not believe that the nation must go down this path, but I do think that there is a good chance that it will.

The handbasket is nearing its destination

Now we see the strings

WASHINGTON (AP) - Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) (WFC) abruptly canceled Tuesday a pricey Las Vegas casino junket for employees after a torrent of criticism that it was misusing $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money.

The company initially defended the trip after The Associated Press reported it had booked 12 nights beginning Friday at the Wynn Las Vegas and the Encore Las Vegas. But within hours, investigators and lawmakers on Capitol Hill had scorned the bank, and the company canceled.

The conference is a Wells Fargo tradition. Previous all-expense-paid trips have included helicopter rides, wine tasting, horseback riding in Puerto Rico and a private Jimmy Buffett concert in the Bahamas for more than 1,000 of the company's top employees and guests.

"In light of the current environment, we have now decided to cancel this event as well," the company said Tuesday night in a news release that also said the it had never planned to use taxpayer bailout money for the trip.

A little History lesson is in order. Remember back when the bailout money was first being handed out? Wells Fargo never asked for a dime of taxpayer money. They didn't need it. That bank had been well managed and had avoided the kind of toxic lending practices which the federal government had been encouraging for years in the name of driving up poor/minority home ownership.

Yet in the meeting called in Washington which the Wells Fargo CEO was required to attend he was told that his bank would not be able to opt out of the bailout. He was bullied and browbeaten and told that it was essentially his "patriotic duty" to accept a large chunk of taxpayer cash that his bank did not want or need (think of Czechoslovakia "negotiating" with Nazi Germany over the Sudetenland - hint, Wells Fargo is Czechoslovakia).

At the time many of us wondered why the government would be so keen to waste bailout money by forcing it on a well managed bank that was begging not to have to take it.

Now we know the reason.

As long as Wells Fargo or any other bank took one dime of bailout money, willingly or unwillingly, they opened the door to the government sitting in judgment on every aspect of their business practices.

This is what the left wants for all American businesses and all American citizens. To make us all dependent in some way or other upon government largess so that dictate to all of us the terms under which we will be allowed to live our lives and earn our livings.

Is that what the American people really intended when they went to the polls last November; to turn the USA into an Obama/Pelosi "worker's paradise"?

I'm back

Contrary to the rumors that some have been spreading (thank's Liz, you will get yours one day) I was neither in jail nor "drying out" in a private facility in Virginia.

Mother Calhoon was in for the weekend so my schedule was not my own.

As I return to the computer to check the news I see that congress has pledged up to 7.7 trillion in handouts to "stimulate the economy" by bailing out poorly run businesses.

Friends, this is an incomprehensible amount of money which the federal government does not have and which the economy cannot afford to have sucked out of the private sector and "redistributed" to losers who have fraked up their balance sheets so badly that they need the moral equivalent of armed robbery to keep their heads above water.

We are literally looking at the end of the United States of America here.

And the tragedy here is that it in no way had to happen.

We were not conquered by a stronger nation nor we brought down by plague or famine. Ecological upheavals did not render our land unproductive and resource depletion did not steal our ability to make the things we need to defend ourselves and maintain our lifestyle.

We simply chose to commit national suicide.