The Green's goal

I have a little free time today so I wanted to bring a few things to your attention that I ran across over the past few days.  The first of them is this essay from American Thinker on the true motives and goals of the green movement.

Green Twilight  

By J. R. Dunn

There's something satisfyingly symbolic about the unfolding Solyndra scandal.  A government "investment" based on a totally spurious Green rationale collapses, threatening to take part of the administration with it.  What more apt illustration of the current status of environmentalism?  It could scarcely go better if you'd scripted it.

It's often been said that Obama is a closet Marxist out to transform the U.S. into something resembling a people's republic.  I've never completely agreed with this contention.  For one thing, he's not precisely a Marxist; he's a Marxisant, a useful French word denoting someone who has memorized all the slogans while not bothering his head with any of the theory.  "Spread the wealth around" is a pure Marxisant statement, just as his attempts to stir up class hatred against private jet-owning billionaires is pure Marxisant behavior.  An actual Marxist would be far more subtle and convoluted, thanks to his grasp of theory and revolutionary tradition.  Obama has neither.  What he practices is bong politics, the kind of thing you'd hear in the college dorm after the third or fourth bowl: "If I was running things, man, I'd like, get rid of money, y'know?  Money messes with your head, right?  So you get rid of it, and then..."

It would be much closer to the point, and fitting in nicely with the bong ideal, to say that Obama wishes to establish a "watermelon" state, in which strict centralization and collectivization are implemented to create not a worker's paradise, but a Green utopia.  Consider the fact that many of Obama's policies -- and almost all of the most noxious ones -- are in service of some environmentalist daydream or other.  Shutting down Gulf oil exploration; new and onerous regulations for coal plants; attempts to halt exploitation of the Marcellus shale; foot-dragging on the Keystone XL pipeline; promotion of electric cars, wind power, bullet trains, and what have you.

"Obamanomics," as James Pethokoukis recently put it, "is about the top-down redistribution of wealth and income.  Government spending on various 'green' subsidies and programs, along with a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, would enrich key Democrat constituencies: lawyers, public sector unions, academia and non-profits."  Pure communism is no longer the goal -- it's the environmentalist state that lies closest to the heart of the modern social democrat.  Obama is unquestionably an authoritarian, an autocrat, whatever you wish to call him, but his hue is as much green as it is red.

So it's a real pleasure to see the entire environmentalist edifice falling to pieces just as they thought victory was in their hands.  Cap 'n' trade was dead on arrival.  Global warming is unlikely to recover from the e-mail scandal, however far the cover-up may extend.  The electric automobile has turned out to be less an automotive revolution than a third car for wealthy Democratic donors.  And now the centerpiece of the Green agenda, renewable energy, has taken what may well turn out to be a mortal hit.

Note that none of these were brought about by rational arguments or serious opposition.  Rationality per se has never made so much as a dent in the green worldview.  What happened was that all the green innovations reached a certain point where they could no longer be sustained by the illusions of the faithful, whereupon they crashed and burned.  They were overcome by their own internal contradictions more than any other single factor.

Rational opposition to the greens has consistently misinterpreted the movement's core beliefs.  Critics have concentrated on arguments that wind, solar, and squirrel-on-a-treadmill power cannot replace brute force methods such as nuclear, coal, and oil.  That electric go-carts are no substitute for technologically mature internal-combustion cars, that bullet trains cannot possibly compete with jetliners.  All this is true -- and all this is irrelevant.

It's all irrelevant because green initiatives are not meant to replace anything.  They are intended to form the basis of a new, deindustrialized society with minimal power generation, limited air travel (or travel of any sort, for that matter), and local, nonindustrial economies.  In a green society, there will be no massive power plants, no private automobiles, no jetliners.  There will be no industrial products at all beyond those required by the environmentalist elite.  Picture Al Gore, his staff, and a half-million peasants.  That is the green United States of the 22^nd century.

As I pointed out in Death by Liberalism, environmentalists have in no way been reticent about the type of society they're aiming for -- one as close to that of Neolithic hunter-gatherers as possible.  That was the last point in time when human beings were fully integrated into the ecology, when they dominated nothing, and were in large part simply animals that talked.

The goal is not to save resources or to conserve the environment.  It is to restore human beings to a point where they are simply another part of the ecology.   It will not be purely Neolithic -- however close they may be to Mother Gaia, greens have no desire to spend their nights in caves.  Agriculture will be necessary to raise ethanol crops (not to mention arugula) for the green aristocracy.  It will be a village culture, poor, primitive, and ignorant of anything other than the fact that humanity has sinned against Gaia and must make amends.  Only the green elite will be allowed power, travel, and information.

This is the society that the premises accepted by Al Gore, John Holdren, Lisa Jackson, and Barack Obama will lead to.  (Though as stated above, Obama probably grasps only the slogans.)  What they have been engaged in is setting up the basic framework for such a system.

So rational debate about kilowatt-hours, ridership, vehicle range, or anything else is simply beside the point.  The California bullet train goes from nowhere to nowhere because it is supposed to go from nowhere to nowhere.  There is no point in connecting LA, San Francisco, and San Diego if those cities are going to be shrunken to a tiny fraction of their current size, granted that they are allowed to remain at all.  Those cities are unsustainable as they now exist, and will be shut down under any serious environmentalist regime.  The bullet train's current path instead is limited to the Central Valley, the state's primary agricultural area.  Conclusions can be left as an exercise for the student.

The same is true of the fossil fuel industry.  The discovery that the Marcellus shale formations of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York hold up to 400 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would gladden the heart of any true environmentalist, who would trade safe, clean-burning domestic fuel for smelly foreign oil in a second.  But this discovery interferes with the long-term green agenda: cutting off access to fossil fuels, then shutting down entire industries as their power source vanishes.  So gas shale exploitation must be strangled -- the ideal requires it. 

Deindustrialization, depopulation, a global return to a style of living not seen since the medieval period -- with modern medicine, cybernetics, and alternate power for the lucky, of course.  Conservatives simply don't grasp this, any more than the Russian aristocracy grasped the truth of revolutionary socialism.  They knew that the revolutionaries were a threat, that any society run by their like would be a disaster, but they could not get their minds around the fact that the fate planned for them and their entire class was annihilation, either in the cellars of the Lubyanka or in the snows of Siberia.  What we look back on as history was not even a nightmare to those people.

So it's good to see the greens fail.  Not due to resistance, though there has been no small amount, and it is increasing.  It is more due to sheer unworthiness to exist.  The problem for the greens is that there is no single step from current reality to their utopia.  They must make a series of small steps, and none of those small steps are feasible.  Almost no one will buy their electric zipmobiles.  Their solar power tech can't succeed even with half-billion-dollar subsidies.  The AGW crowd can't convince anybody even with the help of open scientific fraud and a near-total media blackout.

Fourteen more subsidy applications by renewables firms are pending.  The long collapse has only begun.*

*Breaking news: the Energy Department on September 23 turned down a $275 loan guarantee to Solar City LLC while First Solar was unable to meet the deadline for a $1.9-billion guarantee.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.

Many people will be tempted to dismiss Mr. Dunn's theory that the green movement's end game is a world where a small elite (them) lives like kings on the backs of a great mass of ignorant serfs who live short hard illiterate lives of perpetual toil.

However before rejecting one should consider that the elites have built exactly that kind of society every chance they've gotten for the entire span of human history.

The fact is that the kind of society Mr. Dunn envisions as the goal of Al Gore and his like-minded brethren in the global left-wing elite has been the norm for most of human history.  What doomed those societies was technological progress.  As workers became more productive some of the surplus wealth that was created found its way into the hands of the working people who used it to improve their lives.  They began to have the money to do things like educate their children.  Craftsmen and merchants had the surplus cash and time to invent things that made them even more productive (like the printing press and insurance and joint stock companies).

The upward spiral of technological progress uplifted the lives of everyone who lived in the societies which embraced the new ways of doing things (first Europe then America) and allowed them to leave those parts of the world which rejected modernity in the dust (this is why the West is a good place to live and the Islamic world is a hell-hole).

Al Gore and his ilk have learned the lessons of history.  They know that for the common men and women to be denied freedom they must be denied knowledge, technology and power (as in cheap electricity and cheap motor fuel).  If they can take society back to a point where the average person has access only to the power of wind, water, sun and muscle then the vast majority of the population will have to devote almost every waking hour to the simple production of enough food to keep from starving.

Make all of this misery acceptable to the common man through a religious conviction that to live any other way would destroy the planet but that the anointed elite have a right to things like air travel, 24 hour electricity, air conditioning, flush toilets, cardiac pacemakers, literacy and food that has to be transported over long distances (like fresh fruit in winter) because those elites enlightened leadership is the only thing keeping the planet from being consumed in the hellfire of global climate change and you have a recipe for a stable aristocratic society that could endure for a millennium.

It is this kind of society that the global green elites are striving for.  And their movement has greater power because many of them do not even fully realize what they are doing.  To many of them, especially celebrities and wealthy dilettantes it is simply that the planet is in trouble (the earth has a fever) and they are the only ones with the wisdom to save it.  This commitment to saving the planet and all of the little people who are too ignorant to know what is good for them entitles them to ride around in luxury SUV's and fly on private jets because their time is so valuable and their lives are so important that must be protected.

Of course Al Gore's mansion uses more electricity than some Third World nations - but only because he devotes nearly every waking second to saving the earth from Big Oil and the GOP.  Of course Barack Obama and his wife take multimillion dollar vacations every other week - in the middle of a recession with levels of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression - but they work so hard saving the nation from the Tea Party and french fries.  This kind of thinking feeds upon itself and breeds more and worse.  It leads as inexorably to the kind of world Mr. Dunn predicts as death leads to decay.

This is why I have always maintained that the left is evil and must be opposed.

Bailing out the bailout

Detroit News has an article on their website about Ford's decision to pull its TV add in which a customer explains that he bought a Ford at least in part because Ford didn't take government bailout money. 

Supposedly the decision came as a response to pressure from the White House.

. . . Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early '09 and again when the ad flap arose. And more.


With President Barack Obama tuning his re-election campaign amid dismal economic conditions and simmering antipathy toward his stimulus spending and associated bailouts, the Ford ad carried the makings of a political liability when Team Obama can least afford yet another one. Can't have that.

The ad, pulled in response to White House questions (and, presumably, carping from rival GM), threatened to rekindle the negative (if accurate) association just when the president wants credit for their positive results (GM and Chrysler are moving forward, making money and selling vehicles) and to distance himself from any public downside of his decision.

I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions about what it means for our democracy when the president can seemingly order a private business to pull an advertisement in which they simply tell the easily documented truth.  What I want to draw your attention to is the authors repetition of a myth which has been promoted aggressively by the Democrats and their left-wing allies in the media.

. . . a sizable cadre of current and would-be customers oppose the notion of taxpayer bailouts for automakers, whatever the economic costs to the industrial Midwest and the nation of letting them collapse. Meaning there's an advantage Ford can press to remind folks that it didn't receive direct payouts from Treasury.

The myth is that the choice for the government was between letting the auto makers "collapse" or bailing them out with taxpayer money.  In real life a business which is losing money not because it can't make or sell its product but because of something like excessive debt doesn't collapse absent a bailout.  What it does is seek the protection of a bankruptcy court while it restructures it debt under the authority of a bankruptcy judge.

In the big automakers case the problem was the massive costs of servicing the pension and healthcare costs of retired employees.  In GM's case something like $6000.00 in these legacy costs were attached to every car that rolled off of their assembly lines.  If the car companies had entered bankruptcy they would have been able to rewrite the deals that they made with the United Auto Workers Union and reduce these costs significantly.  This would have been bad for retired auto workers but when you allow your union to force your employer to agree to costs which it cannot possibly sustain you don't deserve a lot of sympathy.

The real reason for the bailout of the auto makers was to rescue the retired UAW members from having to pay the price of their union's bad conduct in the years when Detroit car companies were making money hand over fist because all their foreign competitors had either been bombed to ruins (Germany and Japan) or had been ruined by their government's decision to embrace socialism (the UK). 

The UAW used the threat of strikes to arm twist the auto makers into agreeing to contracts which offered employees the chance to retire at 55 and live the life of a modern lotus eater at company expense.  That this would eventually bankrupt the auto companies was not something that the union cared to consider.  The bill eventually came due and the union called upon their great socialist benefactor in the White House and an ocean of taxpayer money was poured down upon their heads.

I don't wonder that the Administration and its lickspittles in the media are so desperate to conceal these facts.  If the average voter was made aware of the fact that the bailouts were never about keeping GM and Chrysler from closing their doors and laying off all their employees and devastating the economy of the Midwest.  But were instead about keeping a bunch of retired union thugs' snouts firmly embedded in the gravy train - at taxpayer expense.  Then there would be even more hell for Obama and his party to pay next year then there already is.

The "NOT" candidate

From American Thinker:

Herman Cain shocked the GOP world on Saturday by winning the Florida straw poll, garnering 37% of the vote.

Rick Perry, whose debate performances have come under fire in the last 72 hours finished a distant second with 15%. Mitt Romney got 14% for third place.

[. . .]

Is Cain now the "Anybody but Romney" candidate? There were apparently a lot of Perry voters who switched to Cain on the fly. But do they think the Georgia businessman can win?

Put simply, if Barack Obama can win then just about anybody not currently serving time for child molestation ought to be able to win. 

Or perhaps Obama is the Harriet Miers of presidential politics.   Remember when Bush nominated Miers a number of commentators noted that the nomination of a mediocre and generally unqualified candidate for the high court was hardly unknown.  However the outcry over Ms. Miers essentially raised the bar on the quality of Supreme Court nominees. . .

I just remembered Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.  

Never mind.  

Back to the current presidential race.

Both Romney and Obama have to be worried in that the Republican primary voters are looking for an "anyone but Romney" candidate to vote for and voters nationally are looking for an "anyone but Obama" to vote for.  

This leaves the GOP in a position which it has not been in since 1980.  Pretty much anybody we nominate is going to win.  So why not forget about "playing it safe" and nominating a candidate that the mainstream media tells us is electable (you know someone like Gerald Ford, Bob Dole or John McCain) and nominate someone like Ronald Reagan.

Many people, especially Democrats, the mainstream media (sorry, redundant) and establishment Republicans considered Reagan to be a lightweight (just an Hollywood actor) and a dangerous lunatic for wanting to confront the Soviet Union.  Yet when he got the nomination he won an easy victory over Jimmy Carter because Carter was just so damn incompetent that people were willing to vote for "anybody but Jimmah" 

My choice for the Reagan of the 21st century would be Sarah Palin but she isn't the only one who fills the Not Obama, Not Romney - and the increasingly attractive Not Perry - description.  Cain might just do, as the Florida voters seem to think.

Affirmative Action Oscars

From The LA Times:

When Oscar nominations were announced earlier this year, it was impossible to avoid this unsubtle fact: All of the major nominees were white. And when the presenters had all taken their turn on the Kodak Theatre stage, not a single black man was among them, a fact that Samuel Jackson noted tartly in an email to a Times reporter.
It was a sharp turn from the 2009-10 season, when “Precious” and "The Blind Side" drew numerous accolades, and there were black nominees for best director, best picture and best actress (and black winners for best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay).

For anyone concerned about which way the Oscars could go this year, there's reason to take heart.

When I was in high school we were told that each homeroom had to nominate two girls to run for homecoming queen and that one of them had to be black.

Perhaps the Oscars could adopt a similar policy and create a rule that at least one black actor, actress, writer and director must be nominated in each appropriate category.  If no blacks win on the basis of votes then a computer can randomly select one of the black nominees to receive an Oscar by decree.

Then every year we would have a diverse and inclusive award ceremony regardless of the quality of the work that they had done the previous year and the Oscars would "look like America".  That is they would become a racial spoils system in which members of favored groups would receive handouts and set asides without any regard to merit.

Of course this system would have to be extended to other favored groups beyond blacks.  There would have to be Oscars set aside for Latinos and Asians.  Then there is the fact of the massive under-representation of trans-gendered actors in leading roles in action movies.  For example the studios should be required to produce a remake of Dirty Harry with Chaz Bono in the role of Inspector Callahan.

Or Hollywood could continue letting the Oscars be a merit based award system.  But then they gave Oscars to Al Gore and Michael Moore, so I guess the ship has sailed on that.

Looking out my back door

Not all in Hollywood were against US

I lifted this from Big Hollywood because it mirrors my thinking exactly.

The Washington Times is wrong. Hollywood wasn’t AWOL in the War on Terror. In fact, just the opposite is true. Hollywood summoned every ounce of financial and star power at their disposal to fight this war.

Unfortunately, they chose to fight for the other side.

If our history is written by honest brokers, this generation of  Hollywoodists will be remembered as those who openly enabled evil and spent hundreds of millions of dollars making bombs for the enemy — box office bombs. Over a dozen of them, specifically engineered with equal parts lies and hate and propaganda to undermine morale at home and on the battlefield in the hopes that we would lose this war. 

Never forget the crime committed in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon on that terrible day.  And never forget  how Hollywood turned on your country.

There were some exceptions, however, and chief among them was Joel Surnow the co-creator of “24.” Each week, for eight seasons, he gave this country a hero who openly loved America, did what was necessary to protect her, and who was willing to pay a terrible price for it. ”24″ also delivered the goods. Cathartic, exciting and righteous without being self-righteous, the addictive adventures of Jack Bauer became an oasis in a cesspool of Hollywood product delivering the exact opposite message. 

As the face of the program, Surnow paid a price for his apostasy and because he’s a smart man who knows how the world works, my guess is that he knew that someday he would. We all watched as some of the biggest forces in the world of entertainment and politics ganged up to exact their revenge with “The Kennedys.” Don’t believe for a second that wasn’t a form of payback.

For whatever it’s worth, we thank you, Joel Surnow.  You can’t imagine what it meant to millions of us  to have something to count on over those weeks and years — something that told us we weren’t crazy and we weren’t alone.

And thank you to the subversives who used their art and magnificent artistry to take our side through thinly veiled allegory. Thank you Frank Miller and Zack Snyder for “300.” Thank you Christopher Nolan for “The Dark Knight.”

There were others. Men like Gary Sinise who tirelessly support the troops and David Zucker who took the fight directly to that anti-American pig Michael Moore. There is also Robert Davi, Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Michael Moriarty and those like them who have bravely and eloquently spoken out against the talking points issued by their Hollywood Overlords.

For fear of missing one, I won’t attempt to name everyone in Hollywood who did the right thing, who openly supported our military and refused to participate in the resume-enhancing undermining of our country. Within the context of the whole of the entertainment business, however, they make up a heartbreakingly short list. But you know who are and we know who you are and we thank you. 

The rest of you can burn in Hell.

 What a terrible testament to how far Hollywood has fallen.

John Ford was a liberal and John Wayne was a conservative.  They argued frequently about politics however they remained friends and they cooperated in the production of magnificently patriotic movies like They Were Expendable (click  the link for part one of Big Hollywood's seven part series on the production of that movie). 

We have lost that today and it is because of the venom of the left.

May they burn in hell indeed.

9/11/2001 -9/11/2011

Never

Ever

Forget

Much of TV today sucks

I hate reality shows.  Survivor, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, The Apprentice, they all blow.  And don't get me started on Pawn Stars and Ice Road Truckers and other crap shows where we watch people doing their jobs.  I would joke and say that the next thing would be a show about garbagemen but I fully expect some kind of "Hollywood Trash Collector" show to be premiering soon.  If not that then some kind of show where  eco-nannies or poverty nazis go through people's trash and scold them for their wastefulness. 

Oh, and how about this.  Since unemployment is high and unlikely to go much lower as long as Obama is still in office how about "Real Unemployed Deadbeats of [insert city, state or county of your choice]" where the camera follows some layabouts as they spend their two years sponging off the taxpayers.

Respect must be earned

From FoxNews.com:

Republicans have decided they're not going to give a rebuttal to President Obama's jobs speech later this week, a decision House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi took as a high affront to the White House. 

At least three GOP lawmakers also have announced they're not going to show up for the presidential address. House Speaker John Boehner's office then confirmed Tuesday evening that nobody from the party would deliver an official televised response. 

Pelosi said the party's "silence" would "speak volumes about their lack of commitment to creating jobs." 

"The Republicans' refusal to respond to the president's proposal on jobs is not only disrespectful to him, but to the American people," Pelosi said. 

 No Ms. Pelosi.  What is "disrespectful to the American people" is Obama using an address to a joint session of congress to make what will amount to a campaign speech.  A speech in which he will whine about how none of the nation's problems are his fault.  About how he inherited this mess from Bush.  About how the Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the economy to make him look bad. 

He will propose a course of action so wrong-headed and disastrous that Republicans in the House will view it as dead on arrival and he will do this on purpose.  This will be done in order to give him an issue to run on next year - Republican obstructionism.  This is because he knows that any program of government action which would actually stimulate private sector growth would by necessity involve public sector shrinkage.  Taxes would have to be lowered and the tax code reformed.  Regulations would have to be evaluated with an eye to simplification or outright repeal.  Government would have to admit that there are a great many things that it does not do well and has no business (from either a constitutional or practical standpoint) even attempting. And the government payroll would have to be trimmed which would mean that many public employees being laid off.

It goes without saying that this course of action, while indisputably good for the nation, would be anathema to Obama's (and the Democrat party's left-wing base).  Therefore there is absolutely no chance that Obama anything even close to a program which would have the slightest chance of encouraging economic growth.  It simply isn't in him to put the nation's interest before his own.

So for these reasons the GOP is doing exactly the right thing in refusing to offer a reply to what will certainly be a nasty little telepromptered screed.  Doing so would elevate Obama.  A reasoned response justify his empty words and confer upon him an illusion of respectability and reasonableness which he simply does not deserve.

What Republicans should do is boycott the speech.  Let it be obvious that Obama is making a partisan speech to a partisan audience.  If a Republican legislator feels that he must attend then he or she should be polite but offer only the most tepid and brief applause, refuse to stand for any ovation started by Democrats and leave the chamber immediately after the conclusion offering either no comment to the press or making only short statements about how sad it is to see such a great nation governed by such a small and inconsequential man.

The detailed response to why Obama's program of big government tax and spend statism is exactly the wrong thing to do can come in a day or two after our economists have had a chance to analyze it.

Runnin' off to freedom

H/T: American Thinker

We should stand up for what we believe

From The American Spectator:

Most people view the anti-Catholicism faced by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign as a prejudice they are glad our nation has left behind. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, is obviously not one of those people. His recent "Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith," if taken seriously by its readers, would re-instill the fear that any presidential candidate of faith would subsume their decision-making to the religious authority that they embrace.

It's strange that Keller would encourage such questions since he confesses, "I still remember, as a Catholic boy, being mystified and hurt by the speculation about John Kennedy's Catholicism -- whether he would be taking orders from the Vatican." It seems that the good sense of his adolescence has been lost, possibly by his years of worshiping at the altar of secular sophistication.

Keller's particular concerns are the "weird" Mormonism of Romney and Huntsman, the "fervid" evangelicalism of Bachmann and Perry, and the "conservative wing of Catholicism" supposedly represented by Santorum. Regarding Catholicism, the faith in which Keller was raised, he explicitly raises the issue faced by JFK five decades ago -- the separation of Church and State.

The level of furious mis-logic in Keller's article explains much about the decline of the newspaper under his leadership and his upcoming departure to the op-ed page. But, importantly, it represents a powerful segment of the Democratic Party elite that views the continued prevalence of traditional religious beliefs in the U.S. as the chief obstacle to its ideological aims.

[snip]

Keller poses three questions each of the GOP presidential candidates should answer -- on whether public schools should teach evolution; whether the U.S. is a "Christian nation"; and whether Muslims should be appointed to the federal bench.

The authors of the AmSpec piece, Deal W Hudson and Matt Smith, believe:

Following Keller's recommendation would only trivialize the political conversation heading toward the 2012 election. But Keller evidently sees an upside in creating a religious sideshow that would alienate moderates, a doubtful assumption, since those same moderates weren't affected by Obama's twenty years at the feet of a pastor like Jeremiah Wright.

However I tend to disagree. I think that answering those questions from a conservative perspective would help rather than hurt a candidate.  Here is how I would address each of them:


Q: Should public schools teach evolution?
A: Yes.  Public schools should give students a good grounding in the theory of evolution including the problems the theory faces such as the lack of transitional forms.  The fact that the fossil record shows large numbers of species appearing suddenly and remaining stable for million and millions of years should be explained.  The theories which have been put forward such as the "hopeful monster theory" (where a lizard lays an egg and a bird or mammal hatches from it) should be explored and it should be revealed to the students that science has absolutely no naturalistic explanation for how the massive amounts of information (terabytes worth of data) that would be needed to transform one species into another just "appear" seemingly out of nowhere.  It should be made clear to the students that the neo-darwinian synthesis is not supported by the current scientific data and that no theory which both relies only upon naturalistic processes and has any empirical evidence to support it has been advanced to replace it.  My approach does not call for teaching biblical creationism, or any other religion's "origin story".  It does not even call for teaching the theory of intelligent design.  It simply requires the schools to tell students the truth about the current state of evolutionary theory rather than engage in an intellectual whitewash.


Q: Is the US a "Christian nation"?
A: In the sense that most Americans identify themselves as Christian yes.  In the sense that America has an official state religion no.  The Constitution forbids the government from establishing a state church and from preventing any person from practicing their religion as their conscience dictates.  Provided they harm no one else of course.  You may speak in tongues all you wish, but you can't give a rattlesnake to a child to handle.  You can go to synagogue but you can't stone people who break the sabbath.  You can pray toward Mecca five times per day but you can't cut the head off a woman who refuses to wear a head covering.  The real question is what the Framers intended to prohibit in the Establishment Clause.  Did they really mean that it was an illegal "establishment of religion" to allow a voluntary student led prayer at a high school event such as a football game?  Did they really mean that allowing a local church to put a manger scene on the courthouse lawn at Christmas (or a synagogue to set up menorah at Hanukkah)  was the same thing as setting up a taxpayer funded Church of the United States?  I believe that the answer to those questions is absolutely not.  If it were otherwise they would not have created the positions of Chaplin for the House and Senate and would not have chosen to open congress with prayer.  They would not have chosen to open sessions of the Supreme Court with a bailiff shouting "God save the United States and this honorable Court!".


Q: Should a Muslim be appointed to the federal bench?
A: Yes, provided they meet the same standards that any other federal judge should be held to.  Those standards are an appropriate education and adequate experience and a record which shows an unwavering commitment to the principles of originalism.  In other words I could care less about the race, sex, religion or national origin of a judge if I believe that he or she will be what amounts to a judicial clone of Clarence Thomas.  I don't care if he is a black atheist from Zimbabwe if he will rule that the Second Amendment means that any citizen has the right to carry a firearm, openly or concealed, any place where they have a legal right to be and I don't care if she is a lesbian Wiccan whose mother was a Pacific Islander and whose father was Puerto Rican if she will rule that the Commerce Clause means absolutely nothing other than that congress can prohibit one state from placing tariffs on the products from another state and that all laws predicated on any other interpretation of the Commerce Clause are null and void.


The left is attempting not so much to drive God from the public square (they don't believe in God so as far as they are concerned He isn't there to begin with) but to drive people of faith from participation in the public life of the nation.  It is time that religious people fought back by openly and unapologetically acknowledging their faith.  Surveys show that the majority of people in the US do not believe in the blind materialistic theory of evolution, do not support government actions like the removal of the San Diego cross and take no offense at prayer at public events provided that it is not aggressively sectarian.  Leftist elites who show their contempt for America's religious heritage are also showing their contempt for ordinary Americans.  A candidate who calls the elites on that contempt will find themselves backed by a substantial majority of the American people.

No. 3 Stranglehold



One of the greatest hist from the A number 1 conservative gun-toting rocker, Ted Nugent!

Miss Ann is Talking

That means that YOU are listening!

LIBERALS' VIEW OF DARWIN UNABLE TO EVOLVE

August 31, 2011

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were "gaps" in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in The New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, "Evolution, I think, is correct!"

That's the most extended discussion of Darwin's theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

There's a reason the Darwin cult prefers catcalls to argument, even with a 9-year-old at the helm of their debate team.

Darwin's theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the "fittest" to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Otherwise, the mutations aren't random, they are deliberate -- and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about "intelligent design" and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record -- for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

But that's not what the fossil record shows. We don't have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the "trade secret" of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have "secrets.")

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Unlike high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory were correct. He said there should be "interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps."

But far from showing gradual change with a species slowly developing novel characteristics and eventually becoming another species, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing.

Darwin's response was to say: Start looking! He blamed a fossil record that contradicted his theory on the "extreme imperfection of the geological record."

One hundred and fifty years later, that record is a lot more complete. We now have fossils for about a quarter of a million species.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.

Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: "The situation hasn't changed much."

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin's time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. "Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record," Raup said, "such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."

The scant fossil record in Darwin's time had simply been arranged to show a Darwinian progression, but as more fossils were discovered, the true sequence turned out not to be Darwinian at all.

And yet, more than a century later, Darwin's groupies haven't evolved a better argument for the lack of fossil evidence.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted -- without evidence -- that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, "the dog ate our fossils" excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery The New York Times called "among the most spectacular in this century," Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures -- precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn't fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence -- it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of five million to 10 million years.

Even the eye simply materializes, fully formed, in the pre-Cambrian fossil record.

Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian Period was not "evolution," it was "a revolution."

So the Darwiniacs pretended they missed the newspaper that day.

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

These aren't scientists. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true so that they can explain to themselves why they are here, without God. (It's an accident!)

Any evidence contradicting the primitive religion of Darwinism -- including, for example, the entire fossil record -- they explain away with non-scientific excuses like "the dog ate our fossils."

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER

DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK

1130 Walnut, Kansas City, MO 64106 

Miss Ann is entirely correct here.

Darwin believed that as more fossils were discovered the missing transitional forms would turn up and give us a complete picture of the evolution of most species, including man.

It never happened and the theories that have been put forward to explain the sudden appearance of new species require more pure faith to believe than the biblical account of 6-day creation.

We are now supposed to believe some variation of the "hopeful monster" theory in which a lizard lays an egg and a bird hatches out of it.  There is absolutely no mechanism to account for this other than the intervention of an outside intellect with the power to bring about such a change but we are told that any variation of intelligent design theory is off limits because it mixes religion with science.

Yet science wishes for us to believe something which is flatly impossible.

Who are the faith-based fanatics wanting to shove their belief system down other people's throats?

Oh, and while you are grieving over the death of the "horse series" in which eohippus was supposed to have evolved into equus ponder this.

Homo Sapiens is supposed to be about two hundred thousand years old.  Yet agriculture and animal husbandry and cities and all the other foundations of modern civilization are only around 6000 years old.

Are we really supposed to believe that people whose brains were essentially identical to ours and who therefore had all the potential that we have for observation and invention did nothing for one hundred and ninety-four thousand years except figure out slightly more efficient ways to chip flint spear points?  And then one day - in three widely separated places (the Nile river delta, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica) at essentially the exact same time and out of thin air - figured out how to lay the foundation for modern civilization? 

Think about it.  In 1/32 of the time it took our ancestors to get to "fire good, dog friend" modern man gets to "the Eagle has landed" and the launch of the iPhone 5.

Again, who are the faith based fanatics trying to shove an irrational belief system down other people's throats?

Scaming the taxpayer

Wisconsin Town Bars Republicans From Labor Day Parade

In previous years, Republicans have worked the parade route, but this year they will not be allowed to take part. The parade is organized by local unions, which said Wisconsin Republicans "have openly attacked worker's rights."

Wisconsin politics — which hasn't been pretty of late — has made its way into a local Labor Day parade. The organizers of the Wausau Labor Day parade announced they would not let Republican lawmakers take part in the Sept. 5 display. The parade is organized by 30 local unions.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports:

In a statement, [Randy Radtke, president of the council,] added that the parade is intended to celebrate working men and women and what the labor movement has given them: weekends, a 40-hour workweek, child labor protection and a safe working environment.

It should be pointed out that all those "gifts" of the labor movement to the working men and women were only made possible by advances in worker productivity made possible by entrepreneurial capitalism (imagine a campaign to give people free air travel before the airplane was invented).  The same entrepreneurial capitalism that the current labor movement, and its allies in the Democrat party view as a blood enemy and are attempting to destroy.

It was not until advancing technology made it possible for employers to give those benefits to workers that a movement to bring them about became possible.  In other words the labor movement was not a response to long hours, poor working conditions and low wages.  Rather it was an early indicator that it was becoming possible to relieve those conditions.

The fact is that those improvements would have come about anyway even without the labor movement.  It just would have taken a little longer for employers to begin raising wages and improving conditions to attract and retain good workers.  As society has advanced socially the ethos of employers has moved more and more toward providing generous benefits to workers and labor unions have become less and less necessary.  This is why the share of the private workforce represented by unions has been in steep decline for decades.

Add to this the union's tendency to support political candidates and policies that more and more Americans find objectionable and it becomes highly unlikely that organized labor will enjoy any kind of private sector comeback.

This is why the labor movement has concentrated more and more on the public sector.  However public sector unions have never been a good idea.  No less a liberal luminary than FDR pronounced the idea of unionizing government workers as “unthinkable and intolerable."


The reason that public worker unions are so toxic is that in a private sector labor negotiation on one side of the table sits management - representing the owners of the company - and on the other sits the union - representing the employes of the company.


The two sides have representation at the table.  In the case of a public sector labor negotiation the situation is different.  On one side of the table sits the public employee union and on the other sit politicians who depend for reelection upon campaign contributions from unions as organizations and from individual union members.  They also depend upon the votes of public employee unions and upon those union members to staff their campaigns at the grass roots level.  If you doubt me try this experiment.  Come to the DNC convention in Charlotte next year and take a poll of the delegates and see just how high a percentage of them are members of public sector unions.


So in a public sector labor negotiation only one side - labor - is effectively represented at the table.  The great mass of private sector tax payers are shut out of the process and no one looks out for their interests.  And here is a dirty little secret.  Private sector workers are a big segment of those tax payers who have no representation at a public sector labor negotiation.


Private sector union members may think that they stand in solidarity with public sector union members however the reality is that public sector workers are parasites whose only way of increasing their prosperity is to make the private sector workers poorer.  This is because government at any level produces nothing.  It creates no wealth and to survive it must drain the wealth of the private sector.


Most advocates of labor unions can only cite gains made decades in the past as justification for the continuing existence of unions.  There has been no advance in the situation of the average worker in the United States in at least the last 35 years which can be attributed to the intervention of organized labor.  Workers in the private sector have largely woken up to the fact that they mostly no longer need unions to look out for them.  Public sector workers will never come to that conclusion because in their case collective bargaining is a way for them to gain control of both sides of the negotiating process and write their own ticket.


However the price of that ticket is too high for the rest of us to continue paying.

Advice from the master

North Carolina needs a new governor

And a new state legislature that will clean up some of the accumulated crap left over from past Democrat controlled state government.  From Confederate Yankee:

North Carolina Governor Declares Every Concealed Carry Permit in eastern NC Invalid Due to Hurricane Irene

Thanks to a brain-dead state law foisted upon us by a Democratic state legislature (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-288.7), every time the governor—in this instance, Democrat Beverly Perdue—declares a state of emergency, it is illegal from that moment onward to carry a concealed weapon until the state of emergency has been declared over.

14-288.7. Transporting dangerous weapon or substance during emergency; possessing off premises; exceptions. (a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, it is unlawful for any person to transport or possess off his own premises any dangerous weapon or substance in any area:
(1) In which a declared state of emergency exists; or
(2) Within the immediate vicinity of which a riot is occurring.
(b) This section does not apply to persons exempted from the provisions of G.S. 14-269 with respect to any activities lawfully engaged in while carrying out their duties.
(c) Any person who violates any provision of this section is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

We've dealt with this bit of Democrat-generated stupidity before.

Governor Purdue made this declaration while the state was at work, meaning everyone who has a carry permit and lives east of Interstate 95 who was away from home instantly became a criminal by proclamation.

If we look at Google Maps, that means that a carry permit holder in Wilson dining at the Cracker Barrel is perfectly legal, but the permit holder a block to the east filling up on gas at the Kangaroo Express is now a criminal. 

Ridiculous. 

Update: I'd forgotten we were stuck with this crap last year as well.

An honest person going out to scrounge for supplies after a natural disaster like an earthquake or hurricane as well as someone who has to go to work or to seek medical attention in an area experiencing riots has a greater need to be armed.

The Democrat National Convention is coming to Charlotte next year.  What if your daughter worked as a nurse in a downtown clinic there?  She would need to show up because of the greater need for medical services the Convention will require.  Someone will need to treat all the extra cases of venereal disease such a gathering will bring to town.  Not to mention all the bottles, candles and other objects vacuum locked into men's anuses that will have to be extracted (and all the hamsters, gerbils and white mice that will need to be rescued from colons).  Then there is the ever present possibility that the scum and filth which make up the core of the Democrat Party will pull a 1968 and let their true natures come out to play.

Wouldn't you want your little girl to have a .40 caliber Glock tucked into her purse when she threads her way through that mass of human debris?

Hat Tip: KisP

Top Ten Conservative Songs

No. 4 Der Kommissar




After The Fire sings about the soul destroying oppression of communist East Germany.

Ignore at your own peril

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that almost anythign worth saying about the modern world has already been said by Rudyard Kipling.

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS

 by Rudyard Kipling

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

More about Ass-Clown Ron Paul

Patrick at the Pagan Temple left this comment to my post on Ron Paul’s ass-clowness.

“Actually, I agree in principle with Paul's foreign policy as much as I do his fiscal, economic beliefs. But where I do part company with him, in the strongest possible terms, is his naive views of Israel, the Middle East and Muslims in general, and Iran in particular. Those things betray a simplicity and even an ideological blindness that renders him unfit for office.”

I have a lot of fun tweaking the Paul supporters or “Paul pod-people” but like Patrick I agree with most of his economic policies. It is his libertarian views on foreign affairs that I cannot respect.

Paul's "naive views" are his foreign policy. What libertarians fail to realize is that George Washington’s “no entangling alliances” doctrine was a pragmatic calculation based on the infant Republic’s weakness compared to the great European powers – not an expression of an ideal.

The ideal embraced by all the founders (including men as different as Hamilton and Jefferson) was an America that would be at least the equal of any of the European powers in matters military, economic and political; an America that could act anywhere on the globe to protect its interests. This is why we went to war in North Africa against the Barbary Pirates to protect our sea lines of communication. This is why WWII was the right thing to do and why the long Cold War against communism was the right thing (including all the proxy wars like Korea and Vietnam and El Salvador and Nicaragua).

Even the idea that the Founders didn’t want America to have an “empire” as the term is currently defined by the left doesn’t hold water. The War of 1812 was as much about a US desire to capture Canada and bring it into the Union as it was about keeping our sailors from being impressed by the Royal Navy.

US support of Texas’ war of independence and the Californian Bear Flag Rebellion both had territorial aggrandizement at their heart. Can anyone but the most insane left-wing multiculturalist look at the way that the average Mexican lives and not think that the West Coast and Southwest are better off as part of the USA?

Our support for Cuba’s independence from Spain was begun by people who wanted to see Cuba become a state in the Union. That effort was defeated by “anti-imperialists” in the legislature, to the extreme detriment of the Cuban people.

Both the United States and the world are better off with an active and involved US than without it. Just as the British Empire did enormous good in its day (India is vastly better off for having been a British colony) The US has done in its and hopefully our day is long from over.

The current war against Islam is just the latest war against an existential threat to enlightened "classical liberal" culture.  From Christendom's first war against an expansionist Islamic empire to England's war against the fanatical Roman Catholic Spanish Empire to the United Kingdom's war against Napoleon's fanatical atheist French empire to the modern wars against fascism, Nazism and Marxism free people cannot remain free by hiding behind the illusion of secure borders (like the French hiding behind the Maginot Line) and practicing appeasement abroad. 

During the Second World War Switzerland embodied the libertarian ideal of maintaining a strong national defense but avoiding entangling foreign alliances while trading freely with all.  In fact they made enormous profits by trading with both the Axis and Allied powers while showing no moral aversion to taking payment from the Germans in gold extracted from the teeth of Jewish Holocaust victims.

What would the world look like today if the United States and the British Commonwealth had taken the same attitude?

What will the world look by the middle of the 21st century if we take that attitude toward the Islamic world today?

Why can't Ron Paul and other libertarians see that?

These things happen for a reason

From Philly.com:

The Maryland teenager secretly arrested by the FBI for allegedly conspiring with the woman from the Philadelphia suburbs known as Jihad Jane also spoke of a Columbine-style plot with a Pittsburgh-area friend in a jihadist chat room, according to sources and documents.

"I had a lot of thoughts about you today," Mohammed K. wrote to his Western Pennsylvania pen pal late last year. "About us both doing martyrdom operations together in my school. . . . It was like we both were in a big truck and had guns and we were shooting randomly at a huge crowd of kids."

The chats provide new insight into a boy who at age 15 allegedly began helping Colleen LaRose, aka "Jihad Jane," the 48-year-old Pennsburg woman who U.S. officials say represents a disturbing new face of homegrown terrorism.

Mohammed K. was 17 and a high school senior in Ellicott City, Md., when he allegedly wrote those threatening words. The Inquirer is not publishing his last name because he is a juvenile.

Mohammed's chat room friend was Emerson Begolly, a Pennsylvania State University student who was soon charged with soliciting unrelated terror attacks. Transcripts of the chats were publicly filed in that case.

During the Nov. 22, 2010, chat, Mohammed told Begolly he lived near National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

"The place where I live is a HOTBED of NSA and all the security agencies of Amrika (sic)," Mohammed wrote. "And the kids who study in my school proudly state that their parents work in NSA and FBI, and even carry key chains - piss me off."

"Like Columbine?" Begolly asked.

"Na'am, lol" Mohammed wrote, using the Arabic word for "yes" and Internet slang for "laughing out loud."

It could not be determined Saturday whether the authorities took any immediate action based on the threatening remarks, which were reported to the FBI by the anti-jihadist group MyPetJawa.

Neither Jeffrey Lindy, the Philadelphia lawyer representing Mohammed K., nor FBI spokesman J.J. Klaver would comment. Police and school officials in Howard County, Md., could not be reached.

Juvenile cases in federal court are rare, and terror cases rarer still. Federal law prohibits government officials from discussing them.

In February, LaRose pleaded guilty to terror-conspiracy charges as part of a failed plot to kill a Swedish artist whose cartoon of the prophet Muhammad with a dog's head had insulted many Muslims.

It has gotten to the point where it is almost boring to take note of stories like this as they have  become so common.

America went to war with two nations in response to Islamic terrorism and we have killed or captured most of the top leadership of al Qaeda, including bin Laden himself.  However our failure to identify the nature of the problem (which is nothing more or less than Islam itself) and our suicidal fealty to the culturally lethal ideologies of multiculturalism and political correctness have rendered us almost defenseless against this kind of home grown jihad and seriously hampered our ability to deal with the problem on an international level.

Right after Sept. 11 president Bush hosted Islamic religious leaders at the White House to prove that the US was not at war with Islam.  Then it came out that most of those imams were tied to terrorism in some way.  TSA screeners at airports are told not to pay any special attention to people who look Arab/Middle Eastern for fear of being accused of profiling.  If an Arab looks so suspicious that the screener just has to pay special attention to him (like the wires from his bomb vest are sticking out from under his jacket) they also have to pull aside several octogenarians and make them remove their adult diapers and fondle the genitals of a few three-year-old girls just to prove they aren't singling out an Arab/Muslim for special attention.

Christian and Jewish clergy must be banned from the 9/11 memorial service at Ground Zero but a building ruined by wreckage from one of the 9/11 planes (making it as much a part of Ground Zero as the WTC site) must be torn down so that a giant Islamic Victory Mosque can be built.

The United States has helped to bring about regime change in Egypt and Libya (actually going to war in Libya's case) to replace governments that were bad but not currently supporting Jihad terrorism with far worse governments that are connected with organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda. 

The United States and Western Europe (that part of the world once known as Christendom) has seemingly lost faith in itself.  In its value to the world.  It is very likely too late for Europe but not for the US.  That is if we screw up our courage and face facts and take appropriate action.

But our window of opportunity is rapidly closing.  The next presidential election must be about more than jobs and debt.  It must be a reaffirmation of the United States', and Western civilization's, inherent value and ongoing necessity in a world where the only alternatives are one kind of tyranny or another.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

No. 5 - Janie's Got A Gun



A great song about a young woman who takes responsibility for her own safety.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

No. 6.  That Ain't My America




This is Lynyrd Skynyrd at their best.

Ron Paul is an ass clown

And here's why!

Florida Republican Congressman John Mica offered the following morally clear Amendment (5/25/2011-H.AMDT.318 (A018) Amends H.R.1540):

Amendment requires that the rules of engagement [ROE] allow any military service personnel assigned to duty in a designated hostile fire area to have rules of engagement that fully protect their right to proactively defend themselves from hostile actions.

The results? (tallied here):

143 out of 185 Democrats present -- 77% -- voted against this amendment; 217 out of 235 Republicans present -- 92% -- voted for it.

As for the two Republicans in Congress running who are Presidential candidates, Michele Bachmann voted for the amendment; Ron Paul against it.

Mr. Paul's views on fiscal matters are just about perfect and if that were all there was to him I would vote for him in a heartbeat.  However there are also his libertarian views on defense and security policy and his libertarian "just surrender and get it over with" attitude makes him unfit for the White House.


Having said that I would still pick him over Obama.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

No. 7 Heroes by David Bowie.



Two lovers escaping from communist tyranny by going over the Berlin Wall.

No sympathy

Our friend Patrick who blogs at The Pagan Temple has posted his thoughts on the fatwa that was issued against late night TV douchbag David Letterman. 

I couldn't have said it better myself.

David Letterman shills for the political party which has the vapors any time any one takes note of the simple fact that we are at war with people who believe that the Koran is the word of God and who follow the example of Islam's founding prophet.

Let Mr. Letterman reap what the people he votes for - and gives millions of dollars of in-kind contributions to by using his show to mock conservatives (you know, the people who want to STOP the people who want to cut Dave's tongue out) - have sown.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

Number 8 is Manhattan Project by Rush.



Canadian group Rush has a number of songs which are loved by conservatives.  For example Trees, a song about the cruelty of enforced equality.



Then there is Red Barchetta, a song about a distopian future in which environmental extreamist have gained control and remade the nation in their image.



Free Will and Tom Sawyer are celebration of the independant spirit.



All things consdered it is no mystery why they have never been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Delusion alright, but not in the GOP

There is an essay by John Ziegler on American Thinker in which he argues that the withdrawal of Tim Pawlenty dooms the GOP's chances of defeating Barack Obama next year.  He believes that by failing to line up behind Gov. Pawlenty Republicans have proven that they are "delusional".

You can go read his piece for yourselves but his argument boils down to this.  Sarah Palin can't be elected because she resigned her governorship of Alaska before her term was complete and thus became a "quitter".  Of course the fact that Obama quit his Illinois State Senate job to run for the US Senate and then his US Senate job to run for president (if Obama serves out his complete term as POTUS this will be the first elected office he has ever held in which he didn't quit) did not stop him from being elected.

Ron Paul can't win because he is a nut.  Rick Santorum can't win because he opposes the radical gay agenda.  Herman Cain can't win because of his inexperience.  Newt can't win because of the global warming commercial he made with Nancy Pelosi and John Huntsman can't win because he was a part of the Obama administration and has only good things to say about him.

Michelle Bachmann can't win because she is a woman and associated with the Tea Party and is a member of congress in a period when congress isn't popular and Rick Perry can't win because he is from Texas and can therefore be compared to George W Bush.

In Mr. Ziegler's mind the only GOP candidate other than Pawlenty who has even a ghost of a chance of defeating Obama is Mitt Romney but since about half of the GOP primary voters don't like or trust him he probably won't get the nomination.

Unless Republicans stop "deluding" themselves and follow exactly the same kind of campaign "logic" that led them to choose John McCain as their candidate in 2008.

How well did that work out for us?

The fact is that Barack Obama is in the same kind of trouble, and for the same reasons, that Jimmy Carter was in 1980.  He is such a disaster as president that the public will elect someone that they would not otherwise take a chance on just to get rid of him.

Remember that Ronald Reagan was not popular among the moderate wing of the GOP nor among independents.  He would never have gotten the Republican nomination and he would have never won the general election if Carter had not made himself so toxic.  Just like Obama has done.

Obama has become so hateful to conservatives that they will not accept anyone who does not represent a sharp contrast to him in the primaries.  Newt has proven himself to be someone who will stick his finger in the air and say whatever he has to say at any given moment but no one believes him any longer.  Ron Paul is a Libertarian not a conservative.  Mitt Romney still thinks that RomneyCare - the inspiration for ObamaCare - was a good idea (although he believes it should be imposed on the nation state-by-state rather than from Washington).  Huntsman is a serious candidate only to the mainstream media and the more left-leaning wing of the Republican RINO caucus.

Palin, Perry, Bachmann, Cain and Santorum could each probably beat Obama and any of them would be acceptable to the GOP base.  The choice will come down to which one gets Republican primary voters the most fired up and that will be determined by which one is the most willing to attack Obama head on.

The fact is that whoever gets the Republican nomination is going to be savaged by the mainstream media.  They even turned on John McCain and he was their darling - before he tried to defeat B. Hussein Obama.  Choosing our candidate by which one we think will be least offensive to people who hate us and want us to lose is the only way that we can guarantee Obama's reelection.

Something to think about

John F Kennedy - Harvard
Lyndon B Johnson - Southwest State Teachers' College
Richard Nixon - Duke
Gerald Ford - Yale
Jimmy Carter - United States Naval Academy
Ronald Reagan - Eureka College
George H.W. Bush - Yale
Bill Clinton - Yale
George W Bush - Harvard
Barack Hussein Obama - Harvard

Of the past ten presidents of the United States all but three of them attended Ivy League schools and Duke University, alma mater of Nixon, is ranked #9 nationally, above several of the Ivy League 8.

The question I have is this.  Why do we value attendance at an elite school in a presidential candidate?  The best president since the turn of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan, attended what most would call a second tier school while Barack Obama, one of the four worst presidents in the entire history of the nation, attended elite Harvard. 

Since JFK every president except Johnson and Reagan have graduated from an elite college.  Do we like what these "best and brightest" have done with the nation?

I don't doubt that you have to be very smart to get into a school like Harvard.  However history is full of very smart men who were shaped and directed by very evil cultures (Lavrenti Beria, Albert Speer and Mao Zedong are three who come to mind).

I think that a definite pattern is visible when we consider that the nation's dire situation has been shaped by leaders who have attended the "best" schools in the nation.  And it isn't just the past ten presidents who show this pattern.  Consider men like Woodrow Wilson (Princeton and Johns Hopkins) and FDR (Harvard) and the pattern only grows more clear.

Our elite universities take some of the smartest young men and women in the nation and turn them into people who think that what the welfare state has done to the black population is a model for what should be done to the rest of the nation's people. 

Think about this the next time you hear some leftist or RINO sneer at the fact that Sarah Palin attended the University of Idaho.

Top Ten Conservative Songs

Tonights song which I class as conservative comes to us from the group Cheap Trick.  From their first, self titled LP.

Number 9.  Taxman Mr. Thief



Of course we also have to mention the Beatles song that inspired this Cheap Trick number, Taxman.

Some thoughts on Wisconsin

I'm sure that everyone remembers this incident from earlier in the month:

According to witnesses, a group of anywhere from 30 to 100 young black men descended on the Wisconsin State Fair last night, beating fairgoers and looting carnival games, in what witnesses said were racially-motivated attacks, Milwaukee's WTMJ reports.

One witness named Eric, an Iraq veteran, said the attacks reminded him of war:

"I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn't do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody's windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it."

Another witness, Norb Roberts, corroborated that: "We were just like cattle being herded out of the park, and they were picking and choosing who they wanted to beat on," he said.

Officials have not yet given an estimate of how many attackers were involved or how many fairgoers were injured.

You will also remember that this occurred against the backdrop of the recall elections in Wisconsin where Democrats were attempting to oust Republican legislators who had cooperated with Governor Walker in saving a large number of state worker's jobs by making some extremely modest cuts in their benefit package.

This sent the left into paroxysms of foaming madness because unionized state employees are NEVER supposed to do with LESS for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER.

You will remember that this effort to introduce some measure of fiscal sanity was seen as an exercise of the TEA Party.

And you will also remember (the remembering is almost over now) that the left has been smearing the TEA Party with charges of racism since its very first days.

Now weave all these memories together into a single tapestry and then stand back and behold the picture.  A mob of young black men who have for the past several months been hearing from the media, from the pulpits of their churches, from community organizers and political leaders that they've been taught to respect (like Al Sharpton), from their parents and teachers and from their peers that racist white people are trying to destroy their lives.

These young black men then go to a place where a large number of (mostly white) people are gathered and begin attacking white targets of opportunity - and tweeting and texting their peers to encourage them to come join the mayhem.

Does this come as any kind of true surprise?

Where has the media been on this?  The same media that was only too happy to help Bill Clinton blame Oklahoma City on Rush Limbaugh and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords on Sarah Palin (two slanders which had absolutely no basis in reality) have been absolutely silent about the reasons that a mob of young African-Americans might have - at that particular time and place - decided that it was acceptable and desirable to attack random white people.

Is that the stench of hypocrisy I smell?

Top Ten Conservative Songs

Over on Big Hollywood Deanna Murray has posted her list of "Songs to Empower the Conservative to Take Action".  Of her ten songs the only two I've actually ever listened to are Journey's "Don't Stop Believin" and Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone".  However it got me thinking about what my top ten list of "conservative" songs would be.

First off, I don't require that the songs be political or have an explicit conservative message; just that they have a theme or strike a cord that would appeal to an American conservative. 

I'll be posting my picks tonight and over the next nine days.  Let me know if you agree with my choices or if you have any alternate suggestions.

10.  Catch Me Now I'm Falling by The Kinks.



I heard this on the radio the other day for the fist time in several years and it resonated with me considering the difficuties that the US is currently experiencing.  It reminded me of the editorial written by Canadian journalist Gordon Sinclair back in 1973.

Wise words

Today's Wisdom

Shit is drawn to fans like flies are drawn to shit.

All human planning should take this fact into account.

Fjordman - RIP

Andrew Bostom has some tragic news for us:

My colleague, the perspicacious Norwegian essayist Fjordman (whose prolific writings can be read here), was compelled to surrender his anonymity after reluctantly granting an interview to Verdans Gang (published in English, here).

An hysterical, morally cretinous press and blogosphere -- Norwegian, other European, and American -- which had initially accused Fjordman, falsely and recklessly, of being the Brevik mass murderer, continues to persist that he was Brevik's "main inspiration," a charge akin to accusing the Beatles of "inspiring" Charles Manson, or Jody Foster "inspiring" John Hinckley.

Fjordman, real name Peder Jensen, made this announcment in the VG interview:

After the terrorist attack and his blog being cited as an influence, Jensen says he will never use the alias Fjordman again.

- I don't wish to be associated with Breivik and his horrible actions, he says.

The response of the media and the left-wing establishment (sorry redundant) in both Europe and the United States to the monstrous crimes of Andres Behring Breivik has been as sad as it was predictable.  Instead of focusing attention where it belongs, on the evildoer himself, the effort to exploit the tragic deaths of the innocent for propaganda is in full swing. 

The left thrashes around trying to connect any person who as had the good sense to recognize the danger to Western culture posed by multiculturalism in general and Islam in particular (and the courage to speak our write about that danger) to the murderous actions of Mr. Breivik.  Of course they conveniently ignore citations by Breivik of people the left respects (just like the media ignored the fact that large sections of the Unibomber manifesto were indistinguishable from Al Gore's gaseous tome Earth in the Balance.

Of course I'm not suggesting that Mr. Gore has the slightest shred of responsibility for the crimes of Ted Kaczynski any more than Rush Limbaugh was responsible for Timothy McVeigh, Sarah Palin for Jared Loughner, or Richard Wagner for the Holocaust. 

But then I'm not an hysterical lying left-wing maggot.

I don't blame Mr. Jensen for wanting to distance himself from Anders Behring Breivik in any way possible.  Since he lives in a time and place where people can be sent to jail for saying anything remotely critical of Islam.  However it is deeply tragic nonetheless.

I hope that Mr. Jensen will continue to write.  He is very intelligent highly learned and willing to say that which the dominant culture definitely does not wish to hear (can anyone say "speaking truth to power"?).

That the police and political establishment in his home country seem eager to place legal blame upon him for the actions of a madman is in its own way a far greater tragedy than the actions of that madman.