Op-Ed and Opinion

Bin Laden, Gaddafi and Modern Warfare: On the Highway of Death

2011-05-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

By John W. Whitehead
May 2, 2011

“Now thou art come unto a feast of death.”—Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI 4.5.7

War is not about territories. War is not about oil. War is not even about winners and losers. In the end, all that can really be said is that war is about killing. It is about the taking of human life.
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main,” wrote John Donne. “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind…” If this is so, then we belong to a race of human beings that has been greatly diminished over time. In fact, one “atrocitologist” estimates that roughly 174 million people died in the 20th century alone due to acts of war, genocide and tyranny.
War is also about the loss of humanity—a loss that has become an inherent part of modern-day warfare. And with every new death, civilian or otherwise, we lose yet another piece of our humanity and regress toward our primitive, animal instincts. This is what we must grapple with in the wake of the reported assassination of Osama bin Laden and the NATO airstrike said to have claimed the lives of leader Muammar Gaddafi’s 29-year-old son and three young grandchildren. Whether or not it was actually bin Laden or Gaddafi’s relatives who were killed, as some have questioned, is not the issue. As CIA Director Leon Panetta remarked, “Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida is not.”
In other words, while Americans may be celebrating the death of “the most infamous terrorist of our time,” seeing it as a fitting act of retribution for the innocent lives lost on 9/11, the war effort is far from over. Indeed, America’s military response to 9/11 has spawned such blowback in the Middle East that we now find ourselves in a permanent state of war.
As a result, the war machine will continue unimpeded and the civilian death toll will rise higher with every passing day. All the while, most Americans, comforted by expressions of patriotism and pride in their military, distracted by mindless entertainment, technological gadgets and materialistic pursuits, and relatively insulated from the devastation being wrought overseas, seem to be unconcerned about the escalating costs of war—in dollars and lives. Even as these endless wars drag America to the brink of bankruptcy, both financially and morally, most Americans continue to live in a state of denial about the part we have played—are playing—in this bloody tragedy.
Modern technology totally dehumanizes warfare and, in the process, totally dehumanizes us as human beings. While it allows us to wage battles from afar, modern technological warfare also reduces the act of killing human beings to nothing more than targeting blips on a screen—a macabre video game with faceless victims and no danger of someone shooting back. And when an American drone annihilates innocent civilians in some far-away land, this is simply written off as yet another technological blip.
I was an infantry officer in the Army from 1969 to 1971. Men in my platoon who had served time in Vietnam told me many stories—but none more chilling than the one from two helicopter pilots. They told me how they would shoot the “friendlies” on their way back from reconnaissance missions just so they could empty their ammunition before returning to base. The “friendlies” were South Vietnamese women and children, helpless victims in a war they did not understand. But to the American pilots, they were simply dots on the ground.
This is what warfare does to so-called civilized people. Unfortunately, these “joy killings” are not isolated instances. Take, for instance, a U.S.-led attack that occurred during the Gulf War on the night of February 26–27, 1991, after Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawal from Kuwait in compliance with U.N. resolutions.
On a 60-mile stretch of road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq, a convoy of more than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were fleeing. These were people who were putting up no resistance, many with no weapons, leaving in cars, trucks, carts and on foot. The American armed forces bombed one end of the main highway from Kuwait City to Basra, sealing it off, then bombed the other end of the highway, sealing it off. They positioned mechanized artillery units on the hill overlooking the area and then, both from the air and the land, massacred every living thing on the road. Fighter bombers, helicopter gunships and armored battalions poured merciless firepower on those trapped in the traffic jams, backed up as much as 20 miles. One U.S. pilot reportedly said, "It was like shooting fish in a barrel." That fateful stretch of road has since been dubbed the "Highway of Death."
A report submitted to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal stated that those killed were Palestinian and Kuwaiti civilians trying to escape the siege of Kuwait City and the return of Kuwaiti armed forces. The report claimed that no attempt was made by U.S. military command to distinguish between military personnel and civilians.
Pictures taken after the attack show charred and dismembered bodies. Some of these photographs can be viewed by clicking on the link for Peter Turnley’s photo essay, “The Unseen Gulf War.” Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, suggested the carnage could only have resulted from the use of napalm, phosphorus or other incendiary bombs—anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols.
The killing did not stop with the Gulf War. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the American government dispatched its arsenal of deadly weapons to Afghanistan to quash Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaida network—but to no avail. And once again, there were reports of the indiscriminate killing of civilians by American forces where entire villages were wiped out and women and children lay dead on the cold earth of Afghanistan. Then the American military industrial complex trained its sights on Iraq, once again unleashing its awesome war machine. And the carnage continued, made even worse by horrifying reports of Iraqi prisoners being tortured, raped and subjected to all manner of other abuses at the hands of U.S. soldiers.
Most recently, reports and photos have surfaced of a so-called “kill team” comprised of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan who murdered innocent civilians, mutilated their corpses, and then photographed the kills. As Rolling Stone reported, “The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. ‘Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals,’ one soldier explained to investigators. ‘Everyone would say they're savages.’ One photo shows a hand missing a finger. Another depicts a severed head being maneuvered with a stick, and still more show bloody body parts, blown-apart legs, mutilated torsos. Several show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view.”
Despite the rising death toll among the military and civilians, despite the cost to the economy (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone have already cost more than $1 trillion), despite the fact that the American military, acting as an international police force, is spread dangerously thin, despite the fact that Congress has yet to actuallydeclare war against most of the countries in which America ismaking war (thus undermining the one thing that stands between us and tyranny—our Constitution), the American government continues to bang the war drums. And when all is said and done, after all the blather about national security and fighting terrorism and defending freedom abroad have died down, if these endless wars amount to anything at all, it is nothing less than the utter destruction of every decent and noble ideal for which America is supposed to stand.
The fact that modern technological warfare is turning human beings into non-feeling killing machines should cause us to tremble. It should give us reason to pause and question how we could let ourselves travel so far down the road to perdition. We have placed others on the highway of death. In the end, however, it is we who are traveling the highway of death. May God help us all.
WC: 1400

Private Bradley Manning: A Victim of the Military Empire?

2011-03-07T08:35:00.000-08:00

By John W. Whitehead
March 7, 2011

“It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others—even our enemies.”—John McCain, “Torture’s Terrible Toll”

Depending on your view of the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and America’s role in them, Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the 23-year-old Army soldier who is accused of “aiding the enemy” by leaking classified military and diplomatic documents to the anti-secrecy website, Wikileaks, is either a courageous whistleblower or a traitorous snitch. Manning is alleged to have leaked over 250,000 United States diplomatic cables, as well as footage of an American Apache helicopter airstrike in Baghdad from July 12, 2007, in which 18 people were killed, many of them civilians. Two of those killed were Reuters journalists. If convicted, Manning could face the death penalty.
There can be no doubt that Manning’s inhumane treatment by the U.S. government is intended to send a clear warning to all those who would challenge the military empire—“DON’T EVEN CONSIDER IT.” Manning, a slight, 5’2”, 105-pound intelligence analyst, has been held in maximum solitary confinement (his escape would supposedly pose a national security risk) at the Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia, since July 2010—treatment normally reserved for the most violent or dangerous of criminals.
As Glenn Greenwald of Salon observes, Manning has been “subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.”
Imprisoned in a windowless, 6 x 12 foot cell containing a bed, a drinking fountain and a toilet, Manning has been kept under Suicide and/or Prevention of Injury (POI) watch during his incarceration, largely against the advice of two forensic psychiatrists. Under suicide watch, Manning has been confined to his tiny cell for 24 hours a day and stripped of all clothing with the exception of his underwear. His prescription eyeglasses were taken away, leaving him in essential blindness except for those limited times when he is permitted to read or watch television, at which time his glasses are returned to him. A guard is stationed outside Manning’s cell at all times. In a thinly veiled attempt to harass the young man, guards check on Manning every five minutes, asking if he is ok. He is not allowed to have a pillow or sheets, but he currently has a mattress that has a built-in pillow and two blankets.
Things are not much better for Manning under POI watch. As his attorney, David Coombs, points out, he is forced to remain in his cell for 23 hours a day. He is not allowed to have personal items in the cell, and is only allowed to have one book or one magazine at any time to read in the cell. He is not allowed to exercise in his cell and if he attempts to do push-ups, sit-ups or any other form of exercise, he will be forced to stop by the brig guards. He gets one hour of exercise outside of his cell daily, so his exercise routine consists of him walking around in figure eights in an empty room for an hour. When he goes to sleep, he must strip down to his underwear and surrender his clothing to the guards. If he falls asleep with a blanket over his head or curled up toward the wall, the guards wake him up.
Most recently, it was revealed that Manning was stripped and left naked in his cell for seven hours, after which time he was made to stand naked outside his cell during an inspection—allegedly part of an effort by the government aimed at pressuring Manning to identify others involved in the WikiLeaks case. The tactic is certainly not a new one. Indeed, as one investigative news source pointed out, the forced nudity recalls “how the Bush administration used nudity and other abusive tactics to break down ‘war on terror’ detainees. In 2004, the CIA told President George W. Bush’s lawyers how useful forced nudity was for instilling ‘learned helplessness’ in prisoners.”
The American government, of course, insists that such treatment does not rise to the level of torture. In fact, Col. T. V. Johnson, a Quantico spokesman, characterized charges that Manning has been mistreated as “poppycock.” After all, Manning is not being starved, beaten or waterboarded. He’s merely been denied human interaction and the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment. Yet as surgeon Atul Gawande points out in a 2009 article for the New Yorker, solitary confinement rises to the level of torture: “A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than [John] McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.”
There was a time in our nation’s history—long before the abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and before we were reprogrammed to think of such practices as waterboarding as benign forms of legalized torture—that even solitary confinement was frowned upon. The United States Supreme Court even came close to declaring it unconstitutional in 1890 and went so far as to compare it to “[t]he rack, the thumbscrew, [and] the wheel” in its 1940 decision in Chambers v. Florida. Unfortunately, that perception of solitary confinement as torture changed with the rise in popularity of American supermax prisons, designed specifically for mass solitary confinement, in the late 20th century. As Gawande writes:
Public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities...
Which brings us back to Bradley Manning, a young man who hoped to “change something” by exposing what he saw as widespread government corruption. Whether or not Manning is shown to be the source of the leaks, there can be no denying that the information made public by Wikileaks has painted a damning picture of a U.S. government operating in a way that is completely at odds with everything this nation once stood for.
Yet the key here is that Manning, an American citizen entitled to every protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution, has yet to be convicted of anything, which makes his pre-trial incarceration that much more troubling. Moreover, not only does such cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment violate a long list of international human rights treaties, but as Greenwald points out, “[s]ubjecting a detainee like Manning to this level of prolonged cruel and inhumane detention can thus jeopardize the ability of the U.S. to secure extradition for other prisoners, as these conditions are viewed in much of the civilized world as barbaric.”
In fact, John McCain, who experienced torture and solitary confinement during his imprisonment in Vietnam, noted in a 2005Newsweek editorial, “We are American, and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation. We are not simply any other country. We stand for something more in the world—a moral mission, one of freedom and democracy and human rights at home and abroad... It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others—even our enemies.”
Sadly, we in America have conveniently forgotten that we once stood for something more than a warring military empire. Indeed, in our once-stalwart defense of human rights, our adherence to a moral code that was rooted in a respect for human life, and our willingness to lead the world by example through innovation and progress in science and the arts, we were the antithesis of all that America—now the largest international exporter of weapons and war—has come to stand for today.

When Liberals Try to Imitate The Tea Party

2011-03-02T05:35:00.000-08:00

As a former resident of Wisconsin before retiring in Florida, and still a proud "Cheesehead," I can write this piece with a sense of pride and high degree of understanding. I have family living in the Milwaukee area and am able to keep current on all the political news, although for the past several years, the topic of conversation has revolved mostly around “man-made” global cooling. For the benefit of the global warming alarmists, there is no global warming in Wisconsin.

The recent success of the Green Bay Packers brought everyone in the state together. There was a feeling of pride and good will. However, that euphoria soon turned into the shocking scenes we are now observing in Madison and other parts of Wisconsin, where thousands of people are angrily protesting a legislative bill addressing the budget cuts necessary in order to keep the state government afloat.

Republican Governor Scott Walker has taken a much needed stand against the unions in identifying the state's budgetary insanity, created by past Democrats, in bankrupting the state. Newly elected Republican leaders said they expected Wisconsin residents would be pleased with the savings the bill would achieve — $30 million by July 1 and $300 million over the next two years to address a $3.6 BILLION budget shortfall.

A sense of urgency by voters and much needed reforms for responsible fiscal direction are the reasons Republicans changed the political landscape in Wisconsin. For the first time in decades, Republicans control the executive and both legislatives branches of government.

So what's the rub, Wisconsin Democrats?

You got trounced in the last election and are now whining that you're being picked on unfairly. You blame all of the economic problems on others without accepting any responsibility ... never mind you were in charge all those years and despite having been warned that Wisconsin's economic house of cards was unsustainable.

Now, you are sending thousands of protesters to clog the hallway outside the Senate chamber and line the streets around the capitol building beating on drums, holding hateful signs deriding Governor Walker and pleading for lawmakers to "kill the bill." Several protesters also demonstrated outside the homes of some lawmakers, disturbing their right to privacy.

A large portion of the protestors are teachers, who think nothing of going AWOL from their teaching jobs. Some are using their “sick days.” Excuse me, but when I went to school, teachers taught their students not to lie. Several Wisconsin schools have closed during the course of this week's demonstrations, with some teachers dragging their students along with them to Madison. My son David, who decided to attend the protest on Thursday, asked several of the students why they were there. They had no clue, but nevertheless seemed to enjoy the day off from school.

When confronted by thousands of unruly and hateful demonstrators around him, David, one of the original Naples Tea Partiers before moving back to Wisconsin last month, had a great answer when a television reporter asked him if he felt outnumbered. He said, "I have nothing to fear ... I'm a Marine ... 25,000 to one ... I like my odds."

David witnessed first hand some of the hateful rhetoric by many of the protestors. I find it truly ironic that just a few short weeks ago, and since the tragedy in Tucson, President Obama and other liberal pundits self-righteously lectured conservatives that hate speech had no place in America if civility is to become the new standard for political discourse.

"Violent political rhetoric comes almost exclusively from the Right," proclaimed Eugene Robinson, as he made the rounds on the national talk show circuit. Bill Maher spoke of love and said, "the Right-wing loves ... wouldn't it be fun to kill the people we disagree with. Left-wingers don't talk that way."

Oh really? What happened on the way to Madison?

David reported that it was common to see signs with Governor Walker's face in cross hairs, along with pictures of Walker dressed and disguised as Hitler. He was hung in effigy by one person. Slogans like "Walker Needs To Die" and "Don't Retreat ... Reload" were proudly displayed.

Here, take a look if you don't believe David. Go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71gsnLfsbbM

The unions are saying that the bill they are protesting would prohibit public employees from the collective bargaining process. Wrong! Unions still could represent workers, but could not seek pay increases above those pegged to the Consumer Price Index, unless approved by a public referendum. Also in the bill, unions could not force employees to pay dues and would have to hold annual votes to stay organized. In exchange for bearing more costs and losing bargaining leverage, public employees were promised no furloughs or layoffs.

Now we see the problem. Along with the unions, teachers and other public workers are not willing to accept responsibility in order to fix what they have created ... an unsustainable nightmare of entitlements and retirement benefits. With a liberal, it is always a problem of someone else’s selfishness. It is all about the union and maintaining power over their workers, and through them, the populace. The new union motto should be ..."Join the union ... lose your individuality ... don't be responsible."

Here is the really disgusting part of this whole scene in Wisconsin: In attempting to put a halt to the legislation being proposed, Democrat state Senators have fled Wisconsin in order to avoid voting on the measure. How brave of them! Shirking the Constitutional duty that they swore to uphold means nothing to a Democrat any longer. To a progressive, any means to a justified end is apparently acceptable.

As I write this, the demonstrations in Wisconsin are still going strong, while the Wisconsin State Police are trying to hunt down the Democrat politicians in hiding. Even President Obama is encouraging them not to surrender to the “assault on unions.” Such a mockery of our form of government has never before reared such an ugly head. But, you know what Mr. President? Wisconsin is a microcosm for the grim financial straits that exist in almost every state in America. Which state will be next? Your home state of Illinois might be next. How are you going to deal with it? Your days of rewarding the unions’ gluttony, failure and irresponsibility might come to a screeching halt if the Tea Party has anything to say about it. But, rest assured. Our demonstrations will not be a bit like the tumultuous farce now taking place in Wisconsin.

Barry Willoughby
Naples Florida Tea Party

Sex Trafficking: There's More to the Super Bowl Than Sports

2011-02-03T05:18:00.000-08:00

Infecting suburbs, cities and towns across the nation, sex trafficking has become America's dirtiest secret. Unfortunately, as John Whitehead shares in this week's vodcast, it's also one of the star attractions at this year's Super Bowl.

The Identity Ecosystem: Obama's Plan for Internet Control

2011-01-20T08:48:00.000-08:00

By John W. Whitehead
January 18, 2011

"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort."—Marshall McLuhan

The Obama Administration has yet to come up with a plan to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which are draining our economy, prevent the continuing mortgage meltdown, get more Americans back to work, or do away with pork-barrel spending and government corruption, to name just a few of the overriding concerns plaguing our nation today. Instead, purportedly motivated by a desire to make our lives easier, the president wants to implement a universal internet ID that would eliminate the need for multiple usernames and passwords.
For those inclined to view government as a benevolent institution, this can be viewed as a considerate gesture in a time of economic and social unrest. However, for those who would take seriously John Adams' warning "to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty," this latest move is nothing short of a Trojan Horse attempt to sidestep privacy concerns and institute a national ID, all the while giving the government even greater access to our most personal information.
Under the stated goal of achieving internet security and consumer convenience, the Identity Ecosystem, as the program has been dubbed, would supposedly streamline the process of doing business online by replacing the various login names and passwords currently used to access personal accounts and information on various websites with a universal internet ID. However, as Curt Hopkins points out in the New York Times, "a user would have one, 'verified' ID, which would be known by the government, and a set of large corporations. Given the periodic outbreak of governmental and corporate shenanigans, we fail to see the benefit of such a system."
And who has the president entrusted with being the gatekeeper of our most sensitive online transactions? Not the Department of Homeland Security, which spent a year masterminding the strategy, nor the National Security Agency, which carries out the government's warrantless eavesdropping program. Rather, the Identity Ecosystem will supposedly be overseen by the Commerce Department—a move clearly intended to assuage fears that the government would improperly make use of such highly personal information. Yet in the wake of 9/11, information sharing between government agencies has become so commonplace that it would be naïve to think that the DHS and NSA, both of which have been jockeying for control of the nation's cybersecurity, won't have easy access to the information.
Still, if the American people refuse to accept a universal internet ID as a way of life, then does it really matter who oversees the program? In its typical Orwellian fashion, the government has come up with a way around that potential hurdle, as well. Touting the internet ID's convenience and so-called ability to enhance online trust and privacy, the Obama Administration essentially plans to push its Identity Ecosystem as a way to cut through the government's bureaucratic red tape at the federal, state and local levels. Private corporations will eventually follow suit, making it all but impossible for the average American to avoid using the ID.
Considering the degree to which Social Security numbers have come to be relied on by those outside government circles for identification purposes (everyone from cable television and credit card companies to hospitals and utility companies), it would not take much for a universal internet ID to become a de facto national ID, and the consequences could be devastating. Why?
First, such a system will give the government unprecedented access to Americans' internet activities—something it has sought for years. Indeed, last fall, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration was preparing to submit legislation to Congress that would make it easier for the government to wiretap the internet. As Charlie Savage noted, "Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications—including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype—to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order." This would inevitably lead to governmental agencies, in cooperation with the mega corporations, knowing virtually everything about our lives. And privacy as we have known it will be no more.
Second, it will eventually allow the government to have control over all internet activity, e.g., acting as a clearinghouse for who can and cannot access the internet and the extent to which they can do so. As Curt Hopkins notes, "the 'Identity Ecosystem' sounds strangely like the national intranet the Chinese government has been working on, as an alternative to the Internet as a whole, and more controllable." Control is the key word here, and total control is the government's objective.
Third, it would enable the government to better monitor Americans' internet activities—another long desired goal. For example, in 2009, under the guise of combating child pornography, lawmakers proposed the "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act of 2009" which required that all internet users' online surfing habits be retained for two years. The danger, of course, is that the information could be used by corporate entities and law enforcement agencies alike. Although that legislation stalled in committee, the underlying mindset has not changed—namely, that the internet and its users need to be monitored.
Fourth, it would empower the government in its quest to regulate not only internet activity but also the content of expressive activities. In fact, in the wake of the Tucson shootings, FOX News Channel host Greta Van Susteren voiced her support for an identification system for web users seeking to post and comment at online venues in order to "tone down the viciousness on the internet."
Finally, a single internet ID would make Americans that much more vulnerable to security breaches. Just consider some of the more egregious security breaches that have occurred over the past five years:
In 2005, ChoicePoint, a commercial data-broker that provides identification and credential verification services, announced that more than 160,000 consumer records, including names, addresses, and identification numbers, had been stolen. For the federal government, which is barred by the 1974 Privacy Act from forming a database, commercial database brokers like ChoicePoint have become the government's own private intelligence agencies.
In 2006, 26.5 million veterans had their personal information—names, birth dates and Social Security numbers—jeopardized after a Veterans Administration employee took the data home, only to have it stolen when his home was burglarized.
In 2007, more than 146,000 user IDs and passwords, e-mail addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data were stolen from the online job database used by the United States Office of Personnel Management.
In 2008, the U.S. State Department announced that a security breach in its records system, which contains personal information, including Social Security numbers, may have left hundreds of passport applicants open to identity theft.
In 2009, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management once again suffered a security breach in which sensitive data on applicants seeking government jobs was stolen.
In December 2010, just a few days before Christmas, an e-mail spam attack disguised as a White House Christmas Card captured data from numerous government agencies. It was the second such reported attack in a year, aimed at accessing not only government secrets, but also financial data, including sites such as eBay, MySpace and Microsoft, as well as online-payment processors, PayPal and e-gold.
The last bastion of democracy is the internet, and the government is well aware of this. For years now, government agencies have lobbied for greater access to our personal internet activities. In fact, back in 2005, John Ashcroft, George Bush's Attorney General, urged the FCC to require that internet communications be easier to wiretap. As a result, the Bush Administration came under fire from the media and civil liberties groups alike for seeking to expand the government's online surveillance powers. Unfortunately, many of those who were quick to lambast Bush for his civil liberties violations have been less vocal in their public criticism of Obama, despite the fact that when it comes to civil liberties, Obama is no better and may, in fact, be worse. Case in point: if Congress falls in line with the Obama Administration's dictates, all online communications services—including communications sent using texting platforms, BlackBerries, social networking sites, and other "peer to peer" communications software such as Skype—will be required to use technologies that would make it easier for the government to collect private communications and decode encrypted messages that Americans send. That doesn't sound like any kind of "change we can believe in" to me.
When all is said and done, it doesn't really matter what party controls the White House or Congress, because the objective of our bureaucratic government remains the same: total control—of the nation, of the internet, and ultimately of you and me.
WC: 1487

"I'm 63 and I'm Tired"

2011-01-08T08:48:00.000-08:00

by Robert A. Hall

I'm 63. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked hard since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.

I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.

I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them with their own money.

I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood Entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the economy of Zimbabwe , the freedom of the press of China the crime and violence of Mexico , the tolerance for Christian people of Iran , and the freedom of speech of Venezuela .

I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor"; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers"; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery"; of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur'an and Shari'a law tells them to.

I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone, and in the appointment of U.S. Senators from Illinois.

I think it's very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less arrogantly of an all-knowing government.

I'm tired of a news media that thinks Bush's fundraising and inaugural expenses were obscene, but thinks that Obama's, at triple the cost, were wonderful; that thinks Bush exercising daily was a waste of presidential time, but Obama exercising is a great example for the public to control weight and stress; that picked over every line of Bush's military records, but never demanded that Kerry release his; that slammed Palin, with two years as governor, for being too inexperienced for VP, but touted Obama with three years as senator as potentially the best president ever. Wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions or switching to Fox News? Get a clue. I didn't vote for Bush in 2000, but the media and Kerry drove me to his camp in 2004.

I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and mandrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America , while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance.

I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore's, and if you're greener than Gore, you're green enough.

I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don't think Gay people choose to be Gay, but I #@*# sure think druggies chose to take drugs. And I'm tired of harassment from cool people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana.

I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially the ones who aren't working, but are living on welfare or crime. What's next? Calling drug dealers, "Undocumented Pharmacists"? And, no, I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic, and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast track for citizenship any Hispanic person, who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military.... Those are the citizens we need.

I'm tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station, trashing our military. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people than themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure. Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years and still are? Not even close. So here's the deal. I'll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, and the critics can let themselves be subject to captivity by the Muslims, who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia, because the girls were Christian. Then we'll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear.

I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers; bums are bipartisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bipartisanship. I live in Illinois , where the " Illinois Combine" of Democrats has worked to loot the public for years. Not to mention the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet.

I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.

Speaking of poor, I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars called poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were "poor." The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing.

I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination or big-whatever for their problems.

Yes, I'm #@*% tired. But I'm also glad to be 63. Because, mostly, I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughter.

Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate.

A Black man's point of view.

2011-01-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

A BLACK MAN, THE PROGRESSIVE'S PERFECT TROJAN HORSE

As millions of my fellow Americans, I am outraged, devastated and extremely angry by the democrat's unbelievable arrogance and disdain for We The People. Despite our screaming "no" from the rooftops, they forced Obamacare down our throats. Please forgive me for using the following crude saying, but it is very appropriate to describe what has happened. "Don't urinate on me and tell me it's raining." Democrats say their mission is to give all Americans health care. The democrats are lying. Signing Obamacare into law against our will and the Constitution is tyranny and step one of their hideous goal of having as many Americans as possible dependent on government, thus controlling our lives and fulfilling Obama's promise to fundamentally transform America ..

I keep asking myself. How did our government move so far from the normal procedures of getting things done? Could a white president have so successfully pulled off shredding the Constitution to further his agenda? I think not.

Ironically, proving America is completely the opposite of the evil racist country they relentlessly accuse her of being, progressives used America's goodness, guilt and sense of fair play against her.. In their quest to destroy America as we know it, progressives borrowed a brilliant scheme from Greek mythology. They offered America a modern day Trojan Horse, a beautifully crafted golden shiny new black man as a presidential candidate. Democrat Joe Biden lauded Obama as the first clean and articulate African American candidate. Democrat Harry Reid said Obama only uses a black dialect when he wants.

White America relished the opportunity to vote for a black man naively believing they would never suffer the pain of being called racist again. Black Americans viewed casting their vote for Obama as the ultimate Affirmative Action for America 's sins of the past.

Then there were the entitlement loser voters who said, "I'm votin' for the black dude who promises to take from those rich SOBs and give to me."

Just as the deceived Trojans dragged the beautifully crafted Trojan Horse into Troy as a symbol of their victory, deceived Americans embraced the progressive's young, handsome, articulate and so called moderate black presidential candidate as a symbol of their liberation from accusation of being a racist nation. Also like the Trojan Horse, Obama was filled with the enemy hiding inside.

Sunday, March 21, 2010, a secret door opened in Obama, the shiny golden black man. A raging army of democrats charged out. Without mercy, they began their vicious bloody slaughter of every value, freedom and institution we Americans hold dear; launching the end of America as we know it.

Wielding swords of votes reeking with the putrid odor of back door deals, the democrats landed a severe death blow to America and individual rights by passing Obamacare.

The mainstream liberal media has been relentlessly badgering the Tea Party movement with accusations of racism. Because I am a black tea party patriot, I am bombarded with interviewers asking me the same veiled question. "Why are you siding with these white racists against America 's first African American president?" I defend my fellow patriots who are white stating, "These patriots do not give a hoot about Obama's skin color. They simply love their country and oppose his radical agenda. Obama's race is not an issue."

Recently, I have come to believe that perhaps I am wrong about Obama's race not being an issue. In reality, Obama's presidency has everything to do with racism, but not from the Tea Party movement. Progressives and Obama have exploited his race from the rookie senator's virtually unchallenged presidential campaign to his unprecedented bullying of America into Obamacare. Obama's race trumped all normal media scrutiny of him as a presidential candidate and most recently even the Constitution of the United States .. Obamacare forces all Americans to purchase health care which is clearly unconstitutional.

No white president could get away with boldly and arrogantly thwarting the will of the American people and ignoring laws. President Clinton tried universal health care. Bush tried social security reform. The American people said "no" to both president's proposals and it was the end of it. So how can Obama get away with giving the American people the finger? The answer. He is black.

The mainstream liberal media continues to portray all who oppose Obama in any way as racist. Despite a list of failed policies, overreaches into the private sector, violations of the Constitution and planned destructive legislation too numerous to mention in this article, many Americans are still fearful of criticizing our first black president. Incredible.

My fellow Americans, you must not continue to allow yourselves to be "played" and intimidated by Obama's race or the historical context of his presidency. If we are to save America , the greatest nation on the planet, Obama's progressive agenda must be stopped.

Lloyd Marcus (black) Unhyphenated American, Singer/Songwriter, Entertainer, Author, Artist & Tea Party Patriot

SHARE THIS WITH AMERICA ! ! ! !

Lloyd Marcus is one of the strongest voices in the Tea Party movement.

Elvis Presley: Down Lonely Street at the Heartbreak Hotel

2011-01-05T08:25:00.000-08:00

By John W. Whitehead
January 5, 2011

Well, since my baby left me,
Well, I found a new place to dwell.
Well, it’s down at the end of Lonely Street
At Heartbreak Hotel.
—Elvis Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel”

Sometime in 1955, I was jolted by a song I heard on the radio, “Maybelline” by Chuck Berry, America’s first black rock’n’roll hero. So when I saw Berry on television duck walking across the stage, playing his guitar, there was no turning back for me. Rock’n’roll had become the music of my soul.

Then Elvis Presley came along, and everything changed. As John Lennon would say years later, “Before Elvis there was nothing.” Elvis (who, had he lived, would have turned 76 on January 8) combined all the images of rebellion—James Dean and Marlon Brando, among others—into one solitary figure.

To my 10-year-old self, he was exactly what I wanted to be like when I grew up. I totally identified with him. I even dressed up in tight pants and drew mascara sideburns. Grabbing my toy guitar (with no strings), I stood in my front yard serenading little girls who would stare listlessly at me. Two favorite songs, “Hound Dog” and “All Shook Up,” sometimes seemed to stir my young audience, though. One little girl, I remember, said I even looked a bit like the King except I was shorter and not as good-looking.

At first, Presley’s story seemed liked the American Dream come true. As Sam Phillips, the legendary Memphis recording artist and African-American music enthusiast remarked, he had been looking for “a white boy who could sing like a black boy and catch the beat of black music.” With his early “greaser” style, Elvis fit the bill, and Phillips recorded him on his now-iconic Sun label.

Those 1954-55 soundtracks for Sun Records, including “It’s All Right, Mama” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” were some of Elvis’ best recordings. A synthesis of the white and black cultures, Elvis’ music also had a general gospel flavor that reflected his early singing in church.

By the time he had conquered the South with regional appearances, Elvis had also perfected his act. Most notably, he added body gyrations reminiscent of the movements of gospel singers. But on Elvis, the movements took on sexual overtones. The first time Elvis gyrated onstage, the crowd went wild. Since then, his signature moves—a gyrating pelvis and wiggling hips—have been imitated by countless other rock’n’roll artists.

Elvis wasn’t popular with all segments of society, however. Some local newspapers denounced his performances as “demon rock as jungle music,” while ministers publicly attacked him, even threatening to lead a crusade to have him arrested if he set foot in their communities. But religious and parental disapproval only increased Elvis’ popularity among the young, and his television appearances cemented it.

After Elvis performed his first national hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” on the Milton Berle Show in April 1956, the song moved to number one on the music charts. An appearance on the Steve Allen Show followed in July 1956. Although Allen had persuaded Presley to wear a tuxedo and limit his movements, he still only shot Presley from the waist up to avoid those wiggling hips. And for the first time, Allen beat the legendary Ed Sullivan in ratings.

Sullivan, who disliked rockers and believed that Elvis’ act was too sexually suggestive, wanted nothing to do with Elvis. But after Steve Allen’s success, Sullivan surrendered to market economics and signed Elvis for three shows at the unprecedented sum of $50,000. However, a concern about Elvis’ wiggling hips caused the producers to also shoot Elvis only from the waist up on the first show. Still, after the third show, Sullivan conceded to the audience that Elvis was a “real decent, fine boy.”

In reality, Sullivan’s decision to sign Elvis augured a profound change in American taste. While the white elite had appreciated black jazz in the past, they had a visceral, democratic reaction to Elvis. The old order had been challenged and had not held. New forces were at work, driven primarily by new technology and television. The young no longer had to listen to their parents. It was a critical moment for American society.

Soon Elvis was everywhere, even starring in movies (he made more than 30). However, although Elvis could sing, he couldn’t act. Then, in 1958, Elvis joined the Army. Suddenly, he was part of the establishment, and that’s when his rebel image was tarnished. Indeed, years later, when John Lennon heard of Elvis’ death, he remarked, “Elvis died the day he went into the army.”

By the late 1960s, the British rock invasion, led by the Beatles, had dated the music and stance of ‘50s rockers like Elvis. In fact, the dramatically different responses to the television appearances of Elvis Presley in 1956 and the Beatles in 1964 demonstrated vividly how much American society had changed in a mere eight years. Elvis’ blatant sexuality provoked a rash of outraged sermons. Politicians and newspaper editors rallied against him. Adults found him ridiculous or dangerous, while the kids screamed and swooned. There was virtually no crossover.

By 1964, however, respectable adults and even intellectuals were listening to the Beatles. At first, the older generation even seemed to like John, Paul, George and Ringo, although that would change later. But initially, the “boys from Liverpool” did indeed seem enviably like boys rather than men with their English schoolboy haircuts. Exuberant, fun-loving and generous, they seemed to suggest a world that was a fun place to be. Beatlemania was born and Elvis’ generation of hip-swinging artists seemed passé.

But Elvis didn’t go down easy. His appearance on the classic 1968 Singer Television Special for NBC proved that the boy from Memphis could still move an audience. And in the mid-1970s, with a couple of new hits, Elvis made a comeback.

Unfortunately, his success was short-lived. After his 1972 divorce brought on violent mood swings, Elvis began to eat voraciously, sometimes consuming a dozen cheeseburgers and a pound of bacon at a time. Ballooning to around 250 pounds, the whale-like Elvis was forced to cancel all-important Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe shows. And after hints of drug dependence circulated, Elvis secluded himself at Graceland or his Palm Springs home. Then, on August 16, 1977, to the shock and sadness of fans worldwide, Elvis died at the age of 42.

After his death, Elvis became larger than life, with a cult following that approached a religious fervor. Then there are those who still believe he is alive.

Yet in Elvis’ life and death, we see an allegory of the entire American experience during the 1950s, 1960s and beyond. Like many before and after him, a youthful and dynamic beginning ended in premature old age and a bloated, overweight body. A victim of success, Elvis became a parody of himself and of modern, materialistic America. And in the end, like so many of the generation he spawned, Elvis was a solitary soul trapped on that lonely street that leads to the Heartbreak Hotel.

Red Light Cameras

2010-12-21T06:02:00.000-08:00

Safety Devices or One More Step Toward a Surveillance State?
By John W. Whitehead
December 20, 2010

Before Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, unleashed full body imaging scanners and “enhanced” pat downs on American airline passengers, she subjected Arizona drivers to red light cameras. In August 2008, Napolitano, then-governor of Arizona, instituted a statewide system of 200 fixed and mobile speed and red light cameras, which were projected to bring in more than $120 million in annual revenue for the state. She was aided in this endeavor by the Australian corporation Redflex Traffic Systems.
Two years later, after widespread complaints that the cameras intrude on privacy and are primarily a money-making enterprise for the state (income actually fell short of the projections because people refused to pay their fines), Arizona put the brakes on the program. And while other states—including Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, West Virginia and Wisconsin—have since followed suit, many more municipalities, suffering from budget crises, have succumbed to the promise of easy revenue and installed the cameras. As the Washington Post notes:
A handful of cities used them a decade ago. Now they’re in more than 400, spread across two dozen states. Montgomery County started out with 18 cameras in 2007. Now it has 119. Maryland just took the program statewide last month, and Prince George's is putting up 50. The District started out with a few red light cameras in 1999; now they send out as many automated tickets each year as they have residents, about 580,000.
In most cases, state and local governments arrange to lease the cameras from the Redflex Corporation, with Redflex taking its cut of ticket revenue first, and the excess going to the states and municipalities.
The cameras, which are triggered by sensors buried in the road, work by taking photos of drivers who enter intersections after a traffic light turns red. What few realize, however, is that you don’t actually have to run a red light to get “caught.” Many drivers have triggered the cameras simply by making a right turn on red or crossing the sensor but not advancing into the intersection.
Each municipality has its own protocol for what happens next, but generally, the photos are reviewed by Redflex, which then issues tickets to the drivers. And this is where your right to a fair and full hearing largely goes out the window. Indeed, while there is a system for challenging a ticket, it is often convoluted and onerous, with the burden of proof resting upon the driver. Even the courts have a tendency to view the cameras as infallible. According to theWashington Post, Montgomery County, “in screening the tickets to mail out, has had to kick out 23,266 ‘violations’ from May 2007 to June 2009 because ‘No violation occurred/operator error.’ And 10,813 were tossed for reasons including ‘power interruption’ and ‘equipment malfunction.’” Once in court, however, the drivers were invariably found guilty 99.7 percent of the time.
Some opponents advocate ignoring the ticket altogether on the pretext that there are few real penalties to not paying. In Los Angeles, about 56,000 people have opted not to pay their red light camera tickets, resulting in roughly 45 percent of all tickets issued since 2006 going unresolved with no punishment.
Still, supporters contend that the ends justify the means because the cameras increase traffic safety. Yet research suggests otherwise. In fact, multiple studies indicate that red light cameras actually increase the number of crashes. For example, in Greensboro, N.C., the Urban Transit Institute at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University analyzed 57 months of data and concluded that the red light cameras were associated with a 40% increase in crashes. In Ontario, Canada, Synectics Transportation Consultants found a 16% increase in accidents at intersections with cameras, as opposed to an 8% increase at comparison intersections with no police enforcement or cameras. It also found a 2% increase in injury/fatal crashes at camera intersections as opposed to a 10% decrease with police enforcement.
Studies conducted in Virginia also show that the cameras result in an increased number of rear-end collisions. The Virginia Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration funded a study of seven years of crash data by the Virginia Transportation Research Council. The study associated red light cameras with a 27% increase in rear-end crashes and a 42% decrease in red-light-running crashes across six Virginia jurisdictions (Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax City, Fairfax County, Falls Church and Vienna). Overall, however, crashes increased because there are generally more rear-end crashes than red light running crashes. Thus, the study concluded that the results “cannot be used to justify the widespread installation of cameras because they are not universally effective.”
There are, in fact, far superior alternatives to red light cameras. For instance, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, intersection safety would be increased by simply lengthening the yellow light time or adding an all-red light interval. A study by the Texas Transportation Institute found that increasing the length of yellow lights by one second decreased the chance of accidents by 40%. Similarly, another case study revealed that a mere 30% increase in yellow light time produced substantial safety benefits. And when the Virginia Department of Transportation increased the yellow light duration from 4.0 seconds to 5.5 seconds at an Arlington intersection in 2000, the problem of red light running practically disappeared.
Rather than trading one type of crash for another, which is what red light cameras do, increasing the duration of the yellow light has proven to be effective in actually enhancing intersection safety. So why aren’t more communities extending the yellow lights?
Regrettably, a close examination of the history of traffic monitoring devices reveals that, on a larger scale, the profit motive figures prominently into the increased use of red light cameras. In fact, despite the fact that lengthening the yellow light duration has been shown to increase intersection safety, national guidelines have actually lowered the recommended yellow light duration at problem intersections, apparently in an effort to spawn the implementation of red light cameras across the nation.
Moreover, a 2001 report released by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey found that in 1985, the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) began to change the way signal times were calculated so as to provide at least three methods resulting in a reduction of yellow light time. The report ultimately concluded:
Transportation officials and engineers know that the yellow signal timing is essential to safety. The data showing this to be the case are found in their studies. Nonetheless, some have systematically and intentionally ignored the inescapable engineering fact that longer yellows would solve the so-called crises caused by shortened yellows. Red light cameras present a perverse disincentive for local jurisdictions to fix intersections with excessive red light entries. It’s hard to fix a “problem” that brings in millions in revenue. In other words, red light cameras aren’t fixing a safety problem, they’re creating one.
Virginia is a perfect example of what happens when politicians sacrifice safety to generate revenue. In March 2010, Governor Bob McDonnell (R) approved legislation that allows private corporations operating the red light camera systems, such as Redflex, to directly access motorists’ confidential information from the Department of Motor Vehicles. What this means is that not only will government agents have one more means of monitoring a person’s whereabouts, but a remote, privately-owned corporation will now have access to drivers’ confidential information.
Another provision signed into law by McDonnell also shortened the amount of time given to alleged traffic law violators to respond to citations resulting from red light camera violations. While prior law allotted 60 days for the response, the amendment cut that time in half to 30 days. This gives the driver scant time to receive and review the information, determine what action is required, inspect the evidence, consider appealing the citation and respond appropriately. In this way, by shortening the appeal time, more drivers are forced to pay the fine or face added penalties.
The bottom line is this: red light cameras are not safety devices—they’re revenue-raising devices for corporations, states and municipalities, which is bad enough when it comes at taxpayer expense. But when coupled with the entire arsenal of technological tools being aimed at the American people, from license-plate readers, mobile scanners and iris scanners to full-body scanners in airports, biometric ID cards, etc., they become yet another layer in our surveillance society. Ultimately, surveillance is about one thing—total control of the citizenry.
WC: 1408

2010-12-09T10:53:00.000-08:00

There is a phobia in America about Christmas, and it’s all because of those first six letters, C-H-R-I-S-T. In this week’s vodcast, John Whitehead talks about the outrageous lengths to which government officials are going in order to not offend those who do not celebrate the holiday and what you can do about it.

An Awesome Reminder to Every American

2010-12-07T03:11:00.000-08:00

How did Jefferson know?

Thomas Jefferson was a very remarkable man who started learning very early in life and never stopped.

· At 5, began studying under his cousins’ tutor.

· At 9, studied Latin, Greek and French.

· At 14, studied classical literature and additional languages.

· At 16, entered the College of William and Mary.

· At 19, studied Law for 5 years starting under George Wythe.

· At 23, started his own law practice.

· At 25, was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses.

· At 31, wrote the widely circulated "Summary View of the Rights of British America" and retired from his law practice.

· At 32, was a Delegate to the Second Continental Congress.

· At 33, wrote the Declaration of Independence.

· At 33, took three years to revise Virginia 's legal code and wrote a Public Education bill and a statute for Religious Freedom.

· At 36, was elected the second Governor of Virginia succeeding Patrick Henry.

· At 40, served in Congress for two years.

· At 41, was the American minister to France and negotiated commercial treaties with European nations along with Ben Franklin and John Adams.

· At 46, served as the first Secretary of State under George Washington.

· At 53, served as Vice President and was elected president of the American Philosophical Society.

· At 55, drafted the Kentucky Resolutions and became the active head of Republican Party.

· At 57, was elected the third president of the United States .

· At 60, obtained the Louisiana Purchase doubling the nation's size.

· At 61, was elected to a second term as President.

· At 65, retired to Monticello .

· At 80, helped President Monroe shape the Monroe Doctrine.

· At 81, almost single-handedly created the University of Virginia and served as its first president.

· At 83, died on the 50th anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence along with John Adams.

Thomas Jefferson knew what he was talking about because he-himself studied the previous failed attempts at government.

He understood actual history, the nature of God, his laws and the nature of man.

That happens to be way more than what most understand today. Jefferson really knew his stuff.

A voice from the past to lead us in the future:

John F. Kennedy held a dinner in the white House for a group of the brightest minds in the nation at that time. He made this statement: "This is perhaps the assembly of the most intelligence ever to gather at one time in the White House with the exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe .
Thomas Jefferson
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.
A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

Thomas Jefferson

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
Thomas Jefferson

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
Thomas Jefferson
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson said in 1802:
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies..
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

2010-12-02T08:17:00.000-08:00

Americans are increasingly objecting to the TSA's use of full-body scanners in airports. But as John Whitehead argues in this week's vodcast, these scanners shouldn't be forced on the American public without the absolute assurance that they will not harm our health or undermine our liberties.

2010-11-19T07:22:00.000-08:00

All across America, an array of surveillance tools are being used to actively mark citizens, track their whereabouts and monitor even their most private activities. In this week's vodcast, John Whitehead looks at the latest technology about to be unleashed by the government on the American people: the iris scanner.

Invasion of the Body Scanners: More Tales of Terror from the Unfriendly Skies

2010-11-12T12:51:00.000-08:00

In airports across the nation, Americans are being subjected to all manners of egregious searches by government agents. In this week's vodcast, John Whitehead shares emails from individuals—particularly women—who have suffered their own horrific encounters with TSA agents.

More Tales of Terror from the Unfriendly Skies

Hitler Finds Out The GOP has retaken the House

2010-11-08T07:08:00.000-08:00

This needs no introduction!!!

2010-10-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

Remember Lee Iacocca - he has a new book

2010-10-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

Remember Lee Iacocca, the man who rescued Chrysler Corporation from its death throes? He has a new book, 'Where Have All The Leaders Gone?'.
Lee Iacocca Says:

'Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage with this so called president? We should be screaming bloody murder!

We've got a gang of tax cheating clueless leftists trying to steer our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even run a ridiculous cash-for-clunkers program without losing $26 billion of the taxpayers' money, much less build a hybrid car.

But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'trust me the economy is getting better ...'

Better? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned, 'Titanic'. I'll give you a sound bite: 'Throw all the Democrats out along with Obama!'

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore ...

The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs ... While we're fiddling in Afghanistan, Iran is completing their nuclear bombs and missiles and nobody seems to know what to do.

And the liberal press is waving 'pom-poms' instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of the ' America ' my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. The Biggest 'C' is Crisis! (Iacocca elaborates on nine C's of leadership, with crisis being the first.)

Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with thumb up your butt and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. A hell of a mess, so here's where we stand.

We're immersed in a bloody war now with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving ... But our soldiers are dying daily.

We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the world, and it's getting worse every day!

We've lost the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs.

Gas prices are going to skyrocket again, and nobody in power has a lucid plan to open drilling to solve the problem. This country has the largest oil reserves in the WORLD, and we cannot drill for it because the politicians have been bought by the flea-hugging environmentalists.

Our schools are in a complete disaster because of the teachers union.

Our borders are like sieves and they want to give all illegal's amnesty and free health care.

The middle class is being squeezed to death every day.

These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you've got to ask: 'Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, omnipotence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point..

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo?

We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.

Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping the government will make it better for them. Now, that's just crazy ... Deal with life.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when 'The Big Three' referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, look what Obama did about it!

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debit, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the Chicago gangsters in Congress. We didn't elect you to turn this country into a losing European Socialist state. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bonehead on NBC or CNN news will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?

Had Enough? Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope - I believe in America ..

In my lifetime, I've had the privilege of living through some of America 's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises: The 'Great Depression,' 'World War II,' the 'Korean War,' the 'Kennedy Assassination,' the 'Vietnam War,' the 1970's oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years since 9/11.

Make your own contribution by sending this to everyone you know and care about. It's our country, folks, and it's our future.

The New World Order Is Almost In Place

2010-09-24T04:24:00.000-07:00

No Secrets Benefit a FREE Society - JFK

2010-09-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

Mind blowing speech by Robert Welch in 1958 predicting Insiders plans to destroy America

2010-09-20T05:27:00.000-07:00

Can You Hear US NOW !

2010-09-17T03:09:00.000-07:00

How Obama Thinks . . . .

2010-09-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

By Dinesh D'Souza

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?

The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might
force banks to keep the money.

The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income
taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be
constructed at Ground Zero.

Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an
eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.

One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one oflanding on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style
socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American
mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.

A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?

It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.

Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography,
Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary
means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"

As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate
with their income which is taxed."

Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House. While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."

From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his
speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.

If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified
under certain circumstances.

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.

Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."

But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work
hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"

The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed
in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his
son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book
The Roots of Obama's Rage
(Regnery Publishing)
.

http://mobile.forbes.com/device/article.php?CALL_URL=http://www.for...

Hidden Real Estate Sales Tax in Health Care Bill

2010-09-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

  SENTINEL INTELLIGENCE SERVICES, LLC
                                                       LYLE J. RAPACKI, Ph.D.
                                                                 ____________

CONSULTANT AT:
Protective Intelligence and Assessment
Behavioral Analysis and Threat Assessment
Independent Intelligence Analyst                                                                             Lyle@SentinelIntelligenceServices.com
____________________                                                                                           ____________________
Tuesday -                                                                                       Email Briefing Bulletin:
September the 14th, 2010
1308Hrs; m.s.t. (Arizona)

Attached is information showing still yet another "hidden" tax that will effect citizens, and
yet, probably is not known. There are many such taxes coming. Other examples: A 1% tax
will be added to EACH bank transaction you carry-out. This includes, but is not limited to:
deposits, withdrawals, check transactions, ATM transactions. If you are still fortunate to have an employer, much less have an employer who is paying your health insurance as part of your salary package, you will begin to be taxed on the monthly premium paid to keep your health insurance intact. This tax on the premium will be considered income. If you spend $600 at a business during the coming fiscal year, you will be required to obtain a 10-99 Form from that business, as well as their company mailing address and tax I.D. number, and you will have to declare the $600 on those forms for each business where you spend $600 during the year. This is a lot of paper work for small businesses, and home businesses.

There is active discussion to push "Cap and Trade" through after the elections and prior to the new Congress being sworn in January. If this legislation is passed, it will have a devastating effect on business, as well as our Nation's economy. The continued devastation on our Nation's economy is a National Security item and concern. As our country loses its' ability to be financially stable, the ability to protect our assets internationally all lose; our ability to flex military might, when necessary, loses; our ability to influence many countries who look to us for guidance loses; our ability to assist our allies is lost. Our ability to care for our own people and needs of our own Nation is lost. A slow unraveling of society begins. These are security concerns.

Continue to prepare yourself and your family for very lean times. Prepare your neighbors so a strong sense of community is developed. Prepare to fend for yourself and your family in the likelihood of civil unrest. DO NOT go off "half-cocked," but DO sit down and begin a serious review of your ability to survive a disruption in food distribution, as well as fuel and energy. Serious hyperinflation is coming; what cost a dollar today will cost far more in the not-so-distant future. DO NOT think the elections of Republicans will stem the tide and usher in a Golden Era. The deliberate plan to bring America down to Third-World status is NOT merely a Democrat v. Republican issue. It is far more deep and wide than a
simple conventional political explanation. Please don't lull yourself into a false sense of belief that all will be fine the morning after the November election.

Please prepare yourself and your family now while there is still time.

LYLE J. RAPACKI, Ph.D.

Overwhelm The System

2010-09-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

Wayne Allyn Root

Barrack Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos -- thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.

Barack Obama is my college classmate ( Columbia University , class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward and Piven, two professors at Columbia University . They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.

-- Universal health care. The health care bill had very little to do with health care. Â It had everything to do with unionizing millions of hospital and health care workers, as well as adding 15,000 to 20,000 new IRS agents (who will join government employee unions). Obama doesn't care that giving free health care to 30 million Americans will add trillions to the national debt. What he does care about is that it cements the dependence of those 30 million voters to Democrats and big government. Who but a socialist revolutionary would pass this reckless spending bill in the middle of a depression?

-- Cap and trade. Like health care legislation having nothing to do with health care, cap and trade has nothing to do with global warming. It has everything to do with redistribution of income, government control of the economy and a criminal payoff to Obama's biggest contributors. Those powerful and wealthy unions and contributors (like GE, which owns NBC, MSNBC and CNBC) can then be counted on to support everything Obama wants. They will kickback hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Obama and the Democratic Party to keep them in power. The bonus is that all the new taxes on Americans with bigger cars, bigger homes and businesses helps Obama "spread the wealth around."

-- Make Puerto Rico a state. Why? Who's asking for a 51st state? Who's asking for millions of new welfare recipients and government entitlement addicts in the middle of a depression? Certainly not American taxpayers. But this has been Obama's plan all along. His goal is to add two new Democrat senators, five Democrat congressman and a million loyal Democratic voters who are dependent on big government.

-- Legalize 12 million illegal immigrants. Just giving these 12 million potential new citizens free health care alone could overwhelm the system and bankrupt America . But it adds 12 million reliable new Democrat voters who can be counted on to support big government. Add another few trillion dollars in welfare, aid to dependent children, food stamps, free medical, education, tax credits for the poor, and eventually Social Security.

-- Stimulus and bailouts. Where did all that money go? It went to Democrat contributors, organizations (ACORN), and unions -- including billions of dollars to save or create jobs of government employees across the country. It went to save GM and Chrysler so that their employees could keep paying union dues. It went to AIG so that Goldman Sachs could be bailed out (after giving Obama almost $1 million in contributions). A staggering $125 billion went to teachers (thereby protecting their union dues). Al l those public employees will vote loyally Democrat to protect their bloated salaries and pensions that are bankrupting America . The country goes broke, future generations face a bleak future, but Obama, the Democrat Party, government, and the unions grow more powerful. The ends justify the means.

-- Raise taxes on small business owners, high-income earners, and job creators. Put the entire burden on only the top 20 percent of taxpayers, redistribute the income, punish success, and reward those who did nothing to deserve it (except vote for Obama). Reagan wanted to dramatically cut taxes in order to starve the government. Obama wants to dramatically raise taxes to starve his political opposition.

With the acts outlined above, Obama and his regime have created a vast and rapidly expanding constituency of voters dependent on big government; a vast privileged class of public employees who work for big government; and a government dedicated to destroying capitalism and installing themselves as socialist rulers by overwhelming the system.

Add it up and you've got the perfect Marxist scheme -- all devised by my Columbia University college classmate Barack Obama using the Cloward and Piven Plan.

There are people who will simply read and delete this...

There are others that are so wrapped up with Obama-mania that they will never accept any criticism of him.

There are those that say, 'I'm too old to worry about this crap... it's not going to affect me'!

Finally, there are professional blood-suckers that live off everyone else's sweat -- they want more 'Free Stuff'. And we all know where they stand.

If you care about your future, or maybe your children or grandchildren's future, do something now.

Vote the bums out of office this November. And, make Obama a one-term president.

Voting Is Sexy

2010-09-07T15:21:00.001-07:00

MAKE THE MOST OF YOURSELF, FOR THAT IS ALL THERE IS OF YOU!
"RALPH WALDO EMERSON"

'Twas the night before elections

And all through the town

Tempers were flaring

Emotions all up and down!

I, in my bathrobe

With a cat in my lap

Had cut off the TV

Tired of political crap.

When all of a sudden

There arose such a noise

I peered out of my window

Saw Obama and his boys

They had come for my wallet

They wanted my pay

To give to the others

Who had not worked a day!

He snatched up my money

And quick as a wink

Jumped back on his bandwagon

As I gagged from the stink

He then rallied his henchmen

Who were pulling his cart

I could tell they were out

To tear my country apart!

' On Fannie, on Freddie,

On Biden and Ayers!

On Acorn, On Pelosi'

He screamed at the pairs!

They took off for his cause

And as he flew out of sight

I heard him laugh at the nation

Who wouldn't stand up and fight!

So I leave you to think

On this one final note-

IF YOU DONT WANT SOCIALISM

GET OUT AND VOTE!!!!

Propelling a New Economic Direction for Michigan

2010-08-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

By Rob Fowler, President and CEO

Small Business Association of Michigan (SBAM)

Most job growth in Michigan comes from small businesses, especially fast growing companies known as “second stage” firms. In contrast, very few big companies – neither the ones that we have now nor the ones that are lured by expensive tax breaks to locate here in the state – are creating new jobs. The Edward Lowe Foundation reports that between 1993 and 2007, fast growing Michigan small businesses created 137,000 jobs. What did big businesses do? In that same time period, they lost 258,000 jobs.

SBAM has launched a major new initiative entitled Propelling a New Economic Direction for Michigan. This new economic direction focuses on entrepreneurial growth, small business job creation and a new state focus on economic gardening. Economic gardening means tempering the public sector’s traditional role of using tax credits and incentives to lure industry and business from outside the state, and instead emphasizes making Michigan welcoming and nurturing for the home-grown, high-growth small businesses that are proven to be the true job-makers. The initiative will aggressively hold the new governor and legislators accountable for supporting our home-grown small businesses.

We need Michigan to:

1. Create and commit to a competitive business climate

2. Stop picking winners and losers by targeting certain industries at the expense of others. Focus on helping companies get to the next stage of growth regardless of the industry.

3. Retool: develop the leading edge tools for economic development based on a deep understanding of entrepreneurial firms. Let’s lead the nation in this new strategy. It’s Michigan’s heritage.

During the early part of the Twentieth Century, at the birth of the auto industry, Michigan was the Silicon Valley of its day – the global leader in innovation and job growth. We’ve had a world class entrepreneurial culture before and we will again. We invite you to join our fight to set a new economic direction for our state by going to www.sbam.org/action.

This is calling it what it is

2010-08-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

"WE NOTICED"

2010-08-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

Sherry Hackett, wife of the late Buddy Hackett,

is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat.

I would think that many other Democrats

share her position...

This was written by Sherry Hackett, Buddy Hackett's widow

President Obama:

Today I read of your administrations' plan to re-define September 11 as
a National Service Day. Sir, it's time we had a talk.

During your campaign, Americans watched as you made mockery of our
tradition of standing and crossing your heart when the Pledge of Allegiance
was spoken. You, out of four people on the stage, were the only one not
honoring our tradition.
YES, "We noticed."

During one of your many speeches, Americans heard you say that you
intended to visit all 57 states. We all know that Islam, not America has 57 states.
YES, "We noticed."

When President Bush leaned over at Ground Zero and gently placed a
flower on the memorial, while you nonchalantly tossed your flower onto
the pile without leaning over.
YES, "We noticed."

Every time you apologized to other countries for America 's position on
an issue we have wondered why you don't share our pride in this great
country.. When you have heard foreign leaders berate our country and
our beliefs, you have not defended us. In fact, you insulted the
British Crown beyond belief.
YES, "We noticed."

When your pastor of 20 years, "God-damned America " and said that
9/11 was " America 's chickens coming home to roost" and you denied
having heard recriminations of that nature, we wondered how that could
be. You later disassociated yourself from that church and Pastor
Wright because it was politically expedient to do so.
YES, "We noticed."

When you announced that you would transform America , we wondered
why. With all her faults, America is the greatest country on earth.
Sir, KEEP THIS IN MIND, "if not for America and the people who built
her, you wouldn't be sitting in the White House now." Prior to your
election to the highest office in this Country, you were a senator from
Illinois and from what we can glean from the records available, not a
very remarkable one.
YES, "We noticed."

All through your campaign and even now, you have surrounded
yourself with individuals who are basically unqualified for the
positions for which you appointed them. Worse than that, the majority
of them are people who, like you, bear no special allegiance, respect, or
affection for this country and her traditions.
YES, "We noticed."

You are 14 months into your term and every morning millions of
Americans wake up to a new horror heaped on us by you. You seek to
saddle working Americans with a health care/insurance reform package
that, along with cap and trade, will bankrupt this nation.
YES, "We noticed."

We seek, by protesting, to let our representatives know that we are not
in favor of these crippling expenditures and we are labeled
"un-American","racist", "mob". We wonder how we are supposed to let
you know how frustrated we are. You have attempted to make our protests seem
isolated and insignificant. Until your appointment, Americans had the right
to speak out.
YES, "We noticed."

On September 11, 2001 there were no Republicans or Democrats, only
Americans. And we all grieved together and helped each other in
whatever way we could. The attack on 9/11 was carried out because we are
Americans.
And YES, "We noticed."

There were many of us who prayed that as a black president you could
help unite this nation. In six months you have done more to destroy
this nation than the attack on 9/11. You have failed us.
YES, "We noticed."

September 11 is a day of remembrance for all Americans. You
propose to make 9/11 a "National Service Day". While we know that you
don't share our reverence for 9/11, we pray that history will report
your proposal as what it is, a disgrace.
YES, "We noticed."

You have made a mockery of our Constitution and the office that
you hold. You have embarrassed and slighted us in foreign visits
and policy.
YES, "We noticed."

We have noticed all these things. We will deal with you. When Americans
come together again, it will be to remove you from office.
Take notice.

The Message is Clear

2010-08-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck's Departure from Fox News

By Robert Ringer:
Perhaps some have had reservations about the level of concern I have expressed about what is happening in the criminally corrupt and unconstitutional actions of those in control of our government in Washington. The attached article published by World Net Daily provides an interesting analysis of speculation over the outstanding job that Glenn Beck has done in documenting the blatant headlong effort of the Obama administration to ignore and trash the Constitution in the interest of his obsession to convert this nation into a Marxist/Socialist society. If you have not heard the Glenn Beck programs on Fox News you have missed the most honest, factual documentation of the criminal corruption of what is happening in Washington, and I would encourage everyone to see as many of his programs as you possibly can. This country has only about six months to assure the complete reversal of Congressional control in this country. If that does not happen, the freedoms that our country has enjoyed for well over 250 years will be past history.
Unfortunately we do not have enough strong leaders in Congress who can and will stand up and expose the sinister agenda that is in the process of being implemented at this time. As you read the summations of the author of this article he speculates about four possibilities of what might happen to Glenn Beck in the near future.
Your attention is directed to the first of his four options as to what might happen to Glenn Beck. His thoughts there are exactly what I have been fearing for the last six months. Glenn has exposed so much criminal corruption in the Apollo Alliance and the Chicago Carbon Exchange (CCX) and the level to which George Soros, Al Gore, the corrupt union leadership such as the SIEU, and Barack Obama have been involved. What I have been fearing is the same "strange, unfortunate accidents" that happened to the acquaintances of Bill & Hillary Clinton during the early days of their political career. Don't be naive enough to think it could not happen with this bunch. I suggest you read this article carefully, then listen to Glenn Beck's program as often as you can. Our country is in the most perilous time of its 250 year history. Our children and grand children will not enjoy the freedoms, privileges and prosperity that we have enjoyed if this November election does not clean house with this Congress, and create the potential for the impeachment of at least three of the current leaders in Washington.
Glenn Beck's Departure from Fox News - By Robert Ringer
On rare occasions, a unique figure bursts onto the national stage and has a dramatic impact on politics, culture, or both. Glenn Beck is one of those figures. He is surely the biggest, fastest, most controversial star in the political commentary business in my lifetime.

Beck is a real-life version of Howard Beale, the fictional television commentator in the 1976 film classic Network. Beale whipped his cultish TV audience into a frenzy, exhorting them to stick their heads out the window and chant, ''I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!''
Much to the chagrin of the oligarchy in Washington, however, Glenn Beck is not a fictional character. He's real, and he has succeeded in enlightening his audience far beyond Beale's simple rants about the unfairness of life. Beck is much more knowledgeable, much more factual, much more rational, and much more focused on the key issue: America's loss of liberty.
I find it more than just a bit ironic that ultra-liberal CNN Headline News gave Beck his first forum on television. There, he created a huge stir with his ''rodeo-clown'' antics and his willingness to talk openly about his drug- and alcohol-addicted past. But as he increasingly added his political views to the mix, people started asking, ''Why isn't this guy on Fox News?''
Of course, Roger Ailes was closely observing Beck all along, and, in January 2009, he brought him to Fox and fit him into the 5:00 p.m. time slot. While Beck had been moving more and more toward political commentary at CNN Headline News, from the moment he came to Fox his transition to near-total politics was swift.
Combining his incredible talents with the work of his equally incredible research staff, Beck became a household name seemingly overnight. In truth, of course, he had been in media for thirty years, but he had never before had a forum like Fox News.
Beck's show is so good, I'm convinced that if a person doesn't watch it on a regular basis, it's almost impossible for him to understand the true causes of the moral and economic collapse of the United States - or even that it is collapsing - because no one else on TV covers most of the stories he dissects in impeccable detail. His modus operandi has been to expose the bad guys through their own words by playing audios and videos of them shooting off their mouths and by quoting their writings.
For quite some time now, I have believed that Beck has become so good at exposing the truth, so well respected, and so powerful that the Forces of Darkness in the White House and Congress view him as a major threat to their aspirations to eliminate the Constitution, the rule of law, and individual sovereignty in the United States. (In fact, they now refer to him as ''the Beck problem.'')
But, as I have written in the past, the Obamafia is in a no-win situation with Beck. If its leaders ignore him, he will continue to disrobe Chairman Obama and his malevolent progressive pals through their own spoken and written words.
On the other hand, as they have already discovered, the more they try to discredit Beck, the more attention they draw to him - and the more people will learn about the details of how they plan to fundamentally transform America. Worse, their childish mudslinging is no match for Beck's sixty minutes of hard-core truth five days a week (not to mention his three-hour daily radio show).
So Beck keeps raising the ante, and there is no question in my mind that the oligarchy in Washington sees him as a major obstacle between where they are today and their ultimate goal: a firmly entrenched, all-powerful federal government that controls every aspect of people's lives.
Listening to Beck this past year has convinced me that he senses he has been chosen by a Higher Power to lead the charge against the evildoers in government. If so, it's not the first time God has surprised the world with his choice of a messenger.

In laying down the gauntlet, Beck has pointed out that as a recovering alcoholic, he's already been at the bottom, so nothing scares him. ''The worst thing that can happen in my life,'' Beck has said, ''is to lose my honor and to return to my Heavenly Father without honor - without doing what I was supposed to do.'' When people talk like this, it represents a very big problem for those in power.
 Beck has made it clear that he is not afraid of losing everything if that's what it takes to convey the truth to as many people as possible. And, as the far left knows all too well, a man who is willing to lose everything can be a huge obstacle to its achieving its socialist objectives.
The willingness to lose everything is, in fact, a key to being a successful revolutionary, or, in Beck's case, a counter-revolutionary. How many people do you know who are prepared to lose everything to fight for what they believe in? Not long ago, Beck came right out and said, ''I'm going out swinging.'' That statement carried with it some very strong implications. Clearly, something has to give.My best guess? I hope I'm wrong, but I have long had the feeling that Glenn Beck will be leaving Fox News other than through old-age retirement.
How might his departure come about? The way I see it, there are four possible avenues of exit.
As I watch him strip BHO and other members of Crime Inc. down to their dirty underwear every day at 5:00 pm, I ponder what the Obamaviks will do to try to stop him from destroying their full-speed-ahead efforts to transform the U.S. into a collectivist paradise.
I see four possibilities for Beck's exit from Fox News:
Assassination. On more than one occasion, Beck has alluded to cement boots and his ending up at the bottom of the East River. He has also assured his audience that he has no inclination to jump off a tall building, and if something like that were to ever happen to him, it would not be accidental.
Even more ominous is that Beck continually tells his audience that this isn't about him, that each and every one of them must stand up and carry on the fight. When he says this, it sparks memories of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous words at a rally in Memphis the night before he was murdered:
''We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop ... and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.''
Anyone who has read even a nominal amount of political history knows that those on the far left unabashedly believe that their morally superior objectives justify the use of violence. The problem they have with Beck is that using violence to eliminate him is dangerous, given that he has already warned the public to be on the lookout for his sudden demise. Plus, a martyred Glenn Beck could be as powerful for the liberty movement as a martyred Barack Obama would be for the movement to turn America into a socialist police state.
So, let's assume - and hope - that no harm befalls Glenn Beck. What else, then, might cause him to leave Fox News?
Roger Ailes retires or passes on. Roger Ailes has almost single-handedly propped up the free press in this country, being so good at his job that Fox News has been able to render its left-wing media competition almost irrelevant. When Ailes, who recently turned seventy, leaves Fox, there is no assurance that Rupert Murdoch will pick a replacement with equally strong conservative beliefs.
If Roger Ailes is replaced by a ''moderate,'' the new president of Fox News would undoubtedly either terminate Beck or place restrictions on what he could and could not say. And if the latter occurred, you can be sure Beck would depart Fox - with his honor intact, as promised.
Rupert Murdoch passes on. Rupert Murdoch is still going strong, but the reality is that he's seventy-nine years old. And, as I've written about in the past (Fox News's Liberal Future), Murdoch's children and son-in-law are liberals who have long complained that Fox News is too conservative. With Murdoch gone, there would surely be a major shakeup, and both Roger Ailes and Glenn Beck - perhaps along with a few others - would quickly be out the door. It would be the end of Fox News as we have come to know it.
The Godfather option. Barack Obama knows that time is against him. With liberal Democrats dropping like flies in primaries and special elections, he can't afford to wait too long for Roger Ailes to retire or Rupert Murdoch to pass on.
Solution? Just send ''the boys'' over to have a little chat with Rupert Murdoch and make him ''an offer he can't refuse.'' In keeping with Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd's clearly stated objective to force ''some people to step down to make room for others,'' the offer might be as straightforward as: (1) If you get rid of Glenn Beck, Fox News can stay on the air; (2) if you choose to keep him, Fox News will be shut down.
Kind of the Obamafia's version of putting a bloody horse's head in someone's bed to improve his perception of reality.
And let us not forget that Cass Sunstein - whom Beck refers to as ''the most dangerous man in America'' - says he wants to use government power to stop ''conspiracy theories.'' (Translation: Repress the truth by using whatever means necessary to silence the opposition.)
So where does Beck go if he departs Fox News? On at least one occasion, he said that even if the bad guys succeed in forcing him off radio and television, he will come back with a louder voice and larger platform than ever. I found that to be a tantalizing statement, one that caused me to speculate on what such a platform might be.
Of course, the biggest platform of all would be president of the United States. Beck says he would never run for president, because he wouldn't want to risk losing his soul. The implication is that a person can't run for president, and certainly can't hold the office of the presidency, and keep his honor intact.
I thought about this recently when Beck did an in-depth show on one of his heroes, George Washington. He emphasized a number times that what made Washington unique was that he did not want to be president. He accepted the office only out of a sense of duty, and refused to stay in office longer than two terms.
I believe - and it is strictly a personal belief based only on watching and listening to him - that Beck sees himself in much the same way. I think he feels a sense of duty to do whatever he can to help save America. He knows that George Washington did not want to be president, yet he served out of a sense of duty. Even more interesting, Beck has said that ''Americans are looking for someone like George Washington.''
Clearly, he has a vivid sense that he has been put in his current high-profile station in life for a purpose. Which means he may not have a choice but to throw his hat into the political ring - if not in 2012, perhaps in 2016.  Much like the Founding Fathers, I believe Beck has committed himself to using his fame, his fortune, and his enormous talents to help defeat the poisonous progressive movement that is fundamentally transforming the United States into a destitute socialist nation.  So, the $64 question is: Will Glenn Beck ultimately conclude that he has no choice but to run for president?
And the $128 question is: Would enough Americans be willing to open their minds to the truths he would expose to elect him president?
If Beck did become president, I believe he would go down as one of the greatest - and most unpopular - patriots in American history. Unpopular because, like George Washington, he would not be willing to trade his honor for popularity.
In any event, if the presidency is not in Beck's future, it will be interesting to see what his platform will be three to five years down the road. Right now, at Fox News, he's a ticking time bomb for the progressive movement in this country.

I'AM America

2010-08-11T06:23:00.000-07:00

Krista Branch debuts the video to her recent single release, “I Am America.” Share this patriotic song with your family and friends.

Speaker Pelosi’s "Cash for Democrat Re-Election Program"

2010-08-06T05:48:00.000-07:00

WOODBURY, MN- Congresswoman Michele Bachmann issued the following statement regarding next week's special House session to spend $26 billion for supposed “state aid”:

“Next week, Speaker Pelosi is calling the 435 Members of the House to DC next week for the purpose of spending another $26 billion we don't have. We were on a six week hiatus, and members had scattered to the four corners of the Earth.

“The reason she wants to do this is because her members are in political trouble and she knows they will need the financial support of the public employee unions. This $26 billion represents a circle that works like this:

“Take $26 billion away from the productive private sector, deposit it in the US Treasury. Speaker Pelosi and the Democrat majority will then vote to send the money from the Treasury to politicians across the nation.

“State and local politicians then give the money to employees of public employee unions. The public employee union skims their share off the top of the worker's check first in the form of union dues. Part of the dues are funneled into the union's political action committee, which in turn will be spent on political TV, radio, Internet, and print ads, as well as union "boots on the ground."

“Speaker Pelosi and President Obama have already spent $3.6 trillion on stimulus. For them, $26 billion doesn't rise to the level of a day at the beach, so why bring us all back to DC after we were scattered?

“Could it be because their most loyal constituency and political foot soldiers, many of whom could be facing the never before seen horror of a government employee let go due to lack of state and local tax receipts, need to be reminded whose hand quite literally feeds them?

“Spending is the least popular item on the public's mind right now, but it looks to me like this $26 billion has more to do with fully funding the union political action coffers and making sure the left's political "volunteers" get the message to get out the Democrat vote.

“I've invited my House colleagues to join me on what I think will be the largest tele-townhall Congress has ever held, this Monday evening at 7pm in Washington, DC, at the exact moment Speaker Pelosi is opening her session.

“We will call 1,000,000 households, tell them what the Speaker is doing, and ask the peoples' opinion on the "Cash for Democrat re-election Program".

“I am also inviting anyone to join us on the call by opting in at my website, michelebachmann.com. People can weigh in with their opinions in a live interaction with members of Congress.

“This is by far the gutsiest move of desperation yet seen on the part of Speaker Pelosi

The Body Snatchers

2010-08-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

The Body Snatchers: They're After All of Us and You're Next

In this week’s vodcast, John W. Whitehead revisits an old classic, Don Siegel’s 1956Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which poses some critical questions that are still relevant to modern-day America—namely, can we hold onto our basic freedoms and avoid succumbing to the soul-sucking dredge of conformity that threatens our very humanity?

One Nation Under God

2010-07-20T17:33:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama has awakened a sleeping nation

2010-07-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

Gary Hubbell
Aspen Times Weekly

Barack Obama is the best thing that has happened to America in the last 100 years. Truly, he is the savior of America 's future. He is the best thing ever.

Despite the fact that he has some of the lowest approval ratings among recent presidents, history will see Barack Obama as the source of America 's resurrection. Barack Obama has plunged the country into levels of debt that we could not have previously imagined; his efforts to nationalize health care have been met with fierce resistance nationwide; TARP bailouts and stimulus spending have shown little positive effect on the national economy; unemployment is unacceptably high and looks to remain that way for most of a decade; legacy entitlement programs have ballooned to unsustainable levels, and there is a seething anger in the populace.

That's why Barack Obama is such a good thing for America .

Obama is the symbol of a creeping liberalism that has infected our society like a cancer for the last 100 years. Just as Hitler is the face of fascism, Obama will go down in history as the face of unchecked liberalism. The cancer metastasized to the point where it could no longer be ignored.

Average Americans who have quietly gone about their lives, earning a paycheck, contributing to their favorite charities, going to high school football games on Friday night, spending their weekends at the beach or on hunting trips - they've gotten off the fence. They've woken up. There is a level of political activism in this country that we haven't seen since the American Revolution, and Barack Obama has been the catalyst that has sparked a restructuring of the American political and social consciousness.

Think of the crap we've slowly learned to tolerate over the past 50 years as liberalism sought to re-structure the America that was the symbol of freedom and liberty to all the people of the world. Immigration laws were ignored on the basis of compassion. Welfare policies encouraged irresponsibility, the fracturing of families, and a cycle of generations of dependency. Debt was regarded as a tonic to lubricate the economy. Our children left school having been taught that they are exceptional and special, while great numbers of them cannot perform basic functions of mathematics and literacy. Legislators decided that people could not be trusted to defend their own homes, and stripped citizens of their rights to own firearms. Productive members of society have been penalized with a heavy burden of taxes in order to support legions of do-nothings who loll around, reveling in their addictions, obesity, indolence, ignorance and "disabilities." Criminals have been arrested and re-arrested, coddled and set free to pillage the citizenry yet again. Lawyers routinely extort fortunes from doctors, contractors and business people with dubious torts.

We slowly learned to tolerate these outrages, shaking our heads in disbelief, and we went on with our lives.

But Barack Obama has ripped the lid off a seething cauldron of dissatisfaction and unrest.

In the time of Barack Obama, Black Panther members stand outside polling places in black commando uniforms, slapping truncheons into their palms. ACORN - a taxpayer-supported organization - is given a role in taking the census, even after its members were caught on tape offering advice to set up child prostitution rings. A former Communist is given a paid government position in the White House as an advisor to the president. Auto companies are taken over by the government, and the auto workers' union - whose contracts are completely insupportable in any economic sense - is rewarded with a stake in the company. Government bails out Wall Street investment bankers and insurance companies, who pay their executives outrageous bonuses as thanks for the public support. Terrorists are read their Miranda rights and given free lawyers. And, despite overwhelming public disapproval, Barack Obama has pushed forward with a health care plan that would re-structure one-sixth of the American economy.

I don't know about you, but the other day I was at the courthouse doing some business, and I stepped into the court clerk's office and changed my voter affiliation from "Independent" to "Republican." I am under no illusion that the Republican party is perfect, but at least they're starting to awaken to the fact that we cannot sustain massive levels of debt; we cannot afford to hand out billions of dollars in corporate subsidies; we have to somehow trim our massive entitlement programs; we can no longer be the world's policeman and dole out billions in aid to countries whose citizens seek to harm us.

Literally millions of Americans have had enough. They're organizing, they're studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, they're reading history and case law, they're showing up at rallies and meetings, and a slew of conservative candidates are throwing their hats into the ring.. Is there a revolution brewing? Yes, in the sense that there is a keen awareness that our priorities and sensibilities must be radically re-structured. Will it be a violent revolution? No. It will be done through the interpretation of the original document that has guided us for 220 years - the Constitution. Just as the pendulum swung to embrace political correctness and liberalism, there will be a backlash, a complete repudiation of a hundred years of nonsense. A hundred years from now, history will perceive the year 2010 as the time when America got back on the right track. And for that, we can thank Barack Hussein Obama.

Gary Hubbell is a hunter, rancher, and former hunting and fly-fishing guide. Gary works as a Colorado ranch real estate broker. He can be reached through his website, aspenranchrealestate.com

Pondering Sarah Palin as the next GOP chair

2010-07-13T07:30:00.001-07:00

By Ashley Stinnett - The North Star National

The latest hearsay circling the politico rumor mill is that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin could be the perfect fit as the next chairwoman of the Republican Party. She does have an ability to raise money, as well as sellout venues. Plus she is the author of a nationally known bestselling book and has an enormous loyal following, particularly among Tea Party faithful. But are those kinds of credentials enough to qualify her to succeed Michael Steele?

A whole different ballgame.

Only time will tell. In the meantime, we know this:

The Republican National Committee is a completely different ballgame than what Palin is typically accustomed to. It is a business with a lot of fundamental planning, grassroots organizing and execution.

Just take a look at the many gaffes by the current chairman and one will quickly learn that there is a lot more to the job than making stump speeches on behalf of candidates, appearing on Fox News or writing books. Knowing strategy, like the well-planned get-out-the-vote action during the 2004 election, is an absolute must for any party to be successful. Of course, one could make the argument that Palin has had triumph as an executive presiding over a tough business known as a state, but is that the kind of party experience Republicans are looking for?

Remember, party operatives rely on the RNC as a mission control center, especially when conducting state-by-state operations.

One thing is for certain: Whoever takes over as the next RNC chair will have to do a better job at raising money, bottom line. In a political year such as this, where the GOP has been given an endless amount of ammunition from an increasingly unpopular White House, the money should be pouring in. Simply put, money equals advertising, and politics is no different when it comes to marketing and brand labeling. Without it, Republicans can only hope to make modest gains.

Recently, Palin’s political action committee has come out of nowhere to become a major player in fundraising. Being able to secure large amounts of money for candidates could help her cause, should she choose to run for party chair.

And perhaps a larger and often overlooked Palin appeal is her current strategy aimed at pulling a major voting bloc away from the Democrats in this year’s crucial mid-term elections. Her target is women, and if she were to get elected RNC chair in the near future, she would become only the second woman in GOP history to be put in charge of the party while bolstering her identity among all female voters.

After the smoke has cleared from this year’s election cycle, Palin will have plenty of time to evaluate her move. If her handpicked candidates are successful, coupled with a GOP takeover of the House, she could position herself in the driver’s seat for RNC chair. But if the Republicans raise little money, Palin’s candidates do poorly and the Democrats crawl out of the mid-terms still in control, she will have to regroup on where to go from here.

Uh oh, stoners: Even synthetic marijuana is getting banned

2010-07-08T07:46:00.000-07:00

By Dan Calabrese - The North Star National

I guess it’s time for legions of marijuana smokers to descend upon the state capital in Missouri, calling for legislators to die in a fire and declaring them to be dickheads and the Antichrist. Because more of their chemical-induced fun has just been taken away.

Missouri has now become the fifth state to ban a sort of synthetic marijuana called K2, which looks a lot like incense and which you could heretofore purchase at gas stations and the like.

Your reason for living.

The appeal of K2 is that it mimics the high you get from smoking pot, but doesn’t show up on any drug tests, so you can continue to spend your life in a stupor without your employer noticing – except for the fact that your reports read like lyrics from a Pink Floyd album.

Poor dears. Every time someone points out negative information about marijuana, or even a fake version thereof, they act as though their child has been kidnapped. I write columns on this page about everything from economics to foreign policy and all points in between.

On any other topic, I’ll get a handful of comments, many of which disagree and almost all of which calmly and rationally explain where, in the opinion of the reader, I’ve gone wrong.

When I write about marijuana, I easily get 10 to 20 times the comments I get on any other subject, and the comments are nothing if not colorful. Here are a few choice snippets from comments on my column last Thursday regarding a possible link between pot-smoking and bipolar-related psychosis:

- A false prophet and an anti-christ. That is what you are.

- die in a fire, mr Dan Calabrese, fucking little pig

- Unamused and disgusted that you would take the government coin to peddle political piddle. (I’m getting government money for writing this? When? – DC)

- Please stop wasting valuable paper you hack!!

- what a twat,really what a complete dickhead,

- Dan Calabrese have you had your mental state evaluated by an upstanding psychiatrist lately?

- What a fucking asshole!!!..

- Fuck you.

Dude. And it was my understanding that the weed makes you mellow. Guess not.

To be fair, there were some more substantive arguments offered, and you can see the whole thread here. But everyone danced around the point. I noted one study that indicated theremight be a causal connection between pot-smoking and eventual psychosis, and pointed out that it’s stupid to risk it because no oneneeds to get stoned – when God has already put the natural chemicals into your body that allow you to enjoy life to the fullest without introducing any foreign ones.

Pot smokers are determined to deny any possible negative effect, no matter how plausible, because they are bound and determined to keep getting stoned. They. Cannot. Stop. It will ruin their lives.

How dumb are pot smokers? One guy on Facebook actually compared the ingestion of THC to get him high to reading books. And of course, everyone tells me I have no right to express an opinion about it if I’ve never actually tried it – as if getting stoned gives you all the information you need about its long-term health effects.

Stop any drunk driver on New Years Eve and ask him about cirrhosis of the liver. I’m sure he’ll be an expert! At least if you think like a pot-smoker thinks.

There is a reason pot-smokers direct all this anger at me every time I write about their cherished weed: Although they deny it, they are addicted – psychologically if not physically, and quite possibly both. A few of them even go so far as to admit it, telling how smoking pot is their method for coping with life.

This is why pot-smokers flood my comment section with this sort of stuff every time I write on the subject. This is why they tell me on “cannabis forums” to “eat your own shit,” which is a funny comment coming from a pot-smoker, who is always insisting pot is great because it’s from nature. Dude. So is shit. You go first.

You react with great hysteria when someone threatens the thing without which you have decided you cannot live. You regard the carrier of this message as a mortal enemy who must be destroyed at all costs. If you depend on your freedom to get stoned in order to make it through life, you cannot – cannot – stand by while anyone points out the potential problems associated with what you’re doing.

You will come up with nullification arguments to try to silence this information.No one who hasn’t tried it can say anything! Thus, everyone but pot-smokers are eliminated from the discussion. Nice try, Arlo.

Look, I realize that the blowback against the war on drugs the past 20 years or so has been fierce, and somewhat effective. So many people refuse to deal with the realities of life, the pot-smoking population has grown exponentially, which I guess is why I get five or six comments when I write about taxes but 50 to 100 when I write about this.

But just because growing numbers of people believe something – and dosomething – doesn’t mean they’re right. It might just mean that society is spiraling out of control as people abandon all pretense of self-restraint and give themselves over to every conceivable indulgence.

Perhaps the same willful denial that has led the nation to the brink of fiscal calamity is enabling these people to wreak havoc on the natural chemicals in their brain without giving a thought to the long-term effects.

And even if I one day find myself as a minority of one, I really don’t care. When information comes out about the dangers of marijuana smoking, I will tell you about them, and the inevitable comments will be predictable.

If you are bound and determined to go through life stupefied, I can’t stop you. But I am bound and determined to talk about the price you and others are liable to pay for your rejection of sound, sobriety. And you can’t stop me either.

Have at it, stoners.

Can the public’s confidence in government at any level survive?

2010-07-07T08:01:00.000-07:00

By Dan Calabrese - The North Star National

A curious “controversy” has momentarily been stilled in Pontiac, Michigan, where the city’s state-appointed “emergency financial manager” has moved on from his job after several years of force-feeding local elected officials rational financial decisions.

Fred Leeb turned Pontiac’s budget from a red-ink-bleeding catastrophe to a healthy situation with a $3 million surplus, although it remains to be seen if the locals can keep things that way.

You think they're mad now . . .
Down the road in Detroit, another state-appointed emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, battles the local school board daily to achieve some sort of fiscal sanity.

These are two examples of a troubling fact of life in American governance: Fiscal irresponsibility is not limited to Washington D.C., nor is it limited to state capitals like Sacramento and Springfield, where officials have taken to sending out IOUs in lieu of actually paying their bills.

At just about every level, government has been irresponsible and spent more than it had – or at least more than it could sustain over the long term. Federal, state, county, local – you name it. During the boom times of the 1990s and the mid-2000s, elected officials made big-time spending commitments, sweetened union contracts and increased hiring.

And don’t leave school districts out of this. They are the biggest offenders of all, as they regularly bend over and acquiesce to anything teachers unions want to demand – all as the price for labor peace.

This house of cards could stand as long as there was someone at the level above you who was willing to cover your losses. The locals, the counties and the school districts ran short? They looked to the states. The states ran short, they looked to Washington for federal aid. Congressman and senators, regardless of party, would make sure their states got what they needed.

Washington ran short of money to do all this because of exploding entitlement obligations it refused to reform? It would simply print more money or borrow it – from everyone from domestic bond-buyers to the communist Chinese.

Washington finds itself with a debt approaching the entire gross domestic product? Washington forms a commission to study the issue.

The danger here is that public confidence in government at all levels is heading for a complete collapse. The public is starting to get the message that none of the people it elects have been dealing with fiscal reality. Not the mayor or the city council. Not the superintendent and the school board. Not the governor or the legislature. Certainly not your congressman or your senator.

And certainly not Barack Obama.

More than once in recent generations, we have had “change elections” in which the public was so fed up that anyone who yammered on about “change” could win. It was like that in 1992. It was like that in 2008. But no matter what happened in elections like these, one thing didn’t change: Public officials at every level kept spending.

If the public is really getting the message that government at every level is driving the nation toward bankruptcy, the result may well be a determined and permanent push back in the direction of limited government – and that would be a good thing.

But even though I am a limited-government guy, I still want the public to have confidence in the basic institution of government. Not that those in charge of these institutions deserve said confidence at the moment, but if the public by and large loses all faith in the very idea of representative democracy – having been so seriously hosed by those entrusted with the practice of it – elected officials, even the good ones we might elect to replace the slugs we have now, might find themselves incapable of governing because they are essentially operating without the confidence or the consent of the governed.

This is one of the reasons I do not like libertarians. They want the public to lack faith in government. To them, that’s the objective. I want the public to expect less of government, and to hold it more accountable for performing its more limited duties in a responsible manner. But if government comes through, I want the public to respond by giving good elected officials its trust.

The more clear it becomes to the public just how badly government has been operating at every level, the less plausible this seems. And what we get if all confidence in government breaks down – however justifiably – is not good at all.

Drones Over America: Tyranny at Home

2010-07-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

The U.S. government has a history of commandeering military technology for use against Americans. We saw this happen with tear gas, tasers and sound cannons, all of which were first used on the battlefield before being deployed against civilians at home. Now, as John Whitehead reveals in this week’s vodcast, the drones—pilotless, remote controlled aircraft that have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan—are coming home to roost.

Another City Lost to the United States

2010-07-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

Boasting a population that is 97% Hispanic, more than half foreign born, and 40% illegal, the Los Angeles County, Calif., incorporated city of Maywood has achieved the Reconquista goal. It is now as lawless and chaotic as any place in Mexico. Maywood is a warning to every city and town in America.

The Maywood City Council announced this week that after years of radical policies, corruption and scandal, the city was broke and all city employees would be laid off and essential city services contracted out to neighboring cities or to L.A. County government.

How did this happen? Until recently, Maywood was the model for "brown power" politics.

Maywood was the first California city with an elected Hispanic City Council, one of the first "sanctuary" cities for illegal aliens, the first city to pass a resolution calling for a boycott of Arizona after that state passed a law to enforce federal immigration laws, the first California city to order its police department not to enforce state laws requiring drivers to have licenses to drive, the first American city to call on Congress to grant amnesty to all illegals.

Council meetings were conducted in Spanish. Maywood was the leader in the peaceful, democratic achievement of the La Raza goal to take power in the U.S.

The City of Maywood started out quite differently. Back after World War II, Maywood was a booming blue-collar town with good jobs, a multi-ethnic suburb of Los Angeles.

On the 25th anniversary in 1949 of Maywood's incorporation as a city, the town celebrated with a beard-growing contest, a rodeo, and wrestling matches in City Park. Chrysler operated an assembly plant there until 1971.

But the early 1970s saw these industrial jobs in aerospace, auto and furniture manufacturing, and food processing evaporate under the pressure of higher taxes, increased local and state regulation, and the attraction of cheaper land and cheaper labor elsewhere.

The multi-ethnic Maywood of the post-war years was transformed in the ’80s and ’90s by wave after wave of Hispanic immigrants, many of them illegal.

In August 2006, a "Save Our State" anti-illegal immigration rally in Maywood drew hundreds of protesters—but a larger number of defenders of illegal immigration. The pro-illegal protesters carried signs which read "We are Indigenous ! The ONLY owners of this Continent!" and "Racist Pilgrims Go Home" and "All Europeans are Illegal Here."

According to newspaper reports at the time, objectors to illegal aliens were subject to physical attacks. A 70-year-old man was "slashed," a woman attacked, and cars vandalized. Pro-illegal demonstrators raised the Mexican flag at the U.S. Post Office.

The illegal population and their sympathizers became increasingly radicalized. Elections to the City Council saw "assimilationist" incumbent Hispanic council members ousted by La Raza supporting radical challengers.

For years, the Maywood City Council authorized police checkpoints to stop drunk driving. Drivers without licenses had their cars impounded. Illegals in California cannot get drivers licenses. By 2005, the number of such impounds were in the hundreds. A community campaign was launched forcing the City Council to suspend the checkpoints.

Cars were still being impounded whenever a police traffic-violation stop resulted in a driver without a license. Felipe Aguirre, a community activist with Comite Pro-Uno, an "immigration service center," coordinated a new campaign against any impounds. He was elected in 2005 to the City Council. He is the mayor of Maywood today.

Aguirre and a new majority of the council dismantled the Traffic Department. Illegals were given overnight-parking permits and impounds stopped. You didn't need a license to drive in Maywood. The Los Angeles Times wrote glowingly of this "progress" in a story entitled "Welcome to Maywood, Where Roads Open Up For Immigrants".

The Maywood Police Department was restructured by the new council. A new chief and new officers were hired. Later it turned out that many of the new officers had previously been fired from other law enforcement agencies for a variety of infractions. The Maywood P.D. was known as the "Department of Second Chances."

Among those hired was a former L.A. Sheriff's deputy terminated for abusing jail inmates; a former LAPD officer fired for intimidating a witness; and an ex-Huntington Park officer charged with negligently discharging a handgun and driving drunk.

Even the L.A. Times called the Maywood Police Department a "haven for misfit cops." Their story alleged that a veteran officer was extorting sex from relatives of a criminal fugitive; that another officer tried to run over the president of the Maywood Police Commission; and that another officer has impregnated a teenage police-explorer scout.

Charges of corruption and favoritism led to one recall of city council members and threats of more recalls are heard to this day.

Maywood is represented in the state Senate by Democrat "One Bill" Gil Cedillo. He earned the nickname by introducing every year in the state legislature a bill to grant drivers licenses to illegals. Maywood is represented in Congress by Democrat Lucille Roybal-Allard, a staunch advocate of amnesty for illegals.

Today, Maywood is broke. Its police department dismantled along with all other city departments and personnel. Only the city council remains and a city manager to manage the contracts with other agencies for city services in Maywood.

Maywood is the warning of what happens when illegal immigrants, resisting assimilation as Americans, bring with their growing numbers the corruption and the radical politics of their home countries. Add the radical home-grown anti-Americanism of Hispanic "leaders" and groups like La Raza and you get schools where learning is replaced with indoctrination, business and jobs replaced by welfare and gangs, and a poisonous stew of entitlement politics.

In too many American communities, this sad tale is all too familiar.

June 25, 2010, Roger Hedgecock http://www.alipac.us/article-5396-thread-1-0.html

2008 Maywood video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VdSVNVX6Uk&feature=related

What If Arizona Were Quebec?

2010-07-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

By Michael Filozof

Suppose for a moment that 15 million Americans -- the population of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut combined -- sneaked across the border into Quebec. Suppose that these illegal immigrants refused to learn to speak French, that they applied for Canadian welfare, that they reproduced at a rate higher than Quebec's residents, and that they bankrupted Canada's socialized medical system. Suppose that they sent their children to Canadian schools in such large numbers that Quebec's school system had to teach "French as a Second Language" courses.

Suppose that the 15 million illegal American aliens included large numbers of criminals, drug dealers from Vermont, and arms traffickers, causing Quebec's crime rate to soar; that they comprised 20% to 30% of Quebec's prison inmates; and that they routinely evaded capture by Canadian authorities by sneaking back across the border, where they engaged in gang warfare.

Suppose that the illegal Americans congregated in packs on Montreal street corners, looking for day labor for which they did not pay taxes, and drove through the streets of Quebec without driver's licenses or motor vehicle insurance. Suppose that the illegals marched openly in the streets of Montreal, waving the Stars and Stripes, celebrating the Fourth of July, and demanding amnesty. Suppose that illegal American college students formed radical pro-U.S. organizations on Quebec's campuses and demanded resident tuition discounts and affirmative-action preferences.

Let us further suppose that when the Montreal Canadiens played the Washington Capitals at the Bell Centre, large numbers of illegal Americans waved the American flag, booed, hissed, and doused Canadiens fans with beer when "O, Canada" was sung in French prior to the opening face-off.

How do you suppose Canada would react? Would Quebec City and Laval declare themselves "sanctuary cities" and refuse to cooperate with federal authorities seeking to deport the illegal Americans? Would Quebec offer driver's licenses to the illegals? Would the province refuse to ask voters for identification and proof of citizenship?

If Quebec's provincial parliament passed a law allowing the police to demand proof of citizenship from suspected illegals, would the Prime Minister call it "misguided"? Would the Bishop of Montreal accuse the province of "Nazism"? Would residents of Calgary and Winnipeg call for a boycott of Quebec? Do you suppose the federal parliament in Ottawa would propose legislation to grant citizenship to the illegals (thereby allowing them to sponsor the emigration to Canada of their relatives back in the Unites States)?

Of course not. Anyone remotely familiar with Canadian politics knows exactly what would happen. A situation like the one described above would cause the province to explode.

At the very least, you can bet that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Customs Canada would have tactical units all along the border from Massena to New Brunswick. At worst, there would be war. Francophones would be screaming "Arrêt!" and "Non!" to illegal immigration at the top of their lungs. Canada's leading pundits and politicians would be demanding the preservation of Canadian culture against the onslaught from the United States. All of the obnoxious moral priggishness about "human rights" and "multiculturalism" that Canada has become so famous for would go out the window in a heartbeat, and the Canadians would spare no expense in rounding up and deporting the illegal American invaders.

French-Canadians are extremely prickly about their cultural heritage. Quebec has legislatively forbidden stores to advertise in English and mandated the use of French in public schools. French-Canadians have their own political party, the Parti Quebecois, to promote their interests. In 1995, the province held a referendum and came within one percentage point of voting to secede from Canada.

It is utterly mind-boggling to see the reaction of the cultural and political elites in the United States to the law passed by Arizona last week empowering the state to enforce immigration laws. Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles characterized the law as "Nazism," and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano called it "misguided" and "not ... good."

The Constitution grants Congress the authority to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization" and to "repel Invasions." But prominent congressional leaders like Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Raúl Grijalva have taken positions opposing the enforcement of the immigration laws Congress itself has passed.

Even the president has criticized Arizona's law, calling instead for granting citizenship to illegals. What else would you expect from a president who spent his childhood in Indonesia, bowed to foreign emperors, gave a campaign speech as a citizen of the world in Berlin, and who currently has an aunt living as an illegal alien on welfare in Boston? Certainly it is unrealistic to expect that he will serve the interests of the United States.

No sane country has ever elected elites who have systematically undermined their own culture and erased their national borders. Even the French-Canadians know how to stand up for themselves. Who will stand up for the United States and demand, without apology, that the border be sealed and the illegals deported? The Republicans won't do it, the Tea Party is impotent and rudderless, and the Democrats are actively aiding and abetting those who seek to undermine us. If we are unwilling to police our own borders, we are doomed.

I'm not certain what it will take to preserve the United States, but we had better come up with something effective -- and soon.

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: Overwhelm the system

2010-07-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

Barach Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos -- thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.
Barack Obama is my college classmate ( Columbia University, class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University . They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.
-- Universal health care. The health care bill had very little to do with health care. It had everything to do with unionizing millions of hospital and health care workers, as well as adding 15,000 to 20,000 new IRS agents (who will join government employee unions). Obama doesn't care that giving free health care to 30 million Americans will add trillions to the national debt. What he does care about is that it cements the dependence of those 30 million voters to Democrats and big government. Who but a socialist revolutionary would pass this reckless spending bill in the middle of a depression?
-- Cap and trade. Like health care legislation having nothing to do with health care, cap and trade has nothing to do with global warming. It has everything to do with redistribution of income, government control of the economy and a criminal payoff to Obama's biggest contributors. Those powerful and wealthy unions and contributors (like GE, which owns NBC, MSNBC and CNBC) can then be counted on to support everything Obama wants. They will kick-back hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Obama and the Democratic Party to keep them in power. The bonus is that all the new taxes on Americans with bigger cars, bigger homes and businesses helps Obama "spread the wealth around."
-- Make Puerto Rico a state. Why? Who's asking for a 51st state? Who's asking for millions of new welfare recipients and government entitlement addicts in the middle of a depression?Â Certainly not American taxpayers. But this has been Obama's plan all along. His goal is to add two new Democrat senators, five Democrat congressman and a million loyal Democratic voters who are dependent on big government.
-- Legalize 12 million illegal immigrants. Just giving these 12 million potential new citizens free health care alone could overwhelm the system and bankrupt America . But it adds 12 million reliable new Democrat voters who can be counted on to support big government. Add another few trillion dollars in welfare, aid to dependent children, food stamps, free medical, education, tax credits for the poor, and eventually Social Security.
-- Stimulus and bailouts. Where did all that money go? It went to Democrat contributors, organizations (ACORN), and unions -- including billions of dollars to save or create jobs of government employees across the country. It went to save GM and Chrysler so that their employees could keep paying union dues. It went to AIG so that Goldman Sachs could be bailed out (after giving Obama almost $1 million in contributions). A staggering $125 billion went to teachers (thereby protecting their union dues). All those public employees will vote loyally Democrat to protect their bloated salaries and pensions that are bankrupting America . The country goes broke, future generations face a bleak future, but Obama, the Democrat Party, government, and the unions grow more powerful. The ends justify the means.
-- Raise taxes on small business owners, high-income earners, and job creators. Put the entire burden on only the top 20 percent of taxpayers, redistribute the income, punish success, and reward those who did nothing to deserve it (except vote for Obama). Reagan wanted to dramatically cut taxes in order to starve the government. Obama wants to dramatically raise taxes to starve his political opposition.
With the acts outlined above, Obama and his regime have created a vast and rapidly expanding constituency of voters dependent on big government; a vast privileged class of public employees who work for big government; and a government dedicated to destroying capitalism and installing themselves as socialist rulers by overwhelming the system.