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The Middle East Mess

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

I have a novel idea. Let’s just let the Middle East stew in its own Islamic juices. Along with the Maghreb, the northern tier nations of Africa, down into Nigeria, wherever you find an Islamic regime, you find millions of very unhappy people.

I am not the only one who feels that way, a Monday, May 14 Rasmussen Reports poll found that 63% “believe there is a conflict in the world today between Western civilization and Islamic nations, but most also think the United States should leave the Islamic world alone.”

Will the Muslims ever practice tolerance or accept peace with the West or anywhere else for that matter? No, never. The Koran—which Obama always refer to as the “holy Koran”—is replete with directives to fight for “Allah’s cause” (Koran: 9.88), to “fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them” (Koran: 9:5) and twenty other calls to war and murder. There is a reason why their weapon of choice is a Muslim man or woman who is willing to kill themselves in order to kill you.

It is just my opinion, but I believe the present “war on global terrorism” will best be fought covertly with a well-funded, covert intelligence and a counter-terrorism program, not by a massed army followed by a decade of “nation building.”

In the recent past, people throughout the Middle East forced out Tunisia’s despot, killed Libya’s despot, removed Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak from office, and are fighting and dying to get rid of Syria’s despot, Bashar Assad. Both Yemen and Somalia are basket cases with tribal warfare the order of the day. Even the Iranians have demonstrated their unhappiness, taking away Amadinejad’s majority in their parliament. He recently abandoned his usual bellicose talk of wiping Israel off the map.

You cannot point to a single Islamic nation from Morocco to Bahrain that has not had demonstrations intended to pressure their monarchs into granting greater freedom and what we would call democratic reform. As long as Sharia law is in the mix, that’s not a likely outcome.

It took just over seventy years from 1917 to 1991 to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Islam’s grip on the Middle East goes back to the seventh century. The region is not going to change any time soon and those in power, like Assad, are going to be ruthless in their means to retain it.

The only reason that Saddam Hussein is not in control of Iraq is because the United States and its allies invaded in 2003 and brought his brutal regime to an end. Thank you, George W. Bush, but we should have left right after accomplishing that. Americans are tired of lengthy, inconclusive wars. We have been understandably unhappy with all the conflicts since Vietnam.

Afghanistan has been invaded many times since the days of Alexander the Great and the results have always been a disaster for those who did. Next door is Pakistan which like so many nations in the Middle East has never done anything but take our military and economic aid, and betray us at every opportunity. Egypt’s new leaders are getting ready to throw us overboard.

What I propose is a simplification of a complicated problem and there are few simple answers in a world looking at economic meltdown if debt problems are not resolved. When you toss in a roiling Middle East, it just gets messier.

To begin, let’s stop going to war in the Middle East. We invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. A short, intense bombing mission temporarily drove al Qaeda from its haven and it found a new one in Pakistan, including a safe home for bin Laden. We deposed Saddam Hussein, a major troublemaker in the region, and should have come home. We have little to show for the lives sacrificed and the money spent in both ventures. Billions have been squandered in both nations.

Israel is the only legitimately Western nation in the region, a true democracy. It is America’s greatest ally there. It shares invaluable intelligence at the highest levels of our government. It is a major trading partner with the U.S. Most of the technology Americans use in communications and in our military contains Israeli developed components. All the large U.S. technology companies have research centers in Israel. It also has a very large army and is quite capable of defending itself, but an umbrella of protection should exist because it is strategically important to our own security and Europe’s.

As for the Palestinians, they are a diplomatic sideshow propped up by the United Nations, self-proclaimed permanent victims. It tells you everything you need to know about the Palestinians that they are the oldest existing “refugee” group in the world! Israel has done what any sane nation would do. It built a huge wall to keep them penned up in Gaza, controls the West Bank, and maintains a strong defense on their northern borders with Lebanon and Syria.

Unless the Israelis conclude they must attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, it’s my opinion they will acquire nuclear parity. Despite their bellicosity, the Iranian leadership prefers to use the Palestinians and other Arabs as proxy fighters. Even with nuclear parity they live in a neighborhood where everyone else has nukes; China, Russia, Pakistan, and India have nukes and, of course, Israel.. The U.S. could deliver a nuke with ease.

That said, nuclear war is so insane that even the Pakistanis and Indians backed away from using them despite having fought several conventional wars.

The last time Iran was in a war, it was with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from 1980 to 1988 and it turned out very badly for them. They lost over a million men and it was fought to a stalemate. That memory is still very much alive in the minds of Iranians.

Islam is not one big happy family. It is sharply divided between the Sunnis, the majority, and the Shiites. It will be generations before the Muslims ever manage to live with each other in the Middle East without the prospect of these two groups killing one other with regularity.

Why do Muslims hate the West? Despite the fact that there are more than a billion Muslims in the world, they believe they are under attack. Defending Islam is their number one concern. They also believe they must impose an Islamic caliphate on the entire world

At this point in time, the U.S. has other priorities. Or should have.

Our military needs a rest and more muscle in the forms of new ships, new airplanes, and the R&D needed to fight future wars. The U.S. needs to solve its economic problems. We have a huge debt and deficit to reduce. We have millions of Americans out of work. We have others who are losing their homes. We have a failed educational system to fix, roads to repave and bridges to maintain.

We can still park our navy off the coast of the Persian Gulf. We can still maintain bases in the Middle East in places like Bahrain and Kuwait. It’s called readiness.

However, it must also be said that, within a decade’s time, by developing our own vast energy reserves, we could cut our dependency on Middle East oil and leave the Middle East to its own fate.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Gay Marriage is Obama’s Poison Pill

May 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

Let the chatteratti and political pundits say what they will, dancing around the issue of gay marriage on Obama’s chances of reelection, but I will tell you plainly that he has swallowed a poison pill.

Gay marriage is a deal-breaker for a vast swath of American voters that includes Catholics as well as the black and Hispanic communities. Urbanites and suburbanites may say that are okay with gay marriage, but what they tell pollsters and what they say privately among friends and family is far different. Americans may want to be tolerant, but their distaste for the gay lifestyle and incessant demands for acceptance is deeply offensive to most people.

Thanks to what will be seen as a historic gaffe by Vice President Joe Biden, the President was put in a vice as he was seen to vacillate—evolve—his position regarding gay marriage, but elections often turn on such issues. Yes, the economy will be the dominant issue of the 2012 election, but the President found himself in a position where he could not avoid taking a position. It was diametrically different from the one he expressed in the 2008 campaign.

If, as anticipated, pro-gay-marriage activists get a plank in the Democratic Party platform affirming their stance, that will further lock the party into an uncompromising position on the issue. Ironically, they will hold their convention in North Carolina, a state that just made headlines by resoundingly rejecting gay marriage.

Legalized same-sex marriage exists in just eight states and the District of Columbia. In purely political terms, the swing states Obama needs for reelection—Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, and Florida—have all banned gay marriage. Now add North Carolina.

For the record, I have little faith in the polls that seem to suggest that gay marriage is gaining wider acceptance. People who do not feel comfortable being labeled “homophobes” and bigots tend to tell pollsters they are okay with gay marriage even if they are not.

The much-quoted Gallop poll on gay rights noted that the Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage and “less than half of Protestants approve.” According to the poll, among those who attend religious services weekly fully 67 percent oppose it while among those who say they attend monthly 53 percent oppose it.

Politically, while a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that gay marriage is supported by two-thirds of Democrats, it also showed that only 46 percent of independents favored it. Asking Democrats to endorse gay marriage is, in a sense, a no-brainer, but in an election year, the issue will drive independents to the right, a losing proposition for Democrats and Obama.

Incensed by Obamacare, the issue that ignited the creation of the Tea Party movement, by the failed stimulus, by scandals involving “green energy” companies that cost Americans millions, by Fast and Furious, an Obama administration sponsored gun-running operation, and the sluggish “recovery”, Obama already faces an uphill battle for reelection.

While trying to hang the “flip-lopper” anvil around Mitt Romney’s neck, Obama has demonstrated a major flip-flop from his earlier position that marriage is “between and a man and a woman.”

Romney has never wavered on gay marriage, opposing it. You can begin to put the undecided votes in his column.

Even in California where Proposition 8 passed 52 percent to 48 percent, a gay rights measure was struck down by the courts and currently is making its way through the appeals process. In 2006 Arizona similarly passed a gay marriage measure by a slim 51 percent but voted two years later to ban it.

Obama is now trapped between liberals who favor gay marriage and a significant margin of socially conservative voters who oppose it. They are likely to decide the 2012 election.

The non-partisan Battleground poll, over a span of the last ten years, has found that 60 percent of Americans call themselves “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative.” That’s compared with 36 percent who call themselves “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.”

Obama has always been pro-gay rights. His administration has members who are either gay or favor gay rights initiatives. After Obama’s pro-gay marriage statement, his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, lent his support, but before being exposed and forced out from his position as DOE’s Director of the Safe and Drug Free Schools program, Kevin Jennings was the founder of the radical Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network.

Former President Clinton ran into a firestorm of resistance when he said he thought gays should be allowed to serve in the military. Obama got rid of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise.

Political pundits are a cautious lot. They know a lot can happen between now and Election Day. While the economy will unquestionably be the over-riding issue in November, the issue of gay marriage is not going to go away. Gay marriage will be the final nail in Obama’s political coffin.

© Alan Caruba

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Is Fast and Furious the Next Watergate?

May 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

When suspects in a crime are interrogated, they often develop memory loss. When the crime is running guns to drug cartels on both sides of the border, the crime involves the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol officer, Brian Terry, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Jaime Zapata, and countless Mexican citizens.

Katie Pavlich has written an extraordinary expose, “Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and its Shameless Cover-Up” (Regnery Publishing). She is a reporter with extensive contacts inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) who has meticulously documented a story that should result in contempt of Congress action against Attorney General Eric Holder and possibly Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano as well.

It is an appalling story of arrogance, stupidity, and the intimidation of ATF agents who dared to question and expose the operation. It is a story of deception at the highest levels of our government. Both Holder and Napolitano exhibited memory lapses before a congressional committee. Both knew about a federal government authorized gun-running operation to Mexico called “Fast and Furious.”

Pavlich reports that “Fast and Furious was closely followed by Department of Justice officials. On multiple occasions, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke met with Phoenix ATF Director Bill Newell to discuss the progress of the Fast and Furious operation. ‘There were DOJ attorneys and prosecutors who were involved in this since the beginning, giving advice,” testified ATF Special Agent Peter Forcelli.

As Pavlich details it, “Operation Fast and Furious wasn’t a ‘botched’ program. It was a calculated and lethal decision to purposely place thousands of guns in the hands of ruthless criminals.”

The operation was designed to attack the Second Amendment right of Americans to purchase and bear arms, a right considered so essential to the nation that it followed directly after the First Amendment rights of free speech, freedom of the press, the prohibition of the establishment of a nationally sanctioned religion, and the right of Americans to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We are in the grip of an administration that would restrain and erase those rights, and which engaged in a reckless and ruthless operation to achieve that goal. It is an administration that is moving toward the confirmation of a United Nations treaty that would override and eliminate the right to own and bear arms.

The facts regarding Holder’s and Napolitano’s testimony are clear:

“Eric Holder was sent five memos, personally addressed to him, in the summer of 2010 that detailed Operation Fast and Furious.” Holder claimed he first knew about the program in February 2011.

“Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has feigned ignorance when questioned about Fast and Furious. She claims she only found out about the program after Brian Terry was murdered.”

“She visited the White House with Eric Holder to visit President Obama just a day before Holder testified on Capitol Hill about Fast and Furious, leaving the reason for her visit blank.”

Pavlich writes, “These are the facts: There are still 1,400 Fast and Furious guns missing and ATF agents are not actively trying to track them down. Ten thousand round of ammunition were sold to cartel-linked straw buyers under the watch of the ATF. Eight hundred of the original 2,500 weapons sold through Fast and Furious have already been linked to criminal activity.”

The program, observers believer, was the deliberate effort to blame the violence in Mexico and in some cases in America on the gun shops, but those shops were intimidated into participating in Fast and Furious out of fear that ATF would take away their licenses.

After questioning ATF and Justice Department witnesses, Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa, R), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a January 31 letter to ATF officials saying, “As you may be aware, obstructing a Congressional investigation is a crime. Additionally, denying or interfering with employee’s rights to furnish information to Congress is also against the law.”

On May 3rd Rep. Darrell Issa, (CA) Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent every member of his committee a 64-page draft contempt order against AG Holder, along with a 17-page memo outlining the history of the scandal. Only one attorney general has been found in contempt, Janet Reno in 1975.

Fast and Furious is redolent with memories of the Watergate coverup.

On March 23, 2011, in a Univison interview, Obama said, “First of all, I did not authorize it” and when further pressed said, “Eric Holder did not authorize it. He’s been very clear that our policy is to catch gunrunners and put them in jail.” The facts strongly suggest otherwise insofar as Fast and Furious literally authorized a gunrunning program under the aegis of ATF.

As Pavlich noted, “Many people in ATF saw what was happening and tried to warn the bureau, but the new corrupt and arrogant culture of management had become too powerful and intimidating. Field agents who spoke up were punished for having an opinion and daring to voice it. Whistleblowers had their reputation, careers, and finances shattered.”

This culture of corruption is endemic to the Obama administration and as more and more examples become known it has been in full panic mode to suppress the truth. No matter what the outcome of the testimony of two of its top appointees, the only way to save America is to vote out President Obama in November and ensure that Mitt Romney has a Republican Congress.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Playing God with “Endangered Species”

May 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

According to Wikipedia, “A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance although some species, called living fossils survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Most extinctions have occurred naturally, prior to Homo sapiens walking on Earth: it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.”

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed in 1973 at the height of the period in which Congress became enthralled with any legislation purported to save the planet and to regulate anything and everything that had to do with the environment. It is a complete failure.

In 1999, Jamie Rappaport Clark, then the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FDS), told a congressional committee that “…in 25 years of implementing the ESA, we have found that designation of ‘official’ critical habitat provides little additional protection to most listed species, while it consumes significant amounts of scare conservation resources.”

Former congressman, Richard W. Pombo, then the chairman of the House Resources Committee and a member of the Agriculture Committee, said, “For a federal agency to admit its program provides little benefit while consuming huge resources translates in normal English to a program that is useless at best.” He was right then. He is right now.

Why then did the Associated Press report in September 2011 that “The Obama administration is taking steps to extend new federal protections to a list of imperiled animals and plants that reads like a manifest for Noah’s Ark—from the melodic golden-winged warbler and slow-moving gopher tortoise, to the slimy American eel and tiny Texas kangaroo rat.”

The Obama FDS “already had issued decisions advancing more than 500 species toward potential new protections under the Endangered Species Act.” Among the species selected for protection were 35 snails from Nevada’s Great Basin, 82 crawfish from the Southeast, 99 Hawaiian plants and “a motley cast of butterflies, birds, fish, beetles, frogs, lizards, mussels and more from every corner of the country.”

The answer is that the ESA was never about endangered species. It is a blunt instrument of environmental groups and those within the federal government to delay development anywhere in the nation. Almost 1,400 species on the government’s list are listed as “threatened” and none of them can be expected to avoid extinction, a natural process that cannot be impeded by human intervention.

The absurdity of the ESA can be seen in a recent request by Oregon officials for who received permission to kill sea lions that feed on “protected” salmon trying to swim upriver to spawn and now want permission to kill a sea bird, cormorants that dine on baby salmon trying to reach the ocean. The life and death cycle of salmon is as old as this species and those that prey on it for food to sustain their own lives. The Oregonians want to reduce the cormorant nesting colonies by ten percent.

Recall the outcry two decades ago that spotted owls were on the brink of extinction. The resulting action to protect them shut down a great swath of the timber industry in the northwest. It turned out that barred owls were preying on their cousins, again a natural competition between species. The Obama administration wants to set aside millions of acres to protect the spotted own and to authorize the killing of barred owls!

While the plan would allow some logging, it has nothing to do with spotted or barred owls and everything to do with attacking the timber industry in the same fashion it is attacking the coal and oil industry. It is an attack on the nation’s economic maintenance and growth.

Little known is the fact that the government compensates the legal fees of environmental groups that bring action to get a particular species designated as “threatened” or “endangered.” It is a scheme to enrich those groups that has nothing to do with the question of extinction and everything to do with setting aside vast parts of the nation from any development or use.

In 2006, California had the second-highest number of endangered species—from the California condor to the Delhi Sands Fly. It led the lower 48 states in acres of officially designated critical habitat with nearly twenty percent of approximately 100 million acres in the regulatory clutches of the FWS. It will cost California millions in lost revenue, particularly from its agriculture sector which feeds much of the rest of the nation.

In 2006, a federal judge halted a $320 million irrigation project in Arkansas for fear it might disturb the habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker that many believed had already gone extinct. The National Wildlife Federation and the Arkansas Wildlife Federation had jointed sued the Army Corps of Engineers, to stop a project to build a pumping station that would draw water from the White River. Among their claims was that the noise from the station would cause the woodpeckers stress!

The only species that is endangered is the human species as environmental organizations continue to deny access and use of American land needed for growing crops, raising livestock, mining and drilling for energy resources, and building any new improvements including hospitals and other properties that would contribute to the welfare of the human inhabitants of planet Earth.

Not only is the ESA a huge bureaucratic failure, it is testimony to the arrogance and evil intent of the environmental movement to harm any form of economic activity and growth in America.

It is their way of playing God despite millions of years in which the extinction of species has been part of life on the planet. If dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, the ESA would declare them threatened and endangered.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Big Brother, the Internet, and Your Right of Privacy

April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

Most Americans assume that they have a right of privacy guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and, while several of the Bill of Rights imply this right, it is not specifically expressed.

However, it is understood. In a Supreme Court case, Meyer v Nebraska, 1923, Justice McReynolds perhaps said it best:

“While this court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

So, yes, a right of privacy does exist, but it may not exist for long.

There have been three attempts by Congress to exercise control over the Internet including the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act that would empower the companies we depend upon for access to the Internet to collect information on our activities, share it with the government, while refusing to notify us that our Internet use is being monitored. In basic terms, all our emails, Skype chats, web searches and other activities would be made known to a faceless governmental bureaucracy.

This is being put forward as a means to fight the so-called “war on terror” or to thwart cyber attacks.

Alan Gottlieb, a longtime advocate of the Second Amendment, has just created www.nointernettax.org to alert Americans to yet another threat to our privacy to oppose any kind of an Internet tax.

At the state level, the National Governor’s Association has introduced the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) for the purpose of establishing a “national collection center” to monitor and audit your Internet purchases. All your personal information and Internet shopping choices would be administered by “a trusted third party” or government body. An alternative would enable to subscribe to a national “cartel” tax collection system. It is unconstitution.

It is in essence the imposition of a national sales tax to fill the coffers of states that have demonstrated an inability to exercise prudence in the way they spend the taxes they already collect.

At the federal level, Sen. Dick Durbin has introduced S. 1452, the “Main Street Fairness Act” and has sponsored S. 1832, the “Marketplace Fairness Act.” Any time you see or hear the words “fair” or “fairness” it is a subterfuge for the redistribution of your wealth and the right of the government to know every aspect of your life. The Durbin legislation would require online retailers to pay sale tax on their transactions, thus yield million for state government.

H.R. 1981 is yet another similar piece of legislation. Under the guise of protecting children from pornography, it would require online service provides to, as Gottlieb points out, “spy on your online activities and provide that information to the government. H.R. 1981 “is all about data retention and requires Internet service providers to keep detailed records of your internet activity, your name, address, bank account numbers, and credit card numbers.”

Your privacy would vanish.

This kind of effort at totalitarian control exists at the international level insofar as the United Nations has long wanted to impose a world tax on Internet users with a special emphasis on financial transactions. In February, the U.S. Commission on Social Development introduced this form of taxation to support a “social protection floor.” It is a direct attack on capitalism which the communist-based U.N. justifies as its own version of a redistribution of wealth. Need it be said that the idea is being supported by Russia, China, India and Brazil among a number of nations seeking to control Internet transactions.

As Gottlieb points out, you already pay taxes on the Internet. “It is taxed in the same way that catalogues, mail order and TV sales are.” Indeed, “Every time you access the Internet, you are paying telecommunications taxes.” Online purchases that are not taxed include travel and financial services, vital to the vitality of the economy.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Internet Tax Freedom Act into law. It prevents governments from taxing Internet-only activities such as bandwidth, email, or the imposition of multiple taxes on any kind of electronic commerce. It will expire on November 1, 2012 unless extended by Congress.

Gottlieb notes that there are more than 30,000 state and local governments and 7,600 taxing authorities extant in the nation. As we know, most states are in serious financial difficulties, often as the result of government worker unions with which they have signed contracts that provide bountiful retirement and health benefits.

I recommend that you visit http://www.nointernettax.org/ and learn more and then to take action by writing, faxing or emailing your Senators and Representatives to let them know of your opposition to these efforts.

The United States imposes the highest corporate tax in the world and has an unfathomable tax system that sucks vast amounts of money from its citizens. It is $15 trillion in debt because it will not impose any limits on its spending. If any of the proposed measures are passed, not just more of your personal income be tapped, but your privacy will disappear.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Forget Homeland Security, Now It’s About “Environmental Justice”

April 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

It is the nature of any government to seek to expand its authority. The Founding Fathers knew this and gifted Americans with a Constitution that limits authority devolving it to the states and to “the people.” Read the Tenth Amendment. It isn’t working.

The freedoms they sought to establish and preserve for future generations are being eaten away and we tend only to hear about in individual cases when, in fact, it is so widespread we accept the injustices, the inefficiencies, and the enslavement in increments.

After 9/11 it was clear that some reorganization was needed to ensure that various enforcement and other agencies could communicate and coordinate more effectively in order to wage “a war on terror.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created. The sheer size of it should have been a warning.

One of its siblings was the Transportation Security Administration that currently makes taking a flight anywhere a nightmare of intrusive groping and, because one failed bomber used explosive in his shoes, everyone now must remove theirs to get on a flight.

Fifty-seven years ago, the State of New Jersey issued me my first driver’s license. For years all one needed to do was renew by mail, but after 9/11, it was decided that every license had to include a photo. A very high tech license resulted, but it also means that, if you live in New Jersey, every four years you are going to spend a minimum of two hours in your nearest motor vehicle agency standing in line and sitting around for your number to be called in order to renew.

You need bring several documents with you such as a passport, birth certificate, and Medicare card. Just one won’t do. Even though I already have a license with a photo (it was on record at the agency so there was no need for a new photo), I still had to personally prove I am who I am to receive a renewed license. In an age of computerized records of birth and residence, the whole process struck me as overkill.

After December 1, 2012, New Jersey will join eight other States to issue a driver’s license with a gold star in the upper right corner. Without it, I will not be allowed to board a domestic flight or visit a federal building. Do I feel any more secure? Not really. In fact, what I really feel is the tightening grip of the federal and state government on my freedom to drive my car, get on an airplane, or legitimately enter a building in which the work of the federal government is being conducted. This is less about security and far more about authoritarian control.

Environmental Justice

I tell you this because I doubt you are aware that the Department of Homeland Security has added a whole new layer of authority to its portfolio. You thought it was about protecting the nation against acts of terrorism. Now it is about enforcing “environmental justice.”

The DHS has added Green Police to its concerns and, if you think this has nothing whatever to do with some jihadists trying to kill a lot of people as was the case on 9/11, you would be right.

According to a DHS report entitled “Environmental Justice Strategy”, issued February 2012, it is a “commitment of the Federal Government, through its policies, programs, and activities, to avoid placing disproportionately high and adverse effects on the human health and environment of minority or low-income populations.”

This has NOTHING to do with homeland security by the wildest stretch of the imagination and yet it is, according to DHS, federal policy. It gets its authority from Executive Order 12898 and this is the way government expands and expands and expands beyond what citizens expect or request.

The results are always predictable. Ordinary people who just want to be left alone discover that the government has defined the ownership of their land and property as a criminal act.

When Chantell and Mike Sackett found themselves locked into battle with the Environmental Protection Agency that had decided their land was a wetland, they battled the EPA all the way to the Supreme Court which granted them a unanimous decision in their favor on March 12th of this year. This kind of “law enforcement” by the EPA has been common over the years, but Congress has done little to rein in its typical bullying tactics.

Now add to the EPA, the Homeland Security Department with its own Green Police empowered to protect “minority and low-income populations.” This is a deliberate effort to divide Americans from one another, inspiring racial and class warfare. It is a vast reinterpretation of its responsibilities and authority.

Welcome to the Soviet Union of America or the National Socialist States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Energy: Coincidences, Truth, and Propaganda

April 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

On April 18th I received an email from the Sierra Club announcing that “We’re endorsing President Obama for reelection. We’ve made too much progress over the past four years to give it all back to Big Polluters.”

Among the Sierra Club’s many projects to plunge the nation back to the golden days of reading by candle light and transportation by horse has been “Beyond Oil.” It praised the President for implementing “the toughest fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks in history.” Never mind that this has driven up the cost of cars and trucks or that the price of gasoline at the pump is headed toward historic highs.

The Center for Automotive Research has warned that overly stringent standards could add $10,000 to the cost of a new car, thereby decreasing sales, reducing production, and thereby destroying as many as 220,000 jobs. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFÉ’s downsizing effect makes cars less safe and contributed to as many as 2,600 deaths per year.

The enemy for the Sierra Club and others like Friends of the Earth has long been coal and oil, but coincidently on the same day, the U.S. Department of the Interior, no friend to either energy source, released its “Global Estimate for Undiscovered, Technically Recoverable Conventional Oil and Gas Resources.” It is an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey.

U.S. has Largest Energy Reserves on Earth

The estimate, however, excluded data on the U.S. resources. In March 2011, however, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report that revealed that America’s combined energy reserves are the largest on Earth. We sit atop an estimated 163 billion barrels of oil, domestic and offshore. The U.S. accounts for more than 28% of the world’s coal reserves, at least 262 billion tons. Natural gas? We have, conservatively, an estimated 2,047 trillion cubic feet.

The worldwide estimates for recoverable oil are in the billions of barrels but thanks to Obama’s Interior Department fewer leases to explore and extract it on federal owned lands have been issued and some have been reversed. When you add in the fiasco caused by two moratoriums on drilling the Gulf of Mexico, both ruled illegal by the courts, the true intent of the administration is well known and established.

In the wake of Earth Day with all its usual lies about “peak oil”, the “Global Estimate” concluded that the world “holds an estimated 585 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional oil.” In addition, it estimated that were is “5,606 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable conventional natural gas” and “167 barrels” of comparable natural gas liquids.”

For reasons known only to those who set energy policy in the U.S., according to the Institute for Energy Research, “fossil fuel (coal, oil, and natural gas) production on Federal and Indian lands is the lowest in the nine (9) years” that the U.S. Energy Information Administration has issued such reports. It is six percent less than in Fiscal year 2010.

Americans are being deliberately starved of the energy sources we have in abundance.

We are being robbed in the form of higher prices for electricity produced in the most expensive fashion, wind and solar, instead of affordable coal. Not only are gasoline prices up, but the government continues to demand more mileage per gallon of gas.

The result of the environmental organizations propaganda to demonize oil and coal, and the Obama administration’s anti-energy policies, has been the loss of revenues, as well as jobs, from royalties and taxes paid to the government. Meanwhile, Americans have watched the Obama administration loan guarantees to solar industry corporations waste well over a billion taxpayer dollars.

As for wind energy, Reuters reporter Andy Sullivan recently reported that the industry actually “shed 10,000 jobs since 2009 even as the energy capacity of wind farms doubled.” To put this in context, Sullivan also reported that “the oil and gas industry has added 75,000 jobs since Obama took office.”

The Obama administration energy policies have been a thorough-going failure that puts in jeopardy the ability of the nation’s energy industries ability to keep up with demands for more electricity and more fuel for its automotive and truck fleets.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Afghanistan, the Definition of Madness

April 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

Why did George W. Bush invade Afghanistan? Answer: Occurring just after September 11, 2001 in which 2,977 Americans lost their lives, a CIA team was inserted into Afghanistan fifteen days later to begin a campaign against the Taliban who had allied with Al Qaeda and provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden while the attack was planned. A U.S. bombing campaign in Tora Bora followed but bin Laden escaped into Pakistan.

When bin Laden was killed in 2011 by a U.S. Navy SEAL team, he was living in Abbotabad, Pakistan, a mile away from its equivalent of West Point.

The initial reason for the military action ceased to be of any critical importance and the Bush administration pivoted to concentrate on removing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power. Afghanistan became a backwater concern, but in 2002 Bush announced “a Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, intended to be a development plan with security goals. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Insurgent activity in Afghanistan never ceased and military authority there switched to NATO, essentially to protect Kabul. It would be the organization’s first operational commitment outside of Europe. Hamid Karzai became the hand-picked leader of a nation that Transparency International deemed the second most corrupt in the world.

Afghanistan was and is a narco-economy. A result of U.S. involvement and due to a level of incompetance that defies comprehension, billions have been expended on the military and development efforts that found their way into the hands of the Taliban and the corrupt Karzai government.

The previous effort by the then-Soviet Union to exercise influence began in the 1960s. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support its puppet government from an orthodox Muslim insurgent group known as the Taliban. The insurgency drew support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the U.S. Obama bin Laden would create al Qaeda as part of the effort to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.

From 1979 to 1989, the war proved so costly to the Soviet Union that it finally withdrew its troops. The war would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Having learned nothing from history, ancient and recent, the U.S. has just initiated an agreement with Afghanistan to provide support for the next decade. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

According to an April 23 news report, “The partnership agreement ensures that the U.S. will continue to support Afghanistan even after the U.S. ends major combat operations and scales back its development projects over the next two years” and “The strategic-partnership will commit the U.S. to more than a decade of economic and financial support for the Afghan state, which is still battling a resilient Taliban-led insurgency.”

No external entity, from Alexander the Great in 329 BC, to Genghis Khan’s Mongol army in 1221 BC, to the British Empire in 1839-1842, has ever encountered anything but defeat in Afghanistan. Add the U.S. and NATO to the list.

There is, one assumes, some military strategic value to trying to control events in Afghanistan in some fashion. Pakistan, since its founding in 1947, and India have engaged in efforts to exercise influence there with varying degrees of success. The deal that the U.S. has signed with Afghanistan is no more likely to ensure any influence than all previous efforts since 2001. At times, Pakistan has even denied U.S. military transports to provision our troops there.

For those who want to learn the truth of the failure of U.S. efforts, I recommend reading Douglas A. Wissing’s new book, “Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban”, just published by Prometheus Books.

Wissing writes, “Within scant months of Tora Bora, the seeds of American failure in Afghanistan were sown: the U.S. consort with deceitful Afghan warlords and leaders; the American complicity in the revived Afghan opium trade; and the flawed U.S. logistics-and-development schemes that fueled corruption and helped finance the Taliban.”

Wissing concludes his intensively documented book saying, “Decades of American arrogance and cupidity have brought us to this point…but doing more isn’t going to change things. The hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars and millions of ruined lives haven’t made Afghanistan safer or less desperate. As America has upped its bets in Afghanistan, the insurgency has continued to grow in power and in influence.”

When he campaigned for the presidency, Barack Obama characterized the conflict in Afghanistan as a just war in contrast to American efforts in Iraq. By the time he took office, the Bush administration had already negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government.

The latest deal to continue American investment in Afghanistan defies any common sense, any justification. It comes at a time when America is deeply in debt. It reflects the Obama administration’s penchant for spending money it does not have without continued borrowing.

The next administration, assuming Obama’s defeat, must abandon the deal and abandon Afghanistan. Alexander the Great did. Genghis Khan did. The British Empire did. And the Soviet Union collapsed shortly after it did.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Blamer-in-Chief

April 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By Alan Caruba

We teach children to acknowledge and accept blame when they do something wrong. It is an important and useful trait in life. Those who do not learn this remain emotionally stunted children their entire life. I am, of course, speaking of President Barack Hussein Obama and I shudder to think of the continued damage he can do to the nation during his remaining months in office.

As Fox News’ Doug McKelway wrote in August 2011, “Obama has suggested that blame for the stagnant U.S. economy lies in places other than the Oval office. The latest example occurred Monday when the President said, “There will always be economic factors that we can’t control, earthquakes, spikes in oil prices, slowdowns in other parts of the world.”

The greatest slowdown has been at home, the national economy, is the only one of concern to Americans. Three and a half years into his first (and hopefully last term), Obama is still blaming it on former President Bush.

As recently as April 18, Obama returned to his favorite theme. Urging a tax increase on millionaires, Obama said that tax cuts enacted “eight years before I took office” had contributed to a “global economic crisis.”

It is worth recalling the financial crisis occurred in September 2008 in the final months of Bush’s second term.

At the time:
The Dow Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The Unemployment rate was 4.6%

George W. Bush’s economic policies set a record of 52 straight months of job growth. So, Obama is not only trying to distract voters from the actual facts, but lying about them as well.

In point of fact the Democrats had taken control of Congress on January 3, 2007, at the start of the 110th Congress

In December 2011, Investors Business Daily opined that Obama was “no longer content to blame President Bush for the country’s economic ills” but was accusing “his Democratic predecessor of being a co-conspirator.” That would be former President Clinton!

In a “Sixty Minutes” segment, Obama had said the economy was suffering from “structural problems that have been building up for two decades.” Most observers concede that both Clinton and Bush43 did a good job in guiding the economy during their terms, but not Obama.

The segment also included his prediction that “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.” The likelihood that Obama can be reelected with 8.6% unemployment, $4 gas at the pump, massive housing loan foreclosures, and a still stagnant economy grows smaller by the week.

Consider the many ways this President has found everyone else to blame for his failures. Oil prices were blamed on the “uncertainty about what’s going on in Iran and the Middle East”, but prices stayed moderate during all the years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite the horrid waste of taxpayer’s money on the various green energy firms that keep failing, Obama blamed the Solyndra debacle on the Chinese who “were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn’t compete.” That was well known before the Solyndra half billion dollar loan guarantee was made, followed by still more to other solar companies.

Even the deficits that have grown under his administration weren’t his fault. In November 2011, he said “Obviously, this (reducing government waste) is even more important given the deficits that we’ve inherited and that have grown as a consequence of the recession.”

The key word here is “inherited.”

Of course it was inherited and Obama knew that as he campaigned to be the President who would solve the financial crisis. In February 2010 he said “If we had taken office during ordinary times, we would have started bringing down these deficits immediately.” Instead, his stimulus program tripled the national deficit in his first year in office

Regarding the debt, Obama in March 2011 said, “I inherited a big debt.”

In April 2011 he said, “much of it I inherited when I showed up.”

In August 2011 he said “I inherited a big debt.”

The message, repeated ceaselessly, is that the increase is not his fault.

No matter what the problem is, it is NEVER his fault.. This isn’t just habitual. It’s pathological. And it bodes ill if he is reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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Eco-Communism Celebrated Annually on Earth Day

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Eco-Communism Celebrated Annually on Earth Day
By Alan Caruba

I came of age in the 1950s during a period when Joe McCarthy was raising hell about communists in the federal government. He was spectacularly inept, often made intemperate and inaccurate charges, but for the most part he was right. He managed to alienate his fellow Republicans and earn a slap-down from then President Eisenhower. By around 1953 his fifteen minutes of fame were up. His bombastic personality undermined the seriousness of the issue.

McCarthy was all bluster, but the publication of “The Venona Papers: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors” in 2001 revealed that his charges of widespread infiltration of the State Department and even the White House during the Roosevelt and Truman years were true. Venona was the U.S. code name given secret Soviet spy communications that had been recorded during and after World War II. In 1995, the National Security Agency began releasing the documents.

In 2000 Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media wrote about a conference, “Rethinking McCarthy” devoted to the myths surrounding McCarthy that were disputed by journalist M. Stanton Evans, a director of the National Journalism Center. Chief among them was that McCarthy never named any names of suspected communists in government, but Evans revealed a file of material showing that he had. The other myth was that those named had been cleared by congressional committees or were just mildly leftist. They were not.

It is not surprising that Rep. Allan West who recently said that there are some eighty communists in Congress today, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, drew the same response that McCarthy did in his era. Rep. West characterized the response as “A lot of buzz and inaccurate reporting.” Politico.com called him a McCarthyite.

In the run-up to Earth Day on April 22nd—the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union’s first dictator—Brian Sussman, author of the bestselling “Climategate”, has a new book, “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America” ($25.95, WND Books). If you read no other book about the relationship between environmentalism and communism this year, you must read this one.

Sussman has brought together all the relevant facts. “Karl Marx founded a philosophy that inspires dictators and demagogues,” writes Sussman. “Commencing with the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the present, Marx’s tyrannical ideology has been responsible for the documented deaths of more than 110 million individuals around the world.”

“Pollution,” writes Sussman, “never has been Earth’s most troubling foe—Marxism had. And Marxists have always seized upon pollution, both real and imagined, as an effective weapon in their unrelenting war on freedom.”

Americans are the victims of blunders by a succession of presidents, but it was Richard Nixon who kicked off the plundering of the nation by the environmental movement when, in 1970, he quietly signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, followed by the Clean Air Act. “Nixon’s Clean Air Act expanded the ’67 law to autocratically allow the federal government to limit both industrial and mobile sources of air pollution. It set up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Today, the EPA has become a rogue agency, barely controlled by Congress. “Today the EPA is eighteen thousand full-time employees strong, with an annual budget of $10 billion”, notes Sussman.

“From a legal perspective,” writes Sussman, “what Nixon did in signing the Clean Air Act was flatly unconstitutional. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution limits the power of the federal government to the basics, none of which includes regulating the atmosphere.” The EPA engages in the most bogus scientific “research” seen since the days of the Soviet Union

The locus of the environmental movement is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) has been issuing reports that were used to support the global warming hoax and, when it was exposed as a massive fraud, has since changed its message to “sustainability” whose purpose remains the establishment of a global government run out of the UN. It advances every element of the communist movement in its attack on capitalism and the foundation of the freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

We have seen the systematic dismantling of the U.S. Constitution and our economy by our elected representatives, the latest being Obamacare’s effort to takeover one sixth of the nation’s economy while twisting the Commerce Clause to impose a mandate on everyone to purchase health insurance whether they want or need it.

Sussman’s book provides a time-line for the eco-tyranny at work in the nation today. The threat to our freedom and to the position of America as the protector of freedom worldwide is real.

Think about that when you find yourself drowning in the propaganda that will surround and augment the message of Earth Day and the forthcoming UN conference, Rio+20.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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