American education was based on some very fundamental principles and, from the 1640s until the 1840s, they were, in the words of Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, “real civics, real economics, and real virtues.”

Bast is the co-author of “Education and Capitalism” and in a recent speech at the Eighth annual Wisconsin Conservative Conference took a look at the way an education system that produced citizens who understood the values that existed before “progressives” took over the nation’s school system, turning it into a one-size-fits-all system of indoctrination.

“One-size-fits-all is easier for bureaucracies, but it’s not good for kids. No two kids learn the same way, and no two teachers teach the same way”, but Common Core not only makes this assumption, but enforces it.

The good news is, as Bast notes, that “since the early 1960s, parents and activists have been fighting to return to the country’s education system to what had worked so well for 200 years.”

In a Wall Street Journal commentary by Jamie Gass and Charles Chieppo, they called Common Core “uncommonly inadequate” and documented the way it destroys student academic achievement. Gass directs the Center for School Reform at the Boston-based Pioneer Institute where Chieppo is a senior fellow.

The brain child of Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education, and spelled out in a letter to Hillary Clinton following Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, Gass and Chieppo quoted its stated intention “to remold the entire American system” into “a system of labor-market boards at the local, state, and federal levels” where curriculum and ‘job matching’ will be handled by government functionaries.”

Gass and Chieppo cited the way in Massachusetts Common Core’s English standards “reduce by 60% the amount of classic literature, poetry, and drama that students will read. For example, the Common core ignores the novels of Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ It also delays the point at which Bay State students reach Algerbra I—the gateway to higher math study—from eighth to ninth grade or later.”

Common Core is not a plan to produce a new generation of citizens who understand the values on which the nation was based and built, but rather one that focuses on job skills to the detriment of civics, economics, history, the arts, and traditional values. It is a system for serfs, not citizens. It is yet another example of how progressives view people as mere instruments of the state and how they have used the schools to indoctrinate and train them for that purpose.

“We have a president,” says Bast, “who thinks wealth is created by redistribution, that the producers of the world will continue to produce no matter how high the taxes or how heavy the regulations. High school and college students are taught to think the same way” to the detriment of “honesty, hard work, self-responsibility, faith, hope, and love. Are these things being taught in public schools today?” asked Bast. “Maybe in some, but not in many.”

“As long as government owns and operates ninety percent of the schools in the United States,” Bast warns, “we have no right to expect that fewer than ninety percent of students who graduate will be socialists.” The result of the two Obama elections are testimony to that.

In a commentary on leftist school indoctrination, Bruce Thornton, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor of classics and humanities at the California State University, described the distortions today’s students are being taught in K-12.

“The founding of the United States, then, was not about things like freedom and inalienable rights, but instead reflected the economic interests and power of wealthy white property owners.”

“The civil war wasn’t about freeing the slaves or preserving the union, but about economic competition between the industrial north and the plantation south.”

“The settling of the West was not an epic saga of hardships endured to create a civilization in the wilderness, but genocide of the Indians whose lands and resources were stolen to serve capitalism exploitation.”

This is not what students who attended American schools in the 1940’s and 1950’s learned, but starting in the 1960s these distortions were, as Thornton noted, “married to identity politics, the defining of ethnic minorities and Third World peoples on the basis of their status as victims of capitalist hegemony and its imperialist and colonialist mechanisms.” Feminism added women to the list of victims “sacrificed to the white male structure.”

The result, said Thornton was “a student population ignorant of the basic facts of history, the vacuum filled with melodramas of victimization, racism, oppression, and violence that cast the United States as the global villain guilty of crimes against humanity.”

It’s a noticeable, though small, trend as parents homeschool their children. A report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased 75%, however that still represents only 4% of school-age children nationwide. These children do far better on standardized assessment exams than those in government schools.

The good news is that parents and activists across the nation are fighting back to ensure that school choice, based on a voucher system, and other options that include tuition tax credits, special needs scholarships, and education savings accounts. These empower parents to enroll their children in schools that have demonstrated higher standards and traditional values.

“If we can return to a free-market education system,” says Bast, “we can solve most of our political problems.”

© Alan Caruba, 2013

While the nation tries to come to grips with the cascade of scandals involving the Obama administration, a significant phenomenon has been occurring. It is the demise of the global warming/climate change hoax that has driven national and international policies since the 1980s.

Directed from within the bowels of the most corrupt international organization on planet Earth, the United Nations, the hoax originally generated the Kyoto Protocols in December 1997 to set limits on the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The UN’s climate charlatans claimed that CO2 was causing the Earth to dramatically warm. It was a lie. The U.S. Senate unanimously refused to ratify it and, in 2011, Canada withdrew from it.

As reported by Craig Rucker, Executive Director of CFACT, fast-forward to the recent UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, and news that Russia, joined by Ukraine and Belarus, blocked the adoption of the agenda of the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation”, part of the standard fast-tracking toward a 2015 Climate Treaty scheduled to be adopted and signed in Paris. Part of the treaty is a scheme to redistribute the wealth of developed nations to those less developed.

The Russians were fed up with the usual behind-closed-doors proceedings that create such treaties, but no doubt they were well aware that the treaty would empower the UN to govern a large portion of economic activity around the world. All UN treaties require nations to surrender some aspect of their national sovereignty.

There is clearly a backlash against the global warming hoax, particularly from nations that have discovered the costs to their economies that idiotic “renewable” energy schemes and emissions reductions incur. In the real world, they are experiencing longer, harsher winters as the result of the cooling cycle the Earth has been in for the last seventeen years!

Despite President Obama’s incessant claims that the Earth is heating, scientists in both Russia and China have been publishing data from scientific studies disputing the Big Lie of global warming/climate change.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences—50,000 members strong—recently published “Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report”, two hefty volumes with more than 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data on climate change published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.

In May, Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com and a former member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee submitted written testimony to the committee.

“The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim—from A-Z—the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing,” wrote Morano, “and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.”

“There is no evidence,” wrote Morano, “we are currently having any unusual weather.” Weather events such as the Moore, Oklahoma tornado and the sub-tropical storm Sandy that hit the northeast are normal occurrences despite the damage they inflicted.

In The Wall Street Journal in May, Princeton University physicist Dr. William Happer and NASA moonwalker and geologist, Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt wrote that “Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case.”

Literally thousands of scientists around the world have disputed the IPCC “science” and many former “warmists” have reversed their former beliefs. Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, a top Swedish climate scientist, formerly affiliated with the IPCC, said in February “We are creating great anxiety without it being justified…there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic…

“The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that, if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it, we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The threat facing Americans is posed by the Environmental Protection Agency that clings to the Big Lie about CO2 and uses it as the basis for a flood of regulations that are doing great harm to economic recovery and development.

The same holds true for the Departments of Energy and the Interior that deny access to the nation’s huge reserves of energy resources and, in the case of coal, act to destroy its mining industry and plants using it for the generation of electricity.

The global warming/climate change hoax continues to be widely taught in the nation’s schools and that should end. Now.

It continues to be reported as truth by the mainstream media and as fodder for Hollywood movies and for television programs such as those on the National Geographic Channel.

Despite the lies surrounding global warming/climate change, the hoax is in its final death throes and has been for many years. That’s the good news.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

If you liked Obamacare, you will love the proposed immigration “reform” bill which is all about the politics of the Left with no regard to the welfare of U.S. citizens by birth and naturalized citizens. Its final length remains unknown, but it was more than 1,500 pages by late April. The Senate takes up the bill this week.

The fact that Congress is revisiting the immigration issue is testimony to the estimated eleven million aliens illegally here due to law enforcement failures and limitations, and the political implications of granting them and eventually their families what is essentially instant citizenship, though fretted with a variety of fines and other factors.

The immigration bill gives the finger to those waiting, often for years, to go through the naturalization process and to the millions of Americans in need of employment during the worst economic times since the Great Depression.

As Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote in the June 11 edition of The Wall Street Journal, “Mass joblessness is a shameful waste of human resources, a source of misery to millions, and now threatens to create an underclass of long-term unemployed whose skills are atrophying and whose hopes are vanishing.”

The “gang of eight” is composed of Senators of the far Left such as Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ), along with RINOs (Republicans in name only) such as John McCain (R-McCain) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Others include Marco Rubio (R-FL) who is either going to vote for it or against it depending on what day it is. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Michael Bennett (D-CO) complete the list.

You can ignore the promises of increased enforcement of laws to protect our southern border as these laws have been ignored for years. In January, a federal judge ruled that ten Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and officers had the right to challenge the so-called Morton Memo on prosecutorial discretion and the DREAM directive on deferred action that essentially ordered agents to violate federal laws for face adverse employment actions against them. The Memo prohibited ICE agents and officers from arresting or removing, i.e. deporting, any but the most violent criminal aliens; both initiatives of the Obama administration.

As NumbersUSA pointed out in May, the U.S. Senate’s S-744 bill “would give lifetime permits to 33 million more foreign citizens to complete with Americans for scare U.S. jobs” over the next decade when the 20 million Americans are currently seeking work. “That’s like putting the entire population of Canada in line for American jobs.”

The 33 million new work visas in the decade ahead would be almost as many as all immigrants who ever entered the U.S. in its history through to today.

The Center for Immigration Studies says that S-744 “assures the continuation of poverty for the American underclass for the foreseeable future, noting that in the first quarter of this year, the “broad unemployment rate for Americans without a high school degree has reached 30% and is close to 20% for citizens with only a high school education.”

“There are now 55.4 million working-age Americans who are not working.”

NumbersUSA provides another way of looking at S-744, pointing out that is that it is comparable to “re-creating ALL of the Top 20 cities in the United States, filling them entirely with foreign citizens and giving them lifetime work permits to compete with America’s struggling workers—and in just ten years’ time.”

The bill when it was released in April had approximately 1.14 waivers or exemptions per page. The 2,409 page Obamacare bill had 0.78 waivers and exemptions. S-744 is filled with 85 mentions of “unless”, 150 uses of “except”, 18 inclusions of “exempt”, 95 mentions of “waiver”, 47 offers of “discretion”, 47 uses of “notwithstanding” and 618 uses of “may” in its original 876-pages. As noted, the bill now has some 1,500 pages. These are the work of the countless lobbyists who have influenced the bill.

In addition, the immigration “reform” bill includes two “slush funds” amounting to $150,000,000 that may be supplemented with additional taxpayer dollars for years to come. These funds would go to “public or private, non-profit organizations such as La Raza, Casa de Maryland, and the American Immigration lawyers Association! These and other organizations are devoted to helping illegal immigrants apply for legal status.

It gets worse if that is possible. The bill not only provides amnesty for illegal immigrants, but does so as well for their employers. As the Center for Immigration Studies points out, “Illegal aliens will be rewarded for breaking laws for which American citizens are routinely punished” such as the use of fraudulent Social Security cards, while imposing a $1,000 penalty that “in many cases would be waived. Then they would be issued a new Social Security number without any past bad credit or arrest records.”

The so-called immigration reform bill is the worst bill at the worst time. It is an invitation to millions more to illegally enter the United States.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.” – Barack Obama, August 28, 2006

I am trying to think of a time when the federal government was distrusted more. The era leading up to the Civil War surely comes to mind. The deep enmity between the northern and southern states over the issue of slavery pushed the latter into secession. In retrospect, only war could have settled it.

The protests against the Vietnam War went on for years, but it was not an issue of trust, but of policy. They forced Lyndon Johnson to forego running for office again and continued through Nixon’s first term. It was Watergate, however, that raised the issue of trust and it was focused on the White House.

Nor can I recall a time when a matrix of revelations about government, i.e. executive branch, policies and actions, came together as they have regarding the use of the IRS to target conservative and other groups to make fund-raising difficult or impossible. Add to that providing their information to other groups opposing them is nothing less than criminal.

The actions of the Department of Justice to secure access to the phone records of Fox News reporter James Rosen involved deceiving a court into issuing a warrant. The seizure of the phone records of Associated Press editors and reporters was little more than intimidation in the name of finding a leak. An earlier DOJ scandal, “Fast and Furious”, an idiotic gun-running scheme to Mexican drug cartels, was hushed up with an executive order. If you can’t trust the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, who can you trust?

Now, the leak by a former National Security Agency contractor employee has raised Fourth Amendment issues concerning the greatest data-gathering programs in the history of the world. It has made strange bedfellows of liberals and conservatives, both concerned about the implications of a government that can know everything about one’s personal communications.

It strikes me that, while the National Security Agency can vacuum up mindboggling amounts of data, the CIA is focused to spotting foreign dangers, the FBI is searching for terrorists, and the TSA is seizing laptops of iphones because some agent had a “hunch” about their owners, it proved incapable of identifying and preventing the Boston Marathon bombers.

In the aftermath of 9/11 a commission concluded that various intelligence and law enforcement agencies needed to actually share their information.

I have always had a sense of reassurance that these agencies and others such as those responsible for border control are made up of good people seriously trying to protect the rest of us. Those engaged in counter-intelligence need years to develop their skills and instincts. Those engaged in law enforcement know the limits and requirements for its exercise.

So the problem or threat of any corruption of their duties has to come from the very top of government where policies—schemes—are set in motion.

This is what lies at the heart of the mysteries surrounding the assassination of our U.S. Ambassador in Libya and the cover-up that ensued after the September 12, 2012 attack. To date, those Americans on the ground, some working for the CIA, have not been heard from with the exception of some State Department employees who delivered devastating testimony that almost instantly disappeared from further news coverage.

Even more troubling is the way the former UN Ambassador who was sent out to provide a bogus story about a video has been promoted to the position of the President’s National Security Advisor. Replacing her at the UN is an ambassador with a well-documented antipathy to Israel in particular and Jews in general.

What complicates all this for me is the knowledge that America has real enemies.

Despite the President’s assertion that al Qaeda is on the ropes, the facts on the ground suggest it is expanding throughout the Middle East. The Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, has not only taken control of Lebanon, but is actively engaged in support of the Syrian regime. It has the support of both Russia and Iran, and Iran is still in hot pursuit of securing its own nuclear weapons. The Chinese are engaged in a massive espionage program as, no doubt, the Russians as well.

So, yes, I want a vigorous, effective intelligence gathering and law enforcement community of U.S. agencies, but I worry that those who currently hold political power in the White House and the Senate do not have America’s interest in mind.

I worry that a generation that has passed through our government schools have not been taught the true history of the nation or an understanding of capitalism versus communism. I worry that they have been indoctrinated to believe that America is to blame for the attacks that have occurred and that conservative organizations seeking to uphold the Constitution and traditional values are the enemy. And that many of this generation work for the federal government.

The loss of confidence—of trust—in our nation’s institutions is evident. Barely six percent of likely voters have any confidence in Congress to represent their views.

A Rasmussen poll result announced on Monday says that, despite Obama’s reassurances, fully 68% of likely voters think that the government is listening to their conversations. A poll on Sunday indicated that 59% oppose the government’s secret collecting of phone records.

While the revelations about government scandals continue, there will be a continuing erosion of trust. At some point it will reach critical mass and one can only hope the forthcoming 2014 midterm elections will set in motion a reversal and permit power in both the Senate and House to be returned to true conservatives.

We can survive a President who has foisted Obamacare on us, who has weakened our nation’s position in the world, and who has failed to put our economy on a path to renewed prosperity.

The Republic cannot survive a government we no longer trust.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

You have to wonder why all the data gathering by the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, and the FBI failed to identify and surveil the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing? When even the Russians warned national security authorities about the Chechen brothers, Dzhokan and Tamerlan Tsaraev, they were reportedly interviewed and then ignored.

“Are you planning to make bombs to kill infidels?” “No, sir.” “Okay, have a nice day.”

It is useful to recall the extraordinary fear that the 9/11 attacks generated. Americans were ready to accept any means possible to avoid further attacks. The Patriot Act came off the shelf and was enacted swiftly even though most members of Congress barely had time or perhaps even made the effort to read it.

On June 6, an unidentified “senior administration spokesman” said, “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.” The latest revelations about the scope of that intelligence gathering, combined with those about the misuse of data by the Internal Revenue Service, led The New York Times to say of the reassurances being offered—just trust us—“The administration has now lost all credibility”; amending that shortly after to “…on this issue.” Too late. You told the truth the first time.

The Times, along with many conservatives, was wary of the Patriot Act, saying it was “reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.”

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath and affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

S.T. Karnick, the Director of Research for The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based, free market think tank, said, “The audacity of monitoring everyone’s phone calls in hopes of catching a small number of terrorists demonstrated the unconstitutionality and self-contradiction at the heart of the mass government surveillance. There is no probable cause for which to search any particular individual’s call records, merely a probability that someone somewhere used a telephone to assist in the planning or commission of a crime.”

A report in The Guardian, a British newspaper, of the gathering of all phone data was followed on June 6 by a report in The Washington Post that “The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track one target or trace a whole network of associates, according to a top secret document obtained by The Washington Post.”

That document was leaked and if it were not for such leaks to the news media we would not know even a fraction of what the current and past administrations have been doing with regard to the invasion of the constitutionally protected privacy of Americans.

Dr. Yuri N. Maltsev, PhD, professor of economics at the A.W. Clausen Center for World Business of Carthage College, responded to a Heartland Institute invitation to address this issue saying, “Our Constitution is openly and brazenly violated and it reminds me of how Russians, Chinese, Cubans, and many many others lost their freedom and paid dearly with tens of millions of innocent lives.”

Seton Motley, president of Less Government and, like myself, a Heartland policy advisor, also responded to the invitation, saying, “This is just the latest example—but maybe the worst—of the Obama administration’s complete disregard for the Constitution and the freedom from government overreach it guarantees us. Here’s hoping the stunning totality of all we’ve lost will cause us to rise up and demand that it all be restored.”

We have learned that we now all live in a government fishbowl.

In the aftermath of 9/11 the Bush administration did what it thought must be done to avoid a comparable attack, but the Obama administration has turned the Patriot Act into an excuse to ignore the Constitution and impose a potential police state on all of us.

In a June 6 Wall Street Journal opinion by Elizabeth Goitein, a co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, warned that “The most tangible problem is the invasion of American’s privacy. The so-called metadata collected by the NSA includes information about our calls, such as the numbers we call, the numbers of those who call us, when the calls were made, and for how long. This information may seem relatively trivial at first blush. Yet, pieced together, these details can paint a detailed and sensitive picture of our private lives and our associations.”

Add in the information gained from surveillance of our data on the Internet and you have NO privacy whatever.

It is time to increase restrictions on the way the IRS can use the information we are required by law or regulatory fiat to provide. Indeed, it is time to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a Fair Tax. It is time to remove the IRS from the enforcement of Obamacare and to repeal this noxious law.

It is time to overhaul the Patriot Act and to put strong limits on the capacity of the federal government to indiscriminately gather information on every U.S. citizen with massive data gathering systems in the name of national security.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The number of scandals involving the encroachment of the Obama Administration into – and onto – the constitutional rights of American citizens is beyond stunning. And it is without question criminal in many cases. But with an Attorney General seated who – as a practice – routinely tries to manipulate the limits of the law to affect an ideological agenda, and a federal “classification system” that keeps those elected to represent us in Congress from bringing issues of government instituted malfeasance to light, what recourse is left the American citizen?

These encroachments against the United States Constitution are the product of over one-hundred years of Progressive political advances in the area of government. Put succinctly, two of the founding principles of the Progressive Movement; two of the “givens” held in understanding by each and every Progressive, are that: a) Progressives are enlightened; intellectually superior to the masses; and, b) that through centralized government, Progressives can help the masses help themselves to a better life, regardless of whether they want it or not. Once these two facts are understood, you can begin to understand some of the declarations made by Mr. Obama and his spokespeople about the many scandals – or what We the People perceive to be scandals – surrounding the Obama Administration.

According to R.J. Pestritto, the Charles & Lucia Shipley Chair in the American Constitution at Hillsdale College and author of American Progressivism, ““America’s original Progressives were also its original, big-government liberals.”

Jonah Goldberg writes of Pestritto’s examination of the Progressive Movement in Liberal Fascism:

“They set the stage for the New Deal principles of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who cited the progressives – especially Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson – as the major influences on his ideas about government. The progressives, Pestritto says, wanted ‘a thorough transformation in America’s principles of government, from a government permanently dedicated to securing individual liberty to one whose ends and scope would change to take on any and all social and economic ills.’

“In the progressive worldview, the proper role of government was not to confine itself to regulating a limited range of human activities as the founders had stipulated, but rather to inject itself into whatever realms the times seemed to demand.

“…progressives called for a more activist government whose regulation of people’s lives was properly determined not by the outdated words of an anachronistic Constitution, but by whatever the American people seemed to need at any given time.

“This perspective dovetailed with the progressives’ notion of an ‘evolving’ or ‘living’ government, which, like all living beings, could rightfully be expected to grow and to adapt to changing circumstances. Similarly, progressives also coined the term ‘living Constitution,’ connoting the idea that the US Constitution is a malleable document with no permanent guiding principles — a document that must, of necessity, change with the times.”

On the subject of the Obama “scandals” the key words here are “…progressives called for a more activist government whose regulation of people’s lives” and “…whatever the American people seemed to need at any given time.”

In each of the perceived scandals, the Progressives of the Obama Administration justify their actions through those eyes. They see the situations as being too complex for the average American to understand, too emotionally disturbing for them to fathom; the need for constitutional transgression in their quest for the “fundamental transformation” of America too great. And so they deceive their political opposition – and the American public – about their actions, reasons, intentions and goals.

This understood, it is easy to see why, after myriad transgressions against the Constitution and the mission of the Justice Department itself, Mr. Obama declares that he still has “confidence” in Eric Holder. He needs Eric Holder in the senior-most law enforcement position so that he can unilaterally achieve his Progressive agenda through a totalitarian Executive Branch; so he can achieve the “fundamental transformation” of our country through, Executive Order and regulation, especially regulation – legislation through regulation.

It is for this reason – unilateral fundamental transformation – that Progressives have sought to grow our federal government to its current behemoth size; a bureaucratic labyrinth filled with “career” public servants (an oxymoron?) and interminable political appointees whose entire existence is to move the American political center incrementally to the Left; a task they have been achieving with regularity since the days of Wilson and Roosevelt.

It is for this particular reason – it is for this particular governmental mechanism: the bureaucracy – that Mr. Obama will not be directly linked to any of these so-called scandals (scandals in the eyes of all those who revere the Constitution and the rule of law, yes, but not as much to Progressives). The entire Progressive Movement has culminated in this moment in time. They truly believe it is their time. Progressives believe that because they have achieved a twice elected hyper-Progressive president – disregarding the retention of the US House of Representatives by Republicans and ignoring the many governorships that went “Red” last election – that they have a mandate, not for Mr. Obama’s “programs,” but for the complete transformation of our governmental system from that of a Constitutional Republic to a Socialist Democracy based on the now failed models of Europe.

In each scandal there is a bureaucratic figurehead that insulates Mr. Obama from direct responsibility. In the IRS scandal we have Lois Lerner and Douglas Schulman. In the Fast & Furious and AP/FOX scandal there is Eric Holder. In Benghazi there were Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton…and dead men tell no tales. In each instance, Mr. Obama has a dedicated and loyal “useful idiot” who will fall on his/her sword for the “good of the movement.” It is assumed they will, just as it was assumed they would execute their actions of transgressions against the Constitution and liberty itself, with fidelity to “the cause” and without a direct order ever being given.

As We the People watch the “scandals” of the Obama reign unfold, we need to understand that even though Progressives believe this is “their time,” it would have been “their time” regardless of who was in the White House. Was it easier to execute with the first “Black” president in the White House, someone whose constitutionally destructive actions Progressives could defend with a claim of “racism” toward his detractors? Sure, it made it easier, but it would have happened anyway, and it would have happened because of two reasons: a) the public has become apathetic towards their duty to be accurately informed and engaged, and b) the bureaucracy was in place.

Unless We the People insist on the decentralization of government, a viciously executed reduction in the size of the federal government and a radical transformation of the federal tax code to a limited flat tax, FAIR tax or consumption tax, nothing will change with the 2016 elections, regardless of which party captures the White House and holds sway in Congress. Our country – our Constitutional Republic – will continue to be “nudged” to the Left; continue to be fundamentally transformed away from liberty and self-reliance and toward servitude and dependence.

Barack Obama was correct about one thing all those years back in 2008, our nation – the United States of America – is in need of fundamental transformation. That transformation, though, needs to be from a culture of bureaucratic elitism in a centralized government where no one is able to be held accountable, to a nation dedicated to justice for all and the rule of law under the constraints of the United States Constitution.

Or, as John Adams so eloquently wrote in Novanglus Essay, No. 7:

“[Aristotle, Livy, and Harrington] define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men.”

We, my fellow Americans, are a Republic and not a Democracy, for precisely that reason.

On January 8, 1959 as Fidel Castro was entering Havana after the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, fled the revolution that Castro had led there was much joy among the Cuban people except for those closely allied with the Batista regime and those who saw Fidel as a communist. Many of them fled and Miami would become an outpost and a hotbed of hatred for Castro.

That year I was a 22-year-old senior at the University of Miami where some wealthier Cuban families sent their sons and daughters for a higher education. I recall discussing the events with a young Cuban, Blas Herero, who was wondering if he should return. I was utterly clueless. Other than reading some articles that portrayed Castro as a liberator, what I knew about Cuba and Castro could have fit nicely in a bug’s ear.

Castro had been actively trying to overthrow Batista since 1953. His brother, Raul, was known to be a communist and Che Guevera was a Marxist. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, Castro was a problem. He was a problem, too, for the Mafia that owned the casinos in Havana that were a major source of income. Batista received his payoff and the skim, overseen by Meyer Lansky, went to the Mafia bosses who had invested in the casinos. Castro would close them down.

Someone who knows a lot about such matters is William Wayand Turner, the author of a new book, “The Cuban Connection: Nixon, Castro, and the Mob” ($25.00, Prometheus Books). Turner is a former FBI agent who became an investigative journalist and author. Among his other books are “Deadly Secrets: The CIA War Against Castro” and “The Assassination of JFK” with co-author Warren Hinkle. Turner has personally interviewed many top Mafia members and many who were with Castro at the time and since.

Castro had more lives than the proverbial cat. He has survived more assassination attempts on his life that are known. He had the kind of luck that’s rare, but many of the attempts, frequently the plots of the CIA and some in collusion with the Mafia, simply were bungled failures.

The most famous effort to overthrow Castro was the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 16, 1961, organized by the CIA and it was a huge embarrassment to President Kennedy and his brother Robert who at the time was the Attorney General. A year later, in October 1962 when I was in the U.S. Army, we all waited thirteen days to learn the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was part of the Second Infantry Division and we were on full alert. Still in my twenties at the time, I was still essentially clueless about what had occurred except for what I heard on television. I was relieved the crisis was over and was discharged shortly thereafter.

It’s what you do not know about what the government is up to that can get a lot of people killed. For example, on June 3rd, President Obama will sign off on a UN treaty which, if ratified by the Senate, would override the Second Amendment and deprive Americans of the right to own guns. A petition by the National Association of Gun Rights is circulating a petition to be sent to our senators to oppose it.

The problems the U.S. government encountered with Castro and his revolution began in April 1959 when the American Society of Newspaper Editors invited him to visit the U.S. President Eisenhower avoided meeting with him by being conveniently absent to play a round of golf in North Carolina. Richard Nixon, the Vice President, was assigned to meet Castro and Nixon who had risen to fame as an anti-communist had a three-hour meeting with him that destroyed any of Castro’s hopes to align Cuba with the U.S. The Soviet Union stepped in to become Cuba’s best friend.

“There are opinions pro and con,” writes Wayand, “as to whether Castro was a communist before his revolutionary victory. Jim Noel, the CIA station chief in Havana, traveled to the Sierra Maestra range, where the revolutionary was based, to see for himself. His take was that Castro was not a communist. Representative Charles Porter, who spent quality time with Castro in Washington, was convinced he wasn’t in the shadow of Karl Marx. The evidence stacks up that when Castro left Washington for home, he was not a believer in communism. This is convincingly illustrated by his vehement reaction to Nixon’s charge that his administration was riddled with communists.”

Fifty-five years later Cuba is firmly a communist nation with an authoritarian government and a captive population just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. For that we can thank Nixon. An irony of history was the fact that many of those caught during the bungled Watergate break-in were CIA contractors who had taken a role in some of the assassination attempts.

It’s the things we do not know about that the government is doing that shape history and which currently are eroding rights that Americans take for granted.

What we are learning today is that the Obama administration has been waging a war on conservative organizations and a growing number of individuals who are coming forward to share their stories of how the Internal Revenue Service has been used to harass them.

What we know is that Obama is abandoning the Middle East to the control of al Qaeda and affiliated Islamist groups.

What we know is that the Obama administration engaged in a secretive program to run guns to the drug cartels in Mexico. An investigation into “Fast and Furious” was shut down by an Obama executive order.

What we know is that the administration has engaged in a hoax to hide the true facts behind the attack that killed a U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, and those who know what actually happened, including the President and the former Secretary of State, are still stonewalling inquiries. Others closer to the event have been silenced.

As Turner’s book makes clear, it is what we do not know that is the real problem.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

“You may not be interested in war, but war may be interested in you.” — Leon Trotsky

If you think about the presidents who we remember and honor the most, it is those who faced war and rallied the nation to victory. Our first president, George Washington, sustained the Revolutionary War for eight long years against daunting odds, including a Continental Congress that often provided little support for the men under his command that were fighting to create a new, free nation.

Washington’s reputation in war and peace is the reason that the Constitution designates the President as Commander-in-Chief. He was so highly regarded for his conduct of the Revolution that the Founders concluded that future presidents had to be free to wage war, but only after Congress declared that a state of war existed.

America, however, has not formally passed a declaration of war since WWII and then because it had been declared against us first. Since then wars have often been fought under the sanction given by the United Nations as was the case in the Korean conflict and the two Gulf wars, an erosion of our national sovereignty.

Lincoln is revered for having preserved the Union during the bloodiest conflict this nation ever fought. Franklin D. Roosevelt earned his place in our history for mobilizing the nation prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, assisting Great Britain prior to entering the World War II, and then pursuing an aggressive policy to defeat the Axis nations.

Quite a few of our presidents gained fame in various conflicts, from Washington to Grant to Eisenhower. Other presidents presided over wars both long and short.

In a speech on May 23, given ironically at the National Defense University, President Obama did his best to run away from war. His opposition to the war in Iraq, his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, and his efforts to close Guantanamo will likely be seen in the same way as the Clinton policies of the 1990s when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States on behalf of al Qaeda and subsequently attacked the World Trade Towers twice, in 1993 and on September 11, 2001. Weakness always encourages aggression.

In an application of magical thinking, at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the entire U.S. military was instructed not to use the term “global war on terrorism”, replacing it instead with “overseas contingency.” The Obama administration has refused to identify the May 22nd murder of a British soldier on the streets of London by an Islamist as terrorism.

Obama spent his first term and now his second insisting that al Qaeda has been defeated despite ample evidence that it has not. He has never ceased to downplay any event that suggests we and the rest of the world are not engaged in a war with radical Islam.

The Benghazi scandal arose out of an effort to claim and cover-up that the attack was “spontaneous” and the result of an anti-Islam video despite the fact that it occurred on September 11, 2012. Earlier, an attack on soldiers based at Fort Hood was declared “workplace violence.” The bombing in Boston was glossed over as a criminal act, not a terrorist act of war.

The absurdity and the danger of not describing the many instances of the Islamic jihad is a failure of major proportions and not being willing to take preemptive action against its perpetrators suggests it will grow, not diminish, and not cease to threaten the homeland and the world.

In a scathing May 24 analysis of his speech, “President Obama is Tired of Fighting Terrorism”, the Heritage Foundation said that “even as new fronts in the war on terrorism sprang up, the Administration continued to argue that it was winning” despite the Benghazi attack, despite the Boston bombing, despite the attacks in Afghanistan. Time and again Obama has said that the assassination of Osama bin Laden marked the end of al Qaeda and that the isolated drone attacks have reduced its ability to wage jihad. It has not, but Obama proposed scaling back the use of drones.

“The war of ideas,” said Heritage, “was completely banned from the Obama lexicon. Islamist terrorism became ‘violent extremism.’ Terrorism became ‘senseless violence.’ In 2011, however, Obama shifted course dramatically.”

“More than dumping the war of words, the White House signed off on a new counterterrorism strategy that amounted to running away from Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible and limiting the offensive campaign to whacking top-level al Qaeda with drone strikes”, noting that “The new strategy was bound to fail, fighting the last war while al Qaeda evolved into a global insurgency that has spread from Pakistan to Nigeria.”

The Heritage analysis concluded that Obama “is sick of fighting. Unfortunately, America’s enemies are not.”

The buildup of the paramilitary strength of the Department of Homeland Security and its identification of patriots, veterans, and others critical of the Administration has led many Americans to believe it now exists less to protect Americans than to institute plans to impose a dictatorship.

Obama’s fear of attacks at home and conflicts abroad was reflected in his speech. “Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”

His Administration has already “defined” Islamic attacks to the point of not calling them Islamic attacks. His concern and reluctance to use the powers of the presidency to protect the nation ignores the new nature of war with a stateless entity called al Qaeda. Indeed, he wanted his war powers scaled back!

In his speech, Obama said “This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

The Islamic jihad began in the seventh century and has not ended since then. Our democracy and the future of Western civilization depends on conducting a war to end the current aspects of it until today’s Muslims conclude that jihad as a religious duty is too painful to pursue. That’s how this war will end.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

From its earliest days, even before the Revolution, Americans valued their newspapers and understood they played a crucial role in the issues and events of the times in which they lived. It would take a while, however, before newspapers evolved from highly partisan advocates of the early political factions to their role as watchdogs of government.

A literate population depended on them for news that revealed the increasing futility of dealing with a British monarchy and parliament that found new ways to tax the essentially independent colonies. Newspapers became the glue of the new nation, eagerly read in every state, providing news of Congress and the presidency.

By contrast, authoritarian governments understood the need to keep a tight control over the news and none more than the Third Reich of the Nazi Party and in the Soviet Union.

On May 21st, Kirsten Powers, writing in the Daily Beast.com, borrowed from words of pastor Martin Niemoller, a German who witnessed their rise to power and who framed the manner in which the Nazis targeted, jailed and killed all those they deemed enemies of the state.

His poem, “First they came” was echoed by Powers who wrote “First they came for Fox News, and they did not speak out—because they were not Fox News. Then they came for government whistleblowers, and they did not speak out—because they were not government whistleblowers. Then they came for the maker of a YouTube video, and—okay we know how this story ends. But how did we get here?” The “we” to whom she referred are the nation’s journalists.

“Turns out,” said Powers, “it’s a fairly swift sojourn from a president pushing to ‘delegitimize’ a news organization to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters.”

“Where were the media when all this began happening?” asked Powers. “With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers.”

This is what I and many other conservative observers and analysts of the President and his administration have been saying since 2009 and earlier. “These series of ‘warnings’ to the Fourth Estate,” said Powers, “were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.”

In his book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler demonstrated his contempt for the public. “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” Obama’s 2008 slogan was “hope and change.” He was vague about the change he had in mind, but we have been learning about it since his election.

Hitler and his minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, set up a department that dealt solely with newspapers. An instructive history of the press in the Third Reich can be found on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis controlled less than three percent of Germany’s 4,700 newspapers.” The elimination of the German multi-party political system ended hundreds of newspapers that would offer any opposition to the Nazi Party. What followed in the first weeks of 1933 was the systematic use of radio, press, and newsreels to stoke fears of a pending “Communist uprising.” This occurred in a pre-television and, of course, pre-Internet era, but it was effective when backed up by the thuggish behavior of Hitler’s paramilitary units that were used to “brutalize or arrest political opponents and incarcerate them in hastily established detention centers and concentration camps.”

Not unlike the popularity and influence of Fox News, the well-known Berlin daily, the Vossische Zeitung, was targeted, along with the Berlin Tageblatt. The former employed 10,000 people, but in 1933, its owners, the Ullstein family, were forced to resign and, a year later, sell the company assets. The latter newspaper was owned by the Mosse family that published a number of major liberal papers “much hated by the Nazis.” When Hitler took power, the family fled Germany.

This is not to suggest that Fox News or the Associated Press will suffer a similar fate, but it is no accident that their reporters are being intimidated by an administration that has seized telephone records as a message to their owners and editors to curb any criticism, any investigation of what they are doing.

Asserting that James Rosen, a Fox reporter, engaged in criminal behavior for doing what any reporter would do, seek out information about the government, has outraged many in the press, but whether they will stand firm or buckle under remains the real question. In Germany, the press became an arm of the Nazi regime.

If history is any guide, we have real cause to fear the intent of the Obama administration—one now distinguished by its leadership for having no memory of any steps they have undertaken to oppress organizations that oppose its agenda, mobilizing the IRS and Department of Justice.

We are looking into a tyrannical abyss and it is time to be afraid, be very afraid.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Among the greatest liars on Earth today is the international organization called Friends of the Earth (FOE). It has engaged in the most scurrilous fear-mongering for decades, along with Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund, while all the time they pulled in billions in funding.

In May 2012, the Daily Caller noted that “The Congressional Research Service estimates that since 2008 the federal government has spent nearly $70 billion on ‘climate change activities.’” The leading critic in Congress, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) asked at the time, “Which would you rather have? Would you rather spend $4 billion on Air Force base solar panels, or would you rather have 28 new F-22s or 30 F-25s or modernized C-130s?”

“Would you rather have $64.8 billion spent on pointless global warming efforts or would you rather have more funds put toward modernizing our fleet of ships, aircraft and ground vehicles to improve the safety of our troops and help defend the nation against the legitimate threats that we face?’

On May 9th, I received an email from Friends of the Earth that repeated all the lies we have heard for years. Painting with a very broad brush that completely ignores the fact that the U.S. climate has always had highs and lows of temperature, FOE complained that “Last year the U.S. experienced record-breaking weather all over the country. But, the nightly news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC barely talked about what was fueling this extreme weather—climate change.”

What FOE failed to mention was a record that was set in 2012-13; as of May, according to the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, the U.S. had its longest stretch in recorded history—2,750 days—without a major hurricane landfall. The many claims of “extreme” weather are classic fear-mongering. I might also add that, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, the number of wildfires is at a ten-year low. Glaciers are not melting and seas are not rising, unless a millimeter or two worries you.

“Climate change” is the replacement name for “global warming.” Climate is measured in centuries. The weather is whatever is happening anywhere in the nation on any given day. Around the world, however, there has been a significant increase in cold weather and many are still waiting for spring to arrive.

Typical of the hyperbole that is representative of the lies we have heard from so-called environmental organizations, FOE fumed that “the nightly news programs at the major broadcast networks have largely ignored what is fueling this extreme weather—climate change.” Citing a Media Matters for America study, FOE noted that “ABC’s nightly news program did only one segment about climate change last year. Meanwhile NBC’s news show did only four and CBS just seven segments to this critical issue.” Perhaps this is because these notably liberal news organizations have concluded it is not a critical issue?

It gets better, FOE was angry, saying “What’s almost worse is that when these networks have covered global warming, they have often treated climate change as a ‘two-sided debate’ rather than what it really is; an issue in which there is overwhelming scientific consensus.” These are people who do not want to have a debate because, based on the facts, they would lose. As for scientific consensus regarding either global warming or climate change, there is NONE. If anything, leading scientists around the world have been debunking global warming now for years.

One of the leading think tanks in the effort to end the global warming hoax has been The Heartland Institute. It has sponsored several international conferences in which scientists and others have offered papers and addressed the topic. I recommend you subscribe to its national monthly, Environmental & ClimateNews. Its Managing Editor, James M. Taylor, J.D., provides the latest information on the environmental organizations greatest villain, carbon dioxide (CO2).

Two recent dispatches by Taylor noted in one that “Climate models supporting predictions of rapid global warming during the next century have performed miserably predicting global temperatures during the past two decades”, citing a comparison of computer model predictions and real-world temperatures by climate scientist Roy W. Spencer. In another, Taylor noted that “New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, but global temperatures are not following suit. The new data undercut assertions that atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing a global warming crisis.”

Undismayed by the facts, FOE could only cite the taxpayer-funded PBS News Hour that “devoted 23 segments to covering climate change.” When the President is telling everyone that the climate is the greatest threat to the nation, PBS bureaucrats who know where the money comes from can be depended upon to broadcast his lies.

Ironically, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion by Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer on the same day the FOE email arrived. It was titled “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide.” Schmitt was an Apollo 17 astronaut and a former U.S. Senator from New Mexico. He is an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Happer is a professor of physics at Princeton University and a former director of the office of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy.

“The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

No wonder FOE is upset that even the mainstream media networks no longer want to report on a global warming that does not exist. There’s real science and there’s the fulminations and lies of Friends of the Earth.

© Alan Caruba, 2013