America’s Green Enemies

February 21, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Climate Change, Democrats/Leftists, Energy, Environment, Ethics, Global Warming, Government, Government, Corruption, Green Energy, Liberals, Policy, President, Taxes | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

It was good news that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the nation’s first nuclear power plants on February 9th, clearing the way for the construction of two reactors by Southern Company at its Plant Vogtle site near Atlanta, Georgia. The bad news is that these are the first new nuclear plants since 1978!

In a nation with a growing population and increasing need for electricity to power homes and businesses, it is nothing less than insane to not include nuclear energy in the mix of providers. Environmentalists immediately attacked the announcement using the usual scare campaigns.

Equally insane is the failure to provide the means to safely store the radioactive materials that result. Highly contested by environmentalists, the Nevada-based Yucca Mountain deep geological repository storage facility for spent reactor fuel was cancelled in 2009. Nevada’s Senator Harry Reid, Majority Leader in the Senate, played a major role in this disgraceful decision. The Obama administration terminated funding for the development of the site in 2011, leaving the nation with no long-term storage site.
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Taking Hostages: Tehran in 1979 – Cairo in 2012

February 15, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Americanism, Democrats/Leftists, Government, Corruption, Iran, Jimmy Carter, Liberals, President | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

As someone who vividly recalls the Iranian “students” who took our diplomats hostage in 1979 and the 444 days it took to get them back, the repeat of this by the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, putting 19 pro-democracy, non-government organization (NGO) Americans on trial on trumped up charges has an ugly repetitive feel to it.

The contempt the Iranian revolutionaries, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, had for America and, I might add, international law and practice that goes back centuries, is everything you need to know about dealing with militant Islamists, whether they are in Iran, Egypt, or anywhere else on the face of the Earth.

Just as then-President Jimmy Carter dawdled while looking for a diplomatic response, this same scenario is now being played out by Barack Obama and it won’t work now just as it did not work then. Carter authorized a failed military operation that, by most accounts, was poorly organized and executed.
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The Looney Tunes Version of the GOP Campaigns

February 11, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Elections, GOP, President, Republicans | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

I have begun to think of the Republican campaign as a series of Looney Tunes cartoons being replayed again and again. There are filled with a combination of laughs and the fantastical, self-defeating violence of Wily Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner

As the primary season moves along, I sometimes think that far too many Republicans have temporarily lost their minds. Three years of Barack Obama will do that to you.

My response to the campaign thus far may have something to do with the fact that, like Reagan and others, I was once a Democrat and, to borrow a phrase from Paul, First Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

These days, a lot of Republicans sound like a kid who sent Santa a list of toys he wanted and, even though he got most of them, he feels compelled to write and ask why he didn’t get all of them.
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The New American Elite

February 6, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Americanism, Book Reviews, Budget, Business, Congress, Conservatives, Democracy, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Elections, Ethics, Free Trade, GOP, Government, Government, Corruption, House of Representatives, Jobs, Liberals, President, Republicans, Socialism, Taxes, WWII | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

The only constant in the life of individuals and nations is change. Since the beginning of the last century, the process or rate of change has accelerated with the invention and availability of a myriad of machines, technologies that have altered the lifestyle of Americans as well as of millions around the world.

Let me put it in personal terms. When I was born in the late 1930s, my Mother washed the family laundry by hand and hung it out to dry on sunny days or in the basement of our home if it was raining. We were not poor. We were middle class. My Father was a Certified Public Accountant and we lived in a spacious suburban home in an upscale New Jersey community. Mass produced washers and dryers would arrive after the end of World War Two.

The differences between lower economic classes, the middle class, and upper classes were well defined back then. All, however, generally held the same values regarding societal institutions such as marriage, religion, national pride. Those values have eroded since the 1960s and Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, whose new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” ($27.00, Crown Forum) tells you how and why.
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Does Obama Want to Lose? Yes!

February 4, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Barack Obama, Democrats/Leftists, Elections, Government, Corruption, President | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

It seems like a bizarre notion, but does Barack Obama want to lose the election in November?

I think he does!

One is struck by the way Obama has visibly aged in the job. He may well have grown weary being POTUS.

By any rational standard, one would say he wants a second term, but Obama has always operated in a fantasy world where mere words are supposed to translate into reality. And he has repeatedly talked about being a one-term president.

He is, after all, his own invention; the author of two memoirs of a life that had little achievement to point to other than getting elected first to the Illinois legislature and then to the Senate where he lingered a bare two years before running for president.

I raise the question because Obama seems to be deliberately irritating the very people who are supposed to be his “base”; the hard core liberals, the Hollywood crowd, youth, and unions, among others. His partisanship has put Congress into total gridlock.
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Destroying America by Denying Access to Energy

January 27, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Energy, Ethics, Government, Government, Corruption, House of Representatives, Jobs, Liberals, Money, Oil, President, Senate, Taxes | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.

It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue. Our vital transportation sector and all others that utilize petroleum-based products will suffer, too.

While President Obama babbles about millionaires and billionaires, everyone will be impoverished by the loss of jobs and revenue our energy sector produces now and can produce in the future.

This isn’t an “energy policy.” It’s a “no-energy policy” and it is a guarantee of economic disaster.
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Obama Weakens the Military

January 24, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Americanism, Anti-War, Barack Obama, Budget, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, GOP, Government, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Military, President, Senate, Taxes | 1 Comment

-By Alan Caruba

“Si vis pacem, para bellum.” If you want peace, plan for war. The adage is attributed to the 4th or 5th century Latin author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus’s tract De Re Militari book 3. This fundamental wisdom is being ignored by President Obama, one of two recent Commanders-in-Chief who never spent a day in uniform, let alone under fire.

In a recent American Thinker commentary by Jim Yardley, he said, “It is apparent that the president, in developing his strategy, used the same extensive knowledge, his superior intellect, and worldly wealth of experience that he brought to his strategy for his $800-billion stimulus, his strategy for providing cost-free health care to millions of Americans, and his strategy for using ‘smart diplomacy’ to defuse not spots around the world.”

Perhaps receiving the Nobel Peace Prize barely months into his first year as President has convinced Obama that he is the man to get all our enemies to join hands and sing Kumbaya. Obama accepted the prize that has gone to other seekers of peace like Yassir Arafat, founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or co-winners, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. The IPCC and Gore have led the greatest hoax of the modern era, global warming, and Arafat rejected every effort at peace offered by Israel by going back on his word and using terrorism to achieve his goals.

There is no question that the announced cuts to the U.S. military budget are, in part, the result of the domestic run up of debt and borrowing the followed the financial crisis of 2008; itself the result of bad government policies regarding the wholesale granting of mortgages to people who could not afford homes, then bundling those bad mortgages and selling them as assets to the banks.
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The U.S. is on a Suicide Watch

January 22, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Cold War, Communism, Democrats/Leftists, Ethics, Free Trade, Government, Liberals, President, Socialism, Taxes | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

In 1991, the Soviet Union, arguably the greatest experiment in Communism, collapsed. After Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors moved to shift its Communist economy to one that embraced Capitalism while retaining centralized government control.

Following World War Two, the recovering nations of Europe were rescued from Communism by the Marshall Plan, but adopted Communism-Light in the form of Socialism. The U.S. was already headed in that direction, creating programs that we now call “entitlements.” For most of the nation’s history, such “entitlements” did not exist.

What binds together the financial problems of the West is the common thread of infantile behavior and thought. One might call it wishful thinking. Instead of encouraging people to provide for old age and possible illness, politicians decided to turn government into Big Daddy, the eternal source of money for everything.

Need to go to college, start a business, or plan for retirement? Government would be there to help. All this ignored the need to actually pay for these programs. In the case of Social Security Congress began to dip into its funding to pay for other programs! This is what children do.
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Barack Machiavelli

January 13, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Elections, Ethics, Government, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Money, President, Taxes | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

The Founding Fathers, authors of the Constitution, were obsessed with any form of government that could become too powerful, too willing to use force to oppress citizens. They had cause. They had fought a long war against the greatest power of their age, ruled by a king with nearly absolute power. They fashioned an instrument designed to ensure that the President could not rule by edict and defused power among three branches of government.

We have a President currently running for reelection against Congress, Wall Street, Republicans, and the right of citizens to be free of an overly intrusive government.

Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution says: All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in the Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

All appointments of the President must be approved by the Senate while it is in session and the Senate, even over the Christmas and New Year’s vacation has remained in session, if only in a pro forma, technical manner. Every three days it has been convened to assert its powers.

Even so, President Obama has announced several “recess” appointments, all clearly a challenge to the Senate and all clearly a tyrannical power grab. He appointed Richard Cordray as the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new function that puts government between the lender and the citizen. In theory, all loans in the future will be subject to government approval. This is Communism, not Capitalism.

EPA’s Killer MACT

January 9, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Barack Obama, Budget, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, EPA, Ethics, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Taxes | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

To understand how the Environmental Protection Agency operates, one must first understand that it lies all the time. Its “estimates” are bogus. Its claims of lives saved are bogus.

It thrives on scare-mongering to a public that is science-challenged, but the science remains and the EPA must be challenged to save the nation from the loss of the energy it needs to function. It must be challenged to unleash the huge economic benefits of energy resources—coal, oil, and natural gas—that can reverse our present economic decline.

The latest outrage is the MACT rule—an acronym for “maximum achievable control technology” intended to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. The rule is 1,117 pages long. Its purpose is to shut down coal-fired power plants that generate over fifty percent of all the electricity used daily in the United States of America.

The value of the total benefits asserted by the EPA is alleged to be $6 million. Not billion, but million. The MACT rule would force 14.7 gigawatts—enough power for more than eleven million households—to be “retired” from the power grip in the 2014-15 period when the rules take effect.

How Not to Go Crazy in 2012

January 6, 2012 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Elections, GOP, Government, Government, Corruption, House of Representatives, Liberals, President, Republicans, Senate | No Comments

-By Alan Caruba

Election years tend to create a level of frenzy concerning the selection of the nominees and the outcome. The media feed this in order to keep readers reading and viewers viewing. The history of American elections has always been one of vituperation between the parties, so there is nothing new about this. Indeed, since so much depends on it, the political free-for-all is a healthy exercise.

It can, however, make for a difficult environment in which to go about one’s life; the air filled with charge and counter-charge, polls going up and down, and a general sense that something is very wrong with the way the government functions.

On the bright side, a gridlocked Congress may bring a measure of relief to everyone. Writing about gridlock in January 2011, Marcus E. Ethridge, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, noted that “By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups.” In 2011, we saw what happens when advocates of “renewable energy”, wind and solar power, or electric cars, get priority over the needs of most Americans for reliable energy and transportation.
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The 2012 Check List for America’s Survival

December 29, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Congress, Constitution, Democrats/Leftists, Elections, Ethics, GOP, Government, Government, Corruption, Jobs, Liberals, President, Republicans, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

Many people make resolutions to start the year, but I think a list of things that must be done to protect and preserve the Republic should be tallied.

1. President Obama must be defeated in 2012 and the obstructionist Democratic Party must lose power in the Senate to ensure both houses of Congress will be Republican and in a position to initiate real change.

2. The Environmental Protection Agency must be reined in with increased Congressional oversight and legislative limits on its rule-making capacity. Having fulfilled its 1970 mandate to clean the nation’s air and water, it should be scaled back to the maintenance of these functions.

3. Americans, despite the administration’s efforts to redefine and distract us, must keep clearly in mind the threat of Islam to the nation and the world. A Middle East in turmoil lays ahead for 2012.

4. To jump-start the economy, taxes and spending must be reduced across the board. A tax on consumption, rather than income would be a good start. Only 49% of Americans currently pay income taxes, the lowest in decades.
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Christianity’s Triumph

December 23, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Bible, Christianity, History, Islam, Jews, Judaism, Religion, Society/Culture, Western Civilization | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

“By far the most important event in the entire rise of Christianity was the meeting in Jerusalem in around the year 50, when Paul was granted the authority to convert Gentiles without them also becoming observant Jews.”

So wrote Rodney Stark, the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. His most recent book is “The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion” ($27.99, HarperCollins).

For Christians in particular, I recommend it if only because so many have a tenuous grasp of Christianity’s real history, as opposed the versions that too often are casually accepted as truth.

The truth is that the rise of Christianity is one of the most extraordinary stories of the past two millennia. Stark not only has the knowledge of his vast subject, but he writes with such felicity that it is hard to put the 500-page book aside for both its revelations and its devotion to the facts.
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America’s Communist President

December 16, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Communism, Constitution, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Ethics, Government, Government, Corruption, Liberals, President, Socialism, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

In his extraordinary book, “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century”, the historian, Dr. Paul Kengor, stated in his introduction that “We now know that American Communists and their masters in Moscow were acutely aware that they could never gain the popular support they needed to enlist the support of a much wider coalition that could help them push their private agenda.”

Most threatening, however, was Dr. Kengor’s discovery that “it was nothing short of stunning to research this book during the presidential bid of Barack Obama and hear so many of the names in my research surface repeatedly in the background of the man who became president of the United States of America. The way in which so many names and themes from the Cold War past aligned and made their way into Obama’s orbit was chilling.”

Obama’s December 8th speech in Osawatomie, Kansas revealed to anyone paying any attention that the President is a Communist. Speaking of the nation’s economic system that has created the greatest wealth for the most people anywhere, Capitalism, Obama said, “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

No one would argue that capitalism is “fair”, nor would they argue that life is “fair.” These are things that never were and never will be, but Obama’s reelection campaign theme will be that Americans are suffering because of Capitalism, because of a lack of fairness.

In a December 8 Washington Times commentary, Jeffrey T. Kuhner wrote, “There is only one problem with the White House’s narrative: It’s completely false. Mr. Obama is not a defender of the middle class but has been its mortal enemy. His policies have impoverished working-and-middle-class Americans.”
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Looking to the Dollar, Gold, and “Mutti” to Save the World

December 14, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Banks, Barack Obama, Budget, Capitalism, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Ethics, Europe, Foreign Countries, France, Germany, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

The most formidable couple in the world during the 1980s was Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher, a conservative and a woman of iron will, must be looking across the Channel with some amusement to see how her German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, is literally the only person keeping the European economy from collapsing and, it must be said, taking England and America with it.

The cover article of this week’s Business Week noted that “Merkel is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. She won a PhD for a thesis on quantum chemistry…though childless, she is known as Mutti, for Mother.” Born in the post-war years, “Merkel’s worldview reflects the German desire for stability. Chaos plagued the German-speaking people long before there was a German nation…Later the hyperinflation of the 1920s and Depression of the 1930s, both of which undermined the middle-class, gave rise to Nazism.”

Plainly said, Angela Merkel is showing the rest of the world why Keynesian economics doesn’t work; that governments with huge “entitlement” programs and a tendency to throw vast amounts of money at their problems invite disaster. If Europe does not plunge into chaos, it will be because she refused to bail it out with the deutschmark.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is moving billions to Europe to ease its lending crisis.
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Spending More has Never Worked!

December 12, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Barack Obama, Budget, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Ethics, Government, Government, Corruption, Liberals, President, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

Ask any financial advisor what to do when you are drowning in debt and they will tell you to spend less and pay down your debt. This is just common sense. However, if you ask politicians what to do, they will advise that the nation spend more and borrow more.

Despite a huge national debt and deficit, the federal government just concluded its biggest spending year with its second biggest annual budget deficit. For fiscal 2011 which ended September 30, the government spent $3.6 trillion, an increase over the $3.52 trillion posted in 2009.

The budget “deficit” is the difference between the revenues that government took in and what it spent. The “debt” is the accumulation of yearly deficits. The U.S. has a debt of $15 trillion and this grows by billions daily due to the interest that must be paid on the amount of borrowing required to sustain its operations. Fully 40 cents of every dollar the government spends is now borrowed.

The Congressional Budget Office noted that the deficit is “greater than in any year since 1945” as World War Two wound down. As a Wall Street Journal editorial expressed it, “The Obama years have racked up the three largest deficits, both in absolute amounts and as a share of GDP, since Hitler still terrorized Europe.”
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Paper Money, Real Debt, and Spendthrift Nations

December 7, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Americanism, Banks, Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Congress, Constitution, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Government, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Money, Republicans, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

As the citizens of the United States and the seventeen member-nations of the European Union look on, a great drama regarding the future of the EU and its currency, the Euro, is occurring.

The essential problem is that both the U.S. dollar and the Euro are just so much paper, despite the promises and guarantees that they will be honored as real money. The trick has been to keep everyone believing there are sufficient real assets to back up those promises.

Since the U.S. dollar is a kind of universal currency to which other nations peg the value of their currencies the problem for everyone is that the U.S. is broke. Its debt exceeds its annual capacity to generate income, otherwise known as its Gross Domestic Product. Every hour of every day it must borrow billions to meet its obligations. Forty cents of every dollar the U.S. spends is borrowed.

There is a reason why television these days if filled with commercials offering to sell gold. Gold has always retained its value though it does fluctuate. The U.S. Treasury’s gold hoard has a value of more than $400 billion these days, but that value is the flip side of the Federal Reserve’s demolition of the dollar which has lost 95% of its value since1913, the same year the Fed was created.
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The Threat of a Global Financial Collapse

December 3, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Capitalism, Communism, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Elections, Ethics, GOP, Government, Government, Corruption, Jobs, Liberals, Socialism, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

At present, the amount of the annual Gross Domestic Product, $14 trillion—the value of all the goods and services that generate income—is exceeded by the nation’s debts.

America is presently $15 trillion in debt and it grows daily.

In a November 21 Wall Street Journal interview, Erskine Bowles of the presidential advisory commission on the nation’s debt, said “If you take 100% of the revenue that came into the country last year, every single dime of it was consumed by our mandatory spending and interest on the debt.”

“Mandatory spending in English is basically the entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. That means that every single dollar we spent last year on national defense, homeland security, education, infrastructure, high-value added research—every single dollar was borrowed, and half of it was borrowed from foreign country.”
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System Failure on a Global Scale

November 26, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Crime, Foreign Countries, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

We are living in times when the structures involving the global financial system, national security, and self-governance are under attack, decaying, or just self-destructing due to all the ills to which humanity is prone.

Wars in the twentieth century were always an example of either the failure of nations to resolve their differences or of the ancient human inclination to steal whatever they can from their neighbor. Wars organize this into armies for that purpose. The other cause for war is the necessity to rid the neighborhood of the crazy guy who’s hoarding weapons and building bombs.

What is occurring of late, however, goes beyond the usual casus belli to something far greater, a loss of faith in national and international banking systems, aggravated by the failure of nations to act in a prudent fashion to protect the wealth of their citizens and their national sovereignty.
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Super Committee Suicide‏

November 23, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Ethics, Government, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Republicans, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

By the weekend, news reports indicated that the congressional Super Committee was closing in on an agreement. The deficit-cutting panel is mandated to trim at least $1.2 trillion in federal spending over the next ten years and, failing an agreement, automatic cuts would begin in 2013, after the national elections.

In days, however, it was clear that there was no agreement and the Super Committee, as Congress has always done, was looking at a variety of gimmicks and magical thinking to avoid having to address what is now a $15 trillion national debt, more than an entire year’s Gross Domestic Product.

The Super Committee was and is a bad idea on many levels if for no other reason than the Constitution requires that all bills involving expenditures must originate in the House of Representatives (Article 1, Section 7), but “the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.” The Constitution, however, has mattered less and less to U.S. Congresses for a very long time.
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If Not Romney, Who?

November 18, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Conservatives, Economy/Finances, Elections, GOP, Government, Corruption, Jobs, Mitt Romney, President, Republicans, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

Generally overlooked in the midst of the many debates and the usual competition between Republican candidates for the Party’s nomination is the fact that a rather impressive number have thrown their hats in the ring. It is testimony to the health, depth, and diversity of the Party. Compare that with the Democratic Party’s lone candidate, a President already ceded the title of worst ever.

As campaigns proceed toward the on-rushing primaries, Republicans are increasingly focused beyond the usual circus atmosphere, including the latest problems encountered by Herman Cain and Rick Perry’s gaffs. Selecting the GOP candidate has now reached the critical stage.

That is why a lengthy editorial in a recent Wall Street Journal is noteworthy. “Romney’s Fiscal Awakening” was a thorough analysis of a November 4th Romney speech on the subject of reversing the nation’s economic problems. The Journal said “his remarks deserve more attention than they’ve received as a guide to how he might govern.”

Romney has run a smart campaign to this point, not attacking the other candidates and waiting for them to exhaust themselves while he maintained a fairly constant 25% of support to this point. Unlike the boxer who spends all his energy in the first or third round, Romney has tended to the grassroots kind of effort necessary to succeed in the early primaries.
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What We Have Here is a Failure to Negotiate

November 15, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, GOP, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

In the movie, “Cool Hand Luke” the warden of a prison camp utters the now famous line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” The decision of the Democratic members of the Congressional Super Committee to refuse further discussion of revenue issues is a failure to negotiate.

I have a friend, Jim Camp, who is one of the world’s authorities on negotiation, a coach to international corporations and others that engage in multi-million dollar deals requiring major negotiation skills. When the news was reported on Wednesday that the Democratic members had walked away from the negotiation table, I picked up the phone to ask for his reaction.

“We live in an era when the conventional wisdom is that compromise is the goal,” said Camp. “The real goal is a valid mission and purpose. What’s missing is that the committee as a whole is not focused on the real mission which is the best result for the American people and the nation. Instead, their goal is political gamesmanship, a massive over-reach by both parties to the negotiation.”
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Time to Rid the Streets of the ‘Occupy’ Movement

November 13, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Americanism, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Communism, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Government, Corruption, Jobs, Liberals, Socialism, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

Is there any doubt left in the minds of observers of the Occupy Wall Street movement tends toward violence and is in need of control? The mayors of the cities—some seventy at last count—that are being occupied need to crack down on it.

Not all agree, of course. Among the list of the Occupy movement are the following organizations and individuals that have expressed support or sympathy:

Communist Party, USA
American Nazi Party
Revolutionary Communist Party
Industrial Workers of the World
International Bolshevik Tendency
International Socialist Organization
Marxist Student Union
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Party for Socialism and Liberation
President Barack Obama
Vice President Joe Biden
Former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi
The Revolutionary Guards of Iran
Communist Party of China
Louis Farrakhan, National of Islam
Black Panthers

There are others but they all have commonalities, not the least of which is a belief in Communism, they are representative of the American Far Left, and have an affinity for class and racial warfare.
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Killing Energy, Killing Jobs, Killing America

November 4, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Coal, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Electric, Energy, Ethics, Government, Government, Corruption, Jobs, Liberals, Natural Gas, Nuclear Power, Oil, President, Regulation, Solar, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

America has been under attack since Barack Obama took the oath of office on January 20, 2009. The primary target has been the nation’s ability to generate energy for electricity and transportation, without which this nation will slide into Third World status and economic decline.

This appears to be the goal of this administration from the President to his Secretaries of Energy and Interior, to his Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. There is no other rational explanation for what they are doing.

We are days away from the latest Environmental Protection Agency assault in the form of the “MACT” rule allegedly to reduce mercury and other emissions that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says will reduce electricity generation in America by about 81 gigawatts in the years ahead. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said “this could compromise the reliability of the electric system if as much as 8% of generating capacity is subtracted from the grid.”
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Global Warming: An Obituary

November 1, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Americanism, Budget, Climate Change, Democrats/Leftists, Environment, Global Warming, Liberals, Nanny State, Socialism, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

I used to write obituaries when I was a young journalist and I daresay they are one of the best read sections of any newspaper. We have arrived at a time when the obituaries for global warming (now falsely called climate change) are increasing.

The October 25th edition of The Wall Street Journal sports an editorial titled “The Post-Global Warming World” commenting on the fact that the 17th annual United Nations-sponsored climate change conference in November is likely to be an even greater flop than recent ones. Few, if any, nations will sign on to the huge hoax of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) to save the world from burning to a crisp.

Considering the long years of media-driven drivel about global warming, the hoax should have been over by now, given the exposure in 2009 of thousands of emails between the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conspirators and growing body of evidence that everything they asserted was a great steaming pile of horse manure.

If there was ever a reason for the U.S. to stop funding the U.N., this is it.
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Muammar, Dead at Last

October 28, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Semitism, Foreign Policy, Government, Corruption, Israel, Liberals, Libya, Security/Safety | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

There were at last count at least 643 ways to spell Muammar Gaddafi and I for one am very happy he is dead for that reason alone. The fact that he was the dictator of Libya for over forty years, funded the Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am airliner and other terrorist acts also contributes to the good news.

These are proving to be bad times for dictators and it is easy to suggest that Basher Assad, a second generation dictator of Syria, will likely come to an equally bad end. So far this year the former dictator of Tunisia had to flee. Egypt’s Mubarack had to step aside, and both Syria’s and Yemen’s presidents are under siege. Nobody knows who’s in charge of Somalia.

As I watched President Obama take a victory lap when he announced Gaddafi’s death, my thoughts turned to what Ted Belman, a widely-read blogger called the Israpundit, had to say. “Gaddafi wasn’t any worse than the barbarians that killed him and will replace him. There are no freedom-loving democrats in the entire Muslim world which consists of seventh century-minded brutes.”

The Israelis have had the misfortune of having had to fight off Muslims not only for the past sixty-plus years of statehood, but in the decades leading up to it. Unlike those of us in the West, they understand them in terms of the insane, fanatical hatred they have for Jews, Christians, and all other “infidels”, unbelievers.
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Kiss the European Union Goodbye

October 24, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Business, Capitalism, EU, Europe, Foreign Countries, Jobs, Taxes | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

In Paris on October 15th, a group of finance ministers and central bankers known as the G20, representing major nations, gave the European Union until October 23red to find an answer to the financial crisises that are tearing apart the EU and its monetary structure.

Don’t hold your breath. If not now, at least in the foreseeable future, the EU will collapse for the oldest reason, national sovereignty and national self-interest.

If you visit Wikipedia and enter “European Wars,” it will kick out a list that’s several pages long in small print starting with the Trojan Wars, 1193-1184 BC. The Romans conquered everyone for a while. The Spanish tried to invade England. For a while Napoleon was invading everyone. There were the hundred year wars, thirty year wars, and wars for the hell of it. Suffice to say the Europeans have a long record of going to war with one another.
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Immigration, Migration, Politics and Policies

October 21, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Democrats/Leftists, Elections, GOP, Government, Government, Corruption, House of Representatives, Immigration/Immigrants, Liberals, President, Republicans, Senate | Comments Off

-By Alan Caruba

When early humans got the hang of walking upright, the first thing many did was to walk out of Africa and, eventually, to all parts of the Earth from Asia to Europe, to North and South America, proliferating into different races.

Always restless to see what was over the horizon, they populated continents. There will shortly be seven billion of us on planet Earth, an extraordinary number and one with considerable consequences regarding issues of food, water, housing, transportation, trade, and energy.

In terms of our DNA, we are all one big family, closely and uncomfortably related to chimpanzees. A look back at the past five thousand years we call civilization reveals that, in addition to developing agriculture, building cities, and establishing trade, we have never stopped engaging in wars great and small.

In good times we reproduced like rabbits. In bad times, we gathered around the fire and hoped the food would hold out. Many packed up and went someplace else, anywhere else.
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Will Warmists Face Justice for their Deceptions?

October 16, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Americanism, Budget, Cap and Trade, Climate Change, Democrats/Leftists, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Regulation, Taxes, UN | 1 Comment

-By Alan Caruba

When you murder someone the case is never closed. The same holds when you murder the truth. No matter how long it takes, truth is defended despite all the calumnies heaped on those who stand firm against the lies and the propaganda intended to persuade those who have been deceived.

Ultimately, truth is its own defense. There never was a shred of truth in the claim that humans were causing the Earth’s climate to heat up by using so-called “fossil fuels” and engaging in manufacturing and other activities. There was no dramatic “global warming” in the 1980s until the present.

The Earth’s climate has warmed very slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age, dated to around 1850. Five hundred years of extremely cold weather had gripped the northern hemisphere starting around 1300. The much heralded “climate change” is, unlike the weather, measured in terms of centuries, not days, weeks or years. It is used by politicians that do not know what they are talking about. It is also used by charlatans, but I repeat myself.

Under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a massive fraud was engineered. The object was to turn carbon dioxide (CO2), a common though minor atmospheric gas, into a commodity that could be traded in exchanges around the world that would issue “carbon credits” to utilities, industrial facilities, and others who would be required to pay for permission to produce energy and products. It was an audacious scheme.
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The EPA Gets Caught in a Big Fat Lie

October 8, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Budget, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Environment, EPA, Government, Corruption, Liberals, President, Taxes | 1 Comment

-By Alan Caruba

The notion that the Environmental Protection Agency uses “science” to justify their regulations is false, just like most of the claims they issue on various aspects of the nation’s environment. Their favorite scam is to estimate the number of deaths they will prevent with some new draconian regulation.

The EPA is the American equivalent of the Gestapo, a ruthless enforcement agency with a very Green agenda that is opposed to the use of many beneficial chemicals, every form of energy, and the right of people to be left alone.

At the top of its list of priorities is the destruction of the nation’s economy with special attention to all forms of energy production. Manufacturing anything comes next, followed by afflicting the nation’s vast agricultural sector. The EPA insists that dust is a pollutant. You can’t farm without generating DUST.
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