Common Sense University

            The Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles R. Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. The following is adapted from a lecture at Hillsdale College on February 1, 2010 during a four-day conference on the “New Deal”. Due to its length, Common Sense Politics has reprinted this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

            The following is the third part of Charles R. Kesler’s speech:

Postmodernism came out of the 1960s university—though it flowered, if that’s the right word, in subsequent decades, especially after the collapse of Communism. President Obama is a child of the ’60s—born in 1961. The Sixties Left was in some ways strikingly different from the Thirties Left. For one thing, the ’60s left was much more—as they liked to say in those days—“existentialist.” That is, ’60s leftists admitted to themselves that all values are relative, and therefore irrational. But they still believed or hoped that morality could be felt, or experienced through the feelings of a generation united in its demands for justice now. Shared feelings about values became a kind of substitute for truth among protesting liberals in the ’60s, which goes far to explaining the emotionalism of liberals then and since. But when the country refused to second their emotions—when the country elected President Nixon in 1968 and again, by larger margins, in 1972—the kids grew bitter and increasingly alienated from the cause of democratic reform, which used to be liberalism’s stock-in-trade. In this context, President Obama represents not only a return to a vigorous liberal reform agenda like the New Deal, but also a kind of bridge between the alienated campus left and the political left.

The second new element in President Obama’s liberalism is even more striking than its postmodernism. It is how uncomfortable he is with American exceptionalism—and thus with America itself. President Obama considers this country deeply flawed from its very beginnings. He means not simply that slavery and other kinds of fundamental injustice existed, which everyone would admit. He means that the Declaration of Independence, when it said that all men are created equal, did not mean to include blacks or anyone else who is not a property-holding, white, European male—an argument put forward infamously by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision, and one that was powerfully refuted by Abraham Lincoln.

In short, President Obama agrees with his former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, much more than he let on as a presidential candidate. Read closely, his famous speech on that subject in March 2008 doesn’t hide his conclusion that Wright was correct—that America is a racist and ungodly country (hence, not “God Bless America,” but “God Damn America!”). Obama agrees with Wright that in its origin, and for most of its history, America was racist, sexist, and in various ways vicious. Wright’s mistake, Obama said, was underestimating America’s capacity for change—a change strikingly illustrated by Obama’s own advances and his later election. For Obama, Wright’s mistake turned on not what America was, but what America could become—especially after the growth of liberalism in our politics in the course of the 20th century. It was only liberalism that finally made America into a decent country, whereas for most of its history it was detestable.

Unlike most Americans, President Obama still bristles at any suggestion that our nation is better or even luckier than other nations. To be blunt, he despises the notion that Americans consider themselves special among the peoples of the world. This strikes him as the worst sort of ignorance and ethnocentrism, which is why it was so difficult for him to decide to wear an American flag lapel pin when he started running for president, even though he knew it was political suicide to refuse wearing it.

As President Obama hinted in his Berlin speech during the campaign, he really thinks of himself as a multiculturalist, as a citizen of the world, first, and only incidentally as an American. To put it differently, he regards patriotism as morally and intellectually inferior to cosmopolitanism. And, of course, he is never so much a citizen of the world as when defending the world’s environment against mankind’s depredations, and perhaps especially America’s depredations. In general, the emotionalist defense of the earth—think of Al Gore—is now a vital part of the liberalism of our day. It’s a kind of substitute for earlier liberals’ belief in progress. Although his own election—and secondarily liberalism’s achievements over the past century or so—help to redeem America in his view, Obama remains, in many ways, profoundly disconnected from his own land.

This is a very different state of mind and character from that of Franklin Roosevelt, who was the kind of progressive who thought that America was precisely the vanguard of moral progress in the world. This was the way Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, and every great liberal captain before Obama thought about his country—as a profoundly moral force in the world, leading the nations of the world toward a better and more moral end point. Obama doesn’t think that way, and therefore his mantle as an American popular leader—despite his flights of oratorical prowess—doesn’t quite fit him in the way that FDR’s fit him. One can see this in the tinges of irony that creep into Obama’s rhetoric now and then—the sense that even he doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying; and he knows that but hopes that you don’t.

Obama’s ambivalence is, in many ways, the perfect symbol of the dilemma of the contemporary liberal. How can Obama argue that America and liberalism reject absolute truths, and in the same breath affirm—as he did recently to the United Nations—that human rights are self-evidently true? You can’t have it both ways, though he desperately wants and tries to. Here, surely, is the deepest crisis of 20th-century American liberalism—that it can no longer understand, or defend, its principles as true anymore. It knows that, but knows as well that to say so would doom it politically. Liberals are increasingly left with an amoral pragmatism that is hard to justify to themselves, much less to the American public. The problem for liberals today is that they risk becoming confidence men, and nothing but confidence men.

            The Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles R. Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. The following is adapted from a lecture at Hillsdale College on February 1, 2010 during a four-day conference on the “New Deal”. Due to its length, Common Sense Politics is reprinting this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

            The following is the second part of Charles R. Kesler’s speech:

The social and economic rights inherent in these entitlements purported to make Americans secure, or at least to make them feel secure. “Necessitous men are not free men,” FDR liked to say—which meant that freedom required government to take care of a person’s necessities so that he might live comfortably, fearlessly, beyond necessity. The long-term problem with this was that the reasons given to justify the relatively modest initial welfare rights pointed far beyond themselves. No one ever doubted, for instance, that good houses, well-paying jobs, and decent medical care were fine things. But the liberal alchemy that transformed these fine things into “rights” was powerful magic. Such rights implied, in turn, duties to provide the houses, jobs, and medical care now guaranteed to most everyone.

And on whom did the duties fall? Liberalism never came clean on that question. It pointed sometimes to the rich, suggesting that enough of their wealth could be redistributed to provide the plenty that would be required to supply houses and medical care and jobs to those who lack them. But liberalism also liked to say that the duty to provide these things fell broadly upon the American middle class—that these were basically insurance programs into which people paid and from which they took out their benefits when needed.

Could future benefits be cut or eliminated? Liberals breathed nary a word about such unhappy scenarios, selling the new rights as though they were self-financing—that is, as if they would be cost-free in the long-term, if not a net revenue generator. In fact, entitlements are the offspring of formulas that can be trimmed or repealed by simple majorities of the legislature. And the benefits have to be paid for by someone—as it turns out, primarily by the young and the middle class.

The moral costs of the new rights went further. Virtue was the way that free people used to deal with their necessities. It took industry, frugality, and responsibility, for example, to go to work every morning to provide for your family. It took courage to handle the fears that inevitably come with life, especially in old age. But the new social and economic rights tended to undercut such virtues, subtly encouraging men and women to look to the government to provide for their needs and then to celebrate that dependency as if it were true freedom. In truth, the appetite for the stream of benefits promised by the new rights was more like an addiction, destructive of both freedom and virtue.

The new entitlements pointed to a beguiling version of the social contract. As FDR once described it, the new social contract calls for the people to consent to greater government power in exchange for the government providing them with rights: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, etc. The more power the people give government, the more rights we receive. FDR’s New Deal implied that there’s nothing to fear from making government bigger and bigger, because political tyranny—at least among advanced nations—is a thing of the past.

In truth, however, the new socio-economic rights were group rights, not individual rights. They were rights for organized interests: labor unions, farmers, school teachers, old people, blacks, sick people, and so forth. Collectively, these rights encouraged citizens to think of themselves as members of pressure groups or to organize themselves into pressure groups. Subtly and not so subtly, citizens were taught to identify their rights with group self-interests of one kind or another.

These new group rights were conspicuously not attached to obligations. The old rights—the individual rights of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—had come bound up with duties. The right to life or the right to liberty implied a duty not to take away someone else’s life or someone else’s liberty. The new rights, on the other hand, had no corresponding duties—except perhaps to pay your taxes. The new rights pointed to a kind of moral anarchy in which rights without obligations became the currency of the realm—in which rights, understood as putative claims on resources, were effectively limited only by other, stronger such claims. The result was, at best, an equilibrium of countervailing power.

President Obama’s New New Deal doesn’t look so distinctive when you view it in this historical light. The collectivization of health care, for instance, is a hearty perennial of liberal politics and fulfills a 65-year-old promise made by FDR. Moreover, in cultivating the aura of a prophet-leader, uniquely fit to seize the historical moment and remake his country, Obama follows the theory and example of Woodrow Wilson. But there are signs of a few new or distinctive principles in this current leftward lurch, and I will mention two.

First, there is the postmodernism that crops up here and there. Postmodernism insists that there’s no truth “out there” by which men can guide their thoughts and actions. Postmodern liberals admit, then, that there is no objective support—no support in nature or in God or in anything outside of our wills—for liberalism itself. Liberalism in these terms is just a preference. The leading academic postmodernist, the late Richard Rorty, argued that liberals are moral relativists who feel an “aversion to cruelty,” and it’s that aversion that makes them liberals. And indeed, if one admits that all moral principles are relative, the only thing that really sets one apart as a liberal is a certain kind of passion or feeling. President Obama calls this feeling empathy. And yes, of course, all this implies that conservatives don’t have feelings for their fellow human beings—except perhaps a desire to be cruel to them.

Now I don’t mean to suggest here that President Obama is a thoroughgoing postmodernist, because he’s not. But neither is he just an old-fashioned progressive liberal of the 1930s variety. New Deal liberals believed in the future. In fact, they believed in a kind of predictive science of the future. Post-modernists reject all truth, including any assertions about progress or science. Postmodernists speak of narrative—one of those words one hears a lot of these days in politics—rather than truth. Narrative means something like this: Even if we can’t find meaning in any kind of objective reality out there, we can still create meaning by telling each other stories, by constructing our own narratives—and the more inclusive and empathetic these narratives, the better. President Obama often speaks this postmodern language. For example, here is part of a discussion of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in his book, The Audacity of Hope:

Implicit in [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties [notice cruelty: he's against it] of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

Obama’s point here is that absolute truth and ordered liberty are incompatible, because absolute truth turns its believers into fanatics or moral monsters. Now granted, it was certainly a good thing that America escaped religious fanaticism and political tyranny. But no previous president ever credited these achievements to the Founders’ supposed rejection of absolute truth—previously known simply as truth. What then becomes of those great self-evident truths that President Obama’s admitted hero, Abraham Lincoln, celebrated and risked all to preserve? And that Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked so dramatically?

            The Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles R. Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. The following is adapted from a lecture at Hillsdale College on February 1, 2010 during a four-day conference on the “New Deal”. Due to its length, Common Sense Politics is reprinting this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

            The following is the first part of Charles R. Kesler’s speech:

IN PRESIDENT Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in at least a generation. In 2008, he won the presidency with a majority of the popular vote—something a Democrat had not done since Jimmy Carter’s squeaker in 1976—and handily increased the Democrats’ control of both houses of Congress. Measured against roughly two centuries worth of presidential victories by Democratic non-incumbents, his win as a percentage of the popular vote comes in third behind FDR’s in 1932 and Andrew Jackson’s in 1828.

More importantly, Obama won election not as a status quo liberal, but as an ambitious reformer. Far from being content with incremental gains, he set his sights on major systemic change in health care, energy and environmental policy, taxation, financial regulation, education, and even immigration, all pursued as elements of a grand strategy to “remake America.” In other words, he longs to be another FDR, building a New New Deal for the 21st century, dictating the politics of his age, and enshrining the Democrats as the new majority party for several decades to come. Suddenly, the era of big government being over is over; and tax-and-spend liberalism is back with a vengeance. We face a $1.4 trillion federal deficit this fiscal year alone and $10-12 trillion in total debt over the coming decade. If the ongoing expansion of government succeeds, there will also be very real costs to American freedom and to the American character. The Reagan Revolution is in danger of being swamped by the Obama Revolution.

To unsuspecting conservatives who had forgotten or never known what full-throated liberalism looked like before the Age of Reagan, Obama’s eruption onto the scene came as a shock. And in some respects, obviously, he is a new political phenomenon. But in most respects, Obama does not represent something new under the sun. On the contrary, he embodies a rejuvenated and a repackaged version of something older than our grandmothers—namely the intellectual and social impulses behind modern liberalism. Yet even as President Obama stands victorious on health care and sets his sights on other issues, his popularity and that of his measures has tumbled. His legislative victories have been eked out on repeated party line votes of a sort never seen in the contests over Social Security, Medicare, and previous liberal policy successes, which were broadly popular and bipartisan. In short, a strange thing is happening on the way to liberal renewal. The closer liberalism comes to triumphing, the less popular it becomes. According to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans now describe themselves as conservative, 35 percent as moderates, and only 21 percent call themselves liberal. After one of its greatest triumphs in several generations, liberalism finds itself in an unexpected crisis—and a crisis that is not merely, as we shall see, a crisis of public confidence.

To try to understand better the difficulties in which the New New Deal finds itself, it might be useful to compare it to the original. The term itself, New Deal, was an amalgam of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal, and was deliberately ambiguous as to its meaning. It could mean the same game but with a new deal of the cards; or it could mean a wholly new game with new rules, i.e., a new social contract for all of America. In effect, I think, the term’s meaning was somewhere in between. But FDR liked to use the more conservative or modest sense of the term to disguise the more radical and ambitious ends that he was pursuing.

In its own time, the New Deal was extremely popular. Among its novel elements was a new kind of economic rights. The Progressives at the turn of the century had grown nervous over the closing of the American frontier and the rise of large corporations—developments they thought threatened the common man’s equality of opportunity. Aside from anti-trust efforts and war-time taxation, however, the Progressives did not get very far toward a redistributive agenda, and were actually wary of proclaiming new-fangled rights. They were more comfortable with duties than rights, and disapproved of the selfish penumbras cast by the natural rights doctrines of old. Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt preached moral uplift—doing your duty in a more socialized or socialistic era. They tended to associate rights talk with individualism of the backward-looking sort. It took the cleverness of FDR and his advisors to figure out how rights could be adapted to promote bigger government and to roll back the old regime of individualism and limited government.

What was this new concept of rights? Instead of rights springing from the individual—as God-given aspects of our nature—FDR and the New Dealers conceived of individualism as springing from a kind of rights created by the state. These were social and economic rights, which FDR first proclaimed in his campaign speeches in 1932, kept talking about throughout the New Deal, and summed up toward the end of his life in his annual message to Congress in 1944. These were the kinds of rights that the New Deal especially promoted: the right to a job, the right to a decent home, the right to sell your agricultural products at a price that would allow you to keep your farm, the right to medical care, the right to vacations from work, and so on. FDR elevated these rights to be parts of what he called “our new constitutional order.”

Of course, not all of these rights were enshrined in law. After all, President Obama has only just now enshrined a dubious right to health care into law. And not one of these rights was actually added to the Constitution, despite Roosevelt’s pitching them as what he called a “second Bill of Rights.” And the fact that none of them was ever formulated into a constitutional amendment is entirely consistent with FDR’s and modern liberals’ belief in a living constitution—that is, a constitution that is changeable, Darwinian, not frozen in time, but rather creative and continually growing. Once upon a time, the growth and the conduct of government were severely restricted because a lot of liberal policies were thought to be unconstitutional. In fact, many New Deal measures proposed by FDR were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1930s. But nowadays it’s hard to think of a measure expanding government power over private property and enterprise that the Court, much less Congress, would dismiss out of hand as simply unconstitutional.

If you consider the financial bailouts or the re-writing of bankruptcy law involved in the GM and Chrysler deals, these are the kinds of things that politicians in sounder times would have screamed bloody murder about as totally unconstitutional and illegal. But hardly a peep was heard. After all, once we have a living constitution, we shouldn’t be surprised to find we have a living bankruptcy law, too. The meaning of the law can change overnight as circumstances dictate—or as the political reading of circumstances dictates.

Despite not being formally enshrined in the Constitution, most of these new rights—what we’ve come to call entitlement rights—did get added to the small “c” constitution of American politics anyway, either during the New Deal or during its sequel, the Great Society. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and kindred welfare state programs moved to the center of our political life, dominating the domestic agenda and eventually usurping the majority of federal spending, now delicately termed “uncontrollable.”

            It all happened within a few days and it is to our knowledge one of the weirdest episodes in U.S. military history. The U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, Four-Star General Stanley McChrystal gets exposed by a liberal (way leftist) publication article in ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine a few days before it is even available on newsstands and before it comes out, the General is gone! Let’s briefly recall what supposedly happened here.

            With the General’s permission, his staff allowed liberal reporter Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone magazine, a publication that is against the war and very liberal in its content, to follow him around in Afghanistan for a couple of weeks to see what it is like to be in charge of the war going on in that country. During this time, the reporter picked up some quotes spoken “off the record” where unpleasant and uncomplimentary references are being made by the General and his staff about high-level Obama administration officials (including the President). Since these comments were well published two weeks ago when the story broke, we will not repeat them here but conclude with the aftermath of it. It would be easy to google the article and read it in its full context. The magazine article is being brought to the President’s attention, the President calls the General to Washington and after a brief 30-minute meeting in the White House, the President accepts the General’s resignation for his inappropriate comments to the magazine reporter. The announcement is made and Four-Star General David Petraeus is called upon to take over the role of Commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. General McChrystal disappears from the stage and turns in his resignation from the Army in which he served for more than three decades. End of story.

            We here at Common Sense University believe that there is much more to this episode based on the fact that it all went so well and quick. We believe that the General wanted to get out, period!!! It was all that simple. The job was taken its toll on the man, the multitude of tasks simply wore him down and he considered his options and probably found that there were really not many. Sure, he constantly had to spend lots of time with high-ranking administration officials visiting Afghanistan including the Ambassador to that country. The President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai was also constantly running interference with the day-to-day operations of the General and so McChrystal simply had enough and wanted to get out. But how could he do that without losing face with everybody who had counted on him and the troops who followed and believed in him?

            Could he claim a non-existent illness as the reason? NO! Could he just write to the President and say: I can’t handle it any longer, I am in over my head? NO! Could he openly complain to the President about the interferences by all the visitors, President Karzai or the limiting rules of engagement? NO! That did not leave him many options and in order to get out and not lose face, he decided to do something “inappropriate and unbecoming” that would force him to acknowledge his error in judgment and accept the consequences by resigning his commission. And so it went. He allowed a war-hating reporter to follow him around who then would publish a not so complimentary article entitled ’The Runaway General’ in Rolling Stone magazine.

            We refuse to believe that the General was unintentionally allowing this reporter to get near him, pick up off the cuff remarks by him and his staff about other Obama administration officials. We do not believe that the General was that naïve knowing full well that an article would be written about him in that liberal (War-hating) publication and to expose himself  and his staff to that. NO, General Stanley McChrystal wanted to get out and determined that this was the least damaging way to himself of doing so without admitting his discust for the job.        It will remain to be seen (or heard) if the true story about this episode will ever be honestly written, either by the General in a memoir or by those who were his closest confidants. Until then, we are not willing to accept the story as has been written and given to us.

            No, she is not dead in the common use of the acronym. But something has ended and we consider that a good thing. Her career has ended! While Helen Thomas was in many ways a ground breaker for women in journalism, she was also for a very long time at a minimum very controversial. From President Kennedy (in the early 1960’s) on forward, she enjoyed a front row seat at White House Press briefings and she became known for her acidic and even confrontational questions and exchanges with Presidents and whoever the Press Secretaries were. She eventually became the White House bureau chief for UPI and was the first female member and president of the White House Correspondent’s Association and the first female member of the Gridiron Club. Later on, she joined the Hearst Newspaper company as an opinion columnist. Since she was an admitted liberal, the main stream media cut her more slack than almost anybody else. Her longevity was admirable, she celebrated her 89^th birthday in the White Press briefing room last year on August 4 and had her picture taken with President Obama who shares birthdays with her.

            Her Lebanese heritance made her automatically an enemy of Israel but it seems she managed to hide her antipathy to that country fairly well from the outside world for a very long time. Her liberal bias would surface every time a Republican became President and her exchanges were caustic as when she laid into George W. Bush in March 2006 asking him what motivated him (Bush) to invade Iraq since all previous given reasons were proven false. In November 2007, she asked then White House Press Secretary Dana Perino why Americans should depend on General Petraeus in determining when to re-deploy U.S. troops. She asked: “You mean how many more people we kill?” Now with the Obama administration she has been critical about the handling of the press which in her opinion was and is too controlling.

            Then came May 27, 2010, when she was asked during a Jewish Heritage Celebration Day event at the White House if she had a comment on Israel. The questioner was Jewish Rabbi David Nesenoff who filmed the interview (as he apparently did with everybody else). Helen Thomas knew that she was filmed and answered his question: “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine, remember, these people (the Palestinians) are occupied and its their land.”

Next question: “Where should they (the Jews) go?”

Answer: “They should go home, go back to Poland and Germany.”

Question: “So you are saying the Jews go back to Poland and Germany?”

Answer: “And America and everywhere else. Why push people (the Palestinians) out of there who have lived there for centuries? See?”

            That was all and it was finally enough to get her fired from her last employer, the Nine Speakers agency. Her openly hateful attitude towards Israel was simply too much to defend. Even though she apologized for her comments, she was ousted and they let her turn in her resignation on June 7 ending her relationship with Hearst Newspapers.

            What should we call the R.I.P. (Rest in Peace) then in her case since she has not died? We suggest among things based on her longstanding attitude towards Israel the following: Refusing Israel Peace or maybe even Rejecting Israeli People.  Common Sense University has only one question: How could Helen Thomas in her obviously deep felt hatred towards Jews be tolerated and even admired by the media, the U.S. Governments for over fifty years and the American public in general? The answer is in our opinion simple: “She was and still is a liberal!”

            Tomorrow marks nine weeks since the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. That is more than two months in duration and there seems to be no end in sight for this incredible disaster. Throughout this period, only one thing seemed to have been around  and that is called the blame game. Even though hindsight is easier than foresight, here is what should have happened from April 20 on forward:

            When a disaster like the explosion on the BP (British Petroleum) deepwater oilrig Horizon develops, it requires immediate attention and projection of things to come. A thorough analysis should have shown anybody with a sliver of common sense that this could develop into a major catastrophe with incredible consequences. After just a few meetings with real experts with experience in the industry and not with theoreticians from academia, it should have been clear very quickly that this could be identified as two separate issues. The first one being that it would not be easy to stop the leak a mile under the ocean floor within a few days but this could possibly last a while since remedial actions were no guaranty of sudden success. The other major issue was the identification of the potential consequences for the land areas nearby the spill location.

            Everybody knew immediately that the shorelines from Louisiana to Florida were threatened once the spilled oil would reach them. The good thing about that in comparison with a hurricane was that the States would have some time to take preventative measures before the oil approached land. Hurricanes normally do not give us more than a few days, a week at the most, to prepare for this natural disaster but there was little time to do the things required to minimize the damages. With this oil spill disaster, there were at least several weeks before the oil would reach the shores and effective preventative measures could have been taken.

            Now then let us compare this with the reality of what took place. The first thing we heard from the Obama administration was that this disaster was BP’s fault and that they would be held accountable. The Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar even announced that they were holding the boot to their (BP’s) throat and make them pay for all the damages. We have to ask the question: Was there any doubt that it was BP and not Disney World, Coca Cola or the Home Depot that was responsible for this catastrophe? Oh sure, some morons in the liberal media tried to blame this thing on former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. We wonder some times if liberals realize how idiotic their statements are? But back to the issue: It took President Barack Obama nine days before he even commented on the oil spill and he joined in the blame game. He decided to form a commission to look into the disaster and claimed that the government would do everything it would take to hold BP responsible. The three Republican Governors from Louisiana (Bobby Jindal), Mississippi (Haley Barbour) and Alabama (Bob Riley) appeared to have immediate emergency plans ready and begged the U.S. government for certain supplies and other help. Their permit requests to build sandbanks and other such things to prevent the oil from reaching the shores were stopped by review panels and some other bureaucratic roadblocks; they took their sweet time to review the requests and apparently refused most of these requests. It was more important that the paperwork was right and properly filled out for those bureaucrats before they could make decisions as to how to respond.

            One of the first actions President Obama took was to put a six-month moratorium on oil drilling of all offshore oil drilling projects including in Alaska and formed another commission to study the effects on future projects such as these. After some criticism, the President even visited the affected region for a few hours each, met with officials and talked nonsense by telling a group: “I can’t take a straw and suck up the oil!“ He gave nothing but empty lip service to citizens.

            Within days of the oil spill, foreign governments and international companies offered help by way of supply of equipment and materials but their offers were scuttled/refused by the same bureaucratic apparatus. Then the oil hit the shorelines and now the catastrophe took on in a very short time a dramatic turn for the worse. Daily pictures of oil covered pelicans, sera turtles and other birds as well as fish brought the true size of this disaster home to everybody. What did Obama do? He kept on blaming BP and assured the American people that he would make sure that BP would pay for all this, oh, and by the way, he was in charge of this major problem and in fact, his administration had been on the job from day One.

            When this nonsense was rejected by the people and his approval numbers went down, Obama gave a speech from the Oval office last week and after that even met with the CEO and Chairman of BP to ask them to put some twenty billion dollars into an escrow account so that an independent panel could pay those who were negatively effected by the oil reaching the shores. In the same speech on June 15, Obama also talked about the need to pass energy legislation linking this disaster as evidence that our dependence on oil was unsustainable.

            We here at Common Sense University firmly believe that if anybody with a right mind considers this leadership they should be pitied but otherwise ignored. Contrarily if anything, the actions by President Obama clearly show his ineptitude and incompetence when it comes to matters of such major proportion. His entire approach was lackadaisical at best and should be seen as such by all people. Obama has absolutely no skills when it comes to realistic analysis and a sense of how to approach problems of such magnitude. He also has no experience when it comes to leadership and it would be nice if even the liberal media would be honest and see it for what it is. Obama is a man who was deceitful in his run for the White House and we are all paying a huge prize for this and people in the Southern Gulf States will suffer for a long time to come.

            In conclusion, we believe that this has been so far a triple disaster: First, the oil rig exploded and nobody could have prevented it outside of those who worked the rig and decided to take shortcuts to meet deadlines, this is the sole responsibility of BP. Secondly, the U.S. Government has completely failed to prevent the disaster we are seeing now as the oil is reaching the shorelines in the Gulf States. But lastly, the third disaster is the fact that we are having a totally inexperienced and incompetent President in the White House who is simply lost as to what effective decisions to make. He did not realize that this was a crisis from Day One but instead treated in his usual fashion: Looking for whom to blame and pouncing on the culprits and arrogantly repeating that he is in charge and would fix it! This is not leadership, this is shameful and blatant ineptitude!

            Nothing will explain the bias of the liberal mainstream media better than their collective silence on our ever increasing annual deficits and our national debt. It appears that the Democrats in Congress and President Obama recognize that the November elections might bring about changes that will end their reckless spending sprees and so they keep piling on with new social programs and governmental controls before their reign is up come January 2011. The national debt stands currently near thirteen trillion dollars and that is about ninety percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). This is absolutely unsustainable and warning bells should ring around the country twenty four hours a day, every day of the week.

            What is most troubling about this reality is the fact that the combined obligations of entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Healthcare and so on are amounting to nearly one hundred trillion dollars. Add to this the financial obligations by most States and the picture becomes darker and darker with no hope in sight. It’s a nightmare as dark as a major tornado coming at you with the only thing not clearly known is the moment it will hit you. Even if the new Congress in January 2011 would be dedicated to getting spending under control, it would seem to be nearly impossible and we would have to keep on printing money we do not have. Raising taxes would not stimulate the economy and therefore would not remedy the problem.

            Compare this situation to an average family that has been living for a while beyond their means and now faces financial ruin due to a variety of reasons, be it job loss or illness or something else. The family has to get down and make some tough decisions like moving out of the house that they can no longer afford; transferring to another area or even State to seek employment opportunities and of course, most effectively: tightening the proverbial belt whatever that might be. Many times, a family in such a situation can walk away from it by declaring bankruptcy (therewith being released from their financial debt and obligation). But in our opinion, the United States government does not have that option or does it? Can we wake up one morning to hear the President speak on television and declare: “I am sadly forced to announce, my fellow Americans, that we as a country have declared bankruptcy.” Can such a day become reality?

            We most certainly hope not but what are the choices? We are simply running out of money right now, we are borrowing from foreign countries such as China and there will come a day soon when the Chinese will simply stop lending us money and what are we doing then? These are all serious questions and they need immediate attention and a strong effort to get answers so that we avoid such a disaster. A few weeks ago we posted an article about the financial disaster in Greece and we warned at the time that this ‘tragedy’ as we called it could befall us as well.

            We here do not have the answer to the above questions but we can recommend one thing: Question the economists and other self-proclaimed financial experts about the future and why they think we can spend ourselves out of the economic recession by amassing trillions of dollars of debt? We hear and see these guys constantly on television and they assure us that it is possible but they never get asked to be specific as to the details of such a program. We doubt very much that they can explain this and until they do and can, we should stop using them as an excuse for continued spending sprees at the governmental levels.

            Common Sense University knows one thing for sure, neither President  Obama, Senate Leader Reid nor House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have the slightest clue about the financial dangers they lead this nation into. When asked, they refer to the ‘experts’ who tell them it’s alright to keep on spending money, meaning, we can spend ourselves out of the recession that President Bush and the Republicans brought upon America. All we can say is the blame falls on all of us if this country goes bankrupt due to the incompetent people we elected to be in charge of America.

            It has been nearly seven weeks since the BP oil rig platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers on April 20. And while remedial actions to stop the oil flow out of this well have succeeded only partially and definitely not timely, one clear result so far has been that all future offshore oil exploration has been effectively stopped. Nobody can at this time truly estimate the total fallout of this disaster in terms of expenses and damage to wildlife and the fishing industry in some Southern States and it will take a lot more time to get a handle on these numbers. But in and off itself, the disaster has been able to rally the liberal environmentalists around the country to demand an immediate stop to all further drilling plans and they appear to have succeeded.

            There goes the idea of developing and starting an effective energy plan to become (somewhat) energy independent and reducing our dependency on foreign oil sources. One cannot wonder if the environmentalist anti-drill groups are not secretly jubilating behind closed doors as they see this disaster as a timely aid in their objectives. Their charter, while not written on paper, is obviously a severe reversal of our current lifestyles, not only in the USA but worldwide. If they could rule the world, they would all have us back on bicycles or walking on foot or being transported by horse buggies. We wonder if they would not also eliminate railroads, buses and other major mass transportation systems.

            It is really too bad that we cannot transport these self-proclaimed environment protectors and fanatics by way of ‘time tunnel’ back into the middle ages, let’s say the early fifteen hundreds. When one hears them talk, they appear to think of that long ago era as the “golden years” of mankind. But we here at Common Sense University strongly believe that they are all hypocrites. Their true dream is that we all would have to give up all the benefits of our modern age while they could hang on to them. Do you really think that they would give up their computers, blackberries, cell phones and so on freely? Of course not because they would have done so already since all these modern conveniences require some sort of energy, electricity, batteries etc and that is all bad according to them.

            Just look at one their icons: Former Vice-President Al Gore wrote a book about twenty years ago wherein he proposed to eliminate the combustion engines in cars. This unabashed, arrogant hypocrite has been trying to warn us all against the greatest global disaster of all, called global warming and yet, he and his wife just bought a huge nine million dollar mansion just south of Santa Barbara, California. Add this to the fact that he flies around the world in private jets, rides on land in luxurious limousines and enjoys one of the most energy consuming lifestyles most of us cannot even dream of. This is one of the most identifiable images of unabashed liberalism, their motto is: Do as I say and not as I do!

            We here bemoan the oil spill disaster for its true reason and that is simply the damage that it is causing to the waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the beach properties of the Southern States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, even Texas and possibly Florida. The damage to wildlife will be enormous and the effect on the fishing industry cannot even be measured at this time. We also hope that this ‘accidental disaster’ will result in tighter safety measures for current as well as future offshore oil drilling ventures but to stop it altogether is an overreaction by environmentalists and politicians and that is very unfortunate.

            The world has been watching with great unease what is currently happening in Greece. The country is hugely indebted and it appears there is no real solution in site. It is in a way a tragedy that comes to show us that we cannot spend more than what we have. By calling it a tragedy, it behooves us to define what that is. Well over two thousand years ago, there lived in Greece the early philosophers such as Sokrates, his pupil Plato and Plato’s pupil Aristotle. Aristotle was a teacher to Alexander the Great, the man who nearly conquered the entire world. Aristotle’s definition of ‘tragedy’ – as stated in his work ‘Poetics’ as follows: Tragedy is characterized by seriousness and dignity and involving a great person (or peoples) who experience(s) a reversal of fortune.

            What does that have to do what is happening now in Greece? We think the country is experiencing a reversal of fortune of colossal magnitude that will take drastic changes in how the country has been and is being run and administered by the country’s leaders. They have allowed a financial death spiral to keep going for far too long and are approaching a state of total bankruptcy as a country.

            And since Greece is now part of the European Union, the other member States are trying to support its efforts to prevent this collapse by bailing them out with huge financial sums of money from all available sources. At the same time, they are asking Greece to introduce major reforms, spending reductions and stringent austerity measures to improve their finances. While the Greek government appears to recognize the necessity to do so, the people are rioting in the streets. They do not want their lifestyles changed, they want their benefits to continue as before and the hell with the country. This entitlement mentality clearly reflects socialism!

            We here at Common Sense University believe that this what happens when over time people get used to receiving things for free, the average Greek person does not seem to understand that there is no free lunch forever and the country as a whole has reached a point of reducing those ‘freebees‘. And in typical socialistic fashion, the people riot and revolt against the government for reducing the number of cookies they, the people, expect to receive for free.

            Why are we even writing about this? This Greek ‘tragedy’ is costing the United States of America many billions of tax payer dollars and there is no end to this continued support. The number could go well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. America, how do you like paying with your hard earned tax dollars to pay for spoiled Greeks lifestyles and freebees? But that is not the only reason we are commenting on it. There is a great danger that this country of ours might find itself in a similar situation in the near future. When we have Congress and the President think it is alright to have 1.5 trillion dollar annual deficits on top of a national debt of nearly thirteen trillion dollars, the time might be nearer than we think to find ourselves in a tragedy of major proportions. It could be called the Greek Tragedy, American style.

            If anything, we, as a people, should remind ourselves and the elected officials at all governmental levels that we have to change things very quickly to prevent such tragedy in America. We have to insist on curtailing spending at all levels and this might mean severe cutbacks on programs the people have enjoyed in the past and still do. As we have to live within our means, i.e., our incomes at the family level, should we not demand the same from those who we elect to office to administer the affairs of our country, state or municipality? Even if it means cutting back drastically and without smoke and mirror accounting tricks, so be it. If anything, we owe it to our future generations to do so. We cannot continue to just keep on spending right now our children’s inheritances, let alone burden them with a national debt that will send them all to the poor house.

            The past few weeks have been filled with indications that the mid-term elections in early November of this year have the potential of some major re-alignment in Congress. And there are also signs that incumbency might be a serious negative for many current member of Congress and as we can see, their reactions are different. Even though there are quite a number of them, we will list just a few examples here:

            1. Mr. David Obey, a forty-plus year Democrat (spell Liberal) from Wisconsin who currently still chairs the powerful House of Representative’s Appropriations Committee decided to call it quits. His reason for doing so was just simply being “bone tired” after so many years. We are not buying it but instead believe that he had a serious Republican challenger in a very long time in his district according to the polls. This person, conservative 38-year old Sean Duffy, a district attorney in Wisconsin has been endorsed by among others the former Governor from Alaska, Sarah Palin. While she is continuously being maligned by liberals and the mainstream media, she appears to be effective, would you not agree?

            2. Mr. Bob Bennett, a Republican U.S. Senator from Utah was ousted recently by the Utah Republican Party rank and file delegates who voted to support two other candidates to be nominated for the upcoming Republican primary election. Bennett while being a conservative was being faulted of having voted for recent bailout legislation and his pleas to return him for another six-year term to office went unheeded. His post-ousting statement, while sincere and tearful, was pitiful to say the least.

            3. Mr. Allan Mollohan, a Democrat Congressman from West Virginia lost a few weeks ago his primary election bid. He was solidly defeated and the voters in his district elected another man who campaigned against government bailouts and further vast spending by the Federal Government. Mollohan was also several times under ethical investigations and it appears, the people in his district just had enough of him and decided to terminate his representation in Congress.

            4. Arizona Senator John McCain has for the first time a serious Republican challenger in former Congressman J.D. Hayworth and McCain has ‘rediscovered’ his conservatism and he is campaigning non-stop for his re-election in the primary in August.

            What can Common Sense University, if anything, conclude from this? Most certainly the answer is that a much greater interest and awareness exists these days among people who are normally not heard from politically speaking, at least not in an ‘off-year’ election as this one is. All polls indicate that there is great unease in America about the economy, the high unemployment rate that does not seem to change a lot from month to month and the fast increasing national debt. And despite the liberal media’s endless attempts to downplay this, the general public is concerned about the three above mentioned issues.

            Add to this the nationwide Tea Party movement and their activities and one can easily see the rumblings of an oncoming earthquake in early November of this year. Being an incumbent might not be an advantage in 2010, in fact, history might record this year as one where incumbents became endangered species. We here at Common Sense University are advocating this type of change because incumbency has shown us very little to like about it. The political spins about incumbents being more powerful is becoming less attractive and they have one thing against them newcomers in the election process do not have, a record of legislating, i.e. excessive spending among other such actions and those records can be visited and reviewed, analyzed and possibly be found as no longer desirable by the electorate. We will get the answer in about five and a half months, we just have to wait.

            Shortly after we started Common Sense Politics we posted an article on January 2, 2007, entitled ‘What should be done to fix our Immigration issues?’ We reviewed the status of Immigration reform going back more than twenty years when IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act) was signed into law by then President Ronald Reagan and its consequences and subsequent actions and lack thereof. Please take a few minutes and read that article as we presented within it a seven point plan to achieve the goal of comprehensive Immigration reform.

            Now then, today, more than forty (40) months later, NOTHING HAS CHANGED ! This is the sad summary of this apparently permanent problem we are having in this country and it begs the question: Why is that? Because Immigration reform is a political football that every elected official wants to use for personal re-election reasons. The only radical solution is in our humble opinion: Do NOT RE-ELECT anybody to Congress come November 2, 2010, period! No incumbent member of the House of Representatives nor the 36 Senatorial seats should be filled with current office holders. They have all been sitting in the same boat and done nothing, absolutely nothing. They all should be shamed out of office and we should do the same in 2012 and 2014 so that we can throw out all current Senators as well as the President of the United States.

            We want to be clear about this. We would recommend the same if former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were still in the White House for failure to do their assigned duties. One of the highest jobs for any President is the security and safety of this country’s citizens and part of that is securing the borders. To let a large number of foreigners, be it 12 or up to 15 million illegally enter the United States is, if not outright criminal at least a dereliction of duty and should result in removal from office.

            Securing the border is not rocket science in our opinion, it can be fairly easily be solved. Considering the fact that the United States of America has had nearly forty thousand soldiers along the North Korean border for nearly sixty years for the purpose of securing the divide between the north and the south of that peninsula, we have to ask, why can we not do the same on our Southern border with Mexico? Why is it in our country’s interest to protect the South Koreans from invasion by their North Korean cousins and yet we cannot do the same at our borders. Is it because we are still fighting Communist regimes (in this case North Korea) and since Mexico is not a communist country we cannot utilize our military to protect us along the Mexican border?

            All other arguments are mute and should be unacceptable to the American people. Let us close off the border completely and therewith stop the flow of people illegally entering our country. That would have to be priority number One but let us not do it by building more fences, real or virtual, that will take time and we do not have that luxury any longer. We have to do it now! Then we can deal with the people who are living in this country illegally by applying common sense solutions, similar to the ones we outlined back in January 2007.

            And one more thing: America, stop dumping on Arizona! The residents in that State through their elected representatives passed a new law that will deal to some extent with the ’undocumented people’ living there. This was an act of desperation on their part since all pleas for help to Washington D.C. to secure the border with Mexico fell on deaf ears in our nations capitol. To now hear the voices from both political party’s and other special interest groups speaking out against what Arizona did, calling it unlawful, criminal and racist, is sickening to say the least. As we have stated above, there is one rational solution: Do not re-elect anybody to office in Washington D.C. for the next three elections and only vote for those who are willing to effectively deal with this problem called Immigration. Unless this happens, the Saga will continue unresolved.

            Former President George W. Bush has been and still is being blamed for everything that is wrong in America and to a certain point also the rest of the world. We do not intend to list here all the things he is blamed and ‘responsible’ for. We here at Common Sense University totally disagree with all that with one tragic exception: We have to put the blame for getting Barack Obama elected President in November 2008 squarely on his (Bush’s) shoulders or at his feet, whatever you prefer! This might sound very odd at first because you most likely have never considered this before. Allow us to explain our reasoning for this charge against the former President by way of a brief trip into history:

            When George W. Bush was an effective Governor in Texas, he was mostly ignored by the liberal mainstream media. When he decided to run for President in 1999, the same liberal media found him to be dumb, under educated, a failure and assigned other such negative evaluations to him. When he eventually won the Presidency in late 2000, the media declared him as not having been elected but ‘selected’ (by the United States Supreme Court), even though every subsequent vote recount in Florida found Bush to having won that state by a plurality of votes, even though the margin was small.

            During his eight years as President, the liberal media and the entire leftist elites which included the entire Democrat Party membership pounced on Bush and he was blamed for everything that did not go right according to their perverted progressive standards. The criticism, however, became nastier and even more vicious over the years. How did Bush react: He ignored it! This naturally encouraged the liberals even more so and their attacks on the President continued unabated. Liberal fringe groups would produce protest signs picturing Bush as a killer, mass murderer, ‘Hitler-like’ and they even produced and published books and videos how to assassinate the President. This, of course, was considered their constitutional right (First Amendment) and it continued. The overseas press, consisting overwhelmingly of liberals would spread the same stories in their respective home countries in Europe and elsewhere. This was followed by polling that reflected a very negative opinion of President Bush and so, his approval numbers fell. And still, George W. Bush did nothing in response. He considered it his number one job to protect the American people from further terrorist attacks and he succeeded in that, however his image was severely tarnished over time.

            This is where our criticism of him comes from: While he worked very diligently to keep our country safe from future attacks, he ignored the attacks against him, no matter how vicious they were and from whatever side they came. When the 2008 Presidential election campaigns started and ultimately ended in the election of Barack Obama, we attribute this solely to the continued Bush-bashing over the previous eight years that obviously influenced the moderate and independent voters that it was time for a change. They apparently believed that it must be true what was said and written about President Bush, especially in view of the fact that he never responded to that criticism. Therefore, Bush was considered just a failure as President and he had done nothing right for America and Obama was the one that could change all that for the better of America and the world. Even after becoming President, Obama continued to blame everything on Bush and his administration for the better part of a year and got away with it.

            To us here at no-nonsense University, the shameful part in all this was the fact that Bush never felt the need to defend himself against all this criticism. We have to ask what kind of a man lets himself get bashed over many years without at least once speaking out about it. He had a wife and two daughters and a larger family who had to quietly put up with that stuff. If not for himself, he owed them in our opinion to respond to the all this badgering. By his silence, he allowed the criticism of him to become “factual” in the minds of many people in our country as if it was true what they were hearing day in and day out from the liberals. We could never understand why Bush did not feel it necessary to at least respond to these self-appointed liberal elitists in the media and to set the record straight by blasting them for their irresponsible lambasting and distortions of facts. He could have done so with one special Oval Office address to the nation (and the world) and set the record straight, call out these liberals and leftwing extremists and tell them to shut up. We believe had he done so, America would have responded differently in November 2008. A real man would have not taken these vicious and false attacks without response! And so it is that we got Barack Obama as President who turns out not to be at all what liberals predicted he would be as President. When do we stop the influence of liberals in America?

            On January 20, 1993, Bill Clinton became the 42^nd President of the United States of America. With him, this country got the first President of the “I – Me – My” generation. According to President Clinton, he had never done anything wrong in his life, he had explanations for everything and always found a way to blame others. He had developed that skill before and during his governorship in Arkansas and received for that the infamous nickname “Slick Willy”. Bill Clinton was a morally flawed man with no sense of values and virtues other than those that served him and his desires. He denied having extra-marital affairs even when, for instance, tape-recordings proved otherwise (Jennifer Flowers had such tapes and made them public) and he took this habit into the White House. Were it not for a blue dress with his semen stain on it, he would have made us all believe that Monica Lewinsky was nothing but a damn liar. He had one thing going (rooting) for him: The biased liberal mainstream media who covered up for him at every turn and even admired his ability to lie himself out of trouble. He was their idol!

            We here at Common Sense University gave him at first the benefit of the doubt but when we learned by way of evidence that he had abused the Oval Office in the White House by receiving oral sex from Monica Lewinsky (remember, his semen was on Monica’s blue dress), we lost any sense of respect for him. To do this was for us the absolute bottom of human behavior and utmost disgraceful and reflected a complete lack of even one iota of decency by showing a callous disrespect for the  high office he held, it was all about self-gratification for this man. In our opinion, he was human scum and did not deserve our respect.

            In  April 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City and claimed later on to have done this as an act of revenge for the attack by the Federal government (ATF, FBI) on the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel near Waco, Texas. But that did not sit well with Bill Clinton who blamed right wing talk radio shows (among them Rush Limbaugh’s) for inciting the violence that led Timothy McVeigh to bombing the building in Oklahoma City. The compliant liberal media came to his support by attempting to support Clinton’s baseless statement.

            Fifteen years later, Clinton is at it again: He is now warning that the right wing rhetoric coming from the Tea Party movement could lead to repeats of bombings like the one in Oklahoma City. He states that it is perfectly alright to disagree with the government and even criticize them but extreme hate speech and vicious verbal attacks against the current President are just unacceptable and he hopes it will stop.

            We have to ask Mr. Clinton: Why did we not hear a word out of your mouth when your successor, George W. Bush was viciously attacked during his years in office? When people ran around holding up signs showing Bush with an ‘Adolf Hitler mustache” or pictures of him with a bullet hole in his forehead and called him names such as warmonger and war criminal and other such names of the most disrespectful kind including such phrases: Bush lied, soldiers died! How about it, Mr. Clinton, you double-faced hypocrite – was that vicious rhetoric alright in your mind or not cause for incitement? Was that just appropriate criticism and freedom of expression according to the First Amendment? Apparently so, your silence was deafening in those years. Why don’t you do America the biggest favor you could possible do: Just shut up!

            Why don’t you just pursue private interests, whatever they may be, collect money for giving speeches, travel the world and enjoy life as best as you can but stay out of the limelight. There are still plenty of people who admire and adore you, why not just spend time with them in private because that is what you are – a private citizen in the United States. A vast majority of this country’s citizens do not care what you think any longer.

            This might come as a surprise to readers of our articles here at Common Sense University but it is true. We are willing to make a confession. We agree with the fact that there is definitely Climate Change  occurring on our beloved planet Earth. It has happened for thousands of years and so we have to ask the question: Why should it not happen right now, early in the 21^st century? The answer is simple: It should and it does! And while the past twenty years were measured to be a climate change in the ‘warming’ mode, as late as the mid seventies, the same climate ‘experts’ reported a climate change in the ‘cooling’ mode.

            We are therewith in agreement with scientists, climatologists, meteorologists and whatever other titles these ‘experts’ carry that climate change exists! The difference between us here at Common Sense University and the ‘experts’ is the basic assumption of theirs that its cause is us, the human race, the 6.5 billion people populating this planet. This is the hoax that they have been paid huge amounts of money for to follow the hidden agenda of groups – primarily the environmentalists and liberals – who would like to have more control over all people and a reason to take more of our money since we are collectively the cause of global warming.

            It is a sad reflection of our times that – while on the one hand we are making great progress of bringing people together across the globe via communication tools and enhanced education – we are being treated as complete ignoramuses by an elite that wants to control and tax us. On the forefront are, of course, politicians who have millions of pitiful so called ‘improvement projects’ for us people and their undeclared, yet much revered and heralded leader is former Vice President Al Gore who reportedly has made millions of dollars on this scam. They all seem to have one thing in common and it is their firm belief and nearly religious conviction that evidence to the contrary should be ignored. Their motto is the old adage: Don’t confuse us with facts, we have made up our mind!

            Common sense would almost demand that these people, the global warming fanatics, should reconsider their thinking when one thinks of this past winter. Everywhere around Earth, weather conditions were extreme, not warm but much colder. Without listing any specific events and date as to temperature records etc, we think that it was the coldest period called winter in most people’s lifetime. And we agree that it could be rationalized as Climate change for that is what it was. A change from normal winters to a much cooler winter, i.e. a change in the climate!

            When one adds the discoveries and admissions by the world’s leading anthropogenic advocates of their falsifying climate data and assumptions, then one should truly consider this hype for what it was: The greatest hoax ever presented to mankind! Can we expect them to now just go away quietly and to stop their pursuit of people control (by way of mandates and taxes)? We think not but there is one thing that has changed. The vast majority of people have awakened to the fact that there were being fed a lot of nonsense, the people will not any longer be as easily persuaded in the future to believe such agenda driven philosophies. A great amount of skepticism has entered the arena and we can only hope that this was the last attempt to mislead six plus billion people and to make them feel guilty about something they had done nothing to contribute towards.

            One more question: How will the eruption of the volcano on Iceland and its fallout effect the climate on Earth? Would anybody have an answer or is that eruption also our fault? We should not be surprised that the environmental fanatics and other ‘experts’ are working strenuously on a link to us humble human beings and the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano on Iceland. Who knows, they might even contemplate finding a way to blame it on George W. Bush and his administration. Let us remember, extremists and fanatics are beyond logic and common sense rationale!

            This months marks the 42^nd anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee. We think not to be alone when we wonder what would have happened had he lived and continued to work for his goals of a color-blind society and the improvement of lives of African Americans. In 1968, he was 39 years of age, in the prime of his life and then-President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed major civil rights legislation including the Voting Rights Act. Congress had passed this legislation in early August 1965 and it has been amended and renewed several times since.

            President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980’s signed into law a national holiday called Martin Luther King Day on the third Mondays of January. King also received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. While he was widely admired, he had his detractors as well (as is the case with any strong leader) and that is really not surprising and unimportant. The questions that will never be answered are: What would he have been able to do and accomplish in future years? Would he have remained strictly a civil rights leader or would he have entered politics and pursue public office? Would he have been able to achieve other ambitious goals for the African American community? Could he have become a  Governor, U.S. Senator or possibly even President of the United States? We will never know! But we here at Common Sense University believe that he would have significantly closed the racial gap that still appears to exists between blacks and other groups in our society today. He declared in his what is referred to as his “I have a dream speech” in 1963 that he wanted to have his children not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character and we think, he would have tirelessly worked and strived towards such a goal.

            For some time, there has been an effort to enshrine his memory at a special place in Washington D.C. near the Jefferson Memorial and we encourage you to visit www.mlkmemorialnews.org for further details as to the scope of this  worthy and deserving project and support the effort if you desire to do so.

            Actor Michael Richards, better known as ‘Kramer’ from the sitcom Seinfeld got in very hot water when he openly insulted black members of his audience during one of his night-club acts in November 2006. He allegedly had become irritated by a group of black men who were noisy and kept on talking during his act. His outburst was totally uncalled for and the use of racial slurs towards these men was unforgivably extreme. These moments had been recorded and can still be seen today on Youtube when you Google Michael Kramer.

            His subsequent apologies to these men as well as to civil rights leaders Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton were accepted to a degree. He was sued by the men he insulted that night and when he appeared in court, he based his defense to some extent on the fact that there appears to be a double standard when it comes to racism in America. We will quote a few them below even though by doing so, we do not agree with them in its content. His point being that it appears (at least to him) that only White people are racists:

• Blacks have BET (Black Entertainment Television), if Whites had WET (White Entertainment TV), whites would be called racists;
• Blacks have Black History Month, if there were a White History Month, that would be racist;
• A white woman could not enter the Black American pageant, but if there were a White American pageant, that would be racist;
• There are over 60 openly proclaimed Black Colleges in America, if there ever was a White College, that would be racists;
• In the famous Million Man March (in 1995) , blacks were marching for their race and rights, if there were to be Million Man March for rights of the White race, that would be racist;
• There are annual proclamations expressing pride for being black, brown or any other skin color but if there were any events proclaiming white pride, that would be racist.

            Enough of Michael Richards quotes. There seems to be some truth to many of his statements. But in general, ‘White America’ is not bothered at all by these special events that clearly have non-integration elements within them. The general thinking probably being that if it makes these minorities feel proud, rightfully so, then so be it. Why would a white businessman be bothered that he cannot become a member of the Black Chamber of Commerce? He would not because he can join the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the Chamber in his town.

            It only becomes problematic and troublesome when now, as is happening with the full compliance of the liberal media, expressions of disagreement with President Barack Obama are being labeled as racists. This is an outrage because is it an out and out lie! Anybody in America who does NOT like the recently passed healthcare reform legislation and states his or her objections to it is now being considered  or alleged to be a racist because the President is black. These charges are the equivalence of mud being thrown at a wall, even if it does not stick, it will leave a smudge. Even black politicians, commentators, journalists and other people of prominence in the black community who hint at this should be ashamed of themselves for even implying it. We here at Common Sense University believe that it is high time to speak out loudly against these outrageous comments before they become accepted general fact. For if it is not stopped now, Common Sense University can envision that every person who does NOT vote for Barack Obama in 2012 could or will be called  a racist! Will America accept this when the time comes? We think not and hope that liberals will stop this slander now. How are we ever to become a totally colorblind nation if we are accusing everybody not agreeing with liberals of being racists? Do they have no shame? We have to seriously wonder!

            The CIA announced directly or indirectly last week that it can be assumed that the country of Iran now has the capability to put nuclear warheads on missile weaponry, if not today, in the very near future. All we can say emphatically to that is: Thanks for Nothing, President Obama!

            In your Inaugural address on January 20, 2009, you spoke directly to the leaders of Iran and suggested that “we extend our open hand to you if you are willing to unclench your fist.” In your naïve belief that good will on your part could persuade these religions zealots and dictators to give up their pursuit of nuclear weaponry has now unfortunately been proven totally flawed and dead wrong. Shortly after you became President, you gave the Iranian regime until later in the year to ‘come clean’ – whatever that means – and to disavow and halt any enrichment of uranium and other actions on the path to nuclear weaponry.

            In fact, the Iranians gave you nothing, absolutely nothing! They kept right on ‘trucking’, they tested missiles of varying capabilities (short range and long range) and installed more centrifuges needed to hasten the enrichment processes to get the material needed to put nuclear warheads on their missiles. Your deadline of October 2009 came and passed without any change on their behavior. Every time you spoke up and expressed your displeasure over their non-response to your so called deadlines to come clean, they laughed themselves silly. You even kept quiet last June when the Iranian nationwide elections turned ugly on the streets of Teheran. We assume, you did not want to take sides in their ‘internal’ struggles and upset the leadership and potentially give them a reason to deny your requests.

            With all due respect, Mr. President, you flunked this one big time! Your childish attempt at diplomacy with a serious enemy turned out to be a complete and miserable failure. Your inflated belief of your own ability and grandeur in terms of persuasion was one of the worst mistakes since you became President. Having lived and worked on a major construction project in Iran in the mid-seventies of the last century (while the Shah was still in power), we here at Common Sense University firmly believe that we have a much better and firmer understanding of the way these people think, especially the ones in power. The entire diplomatic corps of the United States consists unfortunately of ignoramuses and smooth talking pompous asses who never met or understood the real conditions under which the people lived under in foreign countries. Their diplomatic counterparts play them like fiddles and our guys do not even know it. These people understand and fear only one thing clearly and that is Power on the part of their opponents! Talking nice will get you nowhere with them and the past year has proven that to be correct

            All your efforts have accomplished, Mr. President, is the reality that Iran is at least 15 months closer to putting an atomic warhead on one of its missiles and launching it towards some other country, namely the State of Israel. The Iranians have openly threatened the Israeli State with annihilation for years and thanks to your failed policies, Mr. President, that time is much closer now. Your continued talk about sanctions and severe measures is laughable at this time. Your endless attempts to get the Russians and the Chinese to join you in United Nations resolutions against Iran is silly at best. Instead you have turned on our best ally in the Middle East, namely Israel, and chided them for building some apartment building in East Jerusalem. This is in our opinion stupid at best and potentially deadly and disastrous for Israel and other countries in the region.

            Mr. President, when that first Iranian atomic bomb falls on Tel Aviv, you will be responsible for it! There are no two ways about it. We wish you would get off your high horse and face reality when it comes to dealing with religious zealots and fanatical dictators,  change your thinking and get tough, otherwise, this disaster could happen very soon and you could not blame that on George Bush when it happens on your watch.

            Because of the uncertainty of his return to the professional golf circuit, Tiger Woods’ longtime caddy Steve Williams contracted until the end of July with an Australian television station to broadcast golf and soccer events. This left Tiger Woods in a peculiar situation when he planned and announced his return for the Masters tournament, a week from today on April 8. He let it be known among his friends that he was needing a caddy for the next four months. The list of potential applicants was long but he soon realized that on the basis of this being a short- term contract, he met and agreed to have Ladainian Tomlinson be his caddy. Their major consideration was the mutual benefit to both of them. The NFL star needs off-season conditioning training since summer camp with the Jets does not open until the first week of August.

            Reportedly, Tomlinson figured that carrying an eighty-pound golf bag four to six times a week for over four miles each together with chasing down errant balls was the perfect solution for him to get into shape and that the environment of being out on golf courses in America and even overseas (British Open) should be fun, not to mention the fact that he would not have to be in full football-gear uniform with helmet and all.

            On the other side, for Tiger Woods it was the best pick in that Ladainian Tomlinson is a celebrity in his own right and would most likely divert attention away from Tiger during the early tournaments from potential hecklers and the like. Besides, autograph seekers could get two for the price of one and that should please them somehow. In addition, LT is still a fast runner and he could go quickly after noisy and nasty hecklers and the like. He knows how to tackle and it should not surprise anybody if we see scenes like this.

            Reliable sources have told us that the two Superstars have been working together for the past three weeks in Florida at Tiger’s private golf course and elsewhere. The only weakness for Tomlinson is being not very experienced to give good advise in club selection on the course and whatever else a caddy can help a golfer with. But Tiger Woods many years on the Pro circuit and having played all the courses on the tour until summer should make this shortcoming relatively small and almost negligible. We look forward to Tiger’s return to PGA golf as it will be interesting to see how he fares (by winning) and how many hecklers Ladainian Tomlinson will run down and tackle (should this become necessary). Finally, there is something else on American’s mind other than healthcare reform, the economy and job creation. The winners will in all likelihood be the PGA tour and the New York Jets football team in that they will get to start the next season with a well-conditioned runner.

            It would be funny were it not so serious. As the Healthcare Reform Act has now become law and people and some experts are spending real time with this legislation, truly interesting and even mind-boggling realities surface. We have to remember that this bill is well over two thousand pages thick (at least five reams of paper) and that might have been part of the reason why the American public was leery of this monstrous piece of law. After all, the entire Bible has less than one thousand five hundred pages. It is reasonable to suspect that there are a lot of changes in this healthcare reform bill, otherwise why would it be this big.

            As Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi recently said: “We have to pass this bill so that we can find out what is in it.” Utterly absurd logic and a reflection of a totally twisted mindset to our way of thinking, yet she said it and it is true. We will not present many samples of its content but just a few.

            1. The bill includes providing Viagra type medication for sex offenders (we do not know if they have to be of a certain age or not) and when a Republican Senator last week tried to amend the bill and remove this provision, the Democrat Senators voted to keep this provision and accused the Republican of grandstanding. Therefore, even the revised bill will provide Viagra-type meds to sex offenders, child molesters etc, all they have to do is ask for it. After all, how could we deny these human rights to this despicable group of human scum. This is your liberal Democrat Congress at work, Ladies and Gentlemen.

            2. Even though, the President and other member of his Democrat Party hailed a part of this legislation that will remove the denial of coverage (by Insurance Companies) for pre-existing conditions for children, guess what: It is not in the bill! Oooops, how could that have happened? We think we know. When you have many people contribute to this convoluted piece of garbage called Healthcare Reform Act and nobody is cross-checking the data, there is always a chance that something can fall through the cracks, right? Oh well, do not worry, they (the Democrats) can always attach it to the next piece of legislation in the near future, no problem!

            3. The average citizen of America should feel relieved about this new law and stop worrying about it. The reason is simple: Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has hailed Obamacare as wonderful and good for America! So, stop worrying, will you? He must have read the bill and if he finds nothing wrong with it, then it must be good. Or maybe Castro likes the idea of adding about 17000 IRS agents to enforce the law, dictators always like law enforcements and that’s what we will be getting here.

            Besides, the show must go on, we have bigger things to concern ourselves with. As for example the threats against Democrats who voted for the bill. This is domestic terrorism according to some Democrat leaders in Congress and it is spawned by Republican agitation and hate speech. Specifically, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement are being blamed. The compliant media is playing telephone recordings over and over where Democrat Congress people are being threatened by ‘terrorists’. Would you believe, someone even dared and actually threw a rock through a window of an office of Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D. New York)?

            It is extremely saddening to us here at Common Sense University having to write about this but we feel compelled to do so because it represents the “victim-hood mentality” of liberals in general and in this case the Democrats who are running Congress. All it reflects is the attempt to change the subject of having passed a very bad piece of legislation for America that unfortunately will affect every American citizen. Correction: We are wrong. The newly enacted law does not affect the President, the Vice President and all members of Congress, they are exempted from the Healthcare Reform Act!

            Is this not telling? If this is such great law for America, why would they exempt themselves from it? Does it not tell us that it cannot really be all that good? You think about it!

YES folks, the Democrats in Congress (House of Representatives) passed healthcare reform legislation by approving the Senate version on December 21, 2010, by a vote of 219 to 212 without one single Republican vote and 34 Democrats voting against the bill. This was truly a historic event! But as it can be in all such moments of significance, we have to question whether or not it was a Good Historical Event for America. Common Sense University does not think so since a vast majority of this country’s citizenry was and still is against the passage of this monstrous overhaul of America’s health care system.

But that did not seem to matter to the Democrats, they were determined to make history regardless of the voters’ wishes. And it took a lot of backroom deals, arm-twisting and even a promise of an Executive Order from President Obama (to Rep. Bart Spupak, a Democrat from Michigan) to lock up the votes required to pass this bill. The arguments against this sweeping overhaul made by some respectable individuals and groups, even the expressions and protests of large numbers of citizens could not sway the Democrats. This was their chance to place more control of the American way of life into the hands of the U.S. Government. This was their objective and they did it! That it would reduce the individual freedoms and liberties of people did not really matter to them. We do not think that we here at Common Sense University have to remind anybody that liberals are ideological dictators. Only they know what is right, everybody else is dumb, stupid or moronic. And so it came to pass that we have now by the dictates of the Federal Government ‘universal healthcare’ in America.

It seemed almost like the Democrats were saying: “Don’t confuse us with facts, we have made up our minds!” And now they are ‘giddy’ over their achievement and only time will tell how good it really will be for America as the Democrats proclaim it will be. Their entire support data from covering 32 million more people, that it will reduce costs (health insurance premiums) and also the national deficits, the false CBO (Congressional Budget Office) score (based on truly erroneous assumptions) and the availability of insurance coverage for everybody was so bogus, it stank to the heavens. But the compliant main stream media did not question these details but instead hailed the virtues of these liberal propagandists.

Once again, only time will tell how many millions of Americans will experience a rather rude awakening one day or over time when they find out how this legislation is put together and how it will affect them personally, i.e., how much it will cost them. Even though, there are intentions by many State governments to file lawsuits against the implementation of this healthcare reform law (the mandated insurance purchases by all violates the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution), we only see one effective solution as to how to deal with this all:

Come November 2, 2010: Do not re-elect one single Democrat to Congress, all 253 current House members with a (D) behind them, period! Let us retire them and replace them not just with Republicans but with conservative  citizens (even if they run on the Republican side). We should do the same with those Democrats in the Senate. This might sound like a giant task but it is all about the future of America and up to the American people. If Congress continues to be run by the same people, the time of America’s demise will be in our future and will be a terrible legacy to pass on to our children and grandchildren – we have got to stop it now! Remember, there is no such thing as a conservative Democrat, they are all liberal! Some are reasonable liberals while others are fanatical (like the current Leadership in both Houses) one, but in the end they are all liberal and liberalism is all about power and control and the erosion of individual freedoms and liberties!

            Not quite two weeks ago Common Sense University posted an article entitled ‘Health Care Reform  -  The People be Damned’ and we follow it up with the apparent ‘trampling’ of the Constitution. In Article 1, Section7 it clearly spells out the following “Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States.”

 Later on in this Section it specifies the following “But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered into the Journal of each House respectively.

            For well over two hundred years, this was followed in Congress but now, the Democrats in the House of Representatives found themselves in a situation where they could not get enough votes to pass the Senate version of the massive Healthcare Reform legislation and so, they simply changed the rules! What else are the liberal fanatics currently running Congress to do? The Chairperson of the House Rules Committee, Democrat Representative Louise Slaughter from New York therefore devised a new Rule by which the current version of the Senate Healthcare Reform bill can be approved without voting on it. If this sounds confusing, it is not! By approving this rule, the House of Representatives can simply ‘deem’ this bill as having been approved (without an actual Up or Down vote).

            Ms. Slaughter’s claim this to be absolutely constitutional, Article 1, Section 7 notwithstanding. This rule change is at best an enabler to circumvent a clearly stated provision in our Constitution and is only the latest example of how far liberal fanatics are willing to go to get their way! Shameful is not an adequate word to describe this action. It borders on criminality in our humble opinion. When the precise wording of the founding documents of America can be thwarted by simply adopting a rule in Congress to achieve a goal in clear violation of the Constitution, what do we have left on which to count and depend?

            We are convinced that the legality and constitutionality of the Democrats rule change will be challenged in the country’s courts but that will take time and in the meantime, the damage is done and we have to live with it. It does not at all surprise us here at Common Sense University that President Barack Obama does not care how he gets to sign healthcare reform legislation into law, after all, Congress is a different branch of the Government and he has stated that he does not want to tell them how to do their work. If these kinds of rule changes are acceptable or justifiable, we can see all kinds of mischief in the future in all aspects of life.

            And just to show the absurdity of it all, here is our example: In a future Baseball World Series, the most powerful and influential (money wise) team is behind in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game and is trailing by four or five runs, why not quickly change the rule and DEEM that a home run will be scored like a touchdown in football, in other words be rewarded with six points (runs). And wouldn’t you know: The last batter hits a homerun (bases empty) and low and behold, his team wins the World Series of that year by way of a rule change! We say, if they can make last minute rule changes in Congress (in violation of the Constitution) so that the Congress men and women do not have to vote and yet approve major legislation, why not make this type of rule, the DEEM rule, the law of the land?

            America, are we really getting there, is this our future? Can we just DEEM this country’s multi-trillion dollar debt one day as non-existent and wipe the slate clean? We sincerely hope not because it would be anarchy and the end of our great country!

With the following proviso: Reprinted by Permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, Common Sense University finds the timing of this article very appropriate. It was adapted from a speech given by U.S. Representative Paul Ryan on January 13, 2010, in Washington, D.C., at an event sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship.

Reference to P1/2:

But if one begins with the idea that health care reform to reduce costs should be guided by the principles of economic and political liberty, what would such reform look like? Four changes to the current system come immediately to mind.

One, we should equalize the tax treatment of people paying for health care by ending the current discrimination against those who don’t get health insurance from their jobs—in other words, everyone paying for health care should receive the same tax benefits.

Two, we need high-risk insurance pools in the states so that those with pre-existing conditions can obtain coverage that is not prohibitively expensive, and so that costs in non-high-risk pools are stabilized. To see the value of this, consider a pool of 200 people in which six have pre-existing heart disease or cancer. Rates for everyone will be through the roof. But if the six are placed in a high-risk pool and ensured coverage at an affordable rate, the risk profile of the larger pool is stabilized and coverage for the remaining 194 people is driven down.

Three, we need to unlock existing health care monopolies by letting people purchase health insurance across state lines—just as they do car insurance and other goods and services. This is a simple and obvious way to reduce costs.

Four, we need to establish transparency in terms of costs and quality of health care. In Milwaukee, an MRI can cost between $400 and $4,000, and a bypass surgery between $4,700 and $100,000. Unless the consumer is able to compare prices and quality of services—and unless he has an incentive to base choices on that information, as he does in purchasing other goods and services—there is not really a free market. It would go a long way to solve our health care problems to recreate one.

These four measures would empower consumers and force providers—insurers, doctors, and hospitals—to compete against each other for business. This works in other sectors of our economy, and it will work with health care.

So why can’t we agree on them? The answer is that the current health care debate is not really about how we can most effectively bring down costs. It is a debate less about policy than about ideology. It is a debate over whether we should reform health care in a way compatible with our Constitution and our free society, or whether we should abandon our free market economic model for a full-fledged European-style social welfare state. This, I believe, is the true goal of those promoting government-run health care.

If we go down this path, creating entitlement after entitlement and promising benefits that can never be delivered, America will become like the European Union: a welfare state where most people pay few or no taxes while becoming dependent on government benefits; where tax reduction is impossible because more people have a stake in welfare than in producing wealth; where high unemployment is a way of life and the spirit of risk-taking is smothered by webs of regulation.

America today is not as far from this tipping point as we might think. While exact and precise measures cannot be made, there are estimates that in 2004, 20 percent of households in the U.S. were receiving about 75 percent of their income from the federal government, and that another 20 percent were receiving nearly 40 percent of their income from federal programs. All in all, about 60 percent of U.S. households were receiving more government benefits and services, measured in dollars, than they were paying back in taxes. It has also been estimated that President Obama’s first budget alone raises this level of “net dependency” to 70 percent.

Looked at in this way, I see health care reform of the kind promoted by the Obama administration and congressional leaders as part of a crusade against the American idea. This is a dramatic charge, but the only alternative is that they are ignorant of the consequences of their proposed programs. The national health care exchange created by their legislation, together with its massive subsidies for middle-income earners, would represent the greatest expansion of the welfare state in our country in a generation—and possibly in history. According to recent analysis, the plan would provide subsidies that average a little less than 20 percent of the income of people earning up to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. In other words, as many as 110 million Americans could claim this new entitlement within a few years of its implementation. In addition to the immediate massive increase in dependency this would bring on, the structure of the subsidies—whereby they fade out as income rises—would impose a marginal tax penalty that would act as a disincentive to work, increasing dependency even more.

And before I conclude, allow me to clear up a misperception about insurance exchanges: it makes absolutely no difference whether we have 50 state exchanges rather than a federal exchange, as long as the federal government is where the subsidies for consumers will be located. In other words, despite what some seem to believe, both the House and the Senate versions of health care reform set up a system in which, if you are eligible and you want a break on your insurance premium, it is the federal government that will provide it while telling you what kind of insurance you have to buy. In this sense, the idea of state exchanges instead of a federal exchange is a distinction without a difference.

With the following proviso: Reprinted by Permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, Common Sense University finds the timing of this article very appropriate. It was adapted from a speech given by U.S. Representative Paul Ryan on January 13, 2010, in Washington, D.C., at an event sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship.

SOMEONE once said that before there was the New Deal, there was the Wisconsin Deal. In my home state, the University of Wisconsin was an early hotbed of progressivism, whose goal was to reorder society along lines other than those of the Constitution. The best known Wisconsin progressive in American politics was Robert LaFollette. “Fighting Bob,” as he was called, was a Republican—as was Theodore Roosevelt, another early progressive. Today we tend to associate progressivism mostly with Democrats, and trace it back to Woodrow Wilson. But it had its roots in both parties.

The social and political programs of the progressives came in on two great waves: the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. Today, President Obama often invokes progressivism and hopes to generate its third great wave of public policy. In thinking about what this would mean, we need look no farther than the health care reform program he is promoting along with the leadership in Congress.

Let me say here at the beginning that even though survey after survey shows that 75 percent or more of Americans are satisfied with the quality of their health care, no one I know in Congress denies that health care reform is needed. Everyone understands that health care in our country has grown needlessly expensive, and that some who want coverage cannot afford it. The ongoing debate over health care, then, is not about whether there should be reform; it is about what the principle of that reform ought to be.

Under the terms of our Constitution, every individual has a right to care for their health, just as they have a right to eat. These rights are integral to our natural right to life—and it is government’s chief purpose to secure our natural rights. But the right to care for one’s health does not imply that government must provide health care, any more than our right to eat, in order to live, requires government to own the farms and raise the crops.

Government’s constitutional obligations in regard to protecting such rights are normally met by establishing the conditions for free markets—markets which historically provide an abundance of goods and services, at an affordable cost, for the largest number. When free markets seem to be failing to meet this goal—and I would argue that the delivery of health care today is an example of where this is the case—government, rather than seeking to supply the need itself, should look to see if its own interventions are the root of the problem, and should make adjustments to unleash competition and choice.

With good reason, the Constitution left the administration of public health—like that of most public goods—decentralized. If there is any doubt that control of health care services should not have been placed in the federal government, we need only look at the history of Medicare and Medicaid—a history in which fraud has proliferated despite all efforts to stop it and failure to control costs has become a national nightmare. In 1966 the cost of Medicare to the taxpayers was about $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that it would cost $12 billion (adjusted for inflation) by 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was nearly nine times that—$107 billion. By 2009 Medicare costs reached $427 billion, with Medicaid boosting that by an additional $255 billion. And this doesn’t take into account the Medicaid expansion in last year’s “stimulus.”

The health care reform bills that emerged from the House and the Senate late last year would only exacerbate this crisis. The federal takeover of health care that those bills represent would subsume approximately one-sixth of our national economy. Combined with spending at all levels, government would then control about 50 percent of total national production.

The good news is that we have a choice. There are three basic models for health care delivery that are available to us: (1) today’s business-government partnership or “crony capitalism” model, in which bureaucratized insurance companies monopolize the field in most states; (2) the progressive model promoted by the Obama administration and congressional leaders, in which federal bureaucrats tell us which services they will allow; and (3) the model consistent with our Constitution, in which health care providers compete in a free and transparent market, and in which individual consumers are in control.

We are urged today—out of compassion—to support the progressive model; but placing control of health care in the hands of government bureaucrats is not compassionate. Bureaucrats don’t make decisions about health care according to personal need or preference; they ration resources according to a dollar-driven social calculus. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the administration’s point people on health care, advocates what he calls a “whole life system”—a system in which government makes treatment decisions for individuals using a statistical formula based on average life expectancy and “social usefulness.” In keeping with this, the plans that recently emerged from Congress have a Medicare board of unelected specialists whose job it would be to determine the program’s treatment protocols as a method of limiting costs.

President Obama said in December: “If we don’t pass [this health care reform legislation]…the federal government will go bankrupt, because Medicare and Medicaid are on a trajectory that are [sic] unsustainable….” On first hearing, this argument appears ludicrous: We must stop the nation from going broke by enacting a program costing $800 billion or more in its first decade alone? On the other hand, if the President means what he says, there is only one way to achieve his stated goal under the new program: through deep and comprehensive government rationing of health care.

The idea that the government should make decisions about how long people should live and who should be denied care is something that Americans find repugnant. As is true of the supply of every service or product, the supply of health care is finite. But it is a mistake to conclude that government should ration it, rather than allowing individuals to order their needs and allocate their resources among competing options. Those who are sick, special needs patients, and seniors are the ones who will be most at risk when the government involves itself in these difficult choices—as government must, once it takes upon itself management of American health care.

The very idea of government-run health care conflicts with the American idea of a free society and the constitutional principles underlying it—the principles of individual rights and free markets. And from a practical perspective it makes no sense, given that our current health care system is the best in the world—even drawing patients from other advanced countries that have suffered by adopting the government-run model.

Health Care in a Free Society, P2/2

            Folks, this is now getting very serious, if not frightening and outright scary. What we have been hearing from the President and all Democrat healthcare reform supporters has been a smoke screen. There was extensive talk about using so called ‘reconciliation’ in the United States Senate once the two versions by the House and the Senate bills were to be merged and then requiring passage in both houses. The fight over this solution, the ‘reconciliation’ was fierce and all Republicans and Conservatives railed against it while the Democrats told everybody that this method had been used over twenty times in the past and for that matter mostly by Republicans.

            We were also told for that to happen, as a first step, the House of Representatives had to pass the Senate version of the bill as it currently exists. This is the version that the Senate passed with 60 Democrat votes last Christmas eve that included some extortion-vote buying (Nebraska, Louisiana and Florida) . This bill differs substantially from the House version passed in November 2009. By passing the Senate version in the House, a merging of the two bills could then be undertaken and only then would ’reconciliation’ come into the picture, meaning, the Senate could pass the merged version with only 51 votes instead of the required 60 votes.

            This was all a smoke screen. When the House of Representatives passes the current Senate bill, it can be send to the President and with his signature, this bill becomes the law of the land!

            Then to work on a merging bill would be up to the discretion of the Democrat House and Senate leadership and it could very well be that they decided not to do so right away but to put it off indefinitely. The President could claim victory and America would have government-run healthcare against the will of a majority of the American people! The people’s will to be damned!

            Now you might call this fear mongering on our part but we have seen for over a year the fanaticism on the part of the Democrats to push healthcare reform into law and we believe that they do not care at this time about anything else anymore. They do not care if they lose their majorities in the House and the Senate in November, they do not care if they literally screwed their own Democrat House members who believed them that there would be a time for merging the bills and they most definitely do not care what the American people in a solid majority believe and think about this massive overhaul of the American healthcare system.

            The only thing standing between this becoming reality is the final vote in the House of Representatives and the President has urged House leaders to get this done by March 18, 2010. We can safely assume that there are not enough votes today to pass this bill, otherwise, the vote would take place today! It will remain to be seen if enough votes for passage can be collected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team by March 18 or any other date shortly thereafter. And who knows what behind closed-doors deals are being cut at this time in order to get the required votes? The only thing certain is that they will stop at nothing to get those votes to pass this bill!

            At this time, all we can do is hope and pray that there will be enough rational thinking Democrats in the House who recognize the will of the people as more important than the agenda driven attempt to pass this bill by the Democrats. Common Sense University hopes that there are enough such Democrat Representatives who will vote NO and therefore allow this bill to fail. The Republicans cannot do anything effectively by themselves, they are the minority!

            As President Barack Obama told America several weeks ago, he was fully focusing on job creation to help the bad economy in our country. However, that did not keep him from scheduling and presiding over a seven-hour long televised healthcare debate with Democrat and Republican leaders from the House of Representatives and the Senate on February 25. The build-up to this so called summit was enormous and for the few days leading up to this spectacle nothing else was discussed in the media. Speculations were rampant and everybody had his or her own expectations of what might be the outcome of this summit.

            We here at Common Sense University believe that he, the President initiated this for basically two reasons: First, he wanted to keep a campaign promise that healthcare reform discussions and debates would be televised on CSPAN and secondly, he probably wanted to prove to America that the Republicans were really the party of ’NO’ without any concrete ideas and suggestions. We submit that this is our opinion but we do not think that we were far away from the truth. What happened in reality on February 25 was a seven hour televised civilized discussion seminar attended by approximately forty leaders of Congress and the President and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sibelius.

            It proved, if nothing else, two things: The President knows how to conduct a meeting and the Republicans showed that they – instead of just being a group of Naysayers to healthcare reform – had in fact some concrete and rational proposals of their own. This had simply not been known before to the general public because the liberal mainstream media had ignored that. In terms of time, the President spoke longer than all Republican speakers combined and the Democrats had a chance to make their cases for their healthcare reform bills. While the Republicans talked issues and came forth with a number of well thought out proposals, the Democrats mostly concentrated on sob stories of how some of their constituents suffered. The funniest one being stated by Democrat Congresswoman Louise Slaughter from New York who claimed that one of her constituents could not afford dental care and had to wear her dead sisters dentures.

            After seven hours, the meeting adjourned and nothing had changed! The President then gave another speech last week Wednesday and re-iterated his strong desire and the need for passing his healthcare reform legislation. He wants to get it done before Easter now. The funny thing is, while he said that some Republican proposals had been incorporated in his bill, in reality he does not have a bill, he never had one. The pieces of legislation so far were all generated in Congress. And so, let’s look at them by using a visual prop:

            From what we understand, the proposed healthcare reform legislation amount to somewhat around 2700 pages of text. We suggest to you, next time you visit Staples or Office Depot take five or six reams of paper and stack them on top of one another. Now picture in your mind that they are all filled up with law text. This pile of paper is what the Democrats in Congress and the President are proposing in order to revise healthcare reform for America! We do not know about you but to us here at Common Sense University, this is very, very scary!

            We do not think that we are in the minority when we feel this way and maybe this is part of the reason why a strong majority of Americans are against this type of healthcare overhaul. They really do not understand what is in it and what change it will bring to them personally. And why is the President pushing so hard to pass this now in the next few weeks? Because he knows that this is his only chance to force this massive reform upon us and that is very devious and even shameful! Based on the vast differences between Barack Obama’s campaign promises and current reality as he is now President, we are beginning to doubt just about every word he says and we have lost our trust in him some time ago. We sincerely hope that this current monstrosity called healthcare reform will fail in Congress and never gets to the President’s desk for his signature.