So much for those experts, we are in true awe of the political “experts” called United States congressional members, both in the House and the Senate. For them, doling out money is for these mental midgets like playing Monopoly with the minor difference that they are dealing in billions of dollars and not just their own money or ‘funny money’ but real money, taxpayers money! What we have witnessed in the past three months is so obscene, one has to wonder if they have not gone over the cliff or their brains having totally dried up and are therefore no longer working rationally.
Without delving into the string of events of the past months starting with the housing crisis followed by the credit crisis, the banking crisis, the crisis on Wall Street and in the insurance industry, we are now in full bail-out crisis mode. The country is in a recession and this is resulting in major layoffs across the whole spectrum of corporations and even States. They are all closing in very fast on their respective ‘Bankruptcy Days’ and they are showing up in Washington D.C. asking Congress for immediate help in terms of loans and outright financial rescue and Congress is only too happy, it seems, to help out with money nobody has. They are doing what they have been doing for decades, they are indebting the future of America. And the sad thing is, they are proud of themselves for doing the right thing. This can all be summed up in one sentence: While the individual citizen is tightening his/her belt and is pinching pennies, Congress is doling out billions of dollars! Again, not their own money, oh, no, this is money the American citizen has not even earned yet and will never get to spend because Congress is doing it for them ahead of time. Disgraceful and nearly criminal are not strong enough words to describe this situation where we find ourselves.
To paint a clearer picture, we will try to illustrate this in real numbers: One billion is a number that has a One (1) in front of Nine (9) zeros. In more real terms, if a person is making annually $100,000, he would have to work for ten thousand (10,000) years to earn one billion dollars. Even with an annual income of one million dollars, he would have to work one thousand years to earn that kind of money. Another interesting factoid is to measure the lengths of the earth’s circumference by stringing up one dollar bills wherein two dollars would equate to one foot in length. One billion dollars would nearly be enough to span the globe at the equator four times.
And our government in Washington is just spending it as if there is no tomorrow. There can be no question as to their prime motivator: Bailing out companies means higher employment resulting in happy voters the next time around. It does not matter that future generations are being burdened with a national debt that is outrageous. Currently, the national debt stands at $10,660,730,000,000. That is ten trillion, six hundred sixty billion, seven hundred thirty million dollars. Taking the current population of the United States at 306,000,000 (three hundred six million), this amounts to a personal indebtedness of about $34,840,000 for every person in America. If it were not so sad, it could be funny. Every baby born in this country starts life with a debt of $35,000, is it any wonder that most babies cry at birth?
But hold on, Congress is not finished yet. Since the seven hundred billion dollar bailout in early October, additional emergency bailouts have taken place (AIG Insurance Company) and they are rescuing the American carmakers in Detroit. Several States are on the brink of insolvency and are begging Washington for money, the Democrats are working on a major stimulus package to help the economy and President-elect Barack Obama has his people still working on additional rescue/stimulus deals. In total the numbers are so overwhelming, some “experts”, a.k.a. numbers crunchers are now saying that in all we could easily be adding seven trillion dollars worth of debt in the near future. That would bring the total national debt to 18 trillion dollars which in essence would burden every living soul in the country with about $60,000.
The only remaining question is now: Will we, the citizenry accept this silently or will there be a serious attempt to let our elected officials to stop this madness? As a whole, the American people are known as being generous but this is going too far in our humble opinion. Should we not hold them accountable for their actions? One way would be to never ever vote for them again. That would send a clear message to politicians: “We want you to represent us in Washington, not indebt us!” President Ronald Reagan had it right when he said: Government is not the solution, Government is the problem!
The Great American Bailout Fiasco is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The Ayatollah Khomeini installed a regime in Iran which is best described as Islamofascist. It has followed, in every major detail, the model laid down by Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920s and ’30s. It is a single party regime, and a dictator makes all the key decisions. There are today endless articles in the press about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran, but Iranian presidents come and go. The successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei, has the title of Supreme Leader. He is the only person who really matters in Iran. He makes all the crucial decisions. The Revolutionary Guard Corps reports directly to him. Furthermore, if you watch Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous 1935 film Triumph of the Will, about a National Socialist Party day in Nuremberg, full of “Sieg Heils” and programmed events, you’ll see the similarity to rallies today in Tehran where they gather tens of thousands of people to chant “Death to America.” And like the Nazis, the Iranians mean it.
My favorite response to people who say, “Why don’t we just sit down and talk with the Iranians?” is to remind them of the movie Goldfinger. There’s a wonderful scene in the middle of the movie when Sean Connery as James Bond is spread-eagled on a sheet of gold, a laser beam is cutting through the gold sheet and about to slice him in half, and Gert Fröbe as Goldfinger is standing up on a balcony looking down at him. Bond looks up and asks, “What is this Goldfinger? Do you expect me to talk?” And Goldfinger replies, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” That’s exactly the Iranian attitude.
In fact, we have been talking to the Iranians, almost non-stop, for 30 years. There isn’t an American president from Jimmy Carter to the present who has not authorized negotiations with Iran. The classic case occurred during the Clinton administration. We ended all kinds of sanctions against Iran, let all kinds of Iranians into the U.S. for the first time since the 1970s, had sporting matches with the Iranians, hosted Iranian cultural events, and unfroze Iranian bank accounts. Then President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright started publicly apologizing to Iran for this and that. But when all was said and done, Ali Khamenei reminded everyone that Iran is in a state of war with the U.S., and that was the end of negotiations. This is what has happened every single time we have tried talking to or appeasing Iran.
Einstein’s definition of a madman is somebody who keeps doing the same thing over and over while hoping for different results. Only a madman can believe that negotiating with the Iranians will produce some result different from what we’ve had now for 30 years, including very recently under the current administration. But many continue to believe it.
There is a striking tendency among people in modern Western governments not to recognize the existence of evil in the world. My professional career has largely been spent studying evil. My Ph.D. is in Modern European History, and I studied fascism. Before that I was research assistant for a historian named George Mosse, who wrote books on National Socialism. People from my generation studied these things because we were trying desperately to understand how men like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin came to power, and why nobody saw it coming and understood what was at stake. Why was there the humiliation of Munich and then the Nazi invasion of Poland before an appeasement government in Britain fell and Winston Churchill came to power? Why did it require Pearl Harbor for the U.S. to enter World War II? Could we get to the point where we understood these evil regimes so well that when the next one came along we would see it coming and stop it in its tracks? But over the past 30 years we have seen the same situation play out with Iran, and still we dream of negotiation.
In Natan Sharansky’s useful formulation, if you want to know how a country will behave internationally, look at the way it treats its own people. The Iranian regime treats its people with total contempt. Consider its treatment of women. Although you will never hear the American women’s rights movement complain about it, women in Iran are officially worth half a man. It is in Iran’s Constitution. If a woman who is pregnant with a male fetus gets killed in an automobile accident, Sharia law requires the guilty party in the other car to pay a full fine for the fetus and only half that fine for the woman. This carries through every aspect of Iranian society. Women can’t own or dispose of property. If a woman’s husband dies, the family of the husband disposes of his estate. That’s the contempt that awaits us if the Iranians have their way. In fact, they view the entire non-Muslim world as worth even less than Muslim women.
An Implacable Foe
The U.S. has much to learn about operating in the Middle East. Consider our history with Iraq. We went to war in 1991 to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Nobody in the Middle East thought that we had assembled a coalition of 500,000 soldiers just for that reason. They took it for granted that we were going to destroy Saddam Hussein, remove his regime, and replace it with something more civilized. That was true even of the Saudis. People who were at the highest levels of the first Bush administration have told me that Saudi Arabia was begging us to go to Baghdad even though publicly they were saying that we should stop at the borders of Kuwait. Yet stop we did. Even worse, President Bush the elder said how wonderful it would be if the Shiites and the Kurds would rise up against Saddam and liberate the country themselves. The Kurds and Shiites took this as an open invitation and a promise of American support if they did that. So they rose up, we didn’t lift a finger for them, and they were massacred. In light of this, it was less than smart for American policy makers to believe in 2003, when we went into Iraq for the second time, that most Iraqis would trust us.
Look also at recent American policy toward Iran. Since 2001, Iran has been identified as part of the “axis of evil” and branded as the world’s greatest sponsor of international terrorism. The Soviets always used to say, “If you say A, you have to do B.” That is, if you accept certain kinds of information, that drives you to act. But we have not acted against the Iranian regime, even though, as luck would have it, Iran is tailor-made for the same political strategy that toppled the Soviet empire. If you stop to consider that we brought down that empire with the active support of maybe five or ten percent of its people, how could we possibly fail to bring down the regime in Iran-a country where we know from the regime’s own polls that upwards of 70 percent of the people want an end to their government? But the Iranians, too, have been living in that part of the world and have seen American promises come to nothing. The Iranian people are waiting to see some kind of real action by the U.S. to support them against Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, because they know that the same thing will happen to them that happened to the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites if we are not there actively supporting them. Nor do I mean with ground troops. We should support democratic revolution in Iran.
The bottom line is that Iran is our principal enemy in the Middle East, and perhaps in the entire world. It is also a terribly vulnerable regime, and it knows that-which is why it makes up stories about airplanes and missiles that it doesn’t have. As for the question of nuclear weapons, it seems hard to imagine that Iran does not already have them. Iranians are not stupid, and they have been at this for a minimum of 20 years in a world where almost every major component needed for a nuclear weapon-not to mention old nuclear weapons-are for sale. A lot of these components are for sale nearby in Pakistan. And if the Iranians do have a weapon, it is impossible to imagine that, at a moment of crisis, they will not use it. The point is, we have an implacable enemy which has no intention of negotiating a settlement with us. They want us dead or dominated, just as our enemies did in the 1930s and ’40s. You can’t make deals with a regime like that.
Our choices with regard to Iran are to challenge them directly and win this war now, to do so only after they kill a lot more of us in some kind of attack, or to surrender. There is no painless way out, and the longer we wait, the greater the pain is going to be.
Understanding Iran, Part 2 of 2 is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The following first part is adapted from a speech delivered by Michael Ledeen.
MICHAEL LEDEEN is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor at National Review Online. Previously, he served in the White House as a national security advisor and in the Departments of Defense and State. He is author of more than 20 books, including The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago, Tocqueville on American Character: Why Tocqueville’s Brilliant Exploration of the American Spirit Is As Vital and Important Today As It Was Nearly Two Hundred Years Ago, Debacle: Carter and the Fall of the Shah, and Universal Fascism. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, International Economy, Commentary, and the Washington Times.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at sea on August 4, 2008, aboard the Regent Seven Seas Mariner, during the Hillsdale College “North to Alaska” cruise.
Understanding Iran
IF YOU READ the news carefully, you will find a notable story about Iran every morning. Nine times out of ten it is hilarious. Today’s Iran story is that the head of its armed forces announced that it has a new missile with a range of 300 kilometers or more, manufactured with technology that has never been used before in the history of the world. There is neither a picture of the missile nor any information about the nature of the missile, and, in fact, you can be quite sure that there is no such missile at all.
Just within the last month Iran released a photograph of a missile launch that initially caused great consternation in the West. It showed four missiles being launched, more or less simultaneously, with wonderful contrails behind them. This was supposedly a new intermediate range missile that could hit almost any target in the Middle East, including U.S. military bases. Upon examination, that photograph turned out to be a double phony. First, there was only one missile, and the Iranians replicated it to make it seem as if there were four. Second, the missile was two years old and was not an intermediate range missile at all. A few days later, the Iranians announced that they had a fighter airplane and produced a photo of it. Upon examination, this airplane turned out to be a plastic toy made by Mattel with Iranian markings drawn on it.
So the first thing to understand about Iran is that it is a country where lies and deception are a way of life.
Another important thing to know has to do with the seriousness of Iran as a potential military enemy. In that regard, consider a story that originally appeared in U.S. News & World Report about two years ago. It concerned a joint Special Forces team of five or six Iraqis and five or six Americans that was patrolling the Iran-Iraq border because the Iranians had been smuggling improvised explosive devices and Iran-trained terrorists into Iraq. Off in the distance, this team spotted an Iranian military officer in uniform on Iraqi soil. They went after him and he quickly hopped back onto the Iranian side. As the team continued along the border, they spotted either the same person or another Iranian officer in uniform and again they went after him. This time he didn’t move, and when the Americans started talking to him, the Iraqis with them disappeared and the Americans realized they had been surrounded by 15 or 20 armed Iranian soldiers. The Iranian officer told them to lay down their weapons or they would be shot. In response, the young captain leading the Americans told his men to open fire. Eleven of the Iranians were killed, no American was injured, and the remaining Iranians fled across the border.
This tells us, first, that the Iranians are tricky. They had arranged with the Iraqi Special Forces to turn the Americans over to be held as hostages, and then lured the Americans into an ambush. But it also tells us that they are not really prepared to fight-which is, in fact, what our forces have found in Iraq. We have captured and killed an enormous number of Iranian intelligence and military officers, and very rarely have they ever offered any serious resistance.
The Terror Connection
The simple facts regarding Iran are easy to understand. We are dealing with a regime that came to power in 1979, when the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah. Immediately thereafter, Iran declared war against the United States, branding us “The Great Satan.” The Iranians have been at war against us for 30 years, and prior to 9/11 the Iranian regime was directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of more Americans than any other country or organization in the world. It also may well be that the Iranian regime was involved in 9/11. In this regard, I call your attention to one of the most forgotten documents in contemporary American history. In the fall of 1998, the American government indicted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. There is a paragraph in the indictment that reads as follows:
Al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group, Hezbollah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.
When you read the newspapers nowadays you find every now and then someone saying that there is no real evidence that Iran is supporting Al Qaeda. More often than not, this person immediately goes on to say that Iran would not ever support Al Qaeda because Iran is Shiite and Al Qaeda is Sunni. This is nonsense.
The current chairman of the Intelligence Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives was once asked the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, and he didn’t know the answer. The difference boils down to a historical disagreement about the proper line of succession to the prophet Mohammed. Sunnis and Shiites have been arguing about this since the Middle Ages, and it has played itself out into a very interesting disagreement over the relationship between mosque and state.
In short, Sunnis have long believed that it is legitimate for religious leaders to function in government since Mohammed’s successor is known and is with us, whereas Shiites have traditionally believed that the rightful successor to Mohammed is yet to come, and that therefore no religious leader is entitled to sit in a position of secular power. This is why the Ayatollah Sistani, who is the highest ranking and the most esteemed Shiite figure in Iraq, does not go to Parliament. He and other Iraqi Shiite clergy express their opinions about religious, political, and moral issues, but they don’t sit in positions of political power.
This Shiite view on religion and politics broke down in Iran with the revolution of 1979. When the Ayatollah Khomeini took over in that revolution, he said that not only was it allowable for religious leaders to govern civil society, but indeed it was now mandatory. Khomeini’s most revealing line, spoken on the airplane from France to Iran when he was about to seize power, came in answer to a question about what his rule would mean for Iran. Khomeini said, in effect, that he didn’t give a damn about Iran. He was leading all of Islam, not Iran, he said, and he would happily sacrifice everyone in Iran if he could accomplish the global triumph of Islam.
So Sunnis and Shiites traditionally have this theological disagreement, but it isn’t an unbridgeable chasm, as Khomeini’s example shows. And in the history of the Iranian revolution, Sunnis and Shiites have worked mostly together from the very beginning-indeed, they worked together even before that revolution began.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps was created in the early 1970s in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, and was trained by Yasser Arafat’s ¬Al Fatah. Arafat was a super-Sunni who came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. In other words, today’s most hardcore armed Shiite organization was trained by hardcore Sunnis. Sunnis and Shiites worked hand-in-glove to create a terrorist alliance that overthrew the Shah, took power in Iran, and has waged war against the U.S. ever since.
The lesson here is that when you hear somebody say that Sunnis and Shiites can’t work together, you should run, because those people don’t know what they are talking about.
Understanding Iran, Part 1 of 2 is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College by Mark Steyn while he was in residence as a Eugene C. Pulliam Visiting Fellow in Journalism:
Slippery Slope
Our democratic governments today preside over multicultural societies that have less and less glue holding them together. They’ve grown comfortable with the idea of the state as the mediator between interest groups. And confronted by growing and restive Muslim populations, they’re increasingly at ease with the idea of regulating freedom in the interests of social harmony.
It’s a different situation in America, which has the First Amendment and a social consensus that increasingly does not exist in Europe. Europe’s consensus seems to be that Danish cartoonists should be able to draw what they like, but not if it sparks Islamic violence. It is certainly odd that the requirement of self-restraint should only apply to one party.
Last month, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of Sharia to the United Kingdom was “inevitable.” Within days of His Grace’s remarks, the British and Ontario governments both confirmed that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions are receiving welfare payments for each of their wives. Kipling wrote that East is East and West is West, and ne’er the twain shall meet. But when the twain do meet, you often wind up with the worst of both worlds. Say what you like about a polygamist in Waziristan or Somalia, but he has to do it on his own dime. To collect a welfare check for each spouse, he has to move to London or Toronto. Government-subsidized polygamy is an innovation of the Western world.
If you need another reason to be opposed to socialized health care, one reason is because it fosters the insouciant attitude to basic hygiene procedures that has led to the rise of deadly “superbugs.” I see British Muslim nurses in public hospitals riddled with C. difficile are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Which is a thought to ponder just before you go under the anaesthetic. I mentioned to some of Hillsdale’s students in class that gay-bashing is on the rise in the most famously “tolerant” cities in Europe. As Der Spiegel reported, “With the number of homophobic attacks rising in the Dutch metropolis, Amsterdam officials are commissioning a study to determine why Moroccan men are targeting the city’s gays.”
Gee, whiz. That’s a toughie. Wonder what the reason could be. But don’t worry, the brain trust at the University of Amsterdam is on top of things: “Half of the crimes were committed by men of Moroccan origin and researchers believe they felt stigmatized by society and responded by attacking people they felt were lower on the social ladder. Another working theory is that the attackers may be struggling with their own sexual identity.”
Bingo! Telling young Moroccan men they’re closeted homosexuals seems certain to lessen tensions in the city! While you’re at it, a lot of those Turks seem a bit light in their loafers, don’t you think?
Our Suicidal Urge
So don’t worry, nothing’s happening. Just a few gay Muslims frustrated at the lack of gay Muslim nightclubs. Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you’d suggested such things on September 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn’t seem such a big deal, nor will the next concession, or the one after that.
The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to “hold the line”? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The politically correct bureaucrats at Canada’s Human Rights Commissions? The geniuses who run Harvard, and who’ve just introduced gender-segregated swimming and gym sessions at the behest of Harvard’s Islamic Society? (Would they have done that for Amish or Mennonite students?) The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: Look at what they’re conceding now and then try to figure out what they’ll be conceding in five years’ time. The idea that the West’s multicultural establishment can hold the line would be more plausible if it was clear they had any idea where the line is, or even gave any indication of believing in one.
My book, supposedly Islamaphobic, isn’t even really about Islam. The single most important line in it is the profound observation, by historian Arnold Toynbee, that “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” One manifestation of that suicidal urge is illiberal notions harnessed in the cause of liberalism. In calling for the introduction of Sharia, the Archbishop of Canterbury joins a long list of Western appeasers, including a Dutch cabinet minister who said if the country were to vote to introduce Islamic law that would be fine by him, and the Swedish cabinet minister who said we should be nice to Muslims now so that Muslims will be nice to us when they’re in the majority.
Ultimately, our crisis is not about Islam. It’s not about fire-breathing Imams or polygamists whooping it up on welfare. It’s not about them. It’s about us. And by us I mean the culture that shaped the modern world, and established the global networks, legal systems, and trading relationships on which the planet depends.
To reprise Sir Edward Grey, the lamps are going out all over the world, and an awful lot of the map will look an awful lot darker by the time many Americans realize the scale of this struggle.
Lights Out on Liberty, Part 2 of 2 is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College by Mark Steyn while he was in residence as a Eugene C. Pulliam Visiting Fellow in Journalism:
Mark Steyn’s column appears in the New York Sun, the Washington Times, Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, Maclean’s in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke’s Bay Today in New Zealand. The author of National Review’s Happy Warrior column, he also blogs on National Review Online and appears weekly on the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show. He is the author of several books, most recently America Alone: The End of The World as We Know It. Born in Toronto, Mr. Steyn lives with his family in New Hampshire.
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 13, 2008, while Mr. Steyn was in residence as a Eugene C. Pulliam Visiting Fellow in Journalism.
ON AUGUST 3, 1914, on the eve of the First World War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed, “The lamps are going out all over Europe.” Today, the lights are going out on liberty all over the Western world, but in a more subtle and profound way.
Much of the West is far too comfortable with state regulation of speech and expression, which puts freedom itself at risk. Let me cite some examples: The response of the European Union Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security to the crisis over the Danish cartoons that sparked Muslim violence was to propose that newspapers exercise “prudence” on certain controversial subjects involving religions beginning with the letter “I.” At the end of her life, the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci-after writing of the contradiction between Islam and the Western tradition of liberty-was being sued in France, Italy, Switzerland, and most other European jurisdictions by groups who believed her opinions were not merely offensive, but criminal. In France, author Michel Houellebecq was sued by Muslim and other “anti-racist groups” who believed the opinions of a fictional character in one of his novels were likewise criminal.
In Canada, the official complaint about my own so-called “flagrant Islamophobia”-filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress-attributes to me the following “assertions”:
America will be an Islamic Republic by 2040. There will be a break for Muslim prayers during the Super Bowl. There will be a religious police enforcing Islamic norms. The USS Ronald Reagan will be renamed after Osama bin Laden. Females will not be allowed to be cheerleaders. Popular American radio and TV hosts will be replaced by Imams.
In fact, I didn’t “assert” any of these things. They are plot twists I cited in my review of Robert Ferrigno’s novel, Prayers for the Assassin. It’s customary in reviewing novels to cite aspects of the plot. For example, a review of Moby Dick will usually mention the whale. These days, apparently, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the government’s human rights investigators (who have taken up the case) believe that describing the plot of a novel should be illegal.
You may recall that Margaret Atwood, some years back, wrote a novel about her own dystopian theocratic fantasy, in which America was a Christian tyranny named the Republic of Gilead. What’s to stop a Christian group from dragging a doting reviewer of Margaret Atwood’s book in front of a Canadian human rights court? As it happens, Christian groups tend not to do that, which is just as well, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a lot to write about.
These are small parts of a very big picture. After the London Tube bombings and the French riots a few years back, commentators lined up behind the idea that Western Muslims are insufficiently assimilated. But in their mastery of legalisms and the language of victimology, they’re superbly assimilated. Since these are the principal means of discourse in multicultural societies, they’ve mastered all they need to know. Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading “Behead the Enemies of Islam” and promising another 9/11 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.
Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to “play it cool.” The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to “Push off” (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) “or I’ll arrest you.” Mr. Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely: “There is only one person around here who is in any danger of dying.”
And that’s the way it’s gone ever since. For all the talk about rampant “Islamophobia,” it’s usually only the other party who is “in any danger of dying.”
War on the Homefront
I wrote my book America Alone because I wanted to reframe how we thought about the War on Terror-an insufficient and evasive designation that has long since outlasted whatever usefulness it may once have had. It remains true that we are good at military campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our tanks and ships are better, and our bombs and soldiers are smarter. But these are not ultimately the most important battlefronts. We do indeed face what the strategists call asymmetric warfare, but it is not in the Sunni triangle or the Hindu Kush. We face it right here in the Western world.
Norman Podhoretz, among others, has argued that we are engaged in a second Cold War. But it might be truer to call it a Cold Civil War, by which I mean a war within the West, a war waged in our major cities. We now have Muslim “honor killings,” for instance, not just in tribal Pakistan and Yemen, but in Germany and the Netherlands, in Toronto and Dallas. And even if there were no battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if no one was flying planes into tall buildings in New York City or blowing up trains, buses, and nightclubs in Madrid, London, and Bali, we would still be in danger of losing this war without a shot being fired.
The British government recently announced that it would be issuing Sharia-compliant Islamic bonds-that is, bonds compliant with Islamic law and practice as prescribed in the Koran. This is another reason to be in favor of small government: The bigger government gets, the more it must look for funding in some pretty unusual places-in this case wealthy Saudis. As The Mail on Sunday put it, this innovation marks “one of the most significant economic advances of Sharia law in the non-Muslim world.”
At about the same time, The Times of London reported that “Knorbert the piglet has been dropped as the mascot of Fortis Bank, after it decided to stop giving piggy banks to children for fear of offending Muslims.” Now, I’m no Islamic scholar, but Mohammed expressed no view regarding Knorbert the piglet. There’s not a single sura about it. The Koran, an otherwise exhaustive text, is silent on the matter of anthropomorphic porcine representation.
I started keeping a file on pig controversies a couple of years ago, and you would be surprised at how routine they have become. Recently, for instance, a local government council prohibited its workers from having knickknacks on their desks representing Winnie the Pooh’s sidekick Piglet. As Pastor Martin Niemoller might have said, “First they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character, and if I was, I’d be more of an Eeyore. Then they came for the Three Little Pigs and Babe, and by the time I realized the Western world had turned into a 24/7 Looney Tunes, it was too late, because there was no Porky Pig to stammer, ‘Th-th-th-that’s all folks!’, and bring the nightmare to an end.”
What all these stories have in common is excessive deference to-and in fact fear of-Islam. If the story of the Three Little Pigs is forbidden when Muslims still comprise less than ten percent of Europe’s population, what else will be on the black list when they comprise 20 percent? In small but telling ways, non-Muslim communities are being persuaded that a kind of uber-Islamic law now applies to all. And if you don’t remember the Three Little Pigs, by the way, one builds a house of straw, another of sticks, and both get blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. Western Civilization is a mighty house of bricks, but you don’t need a Big Bad Wolf when the pig is so eager to demolish the house himself.
I would argue that these incremental concessions to Islam are ultimately a bigger threat than terrorism. What matters is not what the lads in the Afghan cave-the “extremists”-believe, but what the non-extremists believe, what people who are for the most part law-abiding taxpayers of functioning democracies believe. For example, a recent poll found that 36 percent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 believe that those who convert to another religion should be punished by death. That’s not 36 percent of young Muslims in Waziristan or Yemen or Sudan, but 36 percent of young Muslims in the United Kingdom. Forty percent of British Muslims would like to live under Sharia-in Britain. Twenty percent have sympathy for the July 7 Tube bombers. And, given that Islam is the principal source of population growth in every city down the spine of England from Manchester to Sheffield to Birmingham to London, and in every major Western European city, these statistics are not without significance for the future.
Because I discussed these facts in print, my publisher is now being sued before three Canadian human rights commissions. The plaintiff in my case is Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, a man who announced on Canadian TV that he approves of the murder of all Israeli civilians over the age of 18. He is thus an objective supporter of terrorism. I don’t begrudge him the right to his opinions, but I wish he felt the same about mine. Far from that, posing as a leader of the “anti-hate” movement in Canada, he is using the squeamishness of a politically correct society to squash freedom.
As the famous saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. What the Canadian Islamic Congress and similar groups in the West are trying to do is criminalize vigilance. They want to use the legal system to circumscribe debate on one of the great questions of the age: the relationship between Islam and the West and the increasing Islamization of much of the Western world, in what the United Nations itself calls the fastest population transformation in history.
Lights Out on Liberty, Part 1 of 2 is a post from: Common Sense University
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This is a very simple explanation of the economic mechanisms that led to our current finacial crisis.
Financial Crisis Explained is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>As in previous years, everybody is waiting for campaign-altering statements by the candidates and then everybody is disappointed when they do not occur. This is absolutely ridiculous when one thinks seriously about it. The moderators control the topics through their questions and are also the timekeepers. How many times have we seen these supposedly impartial moderators ask complex questions about a topic of major proportion and then allow only sixty to ninety seconds for an answer. A classic example came during the 2004 Vice-Presidential debate when moderator Gwen Ifill asked Richard Cheney a very difficult question and gave him thirty seconds to respond. Cheney told her that he could not possible respond to her question adequately to which she said: “Sorry, Sir, you’ve got thirty seconds!”
And it was no different this year. The four moderators, Jim Lehrer (PBS), Gwen Ifill (PBS), Tom Brokaw (NBC) and Bob Schieffer (CBS), all rather liberal members of the mainstream media, selected the questions and decided who would have to respond to them in a very short period of time, at a maximum, two minutes long. And so, the candidates had to limit their statements against a timer and the results were predictable: The answers were incomplete or vague at best. And then we wonder why we do not get sufficient answers to questions we want to ask. The debates in their current format are useless and we here believe that major changes should be made for the next go-around in 2012 and thereafter.
From history we know that in 1858, Stephen A. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln engaged in direct dialogues without moderators where they debated many topics of the time at great lengths, some such debates lasted for many hours. The two candidates were vying for an Illinois seat in the United States Senate and held altogether seven such debates. The format for those debates was one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes and the first candidate had 30 minutes for a so called ‘rejoinder’ for a total of three hours.
We are not suggesting that this should be repeated per se but at least seems much more plausible as it allows the candidates to adequately detail their respective plans for the future instead of answering complex questions with sixty to ninety second sound bites. Since a three-hour debate might be too long, especially when it is televised, reduce the time to two hours. The current debates with the immediate analysis by pundits on every television network last that long as well. If you were to give the two candidates one hour each, they should be able to make their cases respectively and conversely, if they would not do so, the voters could decide for themselves whether or not they had heard truthful statements and realistic proposals by the two contenders. The format for such debates could be a 40 minute long opening (for candidate One), followed by a 60 long minute time slot (for candidate Two) to be concluded by a 20 minute rebuttal (by candidate One). The debates could be pre-determined to deal with specific topics between domestic and foreign policy and even list sub-topics to be included. Should the candidates not address or ignore such topics, they would be judged and evaluated by the voters watching these debates and would have to live with the consequences.
If nothing else, we, the people of the United States of America, would have a realistic opportunity to hear from the candidates vying for the highest offices in this country and then could determine for ourselves who to give our precious vote to. And it would be without influence and spin by moderators and political pundits.
Want real answers? Change Presidential debate formats is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
This amendment is undoubtedly the most referenced one of the Bill of Rights in that it firmly establishes in clear language rights of all people while limiting the power of Congress (consisting of the House of Representatives and the Senate) in law-making ability. Once again, we are in awe of the wisdom and foresight of the Founding Fathers of this country well over two hundred years ago. Their concerns were obviously grounded in experiences living under royal rulers and tyrannies in Europe and it was for them truly important to spell out these concerns and safeguard against limitations when it came to certain freedoms in these early amendments to the Constitution.
You might have noticed, that we bolded above the four words ‘or of the press’ since this is the topic of this article. It was of extreme importance for the press to be free of government dictates or directives in order to write and publish accurately and truthfully about events, all issues and topics as they happened and occurred. It also meant for the press to be able to be critical of actions as taken by any entity, be they government, corporate, religious, political parties or any other private group. It has served the people of America well and the so called ‘press’ – what we in today’s world refer to as media – has for the most part lived up to its expectations by investigating and uncovering misdeeds, wrong doings, criminal acts by a vast variety of individuals as well as groups. For example, it was the diligent work and persistence of two Washington Post reporters in the 1970′s, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who dug up the facts and brought about the truth of the Watergate scandal, resulting in the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the criminal prosecution of several Nixon Administration members.
While we do not know the beginning of the trend, we here at Common Sense Politics do not like how the media – press, television and radio – has changed in years past to the present. This industry has evolved into something different from what originally was intended to be ‘the Freedom of the Press’. The constitutional guarantee of this ‘freedom’ was not meant to be used for opinion forming purposes but to give this industry the right to report the truth about everything.
What do we mean by this? We do not like the fact that negative news items get top billing on a consistent basis. Someone once phrased this ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. In other words disasters, natural or man-made, crimes of any kind be they murders, kidnappings, corporate fraud, people’s sufferings and so on will take priority to so called ‘good news’ any day, any week, any month or any year. The reasoning behind this is called that people in general are not as interested in good news. We wholeheartedly disagree with this! We like to read about rescues, individuals winning battles against fatal diseases, athletes achieving new heights and goals in their respective sports, stories about heroism and survival and overcoming incredible odds and so on. Why has the media determined that the local evening news for example has to begin with the traffic accident on the nearest freeway? Most newscast in metropolitan areas will spent the first ten to fifteen minutes about the murders, drive-by shootings, traffic accidents etc. that happened during the past 24 hours. Do the families sitting down for dinner after a hectic day really want to know all this and just lap up the negative news of the day? We do not think so.
Another major concern of ours is the inclusion of opinions and speculations in stories of any kind. Instead of just reporting the facts as they exist, there is the immediate addition and personal belief of potential consequences of what just has happened. Take for example the recent 5.4 Richter scale earthquake near Los Angeles in Southern California. This was the first strong earthquake in this area since the one centered in Northridge in January 1994. Instead of just reporting the facts about this latest earthquake where no lives were lost, no major damage to structures occurred, the media membership had to embellish the story by commencing to speculate whether or not this one was the forerunner of the anticipated ‘Big One’ for this region. There is absolutely no basis of fact for this sort of nonsense, no matter the intensive studies of major earthquake faults, any kind of even minor reliable earthquake prediction is fiction! To our knowledge, the only somewhat reliable earthquake predictors are our pets that have been observed in the past to act strangely before earthquakes. Why then include this type of speculation in the reports and stories about the 5.4 event on July 29? Could it be the focus on the negative, we strongly believe and think so.
But the major issue we have with this media behavior is their constant attempts to influence opinions on the part of their readers, listeners and viewers. We can safely state that there is no article or report in the political arena that is not spiked by the respective author and this holds true for both sides of the spectrum. The conservatives have to bash the liberals and the liberals have to bash the conservatives. Since the media membership is about 85 percent liberal and the rest conservative, the news stories are truly unbalanced when it comes to what people get to read, to listen to and watch.
Back to the Founding Fathers: Did they intend to give the press this kind of freedom? In other words, is it perfectly alright to use this ‘freedom’ to influence the population as to what the truth and facts are? We think not! Or was this ‘freedom’ just intended and therefore limited to be free of repercussions when writing truths and facts about others and events? We think so! Just to be clear: We have absolutely no problem with editorial pieces by journalists or any other individual; we just think that any slanting or embellishment of a factual story on an event or a person in the public eye etc is wrong and is taken the constitutionally guaranteed “Freedom of the Press” too far.
‘Freedom of the Press’ taken too far is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>“The Greatest Story Never Told”: Today’s Economy in Perspective
THERE IS a debate going on today over whether our economy is in recession. Polls show sagging public confidence. But some perspective is sorely needed. The fact of the matter is that we in the United States, and to a lesser degree the entire world, have just lived through-and continue to live in-the greatest period of prosperity in human history. Over the last 25 years, more wealth has been created, more people have been lifted out of poverty, standards of living have been elevated more dramatically, and the quality and length of life have improved, more than ever before in recorded history. Unfortunately, as Larry Kudlow says, this is “the greatest story never told.” We need to start telling the story, and also to think about its causes.
First, let us focus on the United States (and I say this with full knowledge that the State of Michigan is a unique exception among the 50 states to America’s extraordinary recent prosperity; but the causes of Michigan’s peculiar problems are a topic for another day): Average economic growth in the U.S. has not only been positive for almost the entire last quarter century, but for much of this period the rate of growth has accelerated. Our nation’s total economic output in 1982 was $5.1 trillion; last year it was $11.3 trillion (in real 2000 dollars). Per capita economic output in 1982 was $22,400; last year it was $37,807 (in real 2000 dollars). The average unemployment rate in the 1970s was nearly seven percent; it has been declining, on average, every decade since, and has remained below five percent since 2003. The service sector of our economy has been on fire, growing from $1 trillion in 1982 to $5.5 trillion in 2006. And do you know how far back one has to go to find the year when America’s total manufacturing output peaked? All the way back to 2007! Yes, U.S. factories produced more last year than in any previous year in our history. That’s the “hollowing out”-as its critics like to say-of America’s economy.
This expanding economy has, of course, resulted in huge gains in wealth. The Dow Jones Industrial Average began the 1980s at 825; today, despite its recent declines, it remains above 12,000, a 1,400 percent increase. And with the democratization of the capital markets that has occurred through savings programs like IRAs and 401(k)s and investment vehicles like mutual funds, the average family’s wealth has grown dramatically, too. In 1983, 19 percent of American households owned stocks; in 2005, 50 percent were investors. In 1989, the median family net worth was $69,000; in 2004, it was $93,000.
These gains in income and wealth have resulted directly in a better standard of living for virtually every segment of American society-including the poor. Among families living below the official poverty line in the early 1970s, less than 40 percent had a car, almost none had color televisions, and air conditioning was virtually unheard of; in 2004, 46 percent owned their own homes, almost 75 percent owned a car (indeed, 30 percent owned two or more cars), 97 percent had color TVs, and 67 percent had air conditioning. The poor in the U.S. have an average of 721 square feet of living space per person, as compared with 430 in Sweden and 92 in Mexico.
Similarly, technology has become accessible to all sectors of society. There were 9.8 million cable TV subscribers in 1975, and 65 million in 2006; 2.1 million personal computers in 1985, and 243 million in 2007; 340 cell phone subscribers in 1985, and 243 million in 2007.
Health indicators track similarly. Infant mortality dropped from 20 deaths per 1,000 people in 1970 to seven deaths per 1,000 people in 2002. In 1980, American life expectancy was less than 74 years. Today it is 78.
Nor is America totally unique in this regard. While we have led the world in most measures of prosperity and growth, other countries have been enjoying the broadest expansion of wealth in history as well. A recent issue of The Economist documents the tremendous worldwide improvement in both the social conditions in poor countries and the alleviation of poverty: Between 1999 and 2004, some 135 million people emerged from destitution, and there are now twice as many countries with fast-growing economies as there were in 1980.
Keys to Prosperity
This long period of sustained economic growth and the huge quality-of-life improvements it made possible didn’t happen by accident. They were a result of a major expansion in economic freedom, initially in the U.S., then increasingly around the world. This expansion took many forms, but three of the most important were a dramatic reduction in marginal tax rates, a series of major deregulations, and a broad expansion of trade.
After decades of top marginal tax rates in percentiles from the 70s into the 90s, President Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. The top marginal rate was reduced from 70 to 50 percent, and by the time Reagan left office, it was down to 28 percent. During Reagan’s two terms, the top corporate tax rate was reduced from 34 to 28 percent, individual tax brackets were indexed for inflation, and-although there were some tax increases-the devastatingly high top marginal tax rates that preceded Reagan were gone. Nor have they come back-at least not yet.
In subsequent years, President Bush the elder and President Clinton raised some taxes too much, but lowered others; and it didn’t appear smart to anyone that we should return to the levels that had prevailed prior to Reagan. The current President Bush has lowered taxes dramatically-not so well in 2001, but then very effectively in 2003. The effect was to lower marginal tax rates, phase out the death tax, offer marriage penalty relief, and lower taxes on capital gains and dividends.
Major deregulation was another part of the expansion of economic freedom that has enabled 25 years of strong growth. Interestingly enough, this deregulation began when President Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, lifting price and route controls that had forced higher prices and fewer choices on consumers. Without these controls, airlines could offer deals to fill otherwise half-empty planes and choose more efficient routes. The airline industry has obviously struggled for many reasons in subsequent years, but consumers have been the big winners in terms of increased safety, more choices, and lower prices. Deregulation is responsible for ten to 18 percent lower fares, saving travelers $5-$10 billion a year.
Following this, in 1980, Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act, deregulating an industry that had been closely controlled by the government since 1935. This put a stop to regulations dictating what products truckers could transport and what routes they could travel. The kind of inefficiency that resulted from these regulations can best be understood by the following example: A motor carrier with authority to travel from Cleveland to Buffalo that purchased another carrier’s right to go from Buffalo to Pittsburgh was required to ship goods from Cleveland to Pittsburgh via Buffalo, adding an unnecessary and wasteful 272 miles to the trip. As a result of easing these regulations, prices for truckload-size shipments fell 25 percent by 1982, and efficiency gains and cost savings helped to make possible the “just-in-time” inventory system that has transformed retailing, lowered consumer costs, and, arguably, diminished the economy’s susceptibility to recessions.
President Reagan accelerated the trend toward less regulation, easing or eliminating price controls on oil and natural gas, cable television, long-distance telephone service, interstate bus service, and ocean shipping. In addition, banks were allowed to invest in a broader set of assets, and the scope of antitrust laws was reduced.
More recently, economic freedom has expanded in the form of freer international trade. In 1993, NAFTA eliminated a majority of tariffs on products traded among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and phased out others. In 2004, CAFTA eliminated tariffs immediately on more than 80 percent of U.S exports of consumer and industrial goods to Central America and phased out the rest over ten years. Since 1985, we’ve had bilateral or multilateral trade agreements with 16 countries. International trade is freer today than it has been at any time in the last 100 years.
Why Turn Back?
This “greatest story never told” is indeed a tremendous story. It’s the story of the fastest-growing period of prosperity-and the most dramatic mass elevation from poverty-in the history of the world. And it’s all been possible because-bit by bit, in fits and starts, with advances and retreats-the U.S. and other countries have been moving toward greater economic freedom.
In light of this story-which, to repeat, is ongoing, so that you don’t have to go back to medieval or classical times to find the evidence-it is utterly perplexing that so much of the election year rhetoric of late is aimed at reversing our economic course. For instance, it’s hard to find a domestic policy that can be proven to be as successful as the Bush tax cuts-even by presumably Democratic standards. It’s simply a matter of fact that these tax cuts shifted the tax burden substantially to higher income earners and took millions of lower income workers off the tax rolls altogether. The economy took off and ran for at least five years after implementation, and the federal deficit shrank dramatically after the tax cuts were enacted. Yet calls to reverse these tax cuts abound.
For the Democratic Party, of course, there are other reasons for rolling back economic freedom. One is the powerful special interest groups within its coalition-organized labor in particular-which rely on government for special treatment and benefits they could never obtain in free and fair market-based negotiations. Unfortunately, the resulting higher costs and inefficiencies can devastate industries and regions-Michigan being a prime example.
But if we can expect Democrats to resist economic freedom, how do we explain the timidity on the Republican side to defend the economic ideas that have fueled recent advances in prosperity? The answer is that most politicians are ultimately motivated by their perceptions of public opinion. And despite the evidence, the public doesn’t seem to realize the period of unprecedented progress we are in.
As a side note, the increasing lack of opposition among the American people to higher income taxes should not be surprising when an increasingly progressive tax code means ever fewer Americans are paying any taxes at all: In 2005, the top one percent of earners in the U.S. paid 39 percent of all income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent of earners paid just three percent. Over time, if half of the population believes that it is entitled to have someone else pay for government, we should not be surprised if public support for economic freedom continues to erode.
As one who has done a lot of campaigning over the years, I’ll admit, it can be hard to explain to some audiences why they should have to buy their own health insurance when the other side is offering to have the government give it to them for free. But that doesn’t absolve politicians of the moral obligation to present the principled and true argument.
Happy Birthday, America! is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The Executive and Legislative are constitutionally equal branches of the United States of America with build-in balances for the purpose of preventing having one branch ever dominating the other one. We know that the third person in line for the Presidency (after the President and the Vice-President) is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, we further know that all federal laws commence in Congress. No President can initiate laws, raise or lower taxes by himself, this is the job and responsibility of Congress, the President can sign those laws and budgets or veto them but he cannot write or legalize any laws in his branch of the government.
Another important responsibility rests with Congress: Declaring war, period! Accordingly, President George W. Bush asked Congress to give him the authority to deal with Iraq in such a way as to prevent the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq from posing threats to their neighbors, Europe and the rest of the world by developing Weapons of Mass Destruction among other such things. This authority included the use of military force and Congress granted the President’s request in October 2002. When numerous United Nations resolutions failed to achieve Saddam Hussein’s compliance, America and some of its allies went to war against Iraq in March 2003. The initial invasion of Iraq was very successful and was hailed by nearly everyone in Congress and that included the capture of Saddam Hussein later that year. It was the aftermath of the invasion that commenced the quagmire that followed, the internal ethnic and religious struggles in that country were totally underestimated, if even remotely understood and resulted in what followed since 2003.
But it is important to recognize that President Bush who is singularly being shouldered with the war now, could not spend one dime on the war without prior approval of budgetary funds by Congress. You would not know this when you get your news from the media. They claim its Bush’s war and the President keeps it going unnecessarily. Nobody mentions in this that if Congress would simply stop funding the war, the troops would come home in short order. But in spite of all the bickering and complaining, the Democrat led Congress has not been able to stop the war or even begin bringing the troops home. Contrarily, the President introduced a new strategy early last year called the ‘surge’ (an increase of troops to fight the enemies) and Congress funded that too.
If you will remember, the mid-term election in November 2006 was framed and won by the Democrats with the slogan ‘it is time for a change’. After their victory, the Democrats claimed that the American people had spoken and given them a mandate to end the war in Iraq, raise the minimum wage and some other social issues such as investigating the executive branch’s misdeeds during the previous six years.
Is it too early now to look at their record during the past eighteen months? We think not. Here it comes:
- The Democrat led Congress has not ended the war in Iraq, in fact, it has funded an increase in troops;
- The Democrat led Congress has vigorously investigated the executive branch but has not brought about any indictments or convictions for wrong-doing;
- The Democrat led Congress has increased the federal minimum wage – by attaching it to a war funding bill;
- The Democrat led Congress has weakened our national surveillance programs in our war on terror;
- The Democrat led Congress has not passed any meaningful and course-altering legislation that was veto-proof.
We could be more elaborate and specific but what is the use: The results speak for themselves; the Democrats campaign theme in 2006 “It’s time for a change” has not brought about any significant changes! We also believe that it is safe to say they will not be any significant changes until the November elections this year. So then, what good was this campaign slogan and how do the people who believed their promise, wanted to see changes and voted for them feel now?
The point we want to make with this is very elementary: For all of you out there who wanted to see changes in America in late 2006, voted on the basis of empty promises without spending a little time on your own and trying to make sense out of the promises, you got snookered and deserve to be disappointed or feel at a minimum foolish! But you have another chance this fall: Analyze before you vote, think for yourself before you pull the lever for or against someone or something.
We believe to have made our point, Congress is the number one place for the culprits in America, they promise and do not deliver, they do not have your interest in mind first and foremost but the advancement of their personal beliefs and agendas, their own re-election being number One
In conclusion, we want to make one more point about ‘changes’. Common sense should tell us that bringing about changes does not have to be for the better as they could also result in things getting worse. Case in point: the price of a gallon of gas! The price for a gallon of regular gas was about $1.50 in 2001 (when President Bush moved into the White House and Congress was controlled by Republicans) and in November 2006 the price had risen to $2.40 per gallon, a total of $0.90 for the six plus years, an average annual increase of $0.15. Since the ‘change’ advocating Democrats have been in charge of Congress, the price for a gallon of gasoline nationally has risen from $2.40 to $4.10, a total increase of $1.70 (an average of approximately $0.10 per month)! Is Congress to be blamed for this? There could be two answers to this question? 1. YES, they are an equal branch of government and therewith carry a heavy load of what happens in this country! 2. NO, Congress is not to be blamed for this, the blame rests entirely with the President (and his buddies in the oil industry).
We have to ask you: Does this make sense? We do not think so, equal branches of government share equal responsibilities and therefore should share the blame for our energy crisis! The point is: Change or changes should not be assumed to be good but can also lead to disaster as seen in this example. Our recommendation is therefore: Beware of changes! Think before you vote, treat your right to vote as a precious privilege!
Real Culprits of America, continued… is a post from: Common Sense University
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