What is Obama's Top Priority?

The President mentioned a whole host of non-descript people that keep saying “slow down” to which Obama commented…”How long must we wait?” So who are these mysterious voices? Republicans have been effectively locked out of the negotiations so it can’t be them. The Tea Party people have been dismissed by this administration as crazy and the polls show that Americans are already angry for being ignored so it can’t be them either. Progressive Democrats are all behind the Obama agenda and are urging immediate action so nope, not them. The moderate Democrats might feign resistance but we now know they are just looking for their buy-out so that roadblock evaporates as soon as the cash is on the table. The secret service keeps the President a comfortable distance from nearly everyone else so I thought perhaps it was the Salahi’s; but they are little more than media hounds and wouldn’t dare risk exposure by taking any side in the discussion.

If Obama weren’t a Progressive radical with a heavy Chicago political background, I might think it were his conscience speaking to him but we all know that Chicago politicians and Progressive radicals have no conscience. With all other possibilities scientifically excluded, that leaves only one voice as the possible suspect; the voice no one in Washington ever mentions….the voice of reason.

I did not find it surprising that Obama didn’t mention the multitude of voices chiding him to accelerate the process; to force legislation before the mid-term elections eliminate the dominance of Congressional Progressives. These voices want healthcare reform with a strong public option because that is the one thing that will bring about their real goal of Socialized medicine within ten years. These voices want Cap and Trade because they know what most Americans don’t. That Cap and Trade is not about saving the planet from global warming but saving the planet from Capitalism. It is a mechanism that will bridle this nation’s ability to further develop domestic energy resources and will complete the migration of manufacturing industries to countries that do not possess the same penchant for self destruction.

We have been discussing those voices for quite some time on the Vigilance Project. The United Nations; George Soros and the multitude of Marxist organizations that he funds through the Tides Foundation; ACORN; The Apollo Alliance; SEIU; G.E. and even though there are many more, let us not forget the Progressives firmly lodged in Congress. Considering the initiatives the President still claims are a priority for the nation, each and every one of these factions are more than adequately represented by this administration.

So why didn’t Obama mention these voices in the State of the Union Address? Because they mirror his own ideas of what this nation should look like before he’s through with it. It’s kind of like Karaoke….It might sound like you’re singing but if you are really quiet, you can hear the original song and artist clearly in the background. When Obama is quiet (he has to sleep sometimes) you can clearly hear the background music in the speeches and interviews of Progressive Democrats, Andy Stern, Jeff Immelt and whispered by all of those radical supporters of the Socialization of America. They are no more dragging Obama to the left than an alcoholic must be dragged to a bar.

The State of the Union Address contained as many contradictions as it did lies. Jobs creation is the administration’s number one priority but we must complete healthcare and pass a comprehensive climate bill; both of which are sited by the business community as creating a climate of uncertainly that has prevented business owners from risking any expansion. The President announced support for developing domestic energy resources in America including nuclear, coal and oil but he has already placed the right people within the EPA that will make sure that can never happen.

Every possible avenue available to the radical environmental movement has been used to indefinitely stall projects that would have developed domestic energy resources in this country. They don’t do this in other countries because we are the only idiots that give them unlimited access to our courts even when the figurehead filing the suit does not reside in the community where the project has been proposed. If the President weren’t merely playing lip service to the development of domestic energy he would be asking Congress to declare the development of these resources vital to the strategic interests on the United States and block interference from both the environmental left and the EPA.

The President announced that the Federal government will fund a high speed rail project because Europe and Japan have taken the lead in high speed rail and we cannot accept second place. Well, high speed rail makes perfect sense in Europe and Japan because they do not have vast tracts of undeveloped land not to mention that many of those nations are barely larger than the state of Texas. We also have the burden of a twelve trillion dollar national debt that White House projections claim will double by the end of his second term and those projections do no include healthcare reform or the passage of a climate bill. To be able to call high speed rail an investment you must first be able to expect a return on that investment. Short of providing a bone for his union friends and of course, GE; there is no return for this so-called investment.

Yesterday the White House announced a plan to provide small business with a five-thousand dollar tax incentive for each new job they create in 2010. In addition, they will forego any increase in the company’s payroll taxes for those new employees. Sounds good right? Not really. The minimum wage established by the Federal government is currently $7.35 per hour. Add payroll taxes and benefits, because we are going to have to provide healthcare and each new employee will cost that company a minimum of $20,000 per year and the tax incentives and relief are a one time shot. That is like saying don’t worry about whether or not you can afford the payments…go ahead and buy that new car and I’ll throw in a tank of gas. Just think how far that will get you!

President Obama has stacked the deck against the American business community and they are not responding to his jobs initiatives or to the dangling carrots of tax breaks because until they can accurately forecast their future tax liabilities, they will not expand their markets and product lines nor add new employees. Unlike the Federal government, business must first ask the question of how they will be able to pay for additional labor or new programs or they will shortly cease to exist as a business.

Curiously, the President has once again proved his arrogance while speaking at a House Republican retreat today in Baltimore. He stood before the crowd and accused Republicans of portraying health care reform as a "Bolshevik plot" and telling their constituents that he is "doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America."

Er, sorry Mr. President…..that would be me, not the House Republicans. I wouldn’t be saying half of what I have been saying if your administration isn’t pocked with people with socialist and communist backgrounds and if your friends and advisors weren’t recycled 1960’s radicals.

Can you deny that you taught Alinsky in college and then applied those lessons to your community “organizing” techniques in the street of Chicago? Can you deny that your climate Czar, Carol Browner, belonged to an organization (Socialist International) that sought to unify the world under a single Socialist government or that your science Czar, John Holdren, proposed forced abortion and mandatory sterilization in his writings? Can you deny that your former green jobs Czar, Van Jones openly admitted to being a communist or that your own chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel thinks the First Amendment is overrated? I could go on and on but this is getting repetitious.

About the only thing we haven’t discussed on this subject is the purging of your administration of these pariahs only because you have thus far refused to do that. Without the dismissal of the radicals within your administration and circle of advisors, I can only conclude that your aim is to continue to foment support for a Bolshevik plot to take over the healthcare system and are indeed actively pursuing a path that will lead to the destruction of the Constitution of the United States and our Capitalist financial system.

Paul

The State of Confusion Address

The President took to the air last night to deliver his State of the Union Address after a day filled with one prediction after another of what this critical speech will contain. Obama is in a very difficult position as he enters his second year in office. The antics of his administration and Congressional Democrats have isolated him from Republicans, moderate Democrats and independents alike; his failure to deliver the most radical portions of his agenda have the far left nearly as angry with Obama as they were with Bush and the hundreds of billions he spent for “economic recovery” have not prevented the loss of an additional three million jobs since the Stimulus Bill was signed into law.

The dramatic losses for Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts have so far managed to quiet the biggest (the pun is definitely intended) loud mouth in the pro-Obama arsenal, Bob Beckel. Beckel, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Carter administration and a vociferous supporter of Obama as well as every bit of this administration’s most radical proposals. There is no government program or tax hike that could be too big for Beckel and even after Corzine’s loss in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, still maintained that this President would go down in history as the greatest President of all time. Well, if current events can shut even Beckel up, what chance does this President have that this speech will reverse his fortunes and restore his plummeting approval ratings?

Many have insisting that the President should step to the right; cutting taxes to stimulate business and begin an earnest assault on runaway Federal spending. Of course the Democratic strategists have already been saying that Obama finally gets it and his announcement that he intends to freeze discretionary spending for the next three years is proof that he is serious about tackling the economy which is one of the clear priorities of the American people. Of course that might have worked a couple of years ago or with another President but I doubt that will mean much now. Other Presidents didn’t have the additional baggage of not only breaking this many campaign promises but he has also been caught on a number of occasions just plain lying to the American people .

As they occurred, C Span reported on the closed door meetings that Obama had with Congressional Democrats, Senate Democrats, Heath Insurance and Pharmaceutical industry leaders as well as labor Unions, in his attempts to broker support for healthcare reform and yet he (Obama) appeared on network television this week and said that he held no closed door meetings on healthcare and made no closed door deals to buy support for healthcare. Really?

Does he really believe that if he says that often enough and loud enough that we will suddenly forget what we saw with our own eyes? The spending freeze that he is planning is yet another lie. When he announced his plan to freeze Federal discretionary spending he left out a few little details. The discretionary spending the President refers to only represents a very small portion of the current Federal budget, roughly 17%, and I’m sure it just slipped his mind but he also forgot to mention that he had already raised discretionary spending 24% just in the past year. His freeze will do nothing more than lock in an average 8% annual increase over the spending levels of the Bush administration; spending levels that Candidate Obama called reckless.

To dispel any rumors; the President said little, if anything. What I thought was amusing was that Harry Reid was actually caught yawning as the President announced that two million jobs were saved and taxes were cut for 95% of all Americans. Well of course you would have to ignore that three million jobs were lost since the Stimulus Bill was signed into law or that seven million jobs were lost since Obama took office for that to even be a half truth. But let’s not let petty little numbers stand in the way of progress. Oh by the way…..shifting the tax burden from the individuals to businesses does not yield a tax cut. Business NEVER pays taxes. Those taxes are always passed on to the consumer as a rise in the price of goods or services; in essence, a middle class tax increase.

Oh but fear not. Obama promised, well he suggested, a small business tax break to incentivize hiring but like so many of his promises, that is something only Congress can do. Congressional Republicans would agree, at least most of them, but Democrats would have to surrender their chief guarantor of reelection…..class warfare. How could any self-respecting, OK….I take that back…how could any Democrat hope to gain reelection if they took the side of those evil business owners? After all, they have railed against them for years!

I empathize with the President. It must be exceedingly hard to stand before all of Congress, not to mention the nation, and lie your butt off but then again, he wanted the job. Perhaps he thought it would be like Chicago where animated speech mattered more than content. Perhaps he thought it was more like it was a dozen years ago and no one would pay attention. But this is 2010 and we are all watching the shell game (for a change).

The fact is, Obama said nothing I didn’t expect. Even his call for exploiting America’s energy resources is a red herring. He has already appointed the radical left to positions of power within the EPA that will trump any chance that we will develop nuclear, coal or oil powered plants within the United States. That is apparently the domain of developing nations and he cannot develop those resources and keep his promise to the United Nations.

The most important thing in his speech took place nearly at the end. Despite the failing economy and the continuing decline in employment, our President still thinks that driving the nation into the budget-busting abyss of the current healthcare reform legislation and an equally devastating climate agreement is something he can talk us into supporting. I will give him a little credit though. He all but admitted that this was an effort that has been underway for one-hundred years. Not climate change….healthcare. Theodore Roosevelt started that. Fortunately he failed, and everyone who has tried it since has thankfully failed as well.

It is apparent that the President still doesn’t get it and probably never will. He called for another jobs bill, in essence a third stimulus bill, which only proves he is a hopeless ideologue. It seems that everyone but the Federal government knows that government does not create jobs, the private sector does and the private sector can not flourish as long as government is picking their pockets. The job prospects in this country will not improve as long as business remains skeptical about what their tax liability or energy costs will be but this President still wants healthcare reform and cap and trade. He has empowered the EPA to unilaterally curtail carbon emissions with total disregard to the economic damage that will cause if the Congress rejects the climate bill. He wants to invest in high speed rail even though 10% of this nation no longer needs a ride to work. He wants to accelerate green initiatives claiming this is the wave of the future but where is our manufacturing base? Those “green” jobs will be located in countries that will not have the added burden of skyrocketing energy costs because of the government regulation of greenhouse gasses; regulations imposed because of corrupt climate studies and United Nations interference.

Obama said in a recent interview that he would rather be a really good one term President than a mediocre two term President. I don’t think he looked behind door number three. If this President and his co-conspirators on Capitol Hill do not halt this crazy march towards socialism; if they keep giving speeches instead of listening to the American people; if they keep huddling behind closed doors, the current trend will continue through the November election and Barack Obama will be a lame duck in the second year of his first term. He can call the Republicans the party of no if that suits him. What he fails to see is that at the request of the American people, the Republicans will be the party of no more!

Paul

Who is Ellie Light?

In 1722, Ben Franklin was a fifteen year old apprentice for his older brother’s printing business and news paper, the New England Courant. Young Franklin was as opinionated in his youth as he would be throughout his life and wrote on a variety of subjects hoping they would be published in the Courant. To his dismay, his brother James rejected Benjamin’s writings and instead, insisted that his apprentice devote his attention to the duties of an apprentice.

Not one to be dismissed, Ben Franklin masqueraded as a middle aged widow and secretly submitted a series of letters to the New England Courant under the pseudonym of Silence Dogood. He slipped the first letter under the door of the Courant one night and was delighted when he overheard his brother discussing publishing the letter in the paper. Silence Dogood submitted a new letter every fortnight (fourteen days) as promised in the first letter and each one was subsequently published in the Courant. The letters delighted readers which were a mix of commentary and satire. So complete was the character that Ben had created that once Silence said that she had been widowed, a number of men actually sent proposals of marriage to Silence Dogood through the news paper hoping to gain her attention.

The Courant published fourteen letters in all before James found out that Silence Dogood was none other than his younger brother, Ben. James was furious at having been tricked into publishing Ben’s work especially after he expressly told Ben over and over again to stick to his assigned tasks and leave the writing to those that were employed for that purpose. The rift between the two brothers was serious enough that Ben would eventually leave his apprenticeship without permission and escape to Philadelphia.

It seems that we now have a new Silence Dogood on our hands and while she is not a widow or even witty, she is an ardent supporter of Barack Obama. Letters from a person claiming to be Ellie Light began appearing in January at news paper offices in cities across the country and even at some foreign news papers. Each letter was only slightly different from the others; containing the same basic message which is curiously similar to the excuses that Democratic strategists offer for Obama’s poor performance as President.

The underlying message in the Ellie Light letters is that Obama is doing the best that he can and that he can’t simply wave a magic wand to make all of the problems he inherited from George Bush vanish. She certainly tows the Party line by denigrating Bush, the Tea Party movement, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News before continuing to say that she is appalled at the lack of support that Obama has received from the main stream press and that they appear to be ignorant of the landslide victories that swept him into the Presidency in November or 2008.

Letters of political support are nothing new for the editorial pages of local newspapers and Ellie Light would probably have been chalked up as just another one of Obama’s core group of supporters that would still defend him no matter how badly he fails except there were some red flags that began to appear. More than sixty Ellie Light letters were published in American newspapers and while each one was signed by Ellie Light, she would list her home town as being in the circulation area of that particular newspaper. Once someone began connecting the dots, questions began to fly as to the real identity of Ellie Light and several websites ran with that story. Ellie Light would issue a response to those questions in a series of e-mails to the Plain Dealer, a major daily paper in Cleveland Ohio. Curiously, that e-mail correspondence ended abruptly when she was asked about the different home towns associated with her letters.

So who is Ellie Light? Well, someone named Barbara Brooks claimed to be Ellie Light in her face book page but the Plain Dealer has since spoken with two people that say they are Barbara Brooks. One says she’s a divorced nurse and is the author of the Ellie Light letters and the other claims her husband, not her, wrote the Ellie Light letters. While the Plain Dealer did not elaborate on the husband of Barbara number two, they did report on their interview with Barbara number one.

Barbara number one, the one that claims she is Ellie Light, says she that as a traveling nurse, she has worked in a number of hospitals across the county. She claims that she used the names local towns as her home for each paper because many papers will not print letters submitted by people that do not reside in their circulation area. Brooks denies the suggestions that her letter writing campaign was a plot concocted by the Obama administration saying that if that were true, she would not be whining about the lack of support for the President and would have gone with the White House assertions that support for the President and his agenda remains solid. Of course Ms. Brooks uses Skype, an online phone service and that makes her hard to trace but the Plain Dealer says that Brooks did provide a home address located somewhere in California.

Curiously, a third “Ellie Light has now surfaced. A woman claiming her real name is actually Ellie Light contacted the radio talk show of Michael Smerconish today. Mr. Smerconish describes himself as a life-long Republican and despite his support for many conservative positions, supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election. His support for Obama earned him the honor of being the first radio talk show that was graced with an interview with the President. The Ellie Light that called Smerconish also claims to be a traveling nurse that calls southern California home. Weird huh?

So many Ellie Lights and yet none were asked the crucial question of why the IP address (a computer’s personal identification number) was different in each e-mail, some originating in several foreign countries. That would be a neat trick for a traveling nurse but easily explainable if the letters were actually disseminated from all of those areas. As it turns out “Left Coast Rebel”, a conservative blog, provided a tip on Ellie Light to Dan Reihl of “Reihl World View” after someone claiming to be Ellie Light left a comment on his blog using the screen name “Winston44”. Dan researched that lead and found what appeared to be a dormant Twitter account under that name. While there were no tweets, winston44 followed eighteen people and had six followers. Following a hunch that most people will first add the people they know to a new Twitter account, Dan traced the first of winston44’s contacts and surprise, surprise. That account belonged to Adam Segal, President of the 2050 group.

The 2050 group is an international public relations firm and Segal had been working with the National Alliance for Hispanic Health Care in their push for Obama-care. A November 23rd press release placed the National Alliance for Hispanic Health Care at the White House for a meeting with the President over healthcare. Segal is also well known to be a supporter President Obama especially, his healthcare reform initiative. Now that is curious isn’t it? The Ellie Light letters came from multiple IP addresses, some from Europe. Now there appears to be a link between an international public relations firm that is very friendly to this administration and a Twitter account that Ellie Light used to post at least one comment on a conservative blog. Coincidentally, that public relations firm would have no problem generating e-mails from multiple computers around the world.

This story is evolving daily and Dan Reihl says that he has circumstantial evidence that winston44 is none other than Samantha Powers, the wife of Obama’s regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein. It just seems that every time you research anything having to do with this administration that webs appear; magically connecting all of the usual suspects so none of this really surprises me.

To read the article on Ellie Light in the Left Coast Rebel follow the link below:
http://www.leftcoastrebel.com/2010/01/ellie-light-and-white-house-via-riehl.html

For a look at Reihl World View use: http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2010/01/ellie-light-now-mark-spivey.html

Paul

What Does the Election of Scott Brown Mean?

After a two week absence, so much has happened that I barely know where to begin. I suppose an obvious place to start would be the election of Scott Brown to the Massachusetts Senate seat previously held by Ted Kennedy. This Republican victory overshadowed both the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races for several reasons. First, the “Liberal Lion”, Ted Kennedy had held that seat for nearly fifty years and the White House felt secure that a Democrat would have no problem capitalizing on Kennedy’s legacy. Second, Massachusetts is well known to be one of the most Liberal states in the union, consistently sending the left of the left to Washington and third, without the 60th vote in the Senate, the President’s healthcare reform initiative would be all but dead, something Massachusetts Liberals would want to avoid; at least that is what everyone thought.

Scott Brown campaigned on the idea that his was the vote that would finally put the brakes on the President’s agenda. There was no doubt that this election would determine if the healthcare reform act, as well as many of the President’s other ultra-Liberal programs, would ever see the light of day and the Democrats responded with as vicious a campaign as had ever been seen. Even after all the stops were pulled including a last minute Presidential visit to try and garner support for Coakley, the voters would elect Republican Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy by a tidy margin.

To most reasonable people, this was a wholesale rejection of not only the healthcare reform bill but of the openly corrupt tactics that were being used to force it through the legislative process. Congressional Democrats had defied the will of the people and those people were given an incredible opportunity to send a message that could not be ignored. Well, it could not be ignored unless you were a hopeless ideologue that intended to pursue your agenda regardless of the consequences. Moderate Democrats heard the message loud and clear but our Progressive friends and their President seem to have missed the mark entirely.

According to the President, they were so busy handling the fiscal crisis that he inherited from Bush that they…get this….”failed to adequately speak to the American people about what their core values are”. After the 1994 mid-term elections, President Clinton faced the nation after a massive Democratic defeat and said quite eloquently “We hear you”. Not this President. Instead of admitting that the defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and finally, Massachusetts, were the revocation of the mandate that he only imagined he had, Obama would rather believe that he didn’t explain his ideas in terms that we could understand. How condescending can one man be? Obama apparently believes that if the voters rejected his plans, it was only because he didn’t speak slowly enough or didn’t use the little words that we idiots would understand.

Obama added that the anger of the voters that prompted them to vote for Scott Brown was the same anger that had swept him into office a year earlier. A psychologist on one talk show panel said that this displayed what could only be called, narcissistic tendencies; that this statement was as foolish as a man that would say his wife filed for divorce to be with her new lover not because she was rejecting him, but as a different manifestation of the same love for her new man that had first brought him and his wife together years earlier. I know that sounds foolish but think of what is being said here. Obama believes, or at least he says he does, that the recent Republican victories are just an extension of anti-incumbency anger and that is really only a rejection of previous Bush era policy, not his. The only problem with that argument is that Coakley is not an incumbent that supported Bush policy; she is a Democrat that supports current Obama policy.

Even more bizarre than Obama’s statements are those of the Progressive Democrats in Congress. They are blaming the defeat of Coakley on their failure to push harder for a healthcare reform bill that contained a strong public option. Howard Dean, former DNC Chairman and failed Presidential candidate, absolutely refuses to accept that this is in any way a rejection of Obama’s Socialist agenda and instead believes with all his heart that the Massachusetts’s voters were punishing the Democratic Party for not being Liberal enough. Let me get this right. Massachusetts’s voters were so upset that healthcare reform hadn’t passed that they elected the only credible roadblock to the passage of the healthcare reform bill? He is crazy, isn’t he?

Democratic Strategists are even funnier as they weasel their way around questions about these three major losses for Democrats. The first thing they have all done was to point to the special election in New York’s 23rd district where the Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman was narrowly defeated by Democrat challenger Bill Owens. The results had Owens winning with 49% of the vote to Hoffman’s 45% with Republican Dede Scozzafava still holding 6% of the vote a week after she dropped out of the race, throwing her support behind Owens. Unfortunately, the race was close enough to fall pray to the “ACORN affect” as ACORN focused their “get the vote out” campaign solidly behind Owens. Considering the indictment of ACORN employees for voter fraud in other states, I would guess that if Doug Hoffman had persisted, there would probably been a sufficient number of suspicious ballots found in a comprehensive recount to have shifted the election in his favor.

The race in Massachusetts was lost in part because of the perception of the American people that we are not only being ignored by Congressional Democrats and the President but that since we are resisting this push towards socialization, we are not even worthy to see what they voting on; that even the discussions of the bill are to be hidden from the ungrateful masses that don’t understand that the President is doing this for our own good. The message was certainly clear but the intended recipients are still ignoring it. They have already said that they intend to force this legislation through in true Saul Alinsky form…by any means necessary. The difference between politicians and ideologues is that politicians can be swayed by the threat of losing an election. Socialist ideologues will sacrifice themselves to progress their agenda for the good of the collective. This message of “full speed ahead” only serves to tell us who these people are. Their intent is clear…to bring about massive social change that cannot be reversed no matter who is elected later. There are already provisions in the healthcare bill that will prevent the repeal of certain key portions of the reform act should the “wrong” Party gain power in the November elections.

The election of Scott Brown may be the single most important electoral race in the past 100 years and the only hope of defeating the nefarious plans of the Progressive movement. What must be watched very closely now is how long they will attempt to delay the certification of the election results. Obama spoke out against delaying the certification process but I fear that is just to get his voice on record as opposing that dirty little trick to distance himself from something that he knows is already in the works.

The State of the Union address is coming this Wednesday and I will bet now that it will be another hour long stab at blaming Bush for the economy, the recent attempts by Al Qaida to inflict more damage on the United States and the anger of the American people. Once he is confident that everyone remembers Bush he will make another pledge to have healthcare reform back on the table as a dire need of a compassionate nation. Lenin never took no for an answer and neither will his protégé, Barack Hussein Obama.

Paul

The Ever Vigilant Mother

For the past two weeks I have been with family in New York after the passing of my mother, Irene Magel. My mother was not sophisticated, but she was wise. She was not a celebrity nor was she known to all that many, but she was loved by all that knew her. She was not rich but she did possess a wealth of love and respect that comes with the life-long struggle of raising seven children. Most importantly, armed with her faith and convictions, she faced death without fear or question and with the satisfaction that her work on earth was not simply over, but was in fact, complete.

As I was growing up, history fascinated me. Reading about the early 20th century and how far we had progressed in that short span of time amazed me. It seemed like such a brief moment between the first flight of the Wright brothers and the supersonic Concorde; Goddard’s miniature rockets and the Apollo 11 moon landing; Marconi’s wireless and the cell phone. I attended the New York World’s Fair in 1965 and marveled at the bright, shiny future that was predicted for us. If only a portion of that was to come true, what a fantastic world it would be indeed.

I spoke with my parents about what it was like as they grew up; witnessing the vast differences between what was available to them in their childhood compared to the marvels of the modern world. I was a bit surprised that my mother didn’t find it all that amazing. It never dawned on me that looking at the quantum leap in the quality of life between 1920 and 1980 retrospectively, was entirely different than living through those changes one day at a time. After all, the earth didn’t move when cassette tapes gave way to CD’s or when pocket calculators were replaced by personal computers because those advances happened in incremental steps. Instead of listening to her stories of awe, I found that my mother’s perception of those changes were no different than my own experiences of living life in a dynamic and constantly changing world; mundane and hardly worth the attention. Instead, she found all of her joys and sorrows in the people that surrounded her life and paid very little attention to such trivial appliances.

My mother did tell me about the challenges she faced over the years. She was a mere eight years old when the stock market collapsed in 1929; thrusting her world into chaos and uncertainty. She rarely spoke about her own hardships during those years but as many that lived through that nightmare, she developed a compulsive frugality and would let nothing go to waste. I don’t think anyone that was alive during the great depression ever felt secure again and they would be haunted by a nagging fear for the rest of their lives that those dark days could return at any time and without warning.

Irene was born into a modest existence in Brooklyn, New York and while her childhood was unremarkable, it was still a part of the experiences that would shape her into the person she would become. The meager times and rough neighborhood could have taken her in any direction but she was devoutly religious and her faith would guide her through the years; steeling her against the influences that so many others fell pray to. She would eventually meet my father at a neighborhood party where my father volunteered to accompany her on her task to pick up hamburgers for the crowd. As they walked, they found a curious interest in each other. Before they ordered everyone else’s food, they decided to eat their burgers at the café while they sat and talked. My mother confessed that she wasn’t all that sure about my father because he was eleven years older than she was and to her, that was pretty darn old! Still, one thing led to another and despite the protests from her mother (my grandmother) she married my father just as World War II erupted.

My mother and father had very different personalities but unlike many couples today, found out that those differences complimented each other and that together they could accomplish things that neither would have been able to do alone. My father worked as a truck driver delivering home heating oil and would return each night exhausted and reeking of fuel oil. My mother worked to make a home for them and manage the meager pay my father earned at a time when so many others were out of work. Even though they struggled, their struggle must have seemed like a blessing compared to those that were living in makeshift shacks that dotted the edges of city dumps and vacant lots. While they were better off than many, they still faced the daily hardships of life during those stressful and unnerving years. To add to her list of hardships, my father would be drafted and deployed to the European theater while my mother was expecting their first son, Henry junior.

Unable to keep their apartment while my father fought in the war, my mother moved into her parent’s home while she awaited the arrival of her baby. As soon as she was able, she would work installing aircraft instruments not only to help provide for her son but to do her part for the war effort. While she labored in the factories, my father stormed the beaches of Normandy and would eventually make his way across France with General Patton’s Third Army. There were many nights my mother would shake in fear as the news broadcast the horrific stories of the casualties of war wondering if young Henry would ever meet his father. Though he was wounded several times, my father would survive the war and return to try and figure out how he would live with everything he had witnessed during that horrible campaign and my mother would forever be at his side to help him.

My mother told me the stories of how my father would push her from the bed and throw imaginary hand grenades in his sleep. Only God knows what he saw in the dark because he would never speak of what he faced during the war or what he would fight each night in his dreams. I do know that as my father approached his own death in 1986, he consulted a priest because he was deeply concerned about what he had to do during the war and how to reconcile God’s commandment against killing another human with the actions he was ordered to carry out. It was the one and only time I know of that he cried. Although the priest comforted him, reminding him that the destruction of that evil regime was in keeping with God’s plan for him and that his sins were already forgiven, I couldn’t help but feel a wave of profound sorrow for my father as I realized the heavy weight of the guilt that he had carried silently with him for over forty years.

My father’s experiences had shaped him and he would pass his sage wisdom on to me over the years. He provided me with a very clear view of right and wrong; good and bad, in terms that were rigid and painted in sharply contrasting black and white images. It would be my mother that softened the harsh lines between those two polar opposites and the small measure of gray that she added taught me compassion and forgiveness. It is her influence that gives me the ability to see the bigger picture; to add that little bit of understanding and empathy that makes me just a little more complete. To be perfectly clear, she was not contradicting my father but rather, adding the softness he kept hidden in his heart that we would not find his words. Like so many men of my father’s day, emotions did not come easy and he relied heavily on my mother to add that special touch for us.

I am not ashamed to say that I will miss my mother terribly, she was very special to me and we shared a bond that was unique, even among the others of our family. Thankfully, she also shared her faith with me so I am absolute in my belief that she is now in God’s hands and knowing her devotion to God, I am certain that she is basking in His Glory finally free from all of the pains and fears she suffered during her long struggle on this harsh planet. My children were equally blessed to have been a part of her life and all but my two youngest grandchildren were touched by her as well. Her funeral was surrounded by photographs and memories from our past and it was comforting to see that the services became a celebration of her life and not a statement of our grief over her passing.

Hers was a life of toil and sacrifice but she was neither bitter nor sorrowful. She gladly gave so that her children would have more than she did. She was meek and humble and never worried about how she would be remembered beyond the thoughts of her own children. She couldn’t begin to understand that she had more influence on my life than the most illustrious hero that ever lived throughout the ages. After I returned, I sat and rocked my grandson as I thought about my mother. I looked down at that sleeping child and saw some of my mother’s features on his tiny face. It was then that I realized that she isn’t really gone; she lives on quite happily in her children and her children’s children and that this was her final lesson for me.

Good night Mom, I love you.

Paul

Irene Loretta Magel 1921 - 2010

Due to a death in the family the Vigilance Project will be taking a brief hiatus and will return as soon as possible.

Obama: Immunity for Interpol

On December 16 2009, President Obama issued an executive order amending the International Organizations Immunities Act. When I first heard of this, the commentator erroneously stated that the President had issued an order granting immunity to Interpol as they conduct operations within the United States. In fact, Interpol was already recognized as an International Organization in an executive order issued by Ronald Reagan in 1983 and as such, were already entitled to the immunities enumerated in the International Organizations Immunities Act of 1945 except for the sections of that act that were detailed in Reagan’s executive order (Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6).

In 1995, President Bill Clinton also issued an executive order amending the act as it pertained to Interpol by deleting section 2 (d). That section related to import taxes and duties on personal items brought into the country by agents of a recognized international organization. The order that Barack Obama signed was for the most part, tax related provisions that would actually require Interpol agents to pay taxes on certain monies earned within the United States. There is one little disturbing part of his order that is most definitely not tax related; Section 2 (c).

Executive Order 13524 of December 16, 2009

Amending Executive Order 12425 Designating Interpol as a Public International Organization Entitled to Enjoy Certain Privileges, Exemptions, and Immunities

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words ‘‘except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act’’ and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

Barack Obama

In the original act, section 2(c) grants international organizations immunity from search and or confiscation of property and assets as well as declaring the archives of such an organization as inviolable. This immunity was specifically denied to Interpol in the original order issued by Ronald Reagan in 1983 and that denial was not altered by Bill Clinton’s executive order of 1995.

“The International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288)

Section 2 (c)-
Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity be expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.”

Why would Interpol, an international police department, require immunity from search of their properties and assets? Why would they have a need to maintain secrecy of their records from the government of a member nation and why was that important enough to invoke a Presidential Executive Order to reverse the denial of that immunity? Something just isn’t right.

Interpol was founded in Austria in 1923 as the International Criminal Police (ICP). After the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Interpol fell under Nazi control and the headquarters were moved to Berlin. During that period, the Presidents of the ICP included Otto Steinhäusl who was an SS General, chair of the Wannsee Conference and the chief executor of the “Final Solution to the Jewish question”, Arthur Nebe, a general in the SS and Einsatzgruppen leader under whose command at least 46,000 people were killed, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a general in the SS, the highest ranking SS officer executed after the Nuremberg Trial.

After the end of World War II in 1945, the organization was revived as the International Criminal Police Organization by European Allies of World War II officials from Belgium, France, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. Its new headquarters were established in Saint-Cloud, a town on the outskirts of Paris. They remained there until 1989, when they were moved to their present location, Lyon. ICPO officially adopted the name “Interpol” in 1956.

In order to maintain as politically neutral a role as possible, Interpol's constitution forbids its involvement in crimes that do not overlap several member countries, or in any political, military, religious, or racial crimes. Its work focuses primarily on public safety, terrorism, organized crime, crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes, Piracy, illicit drug production, drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, human trafficking, money laundering, child pornography, white-collar crime, computer crime, intellectual property crime and corruption.

Hmmm? I still see no reason why they would need the immunities detailed in Obama’s Executive Order; particularly immunities regarding archived information. After all, didn’t a “crotch bomber” just walk on to an international flight bound for the United States because our own intelligence and law enforcement agencies refused to share information?

The fact is that regardless of what Interpol’s constitution says, there can be no verification that they are adhering to their own constitution or that they are not impinging upon the Constitutional rights of our own citizens without the ability to subpoena and examine archived files and information if the need should arise. If one of the activities of interest to Interpol is terrorism, wouldn’t their involvement necessarily revolve around a member nation’s definition of a terrorist? We already know our own head of Homeland Security has some very curious criteria for identifying potential domestic terrorists. In fact, Janet Napolitano may have a hard time using the name “terrorist” in conjunction with Muslim extremists but curiously, she has no problem throwing that title around at American citizens, identifying whole groups (profiling) of Americans that she feels may have the potential to engage in acts of domestic terror. You know…those really suspicious tea party people, people with shaved heads and former members of the military that are not exactly pleased with the direction this nation is taking.

We also know that certain records can be catastrophic to a Presidency. Nixon’s fall centered more on eighteen minutes of missing audio tapes than it did on a third rate burglary. The steps Nixon took to categorize the people that he considered unfriendly to his administration led directly to laws prohibiting the compilation of a Presidential enemies list and resulted in requirement to archive and maintain all White House correspondence in perpetuity. No, the wrong kind of records can be very bad for a President unless you can get someone else to keep them for you….someone that cannot be forced to produce those records; maybe even an international police force that routinely keeps, well, records about people. How convenient!

Now that Hillary Clinton agreed that the US would partner with the United Nations on their small arms initiative, those records (records the United States government is prohibited from keeping) as well as the immunity of Interpol, could be very useful if the UN decided it was time collect privately owned weapons in the United States…you know…just to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. After all, Interpol (ICP) records were very useful to the Nazi’s during World War II for exactly that purpose and millions of lawfully owned weapons were confiscated using those records each time the German Army occupied a new territory.

To continue, each member country maintains a National Central Bureau (NCB) staffed by national law enforcement officers. The NCB is the designated contact point for the Interpol General Secretariat, regional bureau and other member countries requiring assistance with overseas investigations and the location and apprehension of fugitives. This is especially important in countries with many law-enforcement agencies. This central bureau is a unique point of contact for foreign entities, which may not understand the complexity of the law-enforcement system of the country they attempt to contact. For instance, the NCB for the United States of America is housed at the United States Department of Justice. The NCB then ensures the proper transmission of information to the correct agency.

Well what do you know about that! The Interpol National Central Bureau for the United States is housed in the same building as the Department of Justice. Why, Interpol is neighbors with Eric Holder. Now that is convenient too. But maybe I’m reading too much into this. After all, a reputable organization like Interpol has an entire independent command structure that doesn’t answer to our President. At least I don’t think so?

As it turns out, the current Secretary General of Interpol is Ronald Kenneth Noble. Ronald Noble is an American that was the Undersecretary for Enforcement of the United States Department of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. Wow! What a coincidence! I’ll bet our current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, saw him all the time back then; in fact, this must be like one of those high school reunions for them. What fun!

The President of Interpol is Khoo Boon Hui. Hui is from Singapore but believe it or not, he attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard right here in the good old USA. A lot of very liberal, very political people attended that school and you would not believe the connections you can make just by being an alumni and that is really, really, really convenient.

Paul

Governor Paterson Battles Progressives in New York

There are moments in life that are just memorable like your first love, your wedding day or baby’s first step. Those things are indelibly etched into your brain because they are so very, very rare. Yesterday the New York Times published a story about New York Governor David Paterson lambasting the State legislature because they are spending New York into ruin. Wow!

Actually, this represents three very, very rare occasions. The first is seeing a career tax and spend Democrat actually facing the reality of a fiscal nightmare instead of trying to spend his way out of it; the second is that he laid the blame at the feet of other tax and spend Democrats instead of blaming Bush, Reagan or some new age planetary alignment and the third, the New York Times actually reported the story as news instead of lacing it with their usual brand of liberal spin. Weird huh?

New York is facing a fiscal crisis that took decades to create and is anticipating a seven billion shortfall for the coming year. Last year, New York barely escaped catastrophe, in part by federal stimulus aid, and yet state officials increased total spending by nearly nine percent, even as the economy continued to stall and State tax revenues plummeted. New York is the home to some of the highest taxes in the nation and that has cost them dearly. Businesses are relocating to areas where they are welcome instead of penalized and there has been a continuing exodus of the affluent as tax rates climb higher; a trend that began years ago because the State and City view New York taxpayers as an inexhaustible source of ready cash.

Paterson could adopt the usual liberal stance, throwing his hands in the air and reminding everyone that he inherited this mess from his predecessor. In fact, in his case it would be easy to do since he replaced a Governor that resigned in disgrace over a prostitution scandal. Even though Paterson is blind, he has displayed better vision in recent months than many of his associates at the State capitol. Hey, maybe he’s been “born again” and will be the next convert to the Republican Party but I doubt it. It’s just like the old saying that there are no atheists on a battlefield, if financial balance were miraculously restored to New York tomorrow; I would bet that he would start signing blank checks again.

Paterson is not popular but with a State budget in crisis, no governor would be. First, Paterson decried the need to bring State spending under control and urged the legislature to cut taxes or risk losing their biggest taxpayers to other states. Then he bucked pressure from the White House urging him not to run for reelection as the White House strategists claimed that it would be easier to retain Democratic control of the State with a new candidate running than it would be to try to get an incumbent reelected in the anti-incumbent climate of 2010. Now Paterson is taking the fight directly to the legislature and this time there were no niceties. There was no fluff or flourish as Paterson laid it on the line. He blamed the State’s financial crisis squarely where it belongs, with the legislature that writes the spending bills. The same legislature that refused to consider budget cuts when the piggy bank was found to be empty, and in fact, increased State spending while they “passed the hat around” in Washington hoping some sympathetic Senator would drop some loose change in it.

Washington apparently possesses the same fiscal common sense that the New York legislature does. As the national debt approached twelve trillion dollars, one would expect that the Federal government would have spent nights and weekends trying to find ways to reduce the weight of the Federal budget so we could begin to pay down our debt. That is what the American people must do when they are faced with a financial crisis. But no, our government nearly tripled the Federal budget, adding a record one point seven trillion dollars to the national debt in just one year. Instead of trying to reduce the debt, they spent their nights and weekends crafting a brand new entitlement bill under the guise of healthcare reform that will cost the American taxpayer an additional two point seven trillion dollars over ten years and that is only if the Medicare cuts in the legislation actually take place - which is something that Congress has never done no matter how many times they pledged that they would.

Thanks to the Socialist programs created under Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”, we now have a mandatory spending burden of over two point two trillion dollars before we even get to discretionary spending for things like national defense and just turning the lights on in the capitol building. In fact, the largest portion under mandatory spending is for Social Security which now costs more than defense spending. Now before the seniors start yelling I know that you’ve paid into Social Security all of your life and that money is yours; well at least it used to be. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The first time this nation needed “healthcare reform” marked the 1965 birth of Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Johnson. By 1968, both of those programs had swollen exponentially and vastly surpassed CBO estimates. As the threat of insolvency loomed on the horizon, the Federal Government emptied the cash out of the Social Security trust fund to save the “Great Society” and stuffed Social Security with IOU’s. Social Security was then made a part of the Federal budget with the thought that they will fix the problem later.

Well later never came and this new “fix” of healthcare reform can only guarantee that Medicare and Medicaid will survive until 2019 even though we are preparing to gut our entire healthcare system and the economic vitality of American business to pay for it. Only one thing is certain. Just as Governor Paterson warns New York, if we cannot restore balance to the government, this nation will cease to exist as we know it. President Bush tried to privatize Social Security during his administration and was castrated for it. Why?

If the Federal government had left Social Security alone back in 1968 it would have plenty of money to meet its obligations. It was a government run retirement plan and under a fiduciary, would have generated the same gains that private retirement plans enjoy; growing through a diverse portfolio of investments. To re-privatize Social Security would mean that the U.S. government would have to repay the IOU’s with interest and that would break the hearts of Progressive Democrats. If people were allowed to pay directly into their Social Security accounts again instead of into the general treasury, where would Progressives get the money they need to fund all of those really important projects like the Napa Valley wine train in Nancy Pelosi’s district, Marijuana and Malt liquor journals or my favorite, politically correct puppet shows in Minnesota? No I am not kidding, these were all pet projects hidden in the stimulus bill.

Congress is spending like they are on a drunken binge and now that we have a professor of “Saul Alinsky Theory” for a President; his twisted view of “social justice” has all but eliminated the need to even discuss fiscal responsibility. There are only two differences between New York and Washington right now. The first is that New York cannot print its own money and the second is that there is no one in Washington trying to stop this runaway train before it runs out of track. The Republican Congressmen can say what they want about the Obama administration but where were they when Bush was on his spending spree? Republicans lost control of Congress for the same reasons that Democrats are in trouble now. America has had enough and we will have no more. If the anti-incumbent fervor can maintain direction and focus, we may be looking at the first major overhaul of Congress and the direction of the nation since the United States Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation.

What can we do with more than five-hundred unemployed members of Congress? While I would love to see every one of them living in cardboard boxes under a highway overpass; I suppose the humane thing to do is to put them in rehab and enroll them in a twelve step program for shopaholics before they go home and do to their families what they did to America.

Paul

Healthcare on C-Span? Not in this lifetime.

For a little comic relief, a reporter covering a press conference featuring Nancy Pelosi asked why the Healthcare conference committee is meeting behind closed door when the President promised total transparency during his campaign. He continued that he (Obama) had stated with clarity that the process would be open, involve both Parties and would appear on C-Span for all to see. Nancy chuckled and said “The President said a lot of things during the campaign.”

That tells me two things. Number one: Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid never had an intention of conducting the conference committee in public no matter what the President said and number two: that Nancy Pelosi is still peeved that Obama is willing to sacrifice the public option, coverage for illegal immigrants and public finding for abortion in order to strike a deal that will allow a bill to pass.

Coming from the Socialist stronghold of San Francisco, Nancy still believes that the healthcare bill will be nothing but an empty shell without these provisions and that the President should persuade if possible but drag if necessary; the Party, the Congress and the nation to accept these extremely liberal policies. Don’t forget, that in the Marxist philosophy, government must care for people for the good of the collective, and that only faithful socialists know what you need whether you like it or not. Nancy really didn’t want the public option; what she wanted was a government run universal care system identical to European models. She would have settled for the public option only because the way it was laced into the House bill it would have crippled the private health insurance industry allowing the public option to morph into a universal care system over time.

What is known is that the President is beginning to learn that D.C. is not Chicago and even though he has surrounded himself with the best political thugs that money can buy, his corrupt little circle of radical community organizers is no match for the real warlords of Washington, career politicians that have spent decades perfecting the art of torpedoing the aspirations of men with one hundred times the experience that the junior Senator from Illinois had. As Nancy Pelosi erupted into schoolgirl giggles at the mention of Obama’s promise to air the healthcare debate on C-Span it occurred to me that the “Big O” doesn’t have the sway over Congress that he thought he had.

Obama is so intent on getting this bill passed that he was willing to surrender key parts of the legislation that were of prime importance to the most liberal of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He has been under heavy fire from Progressive Democrats for dealing away the public option and may lose moderate Democrats for not strengthening the language to prevent the public funding of abortion. Of course if he insisted on keeping the public option and caved on the abortion issue the Progressives would be sulking over abortion and the moderates would be furious over the public option. Now nearly every other state is angry about the deals that were given to Louisiana and Nebraska to secure the votes of Nelson and Landrieu and many of those states have their Attorneys General looking into the legality of those deals on the grounds that the Constitution requires that taxes are applied equally among the states.

In the end, I am sure that they will pass something if only to avoid the charge of failure in an election year. After all, Obama hung all his meat on this hook to the exclusion of everything else so not to bring this to fruition would cripple the rest of his agenda. Congressional Democrats are following him over the cliff hoping that since the bill prohibits insurance companies from having exclusions for pre-existing conditions or from dropping clients that have contracted a catastrophic illness, that Americans will view this as something positive that the Democrats have brought to the table.

Here lies the problem. The Bill enacts all of the tax increases and service cuts immediately but the most damaging (and expensive) parts of the bill do not begin to come into play before 2014. Those are also the parts of the bill that provide access to coverage through the government exchange or provide subsidies for people that cannot afford coverage so the uninsured will still be uninsured when Election Day comes around. Without the exchange and subsidies, what insurance will the unemployed have when companies begin laying off workers in response to the increased tax liabilities this bill will levy on business? If the business mandates begin with companies that have over fifty employees, companies with fifty-three can and will drop a few people to remain below the minimum. Companies with a hundred employees that do not currently offer health insurance may end up only being able to afford eighty with insurance.

The other problem for Democrats is that they continue to underestimate the real anger that has been fomenting in the general population. Sixty percent of Americans do not want this bill to pass and most believe that if the conversations must be hidden from the people, then the bill must be too horrible to risk making it public. Even more believe that if the Congressional leadership has to resort to outright bribery to buy the votes for passage, then this bill obviously cannot stand on its own merit and deserves to fall. Congresses refusal to deliver on Obama’s promise of transparency may, in the end, prove to be a larger liability than if they fail to deliver healthcare reform at all.

Democratic spokesmen and White House loyalists have a great strategy for combating the public demand that the President keep his promise and force the Congress to hold the conference hearings openly; they lie. Simple huh? They keep repeating that this administration has restored transparency to Washington and has maintained an openness that was totally absent during the Bush administration. Well actually, that was two lies and another stab at the previous administration. The truth is that during the Bush administration, Congress never held hearings on any bill of this magnitude in secret.

The Bush administration attempted to privatize Social Security and even though many recognized that as a sound move to help control the budget deficit, it was a very controversial subject. As heated as the debates were and as passionate as both sides of the argument were; it was widely recognized that is was an important issue with serious ramifications and that demanded a complete and very public debate. The measure failed in the end but what is the measure of success? Doing something at any cost just to say we’ve done it or doing it right?

No, the Obama administration does not want these hearings held in public because the American people would openly revolt not only if they knew the dirty details of the legislation but at the criminally corrupt Chicago style bribery that they are using to obtain the votes for passage. Those that are surprised that Obama would lie so boldly during the campaign had obviously read only the books written by Obama himself and not the ones written about him.

This administration is transparent? Obama has three dozen Czars holding positions of power that answer to no one; not even Congress. Not only have they refused to speak with Congress about their actions citing executive privilege but the most damaging bits of information about them is being sought out and expunged from the internet whenever it is found. Obama’s campaign spent over nine-hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to seal any personal information about him including school transcripts, thesis papers, business dealings, legal records and of course, the long form of his Hawaii birth certificate….you know, the one that would actually have a doctor’s signature and a state seal on it.

I suppose the case could be made that this administration is very transparent. After all, what is more transparent than the total absence of substance?

Paul

Old Politicians Never Die, They Just Smell Like it.

Do you remember the good old days when ex-Presidents would build their libraries, make a few stops on a speaking tour and write their memoirs? Now it seems that not only ex-President’s like Jimmy Carter have no idea when to keep their mouths shut but even those that ran for President and lost just have to put their two cents in as well.

Actually, it has nothing to do with the current date because there are large gaps between the Presidents that left office determined to allow the next President to shape policy and the course of the nation as they see fit and then there are those that must emanate an irritating buzz from the sidelines just to remain in the fringe of the spotlight. In fact, it seems that the proclivity of pestilence seems to be a product of ideology with liberals displaying a general inability to afford any measure of courtesy to future administrations; the same courtesy that they would have demanded for themselves had they actually stayed in office.

Former Presidents understand the searing responsibility of holding the highest office in the land even though none of them knew the depth of that responsibility when they began their race to become President. As such, there has always been a certain amount of sympathy that is afforded the next President because of the demands associated with that job. Even George Washington commented to John Addams that he felt sorry for him as he took the oath of office as the nation’s second President. While some serving President’s have invited criticism by blaming every failure of their administration on the previous one, it is a very rare occasion when a former President responds in kind but it still happens.

What is different as of the late twentieth and continuing into the early twenty first century is that for the first time, the losers are twice as vocal as the former Presidents. Most Americans know that Truman ascended to the Presidency after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945 but how many know that Truman was FDR’s third Vice President. The first, John Garner, resigned at the beginning of FDR’s second term and the second, Henry Wallace, was too liberal even for Roosevelt. In fact, Wallace believed that the Russian Revolution was on par with the American Revolution and both represented equal and important parts of man’s march to freedom. Truman was selected as the Vice Presidential nominee for the 1944 election as Roosevelt’s health wavered and Wallace was believed to be too radical to chance his elevation to President should Roosevelt die in office.

How many know that Truman had no Vice President in his first term and that the Vice President in his second term, Alben Barkley, was not his running mate in the general election? Most know very little about former Vice Presidents that did not attain the Presidency and even less about those that lost elections for President or Vice President because there was still some measure of decorum back then. Now, the losers take the stage, still striving for the fame they feel they were cheated from attaining. Al Gore, unlike his predecessors, refused to call for unity behind the new President and instead, fanned the flames of the left’s outright hatred of George Bush after the election of 2000.

Gore used the notoriety he had gained from the attention surrounding the 2000 election re-count to push his radical (and wrong) agenda to foster awareness of the so-called threat of global warming. This thrust him into the limelight once again and like any other attention starved brat, only served to reinforce his ill behavior. As an irritant to Bush administration climate policy, Gore sought to inculcate the radical environmental movement and eventually, the youth of the western world with a religious fervor about coming disasters that will befall the planet because of global warming. Even now, as the IPCC and the CRU have been caught red-handed manipulating and even suppressing climate data to support their hokey theories; Gore persists, spewing out these outrageous claims while his so-called “irrefutable” evidence crumbles bit by corrupt bit. You know, you almost feel bad for him. He couldn’t handle losing the 2000 election without a tantrum and now, in the absence of real proof, he’s acting like the proverbial madman on the corner shouting “The end is near!” as people cross the street to avoid eye contact with him.

Of course Gore could have avoided this embarrassment if he weren’t so vain and simply accepted his defeat with dignity. In fact, he could probably have lived out the balance of his life as a respected political analyst much as Henry Kissinger has. Even Richard Nixon managed to redeem himself and in the later years of his life, had been in high demand by news programs that were analyzing the, then current, Clinton administration. Nixon became a serious voice in the political discussion again because he displayed the confidence of a serious man and not the dour attitude of a sore loser.

By now, we are all used to the nonsensical drivel that emanates from the mouth of former President, James Carter. Most of what Carter says only serves to remind us why his Presidency marked the low tide stain for the modern Democratic Party and more importantly, why his bid for reelection was rejected by the American people. The naiveté of his recent statements are perfectly consistent with the simplicity that he exhibited during his Presidency. Unlike Gore, Carter isn’t lashing out over sour grapes, he just doesn’t know any better. Truthfully, I had always held that I liked Jimmy Carter personally. I think he is one of the few Presidents that followed his heart. Hid did what he believed was right; however, his idea of right did not serve the nation well and as much as he is an honorable man, he did not possess the necessary qualities that a modern nation demands of a President.

Now we have John Kerry. Kerry is only one of a long list of Massachusetts politicians that is quite popular in the liberal rat’s nest of Massachusetts but has failed miserably on a national level. Kerry comes from a wealthy family (Forbes) and married into a wealthier one (Heinz). Like so many born to wealth, the political scene was alluring to Kerry as he drooled at the thought of testing out all of the Socialist theories he had learned in Yale. After all, the lives of the general population are only pawns for wealthy socialists to play with and if they are wrong and their policies ruin the nation, they still have their fortune to escape with. It is all an exercise in theory for them.

Kerry had served in the United States Navy during Viet Nam. Assigned to a swift boat in what veteran’s call “the brown water navy”, Kerry was reportedly injured in combat several times and was decorated for bravery. Kerry had requested early release in January of 1970, for the purpose of running for Congress that fall and was discharged in March of that year. Rather than running for Congress, Kerry decided to join the anti-war movement after his release from the Navy and had made a number of high profile appearances as a decorated war veteran opposed to the war. Of course Kerry had to go just a bit too far and while speaking out against the war ended up denigrating the President, the nation and even his fellow sailors in the process. This would prove to be a critical mistake later in life.

Kerry did run for Congress in 1972 but that bid would fail as Kerry's younger brother Cameron and campaign field director Thomas J. Vallely were found in the basement of the opposition’s campaign headquarters. Charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit grand larceny", the two fenced with the courts for a year with the case being eventually being dismissed a year later but not before Kerry lost the election.

After completing law school and embarking on a brief career in law, Kerry was eventually elected to the position of lieutenant governor of Massachusetts under Michael Dukakis in 1982 and then to the United States Senate in 1985. In 2004, Kerry decided to run for President. During his campaign, a group of swift boat veterans protested his candidacy and brought his service record and military honors under severe criticism citing inconsistencies in the recorded events. Statements Kerry made during earlier “anti-war” interviews resurfaced in which he admitted that he tried to avoid combat by asking for duty with the swift boats which up till then had been used only for coastal patrols. Of course his voting record as one of the most liberal progressives in Congress was too much for main street America and only served to seal his fate. His 2004 bid for the Presidency with running mate John Edwards, ended in a close but failing race with Bush beating Kerry by only 2% of the popular vote at a time when Bush was also wildly unpopular.

Now that Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons and Obama is facing harsh criticisms from other world leaders for vacillating in the face of Iran’s refusal to obey international law, John Kerry is stepping to the foreground for his fifteen minutes of fame again. He is demanding more negotiations with Iran even though negotiations have only proven to allow Iran the time continue the development of nuclear arms without fear of reprisal. In fact, Kerry tried to arrange a visit to Tehran to speak with Iranian officials as if to say that he can do alone, what the current administration in its entirety could not. Apparently, Iran can spot an elitist publicity hound faster than the people of Massachusetts can and denied access to Mr. Kerry.

John Kerry should accept that outside of the “People’s Republic of Massachusetts”, no one really cares what he thinks. For that matter, we really don’t care what any of the political figures that Massachusetts has cursed the nation with has to say about much of anything. If things continue as they are, we are going to see a lot more liberals stamping their feet in the press and on the news shows after the 2010 election send many of them home so I guess we should thank Gore and Kerry for preparing us. It only goes to show that old politicians never die, they just smell like it.

Paul

Will the 2010 Elections be Enough?

I wonder if the 2010 elections will be enough. After all, it seems like anyone we have ever sent to Congress have all succumbed to the same disease. It’s as though power is a virus to which there is no immunity or cure. Even those that have been rejected still seek that alluring aroma of power. In addition to the great and near great, there is that whole undercurrent of real power players; the dark overlords that hold the strings of our political puppets. They live in the shadows and create grand strategies for power on a global scale using the greed of our politicians to achieve their nefarious goals. To them, Congress is but a small outpost and the Presidency is a mere pawn in a much larger game.

After all, who benefits from the legislation that this historically liberal administration has passed or proposed? The bank bailout was passed because the banking system appeared to be on the verge of collapse and that would have stalled the Progressive’s agenda for years. In fact, the banks couldn’t have been nearly as damaged as they first appeared since many of them raced to pay back the TARP money as soon as they found out that the executive salaries of companies that received TARP money would be severely curtailed. Instant liquidity…isn’t that amazing! Of course Freddie and Fanny are the exception and in fact, are seeking hundreds of billions more but then again, they have been latched on to the public teat for years.

Then we have healthcare legislation. It’s been changed at a least a half dozen times, the last two times, behind closed doors and hidden from all but a select few. Still, the proponents argue that we don’t have to debate this bill any more since it has already been in debate for months. Well the general issues may have, but the substantive changes made by Harry Reid and the President’s staff haven’t and most of our illustrious Senators had never been granted the courtesy of even seeing the manager’s amendment (Reid’s work) until after they were forced to vote on it.

The biggest winner would be the Federal government. It is no secret that the Progressives in Congress are still pursuing the utopian dreams of FDR through the socialization of America. Medicare and Medicaid were bankrupting the Federal government just as the opponents of these programs said they would back in 1965. Of course there was the “fix” in 1968 that placed Social Security “on budget” then robbed the assets from the trust fund to cover the shortages in Medicare/Medicaid and now all three of these programs are broke. If healthcare does not pass, the government may have to concede failure and admit their gross mismanagement; something that does not help the cause of the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party that wants more and more radical social programs, not fewer.

It is clear that Andy Stern and SEIU played a major part in crafting at least some of the provisions in this bill so I would have to say they are also one of the big winners if this and several other major bills pass. Under this bill, the only hospitals that are eligible to receive funds for nurse training are those that are unionized. The President already signed an Executive Order earlier this year giving union contractors preference in government contracts with a value of $25 million or more and that is clearly another bone for Andy boy. At least we know some of the reasons that Andy Stern had visited the White House nearly two dozen times since Obama’s inauguration.

There is also proposed legislation for a brand new amnesty program for illegal immigrants. SEIU has admitted that substantial portions of its membership are so-called “undocumented workers” (illegal immigrants) and “POOF”, Congress proposes legislation to make that all better for our good friend Andy. Why is it that people employing illegal immigrants are subject to fines and/or jail but unions can represent those same illegals with impunity? Andy Stern is clearly one of those people behind the scenes with global aspirations and he is using his membership’s dues to fund the political campaigns of anyone that will help him achieve those goals. Quoting a page from the Communist Manifesto, Stern said in an interview that “Workers of the world unite is no longer a slogan”, it is what Stern and the SEIU believe their future is. A global union poised to represent a global workforce in a world dominated by a global government.

One of the displaced power mongers is Al Gore. Gore was so close to becoming President in 2000 that he still has the taste of inaugural champagne in his mouth. I suspect that is what keeps Al Gore on center stage shouting about climate change while the rest of the world reads how scientists conspired to corrupt the data and hide the proof that there is no such thing as global warming.

Al Gore actually resides in both camps and in addition to his unsatisfied appetite for power, has a mercenary reason for his love of climate change. He is heavily invested in a software company that would become a key provider in greenhouse gas tracking software that would be required under cap and trade. If this draconian legislation passes, Gore and the rest of his investment group would become billionaires. Gore’s investment company is also heavily involved with the Chicago climate exchange; North America’s only private exchange for carbon credits as well as five other so-called, greenhouse gases. Gore is not alone; a certain university professor that preferred to teach Saul Alinsky theory (Barack Obama) was also involved in the creation of the Chicago exchange and so was Maurice Strong. Who is Maurice Strong?

Maurice Strong is a Canadian ex-patriot and petroleum entrepreneur who was president of Power Corporation until 1966. Strong was Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in the early 1970’s before becoming the first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. Strong is also one of the world’s leading proponents of the United Nations’ involvement in world affairs and most of his recent affairs reflect those beliefs.

Strong also chaired the U.N.’s University for Peace, an international education chartered through the UN and able to grant masters and doctoral degrees. The educational programs are centered around the peace and security objectives of the United Nations so I am sure that there is a great deal of emphasis on global governance. The University of Peace also offers short courses to non-registered students on subjects that include the undeniably Socialist curriculum of Nonprofit Leadership, Corporate Social Responsibility, Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector, and Educating in the 21st Century. We wouldn’t want them to miss the opportunity to co-opt the unfortunate stooges that can’t afford the regular tuition, now would we?

Strong was one of the heads that rolled in 2005 during the U.N.’s “oil for food” scandal. Oil for Food was a program that was ultimately found to be laced with corruption as U.N. officials were accused of taking bribes to mold the program to favor Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. A check for nearly a million dollars was found to have been issued from a Jordanian Bank made out to an “M. Strong” and hand delivered by South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park. The check was ultimately endorsed by Maurice Strong who was then, The U.N. Envoy to South Korea. Amid the scandal, Strong stepped down from his position saying he would sideline himself “until the cloud was lifted” but Strong was never returned to his former position.

Maurice Strong is one of the increasing numbers of people with questionable ties to the United Nations that is considered an environmentalist. Of course! After all, Socialist radicals had already identified the environmental movement as the key vehicle to achieve their goals. He began his involvement during the first Earth Day in 1970 and has been tinkering around with it ever since. In fact, Strong was one of the architects of the first UN climate conferences held in Stockholm. Titled “Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet”, the conference clearly endorsed the need for a global authority because the threat of man-made climate change is international.

Of course in 1971, the climate panels in the UN were screaming “Ice Age” and the impending crisis was that man’s pollution was cooling the globe so much so that much of the northern hemisphere would be under a mile of ice by the end of the century. One would think that the cry of “wolf” back then would have discredited the climate alarmists for good but they apparently have too much invested in this strategy to let something like a failed climate theory stop them now.

It is noteworthy that Mr. Strong never did return to Canada. He now resides in Beijing China and has been orchestrating his climate chaos from there. Another curious thing is that if the United States enacts cap and trade and the other European powers sign on to the U.N.’s treaty on climate; that would leave China in a very strong position to be the next emerging Super Power as the West’s economic situation atrophies. Naw; it’s just a coincidence that Strong lives in China now in a gated community with armed guards protecting the entrances.

Paul

Will we rediscover the tenth amendment in 2010?

2010 is finally here and now the real fun begins. I predict that Congressional Progressives and Barack Obama will engage in a full court press to force as much of their agenda through as possible before the mid-term election throws a roadblock in front of them. Expect even more underhanded, closed door sessions; more legislation crafted in the dark recesses of the Capitol building and passed on weekend nights. Expect Congressman that block Obama’s progress to face more threats and personal attacks and most of all, expect the main stream media and the White House to denigrate and dismiss any public opposition to their relentless march into Socialism.

We already know that once people have become a dependent on the State, they will vote for anyone that promises to keep the benefits coming. As it already stands, only 53% of Americans actually pay taxes leaving 47% that pay no taxes at all and many actually receive money from the government in welfare or earned income credits. As the scale tips and more Americans become recipients instead of tax payers, the prospect of an election that is actually based on what is good for the nation will dwindle as well. If the trend to socialize our nation isn’t stopped now, it will never be stopped and the United States will consume itself with the inevitable debt only to be absorbed into the growing body of formerly great western powers that are embracing Socialist policies just to avoid anarchy.

Europe’s major nations have already created the European Union to try to stave off financial ruin. They have also signed their own death warrants by becoming signatories to a ruinous climate treaty based on the premise of global warming; the same global warming that has been recently been uncovered as a hoax. The IPCC, CRU and extremist environmental groups, all under UN guidance, are apparently partners in this charade to force nations into a global cooperative that will eventually become the governing body of the planet; or at least that is what they had hoped for.

If we fall pray to the fallacy of global warming, we will face the same destructive events within our own economy and industrial base that Europe has. We have already witnessed the real agenda of the global warming crowd. Oh, I almost forgot. They renamed this created crisis “Climate Change” since the predictions of rising planetary temperatures never happened. In fact, the receding ice packs at the polar caps have recovered and the earth has been logging a drop in annual average temperatures since the year 2000. Regardless, the agenda is clear now that the third world has issued its ransom note to the tune of $200 billion a year.

You see, the United Nations master plan for climate change involves the West’s industrial nations shutting down entire industries to cap the production of greenhouse gas while simultaneously contributing to a global fund to help developing nations create their own industries. Curiously, this is a recipe for the redistribution of not only the West’s wealth, but the West’s ability to create wealth. They haven’t been able to describe just how this benefits the environment since the ability to pollute and create greenhouse gasses is not actually curbed, but sold to the highest bidder.

Then there is the unwillingness of the Obama administration to accept that the threat of massive new taxes and government regulations is the straight jacket that brought our economy to a halt. They have proposed and passed a so-called stimulus bill to try to jump start the economy but the abject waste of money that the program is accused of has stimulated little except some cushy little projects in the States of favored Congressmen. In fact, the stimulus spending has been distributed to areas represented by faithful Democrats by a factor of three to one over areas of the country that are represented by Republicans or Blue Dog Democrats. Even though those areas are suffering higher unemployment than those of the Party faithful, they are receiving little or no assistance.

Another little surprise we can expect in 2010 is a push to pass yet another amnesty program for illegal immigrants. Congressman Luis V. Gutierrez (D-IL) proposed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 (HR 4321). The bill is sponsored by Representative Solomon Ortiz (D-TX) and is co-sponsored by 92 additional Democrats, all of which are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus or both but that really isn’t a surprise, is it?

This bill not only helps with Obama’s little problem that he lied about covering illegal immigrants under the healthcare bill (after all, they aren’t illegal anymore if they have been granted amnesty) but if passed, this bill would make the estimated 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants in this country immediately eligible to apply for public education and social service programs previously restricted to American citizens or lawful émigrés. The proponents of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 don’t actually say how this is supposed to provide America with security and prosperity we are already struggling to preserve. In fact, I would bet the rent that granting amnesty to people that have already broken the law just to be illegal immigrants can only bring America additional insecurity and more financial burden.

Consider the eventuality that at least part of those amnestied millions will eventually become registered stooges for the Democratic Party. Add that to the upcoming census that will re-write electoral districts once again in the most blatant display of gerrymandering since the 1960’s and there is a clear movement in progress to stack the political deck for generations to come.

The last opportunity for the people of this nation to seize our Constitutional authority over the civilian government will be the November elections. We must wrest control of at least the House from the hands of this oligarchy or the 2012 elections may be as meaningless as the most recent elections in Afghanistan or Iran. In fact, a divided Congress would restore the intent of the separation of powers and force them to finally work together instead of rolling over each other like steam rollers.

I am not a demagogue nor am I an ideologue. I believe there can be good and beneficial ideas in all political camps of a constitutionally sound America. What I firmly believe is the partisan politics we see now is devastating to the future of our nation and when one Party controls all; nothing of value ever comes out of the monopoly of power. The best recipe to cure our ills is to eliminate the cause of the problem. Let's face it, if the Parties have to win our support to proceed, we all win.

First: career politicians have been corrupted by the D.C. machine and must be retired. We will never have the civilian government the founding fathers envisioned for us if we allow our Representatives and Senators to hold office for decades. There must be term limits imposed on Congress. The power of incumbency is too powerful and the mechanism that ensures unlimited campaign funds for those that are willing to sell their souls to special interests cannot be stopped through the electoral process alone.

Second: meetings and other communication between lobbyists and Congressmen must all be made public. It is the back room discussions and golf course deals that breed corruption and it would be very interesting to see just how much the legislative process can change when the transcripts of those meetings, e-mails and phone calls begin appearing in the Congressional record.

Third: we must elect only those individuals that are willing to prune the Federal tree; cutting away years of public neglect and eliminating the tangled mess of dead branches that have been strangling everything it comes into contact with. Our country cannot recover as long as the Federal government is allowed to grow unchecked and in fact, it must be reduced in size until it fits into the box it came in. The Federal government has exceeding its Constitutional authority in ninety percent of what it has been doing and until the States and the people can reclaim their dominance over our government, nothing good can happen. This is the year we must be clear in our goals and unified in our direction. We cannot divide the vote among factions within our own movement or all will be lost.

Paul