Republic! Republic!

The day the great 100 year muslim way began

2010-09-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

5 June 1968 : Robert F. Kennedy assassinated
Senator Robert Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary...more

Senator Robert Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary.

Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by the 22-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. He died a day later.

The summer of 1968 was a tempestuous time in American history. Both the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement were peaking. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in the spring, igniting riots across the country. In the face of this unrest, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to seek a second term in the upcoming presidential election.

Robert Kennedy, John's younger brother and former U.S. Attorney General, stepped into this breach and experienced a groundswell of support. Kennedy was perceived by many to be the only person in American politics capable of uniting the people. He was beloved by the minority community for his integrity and devotion to the civil rights cause.

After winning California's primary, Kennedy was in the position to receive the Democratic nomination and face off against Richard Nixon in the general election. As star athletes Rafer Johnson and Roosevelt Grier accompanied Kennedy out a rear exit of the Ambassador Hotel, Sirhan Sirhan stepped forward with a rolled up campaign poster, hiding his .22 revolver. He was only a foot away when he fired several shots at Kennedy.

Grier and Johnson wrestled Sirhan to the ground, but not before five bystanders were wounded. Grier was distraught afterward and blamed himself for allowing Kennedy to be shot. Sirhan confessed to the crime at his trial and received a death sentence on 24 April 1969. However, since the Supreme Court invalidated all death penalty sentences in 1972, Sirhan has spent the rest of his life in prison. He has never provided a clear explanation for why he targeted Bobby Kennedy.

Hubert Humphrey ended up running for the Democrats in 1968, but lost by a small margin to Nixon.

Notes from the future, Islam ruling the planet

2010-09-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors:

The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid scars on his face and neck and hands, some even visible in his scalp beneath a fuzz of gray hair cropped short in a military cut. One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. Before I could finish dialing 911 he announced in a husky voice that he was a Time Traveler come back to talk to me about the future.

Being a sometimes science-fiction writer but not a fool, I said, “Prove it.”

“Do you remember Replay?” he said.

My finger hovered over the final “1” in my dialing. “The 1987 novel?” I said. “By Ken Grimwood?”

The stranger – Time Traveler, psychotic, home invader, whatever he was – nodded.

I hesitated. The novel by Grimwood had won the World Fantasy Award a year or two after my first-novel, Song of Kali, had. Grimwood’s book was about a guy who woke up one morning to find himself snapped back decades in his life, from the late 1980’s to himself as a college student in 1963, and thus getting the chance to relive – to replay – that life again, only this time acting upon what he’d already learned the hard way. In the book, the character, who was to experience – suffer – several Replays, learned that there were other people from his time who were also Replaying their lives in the past, their bodies younger but their memories intact. I’d greatly enjoyed the book, thought it deserved the award, and had been sad to hear that Grimwood had died . . . when? . . . in 2003.

So, I thought, I might have a grizzled nut case in my study this New Year’s Eve, but if he was a reader and a fan of Replay, he was probably just a sci-fi fan grizzled nut case, and therefore probably harmless. Possibly. Maybe.

I kept my finger poised over the final “1” in “911.”

“What does that book have to do with you illegally entering my home and study?” I asked.

The stranger smiled … almost sadly I thought. “You asked me to prove that I’m a Time Traveler,” he said softly. “Do you remember how Grimwood’s character in Replay went hunting for others in the 1960’s who had traveled back in time from the late 1980’s?”

I did remember now. I’d thought it clever at the time. The guy in Replay, once he suspected others were also replaying into the past, had taken out personal ads in major city newspapers around the country. The ads were concise. “Do you remember Three Mile Island, Challenger, Watergate, Reaganomics? If so, contact me at . . .”

Before I could say anything else on this New Year’s Eve of 2004, a few hours before 2005 began, the stranger said, “Terri Schiavo, Katrina, New Orleans under water, Ninth Ward, Ray Nagin, Superdome, Judge John Roberts, White Sox sweep the Astros in four to win the World Series, Pope Benedict XVI, Scooter Libby.”

“Wait, wait!” I said, scrambling for a pen and then scrambling even faster to write. “Ray who? Pope who? Scooter who?”

“You’ll recognize it all when you hear it all again,” said the stranger. “I’ll see you in a year and we’ll have our conversation.”

“Wait!” I repeated. “What was that middle apart . . . Ray Nugin? Judge who? John Roberts? Who is . . .” But when I looked up he was gone.

“White Sox win the Series?” I muttered into the silence. “Fat chance.”

#

I was waiting for him on New Year’s Eve 2005. I didn’t see him enter. I looked up from the book I was fitfully reading and he was standing in the shadows again. I didn’t dial 911 this time, nor demand any more proof. I waved him to the leather wingchair and said, “Would you like something to drink?”

“Scotch,” he said. “Single malt if you have it.”

I did.

Our conversation ran over two hours, but the following is the gist of it. I’m a novelist by trade. I remember conversations pretty well. (Not as perfectly as Truman Capote was said to be able to recall long conversations word for word, but pretty well.)

The Time Traveler wouldn’t tell me what year in the future he was from. Not even the decade or century. But the gray cord trousers and blue-gray wool tunic top he was wearing didn’t look very far-future science-fictiony or military, no Star Trekky boots or insignia, just wellworn clothes that looked like something a guy who worked with his hands a lot would wear. Construction maybe.

“I know you can’t tell me details about the future because of time travel paradoxes,” I began. I hadn’t spent a lifetime reading and then writing SF for nothing.

“Oh, bugger time travel paradoxes,” said the Time Traveler. “They don’t exist. I could tell you anything I want to and it won’t change anything. I just choose not to tell you some things.”

I frowned at this. “Time travel paradoxes don’t exist? But surely if I go back in time and kill my grandfather before he meets my grandmother . . .”

The Time Traveler laughed and sipped his Scotch. “Would you want to kill your grandfather?” he said. “Or anyone else?”

“Well . . .Hitler maybe,” I said weakly.

The Traveler smiled, but more ironically this time. “Good luck,” he said. “But don’t count on succeeding.”

I shook my head. “But surely anything you tell me now about the future will change the future,” I said.

“I gave you a raft of facts about your future a year ago as my bona fides,” said the Time Traveler. “Did it change anything? Did you save New Orleans from drowning?”

“I won $50 betting on the White Sox in October,” I admitted.

The Time Traveler only shook his head. “Quod erat demonstrandum,” he said softly. “I could tell you that the Mississippi River flows generally south. Would your knowing about it change its course or flow or flooding?”

I thought about this. Finally I said, “Why did you come back? Why do you want to talk to me? What do you want me to do?”

“I came back for my own purposes,” said the Time Traveler, looking around my booklined study. “I chose you to talk to because it was . . . convenient. And I don’t want you to do a goddamned thing. There’s nothing you can do. But relax . . . we’re not going to be talking about personal things. Such as, say, the year, day, and hour of your death. I don’t even know that sort of trivial information, although I could look it up quickly enough. You can release that white-knuckled grip you have on the edge of your desk.”

I tried to relax. “What do you want to talk about?” I said.

“The Century War,” said the Time Traveler.

I blinked and tried to remember some history. “You mean the Hundred Year War? Fifteenth Century? Fourteenth? Sometime around there. Between . . . France and England? Henry V? Kenneth Branagh? Or was it . . .”

“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he stood, refilled his Scotch glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back to this time early on in the struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you all were.”

“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.

“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And it’s not over yet where I come from. Not close to being over.”

“You can’t have a war with Islam,” I said. “You can’t go to war against a religion. Radical Islam, maybe. Jihadism. Some extremists. But not a . . . the . . . religion itself. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceloving people who wish us no harm. I mean . . . I mean . . . the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘Peace.’”

“So you kept telling yourselves,” said the Time Traveler. His voice was very low but there was a strange and almost frightening edge to it. “But the ‘peace’ in ‘Islam’ means ‘Submission.’ You’ll find that out soon enough”

Great, I was thinking. Of all the time travelers in all the gin joints in all the world, I get this racist, xenophobic, right-wing asshole.

“After Nine-eleven, we’re fighting terrorism,” I began, “not . . .”

He waved me into silence.

“You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college you went to long ago,” said the Time Traveler. “Do you remember what Category Error is?”

It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being called a “podunk little college” to be able to concentrate fully.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Time Traveler. “In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means.”

I waited. Finally I said firmly, “You can’t go to war with a religion. Or, I mean . . . sure, you could . . . the Crusades and all that . . . but it would be wrong.”

The Time Traveler sipped his Scotch and looked at me. He said, “Let me give you an analogy . . .”

God, I hated and distrusted analogies. I said nothing.

“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation.”

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“Is it?” asked the Time Traveler. “The American battleships, cruisers, harbor installations, Army barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were all struck by Japanese aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on aviation . . . threatening to wipe it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to defeating aviation, so help us God.”

“That’s just stupid,” I said. If I’d ever been afraid of this Time Traveler, I wasn’t now. He was obviously a mental defective.“The planes, the Japanese planes,” I said, “were just a method of attack . . . a means . . . it wasn’t aviation that attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany, lived up to its treaty with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we’d declared war on aviation, on goddamned airplanes rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we’d never have . . .”

I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem unsolvable through your inability – or fear – of defining it correctly.

The Time Traveler was smiling at me from the shadows. It was a small, thin, cold smile – holding no humor in it, I was sure -- but still a smile of sorts. It seemed more sad than gloating as my sudden silence stretched on.

“What do you know about Syracuse?” he asked suddenly.

I blinked again. “Syracuse, New York?” I said at last.

He shook his head slowly. “Thucydides’ Syracuse,” he said softly. “Syracuse circa 415 B.C. The Syracuse Athens invaded.”

“It was . . . part of the Peloponnesian War,” I ventured.

He waited for more but I had no more to give. I loved history, but let’s admit it . . . that was ancient history. Still, I felt that I should have been able to tell him,or at least remember, why Syracuse was important in the Peloponnesian War or why they fought there or who fought exactly or who had won or . . . something. I hated feeling like a dull student around this scarred old man.

“The war between Athens and its allies and Sparta and its allies – a war for nothing less than hegemony over the entire known world at that time – began in 431 B.C.,” said the Time Traveler. “After seventeen years of almost constant fighting, with no clear or permanent advantage for either side, Athens – under the leadership of Alcibiades at the time – decided to widen the war by conquering Sicily, the ‘Great Greece’ they called it, an area full of colonies and the key to maritime commerce at the time the way the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf is today.”

I hate being lectured to at the best of times, but something about the tone and timber of the Time Traveler’s voice – soft, deep, rasping, perhaps thickened a bit by the whiskey – made this sound more like a story being told around a campfire. Or perhaps a bit like one of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories on “Prairie Home Companion.” I settled deeper into my chair and listened.

“Syracuse wasn’t a direct enemy of the Athenians,” continued the Time Traveler, “but it was quarreling with a local Athenian colony and the democracy of Athens used that as an excuse to launch a major expedition against it. It was a big deal – Athens sent 136 triremes, the best fighting ships in the world then – and landed 5,000 soldiers right under the city’s walls.

“The Athenians had enjoyed so much military success in recent years, including their invasion of Melos, that Thucydides wrote – So thoroughly had the present prosperity persuaded the Athenians that nothing could withstand them, and that they could achieve what was possible and what was impracticable alike, with means ample or inadequate it mattered not. The reason for this was their general extraordinary success, which made them confuse their strengths with their hopes.”

“Oh, hell,” I said, “this is going to be a lecture about Iraq, isn’t it? Look . . . I voted for John Kerry last year and . . .”

“Listen to me,” the Time Traveler said softly. It was not a request. There was steel in that soft, rasping voice. “Nicias, the Athenian general who ended up leading the invasion, warned against it in 415 B.C. He said – ‘We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and that he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this to find everything hostile to him’. Nicias, along with the Athenian poet and general Demosthenes, would see their armies destroyed at Syracuse and then they would both be captured and put to death by the Syracusans. Sparta won big in that two-year debacle for Athens. The war went on for seven more years, but Athens never recovered from that overreaching at Syracuse, and in the end . . . Sparta destroyed it. Conquered the Athenian empire and its allies, destroyed Athens’ democracy, ruined the entire balance of power and Greek hegemony over the known world at the time . . . ruined everything. All because of a miscalculation about Syracuse.”

I sighed. I was sick of Iraq. Everyone was sick of Iraq on New Years Eve, 2005, both Bush supporters and Bush haters. It was just an ugly mess. “They just had an election,” I said. “The Iraqi people. They dipped their fingers in purple ink and . . .”

“Yes yes,” interrupted the Time Traveler as if recalling something further back in time, and much less important, than Athens versus Syracuse. “The free elections. Purple fingers. Democracy in the Mid-East. The Palestinians are voting as well. You will see in the coming year what will become of all that.”

The Time Traveler drank some Scotch, closed his eyes for a second, and said, “Sun Tzu writes – The side that knows when to fight and when not to will take the victory. There are roadways not to be traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be assaulted.”

“All right, goddammit,” I said irritably. “Your point’s made. So we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in this . . . what did you call it? This Long War with Islam, this Century War. We’re all beginning to realize that here by the end of 2005.”

The Time Traveler shook his head. “You’ve understood nothing I’ve said. Nothing. Athens failed in Syracuse – and doomed their democracy – not because they fought in the wrong place and at the wrong time, but because they weren’t ruthless enough. They had grown soft since their slaughter of every combat-age man and boy on the island of Melos, the enslavement of every woman and girl there. The democratic Athenians, in regards to Syracuse, thought that once engaged they could win without absolute commitment to winning, claim victory without being as ruthless and merciless as their Spartan and Syracusan enemies. The Athenians, once defeat loomed, turned against their own generals and political leaders – and their official soothsayers. If General Nicias or Demosthenes had survived their captivity and returned home, the people who sent them off with parades and strewn flower petals in their path would have ripped them limb from limb. They blamed their own leaders like a sun-maddened dog ripping and chewing at its own belly.”

I thought about this. I had no idea what the hell he was saying or how it related to the future.

“You came back in time to lecture me about Thucydides?” I said. “Athens? Syracuse? Sun-Tzu? No offense, Mr. Time Traveler, but who gives a damn?”

The Time Traveler rose so quickly that I flinched back in my chair, but he only refilled his Scotch. This time he refilled my glass as well. “You probably should give a damn” he said softly. “ In 2006, you’ll be ripping and tearing at yourselves so fiercely that your nation – the only one on Earth actually fighting against resurgent caliphate Islam in this long struggle over the very future of civilization – will become so preoccupied with criticizing yourselves and trying to gain short-term political advantage, that you’ll all forget that there’s actually a war for your survival going on. Twenty-five years from now, every man or woman in America who wishes to vote will be required to read Thucydides on this matter. And others as well. And there are tests. If you don’t know some history, you don’t vote . . . much less run for office. America’s vacation from knowing history ends very soon now . . . for you, I mean. And for those few others left alive in the world who are allowed to vote.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

“I am shitting you not,” said the Time Traveler.

“Those few others left alive who are allowed to vote?” I said, the words just now striking me like hardthrown stones. “What the hell are you talking about? Has our government taken away all our civil liberties in this awful future of yours?”

He laughed then and this time it was a deep, hearty, truly amused laugh. “Oh, yes,” he said when the laughter abated a bit. He actually wiped away tears from his one good eye. “I had almost forgotten about your fears of your, our . . . civil liberties . . . being abridged by our own government back in these last stupidity-allowed years of 2005 and 2006 and 2007 . Where exactly do you see this repression coming from?”

“Well . . .” I said. I hate it when I start a sentence with ‘well,’ especially in an argument. “Well, the Patriot Act. Bush authorizing spying on Americans . . . international phonecalls and such. Uh . . . I think mosques in the States are under FBI surveillance. I mean, they want to look up what library books we’re reading, for God’s sake. Big Brother. 1984. You know.”

The Time Traveler laughed again, but with more edge this time. “Yes, I know,” he said. “We all know . . . up there in the future which some of you will survive to see as free people. Civil liberties. In 2006 you still fear yourselves and your own institutions first, out of old habit. A not unworthy – if fatally misguided and terminally masochistic – paranoia. I will tell you right now, and this is not a prediction but a history lesson, some of your grandchildren will live in dhimmitude.”

“Zimmi . . . what?” I said.

He spelled it out. What had sounded like a ‘z’ was the ‘dh.’ I’d never heard the word and I told him so.

“Then get off your ass and Google it,” said the Time Traveler, his one working eye glinting with something like fury. “Dhimmitude. You can also look up the word dhimmi, because that’s what two of your three grandchildren will be called. Dhimmis. Dhimmitude is the system of separate and subordinate laws and rules they will live under. Look up the word sharia while you’re Googling dhimmi, because that is the only law they will answer to as dhimmis, the only justice they can hope for . . . they and tens and hundreds of millions more now who are worried in your time about invisible abridgements of their ‘civil liberties’ by their ‘oppressive’ American and European democratically elected governments.”

He audibly sneered this last part. I wondered now if the fury I sensed in him was a result of his madness, or if the reverse were true.

“Where will my grandchildren suffer this dhimmitude?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly so dry I could barely speak.

“Eurabia,” said the Time Traveler.

“There’s no such place,” I said.

He gave me his one-eyed stare. My stomach suddenly lurched and I wished I’d drunk no Scotch. “Words,” I said.

The Time Traveler raised one scar-slashed eyebrow.

“Last year you gave me words about 2005,” I said. “The kind of words Ken Grimwood’s replayers in time would have put in the newspaper to find each other. Give me more now. Or, better yet, just fucking tell me what you’re talking about. You said it wouldn’t matter. You said that my knowing won’t change anything, any more than I can change the direction the Mississippi is flowing . So tell me, God damn it!”

He began by giving me words. Even while I was scribbling them down, I was thinking of reading I’d been doing recently about the joy with which the Victorian Englishmen and 19th Century Europeans and Americans greeted the arrival of the 20th Century. The toasts, especially among the intellectual elite, on New Year’s Eve 1899 had been about the coming glories of technology liberating them, of the imminent Second Enlightenment in human understanding, of the certainty of a just one-world government, of the end of war for all time.

Instead, what words would a time traveler or poor Replay victim put in his London Times or Berliner Zeitung or New York Times on January 1, 1900, to find his fellow travelers displaced in time? Auschwitz, I was sure, and Hiroshima and Trinity Site and Holocaust and Hitler and Stalin and . . .

The clock in my study chimed midnight.

Jesus God. Did I want to hear such words about 2006 and the rest of the 21st Century from the Time Traveler?

“Ahmadenijad,” he said softly. “Natanz. Arak. Bushehr. Ishafan. Bonab. Ramsar.”

“Those words don’t mean a damned thing to me,” I said as I scribbled them down phonetically. “Where are they? What are they?”

“You’ll know soon enough,” said the Time Traveler.

“Are you talking about . . . what? . . . the next fifteen or twenty years?” I said.

“I’m talking about the next fifteen or twenty months from your now,” he said softly. “Do you want more words?”

I didn’t. But I couldn’t speak just then.

“General Seyed Reza Pardis,” intoned the Time Traveler. “Shehab-one, Shehab-two, Shehab-three. Tel Aviv. Baghdad International Airport, Al Salem U.S. airbase in Kuwait, Camp Dawhah U.S. Army base in Kuwait, al Seeb U.S. airbase in Oman, al Udeid U.S. Army and Air Force base in Qatar. Haifa. Beir-Shiva. Dimona.”

“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Oh, Jesus.” I had no clue as to who or what Shehab One, Two, or Three might be, but the context and litany alone made me want to throw up.

“This is just the beginning,” said the Time Traveler.

“Wasn’t the beginning on September 11, 2001?” I managed through numb lips.

The one-eyed scarred man shook his head. “Historians in my time know that it began on June 5, 1968,” he said. “But it hasn’t really begun for you yet. For any of you.”

I thought – What on earth happened on the fifth of June, 1968? I’m old enough to remember. I was in college then. Working that summer and . . . Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. “Now on to Chicago and the nomination!” Sirhan Sirhan. Was the Time Traveler trying to give me some kind of half-assed Oliver-Stone-JFK-movie garbled up conspiracy theory?

“What . . .” I began.

“Galveston,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “The Space Needle. Bank of America Plaza in Dallas. Renaissance Tower in Dallas. Bank One Center in Dallas. The Indianapolis 500 – one hour and twenty-three minutes into the race. The Bell South Building in Atlanta. The TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco . . .”

“Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”

“The Golden Gate Bridge,” persisted the Time Traveler. “The Guggenheim in Bilbao. The New Reichstag in Berlin. Albert Hall. Saint Paul’s Cathedral . . .”

“Shut the fuck up!” I shouted. “All these places can’t disappear in the rest of this century, your goddamned Century War or not! I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t say in the rest of your century,” said the Time Traveler, his torn voice almost a whisper now. “I’m talking about your next fifteen years. And I’ve barely begun.”

“You’re nuts,” I said. “You’re not from the future. You escaped from some asylum.”

The Time Traveler nodded. “That’s more true than you know,” he said. “I come from a place and time where your grandchildren and hundreds of millions of other dhimmi are compelled to write ‘pbuh’ after the Prophet’s name. They wear gold crosses and gold Stars of David sewn onto their clothing. The Nazis didn’t invent the wearing of the Star of David . . . the marking and setting apart of the Jews in society. Muslims did that centuries ago in they lands they conquered, European and otherwise. They will refine it and update it, not toward the more merciful, in the lands they occupy through the decades ahead of you.”

“You’re crazy,” I cried, standing. My hands were balled into fists. “Islam is a religion . . . a religion of peace . . . not our enemy. We can’t be at war with a religion. That’s obscene.”

“Have you read the Qur’an and learned your Sunnah?” asked the Time Traveler. “It would behoove you to do so. Dhimmi means ‘protection.’ And your children and grandchildren will be protected . . . like cattle.”

“To hell with you,” I said.

“Your dhimmi poll tax will be called jizya,” said the Time Traveler. His voice suddenly sounded very weary.“Your land tax for being an infidel, even for fellow People of the Book – Christians and Jews – will be called kharaz. Both of these taxes will be in addition to your mandatory alms – the zakat. The punishment for failure to pay, or for paying late, a punishment meted out by your local qadi, religious judge, is death by stoning or beheading.”

I folded my arms and looked away from the Time Traveler.

“Under sharia – which will be the universal law of Eurabia,” persisted the Time Traveler, “the value of a dhimmi’s life, the value of your grandchildren, is one half the value of a Muslim’s life. Jews and Christians are worth one-third of a Muslim. Indian Parsees are worth one-fifteenth. In a court of the Eurabian Caliphate or the Global Khalifate, if a Muslim murders a dhimmi, any infidel, he must pay a blood money fine not to exceed one thousand euros. No Muslim will ever be jailed or sentenced to death for the murder of any dhimmi or any number of dhimmis. If the murders were done under the auspices of Universal Compulsive Jihad, which will be sanctioned by sharia as of 2019 Common Era, all blood money fines are waived.”

“Go away,” I said. “Go back to wherever you came from.”

“I come from here,” said the Time Traveler. “From not so far from here.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Your enemies have gathered and struck and continue to strike and you, the innocents of 2006 and beyond, fight among yourselves, chew and rip at your own bellies, blame your brothers and yourselves and your institutions of the Enlightenment – law, tolerance, science, democracy – even while your enemies grow stronger.”

“How are we supposed to know who our enemies are?” I turned and growled at him. “The world is a complex place. Morality is a complex thing.”

“Your enemy is he who will give his life to kill you,” said the Time Traveler. “Your enemies are they that wish you and your children and your grandchildren dead and who are willing to sacrifice themselves, or support those fanatics who will sacrifice themselves, to see you and your institutions destroyed. You haven’t figured that out yet – the majority of you fat, sleeping, smug, infinitely stupid Americans and Europeans.”

He stood and set the Scotch glass back in its place on my sideboard. “How, we wonder in my time,” he said softly, “can you ignore the better part of a billion people who say aloud that they are willing to kill your children . . . or condone and celebrate the killing of them? And ignore them as they act on what they say? We do not understand you.”

I still had not turned to face him, but was looking over my shoulder at him.

“The world, as it turns out,” continued the Time Traveler, “is not nearly so complex a place as your liberal and gentle minds sought to make it.”

I did not respond.

“Thucydides taught us more than twenty-four hundred years ago – counting back from your time – that all men’s behavior is guided by phobos, kerdos, and doxa,” said the Time Traveler. “Fear, self-interest, and honor.”

I pretended I did not hear.

“Plato saw human behavior as a chariot pulled by precisely those three powerful and headstrong horses, first tugged this way, then pulled that way,” continued the Time Traveler. “Phobos, kerdos, doxa. Fear, self-interest, honor. Which of these guides the chariot of your nation and your allies in Europe and your surprisingly fragile civilization now, O Man of 2006?”

I stared at the bookcase instead of the man and willed him gone, wishing him away like a sleepy boy willing away the boogeyman under his bed.

“Which combination of those three traits -- phobos, kerdos, doxa -- will save or doom your world?” asked the Time Traveler. “Which might bring you back from this vacation from history – from history’s responsibilities and history’s burdens – that you have all so generously gifted yourselves with? You peaceloving Europeans. You civil-liberties loving Americans? You Athenian invertebrates with your love of your own exalted sensibilities and your willingness to enter into a global war for civilizational survival even while you are too timid, too fearful . . . too decent . . . to match the ruthlessness of your enemies.”

I closed my eyes but that did not stop his voice.

“At least understand that such decency goes away quickly when you are burying your children and your grandchildren,” rasped the Time Traveler. “Or watching them suffer in slavery. Ruthlessness deferred against totalitarian aggression only makes the later need for ruthlessness more terrible. Thousands of years of history and war should have taught you that. Did you fools learn nothing from living through the charnel house that was the 20th Century?”

I’d had enough. I opened my eyes, turned, reached into the top left drawer of my desk, and pulled out the .38 revolver that I had owned for twenty-three years and fired only twice, at firing ranges, shortly after it was given to me as a gift.

I aimed it at the Time Traveler. “Get out,” I said.

He showed no reaction. “Do you want more than words?” he asked softly. “I will give you more than words. I give you eight million Jews dead in Israel – incinerated – and many more dead Jews in Eurabia and around the world. I give you the continent of Europe cast back more than five hundred years into sad pools of warring civilizations.”

“Get out,” I repeated, aiming the revolver higher.

“I give you an Asian world in chaos, a Pacific rim ruled by China after the vacuum of America’s withdrawal – this nation’s full resources devoted to fighting, and possibly losing, the Century War – a South America and Mexico lost to corruption and appeasement, a resurgent Russian Empire that has reclaimed its old dominated republics and more, and a Canada split into three hateful nations.”

I cocked the pistol. The click sounded very loud in the small room.

“We were speaking about ruthlessness,” said the Time Traveler. “If you fail to understand it at first, you learn it quickly enough in a war like the one you are allowing to come. Would you like to hear the litany of Islamic shrines and cities that will blossom in nuclear retaliatory fire in the decades to come?”

“Get out,” I said for a final time. “I’m ruthless enough to shoot you, and by God I will if you don’t get out of here.”

The Time Traveler nodded. “As you wish. But you should hear two last words, two last names . . .religious judge Ubar ibn al-Khattab and rector-imam Ismail Nawahda of New Al-Azhar University in London, part of the 200,000-man Golden Mosque of the New Islamic Khalifate in Eurabia.”

“What are those names to me or me to them?” I asked. My finger was on the trigger of the cocked .38.

“These religious officials were on the Islamic Tribunal that sentenced two dhimmis to death by stoning and beheading,” said the Time Traveler. “The dhimmis were your two grandsons, Thomas and Daniel.”

“What was . . . will be . . . their crime?” I was able to ask after a long minute. My tongue felt like a strip of rough cotton.

“They dated two Muslim women – Thomas while he was in London on business, Daniel while visiting his aging mother, your daughter, in Canada – without first converting to Islam. That part of sharia, Islamic law, is called hudud, and we know quite a bit about it in my time. Your grandsons didn’t know the young women were Muslim since they both were dressed in modern garb - -thus violating their own society’s ironclad rule of Hijab — modesty. The girls, I hear, also died, but those were not sharia sentences. Not hudud. Their brothers and fathers murdered them. Honor killings . . . I think you’ve already heard the phrase by 2006.”

If I were to shoot him, I had to do it now. My hand was shaking more fiercely every second.

“Of course, the odds against one sharia court in London sentencing both your grandsons to death for crimes committed as far apart as London and Quebec City is too much of a coincidence to believe in,” continued the Time Traveler. “As is the fact that they would both be introduced to Muslim girls, without knowing they were Muslim, and go on a single dinner date with them at the same time, in cities so far apart. And Thomas was married. I know he thought he was having a business dinner with a client.”

“What . . .” I began, my arm holding the pistol shaking as if palsied.

The Time Traveler laughed a final time. “All of your grandsons’ names were on lists. You wrote something . . . will soon write something . . . that will put your name, and all your descendents’ names, on their list. Including your only surviving grandson.”

I opened my mouth but did not speak.

“According to their own writings, which we all know well in my day,” continued the Time Traveler, “ ‘Hadith Malik 511:1588 The last statement that Muhammad made was: "O Lord, perish the Jews and Christians. They made churches of the graves of their prophets. There shall be no two faiths in Arabia.’ And there are not. All infidels – Christians, Jews, secularists -- have been executed, converted, or driven out. Israel is cinders. Eurabia and the New Khalifate is growing, absorbing what was left of the old, weak cultures there that once dreamt of a European Union. The Century War is not near over. Two of your three grandsons are now dead. Your remaining grandson still fights, as does one of your surviving granddaughters. Two of your three living granddaughters now live under sharia within the aegis of New Khalifate. They are women of the veil.”

I lowered the pistol.

“ Enjoy these last days and months and years of your slumber, Grandfather,” said the scarred old man. “Your wake-up call is coming soon.”

The Time Traveler said three last words and was gone.

I put the pistol away – realizing too late that it had never been loaded – and sat down to write this. I could not. I waited these three months to try again.

Oh, Lord, I wish that some person on business from Porlock would wake me from this dream.

It was not the horrors of his revelations about my grandchildren that had shaken me the most deeply, shaken me to the core of my core, but rather the the Time Traveler’s last three words. Three words that any Replayer or time traveler visiting here from a century or more from now would react to first and most emotionally – three words I will not share here in this piece nor ever plan to share, at least until everyone on Earth knows them – three words that will keep me awake nights for months and years to come.

Three words.

Sincerely,

164 years of freedom and a slow slide to Socialism

2010-09-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

"From 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, until 1940, when the first Social Security checks were paid out, Americans did not receive income from the federal government unless they were pensioned veterans or employees of the government itself. For 164 years, Americans took care of themselves and their own families. With the Social Security Act, they began to slide into government dependency. Today, thanks to Social Security, a majority of Americans over 65 rely on the federal government for a majority of their income. Thanks to Medicare, enacted in 1965, American seniors now rely on the federal government for their health care, too. If Congress does not repeal Obamacare, virtually all Americans will soon depend on government for their health care. We will no longer be a free and self-reliant people -- we will be a government-dependent people." --CNSNews editor Terrence Jeffrey

People should not fear their government...

2010-09-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson

The Ant & the Grasshoper, American Work Ethic vs. Obama-nomics

2010-09-08T14:46:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a great deal about poverty lately, specifically its causes as well as what our obligations are (both personal and societal) to alleviate it.

This is a dicey subject to address for two reasons. First, because of our current economy, there are many people who are a heck of a lot poorer than they were two years ago. And second, any time someone addresses the issue of poverty, except from a leftist position, they are automatically labeled as cruel, unfeeling, lacking in compassion, and the usual plethora of criticism – without consideration as to whether the arguments have any merit or not.

The reason this issue came up was because of a recent comment on my blog entry "The Ant and the Grasshopper."

I had posted one of those humorous modern-twist rewrites of Aesop's classic fable circulating around the Internet. Most of the readers got a chuckle out of it.

But someone took exception to our amusement and accused us of not being Christian because we preferred the original moral of the story ("Be Responsible for Yourself").

This poses an interesting question. To what extent are we socially, morally and ethically responsible for others? At what point do the Ants share their hard-earned resources with the Grasshoppers? And is it ethical to force the Ants to distribute their resources to the Grasshoppers at the point of a gun? What responsibility do the Grasshoppers have in their own fate?

Let's make one thing clear: In Aesop's fable, what distinguishes the Ant from the Grasshopper is a work ethic. Nothing more, nothing less. The Grasshopper is not down on his luck while the Ant is busy storing food. He is not ill, or handicapped, or in debt, or out of work, or any other hardship an insect might face which would keep him from working toward a secure future for himself. The resources are freely available to both insects. Nothing – nothing whatsoever – is preventing the Grasshopper from getting his rear in gear and storing food for the winter – except an attitude problem.

Yet according to the critic, we should not presume to call ourselves Christian because the Bible admonishes us to love our neighbor as ourselves. The selfish Ant should share his food with the poor helpless Grasshopper regardless of what caused the Grasshopper to get into his predicament in the first place.

So, since I am clearly a flawed Christian unable to appreciate the finer points of loving my neighbor, I need to know to what extent the Grasshopper is called upon to provide for himself before the Ant steps in to keep him from starving in the cold of winter.

Is the Ant required to applaud the Grasshopper's idleness, then uncomplainingly feed him during the winter? Does God smile upon the idle Grasshopper receiving the Ant's hard-earned resources without requiring anything of the Grasshopper in return?

Perhaps. Certainly Jesus died for both the Ants and the Grasshoppers of this world. Not one single one of us – Ants or Grasshoppers – are worthy of such a sacrifice, but He did it anyway.

However I don't believe that releases us from our obligation to try our best to provide for ourselves.

Many of us in this economy are poorer than we were before the downturn due to credit crunches, medical bills, unemployment, inflation, and other unavoidable situations. These people are not Grasshoppers. They are just down on their luck, something that happens to Ants and Grasshoppers alike.

I wish – oh how I wish – people could grasp this very basic concept: No one objects to helping others get back on their feet when they're down. Most of us consider it a privilege, a duty and a pleasure to help those who are down on their luck.

But the Grasshopper is not down on his luck due to misfortune. He simply does not have a work ethic to match the Ant's. Not only does the Grasshopper expect the Ant to help, but he refuses to help himself even when he can. Worse, our government then compels the Ant to help the Grasshopper at the point of a gun, whether the Ant wants to or not. That's when the milk of human – er, insect – kindness starts to run thin.

To forestall the firestorm of criticism undoubtedly in the works by outraged readers, I'll ask again: To what extent should able-bodied, perfectly-capable Grasshoppers be asked to provide their own resources for the winter? Or are Grasshoppers absolved from all responsibility for their own future?

And if the Ants are called upon to love their Grasshopper neighbors as themselves, why are the Grasshoppers excused from returning the sentiment? The Grasshopper, if he loved the Ant as himself, would get busy and store his own food so as not to be a burden to the poor hard-working Ant when the snow flies.

For those who accuse us Ants of un-Christian attitudes with regard to our neighbors, I'll reference a few biblical passages in support of personal responsibility, the most succinct of which is 2 Thessalonians 3:10: "… If a man will not work, he shall not eat." Note that it does not say "Can not work" but "Will not work." Big difference.

It should be obvious to anyone with an insect-sized grain of common sense that government entitlements discourage able-bodied Grasshoppers from working. And on a larger scale, I'm concerned that as more and more Grasshoppers receive the resources which are forcibly removed from the Ants, there will be fewer Ants to support the Grasshoppers.

Since the Bible is ever a handy resource for life's concerns, I'll direct the doubtful to parts of Proverbs 6:

"Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! …it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest – and poverty will come on you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man."

Just a thought.

Patrice Lewis is a freelance writer and the author of "The Home Craft Business: How to Make it Survive and Thrive." She is co-founder (with her husband) of a home woodcraft business. The Lewises live on 40 acres in north Idaho with their two homeschooled children, assorted livestock, and a shop that overflows into the house with depressing regularity. Visit her blog at http://www.patricelewis.blogspot.com/.

Elitist disdain - Now here is CHANGE we can use!

2010-09-08T13:06:00.000-07:00

"According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they're ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans -- for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn't an 'electoral wave,' it's a temper tantrum." --Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson

Cheer up; it could be worse

2010-09-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

"Turning to the U.S. economy and the latest reading on the job market for August. Employers cut 54,000 workers from their payrolls, less than what analysts had predicted. The unemployment rate ticked up a notch: 9.6 percent now as discouraged workers restarted their job search. It's a mixed picture here, but it's giving some encouragement to those who are out there looking, some who are hanging onto their jobs and their businesses by a thread." --NBC's Brian Williams

Our Nung Allies know this story all too well...

2010-09-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

"Politically divided, committed to two wars, in a deep recession, insolvent and still stunned by the financial meltdown of 2008, our government seems paralyzed. As European socialism implodes, for some reason a new statist U.S. government wants to copy failure by taking over ever more of the economy and borrowing trillions more dollars to provide additional entitlements. As panicky old allies look for American protection, we talk of slashing our defense budget. In apologetic fashion, we spend more time appeasing confident enemies than buttressing worried friends." --historian Victor Davis Hanson

Summer of Recovery - Jobless Claims UP AGAIN!

2010-09-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

"It's not as bad as it could've been. That, as the Labor Day weekend began, was the cold comfort that many in the media took from the still-dismal August jobs report. Can't we expect something a little better? True enough, 68,000 new private-sector jobs were created last month, showing that private businesses, though gasping for breath, aren't dead yet. But overall, 54,000 jobs disappeared, raising the toll during the 'Recovery Summer' Vice President Joe Biden ridiculously hailed two months ago to 238,000. Nor was the uptick in the unemployment rate to 9.6% from 9.5% what you expect in a 'recovery.' This is not 'better than expected'; it's worse than expected. This can be gauged not by market expectations for modest job creation, but by long-term experience watching how jobs are created in a normal recovery. By that gauge, we're in the worst jobs slump since World War II. ... If it wasn't clear to everyone by now, it should be: All the actions this government has taken -- the $700 billion TARP program, the $862 billion 'stimulus,' the health care takeover, financial reform -- haven't 'saved or created' 3.8 million jobs, as claimed. Instead, they've destroyed millions of jobs -- and with them, the hopes and dreams of those who've lost the jobs. But the administration remains clueless, hinting that it may seek another 'stimulus' costing billions. This bunch is either willfully doing damage to the U.S. economy, or completely incompetent. On Friday, the president actually patted himself on the back, saying the employment report was 'positive news' that 'reflects the steps we've already taken to break the back of this recession.' If there's one thing that marks this administration as different from others, it's the steadfast refusal to remove its ideological blinders and learn from its mistakes." --Investor's Business Daily

BATF and the Night of Terror

2010-09-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

by Bob Lesmeister

"What are you doing in my house? Get out of my house!"

This is what Janice Hart screamed as she witnessed agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms (BATF) literally tearing her home apart. What had Janice Hart done to have her house destroyed? NOTHING. BATF had the wrong house and the wrong suspect. In what has become the rule instead of the exception, BATF agents blatantly and knowingly violated Hart's 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th Amendment rights. In addition, agents once again forcefully abused children in the "pursuit of their duties."

As related by Margie Boule in the Washington OREGONIAN, in the evening of February 5th Janet [sic] Hart had just returned home to her house outside of Portland, Oregon, from the grocery store with her two young daughters when she noticed law enforcement agents swarming in and out of her home. Little did she realize that they had literally torn the inside of her house apart in the search for guns that didn't exist. When she stormed up to the side door (it had been torn off its hinges and then nailed back on) demanding an answer a BATF agent yanked her inside telling her she was going to jail. In typical BATF fashion, Hart was not informed of the charges against her, she was not read her rights, nor was she allowed to see after her children.

The children were terrified. Both daughters heard the BATF agent say Mrs. Hart was headed for jail and they became horrified. As Hart's daughter told THE OREGONIAN, "I was crying. They (BATF agents) say, 'Shut up and get back in the car.' So, I put up my knee like to get out, and he shut the door on my knee." BATF may call this act of child abuse an "accident" or something that happened in "the heat of confrontation" but the truth is, agents have been engaging in this sort of behavior since the inception of the BATF as a bureau. The most blatant case being the storming of the Branch Davidian compound with automatic weapons, knowing full well that children would be caught in the crossfire. Another incident was the case of Del and Melisa Knudson. During a raid on the Knudson home (no illegal firearms were found), Mrs. Knudson was hand-cuffed and forced to leave her 21-month old daughter unattended in a bathtub. Luckily, the baby didn't drown. Evidently, the agents were not concerned with the baby's welfare nor that of the parents.

As the daughters were being held outside the home, Hart was forced inside. In what must have seemed like a scene from a Gestapo raid in Nazi Germany, Janice Hart witnessed the destruction of her personal property by the "secret police." As she related to THE OREGONIAN, "I'm screaming, 'Oh my God, what are you doing to my house?' They told me to shut up. They said I could talk later. And they kept saying, 'You're going to prison, Janice.' The whole house was totally destroyed."

BATF agents in the kitchen were throwing plates and dishes on the floor. In the bedroom agents were ripping clothes off hangers and dumping them on the floor. Dresser drawers were overturned and strewn all about. Hart's life was terrorized, her children were abused, her house destroyed, and her personal belongings ravaged. During the Gestapo-style raid, while Mrs. Hart was in custody, BATF agents did not bother to insure that Hart was indeed the subject of their warrant. They simply didn't bother to check. And what's worse, when it was obvious the had the wrong person, they continued to terrorize Hart and her family.

In a complete violation of Hart's civil and constitutional rights, BATF agents herded her into the basement of the house and interrogated her. Like a scene from some cheap detective move, agents gave her the "third degree."

"There's about eight of them down there," she told the OREGONIAN, "and they're asking my over and over my name, my Social Security number, my birthdate. On and on, over and over. And I'm saying, 'What did I do?'"

Hart was forced to answer questions for over an hour before she was read her rights and then agents refused to allow her to call an attorney, both serious violations of Hart's Constitutional rights knowingly violated by BATF. George Kim, main investigator, should have known better. The person cited in the warrant was Janice Marie Harrell, who had used "Hart" as an alias, but that's where the similarity ends. The Janice the BATF was in search of had a scar on her face. Janice Hart did not. Harrell was a street woman, while Hart was a working-class homeowner with two children. Hart's eyes were a different color than Harrell's, her hair was different and she was heavier than the real suspect. There was nothing in Hart's background or physical appearance that matched Janice Marie Harrell.

"They pulled up my sleeves, looking for scars," said Hart. Of course, they weren't there. "I say, 'How do I remove scars? Scars don't disappear.' That's when he (Kim) started getting this expression on his face like 'I think I messed up.' But of course, they don't admit that to you."

So, when it's obvious that Agent Kim and his bumbling agents have the wrong person, do they release Hart? No, they arrest her. They read Hart her rights and take her to the Portland slammer. It was at the Portland police station when things finally turned around. The Portland police, professional and conscientious, treated Hart as a person, without intimidation and threats. Immediately upon being fingerprinted, they released her because it was obvious that Kim and his Keystone Cops had arrested the wrong person. It took Portland police 30 seconds to recognize that Janice Hart was not Janice Harrell and they released her, while Kim and his agents were standing nearby scratching their heads.

OREGONIAN reporter, Margie Boule recounted Hart's story for local Portland BATF resident agent in charge, Pete McLouth and he basically said that his agents did indeed pick up the wrong person. He couldn't deny it because Harrell was picked up shortly after the terrorist raid on Hart's home. That's about all he said, however, because McLouth took the standard BATF line of "I can't talk about it because it's an ongoing investigation."

The search warrants used by the BATF in the Hart case were much like the ones used in the Branch Davidian case. Someone, with hearsay knowledge, tipped BATF off. There was no evidence that Janice Hart was Janice Harrell and absolutely no evidence or even the slightest indication that Hart was illegally dealing firearms.

The raid was conducted simply because of one person's gossip. Even though Janice Hart no longer faces criminal charges, she is still feeling the harassment of BATF. She now suffers both sleep and eating disorders. She and her older daughter visit a psychiatrist to deal with the stress and her 4-year-old daughter has had related problems in school. Added to that, Hart's neighbors are no longer the friendly sort. To them, Hart is still a criminal subject of a police raid.

What is evident once again from this raid is the fact that BATF agents did not feel that violent behavior, destruction of property, violation of rights and child abuse would be challenged. It shows once again that silence from the top, read that to mean BATF Director Stephen Higgins' office, is taken as a green light to commit atrocities in the name of the law. Director Higgins is well aware that violations are being committed on a daily basis by his agents, yet he has done nothing and continues to do nothing about it. He once again has proved himself to be an ineffectual and incompetent law enforcement officer. Over the past year it has been shown that sexual harrassment and intimidation even within the ranks of the BATF has gone unabated and violent terrorist raids on innocent citizens continue at an alarming rate. This continues because the Director allows it. One word or one directive from Higgins could prevent future Constitutional and civil rights violations by BATF agents, but so far, he denies there is a problem. Unless citizens get involved and pressure the White House to appoint a professional person with integrity and respect for the Bill of Rights to head BATF, the abuses will continue.

Tom Cloyd, writing an editorial to THE OREGONIAN in response to the raid, sums it up best. "But the horror and violence go even beyond this, for child abuse was apparently involved in this case. Three children, ages 12, 9 and 4 were in the car when Hart arrived home to find it being trashed by federal agents. The children had to watch this act of incomprehensible violence and the 12-year-old was physically abused when and agent closed a door on her leg to keep her from getting out of the car. I hope others will join with me in demanding that federal law enforcement agents of all sorts be briefed on the Bill of Rights, be held accountable to the public for their actions and be prosecuted when they take our society's legitimate and law-driven pursuit of justice into their own hands."

Unfortunately, it seems that Director Higgins is unconcerned with the Bill of Rights as he permits his agents to violate the law time and again without censure or reprimand. I try hard not to draw parallels to the Gestapo of the 1930's and 40's and Stalin's ruthless NKVD, but breaking down of doors, the destruction of property, illegal interrogations etc. of innocent people by BATF are so close to "secret police" tactics that they could be right out of the KGB manual. Russia's first secret police was formed by Ivan the Terrible in 1565 and they were every bit as cruel as their descendants in the Cheka and the KGB. French biographer and historian Henri Troyat describes some of Ivan's secret police tactics: "Husbands were tortured in front of wives, mothers in front of children." I'm sure 12-year-old Nina Hart and 4-year-old Randi Hart know the feeling.

Mortgage Slavery, King Obama Style!

2010-09-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

I read a great article from the Roseburg Beacon on how Tax Freedom Day moved up to August 19th this year. This is the day that the average worker labors to pay for government at all levels. As the pace of government expansion has grown quickly in the last two years, it takes 34 more days of work since 2008 to feed government. If it continues at this pace we will work for the government 365 days of the year in just seven years from now. If we worked all year to satisfy government, wouldn’t that make us slaves? What is we work more than half the year to feed government? Doesn’t that make us half-slaves?

The Kings of old England allowed people to live on their property if they paid their yearly tribute. These are now called property taxes. Today, in our country, if the government wants your property so that someone else can pay more tribute, your property can be expropriated or made worthless until you give in. This is especially worrisome for our personal security and safety as the federal government now owns most of the mortgages in our nation. Owned by government?

Oregon, the state of excess

2010-09-08T10:22:00.001-07:00

I had a young couple with a new baby renting from me on a HUD (government assisted rent) contract. They claimed that the man threw a rubber dog chew toy on the floor. It bounced and put a small crack in a window. A visiting home health nurse noticed the crack and questioned the mother. The nurse told her, “You leave your husband today, or we take your baby!” The husband was charged with domestic violence (not domestic abuse as he did not abuse her). He was forced to attend anger management classes and a restraining order was put on him. He could not see his wife or his child without court supervision for a year.

Now here’s where it gets even more interesting: the father called to tell me this story to break his lease. Since he was not allowed to visit, he no longer qualified as “head of household” on the HUD contract. His wife could not take over the lease without going through HUD’s long wait list. He was crying when he told his story, yet I found it hard to believe. Oregon Children’s Service Division called to tell me I could not hold the breaking of the lease against her in a domestic violence situation. He verified the man threw a dog toy down and acted like I did not take domestic violence seriously. This means that I, the property owner, must absorb the losses from a broken lease that the government refuses to call broken. I’ll know better next time.

Parents, Mark Your Calendars: September 14th Is Obama Day At School!

2010-09-08T10:02:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, White House sources confirmed that President Obama will deliver another back-to-school address aimed at all of the nation’s children. That’s right, the president will make September 14 the second-annual Obama Day at your local school!

You might recall last year’s Obama Day, for which the U.S. Department of Education put out teaching guides that gave parents across the country reasonable cause to fear a day of liberal politics and celebrating President Obama. You might also remember the divisive national uproar that precipitated, which ultimately culminated in a relatively staid — but nonetheless campaign-esque — speech, not to mention a fair amount of after-the-fact sneering at people who either didn’t want public-school kids exposed to left-wing politicking or just wanted their kids, you know, left alone by the president. Finally, you might recall the May Parade magazine graduation “address” the president wrote that offered just the kind of profit-denigrating, “service” extolling rhetoric that people feared eight months earlier:

Of course, each of you has the right to take your diploma and seek the quickest path to the biggest paycheck or the highest title possible. But remember: You can choose to broaden your concerns to include your fellow citizens and country instead. By tying your ambitions to America’s, you’ll hitch your wagon to a cause larger than yourself. You can choose a career in public service or the nonprofit sector, or teach in an underserved school. If you have medical training, you can work in an understaffed clinic. Love science? You can discover new sources of clean energy or launch a business that makes the most efficient and affordable solar panels or wind turbines.

So will this year’s Obama Day be as controversial as the last installment? Probably not.

For one thing, unless the White House is not just wearing blinders, but living in a full-on isolation tank, it won’t authorize the release of any lesson plans to go with the talk. And if it does, it will scrutinize them, put them before focus groups, and torture them until they give up any and all material that could be even minutely controversial.

Second, while there is plenty of anger to go around right now, there’s been no burning summer of discontent like last year’s spree of town-hall conflagrations. It seems the growing ranks of fuming Americans are now more focused on ballot boxes than soap boxes.

Finally, last year there was a sense that President Obama — who’d led the “stimulus” charge, driven the takeover of GM and Chrysler, was championing huge and incomprehensible health-care legislation, and had repeatedly been in Americans’ faces — was simply too much in our lives. Directing his near-ubiquity toward peoples’ kids only made matters worse. Oh, and some of the rather off-putting stuff from the “Cult of Obama,” as Gene Healy dubbed it, probably didn’t help.

This year, while certainly still a presence, it seems the president has made himself more scarce.

So the coming address is not likely to launch nearly the same seismic outrage as last year’s. But there’s still good reason to object to it.

No doubt the speech will feature prominent backdrop propaganda, sweeping views of packed-in, star-struck students, and camera angles designed to make the president appear just a bit larger than life. You know — standard campaign stuff many people don’t want in their schools. The speech will also almost certainly tout “major achievements” in education by the administration, especially the mega-overrated Race to the Top. So it will be politically self-serving — though masked by the plausible explanation that it’s just about “the children” — and yet another reminder why the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to interfere in education.

But there is one other, more mundane argument against this speech, and it is being made — as it was in 2009 — by the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews: the president will once again be eating up student learning time. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has often opined, American students probably need to spend significantly more time learning, not less. Yet his boss has apparently decided that every year he is going to take a little of that precious time and say “this is mine — look at me!”

And so we have to ask ourselves: Are the benefits of students being told to work hard and stay in school really worth the myriad problems that go with a controversial, inevitably politicized, time-grabbing, national presidential address? The answer can only be a resounding “no.”

We Don't Like Either of You

2010-09-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

By Jim Yardley

Numerous opinion polls show that after the November elections, the Republican Party will have regained enough seats in the House to take back the majority position and the Speakership. Results for the Senate are less amenable to forecast, but even so, gains up to and including a remote chance for a majority are possible there as well.

It is necessary to remind Republicans of one salient fact about this predicted shift in political strength as a result of the 2010 midterm elections, and it is a fact that can be expressed in just a few words:

You may have a majority, but you do not have a mandate to govern in any way that you choose.

The Democrats have had a majority for six years, and they have controlled both Houses of Congress and the White House for the past two years. Their disastrous ouster in November will be because they tried to govern as if they had a mandate, and quite clearly, they didn't.

Significant majorities of American citizens have been opposed to many of the initiatives that have come out of Washington since January 20, 2009. The so-called Stimulus, Obamacare, the auto company bailouts, and other programs have all been based on Democratic Party claims that they held a popular mandate for "change." That these changes have been opposed by large majorities of voters in every case hardly indicates that such a mandate ever existed, except in the minds of political speechwriters and MSM apologists.

It should be clear that the Democratic Party majorities were a direct result of dissatisfaction with the direction the nation had taken in terms of limitations of personal freedom, the seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the increasing threats of Islamic fundamentalism, and the other items on a stunning list of Republican failures. In retrospect, it seems clear that the 2006 and 2008 elections were no so much a vote for Democrats as they were against Republicans.

The 2010 midterm election appears to be shaping up as a vote against Democrats. Republicans should give that sentence a bit of thought. Americans are not voting for you. They know you are just as likely as Democrats to be venal, corrupt, stupid, doctrinaire, foolish, and shortsighted. Unfortunately, Republicans are the only option available.

This theme has been echoed several times in recent days. Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal interviewed Grover Norquist, one of the original contributors to the Contract with America, who, 25 years ago, founded the organization Americans for Tax Reform. Mr. Norquist, a man who could hardly be called nonpartisan, compared the upcoming midterms to 1994, when the Republicans took the House. In his words:

There wasn't a Tea Party movement in '94. There was a Perot movement, which was much less visible and organized. This time we have a thousand mini-Perots (in the Tea Party leadership) who are against the Democrats and for the Republicans.

Well, the voters are certainly against the Democrats. As for being for Republicans, Walter Shapiro offered this assessment in his Politics Daily article describing President Obama's continuing rejection of the reality of voter motivation in 2008:

Obama has often spoken with frustration about his failure to receive enough credit from either the media or the voters for his long string of landmark legislative victories climaxing with health-care reform. But maybe the president's fatal error was that he saw the 2008 election as a mandate for far-reaching change when, in truth, it was a narrower rejection of Bush administration economic and military policies.

In essence, the balance of power in Washington is an endless ebb and flow of disgust for both parties, since each seems to react to the delusion that accompanies election to office. The delusion consists of the belief that (a) the voters love them, and (b) they have a mandate to govern.

The sudden and surprising emergence of the Tea Party movement is perhaps a response by voters to the seemingly endless series of elections that consists of voters going to the polls to "throw the bums out." It appears that the ordinary citizens of the United States want to be able to vote for something and are tired of being forced to merely choose which candidates to vote against.

Both parties should also be very, very afraid of the Tea Parties. Democrats still don't take them seriously and try to marginalize them by referring to them as "teabaggers," homophobes, racist, bigots, and so on. Perhaps the Democratic Party should keep track of the number of Tea Party-endorsed candidates who move into offices currently held by Democrats next January -- it should be very educational. They should also remember that pain is Mother Nature's tuition bill, and they are about to learn something.

Republicans view the Tea Parties differently but show the same condescension. Professional Republicans seem to think that Tea Partiers are available for their use as shock troops and can be ignored until the next election. That's why they seem so shocked when a candidate endorsed by the Tea Party wins a primary against their own chosen candidates. I refer Republicans to the paragraph above regarding tuition payments.

In short, both parties have to understand that the majority of American voters don't like either party. Until either party can produce candidates whom we are willing to vote for, instead of choosing which one to vote against, the Tea Parties and registered independents will continue to grow in size and influence until both Democrats and Republicans are listed in the encyclopedia next to the Whigs and the Bull Moose Party.

Jim Yardley is a retired financial controller, Vietnam veteran, and libertarian (small "l"). Jim blogs at jimyardley.wordpress.com, or he can be contacted directly at james.v.yardley@gmail.com.

Obama Needs Your 401(k) to Balance His Budget

2010-09-07T08:02:00.001-07:00

Bob Adelmann | Sep 06, 2010 |

The Obama administration is “taking the first steps to confiscate retirement dollars,” according to Dr. Jerome Corsi who predicts that the end result will be retirees with 401(k) plans holding near-worthless government debt “that will be paid off in a devalued currency worth…pennies on the dollar.”

The move to confiscate those retirement dollars for government purposes was best illustrated by Christina Kirchner, President of Argentina, in 2008 when she announced plans to seize her citizens’ private pension funds. Writers at the Heritage Foundation said that while Kirchner claimed such seizure was necessary to protect her citizens’ investment accounts from the global meltdown, “most observers believe[d] her real motive [was] to use the $30 billion in seized assets to ease the massive debt obligations her leftist spendthrift government [had] run up.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, saying that “taking over the…pension fund assets [would] ease the cash crunch faced by [her] government.”

Corsi said he has a letter from the Treasury Department, Bureau of Public Debt, informing U.S. citizens that the federal government is rolling out a new program called “Treasury Direct” that will allow citizens “to purchase, manage, and redeem…savings bonds” electronically, as well as offering an option to purchase such bonds automatically through payroll savings or a personal checking account. This happened to coincide nicely, according to Corsi, with a bill offered by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) to create “Automatic IRAs” that would require all employers and employees to invest in IRAs using that automatic deduction option, “whether they want to do so or not.”

And this happened to coincide also with a program being pushed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) called “Retirement USA” which would create a government-forced retirement program with assets being directed into special Treasury Retirement Bonds, or R-Bonds. “Retirement USA” is promoting the idea that all workers have a “right” to a government retirement account, in addition to Social Security and any private pension plans those workers already have in place. Others behind “Retirement USA” also support more government dependency for workers, including the AFL-CIO, the Economic Policy Institute, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare and the Pension Rights Center.

All of this is being promoted by the idea that individual citizens aren’t saving enough for their retirement, and that consequently government has to “do something.” Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash., above photo), Chairman of the House Ways and Mean’s Committee’ Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, is confused about whose money is in those 401(k) plans: the individual contributor, or the government. He said that “since the savings rate isn’t going up for the investment [Congress is making] of $80 billion [in 401(k) tax savings], we have to start to think about whether or not we want to continue to invest that $80 billion for a policy that’s not generating what we now say it should.”

The worldview of Rep. McDermott is revealing, and brings clarity to the point of view of many in the Washington establishment that the $4.5 trillion currently invested in 401(k) plans and other private pension plans that enjoy tax breaks actually belong to the government, and that when Congress loses $80 billion that would otherwise flow to Washington due to those tax breaks, it’s an “investment” that must “generate what we say it should”, or else it must be replaced with something else that works better.

The real “story behind the story” was revealed by Joe Wolverton here when he said,

…since the day of his inauguration, Barack Obama and his congressional co-conspirators have consistently and unapologetically set out to systematically nationalize the economy of the United States: first the banks; then the insurance companies; then the auto industry; then healthcare; and now the piece de resistance, the private savings accounts of millions of middle-class Americans.

But, thanks to the SEIU and their program “Retirement USA,” it’s all dressed up to look like a good deal for unsuspecting owners of retirement plans. In “Making the Case for a New System” they take the view that “A secure retirement is part of the American dream. Yet our retirement system is failing many Americans. Social Security is the cornerstone of our system, but as currently structured, is not meant to be our only retirement program. Pensions and savings plans are supposed to fill the gap, but too many workers don’t have plans, and too many plans don’t do the job.” They complain that:

* Private retirement plan coverage is not UNIVERSAL…
* For millions of Americans, private retirement benefits are not SECURE…
* And Private retirement benefits are not ADEQUATE…

And, continues “Retirement USA”’s website, “Social Security must be preserved and strengthened… [and] we must encourage employers to offer and maintain them.”[emphasis added]

Underlying all of this is, of course, the statist presumption that government knows best what’s good for the citizens, and when the citizens’ behavior fails to meet government expectations, then mandates and force must be used to do for those citizens what the government thinks is best.

And the fact that Washington is looking at annual trillion-dollar deficits “for as far as the eye can see,” that $4.5 trillion of private monies is just too tempting to ignore.

This article originally appeared at www.thenewamerican.com and is reposted here with permission.

A publication written by "We the People," The Constitutionalist Today is comprised of articles from a range of writers, journalists, and bloggers. As such, the opinions herein may not reflect the opinions of our staff, management, or editorial board.

Where’s the Food? The Fear of Uncertainty

2010-09-03T09:55:00.001-07:00

As the economy continues to sink deeper, forcing more people into unemployment lines, uncertainty is driving otherwise clear thinking people into a horde mentality that poses a growing danger to society. A recent episode in Tulsa involving a federally subsidized food distribution program is illustrative of the new reality of this uncertainty as increasing numbers of people begin to wonder where their next meal will come from.

Iron Gate, a church-sponsored food distribution program, and recipient of federal stimulus dollars, provides food boxes to eligible low income families. Typically these boxes, containing about 30 pounds of food, are distributed monthly for free to about 165 families who qualify based on their income and dependent status.

It didn’t take long for some bits of erroneous information to spread through viral emails and social media before the hordes converged upon the church to receive their share of free food. At the unexpected sight of 2000 people lining up one morning, the alarmed staff of Iron Gate had no choice but to suspend the food box distribution.

If you have ever witnessed the scene of a promotion van pulling up at a local fair and then throwing out samples of food, you may have been shocked at the sight of healthy, stampeding people to get their free bag. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the ugly scene of a crowd of adults, stoked with the fear of uncertainty, as they jostle for position in a line for free food boxes.

It was a frightening situation heightened by a misinformed crowd jammed together in the hot Tulsa sun expecting something for free. The same scene is likely to be repeated in many other towns and cities as local food banks are reporting a 40 to 50% increase in traffic largely from first time recipients.

As these types of federal and state subsidized free food distribution programs continue to expand, the growing throngs of economically displaced people, fearing an uncertain future, will likely become increasingly panicked at the thought of empty pantries.

The societal danger is that as the crisis worsens, demand for food assistance will grow exponentially, both because of the food shortage and rising prices. As the economic uncertainty continues to spread the entitlement mentality will creep among those who are marginally affected by financial circumstances. Observers of the Iron Gate incident noted that the line of 2000 was comprised of a broad cross section of the economic strata that included many people without immediate need for assistance.

The bigger threat is that as a liberal-minded government continues to expand the supply of free food, it will actually aggravate the problem, by creating a growing dependency class and consuming an ever-larger portion of the market for food. It has the potential of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy which can only exacerbate the problem.

A family in economic distress can be pushed over the edge when there is fear as to the source of their next meal. While this may be a way of existence for hundreds of millions around the world, American families haven’t faced that kind of uncertainty since the 1930s. As more families join the ranks of the economically distressed, their collective fear could strain the tolerances of society and the ability for the government to provide for them. It is a frightening situation.

Vermont, those little rascals!

2010-09-03T09:47:00.001-07:00

*THIS MAY MAKE YOUR DAY!*

Vermont State Rep. Fred Maslack has read the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as Vermont 's own Constitution very carefully, and his strict interpretation of these documents is popping some eyeballs in New England and elsewhere.

Maslack recently proposed a bill to register "non-gun-owners" and require
them to pay a $500 fee to the state. Thus Vermont would become the
first state to require a permit for the luxury of going about unarmed and
assess a fee of $500 for the privilege of not owning a gun.

Maslack read the "militia" phrase of the Second Amendment as not only the right of the individual citizen to bear arms, but as a clear mandate todo so. He believes that universal gun ownership was advocated by the Framers of the Constitution as an antidote to a "monopoly of force" by the government as well as criminals. Vermont 's constitution states explicitly that "the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the State" and those persons who are "conscientiously scrupulous of bearing arms" shall be required to "pay such equivalent.."

Clearly, says Maslack, Vermonters have a constitutional obligation to arm themselves, so that they are capable of responding to "any situation that may arise."

Under the bill, adults who choose not to own a firearm would be required to register their name, address, Social Security Number, and driver's license number with the state. "There is a legitimate government interest in knowing who is not prepared to defend the state should they be asked to do so," Maslack says

Vermont already boasts a high rate of gun ownership along with the least restrictive laws of any state .. it's currently the only state that allows a citizen to carry a concealed firearm without a permit. This combination of plenty of guns and few laws regulating them has resulted in a crime rate that is the third lowest in the nation.

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."

This makes sense! There is no reason why gun owners should have to pay taxes to support police protection for people not wanting to own guns. Let them contribute their fair share and pay their own way.

Kind Obama has new Tax's for you! Just in time for Christmas!

2010-09-02T15:20:00.000-07:00

In just six months, on January 1, 2011, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect.

They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves.

On January 1, 2011, here’s what happens... (read it to the end, so you see all three waves)...

First Wave:

Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief

In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families.
These will all expire on January 1, 2011.

Personal income tax rates will rise.
The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed).

The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent.
All the rates in between will also rise.

Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates.

The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:

* The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
* The 25% bracket rises to 28%
* The 28% bracket rises to 31%
* The 33% bracket rises to 36%
* The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%

Higher taxes on marriage and family.
The "marriage penalty" (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income.

The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child.

The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level.

The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut.

The return of the Death Tax.
This year only, there is no death tax. (It’s a quirk!) For those dying on or after January 1, 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes, a business, a retirement account, could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones. Think of the farmers who don’t make much money, but their land, which they purchased years ago with after-tax dollars, is now worth a lot of money. Their children will have to sell the farm, which may be their livelihood, just to pay the estate tax if they don’t have the cash sitting around to pay the tax. Think about your own family’s assets. Maybe your family owns real estate, or a business that doesn’t make much money, but the building and equipment are worth $1 million. Upon their death, you can inherit the $1 million business tax free, but if they own a home, stock, cash worth $500K on top of the $1 million business, then you will owe the government $275,000 cash! That’s 55% of the value of the assets over $1 million! Do you have that kind of cash sitting around waiting to pay the estate tax?

Higher tax rates on savers and investors.
The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011.

The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in 2011.

These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013.

Second Wave:

Obamacare
There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011. They include:

The "Medicine Cabinet Tax"
Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or healthreimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).

The "Special Needs Kids Tax"
This provision of Obamacare imposes a cap on flexible spending accounts (FSAs) of $2500 (Currently, there is no federal government limit). There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children.

There are thousands of families with special needs children in the United States , and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education.

Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington , D.C. ( National Child Research Center ) can easily exceed $14,000 per year.

Under tax rules, FSA dollars can not be used to pay for this type of special needs education.

The HSA (Health Savings Account) Withdrawal Tax Hike.
This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent.

Third Wave:

The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) and Employer Tax Hikes
When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they'll be in for a nasty surprise-the AMT won't be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired.

The major items include:

The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year.
According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center , Congress' failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families-rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million. These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level. The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.

Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear.
Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or "depreciate") equipment purchases up to $250,000.

This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can currently expense half of their purchases of equipment.

In January of 2011, all of it will have to be "depreciated."

Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses.
There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. The biggest is the loss of the "research and experimentation tax credit," but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.

Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced.
The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available..
Tax credits for education will be limited.

Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses.

Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut.

Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed.

The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.

Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed.
Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA.

This contribution also counts toward an annual "required minimum distribution." This ability will no longer be there.

PDF Version Read more: ; http://www.atr.org/six-months-untilbr-largest-tax-hikes-a5171##ixzz0sY8waPq1

And worse yet?

Now, your insurance will be INCOME on your W2's!

One of the surprises we'll find come next year, is what follows - - a little "surprise" that 99% of us had no idea was included in the "new and improved" healthcare legislation . . . the dupes, er, dopes, who backed this administration will be astonished!

Starting in 2011, (next year folks), your W-2 tax form sent by your employer will be increased to show the value of whatever health insurance you are given by the company. It does not matter if that's a private concern or governmental body of some sort.

If you're retired? So what... your gross will go up by the amount of insurance you get.

You will be required to pay taxes on a large sum of money that you have never seen. Take your tax form you just finished and see what $15,000 or $20,000 additional gross does to your tax debt.. That's what you'll pay next year.

For many, it also puts you into a new higher bracket so it's even worse.

This is how the government is going to buy insurance for the15% that don't have insurance and it's only part of the tax increases.

Not believing this??? Here is a research of the summaries......

On page 25 of 29: TITLE IX REVENUE PROVISIONS- SUBTITLE A: REVENUE OFFSET PROVISIONS-(sec. 9001,
as modified by sec. 10901) Sec.9002 "requires employers to include in the W-2 form of each employee the aggregate cost of applicable employer sponsored group health coverage that is excludable from the employees gross income."
- Joan Pryde is the senior tax editor for the Kiplinger letters.
- Go to Kiplingers and read about 13 tax changes that could affect you. Number 3 is what is above.

Why am I sending you this? The same reason I hope you forward this to every single person in your address book.

People have the right to know the truth because an election is coming in November

Blowback - Cash For Clunkers

2010-08-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

Speaking of the auto industry and the government, the Cash for Clunkers program has had an entirely predictable result -- prices for used cars have jumped 10 percent over last year. When people traded in their used cars on new cars they likely would have bought anyway under the Clunkers program, the government ordered those assets destroyed rather than resold. That contraction of supply has caused price increases for those who can least afford it. As blogger Ed Morrissey put it, "In other words, the White House spent $3 billion to make used cars more expensive for working-class families. Nice work."

Reflecting its typical "we know best" disdain for the peasants

2010-08-27T11:03:00.001-07:00

Regulatory Commissars: They Knew Drilling Ban Would Kill Jobs

With unemployment hovering at 9.5 percent -- real total unemployment, called U6, is much higher -- what's another 23,000 jobs lost? Apparently, not much to Barack Obama. Previously unreleased documents show that his administration issued the federal moratorium on deepwater drilling despite knowing the ban would kill thousands of jobs. According to The Wall Street Journal, the documents reveal that Michael Bromwich, the head regulator of offshore oil exploration, told Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar that the temporary ban "would result in 'lost direct employment' affecting approximately 9,450 workers and 'lost jobs from indirect and induced effects' affecting about 13,797 more."

Also, regardless of confirmation from the region of the moratorium's devastating impact, the government says the ban will continue. That's right -- the beatings will continue until morale improves. Reflecting its typical "we know best" disdain for the peasants, the administration has even claimed the impact wasn't as bad as industry experts said. Try telling that to those 23,000 former workers.

In related news, House Republican Leader John Boehner has called on Obama to fire Treasury Secretary Tim "Tax Cheat" Geithner, National Economic Council Head Larry Summers, and the rest of the White House economic team. (Senior Economic Adviser Christina Romer and Budget Director Peter Orszag have already abandoned ship.) Pointing to "job-killing tax hike[s]," skyrocketing spending and a penchant for new regulations, Boehner said, "We've tried 19 months of government-as-community organizer. It hasn't worked." A political chess move to be sure, but we won't argue that government-as-community organizer is getting rather expensive.

Ground Zero, New York

2010-08-26T21:07:00.001-07:00

Take a look at the Ottoman Empire's habit of building a Mosque on the holy ground of the Empires they've conquered. If you ask me, that is the impetus behind the Ground Zero Mosque. Next step: Iran will seize Iraq the 2nd Holiest place in Islam. Step Two: Iram will seize Saudi Arabia, the Holiest place in Islam. They will unite the entire Muslim world under one banner, control 1/2 of the world's oil reserves, cut off all oil to the US and the west. The rest, as they say, is history and so will be the once great nation of America. No Islam-O-phobia at all.

Obama White House revokes your right to privacy

2010-08-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.)

It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the misadventures of the CIA.)

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism." (Read about one man's efforts to escape the surveillance state.)

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state — with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's — including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous — decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. (Comment on this story.)

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2013150,00.html#ixzz0xmADY9EI

A woman speaks out on Prepping

2010-08-25T18:01:00.000-07:00

Hoarding
I have a pet peeve. I hate the word “hoarding.”

Let me be more specific: I hate the term “hoarding” as applied toward Preppers.

Hoarding implies that by buying some extra bottles of shampoo, we are doing so at the expense of others. It implies that we are somehow wrong to store rice and beans to feed our families during hard times. That by storing food, we are literally taking it out of the mouths of others. It implies that there are already shortages, and we are taking more than our fair share. That by ramping up our own food storage, we are causing others to go hungry.

I'm sure you'll agree that none of these implications are true. We who are preparing are, by definition, doing so during "easy" times. Right now food and other resources are abundant and relatively cheap. Virtually everyone can do something to prepare for future shortages. Most just choose not to. And make no mistake, lack of preparedness is, for most people in this country, a choice.

Hoarding is an ugly word and, I believe, profoundly untrue as it applies toward those who are concerned enough about the current and future economic situation in our country that we are laying in supplies of food and other resources.

How many people, when they hear a rumor about a shortage of sugar, will go stock up on hundreds of pounds of sugar to the point that rumor becomes truth? I clearly remember such an incident from my childhood. Also toilet paper. Also coffee. Also (my husband remembers this from his early boyhood) vacuum tubes. (As in, for televisions.)

But Preppers have no need to engage in a run on sugar or toilet paper or any other resource…because they already have adequate stores, thank you. This is because they had the foresight to stock up on necessities long before anyone ever dreamed a shortage could happen. This is because they believe only by having adequate stores of resources can they avoid becoming one of the stampeding crowd, one of the desperate horde, one of the victims of violence because someone else wants the same bag of sugar or package of toilet paper.

It’s well documented that a resource doesn’t become “valuable” until it becomes scarce. How much does a pound of salt cost at the grocery store? $0.59? Imagine if salt was suddenly scarce. How much would that pound cost?

It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. By definition, Preppers are people who accumulate – “hoard,” if you will – resources when supplies are high and demand (and prices) are low.

What makes me furious is the reaction and attitude toward Preppers when these resources suddenly becomes scarce. How easy is it to blame someone who has a room full of toilet paper when there is none to be had at the store? Why won’t they share, dammit? It doesn’t matter that the Preppers bought TP when it was $5 for a 24-pack and no one else wanted it. I WANT SOME TOILET PAPER. IT’S NOT FAIR (kicking heels) THAT YOU WON’T GIVE ME SOME!!!

Why? Why isn't it FAIR? What's "fair" about trying to force me to share my resources with you when all you did was pooh-pooh my "hoarding" when you could have been doing the same thing? Can you see the childishness of this reaction?

Most Preppers are not rich. God knows we're not. We’re just ordinary folks who see the gathering storm clouds on the horizon and are doing what we can to provide for our families if hard times hit. Naturally we’re viewed with condescending tolerance and not a little laughter at our expense…until TSHTF.

Suddenly that tolerance and humor becomes frustration, outrage, and even violence if Preppers don’t share their store of resources. When asked to explain the logic behind the outrage, the Unprepared generally fall back upon the indignant accusation that the Preppers are “hoarding.”

I see. So why didn’t the Unprepared “hoard” when they, too, had the chance?

What follows is a stuttering list of excuses. Lack of money. Lack of storage. Lack of interest. Lack of foresight. Lack lack lack.

What it translates to, folks, is denial. The Unprepared refuse to become Preppers because they simply cannot, or will not, grasp the idea that anything could interrupt their comfortable lives. Even those who have lived through hardship and deprivation – the aftermath of hurricanes, violent urban riots, war, acts of terrorism – cannot extrapolate into the future and see that deprivation can happen again. And again and again and again. At any time. Totally without warning.

So why do, say, homeowners in Florida not keep plywood, food, water, duct tape, and other resources in their garage for the inevitable hurricane? Denial. Maybe they don’t think bad things could ever happen to them. (It always happens to someone else, right?) Maybe they think someone else will protect them. (The government. Natch.) Maybe they think God will look after them. (It was J.G. Holland who said, “God gives every bird its food but does not throw it into the nest.”) Whatever their excuse, the fact remains that when a tragedy strikes, the Unprepared are caught with their drawers down – and then they’re angry at those who aren’t. The Unprepared line up at Home Depot for plywood and then get angry with their neighbors who knew enough to keep plywood in the garage between hurricanes. Oh, and food and water too.

This isn’t to imply Preppers can’t be affected by tragedies. Of course they can. I know someone with a serious interest in preparedness whose wife died of cancer. He wasn’t “prepared” for that. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, and as with anyone affected by a loss, all he could do was pick himself up, grieve, and get on with life.

But Preppers are doing their best to mitigate disaster. It’s all any of us can do.

No one objects to Preppers “hoarding” food during easy times. We’re viewed with tolerant amusement at our hobby of bucketing beans and rice, at canning every vegetable that comes our way, at buying a few extra tubes of toothpaste. Folks usually view us as a little quirky but otherwise harmless. After all, we’re spending our own money and not asking anyone else to provide those resources for us.

It’s only post-TSHTF that our efforts are suddenly viewed with hostility as “hoarding” because, gee whiz, we’re reluctant to distribute our “hoard” to every grasshopper who demands a share.

“The time to gather emergency supplies,” as a reader pointed out, “is when there isn't an emergency. There will be more supplies available for everybody that way.” In fact, who knows? If there’s enough of a demand for resources, the supplies may ramp up their production to meet the demand, thus assuring plenty of resources for everyone. (Until the bleep hits the fan, of course.)

Hope this clears up any misconception on “hoarding.”

A woman asks: Question Legislation

2010-08-25T17:14:00.001-07:00

Question Legislation
Tuesday, 14 October 2008 00:21
By

Mary Carpenter

---------------------
Mariposa California: the paternal grandmother of two children brutally stabbed to death with a pitchfork inside their rural Merced home on Aug. 23, 2000 demands that we stop passing gun control laws that empower murderers.

The Mariposa Gazette is one of the oldest, continually-published newspapers in the US. The editor confirmed to me that the following letter appeared in the April 5, 2001 issue.

Harry Schneider, Chairman, Pennsylvania Sportsmen's Association
---------------------

I am writing to alert my fellow Mariposans to something going on at the state level that should be far more frightening to you than the so called "energy crisis." We must remember our legislators have a tendency to use such media hogging items to conceal their dirty legislation. SB52 and AB35 will require you to be fingerprinted, pay an unlimited fee, pass a written firearms law test, pass a shooting proficiency test, pass a hand gun handling demonstration exam, require notification of address change (just like a registered sex offender), pay fees that begin in the $40 to $50 range going as high as $100 or more, and comply with various loaning and transferring laws in order to own a handgun.

And what if you do not pass these tests?

I am the paternal grandmother of the two children brutally stabbed to death with a pitchfork inside their rural Merced home on Aug. 23, 2000. Although there were sufficient guns in the house for my granddaughters to defend themselves and their siblings, because of my son's willingness to comply with California State law, two of his children are dead.

(Had the girls been able to get to the gun, by California law, my son would have been charged with a felony.)

If it had not been for my nine-year-old granddaughter's willingness to sacrifice her life for her siblings, four of them would be dead. The man who killed them was a stranger to the family and though not on drugs at the time, was a known drug abuser. He had recently been arrested for assaulting a police officer and was on parole because of jail overcrowding. (Yet they would have room for me should I fail my test and refuse to give them my gun.)

The killer had already violated his parole. The police knew his address. They knew where his mother and grandmother lived. He had mental records. His wife had reported that he had kidnapped her and held her at gunpoint in 1997. She had more recently reported he left threatening messages on her answering machine. Yet my son would have been in more trouble had his 14 or 13 year-old daughters been able to get to his gun. How safe will we be against these predators if they know we are not armed?

Please think about it, and call your legislators today.

Extinction

2010-08-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

‎"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same." ~ Ronald Reagan

Constitutional law 101

2010-08-25T08:18:00.000-07:00

Constitutional law 101: "Any talk of amending the Constitution is just wrong." --Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano responding to Republicans calling for changing the 14th Amendment to prevent automatic citizenship for anchor babies of illegal aliens (This is rich coming from this administration. Of course, they don't want to amend the Constitution; they just want to ignore it completely.)

Soldiers, or "Domestic Terrorists" ???

2010-08-25T08:11:00.001-07:00

Well trained Soldiers, soon to be classified as "Domestic Terrorists" by the very Government they serve. Done for YOU and ME by your elected representatives -- be ashamed, be VERY ashamed....http://shock.military.com/Shock/videos.do?displayContent=219051&ESRC=army.nl

Disarmed -- Defenseless -- Dead: It's the Law

2010-08-25T08:03:00.001-07:00

Richard W. Stevens
Editor, The Bill of Rights Sentinel, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

You be the judge. Does it make any sense for the government to:

1. issue a court order forbidding a woman's ex husband from having or being near firearms,
2. take no significant action concerning the ex-husband's frequent death threats against the woman,
3. require the woman to appear in court in an alimony/child support case against her ex-husband,
4. forbid the woman from possessing defensive sidearms inside the courthouse building,
5. fail to erect metal detectors or to check the ex-husband for firearms at the courthouse,
6. post no warnings about the lack of security in the courthouse,
7. fail to offer any added protection for the woman at the courthouse, and then
8. disclaim any responsibility for setting up the conditions that enabled the ex-husband to shoot the defenseless woman in cold blood, right in front of their young daughter, inside the courthouse?

Isn't it immoral or crazy to position an unarmed woman in a confined space with a man who has repeatedly and credibly threatened to kill her, and then fail to either check the man for weapons or to offer her added protection? The California Supreme Court's recent unanimous decision in Zelig v. County of Los Angeles says it's legally just fine. The Zelig Court proclaimed loudly and clearly:

"It is well established that public entities generally are not liable for failing to protect individuals against crime."

"The public entities and their policymaking officers and employees are immune from liability for any failure on their part to provide sufficient police services."

No Duty, No Protection

Lawyers for the dead woman's estate argued strongly that the government owed legal duties and should be liable. The defendant county government had created a dangerous situation by compelling the woman to attend the courthouse, by forbidding the woman from carrying a defensive sidearm, and by failing to warn her that she was practically undefended there. The police had tape recordings and documents proving the ex-husband had issued the death threats, but they failed to offer extra protection for her. The superior court itself knew the ex-husband posed such danger that it formally ordered him to disarm himself, but the courthouse had no metal detectors and did not check the ex-husband for weapons.

The California Supreme Court addressed each of these arguments and rejected them all. The Second Amendment apparently wasn't asserted. Showing no sorrow or regret, the Zelig Court noted how "gun control" laws had disarmed the victim: "the state, by enacting a general statute prohibiting possession of a firearm in any courthouse, curtailed her ability to arm herself in self-defense." The woman had no civil right to self-defense, however.

Bottom line: the government can disarm you, knowingly put you in danger without even a warning, refuse and fail to protect you from the known danger ... and get off scot-free when the danger harms or kills you.

Readers of Dial 911 and Die: The Shocking Truth About the Police Protection Myth would have fully expected the Zelig ruling to come down as it did. Citing laws and cases from every state, the book shows that the government generally owes no legal duty to protect citizens, and the courts routinely insulate the government from liability.
Worthless Laws

The Zelig case illustrates how "gun control" ideas endanger lives:

Fifteen day waiting period on sidearm purchases -- worthless.

Law forbidding civilians to possess firearms in courthouse -- only stopped the victim, not the perpetrator.

Court order that forbade ex-husband from possessing firearms -- didn't stop him when he wanted to kill.

Sign proclaiming law against civilian possession of firearms in courthouses -- advertised where defenseless victims could be found.

Law that immunizes government entities and officials if they fail to protect threatened citizens -- means government agents have less incentive to protect victims.

Concealed carry permit system that registers gun owners with the government -- worthless in courthouses that forbid all civilian firearms possession.

Zelig is only the latest court case proving that governments don't accept the responsibility for the harm caused by "gun control" laws that disarm the victims and empower the killers. Laws and court decisions in almost all states take the same route.

You can seize the opportunity to prove the dangerous evil of "gun control" ideas in all states by getting copies of Dial 911 and Die. For nearly every state and territory, there is a chapter in Dial 911 and Die that shows how the government makes no promise to protect individual citizens from criminal attack, even when the attacker is known and the threats are imminent. The anti-gunners cannot answer this argument... it's the law... and it makes civilian disarmament policies look both foolish and deadly.

My Transformation From Anti-Gun Feminist To Armed Feminist

2010-08-25T08:01:00.001-07:00

My Transformation From Anti-Gun Feminist To Armed Feminist
Tuesday, 14 October 2008 00:45
By
Katherine von Tour
GOA Member
© 1999

Most people who support the Second Amendment have probably wondered at one time or another how to change the thinking of anti-gunners.

Since I was once a staunch gun-control proponent, including being a member of Handgun Control Incorporated (HCI) in the 1970's, but am today a fervent and virtually no-compromise Second Amendment supporter, perhaps the story of my mental shift will be of interest.

When I recall my mindset in the 1960's, when I was in college in Chicago, and in the early 1970's, when I was teaching grade-school in a private school in Pennsylvania, what I remember most is how completely convinced I was that government was the best and ultimate answer to all of society's ills -- war, poverty, crime and injustice.

I was a true Sixties liberal, who protested the Vietnam War, sported a "Question Authority" bumper sticker on my Volvo, who was a charter member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a charter subscriber to Ms Magazine.

I voted for George McGovern. I hung out with other earnest liberals, many of whom were also members of NOW. It wasn't that I believed government was perfect - far from it! - but I had blind faith that, with enough effort and money, it could be made so.

My idea of a perfect government was one which had a generous welfare program, free medical care for all, lots of benign and helpful social programs, and government-mandated fairness and equality for all.

I joined NOW because it promised to fight for equality under the law for women; it encouraged women to empower themselves, and to be independent. Since I was a single woman, these all sounded like a sensible ideas to me.

I joined HCI because it had convinced me that guns were a root cause of violence and crime, and that only criminals owned and used them.
The Liberal Years

I had grown up stationed with my family overseas, and had been sent to private boarding school in Honolulu, where my family is from, and then to Chatham Hall, a young ladies' "finishing school" in Virginia.

Most of my life had been protected and privileged; while my family didn't have a lot of money, we somehow gave the illusion that we did, since we lived overseas, complete with servants and first-class travel paid for by my father's company.

I had been raised, as my mother puts it, "to be a lady," and certainly "ladies" in our social circle weren't trained in self-defense, particularly self-defense involving firearms, which, in any case, were completely banned in the countries where we lived.

After graduating from Northwestern, and doing graduate work at Lehigh, I got a job teaching 6th grade at a private day school in Pennsylvania, where I stayed for 10 years, during which time I was an earnest and unwavering liberal.

It was during this time that I joined HCI and NOW, and crusaded loudly and vociferously against "violence," "intolerance" and "unfairness."
The "Bubble" Bursts

After ten years of teaching, I was still making very little money, and had burned out. I decided to move back to Hawaii, which was my home, and where my parents had retired after 25 years of being stationed overseas, and purchase a franchise of a skin-care and cosmetic business, whose products were sold through home shows.

I spent five ghastly years in Honolulu, struggling to run a business in a government climate which was as socialistic and larded with welfare and social programs as any I had previously worked towards; those five years were the undoing of my liberalism.

I tried in vain to recruit women who were on welfare to work to do home shows and make money by being independent, but I could in no way compete with the obscenely generous welfare benefits they were receiving for staying home and doing nothing, except in many cases growing pakalolo, (marijuana) which they had plenty of time to do, since all of their needs were more than being met by the state.

The Hawaii State Labor board delivered the final death blow to my business by declaring that all of the independent contractors who worked for my company - and whom I could hardly convince to work at all - were to be classified as "employees," and that I had to pay unemployment, workers' compensation and health care for them.

The government cared not a whit that there was no money in my company to fund this state-mandated largess. I was forced to close down the business, to file bankruptcy, and I moved back to the Mainland, my formerly liberal tail between my legs, a newly-hatched libertarian conservative.

I no longer saw government as the solution to social problems. It certainly hadn't solved mine, nor had it encouraged my trying to create jobs for the people of Hawaii, jobs which they didn't want to do because it was too much work, even though the Honolulu Star Bulletin was filled almost every week with whining letters from people complaining that there were no jobs to be had, and imploring the government to "create" more jobs.

With the fervor and passion I had previously reserved for trying to get the government to expand its powers and programs, I began to read the writings of conservative and libertarian authors -- Bastiat, Hayek, Thomas Sowell and others. I also plunged into the writings of the founders of America - Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Paine, George Mason.

I started meeting people who had also been abused by government agencies - the police, Customs, DEA, IRS and others. I started hearing stories of people having property seized without due process, and of people calling 911 and not having the police not show up in time.

But the pivotal turning point for me was the Los Angeles riots.
Armed in L.A.; guns save lives

I was living in Orange County at the time, but had to go up to LA regularly on business. At that time there had been a rash of violent car-jackings, many of them committed against women who were driving alone.

A friend, who knew a great deal about guns and had grown up around them, told me that, because I was a woman living and driving alone, he wanted me to start carrying a pistol in my car.

He lent me a .38 Special, and showed me how to load, unload and fire it.

One day, just before the riots exploded, I was driving in downtown LA in a scary part of town. It was dusk. As I was stopped at a stop-light, with one car in front of me, two men who had been watching me began quickly and menacingly approaching my car from the sidewalk. One of them was carrying a tire iron.

I grabbed the pistol, which I had laid on the seat beside me, and held it up so they could see it.

The look in their eyes changed in an instant from threatening to fearful, and they immediately turned around and ran in the opposite direction. The light changed. I drove away.

No one was hurt, but a gun in my formerly liberal hand had, I believe, probably saved my life, or at least prevented me from likely injury.
L.A. Riots turn anti-gun advocates into pro-gun supporters

Within a week, the very street where this incident happened had erupted in rioting, looting and killing.

I watched on television as the Korean grocers defended their property with AK-47's and AR-15's, and thus prevented it from being torched and looted. The police couldn't stop the violence and killing.

I had friends who worked in the garment district in LA who barely made it out alive, and who told tales of pulling out pistols and having would-be attackers turn tail and run away.

Guns were saving lives and property.

As the riots threatened to spill over into Beverly Hills, myriad Hollywood types stormed gun stores to arm themselves, only to be told that there was a 15-day waiting period; radio talk shows boiled with people calling in and screaming about how unfair this was, and how the law was leaving them helpless.

Some of them even admitted that they had previously supported the waiting period, and that they were now furious that it had left them unarmed.
Coming full circle: From HCI to GOA

My transformation was complete. I joined the National Rifle Association (I didn't know about Gun Owners of America or Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership yet) and started reading their literature. I bought and read "Armed and Female" by Paxton Quigley - another ex-gun-control woman.

I fell in love with and married the friend who had lent me the .38 Special, and started learning in earnest about guns and how to use them. We joined GOA and JPFO.

And the National Organization for Women? Here's the thing that makes me crazy about an organization ostensibly dedicated to the empowerment of women - NOW is uncompromisingly and adamantly anti-gun, including urging all women to disarm themselves, and supporting legislation to force their disarmament.

The incongruity and hypocrisy of this stance is simply stunning. How can such an organization claim to be "for women?" In my experience as a single woman, there is nothing more effective than a gun for protection.

In my experience as a married woman, when my husband can't be there to pull out a firearm to protect us and our home, he has made sure that I can do so. What could be more empowering and independent and equalizing for a woman than that?

And what could be more threatening to women than women like Sarah Brady, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Carolyn McCarthy and Barbra Streisand who, while beating the drum for "women's rights" are attempting to disarm women as well as men, and leave them at the mercy of criminals? I still believe fervently in the original NOW position supporting the empowerment of women.

And I believe that the most effective thing any woman can do to empower herself is to acquire and learn to use a gun, and to become vocal and aggressive in defending gun rights and the Second Amendment.

When I look back on my mindset when I supported gun control, I see that I was naïve, idealistic and swayed by irrational, baseless propaganda, especially the absurd myth that, by disarming law-abiding citizens, society will be made safer.

There is absolutely no hard evidence to support this. Criminals by definition disregard laws, especially gun control laws. In Australia, which has disarmed its population, it is reported that violent home invasions have increased in some areas by 44%. Rapes and murders have also increased substantially.

In being confronted by the reality that government cannot and will not guarantee my personal safety, I am infinitely thankful, both as a woman and an American, that the Bill of Rights still guarantees my right to defend myself with a gun. Any true feminist must support this position. Any woman who claims to be a feminist, but who supports disarmament of law-abiding citizens is simply a dangerous hypocrite.
Katherine von Tour is presently working on a book comprised of interviews of women who support the Second Amendment; she is looking for women who have personal stories about having used a gun for self-defense, or who simply believe in the right to own and use a firearm. Anyone wishing to be interviewed for this project can contact her through GOA.

Women, Stop Watching Oprah and Learn to Love Guns

2010-08-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

Written by Karen De Coster
Thursday, 07 May 2009 00:00

"To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic." ~ Ted Nugent

Women never cease to amaze me. The majority of them are still "afraid" of guns. Afraid, as in "oohhhh, they are so scary." They say things like "I don’t like them around" and "they’re dangerous." I know of women who have defense-minded, pro-gun husbands and they will not let their guy talk about those nasty things in their presence. Shhh, the children will hear, or, they might actually see an evil gun! Keep them locked away. Don’t tell the neighbors you have a gun in our house, or we’ll be outcasts. And in the background you can almost hear another feeble Oprah sermon keeping women stupid, but oh, they feel good about themselves and their newfound self-esteem.

All the time, women are shocked, shocked! to hear that I have a gun, and worse, I have several guns. And then, oh no, I actually carry one with me. That’s so odd, they think. Oh she’s different. Why more than one gun? She must be the aggressive type. After all, the Oprah way is to trust everyone and insist that all people have good intentions always.

Although I tend to think that most women don’t make sense, period, I especially believe this concerning the gun issue. It’s not only difficult to get women to come around to wanting a gun of their own, but they still can’t get to the point where they will understand and accept why others want to own them.

Let’s face it – women are more vulnerable to attack because, most likely, their aggressor will be a man. Women are physically weaker, and criminals know that we are less willing to be mentally prepared for aggression because, unlike men, most of us just aren’t wired to be combative. A woman’s attacker will be bigger, stronger, and faster than her, and by nature they will be more aggressive, and that’s before considering any mental or drug problem that may be associated with a criminal attack. So why do women not want to take that into consideration and equalize the situation by learning to use and love guns? Dr. Thomas Szasz, libertarian scholar and Professor of Psychiatry at Syracuse University, once stated, "self-defense is not merely our legal right but our moral duty; because women are more vulnerable than men, their need and obligation to defend themselves is even greater than that of men." Dr. Szasz is a wise man.

Here’s my favorite scene: a woman is walking in a parking garage or parking lot, all alone, wearing 3-inch skinny heels, head down, flicking her mane of endless hair, and chatting mindlessly on the phone. "Blah, blah, blah, blah, and blah," but not a single shred of awareness about the inherent dangers of time and place, who is around her, and what they are doing. She is a Bambi in the woods.

I witness this kind of thing all the time. Women tend to function in the fog of the unknown, making themselves easy targets. The first rule of self-defense is awareness. Situational awareness can, and will, save your life. Be conscious about your surroundings. Stay off the phone, keep your head up, and survey the area around you. Walk boldly. You do not want to give a potential attacker the impression that you are an easy target. Avoidance is the ideal. How many times do women think about this? Probably never. But then again, this is not meant to be a self-defense, how-to guide for women, but rather, a call to women to stand up and take control of their personal security. Women who have the habit of entering the mindless, no-think zone while consistently ignoring potential threats are ripe for something awful to happen. Remember, criminals who attack women frequently scrutinize potential prey for easy pickings. They don’t want to tangle with a woman who appears to be alert or tough as nails. They are looking for women who are unaware, unassertive, and fragile.

Women tend to take a white-picket-fence-and-rose view of the world more often than they should. They think that the world is made of gingerbread houses and buckets of goodwill just waiting to be poured upon them. They believe that when evil takes place, it happens anywhere but in their own backyard. It happens on the evening news, but not to them.

One reason that women need to get over their hostility to guns is because the current environment – economic depression, looming inflation, and widespread unemployment – will bring forth a new criminal class due to desperation. In addition, the established criminal class will ramp up their activity. Carjackings, home invasions, robberies, abductions, and rape will plague women in hard economic times.

So how do we get women to dig guns?

Many women will experience frustration if you keep stressing guns as a method of self-defense and get right to the point of mentally preparing to kill someone to save a life. They may not be ready to "go there" if they are already hostile to guns. Ease ’em on in with things to break down their intolerance.

Most women are introduced to guns at the range, or perhaps by just shootin’ stuff on private property somewhere out in the country. Husbands, fathers, brothers – they all make good first-time instructors because they are trusted by the first-time female shooter. Starting out with the smaller guns is less intimidating and therefore works in favor of a woman gaining confidence about her ability.

Women do tend to be frightened by larger guns. They’ll come right out and say it. I recently added a new carry choice – the Ruger LCP .380, a 9.5 ounce pocketful of reliable defense that is very slim and easy to conceal for us smaller ladies, especially when wearing summer clothing. I have found out that ladies new to guns are attracted to this thing because of its size and non-threatening appearance. But watch out! This gun has some temperamental recoil, especially when loaded with high-velocity ammo. However, once women learn to shoot the smaller caliber pistols and rifles and grow their confidence, they get a hankering to shoot the bigger guns, and it becomes a thrilling experience. Knowing that they can handle a .308 rifle or a .45 pistol tends to bring on miles of smiles.

One thing about guns that should appeal to women is their artistic quality. Guns are beautiful works of art. Not only are guns attractively manufactured, but also, modern design and engineering methods make gun ownership for women a real option. There are guns for small hands, small trigger fingers, and even pink guns. You can buy little, pink rifles for young girls who are just starting to shoot. You can laugh, but this may invite young girls to aspire to guns whereas they might not find another reason to be attracted to them.

One thing I notice that people at gun shops tend to do is to steer women toward revolvers as the "best choice." Because revolvers are thought to be simpler and it requires less practice to load and shoot them, women are steered toward them, oftentimes without being given other workable options. A .38 revolver is considered to be the handgun for beginners. Though it is a great gun, this assumption is wrong and it is a risky attitude to take with a female customer whose life may depend on her ability to learn to master her gun. In fact, a lightweight .38 revolver can have some big recoil, especially in smaller, weaker hands. But mostly, a lady should never be swayed from looking at a semi-auto such as a 9mm or .40, or even a .45. Instead, gun shop salespeople should stress the pros and cons between the two, and then impress upon a female newbie that the semi-auto requires more training time but offers many advantages. Every woman has different needs and her options should be fairly presented so she can make an informed decision that best suits her requirements in the long term. Boston T. Party, in his superb book, Boston’s Gun Bible, states in his chapter on women and guns, "I would only recommend a revolver if you do not have the extra time and/or money for a quality semi-auto."

In fact, instead of slapping a revolver in her hand, it should be stressed to a woman purchasing her first gun that she needs guidance beyond her very basic CPL (Concealed Pistol License) class – she must move well beyond the basics and acquire additional training. A woman who buys a pistol must take supplementary courses such as a concealed weapons course and at least one defensive pistol class. This will educate her on the use of her gun in varied circumstances and will foster an extraordinary level of confidence. Only when you really learn to master that firearm do you come to appreciate and love it. Until that happens, a woman will be wary, lack confidence, and will reject the firearm more often than she covets it.

I came to love guns early on. My Dad started me off shooting a Winchester rifle at seven years old. I was fortunate that my entire childhood meant spending the whole summer, each year, at our cottage in Northern Michigan, out in the sticks, thirteen miles removed from the nearest small town. We had a gravel pit nearby where we shot targets, cans, and other objects. Once I learned that guns had a purpose, and that they could be handled safely and skillfully, I fell in love with them and wanted my own. I saw a similar occurrence last month while I was down in rural Tennessee. I watched a ten-year-old girl shooting a Ruger Mark III 22/45, her face plastered with endless smiles each time that little peashooter popped and knocked down another soda bottle. She reminded me so much of myself at that age when, after unloading a full magazine she’d turn to the group and say, "Can I do that again?" Of course, "again" is never-ending because of the sheer joy experienced while learning real world skills from a trusted adult.

In talking to different women, along with firearms instructors, I find that one of the biggest obstacles for women in actively carrying a pistol is getting to the point where they believe they can take another human life in defense of their own life or the life of a loved one. Indeed, this involves some serious reflection prior to ever carrying a gun or having one in the home for purposes of self-defense. I’ve had CPL instructors tell me about women breaking down and crying upon discussion of this topic during their courses. However, women need to understand the value of their lives, and the lives of their children, and how life can be so easily snuffed out by one person – or a group of people – who harbor a cruel and vicious, criminal agenda. It is essential that a woman train to develop a mindset where she can take another human life where and when her life is in immediate danger from an assailant (or assailants). That can take time, and quite often, that mindset will develop with further training and a better understanding of how to handle the dangers she may confront.

Viewing the world through fuzzy-lined Oprah glasses just won’t suffice anymore. Women need to stop living the dumbed-down life that is being sold to them by daytime TV and brainless magazines and novels. They need to stop pretending that every incident in life can be coped with by invoking yet another worthless fluff statement that exclaims, for the twenty-fifth time, how "happy" and non-judgmental and politically correct they are.

Being hapless and clueless is not a virtue, no matter what your chromosome factor. To steal a few words from Ted Nugent, a pull-no-punches advocate of self-defense rights, a person who accepts defenselessness is unnatural, cowardly, and pathetic. Ladies, boycott that mentality by turning Oprah off and giving guns, and your life, a chance.

Karen DeCoster is an accounting/finance professional and writer. She rides a Harley, shoots lots of guns, doesn't watch Oprah or Dr. Phil, and has never read a romance novel or self-help psychobabble. She likes to grow vegetables, ride mountain bikes, use her power washer, do cross-fit, and try new wines under $15. She looks forward to the "Stars with Cellulite" editions of the National Enquirer. Please do not forward her emails plastered with little smiley faces and frivolous poems that end in, "Have a Great Day!" This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website, along with her blog.

Quote of the Day

2010-08-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

"It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren't too sure about that." -- Joseph Sobran

“Political demagoguery rules when truth and liberty are ignored.”

2010-08-23T16:33:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul: Left and the Right Demagogue Mosque, Islam

LAKE JACKSON, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Congressman Ron Paul today released the following statement on the controversy concerning the construction of an Islamic Center and Mosque in New York City:

“Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?”

“Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?

“It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.”

“The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

“Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”

“Just think of what might (not) have happened if the whole issue had been ignored and the national debate stuck with war, peace, and prosperity. There certainly would have been a lot less emotionalism on both sides. The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom?

“In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

“They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars. A select quote from soldiers from in Afghanistan and Iraq expressing concern over the mosque is pure propaganda and an affront to their bravery and sacrifice.

“The claim is that we are in the Middle East to protect our liberties is misleading. To continue this charade, millions of Muslims are indicted and we are obligated to rescue them from their religious and political leaders. And, we’re supposed to believe that abusing our liberties here at home and pursuing unconstitutional wars overseas will solve our problems.

“The nineteen suicide bombers didn’t come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran. Fifteen came from our ally Saudi Arabia, a country that harbors strong American resentment, yet we invade and occupy Iraq where no al Qaeda existed prior to 9/11.

“Many fellow conservatives say they understand the property rights and 1st Amendment issues and don’t want a legal ban on building the mosque. They just want everybody to be “sensitive” and force, through public pressure, cancellation of the mosque construction.

“This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible.

“There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?

“If Islam is further discredited by making the building of the mosque the issue, then the false justification for our wars in the Middle East will continue to be acceptable.

“The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer.

“Conservatives are once again, unfortunately, failing to defend private property rights, a policy we claim to cherish. In addition conservatives missed a chance to challenge the hypocrisy of the left which now claims they defend property rights of Muslims, yet rarely if ever, the property rights of American private businesses.

“Defending the controversial use of property should be no more difficult than defending the 1st Amendment principle of defending controversial speech. But many conservatives and liberals do not want to diminish the hatred for Islam--the driving emotion that keeps us in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

“It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don’t want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society—protecting liberty.

“The outcry over the building of the mosque, near ground zero, implies that Islam alone was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to those who are condemning the building of the mosque, the nineteen suicide terrorists on 9/11 spoke for all Muslims. This is like blaming all Christians for the wars of aggression and occupation because some Christians supported the neo-conservative’s aggressive wars.

“The House Speaker is now treading on a slippery slope by demanding a Congressional investigation to find out just who is funding the mosque—a bold rejection of property rights, 1st Amendment rights, and the Rule of Law—in order to look tough against Islam.

“This is all about hate and Islamaphobia.

“We now have an epidemic of “sunshine patriots” on both the right and the left who are all for freedom, as long as there’s no controversy and nobody is offended.

“Political demagoguery rules when truth and liberty are ignored.”

A Non-Voter’s Thoughts on Ron Paul

2010-08-23T15:54:00.001-07:00

As long as it’s just George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft who are evil – a "bad batch" – then you don’t have to kick the habit entirely. Just make sure you get a good batch next time – elect "good" politicians – and you’ll never have to question the political system to which you have become attached.

~ Me, three years ago: "Kick the Habit: Politics Is Not the Answer"

I can’t believe the things that have been coming out of my mouth these past few months. If anyone had told me a year ago that today I’d be sending an e-mail to my friends urging them to vote – and to vote Republican – I would have said that person was either nuts or just didn’t know me.

And yet here I am, writing the e-mails, getting involved in the movement, and trying to explain to my friends – long used to hearing me tell them why voting is worse than a waste of time, how it helps perpetuate a system that is destructive and wrong – why this time it’s different, this time it not only makes sense to vote, but they must vote …and get all of their friends to do it too.

And all the while, a little voice gnaws away at me, asking if I’m not just falling into the same trap I warned against when I wrote about the 2004 elections "Kick the Habit: Politics is Not the Answer"; If I’m not just putting my faith in a politician to solve problems that have no political solution; If I’m not just trying to solve problems with the very mechanism that created them; if I’m not granting legitimacy to the state by participating in its elections. And the truth is, I don’t have a clean answer to any of those questions. I can’t just dismiss them or pretend I’m not in fact falling victim to the same attachment to political solutions – the same addiction – that I saw so clearly as being part of the problem four years ago, and that I still believe is part of the problem.

But neither can I answer the other voice that asks questions just as troubling. Questions like: "so why haven’t you, and the anti-war movement, been able to end the war in Iraq?" and "what exactly is it you’re going to do to stop them from nuking Iran?" I don’t have answers to these questions either, and I am quite frankly tired of feeling helpless in the face of this kind of evil. And I know: that’s how they suck you in. That’s what politicians and drug pushers alike look for in their potential customers: a sense of helplessness, neediness… an emptiness needing to be filled. I know all that.

But I also know that this time something is different. Ron Paul’s entire political career calls into question my beliefs about how political systems work and how politicians survive within them. My understanding of democratic politics may explain everyone else in Washington, but it certainly doesn’t explain Dr. Paul’s success in being elected and returned to office for ten terms. Or maybe he is the exception that proves my rules. Whatever he is, he is not the same animal as the others in Washington, he’s not selling the same stuff. And his candidacy for president forces me – and, I believe, anyone who has taken a principled stand against voting – to re-examine my reasons for not participating in the system.

The truth is, I never was a "principled" non-voter. I’ve always said – jokingly of course – that if a candidate came along who promised to drastically reduce the scope of government, and I trusted them to do so, and that person actually had a shot at winning, I would have to consider voting for that person. Not surprisingly, I have never been faced with this particular dilemma. I suspect that I am not alone among lifetime non-voters who have never really had to examine their stance. As long as there is clearly no point in voting, we are never really forced to dig deeply into the reasons why we don’t vote. And, certainly in my lifetime, there has never been any point in voting in a presidential election. Until now.

I first encountered Ron Paul the last time he was running for president. He was running as the Libertarian candidate, and nobody even pretended he had a chance of winning. As an opportunity to spread ideas about liberty and free markets though, my friends and I thought his candidacy was a good thing. One of my friends wrote to him and asked him to come speak at our school, the University of California at Santa Cruz (think Cuba to UC Berkeley’s Kremlin).

This was 1987, when the "Internet" was little more than a handful of geeks in computer labs engaging in vibrant discussions on a Unix platform and sometimes making little pictures with X’s and O’s across the screen. My friends and I spent one Saturday plastering the UC campus with "Who is Ron Paul?" flyers and did whatever else we could think of to spread the word in advance of his appearance. When the evening came, maybe six or seven people showed up. (One of my co-organizers says it may have been a dozen, but I think she’s being generous.)

The word "gracious" does not describe Dr. Paul’s response to the meager turnout. "Gracious" would have been skillfully concealing his annoyance and soldiering on through the evening. Dr. Paul was not gracious. He was genuine and engaged and seemed to care only about presenting and defending the ideas he cares about so deeply. He was, I imagine, the same person he continues to be as he pursues the Republican nomination today; a person committed to liberty, doing whatever he can to bring it about in our society.

The contrast between our pathetic gathering twenty years ago and the rock-star receptions Dr. Paul receives wherever he goes today is heart-warming and gratifying. It makes me happy that Dr. Paul’s years of tirelessly speaking the same words in defense of freedom are paying off, and it makes me feel that there may yet be hope for this country.

Like many of his supporters, I don’t agree with Dr. Paul on all of his positions. We part ways on abortion and immigration. But the issues where we do agree are so important and there is so much at stake that our differences are not an impediment to my support. More importantly – and I believe this is one of the greatest keys to his success – I know that his stance on each issue is the product of his genuinely held beliefs. He does not choose his words based on opinion polls or on the fundraising successes they have earned other candidates, but on his own understanding of what is right and what is wrong. Because of this I have unending respect for the man.

I don’t think I am alone in this. People are beyond fed up with empty political promises. They are tired of meaningless "choices" at the ballot box. They are rightly cynical about the entire process. Ron Paul has spent over 30 years of his life demonstrating that his promises are not empty and that he is utterly devoted to the pursuit of liberty in this country. Even people who have just been introduced to him see that he means what he says.

And this changes things. People are accustomed to voting for the lesser of two evils. What happens when someone who is not evil shows up? Integrity is not generally an ingredient found in presidential elections and its presence here now changes the entire nature of the game. Ron Paul is not playing by the same rules as everyone else, and by playing by his own rules – by committing the political cardinal sin of meaning what he says – he changes the rules for everyone else. Candidates are now no longer measured against other politicians whose words mean nothing, but against a man of integrity, and in order to succeed they must rise to his level. But they can’t. A reputation earned in over thirty years of dealing with people is not something that can be bought. Nor can it be "spun" out of thin air. Quite simply: Ron Paul has something none of the other candidates have or can get in time for the elections. This fact alone could very possibly win him the Republican nomination and even the presidency.

And that’s when my own words come back to haunt me. There’s that voice, reminding me that I don’t even believe in the process. That I don’t want anyone to be my president, that decisions over how much freedom I have shouldn’t be up to the majority. That by participating in the system, I’m agreeing that they should, that the majority has the right to rule over my life. So, for the record: I don’t want a president. And I don’t grant the majority the right to make decisions over my life.

But what is at stake is so great now that it is just no longer acceptable to not try whatever means I can find to fight what is going on. It is not acceptable to sit by and watch as "my" government lays waste to entire nations of human beings who have never done me any harm. It is not acceptable to sit by as the same government lays waste to the (however imperfect) institutions that evolved to protect citizens’ rights and freedom from tyranny. Not if there’s anything I can do to stop it. So, if there’s even a chance that Dr. Paul can have an impact in these areas, I feel an obligation to help him do that.

It’s not like I haven’t tried other things. I’ve stood out in front of the New York Public Library in sub-zero weather handing out anti-war pamphlets. I’ve written articles. I’ve marched in anti-war demonstrations alongside tens if not hundreds of thousands of other people – demonstrations that, if you get your information from the mainstream media, never happened. I’ve tried what I knew to try, and none of it has worked. The evils committed by the state – in my name and with my money – have only gotten worse and more widespread, and will continue to do so.

The truth is: I just don’t know what else to do.

So, come February, or whenever it is they hold the primaries in my state (I’m told I can only do this in one state, which is disappointing), I’ll be marching myself down to the voting booths and I’ll be pulling a lever… or filling in a form… or tapping on a screen. Actually, I don’t exactly know how I’ll be doing it, but I’ll be doing what I’ve never done before and what I never thought I’d ever do: Voting in an election for a presidential candidate who I believe can make things better.

I’ve long believed that politicians cannot get ahead by delivering more freedom and less government; that the game of politics can be won only by delivering more favors and more of other people’s money to one’s constituents; that the only real winner, ultimately, is the state, and that those who play the game end up serving its expansion. I’ve always qualified my condemnation of politics and politicians with the words "except for Ron Paul." I’d then usually say something like "but of course he doesn’t actually accomplish anything." Well I was wrong about that. Really really wrong. For all these years, Dr. Paul has been building something no other politician has – something that when just one person has it, suddenly becomes an incredibly valuable asset: credibility.

The question with regard to Ron Paul is not whether or not he will keep his campaign promises – he will. The only question is whether he will be able to accomplish what he has set out to. Will he be elected? And if he is, how far will he be able to get on his wish list of dismantling the leviathan state to which we have become so accustomed?

I don’t have answers to either of these questions. And anyone who says they do doesn’t understand what is happening here: The very nature of the game is changing and all because one man has insisted all along on playing it his way.

So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is possible to effect positive change toward a more free society through the political process. Ron Paul has proven me wrong once already and he may just do it again.

I hope he does.

November 15, 2007

Bretigne Shaffer [send her mail] is a writer and filmmaker living in the Bay Area. She also directs the Free World Media Center, the media production center of the non-profit Liberty and Privacy Network. The views she expresses here are her own and do not reflect the views of the Free World Media Center or the LPN.

Fundrasing for Democratic Party Demogod's does not benefit the poor

2010-08-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

"According to Obama, monetary donations should be funneled into Democratic Party bank accounts. It's a point Obama hammered home while visiting Los Angeles this week to do a fundraiser at the home of John Wells, the producer of 'ER,' 'Southland' and 'The West Wing.' At that $30,400 per couple dinner, Obama shamelessly told his patrons: 'I hope you understand why we're here tonight. It's not to take a picture with the president. We're here to make sure those who took the tough votes are rewarded.' Why not reward those Americans who are out of work and hurting, rather than the legislators who live on cushy salaries and have full medical and dental? Because those Americans are pawns, that's why. Democrats cite to the poor to tug at the heartstrings of the limousine liberal class, but Democrats rarely encourage those limousine liberals to give their money directly to those in need. When's the last time you heard an active liberal politician tell a rich potential donor to send cash to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army without a major natural disaster to spur that politician along? Has it ever happened? No, because that would show that the private sector charities can do a better job than the government. It would demonstrate that the poor could be given care by the private sector in an efficient way. In other words, it would put the lie to the Democratic notion that government is always the solution to social inequalities." --columnist Ben Shapiro

The Islamic White House

2010-08-23T15:34:00.001-07:00

"President Obama couldn't bring himself to observe the National Day of Prayer or spend time with the Boy Scouts of America, but God forbid, he couldn't miss the Muslim Iftar Ramadan dinner, or pass up a chance to praise an Islamic center a stone's throw away from Ground Zero. ... One has to wonder exactly who is this Barack Obama? Is he the Muslim-educated student who has repeatedly proclaimed his Christian beliefs while finding himself unable to put a foot in a Christian church in Washington he can call his own, or is he an adult still motivated by the Muslim faith he learned and practiced as a young man? This is a serious question, especially since Obama has gone out of his way to befriend a community, many of whom bear a deep hatred for the United States and a fanatical belief in the inevitability of supremacy of Islam over the United States. ... Unfortunately, it appears that Islam is also imposing its will and casting a shadow over the Obama White House." --radio talk-show host Michael Reagan

White House set to seize private citizens 401-K wealth

2010-08-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.ronaldholland.com/10steps.htm

You say Potato, I say Potato

2010-08-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

"During the last two years, Democrats have amassed unprecedented growth of federal government power in the forms of bailouts, corporate takeovers, favors to their political allies and nationalization of our health care system. My question is how likely is it for Republicans to behave differently if they gain control? Their past behavior doesn't make one confident that they will behave much differently, but I could be wrong. If Republicans win the House of Representatives, there are measures they should take in their first month of office, and that is to undo most of what the Democratically controlled Congress has done. If they don't win a veto-proof Senate, they can't undo Obamacare but the House alone can refuse to fund any part of it. There are numerous blocking tactics that a Republican-controlled House can take against those hell-bent on trampling on our Constitution. The question is whether they will have guts and principle to do it. After all, many Americans, including those who are Republicans, have a stake in big government control, special privileges and handouts. Ultimately, we Americans must act to ensure that our liberty does not depend on personalities in Washington. Our founders tried to do that with our Constitution." --economist Walter E. Williams

Rep, Chris Dod personaly authorizes AIG exec bonus's

2009-03-23T10:19:00.001-07:00

Dodd's AIG problem

USATODAY, 23 MAR 2009

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., has an AIG problem -- and just in time for his reelection next year.

Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, acknowledged Wednesday that he, as Bloomberg News put it, "weakened a provision dealing with executive pay in last month's stimulus legislation at the request of the Obama administration." The provision inserted in the bill instead expressly allowed companies that received taxpayer bailout money to pay retention bonuses that were part of employment contracts signed before Feb. 11, 2009. That would include the AIG bonuses, although Dodd has said he didn't know about the AIG bonuses at the time.

In an emailed statement, Dodd told Bloomberg: "I did not want to make any changes to my original Senate-passed amendment but I did so at the request of administration officials."

As we've reported before, Dodd's popularity in Connecticut has been slipping. Former Rep. Rob Simmons is the latest to say he might run against Dodd, the Hartford Courant reported Wednesday.

It doesn't help that Dodd is the top recipient of campaign contributions from AIG employees since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Dodd told the Connecticut Post that he will return any contributions that can be linked to the bailout money. "I don't want those contributions," Dodd told the Post.

It's not clear how much Dodd will return. We're waiting on further clarification from Dodd's office on what he meant.

Update at 3:48 p.m. Statement from Dodd's office on returning campaign contributions: "“If I found out that any individuals who have taken bonuses made a contribution, it goes to charity. For months I’ve said I would take no contributions from PACs of companies receiving TARP money. I’m prepared to see to it, I hope others do as well."

AL QAEDA reborn anew?

2009-01-29T10:09:00.000-08:00

AL QAEDA IN THE ARABIAN PENINSULA: DESPERATION OR NEW LIFE?

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

The media wing of one of al Qaeda's Yemeni franchises, al Qaeda in Yemen, released a statement on online jihadist forums Jan. 20 from the group's leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi, announcing the formation of a single al Qaeda group for the Arabian Peninsula under his command. According to al-Wuhayshi, the new group, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, would consist of his former group (al Qaeda in Yemen) as well as members of the now-defunct Saudi al Qaeda franchise.

The press release noted that the Saudi militants have pledged allegiance to al-Wuhayshi, an indication that the reorganization was not a merger of equals. This is understandable, given that the jihadists in Yemen have been active recently while their Saudi counterparts have not conducted a meaningful attack in years. The announcement also related that a Saudi national (and former Guantanamo detainee) identified as Abu-Sayyaf al-Shihri has been appointed as al-Wuhayshi's deputy. In some ways, this is similar to the way Ayman al-Zawahiri and his faction of Egyptian Islamic Jihad swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and were integrated in to al Qaeda prime.

While not specifically mentioned, the announcement of a single al Qaeda entity for the entire Arabian Peninsula and the unanimous support by jihadist militants on the Arabian Peninsula for al-Wuhayshi suggests the new organization will incorporate elements of the other al Qaeda franchise in Yemen, the Yemen Soldiers Brigade.

The announcement also provided links to downloadable versions of the latest issue of the group's online magazine, Sada al-Malahim, (Arabic for "The Echo of Battle"). The Web page links provided to download the magazine also featured trailers advertising the pending release of a new video from the group, now referred to by its new name, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The translated name of this new organization sounds very similar to the old Saudi al Qaeda franchise, the al Qaeda Organization in the Arabian Peninsula (in Arabic, "Tandheem al Qaeda fi Jazeerat al-Arabiyah"). But the new group's new Arabic name, Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Jazirat al-Arab, is slightly different. The addition of "al-Jihad" seems to have been influenced by the Iraqi al Qaeda franchise, Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn. The flag of the Islamic State of Iraq also appears in the Jan. 24 video, further illustrating the deep ties between the newly announced organization and al Qaeda in Iraq. Indeed, a number of Yemeni militants traveled to Iraq to fight, and these returning al Qaeda veterans have played a large part in the increased sophistication of militant attacks in Yemen over the past year.

Four days after the Jan. 20 announcement, links for a 19-minute video from the new group titled "We Start from Here and We Will Meet at al-Aqsa" began to appear in jihadist corners of cyberspace. Al-Aqsa refers to the al-Aqsa Mosque on what Jews know as Temple Mount and Muslims refer to as Al Haram Al Sharif. The video threatens Muslim leaders in the region (whom it refers to as criminal tyrants), including Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Saudi royal family, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. It also threatens so-called "crusader forces" supporting the regional Muslim leaders, and promises to carry the jihad from the Arabian Peninsula to Israel so as to liberate Muslim holy sites and brethren in Gaza.

An interview with al-Wuhayshi aired Jan. 27 on Al Jazeera echoed these sentiments. During the interview, al-Wuhayshi noted that the "crusades" against "Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia" have been launched from bases in the Arabian Peninsula, and that because of this, "all crusader interests" in the peninsula "should be struck."

A Different Take on Events

Most of the analysis in Western media regarding the preceding developments has focused on how two former detainees at the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear in the Jan. 24 video -- one of whom was al-Shihri -- and that both were graduates of Saudi Arabia's ideological rehabilitation program, a government deprogramming course for jihadists. In addition to al-Shihri who, according to the video was Guantanamo detainee 372, the video also contains a statement from Abu-al-Harith Muhammad al-Awfi. Al-Awfi, who was identified as a field commander in the video, was allegedly former Guantanamo detainee 333. Prisoner lists from Guantanamo obtained by Stratfor appear to confirm that al-Shihri was in fact Guantanamo detainee No. 372. We did not find al-Awfi's name on the list, however, another name appears as detainee No. 333. Given the proclivity of jihadists to use fraudulent identities, it is entirely possible that al-Awfi is an alias, or that he was held at Guantanamo unde
r an assumed name. At any rate, we doubt al-Awfi would fabricate this claim and then broadcast it in such a public manner.

The media focus on the Guantanamo aspect is understandable in the wake of U.S. President Barack Obama's Jan. 22 executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and all the complexities surrounding that decision. Clearly, some men released from Guantanamo, and even those graduated from the Saudi government's rehabilitation program, can and have returned to the jihadist fold. Ideology is hard to extinguish, especially an ideology that teaches adherents that there is a war against Islam and that the "true believers" will be persecuted for their beliefs. Al Qaeda has even taken this one step further and has worked to prepare its members not only to face death, but also to endure imprisonment and harsh interrogation. A substantial number of al Qaeda cadres, such as al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya al-Libi, have endured both, and have been instrumental in helping members withstand captivity and interrogation.

This physical and ideological preparation means that efforts to induce captured militants to abandon their ideology can wind up reinforcing that ideology when those efforts appear to prove important tenets of the ideology, such as that adherents will be persecuted and that the Muslim rulers are aligned with the West. It is also important to realize that radical Islamist extremists, ultraconservatives and traditionalists tend to have a far better grasp of Islamic religious texts than their moderate, liberal and modernist counterparts. Hence, they have an edge over them on the ideological battlefield. Those opposing radicals and extremists have a long way to go before they can produce a coherent legitimate, authoritative and authentic alternative Islamic discourse.

In any event, in practical terms there is no system of "re-education" that is 100 percent effective in eradicating an ideology in humans except execution. There will always be people who will figure out how to game the system and regurgitate whatever is necessary to placate their jailers so as to win release. Because of this, it is not surprising to see people like al-Shihri and al-Awfi released only to re-emerge in their former molds.

Another remarkable feature of the Jan. 27 video is that it showcased four different leaders of the regional group, something rarely seen. In addition to al-Wuhayshi, al-Shihri and al-Awfi, the video also included a statement from Qasim al-Rami, who is suspected of having been involved with the operational planning of the suicide attack on a group of Spanish tourists in Marib, Yemen, in July 2007.

In our estimation, however, perhaps the most remarkable feature about these recent statements from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is not the appearance of these two former Guantanamo detainees in the video, or the appearance of four distinct leaders of the group in a single video, but rather what the statements tell us about the state of the al Qaeda franchises in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Signposts

That the remnants of the Saudi al Qaeda franchise have been forced to flee their country and join up with the Yemeni group demonstrates that the Saudi government's campaign to eradicate the jihadist organization has been very successful. The Saudi franchise was very active in 2003 and 2004, but has not attempted a significant attack since the February 2006 attack against the oil facility in Abqaiq. In spite of the large number of Saudi fighters who have traveled to militant training camps, and to fight in places such as Iraq, the Saudi franchise has had significant problems organizing operational cells inside the kingdom. Additionally, since the death of Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, the Saudi franchise has struggled to find a charismatic and savvy leader. (The Saudis have killed several leaders who succeeded al-Muqrin.) In a militant organization conducting an insurgency or terrorist operations, leadership is critical not only to the operational success of the group but also to its
ability to recruit new members, raise funding and acquire resources such as weapons.

Like the Saudi node, the fortunes of other al Qaeda regional franchises have risen or fallen based upon ability of the franchise's leadership. For example, in August 2006 al Qaeda announced with great fanfare that the Egyptian militant group Gamaah al-Islamiyah (GAI) had joined forces with al Qaeda. Likewise, in November 2007 al Qaeda announced that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) had formally joined the al Qaeda network. But neither of these groups really ever got off the ground. While a large portion of the responsibility for the groups' lack of success may be due to the oppressive natures of the Egyptian and Libyan governments and the aggressive efforts those governments undertook to control the new al Qaeda franchises, we believe the lack of success also stems from poor leadership. (There are certainly other significant factors contributing to the failure of al Qaeda nodes in various places, such as the alienation of the local population.)

Conversely, we believe that an important reason for the resurgence of the al Qaeda franchise in Yemen has been the leadership of al-Wuhayshi. As we have noted in the past, Yemen is a much easier environment for militants to operate in than either Egypt or Libya. There are many Salafists employed in the Yemeni security and intelligence apparatus who at the very least are sympathetic to the jihadist cause. These men are holdovers from the Yemeni civil war, when Saleh formed an alliance with Salafists and recruited jihadists to fight Marxist forces in South Yemen. This alliance continues today, with Saleh deriving significant political support from radical Islamists. Many of the state's key institutions (including the military) employ Salafists, making any major crackdown on militant Islamists in the country politically difficult. This sentiment among the security forces also helps explain the many jihadists who have escaped from Yemeni prisons -- such as al-Wuhayshi.

Yemen has also long been at the crossroads of a number of jihadist theaters, including Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Levant, Egypt and Somalia. Yemen also is a country with a thriving arms market, a desert warrior tradition and a tribal culture that often bridles against government authority and that makes it difficult for the government to assert control over large swaths of the country. Yemeni tribesmen also tend to be religiously conservative and susceptible to the influence of jihadist theology.

In spite of this favorable environment, the Yemeni al Qaeda franchise has largely floundered since 9/11. Much of this is due to U.S. and Yemeni efforts to decapitate the group, such as the strike by a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle on then-leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Ali al-Harithi, in late 2002 and the subsequent arrest of his replacement, Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, in late 2003. The combination of these operations in such a short period helped cripple al Qaeda in Yemen's operational capability.

As Stratfor noted in spring 2008, however, al Qaeda militants in Yemen have become more active and more effective under the leadership of al-Wuhayshi, an ethnic Yemeni who spent time in Afghanistan as a lieutenant under bin Laden. After his time with bin Laden, Iranian authorities arrested al-Wuhayshi, later returning him to Yemen in 2003 via an Iranian-Yemeni extradition deal. He subsequently escaped from a high-security prison outside the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, in February 2006 along with Jamal al-Badawi (the leader of the cell that carried out the suicide bombing of the USS Cole).

Al-Wuhayshi's established ties with al Qaeda prime and bin Laden in particular not only provide him legitimacy in the eyes of other jihadists, in more practical terms, they may have provided him the opportunity to learn the tradecraft necessary to successfully lead a militant group and conduct operations. His close ties to influential veterans of al Qaeda in Yemen like al-Badawi also may have helped him infuse new energy into the struggle in Yemen in 2008.

While the group had been on a rising trajectory in 2008, things had been eerily quiet in Yemen since the Sept. 17, 2008, attack against the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa and the resulting campaign against the group. The recent flurry of statements has broken the quiet, followed by a Warden Message on Jan. 26 warning of a possible threat against the compound of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and a firefight at a security checkpoint near the embassy hours later.

At this point, it appears the shooting incident may not be related to the threat warning and may instead have been the result of jumpy nerves. Reports suggest the police may have fired at a speeding car before the occupants, who were armed tribesmen, fired back. Although there have been efforts to crack down on the carrying of weapons in Sanaa, virtually every Yemeni male owns an AK-variant assault rifle of some sort; like the ceremonial jambiya dagger, such a rifle is considered a must-have accessory in most parts of the country. Not surprisingly, incidents involving gunfire are not uncommon in Yemen.

Either way, we will continue to keep a close eye on Yemen and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As we have seen in the past, press statements are not necessarily indicative of future jihadist performance. It will be important to watch developments in Yemen for signs that will help determine whether this recent merger and announcement is a sign of desperation by a declining group, or whether the addition of fresh blood from Saudi Arabia will help breathe new life into al-Wuhayshi's operations and provide his group the means to make good on its threats.

An Open-Letter to My Pro-Obama Friends

2009-01-28T16:50:00.000-08:00

(I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't try)

by Bretigne Shaffer

Dear pro-Obama friends,

I got a call from one of you the day after the election. You were so happy. You had "not been so proud to be an American for... decades!" You're living overseas, and you told me about watching the results in a bar with other Americans and how you were all hugging and crying you were so happy. As I hung up the phone, I found that I felt happy for you too.

Most of you know that I supported neither McCain nor Obama, that I view them as equally opposed to peace and freedom and equally ignorant of sound economic principles. I wasn't going to be happy with the election results no matter who won, so I can at least be glad that some of my friends are happy, and I am. And after his first few days in office, even I have to admit that Obama has done some very good things for which he is receiving well-deserved praise. It is not my intention to dismiss these accomplishments, nor is it my intent to rain on anyone's parade. But I do want to ask you all a big favor.

I'm going to make some predictions about Obama's presidency. Essentially, I'm going to predict that four years from now, an Obama presidency will not look very different from the George W. Bush presidency, or from what I imagine a John McCain presidency would bring. If I'm wrong about this, then I promise that I will re-think my beliefs about our political system and about politics generally. But if I am right, then I'm asking you to do the same. I'm asking each of you to consider the seemingly bizarre proposition that there really is no significant difference between candidates offered up by the established party system; that Republican and Democrat are virtually indistinguishable; and that neither party has at heart the interests of you or me or "the American people." I'm asking you to consider the possibility that continuing to vote for these people just helps to perpetuate the very ills you seek to cure.

So here are my predictions. I'm going to leave aside areas such as the environment (I don't believe that government solutions to environmental problems will help anyone other than special interest groups — many of you probably don't agree with me) and wealth redistribution (I'm old fashioned and believe that theft is wrong even when the government does it) because we may not be on the same page on these issues. (However, on the issue of wealth redistribution, I will say this: Do you really believe that the same man who voted to bail out billionaire bankers at the expense of ordinary taxpayers is really going to help the poor stick it to the rich? Really?)

I'll stick to the areas where I think most of us agree: War and foreign policy; civil liberties; and the economy.

Let's start with war and foreign policy. Obama was not an anti-war candidate, and he is not an anti-war president. His opposition to the US occupation of Iraq was based not on a principled stance against pre-emptive invasion and occupation of a foreign country, but on his view that it had damaged the US's credibility and therefore its ability to engage in military interventions in the future. Senator Obama voted to continue funding the Iraq war and voted against a 2007 pullout in June of 2006. He does not plan to bring troops home from Iraq, but to redeploy them in Afghanistan, and he "support[s] plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marine Corps by 27,000 Marines." (from Obama's website, change.gov)

In an article for Foreign Affairs last year, Obama said "I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened." (Emphasis mine.) He has promised AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) that he will "...do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything." Coming from the future leader of one of the most heavily nuclear-armed nations in the world, these are chilling words. Prior to his election, Obama also spoke of expanding the war on terror to Pakistan (indeed, by the end of his first week in office, he had already ordered air strikes on villages in Pakistan, killing at least 17 people including three children), and prior to his inauguration he remained silent as the Israeli government killed hundreds of civilians in Gaza with weapons provided by the US government.

The sad truth of the matter is that George W. Bush in 2000 ran on more of an anti-war platform than did Obama in 2008. Indeed, the danger inherent in a President Obama is that he will be perceived as being less bellicose than Bush or McCain. I believe that this will allow him to get away with even more than McCain might have, as he will face neither the public opposition nor opposition in Congress that a Republican president would have.

So, here are my foreign policy predictions:

At the end of Obama's first four-year term:

1. The US will still have an active military presence in Iraq.
2. The US will have attacked at least one more country that poses no direct threat to us. (I'm not even going to count his early air strikes on Pakistan.)
3. Military spending will have increased.
4. US citizens will be no safer from terrorist attacks. I say this because I believe the (sadly all-too-accurate) perception of the US as an imperialist warmongering nation will persist. I realize this one is open to interpretation. I would just ask you to honestly ask yourselves at the end of these four years whether this is the case.

My one caveat to this section is this: If the US government becomes financially unable to maintain its empire abroad, then Obama's military aspirations may be hampered by budget constraints. However I maintain (and Obama's own words support me here) that this will not be because of any lack of will on his part.

Moving on to civil liberties and human rights, I have to admit that this is the one area where Obama's presidency is already looking different from that of his predecessor. In his first few days in office, President Obama signed executive orders to 1) close Guantanamo within a year; 2) officially ban the use of torture in the military; 3) close the CIA-run secret prisons around the world; and 4) review detention policies and procedures and review individual detention cases. He has also suspended the military trials at Guantanamo for 120 days, and has acted to combat government secrecy. These are all good things and Obama is receiving well-deserved praise for them.

More important though, the fundamental problems facing civil liberties and human rights in this country do not stem from the operation of some detention centers. The damage inflicted has its roots in such things as the USA PATRIOT ACT (which Obama voted to re-authorize), drug law enforcement, and the repudiation of the very foundation of due process of law, habeas corpus. The big questions then, are: 1) whether Obama's administration will actually follow through on his executive orders and close Guantanamo, close the CIA prisons and truly end torture (there is also of course the question of what will then happen to the detainees); and 2) whether Obama will be able to tackle the more fundamental problems such as restoring habeas corpus and due process.

And there are some fundamental issues that Obama has not even taken on. While he is aware of the fact that more than one percent of American adults, and one out of every nine black men, are in prison, he does not tackle this issue head on. Nor does he really address the war on drugs in its entirety, nor the increasingly dangerous police state it has helped to spawn. To his credit, he has promised to end the illegal federal raids on medical marijuana clinics, and to eliminate the inherently racist sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. However these measures don't even come close to addressing the fundamental problem that is the drug war itself. And some of his moves so far do not inspire hope: His appointment of Eric Holder, formerly a big proponent of mandatory minimum sentencing is worrisome. Even more disturbing, Obama has pledged to strengthen two federal programs ("Community Oriented Policing Services" (COPS) and the Byrne grant program) that have actually contributed to increased militarization of local police forces.

My predictions, then, are a bit more muted than in the other sections. On some of the big questions I listed above, I do not have any predictions. I hope that he does do all of these things, and if he does I will give him credit for it, and even admit that he may be better than McCain in this one area after all (although remember McCain said he was against torture too). To me though, real change means more than simply reversing the most outrageous of measures put in place by the previous administration. However if under Obama habeas corpus and/or due process (including an end to warrant-less searches and seizures) are fully restored, then I will absolutely admit that there are significant differences between the two men, and I will reconsider my view that real change cannot come through the political process.

I am also very concerned about Obama's plans for what amounts to compulsory national service for young people. The idea is that schools receiving federal funds will be strong-armed into implementing "service" (for government-approved endeavors of course) as part of their graduation requirements. I am not going to include this in my predictions however as I really don't have a strong view on whether this will come to pass or not.

What I do predict is the following. By the end of Obama's first term in office:

1. More than 1% of US adults will still be in prison. This number will very likely be even higher than it is today, and the black and Hispanic portion of that population will not have decreased by any significant amount.
2. We will still suffer from the kind of police abuse that is becoming more and more common: military-style raids on unarmed civilians in their homes; the shooting and tasering of unarmed citizens; and police and judicial corruption leading to the jailing of many more innocent people than can be acceptable under any system. The militarization and aggressive behavior of police forces will probably become worse before they get any better. This is another one that is somewhat open to interpretation. I would ask you to rely on your own honest judgement regarding whether you believe things have really changed in this area.
3. "No-Fly" lists will still be in place, and there may even be more restrictions on travel.
4. There will be more restrictions on gun ownership and the right to self-defense.
5. The police tactics and suppression of dissent at the 2012 RNC and DNC conventions will be just as brutal as they were in 2008.
6. Government surveillance of US citizens will continue (remember that bill Obama voted for that gave immunity to the telecoms companies that assisted with this in the past?),

Now for the easy part: the economy.

It is true that President Obama has inherited a tremendous problem from the previous administration. Any president would be hard-pressed to come out of the next four years claiming victory in this area. In fact, the best that anyone could do would be to not make things any worse by allowing markets to function, overvalued assets to depreciate and poorly run companies to fail. Barack Obama is not going to do that.

With his support for the massive financial-industry bailouts, and his plans for stimulus packages to get the economy on track again, President Obama is doing all the wrong things. What got us into this mess was too much borrowing and spending, too much government involvement in markets, and now he wants to implement more of the same as the solution. I'm not even going to ask you all to agree with my assessment. Just watch what happens.

My prediction: By the end of Obama's first four years in office, the US economy will be in much, much worse shape than it is now. Specifically:

1. The US will have massive inflation. The dollar will lose at least 50% of its value against most goods and services, and certainly against the goods and services most people use every day. This is a very conservative estimate. It will probably be much worse.
2. Unemployment in the US will be worse than it is now. It will be at least in the double digits.

Maybe you all have a different concept of what "change" means than I do. If so, then fair enough. But for me, at a bare minimum, any real change cannot possibly include a continuation of the US government's interventionist and imperialist foreign policy. Nor can it include the maintenance of the police state that allows government agents to spy on US citizens, burst into their homes in the dead of night armed to the teeth, seize the property of people not even connected to crime s, shoot and taser non-violent citizens with impunity and incarcerate nearly 1% of the population — or incarcerate anyone for crimes that have no victims. I believe that these things will continue unabated under the Obama administration.

If you agree with me that the continuation of these problems would not constitute the kind of "change" you are looking for, then I'm asking you to accept my challenge: If, by the end of Obama's first term in office, these areas are not significantly different from how they are now — that is, if the US is as much an imperialist, warmongering state as it is today, if civil liberties at home are no more protected than they are today and if the economy is in significantly worse shape than it is today — then I will ask you to admit that you were wrong about Obama. More than that, I'm going to ask you to rethink your views on about the political process more broadly. And I promise to do the same.

For years, I have said that real progress towards peace, freedom and respect for individual rights cannot come from working within the very system that sustains itself through war and the expansion of state power over people's lives. If in fact the Obama administration does herald great and significant change in these areas that we agree upon, then I promise to rethink these beliefs.

Let me correct myself on one point. Up above I said that there was no discernible difference between the Republicans and Democrats, or between McCain and Obama. That's not quite true. Obama is smarter. He will pursue his ends in a more intelligent and a more publicly palatable way than John McCain would have, and he will very likely be more successful in attaining them because of it. But what remains the same are the ends themselves. Ultimately, both parties stand for upholding American empire overseas and expanding the scope of the state in people's lives and the economy at home. If I am wrong about this, then I promise to re-think everything. But if I am not, then I hope you will do the same. Let's talk again in four years.

Thomas Jefferson

2009-01-28T09:50:00.000-08:00

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

The word "Democracy" DOES NOT appear, anywhere in the U.S. Constitution...

2009-01-27T16:33:00.001-08:00

Interesting. Of the many forms of Government on the Planet Earth today, the United States w a s the most unique. The Founding Fathers, established the United States of America as a REPUBLIC and disdained the concept of a Democracy. Give a listen.....http://www.wimp.com/thegovernment/

Let's just start at the beginning shall we...

2009-01-27T16:18:00.000-08:00

This is a test.