The Progressive Destruction of the U.S.

Progressive movement’s century of steady destruction of the U.S. dollar, income taxation, massive liberal intrusion into the lives of all Americans from birth to death

The Progressive Destruction of the U.S.

Barack Obama is the final piece of the map in the progressive movement’s century of steady destruction of the U.S. dollar, income taxation, and massive liberal intrusion into the lives of all Americans from birth to death.

The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressive’s 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends
An excellent analysis of this is found in “The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressive’s 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends” by Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte ($19.95, Idea Factory Press, Phoenix, Arizona). Together they have written eight books on economic topics.

There is a great backlash to the Obama administration’s efforts to impose a socialist economy on America in which the federal government essentially controls all elements of it. The most recent and dramatic example is Obamacare, the takeover of one sixth of the economy. The Tea Party movement emerged to protest it in 2009 and has steadily grown as a political movement.

Their protest march on Washington, D.C. that year drew nearly a million or more Americans.

In 2010 the movement was instrumental in returning power to the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. If the political pundits are right, the forthcoming November midterm elections will remove many of the Democrats who voted for it and may also return power to the GOP in the Senate. The elections are critical to thwarting Obama’s further efforts to destroy the nation by adding millions to its many welfare programs as the result of its failure to increase economic growth from a dismal 2% per year, the lowest in decades. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan took office and reversed recessions. Obama has not.

“Either we successfully reboot the original operating system of individual freedom, free enterprise, and small government that America’s Framers built into the U.S. Constitution or the Progressives will by manipulation and force continue to impose their failed collectivist ideas on humankind’s future,” writes Smith in the introduction to his book. Make no mistake about it, “collective ideas” is another way of describing Communism, often referred to as Socialism.

“They aim to replace Capitalism, private property, ‘selfish’ individualism and God with a human-made Eden, a utopian humanist society where an all-powerful State would equally redistribute the world’s wealth and power to the working elite.”

Consider just five ways progressivism has impacted America; (1) abortion that has killed more than 55.7 million fetuses since 1973, (2) banning prayer to support the development of moral values in schools, (3) the spread of same-sex marriage as a legal definition of marriage, (4) the movement to legalize marijuana, a known gateway drug, and (5) a culture filled with films and television that exploit violence and sex.

The utopian dream has been the creation of intellectuals who view themselves as an elite group who should control economies and lives. The failure of the former Soviet Union and the adoption of Communism in China are prime examples of this elitist notion which, as history has demonstrated, includes the murder of hundreds of millions in the process. Progressivism depends on the use of force.

Noting the stalled economic growth in the U.S. Wall Street Journal columnist, Daniel Henniger, addressed the global implications on Feb 26. “If the American economic engine slows permanently to about 2%, you’re going to see more fires around the world like Ukraine and Venezuela. At the margin, the world’s weakest, most misgoverned countries will pop, and violently.”

Craig points out that “More than 100 years ago, these collectivist ideas began to dominate Western civilization. In 1913 they took control of the United States government and began a ‘fundamental transformation’ of our economy, politics, culture and beliefs that continues today.”

The good news, however, “The Progressive collectivist vision today is dying and its death will cause huge changes in our world.” The anger that gave rise to the Tea Party movement is emerging as a widespread desire for national change. Efforts to downgrade the freedoms embodies in our Bill of Rights are generating major resistance.

“The various collectivisms may still pose a military, political or economic threat as their power wanes—but fewer and fewer people take the Left seriously as an ideology anymore. History has thoroughly discredited the Left as both a moral and practical failure” says Smith, adding that “the trouble is, many have likewise lost faith in the values that once made the West great—Judeo-Christian values and belief, free enterprise and the individual rights of the Enlightenment…Millions of Americans have become hooked, dependent on the entitlement state and on the paper money conjured out of thin air.”

There are signs, though, of change. “As of August 2013, polls found that only 35 percent of Americans supported President Obama’s economic policies, a rating similar to President Herbert Hoover’s after the start of the Great Depression. He is destroying the confidence needed to encourage investment in new jobs or to expand businesses.” More recent polls indicate Obama’s performance in office is rating poorly.

We are witnessing the way the Progressive movement works. “When the economy is good, they raise taxes and expand government. When the economy cycle turns negative, the politicians blame others, refuse to reduce government—and, increasingly, use the bad economy as a reason for expanding government and spending even more.”

That is why Obama’s policies have added $6 trillion dollars to the national debt and expanded government welfare programs. At $17 trillion and growing, it is a massive threat to the economy and to a government that depends on borrowing money to pay its bills. The downgrade of the nation’s credit rating—the first in the nation’s history—is a major warning sign if this is not reversed by electing politicians who want to reduce the debt and the size of the government.

Thomas Jefferson said the future of the nation depended on binding those in power “with the chains of the Constitution”, but we have a President who now routinely ignores those limits and wants to rule independent of the legislative branch, Congress, and refuses to enforce existing laws or changes them unilaterally, an issue the judicial branch increasingly is addressing.

America needs a major revision to the progressive income tax system that began in 1913. It needs to end the Federal Reserve’s (a cartel of banks) control of the economy and its creation of money “out of thin air.” It needs to return to the gold standard to back the value of the dollar. It needs to end the Department of Education’s grip on the curriculum that has indoctrinated the generations since the 1960s to accept Big Government. It needs to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency and return this responsibility to the States. These and other measures must be implemented to return the nation to greatness.

Progressive politics and policies have reversed the greatness of America making it the exceptional nation it was before they were imposed a century ago. That is the challenge of the current and future American generations

Equality can only exist as an ideal

Equality can only exist as an ideal

The Price of Progress - The Poor Will Always Be With Us

“If the poor didn’t exist, we would have to invent them,” Pogue said, spooning kneaded balls of raw spinach into his mouth.

Pogue was Anson’s superior though the term no longer existed in the workplaces of the Community. Pogue was the Coordinator and Anson was the Organizer which amounted to the same thing.

In its drive for income equality, the Community had set the same base pay for everyone with added bonuses determined by a review of workplace peers and countersigned by the Coordinator. Organizers quickly learned to assign their Coordinator a bonus three times his base pay. If they didn’t, the Coordinator would refuse to sign off on their far smaller bonuses.

“Fortunately we don’t have to invent them,” Anson said, glancing around. The Communion was an upscale restaurant serving only raw food, but it was easy to spot the dolees at their tables, taking in one of their mandatory two healthy meals a month.

Pogue chuckled. “Don’t we? In the old days, poverty was an accident or a choice. There are no accidents or choices anymore. A rate of income distribution is set for each district. There have to be so many people of every class in each of the districts and all the countries of the Community equally distributed across race and sex.”

Anson looked over at a dolee uneasily tasting a skewer of honeyed ants. “It’s not as if someone decided that fellow over there should be poor.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. We know how to manipulate the economic situation in each district to achieve the proper distribution. And if everyone goes along, there isn’t a problem,” Pogue said. “Sometimes though we get these persistent fellows trying to climb out of their lot in life.”

Pogue pointed to the dolee. “Suppose he were to go chasing job opportunities outside his assigned district, what would happen.”

“It’s not technically illegal,” Anson said.

“The Community doesn’t make things illegal. It makes them unpleasant. Messages get sent. Inspectors show up to look over his children, hassle him for minor tax reporting matters and give him other things to do with his time. If he persists, we turn to sterner measures to maintain equality.”

Anson raised his glass of wheatgrain juice. “To the poor.”

Coordinator and Organizer clinked glasses while the dolee chewed his ants in disgust.

“Do you know why we need the poor?” Pogue asked.

Anson knew, but he also knew that Pogue needed to enact this ritual monthly to maintain his self-assurance. The Coordinators were becoming uneasy of late. They felt the wind shifting, but did not understand why.

“Empathy,” Pogue said, smacking his lips. “We talk about ending poverty, but it is the poor who teach us to be better people.”

“And we repay them by keeping them poor,” Anson said.

“It seems cruel, but those who suffer, the poor and the oppressed, the sick and the overlooked, inspire us with sensitivity,” Pogue said. “Consider this, what made the Socialists and liberals of the past?”

“Spare time,” Anson suggested cynically. “They were associated with a leisure class, disposable income, excess education.”

Pogue shook his head. “Sensitivity. A baby cries and his parents comfort him. The cry is suffering. The time comes when the parents no longer comfort him as quickly because he is expected to be on his own. From this he draws conclusions about the cruel nature of the world. He becomes sensitized to his own pain and to the outrage that the pain is being ignored. And he generalizes that outrage to the unfeeling outside world at large.”

“So they were a society of crybabies.”

“Cynicism must be in fashion this month,” Pogue said disapprovingly. “Their sensitivity was not in their tears, but in their resentment. Their pain became self-pity and they thought of themselves as better people for it. Their politics articulated that resentment as sensitivity.”

“Not everyone can be a victim,” Anson said.

“That is why we need the oppressed,” Pogue said. “They serve as a reminder of that which we must be sensitive to. The purpose of the revolutionary politics of equality on which the Community is built are not to end poverty or oppression, but to perpetuate them on equal terms for a higher purpose.”

“We must create the poor to pity the poor,” Anson said, looking down at his unappetizing plate filled with red seeds of an unknown provenance.

Pogue slammed a meaty hand down on the table. “No! Pity is weak and sentimental. We must create the poor so that we will be outraged by their plight and by those who do not care about their plight as we do. Only in this way will the revolution permanently perpetuate itself. One day the Community will be overthrown by a more revolutionary system and it will be overthrown by an even more revolutionary system. Each cycle of outrage will rise to a peak as expectations go unmet.”

“We have no hope but failure,” Anson said.

“Exactly. We must fail and go on failing. The agony of the suffering must be there so that we will point a finger at an uncaring world and demand better. It might be in the power of the government to end poverty, but if everyone were truly equal, they would become insensitive.”

“Equality can only exist as an ideal,” Anson said, repeating Communal dogma.

“We are doomed to a reality of inequality,” Pogue said. “We have not come to fix the world, but to shame the world. Equality is our ideal, inequality is how we remind everyone of their moral unfitness to their accomplishments and abilities. It is how we teach them to be sensitive.  Sensitivity defines our politics. The Community does not intend to end suffering, but to make everyone sensitive to suffering.”

“Suffering is life,” Anson said, as the dolee, hungry and unsatisfied, rose from the table. “But are we truly sensitive to that man’s suffering?”

“Obviously not,” Pogue said. “No man can know what someone else is going through. And who is to say that beggar deserves our sympathy. We project our pain onto others and become sensitive to it. Each man is an island. Our self-pity can become pity, but it is only an illusion. It is only ourselves that we pity. It is for our own sake that we become sensitive so that we can denounce the insensitive.”

“Then the Community is an illusion,” Anson said.

“A moral illusion,” Pogue answered, finishing the last of the spinach balls. “The most sensitive of us teach others how to trick their self-pity into empathy. And we must have blank vessels on which to project our self-pity and our outrage at a world that is insensate to our pain.”

“The poor must always be with us,” Anson said, rising from the table.

“Otherwise our sensitivity would be nothing more than selfishness,” Pogue agreed, and ordered another bowl

Some Very Good News About Americans

Americans hold tenaciously to the principles of liberty and freedom

Some Very Good News About Americans

We are all besieged daily by bad news. It is easy to become depressed about the present state of the nation, but there is some very good news as well.

This is not to say there aren’t legitimate problems and concerns. The last two elections put a President in office that lies all the time. The nation’s economy has been so awful that 100 million Americans are either out of work or have ceased looking for work. Democrat political leaders are actually telling Americans that being unemployed is a good thing because it leaves them free to pursue their hobbies.

The President has been pursuing a campaign to make Americans believe that there is massive income inequality when, in fact, there is relatively little. There has always been a very wealthy class and a very poor one. What there is, however, is a loss of wealth primarily in the Middle Class. As for poverty, America has long provided income mobility to those who wish to study and work hard to improve their status.

What is rarely addressed is the seething power of American entrepreneurship which, at present, is trapped by a largely socialist federal government imposing a mountain of regulations that thwart growth and take money from the private sector that would otherwise be invested in the creation or expansion of business and industry nationwide.

Americans have repeatedly suffered, survived, and overcome financial crises to come back to build the greatest economy in the world. Part of the reason for this are the long established values that Americans of every description embrace.

That is why Wayne Baker’s new book, “United America: The Surprising truth about American values, American identity and the 10 beliefs that a large majority of Americans hold dear” is a welcome review that the author’s extensive research confirms.

The beliefs are:

Respect for others
Symbolic patriotism
Freedom
Security
Self-Reliance& Individualism
Equal Opportunity
Getting ahead
Pursuit of happiness
Justice& fairness
Critical patriotism

A journalist, David Crumm, provides an introduction to Baker’s book. “Dr. Baker defines a Core American Value (as one) that is strongly held by a large majority of Americans, stable over time, and shared across diverse demographic, religious and political lines…Here a core value represents an area of deep and broad consensus among American people, not disagreement and division. A core value is not a prescription of what Americans ought to believe, but what Americans actually do believe.”

The research supporting Dr. Baker’s book was conducted over two years by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Institute. The data was analyzed with a battery of statistical techniques to ensure the validity and reliability of the results.

Touching on a few of the values addressed in the book, Dr. Baker starts with respect for others which he describes as “so important that it actually characterizes what it means to be an American…More than 90 percent of Americans in the national surveys I conducted said that respect for people of different racial and ethnic groups is important to them.”

“Respect is given to people who do what they say, who live according to what they believe, who are persons of integrity. A position or title doesn’t necessarily garner respect, but integrity does” says Dr. Baker and that is bad news for those identified as “leaders” or “experts” who do not display integrity. Telling lies undermines everything they say and do.

“We have what appears to be a contradictory situation,” says Dr. Baker. “Politicians, political elites, and party activists are increasingly polarized, moving further apart from one another. Yet public opinion polls clearly show that Americans loathe the divisiveness. And the values of Americans are not polarized.”

“There is widespread agreement among Americans when it comes to core values. Which means our polarizing politicians are becoming less and less representative or our actual views.”

A review of those core values show that Americans love their symbolic patriotism such as our flag and our national anthem. “Love of country is especially strong in America” says Dr. Baker.

“Americans hold tenaciously to the principles of liberty and freedom,” says Dr. Baker. “A 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center shows that 53 percent of Americans see the federal government as a threat to personal rights and freedoms. This is the first time since Pew started asking about this issue in 1995 that a majority felt this way.”

Little wonder when one recalls the assault on the Second Amendment that was launched by the Obama administration and one that failed significantly. Recent news of the Federal Communications Commission’s plans to “monitor” radio and television news judgments evoked a comparable response.

Freedom to participate in politics and elections evoked a response in which 98 percent of Americans agree with this definition of freedom and it stands in stark contrast to the Obama administration’s corruption of the Internal Revenue Service to deny Tea Party and patriot groups non-profit status routinely granted to other groups.

As one reads Dr. Baker’s book, one comes away with a renewed confidence in the judgment of Americans, confirming that their core values are those that have made America a beacon of freedom in the world.

And that’s the very good news!

The Green Scam of “Endangered Species”

The Endangered Species Act should be repealed because it has a pathetic record regarding its goal over the past forty years

The Green Scam of “Endangered Species”

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal took note of what has occurred since the 1990s when some three dozen gray wolves were captured in Canada and transferred to the wilderness of Idaho. According to federal biologists, this was necessary to restore the ecological balance in a region teeming with elk and other creatures on the gray wolf food chain.

The article noted that more than 650 wolves roam the state today according to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game which has been hearing a lot of complaints that the wolves “are wreaking havoc on Idaho’s prized elk and livestock, and prompted the governor’s office to embark on an effort to wipe out three-quarters or more of the population.”

So the federal biologists bring in the wolves and a few years later the governor’s office says kill them. Why? Because the elk population has fallen about 15% since the wolves arrived, along with 2,589 sheep, 610 cows, and 72 dogs.

Take a moment on contemplate how arrogant and unconscionably stupid it is to take gray wolves from Canada and put them in Idaho in the name of “ecological balance.” The only balance achieved was a significant imbalance in the elk population and witless destruction of sheep and cows which represent a livelihood to ranchers and dinner to the rest of us.

Throughout America we are all paying for the environmental notion of “endangered species” and the quest to “save” some from extinction. The problem with that conceit is that 95% of all the species on Earth have gone extinct over hundreds of millions of years. One paper on this noted that “Mass extinction of biological species has occurred several times in the history of our planet.”

The Endangered Species Act became law on December 28, 1973, just over forty years ago. It’s not about saving species. It’s about providing a vehicle to environmental groups to shut off access to vast areas of the nation in order to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas or mining them for coal and other minerals.

In a December 2013 Wall Street Journal article, Damien Schiff and Julie MacDonald reported that “A law intended to conserve species and habitat has brought about the recovery of only a fraction—less than 2%—of the approximately 2,100 species listed as endangered or threatened since 1973.”

“Meanwhile, the law has endangered the economic health of many communities—which creating a cottage industry of litigation that does more to enrich environmental activist groups than benefit the environment.”

“One reason the Endangered Species Act has spun out of control is that the federal agencies that decide whether to list a species—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—no longer based decisions on what the law calls for: data. Instead they invent squishy standards like ‘best professional judgment.’”

The result of that can be seen in California’s San Joaquin Valley where much of the nation’s almonds, broccoli, onions, watermelons, lettuce and tomatoes have been grown. About 13% of all agricultural production in the nation takes place in the region where some 250 different crops are grown. That is, until the Natural Resources Defense Council won a lawsuit against California’s water-delivery system that they claimed was endangering Delta smelt, on the Endangered Species list since 1994. The result was a manmade drought for the valley’s farmers and ranchers. If you wonder why the cost of everything in the vegetable section of your supermarket costs more, you can thank the NRDC.

Lying about animal species is so much a part of the environmental movement that polar bears have become a fund-raising symbol over the years despite the fact that polar bear populations, said to be threatened by melting Arctic ice, have been thriving since the 1970s. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there are between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears worldwide, living in Canada, Greenland, the northern Russian coast, islands of the Norwegian coast and the northwest Alaska coast. Hunting them was banned in the U.S. and worldwide with the exception of Alaskan Natives for tribal needs.

Currently, almost half the land west of the Mississippi river belongs to the federal government and environmentalists want to expand on that to prevent the nation’s booming oil and gas development.  That development could make the U.S. energy independent, create many jobs, and its revenues could significantly reduce the tremendous national debt.  At the heart of the environmental movement is an intent to destroy capitalism and reduce the U.S. among other nations to an era before fossil fuels improved life for everyone.

One way to do that is to increase the endangered list by a record 757 new species by 2018. Two species with the greatest impact on private development are range birds, the greater sage grouse and the lesser prairie chicken. Among the environmental groups who specialize in using the Endangered Species Act are the Wildlife Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity who have been party to more than one thousands lawsuits between 1900 and the present. The Center has made no secret of wanting to end fossil-fuel production in the U.S.

The Endangered Species Act should be repealed because it has a pathetic record regarding its goal over the past forty years and because it threatens the economic development of the nation. Unless or until this occurs, environmentalists will continue their assault on America.

Obama, Putin: Ever Hear Of The Monroe Doctrine

Obama, Putin:  Ever Hear Of The Monroe Doctrine?

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Basically the Monroe Doctrine, boiled down to its essential parts states that European countries should stay on their side of the pond and the US will reciprocate by staying out of their business — and — on our side of the pond.

I have to wonder if either Obama or Putin have ever even heard about this policy instituted by American President James Monroe.

Let’s take a closer look at the Monroe Doctrine:

The Monroe Doctrine was a US foreign policy regarding Latin American countries in the early 19th century. It stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention. At the same time, the doctrine noted that the United States would neither interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal concerns of European countries.  – SOURCE:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
We can all see how well that is working out today, huh?

Consider this:  “As the world remains riveted on Moscow’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, Russian President Vladimir Putin is shifting gears to Latin America.

As first outlined by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu last February, Putin now plans to keep the United States off-balance as Moscow sets up actual military bases and massive arms sales in the Latin American region.

Moscow’s plan follows a recent announcement by Iran to have its warships patrol in waters off the U.S. coast.

Russia and Iran have stated their increased presence is also in response to U.S. military deployments near their countries, including the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization up to Russia’s borders.”– SOURCE:  http://www.wnd.com/2014/03/putin-to-put-russian-bases-in-latin-america/#0eu6egtZYaGZpvZV.99

The Monroe Doctrine would be invoked by many U.S. statesmen and several U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and many others.

Turns out the US does have a soft underbelly approachable from the Gulf of Mexico and points south. We are extremely vulnerable, it seems, from cruise missiles fired at us from the Gulf of Mexico.  Russia’s Bear bombers have been equipped for sometimes with cruise missiles and so have Russia’s nuclear submarines, which have been operating in the warm waters of the Gulf for a very long time now.

Of course, our vaunted leader is busy kissing the nether regions of the Little Dictator (who would be Czar) while ordering the US military decimated in full view of the enemy.

And make no mistake — Russia is an enemy of the US.  All the while, Russia is busy recreating the Soviet Union with a goal of having it recognized as a confederation of former members of the Soviet Socialist States of Russia by the year 2025.

And whose to stop Putin?  Currently, he is the cock-of-the-walk whom no country is challenging.

The US cannot invoke the Monroe Doctrine as a result of Obama fiddling around with the politics and governments of European and Eurasian nations.

Once again the smartest President EVER, and his minions in the West Wing and the State Department, have allowed their messianic attitude to influence their so-called negotiations with Russia and the Ukraine.

If Obama would just stop talking!  President Lincoln said:  “It is better to remain silent and allow people to THINK you’re a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Look.  I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis vividly.  I remember the fear we Americans, especially those of us living in the southeastern states at the time, felt.   Every time a jet flew over everything stopped and all eyes turned skyward.  At the time I was living some 30 miles from a major nuclear target city.  Years before I had been trained by the army how to handle the refugees from a nuclear blast delivered against that city.  I still have nightmares about how we were told we would be ordered to work the wounded, disposing of irradiated bodies, especially those who were victims of fatal does of radiation from the blast, until they, too, fell dead.  It sounds horrible — and it was – but we knew it would have to be done if any of us were to survive.

It was an incredible time of duress we lived under in those days.

Today as we look at the possibility of that threat becoming real once again from Russian bases and Iranian bases in South America, I want to take our leftist limp-wristed government by the shoulders and shake it and demand:  “What the Hell is wrong with you people?”

Can you envisage the damage a single sub or a single Bear bomber could deliver by firing off a barrage of nuclear tipped cruise missiles from the Gulf of Mexico?  That’s a SINGLE sub and/or a SINGLE bomber — not a fleet, a flotilla, or a squadron!  Just ONE!

Oh, did I not mention that we have no defense against those cruise missiles?  Well, the fact is we do not.  We might get lucky and knock down a couple, or even a few, but for the most part they would be invincible and would reach their targets.

We can forget any solution to this problem until we get rid of the Obamas and the Clintons.  We need a solidly conservative Commander-in-Chief before we can expect to realize any improvement in our military and our national defenses.

See, Obama, Clinton, and Kerry are far more concerned about non-existent global warming than they are about the safety and security of their fellow Americans.

We’d better wake up and begin planning for a conservative candidate for President in 2016.  At the moment, frankly, I don’t see one anywhere on the horizon.

Finally, as I wrote this piece, I began to wonder just how President James Monroe would view America’s involvement in all our European and Asian entanglements and just how he would react to Russia and Iran building military bases in our backyard.   I suspect that if he were a “cussing” man, the air would be blue about him.  I daresay, he could not fathom the idiocy that brought America to this precipice.

If I were tasked with explaining it to President Monroe, I’d have to begin by explaining, somehow, that our leaders tossed out the constitution he so fastidiously wrote.  I don’t even want to think about where the conversation would go from there. Suffice to say there IS NO REASONABLE EXPLANATION for what we have become.

Try it.

In the theater of your mind imagine yourself explaining to our Founding Fathers how we so desecrated and destroyed their beloved creation.

Had we only …. .  But we didn’t.  And here we are — circling the drain.

Here we go.

Here we go.

Uh oh: Rumsfeld says ‘a trained ape’ could outperform Obama in Afghanistan

You know it wasn’t a racist comment. You also know it doesn’t matter. MSNBC has their see-what-racists-all-Obama-opponents-are talking point for the next few days.

More to the point, though, knowing Donald Rumsfeld he doesn’t care about any of that, which is one of the things I love about him. The far more important point here is the point itself - that the U.S. had a good relationship with Karzai in Afghanistan when the Bush Administration was in office. It was only when Obama and crew came in that we suddenly couldn’t work with him.

Enjoy a minute’s reminder of the refreshing and honest leadership we had not so very long ago in this country:http://youtu.be/yCmz0DSZR7Y



Obama does seem to have a blind spot when it comes to status of forces agreements. He walked away from the one we should have had with Iraq too. You don’t supposed . . . Obama doesn’t really believe in America’s role as a global leader, do you? Nah!

None of this is to suggest, by the way, that Karzai is without faults. Karzai is a player, and he will do what he thinks is in his best interests. But when Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush team were in charge, Karzai could clearly see it was in his best interests to line up with the United States. Now? America is retreating and showing weakness on every front, and Russia is on the march.

Who’s to say it’s not more in Afghanistan’s strategic interests at this point to align with Putin? After all, it is the Russians’ turn to invade if memory serves, and clearly no one in the West has the intestinal fortitude to stop Putin from going anywhere he wants to go. Obama sure as hell doesn’t.

The point here is not to excuse Putin for anything he’s done, nor is it to excuse Karzai for siding with the bad guys. They both deserve condemnation. But people who understand geopolitical relationships understand how to make a guy like Karzai see that it’s more in his best interests to side with us. The Bush Administration knew how to do that. The Obama Administration either doesn’t know how or doesn’t think it’s important.

So would a trained ape really do better? I guess it would depend how well trained

The defeat in Afghanistan crept up silently

AS I HAVE SERVED I SPEAK OUT FOR MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS FATHERS AND MOTHERS HUSBANDS AND WIFES WHI ARE STILL IN HARMS WAY

The defeat in Afghanistan crept up silently
After Afghanistan

Some wars are lost in a matter of moments, others stretch on indefinitely. The defeat in Afghanistan crept up silently on the national consciousness and even though we are negotiating with the Taliban, the “D” word is hardly used by anyone.

According to Obama, in one of his interminable speeches which all run together and sound the same, there really isn’t a war, just a mission, and the old mission is now becoming a new sort of mission, and the missions, all of them, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, have been successful which is why we are wrapping them up, except that we aren’t really. And that’s about as clear as the message from the big white building with the neatly mowed lawn out front gets, except for the part about how its occupant singlehandedly parachuted into Pakistan, killed Bin Laden, and then stopped off for some curry and a humanitarian award.

Had McCain won in 2008, we would no doubt he hearing a lot about the “D” word and the quagmire in Afghanistan. But the “Q” word doesn’t really get mentioned either. No war has been lost. Only a mission is ending. And missions, unlike wars, can be defined in so many creative ways that it’s hard to know what to make of them. It’s easy to tell when a war has been lost, but a mission can never be lost, only renamed. And renaming is what Obama did to the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan. Those wars weren’t lost; they’re only hiding out in the history books under new names and identities.

Wars are usually remembered according to the proclivities of their historians. The history books tend to record the Republican presidents of the last hundred years as either losing wars or winning wars that weren’t worth winning. Democrats however usually win everyone.

The Korean War and the Vietnam War were not that far in perception at the time, but are worlds apart in the history books. Had John F. Kennedy lived to serve out two terms and then passed on the big chair to his brother, would the history books even record that the United States lost the Vietnam War? Or would it, like Afghanistan, have gone down as a story about a difficult temporary intervention that ended successfully under the leadership of a wise and caring president?

It is difficult to imagine the left’s narrative of the last century with such a big and meaty chunk taken out of it. What would have become of Oliver Stone’s career without the JFK assassination and the mythology of a cruel and senseless war in Vietnam? Or imagine the last decade if Biden and Gore had managed to talk Clinton into going after Saddam. As entertaining as such speculations might be, renaming missions and tampering with the history books does not alter the outcome of wars.

From the early days, the left had gloated that Afghanistan would become another Vietnam. And like the appointment in Samarra, in attempting to escape that Vietnamness, it repeated many of the follies of Vietnam and few of its triumphs, failing to press the advantage while expending thousands of lives based on abstract theories hatched by the bright boys in Washington and fraudulent books passed on by the wives of generals to their husbands.

We are now in the Afghanistanization stage, hanging around a country for no particular purpose, except that we aren’t very good at departures and the men who made this mess still think that Karzai and his crew can make this work if we provide them with some more training and air support without being shot in the back.

And when we have finally left and Karzai’s cobbled together government collapses, its ministers absconding to Paris and Pakistan with suitcases full of stolen aid dollars, what comes after the war?

The old conflict aimed at denying Al Qaeda one base of operations had been outdated a few years after it began. That was something that Bush instinctively understood and that his critics have only slowly become aware of. Al Qaeda is not a country or an ethnic group. It is a religious vanguard that was always meant to serve as the core of an international Islamist terrorist movement. That function had been fulfilled long before an old man watching porn in a covert compound with no authority over anyone except his many wives was finally put down the hard way.

Al Qaeda, like the Communist Party, can rise anywhere. It rose in Iraq, in Somalia, in Mali, in Syria and in countless other places. Like Burger King, the franchise possibilities are endless and the brand name recognition is universal. And unlike Burger King, you don’t even need to pay for the privilege of using the name. Set off a few bombs or kill a few foreigners and watch the money start rolling in from the fat sheiks of the oil-swollen Gulf who have never slit the throat of anything larger than a goat, but like having their own terror armies.

Obama, despite his third culture cred and his ability to carry around important books about world events while on vacation, has no clue

Obama, despite his third culture cred and his ability to carry around important books about world events while on vacation, has no clue what to do about any of that. Obama at War is really a dumber Bush at War, rehashing Bush era ideas and tactics with completely botched implementations. With Kabul in the rear-view mirror, all he has left is Bush’s policy of targeted drone strikes on Al Qaeda terrorist leaders.

This approach has been rebranded as the smarter and a smaller war. A true conflict for the 21st with Muslim grad students in Yemen chatting on XBox Live with Muslim teenagers in Jersey City to convince them to make and carry liquid explosives on board a plane in tiny shampoo bottles while overhead a drone piloted by a formerly unemployed middle-aged professional skier with a degree in drone piloting from Kansas State hunts for them silently in their clan territories

The targeted strike approach was largely borrowed from the Israeli playbook. Like Israel, the United States is in a tangled conflict that won’t end anytime soon. And like Israel, it’s relying on saving some lives and weakening the terrorist infrastructure by taking out a few leaders here and there. Israel’s targeted strikes on Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders never ended the conflict, but aborted more than a few terrorist plots by killing the bomb-makers and planners who were making them happen.

The actual conflict did not end. Neither did the attacks. Rather than shooting soldiers, Israel was shooting officers, because shooting soldiers required extended ground engagements and occupations that had become politically untenable. The United States has embraced the same strategy for the same reasons using technology that came out of Israel. But it hasn’t given much thought to what comes after that.

The failure of the targeted strikes and arrests of terrorist leaders led Israel to pursue a physical separation through barriers and fences. The terrorists compensated for that with rockets and shelling. That led Israel to develop the Iron Dome, a defensive anti-rocket system. The suicide bomber, once ubiquitous, became a rarity, but the attacks have grown more powerful as the terrorists used the territory that they gained through Israeli withdrawals to deploy heavier long-range weapons that can reach major cities.

If the United States follows this same pattern of withdrawal and fortification, then by 2028, there might be an actual Fortress America guarded by anti-missile systems against Pakistani, Iranian and Egyptian nukes. And that scenario, as troubled as it sounds, is probably one of the better ones.

Israel withdrew from physical territories opening the way for a Hamas takeover of Gaza. Obama withdrew from geopolitical territories, announcing in Cairo that the United States would no longer support the undemocratic dictators of the Muslim world unless they had oil. Hamas, or its Egyptian parent organization, took over Egypt. Across the region, Islamist regimes rose and American allies fell. The Islamist winners of democratic elections turned into dictators leaving the United States in the awkward position of supporting new dictators while being jeered and denounced by the Arab Street.

What’s the next step? It doesn’t appear that there is one. Geniuses like Brennan only thought as far ahead as draining Muslim anger by rewarding political Islamists while using drone warfare to decimate violent Islamists. Not only is this distinction mostly imaginary, but the rise of political Islamists has made for more Al Qaeda takeovers and more work for the drones in North Africa.

The plan has failed and the second term is underway. It is very doubtful that Obama, whose big plan for Afghanistan was to copy the Bush plan for Iraq that he denounced in the Senate, has a backup plan. Brennan certainly does not. Secretary of State John Kerry is spending a lot of time talking about Global Warming while waiting a week for a callback from Russia. It’s hard to think of a worse bunch of people in whose hands to put the fate of the nation and the world.

Both Bush and Obama largely missed the point of September 11, which is that it matters less how many training camps Al Qaeda has in some desert where there are more drugs and RPGs than people, but how many operatives they have in the United States. The terrorist attacks carried out by Al Qaeda in America all required that their operatives either be in the United States or have permission to enter it. The truly dangerous training camps aren’t in Mali or in Afghanistan; they are in Jersey City and Minneapolis. The easiest way to stop the next Al Qaeda terrorist attack is to end immigration from the Muslim world.

That is not a position that any presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, is likely to run on anytime soon. Instead anyone who wants the job is salivating at the prospect of pinning Green Cards to anyone with a university degree. Articulating it is taboo even in Israel. And yet after Afghanistan, the United States might find that it has no choice but to build that southern border fence and to slash immigration from the more explosive parts of the world. That revelation may not come tomorrow, but it likely will come.

In Israel, it was Rabin who stated that Gaza had to be taken out of Tel Aviv and who began the construction of the West Bank security barrier because he realized that terrorism would destroy the peace process. An American Rabin may well be a liberal who is forced to come to the realization that the only way to avoid constant conflicts with the Muslim world is to begin cutting off the flow of Muslim immigrants to America.

Such a realization, if it ever comes, is still a long way off. For now the drone war remains a clumsy fallback position. As long as there are no major terrorist attacks, the limited drone strikes are enough to satisfy most Americans. But when one of the Al Qaeda franchises begins poring over blueprints of a major American landmark and another September 11 follows, then the question that has been held in abeyance after Afghanistan will suddenly reappear. What do we do now?

Don’t Give Away the Net

Congress must oppose this latest example of the Obama Doctrine – diminishing our country, emboldening our enemies and undermining our friends

Don’t Give Away the Net

On the afternoon of Friday, March 14, 2014, the Obama administration announced that it was taking a step – without prior notice or evident consultation with Congress – to “support and enhance the multi-stakeholder model of Internet policymaking and governance.” Like so many other of Team Obama’s unilateral decisions, this one is not just contrary to the national interest.  It amounts to fraud.

Specifically, according to a press release issued by the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration ,http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces-intent-transition-key-internet-domain-name-functions

 the NTIA says it intends to “transition key Internet domain name functions to the global multi-stakeholder community.” To that end, “As the first step, NTIA is asking the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to convene global stakeholders to develop a proposal to transition the current role played by NTIA in the coordination of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS).”

The administration says this step will lead to a new management arrangement for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) that will, effective in September 2015, repose that responsibility with some other entity than NTIA. According to remarks at a March 14th press conference by the agency’s administrator, Lawrence Strickling, this transition “must have broad community support” from both Internet users, governments and companies. He also asserted that the forthcoming governance model has to “maintain the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet Domain Name System.”

It is not clear precisely how the U.S government will be able to assure such outcomes having already announced that it is terminating the present arrangement.  Businesses and non-governmental organizations that have endorsed this initiative with the caveat that they expect these conditions to eventuate are either kidding themselves or deceiving the rest of us.

That is especially so given that it is a safe bet ICANN will fall under the effective, if not de jure, control of the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).  Should that happen, neither the security, stability nor resiliency of the Internet’s Domain Name System can be assured.  Indeed, this sort of arrangement has long been demanded by such enemies of freedom and free expression as: the governments of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran; multi-national groups like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; and the UN bureaucracy.

As former senior State Department official Christian Whiton has observed, there are predictable consequences to having the “directory and traffic signals of the Internet” come under the control of such hostile forces, including the following:

Greater control over the content of the Internet, including censorship, by governments who regard it as a threat to their holds on power.

Impediments to technological innovation as bureaucrats and hostile governments seek to dictate what can and cannot be done with the net.

UN taxation of domain name registrations and, in due course, other Internet transactions.  Such international taxation will make the United Nations even less accountable and afford it the latitude to fund activities detrimental to U.S. interests and those of its allies.

Control of the Internet can allow it to be used as an instrument of warfare. While the United States has refrained from making such use, allowing actual or potentially hostile powers to exercise such control may mean the Internet is simply disabled at a critical moment, or perhaps employed against us.
The United States has managed the Internet for the benefit of the whole world since it created first the DARPANet and then the World Wide Web. There is no good reason for abandoning what remains of that role – especially in favor of what is virtually certain to be a vastly inferior management arrangement.

Some have compared this surrender of what has been, as a practical matter, an American asset to President Carter’s decision to give-away of the Panama Canal. The difference is that at the time the Canal was given away, we could not be sure it would wind up in unfriendly hands (although it was predictable and predicted that it would, and the Chinese have proved us right).  But in this case, we have every reason to believe — despite the administration’s obscuring of who will take over from us — that the internet will wind up under the thumb of our enemies.

Congress must oppose this latest example of the Obama Doctrine – diminishing our country, emboldening our enemies and undermining our friends.  Tell your representative to act to keep the Internet an instrument of freedom and technological innovation (www.DontGiveAwaytheNet.com).

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

If ObamaCare had been in place in 2006, I would be dead

Cancer centers opt out, including the one that saved my life

If ObamaCare had been in place in 2006, I would be dead

I saw recently that several cancer centers in this country have decided to opt out of taking ObamaCare-insured patients. One of them is M.D. Anderson in Houston.WHO EDUCATED ME IN ALTERNATIVES OF Max Gerson, M.D. was born in Wongrowitz, Germany (1881). He attended the universities of Breslau, Wuerzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg. Suffering from severe migraines, Dr. Gerson focused his initial experimentation with diet on preventing his headaches. One of Dr. Gerson’s patients discovered in the course of his treatment, that the “migraine diet” had cured his skin tuberculosis. This discovery led Gerson to further study the diet, and he went on to successfully treat many tuberculosis patients. His work eventually came to the attention of famed thoracic surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, M.D.http://gerson.org/gerpress/dr-max-gerson/


I saw recently that several cancer centers in this country have decided to opt out of taking ObamaCare-insured patients. One of them is M.D. Anderson in Houston.

That hit home in a very personal way, because it made me realize something. If ObamaCare had been in place in 2006, I would now be dead. (Let’s see if Harry Reid, or Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, want to try to call me a liar for this.)

3 MONTHS ago this month, I was diagnosed with cancer. The first opinion I received was not encouraging. Not at all. So I sought a second opinion. Fortunately, the nature of my insurance at the time was such that I had the freedom to choose whom I would see, and I chose the outstanding Dr. Lloyd at Houston’s M.D. Anderson. He believed I could beat the cancer, and I then had the freedom to begin seeing an Atlanta-based oncologist who helped get me on the path back to health.

Today I HAVE ALTERNATIVE MEASURES TO CHOOSE FROM

Now let’s say I had been relying on an ObamaCare insurance policy, which would mandate that all my treatment takes place within its own network. In that case, I would not have had the freedom to go to M.D. Anderson and I would never have seen Dr. Lloyd,.NOR WOULD I HAVE FOUND OUT ABOUT DR,Max Gerson, M.D,

And if that had happened, my friends, I would now be dead.

You will recall that one of the Democrats’ major selling points for ObamaCare was that it would prevent people from going bankrupt because of a medical condition. Let’s leave aside for now the question of whether it really does that, since the proposition assumes they would be saved from bankruptcy by virtue of health insurance being made more affordable, which – sorry, Nancy – the

“Affordable” Care Act does not do.

But let’s leave that aside for the moment. Even if it were true, avoiding bankruptcy doesn’t do you a damn bit of good if the thing that saves you from bankruptcy also kills you. And ObamaCare would have killed me.

I’m sure the liberal media “fact checkers” will argue that I might have found a similar second opinion in network. Or maybe they will try to blame the cancer centers for not taking ObamaCare patients. But if “fact checkers” dealt strictly in facts as they want people to think they do, they would have to acknowledge this: Pre-ObamaCare insurance gave me the option of going to Max Gerson, M.D.

ObamaCare insurance would take that option away.

These are real facts, not the sort of editorializing disguised as “fact checking” that we usually get from the “fact checkers.”

ObamaCare is going to kill people. We probably will not be able to identify everyone ObamaCare kills because there will be no way to know who would have been saved by a second opinion that was not made available. But while I pray this does not happen to anyone, there is every reason to think my situation will happen to many other people.

This is one of the reasons it’s so important to win in the 2014 mid-terms. In spite of all these problems, Democrats refuse even admit – let alone address – these problems, and they keep trying to sell us ObamaCare as the good-time rock-and-roll solution to everything that has ever been wrong with health care.

Control of Congress would finally put us in a position to solve some of these problems, and we simply have to do it. People’s lives are literally at stake.

Sarah Palin was right

Prescience.

Sarah Palin was right: Weak Obama watches as Russia invades Ukraine

Author
By Herman Cain

Rob already treated us this morning to the must-see video of Chris Matthews excoriated Mitt Romney in 2012 for suggesting that Russia could be a problem.http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/61524

 That is good TV. But there was an even wiser Republican sage who foresaw as early as 2008 that Vladimir Putin might take Barack Obama’s weakness as a cue to invade Ukraine. Who was this respected foreign policy mind?

Someone who not only can see Russia, but can understand it - a heck of a lot better than Obama does at any rate:Priorities.



While Secretary of State John Kerry yammers on about Russia violating the Helsinki accords and whatever else, Putin just steamrolls into Crimea with no real concern about anything the U.S. might do. We understand that Obama had an extended conversation with Putin over the last couple of days, and it appears that Obama drew another red line that doesn’t mean anything in international circles.

Dan’s piece earlier this morning went into some detail about the comments of Mike Rogers (as well as embedding the video) from his appearance on Fox News Sunday yesterday.http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/61522

 Rogers laid out some actual strategic options we could exercise at this point, but he was also clear about the fact that we don’t have a lot of leverage because Obama gave it away early in his presidency.

It goes all the way back to when Obama cancelled the strategic defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. What did he get from Putin for doing that? Absolutely nothing. As a result, we are left with very little leverage to help the people of Ukraine, which we made a commitment to do many years ago, and now we’re in no position to do it.

And now, exactly as Palin indicated, Obama is reacting with indecision and moral equivalence.

For those of you worried that we will be sucked into another war, don’t worry. We don’t have enough troops around the world even if it was the right thing to do, which it’s not.

I agree  that there is nothing to admire about Putin. He is a thug.

But you have to have enough respect for your adversary – which is not the same thing as admiration – to be prepared for the challenge he poses to you. Here, Obama has failed miserably. Putin has been playing this chess game with Obama from the beginning, and Obama hasn’t made a single gain throughout the game.

And I still can’t get over the fact that the people who found the prospect of a President Palin absolutely horrifying thought it was a terrific idea to put Barack Obama in the White House. As Palin might say, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

Yes, the election of a black man was a historic triumph for the struggle

Yes, the election of a black man was a historic triumph for the struggle. But we do ourselves no honor when we cover up for the disaster of his policies.

Yes, civil rights champions, you can admit Obama is a failed president

After watching the movie “The Butler” staring Lee Daniels and Oprah Winfrey, I have a better understanding of why some people are reluctant to let go of the hoped-for glory of Barack Obama’s presidency and acknowledge his failed policies.

The historic nature of his presidency trumps his failed policies in their minds because of the struggle, the sit-ins, the abuse, the senseless killings, the lynchings, the water hoses and attack dogs unleashed on the “freedom riders” during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

Even more black people are reluctant to let go, but I believe that the champion of the Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others would encourage them to let go, because they would not condone the social equivalent of spousal abuse. On the one hand, people are hanging on to the significance of a black man making it to the White House. And on the other hand they are enduring the abuse of failed policies, deceptions and now the arrogant trampling of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Just as the butler in the movie eventually let go of his anger toward his son who became a “freedom rider” and civil rights activist, it is past time for people to let go of their denial. It is time to face the facts so the future can be better than the past.

It took the butler nearly his entire life to let go of his anger, because he could never let go of watching the senseless killing of his father when he was a child. His father was killed for standing up to a white man who had abused his mother.

Yes, we must celebrate the good things in our history, but we must not hold on to the bad things in our history. Remember them, yes! Hold on to them, no! Let go!

History will record Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States of America. Some people want to quibble that he’s not the first black president since his father was from Africa and his mother was from the USA. Get over it! The semantics do not matter.

If President Obama does not change his policies or his arrogance, which I doubt, history will also record him as the worst president, in terms of results, in American history. Historic federal spending, an un-recovered economy, blurred and ineffective foreign policy, a dependency nation, a health care disaster and a demotivated electorate are just a few of the historic descriptions that will be used to describe his presidency.

A historic triumph of getting to the White House is not enough to define one’s presidency. It also takes results that will leave a positive impact on the nation.

Right now, it’s not looking too good. Those who have spent their lives committed to the struggle do not betray that commitment by acknowledging that this is the truth. Indeed, they honor it. We can do better than this.

Priorities.

Priorities.

VIDEO: Obama tells man who can’t afford ObamaCare to get rid of cable, cell phone

Author
By Herman Cain

President Obama appeared on Spanish-language media the other day, including Telemundo and Univision, to promote ObamaCare signups. What he wasn’t expecting, however, was a viewer challenging his assertion that ObamaCare is really “affordable”. But the president was ready with a helpful suggestion. Hey. If most of you people weren’t spending all that money on your cell phones and cable TV, you could afford health insurance!

It sounds like the sort of thing you might expect the president’s political opponents to make up, so see for yourself:



Someone help me out here. If something is “affordable,” shouldn’t that mean that you don’t have to cut fairly ordinary expenditures out of your budget to pay for it? Or is Obama telling the middle class he so often claims to champion that they have no business having cable TV and cell phones?

It seems to me that if the Affordable Care Act really made health care affordable, the man who posed the question wouldn’t be having this problem and he wouldn’t be getting a hectoring lecture from the president about his decision to spend money on cable and phones. Could it be that ObamaCare is actually imposing costs on people who can’t really afford them, and that there’s nothing “affordable” about it?

And this from the guy who has never come close to balancing a budget.

I CHALLENGE ANY OF YOU TO DUE BETTER

Political class wants you to just sit down, shut up and go away

Political class wants you to just sit down, shut up and go away

The political class wages war on the working class

Author
By Herman Cain

When you look around at some recent news, you realize something pretty troubling about the state of this nation right now: The political class is engaged in an all-out war against the working class.

By the way, when I use the term “working class,” I don’t mean it the way Democrats mean it. They only apply the term to blue-collar-type workers (especially union members), and while these folks certainly qualify as part of the working class, my definition is much more expansive and includes everyone who works hard to earn an honest living rather than getting everything they seek in life through government and politics.

The political class is at war with these folks, and before we get into why the political class is doing this, let’s examine some recent incidents of how they’re doing it:

Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza is being investigated by the IRS, which says he directed $25,000 in contributions inappropriately. D’Souza, you will recall, made the 2016 film Obama’s America, which wasn’t exactly complimentary of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The credit rating agency Standard &; Poors, as we told you this week, got an awfully angry phone call from then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner when it downgraded the U.S.’s credit rating in 2011. Geithner threatened that the government would “look very closely” at S&P as a result of this. They followed through on the threat, too, smacking S&P with a $5 billion lawsuit.

Remember when Dr. Ben Carson gave a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast that was seen as critical of President Obama? Soon after, he was subjected to an IRS audit.

Of course you’re familiar with the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, despite the media’s attempt to convince you the scandal has “fizzled.” But here’s a new one that came out yesterday: There is a conservative Hollywood group called Friends of Abe. It consists of Hollywood conservatives who get together because they want to be around like-minded people, since in Hollywood most of the conservatives try to stay underground, because most of Hollywood is liberal and they will blackball you. Friends of Abe committed the unpardonable sin of having two people come and speak to them. One was Paul Ryan. The other was (gasp) Herman Cain!

Now the IRS has found out and has exposed Friends of Abe, naming names, and demanding to know why they had Ryan and me speak (because they wanted to hear what we had to say?) and who their members are. The better to harass them too, of course.

Let me tell you how the IRS operates when they pull this sort of thing: The IRS lets you know they are investigating you, and then they leave you hanging. Maybe tea party groups have been waiting for two years or more to resolve their nonprofit status. It’s intimidation by investigation, dragging it out and leaving you and your organization hanging out there.

Now a common liberal defense of the IRS is that these people came to the government requesting tax-exempt status, and since they were the ones who made the request, you can’t blame the IRS for making sure they’re following the rules. Some may find that argument reasonable on the surface, but it’s not, and I’ll explain why.

The federal government imposes a massively complex and oppressive tax code on the people of this nation, then establishes loopholes to grant you relief from some of this tax burden if, and only if, you do things in a manner deemed acceptable by the federal government. You simply cannot run a nonprofit organization – and that includes political advocacy – if you have to pay taxes absent a nonprofit exemption. No organization could afford it unless it was being bankrolled by someone with unlimited deep pockets, and most organizations have no such sugar daddy.

So what the federal government has done is establish a taxation regime that prohibits you from operating unless you follow their rules. And the IRS can apply the rules pretty much any way it sees fit. If it wants to demand an explanation from you for having Herman Cain speak, it will do so.  If wants to audit you because you made the president look bad at an event, it will do so.

They don’t even have to find you guilty of anything. All they have to do is decide to look into what you’re doing. They can essentially harass you out of existence if they feel like it.

The political class is waging war on the working class because the working class threatens the political class with exposure of the fraud it is perpetrating on the American people. The policies they have foisted upon this nation are leading us to disaster, and if people wake up to this, their power will be taken away and they will face the worst of their nightmares: They might have to join the working class!

Not only does that mean they would have to work for a living, but they wouldn’t have the power to which they have become accustomed to harass and investigate those who bother them.

My assistant made a statement this morning that was just perfect: Being a patriot is not for sissies.

That’s because the political class wants you to just sit down, shut up and go away. They’re having a rough time right now, because we are not going to sit down, or shut up, or go away. And as long as that’s true, this is a war the political class ultimately cannot win.