The Magic of Obama

“A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.” — Friedrich August von Hayek

Ever wonder why Obama looks so sharp in a dark suit? Ever wonder about that ear-to-ear professional grin he's got? About those little dramatic pauses before he drops a well-rehearsed line? Ever wonder where he keeps his high hat and magic wand?

Well, you don't have to wonder any longer. We're due to see another magic campaign by The Great Obama. It'll be one stunt after another, like those Styrofoam Greek columns at his victory rally in Denver.

Now that the GOP race is settling out, Obama is starting his real campaign. That messianic halo is beginning to hover over his head again. People are beginning to faint at his performances. The other day, in Charlotte, he asked his audience to stay calm and let that fainting lady or gent be treated by the medics.

"Folks do that all the time when I speak," he said modestly, barely restraining himself from performing a miraculous resurrection of the flesh, right there on stage. In a couple of months he could be doing the full Elmer Gantry, raising his arms and going Heal! Heal! as the victim is carried away.

And the crowds will go wild. They love this stuff, our super-intelligent left.

Sandra Fluke is no fluke. She was a set-up, a full-time radical activist for the last ten years — after majoring in Women's Rage at Cornell University. Fluke has been so "active" in the last decade; it's hard to see how she even found time for bathroom breaks. At age 31 Ms. Fluke is a "student" at Georgetown Law School, specializing in activism against this Catholic private university. She's a professional victim or an accuser, depending on the needs of the moment.

That's why you are paying your taxes for Women's Studies, Black Studies, Hispanic Studies, the lot. Your money is going to train "activists" to do PR stunts, in order to squeeze out even more of your money. It all feeds the left-wing Demagogue Machine.

L'Affaire Fluke comes down to Alinsky Rule 1: Pick the target; freeze it; then polarize it — "polarize" means a hysterical mob assault on the designated scapegoat of the moment. This is pure Alinsky, something Obama and his left-wing minions have been well trained in. It is something the conservatives cannot seem to figure out how to combat.

Check out Lenin's Hanging Order. It's all there. Nothing has changed, now that we have Vladimir Ilyich Obama in the White House. Today we are all kulaks.

The U.S. Army used to tell combat soldiers to "find 'em, fight 'em, fix 'em." "Polarize" means to fix 'em, to neutralize the enemy, discredit them, scare them witless, and traumatize them. Raging mobs create fear even without the threat of Siberian prison camps and basement executions. We've seen the radical media go after Republicans and conservatives over and over again. No one is immune; two-year-old Trig Palin is still targeted by the utterly shameless left. Apparently little baby Trig isn't covered by International Women's Day. Nor is Governor Sarah Palin, of course.

Obama has refurbished that oldest trick of the theater, the claque — the wildly applauding gang paid to sit in front of the crowd, ready to cheer on command. With a well-trained claque you can say anything and the audience will still applaud. Most people are afraid to stand out from a maddened crowd. It's how Demagogues operate.

We call our national claque "the mainstream media," and we know they march in lock-step, because they were exposed in the JourNOlist scandal. It's the most significant media scandal ever, and the media are covering it up, of course.

Real journalists don't sing from the same song sheet every single day. Today, our media do that, which means they have no real journalists, just party operatives like George Stephanopoulos. Identical media words every day are a sure sign of coordination. If you ever need to prove the existence of media bias to a friend, just tell him to look at the lockstep headlines.

Right now those "spontaneous" Occupy mobs are being trained by the SEIU to shaft Mitt Romney during the campaign. That "99%" lie they came up with is a setup for the coming campaign. Those 99 signs are not homemade. The 99% slogan is totalitarian, of course, because it tells half the country to shut up and obey orders. It's The Great Obama practicing his tricks for the big show.

The media beat up Obama's enemies in broad daylight, to make sure he won't have real competition in the campaign. Clarence Thomas called the media a "high-tech lynch mob" when he was up for his 1992 Supreme Court nomination, and they haven't changed their stripes. The mob is now trying to gun down Mitt Romney's opponents, one after the other, saving their biggest ammo for Mitt himself. It's happening in broad daylight, and only conservatives are taking notice.

A century before canned laugh tracks, Italy's La Scala Opera House had claques. So did Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. Opera is in the blood over there, and Mussolini loved to strut on the big opera stage. When the Partisans caught him in the end they hung him upside down next to his mistress, suitably mutilated. They understood the value of drama, too. If it bleeds, it leads.

Bill Clinton was the first Democrat to bring a Hollywood director to the White House to stage his television stunts, but Obama makes the Clintons look like Arkansas hillbillies. The Great Obama's election opponents in Chi-Town magically disappeared from their campaigns — twice after sealed divorce records were exposed in public at critical moments. In Chi-Town Axelrod's "opposition research" takes on a whole new meaning.

Hillary and Bill felt the sting of that Obama whip during the 2008 primaries, when all the media turned on them as racists, on cue. Remember that? Choreographed by the wizard and his crew.

This time the target of Sandra Fluke turned out to be Rush Limbaugh. But it could have been Rick Santorum, or you or me. Obama operates by scapegoating. his administration has tried to scapegoat Israel by using front groups like J Street, staffed by Soros activists. The Great Obama took on the whole Catholic Church in the run-up to the Fluke stunt. Obama knows he lost any real Catholics a long time ago, so he has nothing to lose by attacking the Church on abortion. The Fluke stunt was timed to peel off female voters for Obama.

Most American presidents try to combine interest groups. Obama likes to split them. First he carves out the True Believers. Then he tries to sweep up the wishy-washies toward election time.

Admittedly, Rush walked right into the trap by calling the lady a tramp. He lost his deft touch, and just a few blundering missteps turned him into the target of the day. Sandra Fluke is even now being turned into a martyr of leftist womanhood. She's now Saint Fluke the Martyr for abortion rights, all free from the taxpayer.

This is the second time Rush has been honored by presidential attention from a Democrat. Bill Clinton tried to blame Rush for the Oklahoma City bombing. Now The Great Obama has him assaulting American womanhood in the person of Sandra Fluke.

On the other hand, Rush is making out fabulously from all the notoriety. All the talk show hosts in America are wishing The Great Obama had picked on them instead.

So everybody's having fun, except for the American people, who are being suckered.

A Land Devoid of Civil Debate

“Let your Conversation be without Malice or Envy, for 'tis a Sign of a Tractable and Commendable Nature: And in all Causes of Passion admit Reason to Govern.” — George Washington’s 58^th rule of civility.

At the founding of our Republic debate was crucial and civil. Our Founders were not in total agreement on the formation of the Constitution, but through thoughtful and respective debate, both in words and print, they were able to come to an agreement on how this Republic should be governed. They did not rely on TV and 10 second sound bites as we do today. They did not use talking points or agents for political gain. They were serious men working to create a lasting Republic based on Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness of each individual citizen.

We no longer solve problems in America — how can you solve a problem you are not even willing to discuss? Indeed, we no longer solve problems because we have abandoned open and honest debate.

Chronic unemployment, soaring levels of public debt, an education system in serious decline, an antiquated immigration structure, and a burdensome tax code and regulatory climate are but a few of the dilemmas we find ourselves confronted with. Our nation's list of contemporary hurdles goes on and on.

But rather than squarely dealing with these and a host of other issues confronting us, at best, we nibble around the edges. Now, America finds itself awash in a laundry list of protracted crises which seem unsolvable.

Events of the last week provide a glaring example of why we are in so much trouble. Rather than any number of very serious problems dominating our discourse, the nation has been fixated with an absurd episode revolving around a radio entertainer's overzealous reaction to congressional testimony by a law student who thinks the rest of us bear responsibility for her birth control.

This is self-strangulation. Perhaps we should have seen it coming. For in part, it is the inevitable result of a path our predecessors chose long ago. In the simplest of terms, our nation and her people are the victims of a gradual abandonment of truth.

When there is no hard and fast truth, when society can no longer reach consensus on what "is," a void is created, one infinite in scope. In this environment, anything goes. The only thing that we can count on is that the void will be filled.

Like so many nations before her, America has at long last fallen victim to the grand illusions of man. Substantial portions of America have come to view natural law as something entirely negotiable, and the consequences of actions as something wholly arbitrary. "Political correctness" has seized the day, and now the vacuum is so crammed full of junk that there is little room left for honest discussion, much less the commonsense approaches that are required to garner solutions.

Truth has been sacrificed for self-interest, sound bites substituted for careful study, and reasoned debate replaced with emotionalism and political squabbling. Our dialog has become so skewed and toxic that Godless hucksters spewing venom wrapped in the guise of entertainment are now regarded as objective and authoritative figures.

Perhaps the perfect storm has gathered. After decades of honing their craft, today, talking heads and slick marketing consultants find themselves with the ideal environment in which to operate.

The demise of America's education system, wanton materialism, and pop culture obsessions have converged with dramatic advances in communications technologies, delivering us to a place and time where our national conversation is at the mercy of practitioners of fantasy.

With the advent of news sources blasting away 24/7 and the sheer volume of information flying through our modern gadgets, important issues are reduced to tweets, and one "breaking story" is quickly discarded for the next.

On this day alone, millions of words will be written, polished for consumption, and presented to the world. Beautiful people with perfect coifs will parrot the official proclamations of the day, and an army of "experts" will be offered up, creating the illusion of legitimacy and authority. Subsequently, a wall of incessant chatter will sweep across the land.

Many, if not most, of these words; the untold man-hours to produce them; and the accumulative reactions which are sure to follow will prove utterly worthless. (That is, unless misleading and distracting an unsuspecting populace is the point of the entire exercise.) Then, tomorrow, we'll get up and do it all over again.

At the core of our dilemma is that pesky abandonment of truth thing. Modern liberals have ceded all intellectual ground and are no longer grounded by anything as troublesome as absolutes. They have wittingly reduced themselves to purveyors of over-emotional theatrics designed to obscure the failed theories they hold to.

Here, we have finally stumbled upon the curse of a system of governance built upon compromise. When the starting point of one of the two opposing sides in a debate is farcical, such as "Unemployment payments are good for the economy," any and all points of the ground in between are as well. We are simply dealing with a matter of degrees.

The nation is broke. Actually, it is beyond broke and flirting with insanity. As the national debt is pushing $16 trillion, the federal government is borrowing forty cents of every dollar it spends, and we can see an insurmountable stack of bills coming due on the horizon.

Rather than honest discussion, the best the ruling masterminds and their media lapdogs can muster is to terrorize the nation with the specter of a "government shutdown" while haggling over reducing next year's additional borrowing by a paltry 3-4 percent.

Our tax code has grown to an 80,000-page monstrosity. It is antiquated, much too progressive, and counterproductive to the nation, and everyone knows it. It has become a tool by which the federal government picks winners and losers and entices not only groups of voters, but lobbyists of every imaginable stripe. It is a central reason why our government no longer works properly. We have become a nation dominated by what James Madison called “Factions.”

Yet, let a Reformer like Herman Cain come along with his 9-9-9 plan and he is sure to be ridiculed, accused of heartlessness, and shunned to the hinterlands of our national dialog.

After the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords, in Tucson, President Obama was invited to speak at the memorial service at the University of Arizona. Obama urged civility in our dialog and debate and within 24 hours the liberal media, his minions, and the local sheriff were blaming Sarah Palin and the Tea Party the shooting even though the assassin was proven to be a person bordering on insanity with no political convictions. Where was the civility and honesty Obama had preached?

It appears that America has been overrun by immigrants, both the legal and illegal sort. Illegal migrants are straining the budgets of some states to the breaking point. Government budgets, at all levels, indicate that we can no longer afford to take care of our own. Our real unemployment rate has stagnated in the 15%-16% range (but we still legally import one million a people into the United States every year). Islamic terrorists simply amble across our southern border mixed in with the drug mules. Tens of thousands of violent MS-13 gang members routinely terrorize major American cities.

The matter has digressed to the point that our border with Mexico is virtually a war zone in some areas. Were the same scenario taking place anywhere else in the world, the United Nations would be issuing official edicts and the U.S. called upon to step in and quell the violence.

Yet our political class offers nothing more than reminders that "America is a nation of immigrants" while touting a vague concept called "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" which addresses none of our immigration-related problems and plays on getting the votes from certain groups.

Pick a topic, any topic, and you will find the same conclusion. Save America? Without honestly discussing it, good luck with that.

It’s Time to Pull the Plug on Afghanistan

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” — John Adams

The recent alleged shooting of 16 Afghan villagers by a US Army soldier has brought the war in Afghanistan into sharp focus. While tragic, and perhaps criminal, this shooting was not to be unexpected. With constant deployments of our troops in a mission that seems to have no real goal, the insane rules of engagement, the corruption within the Afghan government, and the daily death and maiming of our soldiers this incident is probably long overdue. Human beings are not perfect and our soldiers are human beings. They are not robots who can stand and be killed without having an adverse reaction.

As we hit the 10 1/2 year mark in Afghanistan, the state of trust and confidence between the coalition and the Afghan people is at perhaps its lowest ebb, and support for the war effort is wavering across the political spectrum. Given this, it appears time to reconsider the current status of our effort there — what have we accomplished, and what do we still hope and reasonably expect to accomplish? — as well as what the future may and should hold. Below the fold are some questions that need to be considered about our objectives, accomplishments, and expectations in Afghanistan. This list is not exhaustive by any means, and I certainly don’t claim to have all of the answers; in fact, I may not have any of them. However, they do need to be carefully thought about, and answered, at some point in the immediate future.

First, and perhaps most importantly, it’s critical to note that what the New York Times has called a recent “cascade of missteps and offenses” by the coalition (from the “Kill Team,” to the urinating Marines, to the inadvertent Qur'an burning, to last weekend’s inexcusable slaughter of sleeping civilians by one rogue and evidently disturbed soldier) should not obscure the indisputable fact that moral high ground still exists in this struggle, and that the coalition is firmly in occupation of it. Taliban spokespersons, among others, can condemn coalition actions as loudly as they wish (and, in such cases as this weekend’s massacre, condemnations are correct); however, while those acts ruin lives and tarnish the coalition image, they do not propel us from the high ground. Further, those condemnations do not change the fact that those who wage war on civilians daily, killing indiscriminately, throwing acid in the faces of young girls who dare attend school, opening fire on those attending a memorial for this weekend’s slain civilians, and carrying out all other manners of true atrocities.

As Brian Padden writes for the Voice of America:

“Candace Rondeaux, a security analyst with the International Crisis Group in Kabul, says it is both ironic and not surprising that the Taliban would attempt retaliatory strikes for the killing of civilians.

“They have been responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in Afghanistan over the years, but they do have a much more command of the propaganda value of these events than I think international forces do, and they do find ways to exploit these kinds of moments,” Rondeaux said.

Also Tuesday, hundreds of university students in the eastern city of in Jalalabad protested the killings. Some of the demonstrators chanted "Death to America” and "Death to Obama."

U.S. officials had warned the incident could lead to a surge in anti-American violence in the war-torn country. But the response so far has been muted compared with the public outrage that followed last month’s inadvertent burning of Qurans at an American military base. That led to a week of violent protests and deadly attacks against U.S. forces.”

However, simply fighting those who carry out such atrocities is not a reason to spend ten years, billions of dollars, or thousands of lives halfway across the world — and while breaking the Taliban’s despotic hold on Afghanistan’s government and its people was an added bonus to the initial combat operations in that country, the atrocities committed by that government against its own people was not our initial impetus for war (had it been, we would of course have acted militarily against the Taliban government well before the end of 2001). Colonel Ralph Peters stated several months ago in an interview with Bill O’Reilly: “We went into Afghanistan to drive the roaches out of the motel not to rebuild the motel.” Now we are not only rebuilding the motel but the entire infrastructure and economy of Afghanistan.

As obvious as it is to say, the impetus for war was, of course, the 9/11 attacks, carried out by an al Qaeda that had found safe haven in that Taliban-led country — and now, in the midst of that “cascade of missteps” by soldiers on the ground, those higher up the chain are attempting negotiate an end to the war effort that will almost certainly include some sort of power-sharing role for the Taliban in post-war Afghanistan.

Given this state of affairs, and the dwindling support at home for what had been termed the “real war on terror” by those opposed to the Iraq war, it’s clear that the effort in Afghanistan needs to be reconsidered. Despite a refocusing of national attention on Afghanistan in 2008-2009 (a topic dealt with in more detail below), several questions appear to have gone unanswered at that time, as well as both before and since. The most important of these questions seems the simplest on the surface: what is our goal there? However, after ten years of fighting, that question is both inexcusably and overwhelmingly difficult to answer — and that and several other questions need to be considered both quickly and completely, and the answers should factor heavily into the U.S.’s decision about our next move(s) in Afghanistan.

Several of the questions below will be corollaries to the original question about our goal in Afghanistan, but the lingering silence in response to this most basic inquiry has swollen to 800-lb gorilla proportions. Some of the questions below may also seem simplistic or pedantic; however, I’m trying to start from square one here, and these are some basic inquiries that need to be made. 10 1/2 years have gone by since ODA 555 became the first coalition boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Soldiers have been sent there and to Iraq so many times that many are using both hands to count their total number of combat deployments. These ten years of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan haven’t been conventional in nature; rather, they have required constant vigilance due to the human terrain involved being an often unrecognizable blend of friendly, neutral, and enemy — not to mention the constant threat of IEDs (given this fact, it’s frankly more surprising to me that incidents like this weekend’s atrocity haven’t happened more frequently, not that such a massacre was carried out at all).

As Dan Drezner writing in Foreign Policy has noted, “It’s tough to sound hawkish on a conflict where your rationale for being there has evaporated.” That apparent “evaporation” is reflected in the maddening answerability of the simple question posed above.

Here are a few other questions to consider while we chew on that one:

1. What is the desired end state in Afghanistan? Certainly (hopefully) it isn’t a unified country that operates as a western-style (and pro-western) democracy, because that dish simply isn’t on the menu at the Reality Diner. Afghanistan is and will continue to be far more splintered than that, with tribes and networks holding power and operating in different regions Are we willing to accept Taliban power sharing? Based on the ongoing efforts to engage the Taliban in negotiations, it seems safe to assume that we are (this will also be addressed below). What other components of a post-U.S. Afghanistan do we have in place or in motion, and what do we still hope to put in place before 2014, which is not only when we are scheduled to leave, but when President Karzai reaches his term limit? As this is considered, it is important to remember that the closer we come to the announced 2014 date of security handover and withdrawal, the less influence we will have over the situation there, both strategically and politically.

2. What was our initial goal and desired end state in Afghanistan (ca. 2001) and how does the current state of affairs measure up? It’s an inarguable truth that the best laid plans don’t survive first contact. However, despite media prematurely spewing the term “quagmire” all over the airwaves in October 2001, the lightning-fast initial phase of combat operations went exceptionally well. The Northern Alliance was trained and mobilized, al Qaeda disrupted, and Kabul taken from the Taliban all in a matter of weeks. Following that initial success, we stood up the Karzai government and began a decade of rotating conventional and Special Operations Forces (SOF) troops in and out of the operations theater, making modest gains in improving quality of life, access to education and health care, and infrastructure, while playing counter-network whack-a-mole and dealing with a growing insurgency fueled by domestic and cross-border sources. What was our initial goal at the time? What was our desired end state? At what point did we come close to achieving it, and how have our actions of the last ten years moved us closer to achieving it? This plays into the next question:

3. What goals have the last ten years of operations in Afghanistan been in pursuit of? This may seem simple — undermining and disrupting al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other organizations opposed to coalition efforts in Afghanistan; improving infrastructure and quality of life; and ensuring that we left Afghanistan with a functioning government and a national security force that was sufficiently trained to be able to protect that government and the nation’s people. However, while laudable goals, which of these have been achieved, and which are achievable?

4. How did we get from the goals and mission scope of 2001 to those of 2012? At what point, if at all, did we shift the goal posts, changing our original strategy and desired end state and? If we didn’t, should we have? There can be no question that focusing on Iraq, particularly from 2003-2008, caused Afghanistan to play a distant second fiddle, particularly when it came to media attention and the allocation of finite military resources like special operations units. This reduced our macro-level effort in Afghanistan to the strategic equivalent of treading water, trading some lives and some more money for what amounted to little more than a continuation of the status quo. Once Iraq was hauled back from the brink in 2007-2008, the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations focused more resources and attention on Afghanistan, but to what end? How were the goals put in place in 2008-2009 different from those forecast in 2001, and why?

Believe it or not, this essay isn’t meant as a personal indictment of President Obama, whose rhetoric on Afghanistan during the 2008 election was backed by almost no knowledge of the situation there whatsoever (despite being chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Europe, which has jurisdiction over NATO — and, therefore, the operations in Afghanistan — Obama never once held a hearing). Upon taking office, though, Obama was brought up to speed on coalition efforts there, and his decision to largely continue the strategy laid out at the end of the Bush administration demonstrated both the emptiness of his campaign rhetoric, and the apparent prudence of the Bush/Gates direction based on ground truth in-theater.

However, though the Afghanistan ‘surge’ put in motion by Bush and Gates, and implemented by Obama, put more boots on the ground in-country, thus allowing for more counterinsurgency and stability operations to be conducted, there was no clear communication of just what the goal there was, how it could be achieved, and how or why it differed from our original reason for invading.

Joshua Foust writes in Salon:

“In a speech outlining his strategy for the war, President Obama boiled it down to three goals: Deny al-Qaida safe haven; prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the government; and build up the Afghan security forces so they can take over as U.S. troops leave. It is a remarkable framework, defined as much by absence as by accomplishment, and in terms so vague as to be impossible to achieve definitively. But it is also a fundamentally political strategic framework, focused on the Afghan government as the defining characteristic of any future Afghan state.”

Ten years of military operations, including efforts at counterinsurgency and the use of all tiers of special operations forces to conduct high-value and time-sensitive target hits, are not carried out for no reason or in pursuit of no goal. However, at some point did (or have) such operations become self-serving, conducted simply for their own sake, and toward no larger end? Last August’s loss of 31 American service members in a single helicopter shoot-down (including twenty Tier One operators) that took place in the midst of an operation to catch a man who was functionally middle management within the Afghan Taliban seems to be a microcosm of just this issue. At what point — and how — did the Afghan strategy change so radically that middle-of-the-food-chain Taliban personalities were valued so highly that the tip of America’s uniformed spear was deployed against them? And, if we are in fact negotiating with the Taliban on post-withdrawal power sharing, how can we justify continuing to risk such personnel in action against a group we are actively working to bring to and keep at the negotiating table? Which takes us to question 5:

5. Was removing the Taliban from any form of political power (or eliminating it altogether) an original goal of the U.S.’s efforts in Afghanistan? It seems clear that, absent a sudden spontaneous combustion of every Taliban sympathizer in Afghanistan (and across the border in Pakistan), there will be some sort of arrangement that allows the Afghan Taliban to remain not only viable, but in a position of some power following the coalition withdrawal. If removing the Taliban from power and destroying their ability to regenerate and regain some level of political influence in Afghanistan was an original goal of the coalition effort there, then is there any measure by which we can say we haven’t failed? The role of the Taliban and their threat to the U.S. and its interests should neither be over — nor understated. Their greatest offense for us was their creation of a safe harbor for al Qaeda, which allowed the latter to plan and carry out international terror acts. Now, al Qaeda’s presence is reduced (though it appears to be growing in scope worldwide, if the many claims of “franchises” are to be believed), while the Taliban continues to regenerate.

Further, with their withdrawal from negotiations in the wake of last weekend’s massacre, and what appears to be unity among Afghans (for once) on a position — that of the coalition needing to leave as quickly as possible — it seems even more likely that the fragmented Afghanistan we leave behind will have at its titular helm a virtual corruptocracy, and among its power brokers groups like the Taliban.

6. What are the Afghan National Security Forces capable of? Besides killing coalition troops, of course. Will the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF — ANA and ANP) crumble as soon as their coalition trainers and partners leave? Or are we getting enough quality recruits, and training them quickly and thoroughly enough, that they will be able to provide a measure of security for residents of at least some portions of Afghanistan? If violence picks up again upon the coalition’s departure from the country, how long will the ANSF last before death and desertion decimate its ranks?

These are only a few questions, primarily asked from the 30,000 foot level or higher. As I noted above, many may seem simplistic, particularly to any readers who have an in-depth knowledge of our Afghan strategy and events on that front. However, they need to be asked — a fact which itself suggests they haven’t been given their due consideration to date.

At the bottom line, we have this fact: the Afghan people largely have better lives and more rights than they did under Taliban control in 2001 and before. However, altruism alone doesn’t justify ten years of blood and treasure. America needs to figure out what it’s doing in Afghanistan besides treading water and waiting for 2014, and it needs to decide which options have the best chance of ensuring the best possible outcome for the security and benefit of America and her interests — because, while altruistic achievement may be a nice bonus, when it comes to a decade-long war it’s the strategic benefit and safeguarded security of the participant that matter most. Given this, if we aren’t on track to significantly improve our strategic outlook and the security of our homeland and our interests by remaining in Afghanistan any longer than we absolutely must, and we should begin plans to draw down forces even more quickly than previously planned.

The North Dakota Oil Boom

"The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful." — Calvin Coolidge inaugural address, March 4, 1925.

Recently Barack Obama mocked his critics on the issue of gas prices. In his speech last week responding to high gas prices, President Barack Obama insisted that "we can't just drill our way out of" our energy woes. Actually, we can—and if the president wants proof, he should travel to boomtown USA: Williston, North Dakota.

He stated there was no silver bullet and that we were producing more oil than we have in recent years. What Obama did not say was that we were producing this oil on private and state-owned lands where the federal government had no authority to prevent the drilling and fracking operations. This has led to a boom in North Dakota, a state with a population 672,000 (2010 Census).

North Dakota was explored in 1738–1740 by French Canadians led by Sieur de la Verendrye. In 1803, the U.S. acquired most of North Dakota from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Lewis and Clark explored the region in 1804–1806, and the first settlements were made at Pembina in 1812 by Scottish and Irish families while this area was still in dispute between the U.S. and Great Britain. In 1818, the U.S. obtained the northeast part of North Dakota by treaty with Great Britain and took possession of Pembina in 1823. However, the region remained largely unsettled until the construction of the railroad in the 1870s and 1880s.

North Dakota is the most rural of all the states, with farms covering more than 90% of the land. North Dakota ranks first in the nation's production of spring and durum wheat; other agricultural products include barley, rye, sunflowers, dry edible beans, honey, oats, flaxseed, sugar beets, hay, beef cattle, sheep, and hogs.

For more than a decade, the state has had a strong economy, with unemployment lower than the national average, job and population growth, and low housing vacancies. Much of the growth has been based on development of the Bakken oil shale fields in the western part of the state, but it has also had growth in the technology and service sectors.

According to CNN Money “Thanks to hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" and high oil prices, oil production in the Bakken has exploded.”

“Nationwide there are a handful of shale oil fields that could contain as much as 17 billion barrels of oil, according to a recent study from IHS CERA. That's more than the country's largest oil field, Alaska's Prudhoe Bay.

"It's going to have a major impact on the United States reducing imports," Scott Sheffield, head of Pioneer Natural Resources Company, said Tuesday during a packed roundtable discussion on shale oil at CERA's annual energy conference in Houston.

Sheffield estimates that with the new technology, the country could produce an extra 2 million barrels a day from both the Bakken and from shale oil trapped in existing traditional oil fields.

"If we get 2 million barrels a day, that could have a major impact on world oil prices," said Guy Caruso, the former head of the EIA and now an advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The quarter-million barrels a day currently being produced from the Bakken is already partly responsible for the glut of oil seen in Cushing, Okla., one of the United States' main oil storage and distribution hubs. The glut has helped distort U.S. oil prices in relation to the worldwide market.”

The average prices of a gallon of gas and a barrel of oil are near 150-year highs. Most pundits expect them to go higher. Are you ready for $5-per-gallon gasoline?

In a recent speech, President Barack Obama said: “We’re not going to be able to just drill our way out of the problem of high gas prices.” Actually, to a large extent, we can. For proof, let’s compare what’s been happening in California to the extraordinary accomplishments in North Dakota.

According to the Fraser Institute’s 2011 Global Petroleum Survey, California is the worst State in the Nation for its hostility to drilling. In fact, measured against the rest of the world, California ranks 91st.

Thanks to years of placating environmental extremists, California’s anti-drilling regulations make it almost impossible to drill for new oil anywhere in the State, onshore or off. As a result, its production of oil has fallen by nearly one-third in the past 20 years. As oil production has declined, so has tax revenue. Even with several gigantic tax increases during that period, oil revenues in the State are down.

That’s too bad, because California needs every penny of income it can get. It has one of the highest State sales taxes and personal income taxes in the country. Still, it’s not enough. The budget deficit for the coming fiscal year will top $9 billion — the fifth year in a row of billion-dollar deficits. Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed solution? Raise taxes even higher.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that wealthy Californians are fleeing the State as fast as they can. According to census data, almost one-third of its wealthiest residents — those earning $500,000 a year or more — fled the State between 2007 and 2009. On our Left Coast, they won’t drill for oil. And pretty soon, they won’t be able to drill many millionaires, either.

Let’s contrast the near-bankruptcy of the People’s Republic of California with what’s been happening in one of the most independent and entrepreneurial States in the union: North Dakota.

In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there were 150 million “technically recoverable barrels of oil” in an area of North Dakota known as the Bakken Shale. In 2008, the number had climbed to 4 billion barrels. Two years later, it had doubled to 8 billion barrels.

Today, thanks to vast improvements in recovery technology as well as the discovery of vast new oceans of underground oil, estimates of “recoverable” oil in the Bakken Shale have tripled to 24 billion barrels. That is more oil than is being produced anywhere else in the United States, including Alaska’s famed Prudhoe Bay. But it’s a small fraction of what is possible.

Experts say that current technology can extract only about 6 percent of the oil they know is underground in North Dakota. Total estimated oil reserves are thus around 500 billion barrels. And new discoveries are happening all of the time.

Let me include an interesting footnote on the subject of “reserves.” In 1980, the oil reserves in the United States were estimated at 30 billion barrels. Yet in the intervening 32 years, this country actually produced 77 billion barrels of oil. In other words, we produced more than 2.5 times more oil than the leading experts said there was 32 years earlier.

Today, the numbers are even more staggering. The amount of “technically recoverable” oil in the United States is estimated at 1.4 trillion barrels. (Please note that is “trillion,” with a “T.”) Unfortunately for us, most of that oil is located in areas Obama says we can’t search for it: in portions of Alaska and in waters off our shores.

Combined with known resources in Canada and Mexico, total recoverable oil in North America exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels. How much is that? Let me put it in perspective: It is more than all the oil the world has used since the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Penn., 150 years ago.

So far, all I’ve discussed is oil. When natural gas and coal are added to the total, the numbers are clear: We have enough energy reserves in the United States to fuel all of our needs for 100 years, even if we never made another discovery.

Back to North Dakota for a moment. The effect of the bonanza there has been extraordinary. Stephen Moore, writes in the Wall Street Journal that what is happening in Williston, N.D., “is what the Gold Rush might have looked like had it happened in the time of McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Home Depot.” Moore states in his report:

“When I ask how many people live in Williston, which had a population of 12,000 in 2005, longtime residents shrug and offer different answers: 20,000? 25,000? 30,000? Every night, hundreds of workers sleep in the hulls of their trucks or in temporary housing encampments like soldiers in a war zone. New homes are popping up at breakneck speed. McDonald's is offering workers $18 an hour plus a "signing bonus." In Williston, certainly, America remains the land of opportunity.

All this is thanks to the technological leap forward represented by hydraulic fracking, a process that allows drillers to blast through underground shale rock and pump out oil and natural gas. Projections of how much oil is here seem to grow every year.

In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated 150 million "technically recoverable barrels of oil" from the Bakken Shale. In April 2008 that number was up to about four billion barrels, and in 2010 geologists at Continental Resources (the major drilling operation in North Dakota) put it at eight billion. This week, given the discovery of a lower shelf of oil, they announced 24 billion barrels. Current technology allows for the extraction of only about 6% of the oil trapped one to two miles beneath the earth's surface, so as the technology advances recoverable oil could eventually exceed 500 billion barrels.”

The State has the lowest unemployment rate in the Nation, at just 3.3 percent. California’s, by contrast, is 11.1 percent. That doesn’t even count the unemployed people who have simply stopped looking for work. The true unemployment number is probably closer to 20 percent.

According to the Census Bureau, North Dakota led the Nation in job and income growth in 2011. While California is losing millionaires every day, North Dakota is creating them faster than anyplace else in the country. But even entry-level positions are benefiting. For example, a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s pays $18 an hour plus a “signing bonus” for new employees.

And while the State of California can’t begin to pay all of its bills — it even issued IOUs last year in place of tax refunds — the biggest argument in North Dakota’s State Capitol is how to spend all of the money that’s pouring in. Legislators in Bismarck have approved hundreds of “shovel ready” infrastructure projects, including roads, bridges, railroads and pipelines. But even while spending more on worthwhile projects, legislators also agreed to cut the State income tax.

What’s happening in North Dakota is a classic example of the one thing that would solve our energy problems everywhere — and most other problems in the economy, too. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing Obama and his team won’t even consider.

The solution is simple: Let the market work.

In his State of the Union address in January, Obama declared that “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy.”

Like so much that comes out of our President’s mouth, the sentence was as misleading as his skilled staff of speechwriters could make it. What he meant was that his Administration would continue pouring billions of dollars into every wasteful alternative energy pipe dream they could think up, while continuing to slap higher taxes and more regulatory handcuffs on the businesses that can actually solve our energy needs and make money (and pay taxes) doing it.

Rather than foster energy independence, Obama wants to make us all dependent. Dependent on government, that is.

Want to reduce unemployment? Increase tax revenues? Get the economy humming again? Truly foster energy independence?

The answer to all of them is the same: Get government off our backs. Let the market work. The results will be amazing. Maybe next year God will grant us a government that’s willing to give it a try.

President Signs Law Placing Prior Restraint on Free Speech

“It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” — -Daniel Webster.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” — First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Congress just eviscerated a decades-old law which was intended to protect the implementation of United States policy and interests. The existing law (18 USC 1752) was designed to protect the individuals, under certain circumstances and at certain times, who are carrying out these policies, and the “orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.”

Congress altered the intent of the existing law by authorizing the President to direct protection to “individuals” who may not be involved in implementing U.S. policy at all, to include for example, individuals who are the President’s affiliates, or who are engaged in carrying out his personal political agenda. This would allow the President to use the power of the federal government as a perk of crony capitalism, placing them in a protective bubble, thereby protecting them from public embarrassment and inconvenience of being confronted by the citizenry.

Without fanfare, on March 8, 2012, President Barack Obama signed into law H.R. 347 (and Senate Bill S. 1794) the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011.

Readers may assume that there was no grand announcement of this law's enactment as its name sounds like something to do with giving gardeners guidelines for sprucing up the lawns around government buildings in Washington.

Alternatively, perhaps one could see some of those "good intentions" that Daniel Webster described. Most media coverage of this bill paints it as a beefed up effort to protect the President and other top-rank government officials from assassination attempts and other threats of violence.

There is much more to this law than mainstream media reports or President Obama's brief announcement of his signing of it would indicate.

For example, in one section of this new legislation, individuals are expressly forbidden under penalty of law from trespassing onto the grounds of the White House. Of course, such an encroachment was already illegal, so why the new provision?

There is already a D.C. ordinance that prosecutes White House trespassers. Violation of this provision of the city code was a misdemeanor.

The penalties for such trespass are much more severe, now, however. Under H.R. 347, Congress may at its discretion impose federal criminal charges on not only those who enter the White House grounds without prior permission, but on anyone who participates in protests at or near a location falling within the greatly enlarged scope of this new prohibited zone.

In addition to the increased legal ramifications for trespassing on White House grounds, the penalty for protesting within the shifting high security zone is enough to give pause to those contemplating participation in a protest against a government official or policy. This also includes anyone authorized by the President to receive Secret Service protection including his campaign managers.

One example of how H.R. 347 imposes an unconstitutional prior restraint on political speech and assembly is found in Section (c) of the act. This paragraph defines the key phrase "restricted buildings" as follows:

“Restricted buildings or grounds" means any posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area —

(A) Of the White House or its grounds, or the Vice President's official residence or its grounds;

(B) Of a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting; or

(C) Of a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.”

Under the terms of the existing law amended by this act, the Department of Homeland Security is tasked with deciding which events will qualify as being of "national significance."

According to one report:

Nearly three dozen events in all have been considered a National Special Security Event (NSSE) since the term was created under President Clinton. Among past events on the DHS-sanctioned NSSE list are Super Bowl XXXVI, the funerals of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, most State of the Union addresses and the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

As the foregoing quoted sections of the bill evince, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, as with so many other recent laws, contains paragraph after paragraph of vague terms that can be wrested to suit the mercurial whims of our federal overlords.

In addition to control over the fluid and fickle designation of "restricted buildings" afforded to the Congress, the bill endows the President with the power to extend Secret Service protection to anyone he deems worthy. The President accomplishes such an act by way of issuing a memo.

As the aforementioned Section (c) explains:

“The term "other person protected by the Secret Service" means any person whom the United States Secret Service is authorized to protect under section 3056 of this title or by Presidential memorandum, when such person has not declined such protection....”

When read together, these two subsections make it a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison to "enter or remain" in any designated area without permission, and, that forbidden zone may shift from here to there without prior notice depending on the presence of any person the President has placed under the protection of the Secret Service.

The sponsor of the companion measure introduced in the Senate is Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). During deliberations on the measure, Blumenthal explained the purpose behind the proposal:

“This bill will improve the law enforcement tools available to the Secret Service in its attempts to protect the President, the Vice President, and others on a day-to-day basis by closing loopholes in the current federal law. The new law should punish and deal more effectively with anyone who illegally enters restricted areas to threaten the President, Vice President, or other Secret Service protectees.”

For example, the bill does not require "willful" encroachment into a restricted area, the requisite mental state for committing this new crime is merely the "knowing" encroachment into a restricted area. It is in this nuance that the government lays one of its most well-camouflaged snares.

The distinction between "willful" and "knowing" is a legal construction that needn't be explained fully here, but for purposes of understanding the implications of the difference on a person's First Amendment rights of free speech, one need only understand that a protestor would certainly "know" that he is protesting, where he is protesting, and that his protest is an expression of opposition to a person or a policy. However, given the fact that the designation of a restricted zone changes without notice (no special police tape, no signs, no noticeable law enforcement patrolling the area), a protestor would probably not know that he was trespassing into a specially protected "restricted zone" or that he was too close to a person endowed by the President with a Secret Service protection.

Current law makes it illegal to enter or remain in an area where certain government officials (more particularly, those with Secret Service protection) will be visiting temporarily if and only if the person knows it’s illegal to enter the restricted area but does so anyway,” Michigan Rep. Justin Amash wrote on his Facebook page. “[H.R. 347] expands current law to make it a crime to enter or remain in an area where an official is visiting even if the person does not know it’s illegal to be in that area and has no reason to suspect it’s illegal.”

Amash, Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican, and Ron Paul were the lone dissenting voices opposed to this bill, which is being called the “First Amendment Rights Eradication Act” designed specifically to counter the Occupy movement and other political groups opposed to the bankster regime in control of the Congress and the presidency. Democrats have characterized opposition to the bill as “a whole lot of kerfuffle over nothing

It is possible, therefore, that a person could attend a political speech by one of the GOP contenders or by Attorney General Eric Holder, for example, and unintentionally find himself within the prohibited parameters and be subject to federal fines and imprisonment. Who can deny that this discourages free speech? Furthermore, who can deny that the right to speak out freely against government oppression is one of the chief cornerstones of our Republic?

A straightforward reading of the bill reveals the real threat to the freedoms of association and speech. As written and passed by the Congress, there is nothing that would prevent the application of the relevant provisions of this new act to an innocent person protesting against this or that policy position of a presidential candidate while standing outside a debate venue.

The climate created by the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011 is inhospitable to protest and demonstration, thus it is the very definition of the "chilling effect" on speech that should concern all citizens, regardless of party affiliation.

The United States of America is daily the experiencing the "silent and gradual" erosion of our liberties. In the case of H.R. 347, it was packaged to the public in much the same way as was the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). A majority of Congressmen from both parties voted overwhelmingly in favor of both these laws. When confronted by constituents concerned about the assault such statutes make on our Constitution and on individual liberty, representatives respond that neither measure expands the scope of current law, rather they merely clarify laws already enacted. For this reason, supporters contend, Americans have nothing to fear from NDAA or H.R. 347.

This answer is disingenuous. The plain fact is that both the NDAA and H.R. 347 codify grand expansions of the power of the President to monitor, manipulate, and punish activities within the United States that he and he alone deems to be a threat to his person, to his friends, or to the security of "the homeland."

H.R. 347 was marketed to Congress in the same fashion as the NDAA. The drafters and promoters of both bills represented that only non-substantive changes were being made to existing law. H.R. 347 was marketed to Congress “To correct and simplify the drafting of section 1752...,” and the NDAA legislation as simply affirming the pre-existing authority in the 2001 AUMF.

In reality, both bills made substantive changes that greatly expanded the scope of their application and gave additional power to the President to use domestically. The Secret Service protecting the President is a good thing. The President having the authority to use the Secret Service to protect his cronies is a bad thing.

Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) have launched a bi-partisan investigation into “taxpayer-funded spin” by the Obama Administration. A March 01, 2012 Fox News article references a 2010 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report which explores the nature and lawfulness of undercover activities by the Obama Administration, and includes these revelations:

“The Obama Administration frequently used federal resources to promote the President’s agenda.”

“Using the resources of the federal government to activate a sophisticated propaganda and lobbying campaign is an abuse of office and a betrayal of the President’s pledge to create “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

“Many of the Obama Administration’s propaganda activities are unlawful because they are covert. Furthermore, several programs closely resemble those decried by Democrats and ruled unlawful by GAO during the Bush Administration.”

Certainly, the President can, and may assert in a signing statement that accompanies H.R. 347, that he will not abuse this newly acquired authority, just as he did in his NDAA signing statement in regard to the “indefinite detention” of U.S. citizens. That would likely satisfy many trusting individuals, but it begs the following questions:

If we entrust our current President with extraordinary and extra-constitutional powers, would we trust those same powers in the hands of his successor?

Should the President have these powers in the first place, regardless of his intent to use them?

Perhaps we would be better served by listening to the wisdoms of our Founding Fathers instead of being so trusting of our leaders. The blind trust in men has led to the eventual downfall of every great nation in world history.

The author of the Declaration of Independence said the following:

“In matters of power, let no more be heard of the confidence in man, but bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.” — Thomas Jefferson.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 51 regarding the abuses of power by the legislature:

“But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

These startling suspensions of our most basic civil rights makes one wonder how our Founding Fathers would have responded.

The Michigan Welfare Queen

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." — Thomas Edison

This one will go down as one of the biggest boondoggles of all time. The Los Angeles Times reports Michigan woman wins $1-million lottery, still collects welfare:

“A Michigan woman who won a $1-million lottery jackpot last fall admits she's continued to collect $200 a month in public assistance. That's not all: The 24-year-old also says she deserves the financial aid because she's now saddled with expenses related to two houses.

Can you hear that bellowing and clanging of pitchforks? That's the sound of Michigan taxpayers' outrage.

The situation came to light this week after the Detroit-area Local 4 station received a hot tip: "Please do a story on lottery winners on welfare."

Local 4 did just that. First, it tracked Amanda Clayton using her public assistance card at a local snack market. Then, it tracked Clayton out to her home, where she was packing up a U-Haul for a move to her new place -- a home she had bought with cash from her lottery earnings, along with a new car.

Clayton, stopped in her driveway, barely flinched when the camera and microphone were thrust in her face. Nor did the single mother of two backpedal; she said she deserves the extra income just like any other taxpayer on public assistance.

"I thought that they would cut me off, but since they didn't, I thought maybe it was OK because I'm not working," Clayton told the reporter. "I feel that it's OK because, I mean, I have no income, and I have bills to pay. I have two houses."

Watch the video -- she also quibbles with the reporter who wonders how she can justify taking public aid after winning $1 million on the state's "Make Me Rich!" television show. After taking the lottery payment in a lump sum and paying taxes upfront, she walked away with much less. (Clayton's mother told the media her daughter pocketed about $500,000.)

It's not clear that Clayton is actually doing anything wrong, mind you. She does not have a job, and as a result, does not technically have any income.

But the idea of a lottery winner on welfare does not sit well with Michigan state Rep. Dale Zorn.

The Republican lawmaker has introduced legislation, now pending, that would trigger a state notification whenever a resident wins more than $1,000 in the lottery. He authored that legislation after it was discovered that another Michigan resident, Leroy Fick, continued drawing public assistance after winning a $2-million lottery jackpot in 2010.

The problem, Zorn told The Times on Wednesday, is that many lottery winners opt to take their earnings in a lump sum and pay their taxes upfront. That helps them to largely fly under the radar.

Under Zorn's pending legislation, lottery officials would be required to alert the state's Department of Human Services, which oversees public assistance, whenever a state resident wins more than $1,000.

The winner's name would then be checked against the state's roster of financial aid recipients. Winners would be required to undergo a reassessment to see if they still deserve aid after their financial windfall, he said.

"Public assistance is for those people who can no longer purchase food for their families, or pay their heating bills," Zorn told The Times. "It's not here to help those who win millions of dollars."

For her part, Clayton is no longer talking to the media. But her mother is.

"Until the bill's passed, apparently it's legal, and people need to leave her alone," Euline Clayton told the Detroit News, referring to Zorn's bill. "I'm not saying it's the right thing to do. But it's nobody's business if she's not breaking the law."

Talk about a sense of entitlement this one takes the cake. Our Founders believed in a society of self-reliance with little government intervention into the lives of the citizens. They did believe, however, that the government had some duty to provide assistance to the absolute destitute people — people that could not help themselves due to circumstances, not behavior.

Amanda Clayton’s case is the results of years of handouts creating increased expectations for more entitlements. People have been led to believe that the government owes the “equality” not the equality expressed by our Founders in the Deceleration of Independence and the Constitution but the equality of results promoted by the progressive left.

In January 1944 in his annual message to Congress President Roosevelt laid out his plan for a new Bill of Rights. In his message Roosevelt stated:

“...It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis—recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.

I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights—for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress so to do. Many of these problems are already before committees of the Congress in the form of proposed legislation. I shall from time to time communicate with the Congress with respect to these and further proposals. In the event that no adequate program of progress is evolved, I am certain that the Nation will be conscious of the fact.

Our fighting men abroad—and their families at home—expect such a program and have the right to insist upon it. It is to their demands that this Government should pay heed rather than to the whining demands of selfish pressure groups who seek to feather their nests while young Americans are dying.

I have often said that there are no two fronts for America in this war. There is only one front. There is one line of unity which extends from the hearts of the people at home to the men of our attacking forces in our farthest outposts. When we speak of our total effort, we speak of the factory and the field, and the mine as well as of the battleground—we speak of the soldier and the civilian, the citizen and his Government.

Each and every one of us has a solemn obligation under God to serve this Nation in its most critical hour—to keep this Nation great—to make this Nation greater in a better world.”

This was the first shot fired by the left to institutionalize progressivism. Our Founders believed that the sole role of government was to secure our rights of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness. They believed that happiness meant that happiness meant that each person should be secure in his right to own property, be it land or the fruits of his labors.

James Madison writing in Federalist Paper 10 (considered to be the most important of all the Federalist Papers) stated:

“…The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well as speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities that where no substantial occasion presents itself the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.”

This was Madison’s argument against “Factions”, which he saw as being destructive to the rights of the people and to the future of the United States. In essence factions would result in class warfare.

Since Roosevelt’s call for a new Bill of Rights the progressive left and utopian masterminds have been pushing for more and more factions. We have factions for free education (even at the college level), universal health care, affirmative action, women’s reproductive rights, gay and lesbian rights, the right to a job, the right to a minimum wage, the right to home, the right to a vacation, etc. This list can on and one, but by now you should see what Madison was warning of.

Each of these factions, once set in place, require a bureaucracy and government bureaucrats and masterminds to implement and enforce them. Madison believed these factions would lead to a tyranny of the majority.

Amanda Clayton is an example of the results of these factious interests. She could see nothing wrong or immoral in her continuing to accept government aid after she had been handed $500,000 by the Michigan Lottery. She claimed she did not have a job, had two homes, and bills to pay therefore she needed the aid. The Michigan bureaucrats did not even have a way of checking her welfare status after winning the lotto.

The masterminds of progressive utopian thought have been gaining more and more influence and power for the past 100 years. They have tainted the vision of our Founders so much that we may never be able to recover to the state they envisioned in 1776 and 1787. This constant push for class warfare and the equality of results can only lead to a second revolution

Another Example Of Our Failing Government Schools

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain." — Frédéric Bastiat (The Law)

Several days ago the Washington Post reported that Federal data show racial gaps in school arrests:

“African American students in large school systems are arrested far more often on campus than their white peers, new federal data show.

The data, from an Education Department civil rights survey to be released Tuesday, provide the government’s most extensive examination yet of how public schools across the country bring police into the handling of student offenses.

The new figures also show continuing racial disparities in out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, which are far more common in schools than arrests and referrals to law enforcement.

“The sad fact is that minority students across America face much harsher discipline than non-minorities — even within the same school,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. Duncan cautioned that the government is “not alleging overt discrimination in some or all of these cases.” But he said educators and community leaders should join forces to address inequities.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights collected data from 72,000 schools across the country for the 2009-10 school year.

Overall, the data showed that 96,000 students were arrested and 242,000 were “referred” to law enforcement by school leaders, meaning the students were not necessarily arrested or cited.

In a more focused analysis of school systems with more than 50,000 students enrolled, the data showed that African American students represented 24 percent of enrollment but 35 percent of arrests. White students accounted for 31 percent of enrollment and 21 percent of arrests. For Hispanic students, there was less of a disparity in arrests. They accounted for 34 percent of enrollment and 37 percent of arrests.”

Years ago when I began researching American education I suspected that at least some of our woes were the machinations of foreign enemies. My reasoning resembles what some Muslims said after 9-11: the Mossad must have organized the attack since Arabs lacked the competence to pull off such a spectacular success. In other words, the ongoing destruction of America's educational system is too well conceived, too devious to be the work of our own barely competent education "masterminds." There must be some higher intelligence guiding this subversion.

This paranoia was confirmed by the recent Washington Post story about how the Department of Education uncovered racial disparities in school discipline, particularly police arrests and out-of-school suspensions. According to one recounted study of 50,000 students, blacks comprised 24% of enrollments but were 35% of arrests (disparities were smaller for Hispanics). This pattern is of course ancient news and closely mirrors adult crime data. The only "news" here was the prodigious amount of data collected to demonstrate a rather un-newsworthy point. In the parlance of today I would have to say “Dah” — are you kidding me?

What fueled my paranoia, however, was how these data were interpreted and it is here that I smelled a vast cyber-attack conceivably originating in Shanghai or Moscow. The first tip-off was a "shocked" reaction off Education Secretary Arne Duncan who then called for educators and community leaders to join forces to eliminate this gap. I can only imagine the newly enlightened Mr. Duncan who, despite eight years heading up the violence-plagued, largely minority Chicago public schools, saying to his advisors, "Why didn't you tell me this before!"

More important, however, is that Duncan's newly embraced crusade will further undermine an educational system struggling just to stay even. Has the Secretary ever encountered the term "opportunity cost" — spending time on one task precludes giving attention elsewhere? So, assembling all the task forces, concocting mission statements, commissioning research, defining bureaucratic responsibilities, negotiating agendas among political rivals, turning grandiose plans into specifics, hiring and training the necessary implementation staff and then getting it all funded will now join the nation's educational "to do" list, and will necessarily compete with traditional responsibilities of imparting literacy and numeracy.

Just picture thousands of junior masterminds at the big Department of Education building in Washington, D.C. sitting in their little cubicles, collecting their inflated salaries and counting the days to when they begin collecting their pensions working out the plans for better discipline in the government schools. On the other hand don’t picture such a view as it night make you sick.

Or picture this "make-the-discipline-numbers" missive coming down to some inner-city school already struggling to stay afloat all the while facing mass firings for not boosting reading and math scores. The most rational reaction, at least in my estimation, would be for the already harried principal to throw Duncan's missive in the trash or to give to an assistant who then "misplaces" it.

But, what if pressured principal takes the poisoned bait? To skip the details, the only way to make these "fairness" numbers is to mete out discipline by quotas. Anything else would require thousands of hours of investigation and record keeping which means countless new employees, and since Arne forgot to enclose a check, so much for that. So, if African Americans comprise 30% of the students, they will receive proportionate punishment, regardless of actual behavior. And, if errant behavior continues to be unequally distributed, many blacks will, most likely, be given "get out of jail free" cards and rest assured, many white, Asian and black parents will soon find a safer school. Thousands of otherwise functioning schools will become violent educational wastelands. Struggling schools will become totally unmanageable and, in a sad twist of fate, poor blacks will be hurt the most since they often lack private school options.

It gets worse. As in some cheap science fiction movie, our enemies have now hacked into bureaucratic brains. In fact, the Secretary may be the first victim when he explains that punishment inequality may not be a result of overt discrimination but still the same, we should still try to eliminate it. Think about it: the head of a huge powerful federal bureaucracy is saying that there may not be a problem, all may be fine but we should try to cure the appearance of a possible problem, even if this consumes colossal resources better allocated elsewhere. Another education expert (Professor Russell Skiba of Indiana University) concurs "Where there are clear discrepancies, that should be of concern for us a nation." Our Chinese competitors must be jumping with joy-America will be wasting millions to eliminate differences in disciplinary outcomes simply because, well, they are discrepancies. What's next-a Manhattan Project-like effort to make every student above average by legally mandating a "B" the lowest permissible grade?

Proof that the brains of today's education experts have been seized by some off-shore enemy is also evident by how the offenses that brought expulsion or suspension are now characterized. Fighting, insubordination and class disruption are now "adolescent misjudgments" not reprehensible or criminal behavior. Beating somebody up is now morally equivalent to choosing the wrong elective course. So, replace school security with lessons to improve decision-making.

According to a report in the New American a 13-year old boy at Kansas City, Missouri’s East High raised his hand, eager to answer the question. "What would you know about it?" exclaimed the teacher dismissively. "You're not our race."

This was not dialogue from a Hollywood movie. According to a woman named Melissa Coon, it was what a teacher at East High School in Kansas City told her 13-year-old son, Allen, when he attempted to answer a question during Black History Month. Coon identifies that teacher as Mrs. Karla Dorsey, who is black; Allen is white.

As has already been reported, Allen was a victim of a vicious racial attack last week in which two older black teens doused him with gasoline and set him alight, saying, "This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, white boy." The attack on the boy took place on the east side of Kansas City, Missouri. Fox 4 Kansas City provides some (sanitized) details, writing, “The victim is a student at East High School and regularly walks home after class. When he reached his porch, two older teens grabbed him, pinned his arms behind his back and then poured gas from a gas can on the boy. They then set the boy on fire.”

Thankfully, the teen victim had the presence of mind to pull his shirt up over his head and snuff out the flames. He was treated at Children’s Mercy hospital, having suffered first-degree burns to his face and head. And police said they were concerned about possible damage to his eyes and lungs. Not surprisingly, Coon has pulled her son out of East High and, concerned about further racial violence, intends to leave the K.C. area. Just imagine what the outcry would have been had the races or the victim and perpetrators been reversed.

The New American report states:

“Of course, if you scrutinize the few local outlets reporting the story and cut and paste, you can piece the picture together. The Fox article I excerpted above provides only the vaguest hint of the attack’s racial nature by quoting Mrs. Coon as saying that her family was told “it’s a hate crime.” KCTV 5 did a bit better, reporting that the victim was white and the assailants black; however, while they quoted the attackers as stating “This is what you get,” for some reason they omitted the “white boy” part. Then there was KMBC.com, which presented the latter but neglected to explicitly identify the race of the criminals, leaving the reader to wonder if the attackers were self-hating Norwegian immigrants. But I’ve played the game and figured out that Colonel Mustard did it in the library with the candlestick.

But we’ve seen this bias before. It’s much as when Muslims rioted in France a couple of years ago and burned thousands of cars, and the media reported the rioters as “youths.” Yes, just teen angst, I suppose.

Some may say that the media are reluctant to stir up racial unrest, but this never seems to stop them when the races of the victim and attackers are reversed. Could you imagine the hue and cry if two older white teenagers had set an innocent black child alight while saying, “You get what you deserve, black boy”? The headlines coast to coast would be cast in neon, and the media would love it — it would give them another chance to agitate for more hate-crime legislation.

This is exactly what happened after the horrible dragging death of black victim James Byrd by three white men in 1998; it was headline news for months and led to the creation of a Texas hate-crime law. Meanwhile, when three “youths” beat a cab driver and his passenger while shouting racial epithets in Philadelphia recently, D.A. spokeswoman Tasha Jamerson said that hate-crime charges wouldn’t be forthcoming “because there was no evidence that the assault had been motivated by the race of the victims” (no, just the racial hatred of the assailants). Also in 1998, there was the murder of homosexual Matthew Shepard, which became an even bigger story and likewise was used to justify hate-crime law. Yet what about the brutal death of 13-year-old Jesse Derkhising, who was sexually tortured by two homosexual predators in Arkansas a year later? Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about?

Exactly.

WorldNetDaily.com reports that a Nexis search shows a disparity in the story counts between the Shepard and Derkhising cases of 18 to 1.

Of course, any time you report on a crime motivated by group hatred it can foment unrest, as hate begets hate. But if some think this a justification for suppressing truth, they should note that peddling only half of it can be far more dangerous. As Jack Cashill observed when commenting on the refusal to report politically incorrect “hate crimes,” “The cumulative effect of such routine suppression leads minorities, especially blacks, to think themselves uniquely victimized.” And when you thus believe, you’re more likely to lash out.

Obviously, the job of the media is to report what’s newsworthy. This means not just picking the relevant stories, but also the relevant facts within them. If “people” are attacked for going to school in Afghanistan, it is absolutely relevant that all the victims happen to be female and all the assailants male fundamentalists; this lends the story perspective. Likewise, if virtually every one of thousands of rioters is of a specific group or a victim’s attackers are of a different race and shouted racial epithets, these facts are relevant, too.

The refusal to reveal such facts makes a mockery of journalism. And if we won’t report that rioters are Muslims, why state that they’re youths? If reporting the race of an assailant is out of bounds, why disclose that he's male? Why expose any groups to possible ridicule? Maybe a rape should be reported thus: “Sentient biped accuses other sentient biped of undocumented-lover status.”

Perhaps the worst violence here is the kind that hate-crime laws do to the principle of equality before the law. Because besides being an effort at thought control, they’re never applied equally. They’re not about eliminating hate, but are just vehicles through which the Left can express its hate through law. With hate-crime legislation, leftists now have the latitude to discriminate legally as they cherry-pick sentient bipeds for harsher punishment based on sexual inclination, race, creed, or color.”

While the East High crime is making headlines, Coon states that it was merely the horrible culmination of continual racial harassment her son had to endure at East High. Coon's son is not alone. Other white students also report a pattern of racial harassment at the high school at the hands of their peers — and, shockingly, their teachers.

On an East High staff page created by alumni, there is the Giovanni Ruffini quotation, "The teacher is like the candle, which lights others, while consuming itself."  What a contrast between the words of the past and the deeds of the present.

This softening of language to obscure despicable behavior is hardly new. I recall college athletes who, according to news reports, had "personal problems" that included convictions for felonious assault and robbery. When was the last time you heard the phrase "juvenile delinquent" let alone "thug"? The only linguistic survivor of an earlier moralistic plain-spoken era seems to be "bully" and I suspect that term survives because the objects of bullying are often officially protected gay students.

In effect, in our rush to help youngsters we dilute the moral opprobrium surrounding anti-social behavior while eliminating the last vestiges of personal responsibility. Yesterday's juvenile delinquent is today's "student at risk" since he is "at risk" from being pushed into law-breaking by his bad environment (his likely targets are not, of course "at risk"). At least for some do-gooders, calling a young criminal a "young criminal" needlessly stigmatizes him and thereby only exacerbates criminality; perhaps better to see him as a "high need" student or "under-privileged" youngster who is "reaching out for help.”

Further keep in mind that race-related discrepancies are ubiquitous; unequal punishment is just the beginning. According to one recent study, differences also exist for promotion to the next grade and one might guess a similar pattern for the experiences of one's teacher, available social services, access to technology and tutoring, college counseling and just about every other feature of education. In principle, every nickel of today's education budged could be allocated to eliminating these racial "discrepancies."

If the brains of leading educators had not been hacked, this venture into school discipline would proceed quite differently. The aim now would not be to eliminate "discrepancies" but to ensure that American schools performed well and a key step in this direction would be ridding schools of those students who disrupt learning. Unequal punishment is only a "civil rights" issue for those who mindlessly conflate perfect equality with educational progress. More plausible is that an inability of black and Hispanic students to receive a decent education due to rampant school violence is the real "civil rights" issue. To this point I had a black engineer working for me and he stated that all through his high school days he had to conceal the books he was taking home and his grades for fear of being attacked outside of school for his “disrespect” for other black students by “showing them up.” I also had a Hispanic surveyor who told a similar story.

There are many minority students who want to do well in school realizing that they not only need the grades, but also the knowledge to go on to college and eventually enter the professions where they will be judged by performance not race. These students are constantly harassed by the 35% who seem to run the schools. This is one of the most compelling reasons for school vouchers.

Yes, a single suspended or incarcerated student will not benefit from school, but his or her removal may help the education of dozens of students previously deprived of teacher attention or those just too terrified to even show up. Safe learning environments should be a more pressing "civil right" than "discrepancies that may or may not be a result of discrimination."

"Improving" American education by dispensing punishment by racial quota is a scheme so nefarious though simultaneously so alluring (at least to some masterminds) that it is beyond the reach of our "challenged" home-grown experts. I can only imagine the technical ingenuity necessary to penetrate and capture Arne Duncan's brain. Arne, for the sake of America's future, change your password!