By Dr. Jack Wheeler

It’s starting to look like 1948 all over again.

Mark Twain observed that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes. The 2012 presidential campaign is now rhyming with that of 1948 in iambic trimeter – the poetic form tragedians of Ancient Greece such as Aeschylus and Sophocles used to best express portending doom.

So let’s revisit that extraordinary yesteryear of 1948, resulting in the most famous upset in American politics – Democrat Harry Truman defeating Republican Tom Dewey – and see how we can avoid a similar outcome by using it to our advantage.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Dr. Jack Wheeler

It’s time to choose. There’s only one thing that can extricate the world from the calamity descending upon it.

Jefferson is warning us right now about “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers…setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others.” Because Jefferson’s and Madison’s solution to preventing religious wars – Religious Liberty – is the solution to preventing the economic wars about to descend upon us.

That solution is Economic Liberty. That solution is the Separation of Economy and State – for precisely the same reasons for the Separation of Church and State. Such a separation – capitalism for real – is the only thing that will save the world from plunging into economic darkness. Violently.

With Obama’s Osawatomie Speech, we have reached the fork in the road of America’s future. The critical moment has arrived. If you can stomach it, read the whole thing. It is diabolically dishonest. He is actually claiming his Marxist-Fascist values are those of America’s. He has the mind-boggling demagogic chutzpah to claim that free market capitalism “doesn’t work – it has never worked.”

Free market capitalism – economic liberty – is the only thing that ever has worked to create widespread prosperity. What has never worked in history is what Obama advocates: socialism, fascism, and the destruction of economic liberty by government rules, hamstrings, restrictions, taxes, and subsidies.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Dr. Jack Wheeler

Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. It took coming here, to the darkest pit of hellhole Africa, for it to finally dawn on me who Obama really is, to what total extent he isn’t American at all, but African.

This is my first time here, and assuredly will be the last. Yet I wrote about Equatorial Guinea back in 2006 as an example of “Why Africa Is So Stupid.” It discusses the research on global IQ explaining why sub-Saharan Africa is at the bottom of humanity’s barrel in terms of tyranny, corruption, and poverty – because the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67.

Freedom House, in its 2011 Worst of the Worst report, highlights Equatorial Guinea as “one of the world’s most repressive societies.” Its dictator, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, is a murderer who ran the Black Beach Prison where countless prisoners were tortured to death.

Obiang uses his country’s oil revenue as his personal piggy bank, enriching his friends and family while the average citizen of his country lives on $1 a day. But there is nothing at all exceptional about him. He is merely yet another example of what in Africa are called Big Men – narcissistic charismatic sociopaths who gain power however they can, never let go of it, look upon themselves as demi-gods for whom ordinary morality does not apply, utterly convinced they deserve to be worshipped with total obedience, and to live in complete extravagance while being completely indifferent to the poverty of others.

Remind you of anyone in America?

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Dagny D’Anconia

The evidence is mounting that the Fast and Furious gun giveaway was orchestrated and/or initiated from the top of the Obama administration. Forbes Magazine is calling it “Obama’s Watergate.” Are we to believe that they gave away enough guns to equip a small army of narcoterrorists out of a simple error? We would have to be pretty gullible to believe that.

We have to ask just what they intended to achieve by doing this. It was a truly extravagant gift to the Sinaloa Federation Cartel. It was not just expensive in tax dollars; it was expensive in political capital, and it was so close to the 2012 election.

People don’t give such expensive things away for nothing. The Obama people must have expected something in return.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Robert Agostinelli

The sad tale of profligate spending is clear. With an abandon and reckless disregard for common-sense economics, we have mortgaged our future. This has been the fault of both sides of the political aisle. Seemingly benign acts of largesse and the application of pork-barrel spending have numbed our national sense of responsibility and left us detached from the full implications.

This has been greatly exacerbated by the equally cowardly seduction of “entitlement.” This term embodies the height of all false utopian ideals that socialism has used to seduce its wards.

Long before our current president embarked on his course of ruin, his intellectual compatriots, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, charted the course of our demise. They were the forerunners who, in the name of good intentions, sowed the seeds of ruin whose harvest we are reaping.

The expectation that the government has a duty and an obligation to provide entitlements is and always has been a flawed proposition. Simply put, it is a grand illusion with a vengeful ending if not corrected.

Enter President Obama, the supreme narcissistic leader of the realm, never one to “let a crisis go to waste.” His is an artful blend of Keynesian voodoo economics, increased imposition of government control, and the largest expansion of the entitlement state in our history.

The financing of Mr. Obama’s spending and expansion of government can only be sustained by way of subterfuge.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Charles Kadlec

Sometimes, the methods to produce results are counter-intuitive. For example, skillful pruning of grape vines is essential to the production of vineyards, and cutting back a rose bush promotes its growth. Based on experience, we can learn where cutting can lead to growth.

The following statement is at first just as counter-intuitive: A reduction in government spending will not slow job growth. In fact, the experience of the last two years provides compelling evidence that a reduction in government spending will lead to increased employment and output in the US economy.

Since 2008, annual federal spending less net interest has increased by $530 billion or 19%. Yet, even with February’s welcome gain of 192,000 jobs, there are 2.3 million fewer people employed today than in February 2009, the month before the Obama Administration turned on the spending spigots with the passage of its economic recovery plan. Over those 24 months, private sector employment has declined by 2.0 million. In spite of the rapid expansion of the Federal bureaucracy, government sector employment has fallen by 360,000.

Moreover, a comparison of these results to the recovery from the economic crisis of the early 1980s casts doubt on the Obama Administration’s claim that without the unprecedented increase in government spending, the recession would have been even worse and the recovery slower.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Rob Natelson

You can sympathize with the humanitarian motives of our Libyan intervention while still doubting its constitutionality.

The Constitution prescribes the rules about how the United States is to enter a war, and the Obama administration has violated those rules.

The administration argues that the hostilities, because limited, do not rise to the level of “war,” as the Constitution uses that word. But that position is almost surely wrong: Founding-Era dictionaries and other sources, both legal and lay, tell us that when the Constitution was approved, “war” consisted of any hostilities initiated by a sovereign over opposition. A very typical dictionary definition was, “the exercise of violence under sovereign command against such as oppose.” (Barlow, 1772-73). I have found no suggestion in any contemporaneous source that operations of the kind the U.S. is conducting were anything but “war.”

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Conn Carroll

While Obamacare is rightly notorious as a fiscal nightmare, less well known is just how massively it transferred power from Congress to the executive branch. In fact, the full scope of Congress’s abdication is still unknown. What is now known, however, is that deeply buried within Obamacare was a $105 billion slush fund that assures its implementation into the future, no matter what future voters think or want.

This makes then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comment to the Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties about Obamacare, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” made a year ago tomorrow, ironically prescient. Just this past month, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) updated an October 2010 report titled “Appropriations and Fund Transfers in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).” The new report found that, unbeknownst to almost every Member of Congress, Obamacare contains $105 billion in direct implementation spending that bypasses Congress’s normal appropriations process.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Ulster Man

None other than Franklin D Roosevelt warned against public employees having the right to collective bargaining, warning that such a condition could put at risk the essential functions of government. Now decades following Roosevelt’s advice, America is now witness to the ever growing and increasingly dangerous folly and fantasy that so permeates labor union America.

With mad-dog protesters packing the Wisconsin capitol, attacking Republican state legislators as they enter, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan declared the revolutionary mood of Cairo Egypt had come to Wisconsin. Certainly many in the pro-labor union crowds embraced the comparison, declaring Wisconsin governor Scott Walker as being akin to recently removed Egyptian dictator Hasni Mubarak. (as well as Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, etc…)

Ah, but such comparisons are incorrect if but for the simple fact that in Egypt, protests were enaged under the guise of fighting for democracy, whereas in Wisconsin, the labor unions are attempting to destroy democracy in the name of continued and high cost salary and benefit packages that now threaten to sink local and state budgets. The freely elected officials of the Wisconsin legislator are currently unable to vote on a state budget because a number of Democrats have fled the state, refusing to vote, abdicating their duty, and thus subverting the very principle of representative government. It is a tactic that exposes labor unions and their Democratic Party cohorts for the centralized government pay to play thugs they truly are.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Herman Cain

There is no denying it: America is the greatest country in the world. We are blessed with unparalleled freedoms and boundless prosperity that for generations have inspired an innovative and industrious people. America is exceptional.

American Exceptionalism is the standard that our laws reflect the understanding that we are afforded certain God-given rights that can never be taken away. We know that God, not government, bestows upon us these inalienable rights, and because of that, they must not be compromised by the whims of man. This makes us a unique nation, a nation that remains, as President Ronald Reagan once said, “a model and hope to the world.”

Unfortunately, some politicians have either forgotten or chosen to ignore the glory of our founding. In April 2009, President Obama told a reporter in Strasbourg, France: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In saying this, the president implied that American Exceptionalism is nothing terribly special and instead simply chalked it up to the romanticism of patriotism.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By John Ellis

Why is Obama so disinclined to use the power at his disposal? His diffidence about humanitarian emergencies is one of the most mystifying features of his presidency, and one of its salient characteristics. These crises—in Tehran two years ago, in Cairo last month, in Tripoli now—produce in him a lame sort of lawyerliness. He lists the relevant rights and principles and then turns to procedural questions, like…consultations.

The Obama Administration has largely avoided this kind of withering criticism in the past. But events are changing that. More and more people who ordinarily support the president are wondering whether he understands that he’s no longer Senator Obama, he’s President Obama. They’re looking for presidential leadership on the global stage and they’re not seeing it.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Richard Rahn

The Obama administration’s policies are causing Americans to pay far more for gasoline and other fuels than necessary. America is awash in fossil-fuel energy sources with almost 30 percent of the world’s coal and 80 percent of the world’s oil shale – which contains an estimated three times the recoverable oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Canada, with its oil sands, has the world’s third-highest oil reserves, after the United States and Saudi Arabia. New technologies that enable low-cost natural gas production from shale mean that many countries, including the United States, will have gas for centuries at current production rates.

Fossil fuels at some prices are interchangeable. Coal, gas and oil can all fuel electric power plants. Liquid motor fuels can be made easily from natural gas, and, in fact, many auto, truck and bus fleets already use natural gas. For more than 70 years, the technology has been available to turn coal into liquid motor fuel.

Natural gas now sells in the United States for a British thermal unit (BTU) equivalent of $30 a barrel of oil, and coal sells at roughly half that price. Much of the Canadian oil sands, U.S. domestic oil shale and offshore oil in the Gulf of Mexico can be produced at prices well below $75 per barrel. The United States should be an energy exporter; Canada already is and is the single biggest source of oil for the U.S.

Most countries try to produce oil, gas and coal and sell it on the global market as a way of increasing the real incomes of their citizens, but not the United States. The Obama administration has a hatred of fossil fuels and is determined to reduce their use despite the economic damage.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Conn Carroll

This Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder sent his own version of a “Dear John” letter to the Speaker of the House, informing him that President Barack Obama’s Justice Department will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in federal court. The letter clearly states that the decision was personally made by the President himself, who, supposedly just this week, came to the conclusion that DOMA violates “the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment” of the U.S Constitution. This purely partisan act is completely consistent with both President Obama’s unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department and the same-sex marriage movement’s end-run around for democracy.

DOMA was enacted by overwhelming majorities of both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. DOMA has two core provisions. First, it defines the words marriage, spouse, husband, and wife wherever they appear in the U.S. Code as referring only to the union of a man or a woman. Second, it defends the right of each state not to be forced to accept the redefinition of marriage in a handful of other states as a result of state court decisions or laws. Nearly 40 states have enacted state-level DOMAs, and 31 have embraced traditional marriage in their state constitutions. No state’s voters have ever voted to the contrary.

President Obama knows all of this. He also knows that his Administration’s litany of failures (unemployment above 8 percent, Guantanamo still open, exploding debt, etc.) has weakened him politically.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By MacAoidh

The Obama administration’s determination to strangle offshore drilling took a beating today as U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman found Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in civil contempt for violating a court order Feldman issued dissolving the administration’s offshore drilling moratorium in June of last year.

Feldman’s eight-page ruling, which can be found here, sets forth the elements of what he calls a “determined disregard” for the order he gave in June to lift the moratorium. The judge goes through a chain of events which to him amounts to a pattern of behavior unmistakably showing a commitment to ban offshore drilling, and then refers the case to a magistrate in order to determine damages owed to Hornbeck Offshore Services and the other plaintiffs in the case by the Department of the Interior.

Hornbeck’s general counsel, Sam Giberga, said in a written statement, “What is striking about today’s ruling is that it holds the government, acting through its highest levels, in contempt of a federal court order.”

U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) issued a release condemning Salazar’s department for its actions and praising Feldman.

“Judge Feldman’s decision is a sharp rebuke of the Interior Department for continuing to place politics before all else following the BP spill. A ruling of this nature reveals that the judge believes that Interior blatantly disregarded his earlier ruling – undoubtedly because of their actions that led to the current de facto moratorium,” said Vitter.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Rep. Steve King

Tomorrow (1/19), as one of the first acts of this 112th Congress, the House is due to pass language I introduced to repeal Obamacare: “as if such Act had not been enacted.”

This legislation would validate the strategy for repeal that I have been advancing since the day the law was signed. It will also set the stage for the next component of my repeal strategy: the inclusion of language in every appropriations bill to prevent federal funds from being used to implement or enforce any of Obamacare’s provisions.

When Obamacare passed last March, I immediately introduced a bill to repeal this unconstitutional law. My bill offered a “clean” repeal – not weighed down by any replacement language.

I knew that repeal supporters would need strength in numbers to succeed. I saw no merit in adopting a strategy that would be diminished by disagreements over specific aspects of replacement policy and, therefore, artificially reduce our totals.

Last summer, I began working on the second phase of my repeal strategy. I began gathering signatures on a discharge petition – to force a vote on my repeal bill. Not only did the discharge petition exceed expectations by attracting a bipartisan group of 173 signatures, but every member of the House Republican leadership signed it.

With such strong support, it was clear that my strategy was working. It also set the stage for the inclusion of my repeal language in H.R. 2, the repeal legislation that the leadership brought to the floor and that the House is set to pass.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Dr. Jack Wheeler

So how is John Boehner going to do make his bones? Hold on to those undies now… he plans to get Zero to sign, not veto, a bill to repeal ObamaCare.

Yes, repeal, repeal the whole damn thing, Zero’s pride and joy. Here’s the strategy.

First, the fallback remains: defund it, refuse to appropriate any money to implement any of it. But to go for the jugular means repeal. Of course, any stand-alone repeal bill such as HR 2 passed by the House will be blocked in the Senate, or if passed faces a certain presidential veto that cannot possibly be overridden.

HR 2, the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act,” takes 36 words to eliminate 2,000 pages of ObamaCare legislation: “Effective as of the enactment of Public Law 111-148, such Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.”

It will be voted on and passed by the House next week. It is only a warning shot. For its destiny is not to be a stand-alone bill, but an amendment to two other bills.

These two bills form the sides of a vise in which Dem cojones are inextricably trapped. They are: the CR (Continuing Resolution) to fund the government past March 4 when the current CR ends; and the bill to raise the debt ceiling (call it the DR, the debt raise).

These bills are “must pass” bills – for if they don’t pass, the government shuts down, no checks go out to pay for anybody or anything, and government debt gets defaulted on.

Thus the repeal strategy: HR 2 will be appended to the next CR and the DR by the House. That’s step one. Step two is for McConnell and DeMint to block any passage of either in the Senate unless HR 2 is appended.

And to keep those Dem cojones in an ever-tightening vise, both the CR and DR will be very short term – say 60 days for the former and $100 billion instead of a trillion for the latter, maybe less. This forces the Dems to fight the battle for more spending over and over again.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Ulster Man

13 killed and 30 wounded as a result of the Fort Hood Massacre. Six dead and 14 wounded in Tucson. President Obama reacts with detached attention to one tragedy, while showing deep concern for the other – but why?

A little more than a year ago, the nation dealt with a similar tragedy – at least in scope of lives lost and/or irreparably damaged, to that which took place the past week in Tucson Arizona. The Fort Hood massacre saw Nidal Mialik Hasan, an American-born Muslim serving in the U.S. military, open fire on his fellow soldiers – all the while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. (God is great – the very phrase utilized by the 9/11 terrorists)

President Obama, the nation’s Commander in Chief, did not make an appearance at Fort Hood until November 10th – almost a week after the shootings.

In an interview given to ABC the night prior to the Fort Hood memorial, President Obama refused to use the term terrorist – and even dismissed the attack with the following: “In a country of 300 million people…There are going to instances, uh, in which, uh, an individual cracks.”

Now fast-forward to the president’s almost immediate response to the more recent events in Tucson.

Within an hour of the story breaking, President Obama made his first somber public statement regarding the events. FBI Director Robert Mueller was promptly dispatched to the scene. The following day the president led a national moment of silence for the victims of the tragedy. And as many in the media, Democratic Party, and figures such as Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik blamed the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Limbaugh, Republicans, etc. for helping to somehow instigate the shooting in Tucson, Obama voiced no urging of caution, or made any statement dismissing the shooter as simply one among 300 million who had “lost it.”

What is motivating President Obama to react so differently to such tragic events?

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Ulster Man

As predicted, the Russians were playing an inept and incompetent Obama administration over the implications inherent within the latest START treaty, intending to leave America less capable of defending itself against nuclear attack.

President Barack Obama, desperate to appear presidential, seemingly at any cost, has pushed and prodded for quick Congressional approval of the latest START treaty between the United States and Russia. Surely a much publicized signing ceremony was sure to follow, attempting to glamorize a sure n steady President Obama as he continues to embark on saving the world from itself.

Ah, but what Obama seemingly forgot – yet again, is that it is now well known he is neither sure nor steady as a statesman. Rather, Obama is a man bereft of experience, confidence, or character, and thus, an easy mark for world leaders with far more cunning and grit than the current and hapless American president.

Enter Russia.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

[Be sure to watch the embedded video interview with Rep. King. -Ed.]

By Terrence Jeffrey

Rep. Steve King (R.-Iowa) says that House Republicans should include language that prohibits any funding for implementation of Obamacare in literally every appropriations bill that passes the House of Representatives this year, thus forcing a showdown on the issue with the Democratic majority Senate and President Barack Obama.

“Somebody’s going to blink,” King told CNSNews.com. “It’ll be President Obama or it’ll be House Republicans.

“If House Republicans refuse to blink, we will succeed,” said King in videotaped interview. “ObamaCare will never become the effective law of the land and we’ll be able to leave a legacy of liberty for the future generations.”

Under King’s plan, congressional Republicans would first force a straight up-or-down vote on repealing Obamacare in the House and Senate, but then follow that up by inserting language into all appropriations bills saying that no money from the bill can be used to implement the federal health-care program President Obama signed last year.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]

By Dr. Jack Wheeler

Ah… you may think this is about Barry Soetoro’s dream to ruin America. Nope, this is about another Barry, who once upon a time was also a US Senator who ran for president. His dream was to rescue America.

Americans were disastrously bamboozled into electing one Barry and just as disastrously not the other.

Fifty years ago, the other Barry wrote down his dream. Just think of how much greater, how much safer, how much richer, and how much freer we would all be today if Americans had the brains and courage back then to put him in the White House instead of his precise opposite. Here is Barry’s Dream:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom.

My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution … or have failed their purpose … or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden.

I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible.

And if I should be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty, and in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

This was the dream, the pledge to America, of Barry Goldwater (1909-1998). You’ll find these words on page 15 of his book, written in 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative.

[ READ THE FULL ARTICLE ]