HERE'S WHY DEMOCRATS WORK SO HARD TO DEFEND CRIMINALS
By Howard J. Warner, August 27, 2025

A few days ago, Vice President J.D. Vance in an interview was asked why the Democrats are getting behind criminals and blocking prosecutions and police protection. He responded (to be kind) that the politicians have lost touch with their constituents. But although this might be true of some, he did not get to the real reason.

When Barack Obama was elected president, he indicated that he wanted to fundamentally change America. To that end, he fundamentally changed our health care system, in which many now acknowledge a lack of personal care, as our doctors have become employees of hospitals and large medical groups. Office visits are often to nurse practitioners, as physicians are generally engaged in procedures that generate greater remuneration than office visits. The visits are generally faster, and the provider spends much of the time on the computer. Government influence over our health care system has increased for sixty years (since Medicare and Medicaid), but the Affordable Care Act accelerated this trend. Gaining control over health care was just the beginning to fundamentally changing America from the Enlightenment to Marxism.

As Mark Levin has brilliantly detailed in his book American Marxism, our country did not accept classical class-warfare Marxism, since our creed is to become rich by accumulating wealth through property. But the Frankfurt School version of Critical Theory provides the opportunity to identify oppressed groups aside from the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Democrats have decided to separate the population via race and ethnicity and this has succeeded. For this approach to work there must be a dependent group which appears disadvantaged.

Obama is an intelligent person who morphed Saul Alinsky, Marx, Critical Theory, and anarchy into a legitimate political movement. Although it was successful in his personal ascension to power, this approach has not generally gained ground nationally. (It is well received in the large urban cities with large minority populations.) The movement toward radicalism includes a reduction in policing and punishment for crimes. This results in chaos which threatens the local poor and minority population most giving them a sense of hopelessness and desperation. This is critical to the theory. Hence, these political leaders will resist any attempt to make our streets safer.

Democrats defend crime and defunding the police because this keeps them in power. If people are threatened, they are more willing to distrust those who fall into the “oppressor” groups. The impetus to change paradigms does not come easily when “free” stuff is offered to those with little resources. Hence socialist Mamdani is leading for NYC mayor in a city with a large immigrant population. Crime is the chaos that Critical Theory has ordered. Lowering the crime rate in Washington, D.C. by the Trump initiative is a threat to the Democratic leadership. Of course, the opposition to Trump labels this effort as racism, since Critical Race Theory is one element of this Marxist approach.

Cleaning up Chicago’s southside and west will be of great benefit to the citizens. It will demonstrate Democrat failure. But fixing the problem removes the chaos and might hurt the radicals’ power base.

DEMOCRATS, SWAMP-DWELLERS, INDIGNANT AND ANGRY AT THE THOUGHT OF ACCOUNTABILITY
By Eric Utter, February 15, 2025

According to commentators who say they are bureaucrats in Reddit's increasingly popular r/fednews, an online gathering place for America’s public servants (aka federal workers), the Trump administration’s efforts to greatly curtail graft, fraud, and wasteful spending in the national government is a bad thing.

Not just a bad thing, mind you, but on par with the Holocaust.

Yes, some of the r/fednews community’s 375,000+ members seem to think DOGE’s efforts to bring transparency, accountability, and restraint to the federal government is a more dastardly and damaging attack on the United States than Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and Gettysburg combined.

The sick fact is that, to these self-centered ‘public servants,’ it is.

Because auditing taxpayers’ largesse threatens their ill-gotten, bloated, incomes as well as their agenda-driven pet projects around the world.

They think, “Can Musk be right? Who are these uppity citizens upset that I have two vacation homes -- and that I spend their money on promoting abortion and transgenderism in Botswana and Zimbabwe? Who the hell do they think they are? The nerve!”

One Reddit r/fednews commenter stated that DOGE’s actions were akin to a “coup.” Another remarked, "We're at war."

These Democrats can’t stand the thought of scrutiny. They will not tolerate any attempt to rein in their abuse of power and position. They will do anything to keep their gravy trains running -- and themselves from being held accountable for their actions, despite the wishes of American citizens.

They are scared. Maxine Waters spoke for many when she said, “We don’t know what they have on us.”

Which is why they have increasingly used profanity, spouted violent rhetoric and espoused violent actions when referring to those who would simply audit them. It is also why they wish to abolish the very First Amendment, and take away Americans’ God-given right to free speech.

So, I ask you: Is there anyone more entitled than a Democrat in ‘public service?’ Is there a less accurate term?

Thomas Jefferson said, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”

Just so. And he was — supposedly — a Democrat!

THE LINE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL IS NOT FINE
By Patricia McCarthy, January 25, 2025

“Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid.” --Ronald Reagan

For those of us who grew up not giving much credibility to evil, the last nine years have been a serious wake-up call.

From the moment Donald Trump came down that escalator in June 2015, the left went to work to destroy the man.

Why?

The most obvious reason was that he was an outsider to the uniparty establishment. He had rebuilt the skyline of New York and was friends with, donors to, a long list of Democrats and Republicans, Americans of every color and creed, from Oprah to Mike Tyson, from Dana White to Linda McMahon.

He was beloved by all until, curiously, he decided to run for president on the common sense platform of “drain the swamp.”

Few knew then just how corrupt and deceitful that swamp was and is.

We all should have realized then just how duplicitous the denizens of that swamp truly are. They immediately set out to destroy the man with fake stories for the media to run with, impeachment based on fake stories the media ran with, and then an unending series of illegitimate lawsuits that no other person could have or would have been sued.

It was all lawfare, destruction of a good man by the abuse of the law.

All those involved in the numerous and various schemes to ruin Trump can now be labeled as truly evil.

We may not have realized it then but we do now. Everything they did was based on lies, fabricated allegations, the collaboration of a host of shameless power mad people.

Hillary Clinton commissioned and paid for the phony Russia hoax dossier.

Andrew Weismann, Mark Elias, Norm Eisen, and a host of others colluded to manufacture the Mueller investigation that, in the end, had to admit there was no there there.

Adam Schiff, a veritable Uriah Heep of the Democrat party; a pathological liar, venal and corrupt but too scared to meet with Trump when he arrived in California to survey the fire damage.

Now we know that every one of those people were and are certifiably evil. They all work for the detriment of this country. They abhor our Constitution and with the mindless puppet Joe Biden in office, set about shredding it.

The left loathes our Constitution because as Obama put it, it lays out what the government cannot do, not what it can do. So confident in their ability to breach the law as they saw fit, this cabal of evildoers has committed countless crimes in their effort to rid their depraved “community” of Trump.

When they successfully rigged/stole the 2020 election, when Rupert Murdoch ordered his people at Fox News to make him a “non-person,” when he left office in 2021, it never occurred to them that he would be back. The cabal congratulated themselves on having run him out of town. Then, when he announced he was running again, they escalated their strategies and tactics and set about using lawfare to make certain that he would be battered down for good.

But all their planning went awry; they overreached. The backlash? Trump was re-elected in a near landslide and the Democrat party has been rendered irrelevant.

The left’s plan -- to install the senile Biden in office, run the country their way as neo-Marxists, usher in millions of illegal aliens, and remain in power forever, utterly failed.

They are in the weeds without a plan beyond making up more ludicrous stories like 'Elon made a Nazi salute!'

They are so lost, so irrelevant, it makes one a believer in karma. They deserve to be in perdition.

For the last four years, the left has imposed on the American people DEI -- mandated discrimination, ESG -– mandated climate change nonsense, transgenderism – sheer lunacy combined with physical mutilation of children, speech police that is anything but free, censorship of anything with which they disagree, etc.

In short, the imposition of authoritarianism. And like frogs being slowly brought to a boil, far too many Americans fell for their rules in fear of being cancelled. They became afraid. After seeing Trump operate in the first five days in office, perhaps they are waking up to the wickedness of the previous nine years of Democrat evil. There simply is no other word for it.

The Republicans who voted to confirm all of Biden’s pathetic cabinet picks now struggle to confirm Trump’s fine nominees. Despicable RINOs like Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowsky, Susan Collins and Thom Tillis should be politically dead men and women walking. They betray their own constituents without a care in the world. They, too, fall into the evil category. They love the power they have to wield without concern for what is right.

The last proof of evil on the left is their despicable reaction to the assassination attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania last July.

Far too many of them wrote, tweeted, Facebooked, Instagramed, TikToked their regret that he had not been killed. They bemoaned the fact that the assassin missed. They made jokes about it for weeks and assumed they were in good company, that millions of us wanted him killed.

That was the final straw. That is when many of us who did not know the word to describe the left before suddenly knew. Evil.

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” --Edmund Burke

SO WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PUT TAMPON TIM'S MAXIPAD
DISPENSER IN THE BOYS' BATHROOM AT A TYPICAL HIGH SCHOOL?
By Monica Showalter, August 9, 2024

For weird characters like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, now Kamala Harris's running mate, there is no such thing as human nature.

Which is why he and his woke coevals are constantly in for a surprise when they make human beings into their guinea pigs for a Better World.

And this is particularly obvious in matters involving children and their identities. It's very well known that boys, when given Barbie dolls to play with will turn them into guns for cowboy play.

Writer Kira Davis saw what happened when Tim Walz's wokesterly idea of putting tampon and maxipad dispensers in the boys' room of her kids' high school in California.

That of course meant that at taxpayer expense, the improbable specter of tampon and maxipad machines were installed in all public school bathrooms, including the boys' rooms -- and the boys weren't supposed to notice anything amiss.

Here's her tweet thread:

It's pretty wretched, actually. The boys looked at those tampon and maxipad machines and decided there were better things they could do with them than wait for their periods to come, too.

They pulled the maxipads out, found that they had sticky backings, and with their creative juices going, decided to stick them all over the walls of the school, sometimes spelling out words and no doubt feeling very proud of themselves.

The girls, who know what those things are, probably died of embarrassment to just see them. Sex harassment? If I were a girl in that school, I would definitely feel kind of harassed.

But the wokesters don't care about that sort of thing, they just want to be woke and imagine that all the high schools of America are brimming with people who were born in the wrong sex who must be accommodated, regardless of how the others will take it.

Kids respond best to firm standards and expectations. To make a high-school bathroom gender-fluid is simply confusing and these boys responded in the most boylike way they could, by turning the barbie dolls into guns, and the maxipad machines into graffiti devices as their way of creating some kind of order in their world.

Had they simply been able to recognize the logic of their gender in their own private bathrooms, this would never have happened.

Davis points out that someone had to clean it all up -- the custodians, of course, who were none too pleased. Wokesters never care about the kinds of messes they leave for others.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF DISINFORMATION
By Christopher Chantrill, February 6, 2024

Since the American Godzilla came down the escalator in 2015 our liberal friends have been obsessed with disinformation coming from the Far Right.

Did you know that “disinformation” was originally dezinformatsiya as practiced by the Soviet era KGB? But then other governments got in on the action. Wikipedia nobly asserts that,

After the Soviet term became widely known in the 1980s, native speakers of English broadened the term as "any government communication (either overt or covert) containing intentionally false and misleading material, often combined selectively with true information, which seeks to mislead and manipulate either elites or a mass audience."

So, in the 1980s, experts agreed that disinformation was a government thing.

But now all the best people at the Atlantic are worried about Substack, which is “unwilling to remove avowed Nazis from its platform.”

But are the avowed Nazis committing “misinformation” or “disinformation” or “malinformation?” How would we know? How could we tell?

Fortunately, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency has the whole thing covered and defined with comprehensive and mandatory definitions of “misinformation” and “disinformation” and “malinformation.” And naturally, our liberal friends and their miasma of NGOs -- led by the noble ADL and the SPLC -- are doing their bit to winkle out the bad guys. The SPLC recently helped the FBI horn in on dangerous radical Catholics practicing the Tridentine Mass.

Back in the day, of course, our liberal friends were all worried about government propaganda, what with Joe McCarthy’s lies about Communists in the State Department and the U.S. government’s lies about Vietnam. Now they are worried about nongovernmental liars.

I call that a “tell.”

Back in the day our liberal friends knew that the United States was the great implacable force in the world that was the main obstacle to the Left’s fight for justice and peace. Back then the left saw itself fighting against government power. Today the tables are turned. Now it is “avowed Nazis” on Substack that are standing in the way of the progressive government’s multicultural movement for justice.

In other words, back then the Left experienced itself gazing up helplessly at the battlements of imperialist America. Today it is standing on the battlements of Working Class America looking out at the threatening swarm of annoying deplorables down below.

How dare those peasants appropriate the means of communication that, all good people know, should be reserved for the use of educated and evolved people! The idea of “avowed Nazis” polluting the means of communication with their racist-sexist-homophobia is simply “unsafe.”

In other words, the world has changed, and our liberal friends can’t stand it.

But what exactly has gotten our liberal friends into such a panic? I have an idea.

Back in the day only the best and brightest got to publish ideas -- in books, and newspapers, and magazines -- and there were gatekeepers all along the line to keep things under control.

But now it’s a complete free-for-all. Any local yokel can start up a Substack site. As the Substack About page says,

Substack is something new: a subscription network… A few hundred paid subscribers can support a livelihood. A few thousand makes it lucrative.

And there are no gatekeepers. You can be up and running on Substack in minutes. It’s a complete free-for-all. For the first time in history. Just ask Bari Weiss.

So let us tell the three ages of the History of Communication.

Age of Parchment: Writers write, monks in monasteries create illuminated manuscripts by hand in their monastic cells. Gatekeeper: The Abbot.

Age of Gutenberg: Writers write, printer’s devils convert the written word into print. Gatekeeper: The Editor.

Age of Free-for-all: Writers write, and press Publish. Gatekeeper: The… (oh no!)

Informed by my History of Communication, we now know what our liberal friends are feverishly working on today.

We need new gatekeepers! To keep the Narrative pure! To stop Disinformation before it destroys Our Democracy! To head off “avowed Nazis” at the pass! To prevent “harm” to traditionally marginalized peoples! To stop the Latin Mass before it destroys America! To call out “climate deniers!” To banish TERFs from the university!

I get it. How are we going to send the doughboys to Europe unless President Wilson can control the Narrative about German attacks on “passenger and merchant ships in 1917?” How can the U.S. prevail in Vietnam if left-wing and anti-war protesters get to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention? How are we going to fight World War COVID if anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers spread distrust of government medical experts? And how are we going to save the world from runaway climate change unless “climate deniers” are well and truly deplatformed for their denial of The Science?

There is nothing more urgent, as the nation goes to the polls this year, than to stop the out-of-control Disinformation produced by far-right extremists and influencers on the free-for-all internet with licensed and bonded and DEI-approved Gatekeepers.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

The majority of informed Americans believe that the election of 2020 was at the very least tampered with, and at most, stolen from Donald Trump. I agree with them.

After “mules” delivering contrived and phony ballots to drop boxes throughout the country, Joe Biden somehow became president.

After machine “malfunctions” and outright collapses, an unknown number of ballots, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, were either uncounted, or flipped from Republican to Democrat.

After votes cast by dead people appeared, somehow the election was lost for Trump and every American who voted for him.

After election site intimidation tactics, votes were prevented from being cast at all.

After officials declared an “emergency” at some polling places they were closed down, and voting stopped.

After cases of pre-filled ballots came out after closing time—perhaps millions?—and were run through counting machines more than once, Biden “won.”

After counters stopped the vote mid-count for several hours, Democrats “found” enough votes for Biden; the vote count took a sudden and statistically impossible jump in his favor.

And now, through the influx of more than 5 million illegal aliens since Biden seized the White House, Democrats hope to gain that many Democrat votes in exchange for giving the illegal migrants government goodies on our dime. Democrats hope to make all future elections Republican-proof through illegal immigration, which is why they refuse to close the border. It is only a matter of time before Democrats propose election rights for non-citizens across the board. In some places in the U.S., it has already happened. From there it is only a short hop to threatening freebie benefits if illegals don’t vote Democrat.

The fix is probably in, and we have just begun to imagine the new ways 2024 could be stolen. Everybody knows what is going on, yet I hear nothing from Republicans on what they plan to do to prevent this from happening. Again. Do they expect that Democrats will eschew their cheating ways and suddenly go legit for 2024? With these stakes, are you serious?

I can think of several new ways for Democrats to steal 2024, from “neighborhood canvassing” or ballot harvesting for votes, to linking voting access to loans and banking to voting habits, to tying one’s thermostat to voting habits. There is no end to creative Democrats’ desires to win in 2024, and no shortage of ways to get it done illegally. Their attitude, as always, is “better to ask forgiveness than permission” because they know how much harder it is to reverse an election than to jigger one.

Democrats rely on Republican reticence to take to the streets when they are wronged. For the most part, they judge rightly; Republicans, regretfully, are not known for their zeal for justice when kicked in the groin.

And so I ask Republican representatives on Capitol Hill, “What are you doing to prevent a repeat in 2024?” I ask the same questions of election boards and polling place officials. What cheating safeguards are in place?

Yoo-hoo, Republican activists and voters! What are you doing to prevent a repeat of 2020? And what do I hear back?

{{crickets}}

PROMINENT LEFT-WING PUNDIT CENK UYGUR MELTS DOWN ABOUT 'LEFT-WING EXTREMISTS' HELPING THE RIGHT
James Lynch, Reporter, April 11, 2023

Left-wing political commentator Cenk Uygur expressed frustration Tuesday with “left-wing extremists” whose positions, he claimed, help Republicans win elections by alienating voters.

Uygur, founder and CEO of progressive YouTube network “The Young Turks,” was responding to left-wing backlash to co-host Ana Kasparian’s objection to the activist term “birthing person.” (RELATED: Ana Kasparian Says She’ll ‘Never Apologize’ For Slamming Terms Like ‘Birthing Persons’ https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/10/young-turks-ana-kasparian-not-apologizing-transgender-terms-birthing-persons/)

“Left-wing extremists help right-wing so much! 66% of this country is left-wing, according to polling on policy issues. They don’t believe in defunding the police or being called Latinx or calling women ‘birthing people’ or abolishing prisons. Anyone who claims they do is lying,” Uygur tweeted.

He went on to argue with left-wing commentators such as David Doel, Emma Vigeland and Benjamin Carollo about his criticism of the left’s language. He even responded to anonymous left-wing Twitter users who chimed in on the dispute.

“No, it’s not. If left-wing politicians use language that is greatly alienating to the majority of voters, then Republicans win elections. And then they pass laws against trans people!! You’re hurting your own cause,” he said to Carollo, who claimed the term “birthing person” is “medically relevant.”

“Ana posted the most innocuous tweet of all time, which now a lot of you are saying was perfectly normal. Then leftists lost their shit and started saying it was an attack against trans people, etc. There is absolutely no question about who started this and made an enormous deal out of it,” Uygur said as part of his exchange with Vigeland. She questioned his concern about the language the left uses and whether it is relevant to the electorate.

“To be clear, I think the portion of left-wing that has lost its mind is about 2% of the country and the right-wing that has lost it’s mind is anywhere near 28-33% of the country (according to polling where they answered in clinically deranged ways). There’s a difference in scale,” Uygur said in a separate Twitter thread.

MISPLACED COMPASSION PUTS LIVES IN JEOPARDY
By John F. Di Leo, October 26, 2022

A common charge in western republics has been the claim that conservatives insist on thinking rationally and have no compassion, while liberals make all their decisions on feelings, and refuse to use their heads.

In the oft-misattributed aphorism, Winston Churchill first summed up this difference as: “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative by 40, you have no brain.”

Throughout the centuries-long struggle between constitutionally-limited government and a Marxist welfare state, this tug-of-war between heart and head -- between compassion and the rule of law -- has remained at the core of so many of our policy disagreements.

Should government insist on self-sufficiency, or issue welfare checks? Do we rely on the self-policing of the invisible hand of the free market, or do we micromanage every business with crippling regulations? Do we let a big business go under, or do we make future taxpayers bail it out?

The Left’s positions are always considered the “compassionate” ones. But are they really? Perhaps the wrong side is getting credit for caring. Perhaps it’s time the Right starts fighting this method of classification.

Case in point: The Methodist Hospital murders that took place in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday, October 22, 2022.

At about 11:15, a gunman beat up a hospital patient in the maternity ward and shot two hospital employees before being subdued and arrested.

The shooter, Nestor Hernandez, was there to visit his girlfriend, who had just given birth to his child.

Hernandez is a 30-year-old lifelong criminal with a rap sheet going back to his teens. He had been in and out of the Dallas criminal justice system for such charges as robbery and felony assault before he was twenty, and he earned his first serious jail time -- an eight-year sentence -- after a violent burglary in which he and his accomplice repeatedly beat up a woman to gain access to her apartment and car.

For that one, Nestor Hernandez pled guilty in September 2015 to “aggravated robbery,” which could have won him anywhere from five to 99 years in jail. They gave him eight.

Only they didn’t. If he’d served the full eight years, he’d still have been in jail. He wouldn’t have been free to acquire a girlfriend, get her pregnant, visit her at the hospital, beat her up, and kill two hospital employees.

So what happened? The system decided to show “compassion” to this model prisoner with a violent history, a rap sheet going back to his childhood, and gang tattoos on his face and neck. They didn’t even make him stay the full eight years but let him out of jail on October 20, 2021, after just six years. They installed an ankle bracelet and called it “parole.”

It was this choice that enabled him to put this girlfriend in a position where he could visit her hospital room and start killing innocent bystanders on October 22, just a year after he was freed.

In the end, we must ask, just who warrants compassion? To whom does a criminal justice system actually owe this complex concept of “compassion”?

There’s the criminal, there’s his known victim (in this case, the woman he beat up and robbed of $3000 worth of cash she’d been collecting for a school fundraiser), there’s his future intended victims, the people he is sure to target as soon as he’s released (like his current girlfriend), and there is the collateral damage that will result from his being precipitously set free, like the two hospital employees he killed in his Saturday morning rampage.

Which of these parties occupied the minds of the district attorney’s office when they set up that plea deal in 2015, saving the cost and trouble of a trial, but clearly giving him too short a prison sentence as a result?

And which of these parties occupied the minds of the parole board when they set him free two years earlier than necessary, deluding themselves that an ankle bracelet might protect the public from this thug as well as a concrete and steel cell had done thus far?

Upon consideration, we see that it’s neither a shortage nor a surfeit of compassion that drives the wrong choices here. There’s actually plenty of compassion on the sides of both the advocates and opponents of tough sentencing.

The difference between them is which parties should be the focus of that compassion.

For half a century or more, the American Left has focused and aimed compassion at the criminal, no matter how guilty, how violent, how recidivist, how monstrous, how dangerous to society.

And all this time, the American Right has focused its compassion on all the rest of the parties -- the law-abiding citizenry whom the criminal justice system was established to protect.

The American Right has compassion that is aimed at the deserving parties. The Right has compassion for the victim of that first crime, who deserves justice. The Right has compassion for the future victims, the girlfriends or acquaintances or marks whom this thug will someday attack if set free again. And the Right has compassion for the future bystanders, in this case the hardworking hospital employees who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time… a moment when this violent demon, set free by a foolish, misguided bureaucracy, might choose to go on a shooting spree.

Whose compassion makes sense to society -- those who care most for the happiness of the predator, or those who care most for the safety of the innocent victims upon whom he is sure to prey as long as he breathes free?

If this were a rare occurrence, we couldn’t draw these clear conclusions, but it’s not rare. This same story happens every day in our major metropolitan areas, in Texas and Illinois, in Los Angeles and New York, from coast to coast.

We catch the criminals, we convict them, we give them sentences that are too short, we let them out before their sentences are served… And they commit more crimes, and eventually we catch and convict them again -- perhaps once for every five or ten crimes -- and the cycle repeats.

The details may differ, but the story is the same: the system shows compassion to a proven criminal, instead of showing compassion to his past and future victims. The system thus endangers the neighborhoods, the workplaces, the entertainment venues, the housing complexes, the parks and playgrounds, every single place that society needs to function safely.

The system thus endangers the law-abiding American public, because such misplaced compassion puts human lives in jeopardy, by the millions, every day.

It’s election time, and this crime wave is on everyone’s mind. Voters, too, are known to be motivated by compassion. So the question is: Will the voters’ compassion be in sync with the public interest this time?

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.

JILL BIDEN GOT WHAT SHE WISHED FOR AND FOUND OUT KARMA IS A B_ _ _ _
By Patricia McCarthy, July 19, 2022

Anyone who watched the unlikely Biden campaign unfold as it did knows that Jill Biden, not-a-medical doctor, is largely responsible for the disaster that is her husband's presidency. She, more than anyone else, knew that Joe was suffering from advancing dementia, yet she signed on to the far left's plan to exile Trump no matter what the cost.

Whatever made her and the cabal that rigged the election six ways to Sunday think they could pull it off proves they are all power mad idiots. They apparently thought they could put old Joe out there as a front and implement their treasured Marxist green policies, force the middle and working classes to submit, and preserve their elite status and survive.

That is probably not going to happen. The masses have awakened. They are not deceived by Biden's "Putin price hike," or the claim that we must endure inflation in order to transition to renewable energy. Planes are not going to be flying anytime soon on green energy. Biden, the duplicitous and hypocritical John Kerry, and the rest of the Global Reset crowd that uses climate change as a canard in their wholly disingenuous attempt to subdue the world's population into obeisance will fail.

One has to wonder how these ignorant elitists like John Kerry are faring as they see the farmers of Holland resist their tyrannical government's attempt to strip them of their livelihoods, perfected over hundreds of years. Were they at all enlightened by the Canadian truckers' protests? Have the noticed the rage of parents protesting the sexual grooming of their kids in schools? Do they care at all about how the catastrophic rise in gas prices is affecting families? Biden's inflation has erased every bit of help COVID checks may have briefly provided. That was money down the drain, much of it by fraud. Printed money is fake money that creates inflation. The Fed knows this, but it did it anyway. The men and women who set this in motion know they will not be affected by the financial ruin they cause, which proves their disdain for the people who actually make the country work: truckers, plumbers, electricians, farmers, etc. Only when they can't get their caviar and champagne delivered will they notice the damage they've done.

Back to Jill Biden. As everyone surely knows by now, she is a very stupid woman. How do you say the things she says, insult the people she insults, if you are remotely sentient? The person who puts the words she will speak on the teleprompter is very stupid, too, but that is no excuse. Mrs. Biden is on a par with Kamala Harris when it comes to brains. Joe is clearly damaged goods, but what is Jill's excuse?

But then we all should have known: any person who demands she be addressed as "Doctor" on the basis of a very bad doctoral dissertation (in education, a D.Ed) is both wildly insecure and narcissistic. She and Joe are a perfect match, if imperfectly stupid in every other way. They both have extraordinarily high opinions of themselves, thoroughly unsupported by any actual accomplishments. They have been terrible parents: Hunter is a drug-addicted pervert; Ashley's diary revealed more that we needed to know about Joe's tendency toward pedophilia. The Bidens are a tragically dysfunctional family, yet somehow they ended up in the White House.

This illegitimate and disastrous presidency will forever be known as the worst, most destructive in U.S. history. Perhaps one day, the people who made it happen, who tried and failed to destroy America, will be named. They will not succeed in their goals. Americans are waking up. Hispanics are waking up. Blacks are waking up. Parents are waking up. Young people are waking up. The abortion issue that the Democrats have always relied upon is losing young people, the ones who recognize actual science.

Jill Biden now complains that this and that crisis has derailed his presidency. Does she not realize that he is responsible for every one of those crises? Starting with his cancelation of the Keystone Pipeline and drilling leases on federal land sending energy prices and inflation soaring, stopping the building of the border wall, thus the invasion of America by migrants from all over the world, his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, massive debt-funded spending aggravating inflation, his complete submission to China, fomenting the war in Ukraine to take Putin down (that's not working out), etc. Biden has created the energy emergency, the border debacle, the disintegration of our military via wokery, the defunding of police all over the country, and the obvious rise in crime that has been the result. Biden is a one-man wrecking ball of our still great nation, and Jill is his co-conspirator.

"Evil isn't the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it's a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference."
―Jim Butcher, Vignette

CRITICAL CRAT THEORY: WHEN INTERSECTIONALITY INTERSECTS WITH REALITY
By Robert E. Ford, December 7, 2021

When drug dealers complain about the lack of law enforcement protection, the boomerang has come full circle and hit us in the back of the head.

Gangs of smash-and-grab thieves have targeted cannabis shops in the San Francisco Bay Area while firing 175 shots and stealing about $5 million's worth of products. Alphonso "Tucky" Blunt, owner of a legal cannabis shop, criticized poor police protection and the bureaucratic details of business in Oakland: "I was safer, and had more money, [selling] on the street, illegally." Such is the economic reality of the Bay area.

The thieves resell the stolen pot on the streets. City supervisor Rafael Mandeman said, "Sadly, the illegal market is flourishing by undercutting the prices of legal businesses, which is bad for our economy as illegal businesses pay no taxes." For politicians, the sad part is the "no taxes" part. For the owners, it is the loss of their business.

What the city fathers did not foresee when they reduced economic crimes under $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor and advocated defunding the police, eliminating bail, and reducing jail overcrowding was the loss of their revenue. But it's been worse than that: in October, the pharmacy chain Walgreens announced plans to close five of its stores in San Francisco, citing theft and retail crime as the main motivator behind its decision. And that was only the beginning. Some small businesses are following suit, like this Palo Alto clothing store. "I felt for us it was not only the safest thing but the smartest thing to just pull back our inventory and close the doors," said Danny Ryan, who owns Kickz Inc. on Stevens Creek Blvd. "Our retail store will be closed indefinitely until further notice."

In other news, some lesbians are demanding to "Get the L Out" of "LGBT+." Jennie, a lesbian exercising her own sexual preference, should be free to love whom she loves, but it does not work that way under the Critical Crat Theory: "They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent, just because I won't have sex with trans women." What does it even mean to be a lesbian if forced to have sex with a male who believes he's a female?

And what does it mean to be a female athlete if forced to compete with males for scholarships and to be deprived of a fair chance? Title IX was passed to provide for equality between the sexes in sports. It is eviscerated if anyone can claim to be a female. I feel for the man, but the choice is the hurt feelings of the man who says he's a woman or discrimination against half of the American population.

Oddly enough, a person falsely claiming to be an American Indian (I suppose you could call him a trans Indian) is now facing three counts of misrepresentation of Indian-produced goods and products and faces five years in prison. Lewis Rath "led collectors to believe they were purchasing authentic Native American carvings from him."

Another collision intersects at the border. "Left largely unreported in the national press is that hundreds of thousands of Latino voters in rural Texas — the sons and daughters of early legal migration — also felt repulsed by the 2019 mass-migration crisis during which nearly one million illegal Central Americans swamped the border as Democratic voices encouraged it, litigated efforts to staunch the tide, and promised open gates under a Biden administration."

In a country that demands that we repeat what we know is false, and never speak of certain proven truths, and comply with every government whim, our eyes are beginning to open. As the tidal wave of reality crashes into the quicksand shores of progressive America, we note an ever so slight tilting of their artificial ivory tower.

BOTTOM LINE: DEMOCRATS ARE AFRAID OF YOU
By Christopher Chantrill, March 30, 2021

I’m having a problem deciding whether the Biden administration is stupid or evil or just flat-out afraid of us Commoners.

And then I realized that it’s all three. Here’s why.

Our liberal friends never imagined that a Trump could happen. Nothing in their world prepared them for him. So what happens when you are confronted by something completely unexpected? You stop dead in your tracks.

That is one of the basic themes in Jordan B. Peterson’s oeuvre. As he writes in Beyond Order. 12 More Rules for Life:

Many herbivores, comparatively defenseless, facing imminent and brutal death, freeze in place, paralyzed by fear… But to have no more courage than a rabbit is definitely not to be everything you could be.

The Real Five Laws of American Politics

And Nancy Pelosi is no herbivore, despite her fetish for storing ice-cream in $24,000 refrigerators. Non-herbivores, after freezing in place for a moment when threatened by the fearsome Trump dinosaur, decide what to do next. Friend or foe? Should Dems ignore Trump as a flash in the pan? Should they figure he represented a few dumb deplorables? Or should they treat him as an existential danger?

We know what happened. The Dems chose Door Number Three and embarked on a mission to destroy Trump and everything he represented.

When you choose all-out war, the next thing that happens is that you make Trump and his supporters the frightful enemy, that will smash everything we hold dear -- reinstate Jim Crow, smash our wonderful administrative state, and make every woman into a house slave of the patriarchy -- unless we act now. And then you bombard your supporters with non-stop propaganda, just like our great leaders did in World War I and II and the Cold War.

Were they right? Did Trump and his MAGA supporters represent an existential threat to the progressive project? Or was the real problem that ordinary American Commoners don’t get no respect from the Democratic educated class, and Donald Trump made them believe that he cared about people like them? You decide.

I suspect that if the Dems had given Trump half a loaf then the whole Trump-MAGA phenomenon would have died away and by 2022 the Dems would be winning a big second-term midterm, and back to business as usual.

But they fought Trump for every slice of the loaf, and the rest is history.

Today the Dems are so scared of the Trump dinosaur that they have convinced themselves they need to revamp the elections system with HR1, protect Capitol Hill with troops and a fence, and ram their agenda down the throats of the opposition in a nearly 50-50 Congress. It is a fight to the death, with no quarter.

Yet their agenda of unlimited immigration, Green New Deal, and systemic racism has absolutely nothing for the ordinary American Commoner. Do they really think they can game the election system enough to stop the blowback in 2022?

To me, the obvious folly and knavery of all this is self-evident. The question I ask is this: is there any way we can persuade our Democratic friends to step back from their determination to win at all costs, to slay the evil dragon of Trumpism even if they destroy America in the process?

The answer is: probably not. When you have persuaded yourself and your supporters that you are fighting evil -- especially an evil dragon -- you are fighting for survival and for good over evil and nothing you do is too much if it slays the evil dragon.

Back in the day some people thought it would be a good idea to separate morality and politics just a little. The idea was that if you limited government to stuff that almost all people could agree on, such as fighting foreign dictators and domestic thieves and robbers, then people could practice their different moralities without fighting over them in government.

But then, of course, whatabout slavery? Whatabout the workers? Whatabout women? Whatabout systemic racism? Whatabout the inalienable right of transgenders to compete in women’s sports? And off we go to the races.

Did you know there is a word for a society that combines politics and morality? Totalitarian. It might not be such a problem were it not for the historical record, that when you combine morality and politics you get the killing fields of the war of all against all.

Do our liberal friends not get that? Well, maybe, but meanwhile they have terrified their supporters into believing that white supremacy will kill us all.

I suppose the best we can hope for is a resounding 2022 midterm to return Congress solidly into the Republican column -- despite the Democrats having done everything possible to make sure that no Republican ever wins an election ever again.

Then, all of a sudden, Democrats will discover the importance of minority rights in the legislature, the eternal sanctity of the filibuster, and the horror of legislating morality.

Christopher Chantrill@chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com

KAMALA SPEAKS OF 'A HARRIS ADMINISTRATION TOGETHER WITH JOE BIDEN'
By Thomas Lifson, September 15, 2020

Was this a slip of the lip or a forthright acknowledgment of reality? My guess is that her ego got the better of Senator Harris, who, after all, is used to assuming power through questionable exploitation of older men. It must be a classic "Kinsley gaffe," a politician accidentally telling the truth, since nobody would ever describe Kamala Harris as "forthright." Whatever the underlying psychology, during a "virtual address" (i.e., a video call like Zoom) to a group of Hispanic small business–owners in Arizona on Saturday, the junior senator from California spoke of "a Harris administration together with Joe Biden":

Thanks for admitting that Biden is just a front man, Kamala.
Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

FLYOVER FOLK ARE FED UP WITH BUMBLING BIDE AND THE BIG BAD BUG
Heartlanders are all out of patience for the disappearing, reappearing super bug and Joe Biden’s intercourse of jumbled words.
By: Sarah Cowgill July 10, 2020

Editor’s Note: While the media and other leftist elites ignore the millions of folks living in “flyover” states, they do so at their own peril; it was this silent majority that put President Trump in the White House. Each week, Liberty Nation gives voice to the hard-working heartlanders who are silent no more.

When the silent majority cannot decide whether to laugh or cry, Democrats may well want to pay attention. As they say, excrement got real this week. From Kanye West declaring his intent to run for president to Joe Biden being unable to stop using the word “intercourse” and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) calling for the dismantlement of the U.S. economy and political system, normal people pert near had enough.

And while it takes time to rattle the folks hard at work and minding their Ps and Qs, all the polite Mid-Western flyover folks had their mettle put to the test.

Kayne West -- What Is He Doing And Why?
On America’s Independence Day, former – or perhaps still –supporter of President Donald Trump took to Twitter to toss his MAGA cap into the race for president. His words were oh-so inspiring. “We must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future. I am running for president of the United States!”

Kayne listed his advisers as wife Kim Kardashian, the woman famous only for being famous, and brick throwing mogul Elon Musk. Musk, oh yes, he is a guy that should be able to get to know the common man. Nevertheless, the media cautiously gave in to determining Kanye’s platform. And in an interview with Forbes, he let it fly like a parrot with un-clipped wings:

“Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.”

Citing a Life Issues Research paper, West said “that 102 out of 165, or 62% of the Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are located in areas with relatively high African American populations, or in ‘targeted neighborhoods.’” He may not be too far afield. But he also just irritated all sorts of folks he would want to rally behind the unlikely candidate in support of his campaign. But again, Kim and Elon don’t really have the political chops for a strategic campaign. And that led flyover folks to look beyond the veil to see for themselves what the billionaire rapper had up his diamond encrusted sleeve.

It was a farmer from Kansas who noted: “Kanye is dumb like a fox. He will divert votes for Joe Biden. He is a MAGA man who is thinking outside the box.” “Crazy like a fox,” said Ken Kyker in Mountain Brook, AL. “I’m no fan of his music but he may just deplete Biden voters.” Crazy and dumb for the win.

But Milwaukee resident Kathryn Clarke could not hold her sharp tongue and went on an epic rant (edited for mean stuff, extreme length, and to include punctuation):

“I could not care less what he and his clan of morally corrupt have to say about anything. They all have the morals of alley cats — any Tom will do — flit from man to man and only use their money to change their bodies and buy $1000 dollar shoes for their kids they sure are not helping those that need help. Yes, Planned Parenthood is evil and those people who run it … Will have them answer to God for what they have done … all I can say is God have mercy on all of us because we are not all like that.”

Oh, you can bet your sweet bippy heartlanders were on a tear.

Get Out!

Ilhan Omar

Flyover folks do not like – at all – Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. This week, the dislike escalated into calls for deportation – and those were just about the nicest of them. Ms. Omar had a busy week, from calling for defunding of police to demanding it was time to take America down to nothing: No Constitutional Republic, no economy, just willy-nilly sharia law enforced paradise. It went over as expected.

Texan Glen Dikes was the calmest: “Because of what is in my heart and in whom I FOLLOW, I will not share what I truly feel SHOULD be said. Out of kindness, she should be removed from any part of government. We have more hate mongers than we need! Vote her out!”

But there was another sentiment afoot – and was much more supported. From North Carolina, Donald LaMontagne offered, “That women does not deserve to walk on American soil, vote her out!” And one spunky gal in Chicago simply said, “It’s that woman has a come to Allah meeting – before her deportation hearing.”

Joe Biden

Heavy Sigh
The final two major bones of contention in flyover country were inspired by the man who may or may not be all there and that damn little bug that seems to come back around whenever the economy tries to bounce back.

“The pandemic is that this president has no intercourse whatsoever,” mumbled and stumbled former Vice President Joe Biden on MSNBC, making the rounds again as the deadly virus is once again finding its way to cities that had hosted BLM riots and protests. It’s different now, several weeks after Joe’s original slip of the tongue – the silent majority has lost that “bless his heart” concern. Instead, demanding he just go away and take that blasted killer bug with him. In the words of one frustrated patriot, “This was supposed to be over in June. We’ve been Julyed to.”

HUNTER BIDEN STILL OWN 10% STOCK IN CHINESE COMPANY
ANDREW KERR, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, July 05, 2020

The Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners updated its business records on April 20 to remove Hunter Biden as a member of its board of directors, but he continues to hold a 10% ownership stake in the company through his LLC, Chinese business records show.

Hunter Biden’s departure from BHR’s board was submitted to China’s National Credit Information Publicity System (NCIPS) more than six months after he pledged to relinquish his position with the firm “on or by October 31,” according to Qixinbao and Baidu, two independent services that provide registration information on Chinese corporations based on NCIPS filings.

The records also show that Hunter Biden continues to hold a 10% equity stake in BHR through his company, Skaneateles LLC, as of Friday, a position he maintains despite a pledge in December from his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, that none of his family members would “be engaged in any foreign business” if he is elected president in November.

The Biden campaign did not respond when asked if the candidate will call on his son to relinquish his equity stake in the Chinese private equity firm.

BHR manages the equivalent of $2.1 billion in assets, according to its website. Hunter Biden began serving as an unpaid member of BHR’s board when it was founded in 2013, and in October 2017 he obtained his equity stake in the firm with a $420,000 investment, according to a statement issued by his lawyer, George Mesires, in October.

BHR’s business records with the NCIPS were updated on April 20 to reflect Hunter Biden’s departure from its board less than one week after the Daily Caller News Foundation reported on April 14 that his name was still listed as a member of the firm’s board at the time and that no evidence had yet surfaced to prove that Biden had actually relinquished his position with the company.

In response to that report, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, released a one-sentence letter he received from BHR CEO Jonathan Li dated April 17 stating that Hunter Biden “no longer serves as an unpaid director on the board of Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. effective from October 2019.” (RELATED: Chinese Firm’s Letter On Hunter Biden’s Resignation Raises More Questions Than It Answers)

Mesires provided the letter to Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler, who tweeted that Hunter Biden’s continued presence on BHR’s business records with the Chinese government at the time was due to “an apparently outdated database entry.”

Li’s letter did not specify the exact date in October that Hunter Biden ceased serving as an unpaid director of BHR. Mesires has refused multiple requests by the DCNF for a copy of Hunter Biden’s actual letter of resignation from the firm’s board.

Mesires did not respond when asked if Hunter Biden intends to relinquish his 10% equity stake in BHR.

DEMOCRATS WILL SACRIFICE AMERICANS TO WIN THE PRESIDENCY
By William L. Gensert, May 6, 2020

We were first told we must “flatten the curve.” Then, as the curve flattened, they explained we needed to “test everyone.” That gave away the game. America is a nation of 330 million citizens victimized by the Chinese plague. To acquiesce to the new rules, each person would need to be tested not once, but probably at least twice or even three times. To accomplish this monumental task, we would need at least a billion tests. The amount of time necessary to produce, execute, and evaluate each test is not only incalculable, but unfathomable.

The census takes years to complete when all that is required are answers to a few questions. Or, as an alternative, grab a keyboard and time how long it takes to press the “space” key 1 billion times.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If you need examples, just look at Newsom, Whitmer, and Mills. No, they are not a trio of serial killers from the 1940s or a law firm hired by the Clinton campaign to set up Donald Trump. Nothing so glamorous -- they are the United States governors of California, Michigan, and Maine, respectively. All three are in good standing with their party (D) and the media -- and they have each succumbed to the maddening allure of their inner Stalin, demonically pursuing dreams of total control.

They are not the only ones. There is also Andrew Cuomo (D), New York State. He jumped into the national spotlight derby when he talked about his dear senescent mother and how America had to shut down because people like her were at risk. It was deft use of the airwaves to launch his bid to replace Biden.

Then he ordered nursing homes in New York State to accept COVID-19 infected patients, putting the most vulnerable of our populace at risk -- to expected results.

It is as if each state is trapped in a dystopian version of It’s a Wonderful Life where everywhere reigns a Mr. Potter trying to force us into Pottersville so we can be controlled and ruled. Forget Clarence, we are all George Bailey now.

It is not just our elected betters who have assumed the mantle of tyrannical ways and means detrimental to our well-being, or at least, thoroughly disconnected from rationality and any pretense of fairness.

Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook have all decided to restrict what the average man can and cannot hear or read. Control of information is the bailiwick of dictators. This particular Chinese bat zoonosis has fostered the worst millenarian instincts in our Democrat governors and social media. The latent tendencies were always there; all that was needed was a good crisis that they would not let go to waste.

It is elitism at its worst -- because once we have been convinced that rule by the elite is necessary, it is a small step of minimal social distance, eagerly enforced, for them to acknowledge publicly to us plebes, that it is they who are the elite -- and they should rule.

Newsom, Whitmer, Mills, Cuomo, and Pritzker, as well as Lightfoot, De Blasio, et al., want to be seen as duly elected legitimate leaders exercising the will of the people -- for their own good.

Yet, let’s face it, these little dictators, when they look in the mirror at night (after they have finished asking, “Are you talking to me?”), they see themselves as president. And not just any president -- one drafted by a terrified populace with the understanding that survival depends upon their sage wisdom, astounding brilliance, and unequal bravery.

Like Obama, they long to be Lincoln, FDR, Wilson, and George Washington all rolled into one. Yet they cannot avoid their innate tendencies to rule rather than lead -- to remind us little people, the smelly deplorables who are darn lucky to have them, to shut up and do as we are told.

Are they leaders or tyrants? Certainly, they are not leaders. But are they despots? One is reminded of Archie Bunker’s definition of a “hermaphrodite”: “too much of both and not enough of either.”

What they are is “company men,” doing their best to make sure America does not reopen one day earlier than November 3, 2020. They know what gets them paid, and they know they need to steal the presidency from a Donald Trump, who will not play their game. To gain the executive office, they must ruin the economy and bring misery, destruction and even death to as many Americans as is within their power to do so.

If people must suffer, if people must die, well then, it will be for a good cause: the fundamental transformation of the United States of America.

For Democrats, while the loss of one American life is a tragedy, the sacrifice of millions is an opportunity.

Reprinted with permission by the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com
Please follow the author on Twitter @williamlgensert -- really, please…

MAXINE WATERS LET OBAMA CAT OUT OF THE BAG IN 2013
By Joe Herring, May 31, 2019

When assembling a cabal, prudence dictates that one choose the participants with an eye toward circumspection. After all, a loudmouth is not the best repository for your darkest secrets.

President Barack Obama may be about to learn that lesson the hard way.

In 2010, following the roughshod passage of Obamacare, the American people during the midterm elections unambiguously expressed their disgust with high-handed government edicts. A furious populace handed a solid House majority to Republican leadership, who promptly squandered the opportunity, never missing a chance to stand down, pledging unconvincingly to "fight on the next one."

Epithets swirled like leaves in a dust devil. Spinelessness was given a new and deeper meaning, and dissatisfaction with the "establishment" went from an undercurrent to a raging flood.

Through it all, our Republican leadership still surrendered faster than a French tank battalion as the Left rolled across the nation virtually unopposed.

Even the 2012 presidential race saw Republican nominee Mitt Romney repeatedly fail to press his advantage whenever Obama stumbled, almost as if he was opting to wait until his opponent regained his footing before resuming the fight.

Why? What prompted such haplessness among elected and aspiring Republicans? That question has haunted observers for years, with countless answers proffered and all found lacking.

Perhaps even more puzzling was the unprecedented departure of a great many incumbent Republicans immediately following the election of Donald Trump, a president of their own party. Why would these politicos be "retiring" in droves just when they finally have real power?

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), one of the left wing's most prominent and vocal figures, has a 30-year history of ill advised, frothing rhetoric. "Auntie Maxine" is atop no one's list of vise-lipped confidantes, yet because of her prominence, she is clued in on much of the darker machinations of the Democratic Party and its backers. Occasionally, she reveals more than intended. February 2013 was one of those times.

From Roland Martin's television show:

The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life[.] ... That's going to be very, very powerful[.] ... That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They're going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can't get around it. And he's [President Obama] been very smart. It's very powerful what he's leaving in place.

Many observers at the time (myself included) found this statement a bit of a head-scratcher, as the database to which Ms. Waters referred was not immediately apparent. Personally, I assumed she was speaking of Obama's prodigious campaign organization, perhaps exaggerating the information gleaned from the campaign's wide-ranging social media contacts.

In any case, the comment drifted from collective memory in fairly short order and remained forgotten until just the other day, when it elbowed its way to the forefront of my consciousness.

Now, back to the explanation of previously inexplicable behavior on the part of Republicans under Obama.

In the pages of American Thinker recently, the commendable work of Sundance of the Conservative Treehouse has been featured. He has doggedly documented the publicly available information suggesting our law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies had been weaponized against the political opponents of the Left (Trump especially, but not exclusively) in a spying scheme that features international participants from among our own allies.

Combining this documentation with the revelations from D.C. super-lawyer Joe DiGenova that this illegal surveillance and data-gathering operation had been in full swing far longer than anyone suspected, dating back to just before the election of 2012, and you have the bones of the most egregious plot of sedition our nation has ever seen, one involving the takeover of the federal government by use of blackmail.

Taken in light of the previously opaque comments from Auntie Maxine, one can't help but wonder whether the "database like no one has ever seen before" is in fact the result of the operation DiGenova references. Waters's description certainly fits.

Whenever there is scandal among the high levels of an administration, the first question that springs to mind is invariably "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

In the case of Obama and the illegal abuse of America's intel and investigatory powers to gather information on his political opponents, it appears we need only ask Auntie Maxine, who helpfully told us six years ago that Obama was in on it from the outset.

The author writes from Nebraska and welcomes visitors to his website at dailyherring.com.

JOHN KERRY SPITS IN TRUMP'S FACE -- WE WILL NOT GO 'AMERICA FIRST'
By Robert Donachie, /20/2018

Former Secretary of State John Kerry warned President Donald Trump Sunday that Democrats are not afraid to go against his “America First” policies.

“We won’t win, any of us, ultimately, by retreating within our borders, by focusing on our own nations only, or by going it alone,” Kerry told those gathered at New York University’s Abu Dhabi’s commencement ceremony Sunday — a direct reference to the president’s “America First” trade and immigration policies.

Kerry served as the secretary of state for former President Barack Obama. He also, notably, was one of the key negotiators for the administration when it was finalizing the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump backed out of on May 8.

Kerry lashed out against the president in early May for withdrawing from the deal, calling the administration out for stopping a “working” strategy.

American politics has become “almost all accusatory and all bombastic,” the former secretary of state told those gathered Sunday, arguing we are at the point where we can’t even “agree on what the facts are.”

“No matter how big or how many the challenges, I want you to leave here today confident about our ability to win that future,” Kerry said Sunday. “Every single problem we face is created by human choices. And to the best of my knowledge, those problems can also be solved by human choices.”

Article reprinted with permission from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

COSA SINISTRA: THE LEFT AS CRIME FAMILY
By David Prentice January 8, 2018

The left indeed has become a family. Unfortunately, it often resembles the Gotti crime family (hat tip: Larry Schweikart).

Let's face it: Republicans have their share of corruption, but what the left has become is not tinged with the normal shortcomings of humanity. It's become criminal.

Literally. Fully. And seriously.

Let's look at a few shades of leftist criminality. I don't mean the common finger-pointing, where leftists claim that anything done by the center-right is "criminal." Like being for tax cuts. Being pro-life. Or against illegal immigration. Voting for Trump was criminal. The left thinks anyone to its right is criminal.

But most sane people know that's not true. It's hyperbole for the sake of cowing those who hold differing opinions. It's a political smear writ large – and, might I say, projection. Leftist often accuse others of doing what they do. Not only does it help them feel better about themselves, but it's a strategy to gain and hold power over others.

In itself, that mindset isn't essentially criminal. Maybe you could say it's a shade of gray or misdemeanor. But therein lies the first step on the road to where they ended up. They begin by stepping across a line, and they wake up fully criminal. Let's follow the path downward.

The early Clinton escapades weren't the outcome of being Boy Scouts. Using political influence to do a land deal in Arkansas, or to gain $100,000 in the commodity market for being the governor's wife, was a pretty good sign of who they are – as were Bill's early sexual predations and Hillary's early persecution of the women he used.

The thuggishness of Barack was clear early on. There was his land deal, wherein he enriched himself with Tony Rezko in Chicago. All his political wins came by nefariously taking out his political opponents rather than beating them fairly in the arena of ideas. Everyone should have known.

They all got away with their less than honest early deals but were awarded more power as a result of their nefarious actions. The left loved their ability to lie as they skated through the finish line unscathed.

The next big step up the ladder for the Clintons was becoming president. Posing as the married version of Jimmy Stewart playing Mr. Smith, they simply dug into the seediest side of politics. Having succeeded in the small pay-to-play of Arkansas, they let it all loose on Washington, D.C.

The Clintons were the ones to begin the full politicization of the DOJ. Remember when they fired every single attorney at the DOJ, replacing them with their own loyalists? That was 1993. Our cheerleading leftist media said nothing. After all, they were kindred souls staying silent in the face of shared corruption. Then there was the matter of the famous FBI files the Clintons pilfered, the secret files that illegally gave them dirt (and leverage) on their political opponents. Yeah, Bill, "a bureaucratic snafu." And no, that's not what it was. It was simply aggrandizement of criminal power.

They would go on to trading secrets of rocket technology to the Chinese for political donations – a deal that would advance Chinese missile capacity twenty years overnight. I remember Tim Russert pleading on Meet the Press" for the media to start reporting because "this was really happening." Well, they got away with that, too – along with a host of other illegal and nasty activities.

Barack had his share of shady dealings once he hit D.C., but was a bit more circumspect in hiding what he was doing. Nurtured under the Chicago political machine, the master school of pay-to-play politics, everyone should have known the kind of corrupt monster he was. Instead, he convinced boatloads of people, and a gullible, like-minded media, that he was some kind of light-worker who healed the Earth.

Under that guise, he was scorching the earth.

He began his funneling of money to leftist causes right away with his "stimulus package," stimulating and filling the coffers of his pay-to-playmates. Many of his bundlers simply took money, as they did in the Solydra solar deal, absconding with millions of dollars and producing nothing. His union leaders scored tons of money. As the rest of the U.S. floundered, his already well heeled donors were paid handsomely from this illicit mess. To this day, we don't know where most of that money went. Uncle Joe Biden just turned a blind eye. And no one suffered for his ugly, illegal collusion to steal from the public trough.

Contrary to media and Democratic Parry claims, St. Barack didn't have a scandal-free presidency. Far from it – most of it was nothing but scandal, unreported by the fawning press. It was a time period where the media refused to call out the obvious and many scandals for what they were. Let's just say they were kindred souls, fellow travelers, the media and St. Barack. Friends and bundlers receiving money for nothing.

Fast and Furious. The IRS targeting. The weaponizing of the bureaucracies. Just to name a few. Heck, if a leftist political fact-check site calls your Obamacare lie the "lie of the year," it had to be the lie of the century.

Make no mistake: the Clinton-Obama axis was criminal already, pay-to-play was their M.O., and they had gotten away with it for years.

Let's fast-forward to the heavy stuff. And this is the stuff that is darkly criminal, no shades of gray here.

The Clinton Foundation. Clearly, they enriched themselves with pay-to-play schemes. The reports of Hillary's dealings as secretary of state with those who paid the Clinton Foundation are legion. Documents upon documents introducing themselves to Madame Secretary were earmarked by a staffer "FOB." This was the sign of favor, the way to get to see her, the way to get favors in return. You had to be a donor. FOB, indeed.

Uranium One, the Mother of All Scandals, is typical. This was a matter of one hundred fifty million dollars, mysteriously donated by Russian interests, who benefited after all the parties in the U.S. government signed off. Bill's speaking fees in Moscow were Over 600K per speech – double his normal pay-to-play fee.

The Trump Dossier. Paid for by the Hillary campaign. Used as a pretense to spy on the Trump campaign. Used as a pretense for the so-called collusion case.

All of this is deeply criminal – nor gray, lacking even the slightest hint of another explanation. And we now know that all these cases are being investigated and have been for months. We now know there are four separate criminal cases being investigated with Clinton involvement.

St. Barack? He's been having a great time partying with the Hollywood moguls, all the while thinking his breee-illiant "insurance" plan to get rid of Trump was on.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum: all his fellow travelers are being outed. The cadre of FBI agents and DOJ political partisans: Strzok, McCabe, Ohr, Comey, Brennan, and so many others are being outed for their own forms of, yes, criminality. Helping with the phony Steele Trump dossier while you are high up at the FBI or DOJ is criminal. Going to the FISA courts to unmask Trump campaign associates based on the dossier is criminal. Turning over that information to other higher-ups in the Obama administration – that's criminal. This is the kind of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes.

For all those who have been asking where Jeff Sessions has been, let me say he's been thankfully quiet. He's gotten a lot of ill deserved negativity. But he's a busy man. As you can see, so many investigations, so little time. Likewise, the Republican investigating committees are now doing their part. And Judicial Watch. God bless them all.

Sean Hannity calls this the year of the boomerang.

I'm calling it the year of the sting. The chickens are coming home to roost. Most of these people are going to jail. They committed criminal acts.

It took four years to dot the Is and cross the Ts to put away John Gotti. It may take that long again, but it's happening, and happening as I write. As we sit here, the Democrats are suddenly running from the Trump dossier. They're all spinning with flushed faces, trying to excuse (or more often ignore) the criminality of their heroes. The evidence is accumulating. They are beginning to whine about a "political investigation." To all of you leftists who will be running away, it's not political; it was actually criminal. And you let it happen with your dewy-eyed worship. As you pointed fingers, criminality was being done by your side.

We don't know a lot of the details, but the greatest political sting in history is ongoing. It's been dripping out for over a month and will continue to do so. It's going to be epic. And it will devastate the Democratic Party and its base.

But America will rejoice. Criminals are going to be brought to their knees.

Reprinted with permission from the American thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/cosa_sinistra_the_left_and_its_many_crimes.html#ixzz53cHhJCo5

DEMOCRATS ARE DARING PRESIDENT TRUMP TO FIRE MUELLER AND ROSENSTEIN
By Don Surber, June 18, 2017 -- http://donsurber.blogspot.com

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha (inhales) hahahahahahahahaha.

Go ahead, punks. Make Trump's day.

From Breitbart:

Let's get this impeachment over with, once and for all.

Schiff is such a liar that he could work for CNN.

Lieu is only an MSNBC-level prevaricator.

Impeach, try him, vote, and see how the public reacts.

President Trump should call their childish bluff and just fire Mueller and Rosenstein.

Reprinted with permission. DonSurber@GMail.com

HOW DEMOCRATS CREATED AMERICA'S SOCIAL CASTE SYSTEM
By Michael Bargo, Jr., September 7, 2015

Hundreds of years from now when academics have the objectivity to see what has been going on in the U.S., researchers may see the past two hundred years as the time when the Democrat Party of the U.S. created a politically convenient social caste system.

The U.S. was established upon the core belief that all persons are equal. That government should be composed of representatives who come from all levels of society, that there should be no elite political class. Nor should there be any permanent underclass.

Historically, nation states have established societies made up of at least three castes. At the bottom, economically and politically speaking, there is the lowest class. In India this has been called the Dalit or untouchable class. They were expected to perform the lowest paid jobs, those that required the least skill and education. The largest class, what we would today call the middle class, is the class that both contains the most persons and performs most of the work in the economy, ranging from skilled labor to skilled professional work. The highest class is always the class of political elites. They seek to preserve the caste system that keeps them in power, and they always endeavor to force the middle class and lower class, or the masses, to support them financially.

It is interesting, using the language of sociologists and political scientists, to apply these caste concepts to the Democrat Party’s behavior.

For over two hundred years Democrats have worked to create and maintain a low caste based upon race. For example, it was Democrats who wanted to maintain the South’s system of race-based labor exploitation known as slavery. In the 1820s Democrats who were anxious to maintain the low caste refused to follow federal laws that banned the existence of this caste in new states. America’s Civil War was not started by the North to abolish slavery. Rather, it was started by the South in order to preserve slavery.

American public universities are encouraged to continually create new paradigms of both political control and caste system maintenance. Social constructs, like scientific constructs, change through time and it is necessary to constantly renew the power of government and its authority. One example is the notion of “climate change” which enables universities to receive grant money.

This “caste creep” has been happening under Democrats since they, like political elites for millennia before them, want to create a low caste that is dependent on them. They do not see an economic underclass as a long-term issue of economic oppression. Rather, they see an underclass as a way of keeping themselves in power.

It is startling to consider that southern Democrats essentially treated black southerners in a manner similar to the way untouchables are treated in India. They were forced, by law, to attend different schools, to keep away from whites on trains and buses; and to use their own water fountains and bathrooms as if whites would be contaminated by having any contact with them.

A century later, in the early 1900s, Democrats brought former slaves into the Midwestern, eastern, and northeastern cities and placed them into carefully planned, racially segregated communities; a strategy called “apartheid” when it was practiced in South Africa.

Once the civil rights movement mandated that Democrats establish better employment conditions for minority black residents of the U.S., Democrats once again engaged in another startling and shameful effort to maintain their political control by creating another low caste: immigrant Hispanics. Democrats encouraged persons from Mexico and Central America to flee their impoverished nations and move to Democrat-controlled cities. They promised them “sanctuary” from immigration law in their cities, and supported them with benefits such as subsidized housing, education and health care.

And like the blacks who moved north, these illegal immigrants found themselves forced into racially segregated communities. While housing segregation is technically illegal, Democrats were able to create a legal loophole by saying that these new low caste members were entitled to have representation in Congress.

Today Hispanics in Chicago are concentrated into 14 supermajority Hispanic Wards and their daughters are becoming single mothers at a slightly higher rate than blacks. Furthermore, their employment opportunities are limited to low-paid jobs no one else will do. The schools run by Democrat-controlled unions are so dysfunctional that Hispanics drop out of high school at a rate twice as high as blacks. This high dropout rate among minority blacks and Hispanics may be intentional. Proof of this is that Democrats never provide minority students with other educational choices. If they did have a good education they would move away from the racially segregated barrios and ghettoes and the caste system would gradually disappear.

Democrats have been able to maintain this caste strategy by manipulating the perceptions and expectations of the masses. Their goal has been, as Orwell wrote in 1984, to convince voters to hold two contradictory concepts in mind at once: that Democrats are the Party that helps the poor and that poverty is not created by government but by capitalism.

To this day, many blacks and Hispanics do not realize that the poverty and racial segregation they endure has been created by Democrats. Democrats preach equality but seek to make the social castes unequal. This is done to maintain their political power and control over the nation.

For their efforts in maintaining this caste system government workers are rewarded with highly paid jobs. These government jobs serve two important functions: to maintain the teachings of the government, and to provide campaign contributions to the Party. Today four of the top seven contributors to national campaigns are members of the Democrat Party’s government unions.

In Illinois, a Democrat dominated state, by 2020 there will be over 25,000 retired political elites who will collect over $100,000 a year in a pension. This enables them to spend up to half of their adult life forcing lower castes to work for them.

The idea that Democrats have exclusive control over those economically dependent upon government entitlements is widely held. And if one accepted that Democrats want to control these dependents, it is a small step to realize and accept that they have actively created these dependents. The realization among black leaders that black lives don’t matter arises from the caste system created by Democrats and their progressive liberal policies.

It is unsettling to realize that a political party would create a social caste system. It is particularly disturbing to see how this is done by the Democrat Party that works to maintain the image of promoting social diversity and inclusion. But then this image may be an essential part of the effort.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/09/how_democrats_created_americas_social_caste_system.html#ixzz3l4AIGqrw

As I enjoy my twilight years, I am often struck by the inevitability that the party must end. There will be a clear, cold morning when there isn't any "more." No more hugs, no more special moments to celebrate together, no more phone calls just to chat. It seems to me that one of the important things to do before that morning comes, is to let every one of your family and friends, know that you care for them by finding simple ways to let them know your heartfelt beliefs and the guiding principles of your life so they can always say, "He was my friend, and I know where he stood."

So, just in case I'm gone tomorrow, please know this: I voted against that incompetent, lying, flip-flopping, insincere, double-talking, radical socialist, terrorist excusing, bleeding heart, narcissistic, scientific and economic moron currently in the White House!

Participating in a gun buy-back program because you think that criminals have too many guns is like having yourself castrated because you think your neighbors have too many kids.

Regards, Clint
Go Ahead Make My Day-Pass it on!

DAD, THE DEMS, THE PROSPECTOR AND HIS OLD FRIEND
By Lloyd Marcus, October 9, 2014

My 86-year-old preacher dad told me a great story. Surprisingly, it was a new parable rather than one dad forgot that he told me numerous times before.
Dad said a prospector worked his land digging for gold. Every Saturday, the prospector would take his gold/gold dust to town and cash it in. One Saturday, he bumped into an old high school friend who had fallen upon hard financial times. The prospector graciously invited his friend to bring a shovel and dig for gold on his land. Generously, the prospector told his friend that he could keep all the gold he uncovered.

Come Monday morning, the prospector's friend was a no show. The friend did not show up the entire week. Cashing in his gold on Saturday, the prospector saw and approached his friend, “What happened? I looked for you all week.” The friend replied, “Do you know how much a shovel costs these days?”

Dad burst into laughter at the trifling attitude of the prospector's old friend. I laughed with Dad while seizing the opportunity to tell my lifelong Democrat father that the same trifling attitude is promoted by the Democrats disguised as compassion and is embraced by millions.

The prospector's behavior is Republican, offering his impoverished friend (the poor), not a handout, but a golden opportunity. He offered his friend the dignity, self-respect and joy of earning his own living with endless possibilities. Remember, the old friend was told he could keep all the gold he uncovered.

The old friend's behavior is that of an Obama, Democrat, Hollywood and MSM (mainstream media) indoctrinated entitlement junkie. How dare his rich prospector friend expect him to acquire a shovel. The prospector is obviously white, out-of-touch, racist, sexist and homophobic. This prospector seems like the kind of jerk who thinks it reasonable to expect all Americans to show an ID to participate in the American privilege of voting.

Upon further consideration, the filthy rich SOB prospector is probably Republican, conservative and Christian. No wonder the insensitive selfish hate-filled jerk prospector expected his old high school friend to get a shovel without government assistance and show up for work.

Folks, the Democratic Party would place the prospector's old friend who lacked the initiative to acquire a shovel on a level just below sainthood, considering him to be the victim/hero in the story. This is the way Democrats view minorities and the poor; expecting very little, refusing to hold them accountable for any of their socioeconomic woes.

As a matter of fact, the less initiative and self-reliance the better. Democrats simply keep the barely-enough-to-get-by handouts coming, gin up class envy and hatred for the prospector; and promise to punish him. Their sheep, who are in sync with their master's voice, continue to vote Democrat.

If you dare suggest that people stop defrauding the government with false food stamp and disability claims; that blacks stop dropping out of school, shooting each other in epidemic numbers and stop having babies out of wedlock, the Democrats will vilify you. Their response is “Easy for you to say,” you racist insensitive jerk.

The Democratic Party advocates lowering the bar culturally, morally and in every area of American life. The Left/Democrats deem any suggestion of holding people to a standard as mean-spirited, racist, and judgmental -- and dare I say, Christian.

Back to the prospector: the Left would argue that because the dirt road to the town where the prospector cashed in his gold was etched by wagon-wheels, horses and the foot steps of many, the mayor should confiscate the prospector’s gold and share it with everyone.

Remember when Obama scolded small business owners for taking pride in building their businesses? Obama said, “You didn't build that.” Obama claimed that government built roads providing infrastructure for business to operate, thus making it only fair that he redistribute wealth. Deadbeats like the prospector's old friend stood up and cheered, “Obama!..Obama!”

Clearly, the prospector, the Republican, is the good guy in my dad's story. He showed real compassion for his old high school friend by offering him a “hand up” rather than a “handout”.

By addicting as many Americans as possible to government assistance, Democrats increase their political power. Their tried and true tactic is to brand the prospector as the devil, kick him in the teeth and encourage their ill-informed duped base to do the same. Insidiously evil.

For this reason, I am a black conservative/Republican

Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American; Chairman, Conservative Campaign Committee

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/10/dad_the_dems_the_prospector_and_his_old_friend.html

A major concern of progressives is their supposed interest in the fate of the poor. They purport to be the champions of the poor. But the truth is that they need the poor more than the poor need them, in a symbiotic relationship. As much as 75% of the money allocated to the poor is consumed by the vast bureaucracies that administer this aid. These agencies are actually job programs for college graduates who would often find it difficult to find employment in the private sector. The late William Raspberry wrote a column dealing with Gina, a 14 year old living in a group home, who had a caseworker, a psychotherapist and a court appointed lawyer. These caregivers have to be supported by a number of clerical workers and supervisors who compose the vast helping bureaucracy. If the "poor" were suddenly to disappear they would have to redefine their definition of poverty in order to maintain their sinecures. And that is exactly what they have done.

Advocates for the poor do not ordinarily live by what they preach. The President has informed us that, “We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times.” Yet during a recent trip to China the first family and their staff of about 70 stayed in the presidential suite at the Westin Chaoyang Hotel, which USA Today reports costs about $8,400 a night. Clearly the elite live by a different standard and have for a long time. Communist defector Victor Kravchenko recalled that during the famine in the Soviet Union, “I found myself among men who could eat ample and dainty food in full view of starving people not only with a clear conscience but with a feeling of righteousness, as if they were performing a duty to history.”

What is poverty? The late political scientist Edward Banfield provided four degrees of poverty: destitution, which is lack of income sufficient to assure physical survival and to prevent suffering from hunger, exposure, or remediable or preventable illness; want, which is lack of enough income to support essential welfare; hardship, which is lack of enough to prevent acute persistent discomfort or inconvenience. To this he added a fourth: relative deprivation which is a lack of enough income, status, or whatever else may be valued to prevent one from feeling poor in comparison to others. This last category is elastic enough to include millionaires who covet the possessions and power of billionaires. One important category of poverty Banfield does not mention is psychological or spiritual poverty. This is the most significant form of poverty in an affluent society when physical needs are easily met.

Where do America's "poor" stand in this scale of poverty? In a nation of over 300 million people there are undoubtedly cases of destitution, want and hardship. However, these cases appear to be the exception. As former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman stated, "More people die in the United States of too much food than of too little." According to William Bennett, "Poor people in America have a higher standard of living than middle-class Americans of previous generations." According to the Heritage Foundation, 80% of poor households have air conditioning. Nearly three-fourths have a car or truck, and 31% have two or more. Two-thirds of poor households have cable or satellite TV with 18% having a big screen television. And .6% of poor households own a Jacuzzi. The Los Angeles Times reported the California's "poor" spent $69 million using their welfare payments on at least 14 cruise ships sailing from Miami and other ports, at Disney World, in Hawaii and Guam and at hotels in Las Vegas. Many of the "poor" enjoy luxuries that the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt would envy. Heather MacDonald claimed in 2000 that New York City spent $790 million on the homeless, or $39,500 per person. According to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation the U.S. has spent over $20.7 trillion on means-tested welfare since the beginning of the War on Poverty.

The failure to eliminate "poverty" is a result of the faulty assumptions made about the poor. Many believe that the poor are "just like us" except for the fact that they do not have money. Even such an astute observer as George Orwell believed that providing material support for the poor would improve their behavior. "Give people a decent house and they will soon learn to keep it decent. Moreover, with a smart-looking house to live up to, they improve in self-respect and cleanliness, and their children start life with better chances." It has become obvious that this is not the case. The "poor" have a different set of values condemning them to poverty regardless of how much money is lavished on them. A professional athlete may make $300 million during his career and yet retire in poverty. As Banfield has stated, "the capacity of the radically improvident to waste money is almost unlimited."

This brings us to the last form of poverty: psychological or spiritual poverty. Mother Teresa commented at Harvard, “America is not a rich country. America is a desperately spiritually poor country.” This “spiritual” poverty hits the poor particularly hard. Vladimir Bukovsky noted this upon his arrival in the United States. Having been born and raised in “genuine” poverty he noted that he, “detected everywhere the spirit of ostentatious defiance. The worse it looks, the better, because society is to blame.” American poor made a concerted effort to exhibit their poverty. Advocate for the poor complain that there are "food deserts" in the inner cities. It might also be noted that these areas suffer from being “hardware store deserts.” Yet there is no shortage of nail salons and liquor stores in these neighborhoods. The market determines what people are interested in buying. Tennis shoes, costing several hundred dollars, a pair are not marketed to middle class youth. The target market is inner city youth.

Myron Magnet tells the story of author Amy Tan’s sister and brother-in-law who arrived from China in 1983. After only four years in America, they owned a car, three televisions and a house. They also had two children in college. They accomplished this all with dead-end jobs: he washed dishes and she helped manage a takeout restaurant. Reporter Jacob A. Riis described the attitude of Jewish immigrants early in the 20th century: “The poorest Hebrew knows – the poorer he is, the better he knows it – that knowledge is power, and power as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long, is what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day- and night-schools are crowded with his children, who learn rapidly and with ease. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark back-yard, has its school and its school master, with his scourge to intercept those who might otherwise escape.” According to Magnet, the successes of present day Asian immigrants “contains an implicit reproach” to the indigenous poor. Many arrive with little capital and a poor command of the language, but through hard work become successful.

Innumerable studies have been conducted on poverty's causes and cures. Perhaps the assertion of President Franklin Roosevelt says it best: “Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” Certainly progressive academics are aware of the consequences of their policies. Perhaps that is their ultimate goal.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy, Algora Publishing, 2013. http://johndietrichbooks.blogspot.com/

If you have some well-to-do friends who don't think their tax rates are high enough and would not object if their rates went up, you may want to suggest a couple of possibilities to them to solve this problem. First, they can file their tax returns without claiming any exemptions or deductions. If this isn’t sufficient, here is an excerpt from Publication 17 of the IRS that will provide them with unlimited possibilities for paying more:

I would suggest that they not follow the suggestion in the last paragraph because it kind of defeats the goal of paying more taxes.

Physicists and others seeking to unlock the mysteries of the universe posit many theories about what exists beyond our night sky. One of the more intriguing theories is that our universe is just one of many universes, or dimensions, in which our doppelganger encounters different experiences and thus, different outcomes. Given the bizarre rhetoric being used by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and President Obama lately, this theory is becoming all the more believable by the minute.

When confronted with the news that the economy has gotten worse under President Obama, both the President and Congresswoman have offered up answers that display a stunning disregard for what is happening with the economy. Failing the possibility that both have crossed into our dimension via a liberal wormhole, answers such as the economy is struggling due to the increased adoption of new-fangled job-killers such as ATMs or it has hit a soft patch because of the reluctance of conservatives to accept increased taxes in the form of an ever-increasing "fair share" can be seen for what they are: partisan spin.

The Democrats' calls for an increased "fair share," while excellent on the stump, will do nothing to spare the economy from the dreadful bleeding of jobs that has occurred during this administration. Wasserman Schultz is left with nothing that remotely resembles a success in the almost three years of the Obama administration so she must provide blinkered responses to the cold, hard facts: 1.9 million jobs have been lost, gasoline prices have more than doubled, and the debt has ballooned to an unsustainable $14 trillion under Democratic guidance. It is no wonder she is left to insist weakly that the Democrats have "turned the economy around."

In Weiner-esque fashion, President Obama's policies have been exposed. Left with the difficult task of selling the value of an economy that has gotten demonstrably worse, Wasserman Schultz can only pull the cord on her failsafe Democrat See-and-Say and repeat, pull, repeat. The results are the predictable complaints ranging from the natural disaster in Japan to Greece's eventual default, a crisis that Ms. Wasserman Schultz should watch closely for future spin when the U.S. meets a similar fate. By then, if a Democrat still holds the White House, she will surely resort to a "nothing to see here" redux of bumbling cop Frank Drebin from the Naked Gun movies.

The comedic cop routine would be an improvement, though, to the mainstay of liberal politics: accusations of racism. Simply pointing out the massive failure of the stimulus package and the Democrats' plan to turn the economy around now conjures up images of a return to Jim Crow laws and the mistreatment of African-Americans in Wasserman Schultz's alternate universe. A shameful, libelous non sequitur is now the last refuge of a Democrat when reality doesn't fit the liberal storyline where their policies are rousing successes even when evidence points to the contrary.

Still, that evidence is making even Wasserman Schultz and President Obama bow to reality. At a forum held by Politico.com, Wasserman Schultz claimed "ownership" of the economy on behalf of her fellow Democrats. That ownership presumably includes the wasted disaster that was the stimulus package which spent $1 trillion of borrowed money. At the time of passage, promises were made that the unemployment rate wouldn't climb over 8% if the bill passed and jobs would blossom from the tree of the Congressional spending spree. As is painfully obvious, this failed to materialize and led to the President's poor attempt at humor that "shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected." Outside of the President's deluded pied pipers, most Americans aren't laughing at the gargantuan waste and ineffectiveness of his policies.

With 2012 approaching, it appears unlikely that the economy will begin to turn around sufficiently enough for the President to fulfill Wasserman Schultz's silly claims of economic achievements. What remains then is the contemptible use of the race card against Republican critics and other worldly economic claims that can only be construed as accomplishments in the swamp of DC. Jobs and debt are the worries of the average voter and their doubts will be an electoral death knell for the President no matter their spin or accusations of racism. Then again, maybe President Obama and Debbie Wasserman Schultz know something the rest of us don't and the Recovery Summer is just one worldly dimension away.

Page reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/06/the_alternate_universe_of_democrats.html

At the moment, the Democrat Party is reeling like a boxer who's taken too many combinations to the body. The audience can sense a knockout, and the party's doing everything it can to prevent itself from falling face first to the mat.

The first combination came from a weakening economy which the Democrats have failed to attempt any form of repair. No instead, they have opted for a complete economic transformation from capitalism to statism. Consequently, the economy has only worsened.

The second combination landed from health-care. While both sides of the aisle have agreed that the status quo wasn't acceptable, liberals have manufactured a health-care crisis. They have told the American people that reform was needed immediately-so immediate that there was no time for discussion-and it could only be dealt with appropriately by means of a massive government takeover of the entire system. A majority of the American people don't believe them.

The third combination, hailed from national security, stunned the body. The American people thought that after eight years of security on their homeland, 9/11 was just a distant memory in our nation's history. We were wrong. Liberals have proven to not be the party of national security. We continue to be a nation at war abroad and now we're even more on alert at home as we've witnessed a rise in domestic terrorism. They are not keeping us safe.

Then just as the Democrats gathered themselves and believed that they could dodge any further punches and counter back with a strong left jab, by reaching closer to forcing their unpopular health-care reform legislation upon the nation, the fourth combination landed viciously.

The disclosure of Senator Harry Reid's racist comments towards Barack Obama during the 2008 Presidential Election have served as a devastating blow. The liberals' playbook of identity politics has served effectively to manipulate people to secure their votes, which they need to further advance their agenda. As a result of his comments, Reid has debunked the myth that liberals are the "pro-minority party" and revealed that his party is only pro-itself.

Now the audience is wondering, how much more can this lefty take?
Despite the party's damage control presentation as a united front, the various damaging combinations to the body have knocked off the masks that liberals have worn over their heads for years to sell themselves to the electorate. Now we see why they say in boxing, kill the body, the head will fall.

Definitely not as anything that is good for the nation. Although they will remain in power for the meantime, they are reeling, knowing that they're but a haymaker away from landing on the canvass.

J.C. Arenas is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and welcomes your comments at jcarenas.com

Immanuel Kant once observed that “he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.” I thought about Kant when I recently learned that the Obamas had graced their dog ‘Bo’ with a dog house shaped birthday cake made out of veal – that’s right, veal – the most expensive item on many a restaurant menu.

Winter is approaching and many American families find themselves struggling with severe job loss and a rather bleak vision of the normally festive holiday season. But over at the White House nothing is too good for the nation’s pampered first pet. Says Michelle:

“We had a really sweet celebration – [Bo] got a doghouse cake made out of veal stuff and he had his brother Cappy come over and we had party hats."

Veal stuff? Veal calves are usually brought straight from the auction arena by veal producers and placed immediately into a 2 by 5 foot stall. The calf lives so confined for the next 3 or 4 months unable to move and eats nothing but an iron poor liquid diet designed to prevent its tender meat from becoming too dark. The anemic calf is then taken away and slaughtered.

Veal gourmets might dispute Kant’s conclusion above but consider the following: if George and Laura Bush had been party to an effort to construct a dog house birthday cake made out of veal wouldn’t the left (and PETA) be screaming about cruelty and insensitivity at the White House, especially during these difficult economic times?

Will PETA be the next ACORN? Conservative blogs and websites have been working to uncover a scandal at PETA which has the potential to destroy the credibility of the radical animal-rights organization.

For example, at BigGovernment.com, Mary Grabar has written an expose on the organization. As she notes,

But PETA is not only engaged in legal pay-to-play, their relationships are highly suspicious. They are allies with groups which one would assume are hostile to their goals, and enemies with other companies one would assume should be allies. The question, of course, is ... "why?" As a recent Human Events article noted an interesting fact; PETA's "partner" VISA maintains prominent partnerships with Omaha Steaks and the Kentucky Derby. For obvious reasons, these partnerships seem to contradict PETA's radical goals.

As Human Events noted, "VISA's partnership with Omaha Steaks is such that when a person uses the card to buy a mail-order sampler box, Omaha Steaks receives a whopping 68 percent discount." That's a deal I could get interested in, but then again, I'm not a PETA member.

Here's the rub. According to PETA's worldview, VISA is not only funding a major distributor of animal products -- they are actually an accomplice to the promotion of eating a "slaughtered"animals.

Moreover, PETA recently put out a press release which makes the hypocrisy of these partnerships blatantly obvious:

If one subscribes to PETA's world view, they must logically also conclude that VISA is a partner, and therefore funder to companies and events that support and profit from some of the most egregious violations to animal rights.

But the PETA/VISA connection is not the only questionable "partnership" uncovered. Human Events also pointed out a similar contradiction in PETA's actions concerning its campaign against the Canadian Olympics. It notes, "Currently, PETA is running a campaign to pressure the Canadian government to end an annual seal hunt during which the animals are bludgeoned to death. This sport has been targeted by PETA, and a statement released to urge the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee ‘to use its clout to help stop the Canadian seal slaughter.'"

Similarly, it was interesting to find that VISA maintains a partnership with the Kentucky Derby, the most popular horse race in the world. PETA has made direct assertions to the public to avoid support of this "exploitative 'sport,'" yet does not directly confront one of its funders.

Clearly, PETA is willing to overlook a few minor flaws when partnerships have the potential to impact their bottom line. That would be fine if they had not attacked MasterCard for employing the same type of strategic partnerships. For example, MasterCard is a partner of Ringling Brothers Circus. In response, PETA attacked MasterCard renaming it, "NastyCard."

At the end of the day, PETA is another example of a liberal interest group which wears their ideals on their shoulder -- until you show them the money.

Georgia Arms replied to an e-mail in which I asked if the casings policy (where the Department of Defense would scrap used casings rather than sell them to ammunition manufacturers) was still in effect. They advised that the policy was changed after 5 days because of customer uproar to their elected officials in Washington. It shows that sometimes Washington does listen to the voters.

Sean Harkins, in the April 17, 2009 edition of The Alpena News, reported on Michigan Democratic Party Chair, Mark Brewer. He has been traveling through a dozen Northern Michigan counties to talk to local parties and attempt to sign up candidates. He said the Democrats are targeting the 36th and 37th district senate seats now held by Tony Stamas and Jason Allen. He is also searching for a candidate for the 106th district state house seat now held by Andy Neumann, an Alpena Democrat.

The Democrats apparently think the jobs being done by Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Pres. Barack Hussein Obama are so impressive that they deserve additional seats in the legislature and the State offices. We still have at least 75% of the people in our area employed. We must need to lower that some more. We still have some money left after paying taxes. We have to get that to the State, local and federal government as soon as possible. We should only be satisfied when everyone is equally poor and living on welfare.

Michael Calderone of Politico on Feb. 5, 2009, reported on a conversation between liberal radio host Bill Press and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who only believes in the 1st Amendment for Democrats, and is married to Tom Athans, a liberal talk radio executive.

Calderone reported on Feb. 11, 2009, that Stabenow has now backed off on the idea of hearings for radio accountability but that others in her party, including Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa have taken up the issue.

If Democrats can't compete in the marketplace of ideas, and succeed on talk radio, the answer is to make sure that in the only media market where Conservatives have an edge, the radio must be silenced.

Rep. Jack "Abscam" Murtha, of Pennsylvania, who accused Marines of cold-blooded murder in Iraq, charges that have been dismissed against the marines so accused, has long been closely tied to defense lobbyists, may have some trouble coming his way, according to a report by Emma Schwartz and Justin Rood of ABC News on Feb. 9, 2009.

The FBI has raided the Virginia headquarter of the PMA Group in November and in January, agents of the FBI, IRS, and Defense Criminal Investigative Service searched the office of Kuchera Industries and Kuchera Defense Systems, as well as the homes of the firms' founders. The two firms have received over $100 million in earmarks, thanks to Murtha's efforts.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has called Murtha one of the most corrupt members of Congress, for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from companies and writing them millions of dollars in earmarks. Murtha has declined to comment on the designation.

Like a lot of Democrats, former Washington mayor, Marion Barry, seems to have an aversion to paying taxes. According to a report by Brian Westley of the Associated Press on February 9, 2009, US Assistant Attorney Tom Zeno said Barry, who is a current District of Columbia Council member has failed to file his taxes on time for the 8th time in nine years. He is on probation for a previous conviction for failing to file his tax returns from 1999 to 2004. As a part of the plea bargain, he agreed to file future federal and local tax returns annually.

The prosecutors are trying to have him thrown into jail, or at the least, have his probation extended.

On Feb. 10, 2009 the Telegraph.co.uk from London reported on Joe Biden's latest gaffe. Joe Biden, in discussing the latest stimulus proposal said: "If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, if we stand up there and we really make the tough decisions, there's still a 30 percent chance we're going to get it wrong."

President Barack Obama, when questioned at his press conference on Feb. 9, 2009, as reporters started giggling about Biden's statement said: "You know, I don't remember exactly what Joe was referring to, not surprisingly." It could be a long four years for the perfect team.

A friend from Georgia recently went to a gun shop to try to buy ammunition. The place was packed. The owners finally told everyone trying to buy a gun to go to one of two salesmen, and anyone else to come to him. Everyone in the store, except for 3 people went to the salesmen. The high volume of gun sales has caused an ammunition shortage which will probably last till March. As our friend was leaving the store he saw a picture of Obama with the label "Salesman of the Month." It seems that those buyers are on the mark. On Feb. 25, 2009, ABC News reported that the Obama administration will seek to reinstate the "assault" weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration. For those who don't remember, an "assault" weapon is any semi-automatic that the liberals think is ugly.

Those of us who are "dish nuts" are stunned to learn from the guardian.co.uk on Jan. 5, 2009, that Waterford Wedgwood, the 250-year-old maker of luxury glassware and china was placed into bankruptcy.

The mayor of Waterford, Ireland, Jack Walsh, has warned that if production ceased at the Waterford crystal factory, it would be a "national disaster." The company is seeking new funding with the probability that it will have to turn over a controlling share of the company.

The Canada Free Press, on Monday, Jan. 5, 2009, noting that the liberal Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, trying to place the blame for the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiascoes on the Bush Administration and Republicans in general, located a videotape from a Fox News program showing the true story. Despite threats of a proprietary rights lawsuit if the videotape was run on You Tube, a video now appears on a conservative Canadian website, ProudToBeCanadian.CA clearly showing President Bush warning of the dangers in April 2001 and again in 2003. These calls were met with resistance from the House Finance Committee Chairman, Barney Frank, who vehemently denied any problems with the two entitled saying there was "no crisis." The requested legislation for controls was blocked by House Democrats and killed.

In April of 2005, Charles Schumer, liberal Democrat senator from New York dismissed similar warnings from then-Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, saying that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "did a very, very good job." The video can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM&NR=1

The dailytech.com reported on Jan. 1, 2009 that satellite observations of the sea ice over the 30 years of observation show that the level is the same as it was in 1979.

The data is being reported by the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.

Sea ice is floating and doesn't affect ocean levels, but due to its transient nature responds much faster to changes in temperature or precipitation and is therefore a useful barometer of changing conditions.

The earlier predictions this year that the North pole ice could melt entirely in 2008 were so wrong was attributed to colder temperatures, weaker winds, the fact that the new thinner ice grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The TimesOnline from the United Kingdom reported on Jan. 4, 2009, that residents of a model housing estate bankrolled by Hollywood celebrities and hand-built by Jimmy Carter, are complaining that it is falling apart.

Fairway Oaks, built in northern Florida by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a 17-day blitz, are known 8 years later for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.

A lawyer representing many of the 85 homeowners said that Habitat for Humanity should have told people that part of the estate had been built on a rubbish dump. One resident pulled up his floorboards to find rubbish 5 feet deep under his kitchen. Others complain of cracking walls and rotting door frames. The case claims the idea that using volunteers, rather than professional builders is causing as many problems as it solves.

HOW CRYPTO-MARXISM WON THE COLD WAR
By James Lewis, May 23, 2008

Today, for the first time in American history we have two --- count 'em, two --- hard-core Leftists running for the Democrat Party nomination. The Left hasn't had this kind of chance for power since Truman defeated Henry Wallace in 1948. Hillary and Obama are Marx twins who only differ in race and gender.

All the media tell us is how great it is to have a woman and a black man running for president. What those two really believe, where they learned their quasi-religion, where they derive their support, who else they want to raise to power, and what they will do if they get there --- all that doesn't even get discussed. All over the world, Leftist hearts are leaping at Hillarybama. What exciting progress!

Wait a minute. Marxism lost the Cold War, right? The Soviet Empire came down, Eastern Europe was liberated, China is now semi-capitalist, and post-socialist countries like India are thriving like never before. More of the world is prospering, because economic and political freedoms have spread since the USSR crumbled. Even Russia has a low, flat tax to encourage free markets. Indigenous talents and enterprise are finally being liberated, and the results are wonderful for hundreds of millions of people.

Liberals are upset today because free-market economies are growing too fast, and are therefore polluting an unsullied Mamma Earth. Tens of millions of ordinary people in China and India are doing too well. The elites seem to yearn for the good old days --- the famines in India, the massacres in Russia and China --- and that wonderful sense of being in charge of human progress.

And yet ... in spite of years and years of Leftist catastrophes, our organs of propaganda are still tilting drunkenly to the Left. Crypto-Marxism, a barely disguised revival of the old farce, is flourishing in our chattering classes. The prestige that Marxism lost in the real world soon came back in fantasy. Oh, if people only loved one another! Oh, if people only cared! Oh, if we only had real solidarity with the wretched of the earth! That's the feel-good story. But the real yearning is for power: Oh, if only people like us were in charge of everything.

In Britain, under the daily pounding of the Bolshie Beeb, the most admired "philosopher" of all time is now ... blood-dripping old Karl Marx. Freedom is routinely trashed; thieving tyrants like Hugo Chavez are celebrated.

"Crypto Marxism" --- crypto meaning "hidden" --- is a useful word to describe what's happened in the last twenty years. Because as soon as the Soviet Union crumbled, a host of barely disguised post-Marxist ideologies grabbed the microphones: the Green Movement, now furiously peddling global warming fraud; Third Way socialism in Europe, trying to hitch the welfare wagon to free markets; the European Union, a new autocracy of unelected committees, exactly what the USSR used to call "workers' Soviets"; the unbelievably corrupt, bigoted and self-serving United Nations; and all over the academic world, an explosion of anti-Western and anti-democratic fads like Post-Modernism, Multi-Culturalism, Deconstructionism, Feminism, anti-Zionism, Black Liberation Theology and other repackaged Marx imitations. It was a triumph of image-making and marketing.

Today, crypto-Marxism dominates our political discourse. It's wild --- just as if Nazi goose stepping had became a popular sport after World War Two, instead of the hula-hoop. The Nazis were horrific in their thirteen years in power. The Marxists had seventy years in the Soviet Union, and managed to kill 100 million people according to Marxist historians themselves. But here we are, twenty years later, and all that is deliberated wiped from our minds.

So --- who won the seventy-year struggle of the Cold War? We did in reality. The good guys really did triumph, and in the most profound way, going by Sun Tzu's Art of War --- not by waging a mega-war, but by constant political pressure, by far outrunning Marxist regimes economically, and by a spontaneous revulsion from within the Soviet Empire itself. Yet we fought many small wars --- and two large, bloody and unpopular ones, in Korea and Vietnam. The United States and a few allies faced down numerous Marxist threats in a very determined way. It was a huge test of our will to live and win.

And yet, today the New York Times makes a boutique specialty out of writing loving obits for flaming Old Reds, when they finally sputter out and die. No one on the American Left has ever expressed public sorrow for the estimated 100 million people killed by Marxist murderocracies; after all, they were murdered for "idealistic" reason. The crumbling of the Soviet Empire simply made it possible for the Left to walk away from Darth Vader and the Evil Empire. Soviet Union? Never heard of it.

As Rush Limbaugh often says, conservatives stopped teaching when the Soviet Union fell. Marxists, on the other hand, just accelerated their propaganda. Privately they mourned the "idealistic" experiment of the Soviet Union --- never confessing their own, whole-hearted participation in unrelenting evil. The Boomer Lefties rose to power in the 1970s, and they were not going to sacrifice their religiomania just because all the Marxist nations walked away from Marx. (Except for North Korea, which is still as murderously Stalinist as ever.)

In fact, without the Soviets our hard-core Leftists were no longer agents of a foreign power --- as the KGB archives showed that many of them were during decades of Moscow's control. So they could pretend to be running different "idealistic" movements: Red changed to Green, but that was it. The mainstream media learned to peddle that old Daily Worker agitprop instead of real news, until talk radio and the web broke the media monopoly, and conservatism revived. In Europe this is only barely beginning to happen.

Since 9/11 the Left has been telling itself how really patriotic it is --- providing that you redefine patriotism as internationalism, just like the old CP USA. And of course, the vitally important history of the Cold War is being written by the hard-core Left. It's just as if the Confederate South controlled the history of the Civil War.

Senator Joe Lieberman's fate shows what has happens to centrist Democrats: They are all but thrown out for deviationism, which is exactly what Josef Stalin used to do with the CP USA.

Both Obama and Hillary grew up on the Alinsky Left, which only a theologian can tell from orthodox Marxism. Coming out of Yale Law, Hillary joined a crypto Marxist law outfit in Oakland, California. David Horowitz, who was part of that world until he recovered his moral center, has been pretty clear about the real roots and goals of that Greater Berkeley network.

The triumph of crypto-Marxism is not just weird, it's dangerous. The Reds haven't changed. They have just metastatized: That is why we are now so vulnerable to the next wave of totalitarianism, the Islamofascist kind. The long struggle of Western civilization against bloody tyranny is being covered up. The very real danger of new totalitarianism is being dismissed.

We have to start teaching again from scratch.

Well, that's how it is.

Note to conservatives: You don't win a war until the histories are written.

Roll up your sleeves and go to it. There's work to do.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com

Page Reprinted by permission from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/how_cryptomarxism_won_the_cold.html at May 23, 2008

The "energy plan" announced by the Democrats offers one thing: a significant slowdown of our economy for at least twenty years. Those who run both legislative branches of the congress, and the energy plans of both of their leading candidates for president clothe themselves in the mantle of righteousness. That the Republicans are allowing this to happen, right before our eyes, tells us much about the sad state of American politics.

From their official website, here is the summary paragraph (including the bad grammar) of the Democrat plan to solve the energy crisis:

This is also the Democrat solution. Get it? The Democrat plan is the Democrat solution. In logic this is called petitio principii or "begging the question."

Ask yourself: which of the five components of the "plan" should happen first? "Reducing our dependence on foreign oil" is listed first. But it cannot happen first. In order to keep the economy moving ahead, some type of energy must replace foreign oil-and this energy must be tangible, readily available, and close to the market price of the energy it is replacing.

This is a crucial point and very few people seem to understand it. We cannot solve the energy crisis by talking about the creation of, say, hydrogen fuel cells for cars. We must have a fully functioning economy in the intervening thirty or forty years that it will take to "develop energy alternatives" like hydrogen fuel cells. In other words, the pressing question is not "What energy alternative will we be using in forty years?" The real question is: What energy alternative will we be using tomorrow that will allow us the economic prosperity to create future alternative energies much further down the road?

Presently, over eighty-five per cent of our energy comes from "fossil fuels." We use more than twenty million barrels of oil every day in this country. For the economy to expand and give us time to create alternative forms of energy we will need more, not less, moderately priced fossil fuels in the intervening years. Nowhere in the Democrat plan is there a strategy to provide this energy.

Make no mistake, we are entering an energy crisis. At five dollars a gallon a typical low-income family will spend nearly 20% of total income on gasoline each year. At ten dollars a gallon these people will not get to work -- especially in rural or suburban America where a car is an absolute must.

Where will the desperately needed and moderately priced energy come from? Most of the currently developed oil fields are in the hands of dictators, like Hugo Chavez and the Saudi Royal Family or in the hands of socialist governments, like Norway, Mexico, and Russia. They can afford to keep production low and prices high. Indeed, given their controlled economies, it makes absolute economic sense for them to do so. It is our job (not Saudi Arabia's) to develop new natural gas and oil resources to help stem rising energy costs.

The Democrat plan also calls for "eliminating billions in subsidies for oil and gas companies." (I could not discover when and how the federal government has provided "billions in subsides for oil and gas companies." I assume that this really means raising taxes on oil and gas companies.) How is this strategy going to provide one gallon of fuel for Americans? It certainly has not worked in the past when price controls and higher taxes have always led to long lines at the gas pumps.

The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game.[i] If we do not have a viable, recession free, economy in the short and medium term, then we will not get to a "cleaner, greener and stronger America" in the long run. We will not be able to sustain short-term economic growth that leads to long-term technological development without moderately priced energies being available throughout the process.

Republicans, if they are truly interested in America's future, had better start to point out the obvious flaws in the Democrats' "plan." Time to start drilling.

Larrey Anderson is a philosopher and writer living in Idaho. He can be reached at ldandersonbooks.com
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[i] Recently passed legislation that tinkered with our strategic oil reserves is nothing but a shallow ploy to try and lower gasoline prices a bit by Election Day. (That is all that the recently passed legislation will do-if it even does that-it is clearly an incumbents' reelection bill.) The fact that Republican senators rolled over (after their legislation to explore and drill for more domestic natural gas and oil was easily killed), and unanimously (minus one) voted for the Democrat sponsored bill indicates that elected Republicans are far more interested in staying in office than in solving the energy crisis.

Reprinted by permission from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/your_energy_future_under_the_d.html at May 19, 2008

DEMOCRATS, MOVE ON AND THE MONKEY TRAP
By Denis Keohane, September 18, 2007

There are varieties of the monkey trap used in Africa, South America and Asia. Some are pottery jugs, some are wooden boxes, but all work on the same principle. The trap is secured to something, perhaps tied to a tree. There is an opening in the trap large enough for the target monkey to reach his hand inside. Bait, usually nuts, is placed in the trap. The monkey reaches in, grasps a fistful of nuts, and finds that when his hand is clenched around the bait, he can’t remove it from the trap.

At that point, the concealed hunter who had been observing this approaches the monkey. Seeing danger coming, the monkey jumps around and shrieks in panic, spitting and snarling and going berserk, but does not do the one thing that would allow him to easily escape: let go of the nuts! He is caught or killed.

When it comes to the MoveOn ad about General Betray-Us, Democrats are like that monkey. There’s a national campaign looming, and there’s danger in it for them as a party, but they just can’t let go of the nuts.

Reprinted by permission from the American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/09/democrats_moveon_and_the_monke.html

In the January 2, 2004 edition, theglobeandmail.com carried an article by Marcus Gee commenting on Gen. Wesley Clark's performance in Kosovo.

In running for the Democratic Party nomination, Gen. Clark touts his performance in the war over Kosovo, at which time he was NATO commander. He claims the 78-day conflict in 1999 was an armed intervention that worked. He claims he "stopped a campaign of terror" and "liberated a people." He claims, that in contrast to President Bush's intervention in Iraq, he helped assemble a grand coalition against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Gee comments: "It would be a strong platform if it bore any resemblance to the truth. In fact, Gen. Clark is painting a glorified portrait of the Kosovo campaign, which was far less triumphant and multilateral than he would like Americans to think."

While Gen. Clark is right to say that Bill Clinton assembled a bigger coalition for Kosovo than Mr. Bush did for Iraq, Kosovo was still mostly a US mission. The thrust of the bombing campaign came from US warplanes and the decision to go ahead was essentially made in Washington. The United Nations was decidedly not on board. Clinton avoided seeking support for the war from the UN Security Council when it became clear that Russia and China were opposed. Canada, which said four years later that it could not possibly participate in the Iraq conflict without UN support, went merrily along. So much for multilateralism.

In this triumph of humanitarian intervention, when Gen. Clark unleashed his bombers on Serbia, it turned a messy conflict with ethnic Albanians, in which there had been many killings and at least one terrible massacre, into a true humanitarian disaster. Rather than halt the conflict, it intensified, with hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians fleeing the country in a refugee exodus that captivated the world.

When Mr. Milosovic pulled his troops out of Kosovo, making way for a NATO protection force, letting the refugees return to their homes after thousands had died, Gen. Clark claims the Albanians were liberated from Serb oppression. He says nothing about the Serbs, 180,000 of whom had to run for their lives as the Albanians took their revenge.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and a NATO garrison of more than 12,000 troops, this ethnically cleansed, fiercely nationalistic mini-state of Kosovo is still a poor, dangerous, unstable place where the remaining Serbs live in fear.

Talks on Kosovo's final status are scheduled to begin in the middle of 2005.

Serbia's situation is hardly better. In December, 2003, the Serbians elected an extreme nationalist and accused war criminal, Vojislav Seselj, who is in jail awaiting trial before the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, where Milosovic has been performing since 2002. He, also, effectively won election when his Socialist party took 7.6% of the vote.

The conflict in Kosovo is hardly a model of good intervention, despite Gen. Clark's claims. It was, and is, a mess.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. wrote an article in the May 20, 2002 issue of FrontPageMagazine.com entitled "The 'Next War'; Will Carl Levin Be Allowed To Leave America Vulnerable to Missile Attack?"

Reacting to the recent overblown bloviation from Congressional Democrats about the attacks of 9/11, Gaffney recalled the bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission led by now-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 1998. When asked by Congress to assess the danger of ballistic missile attack on the United States, the Commission declared: "Sea-launch of shorter-range ballistic missiles. . . could enable a country to pose a direct territorial threat to the US sooner than it could by waiting to develop an intercontinental-range ballistic missile for launch from its own territory. Sea-launching could also permit it to target a larger area of the US than would a missile fired from its home territory."

With an estimated 25,000 vessels at sea on any given day, the majority of them flying flags of convenience, terrorists have a capability of launching a Scud-type missile which could reach most of the Nation's population centers.

Gaffney notes that the Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Carl Levin, have decided to hamstring President Bush's ability to address the missile threat. They propose to cut funds sought by the President and Secretary Rumsfeld to build missile defenses by roughly $800 million and introduced new bureaucratic impediments to swift acquisition of such defenses. By a straight party-line vote, the Democrats voted to transfer the money to ship-building and other member directed priorities.

Perhaps the next time we're attacked, the Democrats will look in a mirror first when looking to lay blame.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-RI, is the head of the Democratic Congressional Committee in charge of electing Democrat representatives. He has a definite point of view as to how that should be done. In a fit of pique after a vote on a gun control amendment which was engineered by his pro-gun Democrat colleague, Rep. John Dingell, D-MI, Kennedy stated: "We [Democrats] have written off rural America."

The truth of that statement is evident to Bruce Vincent of the League of Rural Voters who commented on the administration's end-run around the national forest planning process: "While trying to reinforce their eco-credentials, many politicians have resorted to bashing rural economies. Kennedy has said the Democrats are writing off rural areas because they don't need them to win the White House or recapture Congress."

America's 1st Freedom, September, 2000, noted that if 20% of the population remains rural, that's 54 million people. If 70% are of voting age, and 80% of these can be mobilized to vote, then 30 million rural voters can take charge of their political fortunes.

The Washington Times, September 4, 2000 reported on a study just released by the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate (CSAE). The primaries had the lowest turnout in years. Turnout for states where both parties held presidential primaries was only 17% of the eligible voters, the second lowest in 35 years. These statistics lead CSAE to predict a historic low turnout for the general election.

What if those 30 million rural voters decided to buck the trend? Patrick Kennedy might take another look.

Compare these two statements...

From U.S. Representative Debbie Stabenow's congressional web site:

"Her first legislative initiative as a Member of Congress was the Computer Donation Incentive Act, a bill sponsored in partnership with Congresswoman Anna Eshoo that provides enhanced tax deductions to companies who donate computer equipment (2 years old or less) to elementary and secondary schools or to tax-exempt charitable organizations supporting elementary and secondary education. SHE incorporated this bill into the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997." (Emphasis added)

And...

Testimony given by Jerry Grayson of the Detweiler Foundation Computers for School Program (before the House Ways & Means Committee):

"The 21st Century Classrooms Act...provides businesses with an enhanced tax deduction for donation of equipment two years old or less. We are among the many students, parents, teachers and friends of education most grateful to CONGRESSMAN RANDY "DUKE" CUNNINGHAM for his sponsorship of this far-sighted legislation and his championing of better technology in our schools." (Emphasis added)

Someone is lying.

And it's not Rep. Cunningham.

As a state representative, Stabenow fudged facts. As a state senator, she exaggerated her influence. Now, as a U.S. representative, she's stealing other members' accomplishments. For further information, contact Mike Murray, Editor of Stabenow Watch at StabenowWatch@listbot.com, ALT: spindoctor2000@netscape.net

While Al Gore professes to have seen the light about the campaign finance abuses of the 1996 Clinton-Gore effort, the fallout continues.

William Hamilton, Jr. (on whose conviction we reported in February 2000 -- See the Archives under "Media") was sentenced to 36 months in prison, according to Bloomberg on March 14, 2000. Hamilton was part of the Teamsters/Democratic National Committee effort to use the union's money to elect Ron Carey president of the Teamsters and Clinton-Gore to the White House. He was convicted of embezzling $885,000 of union funds.

It is interesting to check out the Federal Election Commission's filings. They not only tell you something about the candidates, they raise some real questions.

As of the July filings, Al Gore had raised $19,559,571. He spent $8,211,047, leaving him with $12,428,594.

As of the same time, Bill Bradley had raised $11,748,225 and spent $4,292,175, leaving him with $7,496,610.

The Washington Times reported in its Oct. 4-10, 1999 edition that Bradley raised $6.7 million from July through September compared to $6.5 million for Gore. Because of Gore's spending on staff, consultants, pollsters, travel and other campaign expenses, he and Bradley were virtually tied for money in the bank at the end of September of approximately $10 million. Does anyone believe that Gore would do better at watching our money than he is at watching his own?

Did you know that Hillary Clinton has TWO campaign committees listed? Since they were apparently opened after the July reporting date, little can be said about her fundraising and expenditures. One of the committees is for the New York Senate race. The other is for President for 2000. Is it the plan of the First Couple to try to save the Democrats from Al Gore by offering Hillary as the candidate at the August 2000 convention? All the money that she raises on her "listening tour" would be transferable. . . .

The Democratic National Committee has put Carlottia Scott on its new "political/leadership team," reported The Washington Times on April 14, 1999.

She is "far left," reports the conservative weekly Human Events and worked for Rep. Barbara Lee and former Rep. Ron Dellums, both California Democrats.

Allan Ryskin, in discussing Scott's radical politics came to light in 1983 when US forces, in the wake of the Grenada invasion, captured documents revealing that Dellums and his the aides, Lee and Scott, had a unique relationship with Maurice Bishop , Grenada's Communist ruler.

Dellums went to Grenada ostensibly to discover if its airfield was being made into a landing site for Soviet aircraft and reported to Congress "nothing being done in Grenada constitutes a threat to the United States or her allies."

However, the captured documents confirmed that the Bishop regime "was intent on thoroughly communizing Grenada." The documents also included letters Scott sent to Bishop for at least a year before Dellums' visit in which she referred to him as "My Sweet", "My Dearest" and "My Darling Comrade leader." In one letter to Bishop, Scott said of Dellums, "Ron is a political thinker, is the best around and Fidel will verify that in no uncertain terms." The letter is signed "Love you madly."

"Now she's got a top job at the Democratic National Committee," Mr. Ryskind concludes.

On May 26, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) held a Capitol Hill news conference to identify the least taxpayer-friendly members of the House of Representatives. The group, America's largest taxpayer watchdog group, released its "1998 Congressional Ratings."

Rep. David Bonior (D-MI), House Minority Whip, and Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-MO), House Minority Leader, were among 33 members of the House -- all Democrats -- to rate an absolute zero.

In general, Republican members of the 105th Congress did well, averaging 75% in the House and 74% in the Senate. In contrast, the Democrats turned in a lackluster performance of just 18% in both chambers of Congress.

"Rep. Bonior's performance has been abysmal," CCAGW President Tom Schatz remarked. "You would think that the House minority whip could have voted in favor of the taxpayer at least once. Instead, he arbitrarily and capriciously voted to misuse the money of hard-working Americans. That kind of record with the taxpayers should keep him in the minority for a long time. . . . It is a truly sad day in Washington when an elected official fails to vote even once in defense of overburdeded taxpayers."

For a complete copy of the 16-page Congressional Ratings report, contact Jim Campi or Aaron Taylor (202) 467-5300 of Citizens Against Government Waste. The web site is http://www.cagw.org

HOW CRYPTO-MARXISM WON THE COLD WAR By James Lewis, May 23, 2008

HOW CRYPTO-MARXISM WON THE COLD WAR
By James Lewis, May 23, 2008