Political Class Dismissed

Jack Kenny writes the most enlightening commentary on the recent killing of Tiller and exposes the hypocrisy of both Barack Obama’s “crocodile tears” and the Catholic Church efforts to join with the pro-death Federal government for “social justice.”

Murdering Abortionists

We have arrived at another moment of truth in America. In 1968, at a time when half-educated college students and dropouts of one kind or another were carrying around a little red book called “Quotations from Chairman Mao,” a gunman pulled a trigger and snuffed out the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Political power, said Mao, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But the bullet that flew from the assassin’s gun did not give him power. For real power flows from the hearts and minds of free men and women and guns do not silence that power. They give us pause to reflect, recollect and morally rearm.

I do not wish to dignify either the assassin or, especially, his victim in calling to mind, at the occasion of the killing of the abortionist in Wichita, the slaying of Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead, George Tiller’s murder should remind us that violence begets violence and the routine, planned destruction of innocent human life is a weak and poisoned reed on which to build a social order.   Click here for the full article…

Paul Craig Roberts crystallizes how tragic the Obama betrayal has been. Partisan loyalists, don’t read this because it’ll challenge your preconceived notions of the black and white 2 party game and you might have to start thinking for yourself.

Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney

Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.

Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama’s validation of the Bush/Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.

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President Obama’s feel-good draft

By James Bovard

On March 18, the House of Representatives voted 321-105 to pass the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, and the Senate is expected quickly to follow suit. The GIVE Act more than triples the number of slots for AmeriCorps members from 75,000 to 250,000. And it takes a giant step toward expanding Washington’s power to make “service” compulsory for all young Americans. Click here for the full article…

A Presidency Fit for a King

It is said that on the final day of deliberation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a female passerby asked an exiting Ben Franklin, “Well Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” He replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” But if Ben Franklin were alive today to witness the unlimited, king-like power of President Barack Obama, he would answer that we are definitely living under an elected monarch.

The Honorable John V. Denson, a Circuit Court judge from Alabama and editor of Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, explains that “the Founders intended for the legislative branch of Congress, composed of both the House and Senate, to be the dominant branch of the federal government, which was then very limited in scope and power. Today the executive has become, by far, the dominant branch of government, even to the point that it is the main threat to the liberty and freedom of American citizens.” (Emphasis added.) Click here for more…

My latest from THE NEW AMERICAN on Sanford’s non-rejection and the blind Obama-worship from politicians and the statist media.
An excerpt:

Although Sanford’s proposal was not the type of rejection that some had anticipated, the mainstream media, fellow politicians, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) reacted as if it was. Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D) decried Sanford’s stance as “fringe.” U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s highest-ranking Democrat in Washington, reacted with outrage at the governor’s alleged “rejection” and brought racial politics into the debate. Click here for the full article…

I interviewed Governor Mark Sanford (R) of South Carolina for THE NEW AMERICAN print magazine. The full interview is now available online here. Here’s an excerpt:

TNA: You have gone on record as saying that you do not support preemptive warfare. One of the biggest expenses our country faces is so-called “defense” spending, used to maintain U.S. military forces around the globe. Obama was perceived as the peace candidate on the election trail, but he is already escalating the Afghanistan war by 17,000 troops. He also plans to station up to 50,000 troops in Iraq through 2011, and maintain all our numerous other commitments around the world. With so many economic problems facing our nation, do you think we can afford to continue the same big-government foreign policy?

Gov. Sanford: I think the answer is that our economic conditions are going to drive a change there. Paul Kennedy wrote an interesting book called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and he talked about how economic supremacy was a precursor to military supremacy and that any government who tried to sustain one without the other ultimately fell. The Soviet Union ran very significant military expenditures that they couldn’t sustain based on where their economy was — what Kennedy called “imperial overstretch.” It’s the tendency of every national power to at some point get there. Britain got there many years ago. We got there a long time ago. Click here for the full interview…

Scary stuff…….

Brown woos Obama on global deal

GORDON BROWN hopes to forge a partnership with President Barack Obama in Washington this week, to call for a “global new deal” to lift the world out of recession.

From CounterPunch by Chris Floyd.

But the hypocrisy – the literally murderous hypocrisy – of claiming that this plan “leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war,” as Obama asserted in his State of the Union speech, is sickening. It does no such thing, and he knows it.

Instead, it entrenches the United States more and more deeply in a “counter-insurgency” war on behalf of whichever clique or faction of sectarian parties in Iraq is most effective in adhering to America’s dominationist agenda in the region. It sends an apparently endless stream of American troops to die — and, in even greater numbers, to kill — in a criminal action that has helped bankrupt our own country while sending waves of violent instability and extremism around the world. It will further enfilth a cesspool of corruption and war profiteering that has already reached staggering, world-historical proportions.

It seems like accusations of racism for any dissent to our Dear Leader are going to be common in the age of Obama. The Miami Herald reports:

The highest-ranking African-American member of Congress on Friday accused Southern governors who oppose economic stimulus spending of indifference to the plight of poor blacks who might benefit from the federal money. … Clyburn said the measure reserved some money for census tracts in which more than one-fifth of the residents had lived at or below the federal poverty level for the last 30 years. He said that 12 of South Carolina’s 46 counties qualified for the targeted aid, all along the impoverished Interstate 95 corridor. “Now the (South Carolina) governor says, ‘I don’t want to accept the money,’” Clyburn told CNN. “That’s why I called this an insult. That’s why I said this is a slap in the face; because a majority of these counties are, in fact, inhabited by African-Americans.”

Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina hits all the right notes in this interview.

Q: You’re talking a lot about learning from history. Following the New Deal the Democrats controlled the White House for 28 of the next 36 years and controlled the House of Representatives for most of the next 70. Do you think Republicans are taking a political risk in opposing these measures?

A: I think that one could draw…a reasonable scenario along those lines.

Here’s the difference, though, as I would see it. We’re in a different spot than we were, late ’20s, early ’30s. Government expenditures as a percentage of GDP was about, you know, little shy of 10 percent. Today it’s right at 18, almost 20 percent. There’s a lot less elbow room with regard to policy when you’re more than double where you were as a percentage of GDP.

If we go too far in just spending too much money and borrowing money, we could put ourselves in the exact position Argentina found itself in the 1920s when they had, you know, cratering of their currency. If you look at the Weimar Republic, you know, between World War I and World War II, you had a cratering of their currency, so much that you had to carry a wheelbarrow load of currency to get so much as a loaf of bread. And horrible things happened in the wake of that experience.

Bill’s a gracious host and allows Dr. Paul to clearly express himself unlike those two Beltway Right Media Pundits, Hannity and O’Reilly. Buuuuuuuuut check out how quickly they end the interview when he brings up Afghanistan and Obama’s expansion of the American empire. Will the Left overlook Obama’s imperialism if he satiates their desire for welfarism at home? Also, silly Billy thinks the Free Market created the crisis and RP’s response on that question goes right over his head. But I give Bill credit for acknowledging the huge waste that is the drug war. I wish liberals would stand up for things like that more but progressives tend to have low energy for initiatives that would reduce government intervention into peoples’ lives.

I think all of us liberty-minded individuals can agree the mainstream media (MSM) is biased and statist. Since Obama is the biggest statist on the scene right now, they’re all in the tank for him. But this AP article is so openly biased that it even shocked me!

After focusing his first month on the economic mess he inherited, President Barack Obama now starts rolling out his own far-reaching agenda with a summit on fiscal policy, his first speech to Congress and the unveiling of his budget for 2010.

Inherited? Didn’t he vote for and endorse all the federal intervention into the market which caused the financial crisis in the first place?

This coming week will mark a turning point from what Obama felt compelled to do, to what he wants to do. It also may test how much spending, change and ambition the American people and their elected officials can stomach in a short time.

“Change and ambition?” This is sad. I’ve seen twelve year old girls talk about the Jonas brothers with more restraint.

The heart of Obama’s economic team — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers — are deficit-wary economists. They are now central to the tug-of-war in the administration and Congress over Obama’s grand vision and his team’s fiscal pragmatism.

The two CFR stooges who are bailing out banks on the back of future generations are wary of deficits? Since when? “Fiscal pragmatism?” Obama just agreed in one day to spend more than both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have cost us. That’s pragmatism? I guess I need to recheck my Websters because I clearly don’t know what pragmatism means.

“A certain passage of time is going to be necessary now before the political climate catches up with the economic environment,” said James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. “We just made what seems to many people to be a very large investment in reviving the economy.” Nonetheless, he said, the stimulus package probably will be too small to deal with the economy’s rapid decline. “If that’s the case,” Galbraith said, “there will be time to move larger measures that require more imagination and more initiative.”

More “imagination and initiative?” Hooooooo boy. I wonder what the press releases from Pravda were like in the waning days of the Soviet Union. I’m betting they weren’t much different than this blatant propaganda. Hopefully the people will learn their lesson of listening to the MSM when the inflationary depression spirals out of control. Then PCD and similar sites in the alternative media will step in to fill the void.

J.D. Tucille keeps writing one strong piece after another!

The national spending spree, by which the U.S. government will seek to get the country out of a slump caused by too much spending and debt by running up the credit cards and letting the kids and grandkids worry about the bills, is now law. It’s a truly remarkable effort, not just because of the questionable economics behind the whole idea of stimulus spending, but because of the troubling ethical implications of trying to buy our way out of today’s problems by binding the Americans of tomorrow to foot the bill for our idiocy. By doing so, it spends not just money, but the liberty of generations to come. Click here for the full article…

My latest article at THE NEW AMERICAN online:

On Tuesday, February 18, President Barack Obama achieved one of his first major goals in office by making his $787 billion stimulus plan a reality. The Washington Post reported: “President Barack Obama … signed into law a plan meant to create jobs, encourage people to spend money and in general feel better about the economy.” Is it the economy Obama wants the people to feel better about or is it the president himself?

President Obama ran a shrewd and successful campaign in 2008. Based on his travel itinerary, it appears that he might have started his 2012 reelection bid a little early. Click here for full article…..

Mario J. Rizzo answers the question being asked by everyone.

The first thing to keep in mind is that activities that prevent or inhibit the re-allocation of resources out of their bubble-induced misdirected uses will only prolong the current recession. This kind of stimulus is not better than nothing. It is worse than nothing.
My own preference is, first to allow market adjustments to take place. When economic agents are confident that prices will be allowed to equilibrate, they will begin to take action in both financial and economic areas. Values of resources and assets will become more transparent. …

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From the Deficit Obliteration Squad:

Is Obama trying to destroy the value of the dollar? Because that’s what it looks like. This reckless policy is exactly the type of thing to tip us off the edge when we’re in a precarious position to begin with. Could they actually want America to suffer from an inflationary depression? Could it be because that very crisis will result in them gaining even more power?

That’s why it sucks that he’s 100% right.

The stronger dollar gives the Federal Government plenty of cover to a pursue a policy of rampant monetary inflation in order to re-inflate the collapsing bubble. Even though the Federal Reserve has thrown trillions of new dollars into circulation, those dollars have actually gained purchasing power - contrary to economic law. This, along with inventory liquidations and going-out-of-business sales, has kept a lid on consumer prices. The continued, although misguided, appeal of U.S. debt has also made it possible for the government to garner cheap financing for its equally misguided and massive bails-outs and stimulus packages.

In addition to cushioning the blow for us, the dollar rally has exacerbated the pain abroad. As money has rushed to our aid it has created a global credit crunch. The rest of the world is not only dealing with losses on toxic U.S. credit instruments but is also shouldering the burden of financing our new borrowing as well. As foreign currencies have fallen, foreign consumers have not received as large a windfall as Americans have from falling commodity prices.

In effect, Americans have been using these life-lines to pull the rest of the world into the stormy seas. However, there are signs that those holding the lines are about to cast them adrift. The dollar rally has run out of steam, gold has clearly broken out, and commodity prices are moving back up. 2009 is already the worst year ever for US. Treasury bonds and foreign stock markets are once again outperforming ours.

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Lew Rockwell nails it on the head!

It is tragic that Obama should be president at all. If we had a position called “national well-wisher,” “national greeter,” or “national symbol of accomplishment,” he would be perfect for the job. He is elegant, graceful, and articulate, and he inspires people in an unusual way. As chief policymaker, however, he has revealed himself as nothing more than a two-bit socialist.
After all the ghastly statism of the Bush years, you might think that the Left would back off from using power to achieve its aims. Instead, they have learned nothing. The Left has been lying in wait for its chance. As the Obama people entered the White House, it was as if they found a closet labeled “failed ideas of the past.” They opened it and the contents spilled everywhere. They started grabbing things and putting them in the regulatory books and in legislation.

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