2009 certainly has been a tough year, and many might think that we have less to be thankful about this Thanksgiving than most. This is untrue. Every day we should be thankful that we live in the United States of America. Because a bad day in America is better than a good day anywhere else on earth.

Let us consider the condition of men, women and children throughout the ages. Life has been, and continues to be today in many parts of the world, a hit-or-miss proposition with food scarce, material comforts lacking and life itself a tenuous gamble. Yet today, despite our economic woes, we in America have more prosperity than most people in the world and most people throughout history have ever dreamed about. And if we are deprived temporarily, then that will only strengthen us. Let us give thanks.

Just look at where modern Thanksgiving itself came from. It originated after the perilous voyage of America’s first settlers who came to a wilderness and struggled just to stay alive. Today our bountiful Thanksgiving tables, graced with turkeys from Minnesota and cranberries from Massachusetts and potatoes from Idaho never even would have been conceived of on that first Thanksgiving when the food came from a half-mile around.

We have made so much progress. What would the Pilgrim settlers think of our freedoms and prosperity today, all gained as a result of their sacrifices?

We would hope that their hearts would be glad.

The Puritans who celebrated the first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts were living in infinitely tougher conditions than America is today. But rather than contemplating the negative they worked hard to confront what challenged them - difficult living conditions, scarce food and a frightening and uncertain future on the edge of a vast wilderness. Yet today many of our citizens are worried only about how long their unemployment checks are going to last…

Those Puritans came to America for ideological reasons and this spurred them on. They gave up their comforts in England to seek out religious freedom. And their belief in God sustained them through the hardest of times, the times that they survived to ultimately create the nation and the prosperity that we now have. And as we enjoy our bountiful meals on Thursday, we should thank them in prayer for their fortitude, and we should vow to maintain our vision of freedom for we face nothing nearly as dire as they did.

And we should think of them as who they really were - people of iron wills who sacrificed their own material security so that others in future generations could live better and more freely and worship Heavenly God in the way that they see fit.

Imagine today that those of us who oppose our government’s policies were given a tract of land in the wilderness. And that we went there with virtually nothing just as the Puritans came to America. And that we had to carve out an existence, with many of our friends, family and neighbors dying during the experience. Imagine the hardship. After a period in the wilderness we would be saying, “Why weren’t we more thankful for what we had?”

Because today in America we must be. We should count our blessings every day and not our shortcomings; and consider the positive and not the negative. Because we are blessed in our abundant land, and someday today’s woes will be a memory.

The first Thanksgiving was said to have been held in 1621 when the Plymouth colonists shared an autumn feast with the Wampanoag Indians. It was much like celebrations of the harvest by Indians and by rural European peasants over the centuries. As early as 1619, British settlers in Virginia prayed to God in “Thanksgiving” and there even is evidence of an earlier “thanksgiving” celebration on September 8, 1565, in what is now St. Augustine, Florida.

Early Thanksgiving meals included venison and wild fowl because that is what was readily available. And so today we celebrate with turkey. In First Thanksgiving from A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Edward Winslow wrote:

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

By 1782, the state of New Hampshire had offered this proclamation to establish a day for thanks to God:

ORDERED,

THAT the following Proclamation for a general THANKSGIVING on the twenty-eighth day of November [instant?], received from the honorable Continental Congress, be forthwith printed, and sent to the several worshipping Assemblies in this State, to whom it is recommended religiously to observe said day, and to abstain from all servile labour thereon.
M. WEARE, President.

By the United States in Congress assembled.

PROCLAMATION.

IT being the indispensable duty of all Nations, not only to offer up their supplications to ALMIGHTY GOD, the giver of all good, for his gracious assistance in a time of distress, but also in a solemn and public manner to give him praise for his goodness in general, and especially for great and signal interpositions of his providence in their behalf: Therefore the United States in Congress assembled, taking into their consideration the many instances of divine goodness to these States, in the course of the important conflict in which they have been so long engaged; the present happy and promising state of public affairs; and the events of the war, in the course of the year now drawing to a close; particularly the harmony of the public Councils, which is so necessary to the success of the public cause; the perfect union and good understanding which has hitherto subsisted between them and their Allies, notwithstanding the artful and unwearied attempts of the common enemy to divide them; the success of the arms of the United States, and those of their Allies, and the acknowledgment of their independence by another European power, whose friendship and commerce must be of great and lasting advantage to these States:—– Do hereby recommend to the inhabitants of these States in general, to observe, and request the several States to interpose their authority in appointing and commanding the observation of THURSDAY the twenty-eight day of NOVEMBER next, as a day of solemn THANKSGIVING to GOD for all his mercies: and they do further recommend to all ranks, to testify to their gratitude to GOD for his goodness, by a cheerful obedience of his laws, and by promoting, each in his station, and by his influence, the practice of true and undefiled religion, which is the great foundation of public prosperity and national happiness.

Done in Congress, at Philadelphia, the eleventh day of October, in the year of our LORD one thousand seven hundred and eighty-two, and of our Sovereignty and Independence, the seventh.

JOHN HANSON, President.

Charles Thomson, Secretary.

George Washington proclaimed a Thanksgiving in 1795 while president John Adams declared Thanksgivings in 1798 and 1799. By 1858 proclamations selecting a day of thanksgiving were issued by the governors of 25 states and two territories.

In the depths of  the Civil War, president Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving to be celebrated on the final  Thursday in November 1863. He was acting on the basis of editorials written by the influential journalist Sarah Josepha Hale.

Today, what do we think about on Thanksgiving? We think not about a vicious civil war or the struggle to survive, but about family, friends and a bountiful harvest which comes every year, not just when the weather is right. We have warm homes, technologically-advanced cars to take us where we need to go, electronic gadgets galore to entertain us, mortality statistics that are the envy of the world, parades and football games, and Black Friday shopping sprees.

It is much, much more than our Puritan forefathers ever could have imagined. And we owe them our gratitude for making it all possible.

We have so much to be grateful for this year, and every year in America.

Happy Thanksgiving to all…

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

The ruthless media attacks on Sarah Palin may be seen as just more assaults on a conservative. But in fact they demonstrate a rabid bias against “women” from one faction in America – male media liberals - that always has claimed that it stands for “women’s rights”.

But in truth male liberals are not at all in favor of rights for all “women”. They select a certain minority of “women” out for certain ‘rights’ and they ignore, or debase, the rest. And even those they say they respect they often do not. In many cases they loathe them beyond words, but cannot say so aloud.

Consider the Ancient Media attacks on Palin herself. Many of the attackers are male liberals who grew up in the 1960s. And right there you have the crux of the matter. Because 1960s male ‘hippies’ were among the most misogynist people who ever lived.

Oh, no! says our modern folklore. ‘Hippie’ boys loved and respected women! That was the start of the feminist movement!

Not so fast. The ‘hippie’ boys used women as sex objects. They abused them with drugs and sloth and personal filth - long, dirty hair, foul clothes, sexually-transmitted diseases and more. They ‘loved and respected’ women as long as the women were putting out sexually. Ultimately they exploited millions of “women” in every way. And they never gave it a second thought. Because in their own minds ‘hippie’ boys were the most important people in the world who deserved everything. Just like a classic liberal always is focused on himself.

Look at how “women” have been, and are treated by the rock-music culture that evolved in the 1960s. For decades, they have been treated like cheap pieces of meat to be cast off by the ‘stars’ when they are done with it.

Today, television is the same. The Parents Television Council, a non-partisan group advocating for responsible TV entertainment, recently issued a scathing report called Women in Peril: A Look at TV’s Disturbing New Storyline Trend. The report says that there has been ‘a significant increase in all forms of female victimization storylines; an increase in the depiction of teen girls as victims; an increase in the use of female victimization as a punch line in comedy series; and an increase in the depiction of intimate partner violence.’

And who controls the TV entertainment industry?

Liberals, that is who, many of whom came out of the 1960s.

PTC said that as of 2009:

‘Incidents of violence against women and teenage girls are increasing on television at rates that far exceed the overall increases in violence on television.’  

‘Every network but ABC demonstrated a significant increase in the number of storylines that included violence against women between 2004 and 2009.’

‘Although female victims were primarily of adult age, collectively, there was a 400% increase in the depiction of teen girls as victims across all networks from 2004 to 2009.’

‘From 2004 to 2009 there was an 81% increase in incidences of intimate partner violence on television.’

Let’s take Bill Clinton as a sterling example of an abuser of women. Clinton would claim over and over that he is an enlightened 1960s liberal male who “respects” what he calls “women”. But he does not. We have seen instance after instance where Clinton abused every “woman” he ever met sexually, emotionally and physically, including his own wife. He even was accused of raping Juanita Broaddrick. Who knows what other skeletons are in his closet. Probably dozens.

And look at the most famous liberal family of all, the Kennedys. They abused women routinely for decades. We will never know the real story, however.

Where does today’s abuse come from?

From the 1960s, that is where. From college campuses and rock concerts and drug abuse and self-indulgence. From human weakness and insecurity which caused the ‘hippie’ males to exert total control over women while claiming that somehow they respected them. Because despite its claims, liberalism is an ideology of weakness and uncertainty. Just look at Hollywood. They are all leftists – and all fragile as glass.

No wonder the feminist movement of the 1970s took root. Women were tired of being abused by males like Bill Clinton and all the rest of the “chauvinist pigs” who they were in regular contact with, who just happened to be… liberals.

What happened in the 1960s is being played out today with sky-high divorce rates, broken families, loneliness, social alienation and rampant homosexuality. Because the sexual license of the 1960s did not bring about ‘peace and love’ but it created anger between the sexes, driving the sexes apart. Millions of males and females today lost the ability to interact with members of the opposite sex because that relationship was reduced by 1960s behavior to just a physical one. And since then we have been told over and over that casual sex is just harmless fun.

It is not…

We were told that the 1960s was about “peace and love”. It was not. It was about pleasure-seeking and violence, anger and exploitation of females by male ‘hippies’ who were narcissists out for their own gratification. They passed “women” around like pieces of beef. One night here, one night there, forget about marriage or commitment, that was old fashioned. And if she got pregnant, well, then you arranged for an abortion. Or ran away and found another bed to sleep in.

Now we have the media attacks on Sarah Palin who is happily married, Christian, conservative values, five kids, optimistic. Could these attacks be simple jealousy, the most powerful emotion of all? Could Palin’s male media attackers be secretly in love with her like they were temporarily in love with all the women they abused – and lost - throughout the years? Could liberal media males secretly envy Palin because she is not like the beastly feminists that they are married to or work with? Because in the liberal household or workplace, the female rules and the male quietly suffers under her tyranny.

Could all the childless spinster feminists at Harvard and Salon.com be suffering an envious rage about Palin’s handsome husband and her wonderful family, which they missed out on in their climb to the top of the paper tower of liberalism?

And could the one-time ‘hippies’ be envious of Sarah Palin because she is the focus of so much public attention, which was the lifeblood of the narcissist 1960s?

The fact is that conservatives have for years been maligned as misogynist and anti-woman. But that is the opposite of the truth. If you know married conservative couples, they are always more loving and more respectful of each other than most liberal couples. Because in the liberal relationship, the sexes are not equal as feminism implies. The male submits, and this stokes his anger.

Liberals love to point to the Bible as an example of conservative male dominance. In St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, it says in Ephesians 5:22:

“Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.”

And libs love to select out this one quote as a symbol of male dominance. But they ignore the sentence before it which advises husband and wife:

“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

And the lines later which say:

“Husbands, love you wives as Christ loved the church… Even so, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.”

The 1960s taught males to exploit the female, not to love and respect her. Yet loving and respecting a woman is the highest form of reverence, and all other genuine equality flows from that, the equality you find in conservative relationships and that is absent from that of many liberals.

So which ideology is really the one that respects women?

The treatment of Sarah Palin explains a lot.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

“I can see his suntan all the way from here,” a TV news reporter said jubilantly as president John F. Kennedy descended the stairs from Air Force One in Texas shortly before being assassinated on November 22, 1963.

This Sunday marks the 46th anniversary of that day.

Just after the killing another reporter wondered about the as-yet-unidentified assassin - “Is he connected to any ‘hate group’?” - and then conjectured that it might be “right-wing radicals” who were responsible for the killing.

 “These Southerners…” said a New York City interviewee disdainfully when asked his thoughts right after the assassination, as if conservative Texas finally had struck some blow against the civilized nation.

These quotes are part of the record revealed in hours of previously unseen videotapes strung together by the History Channel for a fresh look at the Kennedy assassination. And what do they show?

And they show a media bias and a public bias in favor of Kennedy and against certain people whom the media did not like then and do not like today and will smear every time… conservatives, conservative Southerners, gun owners and anyone else who could be linked to the political right. Yet it turns out that Kennedy’s killer Lee Harvey Oswald was a committed communist who once had defected to the Soviet Union and who preached that Cuba should be treated better by America.

So much for “right-wing radicals”. And now indeed we know the name of the “hate group” that really was involved in the murder of president Kennedy, and it wasn’t the cabal of militias, white supremacists, Southern rednecks and gun-toting Texans that the media implied. It was the world’s biggest and most powerful hate group of all – global communism - which has been responsible for more genocide than any other entity in history.

When being held after the killing, Oswald had a few brief encounters with the media when he was being transferred around police headquarters. Like a classic leftist, he tried to shift the spotlight from his actions, complaining repeatedly in an attempt to slander the Dallas cops. “I would like some legal representation but these police officers have not allowed me to have any,” he said on two separate occasions, the same legal representation that is denied to all citizens in communist nations. Oswald also complained that he was not allowed to take a shower, while Dallas police chief Jesse Curry said that Oswald had not asked to take a shower. Oswald said that the wound on his face came from the fact that “a policeman hit me.”

These are classic communist/coward tactics, to throw every lie and every insult and every curve ball at the police and at our justice system through the media.

One uncorroborated story line that developed shortly after the shooting, and was broadcast widely, was that FBI had interrogated Oswald in the weeks before the assassination. This would be a way to smear FBI for bungling its job. Another story line said that that Dallas police wanted to tie Oswald to a plot of international communism, another accusation that could at the moment have been seen as an attempt to portray the police as extremist and paranoid. Except that that analysis would have been on the mark.

And who killed Oswald two days after the JFK assassination?

Jack Ruby, aka Jack Rubinstein, a low-level organized crime figure and strip-club owner who was described as “violent” and “a fanatic” by one of the strippers who worked for him. Others called him “meshuggeneh” or Yiddish for “crazy”. Ruby later said that he acted because he loved president Kennedy and hated Oswald.

Yet have not we conservatives said about many Democrat party adherents that they are involved in organized crime, that they are violent, fanatical and crazy, that they are involved in the sleazy sex trade? Was not Kennedy’s 1960 presidential election itself rigged by voter fraud carried out by the Chicago Mafia?

And still the assassination itself initially was suspected of being the work of “right-wing radicals”.

So there you have it. Because the media template even in the 1960s was to smear conservatives in any way possible. It continues today.

After the assassination, leaders around the world, including the Shah of Iran, ordered flags flown at half-staff. The Shah was a pro-American, pro-Western leader. Yet under a later Democrat president Jimmy Carter the Shah was undermined and run out of his nation which was then taken over by Islamic radicals.

Would today’s Iranian leadership have that kind of respect for an American president?

No. They would cheer his assassination.

Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in 1968 by a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. Yet today it is the far left in America that rabidly favors the Palestinian cause, while conservatives support Israel without hesitation.

President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 by John W. Hinckley, a nut who was influenced by the violent, sex-laced Hollywood movie Taxi Driver. Aren’t they all libs in Hollywood? And why are so many of their movies based in violence?

The Columbine High School killers of 1999 acted on the basis of another Hollywood film, the violent movie Natural Born Killers starring super-environmentalist tree-hugger Woody Harrelson. And who was the director of Natural Born Killers? Answer: Super-lefty kook-job Oliver Stone who also made a movie called JFK that said that the killing of president Kennedy was all a plot by J. Edgar Hoover and the right-wingers in the American government. But the movie JFK has been shown to be full of inaccuracies, just like many other left-wing media outlets are full of falsehoods and inaccuracies like The New York Times, Al Gore and all the rest.

Gee, maybe there’s a conspiracy against conservatives by the conspiracy nuts. A conspiracy of lies and smears, that is.

Today in the media we see any criticism of Obama as a simmering plot to ‘get’ the president. Tea Party activists and town-hall protesters are called dangerous kooks and violence-prone agitators who need to be watched. Yet the only sign of violence in the health-care debate came after Obama called for his supporters to voice their opinions. Within 24 hours, SEIU union thugs were beating up town-hall protestors in the name of Obama.

Meanwhile the same media people with their antennae out for any hint of anger at Obama are the same media people who ascribed Kennedy’s assassination to the conservative right. They are the same liberals who make movies that inspire killers like the Columbine assassins and John W. Hinckley.

One final thought: Why was there no genuine suspicion around all the novelists and filmmakers who overtly portrayed the assassination of George W. Bush during his presidency, spreading that heinous idea around the nation like a flu bug?

Naw, that was just fantasy stuff. That cannot be taken seriously, they said.

Or perhaps we should take the left’s fantasies more seriously, and take the serious stuff - like blaming all the world’s woes on conservatives - with a grain of salt.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

On November 15, NBC’s Meet the Press offered a segment on education featuring former GOP House speaker Newt Gingrich, Obama education secretary Arne Duncan and black activist Al Sharpton.

The debate showed how much lip service to real reform is being paid by the Democrats who control our failing public education system. Because the only way to truly improve education is for the Democrat-allied teacher unions and public school bureaucracy to make major concessions in economic and political power to charter schools and voucher systems which, combined, will help to spur competition to the public school monopoly.

But they will make no concessions unless forced by law. And that is a very difficult process although it is happening in some places.

Here is an analysis of the Meet the Press interview with verbatim excerpts in bold type:

Meet the Press host David Gregory opened the segment by saying that Gingrich, Duncan and Sharpton are “trying to solve a massive bipartisan problem with a workable bipartisan solution.”

Yet the failing educational system is not a “bipartisan problem”. The public schools are government-run institutions controlled lock, stock and barrel by one party, the Democrats.

Sharpton then said: “If we could come together on education, I think it’s an example to the kids that some things should be above our differences.”

Yet Sharpton and his hard-left friends in the public school bureaucracy have never made a single concession whatsoever to improve education except under severe duress, and are continuing to control our schools, particularly the worst urban schools, with an iron hand through the teacher unions and a rigid union bureaucracy.

Gregory then said that Duncan has received $4.3 billion in federal money in a Race to the Top Fund. And this again is just throwing more money at the problem, when teachers already are well paid in America. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study found that the average public school teacher in 2006 earned $34.06 per hour. Today it is certainly over $35 an hour. Yet the Democrats always say that more money is needed. It is not. Fundamental reform is needed. And teachers are as likely to give up power as they are to give up money. Which is only as a last resort.

Gregory then said: “I spoke to the head of public schools here in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee.  Fifty percent dropout rate in Washington, D.C.  Only 9 percent of kids going to a D.C. public school, only 9 percent, will go on to graduate college within five years of completing high school.  A huge achievement gap between black, white and Latino kids.”

And this is typical what happens with complete Democrat control of cities, schools and cultures like inner-city America. Rhee is making some reforms, but hardly enough.

Duncan then said that Obama wants to improve the schools.  “We have to get dramatically better.  We have a time of economic crisis in the country.  We’ve been arguing we have a time of educational, academic crisis.  We have 1.2 million dropouts a year in this country.  How can we sustain that?”

It cannot be sustained. We all know that. Except Duncan and his Democrat friends who are presiding over this system.

Gregory then said: “So the Race to the Top Fund and program means what, in a brief description?”

Duncan replied:  “We want to reward those states, those districts, those nonprofits that are willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better, close the achievement gap and raise the bar for everybody.  And what’s been so encouraging is before we spent a dollar, a dime of Race to the Top money, we’ve seen 48 states come together to raise the bar, higher standards for everyone, to stop lying to children.  We’ve seen states remove barriers to creating new, innovative charter schools.  We’ve seen folks get rid of firewalls separating student achievement data from teachers.”

Yet this is precisely what conservatives have been saying about public schools – that they always want more and more and more money. Notice the word “reward”. That is nothing more than a synonym for “payout to the teacher unions”. And indeed some reforms have been made because sensible people see how obstructionist these public school bureaucrats are and finally are acting against them.

Duncan continued: “We all have to take responsibility.  Simply perpetuating the status quo is not going to get the kind of dramatically different results we want.  So where states, where districts, where nonprofits, where universities, parents, teachers, community leaders, where we all come together and say we want something dramatically different, we’re willing to behave in different ways, we’re willing to move outside our comfort zones, we’re willing to collaborate, we want to put lots of money behind those places that will literally lead the country where we need to go.”

So where have the teacher unions shown any inclination at all to change? Meanwhile our universities are controlled by even more radical leftists who have no brief for genuine education but instead for more leftist indoctrination. At the same time “community leaders” like Obama are in the pocket of the unions. And parents in many of the worst districts are hardly capable of running their own lives after decades in which the Democrats have ruined their cities through corruption.

Gingrich then said:  “I agree with Al Sharpton, this is the number one civil right of the 21st century.  So if you–if the president has shown real leadership–which he has.  This is, a lot of places we fight.  On this one he has said every parent should know whether the school’s good.  Every student should have transparency about a results.  Every parent should have the right to choose a charter school.  Now, I, I would go further.  I’d like to have a Pell Grant for K through 12.  But this is a huge step for this president to take.”

Pell Grant means more money.  Yet, again, money is not the problem. The problem is a bureaucratic system that is geared toward teachers and their paychecks and their benefits and their early retirements and their bureaucracy, and not students.

Duncan added:  “I just want to say, as a country, we need more good schools.”

This is just typical lip service from Democrats like Duncan who ran the schools in Chicago and who is a public school pro-union mouthpiece.

Duncan continued:  “And good charter schools are a piece of the answer.  Bad charter schools are a piece of the problem.”

And the public school bureaucracy, of which Duncan and Obama are an integral part, are doing everything possible to thwart charter schools and to highlight their problems.

Duncan said:  “What we have, though, is we have schools at the bottom where we’re perpetuating poverty, we’re perpetuating social failure.  We have to stop doing that and we have to create options and opportunities for children and communities that have been underserved for far too long.”

Indeed. And in Washington, DC, where the REPUBLICAN party got scholarships to help 1,700 poor kids go to better schools, the DEMOCRATS cut the scholarship program until there was such an outcry that the scholarships were reinstated.

Gingirch then said:  “We visited the Mastery School in Philadelphia.  Second most violent school in the city, 25th percentile in outcome.  Three years ago the state became desperate, took over the school, turned it over to Mastery, which is a charter school system.  Same building, same students.  Three years later, they’re in the 86th percentile.  And as one young man said to us, an 11th grader–everyone in the 11th grade plans to go to college in this inner city, poor neighborhood.”

So indeed charter schools do work. It is proven. Yet still the National Education Association, the huge teacher union, fights charter schools every step of the way, along with political allies like the Democrat party, Sharpton and the Congressional Black Caucus.

Sharpton then said:  “You know, I, I was challenged by James Mtume, who’s a music icon and talk show host, on why I and National Action Network, our group, was not dealing with education.  It was a civil rights issue.  When he showed me the data–55 percent of blacks get a diploma, 58 percent of Latinos, 78 percent of whites–I looked at this achievement gap, which was almost identical to a 1954 when I was born, the year of Brown vs.  Board of Education, and I said, ‘How are we ignoring this?’“

This is Sharpton acting like he just discovered these bad statistics. These stats have been around for decades. Sharpton is just paying lip service. He is a racial agitator who somehow got invited to a serious discussion of social issues. How did that happen?

Gregory then said:  “Can you both concede that both political parties have, have stood in the way of reform through disagreement about education policy?  I mean, in 1995, Speaker Gingrich, you were an advocate of dismantling the Department of Education.  Here you are as a champion for a vision from the Department of Education about school reform.”

Uh, Mr. Gregory, the Department of Education is just another federal agency that is another layer of bureaucracy in the education establishment. It is unnecessary. Gingrich was infinitely more right in seeking to dismantle DofE than Democrats are in their approach to education, which is to fight reform at every turn at the local level.

Gingrich then said:  “But in a, in a time when we have liberal, Democratic president who has the courage to take on the establishment in education and who’s prepared to say every state should adopt dramatic, bold reforms, I think as, as–if politics are the art of the possible, our children deserve a chance to see us come together, to put their future above partisanship and to find a way to take on the, the establishment in both parties and try to get this solved.”

Hey Newt, what are you smoking? Obama is not in favor of reform. That is nonsense. He is a far-left pro-union liberal who never, ever will confront the unions.

Gregory then said:  “Let me–all right, I want to talk specifically about Race to the Top, this effort and some specific challenges that you face.  One of which is a disagreement with the unions on some issues, on the core issue of accountability.  Accountability for this results problem.  We know that the teachers union does not agree with the idea of standardized testing being an indicator of student performance.”

Indeed, public school teachers do not like objective tests because they reveal the failure of the educational system. The unions have fought accountability and ideas like ‘merit pay’ because unions believe that only union loyalty, and not excellence, should be rewarded.

In a videotape, Washington, DC’s Rhee says: “The one topic that is most important to address in public education today, in my opinion, is how we are going to implement a system of accountability.  For far too long, we have had children in our districts who are failing academically, and all of the adults have been able to keep their jobs and keep their contracts and that sort of thing.  And that really, that dynamic has to change.“

Gregory asks boldly:  “So here’s my question, Secretary Duncan.  Why should anybody believe that a Democratic president, who relies on interests like the unions who are out there organizing and who vote, why should somebody believe that he’s really going to take them on, that you are really going to take them on to force accountability?“

Duncan replies:  “We all have to move–at the end of the day, we have to have dramatically better results for children.  What makes great education is the adults.  Talent matters tremendously.  In every high performing school in this country, you have great principals and you have great teachers.  Student achievement is the purpose of education.  We need to evaluate whether students are learning or not.  We need to start to focus on outcomes, not inputs.  And as both these two gentlemen said, we all have to move outside our comfort zones.  Those old, tired fights of the past just don’t get us where we need to go.  Everybody’s moving, everybody’s willing to move.  At the end of the day, we want dramatically better outcomes for students.  That’s the only reason we all work every single day.“

This is just more shameless Democrat boilerplate. The unions work for Democrats and Democrats work for the unions. Period. It’s not going to change.

Gregory says: “But so how you–how do you hold teachers accountable, and while at the same time hold the unions’ feet to the fire?“

Duncan says:   “What we have said, which is a fundamental breakthrough, is we will only invest in those states and districts where student achievement is part of the evaluation.“

In other words, “invest in” means more money on top of already-bloated school budgets where teachers in urban and suburban districts often can make more than $100,000 a year for 9 months of work.

Duncan said: “David, it’s very simple, we simply won’t fund them.  This is–we’re talking about everyone moving outside their comfort zone. Department of Education has been part of the problem.  Let me be very, very clear.  We have been this big, historical, compliance-driven bureaucracy.”

This is a liberal saying this. Which is the reason that Gingrich wanted to get rid of DofE, and conservatives have been trying to get rid of it since it was born. Gingrich was right about that.

Gregory later says:  “But wait a minute.  But hold on.  On this union question, you have fights going on in school districts in this country  …rubber rooms, where teachers who are too incompetent or dangerous to be in a classroom can’t be fired.  You’ve got, you’ve got teachers in Washington, D.C., who are accused of sexual misconduct with their students who can’t be fired.  Is that sane?“

 And Sharpton replies: “And these things have to be dealt with, and this president has said he will deal with it.  But at the same time, you have teachers that have taught long and hard and done great work that have been overlooked, and we’ve got to have the balance there.”

This is more nonsense. Obama will do nothing about this. This is nuts and bolts stuff at the lower levels while Obama sends his children to the most expensive private school in the nation, Sidwell Friends in Washington, DC.

Duncan then said:  “Let me speak.  Teacher evaluation in this country is basically broken.  Great teachers don’t get recognized…. They don’t get rewarded.  We don’t shine a …spotlight on them, we don’t learn from them.  Teachers in the middle don’t get support that they need.  And teachers on the bottom, who frankly need to find another profession, that doesn’t happen, either. “

Which means that the system is broken top to bottom. What this system needs is an Extreme Makeover, a complete reinvention. Which ain’t gonna happen.

Gregory says:  “We talk about accountability.  I also want to talk about how we attract the best teachers, because this is just a huge challenge.  Bruce Stewart, who is the former head of school for Sidwell Friends, a private school here in Washington, D.C., spoke to us about that with his ideas.  This is what he said.“

In a videotape, Stewart says:  “When I began teaching in the ’60s, we had that population of people.  And since then, because greater opportunities have opened up for young women and for minorities, there’s been a great brain drain from American schools.  I think we want to get those people back.  If you look at Singapore, look at Finland, the reason they consistently are testing their population of students in the top levels of international exams, it’s the quality of their teaching force.  They all come from the top third of their colleges, universities.  In the United States, our tendency today is to have that pool of teachers coming from the bottom third of college and universities and from the bottom third of those classes.  That’s something we need to reverse and to change.“

What Stewart is not saying is that religious and private schools, which generally have lower salaries, are not having trouble attracting teachers. It is the public schools, with their huge, inflexible bureaucracies, that are having trouble.

Gregory then says: “How do we change it?  You know, Bruce Stewart says we should have a national teachers academy like West Point.”

Oh, sure. Like we need another big, huge centralized federal school run by government bureaucrats and leaning way over to the left, just like all of our universities. 

Duncan then says:  “We have a huge opportunity here, David.  We have, over the next five to, five to eight years, as many as a million teachers, the baby boomer generation, retiring.  And our ability to attract great talent and then most–more importantly, to retain that great talent over the next few years, is going to change public education for a generation, for the next 30 years. So how do you do that?  We have to make teaching the revered profession that it is and should be.”

These retirements are not an opportunity. They are a disaster. Because the teacher unions have established a system where many teachers retire in their mid-50s. So of course you are going to have massive retirements. This is tremendously expensive. But don’t expect the unions to change anything. This is their gravy train. And this highly bureaucratic, unionized system, despite all its salaries, perks and benefits, is the same one that discourages good teachers from working within it. 

Later Sharpton says:  “I think one of the things that we don’t prepare is our students for having a goal in life.  You cannot arrive without a destination.  And I think one of the things that we have not done is that every child believe they can achieve something and then use their educational experience toward that achievement.“

This is more drivel. Angry activists like Sharpton and the hip-hoppers and the rappers ruin kids’ minds. The destruction of the family in urban America is killing kids’ future. Yet when a conservative or a Christian talks about keeping the family together, they get shouted down by the liberals.

And who runs all of these failed communities and their schools?

Answer: The Democrat party. Lock, stock and barrel.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

The environmental movement started out in the 1970s as a positive factor in American life. It advocated and then coerced the cleanup of the air, land and water; set standards for pollution and energy efficiency; and encouraged land preservation in wilderness areas.

Today, however, the modern enviro movement is causing pollution and promoting energy inefficiency and destroying wilderness. Here is how:

Most of the pollution-reduction goals in the 1970s and up until now have been met using the technology of the private-sector capitalist economy. If technological innovation had not come to the rescue, we might not have solved many enviro problems but simply would have shut down the sources of pollution rather than modernizing them. Today using modern technology we produce much more industrial output with much less pollution.

This technological advancement is a natural part of our free-market economic system. And so we should not be surprised that it has helped to create a cleaner environment. Because our capitalist society is always advancing, trying new and more efficient things and making technology less expensive and more accessible. That is how cell phones, which cost $4,000 in the 1980s, today may cost $20, or sometimes are even given away free.

But the enviro movement has never credited our capitalist system for its crucial contribution to cleaning up the ecology. In fact today the enviro movement is opposing many of the efficiencies in the capitalist system, and opposing capitalism itself. That opposition is causing our economy to become dirtier and less efficient and poorer.

This all started when the enviro movement moved into the second phase of its involvement in the American economy by forcing ever more draconian pollution regulations on business. Much regulation in the 1970s started out positive but over time has become increasingly oppressive and invasive and obstructionist, by micro-managing businesses and their emissions. And it is having the effect of creating unsustainable regimes for business expansion, even halting economic growth here and sending jobs overseas.

This story is being repeated over and over across America much like the story of what happened in the town of Hudson, New York, 125 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River. It is a cement-producing region because of its big lime deposits. When the Canadian firm St. Lawrence Cement wanted to shut down some old plants in the area and build one big, new state-of-the-art facility on the edge of the town of Hudson, with the latest low-pollution technology, enviro groups fought the plant for years and St. Lawrence eventually gave up.

Why did these groups fight this plant?

Because even though the plant would have been cleaner than the old plants, and even though St. Lawrence planned to tear down the older plants to beautify the region, the enviro movement today has many people who are not necessarily or just pro-environment but who are socialistic and who are using the enviro movement to thwart capitalist growth, hiding behind “clean air” and “wilderness preservation” in order to hurt private companies like St. Lawrence Cement.

So now some of that cement production from the never-built Hudson plant is going to go to Mexico or other countries that have much looser regulations. And thus the same amount of cement production will produce more global pollution while killing American jobs and costing us in our balance of trade as we import the cement that should have been made here.

In the meantime, New York state enviro officials are constantly monitoring the older St. Lawrence plants and fining the owners for pollution violations when they occur.

Wouldn’t it have been better to just build a new plant?

Of course.

These types of opposition, along with oppressive enviro regs, are strangling the American economy in myriad small and large ways. Go into any small town or rural area in America and some local no-growth activist or environmentalist will protest just about any economic development project that is proposed. Sometimes a local development proposal like a quarrying operation or a mine is targeted by outside enviro groups, pitting, say, one single landowner or small local company against the wealth and legal power of state and national eco-groups, and state and federal governments. It is hardly a fair fight. Environmentalism is the most powerful special-interest group of all time.

On another level, local conservation commissions nitpick developers and landowners, requiring that every detail be accounted for, often at great expense. In one case in Massachusetts, a local commission required that a landowner who was replacing a decades-old wooden wall at the edge of a lake was required to employ an expensive specialized disposal company just to get rid of… wood. And to present a certified written receipt to the commission.  In other cases, extensive multi-million dollar enviro impact reports are required for projects as simple as a cell-phone tower, costing all consumers dearly and hindering modernization of small-town communication systems.

In another major case, in the state of Oregon in the 1990s, 30,000 loggers were thrown out of work over the phony ‘spotted owl’ controversy. Hundreds of thousands of more people were adversely affected. Did enviros care?

No. And these are just a few examples of nationwide enviro obstruction.

In the rural town of Corinth, New York, 175 miles north of New York City - a small town desperately in need of jobs -  environmentalists descended on the town in 2005 and rallied the people against a proposal for a plant that would have burned  New York City garbage and turned it into  electricity. That would have been a win-win-win situation with A) New York disposing of its garbage; B) jobs created in a small, rural town that needs them; and C) electricity generated.

But now instead that garbage is shipped 1,000 miles by rail to South Carolina and buried in a landfill. This A) wastes energy and creates pollution in the long-distance shipping of the garbage; B) pollutes the environment by filling up landfills unnecessarily, and; C) makes us more dependent on other energy sources by restricting electrical production. These are lose-lose-lose under modern-day environmentalism.

Enviros claim that the garbage-burning plant would have been “dirty”. But anyone who lives near one of today’s trash-to-energy plants knows they are super-efficient and clean using the latest capitalist technology.

One thing is certain, however – the results for the environment of blocking the Corinth plant are definitely “dirty” and will require more energy and will leave more people poor.

In electricity production in America today, 1.2 billion tons of coal are burned every year in “thermal” generating plants that make about 52%of the nation’s electricity. If those plants were all nuclear, we would not need to expend massive amounts of energy and create large amounts of pollution and natural disruption to mine, transport and burn all that coal.

Wouldn’t that all be a positive for the environment?

Yes. But enviros are blocking the most efficient energy production ever in the history of technology… nuclear power.

Now environmentalists are moving into the next phase of their agenda. After supervising the cleanup of the environment, imposing increasing regulation, and blocking energy efficiency like nuclear power, they are today moving into the area of energy production. They are proposing to replace these coal burning plants not with efficient nuclear power but with super-inefficient windmills which are only 40% as efficient as nuclear just to start. Windmills already are destroying wilderness all over America when they are installed in largely rural areas of unspoiled beauty. Many windmills are as tall as a 45-story building. It is just stunning to watch the cavalier way that enviros are willing to bulldoze mountaintops to erect windmills, while they have worked for decades to stop development in the same areas.

And now we have the final phase of environmentalism, which is the theorectical one in which completely fictional nonsense like ‘global warming’ is passed off as fact. This is the last straw. After decades of enviro-mythmaking about the end of the world through acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, disappearing forests and the like, the debunked ‘global warming’ fantasy is an all-encompassing catastrophe and is being used to drive all of the other parts of environmentalism (halting energy use and  economic development, forcing the construction of windmills etc.).

By driving public opinion and policy through the falsehood of unprecedented global heating, the enviro movement is covering every base. It started out positive and has ended up in a bed of lies. And that shows how little regard the environmental movement has for even its original goals, which have been accomplished and now are being superseded and even reversed by a much more dangerous and superfluous agenda based in myth and not facts, to the detriment of the environment itself.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

(This is the second in a series of columns on potential GOP presidential contenders for 2012.)

Some Republicans and conservatives may have previously shied away from Minnesota’s Republican governor Tim Pawlenty as a potential presidential contender in 2012 because he seemed dull. But he recently has been speaking forcefully and thus he deserves a good look. Because he is not only willing to take on president Obama  aggressively but is confronting his own party’s wavering liberal/centrist wing like Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, John McCain and the rest who bungled the 2008 election.

Pawlenty recently said that Obama is “corrosive” to the underpinnings of our society. And that is bold language that makes Pawlenty appealing to conservatives. Because he is speaking the truth against a divisive president who considers himself above criticism.

Precisely Pawlenty  said of Obama: “His solutions are federalization of policy, spending way beyond anything we’ve seen in terms of deficit or debt levels, spending the country into bankruptcy… And what’s behind it is a philosophy that government knows best, a nanny-state mentality on domestic issues that will ultimately be corrosive to the other pillars of our country — to markets, private enterprise, individual responsibility, freedom and liberty.”

On national security, Pawlenty said of Obama: “History proves that it is weakness, not strength, that tempts our enemies. And he (Obama) is projecting potential weakness, and enemies may see that and their respect may be reduced as a result of that, or worse.”

That is tough and intelligent language that Obama had better get used to because Republicans, and especially conservatives, are honing their long knives and are preparing to make sushi of the Democrats who have been saying recently that Republicans are a dying breed. And that may be backhandedly true. Because that is what some conservatives are saying as well. Because it is conservatives who are on the rise and who will save from oblivion a Republican party that is becoming more like the Democrats every day.  And with Obama’s popularity falling daily, America needs a clear alternative.

And those Democrats had better study recent history because they are failing to recognize that Republicans - running often as doctrinaire conservatives like president Ronald Reagan - won a large percentage of significant elections for the 26 years between the 1980 election of  Reagan and the 2006 takeover of the House and Senate by Democrats.

Because as much as the GOP has been ridiculed as lackluster after the McCain fiasco, its conservative principles have widespread appeal. A recent Gallup poll reported that 40% of Americans call themselves “conservative” and only 20% said “liberal”. Meanwhile many highly-motivated political figures like Pawlenty, commentators, and organizations on the conservative right like the Tea Party movement and Glenn Beck’s 912ers are warming up their engines, cinching their seat belts, sharpening their battle axes and waiting boldly in the wings for 2010 and 2012 when they know that the Democrats are going to lose, possibly big time.

Pawlenty recently injected himself into the news again by endorsing a conservative third-party candidate for US Congress in a special New York state election on November 3 in the 23rd district upstate. Rather than supporting the liberal Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava who is backed by Gingrich, who was picked by local Republican leaders and who favors many Obama programs including the stimulus, union card check legislation and gay marriage, Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, Dick Armey, Fred Thompson and other national Republicans backed Doug Hoffman who is on the conservative right and who opposes Obama in every way.

Hoffman lost by only 3.5 points, and now more absentee ballots are being re-counted and Hoffman could win. This would be a huge victory for conservatism. Already Hoffman’s surge is a big boost, as were the results of the November 3 election in New Jersey and Virginia, and in Maine on traditional marriage.

Simply put, conservatives are saying that enough is enough. Because these new Founding Conservatives including Pawlenty believe as Ronald Reagan did – and as Rush Limbaugh does - that if conservative principles are clearly stated, that it will draw to a winning ticket not only Republicans and independents but Democrats as well. These Democrats include working-class people who favor lower taxes and lower government spending, strong defenses, American pride, and conservative social values that the GOP increasingly is abandoning in its dash to the political left.

Pawlenty was interviewed October 27 on Neil Cavuto’s Fox cable show and he was unapologetic about his high-profile role as a Founding Conservative who wishes to re-state our American principles. Here are some excerpts of his comments about the New York state race:

“We have a very poor decision by the small group of party leaders… it wasn’t a grass-roots decision… it doesn’t even pass a minimum standard… I can’t even find an issue that she (Scozzafava) aligns with most Republicans on…. she is so far removed from even a minimum standard… this is about values and principles and ideas… ”

Go Pawlenty!

Here are some other statements from Pawlenty in earlier Cavuto interviews:

Pawlenty discussing the drift of the United States to the left: “…this is sadly reminiscent of the kinds of things we would expect from South America some decades ago. We’re seeing the nationalization of the auto industry… You are soon going to see the full or partial nationalization of the health care industry. You are soon going to see the nationalization, under the Obama administration, of the energy industry. And that, of course, puts the politicians and people making decisions that the market and private businesses should be making… And this is just the tip of the iceberg. You now have politicians chiding the auto industry over size of cars, what they should do, their business decisions, dealership decisions.

“…That is not the proper province for the United States Congress. That should be a private decision… This is going to be a very different country 12 or 24 months from now, and it’s headed in the wrong direction in terms of government micromanaging or intervening, and, worse yet, funding and subsidizing and taking over entire parts of our economy… This is not the United States of America that we know and love and remember. This looks like some sort of a republic from the — South America circa 1970s.”

Pawlenty on Obama’s health care plan: “His speech last night was essentially the public policy equivalent of leftover cold pizza. It was the same thing that the country’s already rejected with a few minor exceptions. So I don’t think he’s advancing the ball.… I think the American people are reacting to the notion of the federal government, first of all, busting the budget again with this proposal. I think they’re increasingly concerned about a White House and a Congress that has no boundaries when it comes to spending…

“They’re concerned about programs that they’re going to take over, not be able to afford, and then potentially ration care in the future, and things like that… Those are not irrational concerns. Even though his speech last night was soaring rhetoric, it’s going to come into collision with reality, and the reality of it is it’s a bad idea and the country can’t afford it.“

Governor Pawlenty is a good man who should be taken very seriously. He is bold. And he has no political baggage that we know of. He is a straight shooter and the type of leader who will appeal to a broad swath of Americans who will be seeking a new direction in 2012.

Pawlenty for president?

Perhaps. He is a genuine contender.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

“We tortured somebody!” Democrat Pennsylvania US congressman Joe Sestak said shortly after it was announced by attorney general Eric Holder that five major terror suspects now are going to be tried in New York City, including accused 9/11 ‘mastermind’ Khalid Sheikh Mohammed along with Ramsi Binalshibh, Walid Muhammed bin Attash, Ali Aziz Abdul Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi.

Sestak’s statement is a reference to the waterboarding interrogation of Mohammed, which is not even torture but is so called by American liberals. And Sestak’s statement is just another indicator of the Stockholm Syndrome that has been gripping America since 9/11. Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological regime under which an innocent victim - like America on 9/11 - begins to sympathize with his tormentor’s cause - like the terrorist cause - after the tormentors subject the victim to days, months or years of indoctrination and lies.

And today, after years of media indoctrination about why Muslims hate us, along with the utterances of a pro-Muslim president, far too many Americans have come to believe that our Muslim tormenters may be right, that America is a rotten place and, hell, why don’t we just give these terrorists their day in court and let them go free if that is the outcome.

And although that outcome is unlikely because the New York prosecutors are a tough bunch, these terrorists indeed could go free. Because there are powerful people on the American left and in the internationalist Islamist movement who want to see that result and who are going to use every legal trick in the book to twist our American justice system to that end.

Except  that these terrorists are not like ordinary criminals and do not deserve our Constitutional protections, which they will receive in these civil trials. They are not even ordinary military combatants. They are the worst of the worst. They break every established standard of military engagement by targeting innocent civilians, using women and children as human shields, firing from mosques and cemeteries, hunkering down in populated areas to avoid retaliation, and murdering prisoners.  Just for starters.

But that is of no consequence to those who wish to put this show-trial on, and an acquiescing public. You just watch what happens. It is going to get very, very ugly. And ultimately the terrorists will merely be the sideshow. Because it is America itself that is going to be the real target in these proceedings.

As this trial unfolds, it is crucial to remember why Muslims hate America. Because that will reveal why Stockholm Syndrome is working.

Many Muslims hate the Christian West not only for basic religious reasons, but also because Islam is a failure on the world stage. Muslims are utterly ashamed of the poverty and backwardness of most Islamic nations in contrast to the wealth and advancement of the West. Because even though Islamic nations have access to every technology that today powers the advanced economies of the world - technologies all originating in the West - they still are centuries behind. And they can never catch up.  

So their solution is to bring down the West rather than work to elevate their own economies. And leftists worldwide want the same thing  - to bring down successful capitalism because they have no viable alternative of their own to offer.

This is why Stockholm Syndrome is so important. Because Islamic terrorists are working in concert with, and piggybacking on similar techniques being used by American leftists to get Americans thinking against themselves. Working in synch, these two angry forces are captivating millions of American minds, and the result will work to the long-term detriment of our nation.

Held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for six years, Mohammed and his fellow travelers indeed are finally going to have their day in court, Obama-style, with all the rights granted to Americans. Except that they aren’t Americans. And this wasn’t some Manhattan stickup with a trail of bread crumbs leading to the perps. Lawyers will seek to challenge every bit of evidence gathered thousands of miles away, to expose every CIA connection and technique, and to use every technicality in the book to have the case thrown out or have their clients exonerated.

And to Stockholm America, whatever happens happens because these terrorists are people who actually may have a legitimate reason to kill thousands of Americans in an act of war. And to observe Obama’s record thus far on terrorism – most recently the politically-correct Army’s failure to single out a big, huge sore thumb like Fort Hood terrorist/assassin Nidal Malik Hassan - we can rest assured that America will be much, much worse for wear when this circus is all over and done with.

And a circus it will be, for months and maybe years to come with some of the most prominent left-wing legal academics working to smear America at every turn. Not because the lawyers themselves are living with Stockholm Syndrome and sympathizing with the bad guys, but because these radical lawyers have for decades been encouraging Americans to sympathize with thieves, union thugs, drug dealers, communists, murderers, pedophiles, rapists, Pentagon bombers etc.

Now think about this: Why would this sheikh want to be tried in New York City, the site of the major 9/11 attack? Would not every juror be prejudiced there? Why will there be no effort by his lawyers to move the trial to say, Peoria, as any counselor would normally demand?

Answer: Because despite the fact that the people of New York were the ones targeted on 9/11, those people have been so overwhelmingly Stockholmed by the terrorists and their media friends at the New York Times and Columbia University that some of them will dance for the sheikh if asked. Mohammed will be hailed like a Black Panther at a Leonard Bernstein cocktail party. Because the sheikh will be seen as a nemesis of the most hated figure in New York - George W. Bush. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Yes, for once, a defendant will want to be tried in the wrong setting intentionally. Because New York is a media bubble where the terrorists and their promoters can garner as much sympathy and coverage for the terrorist cause, and be readily available for studio interviews on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and all the rest - which they will get. Because ultimately this is not about the terrorists. It is about putting America  itself on trial. And putting George W. Bush on trial.

Consider as well the amount of attention that this trial would bring to New York among certain very violent people who are anxious to act. This is frightening… and unnecessary.

And the amount of classified, anti-terrorist material that will be spilled in this civil trial - material that would never be spilled in a military tribunal where these terrorists should be tried - will irrevocably harm our war on terror and give worldwide jihad all the information it needs to proceed around our defenses. Just the way the radical left wants it, and just the way the civil prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers did, leading to 9/11. The jihadi websites are salivating over the news that Mohammed and company will get legal treatment like none ever even contemplated in any murderous Islamofascist venue where they chop off heads first and ask questions later.

The defendants are likely to be tried in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, a ten-minute walk from the World Trade Center site. And what better place to further unnerve the public and put them more under the spell of their captors and tormentors as Stockholm Syndrome requires.

And what better time as well. Isn’t it interesting that this trial was announced directly in the aftermath of the massacre at  Fort Hood? It is as if Obama - through his subordinate Holder who will take all the heat off Obama the way Janet Reno took the heat off Clinton over Waco – wants to jam more terrorist overload down our throats, so that we hardly have time to think. Boom, boom, boom. This is a way to overwhelm and confuse the public about who the bad guys really are. After all, wasn’t it the US Army that caused Hasan to go nuts and kill all those people at Fort Hood?

The way many Americans think about about Fort Hood is this: “Yeah, right… I think so. The Army did it. Hasan was under too much stress from the Army and Bush’s war. Heck, I’m just really worried about my job right now. Let’s just get this over with… Who cares. Mohammed will be found guilty, anyway. What are all these people worried about?”

Not so fast. Mohammed could go free once the so-called “torture” that Sestak was touting is revealed and pressure mounts against the real defendants in the case: The United States of America and George W. Bush.

The Ancient Media will be doing their usual Fort Hood-style hatchet job during these trials, reporting only their wacky anti-American theories (like that the Army made Hasan do it) and waiting breathlessly for every malignant declaration, looking for eleven ways to blame America for terrorism and elevating the terrorists as mere victims of arrogant Western supremacy. And this whole proceeding will have the corrosive effect of further indoctrinating America into the grips of jihadist anti-Americanism. Which is the most sinister outcome of all.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

Summit meetings “are for when nobody knows what to do,” wryly observed Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal commenting on president Obama’s call for an economic summit conference in December to discuss the nation’s fiscal woes.

And Moore is right. Because Moore is a realist who understands actual economics… you know, supply and demand, taxes, economies of scale and the rest. Obama, on the other hand, is a socialist who thinks that economic problems are solved by meetings of wizards in Washington, and at Harvard, where all the “smart” people reside.

But so far Obama’s plans do not seem to be working. While his administration claimed that the February stimulus would save and create millions of jobs, employment losses have continued unabated since its passage.

Things soon will be much, much better, however. Because Obama has announced a ‘summit’.

Cool… Now we’re gonna see some real action!

Here is Obama’s press conference about his proposed ‘economic summit’, with analytical comments added: 

Obama: Good morning, everybody.  Before departing for Asia this morning, I’d like to make a brief statement about the economy. Comment: Again? You haven’t shut up about the economy since the day after you were elected. Give it a rest, will ya!

Obama: Over the past 10 months, we’ve taken a number of bold steps to break the back of this recession.  Comment: No you have not. You have spread around some government money. But that does not revive economies. It hurts economic growth.

Obama: We’ve worked to stabilize the financial system, revive lending to small businesses and families, and prevent responsible homeowners from losing their homes.  And through the Recovery Act, we’ve cut taxes for middle class families, extended and increased unemployment insurance, and created and saved more than a million jobs. Comment: Your “tax cuts for the middle class” were no such thing. They were small tax ‘rebates’ that temporarily stimulated the economy. Real tax ‘cuts’ mean that you cut tax RATES over long periods so that people don’t end up sending their money to Washington in the first place, but rather they plan for the future without fear of the government taking their wealth.

Obama: As a result, the economy is now growing again for the first time in more than a year — and faster than at any time in the past two years.  Comment: It’s phony growth, just a debt-funded blip.

Obama: But even though we’ve slowed the loss of jobs — and today’s report on the continued decline in unemployment claims is a hopeful sign — the economic growth that we’ve seen has not yet led to the job growth that we desperately need.  Comment: And when this happened to Bush – even after the trauma of 9/11 – your media buddies screamed “jobless recovery”. But now they will not. Wonder why?

Obama: As I’ve said from the start of this crisis, hiring often takes time to catch up to economic growth.  And given the magnitude of the economic turmoil that we’ve experienced, employers are reluctant to hire. Comment: And they are going to be more reluctant to hire after you get done telling them to give every employee health insurance and paid flu leave, and everything else. Pretty soon you will be demanding lifetime employment like they do in Europe. Which leads to companies NOT hiring anybody anytime and jobs going overseas.

Obama: Small businesses and large firms are demanding more of their employees, (are) increasing their hours, and adding temporary workers — but these companies have not yet been willing to take the steps necessary to hire again.  Comment: And whenever employers increase work hours in a good economy, employers are called ‘robber barons’ by the media for pushing their workers too hard. Now we are thankful for any activity. Because the Obama Economy is so bad.

Obama: Meanwhile, millions of Americans — our friends, our neighbors, our family members — are desperately searching for jobs.  This is one of the great challenges that remains in our economy — a challenge that my administration is absolutely determined to meet. Comment: Right. It is called “wealth creation” leading to new jobs. Reagan did it. You are not.

Obama: We all know that there are limits to what government can and should do, even during such difficult times.  But we have an obligation to consider every additional, responsible step that we can [take] to encourage and accelerate job creation in this country.  Comment: Rational economists like Milton Friedman would tell you to take one simple, proven step that you are refusing to take – cut taxes and regulations on business so that they expand. The “limits to what government can and should do” are to get out of the way of economic growth.

Obama: And that’s why, in December, we’ll be holding a forum at the White House on jobs and economic growth.  Comment: Wow. A summit meeting… What rubbish. Summit meeting, forum, it’s all the same. Another photo-op to make you look like you are doing something.

Obama: We’ll gather CEOs and small business owners, economists and financial experts, as well as representatives from labor unions and nonprofit groups, to talk about how we can work together to create jobs and get this economy moving again. Comment: Forget about including your friends in the the labor  unions. They have killed millions of jobs in America since the end of World War II. Just study the history of the steel industry, railroads and the auto industry to understand how. It is happening today at GM, Chrysler and Ford.

Obama: It’s important that we don’t make any ill-considered decisions — even with the best intentions — particularly at a time when our resources are so limited.  Comment: You’ve already made bad decisions. Now un-make them. That will spur the economy.

Obama: But it’s just as important that we are open to any demonstrably good idea to supplement the steps we’ve already taken to put America back to work.  That’s what this forum is about. Comment: Hey, I’ve got an idea. Stop hamstringing and frightening business and rich people with more taxes. They will invest their time and wealth and you can go on vacation for the next three years. Because every day you are in Washington holding your summit conferences and news conferences is a bad day for our economy.

Obama: In the coming days, I’ll also be meeting with leaders abroad to discuss a strategy for growth that is both balanced and broadly shared.  It’s a strategy in which Asian and Pacific markets are open to our exports — and one in which prosperity around the world is no longer as dependent on American consumption and borrowing, but rather more on American innovation and products. Comment: Yeah, the same jobs we’ve exported because many businesses can’t make a profit anymore here in America thanks to taxes, regulations, labor union wage demands, lawsuits and enviro regs, all coming from YOUR Democrat party.

Obama: It’s through these steps with our partners, in addition to the work we’re doing here at home, that we will not only revive our economy in the short term, but rebuild it stronger in the long term.  That’s been the focus of our efforts these past 10 months — it will continue to be our focus in the months ahead. Comment: It’s all out of focus. There is no wealth being created. That’s why people voted Republican in the November 3 election after the Democrats said that Americans never, ever would vote Republican ever again.

Obama: Thanks very much, everybody. Comment: And thank you, Mr. President. Now go to Asia. And stay there. So that America can prosper once again.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

The Democrat response to their recent election-day thumping is rather incredulous. For instance, while Sarah Palin phoned in her support for conservative US Congress candidate Douglas Hoffman in upstate New York, Obama made five personal appearances on behalf of Democrat incumbent governor Jon Corzine in New Jersey. Yet when Hoffman lost, the media said it was a big defeat for Palin. But when Corzine lost they said it was not a defeat for Obama but that the New Jersey election was all based on local issues.

Wouldn’t it seem like it was the other way around if you thought about it rationally?

The 2009 election was a big victory for resurgent conservatism and Republican core values, something that conservative true believers have been predicting since Obama’s election. Because we know that Democrats always overreach and shoot themselves in the ballot.  And we know that the liberals are terrified that conservatism will rebound and counter the radicalism of the Democrats with pragmatic and widely appealing limits on government.

The surprisingly strong showing of accountant and businessman Hoffman in New York state’s rural 23rd congressional district really proves how strong the conservative movement is, while the media and the White House have played his electoral loss as a weakness.

Here is why Hoffman’s showing was part of an evolving pattern of growing strength for conservatives, even though Hoffman lost the race by 3.5 points (49% of the vote for Democrat Owens to 45.5% for Hoffman):

Hoffman entered the race only two months before election day on the third-party Conservative ticket. By the time he entered the race and was known, the Republican party had rallied around super-liberal New York state assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava and had given her $900,000 to work with. But between the time of his joining the race and election day, Hoffman had pushed Scozzafava out of the race entirely with his popularity.

This is a sign of strength, not weakness.

If this same scenario had happened in, say, 2005, Hoffman would have pulled down perhaps 4% of the vote. That Hoffman ended up with 45.5% is astounding and a real sign of the times.

But the media do not want Americans to recognize what happened – that in a short time a conservative came out of nowhere and practically won - but only what did not happen - that Hoffman did not win. This is classic media spin.

The 23rd district went for Obama in the 2008 election by 5 points, so it is no longer the Republican bastion that it had been and that has been portrayed by Dems. The 23rd is like many rural districts in America that are no longer nearly as conservative as they once were because liberals today can move out from the cities, live in rural areas, teach at community colleges and state colleges in small towns, and can make a living through the internet or through the advanced communications and transportation systems available to all Americans today.

Now consider the following:

*That Hoffman not only pushed Scozzafava out, but did so without a big organization. This is indicative of the strength of the New Conservatism, that his candidacy would flower primarily by word of mouth and internet.

*That most of Hoffman’s strength was driven by newly-aroused conservatives whom the media marginalize repeatedly. What these media do not want to admit is how widespread and mainstream is opposition to Obama. Just look at the Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. A recent Rasmussen poll showed that a whopping 58% of those polled think that it is very likely that the next president will be a Republican. This is a sign of strength, not weakness.

*That much of the media and public discourse in 23rd district population centers like Potsdam, Canton and Plattsburgh (with New York state university campuses), Ogdensburg, Massena and Watertown, are pro-Democrat like much media in America. Owens was endorsed by the Watertown Daily Times and the Syracuse Post-Standard, the big paper in the region. He also was endorsed by the SEIU union, the people who beat up town-hall protesters last summer.

*That academics in state universities and in community colleges all over the district certainly made a public stand for Democrat Owens. That vice president Joe Biden even flew in for Owens. That many of the public school teachers throughout these areas have been radicalized against conservatives by the unions, with the New York State United Teachers endorsing Owens.

*That Scozzafava threw her support to Democrat Owens two days before the election. That Scozzafava, even after withdrawing from the race still got 5.5% of the vote, which would have helped Hoffman to win if he had gotten it instead.

Yet Hoffman still came close, a sign of strength.

If Republican leaders had held a primary and allowed the voters to pick their candidate instead of forcing Scozzafava on them, things would have been very different. Imagine if Hoffman had won a primary in July and had been given the $900,000 that the Republicans had given Scozzafava. He would have won easily. Imagine if Hoffman were on the mainstream Republican ticket, which would have increased his appeal much more than a third-party presence.

And when Hoffman runs in 2010, as he says he is going to, he will win if the Republicans do not sabotage him again. Because disenchantment with Obama will be stronger than ever.

Hoffman was criticized for being too focused on Washington and national issues like the debt, tort reform and a flat tax, that he was not involved enough in local issues. This is a typical  criticism coming from liberals who don’t believe that their local officials should handle local issues, but that all issues should be addressed from Washington.

Yet Hoffman was controller for the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics and helped it to be profitable. And he has contributed to his communities through his lifetime of business acumen - not politics. Which does not count among liberals, of course.

And the criticism of Hoffman as too Washington-centered is a Democrat’s way of thinking about a congressman. Because liberals think that they send people to Washington to get money and marching orders for the home district while today conservatives want to send their congressman to Washington for the opposite reason – to stop Washington from taking that money in the first place.

In Florida, Republican governor Charlie Crist, who is running for the US Senate as a ‘moderate’, said that he agreed with Obama’s stimulus because its monies helped the state of Florida to pay its bills. Yet this is more of the same thinking.

In other words, why does not the state of Florida just raise its own state tax rates to raise its own money? Why do federal taxpayers all over America – including those in Florida - have to send extra money to Washington to get it back to Florida to pay Florida’s bills?

This is the way liberals think – that all money belongs in Washington and is distributed from there. That is why conservatives like Hoffman have become active, and why conservatives do not like Crist but support conservative Marco Rubio. And that is why conservatives made a rebound this year and will continue to do so next year, and for many years to come.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

Today, November 11, is Veterans Day, a time to honor those who have served our nation in a way that many of us never have and never would. May God bless those who serve in place of - and on behalf of - those of us who do not.

Those millions who have risked their lives throughout the birth of and existence of the United States of America from the first patriots of 1775 to Veterans Day 2009 have selflessly guarded our precious freedoms not by the pen or in elite debate, but by the unmatched force of the sword.

There is a bumper sticker that says ‘If You Love Your Freedom, Thank a Vet’. And while some may dismiss it as a passing slogan, it is not. It is an absolute and unequivocal truth. We owe our veterans dearly for our cherished independence through which we can pursue our lives, liberties and happiness as guaranteed in our founding documents.

Just think of those who have served. They gave up a comfortable and predictable life for one that could end in an instant.  They have been moved around the nation and the world, have served in dangerous war zones, witnessed tragedy that most of us could never tolerate, faced adversity with conviction, and then returned to our American bosom without complaint, usually blending seamlessly and unheralded back into everyday life.

And it is what is inside them that makes them who they are. They do not seek out our admiration because they are strong and confident and assured within themselves. They do not seek out recognition because they respect themselves, and that is all that is needed. Yet they would be the first to admit their weaknesses and to put their faith in a higher power when their own certainties are strained.

Today our American military is a unified, brave and dependable entity. Is it perfect? No. That is not possible. But it is as close to perfect as we could ever hope.

From the American Revolution to World War I to World War II, to the soldiers of Korea and Vietnam, of Iraq and Afghanistan, from the battlefield infantry to the fearless pilots in the air to the mechanics on the ground, from the special ops daredevils to the top brass in Washington, every veteran knows what it means to put your life on the line for your fellow countryman. Because they all have done it with pride.

Many of us never even think about what our freedom means. We are too busy pursuing our lives, perhaps enmeshed in our own personal struggles, seeking out that which is better, stronger, more durable. Yet without the selfless disciplines of the US armed forces over the centuries, we would have nothing to show, to say or to hope for.

Who are our veterans? They are just like you and me. Except that they have that special glint that says that “I am just like you, but at the same time, well, dammit, I am extraordinary.” Because they are. From the ground up they are different. They have been taught, cajoled and disciplined into the greatest fighting force ever known. Whether on the front lines, or behind the scenes, each veteran has been a crucial member of a brotherhood that is like no other that the world has known.

Today, while we Americans may see our nation adrift and in crisis, we should look back and be ever grateful for what we have been given thanks to centuries of selfless service by our military’s veterans. And our current woes shall pass because we have known much worse. Because the world is in most ways more peaceful today – and certainly more democratic – that it ever has been in history.

And our US military has been a key player in spreading the independence and freedom for which our Founders set our own course. Because we have used our military as a global force for good, not a vehicle for conquest. And so our veterans deserve credit for helping to spread promise around the globe, not to do what armies have done throughout history – usurped land, power and freedom from innocent peoples.

Just think of our patriot generals from George Washington to Ulysses Grant to Dwight Eisenhower to Norman Schwarzkopf to David Petraeus, each serving in his own time to his own cause. But these good leaders would amount to nothing without those millions of soldiers who have operated under them in some of the most difficult circumstances ever, with little or no recognition from the public at large except maybe a pat on the back from friends and family. Today we seek to enlarge that circle of admirers.

That is why it is important to thank those veterans who have served, wherever you find them. Honor, sacrifice, discipline, humility… these are the hallmarks of America’s veterans, members emeritus of the world’s most just fighting force ever. We all must be sure to attend Veterans Day ceremonies to pay tribute to those who have made our wonderful lives possible. It is the least we can do in exchange for all that they have done for us.

On November 5, 2009, a Muslim US Army major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on fellow soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 and injuring 30. On April 16, 2007, a Korean-American student named Cho Seung-Hui opened fire on his fellow students at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, a school from which Hasan graduated in 1997. Thirty-two students died. Hui committed suicide.

And both incidents probably could have been avoided had political correctness been held at bay, and if common sense had prevailed.

Most soldiers at Fort Hood are not armed until they are mustered out to a war zone. And Virginia Tech - a state-run school - is a “gun free” zone. This precluded an armed student from taking out Hui, while a civilian police officer responding to the Fort Hood crisis had to shoot Hasan because there were no arms in the crowd that Hasan shot into.

A crowd of soldiers…

So much for the concept that “gun free” places are… free of guns.

At Virginia Tech, it took two hours for campus security officers to alert students that the first two murders of the day had taken place. Yet the very next day, before the proverbial smoke had even cleared, a convocation was held to remember the dead students. No time was wasted there for the politically-correct therapy culture to seize the campus.

At the memorial, Virginia Tech ’school poet’ Nikki Giovanni started railing about disease in Africa and something about loose boulders crushing houses in Appalachia, apparently a gratuitous swipe at the mining industry. This was more political jawboning at a time of great emotion and tragedy. Because liberals never, ever stop their political profiteering.

Liberals like president Obama have warned us not to jump to conclusions about Hasan. Yet Obama jumped immediately to conclusions in the case of black Harvard professor Henry Gates last summer. Obama said the police “acted stupidly” when he did not even have all the facts in the case where Gates was arrested after suspicious activity was reported at a Cambridge residence.

After Virginia Tech, the media immediately went full bore into a gun-control debate. Yet within twelve hours of the Fort Hood attacks, far-left Newsweek magazine was editorializing that Hasan’s actions were the fault of America because Hasan was afraid and angry about his coming deployment to Afghanistan. Newsweek said, ‘And the U.S. military could well be reaching a breaking point as the president decides to send more troops into Afghanistan‘… ‘From there, it isn’t much of a leap to argue that to further tax our military would do as much as anything to guarantee that the homegrown terror on display today could well repeat itself in the future.’

Yet nobody forced Hasan into the military, and nobody forced him to accept military financing of his education as a psychiatrist, the role in which he served. And nobody forced him to pull the trigger. Unless there was a wider conspiracy, which we do not yet know about and which the media will refuse to even conjecture about.

This certainly looks like a terrorist act. After all this type of small-scale individual attack has been considered a possibility since 9/11.

In the Virginia Tech shootings, the facts are startling. Killer Hui was a known loner and weirdo who had written violent short stories that frightened his teacher. He had a history of mental illness. But on many of today’s college campuses we can expect psychosis and violence to be considered normal, rather than suspect. After all most colleges preach abortion (anger at children); disdain for God and Christian peace; and extremist environmentalism (anger at humans and their activities) while nurturing a self-indulgent ethic that is “non-judgmental”.

Hui’s former English professor Lucinda Roy ultimately did nothing about his violent writings, while in 2005, a Virginia court even declared Hui an imminent threat to others. But special justice Paul Barrett decided that Hui was not crazy enough to be committed to a mental-health facility, which would have red-flagged the purchase of the gun that he used to kill his fellow students.

Barrett’s decision is part of the Therapy Culture pushed by liberals in America, in which derangement is normalized, and nobody wants to “offend” anyone by describing truthfully their condition. The same liberals shut down hundreds of state mental institutions in the late 1970s, putting hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people on the streets…. uh, homeless people, that is.

Hui even left notes and videotapes behind condemning rich kids and even Christianity itself. So Hui had learned his lessons well, had he not? Is this not the anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity and class-warfare tactic advocated by many leftists in academia and in the media today, and even seen in terrorists’ jihad videos?

Yet the immediate media spin after the Fort Hood massacre was that we shouldn’t jump to any conclusion, that Hasan’s Muslim roots had nothing to do with the killing.

We shall see as the investigation proceeds. Hasan is recovering from his injuries.

The military became aware more than 6 months ago of internet postings by a Nidal Hasan that defended Islamic extremism. And federal official knew that he was communicating through the internet with radical Islamist websites. Yet where was the follow-up? Was the military too politically-correct to look into this character? Meanwhile many of the media were careful to immediately report that Hasan allegedly reported having been harassed about being Muslim after 9/11. But the military claims Hasan filed no grievance.

Hasan is known even to have argued with and harangued his own psychiatric patients at Walter Reed army hospital in Washington, DC – where he counseled soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan – about the morality of the war. Why couldn’t the military have seen how wrong this was? Or is the military itself today so politically correct that they cannot take a stand simply because someone is Muslim?

Now imagine if a Christian had argued against, say, homosexuality in a public hospital.

He would be fired immediately…

A Department of Homeland Security report  last Spring said that police should be on the lookout for threatening right-wing radicals on American highways with anti-abortion and 3rd party presidential bumper stickers(!) and continued:

‘… rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat… The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today… After Operation Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991, some returning military veterans—including Timothy McVeigh—joined or associated with rightwing extremist groups….A prominent civil rights organization reported in 2006 that “large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.”‘

So how about Islamists in our military posting on the internet and arguing against American policy? Do they deserve scrutiny? And where was our Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano on this one?

Newsweek made another case for Hasan’s actions:

‘And while those who have faced multiple deployments are the most likely candidates to lash out irrationally after returning, it’s impossible to discount how the grind of an eight-year war has affected the rest of the military, who see friends leave whole and return in pieces; who wonder constantly if they’ll be next. (As a psychiatrist, Hasan may have been particularly vulnerable: there have been numerous accounts of chaplains suffering from depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after counseling returning soldiers. Hearing their horror stories, sharing their pain, and being unable to help often pushed these men over the edge. The fact that they were supposed to be healers, that they had never seen combat themselves, made it much harder to ask for help.)’

So here is another rationale from the left. Poor Hasan was traumatized by the traumatized. Which would seem to indicate that he was not fit for service and should have been cashiered out of the military long ago.

From the bogus Duke University rape charges filed by a black stripper against a group of white lacrosse players, to a former Taliban member attending Yale University, American media/university liberalism is out of control. 88 Duke professors even signed an accusatory newspaper ad targeting the lacrosse players before the facts were in, and then refused to apologize when they were proven wrong. This is the type of arrogance that permeates the media and academia today. 

The military should have scrutinized Hasan. But in today’s hyper-politically-correct world, such direct action is seen as rash and inappropriate. And the result was an extremist reaction – the murder of 13 innocent soldiers and civilians that clearly was the work of an Islamic radical working right under the noses of the same American military that is sworn to protect all of us. And only those who look beyond the hype will see that it is reason and rationality that will prevent such incidents in the future.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

Twenty years ago today, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached and thus began the end of this blight on the world’s political landscape. Thirty years ago last week, on November 4, 1979, Islamic militants seized the American embassy in Tehran, Iran and held hostages there for 444 days until January 20, 1981 when the hostages were released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration. After toying with a weak American president in Jimmy Carter, the Iranians knew well that Reagan would retaliate hard if they continued to hold our citizens.

So now we are celebrating two anniversaries. As one tyrannical culture – Soviet communism – began to collapse so that its people could re-integrate themselves into the free world, another tyrannical culture – radical Islam – has been building walls and mounting attacks against the West and its traditions of freedom and progress.

Divided after World War II into communist East Germany and democratic West Germany, the single nation of Germany today is reunited and free. But some young Germans today actually are being taught that the Americans built the Berlin Wall starting in 1961 wall to prevent communism from spreading from communist East Berlin into democratic West Berlin. This is false. East Berlin built the wall to keep its people in, like a prison. Because communism is a prison-like system that most productive citizens wish to flee.

For those too young to know, the Berlin Wall was a real concrete wall that separated the two halves of the city of Berlin. It was designed to stop the steady flow of 3.5 million immigrants out of East Berlin between the end of World War II and 1961 in a massive ‘brain drain’ fleeing the closed, oppressive and bankrupt system of communism. The exodus included many of East Germany’s and East Berlin’s most valuable citizens - engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers.

The very necessity of the Berlin Wall stood as a testament to the failure of communism. That a city and a nation needed to hold in its people by force to prevent them from fleeing was an admission that the marxist system was unsustainable except by force, a fact that always will remain true. Because communism is an evil, counterproductive and inhumane ideology.  

For the decades that it stood, leftists the world over considered the Berlin Wall to be a newly permanent world fixture. On June 26, 1963, president John F. Kennedy visited the wall and gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in order to say “I too am a Berliner”.  He simply was sympathizing with the people trapped in East Berlin and behind what Winston Churchill had dubbed The Iron Curtain of communism.

Over the next 26 years, little was done to challenge the existence of the wall. American policy was generally oriented toward appeasing the Soviet communists who controlled East Germany, and avoiding any provocations of their aggression.

The wall had eight crossing points that allowed transit between the two halves of the city, but all in all crossing was highly restricted and controlled. During the wall’s existence, there were 5,000 successful escapes to West Berlin and an estimated 200 people killed by East German forces while attempting to escape.

A freedom-loving president named Ronald Reagan and his CIA knew that the Soviet economy had been crumbling for decades and that communism needed to be toppled into oblivion. To the dismay of leftists in America, Reagan was very tough in international negotiations, forcing Europe to accept upgraded American missiles pointed at the Soviet Union, and refusing to concede American strength in negotiations over long-range intercontinental nuclear missiles. Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative – an advanced missile defense system based in outer space – and even deigned to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire”.

Liberals in America were terrified that Reagan was going to start World War III. But conservatives knew that Reagan was pushing the globe toward a new era of liberty.

Reagan kept up his blunt rhetoric throughout the 1980s. Nearing the end of his two terms in office, he visited West Berlin in 1987 to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city’s founding. In a speech at the Brandenburg Gate next to the Berlin Wall, Ronald Reagan shocked and horrified the international left when on June 12, 1987, addressing his remarks to Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, he said bluntly:

“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Those six words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” are six of the most consequential and historic words ever uttered by an American president. So rather than stand timidly by as John F. Kennedy did offering sympathy to the suffering people of Berlin, or looking powerless to radical Islamists in Tehran like Jimmy Carter did, Ronald Reagan did what conservatives always do: He stated the truth boldly and without equivocation despite warnings from faint-hearted diplomats in the State Department that the language was far too strong.

By summer 1989, encouraged by Reagan’s call and yearning for freedom, millions were beginning to move more freely around the Eastern Bloc nations and by November 4, one million protestors had gathered in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. On November 9, it was announced that East Berliners would be allowed to travel freely to the West, but the regulations were unclear. The permission became effective “immediately” as huge crowds gathered to move inexorably through the wall’s checkpoints toward freedom.

Although the wall did not begin to be dismantled until days later, November 9, 1989 is considered to be The Day the Berlin Wall Fell. And by 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Eastern Europe was free from its Soviet captors for the first time since World War II.

Today America is facing new adversaries with Tehran, Iran as their headquarters. And while Islamic militancy is not the organized international force that Soviet communism was, it is a menacing energy that threatens America and the West in a much more insidious way – not through direct confrontation, but through terrorist activity, possibly nuclear. And thus the West must stand firm like Ronald Reagan did, not wilt like Carter. Because truth and righteousness are infinitely more powerful than any wall… or any weapon.

Today, November 9,  Berlin will celebrate with a Festival of Freedom while the German embassy in the United States is conducting informational seminars with the motto ‘Freedom Without Walls’.

And today young Americans who never knew the era of the Berlin Wall must… MUST!… take time to understand what this horrible monument to tyranny really meant so that it never, ever is repeated again.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

The very first message was sent over the internet 40 years ago on October 30, 1969. Today the internet has developed in a very short period into a central tool of our economy and our public media. And just as the internet is emerging as the most democratic media forum ever in world history with a place for every man, woman and child to express his/her opinion, internet monoliths and computer giants such as Google, Amazon.com and Microsoft suddenly are favoring the concept of ‘network neutrality’ or ‘internet neutrality’, which ultimately means strong government control of the internet.

Wikipedia.org says that:

Neutrality proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms.

This is the same basic falsehood that leftist anti-capitalists have been preaching for decades – that the private-sector players who in fact have built the internet like Earthlink, Verizon, Juno, Comcast, Road Runner, Facebook etc. cannot be trusted with its future because the private sector is profit-centered. Yet if that falsehood were applied in the real world to our American food-production system, for instance, then our private-sector food supply would not be bountiful as it is, but would be a system of artificial scarcity and empty shelves.

But the exact opposite is true. It is government-controlled agriculture that produces artificial scarcity. Just look at the starving masses throughout the 20th century in communist nations like China, the Soviet Union and North Korea.

Net neutrality is being advocated largely as an economic issue, that private control over the infrastructure of the internet ends up being economically discriminatory. Yet the real reason for regulation is betrayed by Vinton Cerf, who was co-inventor of the internet protocol (IP) and who now works at Google, who criticized the current internet saying that “the internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.”

“Gatekeepers”? Is that not exactly what a free society wants to avoid - powerful people who decide who says what and when? We have “gatekeepers” at the New York Times who make sure exactly what we see on its pages. We have “gatekeepers” in our universities who stifle free speech and who punish anyone who says things that dissent from leftist dogma.

But more crucially, notice that Cerf says “gatekeepers over new CONTENT or services”.

Content? This is a telling word. Does that not appear to mean that proponents of net neutrality really want to control content, perhaps by first controlling the economic infrastructure through government regulation?

Yes. It certainly sounds like they want to control the whole internet, top to bottom, as if it were NBC or the New York Times.

That these mega-corporations like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, in concert with the Obama administration, suddenly see the internet as needing to be regulated by government should be frightening to us all. Because these companies are left-wing big businesses that favor big government in every way, and want to work alongside that government to control the internet - and everything else - under the concept of ‘neutrality’. It should be very worrisome that neutrality-favoring Google employees gave more than $1 million to president Obama’s election campaign in 2008. Meanwhile many, many computer moguls are super-liberal.

Why this tilt to the left? Aren’t rich people supposed to be conservatives and Republicans?

Hardly. Because computers are based in the ‘soft’ information/media/communications sector of the economy which generally has tilted to the left, while the ‘hard’ economy like manufacturing, steel, railroads, logging, construction, energy generation and mining generally is much more conservative. And America today is shifting toward a ’soft’ economy while ‘hard’ endeavors like manufacturing and mining are shrinking or moving overseas.

The internet has been called ‘the wild, wild West’ with so many opinions available. Except that all those different opinions on the internet are more broad-based and wide-ranging than the New York Times or the leftist intelligentsia care for. Many of those opinions disagree with the New York Times’ opinion and the Obama administration’s opinion. And so the New York Times and its media/computer/internet/government friends at NBC and Microsoft and Google and Amazon and in Washington, DC do not want Americans to read those opinions without some sort of filtering.

Because after decades of control, liberals came to believe that all media are theirs alone to control. Until the internet came along. And now they wish to take it over to the left just as they have done with our newspapers, our universities, our public schools, the arts, the entertainment industry and the courts by using one simple tactic - filtering out conservatives and their opinions. And the only way to do that is through government control.

Just look at how liberals have managed to control so much of public opinion today. The Fairness Doctrine was instituted to monitor opinions on the ‘public’ airwaves. Newspapers, magazines, entertainers and artists, once relatively neutral, have moved far to the left under pressure from 1960s extremists who now are in control. Universities have been taken over by 1960s radicals who wish to imprint only a far-left ideology on students rather than teaching unbiased history, science, literature and philosophy.

Now even the White House is saying directly that Fox News is not a legitimate news organization and that Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio need to be controlled through the Fairness Doctrine. This is to stomp out any dissent to doctrinaire liberalism. But the White House never talks about the bias of the Los Angeles Times or MSNBC or liberal talk radio. Because they would be spared under any government censorship under socialist cronyism.

Two communications elites Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and Robert McChesney say that:

Net neutrality means simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet’s wires cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant “end-to-end” design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for economic and social good.

Look at those words… “all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network”. Does this not sound like the marxist principle that everyone is going to be treated the same in society and that this somehow will produce equality? And when you look at the actual outcome after the application of such theory, does it not always produce massive inequality and a hyper-hierarchical system with elites deciding who gets what, and the vast majority of people left with zero?

To add insult to injury, the internet today is putting many liberal newspapers and magazines out of business and this is traumatizing to the left. How could anyone dare put the precious New York Times on its knees as the internet has done? Nobody else could have. And thus the internet must punished and controlled.

The idea behind ‘net neutrality’ is the same idea that has maintained government control over public education. Those who have favored public schools have said for decades that education is too important to be trusted to the private sector, that it would fall under the control of certain capitalist/conservative entities and opinion-makers, and that education must be controlled by the government.

But while public schools once were very good, today they are not egalitarian, inexpensive and unbiased - like ‘net neutrality’ seems to promise for the internet - but elitist, prejudiced and expensive schools that are getting constantly worse, costing more and more every year, that are promoting only a leftist agenda, and that are shutting out conservative thought. Tens of millions of parents would opt out of the public schools if they could, and that is why the public education bureaucracy fights reforms as if fighting for its life. Because genuine reform and competition would expose the public schools for the failures that they are.

The idea of ‘network neutrality’ has existed since the invention of the telegraph. In 1860, a federal law was passed that would subsidize a telegraph line. The law stated:

messages received from any individual, company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of their reception, excepting that the dispatches of the government shall have priority …

There are many critics of ‘net neutrality’. Wikipedia.org says:

Some opponents of net neutrality argue that prioritisation of bandwidth is necessary for future innovation on the Internet.  Telecommunications providers such as telephone and cable companies, and some technology companies that supply networking gear, argue telecom providers should have the ability to provide preferential treatment in the form of a tiered services, for example by giving online companies willing to pay the ability to transfer their data packages faster than other Internet traffic. The added revenue from such services could be used to pay for the building of increased broadband access to more consumers.

Opponents to net neutrality have also argued that net neutrality regulation would have adverse consequences for innovation and competition in the market for broadband access by making it more difficult for internet service providers (ISPs) and other network operators to recoup their investments in broadband networks. John Thorne, senior vice president and deputy general counsel of Verison, broadband and telecommunications company, has argued that they will have no incentive to make large investments to develop advanced fibre-optic networks if they are prohibited from charging higher preferred access fees to companies that wish to take advantage of the expanded capabilities of such networks. Thorne and other ISPs have accused Google and Skype of freeloading or free riding for using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build.

Isn’t that an interesting turn of events?  That Google, the mega-corporation pushing for ‘net neutrality’ would be accused of itself being a freeloader on the internet system built by others? But then again, this is classic liberalism, akin to lazy college professors, featherbedding government bureaucrats and welfare cheaters freeloading off of our economic system while clamoring for more control over that very system. Which is exactly what they do.

Wikipedia.org then goes on to say further about Google:

Those in favor of forms of “non-neutral” tiered Internet access argue that the Internet is already not a level-playing field: companies such as Google… achieve a performance advantage over smaller competitors by replicating servers and buying high-bandwidth services. Should prices drop for lower levels of access, or access to only certain protocols, for instance, a change of this type would make Internet usage more neutral, with respect to the needs of those individuals and corporations specifically seeking differentiated tiers of service. Network expert Richard Bennett has written, “A richly funded Web site, which delivers data faster than its competitors to the front porches of the Internet service providers, wants it delivered the rest of the way on an equal basis. This system, which Google calls broadband neutrality, actually preserves a more fundamental inequality.”

So again, Google is calling for ‘neutrality’ while Google itself is manipulating the current internet architecture to its own ends. 

Robert Pepper, senior managing director of global advanced technology policy at Cisco Systems, and the former Federal Communications Commission chief of policy development, says:  “The supporters of net neutrality regulation believe that more rules are necessary. In their view, without greater regulation, service providers might parcel out bandwidth or services, creating a bifurcated world in which the wealthy enjoy first-class Internet access, while everyone else is left with slow connections and degraded content.

“That scenario, however, is a false paradigm. Such an all-or-nothing world doesn’t exist today, nor will it exist in the future. Without additional regulation, service providers are likely to continue doing what they are doing. They will continue to offer a variety of broadband service plans at a variety of price points to suit every type of consumer.”

This sounds a lot like the case against capitalism itself which has eternally been criticized in theory as elitist and divisive and bifurcated, but which in fact has turned out be the most democratic economic system of all. And this is why we should oppose the fantasy of ‘network neutrality’. It is a theory from the left, whose ideas never have worked and never will work wherever they have been applied but always have produced the opposite result of what their proponents claim.

We should leave the internet alone. It is a tool for democracy that should be encouraged in its present form.

We should ‘Just say no’… to net neutrality.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

That White House operatives would claim that president Obama was not watching the election returns Tuesday evening shows one thing – that Obama and his inner circle truly are contemptuous of America. Because anyone who purports to claim that Obama was watching a basketball game – or watching a documentary about his own 2008 campaign, as another story goes - as his political party was taking a shellacking is disconnected from reality.

Actually Obama indeed may have been watching basketball to nervously avoid the unpleasant reality of what happened to the Democrats. And you can only imagine his dismay when he heard the news that Democrat Jon Corzine had lost the governor’s race in liberal New Jersey, the same Corzine for whom Obama risked a huge amount of personal political capital.

Just think of the calculus going through Obama’s mind at that moment, seeing his political image fractured after a year of arrogance and over-confidence, a year in which he was certain that his smooth image and reassuring talk would help him to re-make America.

This electoral defeat sounds like his rout over the Chicago Olympics, does it not? And it looks like Obama is on a losing streak. After all, he started by bungling his own oath of office.

To cavalierly dismiss the election really shows us a president who came into office unknown and who still remains unknown to the American people. Yet this is what we have in Barack Obama – an unknown quantity, an untested president in over his head, playing politics at every turn, breaking campaign promises daily, sinking in popularity, pushing a hard-left agenda, filling the White House with people who say they admire genocidal mass murderer Mao Tse-Tung, and consulting with radical union bosses and urging extremist climate legislation while the economy suffers.

With this election, however, his future agenda is uncertain at best.

Forget his smiles and happy talk and Michelle and the kids. Forget his promises for hope and change. It is not the kind of change we want from a president who is not who we think he is. And the thrashing that the Democrats took in this election is a harbinger of Obama’s future prospects. Because America already seems to be deciding that they are losing interest in and patience with Barack Obama.  And if Obama thinks he is going to turn the situation around with some magic political bullet, he is wrong. It’s not that way outside of Chicago.

And while Obama had the media in his pocket during much of his first year, this election may mark the demarcation point where they may begin to incrementally flee the ship, just as independent voters fled Obama’s Love Boat in droves on election day 2009.

In his victory speech in the governor’s race in New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie said, “…starting tomorrow, we are going to pick (the state capitol of) Trenton up and turn it upside down” in pursuit of the forces that have bankrupted and corrupted the state. He talked about citizens whom he had engaged during the campaign who genuinely were frightened and who believed that the state, and our nation, are imploding economically and destroying their businesses and their lives and their children’s futures.

Christie said that when he was elevated to US attorney eight years ago, that the general sentiment was that he could never fight the ingrained corruption in the state. He has since locked up 130 officials without losing a single case just like Republican Rudy Giuliani took on the corrupt, entrenched Democrat and mafia interests in New York City and turned it around through genuine hope and real change, not the sloganeering of Obama.

No Barack Obama was too busy watching basketball to care about the re-election of a Democrat governor in Jon Corzine who has been working hand-in-glove with crooked union bosses to rob New Jersey blind, the same people Chris Christie was putting in jail. Obama was too busy watching a documentary about himself to see Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell mop the floor in Virginia with his Democrat opponent, and to notice Republican candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general also winning big in Virginia.

No, Barack Obama was too busy fixated on hoops to keep track of the six of seven state races in Pennsylvania won by Republicans in a state that he carried handily in 2008.

Today the White House is in a public state of denial. With health care in jeopardy, conflict breaking out among Democrats, the economy sucking wind and his party badly beaten in the first big test of Obama’s political coattails, he will continue with his smiles and his happy talk, and he will do his best to act as though nothing significant happened on November 3, 2009. But his carefully constructed facade will fall by the wayside as the nation enters a new era in which fiscal responsibility and the rule of law take over for wild spending and SEIU union thugs beating up innocent Americans in the streets.

Obama’s predicament looks a lot like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger who was elected California governor in 2003. Schwarzy thought that his movie-star fame would give him the keys to the Golden State. Like Obama, Schwarzy was confident that he could manage the California government by the power of his personality alone. But he could not and today Schwarzenegger’s popularity is 27% and the state of California is circling the drain, waiting for a tough Chris Christie-like reformer to come in with a legal sledgehammer to knock down the castle of corruption built through years of Democrat rule.

Obama adviser David Axelrod said, “You don’t with the wave of a wand make everything different.” Yet that is exactly what Obama thought he was going to do after he was inaugurated.

He was wrong.

Sure the conservatives lost one congressional race in New York state by just 3 points. But Doug Hoffman, who wasn’t even in the race until just one month ago, came very close to winning and the Democrats had to pull out every stop to defeat him.

And Obama may take some little solace in that. Except that he does not understand the conservative movement. Because Hoffman will be back in 2010 with a strong, district-wide organization and he will be swept into office with dozens of Republicans who are honing their knives for Obama and his reckless Democrats.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

Conservative radio talk-show king Rush Limbaugh raised eyebrows when he predicted recently that Barack Obama would be a one-term president like Democrat Jimmy Carter. And with significant Republican victories in the November 3 elections, the Democrats could be headed for big losses in 2010 and 2012, including the White House.

In Virginia, Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate for governor and a conservative Christian, won a smashing victory by a whopping 18 points in a state that currently has two Democrat US senators, has had two recent Democrat governors, and which went for Obama in 2008 by 6 points. The “swing”, or the difference between Obama’s win last year and McDonnell’s victory was 24 points, a massive shift in mostly independent voters which has been plaguing Obama himself since inauguration.

Even in super-liberal Fairfax County outside Washington, DC, which Obama won by 20 points, McDonnell split the vote evenly with his opponent Creigh Deeds, who is a moderate Blue Dog Democrat. Deeds’ loss should be a cannon shot over the bow of the 52 Blue Dogs in the House of Representatives who now may even think twice about voting for the massive 2,000-page Pelosi health-care plan.

To add insult to Democrat injury, Republicans won both the Virginia lieutenant governorship and the Virginia attorney general’s office by wide margins.

In New Jersey, a very liberal on behalf of Corzine, reform-minded prosecutor Christie won handily. That win even included 6% of the vote being siphoned off by an independent candidate, meaning that 55% of New Jersey voted against Corzine.

Corzine was seen as part of a corrupt Democrat machine presiding over a terrible, static economy run into the ground by years of Democrat taxes, misrule and overspending. His loss was a big blow for the Democrat party in a very liberal state, and a warning to Obama about his handling of the economy. “Tomorrow we begin to take back

In the largely rural 23rd congressional district of New York state, a reliably Republican district for more than a century, conservative Doug Hoffman lost to Democrat Bill Owens by 49-45. But Hoffman was not even in the race one month ago and forced the well-financed liberal Republican, Dede Scozzafava out. Yet Scozzafava still won 5% of the vote even though she had withdrawn. Scozzafava even sabotaged Hoffman by endorsing Owens. Yet Owens did not even get half of the votes cast. Hoffman will be back next year for a rematch.

In Maine, citizens voted by a large margin, 53% to 47%, to retain the traditional definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman. In this fairly liberal New England state – the two Republican US senators are liberals - this is a big win for conservative/Republican values. This vote might have been expected in a more conservative Midwestern state, but the fact that it happened in Maine is a big slap at the gay lobby, proving once again that the nation is not moving way over to the left as the Democrats have claimed.

In Pennsylvania, Republicans won 6 out of 7 state races and may win the 7th.

This 2009 election shows that just one year after Obama’s juggernaut, it was Democrats who surprisingly faced an ‘enthusiasm gap’, meaning that Republicans and conservatives were much more fired up than Democrats, primarily because of Democrats’ overreaching. In heavily Democrat New Jersey, the deep-seated corruption and taxation of the Democrats was seen as encouraging the Republican opposition. In Virginia, the Democrats simply lost big-time. The election looked like something out of the Reagan years.

It also is important to remember that Obama and the Democrats invested a lot of energy in these elections, much of it behind the scenes. For them to lose so badly is stunning.

Third, these results are a significant slap in the face for a president deemed invincible just one year ago. And don’t think that a lot of these voters were not voting against Obama. In one CNN exit poll, 24% of respondents in Virginia said they were voting against Obama.

Where should the GOP go now?

It should go with those who strongly oppose Obama by learning from Reagan’s 1980 win, and hope for a charismatic leader to re-take the White House in 2012.  

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

The founding of America was based on honesty and truth-seeking because that is the basis of liberty. To undermine the truth and manipulate the facts the way that liberals do every day leads to a slippery slope where the government uses its friends in the media to turn little falsehoods into big deceptions and eventually to overwhelm the citizenry and then control them through sham. Today Al Gore and his cronies are doing the same thing with their nonsensical ‘global warming’ theory. And it must be exposed.

Conservatives now are banding together to fight the falsehoods of American liberalism. But we are up against a foe that is tenacious and uncompromising and that does not value the truth. President Obama, for instance, has said that under his health-care plan that “you can keep your own doctor” or that small businesses can keep their private health plans when he knows darned well that under his ultimate plan that you will have no control over your doctor or your health plan, and that you will do whatever the government tells you to do.

In another speech about small business in Maryland, Obama said: “These entrepreneurial pioneers embody the spirit of possibility, the tireless work ethic, and the simple hope for something better that lies at the heart of the American ideal. And they have always formed the backbone of the American economy. They’re the ones who’ve opened the mom-and-pop stores and started the computer tinkering that has led to some of the biggest innovations and corporations in the world.”

But this glowing description is only for public consumption and contradicts what Obama really believes. Because Obama is a classic Democrat, very much against even the spirit of small business; who disdains the entrepreneurial spirit like a good Chicago pol who operates on corruption and wealth extraction from all business; who is on a mission to undermine private businesses small, medium and large; who wishes to tax business more and more heavily; and who wants to control all business through the government.

In every way, Democrats have created a permissive, dependent and weak society that repeatedly gets itself into trouble and then needs to be dominated by the government. And only conservatism stands in their way. And unless conservatives band together to stop this agenda, we will all be subjected to the untruths and power grabs of the left.

Democrats are seeking power in every way. In a special US Congress election in upstate New York, the “Republican” candidate Dede Scozzafava favored Obama’s stimulus, Obama’s bank bailouts, Obama’s auto bailouts, Obama’s pro-union card check legislation and homosexual marriage. And so we have to wonder: Isn’t there already a Democrat in the race supporting all that? And why do we need a second Democrat calling herself a Republican?

The liberalism of Scozzafava is the reason that a third-party conservative named Doug Hoffman entered the 23rd district race. And then Scozzafava dropped out because Hoffman was doing much better than she was. And then rather than endorsing Hoffman, Scozzafava endorsed… the Democrat candidate!

So what is going on here? Is the Republican party being infiltrated by a Fifth Column of Democrats seeking to neutralize the GOP, people like Schwarzenegger?

Yes, this is happening all over.

And is the Republican party one of those entities that now is divided against itself and therefore “cannot stand” as Abraham Lincoln once conjectured?

Well, yes and no. And what is going on in New York state is going on all over the nation. And the Republican party bigwigs in Washington had better pay attention because the conservative movement is on a mission to re-establish truth and honesty as the cornerstone of freedom, and to expose the left for its deceptions, not kowtow to it like Scozzafava and John McCain have done. So-called ‘Republican’ general Colin Powell even voted for Obama despite the fact that he owes his whole career to Republican presidents like George HW Bush and George W. Bush.

And if the Republican party simply wants to be another Democrat party, then we conservatives must continue to put up our own candidates and let the chips fall where they may. If liberal Republicans lose elections because the vote is split, that is fine. If conservatives win the elections, that is good. Because in the long run the Republican party must move away from the positions of the Democrat party and return to its roots as a party based in the founding truths and principles of 1776 - eliminating debt, protecting the nation and protecting all citizens including the unborn, respecting private property, allowing enterprise to flourish, and recognizing the ultimate value of marriage and the family. Because otherwise our nation will continue to suffer.

In the 1992 election for president, Ross Perot entered the race as a third-party candidate not because he thought he could win but because he knew he could draw enough votes away from Republican George HW Bush to cause Bush to lose. Because he hated Bush. And it worked. And today we have many, many subterfuges going on in our electoral system that conservatives need to be aware of, like Republicans taking Democrat positions, or more succinctly, Democrats running as Republicans like Scozzafava.

Or even representing themselves as such, like when Democrats call on the ‘Republican’ comment line on C-Span and say “Well, I’m a Republican but I disagree with the Republicans” on this, that and the other thing. Don’t believe that this is not happening every day in letters to the editor, internet chatter and the like. Conservatives do not employ such ruses because we know what the truth is, and that it is on our side. And conservatives simply need to call in with the truth because the truth ultimately wins out.

Incrementally all of these subterfuges are adding up. We have an onslaught against conservatives in the media. Some people even made up racist quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh when he did not say them at all. And while millions will hear the quotes, many fewer will know that they were false. And this is the way that socialism undermines conservatives. And only a strong and unapologetic and vigilant conservatism can counter them with confidence and honesty.

Democrats have used voter fraud routinely for decades, recently in the 2004 Washington state governor’s race; in the 2002 US Senate race in South Dakota; in Al Franken’s US Senate victory in Minnesota in 2008 where hundreds of Franken ballots magically appeared in a heavily-Franken district after the vote seemed razor close; or in the 1960 presidential election which Richard Nixon knew he had won but which was fraudulently called for John F. Kennedy. Now in Washington state young people are pre-registering to vote long before they are eligible to vote, and it is suspected that thousand are voting before the age of 18. All of which could be avoided by checking birth certificates and IDs. You know, like a bouncer at a nightclub door…

Look at the way that Obama took both sides of most issues in the election – he was for the 2nd Amendment and against it. He was for coal energy and against it. And the same on most other issues. To read about all of his obfuscations, go here   And that is how he won the election – by appealing to everyone. And enough independents – and even some Republicans - believed what they wanted to hear, defected to Obama and helped to elect him.

It is time for the conservative movement to speak out boldly and loudly against the Democrats and their tricks. It will not take long for the truth to come out if we all work together.  Because the people of America are much more conservative - and much more interested in the truth - than the media are, or are willing to let on.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

The economy has expanded by 3.1% and this appears to be good news. Except that this was the report in July 2008 when growth figures were first announced for the 2nd quarter of 2008. They later were revised downward.

And what stoked the economy plus 3.1% when the 1st quarter of 2008 was negative 1%?

It was the Bush stimulus. Remember the rebate checks issued to taxpayers in May 2008?

Yet the effect of those rebates lasted only a brief period, while we will be paying interest on that debt payout for decades to come as it is folded into the national debt. Meanwhile the following four quarters (3rd quarter 2008 through 2nd quarter 2009) were negative, bottoming out at negative 6.4% in the 1st quarter of 2009.

Now we have reports that the economy grew 3.5% in the 3rd quarter of 2009 and this again sounds like a good number. Yet what stimulated that figure?

More taxpayer money, including the wasteful and temporary Cash for Clunkers program and other government spending. In the 3rd quarter investments in residential real estate grew what seemed like an impressive 23% with the housing market getting a boost from the $8,000 federal tax credit for first-time homebuyers. So housing also was helped largely by more federal deficit spending.

And this too is artificial and will need to be paid for through federal debt service and higher taxes. And this current growth never will be sustained unless there is more and more government spending, all of which will drag down future growth, increase debt and push up taxes and interest rates.   Because you can always afford a vacation if you put it on your credit card, just as the 3.5% growth rate in the 3rd quarter 2009 was put on our national credit card.

President Obama is digging himself a huge hole that he will never be able to get out of. And this is the socialist debt hole that we see all over the developed world in very liberal places like Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia, leading to anemic growth and high unemployment rates for decades at a time. Japan has been in a serious recession since 1990.

Christina Romer, chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, said of the 3.5% growth figure that “this welcome milestone is just another step, and we still have a long road to travel until the economy is fully recovered.” This shows that there is great caution in the Obama administration about getting too cheery about growth. Because there are so many pitfalls in the Obama agenda that unemployment is expected to rise over 10% by the end of the year and will stay there for a long time.

Ronald Reagan faced similar circumstances in 1982 with high unemployment and exploding deficits. But by November 1984 he was re-elected in a landslide because the economy was well on its way to recovery.

The reason? Because Reagan was in the process of bringing tax rates down on businesses and on wealthy Americans, while Obama is raising them. Because president Bush’s 35% federal tax rate on wealthy Americans is going to expire soon and will rise to almost 40%. On top of that, many state and local taxes, along with ‘millionaire taxes’ and surtaxes are going to push total tax rates on wealthy Americans over 60%. This will produce stagnation as more and more wealth is drawn out of the private economy.

Today in New York state, for instance, ever-increasing tax rates are being blamed for an exodus of wealth, confirming what conservatives always have warned about – that ever-increasing tax rates eventually will produce less and less revenue for the government because people will leave rather than pay the higher rates.

When New York governor David Paterson said that he would have sought to raise tax rates on rich people sooner if he had known that wealthy conservative Rush Limbaugh would pull out of his New York city residence, it certainly felt good to say it about a political nemesis. But ultimately it is counterproductive.

In New York state, once one of the richest places in the world, more than 1.5 million state residents left to go to other states from 2000 to 2008, according to a report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. The vast majority - 1.1 million migrants – left New York City, meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

“The Empire State is being drained of an invaluable resource - people,” the report said. And while wealthier people are leaving, they are being replaced by lower-income newcomers who will contribute much less in taxes.

New York City suffered the biggest loss of taxable income in the state. The average Manhattan taxpayer who left the state earned $93,264 a year while the average newcomer to Manhattan earned only $72,726, according to the report.

In 2006-2007, the “migration flow” out of New York to other states amounted to a loss of $4.3 billion, said the Center which used US Census reports combined with Internal Revenue Service data.

The center blames the exodus on the state’s high cost of living and high taxes. But much of the high cost of living is directly attributable to high taxes which are blended into the cost of everything, while those taxes are all man-made and can be controlled. But increasingly left-wing New York state has no inclination to control taxes but seems to be on a trajectory of increases just as Obama is nationally.

The entire nation faces a fate like New York’s unless major reforms are made in Obama policy. America can no longer drift along on past glories and deficit spending. This Potemkin Economic Rebound simply is not sustainable.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

In 2008, Americans spent a whopping $6 billion on Halloween. Today there are 2,500 “haunted” attractions nationwide. Thousands of temporary Halloween stores now pop up after Labor Day. And you may say, “So what?” and “It’s just fun, isn’t it?”

But it is a disturbing trend. Because it represents a cultural shift, the mainstream acceptance of the pagan celebration of Halloween at the same time that Christmas is being marginalized by the media and secular America. No more “Merry Christmas” or “Christmas vacation”. Now it’s just “Happy Holidays” and “winter break…”

Certainly there historically has been a celebration of Halloween as a time for kids to dress up as goblins and to collect candy on trick-or-treat night. And they look forward to it. And it never seemed to harm us when we were growing up in the 1950s.

Or maybe it did…

Over the last 20 years, Halloween has turned increasingly into a grown-up phenomenon, and a culture-wide phenomenon, and it now represents another phase of ‘perpetual adolescence’ among the adult population of America. The New Halloween is manifested in frivolous adult costume parties often featuring decadent themes and behaviors; elaborate lawn tableaux with large-scale props even at homes without children; a wide Halloween presence in the media; Halloween-oriented business pitches; and heavily-attended parades. These all represent the routine acceptance of pagan Halloween at the same time that America is becoming less and less committed to, and knowledgeable about, its Christian founding and the freedoms emanating from it.

In fact the adults most likely to participate in Halloween are also those most likely to have marginal commitment to our freedoms and to the whole idea of American exceptionalism in the first place. They are more likely to be liberal, cynical, attention-seeking, hedonistic, superficial, pleasure-seeking, confused, lonely or even socially ‘lost’. They are more likely to be proponents of our nonjudgmental Whatever Culture that believes that whatever happens is fine, and that freedom means you are free to do whatever your heart desires.

But liberty is not so simple. It comes with warnings and boundaries. After all, we are not allowed to kill somebody because we dislike them. And the more incrementally permissive and flippant our society becomes, the more endangered our freedom becomes. And Halloween represents another chink in our armor of civility and maturity, like Reality TV and Follywood narcissism and stupidity.

Go to any Halloween store this season and you are just as likely to see adults as children shopping for costumes and ghoulish get-ups, in some places more likely, as in New York City. And we are told by the atheist media that this is just harmless fun. But it is not. Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung all were mass murderers who were committed atheist pagans. And many of the people behind the mainstreaming of Halloween are atheists, occultists, satanists, witches and other deviants who are committed to the secularization of America and the degrading of our core cultural institutions.

After all, who needs to visit an art museum or study the Bible or the Constitution when you can dress up like Anna Nicole Smith and get a few chuckles. Except that dressing like Anna Nicole Smith is a completely empty and immature exercise embraced by largely empty people like Smith herself was. And empty people do not care about the higher and more challenging  aspirations of our culture. In fact they usually are obsessed only with themselves and with filling up their emptiness with exercises that often are meaningless in themselves.

Another phenomenon of the New Halloween is the sexualization of young girls. Some contemporary costumes for little girls are either coquettish or downright slutty, with short, revealing skirts and other suggestive paraphernalia.  Which means that Halloween today is being used not only to degrade adults, but to elevate young girls to a stage of sexual exploitation, all egged on by nihilist parents.

Oh, it’s nothing at all, they say.

But that is untrue. It is something. It is a big deal. And we must be vigilant.

Halloween is also a celebration of satanism, of which endless and unlimited permissiveness and sexual pleasure is a part. Satanists are in full flower on Halloween, although it happens largely behind the scenes and undercover, and is dismissed in the “fun” of Halloween. But they are there, and often throughout history, hidden forces slowly manipulate societies to their own evil ends. And if you point to  the satanic nature of Halloween you are ridiculed as sooooo old fashioned.

Today in Greenwich Village, a homosexual quarter of New York City, the Halloween parade draws hundreds of thousands of viewers. Halloween is called Gay Christmas by some who see Halloween as a celebration of that part of society which overtly thumbs its nose at traditional American values and restraint. And the Greenwich Village parade is put on by adults and is largely enjoyed by adults. After all, most homosexuals do not even have children. Much of the event is disturbing beyond the traditional ways, often expressing abnegation, profanity and sexual deviancy. And of course it is politically leftist.

Halloween also is being promoted by people who once were called “witches” but today are called “wiccans”. This softens the blow of who they really are and what their real goal is – to turn people away from vigilance, liberty, scholarship and freedom and into witchcraft and moral equivalence and New Age thinking which is nothing but chaos.  Today openly wiccan people are school teachers and serve in other positions of authority over children. Yet we are not allowed to question them. Or even to question Halloween itself.

Another manifestation of the New Halloween is the widespread and year-round exploration of the paranormal. Ghost hunts, communicating with the dead, haunted hotels etc. This stuff is all over TV and movies, and is more widely accepted than ever.

Now think about the 1950s when Halloween seemed like a much more benign celebration. You may think that it really did not affect us much. But perhaps it was just another base upon which the permissive 1960s ‘hippie’ culture, and its sex and drugs and demonic rock music further degraded us. And thus over the years you have the recipe for cumulative cultural breakdown that we are experiencing today. So perhaps Halloween did affect us. Just look at the adults today who celebrate it, who were introduced to it in the 1950s…

Even Christian churches today have Halloween parties for kids.

Why? Why not at least let these pagan celebrations go on in pagan places?

Answer: Because today paganism is even in our churches, many of which are no longer genuine Christian churches but are places of liberal political indoctrination masquerading as sacred places. So why not celebrate paganism?

Perhaps Americans should start to protest Halloween parades sponsored by public money, and Halloween plays and programs in public schools, the way that secularists have pushed Christian messages out of our public square and out of our schools. Because after all, Halloween is a religious celebration of pagan atheism. And we must have “separation of church and state”!

Oh, no, the celebrants say, you are just going overboard. Halloween is just harmless fun. You are just an unhappy conservative.

But no, do not be deceived. There is much at work under the radar here and it is creeping in on little cat feet. Just as America’s economy has been undermined by mindless spending and ever-increasing debt loads and sloth and corruption, our culture is being undermined by increasing secularism and selfishness. In poll after poll, fewer and fewer Americans are describing themselves as Christian believers while at the same time more and more adults are partaking of the “harmless” celebration of Halloween.

You do the math…

Ultimately, outside of the kids, Halloween represents the most dangerous social trend of all - the stripping away of our identities behind those “harmless” costumes. Because people lacking self-knowledge are more likely to be led by others while those of us who are confident in our identities are more likely to seek equality, freedom and opportunity for all because we trust our own souls. Halloween gives Americans yet another opportunity to get outside of themselves and to become somebody they are not, in the most frivolous ways. And that is the most hazardous outcome of all.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

You know that liberalism has passed its melting point when a widely-known lefty activist and author like Barbara Ehrenreich writes a book attacking positive thinking.

In Bright-sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, Ehrenreich rightly criticizes some of the hype of the positive-thinking movement including motivational speakers like Tony Robbins. But all in all devoting a whole book to trashing positive thinking seems like a weird and counterproductive way to expend time and energy. Unless you are a liberal, of course.

Why not write about the destructive nature of negative thinking, which is infinitely more pervasive and destructive than positive thinking? After all billions living in poverty and misery could not really be said to be entrapped in uplifting thoughts.

Perhaps Ehrenreich, who developed breast cancer in 2001, might seek to link her own disease to her snide, dour and skeptical outlook. But oh no, don’t go there… In discussing the unnecessarily upbeat tone of breast cancer awareness programs in the month of October - which even showed up in a big pink ribbon at the White House - Ehrenreich said “Breast cancer made me nastier.” And she gets laughs from her cynical, deadpan delivery, while her message in fact is deeply troubling. Because there is a much bigger force behind her words because Ehrenreich is a propagandist to the core, not a scholar as she purports to present herself.

It doesn’t sound like Ehrenreich could be much nastier than she already is, which is a classic trait of liberalism – nastiness cloaked in a faux compassion, faux understanding and faux wisdom. She has written for many left-wing publications like The Progressive, Mother Jones and Harper’s magazine. She wrote a completely negative book called Nickel and Dimed, about the struggle of working people in America. Other essays include The Snarling Citizen and Bait and Switch, The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.

Really cheery, wouldn’t you say? And certainly these issues should be addressed. But to never look on the bright side and never count your blessings is a disturbing phenomenon that is common to people like Ehrenreich who  told her C-Span audience that her book is “going after an ideology”. But being a prominent figure in the far-left organization Democratic Socialists of America, could her real target be simply American can-do optimism and capitalism which requires self-investment and confidence, and which has built the most powerful nation on earth, a nation she certainly disdains?  

Does Ehrenreich ever write anything positive? Apparently not. And this is classic liberalism – negative, cynical, defeatist. Don’t look up. Don’t be positive because that is for uncaring Republican achievers who will step on you on their march to the top. You are doomed. The world is rotten. And the government is here to fix it. Here is your check.

Ehrenreich traces the roots of the positive thinking movement to a reaction to gloomy Calvinism. She assigns much of the blame for the explosion in positive thinking to its advocacy in corporate America, springing from roots in 20th century figures like Norman Vincent Peale. Cynically she says that positive thinking is corporate America preparing workers for downsizing and says that those who ride around with Life Is Good bumper stickers are deceiving themselves, and that most of our world is better described by a man with a T-shirt that said that Life Is Crap.

This drew laughter from her probably upper-income, generally liberal audience during a C-Span airing at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC. (Two questioners in a small audience were psychologists.) Yet what is so funny about the whole idea that “life is crap” or that someone would profess it on a T-shirt?

It sounds rather sad, does it not? No positive thinking there. And you would not expect the wearer to achieve much, would you? Common sense tells you that.

Ehrenreich’s prescription for all the woes she relentlessly chronicles is good jobs and better wages. Yet her far-left ideology with crushing taxes and regulations, rampant lawsuits, greedy unions and rabid environmentalism has corroded economic growth, pushing many jobs abroad. So as Ehrenreich describes for profit our woes in excruciating detail, her political ideology only makes things worse.

She says that positive thinking does not help sick people, which is false. Studies have shown – and common sense would tell you – about a higher recovery rate among people who think they are going to recover because disease is both physical and mental. For Ehrenreich to dismiss the mental aspect of disease is simply deceitful. Is not the person who can envision success more likely to achieve it than the guy in the Life Is Crap T-shirt? Wouldn’t a positive, achieving person seek to distance himself from the guy in the T-shirt? And would not medical wellness seek to distance itself from a negative mindset?

Ehrenreich goes on to ridicule figures like televangelist Joel Osteen, who she says is not really a Christian preacher but simply an advocate of positive thinking. Yet most people who wish to improve themselves would rather listen to Osteen than to Ehrenreich. Because a positive message is more uplifting than a negative one. Period. So why not listen?

Ehrenreich says that the opposite of positive thinking is not negative thinking but “realism”. And this is dishonest. Because “realism” actually is a trait of American conservatism, along with positive thinking and hard work, all of which Ehrenreich certainly scorns. The dangerous socialist ideology on which her thinking is based rejects “realism” in favor of “idealism” which is the form of positive thinking which is the real threat to human progress. All those “idealist” regimes where everyone is promised milk and honey end up in death camps and starvation.

And the liberal left engages in another false ritual of positive thinking that conservatives oppose and that is in “self-esteem” programs in public schools, particularly among girls and minorities. This is another corruption of positive thinking because it simply implants a false and unearned conceit which only can drop away like a trap door later in life.

Who would pay to read an Ehrenreich book or to be captured by a negative force like she is?

Answer: Other well-off, well-educated liberals, that is who. New York elite intellectuals who see government action as the key to everything. And that they would be her audience is a real indication of where Barbara Ehrenreich is really going with her ideas, someplace that clear-thinking individuals know we should never think of heading.Being as depressing as it is, Ehrenreich’s work probably is rarely read by people in bad straits, but more by the brie-and-chablis crowd on the left - the overpaid college professors and lawyers and

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.

Democrat US Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada currently is pushing a ‘public option’ plan in the health care bill now before the US Senate. President Obama has favored the public option as well. And repeatedly we are told that this public option – a polite way of saying a government-run health plan - will help to bring down costs by increasing competition with private insurance plans. And that sounds very capitalistic and natural.

Meanwhile the private health insurance industry is being demonized by Democrats who are saying that it is making excess profits. Yet the insurance industry is way, way down on the list of profitability with profit margins of only about 3% whereas some top-tier telecommunications companies are making more than 20% and oil companies make around 10%. So the myth of the rapacious insurance companies is false.

There already is supposed to be competition in the health insurance industry, with hundreds of companies in existence. The only problem is that even with that number of companies there is hardly any competition.

Why?

Because there is so much regulation that companies do not compete with each other but rather they coexist in a highly regulated state-by-state environment. If insurance companies were allowed to sell policies the way that, say, car makers sell automobiles, there would be everything from an inexpensive bare-bones plan for only catastrophic costs (with, say, a $50,000 deductible) all the way up to an all-inclusive and very expensive ‘Cadillac plan’ to cover every single ailment and treatment, and currently available to bigwig corporate executives, union bosses and other rich guys.

But state-by-state regulations require that plans sold in, say, Colorado, have to cover this, that and the other thing, often covering hundreds of conditions, pushing up the cost. There is no real choice, and these government mandates increase costs relentlessly. But why should you pay for acupuncture, foot massage or blemish removal if you do not plan or want to use them? That would be like forcing you to take out fire, theft, collision, hurricane and tsunami insurance on your old car when you know that it is not worth the cost, or is not any risk at all.

So if the state pushes up the cost of your insurance through mandates and then offers you a government plan that is backed by the taxpayer, you are more likely to fall off of your private plan and onto the government plan. And so the very existence of this public option would have the tendency to incrementally harm private insurance companies which would be getting attacked from two sides – from excessive mandates and regulation; and from unfair competition from the government.

President Obama and the  media continue to tell us that health-care costs will come down with a government plan. But that is bunk. Ultimately anyone who pays taxes will be paying dearly for this whole health-care plan - and much more for the public option if it passes - through higher taxes. Then they have to pay for their own insurance as well, whose cost is rising all the time.

Think of this whole situation like the public schools. You must pay taxes to support public education even if you do not have children or do not use the public schools. And you pay those taxes forever; they never end. This gives the public school bureaucracy an endless revenue stream to spend as they wish, particularly on salaries and benefits for unionized teachers. Public schools are the ‘public option of education’.

But liberals argue that private schools are allowed to flourish without interference, just as they say that the private insurance industry will be allowed to sell all the policies it wants under Obama Care.

But that is a feint. Because public school taxes drain away so much wealth that most families cannot afford the extra cost to send their children to private or religious schools. So if you want to spend more money to send you kids to private school, you are free to do so. But you know how it works. It is very costly over and above your taxes.

Then when proposals are made to issue school vouchers using school tax money, or to take other money from public schools budgets to fund charter schools, the public school bureaucracy fights it every way they can. Because it cuts into their revenue stream. And then they see the competition from private schools as exposing their failures. And we all know what the public schools generally end up saying about their mediocre educational offerings - “take it or leave it. Because you are already paying for it.” Because they know you don’t have much choice.

Today increasing numbers of American school students attend charter schools. Yet as education moves in fits and starts toward some privatization and private quality, health insurance is moving in the other direction - possibly into the public option - rapidly and with only the stroke of Obama’s pen.

So once there is a public option in health insurance, the people who run that public system will seek to corner as much wealth as possible and to give nothing to competition, like the public schools. And this is how the private insurance industry will be gutted – slowly, but surely. And soon private insurance would only be for the rich, like private schools.

Finally, we see liberals telling us the same nonsense about energy production as they are saying about health care – that once we build government-subsidized ‘green’ energy systems that the price of energy will come down. But that is false; the price will go sky high, just as it has gone up, up and away in education and will go up with health care. Because windmills absolutely require a government subsidy to survive and are only 40% as efficient as nuclear power. And so we will have to invest 2.5 times as much in windmills as in nuclear, much of it from the taxpayer. This will raise taxes on everyone including the utility industry, draw away vast capital resources from nuclear power, and effectively reduce supply, pushing up prices and ruining our energy production system.

The whole health-care public option is a charade to slowly gut the private insurance industry. It probably will be defeated for now, but it may reappear down the road. Yet we easily can reform the private insurance industry by common-sense cost-containment measures that were used in the 1990s and were very successful. Until liberals started screaming about them, and then they were canceled.

We also need to restrain the Democrat trial lawyers, restrain the Democrat health care unions like SEIU, and restrain the Democrat politicians from over-regulating and mandating the insurance industry. All these private measures together could easily fix health care for good, with no public option and no tax increase.

Yet even without the public option, the Congressional Budget Office says the current health plan will cost almost $900 billion over the next ten years and we know that means many trillions more down the road. But that is unimportant to liberals who want government control and ultimately the public option. And they should just call all it what it is – socialized medicine.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.