Back to Basics

What is it with the “warmists”, Al Gore and his clones who keep insisting the Earth is warming, that too much carbon dioxide (CO2) will be the death of us, and that we have to immediately stop burning “fossil fuels” if we are to save the planet? They are the most relentless liars on the face of the planet.

They want us to cover the surface of the U.S. with solar panels and the mountains with wind turbines to generate the energy needed for everything we do. These Green energy alternatives are so wonderful they are producing a mere three percent of our current needs, require government subsidies and loan guarantees to exist, and tend not to be all that great when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

So why are we still hearing from this discredited and disgraced bunch of charlatans and buffoons? In early May, The New York Times published “Game Over for the Climate” by a major offender of the truth, Dr. James Hansen, who for some reason is still the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), despite having pocketed big bucks beyond his humble government salary. In 2007 he split a million dollar Dan Davis Prize with someone else and in 2001, received a $250,000 Heinz Award. Former GISS employees want him fired.

As debased as The Times is, in 2006 the American Association for the Advancement of Science selected Hansen to receive their Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. I cite this as a warning that even a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper and formerly respected science organization have long since gone over to the dark side when it comes to global warming. Nothing they have to say on the subject should be regarded as more than pure propaganda.

Suffice to say that Dr. Hansen’s opinion article cited every global warming lie we have been hearing since 1988 when he first gained famed testifying before a congressional committee that we were doomed. In his Times article, he predicted that the “semi-permanent drought” would turn the Midwest into “a dust bowl.” Like every other global warming prediction (that hasn’t come true) this will happen “over the next several decades.” Time enough for Dr. Hansen to pick up a few more awards and fatten his bank account.

The face of the global warming hoax, Al Gore, will not shut up. He made news in August 2011 when he totally lost it while speaking at the Aspen Institute. Anyone, noted climatologists, meteorologists, and mere science writers like myself were the target of his rant for actually citing things such as the fact that the Earth has been in a natural COOLING cycle since 1998 and other inconvenient facts about the climate.

“And some of the exact same people” said Gore, frothing at the mouth, “I can go down a list of their names—are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message. ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!”

The climate is not cooperating. The Church of Global Warming is crumbling around them. People are making fun of them.

Bluntly said, the full weight of Tea Party members, their family members and co-workers who go to the polls in November will end Obama’s reign of terror.

I think that 2012 will be known as the year the Tea Party movement changed the future of America away from its entrenched socialist drift to a renewal of the founding principles of the nation. The movement is composed, quite simply, of patriots.

That’s why Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin titled their book, “Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution.” I heartily recommend it if you keeping reading and hearing about the movement but are unfamiliar with its origins and its program of reform.

In 2009 neither of the authors had any idea they would be leading a revolution. Martin was a mother of two who was cleaning houses to make ends meet. Meckler was a northern California attorney. They would end up starting one of the largest grassroots organizations in America. You can visit its site at http://www.teapartypatriots.org/.

It began with protests against President Obama’s “stimulus”, signed into law on February 17, 2009. The next day, CNBC’s Rick Santelli angrily called for tea party to protest what we now know was little more than a political slush fund and an a historic failure that did not reduce unemployment or jump-start the economy. It simply added to the trillions in debt Obama would heap upon this and future generations.

When Rush Limbaugh took note of Santelli, he said, “This is the pulse of revolution, starting today!” The Tea Party movement began the next day.

As Meckler and Martin say in their book, “We were angry at politicians from both parties who had abandoned any pretense of responsibility and spent not only all the money we would earn in our lives, but all the money our children and grandchildren would earn in their lives.”

The Tea Party movement could have become a third party, but it didn’t. The combined wisdom of its leaders and members realized that the way to change the government at all levels was to elect people who were in agreement with its core principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets.

Initially, the Tea Party movement grew from two people to 1.2 million in two months. On April 15, 2009, they turned out for 850 Tea Party events around the nation. Today the authors estimate that 20 million Americans identify themselves as Tea Party patriots. There are more than 3,300 affiliated state and local Tea Party groups. My commentaries, for example, appear on http://www.teapartynation.com/ and I am told on other similar sites.

These people are focused! They understand that the only way to change the government is to change who gets to serve in it. They demonstrated that in November 2010 when the movement returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party. “We’ve seen that the greatest threat to our economic success today comes not from abroad, but from our elected officials.

I have a novel idea. Let’s just let the Middle East stew in its own Islamic juices. Along with the Maghreb, the northern tier nations of Africa, down into Nigeria, wherever you find an Islamic regime, you find millions of very unhappy people.

I am not the only one who feels that way, a Monday, May 14 Rasmussen Reports poll found that 63% “believe there is a conflict in the world today between Western civilization and Islamic nations, but most also think the United States should leave the Islamic world alone.”

Will the Muslims ever practice tolerance or accept peace with the West or anywhere else for that matter? No, never. The Koran—which Obama always refer to as the “holy Koran”—is replete with directives to fight for “Allah’s cause” (Koran: 9.88), to “fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them” (Koran: 9:5) and twenty other calls to war and murder. There is a reason why their weapon of choice is a Muslim man or woman who is willing to kill themselves in order to kill you.

It is just my opinion, but I believe the present “war on global terrorism” will best be fought covertly with a well-funded, covert intelligence and a counter-terrorism program, not by a massed army followed by a decade of “nation building.”

In the recent past, people throughout the Middle East forced out Tunisia’s despot, killed Libya’s despot, removed Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak from office, and are fighting and dying to get rid of Syria’s despot, Bashar Assad. Both Yemen and Somalia are basket cases with tribal warfare the order of the day. Even the Iranians have demonstrated their unhappiness, taking away Amadinejad’s majority in their parliament. He recently abandoned his usual bellicose talk of wiping Israel off the map.

You cannot point to a single Islamic nation from Morocco to Bahrain that has not had demonstrations intended to pressure their monarchs into granting greater freedom and what we would call democratic reform. As long as Sharia law is in the mix, that’s not a likely outcome.

It took just over seventy years from 1917 to 1991 to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Islam’s grip on the Middle East goes back to the seventh century. The region is not going to change any time soon and those in power, like Assad, are going to be ruthless in their means to retain it.

The only reason that Saddam Hussein is not in control of Iraq is because the United States and its allies invaded in 2003 and brought his brutal regime to an end. Thank you, George W. Bush, but we should have left right after accomplishing that. Americans are tired of lengthy, inconclusive wars. We have been understandably unhappy with all the conflicts since Vietnam.

Afghanistan has been invaded many times since the days of Alexander the Great and the results have always been a disaster for those who did. Next door is Pakistan which like so many nations in the Middle East has never done anything but take our military and economic aid, and betray us at every opportunity. Egypt’s new leaders are getting ready to throw us overboard.

The media and the usual race-mongers made sure that all of America knew about George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida on February 26. The local police initially did not arrest Zimmerman because it was an obvious case of self-defense.

There was no such outcry, however, when a month later on March 26 a 50-year-old white man was attacked and beaten with a hammer by two black teens, in Midway, Florida, just six miles from Sanford. The Orlando Sentinel published a description of the attackers, but neglected to mention their race. One of them had just finished a seventeen month prison sentence.

On May 9, the Star-Ledger of Newark, NJ published an article, “Group of 10 or 15 ‘thugs’ rob and beat 5 people following Prudential Center concert, cops say.” There was no reference to their race in the article and when I emailed the reporter for clarification, I received no response.

This kind of double standard is rampant in the reporting of black-on-white attacks and Colin Flaherty, a radio host on WDEL, Wilmington, Delaware, and a writer who has won more than forty awards for his work, has recently published “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America” that chronicles a trend that is receiving little media attention and one which local police authorities tend to avoid discussing.

The book is not a racist screed. It is the reporting of events.

It is also an appalling record of violence against whites that must be addressed or political correctness will doom any chance of dealing with it. In the introduction to his book, Flaherty writes, “Almost as astonishing as the widespread racial violence is the willingness of people in authority to deny it. Ignore it. Explain it away. Even condone and lie about it.”

The book is a chronicle of black-on-white violence in recent years. “In Chicago,” Flaherty notes, “after weeks of racial violence where the newspapers refused to mention the crime was almost exclusively black gangs on individual whites, the Superintendent of Police said he knew what was causing the violence: Sarah Palin.”

“A member of Congress from Chicago, Bobby Rush, said black violence in Chicago was routine and the only reason anyone was paying any attention to the race riots in downtown Chicago was because it was black on white violence.”

“The riots on the streets of South Philly had ‘no racial component’ and were ‘nothing much’ said the Mayor until events forced him to acknowledge the obvious: black people were taking racial violence to a new level.”

Flaherty says “The deniers fall somewhere in between two points; (on) one hand, they say the racial violence is not happening. On the other, they say it is, but everyone already knows it—and it is happening for a good reason. Sometimes they say both.”

“As I started to unravel the threads of these attacks,” writes Flaherty, “it became clear right away that this was happening all over the country for at least a year or two. And that newspapers were underreporting it—when they reported it at all.”

As the Memorial Day weekend approaches at the end of the month, Flaherty warns about Black Beach Week in Miami Beach and Black Bike Week in Myrtle Beach, Florida, along with Speed Week in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Short of having the President of the United States or Jay Leno deliver the commencement address at your university or college, I would put money on the fact that few graduates can tell you who did give the speech, let alone what they said.

In a faux commencement address by Woody Allen he wrote “More than at any other time in history, humanity is at a crossroads: one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness; the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Just before I graduated from the University of Miami in 1955 the dean of the graduate school suggested I continue on to secure a master’s and, after that, a doctor of philosophy degree. My only thought at the time was to escape any and all classrooms for the rest of my life!

The U.S. Army accommodated me right after I graduated by inviting me to join its ranks. Well, “invitation” is not exactly the way it was phrased. It turned out to be a far better education than I might have gotten anywhere else.

I recall a sergeant, formerly in the airborne, who told me, “In the airborne they first separate the men from the boys. Then they separate the boys from the idiots. And then the idiots make their first jump.” Life is easier if you can laugh at yourself. I did not join the airborne, but rather spent my time in an engineer battalion, part of an infantry division, assigned to the intelligence section. To those who still question my intelligence to this day, I say nah-nah-nah-nah-nah!

My term of service was extended thanks to Fidel Castro and Nikita Krushchev who thought it was a dandy idea to install missiles in Cuba. John F. Kennedy disagreed. I waited patiently while they all changed their underwear and I was ultimately allowed to go home.

I have never been asked to give a commencement address. In retrospect I realize now why I was also not asked to do a long list of other things, but I have wondered on occasion what I would say to an audience of students and their exhausted, penniless parents.

My speech might begin with, “Guess what? You’re screwed. Other than the days of the Great Depression, I cannot think of a worse time to be thrust out into the world; your newly minted diploma in one hand and your loan papers in the other. Look to your left. Only one of you is going to find gainful employment that even vaguely resembles what you studied to do, if you find any work at all.”

I was spectacularly unprepared for any useful job so naturally I became a journalist.

Back to the speech, “Your parents have invested their hopes and dreams in you—probably somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. They actually do expect you to get a job and move out. That is not likely to happen. The least you can do is to try to be helpful around the house, but neither of your parents believes this will happen.”

“Earlier generations could aspire to do great things, but your generation and those being born as I speak, can only aspire to pay off your portion of the national debt.

It says a lot about the current state of Democratic Party desperation when James Carville, Clinton’s famed campaign chief, in a recent CNN commentary wrote “You think that Democrats around the country are going to win—as I hear time and time again from people on the street. I ask: What are you smoking? What are you drinking? What are you snorting or just what in hell are you thinking?”

Republicans, too, are worried. It is a common theme among conservatives, the fear that Mitt Romney will commit the same mistake that John McCain did against Obama; the fear that Romney is “too nice.” I say that in a political context, but it is my belief that Romney’s school boy smile hides an iron will.

During the debates he defended himself well enough to earn a vote of confidence from the primary voters, but. in retrospect, he had rather weak competition. From Cain to Perry, Pawlenty to Bachmann, Paul to Santorum, and even Newt Gingrich, the candidates swiftly lost support for a variety of reasons that all come down to the perception that they were not electable.

Now, too, among a wide swath of Republicans there is the common complaint that Romney is a “RINO” (Republican in name only) and they point to his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts, but they do so without acknowledging that he got his programs passed with a Democrat-controlled legislature in a very blue state. If he went back and forth on a variety of social issues, I am willing to cut him some slack.

At this writing we do not know who Romney’s vice presidential choice will be, but I can guarantee you that it will not be Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, or Condoleeza Rice. A woman on the ticket has been tried and it was no help at all. Sorry ladies. If anything, Palin demonstrated she had more grit than McCain in the last election.

What I want more than anything else from Romney is a thorough-going attack on President Obama’s failures. He has failed to turn the economy around and I would argue it is as bad as it was when he took office. Romney and everyone else know this. Now he has to hammer this home from now to November 6th.

Mitt put an interesting spin on Clinton’s campaign theme when he said, “It’s the economy and we’re not stupid.” He should repeat that at every campaign stop.

Just as Obama “inherited” the financial crisis of 2008, Romney is going to inherit “Taxageddon” in 2013 if a GOP controlled Congress does not repeal significant increases in taxes, all of which will stall any effort to get the economy back on a growth track.

Obama’s war on energy in America is another area that Romney has to focus upon, reminding voters of the way he has openly attacked the coal mining industry, done everything he can to shut down oil drilling anywhere on federal land and offshore, his EPA is attacking “fracking”, a technique to access natural gas, and, of course, wasted billions on “green” energy fantasies.

Let the chatteratti and political pundits say what they will, dancing around the issue of gay marriage on Obama’s chances of reelection, but I will tell you plainly that he has swallowed a poison pill.

Gay marriage is a deal-breaker for a vast swath of American voters that includes Catholics as well as the black and Hispanic communities. Urbanites and suburbanites may say that they are okay with gay marriage, but what they tell pollsters and what they say privately among friends and family is far different. Americans may want to be tolerant, but their distaste for the gay lifestyle and incessant demands for acceptance is deeply offensive to most people.

Thanks to what will be seen as a historic gaffe by Vice President Joe Biden, the President was put in a vice as he was seen to vacillate—evolve—his position regarding gay marriage, but elections often turn on such issues. Yes, the economy will be the dominant issue of the 2012 election, but the President found himself in a position where he could not avoid taking a position. It was diametrically different from the one he expressed in the 2008 campaign.

If, as anticipated, pro-gay-marriage activists get a plank in the Democratic Party platform affirming their stance, that will further lock the party into an uncompromising position on the issue. Ironically, they will hold their convention in North Carolina, a state that just made headlines by resoundingly rejecting gay marriage.

Legalized same-sex marriage exists in just eight states and the District of Columbia. In purely political terms, the swing states Obama needs for reelection—Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, and Florida—have all banned gay marriage. Now add North Carolina.

For the record, I have little faith in the polls that seem to suggest that gay marriage is gaining wider acceptance. People who do not feel comfortable being labeled “homophobes” and bigots tend to tell pollsters they are okay with gay marriage even if they are not.

The much-quoted Gallop poll on gay rights noted that the Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage and “less than half of Protestants approve.” According to the poll, among those who attend religious services weekly fully 67 percent oppose it while among those who say they attend monthly 53 percent oppose it.

Politically, while a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that gay marriage is supported by two-thirds of Democrats, it also showed that only 46 percent of independents favored it. Asking Democrats to endorse gay marriage is, in a sense, a no-brainer, but in an election year, the issue will drive independents to the right, a losing proposition for Democrats and Obama.

Incensed by Obamacare, the issue that ignited the creation of the Tea Party movement, by the failed stimulus, by scandals involving “green energy” companies that cost Americans millions, by Fast and Furious, an Obama administration sponsored gun-running operation, and the sluggish “recovery”, Obama already faces an uphill battle for reelection.

While trying to hang the “flip-lopper” anvil around Mitt Romney’s neck, Obama has demonstrated a major flip-flop from his earlier position that marriage is “between and a man and a woman.”

Romney has never wavered on gay marriage, opposing it. You can begin to put the undecided votes in his column.

The political pundits all agree that the November elections will be all about the economy. I suspect that most Americans draw their conclusions about the economy from empirical observations such as whether they or someone they know is out of work, whether shops in their communities are closing, and the price of gasoline at the pump.

While the economy is covered by the business media, newspapers, magazines, and cable channels, it tends to get short-shrift in the mainstream media because there well may be a shortage of reporters who actually understand economic trends beyond the very obvious.

For the record, I am not an economist and did not inherit the arithmetic gene from my late father, a CPA. Instead I have made my way with whatever skills I have as a writer. Suffice to say, I am still working to pay the rent. My interest in the economy is personal.

It’s personal for those without a job. A May 3 report by CNN Money, “The 86 Million Invisible Unemployed” said, “There are far more jobless people in America than you might think.” This is a good reason why you should ignore the government statistical reports on unemployment. They are rigged.

As the CNN report noted, “While it’s true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn’t include the millions of non-working adults who aren’t even looking for a job anymore. And hiring isn’t strong enough to keep up with population growth.”

“A person is counted as part of the labor force if they have a job or have looked for one in the last four weeks. Only about 64% of Americans over the age of 16 currently fall into that category, according to the Labor Department. That’s the lowest labor force participation rate since 1984.”

Jabba the Government

An April 28 Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Growth Deficit”, took note of the fact that “The weakest recovery on record continued in 2012’s first quarter, with the Commerce Department’s Friday report of 2.2% growth.” Despite the official government view that the recession officially ended in 2009, the “quarterly growth has average 2.4%, That’s slower growth than in every modern expansion, and about half the growth rate of all recoveries since World War Two, according to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee.”

A recent poll commissioned by Generation Opportunity, a non-profit think tank that concerns itself with young Americans, found that “just 31% of 18-29-year-olds approve of Obama’s handling of youth unemployment while 69% say the current leadership in Washington fails to reflect the interests of the younger generation.” That is very bad news for Obama and, if they vote, very good news for Romney.

The current issue of Business Week has an article, “The Stuck-in-the-Middle Recovery” asks “What if the economy comes back but leaves millions of middle-class Americans behind?” noting that “Ninety-five percent (95%) of the net job losses during the recession were in middle-skill occupations such as office workers, bank tellers, and machine operators, according to research by economists Nir Jaimovich of Duke University and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia.”

Calling it the Great Recession to differentiate it from the 1930’s Great Depression, Business Week reported that “employers aren’t about to go back to their larger, less efficient workforces.

On May 2nd I received a news release from NuVo Condoms announcing that they “will donate condoms to any high school administration that would like to have a free supply of condoms available to distribute to students before their school prom.” The offer can also be found on their website, so—no—I am not making this up.

Two thoughts collided in my brain when I read that. First, I thought it was a devilishly clever public relations and marketing gambit. The second was that high school proms have apparently changed a great deal since I attended mine in 1955. The 1950s reflected the morals of the time when even a married couple on television like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez of “I Love Lucy” could be seen to share a bed.

Another factor that altered the sex lives of teenagers and adults was the introduction in the 1960s of the birth control pill. It was Margaret Sanger, an early advocate of birth control who underwrote the research necessary, raising $150,000 for the project and it was Frank Colton and Carl Djerassi who came up with the first oral contraceptives, thus earning themselves a spot in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In the 1950s the condom was still the best way to prevent pregnancy and for many young men carrying one in their wallets it denoted their readiness. Suffice to say an unwanted pregnancy then and now was sufficient reason to avoid unprotected sex. Abortion was still against the law until January 22, 1973 when the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade concluded that women had a right to abort an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy.

One might conclude that a lot has changed but you might also be wrong. The Guttmacher Institute has been studying sexual and reproductive health worldwide and in a February 2012 fact sheet on “American teens’ sexual and reproductive health” they report that, while on the average young people have sex for the first time at about age 17, they do not marry until their mid-20s.

“In 2006-2010, the most common reason that sexually inexperienced teens gave for not having had sex was that it was ‘against religion or morals’ (38% among females and 31% among males). The second and third most common reasons for females were ‘don’t want to get pregnant’ and ‘haven’t found the right person yet.’”

Despite the popular notion that today’s teens are sexually promiscuous, even “among sexually experienced teens, 70% of females and 56% of males report first having sex with a steady partner, while 16% of females and 28% of males report first having sex with someone they just met or who was just a friend.”

Throughout history raging hormones have always been at odds with societal prohibitions, mostly advocated by religious institutions and by parents who are concerned for their children’s welfare and future. In present times, too, there is a greater awareness of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) though the message has not reached as many teens as you might imagine.

Nuvo condoms say its message is about “having a positive, fun yet responsible approach to sexuality and sexual relationships.” Their proposal to provide free condoms to schools having a prom poses a moral dilemma. If the schools offer the condoms they are in effect condoning teen sex.