Things to Come

2011-12-22T14:20:00.000-05:00

The Feeder is Mine!

2011-11-11T22:00:00.000-05:00

Hubert de Lartigue

2011-10-24T21:33:00.000-04:00

Hubert de Lartigue:

Hubert de Lartigue

The Virginian: Sunny TV wears the hijab. You can too, just don't use your underwear.

2011-09-25T18:05:00.000-04:00

The Virginian: Sunny TV wears the hijab. You can too, just don't use your underwear.

The Gormogons: The final word on the Gardasil Non-Troversy

2011-09-16T06:10:00.000-04:00

The Gormogons: The final word on the Gardasil Non-Troversy

The Art Of Animation, Antonio Javier Caparo

2011-09-03T23:39:00.000-04:00

The Art Of Animation, Antonio Javier Caparo

Jobs Announcement: Research Chair in the area of Planetary Materials.

2011-09-02T13:56:00.000-04:00

Hat Tip:
Lunar Pioneer

Dear colleagues,
This may be of interest to some of you:

The Department of Earth Sciences and the Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration at The University of Western Ontario, Canada, invite applications for a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in the area of Planetary Materials.

Appointment to a faculty position will be conditional on the selected candidate being awarded a Canada Research Chair. It is anticipated that the Chair nomination will be submitted to the CRC Secretariat in April 2012. The appointment will be made at the rank of assistant or associate professor (probationary (tenure-track) or tenure), with a starting date for the appointment of January 1, 2013, or later. The deadline for applications is September 15th.

Planetary Materials is a major interdisciplinary research theme at The University of Western Ontario, led by the inter-faculty Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration (http://cpsx.uwo.ca).

Please also note that this person will have access to a new Field Emission Electron Microprobe, the first of its kind in Canada.

Full details of the announcement can be found here: https://www.uwo.ca/earth/pdf/Planetary%20Materials%20CRC%20Final.pdf

Cheers,

Oz

Dr. Gordon "Oz" Osinski
NSERC/MDA/CSA Industrial Research Chair in Planetary Geology
Deputy Director, Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration (www.cpsx.uwo.ca)
Team Lead, Canadian Lunar Research Network (www.clrn.uwo.ca)
Depts. of Earth Sciences, Physics & Astronomy
University of Western Ontario
1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 5B7
Tel: 1-(519)-661-4208 (office)
Tel: 1-(519)-857-9251 (cell)
Fax: 1-(519)-488-4721
E-mail: gosinski@uwo.ca
Website: http://www.spacerocks.ca

2011-08-25T15:44:00.000-04:00

Saturday, August 27 (5 PM ET)

Saturday, August 27 (8 PM ET)

The Art Of Animation, Nikita Veprikov

2011-08-09T12:17:00.000-04:00

The Art Of Animation, Nikita Veprikov

Protracted Solar Minima

2011-06-19T20:41:00.001-04:00

The news from the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society is not rent-seeking behavior from hack scientists with a political agenda. These three studies largely confirm theories about the variability in the Sun's activity, fueled by the cyclical reversal of the Sun's (and, thus, the "Interplanetary") magnetic field.

The outcome of these predictions, should they pan out, is grim for Deep Space travel. A little problem nagging those who want to brave the trip to Mars and back, skipping ahead of the class by ignoring what the Moon has been waiting to teach us since the United States Congress made the decision to drop out in 1971, may be coming into focus a lot more rapidly than any of us hoped.

These reputable long-term studies back-up predictions - dismissed at the time - that the Sun was literally winding up, and was overdue, for one of those poorly understood but historically recorded periods of relative quiet.

Whether this means a Maunder Minimum, with effects on Earth like a "little Ice Age," as took place in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, is not the immediate story, yet. I think the big story will be a change in our thinking about the Sun's cyclical behavior, its long-period cyclical behavior.

Most of us, at one point or another, have seen the charts showing the 22-years solar cycle plotted out for at least the last century or less. Sunspots are a secondary effect of what's really being measured. They are a visible manifestation of solar maximum, not the thing itself. An outwardly bright showing of the tightly wound magnetic field of the Sun generated deep within its interior.

The Sun is not a solid, and parts of this "mass of incandescent gas" are rotating around its axis a differing speeds, generating magnetic fields that break apart and sometime oppose one another with violence we poorly imagine.

But, as a recordable phenomena in the historic records here in the West since A.D. 1645 we have been able to use sunspot counts as a reliable measure of an approximate 22-year cycle for most of that time. This record is why the "Maunder Minimum" is now known to have happened simultaneous with the "little Ice Age" of 1700 and less reliably as a proxy recording other protracted solar minima occurring simultaneous to drawn-out cooling here on Earth, perhaps like the one during the early 14th century that might be connected with poor growing conditions, famine and even those conditions that helped the Black Plague of 1349 that may have wiped out a third of Earth's human population with marked efficiency, helped, of course, by the general ignorance of contagion of that brutal time.

No one alive today has experienced a solar minimum deeper than the one that bottomed out (finally) in 2009.

A search on-line for one of those elementary science book graphs that illustrate the rise and fall of solar activity will show cycles generally increasing in strength at their peak, cycle after cycle, during the 20th century. Many of us can remember upon our first look upon such graphs thinking "how long will this go on."

Would solar activity, a precise measure of the Interplanetary Magnetic Field, continue increasing forever, we wondered? Pretty unlikely, since the direct correlation between the Sun's business and our long survival as neighbors nearby, though not thought about much by movie makers preferring dark meteors and aliens, is the most likely influence from "beyond" affecting life on Earth.

What could be more obvious? Though it is invisible to the naked eye barely a mere 50 light years away, our small yellow dwarf star is a long-period variable. We know so little about the variability of small star like our Sun because there are so many brighter, short-period variables to study, many in galaxies far, far away. Stars like ours don't stand out from the hazy crowd at such distances. Or study of Solar Physics is just getting started, and the Sun may be preparing us for classes of its own.

Conventional wisdom holds that, except for the more obvious dangers, the greatest ionizing radiation hazard facing astronauts headed to the Moon, say, is a coronal mass ejection or X-flare event.

On the contrary, however, the thin skin of the aluminum composite making up the hull of the spacecraft in our time provides a pretty fair shield against solar "events." That's really not the radiation that makes travel to Mars dangerous, for example. Space is very unforgiving of hubris, and no amount of burying our heads in the regolith will change the fact that the really hard radiation arriving in the inner solar system from interstellar space, the so-called Galactic Cosmic Rays, or "GSR's" - comes in very big packets of heavy elemental particles.

The skin of an Apollo Command Module doesn't help, it hinders, when protecting against radiation of that magnitude. Far from shielding a traveler from that kind of radiation, the ionizing nuclei of heavy elements traveling at near the speed of light instead are broken apart by a modern spacecraft hull, and afterward expose a living passenger to a shot-gun blast of ionizing secondary particles.

And once an astronaut's exposure has been rated sufficiently high to increase his life-time risk of "Radiation Exposure Induced Death" (or "REID) reaches beyond odds of 4 percent they're grounded. That's NASA policy.

There has been a lot of progress, some genuinely good ideas for designs for shielding astronauts traveling beyond the Moon from the broad spectrum of hard cosmic rays. At least advocates of travel to Mars, for example, have begun integrating some good ideas for protecting a living crew from cosmic rays into notional spacecraft.

A magnetic field like Earth's produced by a spacecraft would need to begin refracting an average cosmic ray more than 2,000 kilometers away for there to be sufficient bending of its vector away from striking home. That's a tall order in mass and energy, one served up by Earth every moment and backed up by our watery atmosphere.

Carrying a water-filled tank or surrounding passengers with a skin of water is a tall order in mass and engineering, also. It would be a lot easier to ship that water from the Moon's gravity well than up from here on Earth. There might be secondary engineering and life support advantages to such a scheme also, but forget about running to a tank for protection from a "shower" of cosmic rays.

Unlike solar storms, cosmic rays arrive from every direction without predictability, except for one measurable factor. Right now the best protection we have against cosmic rays is the very Interplanetary Magnetic Field whose strength corresponds with the Sun's activity.

When the Sun is at its most active the arrival of cosmic rays from outside the solar system in the vicinity of Earth is at a minimum. The correlation is well established as an inverse relationship. When the Sun is at minimum the incidence of cosmic ray bombardment here increases by half. Put another way, the Interplanetary Magnetic Field at greatest measured strength reduces the incidence of Galactic Cosmic Rays at Earth by 50 percent.

It will continue to be interesting to measure cosmic ray bombardment from the periphery of the Solar System.

The cosmic ray detectors on-board both of the 30-year-old Voyager spacecraft are the only experiments still delivering daily readings of this activity from their locations at the weak edge of the Sun's influence.

Here on Earth, where the incidence of Cosmic Radiation has been measured continuously since 1958, the highest peak in that activity (measured on the surface, where only very energetic radiation survives the trip through our own planet's magnetic field, our Van Allen Belts and atmosphere) reached its highest level ever recorded in 2009, precisely the same moment when the Sun's own "activity" was at its most recent protracted minimum.

The instant measurement of the beginning of a fall off in cosmic ray bombardment was one of the first real signs that showed Cycle 24 was finally getting started (though five years overdue).

Predictions made for a couple of hard winters following a latency following after that minimum have proven to be surprisingly accurate, though that latency would seem to call for severe winters (if certain hypothesis actually has meaning) three years after this last long minima.

The previous recorded record for cosmic ray bombardment, more than 10 percent less "severe" than the one just ended, took place around 1964, not long after real monitoring of this activity started. The last time snow drifts higher than two meters were recorded as far south as Washington, DC took place in 1966 - that is until this past winter.

The coincidence of a weak Interplanetary Magnetic Field with harsh winters has shown itself to be predictable, though these predictions have yet to survive stringent inquiry. It's a very broad correlation, at best, and one that does not exclude the false spring or warm February or predict any short-term weather.

But for travel beyond the Moon, beyond where our Moon itself provides an immediate shielding from a full 50 percent of interstellar radiation, and places to bury oneself at least 11 meters below the immediate surface, things are not looking up, except for the most optimistic and determined starry-eyed misfit space enthusiast.

A trip to a place as seemingly and conveniently close as Mars (where the same kinds of shielding available on the Moon can be found, including water) the round-trip using "off-the-shelf" technologies assures an astronaut would be grounded for life upon his or her return. And, oddly, the younger the crew the higher the odds of death, over the course of an individual's lifespan of Radiation Exposure Induced Death.

It looks very much like Deep Space travel is even more likely than ever before headed toward becoming a game for older people, more likely to die of natural causes before succumbing REID. And, yes, such factors are already a part of the scheme by which NASA runs those numbers.

The Great Depression II

2011-01-19T14:23:00.002-05:00

Kirk W. Kelsen
American Thinker

One basis for deciding whether we are in a "recession" or a "depression" is distinguishing how recessions become depressions. With the hindsight of history, we already know.

Parallels between America's current economic crisis and the 1930's Great Depression are instructive. Then, as now, hardship was preceded by a major banking upheaval. Then, as now, a regulatory blizzard followed. Then, as now, millions were displaced. And then, as now, the cause of the Great Depression was widely misunderstood. Many believe today that the 1929 stock market crash caused the Great Depression all by itself, that it was so severe it mysteriously destroyed wealth for another 13 years. To put that in perspective, the serious Carter-era recession should have, by this logic, precluded the Reagan recovery in 1982 and perhaps wreaked havoc until 1990. Not only is this argument absurd, it manifestly did not happen.

In Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 inaugural address he lectured that "[t]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself," suggesting Americans suffered irrational neuroses. This is not at all true. Americans made entirely rational and prudent business decisions amidst considerable uncertainty. Though FDR is invariably cast as heroically facing down near-insurmountable economic travails, the less-flattering diagnosis is much more obviously true: he caused them.

With the New Deal, the Second New Deal, TVA (rural electrification), FERA (emergency relief), CCC (youth work program), AAA (farming subsidies), NIRA (industrial regulation and public works), PWA (public works), WPA (public employment), FDIC (banking regulation), and Social Security all exercising unprecedented Federal power, investor uncertainty was justified and profound. Roosevelt's willy-nilly spending legitimized concern that personal fortunes would be entirely consumed. Capricious policies (often framed by class warfare) caused real fear, not "fear of fear itself," fanning a bad recession into the Great Depression. Without doubt, the Crash of 1929 was extremely serious -- almost as serious as the great unraveling that started in September 2008. The Great Depression from 1932 to 1942, however, was Roosevelt's fault.

FDR's maelstrom of tax and regulatory change notwithstanding, the Great Depression was not all bad news all the time. Unemployment, for instance, peaked early, hitting a Depression-era high of 25% in 1932 (though averaging more than 19% for FDR's pre-war tenure). So there were employment gains in the years following FDR's election. Similarly, stocks rebounded starting in 1933, doubling across 12 months (though plummeting again in FDR's second term). These early upticks augured recovery that was not to be: America's economy remained monumentally dysfunctional for another 10 years.

The Great Depression's harshest rebuke is not that it was relentlessly bad; it's that periodic good news always ended up turning worse again, like a false summit. The persistent reappearance of bad news in the 1930's directly correlates with investor uncertainty created by Roosevelt's incessant meddling. In short, it took a disastrous and transformative presidency to make a "depression" out of "recession" -- even if not all months, quarters, and years were uniformly bad.

Today, just as then, almost one in four working-age Americans (or non-citizens, who also must be counted since they are part of the available work force) are unemployed. This 25% estimate includes those who previously were not in the workforce but who are looking now, presumably out of hardship. Tending to confirm this, a recent household survey found 22% unemployed. Conversely, the latest United States Bureau of Labor Statics (BLS) report puts the number at 9.9%. The disparity arises because the BLS number counts individuals receiving unemployment checks. No check? Not counted.

From what I can tell, the total number of unemployed in America today is at least 37.5 million, rising to over 65 million if the underemployed are included. These numbers sound too big to be true but can be pieced together from a variety of sources, including the BLS.

37.5 million unemployed out of 150 million potential workers -- one in four. If this is correct, then where are the bread lines? First, Americans entered the current downturn far wealthier than ever before. Many survive today on fast-depleting retirement accounts and strained credit. Second, massive security nets -- welfare, extensive unemployment benefits, disability payments, and school loans -- have disguised or deferred the physical presence of otherwise visible hardship and deprivation. Government-backed programs, many themselves insolvent, are the "bread lines" of today.

Persistent high unemployment will not soon resolve: job creation currently lags population growth. About 145,000 jobs must be created every month to reach parity -- not growth. 400,000 jobs would need to be created to replace by 2013 the jobs lost since 2007. Even with a sustained recovery starting immediately, it would take at least eight years to recover jobs lost during the last two.

One reason the job picture is so grim is that investors are confounded by Federal monetary policy. Under Roosevelt, just as it is now and was during Carter, Fed policy was an explicitly Keynesian effort to correct unemployment -- not a stable-dollar course like Reagan pursued, or Thatcher for the British Pound. As Margaret Thatcher pointed out in her autobiography, The Downing Street Years, monetary policies must either "hitch their star" to a stable currency or pursue specific social outcomes, such as reducing unemployment. Never both, it must be one or the other.

With trillions outlaid in "stimulus," America is committed to the latter course today.

Predictably, Moody's announced this month that the United States AAA credit rating will be cut in 2012 for the first time in history unless current and projected Federal debt is reduced dramatically. It looks instead like debt will explode when anticipated State insolvencies are transferred to the Federal government, whether as loans to States or by some sovereign bankruptcy proceeding yet to be devised. A lower credit rating will force America to pay substantially more interest to entice buyers of its debt if, in fact, an adequate market for downgraded United States Treasuries even exists.

Worldwide, sovereign debt is being serially repudiated. Private institutional buyers are being told they are going to get a "haircut." Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (the "PIIGS") are in process of defaulting. The Chinese government recently suggested it will bail out Spain (as part of its move to diversify from the U.S. Dollar), appearing to make China the funder of this century's Marshall Plan.

Meanwhile, to ward off deflation, the dollar is being intentionally devalued because it is the only thing the Fed has left to do, the last arrow in its quiver. And the Federal Reserve, which actively promoted the multiple asset bubbles of the last 20 years, will be unable to manage the inflation genie it is unbottling.

There are two ways to default on a loan. One is to not pay it back, as millions of former homeowners are discovering. The other is to devalue the currency you pay it back with, and this is what America is doing. So China, one-time buyer of American dollars, will get a "haircut," too.

In reply, China is unloading dollars as fast as their economy will allow, but it won't be fast enough. China struggles today with both inflation (at an official rate of eight percent) and their own asset bubble in an all-cash real estate market. With uncertainty on the rise, China's ruling class is hedging its dollar exposure by snapping up commodities at a dizzying rate, and conducting some international trade in non-dollar currencies. The Chinese Yuan has become fashionable lately for world-trade because, as with any monetary system, its legitimacy is based on the issuer's sustained and perceived future productivity. Unsurprisingly, China's expected productivity is about to rival America's.

With the Yuan ascendant, the world is voting that Chinese long-term problems are less ominous than America's have recently become. The United States is ceding the dollar's default status as the international reserve currency and there is little in the short run that America can do about it. This is a grave threat to American prospects and worldwide financial surety.

The significance of the United States Dollar as global reserve currency is not generally appreciated by most Americans, perhaps because only other countries see the impact first-hand. If Germany, for instance, wants to buy oil it must first buy dollars because oil is a dollar-denominated commodity -- ie, it is only traded in dollars. Or rather, it was: Russia, itself a major oil producer, recently announced trades that will be transacted in non-dollar currencies, particularly the Yuan.

Until now, if America really needed to buy any major commodity -- including crude oil, gold, wheat, cattle, orange juice, coffee, sugar, etc., all priced and traded only in U.S. Dollars -- the Federal Reserve could always just print more dollars. True, printing money inflates commodity prices worldwide until they reach parity with the newly-devalued dollar -- but America would still be able to purchase them. In the future, if America must first buy the Yuan at whatever price the Chinese say and then buy commodities, significant control over purchasing power and domestic economic stability is lost.

Which brings us back to uncertainty. Predictions that recovery will soon grow the world out of this crisis are less valid than predictions it won't because nobody knows. No one is sufficiently certain. Rapid-fire federal and state regulations make would-be investors uncertain. Uncertain businessmen limit risk by remaining liquid, which means they don't invest (eg, Apple's $40 billion cash reserve). Investors that don't invest slow the exchange of money, which means money is not in motion. And money not in motion is like having no money at all, or nearly so. Perhaps we soon shall be regaled with another "nothing to fear but fear itself" Presidential bromide.

Atop her dynamic and productive people, America's County, State and Federal governments squat like rogue leviathans excreting tens-of-thousands of new laws and regulations every year. Choked by bureaucracy and debt, The United States of America is in no position to save the world from this crisis this time. Nor should anyone expect that the world will be inclined to save The United States.

In other words, there is uncertainty. Not mysterious, fear-of-fear-itself uncertainty; but rational uncertainty. Uncertainty with a clear and historically-informed basis and a known etiology. And with this odd certainty of uncertainty, The Great Depression II.

Perhaps respected investor Harry Shultz's comment in his final newsletter this month states it best:

"Roughly speaking, the mess we are in is the worst since the 17th century financial collapse. Comparisons with the 1930's are ludicrous. We've gone far beyond that."

Far beyond, indeed. The future does not look bright.

Jared Loughner High School Pal Twitter Page Describes Arizona Shooter As "Left Wing, Quite Liberal" - Atlas Shrugs

2011-01-08T21:25:00.000-05:00

Jared Loughner High School Pal Twitter Page Describes Arizona Shooter As "Left Wing, Quite Liberal" - Atlas Shrugs"- Meanwhile, before the crime scene has been cleared, the New York Times, the drunk doddering local sheriff, even Jane Fonda for crying out loud - everyone with a history-free template in their head - has felt free to step up and fire off blame at the law-abiding.

Meanwhile, every clue anyone can find, anywhere, about at least one individualwas responsible for the assassination of a federal judge and the attempted killing of a U.S. Representative in Arizona, Saturday, shows us only real mental illness.

‘The Man with the Mustache’

2011-01-03T14:58:00.001-05:00

From the December edition of NR

Jay Nordlinger

Two summers ago, National Review took one of its cruises, this one to the Eastern Mediterranean. We had several hundred passenger-readers aboard, and a slate of speakers. One of them was John Bolton, the lawyer and foreign-policy official. On the platform, he was really wowin’ ’em, with his hard-hitting foreign-policy analyses. Over the next couple of days, our passengers kept murmuring, “Bolton is really fantastic. He’s just the kind of man we need. Wouldn’t it be great if he ran for president?” The next time we were on the platform, I said to the audience, “I’ve been hearing a lot of ‘Bolton for President’ rumbles. We know he’s rock-solid on foreign policy. But what about his domestic views? For all we know, he’s a socialist — as some of the best hawks have been.” Bolton, with a glint in his eye, leaned into his microphone and said, “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

Read the rest here, at "one doesn't."

ESR | January 3, 2011 | We are Trig!

2011-01-03T00:43:00.000-05:00

ESR | January 3, 2011 | We are Trig!:

Michael Moriarty
web posted January 3, 2011

"The Hammer", more generally known as Charles Krauthammer, has indeed made his mark indelibly in my old and fading memories. His last three major opinions, the recent revelations of just how cunning and successful President Obama can be? The triumph of President Obama's "Compromise" over tax hikes and "Obama's New Start"?

Then, of course, The Hammer's most recent translation of Obama Transparency.

Of course, my instant "Yea" from the bleacher seats in Canada is particularly fierce in light of all the warnings I've made about the fruits of Roe v Wade. I doubt if Mr. Krauthammer would consider my observations little more than the cheers of a distant but profoundly unrealistic admirer.

Charles Krauthammer is a realist.

In an earlier but unpublished tribute titled The Hammer, I conceded the President's genius, albeit diabolical gifts, and yet noted how many of Obama's political opponents are relatively silent on abortion.

They are "realists" as well.

The Hammer's realism is encyclopedic. There is little he cannot recall, remember or dig up within his considerable reach.

Abortion is not a subject for The Realists. To them, a broadside against abortion is as pointless as whining over addiction and substance abuse. All are eternally human traits to be dealt with realistically.

It is a cardinally Romantic excess of mine to cling nostalgically to the American ideals contained in "all men are created equal" and "unalienable right to life". Our Founding Fathers wrote those words but America didn't even begin to live up to them until after the Civil War and its end in 1865. Even then, it was very slow-going.

Following that, in 1973, the Supreme Court under Richard Nixon, hurled America back to pre-Civil War days with the equivalent of the Dred Scott decision.

Roe v Wade.

As Dred Scott undeniably proclaimed, "All men are not created equal", Roe v Wade clearly stated, "Americans do not possess the unalienable right to life until after their second trimester of gestation!"

Hmmm … despite the presence of human DNA at the moment of a child's conception, here's the New Realism for you: even scientific fact must crumble before the reality of human … uh … well … human reality … and its convenient necessities … or, if you prefer, the necessities of an inconvenient reality.

As I have been told, much too often, "Reality is not black and white. It is grey."

It is odd, however, that America can be driven in the most unexpected and ferocious ways to becoming idealists.

The American Civil War was something that even Abraham Lincoln did his best to avoid. Our eyes have, indeed, seen the glory of the coming of at least something approaching, if not God, then the Truth.

My cautionary axiom for Progressive America and Progressive Americans: Man cannot accept legalized murder without eventually committing suicide.

It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to see the end of the Golden Rule in the legalization of abortion, nor the end of civilization in the end of the Golden Rule.

Lincoln said that America cannot even accept slavery as legal without running the risk of its own demise. It would be a death, as he described it, "by suicide". Lincoln felt that no foreign power could possibly defeat the energy, health and destiny of the America he knew and helped create.

I believe that a very American "suicide" by legalized abortion has been going on now for 37 years. Slavery endured in America for 89 years.

Leave it to The Devil himself to create the most pro-abortion President, Barack Obama, with Lucifer's unavoidable Catch 22, that the President also be black and represent the former victims of slavery.

Why not?

Karl Marx, one of Obama's heroes, was a Jewish anti-Semite.

Yes, the major common denominator of evil is the depth of its ultimate self-loathing and dissatisfaction with life and humanity in general.

Since, according to the Bible, the Devil is the quintessential antithesis of God and dedicated to the entire destruction of all of God's creations, clearly the last act of this drama is the ultimate and inevitable suicide of the Devil himself.

No matter how hard he tries, the Devil just cannot become God. Oh, there are the manic flights of fancy to evil, best represented by the ravings of Adolf Hitler, but they end in suicide. The President's very professorial calm, however, might make us believe there is no suicide in sight for the manic dreams of Karl Marx, Ilytch Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Never let effective style deceive you about the ultimate content; and, in the case of Marxist Calm, cold-blooded suicide is about as calm as it gets.

At right we have our President pondering his next chess move or possible three-pointer from the corner.

America's Regulatory President.

This is a force of nature beyond even its own understanding. An historical and metaphysical had-to-be. The ultimate in Far Left Repose. Marxism's victoriously dialectical version of Rodin's The Thinker.

The Red Genius that can hold two opposing views in his mind at the same time, inevitably arriving at a synthesis magically favoring the Left side of the playing field.

The American Mao.

What keeps him calm? The still-undisputed record of Mao's success in China.

In the minds of the Obama Nation, China and America shared slavery of one sort or another, therefore the rebellion of former slaves is what unites Obama's America with Maoist China.

Obama's 'fundamental transformation of the United States of America" is the American Civil War Part Two, with Mao's Little Red Book as the tranquilizing guide to the modernized version of The Art of War, a Chinese classic that has now been translated into the "Bottom-up, top-down and inside-out", American version of the French Revolution.

The Dialectical Calm of American Maoists.

Unless America begins and tenaciously succeeds in overturning the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision, state by state, the American Mao and American Maoists like Anita Dunn will win.

Why will the Obama Nation win?

The Cold-blooded Calm of the American Mao.

Only an end to Roe v Wade and legalized abortion can possibly unsettle either The American Mao or The Obama Nation.

The President and the rest of his Progressive euphemisms for Marxist tyranny know that America's homicidal selfishness, in the form of legalized infanticide, leaves the United States a morally empty Chiang Kai-shek for the likes of this American Mao.

What certifies his vision?

The equivocation over abortion by American Conservative Libertarians such as Milton Friedman. America's main antidote to the Progressivism of economist, John Maynard Keynes? Milton Friedman's silence on abortion?

I suspect that he and the rest of Friedman's economically conservative friends have felt that some form of a New World Order – hopefully American – is inevitable and "population control" a sine qua non. In other words, Keynes and Friedman, otherwise opponents, would most likely agree upon legalized abortion. It is all a part of their "enlightenment".

"The opposite of truth is not untruth, but reason."

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The older I become the more the implacable truth of that statement is reinforced. That most of life and great human achievement defies reason is my first reply. My second reply is my faith. Nothing defies reason more completely than the life and inextinguishable power of Christ.

"Love" is the only reply to the political legacies of Machiavelli and Mao. The only hope of Man and for Man is love and gratitude to God for what He gave us.

Roe v Wade and Communism or, as it is now passing as, the American Progressive Movement, are not only not Love, they are ultimately Mankind's road to suicide.

Charles Krauthammer, being a realist, would not agree. Love is too unreasonable a prism to look at the world through.

Love, however, as the perpetually heartbroken god of its own creation, is demanding that Roe v Wade be overturned. America's repeated refusal to do so spells her own, inevitable demise.

Love, or God, in this case, can live without Mankind but Mankind cannot live without Love.

What might turn the tide? A President Sarah Palin.

A Christian realism: her son Trig tucked under one arm and her hunting rifle under the other.

Right now Trig is America and the Progressive New World Order undeniably wanted him murdered in the womb.

God bless Sarah Palin! And Trig?!

We are Trig!!

The only thing standing between us and an early grave are women and men such as Sarah Palin and the very Catholic (grade school and high school) trained, Col. Allen West. Please listen to Col. West's CPAC speech here.

May they both succeed in rescuing the White House and America, freeing us from the Bipartisan, Progressive and Decidedly Pro-Abortion, New World Order.

Fervently pro-life defenders of the Second Amendment, encompassing the two major minorities of America, women and blacks, will simultaneously dumbfound the anti-American world; while, at the same time, they will rule with God's blessings by saving the lives of unborn infants.

Until Roe v Wade's infanticide ends, America and Americans will not only founder; they will drown in the ocean of hypocrisy which they created for themselves. Once Roe v Wade was decided in 1973, the Obama Nation was sure to follow. "Morning for America" will not be possible until we begin to overturn Roe v Wade.

We are Trig.

Unless we know that, the Obama Nation wins.

Trig and the right to be a human being are inextricably wedded.

Progress for a Progressive means becoming something greater and more powerful than a mere human being. It obviously means, in the face of Roe v Wade's legalized murder, becoming God.

I'd really rather be Trig. No one can play The Creator better than The Creator already has.

If you think so, I'm glad I'm not you.

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.

Census 2010: Apportionment Basics - Pew Research Center

2010-12-30T06:17:00.000-05:00

Census 2010: Apportionment Basics - Pew Research Center: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

NASA GISS Adjusting the Adjustments

2010-12-28T10:53:00.002-05:00

NASA GISS – Adjusting the Adjustments « Climate Audit:

A peak behind the scenes at the ramifications of the East Anglia scam, and one perp in particular.

Steve McIntyre deserves the Medal of Freedom and James Hansen deserves Five Years at Super Max.

Tax reform not on new State GOP agenda

2010-12-16T16:01:00.002-05:00

Brian Balfour
Civitas Institute

The new GOP leadership in North Carolina’s General Assembly will be facing many challenges this upcoming legislative session, the projected $3.2 billion budget gap being foremost among them. Facing that daunting task, along with a still struggling economy, the soon-to-be majority leaders have signaled they don’t think now is the right time to tackle any significant reform of North Carolina’s tax structure.

According to Sen. Phil Berger (R-Rockingham), who will likely become the Senate president pro tempore when state lawmakers convene this January, “I’m not sure reforming the tax system is something that is appropriate at this time, simply because of the unsettled state of the economy. The people of North Carolina elected us, I believe, to get the state’s fiscal house in order.”

Berger is right to table any major tax reforms for the time being. The General Assembly last attempted to address significant tax reform in 2009 as the Democratic leadership unveiled their “21^st Century Tax Rate Reduction and Modernization Plan” in the Senate Finance Committee. The tax overhaul didn’t make it into the final budget, but generated much discussion.

The 2009 plan was just the latest in a string of several such tax reform plans to be crafted over the last decade, none of which ended up being adopted. Each reform plan is based on the same underlying concept: broaden the tax base and lower the rates.

Read the article, HERE
Tar Heel Tribune:

A Spine Transplant for the GOP

2010-12-13T07:46:00.002-05:00

G. Tracy Mehan, III
American Spectator

Governor Sarah Palin just hit a home run with her cogent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal endorsing Congressman Paul Ryan's (R-WI) Roadmap for America's Future, a tax-cutting, budget-balancing, entitlement-reforming proposal which House Republicans still refrain from embracing wholeheartedly.

In putting her political capital behind the Ryan plan, she may be giving a needed spine transplant to the Republican Party and saving it in spite of itself.

Governor Palin nicely highlights the relative merits of the Ryan plan over the recent recommendations of the president's Nation Commission on Fiscal Responsibility which, while certainly calling for some necessary and painful cost-cutting proposals, "makes only a limited effort to cut spending below the current trend set by the Obama administration."

Lest we forget, the National Commission is also proposing an additional trillion dollars of new taxes, something that is antithetical to everything the voters told us in the recent election and anathema to most Republicans.

So, if Republicans don't want to raise taxes, they presumably want to cut discretionary spending and, even more importantly, reform runaway entitlement spending which is about ready to deluge the nation in red ink with the aging and retirement of the Baby Boomer generation now underway. Why then are the House and Senate Republicans seemingly without any comprehensive, programmatic alternatives to the presidential Commission's recommendations? After all, it takes a horse to beat a horse.

What is the GOP's Big Idea? I am all for cutting earmarks, but they are drops in the big bucket of federal spending. I am all for reducing marginal and corporate tax rates; but this game of chicken in which Republicans join Democrats in spending on new entitlements, two wars, increased discretionary spending, and bailouts, well, for everyone, is going to turn out badly for limited government and taxpayers absent a major overhaul of the way the federal government does business. Something, as they say, has gotta give...

Read the column, HERE.

Why I Support the Ryan Roadmap

Let's not settle for the big-government status quo, which is what the president's deficit commission offers.

Sarah Palin
Wall Street Journal
Dcember 10, 2010

The publication of the findings of the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was indeed, as the report was titled, "A Moment of Truth." The report shows we're much closer to the budgetary breaking point than previously assumed. The Medicare Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2017. As early as 2025, federal revenue will barely be enough to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on our national debt. With spending structurally outpacing revenue, something clearly needs to be done to avert national bankruptcy.

The commission itself calculates that, even if all of its recommendations are implemented, the federal budget will continue to balloon—to an estimated $5 trillion in 2020, from an already unprecedented $3.5 trillion today. The commission makes only a limited effort to cut spending below the current trend set by the Obama administration.

Among the few areas of spending it does single out for cuts is defense—the one area where we shouldn't be cutting corners at a time of war. Worst of all, the commission's proposals institutionalize the current administration's new big spending commitments, including ObamaCare. Not only does it leave ObamaCare intact, but its proposals would lead to a public option being introduced by the backdoor, with the chairmen's report suggesting a second look at a government-run health-care program if costs continue to soar.

It also implicitly endorses the use of "death panel"-like rationing by way of the new Independent Payments Advisory Board—making bureaucrats, not medical professionals, the ultimate arbiters of what types of treatment will (and especially will not) be reimbursed under Medicare.

The commission's recommendations are a disappointment. That doesn't mean, though, that the commission's work was a wasted effort. For one thing, it has exposed the large and unsustainable deficits that the Obama administration has created through its reckless "spend now, tax later" policies. It also establishes a clear bipartisan consensus on the need to fundamentally reform our entitlement programs. We need a better plan to build on these conclusions with common-sense reforms to tackle our long-term funding crisis in a sustainable way.

In my view, a better plan is the Roadmap for America's Future produced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.). The Roadmap offers a reliable path to long-term solvency for our entitlement programs, and it does so by encouraging personal responsibility and independence.

On health care, it would replace ObamaCare with a new system in which people are given greater control over their own health-care spending. It achieves this partly through creating medical savings accounts and a new health-care tax credit—the only tax credit that would be left in a radically simplified new income tax system that people can opt into if they wish.

The Roadmap would also replace our high and anticompetitive corporate income tax with a business consumption tax of just 8.5%. The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP (compared to 21% under the deficit commission's proposals). Beyond that, Rep. Ryan proposes fundamental reform of Medicare for those under 55 by turning the current benefit into a voucher with which people can purchase their own care.

On Social Security, as with Medicare, the Roadmap honors our commitments to those who are already receiving benefits by guaranteeing all existing rights to people over the age of 55. Those below that age are offered a choice: They can remain in the traditional government-run system or direct a portion of their payroll taxes to personal accounts, owned by them, managed by the Social Security Administration and guaranteed by the federal government. Under the Roadmap's proposals, they can pass these savings onto their heirs. The current Medicaid system, the majority of which is paid for by the federal government but administered by the states, would be replaced by a block-grant system that would reward economizing states.

Together these reforms help to secure our entitlement programs for the 21st century. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Roadmap would lead to lower deficits and a much lower federal debt. The CBO estimates that under current spending plans, our federal debt would rise to 87% of GDP by 2020, to 223% by 2040, and to 433% by 2060. Under Rep. Ryan's Roadmap, the CBO estimates that debt would rise much more slowly, peaking at 99% in 2040 and then dropping back to 77% by 2060.

Put simply: Our country is on the path toward bankruptcy. We must turn around before it's too late, and the Roadmap offers a clear plan for doing so. But it does more than just fend off disaster. CBO calculations show that the Roadmap would also help create a "much more favorable macroeconomic outlook" for the next half-century. The CBO estimates that under the Roadmap, by 2058 per-person GDP would be around 70% higher than the current trend.

Is Rep. Ryan's Roadmap perfect? Of course not—no government plan ever is. But it's the best plan on the table at a time when doing nothing is no longer an option.

Let's not settle for the big-government status quo, which is what the president's commission offers. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to make these tough decisions so that they might inherit a prosperous and strong America like the one we were given.

Beijing, 2030

2010-10-21T20:32:00.002-04:00

The Great American Trance

2010-10-21T08:04:00.000-04:00

The Great American Trance

In hypno-therapy, the greater difficulty is not whether a new client can be hypnotized. It's whether or not they can be awakened.

Trucks Encircle ABC, CBS, NBC, Challenge ‘Liberal’ Media to ‘Tell The Truth’ | CNSnews.com

2010-10-07T10:36:00.000-04:00

Trucks Encircle ABC, CBS, NBC, Challenge ‘Liberal’ Media to ‘Tell The Truth’ | CNSnews.com.

(CNSNews.com) – Four billboard trucks bearing the message “Stop the Liberal Bias, Tell the Truth!” began circling the Manhattan headquarters of ABC, CBS, NBC, and the New York Times on Friday. The trucks will do so for eight hours every weekday for the next four weeks as part of a campaign run by the Media Research Center, a watchdog group that analyzes the media for liberal bias.

Similar trucks also are operating in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, passing the offices of the broadcast networks, the Washington Post, CNN, the Newseum, the National Press Club and Politico, and ads about the campaign are running on numerous Web sites and on conservative talk radio programs.

The Virginian: Who's sleazier the print media or the Internet?

2010-10-07T10:32:00.000-04:00

The Virginian: Who's sleazier the print media or the Internet?

"But for more civil discourse, avoid the NT Times and read the Internet. You won’t have to take a bath to wash the filth off afterward."

Stuxnet: EMP looks like Child's Play

2010-09-24T12:49:00.000-04:00

Here's the real "Y2K."

I leave to your imaginations what mere dread of coming variants of this might do to our networked economy. You don't have to worry about this falling into the wrong hands. It's already there.

Stuxnet malware is 'weapon' out to destroy Iran's nuclear plant?

Video games lead to faster decisions that are no less accurate

2010-09-18T14:58:00.000-04:00

Video games lead to faster decisions that are no less accurate

Why the GOP wave?

2010-09-09T15:34:00.006-04:00

The silence you hear in the room is stems from an unwillingness to add my voice to the den of the Silly Season, which will come to an end 53 days from now. Before returning to the studies more appropriate to this brief exile, I pause briefly to allow our friend and former congressional candidate Greg Dority of Washington, North Carolina to say a few words. He knows his economics, certainly, and if Greg's worried, I'm bound to strain to pay attention. Regarding his opinion below, I will only add the caveat that my fellow Republicans should read the present mood of the nation very, very carefully. "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," as the Bard said in another context. - JCR

Greg Dority

Labor Day traditionally begins the mid-term election campaign season and is a good point to reflect on what will happen in some eight short weeks. That there will be a Republican landslide across this country and our state is not in doubt. What will surprise many people is the sheer magnitude of this event.

I can recall using the term "GOP tsunami" to discuss this wave back in February in an attempt to alert our candidates, supporters and neighbors to the unique opportunity this year presents. Salisbury, Lexington, Greensboro, Wilson, Goldsboro, Durham, Washington, Greenville and countless other venues at GOP meetings and Tea Party events I shared the hows and whys of this historic development. Many of our candidates took heed and in Napoleonic parlance, "stole a march" on their lumbering Democratic opponents.

Now the stretch run begins for the final sprint to the wire and it appears North Carolina Republicans will gain 15 seats in the State House, seven in the State Senate and pick up two congressional seats. If the wave begins to expand exponentially, these gains will increase another 50 percent.

Why is this going to happen? How can we sit here eight weeks out and so clearly see the future?

Because our country and our state are in the throes of a global economic collapse that accelerates each week. The Democratic controlled congress and state legislature have failed to recognize the deflationary nature of this event and enable further deterioration by clinging to their Keynesian mentality of the past. This crisis cannot be solved with more stimulus, more spending and more debt. The Democratic party is lining up our children and grandchildren in front of an economic firing squad that will destroy their futures and create an economic wasteland for decades to come.

There are no central bank tools to stop a deflationary cycle once it begins. So-called quantitative easing merely keeps zombie banks on life support as they borrow artificial "money" (created on a computer screen and transferred to accounts electronically) from the government at close to zero percent interest so the banks may buy government bonds yielding 2-3 percent. These monies are not used to make loans to small business or to create new jobs but instead are used as an accounting sleight of hand to prop up stock prices and ensure bonuses are paid to top executives.

The banks are insolvent because their liabilities exceed their assets. In an honest system they would be liquidated at market value, debt would be expunged and the economic cycle would begin anew. The Democratic congress keeps the banks propped up with stimulus spending and bailout programs that ensure debt will increase and strangle future generations. In the process they will destroy the currency -- the current bubble in Treasuries will end badly -- and the economic nightmare will grow.

Meanwhile the people starve as unemployment is through the roof and more than 40 million Americans need food stamps to survive. If the currency is destroyed the food stamps won't be good anymore and people will be in the streets. The situation is that dire, and the American people are not stupid -- they know the Democrats in Washington and Raleigh are executing the middle class.

These Democratic economic policies are nothing more than official cover for a massive looting of the country as the wealth is being sucked out of the nation before a final collapse occurs. Every day there is a new congressional scandal as another Democratic congressman is investigated for putting taxpayer monies in his pocket. The smarter ones just help enable the wealth transfer by ensuring the new money created never reaches the people and, "by the way, will you be attending Congressman so and so's fundraiser in Georgetown tomorrow night?"

The people are not stupid, they are not fools. That is why they are coming to the polls to vote out every Democratic incumbent they can find on the ballot. That is why they are making phone calls, canvassing and organizing rallies to take back our nation. Their failure to act will ensure the final crash and they know it.

A deflationary economic collapse is not a pretty sight. No one living today has witnessed what happens when the "modern" economy stops working and wages, prices, real estate and retirement savings fall in value relative to the currency -- and nobody has any money. Except, of course, for the looters, who are sitting pretty and can buy up the entire country for pennies on the dollar.

The Democrats have gambled on the ignorance of the American people and are about to lose big time.

Mirror: America's Ruling Class -- and the perils of revolution

2010-07-19T12:13:00.003-04:00

Angelo M. Codevilla
The American Spectator

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "global warming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate -- most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class's prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans -- a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents -- lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace's taunt "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers -- easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America's regime class -- relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans -- and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation's unpredictable future. More on politics below.

The Ruling Class

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a "newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy." In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

The Faith

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one's self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it "the old serpent, you work I'll eat." But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.

It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by "science." By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes' deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach's rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx's formulation, that ethical thought is "superstructural" to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called "all men are created equal" "a self-evident lie," much of America's educated class had already absorbed the "scientific" notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class's religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can't you let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill." Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world's examples and the world's reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to "teach [them] to elect good men."

World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people's eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans' lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.

The cultural divide between the "educated class" and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the "vanguard of the proletariat," the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples' ways and to build "the new man." Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson's benevolent genius.

Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America's problems in technocratic terms. America's problems would be fixed by a "brain trust" (picked by him). His New Deal's solutions -- the alphabet-soup "independent" agencies that have run America ever since -- turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.

As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself "scientific," this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in "scientific" terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno's widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the "F scale" (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey's Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers's Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved "scientifically" that conservatives were maladjusted ne'er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled "Liberalism and Personality," following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)

The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true." Confident "knowledge" that "some of us, the ones who matter," have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.

The Agenda: Power

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle's view of democracy. Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing "alternative energy," our ruling class created arguably the world's biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a "green agenda," because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in "climate change." At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any "green jobs" thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies -- that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on "global warming" is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people's energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of America as "private wealth amidst public squalor" (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest's complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).

The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class's economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its "system." But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and "best practices" that constitute "the system" become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied with what "the system" offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost ofcare. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run "guaranteed retirement accounts." If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?

Who Depends on Whom?

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties." Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.

Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison's Federalist #10, "refine and enlarge the public's view," to something like the British Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain's electoral system -- like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote -- had made members of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson's time the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.

In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard "one man, one vote" for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of "gerrymandering," concentrating the opposition party's voters into as few districts as possible while placing one's own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today's Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party establishments -- not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered "safe" for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line.

To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In America ever more since the 1930s -- elsewhere in the world this practice is ubiquitous and long-standing -- government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society's sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector's true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.

Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of "the doctors" even though the vast majority of America's 975,000 physicians opposed it. Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby to the AMA's officers keep them in line, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the doctor ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state of Arizona's enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to Hispanics, the National Association of Chiefs of Police -- whose officials depend on the administration for their salaries -- issued a statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising Hispanics' animosity. This reflected conversations with the administration rather than a vote of the nation's police chiefs.

Similarly, modern labor unions are ever less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the aegis of an organization chosen jointly by employers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers' secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by the union presenting what it claims are cards from workers approving of representation. The union gets 2 percent of the workers' pay, which it recycles as contributions to the Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. The union's leadership is part of the ruling class's beating heart.

The point is that a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today's America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.

Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law. The America described in civics books, in which no one could be convicted or fined except by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today's administrative state -- in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today's legal -- administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever "agency policy" they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any "agency policy" you will be informed that it was formulated with input from "the public." But not from the likes of you.

Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as "interstate commerce" and "due process," then transmuting others, e.g., "search and seizure," into "privacy." Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of "privacy" with a "penumbra" that it deemed "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the "positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.

By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.

As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.

Disaggregating and Dispiriting

The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

Since marriage is the family's fertile seed, government at all levels, along with "mainstream" academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of "the family" -- meaning married parents raising children -- but rather of "families," meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage -- except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize "child care" for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration's secretary of defense and the Republican Senate's majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military's practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms." Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party's most faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents' right to homeschool their children against the ruling class's desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: "to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible."

At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.

While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.

That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, "scientific" judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that "scientists say" this or that, ordinary people -- or for that matter scientists who "don't say," or are not part of the ruling class -- lose any right to see the information that went into what "scientists say." Thus when Virginia's attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth's temperatures are rising "like a hockey stick" from millennial stability -- a conclusion on which billions of dollars' worth of decisions were made -- to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia's faculty senate condemned any inquiry into "scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards" claiming that demands for data "send a chilling message to scientists...and indeed scholars in any discipline." The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general's demands for data amounted to "an assault on reason." The fact that the "hockey stick" conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.

By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking -- to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by "world standards." Each day, the ruling class produces new "studies" that show that one or another of Americans' habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.

Meddling and Apologies

America's best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America's Progressive class, first articulated by such as Princeton's Woodrow Wilson and Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the rest of the world to follow peacefully, today's ruling class makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed, they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people's insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere. That is why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class has complained that the American people oscillate between bellicosity and "isolationism."

Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people's perennial preference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform the world's Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans, believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, has contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it -- but not in its own eyes.

Rather, even as our ruling class has lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded violently to reform foreign countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not having matched that image -- their private image. Woodrow Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe's peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans' non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives' private dream. In our time, this double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obama apologized to Europe because "the United States has fallen short of meeting its responsibilities" to reduce carbon emissions by taxation. But the American people never assumed such responsibility, and oppose doing so. Hence President Obama was not apologizing for anything that he or anyone he respected had done, but rather blaming his fellow Americans for not doing what he thinks they should do while glossing over the fact that the Europeans had done the taxing but not the reducing. Wilson redux.

Similarly, Obama "apologized" to Europeans because some Americans -- not him and his friends -- had shown "arrogance and been dismissive" toward them, and to the world because President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II. So President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter -- not himself and his friends, of course. So assistant secretary of state Michael Posner apologized to Chinese diplomats for Arizona's law that directs police to check immigration status. Republicans engage in that sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself from his own administration by telling him, "Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him..." This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee in the Temple: "Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men..."

In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.

The Country Class

Describing America's country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.

Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend.

Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union's interests above those of parents who want to choose their children's schools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.

Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class's rituals while guarding against infringing its prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams should play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of performance -- including academic ones -- should be matters of public record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open argument. For such people, the Supreme Court's 2009 decision in Ricci, upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to the results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence may sometimes still trump political connections.

Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class's insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class's dismissal of opposition as mere "anger and frustration" -- an imputation of stupidity -- while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class's bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?

The country class actually believes that America's ways are superior to the rest of the world's, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous. Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota's factory methods are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to "world standards." This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or "God Bless America" is sung after seven innings of baseball, and most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League's plaintive renditions of the "Star Spangled Banner."

Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God's law. Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri -- entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood's -- because since the 1970s most of Hollywood's products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The same goes for "popular music" and television. For some in the country class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class's hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake. By that very token, the country class's characteristic cultural venture -- the homeschool movement -- stresses the classics across the board in science, literature, music, and history even as the ruling class abandons them.

Congruent Agendas?

Each of the country class's diverse parts has its own agenda, which flows from the peculiar ways in which the ruling class impacts its concerns. Independent businesspeople are naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relations between government and their competitors. Persons who would like to lead their community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party establishments are accruing. Parents of young children and young women anxious about marriage worry that cultural directives from on high are dispelling their dreams. The faithful to God sense persecution. All resent higher taxes and loss of freedom. More and more realize that their own agenda's advancement requires concerting resistance to the ruling class across the board.

Not being at the table when government makes the rules about how you must run your business, knowing that you will be required to pay more, work harder, and show deference for the privilege of making less money, is the independent businessman's nightmare. But what to do about it? In our time the interpenetration of government and business -- the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations -- is so thick and deep, the people "at the table" receive and recycle into politics so much money, that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grant of privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business's agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation -- and through support of the Republican Party -- usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, the economic argument is framed in moral terms: "The sum of good government," said Thomas Jefferson, is not taking "from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." For government to advantage some at others' expense, said he, "is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association." In our time, more and more independent businesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. But few realize how revolutionary that is.

As bureaucrats and teachers' unions disempowered neighborhood school boards, while the governments of towns, counties, and states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as the ruling class reduced the number and importance of things that American communities could decide for themselves, America's thirst for self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are almost always paid more and have more generous benefits than the private sector people whose taxes support them only sharpened the sense among many in the country class that they now work for public employees rather than the other way around. But how to reverse the roles? How can voters regain control of government? Restoring localities' traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional "police" powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one's self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do.

America's pro-family movement is a reaction to the ruling class's challenges: emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children's education. Americans reacted to these challenges primarily by sorting themselves out. Close friendships and above all marriages became rarer between persons who think well of divorce, abortion, and government authority over children and those who do not. The homeschool movement, for which the Internet became the great facilitator, involves not only each family educating its own children, but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual contact among like-minded persons. In short, the part of the country class that is most concerned with family matters has taken on something of a biological identity. Few in this part of the country class have any illusion, however, that simply retreating into private associations will long save their families from societal influences made to order to discredit their ways. But stopping the ruling class's intrusions would require discrediting its entire conception of man, of right and wrong, as well as of the role of courts in popular government. That revolutionary task would involve far more than legislation.

The ruling class's manifold efforts to discredit and drive worship of God out of public life -- not even the Soviet Union arrested students for wearing crosses or praying, or reading the Bible on school property, as some U.S. localities have done in response to Supreme Court rulings -- convinced many among the vast majority of Americans who believe and pray that today's regime is hostile to the most important things of all. Every December, they are reminded that the ruling class deems the very word "Christmas" to be offensive. Every time they try to manifest their religious identity in public affairs, they are deluged by accusations of being "American Taliban" trying to set up a "theocracy." Let members of the country class object to anything the ruling class says or does, and likely as not their objection will be characterized as "religious," that is to say irrational, that is to say not to be considered on a par with the "science" of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter. Because aggressive, intolerant secularism is the moral and intellectual basis of the ruling class's claim to rule, resistance to that rule, whether to the immorality of economic subsidies and privileges, or to the violation of the principle of equal treatment under equal law, or to its seizure of children's education, must deal with secularism's intellectual and moral core. This lies beyond the boundaries of politics as the term is commonly understood.

The Classes Clash

The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.

In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good among them -- is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain.

Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country "into the ditch" all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today's Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s.

The name of the party that will represent America's country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is there to government by one party but government by another party? Yet this logic, though all too familiar to most of the world, has always been foreign to America and naturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Any country party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats' mirror image.

Yet to defend the country class, to break down the ruling class's presumptions, it has no choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while. Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents' legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control "climate change," and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.

Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to capture Congress, the presidency, and most statehouses. What then would it do? Especially if its majority were slim, it would be tempted to follow the Democrats' plan of 2009-2010, namely to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the Constitution and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest groups that gain from them, while continuing to vilify the other side. Whatever effect this might have, it surely would not be to make America safe for self-governance because by carrying out its own "revolution from above" to reverse the ruling class's previous "revolution from above," it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America. Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country class's diversity as well as to the American Founders' legacy.

Achieving the country class's inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside. Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.

Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government's role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today's Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents', today's 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet to subject the modern administrative state's agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens' discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens' understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court's or an official's unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of truth.

How, for example, to remind America of, and to drive home to the ruling class, Lincoln's lesson that trifling with the Constitution for the most heartfelt of motives destroys its protections for all? What if a country class majority in both houses of Congress were to co-sponsor a "Bill of Attainder to deprive Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and other persons of liberty and property without further process of law for having violated the following ex post facto law..." and larded this constitutional monstrosity with an Article III Section 2 exemption from federal court review? When the affected members of the ruling class asked where Congress gets the authority to pass a bill every word of which is contrary to the Constitution, they would be confronted, publicly, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's answer to a question on the Congress's constitutional authority to mandate individuals to purchase certain kinds of insurance: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" The point having been made, the Country Party could lead public discussions around the country on why even the noblest purposes (maybe even Title II of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964?) cannot be allowed to trump the Constitution.

How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class's greatest difficulty -- aside from being outnumbered -- will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class's greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.

Letter to the Editor

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University.

Berwick: Bigger Than Kagan

2010-07-15T12:36:00.000-04:00

If the American people want the health-care world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that's their choice. But they must be given that choice.

Daniel Henninger
Wall Street Journal

Barack Obama's incredible "recess appointment" of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.

The court's decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds. Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine.

Dr. Berwick's ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren't merely about "change." They would be revolutionary.

One may agree with these views or not, but for the president to tell the American people they have to simply accept this through anything so flaccid as a recess appointment is beyond outrageous. It isn't acceptable.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, was taken aback at the end-around: "Senate confirmation of presidential appointees is an essential process prescribed by the Constitution that serves as a check on executive power."

Let's look, then, at what President Obama won't let the American electorate hear Dr. Berwick say in front of a committee of Congress. These excerpts are from past speeches and articles by Dr. Berwick:

"I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do."

"You cap your health care budget, and you make the political and economic choices you need to make to keep affordability within reach."

"Please don't put your faith in market forces. It's a popular idea: that Adam Smith's invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can."

"Indeed, the Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs."

"It may therefore be necessary to set a legislative target for the growth of spending at 1.5 percentage points below currently projected increases and to grant the federal government the authority to reduce updates in Medicare fees if the target is exceeded."

"About 8% of GDP is plenty for 'best known' care."

"A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing—control supply."

"The unaided human mind, and the acts of the individual, cannot assure excellence. Health care is a system, and its performance is a systemic property."

"Health care is a common good—single payer, speaking and buying for the common good."

"And it's important also to make health a human right because the main health determinants are not health care but sanitation, nutrition, housing, social justice, employment, and the like."

"Hence, those working in health care delivery may be faced with situations in which it seems that the best course is to manipulate the flawed system for the benefit of a specific patient or segment of the population, rather than to work to improve the delivery of care for all. Such manipulation produces more flaws, and the downward spiral continues."

"For-profit, entrepreneurial providers of medical imaging, renal dialysis, and outpatient surgery, for example, may find their business opportunities constrained."

"One over-demanded service is prevention: annual physicals, screening tests, and other measures that supposedly help catch diseases early."

"I would place a commitment to excellence—standardization to the best-known method—above clinician autonomy as a rule for care."

"Health care has taken a century to learn how badly we need the best of Frederick Taylor [the father of scientific management]. If we can't standardize appropriate parts of our processes to absolute reliability, we cannot approach perfection."

"Young doctors and nurses should emerge from training understanding the values of standardization and the risks of too great an emphasis on individual autonomy."

"Political leaders in the Labour Government have become more enamored of the use of market forces and choice as an engine for change, rather than planned, centrally coordinated technical support."

"The U.K has people in charge of its health care—people with the clear duty and much of the authority to take on the challenge of changing the system as a whole. The U.S. does not."
***

There is no need to rehearse the analogies in literature and social thought that Dr. Berwick's ideas summon. That the Obama White House would try to push this past public scrutiny with a recess appointment says more about Barack Obama than it does Dr. Berwick.

Vilifying Dr. Berwick alone for his views is in a way beside the point. Within Mr. Obama's circle they all think like this. Defeat Dr. Berwick, and they will send up 50 more who would pursue the same goals.

If the American people want the world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that's their choice. But they must be given that choice with full, televised confirmation hearings.

Barack Obama, Donald Berwick and the rest may fancy themselves philosopher kings who know what we need without the need to inform or persuade us first. That's not how it works here. That is Sen. Baucus's point.

It should be clear why Berwick is bigger than Kagan. We need a large public debate over these views, over what Mr. Obama has said his health plan would and would not do. We need to find out if every Democrat in Congress and every Democrat writing newspaper columns and blogs agrees with Dr. Berwick about clinical and individual autonomy and about leaders with plans.

Then we need to build an election around whether we want to go down the road Dr. Berwick has planned for us, or start dismantling the one that President Obama paved through Congress on a partisan vote.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

The reckoning approaches

2010-05-31T07:02:00.000-04:00

David Warren
The Ottawa Citizen

A crunch is coming to a country near you; has already come to several countries in Europe; is likely to transform the entire Western world within the space of our lifetimes.

It will obviate all the trends to which we have become accustomed. But while I have no doubt of this, I have no idea what will emerge from it. Human beings cannot see the future, except perhaps prophetically under divine inspiration.

But we can see such rational things as "three into two won't go," and easily predict the catastrophe itself. We have not only an impending fiscal collapse, but escalating "culture wars" that will be resolved one way or another.

I have praised Lee Harris several times previously as a remarkably discerning pundit. His account of the "fantasy ideology of Al Qaeda" exploded from the pages of Policy Review, the summer after 9/11, and since he has written three books on "global" political issues, under titles that unfortunately cast him as a futurologist. His latest, just published, is The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite.

It is in fact a smiling book by the best sort of generous, old-fashioned liberal who gives an entertaining tour-de-horizon of the whole history of creative tension between ornery know-nothing libertarians, and pointy-headed intellectual control-freaks -- from the Magna Carta forward -- including Wat Tyler, Cromwell, Andrew Jackson, everything. He is on the side of both liberty and order, as any sane person will be, and celebrates chiefly the English-speaking societies that have "evolved" through open contests between them. Harris's writing is itself an overlay of high-brow and populist: in the best sense he is a "global village explainer."

My own thesis would be that the tradition symbolized by Magna Carta is being rendered extinct, by the metastatic growth of the Nanny State, the retreat of Christianity, and the uncritical assimilation of inhuman technology.

Harris would perhaps half-agree that we "aren't in Kansas any more," and I would half-agree that our current conflicts were prefigured in many past ones.

Familiar with the attitudes of Middle Americans from living among them (unlike the urban intelligentsia of East and West Coasts), Harris provides an apologia for them that is only slightly condescending. They are people whose whole ethos is "live and let live," yet are accused of intolerance for failing to embrace progressive agendas. They are also people who powerfully resent being told how to live. And they have been pushed too far.

The Tea Party movement has arisen in the U.S. (and could easily arise in English Canada) to redress an imbalance. The election of Barack Obama put a crown on the exponential growth of the state, and his extremely ambitious statist agenda is taking Middle America, very fast, to places it has never wanted to go.

Whether you like or dislike Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh (I adore them both), they have articulated the spirit of rebellion against taxes and debt, against sprawling, parasitical bureaucracies, and against "the culture of death."

To the mainstream media -- to that liberal elite generally -- the question has not been whether we should have vast intrusive bureaucracies, but rather, what their policies should be, and how to pay for them. That is their playing field, on which they locate some "middle ground" or scrimmage line -- itself shifting constantly to the left, toward some vague, Utopian endzone. It comes as an inconceivable shock to them to discover millions of people who are not merely pushing back against this "progress" -- which they could understand -- but want no part of the game.

Their lives are centred on family and church and productive labour, not on politics. They are often poorly informed about things they care little about; poorly researched on current rights and entitlements; real boobs when they stray into debates about such things; and thus, hicks to the politically sophisticated. The latter, in turn, know little enough about family and church and productive labour.

The problem arises between these two amorphous groups when the latter take the former to be their milch cows. At least in America, that is the point at which the hicks suddenly become seriously interested in politics, organize themselves into things like Tea Parties, and go out looking for results.

This is complicated by the fact that Nanny State has come to the end of her fiscal road. Her ambitions have so far outstripped her means, that we are faced with public finance implosions. In the case of the U.S., deficits and debts were unsustainable even before President Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress put the country on track to double them.

Any way you look at it, the crunch is coming. I do not have the illusion it will be painless, for the Nanny State is utterly unprepared for, and was anyway ill-equipped to handle, popular rebellion.

Nor have we anywhere in view the sort of politicians who could ride the tiger, who have any notion how to radically downsize a government peacefully. Yet we are getting beyond the sort of thing we can vote on.

David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.
© 2010 - The Ottawa Citizen

Ponderings: JFK at 93

2010-05-17T08:35:00.002-04:00

For we who survived him President John F. Kennedy stumbled upon the secret of perpetual youth on his way out of downtown Dallas, 46 years ago. In the popular imagination he is never older than during the half-hour after landing at Love Field on a beautiful late November day in 1963, always smiling from his perch in the American Pantheon, never older than the 46 years he had lived on Earth, since May 29, 1917.

On May 29, 2010 another lifetime of equal length will have passed since his exceptionally public, brutal murder. Though it is unlikely Jack Kennedy would have survived the years since, a mostly irrelevant fact for numerologists presents itself in an strange opportunity for reflection. Like Elvis Presley, the day John Kennedy died is better noted than the anniversary of his birth.

Nevertheless, had he lived another 46 years, JFK would have been 93 years old this month.

Plan to unstuck failed burgler 'impractical"

2010-05-02T12:15:00.002-04:00

Burglar FAIL
"Inside out" plan not an option

Jon Voight's open letter to the American people

2010-04-11T23:00:00.001-04:00

Rubio on Judges

2010-04-09T13:19:00.001-04:00

Farewell to American Exceptionalism?

2010-04-03T12:05:00.005-04:00

U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WS) has emerged as one of the more thoughtful and circumspect voices of opposition to the Sandinista minority presently in control of the federal executive and legislative branches of government in Washington City. A speech the Congressman presented in Oklahoma last month shows why. In an age of 8 second soundbytes, it's a risk to recommend such an 8 minute read, but this is worth every moment sacrificed in the effort:

Last week, on March 21st, Congress enacted a new Intolerable Act. Congress passed the Health Care bill - or I should say, one political party passed it - over a swelling revolt by the American people. The reform is an atrocity. It mandates that every American must buy health insurance, under IRS scrutiny. It sets up an army of federal bureaucrats who ultimately decide for you how you should receive Health Care, what kind, and how much...or whether you don't qualify at all. Never has our government claimed the power to decide when each of us has lived well enough or long enough to be refused life-saving medical assistance.

This presumptuous reform has put this nation ... once dedicated to the life and freedom of every person ... on a long decline toward the same mediocrity that the social welfare states of Europe have become.

Americans are preparing to fight another American Revolution, this time, a peaceful one with election ballots...but the "causes" of both are the same:

Should unchecked centralized government be allowed to grow and grow in power ... or should its powers be limited and returned to the people?

Should irresponsible leaders in a distant capital be encouraged to run up scandalous debts without limit that crush jobs and stall prosperity ... or should the reckless be turned out of office and a new government elected to live within its means?

Should America bid farewell to exceptional freedom and follow the retreat to European social welfare paternalism ... or should we make a new start, in the faith that boundless opportunities belong to the workers, the builders, the industrious, and the free?

We are at the beginning of an election campaign like you've never seen before!

We are challenged to answer again the momentous questions our Founders raised when they launched mankind's noblest experiment in human freedom. They made a fundamental choice and changed history for the better. Now it's our high calling to make that choice: between managed scarcity, or solid growth ... between living in dependency on government handouts, or taking responsibility for our lives ... between confiscating the earnings of some and spreading them around, or securing everyone's right to the rewards of their work ... between bureaucratic central government, or self-government ... between the European social welfare state or the American idea of free market democracy.

What kind of nation do we wish to be? What kind of society will we hand down to our children and future generations? In the coming watershed election, the nature of this unique and exceptional land is at stake. We will choose one of two different paths. And once we make that choice, there's no going back.

This is not the kind of election I would prefer. But it was forced on us by the leaders of our government.

These leaders are walking America down a new path ... creating entitlements and promising benefits that model the United States after the European Union: a welfare state society where most people pay little or no taxes but become dependent on government benefits ... where tax reduction is impossible because more people have a stake in the welfare state than in free enterprise ... where high unemployment is accepted as a way of life, and the spirit of risk-taking is smothered by a tangle of red tape from an all-providing centralized government.

True, the United States has been moving slowly toward this path a long time. And Democrats and Republicans share the blame. Now we are approaching a "tipping point." Once we pass it, we will become a different people. Before the "tipping point," Americans remain independent and take responsibility for their own well-being. Once we have gone beyond the "tipping point," that self-sufficient outlook will be gradually transformed into a soft despotism a lot like Europe's social welfare states. Soft despotism isn't cruel or mean, it's kindly and sympathetic. It doesn't help anyone take charge of life, but it does keep everyone in a happy state of childhood. A growing centralized bureaucracy will provide for everyone's needs, care for everyone's heath, direct everyone's career, arrange everyone's important private affairs, and work for everyone's pleasure.

The only hitch is, government must be the sole supplier of everyone's happiness ... the shepherd over this flock of sheep.

Am I exaggerating? Are we really reaching this "tipping point"? Exact and precise measures cannot be made, but an eye-opening study by the Tax Foundation, a reliable and non-partisan research group, tells us that in 2004, 20 percent of US households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. In other words, one out of five families in America is already government dependent. Another 20 percent were receiving almost 40 percent of their income from federal programs, so another one in five has become government reliant for their livelihood.

All told, 60 percent - three out of five households in America - were receiving more government benefits and services (in dollar value) than they were paying back in taxes. The Tax Foundation estimates that President Obama's budget last year will raise this "net government inflow" from 60 to 70 percent. Look at it this way: three out of ten American families are supporting themselves plus - through government - supplying or supplementing the incomes of seven other households. As a permanent arrangement, this is individually unfair, politically inequitable, and economically dangerous.

It raises a subtle but real threat to self-government when the few are paying more and more of the bill for government services and subsidies to the majority: "He who pays the piper calls the tune." The next chapter is the rule of "crony capitalism," where those who pay most taxes get the privileges, and government by and for the people is replaced by government by and for the few. The end of this story is soft despotism.

We already see enough of "crony capitalism." When government sends bailout money to Wall Street firms they label "too big to fail," that's "crony capitalism." When government buys shares in General Motors, names their management, and dictates their salaries, that's "crony capitalism." When big health insurance companies, instead of competing for market, team up with Congressional Health Care writers to order every individual to buy their products, that's "crony capitalism." When thousands of small businesses have to meet bottom lines with no government bailout, well, you're too small to succeed...good luck!

The Democratic leaders of Congress and in the White House hold a view they call "Progressivism." Progressivism began in Wisconsin, where I come from. It came into our schools from European universities under the spell of intellectuals such as Hegel and Weber, and the German leader Bismarck. The best known Wisconsin Progressive was actually a Republican, Robert LaFollette.

Progressivism was a powerful strain in both political parties for many years. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, and Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, both brought the Progressive movement to Washington.

Early Progressives wanted to empower and engage the people. They fought for populist reforms like initiative and referendum, recalls, judicial elections, the breakup of monopoly corporations, and the elimination of vote buying and urban patronage. But Progressivism turned away from popular control toward central government planning. It lost most Americans and consumed itself in paternalism, arrogance, and snobbish condescension. "Fighting Bob" LaFollette, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson would have scorned the self-proclaimed "Progressives" of our day for handing out bailout checks to giant corporations, corrupting the Congress to purchase votes for government controlled health care, and funneling billions in Jobs Stimulus money to local politicians to pay for make-work patronage. That's not "Progressivism," that's what real Progressives fought against!

Since America began, the timid have feared the Founding Fathers' ideas of individual freedom, so they yearn for Old World class models. Our Progressivists are the latest iteration of that same fear of the people. In unprecedented numbers, Americans are speaking out against the intolerable Health Care bill and irresponsible debt-ridden spending.

Does anyone recall Norman Rockwell's famous "Freedom of Speech" painting of an average working Joe standing and speaking his mind at a town hall meeting? Today's Progressivists ridicule average Americans speaking out at tea parties across the nation and denounce their criticisms as "un-American." Millions of average Americans reject their big government solutions, and that scares them.

Last January President Obama said: "There are simply philosophical differences that will always cause us to part ways. These disagreements, about the role of government in our lives, about our national priorities and our national security, have been taking place for over two hundred years."

He was right. So let's examine these "philosophical differences" of government. Progressivists say there are no enduring ideas of right or wrong. Everything is "relative" to history, so our ideas need to change. Progressivists say the Founders' Constitution including its amendments, with its principles of equal natural rights, limited government, and popular consent is outdated. We should have a "living constitution" that keeps up with the times. Progressivists invent new rights and enforce them with a more powerful central government and more federal agencies to direct society through the changes of history. And don't worry, they say. Bureaucrats can be controlled by Congressional oversight.

Would you like an example of how successful Congressional oversight is? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (or GSEs), underwrote trillions of dollars in junk mortgages. Year after year their officials and others from HUD, Treasury, and other agencies who supervise them marched up to Congress for hearings. Red flags were raised. The oversight committees had other priorities and dismissed them out of hand. With the housing market already tanking, Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said: "This ability to provide stability to the market is what, in my mind, makes the GSEs a congressional success story." Less than 18 months later, the ‘market-stabilizing' GSEs went belly-up due to their shoddy business practices, collapsing the mortgage credit industry and sparking the worldwide financial meltdown. No one knows the ultimate cost to the taxpayers but it will be gigantic.

If Congress can't control what a few mortgage finance bureaucrats do with your dollars, why would anyone trust Congress to control what tens of thousands of bureaucrats will do with your health?

The Progressivist ideology embraced by today's leaders is very different from everything rank-and-file Democrats, independents, and Republicans stand for. America stands for nothing if not for the fixed truth that unalienable rights were granted to every human being not by government but by "nature and nature's God." The truths of the American founding can't become obsolete because they are not timebound. They are eternal. The practical consequence of these truths is free market democracy, the American idea of free labor and free enterprise under government by popular consent. The deepest case for free market democracy is moral, rooted in human equality and the natural right to be free.

A government that expands beyond its high but limited mission of securing our natural rights is not progressive, it's regressive. It privileges the powerful at the expense of the people. It establishes the rule of class over class. The American Revolution and the Constitution replaced class rule with a better idea: equal opportunity for all. The promise of keeping the earnings of your work is central to justice, freedom, and the hope to improve your life.

In their hearts Americans know this, but people were alarmed in 2008 by rising unemployment, falling home values, a credit crunch, and a financial meltdown.

They voted for a change of parties in the White House, and elected the largest Democratic Congressional majority in more than three decades. So overwhelming was their majority that the opposition is unable to do anything to stop them from running roughshod over our foundations. Harry Reid had a supermajority in the Senate that could not be filibustered. Still, the people's mandate for Congress and the new President was clear, simple, and unmistakable: get employment back on track ... get our economy growing again.

Americans have lost jobs nearly every month since these leaders took over the federal government in January 2009, more than 4 million at last count. The official unemployment rate hovers near 10 percent, but if we add in folks who have stopped looking for work due to lack of job prospects, the rate is a lot higher.

They began by passing the first Stimulus, a taxpayer giveaway to their favorite special interests. The price tag was $862 billion. They pushed through a second stimulus bill that cost you another $18 billion. Let's see: since 4 million Americans have been unemployed since they passed these "stimuli," that averages $220,000 per job lost. Think about that. Democrats can't even put people out of work without spending near a trillion dollars!

Just to return to where we were at the end of 2007, 8.4 million jobs have to be created. To reduce unemployment to its pre-crisis level of 5 per cent by the end of President Obama's term, our economy needs to create 247,000 new jobs per month. But we are headed in the wrong direction ... except in one field: the government is growing at breakneck pace in expanding federal payrolls.

Although millions of private sector jobs have been lost since the recession began, Washington is on track to add about 275,000 more people to the public payrolls - a whopping 15 percent increase. And we aren't talking minimum wages here. More federal workers make over $100,000 than those earning $40,000 or less. The average government worker's salary in 2009 was 21 percent higher than private sector salaries. The average federal worker's compensation package, including benefits, was nearly $120,000 in 2008, twice the private sector at $60,000. One study shows the private sector benefit package averages $9,900 while the federal package averages almost $41,000. Now the Administration wants Congress to privilege federal workers by writing off their unpaid student loans after ten years. People in productive private sector jobs would keep paying for twenty years. Progressivists would really like everyone to work for the government.

Has any Congress in history enacted, or tried to enact, so many foolish, squalid, and counterproductive programs?

It isn't good news when anyone losses his job. But I'll make an exception when the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader lose theirs in November!

As their first major item of business last year, these leaders pushed through a budget so bloated that it will double the federal debt in five years, and triple it in ten.

Now the Administration has sent Congress a budget that's far worse. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office [CBO] reports that 10 years from now, this budget will drive the federal debt burden up to 90 percent of the nation's entire economic production. It propels spending to a new record of $3.8 trillion next year [FY 2011]. It widens the annual deficit to a new record of $1.5 trillion this year [FY 2010], and raises $1.8 trillion in new taxes through 2020.

Two and a half years after this recession started, and no new private jobs? Think what these mind-boggling tax increases and mountain of debt are signaling to people who want to open or expand job-creating businesses. Congress keeps raising the barriers against work and production - that's your answer.

At a time when economic and job expansion should be Washington's highest priority ... and as if the multi-trillion dollar Health Care debacle were not enough, the Progressivist leadership in Congress are adding insult to injury by promoting their energy and climate agenda through their Cap and Trade plan. Put aside the fact that there is growing disagreement among scientists about climate change and its causes. This bill is a big mistake for other reasons.

CBO estimates that Cap and Trade's total cost is another near-trillion dollars. By one CBO estimate, the tax and energy cost bills for the average American household may grow by $1,600 a year. Other studies put this cost a lot higher.

If you don't believe me, let me quote a key Democratic Senator:

Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Coal-powered plants...natural gas...whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was...would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers...So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.

That was Senator Barack Obama in January 2008, talking about what he would do as President. Don't say the man doesn't work to keep his promises!

Economists across the spectrum tell us that Cap and Trade would make our long-term national economic production fall below potential, causing higher unemployment. Federal spending is on an unsustainable path that can only get worse if this happens. There is general agreement that the environmental improvements from Cap and Trade are either nonexistent or too small to measure.

Congressional leaders are also pushing an unprecedented expansion of the Federal Reserve Board's regulatory powers over financial institutions under the belief that government must protect the people from themselves. This measure will direct federal agents to inspect, and at their pleasure object to, the wages and compensation which businesses on Main Street as well as Wall Street wish to pay employees. It puts bureaucracies in charge of deciding the type and line of credit which consumers and businesses will have access to when they shop for cars, homes, education, and expansion of facilities. The Fed has already failed the twofold assignment it has - keeping the economy and jobs growing, and keeping prices stable. It should return to its original mission of guaranteeing the long-term value of our dollar. Instead the same leaders who never knew the government mortgage giants were supplying credit for worthless mortgages now want Fed bureaucrats to regulate the businesses that supply personal and commercial credit? If that happens, economic recovery will be a longer time coming.

And now I want to return to the Health Care Frankenstein. Most Americans understand that government-run Health Care is not free, not cheap, and not compassionate. I think most Americans believe Congress has no idea of what the public demand will be for subsidized Health Care. They are correct. When Medicare was enacted, Congress guessed it would cost about 10 percent of what it turned out to be after 25 years. Heck, Congress couldn't even figure the cost of the 3-month long Cash for Clunkers subsidy last year, underestimating it on the order of 1 to 9. Most Americans know the Congressional majority are clueless about what their government-run Health Care system is going to cost.

The drama that brought this creature to life was unedifying ... part tragedy and part farce. Ethical categories went out the window. Never in history have the deliberations of Congress been subverted on this scale. The secrecy, the lack of transparency, the half-truths were stunning. The votes called at midnight ... the 2 and 3 thousand page bills members of Congress had no time to read before the votes ... the sordid backroom deals, the Cornhusker Kickback that shamed Nebraska, the Louisiana Purchase, the "Gator Aid" Medicare privilege for Florida, the additional Medicare dollars for states whose wavering representatives only yesterday were ferociously denouncing earmarks ... the federal judgeship dangled for one lawmaker's brother ... the raid on the Medicare piggy bank ... the lie that $250 billion for "doc fix" shouldn't count as a Health Care cost ... the double-counted deficit estimate scam that would land any accountant in jail ... the proposed Slaughter rule that Congressmen not record a vote on a bill their constituents hate, just "deem" it passed and vote on the amendments...and to complete the farce, the phony Executive Order pretending not to fund abortions when the Health Care bill, as "the supreme law of the land," does fund abortions. The level of political corruption to buy the votes for this debacle makes all past examples look penny ante by comparison.

Self-government stands or falls on integrity, not only in those who represent you but in the enactment of law. This indecency soiled our freedom and embarrassed the democracy we promote in other nations. And this may not be the last of it. To enact its transformative agenda, this leadership employs the Machiavellian saying that the end justifies the means. America was born in a revolution against that whole idea. Soon it will be the norm.

The Constitution and the consent of the people are all that stand between limited and unlimited government power. Zealous ideologues with the best of intentions brush aside the limits on power in order to get whatever they believe is good for the people ... no matter what the people believe. Our system of freedom can survive an assault, but it won't survive if the people are frightened, or angry, or asleep at the switch. A great Democrat, President Andrew Jackson, once said: "eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty." We can thank our current leaders at least for this: they have awakened the nation to the danger of taking self-government for granted.

Congress is not only enacting a social welfare state agenda over the objections of the people. It is failing to address the problems that threaten to engulf our country, principally economic decline and entitlement-driven debt crisis. The coming election will be a referendum on the agenda of our current leadership. Either it will give them a mandate that says "more of the same," or it will end the abuse of power and put America back on the path of growth and freedom.

Supposing the American people use their referendum in November to elect a new majority, what would the next Congress do?

The first order of business will be "repeal and replace." We will work to repeal federalized Health Care and replace it with a robust, competitive open market in health care that puts patients and their doctors at the center - not employers, not insurers, and not government agents. This takes at least two elections, and we must show our perseverance.

A new Congress will then turn to the great problem of our stagnant economy and the debt tsunami bearing down on us. The days of pretending not to notice are over. The next Congress will understand this threat and act after transparent deliberation and real debate.

I have put forward my specific solution, called "A Roadmap for America's Future," to meet this challenge. The CBO confirms that this plan achieves the goal of paying off government debt in the long run - while securing the social safety net and starting up future economic growth.

The problem in a nutshell is this: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, three giant entitlements, are out of control. Exploding costs will drive our federal government and national economy to collapse. And the recession plus this Congress' spending spree have accelerated the day of reckoning.

Today, Medicare is $38 trillion short of its promised benefits. In five years, the hole will grow to $52 trillion. Your family's share of this gap is $458,000. Medicaid will add trillions more in state and federal debt.

Social Security's surplus is already gone, and its debt is mounting. Unless its finances are strengthened, the government will be forced to cut benefits nearly 25 percent or raise payroll taxes more than 30 percent.

Both Republicans and Democrats have failed to be candid about this. And we have only postponed the crisis by shaking a tin cup at China and Japan.

A new Congress could start by making you the owner of your health plan. Under my Roadmap reform, a tax break that now benefits only those with job-based health insurance will be replaced by tax credits that benefit every American. And it secures universal access to quality, affordable health coverage with incentives that hold down health-care cost increases.

Everyone 55 and over will remain in the current Medicare program. For those now under 55, Medicare will be like the health-care program we in Congress enjoy.

Future seniors will receive a payment and pick an insurance plan from a diverse list of Medicare-certified plans - with more support for those with low incomes and higher health costs. To reform Medicaid, low income people will receive the means to buy private health insurance like everyone else.

Under the Roadmap's Social Security proposal, everyone 55 and older will remain in the existing program with no change. Those under 55 will choose either to stay with traditional Social Security, or to join a retirement system like Congress's own plan. They will be able to invest more than a third of their payroll taxes in their own savings account, guaranteed and managed by the federal government. For both Social Security and Medicare, eligibility ages will gradually increase, and the wealthy will receive smaller benefit increases.

And we need to get this economy moving again, so the Roadmap offers taxpayers an option: either use the tax code we have today, or use a simple, low-rate, two-tier personal income tax that gets rid of loopholes and the double taxation of savings and investment. And let's replace corporate income taxes with a simple, competitive 8.5 percent business consumption tax. These low-rate and simple tax reforms would provide the certainty and the incentives for investors to open new enterprises and for workers to find a marketplace expanding in new jobs.

The Roadmap plan shifts power to individuals at the expense of government control. It rejects cradle-to-grave welfare state ideas because they drain individuals of their self-reliance. And it still honors our historic commitment to strengthening the social safety net for those who need it most.

I would welcome honest debate in the next Congress on how to tackle our fiscal crisis - and the larger debate on the proper role of government. It's time politicians in Washington stopped patronizing the American people as if they were children - deferring tough decisions and promising fiscal fantasies. Tell Americans the truth, offer them a choice, and count on them to do what's right.

A political realignment is on the way. Democratic leaders are staking their party's future on their ideological agenda. Financial Services Committee Chairman Frank candidly admits that his party "are trying on every front to increase the role of government." Former President Clinton told a Netroots convention last year that "We have entered a new era of progressive politics, which if we do it right could last 30 or 40 years."

The question is, do we realign with the vision of a European-style social welfare state, or do we realign with the American idea?

My party challenges the whole basis of the Progressivist vision of this country's future. We challenge their attack on American exceptionalism. We challenge their claim that bureaucratic centralization is the only way the US can meet the economic and social challenges of our time.

Those leaders have underestimated the good sense of the American people. They broke faith with independents, Republicans, and their own rank-and-file. They walked away from the foundational truths that made America the wonder and the envy of the world. The price of their infidelity will be high.

I hope you won't mind an aside. I absolutely love Oklahoma! As you may know, I married Janna Little, daughter of Dan and Prudence Little, from Madill. Well, Janna and I are planning on spending half of our year here in retirement. And I can tell you it won't be Summer...it's just gets too hot here for a Wisconsinite. We will be spending the Fall and Winter here. You see, I love to hunt and fish. Each year we come for deer, duck, and turkey season. Janna refers to these times as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. There's something about Oklahoma that is truly captivating. It's a beautiful, big, unconstrained country with great-hearted people who know what it is to live like free men and women.

Some of my friends in Marshall County have on occasion called me "yankee," which I find particularly disturbing. I have always thought a yankee is someone from the Northeast, not the upper Midwest. Needless to say, I am told this can be fixed if I include among my life's achievements the high and noble accomplishment of noodling a giant catfish from the banks of Lake Texoma. And so, I will be returning in early June, otherwise known as noodling season, to gain this rite of passage so that I may never be called yankee again, and also hoping I keep my ten fingers intact.

Knowing America, and Oklahoma as I have come to know it, I am confident that the American character is up to every challenge. America is not over. This exceptional nation will not go down the way of mediocrity. Ronald Reagan used to say: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction ... It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for [our children] to do the same." We are that generation. The fight is our fight, and it begins now! The time is at hand to reclaim America for freedom.

Thank you very much.

Note: Congressman Paul Ryan delivered this speech to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in Oklahoma City on March 31, 2010.

Paul Ryan represents Wisconsin's First Congressional District. He serves as ranking member of the House Budget Committee and senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Oldest known shipwreck off the Lost Coast

2010-03-25T08:27:00.003-04:00

"Since storms struck the Outer Banks in November and December, the shipwreck has drifted more than two miles, from the beach across from the Corolla lighthouse to the surf due east of Sailfish Street in the Whalehead Beach neighborhood.

"During its rough journey, floor boards and the keel have come off and disappeared. The wreck could fall apart and wash out to sea or settle completely under the sand.

"Since the wreck was fully exposed in December, Henry and Lawrence have photographed, measured and studied the timbers and tracked its movements. This wreck is probably older than the famous remains of Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, that sank in 1718 near Beaufort, Lawrence said."

Read what little more there was from The Daily Reflector, HERE.

Ashley Stephenson (1963 - 2010)

2010-03-23T13:16:00.003-04:00

Former Kansas Senator Bob Dole is shown around "little" Washington, in eastern North Carolina by Ashley Stephenson in 2002.

The lead-plaintiff in a landmark 2002 redistricting lawsuit, culminating in four Supreme Court decisions named for him, died Monday morning in Beaufort County after a long battle with congenital heart disease.

Ashley Stephenson of Washington, North Carolina was 46.

Senator Phil Berger (R-Eden), state Senate minority leader credited Stephenson with responsibility for the GOP's competitive position heading into the 2010 elections, in a year when Republicans are presented with their best chance to take control of the Senate for the first time.

"It's likely we have not credited Ashley as much as we should," Berger said. "Even in 1994, Republicans ended up a single vote shy of winning control of the Senate, when a Republican revolution won control of Congress for the first time since 1954 and in control of the state House for the first time ever. That was the effect of gerrymandering, something the founders of North Carolina tried to prevent, and the legal precedent proven by Ashley Stephenson in a case he fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and back again.

"Ashley Stephenson proved one man could make a difference," Berger said. "There were a lot of people who laughed when he named the Governor, the Speaker and the Senate President pro tem in a lawsuit. They weren't laughing a year later."

Joel Raupe, a friend since 1993, credited Stephenson's victory with inspiring an equally unlikely success in challenging a U.S. Navy decision to construct a F-22 training field in rural Beaufort County, against the determined backing of then-Senator John Warner (R-VA) who headed the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Here were all these people being removed from farms that had been in their families for centuries, smack in the middle of the biggest migratory bird fly-ways of the U.S. east coast. They were upset, but convinced by the Navy that they had no recourse. Then the Stephenson case put Beaufort County on the radar, winning in every courtroom against the opinion of every reputable odds-maker, and Ashley told them not to roll-over. He urged them to sue, and eventually they won, too."

After the 2000 Census results were finalized, the Democrats in control of the General Assembly approved new state House and Senate districts, Stephenson spoke during a public hearing. The maps were illegal, he insisted, and violated three-century old ban on dividing counties in drawing legislative districts unique to North Carolina.

The ground-breaking process of following through on his lawsuit, deliberation of Stephenson v. Bartlett resulted in delayed Party primary elections in 2002 and 2004 and court rulings that eventually found five complete sets of legislative district maps were unconstitutional, including those plans already in effect since 1992.

In April 2002 Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake authored the state Supreme Court's majority opinion and spelled out the way the legislature must draw legislative district maps to "harmonize" federal requirements, including the Voting Rights Act, with the North Carolina Constitution.

Lake's opinion is now cited simply as "Stephenson," and it established North Carolina's long-time ban on dividing counties in district maps was intended to minimize gerrymandering, a process allowing incumbent legislators to pick and choose supporters in order to create "safe" districts, sometimes by attaching together far-flung areas together with corridors running down highway medians or on points on a map.

Among other things Stephenson also ended the option of creating multi-member districts, some represented by as many as three members of the state House.

Stephenson had been wearing a pacemaker implant for a number of years, and had been hospitalized on more than one occasion in recent years. His condition was monitored closely but his sudden death Monday stunned a wide network of close friends from every walk of life.

"He was a champion for us," wrote 2004 Republican gubernatorial nominee Patrick Ballantine on Monday, ironically expressing sentiment that was alternately deeply personal or partisan, depending on one's point of view.

Outgoing, passionate and optimistic, Stephenson is being remembered in online forums and guest books by the friends he made among everyone he met as skilled with people, known for "finding the richness in every waking moment."

He was devoted to his wife Paula and their son Rocky.

Since 2005 Stephenson worked at Chocowinity television state WITN, an NBC affiliate covering two-thirds of North Carolina's coast.

He was active as an unofficial booster of his adopted hometown, Washington and economic development in a county with 12.8 percent unemployment. Among his many public causes was the restoration of Turnage Theater in downtown Washington.

State funds for that historic theater's restoration had been scarce for many years but soon became available in the wake of legislative compliance with Stephenson. The method outlined by Lake unintentionally required that Washington, which had previously been carved up in several different legislative districts, to become wholly a part of Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight's state Senate district by 2004.

Funeral services are scheduled for 2 PM Wednesday, March 24, at the First Baptist Church in Washington, and internment will follow at Oakdale Cemetery. Afterward, friends and family will greet well-wishers at the Church.

When legislative districts are drawn up by the General Assembly elected in November 2010, for elections every two years in the decade that follows "the Stephenson requirements" will be a required part of that process.

Stephenson was preceded in death by his mother Julie and a brother Reid, and in addition to his son and Paula is survived also by his father, Mayor Glendale Stephenson of Mebane, and two older brothers, Alan Stephenson of Raleigh and Marshall Stephenson of Beaufort County.

He also leaves behind a treasure of devoted friends and memories.

Leftist Judge restores ACORN funding

2010-03-11T02:04:00.003-05:00

Matthew Vadum
NewsReal

If you thought you sent representatives and senators to Washington, D.C., to exercise the constitutionally mandated power of the purse — you’re wrong.

Silly you. You wasted all that time in civics class learning a whole bunch of outdated claptrap about separation of powers and the lawmaking process for nothing.

The spending power belongs to federal judges now, regardless of what that quaint little document called the U.S. Constitution says.

That’s what ACORN’s favorite federal judge, Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York ruled Wednesday.

In December Gershon, a Bill Clinton appointee, helped ACORN out by offering the Obama administration political cover by issuing a temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN. She found that depriving ACORN of taxpayer dollars was an unconstitutional “bill of attainder” that singled out ACORN for punishment without trial. It’s a nonsensical argument unless you believe that cutting off funding –funding that no one has a right to– for an organized crime syndicate is somehow a punishment.

To give credit where it’s due, the Obama administration did the right thing and appealed the December ruling.

Now Nutty Nina’s made the ruling permanent and it’s not yet clear if the administration will appeal this latest ruling. (Here is the permanent injunction and the opinion and order she issued.)

Gershon showed a similar contempt for the legislative branch previously. In 1999 she ruled then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had no right to cut off city funding of the Brooklyn Museum of Art when it displayed dead animals and a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung. Gershon’s not exactly courageous, by the way. She managed to get out of taking accused Al Qaeda terrorist Najibullah Zazi’s case when a courthouse computer randomly assigned it to her.

If this ruling remains undisturbed it will mean every parasitic leftist group in the country will have due process rights in the appropriations process. Congress will not be able to cut any group off for any reason. The rights of tax eaters will become paramount to the rights of taxpayers.

The ruling should be music to the ears of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), a huge fan of ACORN who has given thousands of dollars over the years to the ACORN network. The thoroughly corrupt Nadler urged ACORN’s lawyer to sue the government, arguing that a ban on funding constituted a “bill of attainder.” Within weeks, ACORN took his advice.

The ruling could also appears to mean that ACORN and other leftist activist groups are eligible for up to $3.99 billion in federal funding included in President Obama’s $3.83 trillion fiscal 2011 budget blueprint.

The $3.99 billion comes from a congressional slush fund known as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) $48.5 billion fiscal 2011 budget. CDBG grants, which are awarded to states and localities, flow indirectly to ACORN and similar groups that compete at the state and local level for grants.

A very special happy, happy.... birthday

2010-03-09T16:07:00.002-05:00

For Valerie on her 24th Birthday...

Politicizing Fishing

2010-03-09T15:23:00.002-05:00

Everything this White House touches turns to politics, including Fishing...

Dave Poff
Redstate.com

"It all started here this morning:

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

"I had to read that 3 times before it sank in…and then I did a little research. Guess what old Barack (I’ve never had a fishing rod in my hand a day in my life) Obama has been up to since last year? Plotting a Federal takeover of all our bodies of water (freshwater…saltwater…doesn’t matter), in an effort to set up MORE bureaucracies and circumvent the rights of the States to determine fair use and access rules amongst themselves based on the local interests of everyone involved..."

Redstate the posting, HERE.

Mass Extinction in Slow-Motion

2010-03-08T23:06:00.004-05:00

Detroit Shrinks, becomes metaphor

The end of the road for Barack Obama

"It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not."

Confirmed: Chicxulub asteroid impact
wiped out the dinosaurs

Is there a Near-Earth Object out there with our name on it?

Congressional Budget Office projects
$20 Trillion deficit for
White House-proposed FY 2011 budget

Kay Hagan out of her depth

Orange you glad to be here?

2010-03-08T10:14:00.003-05:00

Weaponizing Mozart:
How Britain is using classical music as a form of social control

In recent years Britain has become the "Willy Wonka" of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace. But our weaponization of classical music - where Mozart, Beethoven, and other greats have been turned into tools of state repression - marks a new low.

The Climategate Whitewash

Since Climategate, it's been clear that the UK Met Office and the UN Climate Czars would need to investigate themselves before anyone else did, and equally apparent that they would find little fault in themselves. Results of their “reviews” have the feel of partially digested left-overs from last night's bongy bash.

Nigeria:

500 Christians hacked to death by machete-wielding Muslims

The Keynesian Stimulus Dogma

The Keynesian economists have a huge blind spot when it comes to history. That is because they tend to view economic history as divided into two eras: the years since the Keynesian revelation (Dec., 1935, when the master, John Maynard Keynes, enlightened the world with his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, and pre-1935 when all was supposedly darkness. They seem oblivious to the historical fact that, before Hoover and Roosevelt, Uncle Sam didn't ramp up spending during recessions /depressions, and those downturns were of shorter duration.

Hardest Cities to Find a Job

Easiest Cities to Find a Job

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The Heretics: McIntyre and McKitrick

2010-02-21T12:04:00.002-05:00

Rich Trzupek
Frontpagemag.com

When the infamous hockey-stick graph that purported to prove that human activities are causing runaway global warming was finally broken, there is some irony in the fact that a couple of Canadians did the breaking. Retired mining engineer Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, have been a thorn in the side of global warming alarmists for years. McIntyre, McKitrick and, more often, the acronym “M&M” to refer to the pair, are the subject of many discussions in the e-mails released from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last November.

Reading the e-mails, it quickly becomes clear that leading alarmist scientists, like Michael Mann at Penn State and Phil Jones at the CRU, seemed positively obsessed – almost to the point of appearing deranged at times – with discrediting McIntyre and McKitrick. For example, when the pair published their first hockey stick busting paper in 2003, Mann sent an angry e-mail to his colleagues, telling them how to deal with MM: “The important thing is to deny that this has any intellectual credibility whatsoever and, if contacted by any media, to dismiss this for the stunt that it is.”

Raymond Bradley, a climatologist with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and part of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), went even farther, suggesting that CRU should provide the “independent” voice that would discredit McIntyre and McKitrick: “…if an “independent group” such as you guys at CRU could make a statement as to whether the M&M effort is truly an “audit”, and if they did it right, I think that would go a long way to defusing the issue… If you are willing, a quick and forceful statement from The Distinguished CRU Boys would help quash further arguments.”

What did McIntyre and McKitrick do to put these climatologists on the defensive? To understand the significance of their work, we have to delve into global warming theory a bit. The disaster scenarios that alarmists predict can not be proven in real time. These scenarios are based on computer models that are horrendously complex and, even if modeling results match up with actual data during this year or that, it still proves nothing in terms of long-term trends.

The Article continues HERE.

Three Big Firms Pull Out of Climate Partnership

2010-02-16T13:50:00.000-05:00

Stephen Power and Ben Casselman
Wall Street Journal

Three large corporations are quitting the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a broad group of businesses and environmental organizations that has been instrumental in building support in Washington for capping U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases.

Oil giants BP PLC and ConocoPhillips along with Caterpillar, Inc., the Peoria, Ill., heavy-equipment maker, have decided against renewing their membership in the organization, according to a statement released by the group Tuesday.

Read the article, HERE.

Is Bipartisanship a Desirable Goal?

2010-02-11T06:19:00.001-05:00

Deborah B. Sloan
American Thinker

Since Scott Brown's historic win in Massachusetts last month, there has been a rising tide of calls for bipartisanship coming from the left. This was a central theme for Obama's recent visit to the House Republican retreat in Baltimore. In an interview with the Washington Post, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called for Republican cooperation on the administration's proposed jobs bill and on health care reform, which according to Gibbs is still in the works; and this Sunday, Obama told Katie Couric that he wants to work with the Republicans on a bipartisan health care bill.

Where was this spirit of bipartisanship last year, when the Democrats thought they could get away with pushing things through while brazenly running roughshod over Republicans and the American people?

In light of the fact that the Obama administration has laid out plans to frame the Republicans as obstructionists in order to minimize Democrat losses in this November's elections, can we even trust the sincerity of this administration's newly adopted calls for bipartisan negotiations? Even if the proclaimed intentions of the Obama camp are sincere, is bipartisanship really something the congressional Republicans should consider?

To objectively evaluate an issue, one must begin by defining one's terms. Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defines bipartisan as "marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties." So essentially, it is a matter of compromise applied to the realm of politics. Is compromise an end in itself, inherently valuable regardless of what elements are being compromised? What sort of compromise could be reached between a murderer and his victim, between slaves and slaveholders, or between the Nazis and the people they sent to die in concentration camps? What compromise could be reached between advocates of government-run health care and those who want the freedom to make their own decisions? No justice could ever be achieved by seeking compromises of this fundamental nature -- compromises of principle.

Read Sloan's full post, HERE.

Why are liberals so condescending?

2010-02-07T18:03:00.001-05:00

Gerard Alexander
The Washington Post

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind."

This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter's presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians' speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.

The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.

This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney's book "The Republican War on Science" argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.

This worldview was on display in the popular liberal reaction to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Rather than engage in a discussion about the complexities of free speech in politics, liberals have largely argued that the decision will "open the floodgates for special interests" to influence American elections, as the president warned in his State of the Union address. In other words, it was all part of the conspiracy to support conservative candidates for their nefarious, self-serving ends.

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years' worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: "What do these people really believe? I mean, they're not stupid -- life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they're not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?"

In Krugman's world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of "these people" -- only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. This is the second variety of liberal condescension, exemplified in Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank argued that working-class voters were so distracted by issues such as abortion that they were induced into voting against their own economic interests. Then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed that theme in his 2004 presidential run, when he said Republicans had succeeded in getting Southern whites to focus on "guns, God and gays" instead of economic redistribution.

And speaking to a roomful of Democratic donors in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama offered a similar (and infamous) analysis when he suggested that residents of Rust Belt towns "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" about job losses. When his comments became public, Obama backed away from their tenor but insisted that "I said something that everybody knows is true."

In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters' underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or "tea party" gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen.

The third version of liberal condescension points to something more sinister. In his 2008 book, "Nixonland," progressive writer Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some Americans against others. Similarly, in their 1992 book, "Chain Reaction," Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argued that Nixon and Reagan talked up crime control, low taxes and welfare reform to cloak racial animus and help make it mainstream. It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants.

Race doubtless played a significant role in the shift of Deep South whites to the Republican Party during and after the 1960s. But the liberal narrative has gone essentially unchanged since then -- recall former president Carter's recent assertion that opposition to Obama reflects racism -- even though survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades. Moreover, the candidates and agendas of both parties demonstrate an unfortunate willingness to play on prejudices, whether based on race, region, class, income, or other factors.

Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety -- including fear of change -- whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. Former vice president Al Gore made this case in his 2007 book, "The Assault on Reason," in which he expressed fear that American politics was under siege from a coalition of religious fundamentalists, foreign policy extremists and industry groups opposed to "any reasoning process that threatens their economic goals." This right-wing politics involves a gradual "abandonment of concern for reason or evidence" and relies on propaganda to maintain public support, he wrote.

Prominent liberal academics also propagate these beliefs. George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, "still believe in Enlightenment reason," while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. "They like to read and think," Westen wrote. "They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right."

Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial beliefs -- including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their states should secede from the Union. Moulitsas concluded that Republicans are "divorced from reality" and that the results show why "it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country." His condescension is superlative: Of the respondents who favored secession, he wonders, "Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?"

I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats. Or does Moulitsas think Jay Leno talked only to conservatives for his "Jaywalking" interviews?

These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant -- they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking. Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.

"There may be other ideas that you guys have," Obama said. "I am happy to look at them, and I'm happy to embrace them. . . . But the question I think we're going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward, are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what's good for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be trying to position ourselves so that come November, we're able to say, 'The other party, it's their fault'?"

Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior. But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth ideologues). A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.

In contrast, an extraordinary range of liberal writers, commentators and leaders -- from Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" to Obama's White House, with many stops in between -- have developed or articulated narratives that apply to virtually all conservatives at all times.

To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over American poverty for nearly two generations.

Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades -- until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited -- until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.

Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today. Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush's aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin's college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.

Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals.

Even liberals should think twice about the prospect of decisions on innovative surgeries, light bulbs and carbon quotas being directed by legislators grandstanding for the cameras. Of course, thinking twice would be easier if more of them were listening to conservatives at all.

galexander16@gmail.com

Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. He will be online to chat with readers on Monday, February 8, at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion. On Monday, he will also deliver the American Enterprise Institute's Bradley Lecture, "Do Liberals Know Best? Intellectual Self-Confidence and the Claim to a Monopoly on Knowledge."

The answer is, "nowhere."

2010-02-04T11:17:00.000-05:00

The Third Warning

2010-02-01T12:52:00.002-05:00

Jack Curtis
The Woodward Report

The future has been changed; three facts marking the shift were laid in the U.S. during 2009:

For the first time ever, the Federal Government is the most important source of state funding.
For the first time ever, there are more employees in government than in goods-producing industry.
And for the first time ever, more union members work for government than for industry.

From those three facts come three inescapable conclusions:

Read the Rest, HERE.

2010-01-28T15:31:00.000-05:00

Viewers of the State of the Union address last night were treated to the spectacle of a man completely disconnected from reality, insisting the country join him in celebrating his failures as rousing successes… or at least the best anyone could have expected to do, in the long shadow of George Bush. It wasn’t a President honestly discussing the state of the union. It was a long, rambling exit interview from a deluded employee, who thinks he was called into the office to get a raise instead of a pink slip. It was the hurt and confusion of an academic who doesn’t understand how his B+ term paper could have become such a disaster when implemented in the real world, and insists it will still work, if everyone pays closer attention to the extensive footnotes.

Beyond the fact-checkable whoppers fried up on the grill of desperate political necessity, the speech illustrated a disturbing ignorance of the way every facet of our economy and culture is connected. Barack Obama is a disconnected President, who lacks a basic understanding of the fantastically complex system he pretends to control. He’s a vain and egotistical man frantically waving his arms in front of a symphony he can barely hear, and claiming to be the conductor.

It was surreal to watch a politician announce his top priority is job creation, then spend the next hour listing class-warfare enemies. I hope people making less than $250k per year start hiring like crazy, because everyone with a higher income just became a hated enemy of the state. Why, if they work for a large corporation, they shouldn’t even have free speech rights!

It’s painful to listen to someone who wants to add nationalized banks to his collection of state-run car companies wax poetic about the power of entrepreneurs, then list all the ways he’s going to punish risk-taking and achievement. Anyone who successfully starts a business, and creates jobs through rising profits and expansion, will quickly become a member of the evil $250k Legion of Doom. The financial speculation he pounded with the poverty-stained cudgel of socialist rhetoric provides the investment capital for those small entrepreneurs. If no one has incentives to excel, and risk-taking is a felony offense, small businesses don’t appear and grow. Entrepreneurship does not thrive in the thin soil of a command economy. Contrary to Democrat Party rhetoric, banks do not exist to give people credit cards they can pay off whenever they get around to it, or mortgages they “deserve” but cannot possibly afford.

Praise for the resilient spirit of the American people rings hollow, coming from a man who doesn’t think they can be trusted to manage their own health care without government supervision. As Governor McDonnell explained in his splendid response, private property and free speech rights are inseparable components of liberty. Neither of them dissipates with rising income levels, or membership in private corporations disliked by the ruling political party. All of those targeted tax cuts and transfer payments promised in the State of the Union are links in the very chain of state control that strangles innovation and risk-taking. If a nation desires economic growth and technological development, it must celebrate achievement and respect individual wealth. The last thing America needs is another five thousand pages of tax law, telling us how we can avoid the tariffs our political class has leveled on activity it has declared incorrect. A “targeted tax cut” is actually a punitive fine, leveled at everyone who doesn’t comply with the government’s designs. We can only hope the Americans who work in the financial sector demonstrate resilience in the face of Barack Obama.

A politician who wants to swell the size of an already-titanic government has no business complaining about lobbyists and special interests, especially when he thinks “special interest” means “a powerful group that doesn’t contribute money to my party.” The party of George Soros, and the candidate who turned his campaign website into a Swiss bank account by disabling its basic identity checks, have nothing useful to say about keeping “foreign money” out of politics. Big Government always brings lobbyists. They’re the only boom industry of the Obama economy. If you want to reduce the control of wealthy interests over our politics, you must reduce the size of government. As the sad fate of the McCain-Feingold regulations prove, you can’t purge those interests through increasingly draconian and illogical rules on political speech. The acolytes of Big Government always pretend that “fighting special interests” means being more aggressive in designating their enemies as special interests.

This State of the Union speech was the midterm exam in a long, painful lesson about the interdependence of politics, culture, and the economy. The challenge facing a democracy is to maintain a government that secures freedom against anarchy, without following its worst instincts into tyranny. Government is force, and the larger its programs become, the more it becomes fixated on compliance. The belief that we can let the government control some portions of our lives and industry, while the rest remain vibrant and creative, is a childish fantasy that should have died for good last night, before the spectacle of a man who doesn’t understand why his declared capitalist enemies aren’t producing enough jobs to boost his approval ratings. When he urged Americans to begin removing the obstacles to their success, he was too disconnected to understand that process already began in Massachusetts last week.

You ain't seen nothin' yet!

2010-01-27T09:17:00.001-05:00

Christopher Chantrill
American Thinker

Isn't it great to have a Republican senator from Massachusetts? It's also good to have the First Amendment reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court -- even if our liberal friends are shocked and appalled at the notion of corporations sticking up for themselves.

As delicious as last week's good news was for conservatives, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet. We do not mean that every week will bring new conservative successes. Not at all. It is just that every month will bring fresh anguish for President Obama and his supporters.

There's the sinking spell in the equity markets last week. It might be from worrying about the president's anti-banker populism. Or more likely, it is telling us that we are not out of the woods yet on the economy. I suspect disappointing news on fourth-quarter GDP on January 29.

Read the full essay HERE.

Alas, Babylon

2009-12-12T15:27:00.002-05:00

CAMP TAJI, Iraq- Under the cover of night, an AH-64D Apache attack helicopter from the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, departs the flight line to conduct operations in support Operation Iraqi Freedom, Dec. 2, 2009 [army.mil/flickr].

An Unconstitutional Mandate

2009-12-11T13:20:00.002-05:00

Hans A. von Spakovsky
NRO The Corner

When Nancy Pelosi was asked where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance, she dismissed the question by saying, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” According to CNSNews, her press spokesman said that this authority comes from Congress’s “constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce.” However, as a new legal memorandum from Heritage points out, Speaker Pelosi is completely wrong: The individual insurance mandate is both unconstitutional and unprecedented (there is a two-page executive summary for anyone who does not have time to read the entire memorandum).

There is no question that the Supreme Court has upheld extensive regulation of economic activity through the Commerce Clause, but it has never upheld any requirement by Congress that an individual participate in economic activity. There is nothing in the Constitution that allows Congress to punish you if you don’t engage in commerce. Liberal law professors and editorial writers such as Erwin Chemerinsky of UC-Irvine and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post try to gloss over this point, and won’t admit that the Supreme Court has never approved any such requirement.

The new Heritage paper points out that the penalty imposed on individuals who don’t comply with this mandate is also a capitation tax, and therefore unconstitutional, because it is not assessed evenly based upon population. The paper also explains why a federal mandate to buy health insurance would be totally different from state requirements to buy automobile-liability insurance. The federal government does not have the inherent police powers of the states that authorize such mandates; the state requirements are imposed on those who engage in a voluntary activity (driving a car), while the health-insurance mandate would be imposed on everyone; you only have to buy liability insurance if you drive on public roads; and finally, states only require you to get insurance that protects third parties that you may injure through your driving — you are not required to buy insurance to protect yourself from injury or your own car from damage.

If Congress can impose a health-insurance mandate, then there is no limit to what Congress can do, and the Constitution’s limits on congressional power will have essentially been eliminated. As Will Rogers once said, with Congress, every time they make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law it’s a joke. Unfortunately, none of us will be able to laugh over this pending abuse of power.

A link between Altzheimers and Mad Cow?

2009-12-09T09:58:00.002-05:00

In three cases from an Illinois family, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report that brain regions harmed by an inherited form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) also have amyloid plaques identical to those found in the same brain areas in Alzheimer's patients.

The finding adds to other, earlier evidence suggesting that the misfolded protein believed to cause CJD, known as a prion, appears to play a role in the Alzheimer's disease process.

"This interplay between amyloid and the prion protein raises questions about whether these diseases are really all that different, and whether there are common pathways involved in both conditions that can provide an avenue for new treatments," says lead author Nupur Ghoshal, M.D., Ph.D., an investigator at Washington University's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC).

Read the article from PhysOrg

Lemmings: 56 of world’s moonbat media print the same editorial

2009-12-07T00:44:00.002-05:00

The Voices of Kindergarten

"Even The Age doesn’t fall for it, sensibly preferring to rely on its own views rather than cutting and pasting other editors’ nonsense. And nonsense it most certainly is, written by the most lefty and greeny of the world’s newspapers, the UK Guardian. Full of pious platitudes and vacuous statements, it is a painful read:"

An Astonishingly Stupid Headline

2009-12-06T20:47:00.002-05:00

Alan Caruba
factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com

"Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age."-- MIT Professor Richard Lindzen, PhD, Atmospheric Science

“On such (climate) models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars—and substantially diminished freedom.”--George F. Will, syndicated columnist, Washington Post

Long ago I took one science course in college because it was required, not because I had any great interest in science. The course was zoology and only my end of semester paper on raccoons, an assigned subject, avoided a failing grade. To this day, more than fifty years later, I still recall that its Latin name was Procyon lotar.

I cite this to indicate that anyone can learn science. It is neither mysterious, nor arcane. To some it is an intoxicating, powerful search for new understanding and new truth that becomes a lifelong pursuit, but even someone with no particular aptitude can grasp its fundamentals with a minimum of effort.

Why, then, do men entrusted with explaining the world to us, the reporters and editors of respected journals, resolutely refuse to embrace the truths that science offers in favor of the man-made myths intended to influence public opinion and policy?

Why do otherwise educated and apparently intelligent men publish a magazine like The Economist and put on its cover “Stopping Climate Change”, about a 14-page “special report”?

This is an astonishingly stupid headline. Even a child knows you cannot “stop” climate change. None of the more than six billion people on Earth can “stop” climate change because one of the definitions of change is “to become different” and a planet that has existed for 4.5 billion years has passed through many changes long before the first appearance of Homo sapiens.

Imagine a child saying, “Make it stop snowing” or “make the Sun come out.” But there are more than 16,500 men and women this very day who are gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark at a “Climate Change” conference based entirely on lies that defy simple truths about how the Earth functions.

Unless one was determined upon a willful ignorance of those truths, the vast body of lies that continue to be reported would and should sink beneath the weight of real science, legitimate science, not the computer model inventions that conveniently ignore the Medieval Warm period when temperatures were higher than they are now, a time when Chaucer (1342-1400) would write of vineyards in northern England, a time well before the Industrial Revolution and the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) that result from the use of coal, oil, and natural gas.

It is only willful ignorance that would keep a reporter or anyone else from knowing what has been known for years, that CO2 increases over the past 300,000 years have never caused temperature rise. Indeed, the rise of CO2 always follows in the wake of a temperature increase. What is so terribly wrong about the Copenhagen conference and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sponsoring it is that its own member scientists know that too.

A week after the revelations of more than a thousand emails between the chief perpetrators of the science fraud that has since come to be called Climategate, an editor at The Economist could still write, “This newspaper believes that global warming is a serious threat, and that the world needs to take steps to try to avert it.”

Could The Economist be so uninformed, misinformed, or willfully ignorant of the commonly known fact that, despite a rise in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the Earth has been in a new, natural cooling cycle for a decade?

Can all the labors of the 16,000 scientists, diplomats, politicians, and other assorted conspirators manage to ignore that fact?

Not only can they, the newest form of the fraud has emerged already and was trumpeted in the pages of The Economist, claiming beyond all credulity that the Earth’s vast “carbon sinks”, its oceans, forests and all vegetation, are unlikely to be able to “absorb” all the CO2 being produced by that most horrid of all creatures, human beings.

The IPCC should be disbanded as a threat to mankind. The EPA should be required by Congress to produce scientific proof that CO2 is a “pollutant” to be regulated. It cannot!

The people attending the conference should be run out of Copenhagen as if peasants were once again pursuing the monster, Frankenstein.

And The Economist, along with all the so-called scientific magazines and news outlets that have prostituted themselves to the global warming fraud, should issue an apology to their readers.

It's a return to the Star Chamber as Europe finally tramples Magna Carta into the dust

2009-12-06T20:15:00.001-05:00

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph

If you have a spare evening, read the Magna Carta. It is a restraining document. What leaps out from the pages of Langton’s text is the intent to protect subjects from overweening authority (in this case, Norman-French despotism), by restoring ancient freedoms.

I have a copy dated MDCCLXVI (1766) left to me by my father, and to him by his father. The customary law is Saxon, Celtic, even Visigoth.

"All men in our Kingdom have and hold the aforesaid liberties and rights, well and in peace, freely and quietly, fully and wholly, for ever."

"No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, unless by lawful judgment of his peers."

"No constable or bailiff shall take another man’s corn or chattels without immediate payment, nor take any horses or any man’s timber for castles."

"Any one may leave the Kingdom and return at will, unless in time of war, when he may be restrained for some short space for the common good".

Here is a nice one, as the Square Mile falls under the control EU authorities with "binding powers".

"The City of London shall have all its ancient liberties and free customs." Merchants should be free from "evil tolls".

The founding texts of the English Constitution – charter, petition, bill of rights – have one theme in common: they create nothing. They assert old freedoms; they restore lost harmony. In this they guided America’s Revolution, itself a codification of early colonial liberties.

Read the full article HERE.

Government by Wishful Thinking

2009-12-06T15:23:00.001-05:00

This weeks 'Best Guess'

Steven Dan Beste
Hot Air (Greenroom)

"Teleologists believe that thought directly affects things. The mere act of thinking about something and wanting it a lot directly changes reality, even if the thought doesn’t get translated into action.

"It was teleologists who were mainly involved in the anti-war movement about five years ago when it was at its greatest. I remember reading about how they’d have a demonstration somewhere. Lots of people would come out. They’d parade about carrying signs saying, “End the war!” Someone would burn a giant mockup of President Bush’s head. And afterwards they’d all talk about how successful the demonstration had been.

"Successful how? It didn’t have any political effect that I ever noticed. The war didn’t end because of the demonstrations. So what was it that they thought was successful? Well, if you asked them they’d talk about how there was all sorts of positive vibes. How good it felt to be out there. And how so many people were feeling the same thing."

Read this excellent analysis HERE.

Climategate II: Revenge of the Climate Modelers

2009-12-05T00:17:00.001-05:00

Roy Spencer, Ph.D.

It has been two weeks since Climategate revealed that some of the IPCC’s leading researchers have conspired to manipulate temperature data, hide data from other researchers, and bully those scientists who do not agree with them by interfering with the peer review process.

(If you haven’t heard about Climategate, it might be because you are still watching ABC, CBS, or NBC. Google ‘Climategate’, though, and you will get 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 web page matches.)

Supporters have claimed that there is nothing to see there…that the Climategate e-mails released to the world by a whistleblower just show how scientists normally work. This is a particularly bad strategy, and the public knows it. Scientists do NOT behave this way…at least not in my world.

Others have claimed that a few bad apples do not spoil the whole IPCC barrel. Well, if it wasn’t for the fact that these are the core people who gave us the primary thermometer evidence of 20th Century warming (Phil Jones), and the Hockey Stick temperature reconstruction which conveniently did away with the previous 10 or more centuries of natural climate change (Michael Mann), I might be inclined to agree with them.

I will admit that it seems unlikely (but not impossible) that a reanalysis of the thermometer data will lead to a much reduced rate of warming in recent decades. But my bigger concern is that the “it’s-OK-to-fudge” attitude pervades the entire IPCC apparatus.

These e-mails are from the observational side of the IPCC, that is, the research into temperature observations of the past. What I am more concerned about, though, is the manipulation of climate models, which are used to predict the future state of the climate system. Computer models are much easier to manipulate than real data, and one can get just about any answer one wants out of them.

Now that we have seen that the temperature observation guys ‘wanted’ to get a certain result, it is reasonable to wonder whether the modelers are also incentivized to produce particular results. I’m sure the hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into global warming research – money that would dry up if the threat evaporated — has not influenced their objectivity.

Now, trillions of dollars in global warming legislation are riding upon these model ‘black boxes’ that relatively few people understand the inner workings of. The models are so complex, with many adjustable parameters which have no known true values, that it is unlikely that they can ever be replicated by other researchers. In case you hadn’t heard, reproducibility is a basic requirement of scientific research.

The IPCC has gotten around this problem by relying upon many modeling groups running different climate models. The presumption is that the full range of warming estimates produced by 20 different climate models would surely bound the ‘truth’, that is, the true amount of warming that will occur for a given amount of additional greenhouse gas emissions. But do these models really bound the problem?

I’ve been reminded recently that in science you really can not prove any hypothesis to be true; you can only prove a hypothesis false. How does this help us when it comes to model predictions of future warming? Well, if we can not prove whether a model that produces 2, or 4, or 6 deg. C of warming is correct…can we prove whether a model that produces only 0.5 deg. C of warming is false?

If we build a model that produces very little warming – less than that produced by any of the IPCC models – is that model any less realistic in its behavior than the models that produce a lot of warming? In other words, how do we know that the IPCC models really do bound the problem? I suspect that one or more modeling groups have already done this, but the IPCC leadership probably nixed the idea of letting the public find out about it.

Maybe there is a disgruntled modeler out there who is now willing to spill the beans, just as happened with the Climategate emails. We can call it Climategate II.

Of course, the IPCC turns the argument around, and shows us a few models which produce huge amounts of warming. But as I’ve said before, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If a couple of their models suggest it is theoretically possible to have catastrophic warming, should I be any more concerned than, say, the possibility that a new particle accelerator used by nuclear physicists will suddenly cause the Earth to explode?

While it would be easy to simply not build or use the particle accelerator, it is much more difficult to reduce global fossil fuel use by, say, 50% or more.

In the wake of Climategate, I fully expect a renewed IPCC assault on our common sense using the climate models as their ultimate climate ‘truth’. It will be claimed that the observations involved in Climategate aren’t important anyway…it’s the computer models that are telling us what the future will be.

Yeah, right.

The Crime of the Century

2009-12-01T00:50:00.000-05:00

"Few recent events have illustrated the ineptitude, and political agenda, of the mainstream media more dramatically than “Climate-gate.” The revelation of email correspondence from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, documenting various attempts to suppress data and manipulate scientific “consensus” with thuggish tactics, confirms what critics of the global-warming movement have always maintained: it has a lot more to do with money and politics than science. In fact, the global-warming movement is essentially the opposite of science – the manipulation and destruction of empirical data to support a theory whose accuracy was decided in advance."

Read Dr. Zero's genius at Hot Air

Continuing Climategate Coverage

2009-11-30T17:48:00.002-05:00

Next Big Future

From the comments:

These same scientists threatened my job with the US Geological Survey when trying to publish a study showing with higher confidence that global temperature changes were natural and caused solely by Earth's physical processes. Additionally, these same scientists would not discuss or refute the science and facts presented. Instead, they took two days to personally insult and attack me.

I always knew that when man-made global climate change was shown as insignificant that people would lose faith, note the word "FAITH", in science. But this event and exposure is by far worse for the science community; but "Truth is the daughter of Time (Francis Bacon)".

Several USGS scientists got fired for the same thing when discussing data manipulation for models developed for the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. But no outcry and defense for those scientists?

IF you see no problem with this and not wondering if the public has been misled by these scientists, then you are not scientists, you're in denial, and you stand for no moral principles

The Religion of Global Government

2009-11-30T12:52:00.001-05:00

Jeff - The Air Vent

This is a stunner. Fox news just released some UN documents which are pretty clearly worded as to their intent.

Conservatives have long recognized the UN agenda of global socialization. It’s one of the main problems behind the global warming religion, a religion who’s status becomes more official with each passing day. A couple of documents have recently been reported at Fox news outlining how the topics of one UN organization will be shifted to achieve their wealth distribution agenda to the poor developing nations in the Southern hemisphere. The document discusses further expansion of the environmental movement, including unelected committees to provide regulation and enforcement of global law. As leftists they fail to notice that these poor developing countries disadvantages are created by their leftist governments. They believe religiously that it’s the Northern countries fault that these poor disadvantaged communists cannot succeed. All governments are created equal and we should prop up and pay these dictators to help them achieve equal prosperity to the world.

More than one document from was in the released CRU files that has some bearing on this but I’ll put this one here.

2009-11-29T15:49:00.002-05:00

Roy Spencer's Top Ten Annoyances in the Climate Change Debate

2009-11-28T17:44:00.001-05:00

Roy Spencer, Ph.D.

"Well, maybe not my top 10…but the first ten that I thought of."

1. The term “climate change” itself. Thirty years ago, the term “climate change” would have meant natural climate change, which is what climate scientists mostly studied before that time. Today, it has come to mean human-caused climate change. The public, and especially the media, now think that “climate change” implies WE are responsible for it. Mother Nature, not Al Gore, invented real climate change.

2. “Climate change denier”. A first cousin to the first annoyance. Again, thirty years ago, “climate change denier” would have meant someone who denied that the Medieval Warm Period ever happened. Or that the Little Ice Age ever happened. What a kook fringe thing to believe that would have been! And now, those of us who still believe in natural climate change are called “climate change deniers”?? ARGHH.

3. The appeal to peer-reviewed and published research. I could go on about this for pages. Yes, it is important to have scientific research peer-reviewed and published. But as the Climategate e-mails have now exposed (and what many scientists already knew), we skeptics of human-caused climate change have “peers” out there who have taken it upon themselves to block our research from being published whenever possible. We know there are editors of scientific journals who assist in this by sending our papers to these gatekeepers for the purpose of killing the paper. We try not to complain too much when it happens because it is difficult to prove motivation. I believe the day is approaching when it will be time to make public the evidence of biased peer review.

4. Appeal to authority. This is the last refuge of IPCC scientists. Even when we skeptics get research published, it is claimed that our research is contradicted by other research the IPCC has encouraged, helped to get funded, and cherry-picked to support its case. This is dangerous for the progress of science. If the majority opinion of scientists was always assumed to be correct, then most major scientific advances would not have occurred. The appeal to authority is also a standard propaganda technique.

5. Unwillingness to debate. I have lectured to many groups where the organizers could not find anyone from the IPCC side who would present the IPCC’s side of the story. I would be happy to debate any of the IPCC experts on the central issues of human-caused versus natural climate change, and feedbacks in the climate system. They know where to find me. (For the most common tactic used by the IPCC in a debate, see annoyance #4.)

6. A lack of common sense. Common sense can be misleading, of course. But when there is considerable uncertainty, sometimes it is helpful to go ahead and use a little anyway. Example: It is well known that the net effect of clouds is to cool the Earth in response to radiant heating by the sun. But when it comes to global warming, all climate models do just the opposite…change clouds in ways that amplify radiative warming. While this is theoretically possible, it is critical to future projections of global warming that the reasons why models do this be thoroughly understood. Don’t believe it just because group think within the climate modeling community has decided it should be so.

7. Use of climate models as truth. Because there are not sufficient high-quality, globally-distributed, and long term observations of climate fluctuations to study and better understand the climate system with, computerized climate models are now regarded as truth. The modelers’ belief that climate models represent truth is evident from the language they use: climate models are not “tested” with real data, but instead “validated”. The implication is clear: if the data do not agree with the models, it must be the data’s fault.

8. Claims that climate models have been tested. A hallmark of a good theory is that it should predict something which, upon further investigation, turns out to be correct. To my knowledge, climate models have not yet forecasted anything of significance. And even if they did, models are ultimately being relied upon to forecast global warming (aka ‘climate change’). As far as I can tell, there is no good way to test them in this regard. And please don’t tell me they can now replicate the seasons quite well. Even the public could predict the seasons before there were climate models. Predicting future warming (or cooling) is slightly more difficult, but not by much: a flip a coin will be correct 50% of the time.

9. The claim that the IPCC is unbiased. The IPCC was formed for the explicit purpose of building the case for global warming being our fault, not for investigating the possibility that it is just part of a natural cycle in the climate system. Their accomplices in government have bought off the scientific community for the purpose of achieving specific policy goals.

10. The claim that reducing CO2 emissions is the right thing to do anyway. Oh, really? What if life on Earth (which requires CO2 for its existence) is actually benefiting from more CO2? Nature is always changing anyway…why must we always assume that every single change that humans cause is necessarily a bad thing? Even though virtually all Earth scientists believe this, too, it is not science, but religion. I’m all for religion…but not when it masquerades as science.

The Heart of the Scandal

2009-11-26T19:16:00.004-05:00

The uncovered "inconvenient truth"

Steve McIntyre
Climate Audit

People seem to be missing the real issue in the CRU emails. Gavin over at realclimate keeps distracting people by saying the issue is the scientists being nasty to each other, and what Trenberth said, and the Nature “trick”, and the like. Those are side trails. To me, the main issue is the frontal attack on the heart of science, which is transparency.

Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists attack the work by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.

This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct.

As far as I know, I am the person who made the original Freedom Of Information Act to CRU that started getting all this stirred up. I was trying to get access to the taxpayer funded raw data that they built the global temperature record out of. I was not representing anybody, or trying to prove a point. I am not funded by Mobil, I’m an amateur scientist with a lifelong interest in the weather. I’m not “directed” by anyone, I’m not a member of a right-wing conspiracy. I’m just a guy trying to move science forwards.

The recent release of the hacked emails from CRU has provided me with an amazing insight into the attempt by Steve McIntyre, myself, and others from CA and elsewhere to obtain the raw station data from Phil Jones at the CRU. We wanted the data that was used to make the global temperature record that is used to claim “unprecedented” global warming. I want to give a chronological account of the interactions. I will reference the email numbers so that people can see the entire emails if they wish. While we don’t know if all of these emails are valid, the researchers involved such as Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann that clearly indicate that they think they are authentic.

The story actually starts HERE.

It's never been about the science

2009-11-26T19:08:00.002-05:00

Why 'climate-gate' won't stop the 'greenies'

Lorrie Goldstein
Toronto Sun

If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."

They never have.

What "climategate" suggests is many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.

Now they and their media shills -- who sneered that all who questioned their phony "consensus" were despicable "deniers," the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust -- are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them.

Read the rest here.

Is It Constitutional?

2009-11-26T19:01:00.000-05:00

Phil Maymin
New Haven Advocate

You might think it is hard being a legislator: You have to come to work on a Saturday, read thousands of pages, debate, vote — what a mess! Those poor congressmen and senators, sacrificing their weekends and doing all they can to save a troubled nation, right? Nope. Being a legislator is easy. If you're having a hard time, you're doing it wrong.

Every federal elected official takes an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution. That oath should trump any campaign promises, back-room lobbyist deals and even a legislator's better judgment. If a particular bill is unconstitutional, no matter how good you believe it to be, you simply cannot vote for it. Likewise, a priest simply cannot reveal a confession, even if he thinks he ought to, and a lawyer cannot violate confidentiality about past acts, even if he thinks it'd be right to. They've taken oaths.

For a while, I've wanted to send each federal lawmaker a single question on a pre-addressed and stamped postcard: "What bills have you reluctantly voted against because they were unconstitutional, even though you thought they were good for the country?" I bet only Ron Paul would have a real list. I also bet no one would answer unless I enlist an army of crayon-wielding pre-schoolers to give it that homemade touch.

It should be easy to be a legislator. Just read a bill until it violates the Constitution, then vote against it. If you somehow get to the end of it without a violation, then use your judgment. The way bills are written now, it might never happen during your term.

The health care reform plan is now more than 2,000 pages. For perspective, the entire federal tax code is about 8,000 pages, and that monstrosity itself is known for neither its brevity nor its wit.

Do you know what the health care plan is for? According to its own terms, it is partially to amend the federal tax code "to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes."

I got the Senate bill. I searched for the term "Armed Forces." Other than in that introduction, the term appears only once — to exempt them as well as other government employees from the health care plan that will be shoved down our proletariat throats. The term never appears again.

But fortunately, there is a lot of effort put into pacifying our restless American Indian population. In this time of Thanksgiving, when we reflect on how much we have taken from the Native Americans and how little we have returned, this health care plan helps atone for the miscarriage of justice. Specifically, when a five-year plan for dental education is enacted across this country (seriously), the "science-based" strategies and activities will be targeted towards specific populations such as children, pregnant women, the elderly, Native Americans and other ethnic minorities. What kind of teaching will our hard-earned but easily-usurped wages pay for during this five-year educational onslaught? Dental sealants. Our long national nightmare of Indians ignorant of the benefits of dental sealant is finally over.

Do you know how often the word "homebuyers" appears in the document, after its prominent location in the introduction? A big whopping zero. Obviously the introduction is just a placeholder for a massive infusion of government authority over your life.

In this latest health care bill, the text reads, "Strike all after the enacting clause and insert the following," which is then duly followed by thousands of pages of an uninterrupted new bill.

We can call our legislators and tell them not to vote for the bill, but that will just delay the inevitable and add a couple of thousand other pages of pork into it. There are 100 senators. If each got basically 40 pages to write whatever law they wanted, even if it contradicted stuff other senators wrote, who wouldn't vote for it?

They are cashing a carte blanche we didn't agree to pay.

Dr. Phil Maymin is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at NYU-Polytechnic Institute.

Give Thanks for This Harvest

2009-11-25T23:28:00.004-05:00

Blake Hurst
The American
AEI

When all the locals are combining grain here in northwest Missouri, there is so much dust in the air that it makes for beautiful sunsets. Sort of a purple haze over the Corn Belt. Makes us sneeze, as well. The fall air is clear, and the colors are sharp, shades of brown, gold, and grey. The fall days are long, lasting well into the night, as we hurry to get the crops from the field.

Our harvest crew includes my two brothers, my dad, mom, wife, sisters-in-law, son-in-law, daughter, and three nephews. We're all dressed in overalls or blue jeans, heavy jackets, and baseball caps. The family resemblance is strong, and my brothers and nephews are big guys, so the overall effect is a bit spooky. Think of a Faulkner novel, substituting rusted-out pickup trucks for mules.

I had to laugh at a recent Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times, in which he had traveled back to his family's farm in Oregon and was remembering how it was when he was a boy. But that idyllic time is lost, all lost, and Kristof concluded that farms have lost their soul. Or at least "industrial" farms operate at a soul deficit. I don't know exactly what Kristof meant by the loss of soul. Reading what others write about agriculture, I sometimes think that what others see as "soul," we farmers remember as grinding poverty and isolation. Does the fact that I follow the grain markets on my iPhone imply a loss of soul? If so, then this "soul" business is all cabbage, and the hell with it.

But if he means a family, working together from dawn till dusk to bring the harvest in, a place where love and affection and forbearance bind the workers together, then soul still exists, and we've got plenty of it. My grandkids ride with me on the combine (no emails please: the machine has an extra seat, complete with seatbelt, inside a roll bar–equipped, air-conditioned cab) and my grandson just sits, grins, and at intervals tells me that "I like the combine, Poppa!" Poppa is better than a video. Of course, combines come complete with a video screen that has global positioning information, yield totals, and moisture content of the grain. All of which my granddaughter finds boring, and she asks me to change the channel.

Read the rest of Blake's column, HERE.

Climate Con Job

2009-11-24T21:01:00.001-05:00

Climate Con Job
IBD

Junk Science: The Senate expects to take up global warming legislation by spring, but nothing more should happen in Congress on this issue until there's been a thorough probe of the ClimateGate scandal.

The scientists who have rung over and again the global warming alarm appear to be guilty of fraud. This we long suspected. Now, their own words, exposed by hackers who hijacked their e-mails, seem to confirm our suspicions.

For decades they've told us that the Earth is warming because of a greenhouse effect caused by man's carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. But what they've been telling each other isn't consistent with that story. The e-mails, more than a thousand of them, use phrases and terms such as "hide the decline," "trick" and "contain" (as in to conceal the Medieval Warm Period, an era in which temperatures might have been higher than today's).

There's also at least one damning admission — "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment" — sent by Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The editorial HERE.

The meaning of those hacked Emails

2009-11-24T20:47:00.002-05:00

Russell Wilcox
forthegrandchildren

I’m sure most of my readers are now well aware of the fact that e-mails that were discovered between global warming activist scientists revealed the fraud that has been perpetrated on the world in pursuit of government funding for their projects and to advance their liberal world view. So now we know for sure what most conservatives (especially those who believe in God) have known all along: there is no man-made global warming, just a continuation of natural cycles that have gone on for eons.

Read the Posting of a retired teacher

Why You Should Be Hot and Bothered About 'Climate-gate'

2009-11-24T20:18:00.001-05:00

John Lott
FoxNEWS.com

Science depends on good quality of data. It also relies on replication and sharing data. But the last couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations. Computer hackers have obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. These e-mails, which have now been confirmed as real, involved many researchers across the globe with ideologically similar advocates around the world. They were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims. The academics here also worked closely with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and Professor Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University, who has been an important scientist in the climate debate, have come under particular scrutiny. Among his e-mails, Professor Jones talks to Professor Mann about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series...to hide the decline [in temperature]." Professor Mann admitted that this was the exchange that he had and explained to the New York Times that "scientists often used the word 'trick' to refer to a good way to solve a problem, 'and not something secret.'" While the New York Times apparently buys this explanation, it is hard to see the explanation for "to hide the decline."

And there is a lot more. In another exchange, Professor Jones tells Professor Mann: "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone" and "We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind." Professor Jones further urges Professor Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s controversial assessment report: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re: [the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report]?" In another e-mail, Professor Jones told Professor Mann and Professor Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona and Raymond S. "Ray" Bradley at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: "I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!"

Professor Jones complains to another academic: "I did get an e-mail from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting e-mails" and "IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on." We only have e-mails from Professor Jones' institution, and, with his obvious approach to delete files; we have no idea what damaging information has been lost.

Another professor at the Climate Research Unit, Tim Osborn, discusses in e-mails how truncating a data series can hide a cooling trend that would otherwise be seen in the results. Professor Mann sent Professor Osborn an e-mail saying that the results he is sending shouldn't be shown to others because the results support critics of global warming. Time after time the discussions refer to hiding or destroying data.

Other global warming advocates also privately acknowledge what they won’t concede publicly, that temperature changes haven’t been consistent with their models. Dr. Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and prominent man-made global warming advocate, wrote in an e-mail: “The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

There were also been discussions to silence academic journals that publish research skeptical of significant man-made global warming. Professor Mann wrote: "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal." Other emails refer to efforts to exclude contrary views from publication in scientific journals. Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, told The Wall Street Journal: "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."

The New York Times argues: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here." -- This from the same news organization that regularly publishes classified government documents! Yet, these e-mails were covered by England's Freedom of Information Act and should have been released when they were requested. Hiding data, destroying information, and doctoring their results raise real questions about many American academics at universities such as Pennsylvania State University, University of Arizona, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst. When at all possible available data must be shared.

Usually academic research is completely ignored by the general public but in this case proposed regulations, costing trillions of dollars, are being based on many of these claimed research results. This coordinated campaign to hide scientific information appears unprecedented.

John R. Lott, Jr. is a FoxNews.com contributor. He is an economist and author of "Freedomnomics."

Global Warming With the Lid Off

2009-11-24T18:14:00.002-05:00

What the Global Warming Emails reveal
Wall Street Journal

'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.

The "two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.

Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all. Those who have responded have insisted that the emails reveal nothing more than trivial data discrepancies and procedural debates.

Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn't have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

Consider the following note that appears to have been sent by Mr. Jones to Mr. Mann in May 2008: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?" AR4 is shorthand for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, presented in 2007 as the consensus view on how bad man-made climate change has supposedly become.

Read a Selection of the Emails:
Climate Science and Candor

In another email that seems to have been sent in September 2007 to Eugene Wahl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Paleoclimatology Program and to Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Climate and Global Dynamics Division, Mr. Jones writes: "[T]ry and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with."

When deleting, doctoring or withholding information didn't work, Mr. Jones suggested an alternative in an August 2008 email to Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, copied to Mr. Mann. "The FOI [Freedom of Information] line we're all using is this," he wrote. "IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI—the skeptics have been told this. Even though we . . . possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part of our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don't have an obligation to pass it on."

It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren't averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."

Mr. Mann's main beef was that the journal had published several articles challenging aspects of the anthropogenic theory of global warming.

For the record, when we've asked Mr. Mann in the past about the charge that he and his colleagues suppress opposing views, he has said he "won't dignify that question with a response." Regarding our most recent queries about the hacked emails, he says he "did not manipulate any data in any conceivable way," but he otherwise refuses to answer specific questions. For the record, too, our purpose isn't to gainsay the probity of Mr. Mann's work, much less his right to remain silent.

However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.

Iceberg Dead Ahead

2009-11-21T21:32:00.004-05:00

John Steele Gordon
Commentary

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, in which he predicts — correctly in my opinion — that we are headed for a fiscal iceberg.

Our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in just the past few years. The federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion — the highest since World War II — as spending reached nearly 25% of GDP and total revenues fell below 15% of GDP. Shortfalls like these have not been seen in more than 50 years.

Going forward, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 for every American. By 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the president’s budget, the deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion, even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be above historical norms.

This is also nothing new. The national debt was for most of American history, as Hamilton said it would be, a “national blessing.” It allowed us to fight and win our wars and to relieve suffering in an economic depression far worse than what the country is experiencing now. But in the last thirty years — the most prosperous and relatively peaceful thirty-year period in American history — liberals and “conservatives,” Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington have allowed the debt to explode for their short-term political benefit while they hid the truth with phony accounting.

Read the Balance, HERE.

Lincoln all over

2009-11-21T16:14:00.004-05:00

A Trend Map from Trendmaps.com from the Twitter AVI and plotted in "real time" showing a shout, nationwide, in response to Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas) and her announcement made on the Senate floor allowing a Senate bill that will socialize medicine to "move forward."

ClimateGate and the Elitist Roots of Global Warming alarmism

2009-11-21T09:48:00.002-05:00

Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.

The hundreds of e-mails being made public after someone hacked into Phil Jones’ Climatic Research Unit (CRU) computer system offer a revealing peek inside the IPCC machine. It will take some time before we know whether any illegal activity has been uncovered (e.g. hiding or destruction of data to avoid Freedom of Information Act inquiries).

Some commentators even think this is the beginning of the end for the IPCC. I doubt it.

Read the full post HERE.

Kiss freedom goodbye if "health care" passes

2009-11-18T20:01:00.004-05:00

"Isn’t it ironic that the communist Chinese are more concerned about the cost of socialized medicine than the President and the Congress?"

Andrew Napolitano
Reason.com

Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights. If this health care bill becomes law, America, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, and privacy as you have enjoyed it will cease to be.

Last week the House of Representatives voted on a 2,000 page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care. Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.

We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms.

Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.

When I recently asked Congressman James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, to tell me "Where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate everyone's healthcare," he replied that most of what Congress does is not authorized by the Constitution, but they do it anyway. There you have it. Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights, it doesn't care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn't even read the laws it writes.

America, this is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be.

When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever. What will you do to prevent this from happening?

We Can't Sit Back and Allow the Loss of Our Freedoms

We elect the government. It works for us. As we watch the Democrats' plans for health care take shape, we can only ask how did our government get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives?

On Saturday November 7, at 11 o’clock in the evening, the House of Representatives voted by a five vote margin to have the federal government manage the health care of every American at a cost of $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

For the first time in American history, if this bill becomes law, the Feds will force you to buy insurance you might not want, or may not need, or cannot afford. If you don’t purchase what the government tells you to buy, if you don’t do so when they tell you to do it, and if you don’t buy just what they say is right for you, the government may fine you, prosecute you, and even put you in jail. Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost. The privacy of your communications and medical decision making with your physician will be gone. More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal of federal bureaucrats.

It was not supposed to be this way. We elect the government. It works for us. How did it get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives? Evil rarely comes upon us all at once, and liberty is rarely lost in one stroke. It happens gradually, over the years and decades and even centuries. A little stretch here, a cave in there, powers are slowly taken from the states and the people and before you know it, we have one big monster government that recognizes no restraint on its ability to tell us how to live. It claims the power to regulate any activity, tax any behavior, and demand conformity to any standard it chooses.

The Founders did not give us a government like the one we have today. The government they gave us was strictly limited in its scope, guaranteed individual liberty, preserved the free market, and on matters that pertain to our private behavior was supposed to leave us alone.

In the Constitution, the Founders built in checks and balances. If the Congress got out of hand, the states would restrain it. If the states stole liberty or property, the Congress would cure it. If the president tried to become a king, the courts would prevent it.

In the next few weeks, I will be giving a public class on Constitutional Law here on the Fox News Channel, on the Fox Business Network, on Foxnews.com, and on Fox Nation. In anticipation of that, many of you have asked: What can we do now about the loss of freedom? For starters, we can vote the bums out of their cushy federal offices! We can persuade our state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care—where the Constitution gives the Feds zero authority. We can petition our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, return the selection of U.S. senators to state legislatures, and nullify all the laws the Congress has written that are not based in the Constitution.

One thing we can’t do is just sit back and take it.

Judge Andrew Napolitano is Fox News' senior judicial analyst. This article originally appeared in two parts on FoxNews.com.

Where are the K rations?

2009-11-17T12:54:00.003-05:00

U.S. military veterans and their families wait to be seated for dinner at Golden Corral on Carolina Avenue on Military Appreciation Monday. The free appreciation dinner for veterans is held at Golden Corrals nationwide every year [Katski/WDN].

Golden Corral honors veterans with free meals

By Gerg Katski
Washington Daily News

Donald Sayer said he shakes a lot of hands as commander of the Beaufort County Disabled American Veterans chapter, but none more important than those of area veterans who greet him every year at Military Appreciation Monday at Golden Corral on Carolina Avenue.

Sayer and several other members of Disabled American Veterans Chapter 48 welcomed veterans, active-duty military personnel and military reservists to the appreciation dinner in Washington, accepting donations for the organization at Golden Corral’s front door. Sayer, a Vietnam War veteran who served in the Army, said the donations go to help disabled veterans in nursing homes and veterans in need.

Charles Lins, a fellow Vietnam War veteran who also served in the Army and a DAV member, called the annual appreciation dinner “absolutely fantastic.”

“It makes me so happy to find someone that appreciates us (veterans),” he said. “Too many times we’re pushed aside.”

The rest of the story

State Senate refuses ethics reform

2009-11-17T12:41:00.003-05:00

Paul Stam

During the 2009 Session I was a primary co-sponsor of three bipartisan bills aimed at reforming our State ethics laws. House Bill 944, “Disclosure by Appointees,” sponsored by Reps. Glazier (D-Cumberland), Ross (D-Wake), Stam (R-Wake) and Tillis (R-Mecklenburg), requires disclosure of campaign contribution activity by those appointed to critical positions in state government. House Bill 961, “Pay to Play Regulation” was co-sponsored by Reps. Glazier, Stam, Ross and Goodwin (D-Richmond). This legislation is aimed at preventing conflicts of interest involving political contributions by critical state contractors. House Bill 1136, “Executive Branch Revolving Door,” sponsored by Reps. Ross and Stam, would prohibit certain Executive Branch employees from registering as lobbyists for six months after leaving employment with the State.

All three bills passed the House of Representatives with almost unanimous approval. HB 944 was received by the Senate on May 7, 2009. HB 961 and HB 1136 were received by the Senate on May 14, 2009. However, not one of these bills was considered by the Senate prior to adjournment last August. Recent allegations involving former Governor Mike Easley and Mary Easley, as well as other top Democratic officials, indicate the critical need for ethics law reform.

These bills will be pending in the Senate when the legislature reconvenes next May. I call upon the Senate leadership to make their consideration a priority.

Rep. Stam is the minority leader and represents District 37 and southeastern Wake County in the North Carolina House of Representatives.

Watermelon Worship

2009-11-16T16:22:00.001-05:00

Peter Foster

National Post

Fired official believes climate change equivalent to religious belief

The case of fired British “sustainability official” Tim Nicholson has attracted much interest. That’s because Mr. Nicholson is pursuing redress from his former employer, home developer Grainger plc, under the UK’s Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations of 2003. He claims he was fired for his convictions about catastrophic man-made climate change.

Horrified commentators on both left and right have suggested that environmentalism will now be established as a religion. Environmentalists are none too keen on this notion, true though it may be, because it undermines their assertion that their case is based on pure science (which is Mr. Nicholson’s position). Business supporters suggest that a victory by Mr. Nicholson will force the cost of quasi-religious green irrationality onto the bottom line.

The rest of the story, HERE.

"The Ice Caps are Melting"

2009-11-14T20:18:00.003-05:00

Tiny Tim, ahead of his time, breaks bad. (1968)

The Clamor for Calamity

2009-11-11T22:52:00.003-05:00

"The Clamor for Calamity also reveals how irrational environmentalists consider the rest of us to be. We are so spectacularly stupid, so brain-addled by consumerism -- with eyes that do not see, and ears that do not hear -- that the only possible solution is not debate, but disaster."

Brendan O'Neill
Planet Gore
NRO

If a climate-change sceptic suggests that the Sun, rather than man, is responsible for climatic variations he is denounced as evil, a heretic, someone whose words are so foul and twisted that they will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead.” In other words, question the environmentalist consensus, and you are endangering life itself -- your words are literally poisonous.

Yet when a climate-change activist openly calls for calamitous events and the deaths of thousands of people as a way of focusing our leaders’ minds on the problem of climate change, no one bats an eye. You can fantasize about the outbreak of disease as a means of “reducing the population” or dream about natural disasters (which should be as “traumatic as possible” in order to wake people from their consumerist-induced stupor), and your fellow activists will nod along in agreement. So warped is environmentalist morality that those who raise legitimate questions about politics and science are accused of killing people with their words, while those who actually talk about the need for people to die are patted on the back.

Environmentalists are so colossally angry at the public’s refusal to heed their every word that they have kickstarted what we might call a Clamor for Calamity, publicly arguing that disaster is the only way to bring people to their senses. Last month, Jonathon Porritt -- the former green adviser to the U.K. government and close buddy of Eco-Prince Charles -- said that there will have to “traumatic shocks to the system” in order to “jolt” politicians on climate change. What kind of traumatic shocks would Mr Porritt like to see? Well, something like Hurricane Katrina or the recent Australian bush fires -- only worse.

Read the entire post, HERE.

Cluelessness about Fort Hood

2009-11-06T12:02:00.007-05:00

"If our difficulties can be ascribed to something that has happened in the past, they cannot serve as evidence of our present inadequacy and cannot blemish our self-confidence and self-esteem." - Eric Hoffer, "The Passionate State of Mind," (1955)

Joel Raupe

Amazing, isn't it?

And this is worse than not having a clue, this sells cluelessness as an acceptable narrative. Of course, had these killings taken place at the neighborhood Olive Garden, people would claim to have a clue, would they not?

They might ask, yet again, what motivated millions of Germans to join the Nazi comic opera, seventy years ago, and why their officers were offended when, after all was said and done, it was explained to them that "just following orders" was hardly an excuse and made a poor defense.

The Fort Hood "shooter" fits a profile, and along more than one track, of those who join Mass Movements. See a definitive work on the subject, "The True Believer," by Eric Hoffer (1951).

The "readiness for self-sacrifice" is a big clue. The perception of a "permanently ruined self," incapable of socialization and, perhaps more importantly, lacking the capacity or opportunity for achieving a sense of "unquestioned usefulness," the shooter sought self-annihilation and a promised escape from the burden of responsibility that comes with freedom, by submission to a collective, where choice becomes the prerogative of the collective, especially a collective touched with timeless destiny.

Add to Hoffer the singularly Judeo-Christian view that there is no escape from the responsibility that comes from "knowing good and evil," and the panic that sent Adam and Eve running for the tall grass, suddenly aware of their "nakedness," and the shooter at Fort Hood becomes an exaggerated picture of the Human Condition, as lived by many.

A pet cat will tease a captured and stunned mouse until the prey is exhausted or dead, torturing the mouse to death, and yet nonody suggests the cat is doing anything other than its "natural born thing."

If little Johnny does the same thing, though, we seek professional help for him.

There's no mystery here. There's particularly no need to make up some bogus, previously unidentified pathology. The shooter made a deliberate decision, coldly based on his perception of having merged his unwanted self with a collective that cannot die and cannot be questioned.

It's amazing how so recent a history as that of World War II can be lost on so many, so quickly.

For a brief time, in the middle 1960's, Hoffer's "The True Believer" was required reading in many American High Schools, and this longshoreman philosopher with no formal education was the subject of prime time television specials, and was even interviewed for ninety minutes one evening by Walter Cronkite.

Ronald Reagan awarded Hoffer the American Freedom Medal in 1982.

His work has been back in print since 2001.

Reality TV star finds fame "elusive"

2009-11-01T16:53:00.002-05:00

"Summer of Rage" 2009

2009-10-15T06:24:00.004-04:00

A healthy cynicism of government and of those who would fatten their bank accounts at public expense appears justified, as much now as at any other time in our nation's history. The Constitution was drawn up and later amended to make our government subservient to a "eternally vigilant" people, without which the American Experiment would certainly fail.

This principle was based on the "proper study of man," recognizing the corrupting influences of power; that power corrupts and also that those already corrupted by its "heady wine" are drawn again and again, quite naturally, to its addictive flame was mixed into the government's foundation when it was first poured.

On first glance at government in action today, however, you might conclude that government had reached some sort of new immunity from critical oversight. A longer look will dispel that superficial notion, however, and quickly reassure you that, other than its sheer size and scope, governments have not changed very much after all.

What we hear today is an echo of the way things have functioned pretty much from the beginning.

What has changed is the Free Press, which today, in the guise of "Journalism," has gradually been subverted to serve the powerful at the expense of the powerless. And even this is no real change, except perhaps on the label.

If you were able to step free from today into the America of the middle 19th Century the pattern would easily be recognized, and at the same moment it would seem alien. Four and five generations back, at the beginning of the Civil War, every town large enough for a tavern usually had two, three, perhaps four or more "broadsheet" newspapers, for example.

While there was no radio or television there was no shortage of news, and even a rudimentary Internet had begun to branch out across the landscape in the form of Samuel Morse's telegraph.

One big difference would be clearly alien. Each of those broadsheet newspapers operating wherever two or more were gathered were unapologetically partisan in purpose and in message.

Today what some call the "mainstream media" labors under the burden of having to sell information within an illusion of "neutrality." A century and half back, no blue sky could be seen between a political Party and its Press. If you didn't like the message its opposite might be available next door. No one conceived of a "middle ground," in contrast with today's Journalists, to whom a murky middle has become the very language used to spread partisan messages.

At the beginning of Abraham Lincoln's administration in 1861 the nation was already at war with itself. It was more than just "deeply divided." South Carolina, whose sea port at Charleston was the source of two-thirds of the federal government's revenue in the form of tariffs, had already declared independence, citing the Lincoln's election as its cause. It was a "present crisis" before Lincoln took the oath, and a month and half later the nation was in a shooting war with itself.

The Democrat Party of that time was as divided as the nation, setting up the opportunity for the new Republican Party to elect its first President and to consolidate a new base of power. During Lincoln's first year Democrat newspapers in the North were effectively criminalized, as many Democrat office holders and newspaper publishers were thrown into federal stockades without benefit of arraignment. Mobilization of a standing army and the deliberately turned blind eye of Lincoln gave members of his cabinet an excuse to make war on the new Party's enemies.

In 1861 they called it the "Summer of Rage," and it was characterized by official and unofficial organizers of the new Republican Party gathering their own versions of our Flash Mobs to riot, loot and pillage any and all who dared to criticize the new government.

Throughout the course of the war, one that ended with Republicans as the dominant force of a re-worked relationship between the States and Washington, opposition on the home front was effectively silenced.

Whether those methods used by Lincoln were right or wrong is not at issue. Lincoln himself set everything second, including slavery, to preserving the Union. Eventually those methods worked, and the institution of African slavery in the United States was shut down in the bargain.

Any debate on whether those ends justified the means is a waste of time unless the means Lincoln used are one day applied to achieve an end thought as noble.

So, it was a little disquieting to see a popular new regime inaugurated in January 2009, as led by a president so quick to invoke Lincoln at every turn on his first day in office. Aside from not having to travel in disguise, as Lincoln did to evade angry mobs of protesters in Baltimore and elsewhere on his train trip to Inauguration, the president-elect symbolically followed that same path to Washington 148 years later.

He ate the same breakfast as Lincoln did his first day in office and took the Oath on the very same Bible.

Barack Obama's genetic heritage was heralded passionately enough to excuse this symbolism, of course, at a historic moment when a man of African descent became president he quite naturally called on a semi-deified Abraham Lincoln for his blessing. It took a passionless point of view to wonder whether something more than Lincoln's ends was being evoked. Perhaps, as some believed, the 14th President's means were being celebrated as well.

Nothing President Obama has done so far has soothed this disquiet.

On the contrary it sometimes seems as though he were determined to create greater and even greater crisis so those means applied by Lincoln and his Party might excuse a second re-working of relationships, this time between Washington and the American Citizen.

How else can we look on an otherwise insecure-looking intolerance of dissent exhibited by his cabinet? This administration's adolescent and unseemly attacks on FoxNews, which is no different than any other mainstream news outlet in seeking a perspective from a illusory and "balanced" middle ground, are difficult to understand in a Capital City where Franklin Roosevelt once said nothing happens by accident.

Most disquieting of all, however, is the fact that President Obama lacks a domestic war as Lincoln's excuse for silencing dissent.

It would be too narrow, however, to credit someone with being sophisticated enough to remember the model left to us by Lincoln not to also credit him with remembering a wide variety of models from the not-so-distant past, as well. Among those means employed for re-working societies left to us from just the past century alone there are more than enough example from which he might choose.

Angry Young Man

2009-09-28T11:30:00.003-04:00

"It's been long known the conveyance of message by language goes far beyond the words. Only seven percent of the message is contained in the literal words, with the remaining ninety-three percent more or less evenly divided between gesture (aka, "body language") and "tone" of voice. A slight plurality is given to the latter, and it is within this area that our "President" has the mastery common to any "two-bit carnival hypnotist."

"Even so, this mastery of Tone is not perfect and his imperfections combined with his Gestures make a majority of what he has to say appear to be very angry, indeed.

"I don't need to turn the sound down on his words or tone to see the man is very angry, and judging now by what little divisive actions he has actually committed to, in Honduras in particularly, but also in his choice of fights in the Congress, also, the direction of his anger is toward this country.

"My guess is the man hates this country, which means he hates the American People, though he is not intelligent enough to know the one follows the other.

"Subconsciously, my guess is that he knows all-too-well the course his anger must take, and who it is who will be effected, and he rationalizes this under some form of logic that makes sense only to him and others among those he makes for appointments and for company.

"The president is, in fact, at war with America and her friends and in full support, with all the resources he presently has at his command, of America's enemies.

"God save the Republic and bless the American people. This is the sad result of the full flower of the atheist Eugenics movement and the direction self-appointed elites of the late 19th century took in adopting the deliberate effort to dumb down people through the Prussian grade school model, and the Experimentalist method as the only permitted philosophy of education.

"God save us indeed. We are in grave danger."

The full thread HERE.