America Rising

Republicans screwed up big time, ballooning the deficit and ignoring the constitution just like Democrats, so we threw them out of power.  Americans got a taste of unvarnished liberalism, and we don't like it.

This video is good...

US INTERVENTION UNJUSTIFIED

US INTERVENTION IN WWI, WWII, DEEMED UNJUSTIFIED

A secret US Congressional committee that has been meeting since 2 September 1945 has determined that US intervention on behalf of Europe in both WWI and WWII was completely and utterly unjustifed and in violation of international law.

US returns Austria, Sudetenland, Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Crete, Libya, and Egypt to Germany, as well as apologizing and returning Albania to Italy.

The US State Department released a statement that given the illegality of US actions in Europe and the subsequent illegality of the Dutch Parliament, the findings of the Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq was quite frankly irrelevant and it was waiting to hear what the Third Reich thought.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8453305.stm

Also quite frankly, the Dutch can go pound sand!

~Finntann~

Global Warming, Free Health Care, and Other Liberal Fantasies

Liberal Belief in Fairy Tales is not Limited to Global Warming

Liberals live in a fantasy bubble where all us conservatives are lowbrow wife beaters or slack-jawed hicks with tobacco juice dribbling down our chins.  We're uneducated and superstitious; just look at how many of us go to church!  Meanwhile, enlightened liberals constitute America's cognoscenti and intelligentsia.

Well, Michael Graham has written a brilliant article that bursts that irrational bubble.

If you thought the “fire never melted steel” crowd was nuts, check out the new study from the bipartisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

They find that liberals and Democrats are far more likely to believe in ghosts, psychic powers and astrology than their conservative/Republican counterparts.

About 50 percent more Democrats than Republicans say they have spoken to the dead.  Or as it’s known at Democratic Party headquarters, “voter outreach.”

He goes on to catalog Obama and Dems talking out of both sides of their mouths:  Speechifying about deficit reduction while ballooning the deficit, saying "no more earmarks" while passing bills that contain thousands of them, laughable claims of slashing medicare spending while adding more people to the program...

He concludes:

Even if their math is right today, who is naive enough to believe this trillion-dollar government program will come in on budget?

I know people who believe in leprechauns who aren’t that gullible.

This would explain why the Democrat politicians want to treat us all like children.  They think we're all as naive as their liberal democratic constituents.

Uncontrolled Immigration Upsets Societies

** CAUTION:  Unhinged DeviledEgg Rant! **  

The west has grown slack, and the vandals are dismantling our culture...

Anti-Immigration anger got out of hand in southern Italy, as all situations do when governments fail to carry out their responsibilities.  While we should condemn the (relatively tame) violence in Southern Italy (BB Guns were the weapons used), can't we also open our eyes and see the logical progression that led up to this lamentable event?

Unbridled Immigration is a Recipe for Disaster!

Cultures do clash.  The wider the cultural differences, the bigger the clash. I respect Pope Benedict's defense of immigrants.  We must defend their human rights, and any violence against them is way out of line and should be criminally prosecuted.

But where is the respect for the host country, its laws and the cultural norms of its citizens?  It's not a fundamental human right to breach borders and upset the traditional order.  Immigrant invasions end up satisfying no one, producing cultural strife and anger on all sides. 

Welcome to the 7th Century!

Unassimilable bigots have brought us honor killings, cartoonist menacing, and enraged rantings over religious slights that Christians and Jews simply shrug off on a daily basis.  Their criminal treatment of women leaves the average American male chauvinist pig blushing with inadequacy.

Are we supposed to passively stand by as our cultural rug is pulled out from under our feet?  Hell No!

A Nation has a Right to Set its Own Immigration Policy

It is not a fundamental human right to invade my country, and it is not racist or bigoted to pick and choose who comes in.  It's self preservation.  If you're foaming at the mouth and hate our freedoms, you can't come in!

Our refusal to do our own dirty work contributes greatly to this problem
Real welfare reform would see those on the dole doing jobs "Americans just won't do."  Take away the food stamps, and hunger will become a great motivator.  Also, there was a time when college kids did farm work and bussed tables to pay for their education instead of daddy and Uncle Sam going into hock to pick up their tab...

Uncle Sam in Your Attic

Liberal screamed about government being "In our bedrooms" during the Reagan years.  Well, now we have Obama and Biden in our attics 

"Insulation is sexy," said the president.  Oh, yeah?  Obama has never gotten within 10 feet of the stuff, let alone installed any of it in a sweaty, cramped attic.  He has no idea what it's like to be itching your ass off for weeks on end afterwards...

Democrats:  Lobotomizing Americans one Government Program at a Time

Anyway, according to VP Biden, Americans are just too stupid or too broke to embark on home improvement.  Here are the barriers to weatherization he cites in his report, "Recovery Through Retrofit" [PDF].:

Consumers do not have access to straightforward and reliable information on home energy retrofits

Has he heard of the Internet?  A previous Vice President invented it.  You can look up products and research their prices and energy efficiency ratings.

Homeowners face high upfront costs and many are concerned that they will be prevented from recouping the value of their investment if they choose to sell their home. The upfront costs of home retrofit projects are often beyond the average homeowner’s budget.

No duh...  This is a calculus every homeowner must make.  If you're selling your house, you don't blow money on upgrades that provide no return.

Home Ownership is not for the Stupid
Home improvements are not cheap, so you save up for those big projects, or do it a little at a time.  I spent one year replacing all the windows at the old Silverfiddle homestead.  Every payday I bought one window and installed it because we couldn't afford to do it all at once.

Are there really that many homeowners so stupid they need Obama and Biden to take them by the hand?  If so, they have no business owning a home.

Tea Party: A Genuine Small Government, Free Market Movement

Tunku Trumpets Tea Parties

Tunku Varadarajan provides an heroic defense of the Tea party movement, while dissecting the psychology of those on the left and right who sneer at the movement.

His article is a thing of beauty.  Go read it, memorize it, copy it and distribute it.  This man has summed up our sentiments better than any DC GOPer ever could.

Is the Tea Party Movement anti-elitist, as the critics charge? 
Yes, Tunku concludes, but what's wrong with that?  Especially when the elitists have made such an abysmal wreck of everything (Wall Street, Washington), while arrogantly maintaining an air of superiority?

Big Business is not Synonymous with Capitalism or the Free Market

Yes, the populists fear and hate the big businesses and Wall Street; but—and this is the heartening thing—they have not let this turn them against capitalism and the free market.

They seem truly to have taken in the point, long emphasized by libertarians and others, that big business is not the same thing as capitalism or the free market, that it is in fact often their enemy.

Perhaps the Obama administration has finally driven this point home, as it has been an object lesson in how the party of big government is really in bed with big business, giving it all the bailouts and favors.

A Genuine Anti-Big Business, Anti-Big Government, Free-Market Party

So by this reckoning, the Tea Parties would be a very serious development in which anti-big business forces would finally join with anti-big government forces to create a genuine free-market party that would maximize the opportunities of the little guy.

God bless Tunku Varadarajan and let freedom ring!

Time for US to Butt Out

Yemen Intervention Would be a Fool's Errand
Marc Lynch, who is no conservative, has written an excellent article on Yemen that I wholeheartedly agree with.  Unlike the thumb-sucking bedwetters at the Guardian, he provides reasons for his opposition to any US intervention in that Hell's half acre at the ass-end of the Arabian peninsula.

No Easy Answers
There are no easy answers to the problems infesting our globe's many intractable hot spots.  Yemen looks like another situation where an oppressive, decrepit regime will invite us in to do its dirty work, while we think we're fighting for freedom.  They paint their enemies as "terrorists" and unleash the awesome American firepower against them.  

Lynch warns against both military intervention and development assistance.  The former would be a quagmire and the latter would be sucked up by greedy, corrupt officials.  He posits that no realistic option offers even an outside chance of success, so we should simply manage the situation as it suits our national interests. 

Marc Lynch's Conclusion:

It's never as satisfying as a morally pure call to battle, but the administration shouldn't over-react or under-react.

Be patient, build intelligence and CT assets, strike against clearly AQ targets when available but only where the civilian costs will be minimal and the rewards high, search out local partners... the usual.

But the administration shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking it must "do something" to fend off political harping from the right and end up over-committing... or taking steps which ultimately make the situation worse.

Amen!  And ditto for Iran   
I pray we are covertly funneling millions to the Iranian opposition, but we should not send one American soldier or bomb.

Bring Iraq to a good end (and they are on their way in a land where Saudi Arabia or Turkey is considered "good").  Bring Afghanistan to an acceptable end, and assiduously avoid future "big footprint" operations like the money-wasting plagues that they are. 

Middle East:  The World's Nuthouse
These people have been bombing, shooting and stabbing and stoning one another since time immemorial, what makes us think that we can change them?  If we merely stay out of the way, they will start attacking each other over ancient, still simmering feuds instead of going after us.  Remember the charnel house that was the 10-year Iran-Iraq War?


Europe, Saudi and the rest of you who no longer share our values, you're on your own!

And while we're at it, we need to fold up the Western European security umbrella as well.  Time for our cousins across the pond to man up and learn to live without the bossy hyperpower on their backs all the time.

Sounds isolationist, but I'm not.  We just need to pick our battles wisely.  Too often we've been suckered into petty parochial struggles where the craftiest side was able to demonize the other, wrongly rousing Uncle Sam's sense of righteousness, always with unintended consequences.  Israel is the only country in that region worth fighting for, and they can take care of themselves.

No Happy Endings
Everything can't be tied up neatly with a nice bow on top.  Poverty and violence abound in most of the world (what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls The Gap).  Some societies do not cohere well because of the nature of the people, the terrain, lack of resources, whatever.  These fractious conditions spawn congenitally weak governments...

"... where every man is Enemy to every man... And the life of man [is], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  -- Thomas Hobbes

Real Conservatives Heed Washington's Admonition Against Foreign Entanglements

A forgotten component of traditional conservatism is wariness towards foreign entanglements.  That doesn't mean withdraw from the world; it means don't get suckered into the internal affairs of other countries, and don't get sucked into fights between warring factions.

And this isn't a "be nice so the bed people will start liking us" argument.  Bad people will always hate us because we stand for good.  We should reserve the right to unapologetically smack them at the time and place of our choosing based on our national interests, not some foreign power.