UN Plans to Expand the Phony Water Crisis … ‘Smart Water Meters’ on the Way

By Anthony Wile | June 16, 2012 | The Daily Bell

UN-Water Survey Examines Water Law Reform … Twenty years ago this June world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro for an Earth Summit to develop an action plan for sustainable development. They discussed a wide variety of topics including climate change, alternative sources of energy to replace fossil fuel and the growing scarcity of water. This June, world leaders will gather once again for the Rio+20 Conference to examine the progress that has been made. – WaterWorld

Here we go again!

Leading proponents of “leveling” are preparing to descend on Brazil for the upcoming Rio+20 Earth Summit, hosted by the United Nations, and one of the items on the menu will be a re-valuation of the UN’s muddled Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) initiative.

The results will doubtless be a further weakening of property rights around the world under the guise of communitarianism and outright socialism.

Global Governance Utopianism and the Threats to Freedom

By Avi Davis | June 10, 2012 | Breitbart News

It does not take much to trace the lineage of the global governance movement.  Beginning with the very first work on international law, written by Herman Grotius in 1623, down through the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant and Karl Krause and to the mid- 20th century novels of H.G. Wells, a line can be drawn threading together advocacy of intellectuals and political leaders for the establishment of some kind of global authority to be placed in charge of governing mankind’s work and activities.

Obama Has Signed 923 Executive Orders In 40 Months

By Josey Wales | June 5, 2012 | Before It’s News

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: Obama has signed 923 Executive Orders in 40 months!

What did Congress do in those 40 months?

Our Age of Anxiety

By Yuval Levin | May 28, 2012, Vol. 17, NO. 35 | Weekly Standard

Romney’s challenge is to address the deep uneasiness in America and point the way to a comeback.

There is something very strange about the 2012 presidential race so far. The election comes at a time of extraordinary public unease, which clearly demands some response from the political system, and especially from the men running for the highest office in the land. But the two presidential candidates are both running campaigns oddly detached from what is rightly worrying voters.

If you were to judge the state of the country by listening only to the Obama campaign, you would conclude that we are on the verge of the long-awaited triumph of the liberal welfare state, and that all that stands in the way is a gang of retrograde Social Darwinists who somehow manage to be simultaneously nihilistic and theocratic. That band of reactionaries ran the economy into the ground for the sake of their wealthy patrons, and now they’re coming for our social programs and for women’s freedoms. Only if they are held off can the forward march of history proceed.

If you were to judge the state of the country by listening only to the Romney campaign, you would conclude that all was well in America until we took a wrong turn four years ago and elected a president hostile to freedom and prosperity. If we just correct that error and undo what he has done, our economy will be ready to bloom again.

Real Hope for Ending Federal Debt

By Bruce Walker | May 22, 2012 | American Thinker

The per capita federal debt is $31,000 growing.  Much of Europe and many American states are facing practical bankruptcy.  As the creditworthiness of the United States and many states is been downgraded, the cost of simply servicing the existing debt will rise.  Add to these woes vast unfunded entitlements and money simply created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve System, and it is hard to see how even very aggressive Reaganomics can save us.

Government is so far in debt that simply cutting spending less is not enough, and raising taxes is foolishness.  We need to dramatically increase the sources of non-tax revenue.  Fortunately, the convergence of more sophisticated technology and rising costs for natural resources makes that possible.

Anu Mittal, director of natural resources and the environment for the General Accounting Office, recently testified before Congress that the oil reserves in the Green River Formation, spanning much of the Rocky Mountain Region, are greater than all the rest of the world’s reserves combined — perhaps three trillion barrels, with about half the oil on federal land and with half of the oil extractable at current prices.  The federal royalty by a rough estimate would be over $9 trillion.

Enviro-Idiots: Two Earths Needed by 2030

By Rush Limbaugh | May 17, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I have here, ladies and gentlemen, a full-fledged story at the Huffing and Puffington Post: “WWF Living Planet Report Warns That By 2030 Two Earths Will Be Needed To Sustain Our Lifestyles.” There is a single reason that they give this warning.  And while I read this I want you to ponder what that single reason might be.  Why might we need two earths by 2030?  That’s just 18 years from now.

“Humans will need two Earths to support our lifestyles by 2030 because we are draining the world’s resources so quickly, a new report has warned.  Produced by the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London, the Global Footprint Network and the European Space Agency, the 2012 Living Planet Report measures humans’ ecological footprint on the planet. At the moment, the picture is bleak, according to Jim Leape, Director General of WWF International, with resources being drained 50 per cent faster than they can be replenished. He said: ‘We’re all familiar with the stories of what we’re doing to Planet Earth, the ways in which we’re changing the climate, depleting the world’s fisheries, destroying the world’s forests.'”

None of that’s true.  There is more forest area in this country than at the time of the founding.  Each time that stat is mentioned, the left goes nuts.  But here we get to the real reason this is happening.  Mr. Leape, Jim Leape, director general, WWF International, says, “The starting point for reducing our impact on the planet is to end our love affair with fossil fuels — ‘the energy technology of the 20th century’ — and switch to renewable energy.” That shift alone will make a huge difference on our footprint on the planet.  So once again an all-out assault on fossil fuels and oil.  You know, it could be argued — no, I don’t think it is arguable.  Life on earth has never been better, has it?  For more people on earth, life has never been better.  It’s never been more full of opportunity. It’s under assault, of course, but the life expectancy, medicines, never been better.  This is typical bunk.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to beg your indulgence for just for a second.  I kind of glossed over this story that’s on the Huffing and Puffington Post from the World Wildlife Fund. I want to go back to it for just a couple of points.  And I want you to stop when I read this opening sentence.  I want you to realize that the people behind this are dead serious.  “Humans will need two Earths to support our lifestyles [in 18 years] because we are draining the world’s resources so quickly,” according to a new report.

Now, to you and I, this is pure bunk.  It’s insane.  But college professors, high school teachers all over the country will likely pick this up, and it will become part of the daily lesson plan.  It will be added to, just like Lexis and Nexis is a massive database of news stories, and whatever is published today on AP, say about me, will end up in LexisNexis and will be there forever.  Lazy journalists will cite it, go back and look, “Oh, a story about Limbaugh?  What else is there.” They’ll find stuff that’s been in the database for 45 years and they’ll run it.  Same thing here.  Need two earths.  I want you to stop and think how literally ridiculous this is, but these people, and they are full-fledged liberals, leftists, whatever, they mean it.

It is another in a never ending series of crises that the people of this country are inundated with practically every day now in the media.  Now we’re going to need two earths.  It’s all about climate change. It’s all about global warming. It’s all about our sinful, unacceptable use of oil and fossil fuels.  We are destroying the planet. We are using up this planet’s resources so quickly we’re gonna need two planets to handle our needs.  These predictions have been made for over a hundred years, that we’re running out of resources, that we’re gonna deplete the world of natural resources, minerals, food, and none of it has ever been true.  None of it.

They have a statistic in this story that is just patently ridiculous.  We are using 50% more resources than the earth can provide.  That is not possible.  If the earth can’t provide the resources, how can we use them?  The simple fact of the matter is, the earth is providing the resources.  Paul Ehrlich back in the seventies predicted that by now there would be war, pestilence, famine because of too many billions of people.  We have shot past his prediction.  We have not run out of anything.  We continue to produce enough and more for what everybody needs.  Look at the growing countries of China and India.  Without getting into why, their economies are growing.  People there are buying cars.  They’re driving cars.  They’re buying gasoline.  They’re not having any problem finding gasoline.  If they can afford it, it’s available.  We’re not running out.

Whatever the demands, economic or otherwise, lifestyle, they are met, be it food or what have you.  Now, you might be able to go to a country and say people are starving, but that’s not because the earth is being depleted.  That’s because there’s a dictatorship likely starving his people in order to maintain power.  Or you have a socialist or communist government which has no idea how to create wealth and doesn’t really want to.  The only thing in short supply in the world is capitalism.  We have an unequal, unfair distribution of capitalism.  There simply isn’t enough of it.  There’s way too much socialism in the world.  There’s way too much Marxism.  There’s way too much communism.  There is way too much dictatorship, which, by the way, is the way humanity, for the most part, has lived since we first began walking the earth.

Read the full article here.

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The New Class Warfare

By Joel Kotkin | Spring 2012 | City Journal

California’s superwealthy progressives seem intent on destroying middle-class jobs.

Few states have offered the class warriors of Occupy Wall Street more enthusiastic support than California has. Before they overstayed their welcome and police began dispersing their camps, the Occupiers won official endorsements from city councils and mayors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, Irvine, Santa Rosa, and Santa Ana. Such is the extent to which modern-day “progressives” control the state’s politics.

But if those progressives really wanted to find the culprits responsible for the state’s widening class divide, they should have looked in a mirror. Over the past decade, as California consolidated itself as a bastion of modern progressivism, the state’s class chasm has widened considerably. To close the gap, California needs to embrace pro-growth policies, especially in the critical energy and industrial sectors—but it’s exactly those policies that the progressives most strongly oppose.

Illustration by Arnold Roth

Even before the economic downturn, California was moving toward greater class inequality, but the Great Recession exacerbated the trend. From 2007 to 2010, according to a recent study by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, income among families in the 10th percentile of earners plunged 21 percent. Nationwide, the figure was 14 percent. In the much wealthier 90th percentile of California earners, income fell far less sharply: 5 percent, only slightly more than the national 4 percent drop. Further, by 2010, the families in the 90th percentile had incomes 12 times higher than the incomes of families in the 10th—the highest ratio ever recorded in the state, and significantly higher than the national ratio.

It’s also worth noting that in 2010, the California 10th-percentile families were earning less than their counterparts in the rest of the United States—$15,000 versus $16,300—even though California’s cost of living was substantially higher. A more familiar statistic signaling California’s problems is its unemployment rate, which is now the nation’s second-highest, right after Nevada’s. Of the eight American metropolitan areas where the joblessness rate exceeds 15 percent, seven are in California, and most of them have substantial minority and working-class populations.

When California’s housing bubble popped, real-estate prices fell far more steeply than in less regulated markets, such as Texas. The drop hurt the working class in two ways: it took away a major part of their assets; and it destroyed the construction jobs important to many working-class, particularly Latino, families. The reliably left-leaning Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy found that between 2005 and 2009, the state lost fully one-third of its construction jobs, compared with a 24 percent drop nationwide. California has also suffered disproportionate losses in its most productive blue-collar industries. Over the past ten years, more than 125,000 industrial jobs have evaporated, even as industrial growth has helped spark a recovery in many other states. The San Francisco metropolitan area lost 40 percent of its industrial positions during this period, the worst record of any large metro area in the country. In 2011, while the country was gaining 227,000 industrial jobs, California’s manufacturers were still stuck in reverse, losing 4,000.

Yet while the working and middle classes struggle, California’s most elite entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are thriving as never before. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. “And what a world it is. Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value.” Meanwhile, in nearby Oakland, the metropolitan region ranks dead last in job growth among the nation’s largest metro areas, according to a recent Forbes survey, and one in three children lives in poverty.

One reason for California’s widening class divide is that, for a decade or longer, the state’s progressives have fostered a tax environment that slows job creation, particularly for the middle and working classes. In 1994, California placed 35th in the Tax Foundation’s ranking of states with the lightest tax burdens on business; today, it has plummeted to 48th. Only New York and New Jersey have more onerous business-tax burdens. Local taxes and fees have made five California cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Culver City—among the nation’s 20 most expensive business environments, according to the Kosmont–Rose Institute Cost of Doing Business Survey.

Still more troubling to California employers is the state’s regulatory environment. California labor laws, a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce study revealed, are among the most complex in the nation. The state has strict rules against noncompetition agreements, as well as an overtime regime that reduces flexibility: unlike other states, where overtime kicks in after 40 hours in a given week, California requires businesses to pay overtime to employees who have clocked more than eight hours a day (see “Cali to Business: Get Out!,” Autumn 2011). Rules for record-keeping and rest breaks are likewise more stringent than in other states. The labor code contains tough provisions on everything from discrimination to employee screening, the Chamber of Commerce study notes, and has created “a cottage industry of class actions” in the state. California’s legal climate is the fifth-worst in the nation, according to the Institute for Legal Reform; firms face far higher risks of nuisance and other lawsuits from employees than in most other places. In addition to these measures, California has imposed some of the most draconian environmental laws in the country, as we will see in a moment.

The impact of these regulations is not lost on business executives, including those considering new investments or expansions in California. A survey of 500 top CEOs by Chief Executive found that California had the worst business climate in the country, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls California “a difficult environment for job creation.” Small wonder, then, that since 2001, California has accounted for just 1.9 percent of the country’s new investment in industrial facilities; in better times, between 1977 and 2000, it had grabbed 5.6 percent.

Officials, including Governor Jerry Brown, argue that California’s economy is so huge that it can afford to lose companies to other states. But for the local economy to be hurt, firms don’t have to leave entirely. Business consultant Joe Vranich, who maintains a website that tracks businesses that leave the state, points out that when California companies decide to expand, often they do so in other parts of the U.S. and abroad, not in their home environment. Further, Brown is too cavalier about the effects of businesses’ departure. As Vranich notes, many businesses leave California “quietly in the night,” generating few headlines but real job losses. He cites the low-key departure in 2010 of Thomas Brothers Maps, a century-old California firm, which transferred dozens of employees from its Irvine headquarters to Skokie, Illinois, and outsourced the rest of its jobs to Bangalore.

The list of companies leaving the state or shifting jobs elsewhere is extensive. It includes low-tech companies, such as Dunn Edwards Paints and fast-food operator CKE Restaurants, and high-tech ones, such as Acacia Research, Biocentric Energy Holdings, and eBay, which plans to create 1,000 new positions in Austin, Texas. Computer-security giant McAfee estimates that it saves 30 to 40 percent every time it hires outside California. Only 14 percent of the firm’s 6,500 employees remain in Silicon Valley, says CEO David DeWalt. The state’s small businesses, which account for the majority of employment, are harder to track, but a recent survey found that one in five didn’t expect to remain in business in California within the next three years.

Apologists for the current regime also claim that the state’s venture capitalists will fund and create new companies that will boost employment. It’s certainly true that in the past, California firms funded by venture capital tended to expand largely in California. But as Jack Stewart, president of the California Manufacturing and Technology Association, points out, a different dynamic is at work today: once a company’s start-up phase is over, it tends to move its middle-class jobs elsewhere, as the state’s shrinking fraction of the nation’s industrial investment indicates. “Sure, we are getting half of all the venture capital investment, but in the end, we have relatively small research and development firms only,” Stewart argues. “Once they have a product or go to scale, the firms move [employment] elsewhere. The other states end up getting most of the middle-class jobs.”

Radical environmentalism has been particularly responsible for driving wedges between California’s classes. Until fairly recently, as historian Kevin Starr says, California’s brand of progressivism involved spurring economic growth—particularly by building infrastructure—and encouraging broad social advancement. “What the progressives created,” Starr says, “was California as a middle-class utopia. The idea was if you wanted to be a nuclear physicist, a carpenter, or a cosmetologist, we would create the conditions to get you there.” By contrast, he says, today’s progressives regard with suspicion any growth that requires the use of land and natural resources. Where old-fashioned progressives embraced both conservation and the expansion of public parks, the new green movement advocates a reduced human “footprint” and opposes cars, “sprawl,” and even human reproduction.

The Bay Area has served as the incubator for the new green progressivism. The militant Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969 in San Francisco. Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, author of the sensationalist 1968 jeremiad The Population Bomb and mentor of President Obama’s current science advisor, John Holdren, built his career at Stanford. Today, more than 130 environmental activist groups make their headquarters in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and surrounding cities.

The environmentalist agenda emerged in full flower under nominally Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who initially cast himself as a Milton Friedman–loving neo-Reaganite. On his watch, California’s legislature in 2006 passed Assembly Bill 32, which, in order to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, imposes heavy fees on using carbon-based energy and severely restricts planning and development. One analysis of small-business impacts prepared by Sacramento State University economists indicates that AB 32 could strip about $181 billion per year, or nearly 10 percent, from the state’s economy. At the same time, land-use regulations connected to the climate-change legislation hinder expansion for firms.

Another business-hobbling mandate is the law requiring that 30 percent of California’s electricity be generated by “renewable” sources by 2020. The state’s electricity costs are already 50 percent above the national average and the fifth-highest in the nation—yet state policies make the construction of new oil- or gas-fired power plants all but impossible and offer massive subsidies for expensive, often unreliable, “renewable” energy. The renewable-fuel laws will simply boost electricity costs further. The cost of electricity from the new NRG solar-energy facility in central California, for instance, will be 50 percent higher than the cost of power from a newly built gas-powered facility, according to state officials. For providing this expensive service, NRG will pay no property taxes on its facilities. By some estimates, green mandates could force electricity prices to rise 5 to 7 percent annually through 2020.

Read the full article here.

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A New Declaration of Independence

By Eileen F. Toplansky | April 28, 2012 | American Thinker

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary to ensure that a President, who has led the country to near ruin and who is working to discard the basic principles upon which this Great Country rests, be peaceably removed it is incumbent upon us that we submit the reasons to the people.

Without any in-depth research or vetting about his background, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44^th president of the United States.  There were voices of caution who early on exposed Obama’s connections to former terrorist Bill Ayers, anti-American vilifier Reverend Wright, crook Tony Rezko, and anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi, but they were laughed at as the people allowed themselves to be demagogued on hope and change.  Evidence continues to suggest that Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate is, indeed, a forgery.  This would make his presidential eligibility suspect.

Thus, the American people are at a critical watershed moment in our history.  The facts are in; Obama’s ideology and core principles are now public and exist for all to see.  We can no longer claim ignorance; we can no longer be naïve; we can no longer deny what is patently before us.  The record of this current president is a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these United States.  To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Mr. Obama has “given himself the powers to declare martial law[.]  It is a sweeping power grab that should worry every American.”  Thus, “Barack Obama is very dangerous, the apotheosis of an insidious strain of authoritarianism that destroys from within.”  In a statement published on December 31, 2011, Mr. Obama states that “[t]oday I have signed into law H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012.”  Though he claims that he has “signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” it was Mr. Obama who “demanded the removal of any and all protections for US citizens and legal residents.”

And like King George III, Obama has now established the distinct possibility of placing “[s]tanding armies without the Consent of our legislatures” — although sadly, in this case, the Senate passed this unwholesome disgrace.  King George III would be pleased.

In fact, Mr. Obama sees fit to bypass the “pesky” Constitution whenever it suits him, thus ignoring limited-government tenets which were at the core of the Founding Fathers’ belief system.  Thus, the NDAA detention mandate allows indefinite military detention not just to foreigners; now “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

In fact, should Mr. Obama be re-elected to a second term, “our rights to speech, religion and property, and to privacy in our persons and homes, will be transformed.”  Mr. Obama has already “hectored Christianity on matters of conscience.”  Through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, Mr. Obama is forcing Catholic institutions to pay for insurance covering contraceptives.  Why, when “religious liberty was weighed against access to birth control, did freedom lose?” — a clear intrusion into the first of the five protections of the First Amendment.  Bishop Daniel Jenky has likened President Obama’s health care policies to the attacks on the Catholic church by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of yesteryear.  Dare we go down that totalitarian road again?

The onslaught against free speech has been heightened because of the “cooperation between [Mr. Obama] and the OIC or Organization of Islamic Cooperation.”  The “Obama administration stands ‘united’ with the OIC on speech issues,” thus silencing Arab reformers and anyone who makes any allegedly negative remarks about Islam.  The “repressive practices” of the OIC member-nations speak volumes about their restrictions on free speech.  Hence, “the encroachment of de facto blasphemy restrictions in the West threatens free speech and the free exchange of ideas.”  That an American president would threaten this most fundamental right is yet another resounding reason why he needs to be removed from office.

In December of 2009, Nat Hentoff, a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, asserted that “[i]f congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care ‘reform’ measure to send to the White House for President Obama’s signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions[.]” Thus, “these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you[.]  Is this America?”  Hentoff concludes his piece with the revelation “I’m scared and I do mean to scare you.  We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be.”

Thus, we still hold “these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  And “whenever any Form of Government becomes  destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles … as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  We do not declare violent revolution but do demand the secure right to change the government through the ballot box.

But even this fundamental right is being seriously eroded as the Department of Justice openly and arrogantly dismisses genuine cases of voter intimidation with nary a word of concern by Barack Obama.  Although there is visual proof and  evidence of threats to the voting public as well as exhortations of death threats to a man on trial, Attorney General Eric Holder turns a blind eye.

By his selective indifference, Mr. Obama has created a racially divisive atmosphere in America.  He continues to promote this hateful attitude wherein the civil rights progress made in this country for all its citizens is ignored.  Surely, Mr. Obama has “excited domestic insurrections amongst us” as he engages in racial division, class warfare, and phony gender wars.  If Mr. Obama is, indeed, so interested in the rights of women, then why does he support Islamic sharia law, which demands second-class status for women?  These diversions serve to stir up resentments; unfortunately, they are successful in obfuscating the shameless actions of this 44^th president.

Mr. Obama is not content with taking the country down the path to “European socialism.”  His centralized control of the health care industry, his increases in entitlement programs, his redistribution of capital — in fact, his sweeping regulations that give the government new authority to control the entire financial sector — are reminiscent of Karl Marx’s 10-Point Agenda, and although communism was unknown in 1775, the signatories of the Declaration knew of the absolute power of the monarchy and would see through the oligarchic nature of this “ism.”

Amazingly, Mr. Obama has assured Russian leaders (who have gained their power through rigged elections) that American concessions are coming their way, but they [the Russian leaders] must wait because he is seeking re-election and he dare not tell his own people of his true intentions.  What credible reason would a loyal American president have for weakening American and allies’ defense systems?  During the open microphone conversation between Obama and Medvedev, a puppet of KGB Putin, the world learned whose interests Obama was truly serving.  Surely, this is “enough to chill friends and allies, democrats and dissidents, all over the world.”

Furthermore, Obama has “obstructed the Administration of Justice[,]” instead pitting one group against the other through “waivers.”  If ObamaCare is so laudable, why extend waivers in the first place?  In fact, it is yet another example of how manipulative Mr. Obama is when he tries to make the people “dependent on his will alone.”

Mr. Obama has ignored the laws of our country to impose an arbitrary and capricious rule of law by outside forces.  He finds it more expedient to pit the federal government against an American state which is trying only to enforce federal immigration law.  To this end, Mr. Obama has seen fit to “subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution[,]” which was so clearly enumerated in the Declaration of Independence as reason to reject King George III.   By issuing a Universal Period Review (UPR), the first of its kind, Mr. Obama has given the United Nations the right to dictate to Arizona.  Thus, the “stakes for our national sovereignty have just been raised.”  Despotic countries of the United Nations have now been empowered to dictate how Americans should conduct themselves.  Is this not reminiscent of King George III “waging war against us”?

Moreover, the Obama State Department ordered the “suspension of routine border inspection procedures in order to whisk (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamists into our country.  Thus, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party did not have to go through the normal procedures of inspection.  Recall that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission statement is “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!”  Negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood is akin to negotiating with the dictator Hitler.  It is appeasement all the way.  Why does the Obama administration cavort with such people?  Does this not make him unfit to defend the interests of America?

Read the full article here.

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The American People are Fed Up

By Rush Limbaugh | May 09, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Americans, ladies and gentlemen, are taking their country back — and they’re doing it one election at a time. As was evidenced in Wisconsin, Americans are not afraid of union goons. They’re not impressed with a “slow-jamming” Preezy. They aren’t intimidated by the media anymore. From reconfirming the meaning of marriage, to showing support for a great Wisconsin governor, to humiliating a sitting Democrat president with a huge turnout for a convicted felon, voters demonstrated that the power attributed to Barack Obama and the State-Controlled Media has been overestimated. Conventional wisdom was nuked yesterday.

Tea Party dead and Occupy Wall Street in the ascension? Obama a shoo-in reelection? In fact, the Beltway Republicans, the Republican establishment still think Obama is a shoo-in! They really do. I kid you not. They think… Maybe not a shoo-in now, but before yesterday, “Ah, Rush, don’t get your hopes up. He’s an incumbent. He’s got so much at his disposal,” and that could well be. But the people don’t want to hear that.

The people of this country are not going to allow themselves to be dispirited with phony polls and inaccurate reporting. They’re not gonna be influenced by photo-ops with George Clooney. Being $5 trillion in debt — new debt, given to us by Obama — trumps photo-ops with George Clooney. Years of 8.5% plus unemployment trumps the Preezy slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon.

Out-of-work college graduates are snapping out of their hope and change trance, and they realize all they’re getting is insurmountable student loan debt, not jobs. Voters are continuing to tune out the Drive-By Media in greater numbers. They’re tuning in talk radio, the Internet, Fox News. The people of this country know what’s at stake. They know failure when they see it. They know disaster when they see it. And they know how to stop it.

And they fully intend to.

Last night was a significant aftershock of the 2010 electoral earthquake that rocked the Democrat Party. The Tea Party’s not dead. No, 2010 was a warm-up. The Tea Party’s moved on from a protest movement to an active, vibrant, grassroots movement that knows how to nominate the right people and then get them elected — and that is sending shivers of fear down the spines of professional Democrats, consultants, elected officials, and people in the media.

Democrats are voting against President Obama.

Democrats are distancing themselves from failure.

The cult of personality, the cult of celebrity that this White House has attempted to mine is being overwhelmed by the sting of reality. People’s homes having no value. People’s jobs are paying nothing. People are not able to get jobs. No economic growth. Moratoriums on drilling for oil. Roadblocks on pipelines that would bring oil, which would cheapen energy prices. Attacks on existing, conventional energy sources.

The American people want no part of it.

The American people don’t hate fossil fuels.

Barack Obama might, but the American people don’t, and he has not been able to convince them to. The American people are not going to settle for 8.1% unemployment. The American people aren’t going to settle for 7% unemployment. Vast majorities of the American people understand the greatness of this country. Vast majorities of the American people understand (and listen to me carefully here) that when this nation is on the right track, there’s none better.

When this nation is on the right track, there’s no end to opportunity.

When this nation is on the right track, there’s no end to prosperity.

Our economic and educational opportunity is better than anywhere in the world. But this country isn’t on track, and the American people know it, and they want it back on track. They don’t want this new direction. They don’t want this fundamental transformation of America. They don’t want a silly, impossible socialist utopia. They want reality. They want an acknowledgement of the greatness of this country, not somebody who’s embarrassed of it, or who doesn’t like it, or thinks it’s immoral or unjust.

Read the full article here.

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The New Reactionaries

By Victor Davis Hanson | April 29, 2012 | PJ Media

Our New Regressivism

About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naïve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly an ideological rather than a political identification, and had included some early twentieth-century Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.

But twenty-first century progressivism is not aimed at political reform. There is no new effort at racial unity. There is not much realization that we are in a globalized, rapidly changing, high-tech economy or that race and gender are not as they were fifty years ago. Instead, progressivism has become a reactionary return to the 1960s—or even well before. The new regressivism seeks to resurrect the machine ethos of Mayor Daley, the glory green days of the Whole Earth Catalog, the union era of George Meany, Jimmy Hoffa, and Walter Reuther, the racial polarization of the old Black Panther Party and the old Al Sharpton, and a Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, or Peter Jennings reading to us each evening three slightly different versions of the Truth.

The New Old Chicago

Barack Obama is trying to turn back the way of politics to the era of the pre-reform Chicago machine. He was the first presidential candidate to renounce campaign-financing funds since the law was enacted. He opposes any effort to clamp down on voting fraud. Even his compliant media worries that the president’s current jetting from one campaign stop to another in the key swing states is a poorly disguised way to politick on the federal government’s dime. Bundlers are, as was the ancient custom, given plum honorific posts abroad. Obama has held twice as many fundraisers as the much reviled George Bush had at a similar point in his administration. Obama supporters now target large Romney givers and post their names with negative bios on websites, as if we are back to Nixon’s enemies of the people. Websites sprout up that go after administration critics in Agnew style, but without the latter’s self-caricature. The 2008 criticism about ending the revolving door, lobbyists, and pay-for-play renting out of the Lincoln bedroom was, well…just examine the career of a Peter Orszag. An embarrassed media keeps silent about the new reactionary ethics, apparently on the premise that not to would endanger four more years of the “progressive” agenda. On matters of presidential style, we are likewise retro, as Obama sets records for playing golf, and in Marie Antoinette style the First Family bounces between Vail, Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard, Vegas, and Costa del Sol, often in separate jets, as if we, the people, receive vicarious joy from catching glimpses of the Obama versions of Camelot. We have Kennedy wannabes without their own Kennedy money.

Earth Day Forever

On matters of energy, Obama has regressed to the Earth Day mindset of the 1970s, when we were reaching “peak” oil, and untried wind and solar were soon to be the new-age remedy for soon-to-be-exhausted fossil fuels. Add up the anti-empirical quotes from Obama himself, Energy Secretary Chu, and Interior Secretary Salazar (inflate your tires, “tune up” your car, look to U.S. algae reserves, let energy prices “skyrocket,” hope gas rises to European levels, don’t open federal lands even if gas reaches $10 a gallon, etc.) and, in reactionary fashion, we are time-machined back to the campus quad of the 1970s. In this  la la world of Van Jones, evil oil companies supposedly connived to stifle green energy and hook us on fossil fuels, inferior energies that have nothing to recommend them. It is as if the revolutions in horizontal drilling, fracking, and discoveries of vast new reserves never occurred, as if Exxon and Chevron dodge taxes in a manner that Google and Amazon never would, as if efficient smaller gas engines, clean gas blends, and pollution devices have not made the American car both clean-burning and economical beyond our imagination forty years ago. The Obamians, frozen in amber, really believe oil is about to run out, “tuned up” internal combustion engines powering underinflated tires pollute as they did in the 1920s, and Teapot Dome U.S. oil companies need to be “crucified”—as regional EPA director and Obama appointee Al Armendariz, in fact, boasted. So we borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize money-losing solar and wind plants, while putting federal lands rich in oil and gas off-limits to companies eager to pay royalties, hire thousands, and supply the U.S. with its own energy—and all for a regressive ideology. Few see that Solyndra really is the new Teapot Dome.

Read the full article here.

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EPA’s Plans for Implementing UN’s Agenda 21

By  Larry Greenley | May 3, 2012 | The New American

One of the most successful grassroots campaigns during the past year has been the Stop Agenda 21 movement both at the local level and state level. However, we haven’t heard as much about Agenda 21 implementation at the national level.

Of course, there were President Bill Clinton’s establishment of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development by executive order in 1993 and President Obama’s “Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance” executive order in 2009. And, many federal agencies have been incorporating sustainability into various aspects of their organizations. Still, virtually all Stop Agenda 21 grassroots activity has been focused on the local and state levels.

The establishment of Clinton’s President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD) started a pattern of denial by federal government agencies regarding any connection with the United Nations Agenda 21. Even though the PCSD was clearly established in 1993 in support of the UN’s Agenda 21 and its Sustainable Development proposals from the UN’s ’92 Earth Summit in Rio, the PCSD’s statements and documents never referred to the UN and Agenda 21.

We have evidence that federal officials were taking pains to make the PCSD appear to be completely separate from the UN’s Agenda 21 because J. Gary Lawrence, an advisor to the PCSD, said the following in 1998:

Participating in a UN advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated groups and individuals in our society…. This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking LA21 [Local Agenda 21]. So, we call our processes something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.

This helps explain why virtually all federal activities in pursuit of sustainability rarely make any reference to the UN or the UN’s Agenda 21, even though these federal activities are very much in sync with the UN’s Agenda 21.

Nonetheless, there have been very significant developments regarding sustainability at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) beginning with its 40th anniversary in late 2010. On November 30, 2010, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson stated: “Today I am formally requesting President Cicerone and the National Academies convene a committee of experts to provide to the U.S. EPA an operational framework for sustainability that applies across all of the agency’s programs, policies, and actions.”

Jackson added: “Today we have a new opportunity in front of us. We have an opportunity to focus on how environmentally protective and sustainable we can be. You see, it’s the difference between treating disease and pursuing wellness.”

The National Academies of Science (NAS) responded with a detailed study, Sustainability and the U.S. EPA (aka the “Green Book”), which cost the EPA $700,000, and which was published in August 2011. The NAS also produced a five-minute video (see video also below) about this project.

Here are some excerpts from the 286-page “Green Book”:

Read the full article here.

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How Did Dinosaurs Get Miles Under the Earth?

By Bob Unruh | April 25, 2012 | WND

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after spending nearly three decades writing on a wide range of issues for several Upper Midwest newspapers and the Associated Press. Sports, tornadoes, homicidal survivalists, and legislative battles all fell within his bailiwick. His scenic photography has been used commercially, and he sometimes plays in a church worship band.

Book deflates traditional theories about ‘fossil fuels’

The Bakken formation in North Dakota, Montana and Canada now is estimated to hold up to 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, only it’s available primarily when the price of oil is above a bargain rate – as the oil is located miles deep and drilling costs are substantial.

So a new book about oil, “The Great Oil Conspiracy: How the U.S. Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People” by New York Times bestselling author Jerome Corsi, asks how did the dinosaurs that died and became part of those “fossil fuels” get to be tens of thousands of feet under the surface?

That’s just one of the many questions addressed in the book that takes many traditional beliefs about oil – it’s finite, it’s made through the process of various life forms dying and decaying, and others – and explains that they are just wrong.

How do we know? From government documents.

Corsi explains that at the end of World War II, U.S. intelligence agents confiscated thousands of Nazi documents on what was known as the “Fischer-Tropsch Process” – a series of equations developed by German chemists unlocking the secrets of how oil is formed.

He reports when the Nazis took power, Germany had resolved to develop enough synthetic oil to wage war successfully, even without abundant national oil reserves.

After the war, while the Russians saw through the technical equations and realized that the process for making synthetic oil is the same process that nature uses to make oil deep inside the earth, U.S. scientists buried the documents and hid them from the public.

For decades, the confiscated German documents remained largely ignored in a United States where petro-geologists and petro-chemists were convinced that oil was a “fossil fuel” created by ancient decaying biological debris.

Not without reason, Corsi explains, since big U.S. oil companies had no financial interest in explaining to the American people that oil was a natural product made on a continual basis deep within the earth. If there were only so many fossils in geological time, there could only be so much oil. Big oil could then charge more for a finite, rapidly disappearing resource than for a natural, renewable and probably inexhaustible one, he writes.

Corsi took to the airwaves last night, on “Coast to Coast AM,” which airs on more than 560 stations in the U.S. and others in Canada, Mexico and Guam, to explain the evidence he has uncovered.

His interview has been posted on the show’s website.

The Bakken Formation, which was found in the 1980s and 1990s, initially was thought to have only a minor quantity of oil between layers of shale and sandstone.

“The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in 1995 that the Bakken Formation had only about 151 million barrels of recoverable oil,” Corsi reports. “Then, with advances in drilling technology, the U.S. Geological Survey reassessed the quantity. … A USGS assessment released in April 2008 concluded the Bakken Formation may have an estimated 3 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil.”

The issue, he said, is not that the National Archives in Washington contain documentation on the Nazi Fischer-Tropsch process for making synthetic oil from coal, as well as suggestions that oil is a renewing resource that could power the world far into coming generations, but that the U.S government has known about the information for years and has kept it concealed.

“The … ‘conspiracy’ at the heart of the book is not that the Nazis learned how to make synthetic fuel, but that the Fischer-Tropsch equations (that the Nazis developed to produce synthetic oil) unlocked the secret of abiotic oil and explain how the earth produces oil naturally, without organic material, at deep earth levels on a basis that is continuous, even today,” Corsi said.

“The Nazis understood that oil is a renewable resource, and the U.S. government and Big Oil hid that from the U.S. public – fostering on an uneducated U.S. population the idea that oil is fossil fuel that eventually will be gone — the ‘peak oil’ theory,” he said.

A series of recordings of Dr. Corsi’s interview with George Noory:

Read the full article here.

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Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, Without Cars or Houses? Is California Banning Suburbia? [Video]

California Declares War on Suburbia

Planners want to herd millions into densely packed urban corridors. It won’t save the planet but will make traffic even worse.

By Wendell Cox | April 9, 2012 | Wall Street Journal

It’s no secret that California’s regulatory and tax climate is driving business investment to other states. California’s high cost of living also is driving people away. Since 2000 more than 1.6 million people have fled, and my own research as well as that of others points to high housing prices as the principal factor.

The exodus is likely to accelerate. California has declared war on the most popular housing choice, the single family, detached home—all in the name of saving the planet.

Metropolitan area governments are adopting plans that would require most new housing to be built at 20 or more to the acre, which is at least five times the traditional quarter acre per house. State and regional planners also seek to radically restructure urban areas, forcing much of the new hyperdensity development into narrowly confined corridors.

Related Video

Transportation consultant Wendell Cox on why California pols want to force people into denser urban housing.

In San Francisco and San Jose, for example, the Association of Bay Area Governments has proposed that only 3% of new housing built by 2035 would be allowed on or beyond the “urban fringe”—where current housing ends and the countryside begins. Over two-thirds of the housing for the projected two million new residents in these metro areas would be multifamily—that is, apartments and condo complexes—and concentrated along major thoroughfares such as Telegraph Avenue in the East Bay and El Camino Real on the Peninsula.

For its part, the Southern California Association of Governments wants to require more than one-half of the new housing in Los Angeles County and five other Southern California counties to be concentrated in dense, so-called transit villages, with much of it at an even higher 30 or more units per acre.

To understand how dramatic a change this would be, consider that if the planners have their way, 68% of new housing in Southern California by 2035 would be condos and apartment complexes. This contrasts with Census Bureau data showing that single-family, detached homes represented more than 80% of the increase in the region’s housing stock between 2000 and 2010.

The campaign against suburbia is the result of laws passed in 2006 (the Global Warming Solutions Act) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in 2008 (the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act) on urban planning. The latter law, as the Los Angeles Times aptly characterized it, was intended to “control suburban sprawl, build homes closer to downtown and reduce commuter driving, thus decreasing climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.” In short, to discourage automobile use.

If the planners have their way, the state’s famously unaffordable housing could become even more unaffordable.

Read the full article here.

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Obama as Farce

By William L. Gensert | April 11, 2012 | American Thinker

Karl Marx said history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”  Barack Obama has reversed that.  His first term was certainly farce; his second will be tragedy.

Obama has Forrest Gumped his way through his presidency, except without the success, charm, and endearing sweetness of the original.  He has given America three and a half years of farce, even if no one is laughing.

He is an adumbrated president, desperate about his re-election prospects.  Sold as a bipartisan moderate, a post-racial healer, a transformative leader — we were told he would not just solve our problems, but heal the earth and save humanity.

The president has governed as a hyper-partisan, race-baiting, barely present tyrant with absolutely no leadership skills and little regard for the constitution.  His daily ululations paint anyone who dares to disagree as evil and un-American.  People are either pro-Barack or an enemy of the nation — there is no in-between.

It is the intangible aspects of the presidency where Barack Obama is most adept: entertaining, vacationing, and golf.  The parties are legendary and extravagant.  Bringing the NBA to the White House, or the NFL or Motown or Broadway — when he feels like it, the party comes to him.  The vacations are even more extravagant, and the golf…everyone knows about the golf.  He may not be good, but at least he puts in the time.

America has to pay for it all, but this is an opportunity to see the true Barack Obama, surrounded by minions and sycophants constantly telling him how great he is.  Is it any surprise he wants four more years of this?

Obama hagiographer Davis Guggenheim has said, “I mean, the negative for me was there were too many accomplishments.”  Barack wholeheartedly agrees; after all didn’t he recently say, “My entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism”?

Popeil’s Pocket President, brought to you by Ronco, or Rahm Emanuel — one of those.  At least the Pocket Fisherman worked.  Barack doesn’t work; it’s all parties, vacations, and golf — in between, he practices verbal assassination of anyone who disagrees.  Chin up, he turns away and looks off in the distance, à la Mussolini, as the applause and adulation reverberate from the rafters.

“No, please,” he pleads, “I do this for you.”

In less than four years, he has reduced America to the laughingstock of the world.  We are threatened by Iran with nuclear Armageddon, while he lines up a putt and tells us what his imaginary son would look like.

He talks of “flexibility,” while he plots both unilateral disarmament and the scrapping of missile defense.  With no deterrent and no defensive capability, the nation will be defenseless and impotent.

Read the full article here.

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Here are some real ‘Reagan Rules’ for Obama

By James Pethokoukis | April 11, 2012 | The American

Apparently President Obama is joking that he’s willing to change the name of the Buffett Rule to the Reagan Rule if that’s what it takes to get it through Congress.  But there are already so many Reagan rules — and Obama is following none of them. Here are few Reagan Rules the president would be wise to follow:

1. Blame government, not business.

Reagan: “The people have not created this disaster in our economy; the federal government has. It has overspent, overestimated, and over regulated. It has failed to deliver services within the revenues it should be allowed to raise from taxes … At the same time, the federal government has cynically told us that high taxes on business will in some way “solve” the problem and allow the average taxpayer to pay less. Well, business is not a taxpayer, it is a tax collector. Business has to pass its tax burden on to the customer as part of the cost of doing business. You and I pay the taxes imposed on business every time we go to the store. Only people pay taxes and it is political demagoguery or economic illiteracy to try and tell us otherwise.”

2. Cut taxes and make the safety net more efficient.

Reagan: “The key to restoring the health of the economy lies in cutting taxes. At the same time, we need to get the waste out of federal spending. This does not mean sacrificing essential services, nor do we need to destroy the system of benefits which flow to the poor, the elderly, the sick and the handicapped. We have long since committed ourselves, as a people, to help those among us who cannot take care of themselves. But the federal government has proven to be the costliest and most inefficient provider of such help we could possibly have.”

3. Get government under control.

Reagan: “We must put an end to the arrogance of a federal establishment which accepts no blame for our condition, cannot be relied upon to give us a fair estimate of our situation and utterly refuses to live within its means. I will not accept the supposed “wisdom” which has it that the federal bureaucracy has become so powerful that it can no longer be changed or controlled by any administration. As President I would use every power at my command to make the federal establishment respond to the will and the collective wishes of the people. We must force the entire federal bureaucracy to live in the real world of reduced spending, streamlined functions and accountability to the people it serves. ”

4. Obey the U.S. Constitution.

Reagan: “The 10th article of the Bill of Rights is explicit in pointing out that the federal government should do only those things specifically called for in the Constitution. All others shall remain with the states or the people. We haven’t been observing that 10th article of late. The federal government has taken on functions it was never intended to perform and which it does not perform well. There should be a planned, orderly transfer of such functions to states and communities and a transfer with them of the sources of taxation to pay for them.”

5. Don’t forget to cut taxes.

Reagan: “By reducing federal tax rates where they discourage individual initiative—especially personal income tax rates—we can restore incentives, invite greater economic growth and at the same time help give us better government instead of bigger government. … In short, a punitive tax system must be replaced by one that restores incentive for the worker and for industry; a system that rewards initiative and effort and encourages thrift.”

6. Don’t hate fossil fuels. 

Reagan: Our country was built on cheap energy. Today, energy is not cheap and we face the prospect that some forms of energy may soon not be available at all. …  We need more energy and that means diversifying our sources of supply away from the OPEC countries. Yes, it means more efficient automobiles. But it also means more exploration and development of oil and natural gas here in our own country. The only way to free ourselves from the monopoly pricing power of OPEC is to be less dependent on outside sources of fuel.

The answer obvious to anyone except those in the administration, it seems, is more domestic production of oil and gas. We must also have wider use of nuclear power within strict safety rules, of course. There must be more spending by the energy industries on research and development of substitutes for fossil fuels.

In years to come solar energy may provide much of the answer but for the next two or three decades we must do such things as master the chemistry of coal. Putting the market system to work for these objectives is an essential first step for their achievement. Additional multi-billion dollar federal bureaus and programs are not the answer.

Read the full article here.

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