Archive for January, 2007
by Jim Kouri, CPP
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on the most massive military buildups in history. Part of President Reagan's strategy for winning was to entice the Soviets into a competition it could never even hope to win. A communist economy by its very nature is ill-equipped to compete with a free-market, capitalist system whether it's foreign trade or weapons technology.
And so, slowly the Soviet economy became a basket case due to the communists' desire to exceed America in an enormously expensive arms race.
After the Cold War, with the Soviet threat gone and with Democrat President Bill Clinton in the White House, terms such as "the peace dividend" became commonplace within the Washington Beltway and in the mainstream news media. No longer was the political establishment interested in defense, and the new agenda for the US was domestic.
However, slowly and methodically Russia's steel-eyed leader Vladamir Putin began to rebuild and expand his nation's arsenal and its fighting forces. This new phase in Russia's military buildup has created fear in some quarters in the US that a new arms race exists. Recently the Russians deployed a nuclear ballistic system that their generals made clear could render US anti-missile defense systems ineffective, according to reports in the European news media.
by Thomas E. Brewton
With mounting stridency, news media demand to know why President Bush fails to bow to public opinion expressed in the recent Congressional elections and pull our troops out of Iraq.
The underlying assumption is that public opinion, expressed in elections or opinion polls, in all cases represents truth and wisdom. As I wrote in The Limitations of Public Opinion, such is seldom the case when complex policy matters are the subject of those opinions.
The stock market, for example, gives us a daily, broad spectrum opinion poll reflecting the outlook for business. Obviously, however, very few people have the knowledge and resources to become rich and to keep their wealth over time simply through knowing what composite market opinion is at any given time.
by Christopher Adamo
Prominent grassroots conservatives were dismayed this week to learn of a 1994 letter written by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney when running for the U.S. Senate, in which he voiced his support of "gay rights," to the point of claiming to be a stronger ally than Ted Kennedy. His stance on abortion was little better, assuring pro-aborts that he would do nothing to infringe on current Massachusetts law.
While not as thoroughly indicting as John McCain’s tirades against the Christian right back in 2000, this information represents a clear disconnect with the constituency Romney now seeks to court.
Ever since the mid-term elections, he has sounded like a citadel of traditional values. But as the details of his past are revealed, conservatives around the nation find it increasingly difficult to join the Romney camp. In truth, none of this is really new. Certainly those conservatives living in Massachusetts, few in number though they may be, are not surprised.
By Alan Caruba
Lyndon Johnson would tell anyone who would listen that he did not know how to get out of Vietnam. The result is a memorial wall in Washington, D.C. with the names of some 50,000 or more servicemen and women who died in a war this nation unequivocally lost. Four Presidents wrestled with the questions of whether to get into that civil war and then how to get out.
In the end, having failed to leave years earlier, our departure was ignominious. In failing to leave for political reasons, Richard Nixon compounded that ignominy in blood.
I wonder how many more of our soldiers will die in Iraq while President George W. Bush tries to find a way to leave as events in that nation and the Middle East conspire against him. There is no good way. There is only leaving.
By “leaving” I mean withdrawing our troops to a level that will vastly reduce the day-by-day loss to improvised explosive devices, snipers, and suicide bombers. That’s not the way our military is constituted to fight a war. That’s an internal guerrilla action intended to determine control of Iraq while ridding it of the American military presence. It is the needless sacrifice of young men and women in uniform for the notion that America cannot recover from leaving.
by Sher Zieve
A new virus is spreading throughout the US Senate and it appears that an increasing number of our lawmakers have been infected. The last notable germ to contaminate the Senate was this year’s Pro-Illegal-Alien bug that will continue to allow illegal immigrants to enter the US and destroy any continued hope for US sovereignty. However, this new highly-contagious and virulent disease may prove to be terminal—for both the United States of America and its people.
Some of the observable symptoms of this latest malady include:
- US Senators traveling to the Middle East, while rushing to formulate their own—individual—US foreign policies
- US Senators demanding that President Bush meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad to "help" with Lebanon and Iraq—even though Assad has been part and parcel to terrorist activities in the region
- US Senators demands that the Bush Administration open up "talks" with Iran regarding "assistance" in the ‘problems in the Middle East’—despite the fact that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been the largest supplier of terrorists in Iraq, has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and is a weapons’ supplier to both Palestinian Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon
- Bent over US Senators looking under rocks, in order to find the elusive and mythical "appeasement Unicorn"—despite the fact that terrorists only respond positively to strength
- Senators heard almost incoherently mumbling, while gnashing their teeth: "We have to give up. We have to surrender…
by Thomas E. Brewton
As noted frequently in past postings, the unavoidable tendency of socialism is concentration of political power in the hands of a ruling elite who decide for the masses what their living and working conditions are to be. This is called state-planning.
In ways that would have been inconceivable as recently as the 1920s, our everyday lives are circumscribed by unelected bureaucrats in Washington who make regulations, enforce them, and adjudicate them, too often without our access to the normal safeguards of the common law. Those bureaucrats think of the IRS, for example, issue rulings that most Federal courts will not contest, on the grounds that they lack the supposed expertise of the tens of thousands of Federal regulatory bureaus.
by Carey Roberts
On November 7 American voters took the GOP to the woodshed and gave them a licking they won’t forget for a good long time.
Congressman Mike Pence concluded solemnly, "I believe we did not just lose our Majority, we lost our way. I believe this happened to us because somewhere along the way we lost our willingness to fight for limited government, fiscal discipline, traditional values and reform."
So how did the GOP fall off the wagon?
Six years ago the GOP brain-trust decided to get serious about closing the gender gap. At the 2000 Republican National Convention someone seized on George Bush’s middle initial, and soon everyone was buzzing that "W is for Women."
After Bush’s photo-finish victory over Al Gore, the GOP pollsters poured over the exit results. True enough, a strong showing from the men had tipped the race in Bush’s favor. But despite his "W is for Women" mantra, Bush had lost the female vote by 11 points.
Clearly a catchy slogan wasn’t going to do the trick. So word was put out to recruit more females to prominent party roles and pay more attention to women’s issues.
by Erik Rush
Recently someone asked me what sort of people "qualified" as "white trash" given what passes for conventional wisdom in America. My response included such things as lower-income, undereducated whites with a preference for colloquial speech and occasionally, a proclivity toward racking up misdemeanor offenses. A healthy dose of low self-esteem generally helps, too. Indeed, as may seem obvious, it's much more about attitude and mindset than ethnic or genotypic qualities.
Inamsuch as the above gives rise to subcultural niches, I don't have any problem admitting that I occasionally use the "n-word." That we've come to a point where I have to be concerned that using the word in a column might be edited down to "the n-word" is pretty absurd, in my view. I also don't have any problem admitting that I occasionally use the w, g, d, s, h and k-words (have fun figuring those out) when I find myself frustrated with the behavior of individuals who insist upon adhering to societally counter-productive, self-destructive and often offensive, irksome stereotypes.
Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas wrote about the proposed NAFTA Superhighway in one of his weekly columns. Unfortunately, none of the mainstream liberal media made no mention of this illegal agreement made between Mexico, Canada and the united States. The following article is from Rep Ron Paul's weekly column and it shows how dastardly some of the components of our government are working to destroy our country by undermining our sovereignty and our constitution.
By now many Texans have heard about the proposed “NAFTA Superhighway,” which is also referred to as the trans-Texas corridor. What you may not know is the extent to which plans for such a superhighway are moving forward without congressional oversight or media attention.
This superhighway would connect Mexico, the United States, and Canada, cutting a wide swath through the middle of Texas and up through Kansas City. Offshoots would connect the main artery to the west coast, Florida, and northeast. Proponents envision a ten-lane colossus the width of several football fields, with freight and rail lines, fiber-optic cable lines, and oil and natural gas pipelines running alongside.
By Alan Caruba
It is not for nothing that Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Republic, is a former member of the KGB. From its earliest days, Soviet Russia maintained a vast army of spies around the world and penetrating the United States remained high on its list of priorities.
In 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Robert Hanssen, a FBI special agent who was a Russian spy, judged to be one of the most damaging moles in U.S. history. As Bill Gertz, a Washington Times reporter, notes in his latest book, “Enemies: How America’s Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets—and How We Let It Happen”, “Today, nearly 140 nations and some 35 known and suspected terrorist groups target the United States through espionage, according to intelligence officials.”
“Over the past several decades, foreign agents have penetrated every U.S. national security agency except the Coast Guard. That includes the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, the State Department, and the Energy Department.”