Is somebody watching over you today? Is there someone somewhere that is willing to put your well-being ahead of theirs? Those are powerful questions that we seldom ponder here in America. Why? The answer is that safety, security and most importantly freedom, the delicacies sought in so many places in the world, are things we in America nonchalantly pile upon our plates daily like hungry diners at an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. Say what you will, but the reality is that even in the worst of times we really have it good. However, America, the magnet for so many people of the world, has been maintained and has flourished by the blood of the American soldier. The soldier’s willingness to fight and if need be, die on foreign soils against vicious enemies for the nation’s survival is often underestimated.

            The war on terror brought a realization to most Americans through the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that we had to take a stand against radical Islamic extremism. In one of President George W. Bush’s best moments as the leader of the free world, Americans took an overdue offensive stance against terrorism. American fighting forces, along with others across the world, have been fighting a brave battle against the scourge of Islamic terrorism. Unfortunately, the battle to defeat terrorism has been as much a battle within as on the outside. In a political environment not seen since Vietnam, the American soldier has been placed in the very untenable situation of being charged with finding victory in the battle zone, without being able to incorporate the normal tools by which victory is attained. Political correctness on the battlefield handed down by those in government without the belly for war or simply American victory, has threatened the lives of American soldiers in more ways than one.

To say that President Obama’s speech, marking the retirement of our last combat units from Iraq, was uninspiring… well, it was uninspiring. As usual, he’s taking credit for something that was planned back in the Bush administration. He did acknowledge former President Bush in an offhand sort of way, making it almost an insult.

We know Obama doesn’t do ad lib, so it makes you wonder about some of his writers. It’s like they are as far out of touch with the pulse of America as Obama is, maybe more so. The speech was short for Obama, but then he hasn’t much to say these days… just the same updated re-written garbage that he’s been spieling for two years.

The speech returned to his economy, and make no mistake about it, it is his economy… George Bush retired two years ago, though you wouldn’t know it to listen to some of the liberal backwash out there. There’s no amount of spin that can disguise the fact that George Bush left us with a budget deficit of 400 billion dollars plus, which was bad enough in the opinion of most conservatives.

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The United States and China discussed human rights at a round of high-level talks.  One might be surprised that the meeting did not so much focus on the egregious atrocities that have gone on under this Communist tyranny from the time of its founding to this very day.  Rather, Obama administration officials allowed America to be berated on issues such as homelessness and the new Arizona immigration law.

Before America as a nation takes this criticism seriously, perhaps we should consider what the law entails and how this compares with what goes on in Red China.

The Arizona law will permit police to ascertain an individual's identity and thus legality after initial contact.  Essentially, this isn’t anything that isn’t already authorized by law and is perhaps an even better guarantor of individual liberty and dignity than what is already permitted.

In a number of decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that police could compel an individual to identify themselves even when it had not been established that the law had even been violated or that there was probable cause indicating such.  Interestingly, there were no riotous mobs in the streets when it was thought these kinds of identity checks were only going to be aimed at actual Americans.

Even if scores of those with no legal standing in the United States are removed from the streets of Arizona as a result of the new law, they will still fair considerably better than those taken into custody in dictatorships.  In Iran, several American coed tourists straying over the Islamic Republic’s border with Iraq were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. 

And unlike illegals here, those there are not fawned over with lavish government handouts with their bureaucratic benefactors hoping the outsiders will recast the entire society in a foreign image.

It could be properly argued that the American students deserved some kind of punishment for violating another country’s sovereign borders.  What likely cannot be argued against is that the accommodations they languished in made Camp Gitmo look like a swanky New York City hotel.  Guards there are not going out of their way to provide American delicacies or to treat our holy books and founding documents with a nauseating degree of deference.

In China, one house church pastor sentenced to prison was allowed to languish and suffer without access to his diabetic medicine.  And it could be argued that he can be considered one of the lucky ones.  It has been claimed that organs are regularly harvested from dissident Tibetans and Christians.

If Red China had the illegal alien problem plaguing the United States, do you honestly believe authorities there would do little than look over the papers of these transnational vagrants, whisper sweet nothings in their ears, and release them on their recognizance which many have very little of to begin with given their connections to the drug trade, human smuggling, and assorted gangs.  And given the propensity of a certain atrocity to occur throughout Chinese history (be it during the Great Cultural Revolution or in rumors a few years back regarding what was being done to fetuses), if a wife in China told her husband that they would be having a little Mexican later that evening that wouldn't mean he should expect to have a taco or burrito for dinner.

Many infringements upon human rights stem from an improper understanding of the relationship between social institutions such as government and the individual.  In America, the extremes of these have been minimized in part due to the assumption that the individual possesses worth of his own created in the image of God.  The individual is not owned by the state.

As an officially atheistic socialist country, the Chinese Communist Party and state see themselves as the highest authority with these determining that it is not so much the individual that counts but rather the group as a whole.  After all, if we are simply nothing more than animated primordial ooze as the Darwinian insists and upon which Marxist-Leninism rests, it is kind of hard to get worked up over one person when there are over a billion more walking around easily capable of taking the place of a defective cog in the machine of state.

Since in the Communist system you are less an individual, the more the system provides of those things deemed to be necessities by the overseers (under whom fewer things end up being defined as necessities than in a free market economy) in such command societies such commodities extended only so that the goals mapped out for you by the COMMUNITY might be achieved.  In a constitutional republican system, it is believed that the individual is best suited to determine for themselves which needs and desires should take priority for oneself and one's family.  Granted, the system is not perfect, but it is far preferable and more in line with what God intended for humanity.

Thus, that is no doubt why China would rank homelessness as a human rights violation while not batting an eye at putting a bullet in the back of the head of a House Church pastor so that his kidneys might remain undamaged for organ harvesting.  In America, those who love liberty must first inquire as to why the individual is homeless before formulating an appropriate policy response.

Though it is not politically correct to mention it these days and even if they represent only a fraction of those without a domicile, frankly there are those that simply refuse to do that which is necessary to maintain a residence or they engage in behaviors that cause their homes to be lost.  Of those that went into vapors when Glenn Beck critiqued the subject, tell me where is the social justice to take from those working and scrimping in order to hoe their own path to give it to those living irresponsibly and demanding a standard of living far above a subsistence level with a few basic comforts that they are not willing to exert the labor necessary to acquire?

One might feel sorry for the children of such deadbeats and somehow provide enough for the children to get by without hardly a single bread crumb going to such pathetic excuses for parents.  It is preferable that such outreach come from the private sector free to point out the deficiencies of individual character and the blunt steps necessary to correct the situation.  Often in these times where we must constantly walk around on eggshells for fear of offending some self-enlightened leftist do-gooder with a law degree or a bullhorn and definitely too much time on their hands, government is unable to articulate those steps necessary for complete restoration.

And while we are at it, perhaps something needs to be said about and to these women that fall for scumbag men.  If you find the boozing and carousing attractive when you are young only to have it morph into not knowing how you are going to feed the five kids because he's blowing the milk money on beer and backhanded you across the face because you dared ask where he was the night before, other than for tossing his rear in jail, don't expect much pity and especially don't expect some behaved guy you wouldn't give the time of day to 15 years ago to take you in as if he has some obligation to provide for another man's progeny.

One of contemporary liberalism's most glaring intellectual deficiencies is that it assumes that the remainder of the world, when you come down to it, lives no differently than the people of the United States.  Before we pull out the sackcloth and ashes to belittle ourselves embarrassingly on the world stage, let’s at least make sure we don’t waste the effort on autocrats, thieves, cutthroats, and homicidal mass murderers.

by Frederick Meekins

Another incumbent, this time a Republican, has fallen by the wayside. Lisa Murkowski becomes the the seventh incumbent to fall to the wrath of the voters this year.

Joe Miller and Lisa Murkowski

Murkowski was defeated by conservative lawyer Joe Miller of Fairbanks for the Republican primary. Miller came out of nowhere, backed by the Tea-Party groups and aided as well by an endorsement from Sarah Palin.

I’m thinking that even the thickest of the Democrat faithful must be aware of the upcoming shellacking that the DeMarxist government of Barack Hussein Obama is going to take in November… only 62 days away now.

We as Conservatives must now rededicate ourselves to the final drive to the November 2 elections. Mark Levin calls the upcoming elections “the most important of our country’s history”, and I have to agree. Never have I seen and felt so much intensity on the run up to an election.  read more »

In anticipation of President Barack Obama’s primetime address to the nation last night on the Iraq War, columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “Now that the Iraq War is over… only one thing is clear about the outcome: We didn’t win.”

Actually, I can think of about 12 things that are clearer about the outcome of the Iraq War than the conclusion that we didn’t win: (1) Obama was wrong about the surge, (2) Vice President Joe Biden was wrong about the surge, (3) President George W. Bush was right to ignore Congressional Democrats and the Iraq Study Group and order the surge in 2007, (4) insurgent violence dropped precipitously after the surge was implemented, (5) if Democrats had had their way on the surge in Iraq, per Harry Reid’s declaration that “this war is lost,” it would have been lost, (6) Biden was wrong about dividing Iraq into ethnic partitions, (7) Biden is a loon for claiming that the Iraq War could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration, (8) Iraq is now the fourth-most politically free Middle Eastern country, after democracy Israel, republic Lebanon, and constitutional monarchy Morocco, (9) General David Petraeus’ Iraq surge set the model for beating back insurgents and winning in Afghanistan, (10) despite liberals’ bleating about its expense, eight years of the Iraq War—including training and preparation for the March 2003 invasion—now turn out to have cost less ($709 billion) than Obama’s useless trillion-dollar stimulus bill, (11) Bush’s popularity didn’t sink to the level that Obama’s is at now until late 2005, two-and-a-half years into the Iraq War and well into Bush’s second term, and (12) Obama’s address last night was full of bromides, revisionist history, and platitudinous prescriptions for the future that have little relation to what will actually need to be done in the War on Terror according to a fair evaluation of conditions on the ground.  read more »

In the five day news cycle of politics, that’s the blink of an eye. Liberals got a good look at the real America when Glenn Beck’s call to God and country caused a mere 600,000 or so of you to pay your own way to travel to Washington DC.

I wrote in February 2009 that there was a ‘different’ feel out here… people were visibly, and more importantly audibly, upset at Barack Hussein Obama’s abrupt shift to the left. I said, that in this day and age of instant communication, he wouldn’t be able to hide who he really is for long.

I was gratified to be right, as layer after layer of spin, cover and distortion were stripped from Obama’s public persona, and people were able to see beyond the glitz and canned goodies into the frightening, gray world of deprivation and poverty that would be the inevitable result of the triumph of the left.

The people came together, first in town hall meetings and then at the Tea Parties which sprung up all around the country like mushrooms after a spring rain. Their message was remarkably consistent, though they had no apparent leadership on anything other than a local volunteer level.

Conservative values, the defeat of the Obama agenda and the reversal of health care, smaller government, tax cuts and preservation of the Republic are consistent messages throughout.
We The People… we’re coming to take our country back. Then we’re going to be asking some very pointed questions.  read more »

It’s not his Waterloo… that comes later… it’s more like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. It’s like Obama is absolutely overwhelmed with the job of the presidency. Nothing in his background, or training, had prepared him for the reality of the biggest job in the world.

I think Obama was fascinated by the idea of being president. I don’t think he, or the cabal of leftists he has gathered around him, have a clue as to how to run anything, much less this country. The Marxists have managed to unite this country as perhaps nothing else could have.

Obama has had a tin ear from the outset. He has proven to be so ideologically driven that not even the impending Conservative tsunami looming in November will sway him from his vision of fundamentally changing American life and values. This is not a Bill Clinton, with someone like Dick Morris to convince him to move to the center in this center-right country.

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And a thirsty one it is indeed, as they all are. The United States has sold Israel two billion dollars worth of military fuel stocks. That’s about 444 million gallons of JP-8, unleaded and diesel fuel.

Israel’s air force would use prodigious quantities of fuel in an all-out air assault against her enemies that could last for days. The tanks and mobile artillery won’t be slow consuming huge amounts of fuel either. This, right in the face of Barack Obama’s biggest push to neuter Israel, by promising a ‘nuclear shield’ to protect her from her enemies… if she promises not to attack Iran.
Note to our Israeli friends: Barack Hussein’s promises are as empty as his economic policies.

It’s remarkable that the administration that has done everything in its power to prevent the Israelis from defending themselves against the real and present danger that is fundamentalist Iran, is the same one that is supplying the one strategic assurance Israel needed to prosecute a sustained military effort.

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After the excitement of the primaries at the start of the week, it was pretty much back to business-as-usual. The same old rhetoric, blame-shifting and outright lies from the doomed Democrats.

Joe Biden

The howler of the week was courtesy of none other than Joe Biden, gaffe-master extraordinaire. Stating that the economy recovery was slower than he would like, he insisted that we are headed in the right direction. So was the Titanic, Joe. It doesn’t take a master cartographer to read the economy map. If you take the Cartesian coordinates of unemployment, private sector expansion and market confidence, you’ll probably find yourself somewhere in the Bermuda triangle of failed stimuli.

I’ll give Joe one thing… his timing was impeccable, the mark of a gifted comedian. A few days after his remarks, a GDP figure of 1.6% was announced which, in any known universe except the Democrats’, is hardly a move in the right direction.

On Wednesday, it was revealed that former GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman had announced to family and associates that he was gay. While his reluctance (or should I say hesitancy?) to ‘come out’ earlier was perhaps due to possible reactions of Republican colleagues, it was the liberals who supplied some vicious character attacks. While I do not agree with Mr Mehlman’s now open support of gay marriage (not to be confused with civil partnerships, the legal implications of which I have no objection), I applaud his courage and his remarks on the dangers that Islam poses to minority groups.  read more »

I’ve figured it out… we’ve got this all wrong. There have been 3.5 million new and saved jobs since Obama took office. We know ’cause they told us so.

The problem is, it’s not the truth. It’s not even close to the truth. The truth is that the American people aren’t buying the story lines any more. The spin scarcely has time to get started before we tear it apart and subject it to the ‘new media review’. By the time we unravel it, there’s not much spin.

I guess we’re all sort of stunned out here, watching this administration self destruct. It’s not just that Barack Obama and that pack of amateurs he has in his government are wrong in their approach to governing and economic policy for this country. It’s that they have been, and are, wrong about every single thing they’ve done since taking office.

With the November 2 elections right around the corner, the desperation in some corners of the Democrat establishment is palpable. With the clock running out, so are the options for incumbent Democrats, some of whom have already fallen by the wayside in primaries across the nation… with many more to come.  read more »