Pace-Makers

by J. Christoph Amberger

My way home from the office passes a half-dozen local colleges, most of them situated on or slightly off Charles Street, one of the main north-south axes of Baltimore.

If the weather is fair -- a bit of sun and not too windy -- I often pass groups of “peaceful demonstrators.” You know the type: old fogeys who last changed their hairstyle in 1970, with long Karl Marx beards and fluttering white manes. (And that’s just the women!) There are middle-aged women with buzzcuts, Birkenstocks and batik moomoos. And sometimes, you even see the occasional youngish teaching assistant, recognizable by his matted hair and his soiled leg-wear.

They all hold up signs: “War is Not the Answer.” “Peace Now!” Even “Pace.” Because, after all, they’re not just peaceful but multicultural. (I have to disappoint you, though. The manufacturers of the latter signs are not called Pace-makers.)

On the anniversary of 9/11, the fair-weather pacifists are typically reinforced by gaggles of church ladies and soccer moms. (You can tell because the side streets are parked shut with SUVs that have Kerry stickers on the rear window.) I remember one in particular, who had her preschooler hold up a sign that said, “My Mom says ‘Don’t Hit!’”

Where were you when we needed you, I thought as I turned up my P.R. Kantate CD. If only Mohammad Atta had seen that sign in 2001, he’d still be sitting at home, drinking Diet Coke and watching Judge Judy reruns, converted to blissful peace and harmony by the earth-tone universal wisdom of a liberal suburban mother.

Pacifism is not evenly spread throughout the city, though. There are certain hotspots, one of which is located near Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Campus. As far as tuition rates go, that’s as high as it gets in Baltimore.

But evidently, public peacefulness may not be directly related to the size of the parental tuition check. A study commissioned by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and designed and conducted by pollsters at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy ranked JHU dead last out of 50 U.S. colleges in a survey testing the knowledge of American history, economics, political philosophy and U.S. foreign relations.

Nearly half of Hopkins seniors couldn’t answer the majority of the survey’s multiple-choice questions correctly.

No wonder, I thought. They didn’t ask them the right questions: Because war, apparently, was not the answer.

McCain & Co. Undermine War On Terror

From the Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF.org)

A cabal of RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) is trying to STOP, the interrogation and terrorist tracking measures that have thwarted numerous attacks on U.S. soil in the last five years!

You read that right!

RINO Senators, led by John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner, believe that captured terror suspects should be treated with kid gloves and afforded some of the same rights we enjoy as American citizens.

Here is the reality: The fact that Americans haven't been attacked since 9-11 is not a mistake...

The terrorists haven't lost their desire to kill thousands, if not millions of Americans, if they get the chance. Indeed, they continue to plan massive attacks on major U.S. cities designed to kill as many Americans as possible and to cripple the U.S. economy.

U.S. Intelligence, together with that of our allies, has thwarted numerous plots using the same interrogation and surveillance techniques that McCain, Graham, Warner and others are NOW DEMANDING WE HALT.

These include plots targeting New York City's transit system and passenger airliners flying to the U.S. from London.

Despite what these RINO Senators and other liberal naysayers want you to believe, the U.S. does not perform torture during its interrogations.

Following the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, President Bush made a simple request...

He asked Congress to give him a bill that would provide the CIA and other agencies with the power to properly interrogate terrorists, try these terrorists before military tribunals, and withhold evidence from terrorists that might compromise the security of the United States.

But McCain, Graham and Warner had other ideas!

And now that these RINOs have sided with other Senate liberals -- our ability to thwart future terrorist attacks and win the War on Terror could be significantly crippled!

That's not just unacceptable -- IT'S DISGUSTING!

We're not going to take this lying down and we know that you won't either!

These renegade Senators need to see the light and feel the heat RIGHT NOW if we are to avoid the senseless loss of American lives!

And there's not a second to lose!

Use the hyperlink below to send your URGENT Blast Fax messages to President George W. Bush and EACH AND EVERY Republican Member of the House and Senate leadership. Demand that they pass the President's tough bill -- the protocol that for five years has kept America safe from Islamic terrorism.

And while they're at it, tell them to order McCain, Graham and Warner to stop jeopardizing the safety of Americans at home and the lives of our troops in the Middle East.
http://www.cfiflistmanager.org/mccainfour.html
AOL Members Use This Hyperlink

Al-Qaida warning: Muslims leave U.S.

From World Net Daily:

Sunday 17 September 2006
The new al-Qaida field commander in Afghanistan is calling for Muslims to leave the U.S. – particularly Washington and New York – in anticipation of a major terror attack to rival Sept. 11, according to an interview by a Pakistani journalist.

Abu Dawood told Hamid Mir, a reporter who has covered al-Qaida and met with Osama bin Laden, the attack is being coordinated by Adnan el-Shukrijumah and suggests it may involve some form of weapon of mass destruction smuggled across the Mexican border.

Comment
Isn't it time we woke up and started threatening our elected "leaders" with their jobs? How long have we been demanding proper boredr security? While McCain/Kennedy and Bush fiddle-fuss around with different amnesty schemes for the sole purpose of securing votes, our borders are wide open to anyone who wants to sneak into this country.

Would you accept this level of performance from a store? Would you accept this level of performance from an employee? We need to get on the phones and make them understand that we are serious about protecting this country and that they need to either get on board now, or seek other forms of employment.

Call your Senator/Congressman today and ask them what they are doing to secure our borders. Let them know that if another attack happens on our soil, they will be complicit in the crime.

Quote of the Day

This is no Joke

"Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence."
- Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam, September 15, 2006

Global Taxes Feed the Greedy and Corrupt

The late and far too influential liberal economist, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) once observed: "The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward." We agree about that potential reward, but note that Keynes referred to tax "avoidance," which we repeatedly have explained is legal. That's as opposed to tax "evasion," which is not legal.

The trouble with taxes is those who feed upon them. Taxes are the lifeblood of the vampire-like government bureaucracy at every level. Without the billions in taxes millions of bureaucrats extract from our hard earned paychecks, oppressive government would wither and die like Dracula in the sunlight. Happy thought what?

But if you thought paying taxes to your city, county, state, and the federal government was "enough already" -- guess again. For several years now there has been a concerted international effort by dedicated welfare state leftists to impose global taxes on middle class and wealthy people in every nation, but most especially Americans who already pay for the largest slice of groups such as the United Nations.

And it is the money hungry UN bureaucrats who are leading the push for a global tax on you and me and everybody else who works for a living. These worthies want to impose on the already burdened taxpayers of the world, a new round of "global taxes" to finance the UN and its programs. This plan would supplement annual dues from each nation with direct UN taxes. In early 2002 we reported about a UN conference held in Monterey, Mexico, that we called "the tax collectors meeting from Hell" where plans were mapped for a UN "international tax organization," a one world IRS. The UN is demanding that the rich nations spend 0.7% of their gross domestic product on "development" aid. This is more than $300 billion a year, well over $3 trillion over the next decade.

Subsequently, French President Jacques Chirac, who never met a tax he didn't like, called for such world taxes, this time cloaked in fighting "world poverty." Chirac proposed an international tax on arms sales and every financial transaction to be used to "eradicate poverty." (Yet billions have been spent for this very goal in recent decades, most of it from the pockets of American taxpayers who finance U.S. foreign aid programs).

Later he proposed a tax on all airline ticket sales which is now French law.

And backers of global taxes are still hard at work. The Global Policy Forum, a UN-affiliated leftist talk tank, says the short term goal is to "break down the taboo" of talking about global taxes. This is a stark reminder that the work against global taxes must continue. In 2005 the UN issued a report calling for a global tax on airplane tickets to help poor nations and 66 nations endorsed the report. At the 2005 G-8 summit, Chirac renewed calls for a global airline ticket tax and won support from several G-8 leaders. In March 2006 an alliance of 12 nations - Brazil, Chile, Congo, Cyprus, the Ivory Coast, Jordan, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Norway, and the United Kingdom - agreed to adopt similar proposals.

As Sven Larson of the Heritage Foundation has written: "Global taxes feed incompetent, corrupt bureaucracies. National governments are good at wasting taxpayers' money, but at least there is hope they can be held accountable. International bureaucracies, like the UN and the World Bank, however, are above and beyond accountability. Nonetheless, some suggest that they should be given the right to tax American citizens directly. This is a particularly bad idea. The UN has the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal on its resume, and the World Bank is responsible for more failures than successes in global development."

In 2002, speaking for the Bush administration at the UN, then U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said: "Global taxes are inherently undemocratic. Implementation is impossible." The U.S. also refused to sign or agree to a UN declaration endorsing Chirac's global UN taxes.

We certainly agree, but we should all be aware of what's going on.

That's the way that it looks from here,

Bob Bauman, Editor

Permission To Speak Freely

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/11/2006

Campaign Finance: September marks the start of the 60-day period before an election when private citizens cannot criticize on TV or radio their representatives' votes. Or even praise McCain-Feingold, for that matter.

A couple of weeks ago, the Federal Election Commission declined to loosen a muzzle that had been imposed on the First Amendment by the Orwellian-named Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 and that exempted "grass-roots lobbying" — or what used to be called in the Constitution "petitioning the government for a redress of grievances."

Supporters of the act say their intent is to ban what they call "sham issue ads" in which groups advocate a position on an issue that subliminally attacks a candidate by saying something like "Call Candidate X and tell them how you feel." The claim is that, in a democracy, they are actually trying to influence the way people vote. Shameful.

Wisconsin Right to Life, for example, wants to run a radio ad encouraging listeners to contact that state's two senators, Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold, and urge them to support passage of a bill making it a federal offense to transport a minor across state lines to get an abortion in defiance of home state parental-notification laws.

Problem is, Kohl is up for re-election. Therefore, says the FCC, his name can't be mentioned in the ad because such ads are really campaign ads, not issue ads. And campaign ads, it says, are limited to political action committees subject to campaign limits. Ironically, Kohl previously voted for the bill and Feingold, who is not up for reelection, voted against it. So how is it a campaign ad?

Newspapers, radio and TV stations, on the other hand, are free to influence the election, spending their corporate dollars on editorials or news coverage that is often slanted one way or the other. But a group of private citizens banding together in common cause cannot, for it would be committing the crime of attempting to participate in the political process.

As Justice William Douglas once said: "It usually costs money to communicate an idea to a large audience. But no one would seriously contend that a limitation on the expenditure of money to print a newspaper would not deprive the publisher of freedom of the press. Nor can the fact that it costs money to make a speech — whether it be hiring a hall or purchasing time on the air — make the speech any the less an exercise of First Amendment Rights."

As we try to promote democracy in Iraq in the Middle East, we suppress it here at home. And while some oppose tinkering with the Constitution with amendments defining marriage or banning burning of the American flag, they stand silently by as it is amended by stealth, with McCain-Feingold in effect having repealed the First Amendment.

Silencing political opposition is not reform; it's incumbent protection. In any other context, it would be called censorship. In any other country, it would be called repression. And when criticizing leaders is suppressed and campaign speech is regulated, supervised, watched, controlled, authorized or prohibited by an agency of the national government, it's called dictatorship.

Billionaires like George Soros and even entire political parties can influence elections all they want.

But a bunch of Wisconsin pro-lifers are a corrupting influence? We don't think so.

In both 2004 and 2006, grass-roots groups have gone without the basic constitutional right to criticize and influence their government. We would support a constitutional amendment to protect their free speech, but we thought we already had one.

The Perversion Of Islam

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/11/2006

The Enemy: 75% of suicide bombings in the past 25 years have occurred since 9/11. In one month last year, there were as many in Iraq as during Israel's conflict with the Palestinians. Now they're breaking out in the Afghan capital.

Last week, a suicide car bomber rammed into a U.S. military convoy just 200 yards from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. The blast killed 16 people, including two U.S. soldiers.

The emergence of a suicide bombing cell there reminds us again that Muslim "martyrs" are the most effective weapon (absent WMD) the terrorists have against the West.

The Rand Corp. predicts they'll pose a constant threat to us. So how can we stop them?

For starters, we need to find out what really makes them tick. Recently released "martyrdom videotapes" recording the last testaments of the London bombers and the 9/11 hijackers show their unshakable love of death. Why are so many Muslim men itching to die?
Some say they want to escape poverty. Others say it's the only way they can resist their more powerful "oppressors." But a controversial new documentary finds another reason: lust.

In the recently released movie "Suicide Killers," French filmmaker Pierre Rehov interviews the families of suicide bombers and would-be bombers in an attempt to find out why they do it. What he learns is alarming: They actually believe Allah will reward them with a harem of virgins and other carnal pleasures in the afterlife.

Such a notion of heaven is often dismissed out of hand by Western analysts as a myth or fantasy of heretics. But Rehov found it's culturally accepted and deeply rooted in the Muslim world.

"People don't understand the devastating culture behind this unbelievable phenomenon," he said in a recent MSNBC interview.

He says sexual repression in Islam — young Muslim men are forbidden from dating or even swimming or dancing with girls — makes the idea of redeeming promised virgins in Paradise all the more appealing. Desire and death become one.

"It is no coincidence that suicide killers are mostly young men dominated subconsciously by an overwhelming libido that they not only cannot satisfy, but are afraid of, as if it is the work of the devil," Rehov said. "Since Islam describes heaven as a place where everything on Earth will finally be allowed, and promises virgins to those frustrated kids, killing others and killing themselves to reach this redemption becomes their only solution."

Even married men dream of the beautiful "dark eyed" virgins, rivers of wine and endless parties in Paradise, he says.

"We interviewed a suicide bomber who is living in Gaza — he's married with three kids and he's still dreaming of the virgins in the afterlife," Rehov said. One of the London suicide bombers was married and had a child. Some of the 9-11 hijackers had steady girlfriends. Yet before the attacks, they shaved and doused themselves with flower water in preparation for their weddings in Paradise.

"Know that the women of Paradise are waiting, calling out 'Come hither, friend of Allah,' " according to a four-page letter circulated among them titled, "THE LAST NIGHT." "They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing."

Such fantasies might be easier to understand if the killers were rubes. But they were well-educated men, some in their 30s. Complicating matters, most were deeply religious and students of the Quran — some had even memorized it. How could they be so mistaken?

They weren't — and aren't, asserts Rehov, who says the would-be Muslim suicide bombers whom he has interviewed have shown him passages in the Quran "in which it's absolutely written that they're going to get the girls in the afterlife" if they die fighting infidels in jihad.

"It's obviously connected to religion," Rehov stressed. "They really believe they are going to get the virgins."
But isn't suicide forbidden in Islam? Yes, but only selfish suicide, he notes. Self-immolation in the cause of Allah is actually the highest expression of love for Allah, rewarded by the highest honor in Paradise.

Muslim martyrs believe the first drop of blood they shed during jihad washes away all their sins instantaneously, he says.

It boggles the Western mind to think that anyone could believe that murdering people could wash away lesser sins, but this is what the enemy believes.

More astounding is how rare it is that you hear Muslim leaders in the West speak up and say this is wrong. Instead, many have actually condoned suicide bombings, and not just in London.

Addressing a youth session at the 1999 Islamic Association for Palestine's annual convention in Chicago, Council on American-Islamic Relations founder Omar Ahmad praised suicide bombers who "kill themselves for Islam," according to a transcript provided by terror expert Steve Emerson's Investigative Project.

"Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam, that is not suicide," Ahmad asserted. "They kill themselves for Islam."

And, apparently, for all its heavenly booty. We say "apparently" because we don't know for sure. We are not worshippers of or experts on Islam. But it is curious that Muslim clerics do not disavow the virgins-for-martyrs reward as a perverted interpretation of the Quran. Their silence leads one to think it is indeed an accurate interpretation.

Whether it is or not, Western leaders must stand up and denounce the perverted notion that God would reward killers with a harem of virgins in his heavenly domain. It must be a source of ridicule not just for late-night talk shows, but for press conferences and official speeches.

If this is what's getting our enemy worked up for jihad, then no one's feelings should be spared.

4 Horsemen Of 9/11

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/11/2006

Politics: Clintonista critics of the ABC film "The Path To 9/11" have their own problems with the truth about their roles before and after the attacks, which were precipitated and planned on their administration's watch.

Among the critics is Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic congressional staffer during the Clinton impeachment proceedings and the 9/11 Commission member who conducted the infamous inquisition of Condoleezza Rice over a presidential daily briefing that allegedly warned President Bush of the attack.

The shabby treatment of Rice, with Ben-Veniste asking loaded questions based on false premises, and then refusing to let Rice answer, hinted that for him the 9/11 Commission was less a search for the cause of 9/11 than an opportunity to blame the Bush administration for it.

As reported in Congressional Quarterly, Ben-Veniste, who saw the film during a private screening at the National Press Club on Aug. 23, said of a since-edited scene depicting Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger nixing the imminent capture of Osama bin Laden: "There was no incident like that in the film we came across."

The New York Times on Wednesday quoted Ben-Veniste as saying of the incident as originally portrayed in the film: "As we were watching, we were trying to think how they could have misinterpreted the 9/11 Commission's findings the way they had."

Maybe the film's producers and directors did the unthinkable — actually read the report.

It says that on Dec. 4, 1999, the National Security Council's counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, sent Berger a memo suggesting a strike against al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan in the last week of 1999. "In the margin next to Clarke's suggestion to attack al-Qaida facilities in the week before Jan. 1, 2000, Berger wrote, 'no,' " the commission found.

According to the report, Berger, who claims the film "flagrantly misrepresents my personal actions," was presented with plans to take action against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida four times — the spring of 1998, June 1999, December 1999 and August 2000. Each time, Berger was an obstacle to action.

Like Ben-Veniste, Berger has been an obstacle to finding the truth about the prelude to 9/11. In case you've forgotten, he was the fellow caught at the National Archives stuffing top secret material related to the 9/11 Commission inquiry into his socks and pants. Some of those documents were "mistakenly" destroyed. Could it be that one of the documents Berger was trolling for was the Clarke memo on which he wrote "no" to attacking al-Qaida?

Certainly they included critical assessments of the Clinton administration's handling of the Millennium bomb plot to blow up LAX. The Clintonistas were advertising this as an example of Clinton's success in fighting terrorism rather than, as Attorney General John Ashcroft testified, "sheer luck," thanks to a suspicious border guard.

On the 9/11 Commission with Ben-Veniste was Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton administration deputy attorney general. She said recently that she "had a problem if you make claims that the (TV) program is based on the findings of the 9/11 Commission" because the film was "contradicted by our findings."

Gorelick was a participant in the very events that the 9/11 Commission investigated. She, too, pummeled Rice, not with questions, but with accusations of malfeasance. As she asked Rice, who was then national security adviser, why her office failed to "connect the dots," Gorelick knew that she was the one who issued the memo ordering the FBI to erect a legal wall between itself and the CIA, preventing them from sharing information. Gorelick should have been a 9/11 Commission witness rather than panel member.

Democrats who whined after 9-11 about what Bush knew and when he knew it forgot Gorelick was the architect of the policy that established a wall between intel and law enforcement, making "connecting the dots" before 9-11 a virtual impossibility.

Gorelick was the author of the 1995 memo that helped establish what Ashcroft testified was the "single greatest structural cause" for Sept. 11 — "the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents."

"Government erected this wall," said Ashcroft. "Government buttressed this wall. And before Sept. 11, government was blinded by this wall."

Clinton's secretary of state, Madeline Albright, who also is featured prominently in "The Path to 9/11," insists the film "depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred."

Albright, who spent much of the Clinton administration helping appease North Korea into becoming a nuclear power, certainly never decided that bin Laden should be killed or captured.

In Richard Miniter's book, "Losing Bin Laden," Clarke tells of a meeting after the USS Cole was bombed in a Yemeni harbor. When the subject of retaliating against bin Laden came up, Albright was more concerned about the reaction of world opinion to an attack on Muslims, and the impact of such a strike on the Mideast peace process.

According to Miniter, Clarke recalled Albright saying, "Bombing Muslims wouldn't be helpful at this time." Or killing bin Laden prior to 9/11?

As we've said, no amount of script rewrites will change the fact that al-Qaida rose and flourished on Clinton's watch, fueled by indecision and perceived lack of American resolve. Opportunities to inflict a mortal wound on al-Qaida by killing or capturing its leader were repeatedly missed or blown.

For their performance in aiding and abetting this threat to America, we give Ben-Veniste, Berger, Gorelick and Albright two thumbs down.

Pro-Growth Fight Vs. Sen. Chafee A Choice Between Purity, Power

BY JED GRAHAM
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/11/2006

In some ways, today's Rhode Island primary looks like a GOP version of the Connecticut Democratic primary that sent Sen. Joe Lieberman to defeat.

Moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee faces the battle of his political life in Rhode Island from conservative Steve Laffey, the mayor of Cranston.

Laffey is the darling of the Club for Growth, an anti-tax political group. Through ads and member donations, the Club for Growth has funneled more than $1 million to Laffey, former president of Memphis, Tenn.-based investment firm Morgan Keegan & Co.

Similarly, left-wing Web sites MoveOn.org and DailyKos.com helped propel Ned Lamont — Lieberman's anti-war challenger — to a primary victory last month.

The left's purge of Lieberman for his support of the Iraq War and the right's challenge against Chafee for his liberal economic positions represent "a triumph of the true believers," said Brown University political science professor Darrell West. "They go for ideological purity" even at the expense of victory.

Still, there are important differences between the Connecticut and Rhode Island primary fights. At least with regard to the battle to control the Senate, the right's challenge against Chafee is clearly more consequential.

Since Connecticut has no credible GOP candidate, Democrats will have de facto control of the state's Senate seat whether or not Lamont wins in November. Lieberman, who is now running as an independent, has said he will caucus with the Democrats if elected.

If Laffey ousts Chafee in the Rhode Island primary, he would be a huge underdog in the general election. Early polls have Laffey running about 30% behind Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, the former state attorney general, while Chafee and Whitehouse are running neck and neck.

Democrats need to pick up six seats to gain control of the Senate. A Chafee loss could give them an inside track at winning one of those seats, and there are enough tight races to give Democrats a legitimate shot at winning five more.

Republicans in Washington are worried enough that they've been coming to Chafee's aid in a big way. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads and mailers in support of Chafee and has said it won't give any support to Laffey if he wins the primary.

Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina called Laffey "bombastic" and said Chafee "is the only one who can win in Rhode Island."

High Risk, Reward
So why is the Club for Growth trying to defeat the GOP's best hope for victory in a blue state where President Bush got only 39% of the vote in 2004?

David Keating, the Club for Growth's executive director, said the outfit wouldn't have gotten involved in the race if it didn't think Laffey had a decent chance to win.

"It's a high risk, but high reward," Keating said. "The payoff is somebody who's absolutely fabulous."
Keating dismisses the notion that a Laffey primary win would be the deciding factor in whether the GOP holds the Senate.

"There's been a strong likelihood from the beginning that a Democrat would be elected (in Rhode Island)," he said.

Brown University's West agrees that Chafee would be in trouble if a strong tide hands the Democrats five other Senate seats in states like Missouri, Montana and Tennessee.

If Chafee does win, he'll enter the general election with depleted funds against a Democratic challenger with a healthy war chest.

No matter the outcome in November, Keating sees a side benefit to defeating Chafee in the primary: Other Republicans in Congress may think twice before voting against low taxes and small government.

Chafee Rubs Republicans Raw
"Lincoln Chafee does not understand the basic pillars of economic policy that lead to economic growth," Keating said. "In his whole term, there isn't anything in his record that he's ever voted for pro-growth tax policies."

Chafee opposed the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, as well as recent efforts to extend dividend and capital gains taxes and make estate tax relief permanent.

He also voted against the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and against authorizing force in Iraq, though those aren't big issues in the campaign. Chafee said he didn't even vote for President Bush, instead writing in the name of his father, George H.W. Bush.

The only issue in which Chafee has been aligned with the growth wing of the Republican Party was his vote against the Medicare drug benefit. Chafee has consistently voted against legislation that he believed would lead to higher deficits.

While left-wing Democrats took the risk that defeating Lieberman would paint the party as staunchly anti-war, Keating doesn't see any such risk in targeting Chafee.

"The Republican Party tent gets really big when it appeals to voters to do things like cut their taxes and cut Washington waste," he said. "Their tent shrivels up and blows away when they don't do those things."

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Politicizing Religion

By Patrick J. Shanahan:

September 1, 2006 -- I have noticed an interesting trend on the radical left recently. Parts of the left are engaged in a propaganda war aimed at “taking back religion” from the right. Or at least neutralizing it. On a stroll through a local Barnes & Noble the other day I spotted at least three new books bemoaning the involvement of religion in the political process. This is becoming a common theme. Fear of “theocracy” - which is, of course, a ludicrous term - appears to be widespread on the outer reaches of the left. This makes sense politically. Perhaps the strongest single presence refusing to yield to the secular “progressive” juggernaut is the religious right.

A dispassionate observer might find this all a little peculiar. What an interesting concept, this notion that religious belief, symbolism and custom have no place in politics (or anywhere in the public square). What a humongous leap from “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. How did we get to this rather odd place?

Certainly not from the Constitution. The simple words quoted above are all that the Constitution has to say about it. And it is stunningly clear that the Founding Fathers – while not an overly pious bunch – believed that ethical education in general and religious moral grounding in particular were indispensable components of the democratic experiment. Jefferson’s much vaunted “Wall of Separation” was designed to reassure a group of Danbury Baptists that the government wouldn’t restrict their ability to practice their religion, not to prevent religion from influencing government and politics.

Throughout the course of American history it was taken for granted that religion was an indispensable component of public and political life. It was an animating force behind many key “reform” movements, including the Abolition Movement (yay!) the Temperance Movement (boooo!) and the Civil Rights Movement (yay!, until about 1975, then Boo!).

What happened to change this? Well, to put it in modern business terms, it’s an issue of scope creep. Until very recently in American life the vast majority of social customs, rules and laws were completely beyond the scope of the federal government. This makes sense in that the Constitution makes no mention of them whatsoever. Most were beyond the scope of state governments. Social customs were largely defined and enforced by non-governmental social institutions, including the family, churches, fraternal organizations and charities. Social changes occurred mostly through the rough and tumble of social evolution. Some social rules were codified in state laws, but virtually none were governed by federal law or rules.

What changed that stable model was the Warren Court’s war on social institutions. Delighted to serve as the judicial arm of the secular humanist progressive movement of the early and mid 20th Century, the Warren Court dove into expansion of the federal government’s role in governing social life with Brown v Board of Education in 1954. Today this is seen as a necessary and health decision by the great majority of Americans (I am not one of them). Although it pushed through a very necessary social change, by doing so it set the precedent for meddling in the social customs and mores of the nation.

Anxious to implement its agenda, the Warren Court began to remove from the people the right to decide how to govern their social lives. From birth control to “school prayer” to abortion to “gay rights” the Courts have looked the American people in the eye and said “Shut up rednecks, you don’t have a say in this.” They foisted the coastal secular progressive culture on all Americans.

Now, if you were a coastal secular progressive sort of person this all was quite uncontroversial. But let’s assume you were a flyover religious conservative sort of person. This all began to feel downright aggressive and, well, tyrannical.

Ironically many of the folks being told to shut up and go away were loyal Democrats. As the Democratic Party began to line up behind the secularist agenda, they had only one place to go. And so began the great realignment that has brought us to our current red/blue divide.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were two early pioneers in organizing the scorned faithful. The newly coined “religious right” began to fight back. And they continue to fight back. They must, because the attacks on traditional religious mores do not stop. The secularist left continues to seek to expand the scope of federal involvement in social issues. What that really means is that they continue to try to dictate to the rest of us how we need to live.

The “religious right” didn’t start this fight. The secular left did. It is almost amusing to see them still trying to convince us that we need to go hide in the dark corners of our churches and let them make all the important decisions. Arrogant doesn’t begin to describe it.

Hong Kong Adapts to the Brave New World

by GaveKal

One of our favorite anecdotes about Hong Kong dates back to 2003, when the S.A.R. was mired in doom and gloom (property prices were down –70% from their highs, people were hysterical about SARS…). That year, taxi drivers went on a strike to ask for… lower cab fares! The logic was that, at a lower price, more people would ride taxis (the government refused on the premise that the cabs would then start competing with the buses, tramways & MTR). If nothing else, this story illustrates HK’s amazing power of adaptation and “can do” attitude.

In recent days, we have been reminded of Hong Kong’s power of adaptation as the territory starts a debate on whether to lower income tax rates, and introduce instead a goods sales tax (GST). Unsurprisingly, as the debate shapes up, precious few commentators fail to mention that, should Hong Kong adopt such reforms, it would be adopting a new tax regime of “tax breaks for the rich” and “new taxes for the poor”.

But of course, this misses the more important point, namely that the HK government is adapting to the new economic realities.

In Our Brave New World, we wrote that one of the implications of the platform company model is that industrial jobs in the creative world disappear, only to reappear in Mexico, China, etc... Over time, the job market in developed economies moves to a minority of very creative individuals who work for themselves, and a majority of fellows who work in the service industry for the creative minds and/or the tourists coming in from the industrial world (this, of course, is a left wing politicians’ worst nightmare, if for no other reason that their political parties all rely heavily on trade unions and organized labor for their funding, and to bring out the votes on election day).


And this is where it gets interesting: once the switch to the platform company model is made, companies usually realize that they should domicile their research and marketing activities in countries with low marginal tax rates.

Take the financial industry as an example: on any given day, the biggest foreign net buyer or seller of US Treasuries is the Caribbean Islands. Now needless to say, the Caribbean islanders are not amongst the world’s largest investors; but the hedge funds domiciled there most definitely are. So the ‘efficiency capital’ of the world which used to be domiciled in big investment banks, in the world’s financial centers (whether London, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo…) has now re-domiciled itself in hedge funds whose legal structures are in the Caymans, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, etc…

The tax revenue on the ‘efficiency capital’ is now lost for the US, the UK…; and there is little they can do to gain it back.

As an increasing number of companies move to the ‘platform-company’ model, or as people leave the big companies to work for themselves or smaller entities, it is likely that the top talent will want to work (or at least be taxed!), in low tax environments.

This economic reality should lead to a structural decline in tax receipts in the countries which do not adjust to this new model. In the new world towards which we are rapidly moving, income taxes will becoming increasingly voluntary and governments will have to get their pound of flesh through property and consumption taxes instead. This is good news. Over time, it should lead to more efficient (i.e., downsized) governments all over the Western World. The platform company business model should end up killing off the Welfare State.

In the ‘first wave’ world, governments provided subjects a modicum of Regalian functions (police, army, judges). With the second wave, governments started to branch out and provided citizens with income redistribution, education, pensions, healthcare, unemployment insurance, etc…But in the ‘third wave’ world, will governments still be able to provide “prosumers” with all of the above services? How will they pay for them?

In the ‘third wave’ world in which platform companies operate, taxes will increasingly become voluntary. Governments will thus have to compete with each other to provide the best services at the lowest possible costs to attract the world’s best platform companies, and their workers. Over time, this should mean that governments which provide the most efficient Regalian functions, and at the lowest costs (Hong Kong? Singapore? ...) stand to survive in their current structures. Hong Kong is adapting to this economic reality.

And that is great news for the local economy.

Quote of the Day

“A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don’t are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.”
- Charles Krauthammer, Feb. 10, 2006

Evolution Rules Even the Federal Chairman

This comment is by John Pugsley, Chairman of The Sovereign Society. A long-time hard-money advocate, he authored several best-sellers in the 1970s and 1980s, including Common Sense Economics, The Alpha Strategy, and The Copper Play.

A century and a half ago, Darwin ignited a revolution in human understanding by positing that biological evolution weeds the garden of life on earth, casting out organisms that fail to adapt to threats or changes in their environment. Those that adapt procreate and leave descendents. Those that don't, leave fewer or no descendents. It was another century before we learned that genes carried in DNA were the mechanism of this evolutionary cleansing.

Human history, particularly the history of science and technology, hints that ideas also succumb to evolution's relentless culling. Biologist Richard Dawkins suggested calling them memes. "Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain..." Flowing through time in the collective memory of culture, the most useful survive and thus better and better ideas evolve.

Memes in the physical sciences have clearly improved through natural selection, but the pace of evolution in the social sciences, particularly in economics, has been glacially slow.

This fact came to mind last week as I read Ben Bernanke's keynote address at the Thirtieth Annual Economic Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. His talk, titled "Global Economic Integration: What's New and What's Not?" provided thought-provoking commentary on the history of globalization, and the political obstacles it has encountered over the centuries.

When economies are open, he acknowledged, "the expansion of trade opportunities tends to change the mix of goods that each country produces....The resulting shifts in the structure of production impose costs on workers and business owners in some industries and thus create a constituency that opposes the process of economic integration." [Emphasis added.]

In plain talk, special interests lobby politicians in each sovereign jurisdiction to construct barriers of regulations, tariffs, and outright prohibition that block foreign imports or subsidize domestic exports. The true impediments to globalization have always been governments, and the immense cost of this interference has been born by the consuming public. Government intervention in economic affairs has thus been a drag on the progress of every nation that has used it.

Bernanke appears pro-globalization, and spoke positively about its history. "Two thousand years ago," he noted "the Romans unified their far-flung empire through an extensive transportation network and a common language, legal system, and currency."

Yet he excluded the interventionist role that central bankers have played over the centuries. He suggested that Roman currency helped early globalization, but failed to mention that Roman emperors controlled the issue of money as a means of plundering the public, thus contributing to the fall of the empire. Effectively similar schemes of plunder are now managed by Mr. Bernanke and his central-bank brethren.

Natural selection over two thousand years has not cast out the most destructive memes, which are the ideas that the governments must control money creation, and must intervene in the exchange of goods between individuals. Unfortunately, evolution in the physical sciences has given government a more efficient money technology. Instead of being forced to clip coins, as the Roman emperors did (oh, government still does that, as I described in a recent A-letter), the central bankers now create money with the click of a mouse.

In spite of Mr. Bernanke's apparent support for globalization and free trade, he and the politicians that appointed him neither believe in free currencies, nor in free trade. When their constituencies demand it, they quickly intervene in both currency and trade, as do their counterparts around the world. Memetic evolution does appear to work, but in the case of government intervention in the free market, it is working with glacial slowness.

Human nature compels individuals to protect themselves, so in the end the politicians and their appointed bureaucrats who conspire to control what money you can use, what you can buy, at what price, and from whom, will fail. Relentless evolution will ultimately cast such flawed memes out of the garden. But it won't happen in your lifetime. Your challenge and mine is to understand the nature of the attack, and immunize ourselves and our wealth.

What Can NFL Football Teach Us

By Matt Badiali
September 7, 2006

It began like a bad action movie, with Bolivian troops seizing control of oil infrastructure.

That’s how Evo Morales celebrated his 100th day in office, by declaring all Bolivian oil state property. His idea is neither unique nor new. It springs from a basic human flaw: greed.

Greed takes center stage in the press these days because everybody wants more... Take professional football for example.

The current standoff between the New England Patriots and star wide receiver Deion Branch is rooted in greed. Branch is a former Super Bowl XXXIX MVP and, at least in his mind, significantly underpaid.

But Branch is currently under contract. He and New England signed a five-year contract when he was an untested rookie. Since then the Patriots have not only paid him roughly $1 million a year, but have “invested” significant coaching and training in Branch. The contract expires next year.

If Branch is unhappy with the deal today and the Patriots aren’t, that’s life. Next time, negotiate harder.
Instead Branch refuses to work. He’s trying to force the Patriots to trade him, which would get him a new contract.

This parallels events in Bolivia. Foreign companies have made huge investments in Bolivia since the mid-1990s. In fact, foreign technology and investments increased Bolivia’s gas reserves sevenfold.
Bolivia repaid that investment with confiscation and trumped-up “tax” charges.

Bolivia and other countries of its ilk don’t hesitate to break contracts and steal assets. The leaders of these countries think it’s fine to let companies spend capital developing infrastructure and finding reserves.

However, when the money starts coming in, that asset belongs to “The People.”
How’s that for honoring your word?

Events in Bolivia derailed Morales’ bid at nationalization before it got very far.

Recently, a wave of resignations, backbiting, and recrimination within the Morales government foiled his attempted theft. The state was forced to announce that the plans for nationalization were on hold due to lack of funds and expertise. Morales found out that without trained experts, the oil and gas won’t flow.
For investors, majors offer the most protection during this period of Latin American nationalization.

Although companies such as BP, Total, and Petrobras have invested heavily in the region by Bolivian standards, the global scope of their operations minimizes risks posed by instability in a single country.

For example, only 3% to 4% of BP Group’s proven reserves lie in Bolivia. In contrast, smaller companies with a presence in South America are more vulnerable to a single greedy dictator upsetting their apple carts.

When evaluating oil companies doing business around the globe, it is important to understand the nature of the parties they deal with. With some people, not only is their word not their bond, they won’t even honor signed contracts!

Vive la France!

by J. Christoph Amberger

Napoleon Bonaparte had a dream: Establish a French empire with subservient satellites from North Africa to the Ural Mountains, united by common law and a Francocentric economy.

He ran into a bit of a problem. Les rosbifs -- today they call them Anglo-Saxons in France -- didn’t play. And then there was some unpleasant business in Russia. But while Napoleon didn’t live to see his dream turn into lasting realities, he can rest in peace that it took less than 200 years for his heirs to accomplish it.

Today, it’s called European Union. Again, the rosbifs are a constant source of ennui. And while the Germans have happily assumed the role of a well-trained French poodle when it comes to French foreign policy, the Russians remain outside their immediate influence. (Until Gazprom manages to strike a deal with the Champs Elyssées, that is.)

Britain’s struggle against Napoleon provides the backdrop of the popular Sharpe novels by British author Bernard Cornwell. I’m a bit of a Sharpe addict, making sure I have my order for every new installment placed with the British subsidiary of Amazon.com well in advance of the publication date. (This way, I have the volume in my hands weeks before it comes out in the States.)

As a writer, Cornwell is rather successful at his game. He’s reportedly sold more than 45 million copies of his 40-some novels. No matter where you go, chances are that there’s a bookstore carrying at least a couple of Sharpe novels in the fiction section.

That is, unless you go to Amazon.fr, Amazon.com’s French subsidiary. There, you can almost sense the disdain with which the site’s search function processes your request: “Sharpe, ‘oo?”

All you find is a couple of Cornwell’s medieval adventure books. Apparently, there’s no French market for books in which the antagonists are French.

Coming from a country defeated in not just one but two world wars, I find this curious. It would be unimaginable in Germany that a popular line of entertainment or culture would be suppressed because the villains are Nazis. To the contrary: After all, Hogan’s Heroes replaced Seinfeld in Germany, back in the 1990s.

The American journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman wrote back in 2004: “[According to French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin], the real struggle in today’s world... is not between freedom and tyranny, but between the French religion of the all-powerful state and the Anglo-American system of transparency, checks and balances, which [Villepin] reminds his readers ‘inspired only contempt’ when the original generation of French revolutionaries looked across the Atlantic for support in 1793. ... Americans need to understand that our values and our model pose a challenge for the French, who have consistently favored authoritarian regimes over democracy, not just in the third world but also in Europe, where they still are attempting to force an autocratic constitution for the European Union down the throats of the newly liberated nations of the former Soviet bloc.”

No wonder, then, that Sharpe’s a mite unpopular as a concept...

Iraq Veteran: Pullout Would Belittle Soldiers, Ratify bin Laden

By Ronald Kessler

A premature withdrawal from Iraq would ratify Osama bin Laden’s position that the United States is a “paper tiger” and jeopardize American security in the view of Vince Micco, an Iraq War veteran who is running for Congress as a Republican in New Jersey. “The only beneficiaries of a hasty pullout would be our two chief antagonists in Iraq — Iran and Syria — because they’d see it as a defeat of American resolve,” Micco said in an interview.

Micco is running against incumbent Steve Rothman in New Jersey’s ninth district, which includes Bergen County and part of Hudson, and Passaic counties. Rothman has endorsed the call of Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., for pulling out of Iraq within six months.

Micco served in Iraq as an Army sergeant assigned to counterintelligence from March 2003 to April 2004. When he returned to New Jersey, he was appalled by the way the media emphasized setbacks and ignored progress in Iraq. Micco said he found that, by and large, Iraqis are grateful to America. “I was stationed throughout the most volatile regions, primarily in the Sunni Triangle,” Micco said. “I would meet with Iraqis in a safe house to get actionable intelligence.

Week after week, these brave Iraqis would tell us who is selling weapons out of their basements for use against the coalition or which preacher at the local mosque is preaching jihad against our forces. Or they would say they heard that an attack will be mounted at this time and location against coalition forces.” If the informants provided reliable intelligence, Micco would recommend them for a reward. “I would say to them, ‘I realize how much you risk by helping me. On behalf of grateful Americans, thank you so much for helping us,’” Micco said. “They would interrupt me and say, ‘No, no, we need to thank you for getting rid of Saddam.’”

Micco said that just about all the informants had a gruesome story to tell about a family or someone they knew who was suspected of having dissident political opinions. “Their door was broken down in the middle of the night by Saddam Hussein’s security agents,” Micco said. “They were whisked off to some prison and raped, tortured, killed, and forgotten.”

Micco said Iraqi children treat American military forces as rock stars. “We would receive packages of goodies from our loved ones,” he said. “Before going out in the morning, we would pack the goodies we received into our uniforms in case we saw the children. It’s such a delight to see their faces when we pulled out a Snickers bar or handed them a bag of potato chips.” These children will eventually run Iraq, he said.

“Candidly,” he said, “the prevailing age demographic in Iraq is used to Saddam’s rule. When the young generation of Iraqis is old enough to run the country, we’ll begin to see dividends that’ll get better every year. "A lot of the Shiites don’t know how to handle their new power, influence, and freedom, so they take their marching orders from clerics, who take their marching orders from Iran.

Eventually, the U.S. will have the greatest ally in the Middle East, where we especially need allies. What we are doing in Iraq is visionary because it will pay dividends for generations to come.” Micco acknowledged that sectarian violence has increased in recent months. But he said the “troublemakers” account for 1 percent of the Iraqi population, yet account for 99 percent of the TV coverage of the war.

“These troublemakers will explode a device knowing full well it will be on TV all over the world,” Micco said. “The media’s lopsided, negative coverage of the war helps the resistance, which is funded, equipped, and directed by Iran and Syria, to recruit impressionable people. The media’s fixation with the roadside bomb explosions and the resistance in general emboldens the troublemakers.”

Micco said Democrats have found a wedge issue they think will defeat the Republicans. “But by calling for a premature pullout,” Micco said, “they are belittling the service of those who served and died in Iraq and jeopardizing American security.” He said, “We have come so far so fast in Iraq. Iraqis are enlisting in the military forces and the police. With each passing month, Iraqis are coming on line. American resolve — or lack thereof — is something that our enemies pay close attention to when planning attacks.”

According to Micco, “The entire Muslim world is watching Iraq and waiting to see if Osama bin Laden was right when he was quoted calling America a ‘paper tiger.’ The Democrats need to recognize this fact: We are there, and we need to win.”

The Pentagon has set up a new program to provide recently returned service members as speakers at events. The events cannot be for partisan purposes or to raise funds. The Web site for the program is www.whyweserve.dod.mil.

Clinton Demands ABC Fix 9/11 Movie or Pull It

From Newsmax:

An angry Bill Clinton is demanding that ABC "correct all errors” in its upcoming miniseries "The Path to 9/11” — or pull it from the air.

In a letter to ABC boss Bob Iger, Clinton refuted several of the miniseries’ assertions, including that he was too preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to care about Osama bin Laden.

"The content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate and ABC has the duty to fully correct all errors or pull the drama entirely,” reads the letter, written by Bruce Lindsey, head of the Clinton Foundation, and Douglas Bond, a top lawyer in Clinton’s office.

The letter — obtained by the New York Post — also charges that the miniseries is a "fictitious rewriting of history.”

Clinton aides have seen only a trailer from the six-hour miniseries, which airs on Sept. 10 and 11, the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They have also received reports from political allies who have seen it.

Clinton’s office requested a copy of the docudrama, but the request was denied, Clinton spokesman Jay Carson told the Web site TPMCafe.com.

In one scene from the miniseries, an FBI agent and a CIA operative complain about red tape frustrating their attempts to pursue terrorists, according to a front-page story in the Post that refers to Clinton as "Bungle Bubba.”

The movie then cuts to a close-up of Clinton maintaining that he did "not have sex with that woman” — Monica Lewinsky — insinuating that the Lewinsky scandal was distracting him from the bin Laden threat.
Clinton’s letter notes that the 9/11 Commission’s report concluded that he was "deeply concerned” about bin Laden. In another scene, then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger — played by Kevin Dunn — denies authorization to CIA agents about to capture bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Clinton claimed in his letter that "no such episode ever occurred,” and the 9/11 Commission’s report stated that Berger approved the capture of bin Laden, but then-CIA boss George Tenet pulled the plug on it.
In fact, "The Path to 9/11” is based in part on the 9/11 Commission’s report, and Commission co-Chairman Thomas H. Kean served as a consultant for the miniseries.

NewsMax reported on Tuesday that certain former members of the Clinton administration were "in a panic” over the upcoming docudrama, which ABC bills as "an epic miniseries event.

America’s Second Civil War

By: Linda Kimball

August 31, 2006 -- It has been reported that Gov. Schwarzenegger caved into the persistent demands of Cultural Marxists and signed into law SB 1441. This law---a foul subversion of our Rule of Law and Constitutional rights---serves to further undermine the traditional family and parental rights by forcing extreme sex education upon children. Campaign for Children and Families in California and America (CCFAC) is outraged and appalled by Schwarzenegger’s cowardly capitulation. Schwarzenegger has “trampled the religious freedom to satisfy hyperactive sexual activists...Schwarzenegger is doing what Gray Davis did---trample religious freedom at the bidding of liberal activists from San Francisco and Hollywood. He’s not the lesser of two evils, he’s doing evil.” (Schwarzenegger Squashes Religious Freedom, Save California, 8/29/06)
American’s are increasingly puzzled, infuriated, and alarmed by the nonstop erosion of their freedoms. They want to know, “What’s going on and who are these Americans who’re working to deprive us of our rights and freedoms?”

In the “The Siege of Western Civilization,” Herb Meyers, former CIA analyst in the Reagan administration and one of the first scholars to predict the implosion of the Soviet Union, explains that there are three major threats to the survival of Western Christian-Judeo Civilization. The first of these is the war with radical Islam. The second is the incredible plunging birthrates throughout the West and Japan. We have stopped breeding, said Meyers, and this may well lead not only to destruction of the world economy, but to the extinction of entire populations. Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the world, declared Herb. Western Europe and Japan, said Meyers, are catastrophes simply waiting to happen. The third threat is what Meyers termed the ‘second civil war’ being waged within America by a coalition of God-hating progressive secular humanists (socialists), and Cultural Marxists (multiculturalists). As Meyers cautioned, these revolutionaries mean to overthrow and destroy the America of our Founders and its traditional Christian-Judeo based culture.

What is Communism?
In theory, communism is a classless social system in which all productive property is owned equally by the community rather than by the individual. This system therefore requires uniformity in education, food, clothing, dwellings, job, speech, thought, and even conscience. Because everything belongs to the State---including all citizens---and all social goods are to be shared equally, polymorphous sexual fluidity plays a prominent role in an aggregate of this sort. According to communist theory, a state of “social justice” will have been achieved when all individuality has been subsumed into the ‘group’ and all goods are shared equally.

History tells us that the earliest attempt at building a communist society took place in ancient Crete, around 1300 BC. This experiment inspired Lycurgus to set up a similar regime in Sparta. As Plutarch informs us, there was a uniform network consisting of education, gymnastics, and military training for youth of both sexes. Public meals and sleeping quarters were provided by the State and all land ‘fairly’ redistributed. Plutarch observed that because people themselves are viewed as property of the State, “no man was at liberty to live as he pleased, the city being like one great camp where all had their stated allowance.”

As Lycurgus was inspired by the Cretan experiment, Plato in turn, was inspired by the Lycurgus experiment. Plato’s ideal communist society would be ruled by philosopher kings and there would be “sharing of women and children among these, eugenic breeding, marriages controlled by the state, infanticide, abortion, and strictest censorship, all aimed at moulding citizens to the ideal design of his republic.” (The Theme is Freedom, M. Stanton Evans, p. 134)

In speaking of what led to the downfall of the communist Oneida Community in Oneida, New York (1848), William Hinds commented, “The first step out of communism was taken when ‘mine and thine’ were applied to husband and wife; then followed naturally an exclusive interest in children; then the desire to accumulate individual property for their present and future use.” (American Communities, Hinds, 1902)

As revealed by Hinds, the traditional family is the foundation of personal property, which is why Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, George Lukacs and comrades sought its destruction. Likewise, it’s why today’s Cultural Marxists are viciously attacking it and promoting sexually fluid alternatives such as polygamy and same-sex marriages.

Additionally, since all goods are to be shared equally—even sex--- and promiscuity is, therefore, a prominent feature of secularized communal societies, Christian sexual ethics such as abstinence, fidelity, and monogamy are as antithetical as are the ideas of personal property and individual rights and freedoms.

Historically, all attempts at creating communist utopias have ended in failure. On one hand, the impossible dream of eradicating social classes has inevitably birthed totalitarian ruling classes. On the other hand, communism is quite simply, abhorrent and unnatural and people in their right minds want no part of it, which is why communists in this century have slaughtered in excess of 100 million people in their insanely evil quest to force this catastrophically unnatural system upon people…for their own good, of course. Seen in this light, the utopian ideal has been one of most vilely destructive fantasies to ever have infected the mind of men.

Who are the Enemy Combatants?
Worshippers of the communist principle (Cultural Marxists and secular humanists) are the enemy combatants who, while posing as patriotic Americans, are by deed waging a second civil war against the America of our Founders and traditional values Americans. With their disguises removed and their contemptible goals revealed it becomes clear as to why traditional marriage and Christianity are under a brutally relentless assault. It likewise focuses the light of truth upon the underlying motivation of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit who lashed out at parents on Nov. 2, 2005. In the ruling handed down by these black-robed totalitarians, it was declared that the upbringing of children, “does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door…There is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children (and) parents have no due process or privacy right to override determinations of public schools…” These despots, who view children as chattel of the State and parents as sperm/egg donors, emphasized that the parents, “fundamental right to control the education of their children is…substantially diminished.” (Judicial Supremacists Lash Out at Parents, Phyllis Schlafly Report, Eagleforum, 2005)

America’s bastard children—Cultural Marxists and progressive secular humanists—are following the strategic plan for the overthrow of America that was designed by Marxist theoreticians such as George Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci of the Frankfurt Institute, a Marxist think-tank. According to plan, revolutionaries are dechristianizing America and sexualizing and dumbing-down her children while simultaneously encouraging kids to rebel against their parents. They are subverting the Rule of Law and Constitution, undermining national security and weapons-defense systems, working to erase our borders, preventing the US from drilling for much needed oil, colluding with Islamofascists, and provoking unassimilated immigrants into open rebellion. Additionally, they have created the abomination of special rights groups whose ‘special rights’ are enforced by quota systems, psychopolitical ‘sensitivity and diversity training’, Stalinist speech codes and fascist hate-crime laws. All of the aforementioned lend themselves to the disintegration of society and the unleashing of chaos…necessary prerequisites for revolution.

Until the advent of Christ---creator of mankind and Author of individual and political freedom--- history was essentially a dog-eat-dog world. It was a ‘survival of the fittest’ world in which the common man dwelt in fear and submission to his government. Power flowed from the gods and goddesses to predatory kings, emperors, and monarchs and then they did whatever they wanted and told the people what they could or could not have in terms of freedoms and privileges.

The greatest revolution in the history of the world--- the American Revolution--- radically changed the tyrannical ‘top-down’ model. America’s Revolution led to the creation of something wholly unique---a Constitutional Republic where power flowed from God---our Creator---to all of the people, hence the term, “we the people.” Nowhere in the world but in America do “we the people”---empowered by our Creator---tell the government what it is allowed to do.

It’s in the Genesis account---where God made man in His own image and gave him dominion over the earth---where the all important and immutable first principles of life and liberty come from. In the Declaration of Independence these principles are expressed thusly, “that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

These immutable first principles are exposited upon and made secure by the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Rule of Law. Our rights and liberties---when rightly exercised within the limitations of moral discipline--- lead to the creation of a dynamic, prosperous society in which decency, safety, families, free markets, innovation, and creativity flourish for the good of all.

“The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were…the general principles of Christianity…those general principles…are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature.” (Works, Vol. x. pp.45-46, Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813)

On behalf of a phantasmagorical utopia that exists only within the collective mind of the chronically disconnected-from-reality Left, Cultural Marxists and their allies---both national and international—are waging an all-out revolution to overturn the American Revolution and thereby destroy the America bequeathed to us by our Founders.

The wholesale destruction of the highest, most advanced form of civilization the world has ever seen is happening because, “We’ve forgotten what Western civilization is,” said Meyers, “we no longer teach it in the schools.” “Our culture is Western Civilization. This is who we are,” explained Herb Meyers. “We need to understand what Western Civilization is all about, such as the rule of law, human rights, and economic liberty, and above all we need to teach this to our children.

Western Civilization is completely bound to our Creator. He it is who endows us with our inalienable individual rights and liberties. Thus it is of the highest priority that we not only prevent Cultural Marxists and their atheist brethren---some of whom are even on the Right-- from finishing the job of severing Christianity from our government and culture, as they’ve so insidiously done, but that we repair the damage done by them. For if they succeed in finishing the job, Western Civilization will end and brutal tyranny unlike anything the world has yet experienced will commence.

Let us heed the prophetic advice of Daniel Webster who cautioned, “Hold on my friends to the Constitution and the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6000 years may not happen again. Hold onto the Constitution, for if the American constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.”

Quote of the Day

Steve Chapman recently had a few choice words about alternative fuels that I liked. He writes:

“If things are ever going to change, the time is now. Gas prices have more than tripled since 2002, and even after adjustment for inflation, they are higher than at any time since the early 1980s. Alternative fuel suppliers merely have to offer something cheaper, and they would have Big Oil on the run. Instead, they prefer to rely on handouts from government. (...)

“Reducing oil consumption, in an effort to weaken oil-producing nations and combat global warming, is a perfectly sensible idea. But asking the government to decide the best alternatives is like asking the government to decide what products Home Depot should stock.”

But judging from the campaign commercials for the upcoming primaries, it looks like there is no shortage of bozos running for office who’d not only love to tell Home Depot what products to stock, but how much profit they’re allowed to make on them.

No idea seems bad and tired enough to be recycled as a political platform. When I hear that, I can’t help reacting... with a theatrical waving of hands and realistic-sounding gagging noises.