Equality of Results

A trend has developed in recent years to award every participant in junior sports a trophy or ribbon regardless of their actual performance, the logic being that children’s self-esteem is fragile and must be protected from the ignominy of failure.  If little Johnny reports for every practice and every game with his uniform clean and pressed yet consistently strikes out, muffs ground balls and falls asleep in the outfield, he nonetheless receives a small trophy at the end of the season (to no small delight of his parents) because it is Johnny’s intentions that matter, not his performance, and because the adults want to shield him from the stigma of losing.  This practice, however well-intentioned, nonetheless defies reality and beyond that, creates a sense of entitlement in the little tykes that they will carry forward into later life.  They will expect to be rewarded no matter what they do and to receive the benefits of success without the sacrifice required to succeed, and when they are eventually disabused of such an expectation, they will be angry, bitter and resentful.  They may even turn violent, not at the deception to which they were victim but at the person, agency or government that refuses to play along because the addict doesn’t resent the drug that is ruining his life but the police who stop him from obtaining it.

This scenario is playing out in Greece, in Wisconsin and in the Occupy movement worldwide with thousands of angry, bitter and resentful people who have been promised lavish government benefits rioting in the streets, raging against the notion that the money has run out.  The governments of France and Greece have recently been turned out by these people, punished for daring to control the entitlements they crave and replaced by old-fashioned socialists who love spending money they do not have on programs they cannot afford.  This is the sad consequence of the Left’s overarching goal, equality of results for every human being and it is of course completely avoidable.

If little Johnny only gave it some thought (and the adults who inculcate his expectations), failure and success are inescapable realities of life.  Johnny’s favorite player, however talented and famous he may be, still commits errors in the field, gets caught stealing, strikes out with men on base and will never hit safely in even half his turns at-bat.  Johnny’s favorite team does not win every championship or even every game and Johnny would scoff at the suggestion they should be rewarded for losing.  Generals who lose battles receive no medals and defeated armies are not treated to ticker-tape parades.  Human beings naturally admire and reward success in whatever enterprise interests them, yet liberalism finds such instinct snobbish and elitist, stewing indignantly at the idea that the benefits of success should be reserved for those who actually earn them, as if winning itself were abhorrent.  Plaudits and perks should be distributed equally, liberals demand, because winners aren’t better than losers.  Of course, they demonstrably are, but liberals seek to right what they see is an outrageous wrong throughout human society.  To them, everyone must have the same amount and quality of education (busing, the subsidization of poorer districts by wealthier ones, grade inflation), the same model of automobile (Chevy Volts for everyone!), cell phone, iPad, washing machine and the same type of home to put it all in, the same quality of health care and retirement fund and the same income level and if the elitist “winners” balk at sharing their wealth to make all this happen, then the liberals just take it from them.  This is the approach that Europe has taken and it has led them to the edge of economic disaster, and as Europe strains against bankruptcy on a continental scale, Priest-King watches from across the Atlantic and blithely insists that it cannot happen here, though he undertook the same approach (and achieved the same results). 

Life isn’t fair but it is also predictable.  If a person undertakes a huge risk and succeeds, then that person reaps huge rewards.  If a person abhors risk, then that person reaps much smaller rewards.  Priest-King’s constituents squatting in Wall Street and elsewhere want to invert that function and reap huge rewards while accepting no risk, for instance, demanding that banks simply forgive their student loans after their college education is complete, thereby attaining the same station as someone who paid as they went.  This is the essence of Priest-King’s philosophy, that others should be forced to pay for his dreams and should be punished for outdistancing him, as if he were cheated, an odd position for someone who enjoyed the benefits of an Ivy League education and preferential treatment, and it is ridiculous.  America is great because everyone has the opportunity to go as far as their ability will take them, and trying to replace equal opportunity with equal results is doomed to fail.

Malum In Se

Sunday, 06 May: Joe Biden announces his support for gay marriage on Meet the Press.

Monday, 07 May: Education Secretary Arne Duncan announces his support for gay marriage.  White House Press Secretary Jay Carney states that Priest-King's position is still "evolving."

Tuesday, 08 May: North Carolina voters strongly approve a state ban on gay marriage.  This is an embarrassment for Priest-King given the Democrat National Convention will be held in Charlotte this year, so the White House calls ABC News and asks Robin Roberts to fly down to DC to interview Priest-King on Wednesday morning.

Wednesday, 09 May: Priest-King announces his support for gay marriage on national TV.  Doing so energizes the gay lobby and helps keep the defeat in North Carolina out of the news, as does a 11-page report in The Washington Post about Mitt Romney's alleged hazing of a possibly gay classmate in 1965.  The objections to this report, raised by the family of the now-deceased classmate, are given scant notice.

Thursday, 10 May: Priest-King attends a $40,000-a-plate fundraiser at George Clooney's house in Los Angeles where his support for gay marriage goes over very well with the liberal Hollywood elite.  Priest-King raises $5.6 million but the White House announces that $15 million was raised because that would make it the largest amount ever raised at a single event, even though that figure includes receipts going back weeks or even months.  Priest-King's message is that support for gay marriage is extremely popular and the bully Mitt Romney is out of touch with mainstream America.

It's all about the money, folks.  For anyone who believes the White House or George Stephanopoulos or Karl Rove that this was all an unplanned reaction to Joe Biden's remarks on Meet the Press, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell them.  Priest-King is a politician for whom image is everything (the speech in Berlin and his acceptance speech in Denver) and who cannot function without a teleprompter (his candid answer to Joe the Plumber got him in serious trouble, as did his live-mic comment to Russian President Medvedev regarding "flexibility" on NATO missile defenses after the general election).  Although he had publicly supported gay marriage as early as 1996, he had backtracked from that position in 2004 for political expediency's sake when he ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.  Gay marriage is a hot-button topic and nowhere near widely-accepted - the defeat in North Carolina was the 32d the gay lobby has suffered nationwide - so Priest-King used the gaffe-prone Vice President as his surrogate hoping to tip the scales in his favor without having to commit publicly himself.  If North Carolina rejected the measure, Priest-King would get something for nothing; if North Carolina approved the measure as they did, Obama could roll his eyes and claim that Biden was just being Biden and then weigh in himself: Having lost in the Tarheel State, there would be no point in delaying a public announcement any further.  Ordering a hit piece on Romney and collecting $5.6 million/$15 million from his Hollywood friends then turns a stinging defeat into a win and preserves his self-image as a modern, sensitive leader not only in tune with popular opinion but leading it.

Money is the lifeblood of politics as it is with so many things and Barack Obama has to have it.  He cannot raise the millions he needs by emphasizing the economy because that's a loser, what with unemployment above 8% for his entire Administration, growth crawling along at 1.7%, gasoline at $4 per gallon, a stimulus plan that failed, a bank bailout that failed, a green energy plan that failed, $15 trillion in debt and an Affordable Care Act that will cost at least twice as much as advertised.  So Obama picks cultural fights with conservatives, blares about a Republican "war on women," mandates that religious institutions provide insurance coverage for contraception, demands discounted student loans for his college-age constituents, and announces his support for gay marriage so he can appear as the champion of liberal causes and rake in the dough.

Beyond the crass political maneuvering, though, this episode demonstrates once again Priest-King's obssession with fundamentally restructuring America into a true socialist state.  He has already ordered the Justice Department to forego enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, a bald violation of his Constitutional responsibility to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," and now he goes even further by openly avowing his support for homosexual marriage.  Understanding that younger, more liberal voters approve of gay marriage (like the college students to which he has been pandering recently), he would eventually order the DOJ to challenge state bans directly, hoping that in a second term, he would have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn them permanently and have public opinion behind him.  That, plus Obamacare, amnesty for illegal immigrants, cap-in-trade legislation and compulsory union membership would rebuild the United States into the country of his dreams, a Balkanized polyglot of socialist collectives where mediocrity overrides talent and depravity is celebrated, not scorned.

Yet there are millions of Americans who reject Priest-King's vision, who reject homosexual marriage in particular and homosexuality in general, who deny that marriage can be defined to suit whichever left-wing radical inhabits the White House, and who exercise their denial through the ballot box.  These Americans embrace the traditional definition of marriage, the Biblical definition of marriage, the true definition of marriage as a legal, physical and spiritual union of one man and one woman for life and who ardently oppose efforts to expand the definition to include anyone else.  For one thing, once marriage is redefined to include homosexuals, what guarantee do we have that it will not be redefined again?  Polygamists will demand recognition, and pedophiles, and people who want to marry their pets, and the gays will not be able to scoff at such notions as being immoral and ridiculous because the line was already moved for them and then society collapses.  Conservatives have fought abortion and pornography and taxpayer-funded contraception and legalized marijuana and gay marriage for forty years because these vices rot society and rotting things die, regardless of how wonderful Ellen DeGeneres or George Clooney or Barack Obama declare them to be, and anyone who sneers at that prediction should simply look at where we are.  American society is coarse, vulgar and degenerate, nowhere near healthy, moral and thriving, and as the Romans lost their empire after 500 years because of weakness and depravity, Americans may wake up one day and discover they've lost their country to a stronger people.  Anybody who welcomes this fate for the greatest, freest and noblest country the world has ever seen is nuts, and if Barack Obama himself stands in favor of it, then we should all stand against him.

The Smartest People in the Room

One of the fundamental failures of liberalism is the way liberal policies conflict with each other and nowhere is that conflict more apparent than when discussing energy.  Liberals worship the Earth as a god, they love clean, renewable energy like wind and solar and pond scum (Priest-King's latest favorite) because they want to avoid offending their god and there's a certain internal logic there, but it all falls apart when you start connecting one position to another.  Any third-grader will tell you that trying to force like magnetic poles together is an exercise in futility, but try telling that to a liberal: They can overcome Nature, don't you know.

For example, liberals love clean, inoffensive energy but they also say they want a prosperous economy, at least in the way they define prosperous:  Wealth is distributed equally from top to bottom, nobody has any more than anyone else and employment is concentrated in manufacturing and building trades, fields historically dominated by the Democrat Party but which also require abundant, reliable and relatively inexpensive sources of energy which from the Industrial Revolution onward have been drawn from oil and coal, the two greatest demons in the tree hugger's philosophy.  So the liberal attacks oil and coal, forbids drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and the Alaska ANHWR (Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and former EPA Administrator Carol Browner were condemned by Federal courts in June and July 2012 for publishing a report that purposely distorted the views of a White House-appointed panel that opposed the Administration's moratorium on offshore drilling), forbids fracking that would extract more oil from existing wells (EPA Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz, in a speech in 2010, asserted that his enforcement policy toward oil and natural gas companies was comparable to the Romans' practice of crucifixion), stops construction of the Keystone pipeline (forcing the Canadians to sell their oil the Chinese, boosting their economy and not ours), imposes draconian fuel mileage standards on the automakers to kill production of the trucks, minivans and SUV's that Americans prefer, issues drastic clean air regulations designed to close coal-fired power plants that provide 40% of our electricity, presses for cap-in-trade legislation that would kill the coal industry entirely, and imposes stiff sales taxes on gasoline to discourage consumption (U.S. oil consumption has fallen over 1.6 million barrels per day from 2004-2010 but still not enough to satisfy the socialist one-worlders).  As if that were not enough, the liberals provide billions of dollars in Federal loan guarantees to the solar power industry, fully aware the American public has largely rejected solar power and that individual businesses are on shaky financial ground, then stand aside as Solyndra, Solar Trust and other companies go bankrupt.  They mandate the total replacement of incandescent light bulbs that have been the norm for over 125 years in favor of fluorescent bulbs that are more expensive and are the very devil to dispose of (the EPA recommends evacuating a room in which a CFL bulb breaks, airing it for 5-10 minutes, shutting off the home's central air system to avoid circulating poisoned air and removing any debris outside).  Still not finished, the liberals pour billions into electric cars, hoping that the love that the white, affluent, environmentally-conscious elite have for their toys transfers to the general public, then scratch their heads when the Chevy Volt, Fisker Tesla and Nissan Leaf either fail to sell or are so prone to mechanical failure that production is halted.  (The Tesla apparently turns into a "brick" if the battery drains, such that it must be returned to the factory for a total overhaul.)  The net effect is an economy that struggles to grow, deprived of the energy it needs, and the strangling of the very industries that the liberals claim to champion, and this paradox never occurs to the liberals nor to the unions who traditionally throw their support behind them, proof that liberal energy policies can never succeed because they literally cancel each other out.

What about gasoline prices?  Liberals always complain that the rising price of gasoline unfairly affects the poor and middle class and that the oil companies are gouging the public, but they never offer to reduce or eliminate the heavy taxes they attach to the sale of gasoline, or reduce the heavy regulations that throttle the construction of new refineries, or remove restrictions on new drilling, or do anything that would increase supply, lower demand and therefore prices.  Priest-King blocked the Keystone Pipeline that would have increased trade with a friendly country and reduced our dependency on Middle East oil while he flatly stated that "we can't simply drill our way out of this problem, " when in fact we could if he would only get out of the way.  In ten years' time, we would have tapped enough of our own reserves (and Canada's) that we could indeed reduce gasoline prices, create new jobs, boost our economy, cut our foreign oil imports and bolster our national security, but these benefits are all secondary to the desire to revert to a horse-drawn, agrarian, pre-industrial economy that would be at one with Nature and which, of course, would be completely inadequate to sustain a nation of 310 million people.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/15/despite-stimulus-funding-solyndra-and-4-other-companies-have-hit-rock-bottom/
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/02/us-solartrust-bankruptcy-idUSBRE8310ZV20120402
Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/297070/epa-expands-its-mission-crucifixion-charles-c-w-cooke
Source: http://www.epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup.html

If You Ain't Cheatin' You Ain't Tryin'

Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent comments about the supposed nonexistence of voter fraud in the United States and his opposition to voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina are the latest proof that he is just another liberal hack and an embarrassment to his office, with apologies to Janet Reno. After refusing to prosecute the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation in Philadelphia during the 2008 election, after calling America "a nation of cowards" for supposed reluctance to discuss racial issues, after instituting a policy at Department of Justice that there would be no investigations against minorities for civil rights violations in the Obama Administration, after announcing that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and other Gitmo terrorists would be tried in New York City in civilian courts (and then renegeing after a groundswell of protest), and after overseeing Operation Fast and Furious, in which Mexican drug lords were allowed to purchase guns in the United States and take them to perpetrate murder, including the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, and lying to Congress about his knowledge thereof, Mr. Holder now stubbornly refuses to approve voter identification laws passed by the Texas and South Carolina legislatures because they would unfairly impact minorities, the poor and the elderly, at least in his distorted view. Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires that states in the Old South submit their election laws to the AG for review and approval in order to prevent Jim Crow-style voter suppression, Holder sees himself as a champion of the disadvantaged in this case, ensuring that every voter has the chance to cast their ballot.

…instead of ensuring that every legitimate voter has the chance to cast their ballot as these voter ID laws attempt to do. Free and fair elections lie at the heart of our democracy. The people have a right to expect that elections are conducted lawfully, that cheating, rigging and fraud are vigorously prosecuted, and that the results of every election are genuine. Since the presentation of photo ID is required throughout our society (I can’t check into a hotel without identifying myself) and since photo ID’s are free of charge to registered voters in the states in question, Mr. Holder has no reason for his obstinacy other than a desire to facilitate fraud such that the greatest number of liberal-leaning, pro-big government, entitlement program-consuming people reach the polls on Election Day, legal or not. And as for Holder’s comment that voter fraud in the U.S. is "nonexistent," a view echoed by The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, CNN and the George Soros-funded Brennan Center for Justice, that view is based on the deliberately misleading reference to the relatively low number of voter fraud convictions reported nationwide. It’s a vicious circle: Minus photo ID’s, voter fraud is easier to commit and harder to prove; the harder voter fraud is to prove, the fewer voter fraud convictions are obtained; the fewer voter fraud convictions are obtained, the greater the perception among liberals that voter fraud is "nonexistent." The fraud can continue, Democrats get elected and Republicans’ efforts to stop it are frustrated.

But voter fraud convictions are not the only indicator that voter fraud is actually occurring. Take for example last week’s incident during the Washington, DC city election in which an associate of James O’Keefe, the filmmaker who exposed ACORN’s voter fraud operations in 2008, approached a poll worker at Eric Holder’s own polling place and could’ve cast a ballot for the Attorney General without any identification (he didn’t). This incident has caused some embarrassment and anger on the Left, liberal commentators have simultaneously dismissed it as a harmless prank that proves nothing and attacked Mr. O’Keefe as a right-wing muckraker (“It’s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones"), but the point is that committing voter fraud in the nation’s capital in the Attorney General’s name was ridiculously easy and nobody was arrested or charged, let alone convicted.

And what about ACORN? In 2009, the left-wing activist group was investigated for various forms of voter and election fraud in fifteen states during the 2008 general election that included the following:

- Nevada officials charged ACORN, its regional director and its Las Vegas field director with submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms. Larry Lomax, the registrar of voters in Las Vegas, said he believes 48% of ACORN's forms "are clearly fraudulent."

- Prosecutors in Pittsburgh, Pa., also charged seven ACORN employees with filing hundreds of fraudulent voter registrations before the 2008 general election.

- Fred Voight, deputy election commissioner in Philadelphia, protested after ACORN (according to the registrar of voters and his own investigation) submitted at least 1,500 fraudulent registrations in 2008. "This has been going on for a number of years," he told CNN.

- Washington state prosecutors fined ACORN $25,000 after several employees were convicted of voter registration fraud in 2007. The group signed a consent decree with King County (Seattle), requiring it to beef up its oversight or face criminal prosecution.

In September 2009, Mr. O’Keefe and a female associate, posing as a pimp and a prostitute, videotaped employees at ACORN’s Brooklyn, New York, office helping them obtain public funding for a brothel to be staffed by underage girls who were also illegal immigrants. ACORN subsequently lost its Congressional funding – a fact that is by itself embarrassing – and was shut down, but apparently Mr. Holder doesn’t consider widespread and systematic voter fraud committed by one of Priest-King’s favorite groups (community organizer Obama started working with ACORN as early in 1992 and has sat on its Board of Directors) as actual fraud, a strange position for the nation’s top law enforcement officer to hold.

What if we go back further, to say, 2004? In 2008, the Milwaukee Police Department released a report of its 18-month investigation into voter fraud in the city in the 2004 general election and concluded that there had been an "illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of an election in the state of Wisconsin." This organized attempt included the following examples:

- Twenty-nine voters were registered at a county office building that featured no residential living.

- Between 4600-5300 more ballots were cast than voters that could be accounted for.

- The ballots of 540 people who registered on-site and then voted (allowed under Wisconsin law) were not counted.

- Eighteen convicted felons were hired as elections inspectors, eight of whom had been hired by ACORN.

- Out-of-state people were allowed to vote (and their votes allowed to stand).

- One hundred twenty-eight voters used a homeless shelter as their address of record.

- Over 2600 students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who were registered to vote in Milwaukee, living at one residence hall, were also eligible to vote in another jurisdiction.

- Dead people voted, people voted multiple times and addresses used to register to vote did not exist.

Given that John Kerry won Wisconsin by a grand total of 11,000 votes out of 2.9 million cast, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that the full-court press put on in the City of Milwaukee put him over the top, hardly a "nonexistent" example of voter fraud.

Same-day registration on Election Day facilitates voter fraud and the lack of photo ID makes it worse. That Eric Holder embraces the former and opposes the latter is a stark indicator that he’ll do anything to help his boss win: After all, if you’re not willing to cheat, you must not want it bad enough.

Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295431/why-we-need-voter-id-laws-now-john-fund
Source: http://blog.heritage.org/2008/09/15/voter-fraud-puts-ohio-election-at-risk/?query=Voter+Fraud+Puts+Ohio+Election+at+Risk
Source: http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/doj-official-calls-okeefe-voter-id-stunt-manufactured

Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/285771/if-fraudulent-vote-falls-woods-christian-schneider
Source: http://media2.620wtmj.com/breakingnews/ElectionResults_2004_VoterFraudInvestigation_MPD-SIU-A2474926.pdf
Source: http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2010/04/voter-intimidation-black-panther-style?query=Voter+Intimidation+New+Black+Panther+Style

American Dictator

"Accomodating" religious institutions sounds very similar to the Chinese practice of requiring churches to register with the government. Unregistered churches are destroyed, their property confiscated, their members harassed and beaten and their pastors jailed. Authoritarian regimes see faith-based institutions as a threat because their loyalty is to God and not the state, so Stalin destroyed 70,000 churches in the Soviet Union, Hitler sent Catholic priests to the concentration camps, Mao murdered Christians in the thousands and Islamic states persecute the Church with a vengeance (Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia).

With polling data that suggests that most women in general and most Catholic women in particular support contraception and abortion and insurance to cover them, Priest-King thinks he has a winner with this policy. He can advance liberal causes at little cost to himself, force religious institutions to choose between violating their deepest beliefs or risk closing those enterprises they operate as part of their mission, and know he has popular support behind him, at least the popular support that matters to him. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Rosa Delauro and Senator Patty Murray are all prominent Catholic women who embrace Priest-King's policy and dismiss the Church's objections (as if they have authority to speak for the Church), providing authoritative cover where Priest-King is concerned and proving once again that for liberals, politics takes priority over faith. Advancing socialist policy is their core belief, not faith in God, and anyone who resists them must be subjugated.

Socialists like Priest-King and his allies see democracy as clumsy, dysfunctional, complicated and slow, and seek to replace it with a statist model where power is aggregated to the center, society is rigidly and uniformly regulated and civil rights are distributed and adjusted as the government sees fit. Power flows from the government down to the people, not from the people to their government, and Priest-King has aggressively pursued this vision: Firing the CEO of General Motors although he had no Constitutional authority to do so; refusing to enforce current law regarding illegal immigration, the Defense of Marriage Act, gays in the military, and refusing to prosecute Black Panthers for voter intimidation during the 2008 election; shaking down BP for a $20 billion slush fund and appointing judges to the Federal bench without Senate approval, again without Constitutional authority; and of course, via Obamacare, ordering American citizens to purchase health insurance in violation of their rights under the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments. This is a man who believes he has the right to intervene in every facet of American society, to pick winners and losers, to choose which laws he'll enforce and which he won't, and to rebuild America into the workers' paradise promised by Lenin.

But two major obstacles stand in his way. First, the Founding Fathers anticipated such despotism and included the Second Amendment in our basic law. Every citizen has the right to buy, own, transport and use as many firearms as he likes, and this fact - that there are over 200 million privately-owned firearms in the United States - represents a powerful roadblock to Priest-King's vision as the people have the means to resist him if it comes to force. (Remember Lexington and Concord? How about Ruby Ridge?) So Priest-King has employed a two-track strategy to remove it. For starters, he has supported international treaties with the UN and the Organization of American States that would, if ratified by the Senate, essentially ban privately-owned firearms in the United States - he is by nature a globalist, after all. Next, to discredit private gun ownership and prove that more gun control is needed, his Attorney General authorized Operation Fast and Furious, by which known agents of the Mexican drug cartels were allowed to buy firearms in the United States and then disappear. The idea was that if American guns were connected to crime in Mexico, Priest-King would have the justification he needed to impose even stricter gun controls than the 32,000 existing laws provide. This approach has backfired since Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in December 2010 by guns traced to Fast and Furious, only half of the 1400 guns involved have been recovered and Congress is vigorously investigating the Department of Justice for its role in this ridiculous and illegal plan, but nonetheless it demonstrates how far Priest-King is willing to go to disarm America forever.

The second major obstacle to Priest-King's socialist utopia is the Christian Church. People whose
allegiance is to God and not to this would-be Caesar aren't easily persuaded, so they must be coerced. Priest-King knows that caring for the community is a major component of Christianity: Christians have built and operate thousands of schools, universities, hospitals, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women and their children, substance abuse treatment centers, food banks and the like. So he presents a devilish dilemma to those organizations: Provide insurance coverage for contraception and abortion which would violate their religious principles, or close those institutions that serve so many. Either way, he bends the Christian Church to his will, asserting his dominance, the Constitutional guarantee of free exercise of religion be damned. The Church must serve the state, he demands, and therein lies the soul of a tyrant. When a leader insists that his will must be obeyed in defiance of law, that the people exist to serve him, then he assumes the role of a despot and deserves to be rejected: Sic semper tyrannis.

Gotterdammerung

JUST AN ASIDE BEFORE I REALLY GET STARTED:

The pro-abortion lobby is angry because the Susan G. Komen Foundation has cancelled funding to Planned Parenthood and they’re alarmed that Pfizer has announced a recall of some of its birth control pills, but they’re fuming over a Congressional investigation that indicates that tanning salons lie to their young female clients about the risks of cancer. I’m mystified that tanning salons merit the attention of the United States Congress but that’s where we’ve sunk as a society: The liberal kook fringe will demand a Congressional investigation into tanning salons as a threat to young women, and demand that minor girls should not be allowed to frequent tanning salons, but will simultaneously demand the right of those same young women to abort their babies. “Tanning beds – bad, killing children – good.” Insane.

In the final act of the final opera of the four-part cycle The Ring of the Nibelungs, Richard Wagner describes a scene of hopelessness and devastation. With the Rope of Destiny broken, his spear Gungnir shattered, the great hero Siegfried dead and the Ring of Power returned to the Rhinemaidens, Wotan, the father of the Norse gods, burns the great Hall of Valhalla to the ground, taking all the gods and heroes with him to a fiery death. Having lost everything, Wotan chooses suicide for himself and his entire race rather than live in mediocrity.

Wagner sought to portray this sort of self-destruction as noble and historians have opined that Adolf Hitler, himself a great fan and devotee of Wagner’s work, emulated Wotan’s example by choosing suicide not only for himself but for Germany as well at the end of World War II. Surrendering to the Allies, facing the ignominy of trial, humiliation and the hangman’s noose was too much to bear for the Fuhrer, even if surrendering meant saving the lives of his people, so he allowed the full weight of Russian fury and Allied bombs to descend on his country and blast it to oblivion. To my mind and the minds of many Germans I have met, this was the very model of insanity.

Here in the United States, Barack Obama, the Priest-King and Emperor of the Americas, stands atop the wreckage of the nation he was elected to lead. His stimulus plan has failed, his bank bailout plan has failed, his takeovers of the automobile manufacturing, insurance, banking and home mortgage industries have failed, a thousand companies have fled from Obamacare, his overtures to Russia, China, Iran and the Muslim world have failed, the model of his green energy initiative is bankrupt, his gun-running project to Mexican drug lords has failed and his Attorney General has been caught in a lie, he has suffered repulses in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, the midterm elections and in the Supreme Court, and as demonstrated in his State of the Union Address recently, he is out of ideas, at least ideas acceptable to him:

· He advocates Federal assistance to his union buddies in the manufacturing industry while he knows that America has shifted to a service-oriented economy
· He advocates helping his friends in the teachers unions
· He advocates price controls on universities
· He advocates allowing illegal immigrants to stay in America without the threat of deportation
· He advocates exploitation of our own oil and natural gas reserves at the same time that he blocks the Keystone pipeline
· He creates a Financial Crimes Unit to investigate shady financial deals when we know that the bad loans that caused the housing collapse and then the recession in 2008 were a direct result of pressure applied by Democrat Congressmen in the Nineties
· He advocates higher capital gains taxes on money that has already been taxed
· He advocates slashing military spending as China, Russia, Iran and Islamic terrorists threaten us across the world

In his mind, there is nothing left to do. He clings to the ideology of the Left, he cannot envision anything else, he keeps saying the same things and doing the same things and hoping the same things will work and when they don’t, he starts all over again. He keeps running on this philosophical scamper wheel because to try something else, anything else, would invalidate everything he believes in, and rather than face the humiliation of changing course, he dooms himself and his country to even greater suffering. Need some proof? Here’s what three years of Priest-King’s leadership has gotten us:

January 2011 unemployment rate: 8.5%
13.1 million people unemployed
2.5 million people marginally attached to the labor force (people who wanted to work and were available to work, who had looked for work within the previous 12 months but couldn’t find anything)
Actual unemployment rate: 9.9%
Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

6 million people collecting unemployment benefits
2.4 million people collecting state unemployment benefits
3.6 million people collecting Federal unemployment benefits
People can collect 26 weeks of state unemployment benefits, then collect up to 73 weeks of Federal unemployment benefits
Federal unemployment benefits have been extended eight times since June 2008
Cost of another extension: $44 billion

Reps. Barbara Lee and Bobby Scott claim that unemployment benefits stimulate the economy, one of the most absurd positions imaginable, akin to bleeding a patient to restore him to vigorous health.

The average time that the unemployed have been without work hit a record 40.5 weeks in September 2011.

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/11/news/economy/unemployment_benefits/index.htm

2011 Federal deficit: $1.299 billion
2008 Federal deficit: $248 billion
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_deficit_chart.html

2011 Federal debt: $15.5 trillion
2008 Federal debt: $10.0 trillion
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart.html

2011 Federal debt represented over 100% of GDP
2011 interest on Federal debt stood at 3.5% of GDP (government will likely default if the interest on national debt reaches 12%)
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_2007_2016USp_XXs1li111mcn_H0f

2011 Federal spending as percentage of GDP: 24.7%
Source: http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/runaway-spending-tax-revenue

2011 new single-family home starts: 606,900 (1.2 million starts would be expected in a healthy economy)
Source: http://money.ca.msn.com/investing/news/business-news/us-housing-starts-fall-2011-a-bad-building-year-1

Priest-King has spent more money than any other human being in the history of Planet Earth but we are left with a staggering, punch-drunk economy, eyes swollen shut and one haymaker away from hitting the canvas. Now with all this money being spent (which must include the Federal Reserve’s two Quantitative Easings, in which the Fed bought almost one trillion dollars of U.S. Treasury bonds to try to stimulate inflation and kick-start the economy), one would ordinarily think that inflation would be skyrocketing and adding to our list of troubles, but it isn’t: Although inflation has doubled since 2009, we are still left with a comfortable three percent rate. How can that be, you ask? Simple – when 15.6 million people can’t find work, unemployment acts as dead weight on the economy, slowing it to a crawl. Even with ridiculously low interest rates – the Fed’s prime interest rate still stands at 0.25% - people and businesses simply aren’t borrowing and spending and building as fast as a liberal community organizer thinks they should (new housing starts stand at half the norm), and since Priest-King can’t think of anything else to do but spend even more money, he determines to throw good money after bad :

2012 projected Federal pensions (including Social Security): $806 billion
2012 projected Federal health care (including Medicare and Medicaid): $866 billion
2012 projected Federal education: $121 billion
2012 projected Federal welfare: $432 billion
2012 projected federal defense: $925 billion or 24.8% of Federal expenditures
2012 projected Federal social programs spending: $2.225 trillion or 59.7% of Federal expenditures
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/current_spending

So we have absolutely amazing sums of money being dumped into the economy while interest rates remain at record low levels, meaning that our currency loses its value with every breath we take, we have millions of people out of work, businesses afraid to hire because of aggressive, adversarial policies pursued by the Federal government, the credit worthiness of the United States has been downgraded for the first time in history, free enterprise itself demonized by the President and his Occupy Wall Street co-conspirators and we have a debt heavy enough to sink us all and what does Priest-King propose to do? Why, slash the Pentagon, that’s what: Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced on 26 January $487 billion in cuts over ten years, including 72,000 soldiers and 20,000 Marines and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (cutting from 42 planes to 29 in 2012) and very plainly threatened the Republicans in Congress with the following:

“Make no mistake: the savings that we are proposing will impact on all 50 states and many districts, congressional districts, across America. This will be a test, a test of whether reducing the deficit is about talk or about action.

I understand how tough these kinds of issues can be, and I understand also that this is the beginning and not the end of this process. But my hope is that when members understand the sacrifice involved in reducing the defense budget by almost a half a trillion dollars that it will convince Congress of the important responsibility they have to make sure that we avoid sequestration.

That would be a doubling of the cuts, another $500 billion in additional cuts that would be required to take place through a meat- axe approach, and that we are convinced would hollow out the force and would inflict severe damage to our national defense for generations. “

Translation: Either increase taxes and spending or we’ll gut your precious Defense Department with a dull deer antler. Friends, this is like a gangster movie, when the bad guys kidnap a member of a rival gang and cut off a finger just to prove they’re serious. The Left will absolutely risk the national security of the United States, at a time when we are challenged by China, Russia, Iran and Islamic terrorists, before they cut social welfare and entitlement spending.

Source: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=66940
Source: http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4962

But do we really have to increase taxes? Is our debt problem caused by a weak revenue stream? Will pillaging the wealthy get us out of this mess? Well, empirical data would indicate it won’t:

2011 Federal revenues: $2.15 trillion

Federal revenue has more than tripled since 1965 (Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003)

And in a sharp rebuff to the Occupy Wall Street idiots and the liberal Democrat lawmakers who urge them on, the facts are that the top ten percent of wage earners pay 70% of Federal income taxes while the bottom fifty percent of wage earners pay only 3%. That debunks the myth that wealthy people don’t pay their fare share of taxes, when the truth is that wealthy people pay an extremely disproportionate share of the total while the middle class pays almost nothing and consumes everything in sight. The truth is, friends, that the Federal government receives plenty of money, mountains of money, but blows it so much faster than it takes it in.
Source: http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/federal-government-revenues

So if Priest-King won’t listen to reason on this side of the Atlantic, will he take a lesson from our allies on the other? Absolutely not. The bailouts of Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece and the possible collapse of the eurozone itself do not register with him. Hugely unrealistic social welfare programs, free education and health care for life, two years of paid family leave after the birth of a child, thirty-hour work weeks and lavish retirement plans that crush whole governments and steal their sovereignty make no impression on him. He believes with all his soul that socialism is good, socialism is fair, socialism overcomes the fundamental injustices of life and if it has failed at all (he ignores the collapse of the Soviet Empire and China’s transformation to a market economy), it has failed because it just hasn’t been tried hard enough, to which I say, !@#$%^. Life is indeed unfair but if you live in the United States, you have a better chance of having a prosperous life than anywhere else on Earth as long as you have the nerve to try for it. Pitching a tent in front of the New York Stock Exchange, screaming at the police and demanding that your college loans be forgiven won’t cut it, and neither will dragging your country into the flames with you when your plans fail. What WILL work is voting Barack Obama out in November, consigning his debacle of a Presidency to the abyss and starting over, older, considerably poorer but wiser.


Source: http://primerate.wsjprimerate.us/2011_01_01_archive.html
Source: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/
Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/02/new-report-released-by-gop-lawmakers-suggests-top-justice-officials-had/
Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/24/transcript-obamas-2012-state-union/
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/federal-investigation-finds-indoor-tanning-salons-deny-health/story?id=15483714
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/pfizer-recalls-birth-control-pills-cites-packaging-error/story?id=15490045
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/video/susan-komen-cuts-ties-planned-parenthood-15493090

The Last Thing that went through his Mind was an American Bullet

Excerpt from the fatwa written by Osama bin Laden and faxed to the Al Quds Al Arabi newspaper in London in August 1996, amounting to a declaration of war against the United States, Israel, the West and Christianity itself:

"Our Lord, the people of the cross had come with their horses and occupied the land of the two holy places. And the Zionist Jews fiddling as they wish with the Al-Aqsa mosque, the route of the ascendence of the Messenger of Allah (ALLAH'S BLESSINGS AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM). Our Lord, shatter their gathering, divide them among themselves, shake the earth under their feet and give us control over them; our Lord, we take refuge in you from their deeds and take you as a shield between us and them."

Jeremiah 50:31-34:

"Behold, I am against thee, O thou most proud, saith the Lord GOD of hosts: for thy day is come, the time when I will visit thee.

"And the most proud shall stumble and fall, and none shall raise him up: and I will kindle a fire in his cities, and it shall devour all round about him.

"Thus saith the LORD of hosts: The children of Israel and the children of Judah were oppressed together: and all that took them captives held them fast; they refused to let them go.

"Their Redeemer is strong, the LORD of hosts is His Name: He shall thoroughly plead their cause, that He may give rest to the land, and disquiet the inhabitants of Babylon."

No matter where you go, no matter how long it takes, no matter how much it costs, no matter what we have to do or what we have to sacrifice, no matter who we offend, we will never, ever, ever give up hunting you. We will hunt you to the very ends of the Earth, to the dark side of the moon if we have to. If it is God's Will that you escape us and die of old age, so be it; but if it is God's Will that you fall into our hands, we will come for you in the night, we will shoot you in the face in front of your children and dump your body in the ocean for the sharks to fight over. And when you are dead, you will face the justice of Almighty God, administered immediately, righteously and eternally for torturing and murdering His saints. This is the end reserved for the servants of Lucifer.