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A War with Iran is Inevitable

 By Alan Caruba

If the U.S. and allies had known that Nazi Germany would embark on the genocide of six million Jews in Europe, along with five million others that included gypsies, homosexuals, and political opponents, is there any doubt they would have taken preemptive measures to stop the Holocaust?

What we know about the Iranian regime is that it is led by Shiite fanatics that believe that the only way the mythical Twelfth Imam can return is for the earth to be in a state of complete chaos and anarchy. Almost from the beginning, following the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, the regime has engaged in an effort to achieve nuclear weapons. Their use against Israel is a certainty, but they would also be targeted against Europe.

Thus, when Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) recently called for war with Iran, I assumed he has some information I do not. Sen. Graham said, “I think we’re to the point now that you have to really neuter the regime’s ability to wage war against us and our allies.”

In the 1980s, Iran fought an eight-year war with Iraq. It ended in a stalemate, a million casualties, and the need to rebuild from scratch what was left of its military. Iran is located in one of the nastiest neighborhoods of planet Earth. It shares borders with Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan.

The Gulf States deeply distrust Iran’s nuclear and other hegemonic ambitions. The Saudis and the Egyptians recently conducted joint military maneuvers for that reason.

Internally, it faces a growing opposition from its mostly young citizens to the rule of the Supreme Ayatollah, Mamoud Ahmadinejad, and others who support the dictatorship that passes for a government there. Given time and covert assistance, one assumes they might prevail, but the real question is whether the world has the time?

Iran’s economy is in a state of collapse. As recently as November 9th there was a report of the arrest of four prominent Iranian student activists and others in anticipation of a government plan to phase out basic food and fuel subsidies. “The government is bracing for social unrest,” said one report.

If Iran’s leadership were rational, the last thing they need at this point is a war. They are not and their openly expressed hatred for Israel gives every indication of that.

As the primary source of funding for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza strip, Iran would seem to favor having its proxies take over Lebanon by force and to wage a new war on Israel. This would take some attention and pressure off of Iran as it works its will behind the scenes.

The Department of Defense and the CIA have war-gamed various plans against Iran over the years and the feedback was that neither liked the outcome because they always included the problem of an uncontrollable escalation.

As a point of reference, we put too few troops into Iraq in the 2003 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq regime and, while Baghdad quickly fell, the result became a long, unpopular war.

This raises the question of why, before leaving for his Asia trip on November 6, President Obama, according to Debka File, ordered the Pentagon “not just to beef up American and NATO military pressure on Iran, but to do so as conspicuously as possible.”

There are three aircraft carriers, four nuclear submarines, and marine assault units in the vicinity of Iranian shores as this is being written. This suggests that U.S. intelligence has picked up some disturbing signs or that the Obama administration simply wants to send a message to Iran that any trouble-making in the Middle East would be unwise.

Meanwhile, Sen. Graham called for “sinking the Iranian navy, destroying its air force, and delivering a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guards.” We can do that any time we want. What is the Senator not sharing with us that increases the urgency of such action now?

The problem Iran poses ultimately comes down to choking off the Straits of Harmuz through which flow millions of barrels of oil to the West. That would be a very destabilizing event and not permissible to the U.S., NATO nations, and others. If, however, Iran’s goal is to create world chaos, nuclear-tipped missiles would be the best way to achieve it.

As with so many geopolitical and military options, there are few good choices, but much of Iran’s bellicosity likely comes from its internal situation which, as we have seen, is an increasing threat to its regime. A show of force is a good idea. The use of it before Iran goes nuclear is even better.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Good Old Days

By Alan Caruba

It started with a haircut in the morning. I sat in a barber chair I had sat in initially around the age of five. In those days, the 1940s, four Italian gentlemen cut hair and it cost 25 cents for a kid and $1.25 for an adult. Same shop, but my haircut cost $16.00 not counting the tip. Except for the owner, some lovely gals cut hair there these days.

When my parents moved to an upscale suburb of Newark, New Jersey in 1942, they paid $11,000 for a three-bedroom home with a stand-alone garage. I sold it for many multiples of that and it was essentially the same house with a few improvements. I sold because, in 2000, the town had reevaluated the property and literally doubled the taxes. Ten years later, a second reevaluation was deemed worthy of an article in The Wall Street Journal.

My parents put two sons through college on the earnings of my Father, a CPA with vivid memories of the Great Depression. He was a liberal, a Democrat, and advocate of the United Nations. Starting in the 1950s Mother taught gourmet cooking in the adult schools that sprang up after the war, earning enough to purchase the family cars and otherwise contribute to the budget. They remained married for over sixty years. He never learned to drive.

After the haircut, I topped out the gas, a little under a half-tank, and paid $21 for a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, the latter mandated by the government and heavily subsidized. The cost included state and federal taxes. I can recall when gasoline in the 60s and 70s was around 60 cents a gallon. I can also remember long lines at the pumps in both 1967 and 1973-74 when the Saudis, angered by the U.S. support for Israel, implemented oil embargoes.

A visit to the supermarket these days is a carnival of sticker-shock. The price of food has been rising thanks in part to the increase of the cost of energy to produce it and the diversion of corn to produce ethanol that reduces the mileage you get from the gas you purchase and likely harms your car’s engine. Corn is a major feedstock so the cost of a steak is rising too.

During WWII, the milk was delivered to my home by a horse-drawn wagon. Before refrigeration became widely available, we kept it in an ice box that required the delivery of large blocks of ice. There was radio, but no television. If you wanted air conditioning, you had to go to the local movie theatre. Price of admission, plus popcorn cost a kid about twenty-five cents. I saw my first television program in the 1950s. Within no time, everyone had a TV.

When I attended elementary, middle and high school there was zero talk about illegal drug use because there was none and I cannot recall any mention, let alone the teaching of heterosexual or homosexual sex of any kind. The school day began with a pledge of allegiance and a prayer. We did not have a politically correct curriculum or have to listen to fantasies about the planet heating up.

We did not recycle because everyone knew it was just the garbage.

It was the rare child who came from a family that had experienced divorce or who was being raised by a single parent. There was no segregation in the north, but my high school was almost completely white. That ratio has been reversed.

The Draft ensured that every able-bodied young man would serve a minimum of two years in the military learning the arts of warfare. We had all been born early enough to have passed through World War Two as very young children. This was followed by a conflict in Korea in the 1950s when we were teens. By the time the Vietnam War came along it was a new generation of conscripts fighting it. After that, the military became entirely staffed by volunteers.

The biggest scandal of the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower involved a vicuna coat his chief of staff had accepted as a gift. It would take Watergate to stain and end Nixon’s presidency, an ugly sexual dalliance to undermine Clinton’s, and a parade of congressional felons that constitutes a non-stop perp-walk these days.

Since I was a lad the government added a Department of Education, a Department of Energy, a Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others I cannot recall. Regulation of everything has exploded. Borrowing and spending has exploded. If anybody had told me back then that the government was broke, I would have thought he was crazy, but the debt ceiling kept being raised until there is, in effect, no ceiling.

In my memory, American society began to shift from traditional values and patterns in the 1960s. The century-long failure of the South to rid itself of the aftermath of the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, eventually found expression among blacks, but it also caused riots in U.S. cities.

In time, gays in New York would rebel against police harassment and a whole new movement would be sparked, culminating in the demand for same-sex marriage, along with an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military. The lives of women changed with the advent of “the Pill” and demands for more equality.

Sex, drugs and rock’n roll became the order of the day. We have gone from Frank Sinatra to Lady Ga-Ga. Later generations than mine share a more chaotic vision of society and a far more costly one in which to live.

It has taken the emergence of the Tea Party movement to capture and focus the independent voters who have seesawed back and forth between the comfort of Eisenhower's conservatism to the free-spending of Lyndon Johnson, the conservative values of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s effort to force European-style socialism on America.

In my life, we have gone from the Great Depression to an era in which whole nations have discovered that a highly centralized government inherently cannot function without bankrupting its citizens whether they live in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Portugal, Greece or in the former Soviet Union.

As international organizations have flourished, from the United Nations to the European Union, the more unwieldy, corrupt, and grasping they have become.

We live now in the Age of Terrorism. No one in authority seems to want to acknowledge the source, the threat to civilization called Islam. Few Americans knew anything about Islam before 9/11. Now you can’t get on a plane without a full body scan and search.

If your grandpa or grandma say they miss the “good old days”, keep in mind that in many fundamental ways, they really were good.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Pat Me Down, Please

The Organic Food Scam

By Alan Caruba

Once, years ago, I was in a Midwestern State talking with a farmer. I raised the question of how much pesticide he used on his crop to ward off or kill insect predators or, in the case of weeds, how much herbicide.

“Look, my family and I eat a part of what I grow,” he said. “Do you think I am going to put anything on the crop that would endanger them?” Good answer.

I thought about that encounter while reading a really extraordinary book by an organic crop inspector that just blows the whole scam about organic foods wide open. “Is It Organic?” is a 599-page book by Mischa Popoff that comes with a wonderful history of farming while revealing why the public is being conned into believing that organic foods are safer and better for them when all they are is more expensive.

The book is available from http://www.isitorganic.ca/. If you’re a consumer interested in environmentalism, the history and politics of organic foods, or you are involved in agriculture the price is worth it. If you like plain talk and honest outrage, every fact-filled page will prove far more educational than most of the literature about environmentalism, energy, socialism, and agriculture than you will find anywhere.

“I believed in the principle of producing top-quality food and letting the market decide if it was worth more. Still do in fact,” writes Popoff. “But I learned the organic industry abandoned living up to that principle long ago.”

The secret this multi-billion dollar industry doesn’t want anyone to know is that “there is no field testing on certified organic farms to ensure synthetic fertilizers and toxic chemicals are not being used and to ensure harmful pathogens from animal waste are safely eliminated. The excuse I was given is that field testing is too expensive; something I later learned is patently false.”

“Testing in the field goes straight to the heart of what organic farming always meant throughout its vibrant history, until it was ruined by political activists. You’ll hear talk of end-product testing, but it’s a BIG waste of time. Synthetic chemicals dissipate if you wait long enough.”

“Honest organic farmers want field testing and so do consumers; so why is it rejected in this multi-billion dollar industry at the same time as it’s talked about as if it was the routine?”

Popoff explains that, “Organic food sold from one end of this continent to the other, whether grown locally or overseas, becomes ‘certified’ based on paperwork refereed by activist private-sector bureaucrats who make money hand over fist by giving their stamp of approval.”

Like global warming, organic food is a scam and it is run by an “unscientific, undemocratic, radical socialist movement” that eclipses the organic farmer “and bilks consumers in order to underwrite a political revolution that is about to impact your ability to feed your family.”

Food Pornography

Popoff calls it “food pornography”, an industry that calls itself organic, “but which is really just pure marketing from start to finish, promising everything and delivering nothing.”

“The genius of claiming that private companies test organic food,” says Popoff, “before they accept it as truly organic and put their corporate brand on it lies in the fact that there’s no possible way to know if it’s true.”

This is a very refreshing book to read on many levels and it’s worth knowing the author did not grow up in some suburban enclave and lived a privileged life. He was a farm boy “My family didn’t have a phone ‘til I was seven and I got my first horse before we got a television. I learned to drive a tractor and the bail truck when I was ten, and I got my first car, a three-speed standard, at the age of twelve.”

Far from the usual story of some PhD holding forth based solely on academic study and research, Popoff worked his way through college “grinding hamburger on the graveyard shift at a local grocery store.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1991 with honors in history and a minor in philosophy.

I doubt that “Is it Organic?” will leap onto the bestseller lists, but it deserves to be widely noted and widely read. It’s the literary equivalent of a lighted dynamite stick, exciting to read and thrillingly honest, a dangerous book in the best possible way.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Federal Reserve's Magic Money

By Alan Caruba

Historically, the Federal Reserve has had a poor record when it comes to correcting an economic slide into Depression.

In his book, “New Deal or Raw Deal?” historian Burton Folsom, Jr, asked and answered the question “What caused the Great Depression?” Among the factors he cited was the huge debt left over from World War One. In the United States, the national debt had ballooned from $1.3 billion to $24 billion in three short years, half of which consisted of loans made to the allies.

Today the U.S. is feeling the impact of the aftermath of 9/11 when military action was taken first in 2001 and then in 2003. We are still in Afghanistan and Iraq without much to show for it. As opposed to short, preemptive, lightning strikes, we have become involved in “nation building.” Forgotten is the fact that it was the Russian intervention in Afghanistan that ultimately brought down the former Soviet Union.

In the 1930s, in addition to tariffs on imported goods, “The third cause of the Great Depression was the poor performance of the Federal Reserve,” concluded Folsom. “The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 to control the money system by regulating interest rates and lending money to banks.”

In an eerie way, Raymond Moley, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust” of advisors and an initial advocate of the New Deal, reflects the widespread perception of Barack Obama today. In 1933 Moley broke with FDR and became a conservative. Following a meeting with FDR, Moley recorded his observations.

“I was impressed as never before by the utter lack of logic of the man, the scantiness of his precise knowledge of things that he was talking about, the gross inaccuracies in his statements, by the almost pathological lack of sequence in his statements, by the complete rectitude that he felt as to his own conduct, by the immense and growing egotism that come from his office, by his willingness to continue the excoriation of the press and business in order to get votes for himself, by his indifference to what effort the long continued pursuit of these ends would have upon the civilization in which he was playing a part.”

This description of FDR is, in astonishing ways, a mirror image of Barack Hussein Obama.

The dissatisfaction that Moley expressed has been manifested in the immergence of the Tea Party movement and the rejection of many in Congress who supported Obama’s agenda, including Obamacare, his failed efforts to jump-start the economy with large, temporary stimulus bills, temporary housing rebates and business tax credits, and the one-time cash-for-clunkers program that followed the federal takeover of General Motors and Chrysler.

There are harsh facts being ignored about the present economic crisis. More than 42 million Americans were on food stamps in August, an all-time record and a number that is 17% higher than a year ago. The U.S. is experiencing massive unemployment and the American Bankruptcy Institute predicts there will be an estimated 1.6 million consumer bankruptcies this year.

The U.S. government is completely and totally broke. A Boston University economics professor, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, has concluded that the U.S. government is facing a “fiscal gap” of $202 trillion dollars.

John Allison, who for two decades served as chairman and CEO of BB&T, the nation's 10th largest bank, told CNSNews.com that it is a “mathematical certainty” the United States government “will go bankrupt unless it dramatically changes its fiscal direction immediately.”

Having tried “quantitative easing” once already the Federal Reserve is undertaking a second effort. It consists of printing magical money and using it to purchase U.S. treasury securities. QE-1 cost $1.7 trillion and did not work. QE-2 will fail as well to the tune of $0.9 trillion.

The U.S. dollar has lost 50% of its purchasing power since 1986 and it has dropped 11% in value since June of this year.

Writing in the November 8 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Kevin M. Warsh, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, went public to warn against QE-2. “Fiscal authorities should resist the temptation to increase government expenditures to compensate for shortfalls of private consumption and investment,” said Warsh who urged “a strict economic diet of fiscal austerity.”

Whether it is Congress or the Federal Reserve, the failures of the present reflect the failures of the past. Major surgery is needed to pare the entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare. Instead, Obamacare added millions to the Medicare rolls.

The government sponsored entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, need to be privatized to avoid using billions more in public funds to save them and the too-big-to-fail banks that engaged in “liar’s loans”; mortgage loans that ignored prudent lending practices resulting in the housing market collapse.

TARP did work as an emergency measure, but the government has got to stop being the lender of last resort. It’s our money.

The Federal Reserve is contemplating the creation of “magical money” at a time when the U.S. economy is in deep trouble. It is a trouble that can only be cured by retaining the Bush tax cuts and by simplifying the current insane tax code. Why is there such slow growth? American corporations pay the second highest tax rate in the world.

The burden of federal regulation must be reduced. Economists W. Mark and Nicole Crain, noted in a September Wall Street Journal that “The annual cost of federal regulations increased to more than $1.75 trillion in 2008, a 3% real increase over five years, to about 14% of U.S. national income.”

The President’s original economic advisors have departed. They, like Raymond Moley in the 1930s, know that he is either clueless and/or resistant to any pragmatic solutions.

The midterm elections gave power to the Republicans in the House, the branch from which all financial bills must originate. Failing to do the same in the Senate, it may take two years to repeal Obamacare, but efforts must be taken to defund it, to render it inoperable. The courts may offer relief with a decision that it is unconstitutional.

When the new Congress meets in January 2011, every pressure possible must be brought to bear on the Federal Reserve to stop short-term failed “solutions” before the U.S. dollar is utterly debased.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Cartoon Round Up

Did Someone Say Donate?

You may have noticed that a "Donate" button has been added to the blog. And you may have noticed that "Warning Signs" has never had any advertising. In these challenging times, in lieu of ad revenue, I am hopeful that, if you like a particular commentary or the whole genre of posts, you will consider a donation to help underwrite the effort.

Thanks!

Thou Shalt Not

By Alan Caruba

Is there anything that some special interest group or some government agency doesn’t want to forbid you from eating, driving, wearing, using, and enjoying? We live surrounded by a multitude of “thou shalt not’s.”

Throughout history people have been afflicted with rulers and others who felt compelled to create lists of things forbidden to them. In matters of moral behavior, the Decalogue, otherwise known as the Ten Commandments, is quite sufficient to get you through life. Generally speaking, everything else from dress, food, and fun should be an individual decision so long as no one else is harmed.

The biggest “success” story among the lifestyle puritans are the endless restrictions on smoking. The biggest crock is the claim that “secondhand smoke” killed a lot of people who did not puff on a cigarette, cigar, or pipe. Worse, millions in “stimulus” money, public funds, have been allocated to anti-smoking campaigns.

As just one example, Georgia’s Dekalb County’s Board of Health received $3.2 million for an anti-smoking campaign and it is just one of four urban areas that have received such funding. A total of $650 million is being wasted in this fashion. How many jobs will this create? None.

My late Father lived into his early 90s and I cannot recall a day he did not light up his pipe, nor the sweet perfume of the smoke as it wafted around the house. My late Mother, who never smoked a day in her life, also lived well into her 90s.

Mother was a cookbook author who taught classes in gourmet cooking and dining for three decades in the adult schools where we lived. An authority on wines and liquors, we had a wine cellar in the basement fit for royalty; apparently all that wine had no adverse affect and likely prolonged her life, Dad’s and mine.

Americans love fast food. We love our McDonald’s, our Burger King’s, the many pizza franchises, Red Lobster’s, Olive Garden’s, Outback, and all the other wonderful places to take the family or a date. They all remain the object of scorn and scolding by endless self-appointed “consumer advocates” They and every other thing we eat are blamed for an alleged epidemic of obesity. Do I care if someone is fat? No. It’s none of my business.

Claiming that fat people cost taxpayer’s money is absurd. Many come from a long family line of hefty ancestors. Surely all those people who are genetically disposed to cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses cost money as well, particularly if they have lost their jobs and no longer have health insurance.

I am concerned about illegal drug use, mostly because it fuels the Mexican drug cartel wars that are killing Americans foolish enough to wander into bandito land. I yield to my libertarian inclination to think that we could eliminate a lot of wasted time and money if we just legalized drugs and let those foolish enough to use them pay taxes for the privilege.

I know that drug users, like alcoholics, underage drinkers, and a wide variety of solid citizens will drink and drive, but that’s why we have police and jails. Nothing will stop it except perhaps for bartenders who refuse to sell “one more for the road.” You could close every liquor store in sight and people, as in the bad old days of Prohibition, would find a way to have a drink or two or three.

I grew up in a time when kids rode bikes without mandatory safety helmets, drank water from the garden hose, played ball in the street, and lived to tell about it. We were told “don’t talk to strangers” and it was good advice. We were told to be home for dinner, a time set aside for the entire family to sit down together and discuss the events of their day.

I dislike the eco-freaks who demand that everyone buy a hideously expensive electric car when the ones we do buy are marvels of technology while there’s an estimated thirteen trillion untapped barrels of oil sufficient to keep them running on high octane for a very long time to come. Consumers will save an estimated five billion dollars if the government allows the ethanol mandate to end this year.

I don’t frankly want to hear that every single thing I buy is not sufficiently “Green” or that my “lifestyle” is an offense to planet Earth. I harbor the notion that the Earth doesn’t care and that these annoying people will complain that my ashes were despoiling the Atlantic Ocean when I pass from this mortal coil.

I have a friend who lives in a cabin in the backwoods of Missouri with two dogs as his companions. In the past he has enjoyed a fair degree of success as an author and other literary endeavors, but these days, when not earning a living as an editor, he is into the distilling arts and sciences, making some excellent hard cider and other potable potions. For his 51st birthday, he has signed off social networking on Facebook and yanked his blog from the Internet. To his longtime friends he said you know my phone number and address.

He is a happy man, having earlier rid himself of a crazed wife and dodged a potential one for whom he was the perfect “fixer-upper.” An unfortunate investment in a saloon in the methamphetamine capitol of the U.S. did not pan out. He accepts the fact that the nation is broke and that he cannot do a damn thing about it, nor does he expect Congress will do anything sensible to avoid this outcome.

I find his attitude refreshing though it is my “job” to warn against the coming collapse.

It is, however, the nature of all people elected or appointed to any position of power, no matter how low or high, to thereafter enlist an army of bureaucrats to enforce a multi-volume encyclopedia of regulations intended to save us from ourselves and to behave exactly as they want us to. I don’t like any of these people.

I wish all those harridans, hypocrites, and others who think they know better how you and I should live our lives would all be transported to the dark side of the Moon.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Election Fatigue

By Alan Caruba

It’s a lot like the marathon experience of “hitting the wall” when you have to push on to get to the finish line. It’s election fatigue.

Elections give media news people hundreds of hours to speculate, to evaluate, to discuss what is occurring in every district of every State, to report which candidate is ahead or behind, to trot out a new poll every day, until those who have probably made up their mind long before refuse to listen to another word.

There are, of course, thousands of words that follow an election and it must be said that the 2010 midterms were quite literally historic. As Karl Rove noted, “Tuesday’s election was epic. Republicans gained over 60 seats in the House and six in the Senate. They’ll now occupy eight additional governor’s mansions and at least 500 more seats in state legislatures.”

“The Republicans picked up more House seats than in any election since 1938, leaving the Democrats with the smallest number in the House since 1946,” and, predicted Rove, “Democratic losses could get worse in the next election. In 2012, three times as many Senate Democrats as Republicans face the voters—and many are from red states. Two more years of voting for the Obama agenda could do them in.”

The question in the minds of most Americans is how does all this translate into solving the awesome problems facing the nation and, more particularly, what does it mean to my future?

Everyone is going to have a different answer to the latter question because everyone has their own specific circumstances. I would not, for example, want to be a new college graduate right about now. The likelihood is they will be moving back in with mom and dad while others will be struggling to hold onto their homes.

While it is likely that the Bush tax cuts will remain, the temptation of States like California and other big spenders to raise taxes exists. The great challenge of our times is to shrink government at every level to an affordable size. Something is very wrong when the largest union in the nation is for government workers. It is inherently wrong that this union can give money to candidates when that money comes from members being paid with public funding.

The answer to the former question, the personal impact the post-midterm nation will have, involves the potential for a huge inflation, a continued devaluation of the U.S. dollar, a stagnant employment prospect as few jobs are created, and for some the prospect of being laid off from work or running out of the funds put aside or invested for retirement.

Real reduction of government is needed, but few believe it will occur. We have a bloated federal government workforce, many of whom are earning twice what a comparable private sector job would pay. There are entire federal departments and agencies that could be pared without being missed.

There are some important policy changes that could significantly improve the job sector and the mythical “energy independence” politicians love to talk about. You don’t just poke a hole in the ground and get oil. It takes time. Involves a lot of risk, and it takes lots of money.

Big Oil is in the business of risk and would spend the money if it was permitted to drill in and offshore of Alaska where vast amounts of oil are known to exist. There’s oil in the Dakotas and there’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico where the Obama administration is deliberately rendering thousands unemployed by slowing the permitting process. When you think oil, also think natural gas. The oil companies are as interested in it as crude.

Let’s stop handing out billions in tax credits and other funding for “Green energy”, wind and solar power. Few projects are more stupid than a proposal to build the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant in the Southern California desert. It just got the green light (no pun intended) from the Obama administration to the tune of $6 billion.

While the Greens are always screaming bloody murder about endangered species and the destruction of “pristine” land, this one project will take up 7,025 acres of federally owned land near Blythe, California. The cost of the transmission lines that will be needed is ridiculous when a single coal-fired or nuclear plant could produce many times more dependable, 24/7 megawatts of electricity than this blanket of solar panels ever will.

Barack Obama is still talking about a fictitious and fraudulent “climate change”, i.e., global warming at a time when most of the world has concluded that there is no global warming and when the largest carbon credit exchange in the U.S. just closed its doors.

Therein lies the real problem. Granted that the election has been a blow against the Obama agenda, Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton who moved to the center after his midterm losses.

Obama is a very different animal. He is still capable of doing a lot of harm from the Oval Office and, as we have seen, he is not shy about doing it. This is an administration that added $2.7 trillion to the national debt, including a record $1.4 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2009 and a $1.3 trillion deficit for FY 2010.

That’s why we must shake off election fatigue and be as relentless in the two years ahead as those through which we have passed. Obama is punishing America because he doesn’t like America.

He must be politically neutralized. It won’t be pretty.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Last Full Measure of Devotion

Excerpt from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863:

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."



In the Conservative Reading Room

By Alan Caruba

With Christmas around the corner, it’s probably a good idea to look at some books that conservatives would enjoy and from which they would benefit.

Decision Points by George W. Bush ($35.00, Crown) is, of course, receiving a great deal of attention as the former president gives interviews to promote it. Reportedly 4,000 people showed up at a book signing opportunity in Houston to purchase it (already heavily discounted at Amazon.com). The book is a useful insight to why W did what he did at the time he did it. What emerges is a man who is comfortable in his own skin and with his beliefs. As he says, he will be gone by the time history makes a judgment of his performance in office, but for now the book provides an understanding of what it means to live history and make history one day at a time. Intelligence analysis is not always correct. Threats to national security must be evaluated. War, says W, is always the last option on the table. The publisher has printed 1.5 million copies. It will likely be a bestseller.

Rules for Radical Conservatives by David Kahane ($25.00, Ballantine Books) is a stab at conservartive humor. Liberals assume that conservatives have no sense of humor, but that is not true. Anyone who has listened to Rush Limbaugh knows and enjoys the laughs he serves up along with pithy comment. Kahane has penned a wickedly funny expose of what actually goes on in liberal enclaves. Those who read the National Review are already familiar with him and know the name is a nom de plume. Trying to figure out who he really is has become a parlor game of sorts. His is the persona of an insufferable Hollywood liberal inadvertently spilling the beans on their intentions to “transform” the nation. This book arrives just in time to savor the retaking of the House by the Republican Party and glimpse some hope of doing the same in the Senate and White House in 2012. Until then, it will prove entertaining for the right-winger in your life.

Selling Out a Superpower: Where the US Economy Went Wrong and How We Can Turn It Around by Ronald R. Pollina ($26.00 Prometheus Books) Are you still wondering why America and its economy are in decline? Then this is the book you must read. Economics may make your eyes glaze over or even just sound boring, but this extraordinary book by a man who has worked for decades with companies seeking to relocate or find a State congenial to their growth will prove to be a shocking explanation of what is wrong with the economy. I guarantee you that it is not boring. For example, I bet you do not know that in 1968 there were 62 lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and that today there are 34,000! They outnumber member of Congress and their staffs by a margin of two to one. By 2008 they were spending approximately $8.2 million for influence every day. Few represent the majority of Americans in the middle class. And that is why the real median household income in America has stagnated for more than a decade. The farther the nation has drifted from the constraints of the Constitution, the greater the central government has grown, strangling the economy with massive regulation, rising levels of taxation, and literally driving companies and the jobs they provide offshore. No single book I have read this year comes close to explaining what has occurred and what must be done to avoid a bad, sad future for the current and next generation of Americans.

The Patriot’s Toolbox: Eighty Principles for Restoring our Freedom and Prosperity is a guide that can be had by going to http://www.teapartytoolbox.org/. Directed at members of the Tea Party, it has eight chapters, seven of them previously published by The Heartland Institute as booklets in a series called “Legislative Principles” and one written specifically for this book. I heartily recommend this guide that will bring the reader insight and information regarding areas of concern and action that include health care, energy and the environment, school reform, privatization, and much more. The Institute is a non-profit, free market advocate for reform. It has been a major factor in the demise of the global warming hoax, sponsoring a series of international conferences that brought together the world’s leading scientists and others to debunk this fraud. The book was distributed to 34,000 candidates for public office and nearly 20,000 civic and business leaders, Tea Party activists, and Heartland supporters. They book can be requested for free, but I would urge that you support the Institute with membership or a donation you can provide.

The Energy Imperative by Phil Rae and Leonard Kalfayan with Michael J. Economides ($34.99, ET Publishing, Houston, TV) should be mandatory reading for every college or university student because he reads very much like a textbook and, for that reason, I would recommend it to anyone who is confused by all the talk about “green energy”, “Big Oil”, “dirty coal”, the usual hogwash the environmental organizations and politicians put forth to hide the fact that the United States and all other nations are totally dependent on energy and that so-called fossil fuels are essential to their existence. They are “the master resource” and the nations that use the most energy are also the nations that enjoy the best economies. This book was written so that anyone can read and understand the fundamentals of energy and its use. I guarantee you will be the smartest person in the room when you read this book.

Energy and Climate Wars: How Naïve Politicians, Green Ideologues, and Media Elites are Undermining the Truth About Energy and Climate by Peter C. Glover and Michael J. Economides ($24.95, Continuum, New York and London) address the ideological social agenda that is being driven more by myth than facts. I count both authors as friends and am frankly in awe of their individual and combined knowledge and insight regarding an issue that will determine whether the U.S. continues to rank among the great powers of the world or not. Right now the Obama administration is doing everything it can to destroy the coal mining industry, has stealthily shut down exploration and drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and is spending billions of public dollars on the least effective forms of energy, solar and wind, despite the fact they represent about one percent of all the electricity the nation requires. Glover is a British writer and journalist specializing in political and energy analysis. Economides is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Houston. He is the editor of Energy Tribune and what he does not know on the topic is probably not worth knowing.

The False Promise of Green Energy by Andrew Morriss, William T. Bogart, Roger E. Meiners, and Andrew Dorchack ($24.95, Cato Institute) will not be available until February 2011, but it knocks the propaganda and lies about “green energy” into a cocked hat. Sold as better for the environment, less polluting, and a whole new arena of new jobs, these and other claims are examined while exposing a large, vocal alliance of special interests—corporations, politicians, and environmentalists—who expect to reap billions boosting it. One problem has emerged for these hucksters. The Chicago Climate Exchange, created to buy, sell and trade “carbon credits” just closed shop in the wake of “Climategate”, the news that the Earth is not warming and that the data about global warming was cooked up by a handful of rogue climate scientists working with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Naturally, the mainstream media that wrote many stories about its opening ignored reporting its demise. Green energy is part and parcel of the multitude of lies told about the environment to enrich those telling them.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Voters Said No. Obama Says No.

Are Liberals Just Nuts?

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has tried to discuss, debate, or argue political issues with a liberal eventually concludes they are dealing with someone too deranged to be influenced by facts. The midterm election defeat of Democrats in the House and the narrowed margin of control of the Senate mean nothing to liberals whose explanations ignore reality.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, explained the defeat in almost classic liberal terms. “Well, anger certainly continues to be all the rage in the corridors of American politics,” he pouted in an commentary titled “Man Up, America!” ignoring the fact that Nancy Pelosi--a woman--wielded the power in the House that produced the largest turnover of seats since 1938.

Ignoring the possibility that two years of legislative insanity that forced Obamacare on an unwilling majority of Americans, of stimulus bills that were nothing more than pork, of financial reforms that ignored the source of the mortgage meltdown, Carter concluded that “The general anti-Obama rage out there is palpable, adding that the “hatred for Obama” had “more to do with race than anything else.”

This “white, conservative and independent Americans are all bigots” mantra ignores the fact that Obama made history as the first black man to be elected president and that it could not have happened if a lot of white people had not voted for him, starting with the Iowa primaries in a very white State.

“What makes today’s fury more worrying,” Carter continued, “is the fact that angry right-wing extremists tend to carry guns in disproportionate numbers to their liberal counterparts.” Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, it was Obama talking about people “who cling to their guns and religion” instead of turning their lives over to an all-powerful central government.

Nearly a million “angry right-wing extremists” turned up in Washington, D.C. to peacefully protest passage of Obamacare without a single arrest or incident. They were summarily dismissed by a very arrogant White House that was too busy forcing “healthcare reform” on the majority of Americans to pay attention to how many of them were unemployed.

There is an aspect of psychology called “projection” when one accuses someone of the very characteristics found in themselves. “What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums”, asked Carter. We call them liberals.

Compounding the failure, refusal or inability to accept the reality that liberal, Democrat actions, led by President Obama and enacted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, we have learned that the Speaker has made it clear that she wants to retain her power as the new House Minority Leader.

Historically, House Speakers who have presided over a loss of power resign, but not Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, her letter to the Democratic caucus cited “the most productive Congress in a half century” without apparently taking any notice that its legislative program led to a loss of 61 seats in the House. “We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back,” she said, citing the programs that were responsible for a crippled party in Congress.

Under normal conditions, the current Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, would be expected to be elected by the Democratic caucus to replace Madame Pelosi, but there does not appear to be anything “normal” about those who lost or those who survived.

Pelosi wants the Democrat Seal of Approval for two of the worst years Americans have been through and, of course, Democrats have been in control of Congress since 2006, halfway through former President Bush’s second term. Stimulus hasn’t worked. Unemployment is higher now than when Obama was elected. Obamacare, passed by Democrats who hadn’t even been allowed to read the bill, and a multitude of other ills resulted in a massive rejection of Democrats in Congress.

What have liberals learned from this? Nothing! The swift decline of confidence in Obama is attributed to his skin color. The economic stagnation is the fault of Wall Street. The rise in healthcare premiums will be blamed on insurance companies, not Obamacare. The anger of the electorate is blamed on angry, white-wing conservatives even though Tea Party candidates did not all get automatically elected to office.

On the Saturday following the elections, Rasmussen Reports summed up the situation for Obama as follows:

“Still somewhat in shellshock following Tuesday’s elections, President Obama so far seems content to blame the messenger, not the message.”

“In other words, the American people would really like his agenda if he had just explained it better. We’ll see.”

“Voters have mixed feelings about the tone the president set at his first post-election press conference on Wednesday. Most, in fact, are not confident that the president can work with the new Republican majority in the House to do what’s best for the American people.”

“Just before Election Day, the majority of voters said the election was a referendum on the president’s agenda and that he should change course if Republicans win control of the House. But most also don’t expect him to make that change.”

Obama got elected on a message of hope and change, but voters did not like the change and are running out of any hope that he understands what happened on Election Day.

That’s what happens when liberals are given power and that is why the next two years will be continued resistance to the changes voters want. Expecting them to rationally interpret the elections is a waste of time.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Caruba's Crystal Ball: The 2012 GOP Presidential Nominee

By Alan Caruba

If the Republican Party nominates a RINO (Republican in Name Only) like John McCain in 2012 it will lose and, assuming the Democratic Party clings to its suicide pact with Barack Hussein Obama, he will win.

It is doubtful that Obama will not be re-nominated for the 2012 race. As the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel pointed out, “History doesn’t inspire optimism. Over the past 100 years, every time a president two years into his first term lost Congress, he went on to be re-elected: Truman in ’48, Eisenhower in ’56, Clinton in ’96.”

What we do know is that independent voters will decide whoever will be elected in 2012. There were no Tea Parties in those earlier elections and a lot depends on what the GOP does over the course of the next two years. While they control the House, they have limited options beyond a declared intention to repeal Obamacare, cut government spending, etc. Twenty-three very nervous Democrat Senators up for election in 2012 may prove cooperative. Obama will not.

So, let the speculation begin! Rasmussen Reports polled likely primary voters to find out who Republicans favored at this early point and released a November 4 announcement that three ex-governors, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, and Sarah Palin were in a dead heat.

My crystal ball says that none of these politicians will be on the ticket.

Romney is a RINO who brought an early version of Obamacare to Massachusetts when he was governor. Huckabee plays well on television and should stay there. Palin has a cult following, but is a political anomaly who could be defeated in a general election.

Many Republican women candidates did not fare well in the midterms. None of these early potential candidates should be considered serious contenders for the presidency at a time when many Republicans are looking for new faces, not failed earlier contenders.

Others to ignore in this category include Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour, as well as Tim Pawlenty. All are good governors, but none have the star power it takes to be president.

There are Republicans who are already making appearances in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other early primary states and, of these, Mike Pence, an Indiana Representative who won a recent presidential straw vote at a “values summit” in September looks like a viable contender. There’s some buzz for John Thune, a handsome Senator from South Dakota, but Thune has not geared up for the campaign and few voters know anything about him.

Marco Rubio, the newly elected Senator from Florida, is a bright young, articulate face of the new GOP, but he needs to get a full term under his belt before running. He needs his name on some piece of legislation that gains attention. He is, for sure, a rising star.

Newt Gingrich may want to be president, but he is likely to conclude that being the party’s “elder statesman” is the role in which he is most comfortable. I do not think he will run for the nomination. For all his virtues, Gingrich is no Ronald Reagan.

The 2010 midterm elections were unique in that they were all about rejecting Obama’s actions in his first two years and the growing suspicion that he is a few cards short of a full deck. He can be depended upon to pursue the same policies that led to his rejection.

It is worth noting the way even some Republicans in Congress who had been there a long time got swept from office and the way some people with no political resume were elected. A “wave” election, the midterms were also in many ways an anomaly or, as Wall Street would call it, a correction.

My crystal ball tells me that the Republican Party could likely embrace Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey.

A lot depends on whether Christie will campaign for the presidency and he seems determined to serve out his first time. In two years he will look even better having already demonstrated that his endorsement is golden and he is a great campaigner whom audiences love. One day after the midterm elections, the respected political pundit, Stuart Rothenberg, addressed a group of D.C. insiders His pick? Gov. Chris Christie.

Gov. Christie says he wants to stay in New Jersey to address its need to reduce its burden of debt and shake loose the civil service union’s grip, but few serious politicians can or would ignore their party’s call to run for the presidency. Gov. Christie has enormous personal appeal on many levels and just the right values for a large segment of independent voters who have demonstrated they want to “clean house” in D.C.

One mistake the Republican Party must not make is the expectation that it can “co-op” the Tea Party. The GOP needs to cooperate and be responsive to it. It’s not a third party. It is a movement.

While potential candidates begin to maneuver for a shot to be the Republican Party choice, I think the time for the familiar faces has passed and the demand for real change based on rediscovered conservative values favors a new face.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Nancy is Ready for her Close-Up

I, for one, am hoping the Democrats elect Nancy Pelosi to be the Minority Leader in the House. She will be a constant reminder of the pathetic depths to which the party has fallen and an inspiration to rid the Senate of Harry Reid, increase the GOP margin in the House, and elect a Republican President in 2012.

Islamaphobia is Really Islam-Awareness

By Alan Caruba

On November 5, a memorial to the twelve soldiers and one civilian killed by U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan was unveiled at Fort Hood, Texas, one year to the day when they were murdered while Hasan in full combat uniform shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!”, Arabic for “God is great!”

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist and American-born Muslim, has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. An Article 32 hearing is scheduled to determine if there is enough evidence to send him to trial. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow.

The latest assault on humanity and civilization by Islamofascists is the news that al Qaeda’s Yemen branch is taking credit for having blown up a UPS air cargo plane a while back and that packages containing bombs were thankfully intercepted before they killed people on commercial airlines.

In the week of November 1 through 5, eleven children were among 67 worshippers at a mosque in Pakistan by a suicide bomber yelling—guess what?—“Allahu Akbar!” The same day in Afghanistan, nine people at a bazaar were blown to bits by a teenage suicide bomber; seven worshippers in Peshawar, Pakistan were killed when terrorists threw grenades into a mosque; a young boy was killed by rockets fired into Khyber, Pakistan; two people were killed in Yemen by al Qaeda bombers; and two civilians were killed by a Taliban attack in Helmand, Afghanistan. (Source: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/)

Ever since September 11, 2001, Americans have had a heightened sense of fear regarding Muslims, but it would appear that it is Muslims who have even more reason to fear other Muslims than Americans. This is not to say that some aren’t planning to kill Americans as this is being written.

The worst of this is President Obama’s continual efforts to whitewash a threat to the West and civilization in general as he has done again on his trip to India when he claimed that Islam is “distorted” by a few extremists. The problem, of course, is that there are more than a billion people worldwide who regard themselves as Muslims and the vast majority of whom who have remained conspicuously silent about Islamic terrorism.

What I don’t understand is the charge of “Islamaphobia” that is dragged out by various spokespersons for the Muslim community in America as if it is some sort of deranged response to the fact that Americans and everyone else in the world are at risk from those who get their kicks yelling “Allahu Akbar!” before killing either fellow Muslims or infidels, i.e. unbelievers, who do not want to embrace the religion of peace.

I would argue that Islamaphobia is just Islam-awareness that, at the street level, means keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior, cars parked in Times Square with smoke coming from their trunk, packages or backpacks left unattended in subways, and all the other nasty greetings from Allah’s most dedicated believers.

I’d like to say at this point that I have complete confidence in the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies charged with keeping us from being blown to hell, but I do not.

This is based largely on the glassy-eyed comments of Secretary Janet Napolitano who probably needs help selecting something from a menu or reminders what day it is. She is the very definition of clueless and this is why, I suspect, she was selected for the post by Barack Hussein Obama.

How Islamaphobic can Americans be when they elected the son of a Muslim father, a man who spent his boyhood in Indonesia with a Muslim step-father, and who just came within a hair’s breath of endorsing the building a mosque near Ground Zero after having been seen bowing to the kind of Saudi Arabia?

The greatest tribune I can pay Americans is that they have not gone on a rampage dragging native-born Muslims from their beds and slaughtering them. We are so attendant to their feelings that some judges want to incorporate Sharia law into their decisions concerning homicidal behavior, schools are now adding Islamic holy days to their calendars, and various other efforts to avoid hurting their feelings are widely found.

I do not care if Muslim’s feelings are hurt. I am still angry about having the Twin Towers destroyed and the Pentagon attacked with the loss of just over 3,000 American lives. I am increasingly unhappy about the billions being spent in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, along with the cost of the lives of our military personnel. I have pretty much concluded that we have wasted too much blood and treasure in these places where Islam resists precepts of democracy, tolerance, and moral, moderate behavior.

The Americans for whom I have real sympathy are Arab-Americans and here’s why. Two thirds (63%) of Arab-Americans derive from Christian minorities in the Middle East. These are people whose families have suffered at the hands of extremist groups in their former home countries. More than half of all Arab-Americans are Maronite Christians from Lebanon who fled Syrian Baathists, Palestinian terrorists, and the Shiite Hezbollah.

So do not talk to me about Islamaphobia. A phobia is an irrational fear of something. It is just common sense to fear members of a so-called religion more devoted to death than life; a religion that authorizes, sanctions, and demands that unbelievers be killed in the name of Allah.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Making Obama an Offer He Can't Refuse

Greenwashing America

By Alan Caruba

Every time you see some product being sold as “Green”, allegedly safer or beneficial for the environment, you can be sure that it is more expensive than a comparable product that does the same thing without making this claim.

Everything you eat, drink, wear or use begins as a “natural” product. It is absurd to think that calling it “Green” improves it in any fashion. Countless inspections before anything reaches the marketplace ensure product safety. To put it another way, a carrot is a carrot is a carrot.

Recently I received a news release from a public relations firm touting clients selling Green products such as “Parsley Plus All-Purpose Cleaner”, along with “stylish organic bed linens, “natural and organic clothing”, a “99.6% natural line” of shampoos, and, “100% Bamboo towels.”

In a similar fashion, every time you hear a corporation claiming it is concerned about the environment you can be sure that it is trying to protect itself against lawsuits from environmental groups or Environmental Protection Agency action that will eat into its profits and dividends.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Misleading Claims on ‘Green’ Labeling” cited a study asserting that “more than 95% of consumer products examined committed at least one offense of ‘greenwashing’, a term used to describe unproven environmental claims, according to TerraChoice, a North American environmental-marketing company that issued the report.”

“Environmental-marketing company”? By reading further down in the article, one learns that “TerraChoice was recently acquired by Underwriters Laboratories, an independent product-safety certification organization”, adding that both companies “could benefit if more manufacturers seek third-party verification of the eco-claims.” You think?

Consumers Union, an independent testing company, has built its reputation on its review of various products. Underwriters Laboratories has done the same, but there is no reason to believe any Green product claim, particularly since TerraChoice has announced it is probably a scam. Not surprisingly, third party certification has been offered by some major environmental organizations as yet another way to raise a few bucks.

It is no accident that the term “greenwashing” is akin to “brainwashing”, a term that came out of the Korean War when it was learned that American prisoners of war were subjected to “re-education” by their captors.

Communists have always been big on re-education, a practice of nations such as China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, and others where you were expected change your mind and learn to love Big Brother. The alternative was that you either stayed in their concentration camps or were systematically murdered for the crime of having been an intellectual, a landowner, or a bourgeois capitalist.

Communism murdered more people in the last century than all its wars combined.

Environmental organizations, in league with an unquestioning mainstream media, have been greenwashing and brainwashing the public for decades. It usually takes the form of scare campaigns and, in the case of supermarket products, it is directed at chemicals, plastics, how livestock is raised, or some other totally superfluous “issue” that has nothing to do with the quality, price or safety of the product. The object is always the same, to lay a guilt trip on the consumer, i.e., to greenwash them.

Green product claims go hand-in-hand with the metastasizing Green regulations whose bottom line raises the costs of everything in America these days. Angela Logomasini of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is an expert on regulatory affairs. When it comes to the environment, Congress passed 1,163 new laws between 1973 and 2006. Ms. Logomasini found that only 85 of those statutes reduced government regulation, while 795 increased it. The remaining were deemed to lack significant regulatory impact.

Five of the fifty volumes containing the federal regulatory code are devoted exclusively to environmental regulation and an additional twelve also address environmental regulation in some respect. The Small Business Administration concluded that environmental regulation is the leading regulatory expense for businesses with fewer than 20 employees, averaging $3,296 per worker.

Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency that generates the new laws and regulations is totally out of control. It has been on a regulatory binge anticipating a Congress controlled by Republicans. Nothing rational explains President Obama’s continued reference to greenhouse gas emissions, Green cars, and, especially, Green jobs when so many Americans are out of work..

The EPA, created by Richard Nixon with an executive order in 1970, has to be downsized to its original mandate, ensuring clean air and clean water. When it began to define rain puddles as navigable waters and ordinary dust as a pollutant, you have to know just how crazed and dangerous it has become.

It will take a generation or two for Americans to shake loose of the insanity that is environmentalism. Long seen as a religion, it seeks total control over every aspect of your life.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

500 Followers and Counting!

My thanks to the many people who have identified themselves as "followers" of this blog. A RSS option has been added (scroll to bottom of page) along with a count of the site's page views. Its daily posts are a regular feature of CanadaFreePress.com as well as other news/opinion websites, serving the U.S., Australia, Europe and Asia.

Cartoon Round Up

On Writers, Professional and Otherwise

By Alan Caruba

One thing the invention of the personal computer and the Internet has done has turned millions of people into writers. Millions of blogs exist so that people can express and share their views on every subject on earth. Forums provide further opportunity to share one’s thoughts, if only to comment on others’.

I do not consider the 140-word limit on Twittering to be writing. That’s more like a Post-It Note, but in contrast to that there has been an explosion of self-published books. I know about this firsthand because I have been a book reviewer for fifty years and, for the past decade, have seen far too many poorly written, but self-published books.

Over the course of those fifty years I have been a professional writer in one capacity or another. After getting out of the U.S. Army, one of my first jobs was as a reporter for a New Jersey weekly. That led swiftly to becoming its editor because there was no one else around to do the job! From there I progressed to a reporter on a daily newspaper and, from there, a series of jobs, all of which required writing and editing skills.

In the early 1970’s I joined the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors (formerly the Society of Magazine Writers), the National Science Writers Association, and was a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle. I cite these affiliations because it meant that most of my friends were drawn from a relatively small community of writers for newspapers, magazines, and of books.

I rubbed elbows with the nation’s leading magazine writers and authors, and had occasion to meet and chat with literary giants like James Michener, playwright Tennessee Williams, and others. For the most part, though, my fellow writers were more akin to blue collar working stiffs, turning out magazine articles to pay the rent or writing books that barely sold enough copies to justify the small advances they received.

At one point, some writer’s organization underwrote a survey of what authors earned from their books and the average turned out to be something in the range of $5,000. You could earn more pumping gas or even mowing lawns given the months of labor involved.

In September the Wall Street Journal ran a page one story, “Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books” by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg. In essence, he found that authors are getting smaller advances against the sales of their books these days and their take on an e-book is pitiful. A hardcover book sold at $28.00 will yield $14.00 for the publisher and $4.20 for the author. The same book in an electronic edition will sell for $12.99, putting $9.00 in the publisher’s pocket and a mere $2.27 for the author.

Writing for magazines is not much better. Time was a professional writer could expect $1 a word for an article as the minimum standard and often much more if one had some measure of fame. A random look at what some of the top professional writers are earning these days suggests they are lucky to be paid at that minimum level. Pay levels vary depending on the publication, but it is no secret that both newspapers and magazines are suffering losses of advertising and other income, further reducing or eliminating any payment.

Long ago I got into the public relations profession and that afforded me the opportunity to see my writing in various media, usually in the form of a news release or a feature article. As news and opinion websites proliferated on the Internet I began to contribute to them and, in 2007, I started my own blog where my posts on anything that interests me are provided to websites and other blogs at no cost.

For many of my writer friends, it is writing of the kind that lacks any fame, glamour or excitement that pays the bills. Many earn a living editing the work of other writers. There are medical conference reports or scripts for business conference moderators that pay well. Some pick up a fee as speakers or, better still, as speech writers. Many teach—usually at the college and university level.

I cannot tell you the many times I have ghost-written commentaries for people too famous and too busy to write their own.

For the vast legion of amateur writers my advice is to find something more productive to do. The world is not waiting for your memoir or autobiography. Unless you have spent years developing expertise in some area of life and work, either demand to be paid for it or refuse to give it away for free.

As the economy continues to head south, writing for a living has generally preceded the decline. For publications of all descriptions, the plethora of free material has proved a godsend.

Literally for centuries writing has always has always been a very difficult way to make a living. You know only about those authors who actually found an audience and market while the countless others sank beneath the waves of exploitation and indifference. Many famous writers famously died broke. And drunk.

The song, “Mothers don’t let your sons grow up to be cowboys” applies equally to the writing profession. And it’s good advice.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Impatient Americans

By Alan Caruba

Americans are an impatient people. There’s a reason why every manner of labor-saving device was invented here and why we are in love with every kind of device that lets us instantly communicate with one another.

In an earlier era, it might have taken longer for a majority of Americans to realize just how awful President Obama’s legislative and other policy initiatives were for the nation, but a plethora of punditry on countless Internet websites and blogs alerted them even while the mainstream media was trying to deceive them as they had with their support for candidate Obama.

As an aside, media prognosticators are predicting that daily newspapers are essentially all dinosaurs and many, if not most, will be gone in a decade or so. The general rule is that new technology, the Internet, drives out old technology, dead-tree newspapers.

The other factor is that most daily newspapers with their liberal outlook have simply been abandoned by subscribers who have tired of seeking real news amidst the propaganda. Prediction: none of the news weeklies will be around in five years or less.
When even the National Enquirer and Star Magazine are filling for bankruptcy protection, you know the times they are changing. Survivors, however, may be the nation’s many weekly newspapers because, like politics, all news is local.

Impatience with a Congress that was so clearly out of touch with most constituents has resulted in a historic turnover of power to the Republican Party and it is a far more humble party than its heyday during George W. Bush’s two terms, the latter of which saw Americans return Democrats to power.

Americans had already grown weary of the war in Iraq that had begun in 2003 and had little enthusiasm for the nation’s military involvement in Afghanistan since 2001. Throughout history, great empires have fallen because they got over-extended in such conflicts.

Making matters worse for any administration is the growing perception that the Middle East is psychotic; a place where reason takes a backseat to a seventh century religion that dominates its politics and social life. Watching Muslims blow up mosques filled with other Muslims is sufficient to convince many Americans that no amount of military power or billions in foreign aid will change anything.

Only one nation in the Middle East poses any kind of military threat and that is Iran. The minute it actually acquires nuclear weapons will be the hour in which Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and various Gulf States sit down at the table with Israel to discuss and plan ridding itself of this threat. The Iranian leadership—not its people—are certifiably crazy.

Americans will be looking to a Republican controlled House to rid the nation of Obamacare and begin to address over-spending, joblessness, and other issues, but the next two years will be spent in triage, trying to stop the bleeding until the patient can make it to the operating room and that will require the election of a new president and a Republican Senate.

So Americans are going to have to strive to be patient while the many Republican governors redistrict their states to aid a victory in 2012. They will have to content themselves with legislative maneuvers to defund Obamacare or remove many of its more noxious mandates. Also on the To-Do list will be to put the Environmental Protection Agency in manacles before it utterly destroys the economy with crazed greenhouse gas emissions regulations.

There is little that can be done to turn around the decades-old disastrous energy policies that have stalled the construction of the many new coal-fired and nuclear plants needed to provide the electricity that is the very breath of life to the nation. The Obama administration will also continue to thwart any oil exploration and drilling, and how much of a priority this will be in the new Congress is unknown.

Meanwhile the White House has announced that, upon his return from India, President Obama will sit down with the Republican leadership of the House along with their Democrat counterparts including the noxious Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It is likely to be little more than a photo-op because this president is deaf to partisanship or the reversal of his plans to destroy the nation.

This means that that a less frightening two years is ahead with the hope of real change in 2012. The economy is barely improving and is likely to remain stagnant, even with the extension of the Bush tax cuts. A Mount Everest of federal regulations will have to be eliminated to get the economy moving again.

And then there are the unknown and unpredictable “events” that will occur. 9/11 was one such event in 2001.

On September 18, 2008, there was a little reported electronic run on U.S. banks that withdrew $550 billion before the Federal Reserve stepped in to stop it. It blew away the charade of the nation’s housing market that involved Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Privatizing both should be a GOP priority. Americans have yet to have been told who withdrew those billions.

Other events over which there is no control such as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes could play a role. We’ve seen how the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico undermined confidence in the Obama administration.

Two years isn’t really that long a time, but a lot can happen and it will call for patience and perseverance.

© Alan Caruba, 2010