An epic debate is underway in our country. Proposed climate legislation would have a far-reaching impact on our standard of living and give government a portal into every aspect of our lives. The affordable, dependable and abundant energy upon which any great civilization is built is about to be rationed. [Read more…]
Leftism
America’s Uncontrolled Debt and Spending is the Real ‘Waterloo’
Acton Institute | by Ray Nothstine | Oct. 21, 2009
Religious left icon Jim Wallis has popularized the maxim, “budgets are moral documents.” Yet the often repeated declaration is true in a way Wallis hasn’t envisioned, signaling bad news for Washington’s big spenders and those stuck footing the bill. Currently this country is facing no greater crisis than out of control spending and a mounting federal debt—a moral problem of prodigious proportions.
The Office of Management and Budget is projecting $9 trillion in deficits over the next ten years. Washington’s leaders have long paid lip service to the crisis, but their actions betray their words. [Read more…]
The End Game of the Left
American Thinker | by Andrew Thomas | Oct. 23, 2009
Is a blind hatred of the “rich” driving much of the left’s apparently self-destructive behavior? In a previous AT article, I concluded that the goals of the left are “abortion and eugenic elimination of the ‘undesirables’, the euthanasia of the old and infirm, and the genocide of those who disagree.” But what was missing from this evaluation is the ultimate motivation for these travesties. Is it all driven by obsessive rage and hate?
I don’t think it is quite that simple. There appears to be an abundance of negative emotion in the leftist mind, but that is only part of the equation. [Read more…]
All the President’s Mao
American Thinker | by Mac Fuller | Oct. 22, 2009
President Obama and “the other side of Barack’s brain,” Valerie Jarrett — whose stepfather coincidentally maintained close ties with the President’s adolescent mentor and Communist, Frank Marshall Davis — handpicked the following bureaucrats and placed them in positions of great authority, power, and visibility:
Van Jones, “Green Jobs Czar,” self-defined Communist.
Ron Bloom, “Manufacturing Czar” cites Chairman Mao as a political guide.
Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, who stated in an address to high school students this past June that Chairman Mao Tse-tung was one of the two “philosophers” she most often turns to. [Read more…]
Green Patriarch Bartholomew Embraces Leftist Environmental Agenda
AOI | by Fr. Johannes Jacobse | Oct. 22, 2009
His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew lost no time ringing the alarmist bell as he officially opened the symposium, “Restoring Balance: The Great Mississippi River” today.
He said that, “we have reached a defining moment in our history … the point where absolute limits to our survival are being reached … instead of living on income, or the available surplus of the earth, we are consuming environmental capital and destroying its resources as if there is no tomorrow.” [Read more…]
Welcome to the World of Newspeak
American Thinker | by Janet Levy | Oct. 22, 2009
In George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” Newspeak refers to language designed by a totalitarian regime to control thought and make subversive speech impossible. It destroyed words with prohibited meanings so that heretical thoughts couldn’t be expressed. A form of censorship, Newspeak employed euphemisms and words deliberately opposite the reality they described. For example, “joycamp” was the term assigned to forced-labor camps. The “Ministry of Truth” was in actuality an organ of disinformation.
Newspeak was created to institute thought control and thereby exert political control through restrictive changes to the language. [Read more…]
Obama’s War on Fox News and Half the Country
American Thinker | by Allan Erickson | Oct. 22, 2009
On the one hand, we should celebrate the war between Fox News and the White House.
It is a good thing President Obama & Co. are angry with Fox. It means Fox is doing its job, you know, holding the Executive Branch accountable, like a real news organization. This is good news. Traditionally in America, the Fourth Estate’s role has been to challenge those in power, challenge the assumptions, examine the assertions, and check for accuracy, all the while carrying both sides of the story. [Read more…]
Nazis And Commies
American Thinker | by Bernie Reeves | Oct. 11, 2009
Is the fascination with Nazis in Western culture a product of natural interest, or is it an unspoken pact by novelists and filmmakers to obscure the greater atrocities committed by the Soviets — most notably under Stalin, who ruled in the same era as Hitler?
A recent documentary on the Turner Classic Movie cable channel illustrated the point. Said the commentators, when all else fails in selecting a villain, make Nazis the sinister evil force and success is assured. Yet the idea to create Soviet villains never appears to occur to novelists and filmmakers, except in spy thrillers where each side is usually defined as morally equivalent. [Read more…]
Nobel’s Stockholm Syndrome
Townhall | by Jerry Bowyer | Oct. 9, 2009
It was because of a woman named Bertha Kinsky. She was a pacifist and a free-thinker (which means anti-religious). He fell in love with her, and they married, but she left him. He was wealthy, but not intellectually respected. He inherited his father’s industrial business, which was, horror of horrors, an arms manufacturer. He was not a college graduate, but he learned chemistry anyway and developed dynamite, and became one of the wealthiest men in the world. He went on to write poems and anti-Christian plays, but they never respected him. She never really respected him. Alfred Nobel had money, but not status. [Read more…]
Child Rape and the Values of People Who Make Films
Townhall | by Dennis Prager | Oct. 6, 2009
We have reason to be grateful to the Polanski affair. It offers that most needed of virtues: clarity. It has made the average citizen aware of how broken the cultural elite’s moral compass is. And it has illuminated how equally distorted their self-image is. They see themselves as morally superior. They see themselves as worldly when in fact they are profoundly insular. And they see themselves as courageous artists when in fact the rarest films are those that involve any moral courage (for example, how many films about Islamic terror and the world that incubates that terror can you name?)
But the greatest benefit of the Polanski affair may be that the next time you see the Hollywood elite come out on behalf of or against some public issue, you can most likely assume the opposite is the morally correct position. [Read more…]