Report: Oil production on federal lands falls, again

America’s domestic oil-and-gas production is going bananas, and it’s largely thanks to advances in technology and expanded drilling on private and state-owned lands.
President Obama, however, is pretty fond of implying that the credit for the oil-and-gas industry going gangbusters belongs mostly to his policies. For much of 2012, he deliberately misused statistics that made it sound like “oil production is the highest it’s been in eight years” and “we’re importing less and less oil” was all him, and as recently as his last State of the Union he was insisting that “my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits… In fact, much of our newfound energy is drawn from lands and waters that we, the public, own together.”
No. A thousand times, no.
Via the Daily Caller:

A report by the Congressional Research Service shows that oil production on federal lands took another dip in 2012, while overall U.S. oil production has exploded due to increased production on private and state lands.
“All of the increased production from FY2007 to FY2012 took place on non-federal lands, causing the federal share of total U.S. crude oil production to fall by about seven percentage points,” according to the report. “Overall, U.S. natural gas production rose by four trillion cubic feet (tcf) or 20% since 2007, while production on federal lands (onshore and offshore) fell by about 33% and production on non-federal lands grew by 40%.”
Since President Obama took office, oil and natural gas production on private and state lands has increased. In 2009, non-federal lands produced 3,487,800 barrels of oil per day which grew to 4,580,800 barrels per day last year. Non-federal lands produced 16,233 billion cubic feet of natural gas in 2009 and expanded to 20,242 billion cubic feet in 2012.

It was a good effort to spin the facts, but you just got called out. Tough break.

“Where the states have been in charge, we have seen energy development boom in a safe and responsible way, but under federal control we have seen a sharp decline in production. A web of red tape and a backlog of delayed permits are blocking important energy production opportunities on federal lands,” Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power, said in a Tuesday statement.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/07/report-oil-production-on-federal-lands-falls-again/

The importance of promoting self-reliance and a better future through work Welfare Reform Is Back

Last summer, the Obama Administration gutted the successful 1996 welfare reform law by offering to waive its work requirements. Now the debate is back, as several Members of Congress are trying to restore the reforms that helped so many out of poverty.

Last summer, the Obama Administration gutted the successful 1996 welfare reform law by offering to waive its work requirements. Now the debate is back, as several Members of Congress are trying to restore the reforms that helped so many out of poverty.

The work requirements were the heart and soul of the historic welfare reform signed by President Bill Clinton. As a result of “workfare,” welfare rolls declined by half within five years, and employment rates among low-income individuals increased.

Some of the biggest winners from workfare were children. Millions of children were lifted out of poverty. In 2003, the nation had the lowest level of poverty among black children in its history.

The Obama Administration’s undoing of this program threatens to set back America’s children and families. Conservative Members of Congress introduced legislation last week that would overturn the Administration’s plans to allow states to waive work requirements from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. At a hearing last Thursday, Representative Dave Reichert (R-WA) said:

It is critical for us to review the damaging effects of waiving TANF work requirements, which could result in less work and earnings, and more poverty and government dependence.

The reforms need to be restored and strengthened. However, TANF is just one of several welfare programs operated by the federal government to provide cash, food, housing, and health care assistance to poor and low-income Americans. Today, taxpayers fund roughly 80 different programs at a cost of nearly $1 trillion a year for these purposes. These include:

12 programs providing food aid;
12 programs funding social services;
12 educational assistance programs;
11 housing assistance programs;
10 programs providing cash assistance;
9 vocational training programs;
7 medical assistance programs;
3 energy and utility assistance programs; and,
3 child care and child development programs.
How many of the government’s 80-plus welfare programs include a work requirement? Just two.
While Americans are a compassionate people who want to help our neighbors truly in need, the overwhelming majority also understand the importance of promoting self-reliance and a better future through work. Regardless of political affiliation, more than 90 percent of individuals say that able-bodied adults should work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving cash, food, housing or medical care from the government.
Work requirements should not only be restored to the TANF program but should also be expanded to other government welfare programs, such as food stamps, one of the largest and fastest-growing welfare programs.
At a hearing last month, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) highlighted the critical need to reform the nation’s massive welfare system. He noted:

It is time to return to the moral principles of the 1996 welfare reform. That reform was guided by the principle that, over time, unmonitored welfare programs were damaging not merely to the Treasury but to the recipient.

Thanks to the 1996 welfare reform, people’s lives were changed for the better. Americans were lifted out of poverty. We need to expand these ideas, applying principles that help reduce dependence and allow more Americans to pursue the path of upward mobility to other government assistance programs.

http://blog.heritage.org/2013/03/08/welfare-reform-is-back/?roi=echo3-14808918998-11738096-21e788bfd88406b02c2b5289931b6236&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

Fact Checking Obama: Day, Another False White House Sequester Claim

Once again we find Glenn Kessler doing the honorable, bipartisan work of holding a White House responsible for what they say and do. And once again, the White House has been caught lying regarding a sequester scare tactic, this time with respect to a claim about the effect a measly 2% budget cut might have on vaccinations.

Yet, in raising the alarm about the sequester, the administration has highlighted the decline in vaccinations that it claims would result from sequestration. The White House Web site displays an interactive map, which when you click on Maryland, it declares: “2,050 fewer children will get vaccines for diseases like measles and whopping cough.”  It’s even worse for Virginia: 3,530 children would supposedly be affected.

 That bit of nonsense earned the White House two of those bad-boy Pinocchios.

While I'm thrilled some individual journalists are doing what they're supposed to do -- hold the White House accountable -- now that Obama has been caught in over at least a half-dozen lies, when does the president's beclowning of his own credibility become The Narrative in the full media?

That was a rhetorical question.

 http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/03/08/WaPo-Another-False-Sequester-Claim

Record 89,304,000 Americans 'Not in Labor Force' -- And Obama dose not care. 296,000 Fewer Employed Since January

(CNSNews.com) - The number of Americans designated as "not in the labor force" in February was 89,304,000, a record high, up from 89,008,000 in January, according to the Department of Labor. This means that the number of Americans not in the labor force increased 296,000 between January and February.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) labels people who are unemployed and no longer looking for work as “not in the labor force,” including people who have retired on schedule, taken early retirement, or simply given up looking for work.
The increase marks the second month in a row, after rising in January from 88.8 million in December.  Those not in the labor force had declined in December from 88.9 million in November.

The nation's unemployment rate decreased to 7.7 percent in February, down from 7.9 percent in January.  Overall unemployment “has shown little movement, on net, since September 2012,” the Labor Department said.

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 236,000 in February, according to the report.


http://cnsnews.com/news/article/record-89304000-americans-not-labor-force-296000-fewer-employed-january

Obama's Drops His Family Friendly Mask. But that was then. Last week, President Obama dropped the family friendly mask. He sent his Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court with a simple message: Dump Dads. Lose Moms.

Just four years ago, candidate Barack Obama said he believed that marriage was between a man and a woman. "And God is in the mix." Who moved?

Say what you will about President Barack Obama's policies, millions of Americans voted for the man in no small part because his family represents a much yearned-for ideal. How much happier Americans would be if all our children lived in a stable, loving, married family with a mom and a dad--like the Obama family. Many writers expressed the hope that having these real-life Huxtables in the White House would turn around many devastating pathologies in America's cities--and in our rural areas, too.

But that was then. Last week, President Obama dropped the family friendly mask. He sent his Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court with a simple message:
Dump Dads. Lose Moms. 

That's because the Solicitor General speaks for the president. In the most august and formal way, it is this officer who carries the president's deepest convictions to lay them before the nation's High Court. What the Solicitor General actually said was this:

“As an initial matter, no sound basis exists for concluding that same-sex couples who have committed to marriage are anything other than fully capable of responsible parenting and child-rearing. To the contrary, many leading medical, psychological, and social-welfare organizations have issued policy statements opposing restrictions on gay and lesbian parenting based on their conclusion, supported by numerous scientific studies, that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as likely to be well adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents.”

“The weight of the scientific literature strongly supports the view that same-sex parents are just as capable as opposite-sex parents.”

Actually, the weight of scientific evidence proves no such thing. All the work of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (www.marri.org) shows that children do best in a family where mother and dad are married and where the family worships regularly.
As for children raised by two adults of the same sex, the most extensive study ever done was that of Dr. Mark Regnerus. Dr. Regnerus of the University of Texas conducted the largest, most rigorously controlled study in history. Here's what the U.T. study found:

The results of the NFSS [National Family Structures Study]research revealed that the “no differences” claim—the claim that children raised by parents in gay or lesbian relationships fared no worse and in some cases better than children raised by intact biological parents—was not true. On the contrary, the children of these households, on average, did worse than children raised by their biological, still-married parents.

The weight of scientific evidence--as opposed to Donald Verrilli's politically correct posturing--shows that his statements before the High Court are "not true.” Remember, we are talking about the well-being of the children, not whether the adults in these relationships are well-satisfied with their domestic arrangements.
People around the world are amazed at the casual way some Americans are ready to dispense with mothers and fathers. In France, for example, a young pro-marriage spokesman joined the nearly 800,000 impassioned defenders of marriage who turned out in Paris on Jan. 13th. This young spokesman--Xavier Bongibault--said "everyone needs a mother and a father. It's only natural." It is natural. And this young demonstrator is gay.

He understands what the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge: Children need their mothers and fathers. It is their natural right. We can go as far back as 1790 and Edmund Burke and the French Revolution to see confirmation of this. The Rights of Man, wrote the great Irish philosopher and parliamentary leader, include the right to "the inheritance of our parents and the consolations of religion."
The Obama administration is casting all that away. President Obama promised to "fundamentally transform America." Few then realized he meant it. Abolishing marriage is what he is doing. Not changing. Not expanding. More than re-defining marriage, he is abolishing it.

Pat Moynihan was a liberal, but a sensible liberal. His was a voice crying in the wilderness when he expressed his alarm for the black family when the out-of-wedlock birthrate rose to 24%. That was 1965. Now, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for the entire country is 42%. Moynihan was right.
"What's the use of being Irish," Pat Moynihan said when President Kennedy was killed, "if you don't know the world will break your heart." Now, we are all Irish. The world is breaking our hearts. And President Obama is breaking our hearths

http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2013/03/06/president-obamas-drops-his-family-friendly-mask-n1526709/page/full/

Obama Admin Wants to Deport Christian Homeschoolers.

The Romeike family fled their German homeland in 2008 seeking political asylum in the United States – where they hoped to home school their children. Instead, the Obama administration wants the evangelical Christian family deported.

The fate of Uwe and Hannelore Romeikie – along with their six children – now rests with the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – after the Dept. of Homeland Security said they don’t deserve asylum.
Neither the Justice Dept. nor the Dept. of Homeland Security returned calls seeking comment.
“The Obama administration is basically saying there is no right to home school anywhere,” said Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association. “It’s an utter repudiation of parental liberty and religious liberty.”

The Justice Dept. is arguing that German law banning home schooling does not violate the family’s human rights.

“They are trying to send a family back to Germany where they would certainly lose custody of their children,” Farris told Fox News. “Our government is siding with Germany.”
Farris said the Germans ban home schools because “they don’t want to have religious and philosophical minorities in their country.”

“That means they don’t want to have significant numbers of people who think differently than what the government thinks,” he said. “It’s an incredibly dangerous assertion that people can’t think in a way that the government doesn’t approve of.”

He said the Justice Dept. is backing that kind of thinking and arguing "it is not a human rights violation.”
Farris said he finds great irony that the Obama administration is releasing thousands of illegal aliens – yet wants to send a family seeking political asylum back to Germany.

“Eleven million people are going to be allowed to stay freely – but this one family is going to be shipped back to Germany to be persecuted,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

The fear of persecution is why an immigration judge granted the family political asylum in 2010.
German authorities demanded the family stop home schooling. They faced thousands of dollars in fines and they initially took away their children in a police van.

German state constitutions require children attend public schools. Parents who don’t comply face punishment ranging from fines to prison time. The nation’s highest appellate court ruled in 2007 that in some cases children could be removed from their parents’ care.

“Families that want to have an alternative education can’t get it in Germany,” Farris said. “Even the private schools have to teach public school curriculum.”

After authorities threatened to remove permanent custody from the Christian couple – they decided to move to the United States.

Uwe, a classically-trained pianist, relocated their brood to a small farm in the shadow of the Smokey Mountains in eastern Tennessee.

“We are very happy here to be able to freely follow our conscience and to home school our children,” he told Fox News. “Where we live in Tennessee is very much like where we lived in Germany.”
Uwe said he was extremely disappointed that their petition to seek asylum was appealed by the Obama administration.

“If we go back to Germany we know that we would be prosecuted and it is very likely the Social Services authorities would take our children from us,” he said.

Uwe said German schools were teaching children to disrespect authority figures and used graphic words to describe sexual relations. He said the state believed children must be “socialized.”

“The German schools teach against our Christian values,” he said. “Our children know that we home school following our convictions and that we are in God’s hands. They understand that we are doing this for their best – and they love the life we are living in America on our small farm.”

Farris said Americans should be outraged over the way the Obama administration has treated the Romeike family – and warned it could have repercussions for families that home school in this nation.
“The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children has been at the pinnacle of human rights,” he said. “But not in this country.”

http://townhall.com/columnists/toddstarnes/2013/03/05/obama-admin-wants-to-deport-christian-homeschoolers-n1526500/page/full/

From Stalin to Sequestration

Allow me to begin by apologizing for having been absent from these pages for a while. My up-coming book Disinformation, which I have co-written with Professor Ronald Rychlak, became the subject of a documentary movie to be released in June, and that has monopolized my time.
On March 6, 2013, we celebrate 60 years since the death of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose nom de guerre was Stalin — meaning man of steel. I deliberately use the word “celebrate,” because Stalin’s death allowed the first ray of light to penetrate into one of the darkest and bloodiest disinformation operations in history: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. Soon after Stalin died, the curtain shielding his “workers’ paradise” from public view was ripped apart, and the rest of the world got its first glimpse of the gulag empire that the Soviet Union really was. According to recent revelations, some 94 million people were killed during the lifetime of the Soviet empire[i] so as to uphold the heretical system of socialism, a creed that deprived mankind of the very motivational forces needed to keep mankind going: private property, competition, and individual incentive.

In theory, socialism is an idyllic dream. In reality, it is a phony nightmare, modeled after Karl Marx’s infamous dictum “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen” (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need), a social theory that has destroyed the economy of every country where it has been applied. To put it into plain English, the socialist redistribution of wealth is theft, and stealing became a national policy on the day the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born. Immediately after the revolution of November 1917, Russia’s new socialist government confiscated the imperial family’s wealth, seized the land owned by the rich Russians, nationalized Russian industry and banking, and killed most of the property owners. In 1929, the Kremlin turned its covetous eyes toward the poorest elements in the country; by forcing the peasants into collective farms, it stole away their land, along with their animals and agricultural tools. Within a few years, virtually the entire Soviet economy was running on stolen property.
In the mid 1930s, the Communist Party itself became a target for theft. Following a brief period of collective leadership exercised by the Central Committee and later by its elite, the Politburo, Stalin personally stole all the top-level positions in the country and pinned them onto his own chest like war decorations, thereby establishing a dismal new feudalism in the middle of the 20th century. That is exactly what occurred later throughout Eastern Europe, when the Soviet socialists took over after World War II. By the time I said goodbye forever to Socialist Romania in 1978, the list of official positions and titles accumulated by Ceausescu and his wife could have easily filled a whole page.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Empire signaled a stern warning that in the long run stealing does not pay, even when committed by the government of a huge country. All socialists who have ever risen to lead a country have ended up in hell — all, from Lenin to Stalin, Tito to Zhivkov, Enver Hoxha to Mátyás Rakosi, Sékou Touré to Nyeree. All had their days of temporary glory, but all ended in eternal disgrace. A few remnants, like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, are still hanging on, but they certainly have a place in hell reserved for them. (Update: Chavez has died since the writing of this post.) In this year that Marx’s Manifesto turns 164 years old and should have long been discredited, there are still some foolish countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus, Italy, and Spain that are being devastated by a misplaced trust in its advocacy of “to each according to his need” and its consequential redistribution of the country’s wealth.

There are myriad reasons why socialism can never succeed. One is the irrational socialist attitude toward money. Marx’s socialists always depicted money as an odious instrument of capitalist exploitation, and they always preached the gospel that in the utopian socialist society there would be no money, no prices, no wages. Until that day, however, they admitted that money was unfortunately a necessary evil that had to be retained during the transition period from capitalism to socialism — because the socialist leaders were unable to offer anything to replace it. Nevertheless, in the socialist Soviet empire, money lost its economic regulatory function as well as its status as a measure of wealth, becoming merely an instrument for expressing domestic wages and prices. Irrational, unpredictable and chaotic, the socialist attitude toward money brought nothing but economic anarchy. I saw that with my own eyes during the 20 years I was involved with Romania’s financial system, as I went from being deputy chief of the country’s trade mission in West Germany to economic advisor to the Romanian president.

Thirty-four years ago, when I broke away from my life in the top circles of the Soviet empire, I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people to stop thinking of government as a boon bestowed from on high, and to free themselves from the clutches of socialism. Alas, now I see the socialist plague of “to each according to his need” beginning to infect my adoptive country, the United States. On Feb. 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed: “We Are All Socialists Now.”[ii] That was just what the official Romanian newspaper Scînteia proclaimed when my former boss, Nicolae Ceausescu, began changing Romania into a monument to himself. Two years after seizing power, the socialist nomenklatura of the U.S. Democratic Party produced the same results as Romania’s socialist nomenklatura did — on a U.S. scale. Over fourteen million Americans lost their jobs, and 41.8 million people went on government food stamps. The GDP dipped from 3.4% to 1.6%. The national debt rose to an unprecedented $13 trillion, and it is projected to reach $18 trillion by 2019.

Scînteia went bankrupt, and Newsweek was sold for one dollar. But a member of the Democratic nomenklatura representing the economically ruined state of  California in the U.S. Congress — who is incidentally a stout admirer of and visitor to Fidel Castro’s Cuba — is preaching that the future of the U.S. oil industry is “all about socializing,” all about “the government taking over and running all our oil companies.”

http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/2013/03/06/from-stalin-to-sequestration/

Tactic of appeasing the Arab Street has proven futile The Arab Street Is Still AngryWhen Mubarak was in power, the “Arab Street” of Islamists and Egyptian leftists was angry at America for supporting him. Now the “Arab Street” of Egyptian leftists, Mubarak supporters and some Anti-Brotherhood Islamists is angry at America for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

Much like Festivus, American diplomacy to the Middle East usually begins with an airing of grievances. These are not the American grievances over decades of terrorism and acts of violent hatred. These are the grievances that are supposedly infuriating the Arab Street. The list begins with Israel, continues on to the “Arab Dictators” supported by America and concludes with warnings to respect Mohammed by not making any cartoons or movies about him.

During his first term, Obama kept his distance from Israel, locked up a Christian who made a movie about Mohammed and withdrew his support from the Arab Dictators. The street should have been happy, but now it’s angrier than ever. And much of that anger is directed at America.

Mohamed El Baradei, once the administration’s choice to take over Egypt, has refused to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry. Joining him in this boycott is much of Egypt’s liberal opposition.
:
The American foreign policy error was to assume that the political grievances of the Arab Street could be appeased with democracy. They can’t be. The various factions are not truly interested in open elections. What they want is for America to elevate their faction and only their faction to power. When that doesn’t happen, they denounce the government as an American puppet and warn of the great and terrible anger of the Arab Street if America doesn’t make them its puppet instead.

Democracy is no solution, because none of the factions really wanted democracy for its own sake. They wanted it only as a tool to help them win. Now that the tool has failed most of them, they don’t care for it anymore. And the Islamists who benefited from democracy have no enduring commitment to it. Like all the other factions, they see it as a tool. A means, not an end.

While the West views democracy as an end, the East sees it as only a means. The West believes in a system of populist power rotation. The East however is caught between a variety of totalitarian ideologies, including Islamists and local flavors of the left, who have no interest in power rotation except as a temporary strategy for total victory.

There is no actual solution to the Arab Street that will please all sides and keep their hatred of America down to a dull roar

There is no actual solution to the Arab Street that will please all sides and keep their hatred of America down to a dull roar. Whichever side the United States of America backs will leave the others full of fury. If the United States doesn’t back a side but maintains good relations with the government, it will still be accused of backing that government.

The only way to disprove that accusation is for the winning side to demonstrate its hostility to the United States. Accordingly even governments that are in theory friendly to the United States must demonstrate their unfriendliness as a defense against accusations that they are puppets of the infidels. And as a result, no matter whom the United States supports, all the factions, including those we support, will continue to engage in ritual displays of hostility against us.

Trying to appease the fictional construct of an Arab Street that has clear and simple demands is a hopeless scenario. It’s a Catch 22 mess where every move is ultimately a losing move, no matter how promising it initially appears to be.

There is no Arab Street. The real Arab Street is the overcrowded cities full of angry men with no jobs and lots of bigotry. Their hostility to the United States has nothing to do with the sordid politics that experts insist on bringing up to prove that the Muslim world hates us with good reason. Even if this history did not exist, the United States would be just as hated. The best evidence of that is that most of the accusations that enjoy popularity on the Arab Street are entirely imaginary.

Demagogues can lead the street from bread riots to toppling governments, but what they cannot do is fix the underlying problems, let alone change the bigotry of people who blame all their problems on the foreigners, rather than on themselves. Each faction promises that the anger will subsidize and stability will return when it comes to power, but the anger will never go away because it’s too convenient to blame America for everything. As long as America is around, no one in the Muslim world ever has to take responsibility for anything.

The United States has supported different factions in the Muslim world for the sake of stability. The latest of these is the Muslim Brotherhood. With terrorism from the religion whose name none dare speak running rampant across the world, the Muslim Brotherhood was supposed to pacify the violence by showing that Islamists could come to power without flying planes into buildings.

While Washington was culpable in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian opposition was far more culpable for forming an alliance with the Brotherhood to overthrow Mubarak. The same Egyptian leftists who are warring with the Brotherhood now were assuring us two years ago that the Brotherhood would never come to power. They gave American policymakers and diplomats those same assurances and now they are condemning them for taking them at their word.

El Baradei was entirely willing to ride the Muslim Brotherhood’s numbers to the presidency. Instead the Muslim Brotherhood rode him and then rode over him. Now El Baradei, who applied eagerly for the job of being America’s puppet, is denouncing America for supporting a puppet government. America is, if anything, more the puppet of the Muslim Brotherhood than the other way around, but accusations of evil puppetry are as common a theme in the politics of the Middle East as giant puppet displays are at leftist protests in America.

Every faction in the game understands that America’s goal is to achieve regional stability while ending the anger and hatred directed at it. Stating a vulnerable goal in the region is a piece of tactical clumsiness that leads the opposition to promote instability and spread anger toward America because they know that is what it fears. And so the very act of defining a “love and peace” goal not only makes attaining it completely and utterly impossible, but actually leads to the very opposite result.

Much as respecting human shields actually promotes the use of that tactic by terrorists, aiming for stability leads to instability. And so every American diplomatic initiative ends with an angry Arab Street and no peace in sight. Every American diplomatic visit leads to a choice that is bound to make America unpopular with everyone no matter what choice it makes.

The United States withdrew its support from Mubarak because it did not want to support a leader whom the proverbial Arab Street hated, but now it is stuck supporting another leader whom the Street hates. After all that effort and the sacrifice of national interests, the United States finds itself right back where it started in terms of the angry Arab Street, even while its strategic interests have taken a beating.
Washington should never have withdrawn its support from Mubarak and now that the tactic of appeasing the Arab Street has proven futile, it should stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood out of some misplaced commitment to Muslim democracy, a mythical creature that no one in the Muslim world actually believes in, and the even more misplaced notion that the Muslim Brotherhood can restore stability to the region.
As the past year has shown us, the Muslim Brotherhood is not capable of bringing stability to Egypt, let alone the region. It is a violent sectarian organization incapable of running the country without resorting to violence. And while that alone does not distinguish it, its inherent Islamist tendencies do. Refusing to support the Muslim Brotherhood should not however lead to any further fallacies about freedom and democracy. These two attributes are not about to arrive in Egypt in any enduring form.

A chaotic Egypt will likely drift into one kind of tyranny or another. The United States should stay out of the process, providing no support to any of the factions, until a stable non-Islamist government that is willing to cooperate with the United States on security issues arises. That should be the only American criteria with respect to who rules or misrules Egypt.

The Arab Street is not America’s problem. It is the problem of those who wish to rule it. If the Egyptian people truly wish democracy, then they will fight for it and obtain it without our support. If they do not, that is also their business.

America’s interests in Egypt do not involve waging a democracy crusade, but keeping heavy firepower, a large population and nuclear technology out of the hands of our enemies.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53514?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=9365df7237-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email

Sustainability Marxism: Agenda 21 "We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. Dave Foreman (Co-founder of Earth First) “If we don’t overthrown capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecology sound society under socialism. I don’t think it’s possible under capitalism.” Judi Bari (Earth First)

We’ve been saying it for years – sustainable development is really just a disguised Marxism, with its top down control of economic decisions, violation of private property rights and emphasis on Social Justice, a term, incidentally, coined by non- other than Karl Marx (so what was your first clue?). Well, as Agenda 21 has been enforced in more and more policy, the perpetrators have grown more and more bold in openly revealing the truth – it really is a not-so disguised Marxism after all. But, of course, I’m just the lunatic fringe. So, let them tell you in their own words.

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects.”
Dave Foreman (Co-founder of Earth First)

“If we don’t overthrown capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecology sound society under socialism. I don’t think it’s possible under capitalism.” Judi Bari (Earth First)

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization we have In the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” Michael Oppenheimer (Environmental Defense Fund)

So when (people like Tom DeWeese) react to… Climate Change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it’s not because they are paranoid… It’s because they are paying attention.” Naomi Klein (writing in The Nation Magazine, 11/28/11)

“Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective.” Harvey Ruvin (Vice Chairman, ICLEI)
“Only socialism and the global solidarity of all working peoples can free both humanity and the earth from the fatal threat of global capitalism.” Third Annual Conference of the World Association from Political Economy) Langfang, China, May 23 – 25 – 2008

We call for “Zero Economic Growth.” Speaker at the UN’s Rio+20 Summit, June, 2012.
“What is occurring here, not just in Doha, but in the whole climate change process, is the complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” Christiana Figueres (Executive Secretary, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, November, 2012)

Ravings of a Sustainable Lunatic
So, Marxism is all the rage in the international circles, but local proponents, planning groups, planning departments and elected officials deny any such connections to their planning programs. Is there one? Let’s let an avowed Marxist author Ted Trainer explain how and why to impose the local process as he described it in his book, “Transition to a Sustainable and Just World.” See if you don’t recognize some of your community’s local planning programs.

According to Trainer:
The global economy is massively unjust. It delivers most of the world’s resources to the few in rich countries, and gears Third World productive capacity to rich world super-markets, not to meeting the needs of the world’s poor billions. Rich countries must move down to living on their fair share of global wealth. Local planning is based on this theory – YOU MUST LIVE ON LESS.

These faults cannot be fixed within or by a society driven by growth, market forces, production for profit, or affluence. These are the causes of the global sustainability and justice problems. Consumer society cannot be reformed to make it sustainable or just; it must be largely replaced by a society with fundamentally different structures. Local planning focuses on curtailing energy and natural resource and land use.
The alternative has to be THE SIMPLER WAY, a society based on non-affluent lifestyles within mostly small and highly self-sufficient local economies under local participatory control and not driven by market forces or the profit motive, and with no economic growth. (sound familiar – Rio +20) There must be an enormous cultural change, away from competitive, individualistic acquisitiveness.

What then is the most effective transition strategy? The essential aim is not to fight against consumer- capitalist society, but to build the alternative to it. This revolution cannot be achieved from the top, either by governments, green parties or proletarian revolutions. This can only be a grassroots transition led by ordinary people working out how they can cooperatively make their local communities viable as the global economy increasingly fails to provide. The Eco-village and Transition Towns movements have begun the general shift, but…

Local self-sufficiency initiatives such as community gardens and Permaculture must be informed by the awareness that reforms to consumer-capitalist society cannot achieve a sustainable and just society. Nothing of lasting significance will be achieved unless it is clearly understood that our efforts in these local initiatives are the first steps to the eventual replacement of the present society by one which is not driven by market forces, profit, competition, growth or affluence. This awareness is far from sufficiently evident in present green initiatives. The most important contribution activists can make is to join community gardens ,

Transition Towns movements etc. in order to help to develop this wider and radical global vision within participants. THIS IS WHAT YOUR LOCAL PLANNNERS AND DEVELOPMENT PLAN S ARE DESIGNED TO DO. THIS IS THE DIRECT CONNECTION BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL MARXISM AND YOUR LOCAL GOVERNMENT PLANS!
Ted Trainer’s book, “Transition to a Sustainable and Just World,” is the blueprint for establishing Marxist principles into your local community.


http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53501?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=9365df7237-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email

Leftist policies drive an iconic American city into bankruptcy How the Democrats Destroyed Detroit: Detroit residents have had fifty years to fix their own problems. They’ve elected Democrat after Democrat, bringing the city to the brink of bankruptcy. It is hard to imagine an emergency manager could do worse,

Last Friday, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, announced that the state will proceed with a takeover of Detroit’s Democratic city government. “The current system has not been working. We have not stopped the decline,” said Snyder. “This is time for us not to argue or to blame, but to come together as Detroit, Mich., not Detroit vs. Michigan, and bring all of our resources to bear.” Snyder may not want to point the finger, but it is obvious that decades of Democratic rule and economic policies have brought this once great city to its knees.

The move, one step short of declaring municipal bankruptcy, means Snyder will be appointing an emergency manager with sweeping powers similar to that of a bankruptcy judge. Such powers include the ability to toss out unaffordable contracts with public employee unions and vendors, put city assets up for sale, consolidate or eliminate government departments, make further service cuts, or recommend municipal bankruptcy—all of which can be implemented with little to no input from local elected officials.

Democratic Mayor Dave Bing has a 10-day window to request a hearing on the decision. If he does the hearing will take place on March 12 in Lansing. If the appeal is denied, Snyder will appoint the manager. As of now that person hasn’t been identified, but the Governor says he has someone in mind. After 18 months, the emergency manager would be subject to review by local officials, at which time he could be removed or replaced.

Mayor Bing sounded like he was leaning towards appeal. “The Governor has made his decision, and it was his decision alone to make,” said Bing. “While I respect it, I have said all along that I do not favor an Emergency Manager for the City of Detroit. I will look at the impact of the Governor’s decision as well as other options, to determine my next course of action.”

Democratic politicians and civil rights organizations in a city where the population is 82.7 percent black were far less sanguine. “For one individual to be able to wipe out the duties of our duly-elected officials, that’s more or less a dictatorship, and it’s against everything that America is supposed to be about,” said the Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the local NAACP.

The “dictatorship” meme was echoed by other Democratic officials. State Rep. Brian Banks, who represents parts of northeast Detroit, contended the Governor should not have the largest voice when deciding what’s best for Detroit.” State Sen. Bert Johnson (D-Highland Park) characterized the appointment of an emergency manager as “a death in the family.” Activist minister Malik Shabazz claimed that the “governor and the right wing in Lansing are destroying democracy and moving us into plutocracy.” And Rev. D. Alexander Bullock, president of the Detroit Chapter of Rainbow-PUSH, claimed the development “will add to the growing tension in Michigan.”  “We wait to see if austerity will trump democracy and prosperity,” he added.

What prosperity? Detroit’s downward spiral has been legendary. Once the fourth largest city in the nation, and home to its largest industry, Detroit’s population has been cut in half, from 1.5 million in 1970, to less than 700,000 in 2012. Median household income is $27,862 compared to the state median of $48,669. The poverty level is 36.2 percent compared to a statewide level of 15.7. The murder rate is 11 times that of New York City, and the unemployment rate is above 18 percent, more than double the national average. Detroit Public Schools (DPS) have been under emergency management since 2008. In late February, the state review board revealed that the city faces a short-term cash $327 million budget deficit and an estimated $14 billion in long-term debt, primarily driven by unfunded pension and retirement health care obligations.
As a result, the city can’t provide basic services. The Detroit Fire Department is so short of critical resources, rotating “brownouts” of fire companies are required. Forty percent of the city’s street lights are broken. For the past two years, the Bing administration has slowly adopted a city “triage” system, best described by the Detroit Free Press. “Infrastructure improvements, demolition activity, outdoor maintenance and development incentives will henceforth be concentrated in a relatively small number of neighborhoods that boast the high numbers of owner-occupied homes and little evidence of residential and commercial blight,” it reports.

To accord with this plan, the city’s 139 square miles have been broken down into four categories by Detroit’s Planning and Development Department: “steady,” as in little blight and a high number of owner-occupied homes; “transitional,” as in a neighborhood on its way up or down; “varied” as in some streets are stable and others are not; and “distressed” as in large amounts of blight, and few amenities, such as grocery stores.

47 percent of the owners of Detroit’s 305,000 properties didn’t pay their property taxes in 2012

Detroit residents have responded in kind. A staggering 47 percent of the owners of Detroit’s 305,000 properties didn’t pay their property taxes in 2012. Homeowner Fred Phillips illuminated the frustration many of those residents feel. “Why pay taxes?” he asks. “Why should I send them taxes when they aren’t supplying services? It is sickening….Every time I see the tax bill come, I think about the times we called and nobody came.”
Yet it’s even worse than that. Detroit has some of the highest big city property taxes in the nation, and property assessments remain overly inflated, amounting to as much as ten times the market price of the property, according to recent research compiled by two Michigan professors.
This has led to another phenomenon. Property owners are allowing themselves to be foreclosed upon, and then re-buying the same property at a reduced price, legally eliminating their outstanding debt in the process. Six hundred properties were repurchased in this manner in 2012, triple the number that occurred in 2010.

In short, Detroit is a city on the brink of ruination

In short, Detroit is a city on the brink of ruination. At the center of that ruination is 50 years of Democrat rule. The last Republican Mayor the city had was Louis C. Miriani, who lost his reelection bid in 1961 and ended up spending 10 years in prison for tax evasion. Incoming mayor, Democrat Jerome Cavanagh, brought the “Model City” program—fashioned after Soviet Union centralized efforts to transform entire urban areas at once—to a nine-square-mile section of the city. Using a commuter tax and a new income tax as his vehicle, Cavanagh promised residents “the rich” would pay for it all. Yet because people were being told by government how to run their businesses and their lives, in exchange for government goodies, the program ended up failing spectacularly.

1967 Detroit Race Riot and “white flight”

In 1967, after police broke up a celebration at an after hours club, an enraged neighborhood began to riot, igniting the worst race riot of the decade. Black-owned business were looted and burned to the ground. Forty people were killed and 5,000 were left homeless, and the “white flight” out of the city center, totaling 140,000 people over an eighteen month period, ensued. The city was never the same.
An unbroken series of Democratic mayors followed, all of whom had a hand in implementing the full panoply of progressive policies, highlighted by the giveaways to public service employees. Their outlandish salaries and benefit packages, coupled with highly inefficient work rules, killed the golden goose: the auto industry, and its attendant industrial community headed South, where lower taxes and right-to-work rules kept their businesses afloat.

The same swath of progressive policies destroyed the public school system as well. Perhaps nothing illustrates the corrupting influence of those policies better than the Detroit Federation of Teachers’ success in scuttling a $200 million offer by businessman and philanthropist Robert Thompson to build 15 charter schools in the city in 2003. Ten years later, the Detroit Public School (DPS) system remains a cesspool of failure, corruption and bankruptcy, all of which is chronicled here.

Considering some of the men who have run this city, Detroit’s descent into socialistic ruination should surprise no one. From 1974 to 1993, Coleman Young, who was subsequently revealed to be a member of the Communist Party, was mayor of the city. He failed to stem Detroit’s descent into chaos, and in 1992 his police chief was convicted of stealing $2.6 million from city taxpayers, even as Young defended him. Michigan’s hard-left U.S. Senator Carl Levin was Young’s chief supporter, serving as Detroit City Council president.

Kwame Kilpatrick, who served as Mayor from 2002 to 2008, represents the epitome of corruption. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to two felonies and no contest to a third one, receiving a sentence of 120 days. In 2010, he received a five year sentence for probation violations stemming from his obstruction of justice conviction. Currently Kilpatrick, along with his father, Bernard Kilpatrick, and his longtime contractor friend Bobby Ferguson, who got millions of dollars in city work, are awaiting a jury verdict on racketeering, bribery and tax charges that could send them all to jail for 20 years.

All of these polices and politicians have had their effect. In 2012, Forbes Magazine rated Detroit the most dangerous city in America. A Detroit News poll revealed that “Detroit’s crime crisis” has gotten so bad, a staggering 40 percent of its residents intend to leave the city within five years. Another two-thirds say the city is on the wrong track. The poll also found that all of Detroit’s public officials were held in low esteem, except for Police Chief Ralph Godbee—who retired due to a sex scandal after the poll was taken.

Now one might think that those living in the epicenter of Democrat-inflicted misery for fifty years might consider changing course. One would be completely wrong. On Nov. 6, Barack Obama received 98 percent of the vote. On the same night Detroit voters elected a convicted felon, Brian Banks, to serve in the state legislature. Other election results show overwhelming margins of victories for Detroit Democrats as well.

Thus, the self-inflicted misery continues, even as it is almost certain that Detroit’s Democratically-dominated city government will resist the efforts of Gov. Synder, and the Republicans who run the state legislature, to keep the city from going under. It is also likely that much of that resistance will be framed in racial terms, a theme that has already been stoked by U.S. Rep John Conyers (D-MI), who has represented Detroit for 47 years. “How come all of the jurisdictions put under emergency management are majority African American? Has anybody noticed that?” he wondered. Here’s what some people have “noticed,” Mr. Conyers: the top ten most dangerous cities in the nation are each led by a Democrat mayor.

Gov. Snyder frames the issue correctly. “There’s probably no city that’s more financially challenged in the entire United States,” he said. “We need to start moving upward with the city of Detroit.” Eric Lupher, director of local affairs for the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, put it even more bluntly. “The city could stop doing all of its current operations today—no more police and fire, no more garbage collection, no more street lights—and the city would still have billions of dollars of debt and promises made for future payments that it would have to pay.”

Detroit residents have had fifty years to fix their own problems. They’ve elected Democrat after Democrat, bringing the city to the brink of bankruptcy. It is hard to imagine an emergency manager could do worse,


http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53515?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=9365df7237-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email

One last time Ronmey Vs Obama: Romney Blasts Obama’s Sequestration: He Could've Brought Nation Together But Is ‘Flying Around the Country .. Berating Republicans’

CHRIS WALLACE, 'FOX NEWS SUNDAY' ANCHOR: How do you think the president has handled the sequester, the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts?

MITT ROMNEY:  Well, no one can think that that's been a success for the president.  He didn't think the sequester would happen.  It is happening, but to date, what we've seen is a -- the president out campaigning to the American people, doing rallies around the country, flying around the country and berating Republicans and blaming and pointing.

Now, what does that do?

That causes the Republicans to -- to retrench and to put up a wall and to fight back.  It's a very natural human emotion. The president has the opportunity to lead the nation and to bring Republicans and Democrats together.  It's a job he's got to do and it's a job only the president can do.

WALLACE:  The Obama administration is, right now, releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants who had been slated for deportation because they say they can't afford to hold them.  What do you think of that?

MITT ROMNEY:  Um, I think the president has to act in the interest of the country and -- and that means if we need an aircraft carrier in the -- in the Gulf -- and I believe we -- we do, I thought we needed one more -- that he should do it.
I -- I think if there are people who are incarcerated, uh, he should make sure that -- that, uh, we're able to keep them in jail// Look, it's -- again, it's -- it's politics.  It's, OK, how do we do something that will get a headline that will make it look like those terrible Republicans aren't willing to come together?