The New York Times reports federal prosecutors are recommending felony charges against former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus for allegedly providing classified information to a civilian author and journalist with whom he allegedly had an affair.
In light of the news, it’s worth looking at the following excerpt from my book: Stonewalled.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
SHARYL ATTKISSON: The U.S. Government vs. David Petraeus
Friday, January 09, 2015
Congress itself implicated in new Obamacare scandal
They didn’t fess up willingly. But after we applied the appropriate pressure, government officials responsible for operating the Washington D.C. Obamacare “Small Business Exchange” have finally admitted that Congress is taking advantage of health benefits its members and staff are not entitled to claim.
At least 12,359 members of Congress, congressional staffers, and their spouses and dependents currently purchase health insurance in D.C.’s Small Business Exchange even though Congress far exceeds D.C. law’s 50-employee limit for participating in the exchange. That’s why we filed a lawsuit in October on behalf of Kirby Vining, a D.C. taxpayer, against the D.C. Health Exchange Authority. In a court filing, the D.C. government conceded that, under D.C. law, the U.S. Congress is not permitted to obtain insurance through the District’s Small Business Exchange. But members of the political class, true to form, do not believe the rules apply to them. How do we know?Our lawsuit cites applications filed by the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate with the D.C. Exchange Authority. The applications, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, show that the House and Senate claimed to have only 45 employees each. They also show that the House and Senate attested to having “50 or fewer full-time equivalent employees.” Congress employs upwards of 20,000 people. D.C. law limits participation in the exchange to small businesses having fewer than 50 full-time employees. The applications also falsely state that the House and Senate are “local/state governments.” The “electronic signature” section of the application includes the following language:
I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NEW OVERLORDS: Say Hello to the New One-Party State
Oligarchy is defined as a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.
The oligarchy is composed of the Democrat and Republican establishments, the media and the financiers, who every four years hire a President.The political system they operate is known as "totalitarian democracy", one in which lawfully elected representatives rule a nation state whose citizens, although granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of government.
The main policy of the American oligarchy is malfeasance, the performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law.
Or as Ambrose Bierce, a 19th century political satirist, described Washington D.C. as a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles and the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
How did, for example, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) manage to grow his net worth to $10 million while raising a large family, on a public official's salary, and incurring the expenses associated with maintaining two residences on opposite sides of the country?
According to Peter Schweizer ("Throw them all out: how politicians and their friends get rich off insider stock tips, land deals, and cronyism that would send the rest of us to prison"):
Thursday, January 08, 2015
JOHN McCAIN'S "ETHNIC CLEANSING": There's a Soviet-style Purge of Conservatives in Arizona
Republicans: Political purges may work in totalitarian states, but in a democracy they can be self-defeating. The senator who called the Tea Party "wacko birds" should realize the GOP's real enemies are called Democrats.
It's been said that all politics is local, and normally a state party's internal squabbles would not be national news. But when they involve a former presidential candidate on an issue that will affect the selection of the GOP's 2016 presidential nominee and chances, we sit up and take notice.Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who lost the 2008 election to Barack Obama and who is running for re-election in 2016, wants to pull the Arizona portion of the grass-roots movement known as the Tea Party out by the roots and purge the ranks of the Arizona GOP of precinct committeemen and local party chairmen aligned to the Tea Party.
Local McCain opponent A.J. LaFaro, who has announced that he will not seek re-election to the Maricopa County GOP chairmanship, has compared the McCain organization's attempted party purge of Tea Party supporters to "ethnic cleansing."
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
OBAMA'S GREATEST HITS: "The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam"
[In my] book After America, I speculate on how future generations will look back on our time from a decade or two hence:
In the Middle East, Islam had always been beyond criticism. It was only natural that, as their numbers grew in Europe, North America and Australia, observant Muslims would seek the same protections in their new lands. But they could not have foreseen how eager Western leaders would be to serve as their enablers. ... As the more cynical Islamic imperialists occasionally reflected, how quickly the supposed defenders of liberal, pluralist, Western values came to sound as if they were competing to be Islam's lead prison bitch.
Among them is the so-called leader of the free world, who stood up before the world at the United Nations and, in service of his Administration's lies over Benghazi, shamefully told the assembled leaders:
The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.
Mission accomplished - at least in Paris. As I wrote two years ago:
Country with abusive, draconian immigration laws offers President Obama help with his "Executive Amnesty"
Hypocrisy: Mexico's president tells ours that his country will supply any documents needed for illegal aliens to qualify under Barack Obama's executive amnesty. At the same time, Mexico deports more illegals than we do.
In an Oval Office meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said that his administration "is ready to give (support) to the Mexican population living in the United States so that they can show the documentation that is necessary to prove that they have been in the United States prior to 2010" to meet the five-year requirement of Obama's amnesty plan and "all the other requirements" to qualify for executive amnesty.This may be the first time that an American president has sought and received the assistance of a foreign leader to break the laws and violate the Constitution of the United States that he was sworn to uphold and defend.
Obama told reporters how much he appreciated "Mexico's commitment to work with us" on implementing his amnesty plan.
How gracious of President Nieto, whom Obama praised for stemming the flow of illegal aliens from Central America into the U.S. after their transit through Mexico. "In part because of a strong effort by Mexico, including at its southern border, we've seen those numbers reduced to more manageable levels," he said.
We suspect that a manageable level the American people would accept is probably closer to zero. It's interesting that Obama praises Mexico's border security at its southern border while he was woefully and deliberately neglecting border enforcement at our southern border with Mexico.
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
Say Sayonara to the Global Economy
The surreal nature of this world as we enter 2015 feels like being trapped in a Fellini movie. The .1% party like it’s 1999, central bankers not only don’t take away the punch bowl – they spike it with 200 proof grain alcohol, the purveyors of propaganda in the mainstream media encourage the party to reach Caligula orgy levels, the captured political class and their government apparatchiks propagate manipulated and massaged economic data to convince the masses their standard of living isn’t really deteriorating, and the entire façade is supposedly validated by all-time highs in the stock market. It’s nothing but mass delusion perpetuated by the issuance of prodigious amounts of debt by central bankers around the globe. And nowhere has the obliteration of a currency through money printing been more flagrant than in the land of the setting sun – Japan. The leaders of this former economic juggernaut have chosen to commit hara-kiri on behalf of the Japanese people, while enriching the elite, insiders, bankers, and their global banking co-conspirators.
Japan is just the point of the global debt spear in a world gone mad. Total world debt, excluding financial firms, now exceeds $100 trillion. The worldwide banking syndicate has an additional $130 trillion of debt on their insolvent books. As if this wasn’t enough, there are over $700 trillion of derivatives of mass destruction layered on top in this pyramid of debt. Just five Too Big To Trust Wall Street banks control 95% of the $302 trillion U.S. derivatives market. The reason Jamie Dimon and the rest of the leaders of the Wall Street criminal syndicate commanded their politician puppets in Congress to reverse the Dodd Frank rule on separating derivatives trading from normal bank lending is because these high stakes gamblers want to shift their future losses onto the backs of middle class taxpayers – again. The bankers, with the full support of their captured Washington politicians, will abscond with the deposits of the people to pay for their system destroying risk taking, just as they did in 2008 by holding taxpayers hostage for a $700 billion bailout.
Only the ignorant, intellectually dishonest, employees of the Deep State, CNBC cheerleaders for the oligarchy, or Ivy League educated Keynesian loving economists choose to be willfully ignorant regarding the true cause of the 2008 implosion of the worldwide financial system. The immense expansion of credit in the U.S. from 2000 through 2008 was created, encouraged, supported and sustained by Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and their cohorts at the Federal Reserve through their reckless lowering of interest rates and abdication of regulatory oversight, as their owner banks committed the greatest financial control fraud in world history. Total credit market debt in the U.S. grew from $25 trillion in 2000 (already up 100% from $12.5 trillion in 1990) to $53 trillion by 2008.
The bankers, politicians, mainstream media corporations, and mega-corporations that run the show lured Americans into increasing their credit card, auto loan, and student loan debt from $1.6 trillion in 2000 to $2.7 trillion in 2008, while extracting over $600 billion of phantom home equity from their McMansions. And it was all spent on things they didn’t need, produced in Chinese slave labor factories. The mal-investment boom was epic and the collapse in 2008 would have purged the bad debt, punished the risk takers, bankrupted the criminal banks, reset the financial system, and taught generations a lesson they needed to learn – excess debt kills. Instead of voluntarily abandoning the madness of never ending credit expansion and accepting the consequences of their folly, the world’s central bankers and captured politician hacks chose to save bankers, billionaires, and the ruling elite at the expense of the common people.
RUSH: It's absolutely unprecedented how the Republican Party is maltreating its base
They can't believe at The Hill that anybody would challenge John Boehner.
And do you know why? Do you know why they can't believe that? Because if you read -- you don't have to go very far -- halfway into the story you find out at The Hill it is John Boehner who gets credit for all of the new House Republican seats. I kid you not. It is the most amazing thing. And these people think that they are a cut above, they're smarter than everybody else. This is their business, not ours. They know it; we don't. They're sitting in there and they're writing -- and The Hill is typical. It's not an outlier. They really think, why would these Tea Party types, why would these Republicans be upset with Boehner? Why, he just led to unprecedented victory for Republicans in the House.
They don't know that Boehner had nothing to do with it. They don't know that the Republicans didn't even mount a campaign. They don't know that it's the Tea Party that engineered this massive Republican majority in the Senate, as well as the House. They really don't know this...
There are people at the highest levels of the establishment who believe the myths that they create, and they really, some of them, when they write stories like this that they don't understand why there's so many upset with Boehner. Why, look what he did, my God, he's led the Republicans to the biggest House majority since Truman. They really believe that, folks...
Monday, January 05, 2015
HERE THEY ARE: The final 2014 shooting stats from glorious, gun-free, crime-free Chicago!
Check out the entire dashboard. One wonders when the loopy denizens of Cook County will finally have had enough and flush the Democrats who have methodically destroyed the state, piece by piece, like a biblical storm of locusts.
Oh, and hey: great job, Rahmmy!
Hat tip: BadBlue Guns.
JOHN EDWARDS REDUX? Enquirer Finds Court Docs Pointing to "Bill Clinton Underage Sex Lawsuit Shocker"
Say all you want about The National Enquirer, but Democrats of all people should know the scandal rag is one of the few places that does any honest investigative journalism anymore — or even can afford to. Don’t believe me? How do you spell John Edwards? The folks at The New York Times are still trying to get that one right.
Now the Enquirer has another hot story: “Bill Clinton Underage Sex Lawsuit Shocker!” It begins in the mag’s inimitable prose:
Bill Clinton has been identified in a sex lawsuit involving underage girls – and the sleazy scandal threatens to blow up his wife Hillary’s bid to be president!
In a bombshell exclusive, The ENQUIRER has obtained shocking court documents that reveal details of Bill’s close relationship with billionaire money manager Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex creep.
According to the legal papers, Clinton traveled on Epstein’s private jet numerous times and partied on a Caribbean island owned by Epstein, who served 13 months for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
Sunday, January 04, 2015
REPLACING SPEAKER BOEHNER: Here's How It's Done
December’s disgraceful CRomnibus debacle fresh in mind, House conservatives may finally be ready to hand the most powerful gavel in the House from John Boehner to a more principled leader when they vote for Speaker of the House on January 6th. Replacing Boehner is both possible and necessary for a multitude of reasons, but it’s important to understand how the vote works in order to counter the misinformation that has already started coming from those with a vested interest in keeping the status quo.
Under the Constitution, the Speaker of the House must be elected each Congress by a majority of present Members of the House – 218 votes at the current count – and the Speaker election must occur before any other business in the new Congress. Although both parties typically nominate a single candidate before the vote takes place, any Member of the House can vote for any person to become Speaker – they can even vote for someone who is not in Congress at all!
This means that under the current numbers (246 Republicans to 188 Democrats) only 29 Republicans need to vote for someone other than Boehner in order to force another vote. The House will hold as many votes as necessary until one individual gets to the magic 218.
An important point to take away from this is that there is literally no way the Democrats could get the necessary votes to elect a Speaker of their choice unless a large number of Republicans were to join them. The charge that voting against Boehner could lead to a Speaker Pelosi (an accusation that was tossed around last time in 2013 and is sure to come back) is ridiculous and impossible.
At least two conservative members so far, Reps. Ted Yoho (FL) and Louie Gohmert (TX), have stepped up as possible alternatives to Boehner, and many more have publicly refused to vote for him. There's no question at this point that there enough conservatives who are dissatisfied with Boehner's leadership to keep him from a third term as Speaker if they were to stand together.
But voting against the sitting Speaker of the House is a huge political risk for anyone involved – Leadership can kick them off of committees, make it impossible for their bills to get a vote, and even support primary challengers against them. Polls already show a large majority of Republican voters want a new Speaker, but the Republicans in Congress need to hear from you, to know that their constituents stand with them. It’s crucial to send messages and phone calls to their offices to help bolster their resolve.
Saturday, January 03, 2015
STATE REP. MIKE HILL (R-FL): It's time for state legislators to stand up to a corrupt Congress
Our country was founded by men who were vested in a better tomorrow for their countrymen and future generations. The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights are overwhelming evidence of their ideas in what it would take for a country to succeed.
Upon my commission as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Likewise, when I was sworn into the Florida Legislature, I took an oath to protect and defend the U.S. and Florida constitutions.
Congress has recently shown that it does not have the ability, or the desire to govern properly and reduce excess spending. The U.S. debt is steadily climbing due to a lack of congressional and executive self- control. The burden of this debt will be carried by our children and our grandchildren. This is a threat to our nation. How can a country successfully compete with other nations if they cannot financially support themselves? It is time to stand up to the corruption of Washington, letting the Legislative and Executive branches know that “We the People” are fed up with their egregious spending.
I am a member of The Assembly of State Legislatures, which consists of state legislators from around the United States who are aware of Article V of the Constitution, and recognize that the power belongs to the states and the people. The mission of The Assembly is to lay the framework and rules for a convention of the states, as described in Article V, for an amendment to our Constitution.
No amendments have been formally proposed by The Assembly as of this writing; however, the more-popular amendments include a federal balanced budget, congressional term limits, and returning power to the Congress and away from an out-of-control judicial system that usurps the will of the people.
Thursday, January 01, 2015
Obama National Labor Relations Board Quietly Moves to Control 10 Percent of U.S. Economy
Making good on a warning made in July, the National Labor Relations Board took a breathtaking move late last week to control nearly ten percent of the private output of the U.S. economy. The move came when NLRB General Counsel Richard Griffin announced that he would pursue 78 charges against several McDonald’s franchisees as well as McDonald’s USA, LLC, for alleged national labor law violations.
Charges of this nature are commonplace within the NLRB. The difference here is the entities being charged: the franchisee and the franchisor. Griffin’s declaration back in July 2014 flew in the face of established law when he declared that McDonald’s USA could be held liable along with the franchisees under a “joint employer” theory should charges be filed.
The NLRB has now followed through on that threat.
A common feature of a franchise contract is the sovereignty of the franchisee regarding facility and labor management. The franchisor enhances and protects brand and, perhaps, product quality. In short, they contractually split liabilities and responsibilities.
The NLRB, however, takes the position that since McDonald’s USA makes incentives and resources available to its franchisees it goes beyond “protection of the brand”. And that, Comrade Griffin believes, makes it a “joint employer with its franchisees” and must share liability for labor law violations. In so doing, the NLRB ignores the expressed contractual provisions and the intent of the parties as well as freedom of contract.
...It should be noted that the 78 charges sustained by the NLRB represent only 26 percent of the 291 charges ginned up by Fast Food Forward, a group put together by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to target and strike McDonald’s stores. Their purpose was to (1) form a union without “intimidation from their employers” and (2) obtain a $15 hourly minimum wage.
...The NLRB’s move is huge and has serious ramifications.
You won't believe the latest lie Mr. Obama told the poor souls listening to National Government Radio
President Barack Obama claimed that illegal immigrants do not burden taxpayers and are not a drain on public resources... In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Obama also slammed and dismissed those who are concerned about the negative impact that illegal immigration often has on American workers (U.S.-born and legal immigrants) as “nativists.”
“If you’re concerned that somehow illegal immigrants are a drain on resources and forcing, you know, Americans to pay for services for these folks, well, every study shows that’s just not the case,” Obama claimed. “Generally, these folks don’t use a lot of services, and my executive action specifically is crafted so that they’re not a drain on taxpayers; instead, they’re going to be paying taxes, and we can make sure that they are.”
That, of course, is a blatant and unconscionable deception.
In July 2010, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) released the results of a study which examined the costs of illegal immigration at the federal, state and local levels. The study found that U.S. state and local governments shell out $84.2 billion annually in various services (law enforcement, schools, social services, etc.), with California taxpayers alone, spending $21 billion on illegal aliens every year... The same study found that $29 billion is spent every year in federal funds on illegal aliens.
Therefore, in 2010 alone, illegal aliens cost the American taxpayer more than $110 billion. That figure is certainly much higher now.
In fact, in December of 2012, Obama's own Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, a man with the unlikely name of Nelson Peacock, answered a question from Senate Republicans regarding the costs of deporting all illegal aliens in the United States.
“Our conservative estimate suggests that ICE would require a budget of more than $135 billion to apprehend, detain and remove the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.”
As Dave Gibson notes, this mass deportation "would pay for itself in a little over a year".
Hat tip: BadBlue News.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
BEST OF 2014: "Dear beautiful America, please, stop moving Forward"
Upon migrating to the United States many years ago, I embraced my new home and left the past behind. Never could I imagine that, at some point, that past would become relevant.
But now, I am compelled to talk about it again.
In the USSR, we had state-controlled media which shaped the narrative entirely.
Our founder, Vladimir Lenin, was portrayed as a noble, charismatic, and smart man -- the champion of the underdog (the working class), the seeker of equality, defeater of the rich. The humble man with common ideas who was destined for greatness.
Lenin peered at us intently from textbooks and walls. His was the face behind the good intentions that shaped our everyday life.
As a kid, I was largely shielded by my family -- they took the brunt of "adult tasks" in everyday life. They bribed officials to accomplish the most basic of things, they conserved every kopek and piece of bread, they got me the rare medicines I needed, all through means I didn't dare fathom.
Of course, there was nothing special about those medicines, those favors, or anything else that took such effort to obtain -- in America, you can just go out and get it in a corner store. In the Soviet Union, the word "deficit" was commonly used in everyday language.
"This and this product are in deficit." This meant that you couldn't buy them. Maybe for the next three months or maybe forever, unless someone was bribed or the product was obtained via the black market, friends, or contraband. Fruits and vegetables had their "seasons" when they made an appearance in local stores -- we didn't have advanced technology like hydroponic farms.
Instead, adults were herded into collective farms, which were the Soviet antithesis of family -- or individual-owned farms. Under cheerful banners of "accomplishing a five-year plan in four," they usually underperformed and the bureaucrats responsible faked the numbers, which moved up the chain of command.
"Deficit." I heard this term a lot, as I stood in long lines for bread and milk in stores with cheerfully generic names like "Progress" or "Sunrise."
The lines resembled those formed by hipsters in America lining up for the sale of the next iPhone model -- except we stood in them every day.
As much as my family shielded me from their troubles, they couldn't protect me from factors beyond their control. They couldn't raise my level of living above theirs. And they certainly couldn't get me anesthetics for dental visits. Sitting in the gray, sterile corridor for two hours, hearing the sobbing of the kids already in the dental chair as their teeth were drilled without anesthetics, water, or suction, and knowing that your turn was coming -- some handled it better than others.
In the local clinic, needles were resterilized and reused. Ambulances took three hours to arrive, if they came at all.
That was our "free" healthcare.
We also lived in a "free" apartment, which was suffocatingly small by American standards, and it took years, if not decades, for an average couple to obtain such a place. Usually, several generations of a family lived under one roof until the government bestowed upon its citizens another gray five- to sixteen-story building that looked just like its gray neighbor and had the same exact green-painted swings in the yard.
Since almost nobody had cars, people could rarely afford to move to another city or republic.
Public transportation, which we all had to use, consisted of cranky people squeezed tightly like sardines inside a rusty box on wheels. Despite that, when I was eight, I wanted to be a trolley bus driver. Partially because of all the buttons he flipped to open and close doors, but mostly because there was a wall between him and the sardine can.
The walls in Soviet apartments were poorly insulated from noise and cold. Therefore, wall carpets were dominant in Soviet culture. They all looked similar, usually colored red with abstract, curving patterns.
Soviet factories were state-controlled. Variety was not a concept. The color red was all over the place -- it garnished the banners hanging off the sides of gray five-story buildings, with profiles of Lenin, Marx, and Engels fluttering lightly in the wind, proclaiming that "Marxism-Leninism is the symbol of our times." Others stated, "Forward toward Communism!"
Red was splattered on our classroom walls and our school uniforms.
In grade school, you became an "Octyabronok" (named after the October 1917 revolution) and wore a Lenin-faced star on your lapel. You got a free newspaper, the "Young Leninist." Later, you became a "Pioneer" and swapped the star for a red tie. After that, you moved on to "Komsomol" (All-Union Leninist Young Communist League). Those who did not follow the groupthink enough to make it to "Komsomol" lost access to crucial resources and careers later in life.
I grew up with no concept of "brands." If I wanted to get that shoddy water pistol that suddenly appeared in a store, and my parents let me, then that was the water pistol. It broke in two weeks, of course.
Bread in the stores was the bread. Milk was the milk. Kolbasa was the kolbasa. Everything was manufactured by the state to provide the minimum required survivability, and minimum expected functionality. Improvements in design and the manufacturing process did not exist.
When I came to America and laid down on an American bed, it struck me that it was more comfortable than any bed I'd ever experienced. It was the result of evolving design oriented toward customer satisfaction -- a concept alien to my former homeland.
The two famous brands of Soviet cars, Zaporozhets and Moskvich (both named after their places of origin), just... existed. We didn't really have Zaporozhets 1980 followed by a new and improved Zaporozhets 1981 -- now with power steering! No such thing. It was a car, and it required no further improvement. There was no customer demand, because people were poor, the state-controlled prices were very high, and product evolution crawled at snail's pace.
The very concept of "customer convenience" did not exist. We didn't have bottles sculpted to fit the shape of your hand, nor did we have polite cashiers, for they were under no obligation to please anyone -- they worked for the state. The abacus was still in common use in our stores while American stores had electric change machines, credit card readers, and sliding doors.
Like most things, clothes were in "deficit" and thus traveled from older to younger siblings in every family over time. Broken things weren't thrown away but repaired.
Our giant lamp television was carried in the family since about the time I was born. It received three channels -- all State-controlled. On our evening news program, the Chernobyl disaster announcement was calm and lasted fifteen seconds. Our state papers, such as Pravda and Izvestia, were not read but used as invaluable sources of free toilet paper. This is not a joke.
Our propaganda put the big focus on the noble working class and how there was no such thing as a "lower" profession. Much emphasis was made on the nobility of simple working man, and certainly there is something to that.
But when the janitor receives roughly the same salary as a teacher who is paid roughly the same as a surgeon who is paid roughly the same as a programmer, all of them surrounded by peers who get paid the same no matter how well or poorly they perform, some people start carrying the team, and then they just give up. Everyone performs poorly in the end.
It was painfully obvious to everyone just how low the desire of the average person is to produce goods for other people. Without competition or opportunity to get ahead, with the state controlling production and paying equal salaries to workers regardless of their contributions, we had no concept of abundance.
With our "free" services, we regularly experienced water and electrical outages and sometimes went to a nearby forest to get water. Once you fill that bathtub with water, you can't use it for anything else.
The first time I entered an American food market at the age of seventeen, I froze.
Older Soviets who visited American stores for the first time, got hit harder -- all the lies they were taught from childhood through the decades of their lives -- until that last moment, they expected them to be at least partially true.
Sure, they heard stories from overseas, but come on, those were just the Potemkin villages, mirages created to make the Soviets jealous. How can one imagine the unimaginable?
"They told us in Odessa, that in San Francisco it's hard to find milk."
This is the typical Soviet mentality, and they were used to it, and they bought into it, and then they entered that American supermarket and saw the rows upon rows of milk of different brands and kinds and fat percentages.
This is where some have been known to cry. It is the realization that their lives were stolen from them by the regime. A realization of what could've been, if they had been lucky enough to be born in this place which, from everything they knew, could not possibly exist.
I now live in Northern California, in the heart of the Bay Area, thousands of miles away from my homeland.
And yet the poison of Soviet propaganda seeps through college dorms just as it did in Soviet classrooms.
Stop a random youth on the street and you'll find out what he thinks about capitalism (bad!) and communism/socialism (good!). Their favorite news programs are the "Daily Show" and the "Colbert Report," where comedians reinforce their brainwashing via short, catchy clips.
Walk through Berkeley and you will see wall graffiti of the same hammer and sickle that adorned the big red flags of the Soviet era.
This doesn't extend to just youths. People of all ages, even acquaintances that I otherwise respect and admire, are like this. They support the "progressive" leader Barack Obama, worship the nanny state, and believe in equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.
They badmouth capitalism and complain that only one percent of the American population has the "American dream." They buy into the class warfare rhetoric hook, line, and sinker. They want artificially raised minimum wage, government handouts, and believe that Obamacare is the greatest thing since the invention of pockets.
I look at them and the red ties materialize, familiarly, around their necks.
There are "academic" speakers now who advocate that having too many choices is "bad for you." Too stressful to choose, you see.
Living in the Soviet Union, being bombarded with similar nonsense, we had nothing to contradict it. When we walked outside the school, the everyday reality had no traces of the wealth afforded by capitalism. We lived in the grayness and that grayness was all there was.
Americans leave school to go home and they drop by a mall to buy something from an incredible selection of wealth and choice afforded by capitalism. They drop by a small corner store, which could probably feed a savvy Soviet village for a month (dog food is food, too, you know), and they pick up some "entertainment food" that did not exist in the USSR, in quantities that weren't affordable for an average Soviet family.
Then they go home and write essays on their expensive iPads about how they don't have the American Dream.
Now, most American news sources are no different than Pravda and Izvestia. Now, the government used the IRS to stifle political opposition. Now, ObamaCare is a wealth redistribution platform disguised as a common good. Now, Obama is being portrayed in academia and the media alike as a charismatic, messianic, "progressive" figure, fighting for the "underdog." He would feel right at home as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Now, Obama Youths are me, from decades ago. Leninist academia has had its way with them. Now, just like Soviet leaders, American leaders give lip-service to "social justice" while stocking up on personal wealth for their families.
There's nothing new under the sun. I'm hardly the only ex-Soviet to point out the parallels. But some things matter enough to bear repeating.
Dear beautiful America, please, stop moving Forward.
Hat tip: BadBlue News
BEST OF 2014: Stuff Bush Didn't Do, Illustrated
Related: President Barack Obama's Complete List of Historic Firsts [Updated]
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
BEST OF 2014: Ameritopia, the Comic Book
Monday, December 29, 2014
MARK LEVIN: Yes, this Administration has Blood on its Hands
My blood has been boiling, I've been grinding my teeth, listening to all this, watching this, two dead police officers, murdered. President of the United States issues a statement, a written statement. The attorney general of the United States always wants to debate race (with this "nation of cowards"), nowhere to be found. Another coward, another phony. Yes, they do have blood on their hands. No, they didn't kill these police officers. But they have created an environment with their political war against the cops in this country borne out of Ferguson, Mo., with a police officer there whose career is destroyed, who has a death warrant on his own head, was defending himself and shot a thug who first tried to take his pistol and then returned for more!
And out of that, out of that, the president of the United States and the attorney general of the United States, that piece of crap Sharpton, wherever he shows up, isn't it funny, things seem to happen, usually violence. Out of that we get riots! Stores are burning in Ferguson, Mo. People are throwing Molotov cocktails. People are shooting their guns. The liberal Democrat governor pulls back on the National Guard. The police have to walk around with their hands in their pocket, afraid to do anything to protect the citizenry. Borne out of what? A lie! A fraud! Because Michael Brown didn't have his arms up in the air. He was trying to assault, again, if not kill a police officer!
You won't believe how Common Core tries to teach kids subtraction
...A massive federal takeover of education known as “Common Core” is attempting to impose nationwide academic standards on public schools throughout the entire country. Thanks to the backing of billionaire Bill Gates, endless promotion by the U.S. Department of Education, and financial bribes to state governments by the Obama administration, 45 states and Washington, D.C. have already agreed to implement the full Common Core standards in their schools. Unfortunately, these “standards” are doing to public education what Obamacare is doing to our health care system – absolutely ruining it. Just look at how basic math instruction has changed. Posted below is a comparison between the “old method” of subtraction and the “new method” of subtraction being taught in many of our schools. When I first came across this on Facebook, I thought that it was a joke…
...I thought that there was no possible way that this could be real. I really thought that this must have come from some sort of parody website.
But it is actually true.
Here is another example of this. The following is an incredibly bizarre Common Core math problem and the response by one very frustrated parent that has gone viral all over the Internet recently...
Saturday, December 27, 2014
GELERNTER: States Can End "Executive Amnesty" Without a Lawsuit
This week, Tennessee became the 25th state to join a lawsuit against the president’s executive amnesty order. The lawsuit may work, but there’s another, more direct, and considerably more interesting redress against executive overreach [first p]roposed in 1798 by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
...The nullification doctrine posits that, as the federal government is the product of the Constitution, and the Constitution is a compact of the states, it’s the states that have the final say on any law’s constitutionality. If a state determines that a law exceeds the terms of the compact to which it agreed, it has the right to nullify that law within its own borders.
Jefferson and Madison’s idea was for states to declare the Alien and Sedition Acts null and void. Instead of joining a lawsuit against the executive amnesty, those 25 states could simply deem the executive amnesty null and void, and refuse to recognize illegal aliens’ work permits or issue them driver’s licenses.
Why, you wonder, would that be better than filing a lawsuit? In a certain sense, it wouldn’t — because winning that suit would strike down Mr. Obama’s order in all 50 states. Which is not an unlikely outcome, given the order’s extremely shaky legal footing. However —
The judiciary has consistently ruled against the nullification doctrine, asserting its unique, judicial right to declare laws unconstitutional. But this executive order isn’t a law. And given its extremely shaky legal footing, it isn’t difficult to imagine a federal bench recognizing the states’ right to disregard federal orders that don’t clearly have the force of law. And that would be a tremendous — tremendous — blow against the executive’s assumption of legislative powers.
But in the shorter, directer term: It [nullification] would force the Obama administration to go on offense, suing the states to enforce a law that isn’t a law. And I don’t think that case can be made.
I think this is an intriguing idea. Gelernter notes that your state's governor and attorney general should be contacted, especially if you live in a red or purple state.
Nullification may be a non-starter under normal circumstances, but nullifying non-laws should be anything but controversial.
Hat tip: BadBlue News.



























