Last Days of the Republic — No Way Home … J. D. Longstreet

Last Days of the Republic — No Way Home
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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America made a decision yesterday to turn its back on constitutional government and go voluntarily into slavery.

I had thought better of my country and my countrymen, but I was wrong.

This America is not the America I remember. This is not the America of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, etc. No. This is Obama’s America, a mediocre, has been, washed-up, pathetic, pitiful husk of its former self.

America has, indeed, turned a corner, away from freedom and constitutional government and embraced Marxism and communism — and — its own death as a nation.

In a commentary at WND Joseph Farah says: “That’s what Obama represents to me – God’s judgment on a people who have turned away from Him and His ways and from everything for which our founders sacrificed their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.” You should read the entire article here: “http://www.wnd.com/2012/11/america-pronounces-judgment-on-itself/

Dear reader, if you think things have been bad in America in the recent past, just wait ’til after January 20th. We are headed for the worst recession since the Great Depression. It will make the one we have just come out of seem like a Sunday School picnic.

Americans who revere the 2nd Amendment had better gather all the arms and ammunition you can afford — and hoard it. I suspect you — and I — will need it soon.

My country, which had been fighting for its life — died last night. The eagle is NOT the Phoenix. It cannot rise from the ashes. It is finished.

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I just cannot fathom why anyone would willingly give up their freedom. But that is exactly what America did.

Before Obama, America was a world leader. Today, under the Obama Regime, America has become a doormat upon which all the rogue nations of the world wipe their feet. And it will get worse — much worse.

Nothing much has changed in the Congress. It will remain deadlocked when next it convenes. That is probably a good thing. See, our national legislature is split between Marxist slave masters and freemen who are trying to protect the constitution.

But why? The constitution is dead. we are truly living in post constitutional America. Obama and his Marxist henchmen shredded it.

Yes, I readily admit to being angry. But more than anger I feel disappointment at my fellow Americans who acted, not as Americans, but as citizens of some third-world banana republic who feel they must continue to swear fealty to their benevolent dictator because he is their meal ticket.

What the hell happened to REAL AMERICANS? Real Americans would have taken their country back yesterday. Have we become a nation of wussies? Apparently, we have. Am I just learning something our enemies have known for a while now? Again, it certainly seems so.

America is going over that cliff we have been warned of for so many months now. There is nothing, now that can prevent that from happening. The economy can only get worse. Business is so intimidated by the Obama Regime they they will not risk their hard earned funds in expanding and hiring employees. In fact, I expect we will see a giant exodus of businesses moving their plants and headquarters out of the US to more business friendly countries and, frankly, I don’t blame them. If it were me, I’d have moved my business long ago.

The old America couldn’t be beaten. This new America can’t win, because they don’t know how. There is a distinct shortage of steel spines in America today.

It is sad beyond measure to see what this generation of Americans has done to their country and, by extension, to the world. You have murdered the last best hope of mankind on this planet.

It has been suggested that Obama is God’s Judgment on the people of America. I have come to believe that. How else can one explain the “blindness” to self destruction demonstrated by the American electorate yesterday.

As a wee lad I was reminded often on Sunday mornings by my old country preacher that “God will not be mocked.” How right he was! America has mocked God with our multiculturalism, our inclusiveness, our tolerance of heinous sins such as the murder of unborn babies and homosexuality, and removing God from the public square, just to name a tiny fraction of our sinful infractions. Did we think God would not notice?

No matter what you may have been taught — God is not a tolerant God. There is a price to be paid for what America has done. We have only just begun to feel the wrath about to poured out on this nation.

J. D. Longstreet

America Commits Suicide … Alan Caruba

America Commits Suicide

By Alan Caruba

I had hoped that the majority of voters would elect Mitt Romney, but instead of a man of character they chose charisma.
They ignored four years of failure and deception. In advertising, they say “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” Romney, sadly, lacked sizzle.
Obama’s victory was one of a long line of Progressives from Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Jimmy Carter. It was not new, but it will likely do more damage on top of what his predecessors have done.
It turned out that there were not enough voters from the faith-based communities. You know—the kind of people Obama said “cling to their religion and guns.” There were not enough from a range of population subsets to make a difference.
Like New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg who thought a marathon run through boroughs devastated by Hurricane Sandy was a really good idea, Obama has never had any real sense of how people feel about things that are important to them. Why should he? He was raised in a communist cocoon in which family, friends, fellow students, teachers, and mentors ensured he would never be exposed to the fundamentals of free market capitalism that has been the bedrock of the nation’s prosperity.
I have written repeatedly that he just does not like America and that this explains his view that our nation is not an exceptional place in which to live.
His mother was attracted first an African and, after being divorced, to an Indonesian, both Muslims. And then she abandoned Obama to the care of his leftist grandparents. His academic life led him from Occidental College to Columbia University, and then onto Harvard Law School, all leftist strongholds and, yet oddly few of his fellow students even remembered him.
On the radio of the 1940s there was a show called “The Shadow” about a man with the “power to cloud men’s minds” who used it to fight crime, but Obama developed the power to so utterly charm people that, like any successful confidence man, he left people impressed with all the exterior aspects of him without few clues about what he stood for, what he believed, and what his true goals are.
Despite four years of his campaign and his first term not enough Americans understood that Barack Obama is as alien to America as if he had come from some very different, very foreign place.
What is most baffling is why a majority of voters looked at the estimated 23 million of their fellow citizens who were out of work or had stopped looking for work, and whose lives along with their own were even further encumbered by the massive debt Obama had run up; currently $16 trillion and climbing, and thought that was okay?
In a nation whose citizens pride themselves on their ability to work to meet the needs of their families, it was and is profoundly disturbing that 47 million must use food stamps or that millions have fallen below the poverty level.
Why did the majority of voters not understand the fearful implications of the erosion of the nation’s military power, not knowing that peace can only be maintained by a navy that keeps the sea lanes open, the marines who are skilled at making a quick entry into a battle zone, the army that can subdue an enemy, and an air force that has no comparison? The active military and veterans understood what their Commander-in-Chief was doing to them, but the lies about the Benghazi attack that killed a U.S. ambassador and three others were ignored.

Those who voted for Obama were content to believe the cascade of lies Obama told. They ignored the President’s record of failure—the failed “stimulus” that was nothing more than a political slush fund, Obamacare that was forced on the nation by a straight party vote by Democrats in Congress, the bankruptcy of the “clean energy” companies that could not compete even with public funding, and the eruption of Islamic frenzy that saw him abandon friend and foe alike in the Middle East.
It was Obamacare that gave birth to the Tea Party movement. The President, his advisors, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate never understood what the Tea Party was about. Why would they? The U.S. Constitution was what they wanted to believe it said, not what it really says.
Now Obama has the opportunity to fill seats on the Supreme Court with more progressive judges, thus affecting not just the next four years, but generations of Americans to come.
The abandonment of Israel troubled many, but just as troubling was the Democratic Party convention in which the inclusion of God and Jerusalem in the party platform evoked jeers and derision. It was the same Democratic Party that had, since the end of the Civil War, fought against the calls for equality from America’s black community. Even so, the African-American community continued to support them.
In 2008 Americans voted for Obama in the belief that they could demonstrate to the world that it was post-racial, post-partisan. Instead they got a cold, indifferent, arrogant man who listened only to a small circle of leftist advisors and shadowy, unknown and unseen “czars” in the White House.
Obama was as disinterested in Main Street as he was antagonistic to Wall Street. His constant talk of “millionaires and billionaires” and the need to redistribute wealth may have worried some people, but not enough of those who believe they too can achieve the American dream of wealth and success based on hard work and a measure of risk.
The majority of voters ignored the realities of the nation’s economy. They failed to realize that Obama’s opposition to the vast wealth of America’s energy reserves of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear will only delay the nation’s way out of debt and dependency.
In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”
John Adams, Founding Father and the nation’s second President warned “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Today, conservatives in America are wondering if the 2012 election was a vote to commit national suicide.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Fractured fairy tales … Paul Driessen

Fractured fairy tales
Greens hate natural gas and fracking, but costly, parasitic wind energy can’t live without it
Paul Driessen

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have boosted shale gas production from zero a few years ago to 10% of all US energy supplies in 2012, observes energy analyst Daniel Yergin. Fracking has also increased US oil production 25% since 2008 – almost all on state and private lands, and in the face of more federal land and resource withdrawals, permitting delays and declining public land production.
In the process, the fracking revolution created 1.7 million jobs in oil fields, equipment manufacturing, legal and information technology services, and other sectors. It will generate over $60 billion this year in state and federal tax and royalty revenues, reduce America’s oil import bill by $75 billion, and save us $100 billion in imported liquefied natural gas, concludes a new IMF Global Insight analysis.
A resurgent American petroleum industry could add “as many as 3.6 million jobs by 2020, and increase the US gross domestic product by as much as 3 percent,” says Citigroup’s “Energy 2020” report. Fracking is bringing new jobs and revenues to states underlain by shale deposits, and could give our nation over a century of hydrocarbon energy that will keep prices low for fuel and petrochemical feed stocks.
That means more manufacturing and other jobs for millions of graduates and unemployed workers, and new prosperity for the “Rust Belt” and other areas. “Plunging natural gas prices have turned the US into one of the most profitable places in the world to make chemicals and fertilizer,” says the Wall Street Journal. It’s also “slashed costs for makers of energy-intensive products such as aluminum, steel and glass.”
It could make North America energy independent and even a net exporter of natural gas. In fact, this amazing new technology could turn the United States into the world’s #1 oil producer within just a few more years.
For people still concerned about “catastrophic manmade global warming” (despite 16 years of stable global temperatures), unconventional gas also provides a way to cut carbon dioxide emissions by up to 40% using clean-burning fuel that costs a third less than oil on a per BTU basis, notes Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg. The USA’s CO2 emissions are now at their lowest levels in 20 years, because of natural gas, a sluggish economy, and the retirement of 100-200 coal-fired power plants due to an EPA regulatory onslaught that is based heavily on agenda-driven, slipshod and even fraudulent and illegal science.
Logic and common sense would engender unprecedented public, political and even environmentalist support for hydraulic fracturing and expanded oil and gas production. Indeed, that is Governor Romney’s perspective and policy. Unfortunately, Team Obama remains largely opposed to domestic drilling, fixated on “renewable” energy, despite having already wasted some $97 billion on wind, solar and algae projects – and poised to unleash a boxcar of new EPA and BLM rules designed to usurp state control and restrict or hyper-regulate fracking on federal, state and private lands alike, win or lose on November 6.
Team Obama justifies its stance by citing public anxiety over fracking. It fails to mention that this anxiety has been nurtured and orchestrated by a host of environmental pressure groups whose existence, monetary sustenance and political power depend on a steady stream of new eco-hobgoblins. Their fractured fairy tales about this game-changing energy technology would be as funny as the Rocky and Bullwinkle tales, if the economic, employment, national security and environmental consequences weren’t so serious.
Hydraulic fracturing devastates their mantra that we are running out of oil and gas. It annihilates their incessant assertions that hydrocarbons are the energy of the past, and renewables are the future. In reality, wind and solar cannot live with cheap natural gas (because they cannot possibly compete with it) and cannot live without it (because they only work 20% of the time and need gas as constant backup power).
Consequently, the anti-fracking factions have concocted a hodgepodge of eco-scares, each one more absurd and indefensible than the last.
Burning tap water. Yes, you can ignite methane at your kitchen faucet, if your well was drilled through gas-bearing rock formations and was not properly cemented and sealed to keep gas out. (Eternal Flame Falls in New York’s Chestnut Ridge Park is one example of natural methane leakage.) But fracturing zones are thousands of feet below groundwater supplies; production wells use cement and steel casing that extends hundreds of feet below the surface; and sensitive instruments monitor downhole activity, to ensure that valuable gas does not escape into near-surface formations or the atmosphere.
Groundwater contamination. Fracking fluids are 99.5% water and sand. The other 0.5% is chemicals that fight bacterial growth, keep sand particles suspended in the liquid and improve production. The vast majority today are found in household items that Americans use safely every day – including cheese, beer, canned fish, dairy desserts, shampoo and cosmetic products. New fluids like those developed by FamilyJoule and Halliburton represent the new kinds of entirely nontoxic and biodegradable chemicals that almost all drillers are now using.
Steadily improving technologies, techniques and regulations minimize risks even further. For instance, heavy plastic liners are now commonplace under drilling rigs, storage tanks and containment pits. Along with modern drilling and well casing methods, they help make the likelihood of chemical or salt contamination of groundwater a minuscule fraction of what is posed by winter salting of icy roads.
Wastewater and water depletion. In addition to changing the composition of fracking fluids (and making that information readily available online), to address concerns about water use and wastewater disposal, drilling companies increasingly recycle the water they use. Devon and other companies have recycled hundreds of millions of gallons, and some 90% of water produced in the Marcellus shale region of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia is now reused. Moreover, the amount of water used in fracking is far less than what is required to grow corn and process it into ethanol.
Earthquakes. Fracturing rocks does cause cracking that can be measured with ultra-sensitive equipment. But these micro-seismic events measure around 0.8 on the Richter Scale, about what is caused by a car passing by. Even loaded dump trucks register only a 3 (the minimum that can be felt by humans), and property damage does not begin until level 5. Deep injection of water for geothermal energy development or enhanced oil recovery operations (or to dispose of petroleum, municipal or industrial wastewater) has caused detectable seismic activity; however, of more than 800,000 injection wells nationwide, only about 40 were actually felt at the surface. Rules and practices increasingly address these injection well issues.
Fracking regulation. State and local regulation and cooperation with industry, constant refinements and improvements in rules and practices, and accommodation to public concerns about water, drilling and fracking fluids, road congestion, community impacts and other issues have been ongoing for decades. That is part of the reason that 2.5 million instances of fracking worldwide (over 1 million in the USA) since 1949 have not caused any serious harm. That’s a safety record any industry would envy.
Unfortunately, environmentalist fractured fairy tales cost us energy, jobs, revenue and prosperity – for no ecological benefit. The ultimate irony is Europe, where Big Green opposition to fracking and nuclear power is ushering in a coal-burning renaissance. Germany and other central EU countries will be building 10,600 megawatts of new coal-fired electrical power plants during the next four years!
Meanwhile, green power mandates have already pushed Germany’s electricity prices to the second highest in Europe (32 cents per kWh, compared to an average of 10 cents in the USA) – and the average German household faces another big rate hike over the next year. Countless jobs are also at risk.
America has the world’s largest reserves of oil, gas and coal. We need access to these deposits, under rational regulations that reflect reality, instead of eco fairy tales. We need people in the White House, Congress and government bureaucracies who can distinguish between fact and fiction, understand how to produce real energy, jobs and revenues, and don’t have an agenda to “fundamentally transform” our nation.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.