Rethinking George Bush?

Victor Davis Hanson  "The frenzy of Bush hatred and Obama worship that crested in the summer of 2008 is over. We now better remember the Bush at Ground Zero with a megaphone and his arm around a fireman than the Texan who pronounced "nuclear" as "nucular." Meanwhile, hope-and-change now seems to offer little hope and less change.
"America woke up from its 2008 trance and is concluding that Bush was never as bad, and Obama never as good, as advertised."

Reading assignments from Boortz on the economy

Tea Party insurgents prepare to seize power in 2012  UK Telegraph; "But each insult and attempt to marginalise them seems only to have stiffened their resolve and swelled their numbers. Polling indicates that they are now more popular than either Republicans or Democrats. Despite all the claims they are extremists, around half of the electorate now identifies with the Tea Party and up to a quarter view themselves as members."

Let Them Eat Tax Hikes WSJ; "...31 House Democrats signed a letter urging Ms. Pelosi to bring a bill to extend all the tax rate reductions, not just the middle-class cuts. "We have heard from a diverse spectrum of economists, small business owners, and families who have voiced concerns that raising any taxes right now could negatively impact economic growth,"..."

Senate Democratic candidates backing away from President Obama's tax plan  The Hill; "Democratic Senate candidates who are more comfortably ahead in the polls, or have little prospect of actually winning, are more comfortable with Obama’s tax plan."

Government Believes It Has A Right To The Wealthy’s Income  "The progressive movement, unveiled over the past 18 months, believes firmly that the potential success of the collective trumps the rights of the individual. A guided economy, redistributive tax policy, and a slew of federally dictated entitlement programs are the means by which progressives seek to accomplish an elusive social utopia. As Frank J. Goodnow, one of the founders of modern progressivism once noted, “Social expediency, rather than natural right, is thus to determine the sphere of individual freedom of action.” When the collective comes before the individual, when liberty is trumped by statism, government claims the product of your labor. If, in its great beneficence, Government offers you the gift of 60 percent of your earned income, you ought to be thankful. Or so the story goes."

"George Will comments on the fact that even Cuba's Fidel Castro is having second thoughts about communism."
 
Clinton Falsely Claims He Reduced National Debt, Gregory Doesn't Challenge Him  "According to the Office of Management and Budget, we showed a combined unified surplus of $559 billion in that four year period. Yet the gross federal debt rose by $394 billion.
"Wouldn't you have loved to see Gregory ask Clinton to explain how that happened?"
All via Neal Boortz

Energy Department Says It Has ‘Mandate’ to Force ‘Market Transformation’ for Household Appliances

CNS News  "The first three include government subsidies for private-sector green energy projects; special tax incentives for green energy projects; and low-interest government-backed loans for green energy projects.
“The fourth one, which the secretary and I love,” said Zoi, “is where we have a mandate. Where we can actually just issue regulations and do market transformation.”....
"Before becoming President Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy, Zoi served as environmental adviser to President Bill Clinton and the founding CEO of former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection." H/t to Neal Boortz.
Government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Keep watching

Neal Boortz "I love the way the ObamaZombies refer to the tea partiers as "extremists." Maybe they're right. Wanting lower taxes, cuts in federal spending and a smaller government IS an extremist position ... for Democrats."

Little Red Hen, 2009

Ethel C. Fenig  "The classic children’s fable has been updated for the times but the moral remains the same."

Islamic Religion and American Culture

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad,   "The diversity of the American Muslim community, racially, by national origin, ethnically, makes untenable the confusion of culture and religion that has entrenched the stagnation of so much of the Muslim world. On top of that, the rising number of Muslims born in America means that it is only a matter of time until the Muslim community is dominated by indigenous Muslims who are already integrated into the American culture. To paraphrase an old saying, you could take them out of America but you couldn’t take America out of them. Either they will have an American understanding of Islam, in which case they will expand its integration into and influence upon the American culture, or they will have no good understanding of Islam at all, in which case they will become secularized as have so many Muslims, Jews and Christians before them. We, my fellow children of Adam, are the khulufah, and the choice is ours."  http://minaret.org/
Perhaps one reason some American Muslims are driven to violence against this country.

A Class War or War?

Abe Greenwald  "The enemy is becoming an intimate part of the American landscape and less easily identifiable as a distinctly foreign phenomenon. This is precisely the time for our leaders to find an intelligent way of discussing the true nature of the fight. Officially denying that there are Muslim terrorists among us will not protect innocent Muslims; it will put them at greater risk, as a potentially traumatized citizenry becomes frustrated with leadership that refuses to take seriously the complicated threats arrayed against it. Yet at no time since 9/11 has our government been this willfully inarticulate — even insulting — about the challenges we face."

Freedom of expression forces cartoonist to go ghost

Ethel C. Fenig "...The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, "going ghost": moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program-except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It's all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" cartoon." Background here.

U.S. Supreme Court depicts Muhammad  "While Muslims engaged in violent protests worldwide over caricatures of Muhammad have insisted any image of their prophet is considered blasphemous, a prominent frieze in the U.S. Supreme Court portrays the Islamic leader wielding a sword.

"The stone sculptures of 18 lawgivers, from Hammurabi to John Marshall, are meant to signify the law's foundation in a stable society. Included is Moses with the Ten Commandments."

Obama’s Washington Animal Farm

Victor Davis Hanson"Obama, the supposedly savvy politician, oddly has little appreciation of the psychology of business. Millions of job creators still have only a vague idea of the net effect of Obama’s policies — except that they will probably mean less profits, and they are being enacted in a punitive spirit for past sins."

History and War: An Interview with Victor Davis Hanson

John Hawkins  Hawkins:" America's media seems at times to be ambivalent, even to the point of being hostile toward our military and efforts to win the war on terrorism. Can you talk about other times in history that's happened and what the results of it have been?"

Hanson: "I think if we were to go back to England and France between 1920 and take an arbitrary date — 1936 — it was politically incorrect to evoke Verdun. The Battle of Verdun was not mentioned in the school system. By the same token, those who wanted to re-arm in Britain were accused of trying to evoke these ghosts of the Somme. The media wanted to condition the British public to the notion that any other war would end in the nightmare of the trenches. So, it was much better to use the arts of appeasement — which wasn't a dirty word. It was a positive word that meant you were willing to avoid a blood bath in the trenches. The result of that, of course, was the serial aggrandizement of Germany from 1936 to 1939."

Bob Lang cartoon

The Buckley Rule; Pro and Con

Charles Krauthammer "Bill Buckley — no Mike Castle he — had a rule: Support the most conservative candidate who is electable."....
"Castle wasn’t only electable. He was unbeatable. Why do you think Beau Biden, long groomed to inherit his father’s seat, flinched from running? Because Castle, who had already won statewide races a dozen times, scared him off. Democrats had already given up on the race.
"O’Donnell, a lifelong activist who has twice lost statewide races, is very problematic. It is not that the Republican establishment denigrates her chances — virtually every nonpartisan electoral analyst from Charlie Cook to Larry Sabato to Stuart Rothenberg has her losing in November."

The Limbaugh Rule   "It waters down and destroys the brands of Republicanism, and we end being blamed for liberal policies because our guys vote for it.  The Limbaugh Rule is if you got a liberal or a conservative running, you vote the conservative.  Period! End of story.  But who knows who's "electable"?  This was any point.  The "Buckley Rule" that these guys are all quoting -- and, by the way, half of these people quoting the Buckley rule couldn't carry his typewriter."