Chuck Colson

During the seemingly endless build-up to the Iowa caucuses, there was one consistent refrain repeated over and over. It’s like the big lie — the more you keep repeating it, the more people are going to believe it, but it remains a lie.

The lie was simply this: that the political parties have to choose between social issues and economic issues. This year, the media and the party machines are telling us ad nauseam that the only issue that matters is the economy.

So any candidate who wants to win the White House should just shut up about things like marriage, the sanctity of life, religious liberty, and those other annoying issues that distract us from focusing on jobs and the economy.

But that’s crazy! Doesn’t anybody get the connection between the social issues and economics issues more »

by Joseph Ashby -
Peeking through Occupy Wall Street’s cloudy drum sessions, group speeches, and celebrity visits are a few rays of reality’s sunlight. These glimmers of the real world show that even the campers of Zuccotti Park aren’t immune to Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration that “the facts of life are conservative.”

Conservatism is the natural political outgrowth from the real life experience. Humans are naturally flawed, greedy, and untrustworthy. Conservatives recognize that fact and promote the market system and divided government in order to pit one greedy person against another.

Conversely, the left continually denies and fights against human nature (inevitably losing to it). For leftists, it’s always a matter of finding the right human to rule — the disinterested regulator, the consumer-protecting bureaucrat, the messianic president, etc. more »

by Peter Ferrara -
Last Friday’s report on economic growth for the second quarter of 2011 completes the burial of Obamanomics. The economy grew a paltry 1.3% for the quarter, with reported growth for the first quarter reduced from a meager 1.8% to a negligible 0.4%. The economy for the entire year so far has actually grown less than the weak growth we thought we had for the first quarter alone.

The growth for the fourth quarter of 2010 was also reduced to 2.3%, meaning that for the last nine months the economy has grown a minimal 1.5%, barely treading water as the weekend Wall Street Journal described it. For comparison purposes, economic growth during the first seven quarters of the Reagan recovery in the 1980s boomed at an average of 7.1%. Economic growth during the first seven quarters of the Obama non-recovery has now been reduced to an average of 2.6%, barely a third as much.

Historically, as the Journal also reiterated, “the deeper the recession, the more robust the recovery.” So the idea that the recovery is so bad because the recession was so bad doesn’t wash. Based on the historical pattern, we should be in the second year of a booming recovery by now. President Obama? instead is mired in three and a half years of stagnation with worse to come. more »

by Selwyn Duke -
Increasingly, it seems that the American flag is joining toy guns and dodgeball on the banned-from-school list. And the latest story on this front involves The Butterfield Elementary in Orange, Massachusetts, where a teacher told an eleven-year-old boy that he may not hang his depiction of Old Glory because it might “offend” another student.

The boy, Frankie Girard, had drawn the picture in art class but then found that his teacher didn’t share his patriotism. Says his father, John, “He was denied hanging the flag up. And he asked if he could just even hang it on his desk, and he was told no. He could take the picture that he drew and take it home and be proud of it there.”

I guess patriotism has joined piety as a “private matter.” (Leftists tend to confuse closets with shelves. Everything that should be in the former, they display; everything that should be on the latter, they hide.) more »

by Ralph R. Reiland -
Here’s how the economic and political system of a nation is destroyed.

Every price increase of just a dime per gallon of gasoline at the pump extracts approximately $5 billion from the pockets of U.S. consumers over the course of a year.

On top of killing family budgets, with a dollar per gallon jump at the pumps picking our pockets of $50 billion per year, there is on the macro level an inverse relationship between the price of oil and the overall health of the economy — oil price hikes deliver less job growth, less demand for labor, more unemployment, more poverty, more inequality, more inflation, lower real income increases, and smaller advances in the standard of living. more »

by Bruce Walker -
The political courage shown by Governor Walker and Republican legislators in Wisconsin should be an object lesson to all conservatives: Be bold! Those who oppose us, those who have infested the institutions of American life and the organs of American government, and those who live at the expense of our sweat and our pride will show us no quarter. While our war for the soul of America is peaceful in the sense that it involves no physical violence, it is still total war.

The nauseating comments by the leftists overlords of NPR about the Tea Party show how much these leftists hate and fear us. The indecent firing of Juan Williams was more evidence of the willingness of the intolerant left to fight without scruple against anyone who does not slavishly follow the party line — even those who still sincerely believe some bits and pieces of leftist mythology. The scurrying Democrats from the Wisconsin Senate show contempt not just for Republicans, but also for the voters who elect them. The thuggish behavior of Wisconsin schoolteachers shows that we cannot assume that these hirelings are honorable. more »

by Victor Volsky -
The world is going to hell in a hand basket; Japan, ravaged by an earthquake and a tsunami of biblical proportions, is teetering on the brink of yet another, nuclear, disaster; the Middle East is aflame; the national debt is skyrocketing while Congressional Democrats and Republicans are mud-wrestling over the budget; gas prices are inexorably climbing to the psychologically devastating $4/gallon level — and meanwhile what is the U.S. President doing?

Amid all the turmoil, he discusses an apparently world historical issue of school bullying; honors the 2009-10 Stanley Cup Champion Chicago Blackhawks; delivers a radio address on another all-important subject, “Women’s History Month;” attends a fund-raiser; goes golfing (that darned weather: it was just too nice for the President to resist the temptation of hitting the links — for the 61st time in his two plus years in office); yuks it up with the Washington press corps (pronounced “k-o-r”, not “k-o-r-p-s,” try to remember this, Mr. President) at the annual Gridiron Dinner. And to top it all off, the crowning event in Barack Obama’s busy schedule — drum roll, please! — videotaping his NCAA tournament bracket picks. (Think about it: Obama discusses basketball with authority, which means that he must be spending a lot of time watching the games and listening to sports commentators. Exactly what he was elected for, wasn’t he?) While Rome burned, Nero fiddled. While the world burns, Obama ponders the outcome of a college basketball tournament. more »

by Jeffrey Folks -
In terms of energy policy, as in so much else, the Obama administration is in leaderless disarray. The only thing it seems capable of doing is delaying and shutting down energy production. As soon as some promising new supply pops up, like the shale gas capable of fueling America for the next century, the Obama EPA is there launching an environmental study designed to regulate and restrict it. At the moment when new energy supplies are most needed, there are no plans to increase supplies — only plans to reduce them. One would almost think that this President wants to bring America to its knees.

Meanwhile, for the Chinese and other fast-growing economies, it’s full speed ahead on new energy projects. Chinese oil companies are pursuing new oil and gas exploration on a global scale, even in the mainland U.S. They are buying up oil and gas leases in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America, including just offshore Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. more »

by Emily Miller -
Congressional Democrats and President Obama are blocking every effort by Republicans to cut runaway government spending, leaving Washington at a stalemate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) even failed to pass a token spending cut last week. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) has fought any cut from current spending levels in a Continuing Resolution (CR). And, Obama announced for the second time that he will veto the Republican spending cuts, while he refuses even to negotiate with Congress on the budget.

After months of refusing to cut any spending, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) finally came out with a Democratic offer to cut spending for this current fiscal year by a mere $4.7 billion. The budget deficit for the current fiscal year is projected to be $1.6 trillion. So, the Senate Democrats’ spending cuts would lower the federal deficit by a mere .004%.

“At a time when Washington is borrowing about $4 billion a day, Democratic leaders want to cut about four and a half billion in government spending for the rest of the fiscal year and then call it a day,” said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.). more »

by Richard N. Weltz -

With a bold political announcement, President Barack Obama has completed the trifecta — de facto coups which bring into his White House the powers and functions of the other two branches, as outlined in our Constitution.

That document assigns the legislative function to Congress, but the Executive Branch blithely and routinely co-opts that power by run-arounds and choosing to enforce or not enforce duly passed laws of the Legislature.

Notable examples in the scant couple of years The One has been in office include: refusal to enforce voting laws against intimidation at the polls in Chicago, efforts to use the regulatory functions of the EPA to circumvent the specific legislation of Congress to ban cap-and-trade, refusal to enforce immigration laws, and attempts by the FCC to regulate matters banned from its jurisdiction by law. more »

by Michelle Malkin -
First lady Michelle Obama said, “Let’s Move!” Who knew Democratic politicians in Wisconsin and Indiana would take her literally?

Faced with stifling debt, bloated pensions and intractable government unions, liberal Midwestern legislators have fled those states — paralyzing Republican fiscal reform efforts. Like Monty Python’s Brave Sir Robin and his band of quivering knights, these elected officials have only one plan when confronted with political hardship or economic peril: Run away, run away, run away.

Scores of Fleebagger Democrats are now in hiding in neighboring Illinois, the nation’s sanctuary for political crooks and corruptocrats. Soon, area hotels will be announcing a special discount rate for card-carrying FleePAC winter convention registrants. Question: Will the White House count the economic stimulus from the mass Democratic exodus to Illinois as jobs “saved” or “created”? More important question: How much are taxpayers being charged for these obstructionist vacations? more »

by J. Robert Smith -

How delicious is irony, how fickle fate?

Just a little more than two years ago, liberals were ecstatic about Barack Obama’s election and Democrats’ control of Congress. Liberal pundits were all atwitter about the brand new Democratic Era that voters had ushered in. America would finally become what America should have been years ago: a European-style social democracy.

Boy, did Democrats misread their mandate! With very little hindsight needed, it’s apparent to all but ideologically-blinkered liberals that the Democrats’ gross overreach isn’t what voters wanted or expected. Voters wanted a redo of the Clinton years. Instead, in the person of Barack Obama, voters got an amalgam of FDR and LBJ with a dash of Neville Chamberlin thrown in. more »

by Jeffrey Folks -

President Obama has been speaking lately of what he views as an upswing in the economy. “The economy is growing again,” he declared in the State of the Union address. Not surprisingly, he failed to mention that for 104 consecutive weeks, larger and larger numbers of Americans have become dependent on welfare. Or that within those families receiving welfare, fathers have become more and more irrelevant, and youth crime has increased.

But, then, those are not facts that one expects to hear from the President in a State of the Union address, or anywhere else. What we hear, again and again, is the fantasy that government creates jobs, government drives the economy, government feeds kids and sends them to bed happy. The facts are just the opposite.

In fact, the Department of Agriculture has just reported that 43.6 million Americans are now receiving food stamps. more »

1/4/2011 – Aaron Gee -

As I pondered the direction our government had taken over the previous year, I looked at the definition of socialism by typing “define: socialism” into Google. The first definition presented was from Princeton’s wordnet and read as follows: “a political theory advocating state ownership of industry.” The definition feels woefully lacking.

Ownership denotes control, and the state is certainly getting into the business of controlling industry. Our government has exerted control over enterprise via legislative fiat more over the last year than at any other time since FDR’s power-grab during the Great Depression. From the thousands of pages of ObamaCare to the thousands of pages of the Dodd-Frank “financial reform” bill, government power is firmly entrenched in business, and it is expanding. The more regulations the state adds, the more control it exerts. more »

Dennis Prager

To be admired by the women they love
12/19/2010 – Dennis Prager -

It is said that the one question about men and women that even the great Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, could not answer was: What do women want?

Whether or not Freud actually admitted his ignorance on this question is irrelevant. The very popularity of the anecdote testifies to one incontrovertible fact: A lot of men don’t know the answer.

It is probably fair to say that a lot of women also don’t know the answer. If they did, all they would have to do is tell men. That would solve the riddle — and make most men and women very happy.

So, to the extent that this is a great riddle, it is so because most members of both sexes seem not to know the answer.

Adding support to the widespread belief that what women want is close to unknowable is the underlying presumption that just about everybody knows what men want. more »