In August 2009, Gallup data showed that conservatives outnumbered liberals in every single state.  In February 2010, Gallup presented polling data that showed the same thing: though the numbers were different, conservatives outnumbered liberals in every state.  Six months later, Gallup presented new polling numbers which showed that conservatives outnumbered liberals in every state but Rhode Island.  One year ago, in February 2011, Gallup again showed polling data which revealed that in every single state, conservatives outnumbered liberals.  Then, in February 2012, the Gallup Poll showed that in every state except Massachusetts, conservatives outnumbered liberals.

Crucially, Gallup never played up this startling news about the ideological composition of our nation.  Instead it seemed to downplay this very big story. That ought to be very encouraging to conservatives, but instead many of us seem inconsolable and seem certain that our countrymen have been bribed or hypnotized or flattered into leftism by the organs of leftist propaganda or the leftist cadres within the federal government.

Survey USA, which sometimes uses the polling of local organizations in a state and sometimes conducts its own polls, conducted a national poll a few days before the latest Battleground Poll.  This poll also shows that nationally, conservatives far outnumber liberals.  Moreover, the polls conducted by local news organizations which report through Survey USA show the same thing.

The Battleground Poll, conducted by George Washington University in collaboration with a Democrat and a Republican polling organization, also has published the ideological self-identification of Americans.  The latest Battleground Poll has just been released, and the pattern in the latest Battleground Poll is identical to the previous twenty-one polls over the last ten years.

In the latest poll, 58% of Americans describe themselves as “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative,” while only 37% of Americans describe themselves as “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.”  The “moderate” or “don’t know” remain as in past polls very small, at 2% for both of those groups.  Moreover, conservative Americans are much more conservative than liberal Americans are liberal.  So, while 61% of Americans who identify themselves as conservative or liberal pick “conservative,” when asked if they are “very conservative” or “very liberal,” 68% of those strongly ideological Americans are “very conservative” while only 32% are “very liberal.”

Is Battleground over-reporting conservatism in America?  As I noted last November, the other Battleground Poll questions seem almost to be leftist push-polling.  Look at the structure of Question 26, Question 27, Question 31, or Question 32 of that poll.  Each question has false choices or leftist assumptions.

In September 2011, I noted that the August 2011 Battleground Poll seemed to show a significant drop in the percentage of conservatives in America, down to “only” 55% compared to 39% liberals.  A review of the demographics of the population polled in August 2011, however, shows something very interesting: the age group of 18-24 had jumped dramatically over what it had been in all of the previous Battleground Polls, and the 24-29 age group had also gotten bigger than in previous Battleground Poll reports.  America did not suddenly get much younger.  Battleground had changed its polling sample.

Does a review of the February 2012 Battleground Poll demographics reveal anything unusual?  Look at Question D6, which asks: “Which candidate for President of the United States did you vote for?”  The response from those Battleground Poll polled was 54% “Barack Obama” and 41% “John McCain.”  What was the actual popular vote in 2008?  Barack Obama received 52.9% of the vote and John McCain received 45.7% of the vote.

In the previous Battleground Poll, 48% of those polled said that they had voted for “Barack Obama” while 41% said that they had voted for John McCain, reflecting the actual seven-point gap in the 2008 election.  That was identical to the May 2011 answers to Question D6.  While all the other Battleground Polls after the 2008 election showed more Americans stating that they voted for Obama than McCain in their answers to Question D5 (Question D5 in earlier polls was Question D6 in the last few polls), the gap was much smaller than in the February 2012 Battleground Poll.

The answer to D6 (or D5 in earlier polls) did not relate to opinion or to future actions.  It was a matter of simple historical fact: which candidate one voted for in 2008.  The data ought to remain stable and ought to correspond closely to the actual election results.  What happened in the latest Battleground Poll, which provides other encouraging news for leftists and Democrats, is that the population of Obama voters shot up dramatically while the population of McCain voters slumped.

The reality ought to be obvious to any American who is not a perennial conservative pessimist or a delusional leftist: conservatives are the overwhelming majority of Americans.  The polling organizations which tell us that are none too happy about their findings and have tried to hide this fact or tweak populations to minimize conservatives.

That darned conservative majority, whose existence seems to please no one, remains resilient, robust, and very, very real.

HT: American Thinker (read full article)

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.

Do we really need more evidence of just how bad the left is? The blatant appeal to hatred, the naked pursuit of power, the wholly unsavory smell of deceit — the absence of the tiniest fig leaf of respectability — are apparent in everything the left does these days. Its bullying can be met only two ways: with surrender or with resistance. The wise course, resistance, cannot be done halfheartedly. All those who stand in the way of leftists face the same gallows in the end. President Reagan, noting the foolishness of timidity in fighting the left, put it well: “What are they going to do? Hang us from a higher tree?” (Recall that this same great American summed up his Cold War strategy thus: “How about this? We win. They lose.”)

This is the long heritage of defiant courage in the face of oppression. It is William Wallace at Stirling Bridge reminding Scots that they will die but that they need not die as slaves. It is Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses telling his fellow Virginians that “[t]he gentlemen cry ‘Peace, peace,’ but there is no peace: the war has already begun.” It is Churchill’s pugnacity after France fell, telling Hitler and Britons that “[w]e shall never surrender.” It is Solzhenitsyn, alone and threatened in the maw of Marxist tyranny, using his pen to embolden the world against the Evil Empire.

Those who lie, those who lust for power, and those with whom no honorable compromise is possible — these enemies of liberty — must simply be defeated. What does Rush tell his listeners every day? “My goal is to defeat liberalism.” His defiance is like General Jackson in the Civil War at Manassas: fleeing Confederates stopped, looked, and turned around. One of them, famously, told us why: “There stands Jackson like a stone wall.” Courage in war — and we are very much in a war — is contagious (and so is cowardice). There is no substitute for victory in our war. Those lions who stand up in the face of wickedness inspire others, while those mice who try to do business with the hopelessly corrupt fall within the malign spell of the left or end up, as Reagan reminds us, hung from a lower branch.

What does this mean in practice today? Republicans should push “right to work” everywhere as hard as their political muscle will let them. Labor unions, as much a dinosaur as Marxism, are the enemy of the working man, the enemy of government economy, the enemy of jobs, and the mortal enemy of every Republican. Fight also that horror called “public education,” which is a slave to leftist dogma and a vast hole in every state budget: privatize the instruction of our future. Tackle entitlements not meekly with an eye to the latest poll data, but as if these interconnected Ponzi schemes — public employee pensions, Medicare, Social Security, and the rest — are vast frauds which will leave us all poor and afraid. The stench of corruption in ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and sibling monsters must be recorded, exposed, and pressed relentlessly.

Each apology for doing what is right is simple surrender. All vain efforts to peel off “moderate” Democrats blur those distinctions which we want to be crystal-clear. Every poll-driven statement by Republican leaders to capture the imaginary center shows that these Republicans are in fact not “leaders,” but dupes. If our ends are honorable and good, then sheepishness about pursuing those ends is not just immoral, but vastly unwise. We are fighting for our country, for all the good that it is and that it can be, and for all the heroes before us who gave us this land. Like them, we must be bold.

HT: American Thinker

Dennis Prager

Next Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010 is not Election Day. It is Referendum Day.

It may be commonplace for commentators to announce that every election is “the most important election in our lifetime” or something analogous. But having never said that of a presidential election, let alone an off-year election, this commentator cannot be accused of crying wolf when I say that this off-year election is not simply the most important of my lifetime. It is the most important since the Civil War.

The reason is that unlike all previous elections, this one is actually a referendum on the direction of the United States of America.

If the Democrats win:

– The American people have announced, consciously or not, that they support the Democratic Party’s “fundamental transformation” — those were President Obama’s words when he campaigned, and he has lived up to them — of America from a liberty-based state of limited government into an equality-based welfare state with an ever-expanding government.

– America will change from a country that emphasizes producing wealth to a country that emphasizes redistribution of wealth.

The left has never been primarily interested in creating wealth. Its primary goal always and everywhere has been to redistribute it. That so many businessmen and much of Wall Street are only now awakening to this fact is only a testament to the staggering lack of wisdom in big business.

– America will produce increasingly narcissistic citizens.

For proof, just look at the virtual shutdown of much of France and the ubiquitous rioting of vast numbers of its citizens over a tiny change in its welfare state — raising the age of retirement from 60 to 62. The idea that one will work two more years before receiving benefits until death so offends vast numbers of French — including young people who have every reason to believe they will live until the age of 100 — that they are fighting it as if their very lives were in jeopardy. That is the self-centeredness that all welfare states engender in their citizens.

– America will further reinforce the conviction that minorities are victims — who must be protected from their fellow Americans by the state.

Latinos, blacks, Muslims, gays and vast numbers of women have been told by the left and its political party that they are all persecuted by a country that is SIXHIRB — Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist and Bigoted. That America is the least SIXHIRB country in the world is a fact that has been all but drowned out by the left-wing domination of television and print news media, all the entertainment media, and the high schools and universities.

– America will continue to undermine its unique ability to Americanize people of all ethnic, national, racial, and religious backgrounds.

With a Democratic victory the country’s very motto — E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many One” — will continue to erode as ethnic and racial identities rather one American identity are increasingly celebrated. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has just announced that Germany’s experiment with multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” but the left and its political party, the Democrats, have redoubled their efforts to supplant E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism.

– America will continue its economic slide.

With a Democratic victory, unsustainable debts will mount, wealth-producing companies will continue to flee from higher taxes and more regulations, energy use will be taxed in the name of environmentalist utopianism, and the government will continue to print dollars.

– America will become increasingly secular.

With a Democratic victory, the left’s goal of rendering America’s other motto, “In God We Trust,” an anachronism will come closer to fruition. Leftism is a jealous god. As in Western Europe, the Judeo-Christian roots of this country are ceasing to play the indispensible moral role they have played since before 1776.

And what would constitute a Democrat victory next Tuesday? Anything other than a Republican landslide. Any other result will be interpreted by the media and by the Democrats as solely a result of the economic recession and as the normal losses of the dominant party in off-year elections.

In other words, the only way to ensure that the electoral results are seen as a repudiation of the growth of the state and the other Democrat and leftist goals is through an enormous Republican victory.

Only then will America understand that this election was not first about jobs. It was above all about America.

HT: DennisPrager.com

The first: the tea party is not a “threat” to the Republican Party, the tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn’t remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.

In a practical sense, the tea party saved the Republican Party in this cycle by not going third-party. It could have. The broadly based, locally autonomous movement seems to have made a rolling decision, group by group, to take part in Republican primaries and back Republican hopefuls. (According to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, four million more Republicans voted in primaries this year than Democrats, the GOP’s highest such turnout since 1970. I wonder who those people were?)

Because of this, because they did not go third-party, Nov. 2 is not going to be a disaster for the Republicans, but a triumph.

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration’s spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: “We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!” They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

And they not only freed the Washington establishment, they woke it up. That establishment, composed largely of 50- to 75-year-olds who came to Washington during the Reagan era in a great rush of idealism, in many cases stayed on, as they say, not to do good but to do well. They populated a conservative infrastructure that barely existed when Reagan was coming up: the think tanks and PR groups, the media outlets and governmental organizations. They did not do what conservatives are supposed to do, which is finish their patriotic work and go home, taking the knowledge and sophistication derived from Washington and applying it to local problems. (This accounts in part for the esteem in which former Bush budget chief and current Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is held. He went home.)

The GOP establishment stayed, and one way or another lived off government, breathed in its ways and came to know—learned all too well!—the limits of what is possible and passable. Part of the social and cultural reality behind the tea party-GOP establishment split has been the sheer fact that tea partiers live in non-D.C. America. The establishment came from America, but hasn’t lived there in a long time.

I know and respect some of the establishmentarians, but after dinner, on the third glass of wine, when they get misty-eyed about Reagan and the old days, they are not, I think, weeping for him and what he did but for themselves and who they were. Back when they were new and believed in something.
Finally, the tea party stiffened the GOP’s spine by forcing it to recognize what it had not actually noticed, that we are a nation in crisis. The tea party famously has no party chiefs and no conventions but it does have a theme—stop the spending, stop the sloth, incompetence and unneeded regulation—and has lent it to the GOP.

Actually, Maureen “Moe” Tucker, former drummer of the Velvet Underground, has done the best job ever of explaining where the tea party stands and why it stands there. She also suggests the breadth and variety of the movement. In an interview this week in St. Louis’s Riverfront Times, Ms. Tucker said she’d never been particularly political but grew alarmed by the direction the country was taking. In the summer of 2009, she went to a tea-party rally in southern Georgia. A chance man-on-the-street interview became a YouTube sensation. No one on the left could believe this intelligent rally-goer was the former drummer of the 1960s breakthrough band; no one on the left understood that an artist could be a tea partier. Because that’s so not cool, and the Velvet Underground was cool.

Ms. Tucker, in the interview, ran through the misconceptions people have about tea partiers: “that they’re all racists, they’re all religious nuts, they’re all uninformed, they’re all stupid, they want no taxes at all and no regulations whatsoever.” These stereotypes, she observed, are encouraged by Democrats to keep their base “on their side.” But she is not a stereotype: “Anyone who thinks I’m crazy about Sarah Palin, Bush, etc., has made quite the presumption. I have voted Democrat all my life, until I started listening to what Obama was promising and started wondering how the hell will this utopian dream be paid for?”

There is also this week a striking essay by Fareed Zakaria, no tea partier he, in Time magazine. He unknowingly touched on part of the reason for the tea party. Mr. Zakaria, born and raised in India, got his first sense of America’s vitality, outsized ways, glamour and crazy high-spiritedness as a young boy in the late 1970s watching bootlegged videotapes of “Dallas.” What a country! His own land, in comparison, seemed sleepy, hidebound. Now when he travels to India, “it’s as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future. After centuries of stagnation, their economy is on the move, fueling animal spirits and ambition. The whole country feels as if it has been unlocked.” Meanwhile the mood in the U.S. seems glum, dispirited. “The middle class, in particular, feels under assault.” Sixty-three percent of Americans say they do not think they will be able to maintain their current standard of living. “The can-do country is convinced that it can’t.”

All true. And yet. We may be witnessing a new political dynamism. The tea party’s rise reflects anything but fatalism, and maybe even a new high-spiritedness. After all, they’re only two years old and they just saved a political party and woke up an elephant.

The second fact of 2010 is understood by Republicans but not admitted by Democrats. It is that this is a fully nationalized election, and at its center it is about one thing: Barack Obama.

It is not, broadly, about the strengths or weaknesses of various local candidates, about constituent services or seniority, although these elements will be at play in some outcomes, Barney Frank’s race likely being one. But it is significant that this year Mr. Frank is in the race of his life, and this week on TV he did not portray the finger-drumming smugness and impatience with your foolishness he usually displays on talk shows. He looked pale and mildly concussed, like someone who just found out that liberals die, too.

This election is about one man, Barack Obama, who fairly or not represents the following: the status quo, Washington, leftism, Nancy Pelosi, Fannie and Freddie, and deficits in trillions, not billions.

Everyone who votes is going to be pretty much voting yay or nay on all of that. And nothing can change that story line now.

HT: WSJ

Establishment Washington got yet another whipping last night, as “the unelectable” Christine O’Donnell — supported by Sarah Palin and the Tea Parties — rallied to convincingly beat liberal and well-connected Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican primary for Senate. Castle, we were told by the powers that be, was the only electable Republican — and his loss is already being mourned by “Beltway conservatives” like Karl Rove and Dana Perino, not to mention the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has announced that O’Donnell will have to finance her campaign on her own.

Well, fine. The last time Republican voters agreed with the Beltway pundits (and the Democrats) and awarded a nomination to “the most electable Republican” who was “well-respected across the aisle,” we got John McCain. How did that work out? Just great — as long as you are a Democrat.

Thankfully, tiny Delaware’s voters ignored their party apparatus, actually held a true Republican primary, and chose the person who most closely represents what the Republican base voter believes in. This is what party primaries used to be for. It is what they should still be held for. It is simply unforgivable for Republican apparatchiks to choose sides in a primary — yet they do — and they are so often disastrous picks. Can you say “Arlen Specter”? “Charlie Crist”?

So while there’s no guarantee of success in November for O’Donnell, she joins a list of “unelectable Republicans” past and present like Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Rand Paul, Scott Brown, Sharron Angle, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio, to name a few. Their stories are varied, but all were deemed “unelectable” by the party insiders at some point in their careers, and they were all considered too conservative.

O’Donnell’s story of last night was simply a continuation of their stories in this very unusual 2009-2010 election cycle.

All faced establishment candidates and long odds — and yet all won by being unabashedly conservative. All read the tea leaves of the national mood much better than government insiders and political pros.

It is true that Angle, Paul, and Rubio have not won general elections yet — but they have already disproven the “unelectable” myth by staging huge rallies in the polls that we were told could never happen by the experts and insiders. Brown and Christie (who campaigned for Castle) meanwhile have shown that strong small-government conservatives can win in blue-state bastions like Massachusetts and New Jersey after all, destroying yet another inside-the-Beltway myth.

Compared to what Brown and Christie have done, Delaware might be relatively easy for O’Donnell. She had to come from way back in the polls just days ago, but she came so far so quickly that her win last night was never in doubt. It’s possible that she can do the same in the general election in a tiny state like Delaware, where face-to-face politics is the rule. And Joe Miller can replicate this in Alaska as well.

Perhaps some elections cannot swing so fast among huge populations, but one of the many ways the Tea Party groups are showing superior sophistication to the political pros is understanding the dynamics of small voting populations. Small-population Delaware, Nevada, and Alaska have just as many senators as do New York and California, and these are prime places to take a stand for principled conservatism with unknown candidates.

Yet the siren call of name recognition, inside connections, and perceived electability endures among the formulaic party pros.

Never mind that Mike Castle simply joins other moderate and respectable “electable Republicans” on the ash heap of history like McCain, Charlie Crist, Bob Dole, Arlen Specter, latter-day Jack Kemp, and Lisa Murkowski. All were establishment favorites who have, for varying reasons and in varying ways, brought shame and defeat upon that very establishment’s party. Some even became official enemies of the party, proving that conservative doubts about them were justified all along.

But the Beltway arrogance is not deterred.

The long knives of establishment Washington — including the blades of Rove and Perino — were already slashing into O’Donnell last night. They mumbled about her personal problems and her inexperience and her unclear financial background as reasons she cannot win the general election.

Well let me clue these comfortable Beltway mavens in on something: many of us country-class peons out here in “non-government” land have had problems like O’Donnell’s because of the burden of supporting Washington, not to mention the rash of bureaucrats at every conceivable level of government. It is becoming damned near impossible to negotiate a life outside the Beltway without some problems. That’s exactly what the Tea Party movement and all of these elections are about. We are sick of it.

In fact, the Delaware seat up for grabs is “the Joe Biden seat,” a seat that for decades has included a private AMTRAK seat every morning and every night for Biden. Whatever O’Donnell’s personal and financial problems are, they may have something to do with the fact that the taxpayers weren’t subsidizing her every whim the way they have Biden’s and Castle’s for decades.

It is too early to know if Delaware’s voters will look at O’Donnell’s candidacy that way in the general election — but we do already know this: Washington insiders’ views of electability are deeply flawed, and Washington has never been so isolated from the rest of the country. If elected, O’Donnell nor Miller nor Angle nor Rubio will be a threat to “work with” the Obama agenda or, worse yet, jump parties.

The voters instinctively know this. That’s why they are voting for these people. And when you think about it, that’s what makes someone truly “electable,” isn’t it?

And that’s the takeaway from the amazing victory last night for Christine O’Donnell.

HT: American Thinker

Lloyd Marcus

9/12/2010 – Lloyd Marcus -

Here are two paradigms which evil, divisive Democrats have shamefully promoted and exploited for years: one, white men are burning the midnight oil thinking of ways to keep blacks down; and two, all rich white people are selfish, evil, and deserving of punishment.

No Democrat president has sold the “you have too little because the rich have too much” message better than Barack Obama, which led to angry protesters picketing the homes of corporate executives.

Democrats are masters at creating a hated “bad guy” to further their agenda.

As a black man, I wish to share a few of my life experiences which crush the paradigm that all whites are committed to keeping blacks down.

When I was 15, I wanted to attend art college on weekends. I wrote a letter to my (white) senator. When I arrived home from school one day, my mom said our senator stopped by, saw the sign I was painting for our teen dance, and decided to give me a scholarship.

I wrote a letter to then-Baltimore mayor William Donald Schaeffer for a scholarship. Imagine this nervous 15-year-old black kid from the ghetto, dressed in my Sunday best and my artwork between two pieces of cardboard as a portfolio, sitting in the mayor’s huge office. My artwork was spread over his massive carved oak desk. Schaeffer was kind and easy to talk to. He became annoyed by interruptions and instructed his secretary to hold his calls. We talked for an hour or so. A few weeks later, I received a scholarship to the Maryland Institute College of Art.

When I was a young man in the U.S. Army stationed at Ft. Bragg, NC, my pregnant wife and I were seeking a loan. The clerk said we needed a co-signer. A (white) captain, overhearing the conversation, said, “I’ll co-sign for you!” I said, “But sir, you don’t even know me.” He replied, “You seem like a nice enough feller.”

After college, I went job hunting for a position as a graphic designer. Upon viewing my portfolio, (white) businessman John Halechak did not offer me a job. Instantly, he gave me office space, a room in a high-rent office building, to start my own business.

So there you have it: a few personal anecdotes that are also antidotes to the Democrat narrative that white America tries to keep us blacks down and in our place.

As for the Democrats’ relentless attacks and insistence that we hate the rich, had Mr. Halechak not been well-off, he would not have been in a position to help me. Still, Democrats want to, as Obama said, “spread the wealth around” — which really means redistribution of other peoples’ hard-earned money. Then we will all be equally just barely getting by.

U.S. unemployment has risen to a postwar historical high, and our economy is diving downward. The Obama administration could turn things around by simply creating a friendlier atmosphere towards business and not raising taxes. Economics 101 says that the higher you tax an activity, the less people will indulge in that activity. Reagan proved that lowering taxes generates more activity, which generates more revenue for the government.

Obama and company are locked in their paradigm that the rich are selfish SOBs deserving of punishment. Obama plans to end the Bush tax cuts, spinning that they benefit only the rich.

A tax cut across the board for all Americans would tremendously boost our economy. Unfortunately, the Democrats’ insane hatred, demonization, and jealousy of the rich compels them to sink the entire ship of America rather than save one rich person.

These two evil Democrat-promoted paradigms — white men oppose black success and the rich are SOBs — are deeply ingrained in the psyche of many Americans.

However, I learned years ago, while serving in the U.S. Army, that good people and jerks come in all colors.

As for hating the rich, the Bible says, “Thou shall not covet.” With the exception of a few Ted Kennedys and John Kerrys in this world, most of the rich worked hard to get to where they are. Rather than hating them, I want to learn from them.

Once, a dear friend was in danger of losing his home. I was not in a financial position to help. All of my sympathy and good intentions could not help him — he needed cash. Wealth is a very good thing.

HT: American Thinker

America is an idea.

6/11/2010 – Carol Negro -
America is not a plot of land. It is not a culture. It is not a nationality. It is not a set of traditions or customs. It is not a government. It is not a people. It is not a book of laws. And it certainly isn’t a race.

America is an idea.

That’s why anyone can become an American. Embrace the idea (and fill out a few forms) and you’re an American.

You’re one of us.

Most other nations are nationalities. Their heritage depends on blood and territory. America is portable. We carry it around in our hearts and minds.

If you bomb our cities, you can’t destroy America. If you ruin our economy, you can’t destroy America. If most of the continent falls into the ocean, you can’t destroy America. Even if you kill most of us, you can’t destroy America.

Because wherever two or more of us are gathered in her name…America is there.

Here is the secret: We don’t live in America. America lives in us.

America is an idea.

The greatest, purest, sweetest, most sublime idea in the history of the world. It lifts man up, it blesses him, it encourage him, it enlightens him, it civilizes him, it opens his heart, it makes him kind and generous and honest and brave and free. It makes him smart and successful and industrious. It makes him innovative and cheerful. It makes him happy, honorable, and honest.

America is an idea.

And it is that idea that is under constant assault in the halls of power, the press room, the classroom, and the screening room.

Who seeks to murder the idea seeks the destruction of America.

What specifically is this idea? It is that man is created with certain inalienable rights, including Life, Liberty, and Property. It is that man has the right to self-government, the right to be left alone, the right to the fruit of his labors, the right to dispose of his property as he sees fit. It is that all men are created equal under God and the law, and that no man can take away these rights, and that the sole duty of government is to protect them. It is that government must be accountable to The People, not the people to the government. It is that ours is to be a nation of laws, not of men, and that no one is above the law. It is that justice is blind. It is that man must be virtuous if he is to be free. It is that human rights come from the creator and cannot be abrogated by men.

The entire goal of the Left is to murder the idea of the goodness and righteousness of freedom, of self-reliance, of independence, of merit, of virtue, of hard work, of honor, of courage, of sacrifice, of loyalty, of morality, of faith, of the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property.

The Left, in politics, media, education and entertainment, despise the idea that is America. And they are doing everything in their power to promote a replacement “idea” — one that distorts the language of freedom to promote the serfdom of dependence, twists the meaning of truth to tell lies, seeks to limit freedom, mocks faith, virtue and morality, undermines self-reliance and the independent spirit; one that disdains (or punishes) hard work, laughs at frugality, and sneers at sacrifice; one that approves of murdering new life, regulating liberty, confiscating property, and seizing the fruit of our labors. One that denies the Creator and those annoying and inconvenient inalienable rights.

They seek to replace a divinity with a corpse.

Since America is the idea, plotting the overthrow of the idea is plotting the overthrow of America.

They may love their jobs, their plot of land, their privileges, their personal wealth, their property, their family, their friends, their clubs, and their cars. They may love California wine and Maine lobster and Southern Fried Chicken, Texas barbeque, and Boston baked beans. They may love museums, and lighthouses, and beaches and palm trees and big salty lakes, and waterfalls and huge canyons, and redwoods and geysers and cowboys and Indians. They may love football, and Santa Claus, and Martin Luther King Day. They may love fireworks, and Hollywood, and Harvard. But they don’t love America.

They have already killed her in their own hearts. And they are trying to kill her in ours and our children’s with their unconstitutional laws, their biased reporting, their false history, their immoral and undermining “art.”

They seek nothing less than the death of the American idea, which is far worse than the conquest of territory. They mercilessly and tirelessly work toward the destruction of the American soul.

HT: American Thinker

Sarah Palin

5/27/2010 – Sarah Palin -
Nearly 40 days in, our President finally addressed the American people’s growing concerns about the Gulf Coast oil spill. Listening to today’s press conference, you’d think the administration has been working with single-minded focus on the Gulf gusher since the start of the disaster. In reality, their focus has been anything but singular to help solve this monumental problem.

If the President really was fully focused on this issue from day one, why did it take nine whole days before the administration asked the Department of Defense for help in deploying equipment needed for the extreme depth spill site?

Why was the expert group assembled by Energy Commissioner Steven Chu only set up three weeks after the start of this disaster?

Why was Governor Jindal forced more than a month after the start of the disaster to go on national television to beg for materials needed to tackle the oil spill and for federal approval to build offshore sand barriers that are imperative to protect his state’s coastline?

Why have several countries and competent organizations who offered help or expertise in dealing with the spill not even received a response back from the Unified Area Command to this day?

The President claimed that “this notion that somehow the federal government is somehow sitting on the sidelines and for the last three or four or five weeks we’ve just been letting BP make a whole bunch of decisions is simply not true.” But, in fact, that is how U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen described the Obama administration’s approach to this crisis: “We keep a close watch.”

Listening to the President, you get the impression he is continually surprised by the inability of various centralized government agencies to get more involved and help solve problems. His lack of executive experience might explain this because he is apparently unaware that it’s his job as a chief executive to make sure they do their jobs and help solve problems.

The fundamental problem at the core of this crisis is a lack of responsibility. (I risk the President taking my comments personally, but they’re not intended to be personal; my comments reflect what many others feel, and we just want to help him tackle this enormous spill problem.) There’s a culture of buck-passing at the heart of this administration that has caused the tragedy of a sunken oil rig to turn into a potential disaster.

The 1990 Oil Pollution Act was drafted in response to the Exxon-Valdez spill in my home state. It created new procedures for offshore cleanups, specifically putting the federal government in charge of such operations. The President should have used the authority granted by the OPA – immediately – to take control of the situation. That is a big part of what the OPA is for – to designate who is in charge so finger-pointing won’t disrupt efforts to just “plug the d#*! hole.” But instead of immediately engaging with this crisis, our President chose to spend precious time on political pet causes like haranguing the state of Arizona for doing what he himself was supposed to do – secure the nation’s border. He also spent much time fundraising and politicking for liberal candidates and causes while we waited for him to grasp the enormity of the Gulf spill.

Now that the American people are calling him out on his lack of engagement with this disaster, the buck-passing is in full swing – and, unbelievably, his administration is still looking to blame his predecessor. Amazingly, even those of us who support energy independence for America are the brunt of some buck-passing.

He suggested today that a “culture of corruption” at the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) was solely the previous administration’s responsibility and that the failure of the inspection system was a failure of that administration. That is false. The MMS has been his responsibility since January 20, 2009.

The MMS director who resigned today, Elizabeth Birnbaum, was appointed by his administration. And the most recent inspection of the oil rig took place a mere 10 days before the explosion – also very much on his watch, not President Bush’s.

The President is also now attempting to somehow distance himself from his administration’s recent decision to open a few areas of the continental shelf to oil and gas exploration. That’s unfortunate because America desperately needs our domestic oil and natural gas. We rely on it for our prosperity, security, and freedom. The President’s decision to open a few areas to offshore exploration was the right decision then; and unlike his quickly evolving position on energy development now, I continue to believe it’s the right decision today – because energy independence is in the long-term economic and security interests of the United States.

As I explained in an article in National Review last year, conventional sources like natural gas “can act as a clean ‘bridge fuel’ to a future when more renewable sources are available.” I do not, as the President mistakenly believes, think we can “drill, baby, drill” our way out of all of our troubles. As I have consistently stated, we need an “all of the above” approach to energy independence that combines conventional drilling with energy conservation and renewable-energy development. My record in Alaska clearly shows my commitment to this “all of the above” approach. Over 20 percent of Alaska’s electricity currently comes from renewable sources. As governor, I put forward a long-term plan to increase that figure to 50 percent by 2025, which is the most ambitious renewable energy target in the nation. I take great pride in helping to make Alaska, in the words of the New York Times, “a Frontier for Green Power,” even as we continue to embrace the need to “drill, baby, drill” at the same time.

Alaska can be that frontier for renewable energy only because our conventional oil and gas reserves provide us with “a bridge” to a greener energy future. In fact, Alaska has enough reserves of both oil and gas to help the United States cross that bridge – if only we are allowed to drill!

Please, Mr. President, hear me on this, if nothing else: if it’s your administration’s decision to suspend the leases of new oil field developments off the coast of Alaska in response to the Gulf’s deepwater spill, and you still remain committed to locking up ANWR and other oil-rich lands, please know you are making a mistake. Unless we continue to drill here and drill now, we risk digging ourselves deeper into the hole created by our continued dependence on foreign energy – which often comes from regimes that care nothing for our prosperity or security, and even less for global environmental safety.

We need affordable, reliable, secure, environmentally-sound, and domestically-produced energy, but this administration continues to lock up federal land filled with huge energy reserves. If there is to be a moratorium on offshore development, then it’s time we stop ignoring our safest options for domestic development – places like ANWR and NPR-A in my home state of Alaska.

And it’s time for the administration to stop passing the buck and get control of the disaster in the Gulf. There’s a reason why Harry Truman had that famous sign on his desk. The “buck stops” with the occupant of the Oval Office. When the American people elected President Obama they gave him responsibility to handle this disaster. He promised to “heal the earth, and watch the waters recede…” or something far-fetched like that. It was unbelievable then, it’s impossible now, but what I believe he meant was that he promised to be held accountable. With all due respect, Mr. President, you have a huge job in front of you. We hope you’re learning. Please learn that we must have domestic energy development, you must stop looking backward and blaming Bush, and we must all work together to “plug the d#*! hole.”

- Sarah Palin

HT: Sarah Palin – Facebook Notes

Story was renamed and re-published under a more appropriate title. Read the entire article on the Chris Banescu website. (re-printed with permission)

They are all the famous Man on Horseback, the hero of the hour who instantly turns into a tyrant. Even today Latin America is bedeviled by its own Obamas, who all demand to be idolized and worshipped. Obamas are a dime a dozen.

The Founders knew about abuse of power by arrogant and ignorant narcissists, over and over again in human history. They read it in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. They read it in the Book of Kings, where you can find out all about Saddam Hussein, because the politics of the Middle East hasn’t changed much. They saw it in the Middle East of their day, which was full of clan tyrannies and immense cruelty. Arab slavers were still raiding Britain when the Founders proclaimed the Declaration of Independence.

They read it in Plutarch’s Lives of the Ceasars. They read it in the history of Athens, torn between bloody factions, and constantly raising new Obamas to power.

You see, all you Salonistas, the Founders were profoundly educated people. They were passionate believers in the Enlightenment. They understood the role of free speech, free thought, free political debate, and free trade. They saw the benefits of freedom in their own lives.

The Founders knew about slavery in the South, and they were deeply ashamed of it. But unlike contemporary liberals, who are massively ignorant of everything but their navels, they also knew that slavery was the norm in the British Royal Navy, for example, which recruited its sailors by force, using press gangs in London and other port cities. The British Navy also kidnapped American sailors.

The Royal Navy abolished the African slave trade. But common British sailors were whipped to work every day. They slept in 28 inches of space, almost as bad as African slaves, and were kept in bondage (deserters were hanged), and drug-addicted on daily grog and beer. The Founders knew about slavery in Biblical times, and among Russia’s serfs. They knew about slavery in France and the German states, where violence was used routinely to keep peasants tied to the land. The Founders also knew about the mental slavery that comes from indoctrination, which is why they loved liberty, including liberty of faith.

The Founders understood that liberty had to come in stages. Only tyrants claim to create instant paradise. Practical statesmen work step by step. They created the intellectual and legal framework for the liberation of the slaves. When Abraham Lincoln came along, Americans were willing to fight a terrible war to free the slaves, even if more than half a million people had to die. Read the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and you can see the real campaign for human liberty, not the fantasy version liberals entertain today. Liberty is bought very dearly, in blood and suffering. (And it was Christian Abolitionists who created the campaign to liberate the slaves.)

America’s wars of liberation were real, not frauds like the Marxist ones. We brought liberty to Europe in World War I, in World War II, and in the Cold War. We brought liberty to American slaves in the Civil War. No other nation in history can claim anything close to that.

The Founders created the first land of liberty in human history. To be sure, they learned a great deal from British political thinkers like John Locke and Edmund Burke, and from the classical writers. They demanded for themselves the rights that were (theoretically) granted to Englishmen of their time. Meanwhile the French Revolution led to massive bloodshed and twenty years of bloody war to conquer Europe. Napoleon was another Obama idol.

Read your history, my friends. Real history, not the Leftist propaganda version.

America gave the first great opportunity in human history to start afresh. The Founders used that opportunity to create the greatest political foundation in history — because they understood that human nature hasn’t changed, and that there would be those (like Obama) who were so power-oriented that they would try to lord it over all Americans. The Constitution was carefully designed to stop and balance human power mongers, like Obama. It has done so for two hundred years, and today it is the Marxist Left that is mounting a great assault on the US Constitution. But Marx never changed human nature.

The Left seems to believe that Karl Marx found a better way than the American Founders did. But look at the works of Marxism: The Soviets, Maoism, Pol Pot. One hundred million human beings killed by Marxist regimes in the 20th century alone. Look at North Korea, my sadly ignorant friends. Look at Robert Mugabe and his ilk. Look at the Nazis and their close affinity for Marxist totalitarians.

Karl Marx was just a throwback to all the slave-taking empires in history. Marx was born in Prussia, and idolized the chief propaganda philosopher of Prussia for his own “philosophy.” (That was Friedrich Hegel.) Marx wanted a militaristic state, run by an elite of Marx followers, who would indoctrinate all the workers to march in lockstep to the Central Commander. Is that what you want? It’s what Obama is creating for the United States today.

Read a little history, my poor friend, and you will see Obamas everywhere you look. Lenin was an Obama (and the Obama campaign deliberately used Lenin imagery for its propaganda). Stalin was an Obama. Mussolini was an Obama. Napoleon was an Obama. Putin is an Obama. Ahmadinejad is an Obama. Saddam was an Obama.

America never had a rock star president until the Obama campaign. George Washington made very sure no one would suspect him of being an Obama. Lincoln never claimed to be an Obama. None of our presidents have paraded themselves as Obamas — not until Obama came along and brought the psychology of self-glorifying narcissism to these shores. And the Left snapped to and saluted Obama, worshiped at his feet of clay in that ancient and corrupt way that humans have known for millenia.

Are rock stars your idea of an American president? If so, please go back to school and read a little history.

Russian president Medvedev said this last week – said it out loud, to the deaf, dumb and blind Leftists of the world:

“President Medvedev has issued a stinging repudiation of the Soviet Union, condemning it as a totalitarian state that had deprived Russians of their basic rights. He also condemned Joseph Stalin’s record of repression before Victory Day celebrations on Sunday marking the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, an event that many elderly Russians attribute to the leadership of the Soviet dictator.

… “Stalin committed mass crimes against the people. And despite the fact that he worked a lot, despite the fact that under his leadership the country achieved successes, what was done to his own people cannot be forgiven.”…

Conservatives love the Founders because we read history. We know that you don’t read history. Obama doesn’t know history.

That’s why you liberals scare us.

HT: Human Events

Individual rights must be the rallying point for reclaiming liberty.

The Founders of the United States hoped to create a society of free individuals, but for at least a century, the nation has been marching ever more quickly in the direction of tyranny. The independent Tea Party movement represents a renewed desire to roll back the tide of government expansion, but this cause will fail unless its participants take an uncompromising stand in favor of individual rights. A building, no matter how rigid, cannot stand upon a weak and cracked foundation. In the same vein, errors and inconsistencies in a society’s philosophical foundation will cause its downfall — even in one as great as ours.

The Republican Party inadvertently teaches this lesson. Even though its leaders have mostly advocated free markets and individual responsibility, they have failed to defend the proper moral foundation of a free society. This failure has led us to imminent crisis, and their actions illustrate perfectly why an unyielding adherence to the correct moral principles is so vitally important. For example, many Republicans argue for a return to constitutional limits on government, which is a good idea. But if they do not understand the moral context the Founders used to write the Constitution — individual rights — then they will misinterpret “Constitutional limits.” The wrong moral context might lead someone to conclude that “promoting the general welfare” is a Constitutional sanction for some species of statism, which is absurd.

Republican leaders commit this kind of error with The American Energy Act, in which they arbitrarily propose building one hundred nuclear reactors over the next twenty years. Rather than deregulating and allowing people to choose their own energy solutions — which would uphold individual rights — politicians will instead continue the practice of manipulating buyers and sellers. Markets deal with the concrete facts of reality, however, and reality is not subject to the whims of any lawmaker. On the contrary, reality dashes all attempts to rewrite it.

For example, if the reality of energy demand required a hundred or more new reactors, this mandate would be wasteful because suppliers would build at least this many reactors anyway. If buyers demanded fewer than a hundred reactors — perhaps because there are better and cheaper energy solutions on the market — then Republican legislation would make energy more expensive because it would force capital away from cheaper solutions and toward nuclear energy. Simply put, violating individual rights will not produce the favorable outcome Republican leaders are looking for.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made the same error in a recent appearance on CNN. He discussed the Democratic health care bill and identified the slogan “repeal and replace” as a key component of Republican campaign strategy. He went on to say, “[H]opefully we’ll be able to repeal the most egregious parts of this and replace them with things we could have done on a bipartisan basis much earlier this year.” McConnell implied that Republicans are willing to compromise with Democrats on health care legislation, which is a tragedy in itself, given the horrifying national crisis of debt. But even worse than this, Republicans propose a bill that is principally and morally no different from the Democratic bill.

Where Democrats seek to plan health care directly, Republicans propose tax incentives and federal-to-state bonus payments to plan the industry “indirectly.” The key similarity is that Democrats and Republicans both agree that politicians must use their particular methods of planning to manipulate buyers and sellers of health care services. Because the free market already provides a profit incentive for exceptional services at the best prices, Republican legislation is unnecessary and even harmful.

As mentioned above, markets deal with the facts of reality, and any kind of successful business venture must gauge these facts accurately. Republican health care legislation will distort the view of the marketplace by making it appear as if some kinds of services are better than others. If individuals actually require different services, then this legislation will necessarily increase cost and waste. Just as with the previous example of nuclear energy, capital would be forced away from better services to those “encouraged” by Republican legislation. With this proposal, Republican leaders would create more government control, fewer choices for individuals, and yet more cracks in the foundation.

Republican leaders do not question whether government should interfere at all in the choices of free individuals, but rather how the interference should be implemented. Both parties treat society as a singular entity that should be herded, steered, and molded in the image they envision. In reality, a society is composed of individuals making their own decisions. Treading on the rights of individuals will necessarily damage the society that emerges. The simple point has been lost on Republican leaders that the most effective way to encourage innovation is to stop meddling with people.

The philosophical arguments of individualism hold that rights are derived from the factual traits of human nature. It is the individual — not society — that must use his thinking mind in order to produce what he needs to survive and pursue his own happiness. The only way to live with others is to recognize this fact and respect it by never initiating force upon another, because force negates a thinking mind. Since societies are made by individuals working together, it follows that a stable and thriving society necessarily respects its fundamental unit: the individual. After all, a building will not stand with its foundation destroyed.

The current state of U.S. politics is analogous to a trick of sophistry known as Morton’s Fork, which is a way of presenting two choices that lead to the same unfavorable conclusion. Lord Chancellor John Morton, charged with replenishing the depleted coffers of Henry VII, devised a tax strategy under which no one was exempt: Either a subject lived frugally, and must have savings enough to give to the king; or they lived opulently, and obviously had enough money to spare for the king. Either way, the crown wins.

Just as Henry’s subjects never questioned the king’s right to demand a ransom, voters today do not question the bipartisan violation of their rights. A vote for either party results in the same unfavorable outcome: a politician with no moral qualms about trampling your rights as an individual. Voting alone will not solve this problem.

Americans must deny Morton’s Fork and recognize a third option besides two species of tyranny: a free society that upholds individual rights as an inalienable, moral absolute. Politics is founded upon moral philosophy, and the former cannot be altered without reforming the latter.

Advocates of liberty must adopt individualism as a moral conviction if we are to renew the hope that our nation can be reclaimed, salvaged, and rebuilt with the proper foundation. We must demand that our representatives adhere consistently and uncompromisingly to individual rights, and we must make it clear that we will accept no political infringement upon our sovereignty as individuals. The battle of ideas is being waged here and now, and there has never been a more urgent time to act. The outcome will determine whether our nation will collapse from the weakness of its own philosophical contradictions or thrive once again.

HT: American Thinker

The left loves to hide. This is why leftists reject the label “liberal” in favor of “progressive” or some other meaningless term. This is also why leftists must describe their opponents as the “hard right” or “right-wing extremists,” rather than simply respond to the serious policy issues their opponents raise.

The establishment media, which has been obviously tilted to the left for fifty years, petulantly denies any leftist bias. This utter denial continues more than forty years after Agnew’s speech against the television elites in 1969 and in spite of polling data, such as a Gallup poll which shows a huge plurality considering the media more liberal than conservative and a Zogby Poll which shows 64% of Americans seeing a liberal bias in the media.

Why do these elites lie about what they believe? Newspapers used to proudly proclaim their advocacy of partisan positions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking an editorial stand. The problems of the establishment left media are these: (1) They do not compete against each other by exposing the stories which are being ignored or tilted, so these clusters of corporations act like constituent parts of a monopoly or a trust, and (2) they lie about their biases, perversely pretending to be the noble, neutral mediators of public discourse.

The establishment media was once decked out in royal robes. Now it is part of the Naked Left. The nimble, principled, bright media of conservative talent founded on talk radio, cyberspace news and social websites, Fox News, and the rising conservative book industry finds out and reports within hours stories that the leftist monopolist of news used to spike for months.

Colleges used to be places of learning, debate, and free thought — long ago. Academia is no longer like that. The soft disciplines like political science, history, and philosophy have become pretentious tools in the hands of aging Marxists and their craven pals. Politically correct speech, which sounds like it comes right out of Orwell’s 1984, was the serious and severe creation of the once-respectable college administrations.

One of the biggest stories in the last fifty years is how deeply Soviet agents had penetrated not just our government, but the motion picture industry, journalism, and other choke points in our society. The end of the Soviet Union allowed scholars to prove beyond any doubt not only the guilt of men like Alger Hiss, but also of men and women whom we never dreamed were traitors. Has academia revised at all its estimations of the Red Scare? No. It prefers, instead, to proclaim Marxism and socialism as still “untested ideals” and the unmarked graves of its hundred million or so victims as meaningless statistics.

But those historians and political scientists have lost whatever fig leaf allowed them to once hail Stalin as a great man. The archives of the KGB, the GRU, the Stasi in East Germany, the inner sanctum of the Kremlin — all denude these wrinkly old slaves of the left, who run their petty empires in colleges as a dying class of aristocrats, addled adherents of the Old Regime of “Uncle Joe” Stalin leftism. Plenty of diligent conservative scholars have exposed the Naked Left in academia through books, lectures, and articles. These free minds cannot be shackled with the narcotic of tenure and the other debilitating enticements of cushy college sinecures.

Seldom has the Naked Left been more exposed that in the myth of man-made global warming. As Marc Sheppard observes, the so-called science of man-made global warming has been hopelessly manipulated to reach preordained conclusions. Hiding something as huge as the Medieval Warming Period through the scientific equivalent of three card Monte shows that the emperors of bureaucratic “science” have no clothes. Ben Stein has done estimable work in his film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in showing how politically correct science is the only science treated as legitimate — no matter how lame its analysis or weak its predictive power. The Naked Left of state-allowed science is simply intellectual slop. Nimble, clever, honest minds have done what dull, regimented, bent minds cannot.

Soon Democrats will face directly an electorate that sees right through them. All the procedural tricks and side deals slavered onto a legislative sandwich with thousands of slices fool only the hopelessly prostituted minions of the left. Ordinary people grasp the awfulness of vast legislation pushed through Congress without a single Republican vote and before members of Congress could feel the full dragon’s breath of constituent fury. The left was never more naked than in the crass spectacle last month.

Truth, courage, and honor have led conservatives through long campaigns against the dying leftist establishment. Much of this work simply involved exposing the left for what it is, and now it is the Naked Left — having nothing worth wanting, as everyone can now see.

HT: American Thinker

We’re Not Gonna Take It
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOqk_q4NLLI

We’re Not Gonna Take It – Tea Party Anthem (Facebook Group)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=103415213030871

Spread the word!

We’re Not Gonna Take It (by Twisted Sister)
Oh We’re Not Gonna Take It
no, We Ain’t Gonna Take It
oh We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore

we’ve Got The Right To Choose And
there Ain’t No Way We’ll Lose It
this Is Our Life, This Is Our Song
we’ll Fight The Powers That Be Just
don’t Pick Our Destiny ’cause
you Don’t Know Us, You Don’t Belong

oh We’re Not Gonna Take It
no, We Ain’t Gonna Take It
oh We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore

oh You’re So Condescending
your Gall Is Never Ending
we Don’t Want Nothin’, Not A Thing From You
your Life Is Trite And Jaded
boring And Confiscated
if That’s Your Best, Your Best Won’t Do

oh…………………
oh…………………
we’re Right/yeah
we’re Free/yeah
we’ll Fight/yeah
you’ll See/yeah

oh We’re Not Gonna Take It
no, We Ain’t Gonna Take It
oh We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore

oh We’re Not Gonna Take It
no, We Ain’t Gonna Take It
oh We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore
no Way!

oh…………………
oh…………………
we’re Right/yeah
we’re Free/yeah
we’ll Fight/yeah
you’ll See/yeah

we’re Not Gonna Take It
no, We Ain’t Gonna Take It
we’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore

we’re Not Gonna Take It, No!
no, We Ain’t Gonna Take It
we’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore

just You Try And Make Us
we’re Not Gonna Take It
come On
no, We Ain’t Gonna Take It
you’re All Worthless And Weak
we’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore

We The People Reject Obama's Vision for America

The Daily Constitution | We The People | 3/25/2010

Dear President Obama,

“We The People” have stated resolutely we reject your vision for our country. You claim you have not heard us.
“We The People” have assembled across America resisting your efforts to subvert our constitution and undermine our liberty. You claim you have not seen us.

Since you have not acknowledged our message, let us here present it once more for if as President Wilson said, “a leader’s ear must ring with the voices of the people,” the time has come.

Our greatest treasure is freedom – the absence of restraints on our ability to think and to act. The corollary of freedom is individual responsibility. We believe in the power of the individual.

A few years ago President Bush said, “History moves toward freedom because the desire for freedom is written in every human heart.” Let us add that we will preserve it only as long as devotion to freedom is expressed in the heart of our actions.

When President Lincoln dedicated Gettysburg National Cemetery he declared, “It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus so nobly advanced.”

That unfinished cause for which our soldiers willingly go to battle and for which so many have given their lives is a free United States of America. It has been nearly one hundred fifty years and the work President Lincoln spoke of is not finished. In fact, that work will never be finished.

Freedom is the capacity of self-determination. It is not an entity but a condition and conditions change. Freedom can expand, yet so can it contract.
You promised change when you took office, Mr. President, but subjugation is not change we wanted or will accept.

You have expanded government, violated our Constitution, confounded laws, seized private industry, destroyed jobs, perverted our economy, curtailed free speech, corrupted our currency, weakened our national security, and endangered our sovereignty.

By compromising our nation’s cultural, legal and economic institutions, you are ensuring that our children will never achieve the same quality of life as we enjoy today. Through generational theft you are robbing the unborn of opportunity.

This is not acceptable. Not in America. We did not become a strong nation through hope but rather through self-reliance.

No one better understands the relationship between individual achievement, dignity and strength than our armed forces. Through every war our soldiers have held this nation’s destiny in their hands. They have not failed us. They cherish freedom enough that they are willing to die for it.

Our duty to them and to ourselves is to treasure freedom enough to live up to it.
We accept the challenge, Mr. President. That is why we are assembling across the land to deliver our message to you as often and in every way we can. Dismiss us at your political peril.

Our great nation is a Republic. We will not accept tyranny under any guise. Your policy to redistribute the fruits of our labor is Statism and will not be tolerated.

By our honor, Mr. President, we vow forever to resist coercive government in America. Patriots will not stand silent as you attempt to dismantle the greatest nation on earth. “We The People” will defend our liberty. We will protect our beloved country and America’s exceptionalism will prevail.

God Bless the United States of America!

Sincerely,

We The People

We The People Reject Obama's Vision for America

HT: New Ledger

Joseph C. Phillips

Townhall | by Joseph C. Phillips | 3/15/2010

A little bit of wisdom that was shared with me not too long ago. “God gave us a Powerful gift – your mind. As you look around at any object, it began as an idea in some one’s mind. Any change of situation begins as a thought.” Indeed there is infinite power in an idea.

Russell Kirk wrote, “Conservatism is not a political system, but a way of looking at the civil order.” Put more plainly, it is a world view. People often confuse being a conservative with being a Republican. However, Republican is a political party not a way of thinking. All republicans are not conservatives. In fact as we have seen over the years there are even some republicans that are not republicans. Being a conservative is really about the embrace of an idea.

There is a film I recommend everyone rent and watch. It is called “Amazing Grace.” It is the story of William Wilberforce and his struggle to end the slave trade in the British Empire.

During an especially poignant moment, the former slave and abolitionist, Olaudah Equiano, opens his shirt displaying the brand burned into his chest when he reached the West Indies from Africa. In his words it was a mark that let him know that he no longer belonged to God, but to men. This moment in the film is striking not because it affirms the cruelty of slavery. Slavery was/is not evil because of its cruelty, but because it violates the natural state of man by reducing the divine to the profane.

For me this moment eloquently illustrates the seed idea of conservatism—that all men belong to God! Thomas Jefferson was equally eloquent when he said that “some men were not born with saddles on their back and others with boots and spurs to ride them by the grace of God.” Jefferson of course codified this idea into the Keystone document of our Republic.

It is the assertion of divine ownership that is the basis upon which we claim our liberty. The natural rights of man emanate from this simple truth: God made man free and independent. As free men, we must own our bodies, our ideas, and the fruits produced by same. No man or no government can morally lay claim to that which God has made ours through his grace and mercy. It is upon this concept that rights are properly defined; upon this rock that America was founded and this idea that is the bedrock of conservatism.

Not too long ago I was in my home town of Denver, Colorado. I was speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the Claremont Institute of which I am a Lincoln fellow. I was on the phone with a very old and dear friend of mine trying to make plans to meet following the event. “The Claremont Institute?” She asked, “What is that?”

I responded, “It’s a think tank devoted to restoring the founding principles to our national life.”

“Oh,” she said. “Ultra right wing…”

“Uhm exactly which of the founding principles do you disagree with?” I responded.

I have made it my habit to never admit to being a conservative unless I am allowed to define what that means. It is routinely and wrongly asserted that the conservative objects to change. Frankly it is a fallacious argument the new left routinely makes and one conservatives far too frequently – and to our detriment – neglect to refute. The fact is that to conserve has never meant simply arguing for the status quo. Conservatives might be more properly understood if we referred to ourselves as conservationists.

Like conservationists conservatives are not content with current conditions. Rather they are both seeking to prevent the depletion of some treasured resource. Both Conservatives and conservationists act to defend and protect; to restore, to supervise and nurture those things essential for the survival of a society or culture. Preservation is achieved through education and prudent management or husbandry.

For many citizens stepping forward and demanding that we conserve trees or some rare species of bird is looked upon as a noble undertaking. It is a pity that some of those same eyes view the act of conserving, defending, restoring and supervising the prudent management of the principles upon which this nation was founded as a whacky or evil endeavor.

Equiano was correct and the power of that small idea – to quote a young Muhammad Ali – “Shook up the world!” I would submit that conserving that idea and the principles which grew from it are as important as conserving our natural resources. Better yet I contend that idea and those principles are our greatest natural resource.

HT: Townhall