PROVOCATION

David Kaiser is a respected historian whose published works have covered a
broad range of topics, from European Warfare to American League Baseball.
Born in 1947, the son of a diplomat, Kaiser spent his childhood in three
capital cities: Washington D.C. , Albany , New York , and Dakar , Senegal .
He attended Harvard University , graduating in 1969 with a B.A. in history.
He then spent several years more at Harvard, gaining a PhD in history, which
he obtained in 1976. He served in the Army Reserve from 1970 to 1976.

He is a professor in the Strategy and Policy Department of the United States
Naval War College . He has previously taught at Carnegie Mellon, Williams
College and Harvard University . Kaiser’s latest book, The Road to Dallas,
about the Kennedy assassination, was just published by Harvard University
Press.

Dr. David Kaiser

History Unfolding

I am a student of history. Professionally, I have written 15 books on
history that have been published in six languages, and I have studied
history all my life. I have come to think there is something monumentally
large afoot, and I do not believe it is simply a banking crisis, or a
mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis. Yes these exist, but they are merely
single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a
sharper focus.

Something of historic proportions is happening. I can sense it because I
know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it.
Yes, a perfect storm may be brewing, but there is something happening within
our country that has been evolving for about ten to fifteen years. The pace
has dramatically quickened in the past two.

We demand and then codify into law the requirement that our banks make
massive loans to people we know they can never pay back? Why?

We learned just days ago that the Federal Reserve, which has little or no
real oversight by anyone, has “loaned” two trillion dollars (that is
$2,000,000,000,000) over the past few months, but will not tell us to whom
or why or disclose the terms. That is our money. Yours and mine. And that is
three times the $700 billion we all argued about so strenuously just this
past September. Who has this money? Why do they have it? Why are the terms
unavailable to us? Who asked for it? Who authorized it? I thought this was a
government of “We the People,” who loaned our powers to our elected leaders.
Apparently not.

We have spent two or more decades intentionally de-industrializing our
economy. Why?

We have intentionally dumbed down our schools, ignored our history, and no
longer teach our founding documents. Why are we exceptional and why are we
worth preserving? Students by and large cannot write, think critically,
read, or articulate. Parents are not revolting, teachers are not picketing,
school boards continue to back mediocrity. Why?

We have now established the precedent of protesting every close election.
(sometimes violently) Did you ever think such a thing possible just a decade
ago? We have corrupted our sacred political process by allowing unelected
judges to write laws that radically change our way of life, and then
mainstream Marxist groups like ACORN and others to turn our voting system
into a banana republic. To what purpose?

Now our mortgage industry is collapsing, housing prices are in free fall,
major industries are failing, our banking system is on the verge of
collapse, social security is nearly bankrupt, as is Medicare and our entire
government. Our education system is worse than a joke (I teach college and I
know precisely what I am talking about) – the list is staggering in its
length, breadth, and depth.. It is potentially 1929 x ten…And we are at
war with an enemy we cannot even name for fear of offending people of the
same religion, who, in turn, cannot wait to slit the throats of your
children if they have the opportunity to do so.

And finally, we have elected a man that no one really knows anything about,
who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, let alone a town as big as
Wasilla , Alaska . All of his associations and alliances are with real
radicals in their chosen fields of employment, and everything we learn about
him, drip by drip, is unsettling if not downright scary.(Surely you have
heard him speak about his idea to create and fund a mandatory civilian
defense force stronger than our military for use inside our borders? No? Oh,
of course not. The media would never play that for you over and over and
then demand he answer it. Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter and $150,000
wardrobe are more important.)

Mr. Obama’s winning platform can be boiled down to one word: Change. Why?

I have never been so afraid for my country and for my children as I am now.

This man campaigned on bringing people together, something he has never,
ever done in his professional life. In my assessment, Obama will divide us
along philosophical lines, push us apart, and then try to realign the pieces
into a new and different power structure. Change is indeed coming. And when
it comes, you will never see the same nation again.

And that is only the beginning.

As a serious student of history, I thought I would never come to experience
what the ordinary, moral German must have felt in the mid-1930s. In those
times, the “savior” was a former smooth-talking rabble-rouser from the
streets, about whom the average German knew next to nothing. What they
should have known was that he was associated with groups that shouted,
shoved, and pushed around people with whom they disagreed; he edged his way
onto the political stage through great oratory. Conservative “losers” read
it right now.

And there were the promises. Economic times were tough, people were losing
jobs, and he was a great speaker. And he smiled and frowned and waved a lot.
And people, even newspapers, were afraid to speak out for fear that his
“brown shirts” would bully and beat them into submission. Which they did -
regularly. And then, he was duly elected to office, while a full-throttled
economic crisis bloomed at hand – the Great Depression. Slowly, but surely
he seized the controls of government power, person by person, department by
department, bureaucracy by bureaucracy. The children of German citizens were
at first, encouraged to join a Youth Movement in his name where they were
taught exactly what to think. Later, they were required to do so. No Jews of
course,

How did he get people on his side? He did it by promising jobs to the
jobless, money to the money-less, and rewards for the military-industrial
complex. He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control,
health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill
pride once again in the country, across Europe , and across the world. He
did it with a compliant media – did you know that? And he did this all in
the name of justice and change. And the people surely got what they voted
for.

If you think I am exaggerating, look it up. It’s all there in the history
books.

So read your history books.. Many people of conscience objected in 1933 and
were shouted down, called names, laughed at, and ridiculed. When Winston
Churchill pointed out the obvious in the late 1930s while seated in the
House of Lords in England (he was not yet Prime Minister), he was booed into
his seat and called a crazy troublemaker. He was right, though. And the
world came to regret that he was not listened to.

Do not forget that Germany was the most educated, the most cultured country
in Europe . It was full of music, art, museums, hospitals, laboratories, and
universities.. And yet, in less than six years(a shorter time span than just
two terms of the U. S. presidency) it was rounding up its own citizens,
killing others, abrogating its laws, turning children against parents, and
neighbors against neighbors. All with the best of intentions, of course. The
road to Hell is paved with them.

As a practical thinker, one not overly prone to emotional decisions, I have
a choice: I can either believe what the objective pieces of evidence tell me
(even if they make me cringe with disgust); I can believe what history is
shouting to me from across the chasm of seven decades; or I can hope I am
wrong by closing my eyes, having another latte, and ignoring what is
transpiring around me.

I choose to believe the evidence. No doubt some people will scoff at me,
others laugh, or think I am foolish, naive, or both. To some degree, perhaps
I am. But I have never been afraid to look people in the eye and tell them
exactly what I believe-and why I believe it.

I pray I am wrong. I do not think I am. Perhaps the only hope is our vote in
the next elections.

David Kaiser
Jamestown , Rhode Island
United States

Pass this along. Perhaps it will help to begin the awakening of America asto where we are headed…

Obama’s Stimulus Creates Useless Jobs
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
By Ben Shapiro

There’s one reason, and one reason only, that President Barack Obama’s “stimulus” passed so swiftly through Congress: Most Americans are worried about their jobs. And Barack Obama promises to save or create four million jobs.

Even Obama’s most ardent opponents embrace the “make jobs” programs embedded in the stimulus. “Construction projects that put people to work, that fits the bill,” Sarah Palin told Greta Van Susteran of Fox News. “But these big, huge, expanded social programs … that’s not right, that’s not fair.”

Neither Republicans nor Democrats get it. The problem isn’t just the pork barrel social welfare spending. It’s not merely the redistributionist scheme disguised as “tax cuts.” The public relations backbone of this bill—government spending on our nation’s “crumbling infrastructure”—is misguided. While the country’s infrastructure may need revamping, this sort of spending will not stimulate the economy. It will not create the kind of jobs Americans need.

When politicians embrace government “make jobs” programs, they demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of employment in the economy. The goal of a thriving economy isn’t full employment—it’s raising the standard of living. Employment rate means nothing if the jobs it measures do not create wealth for the economy.

During the Great Depression (1930-1940), the United States had an average unemployment rate of almost 18 percent; the USSR, by contrast, had “full employment.” And yet when the Oscar-nominated movie “The Grapes of Wrath,” chronicling the Great Depression, premiered in 1941, the USSR banned the movie for the simple reason that the poverty-stricken Joads owned a car—a luxury virtually no Soviet outside the government enjoyed. Full employment did not breed prosperity.

That’s because not all jobs are created equal. Valuable jobs provide products and services the free market supports; useless jobs provide products and services the free market would not support. Valuable jobs provide products and services that enrich quality of life, making it cheaper to live better; useless jobs provide products and services that have minor impact on quality of life.

Here’s the magic of private sector jobs. Imagine Bill owns a fruit stand. He sells his fruit for $2 per pound. Herman sees that Bill is doing well, and decides to open a fruit stand of his own. He figures he can undercut Bill and live on less of a profit margin, so he sells his fruit at $1 per pound. Pretty soon, Herman runs Bill out of business. It’s tough for Bill.

But meanwhile, customers are spending $1 less for their fruit than they were. They’re spending that extra money at Bob’s clothing store, keeping Bob employed—and Bob can now hire Bill. The bottom line is this: The power of free enterprise creates competition that raises production, lowers prices, and makes lives better for consumers and producers. And that’s true even if employment declines in the fruit stand business.

Now let’s look at government jobs. Imagine Cool Hand Luke works for the government as a menial laborer. He builds roads in New York. People don’t choose to pay Cool Hand Luke—the government forces them to pay his salary.

Now, certain people in New York may benefit from the new road. But they would rather have spent their cash on a new car, or a new computer, or a new business. And the people who live in California, who are also paying Cool Hand Luke, get nothing for their money. Their quality of life is not improved one iota. The bottom line is this: The government can always provide employment, but that employment will not benefit the public nearly as much as a private sector job would.

Americans instinctively understand that quality of life matters far more than employment rate—and that only valuable jobs increase quality of life. That is why Americans oppose Obama’s “stimulus” package.

According to the latest Rasmussen poll, 53 percent of Americans think the “stimulus” will either fail to stimulate or actually hurt the economy. Unsurprisingly, the only sector of the American economy that overwhelmingly supports the stimulus plan is government employees, by a margin of 49 percent to 24 percent.

And yet our politicians think they can appease us by offering us useless jobs. They think investment bankers will be happy to staff the bureaucracy at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They believe Americans will be glad to subsidize Caterpillar Inc. Employees, rather than putting that cash in their own checking accounts.

Obama might prevent rising unemployment. After all, so did President Jimmy Carter. But he’ll do so at the cost of private sector employment. Americans will pay the price in standard of living—but at least they can say they have a job, no matter how useless.

The times they are a changing
By Daniel Greenfield Saturday, May 16, 2009

The key question is not whether America will recover from the current managed economic decline, but whether America will be allowed to recover.

And the key factors that will determine are whether we will have a free market economy, or a socialist economy dominated by vastly expanded and empowered unions, cap and trade, and a great deal of new taxes and regulations.

Obama’s new jobs program has gotten off to a good start, as he’s busy running Chrysler into the ground. After slashing Chrysler’s ad budget by 50 percent, the company will also be closing nearly 1/4th of its dealerships, killing 38,000 jobs.

But don’t worry, while 38,000 small business jobs may have been lost… but Obama’s UAW supporters will keep their jobs. And that of course was the whole point.

Use taxpayer money to bail out and handover auto companies to the UAW, and kill the dealerships. After all when the auto companies are government subsidized, who needs to sell the actual cars themselves?

But now maybe some of the 38,000 people who lost their jobs for Obama can get jobs in his booming new government employment sector, so long as they have useful skills, such as recording the GPS addresses of people’s homes, rubber stamping forms or helping Rahm Emanuel and the great people at ACORN makes this the very best census ever!

Of course people with actual useful skills or sales experience need not apply. That’s for the capitalist scum in the old ugly racist America. Not the happy cheerful new America that uses taxpayer funds to take over and gut American companies and turn them into lifetime employment packages for the supporters of the Beloved Leader.

And all the while Obama is pushing 60,000 new government jobs, making sure that all of America winds up with the prosperously bankrupt union tick infested economy that California already enjoys.

Meanwhile The Shining One is making sure that Israel doesn’t attack Iran without notifying him, which is much the same as notifying Iran itself. Especially considering some of Obama’s appointees, whose sympathies are not exactly subtle.

Meanwhile everyone on down is pressuring Israel to implement a Two State Solution ASAP, regardless of the fact that would mean creating a terrorist state inside Israel, whose leadership would include Hamas, and which has never demonstrated any willingness to stop being terrorists.

The blackmail card of course is Iran.

Speaking of radicalism and anti-semitism, the Jewish Press has an article by Rabbi Avi Weiss, traveling to the embattled Jewish community in the heart of Hugo Chavez’s radical left wing dictatorship, and what life for Jews and Catholics looks like under Hugo.

I’m traveling with Shmuel Herzfeld, rabbi of the National Synagogue in Washington, D.C.; Adam Scheier, senior rabbi of Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal; and Gabe Ledeen, a former U.S. Marine who did two tours of duty in Iraq…

Our first stop is Congregation Tiferet Yisrael, the largest Sephardi synagogue, which was defiled on January 31. It was a raid carefully orchestrated by nineteen assailants, a kind of commando attack. For me, it points to deep complicity on the part of the government. It’s not only that Chavez’s anti-Semitic rhetoric created a climate that inspired these attacks, it was much more. I believe this was virtually state-sponsored terror…

Some U.S. defense agencies feel congressional hearings could result in a backlash against Venezuelan Jewry. So powerful is this position that it has been adopted by my own congressman, Rep. Eliot Engel, whom I consider not only a dear friend but the strongest supporter of Israel in Congress today. As chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Rep. Engel is in a position to call for these hearings, but has decided not to do so because Venezuelan Jewry opposes it.

Here I saw and heard how well-meaning people in the American Jewish establishment had misrepresented the views of Venezuelan Jews. The position that Venezuelan Jews oppose congressional hearings is simply false. We closed the meeting holding hands around the table as we sang “Am Yisrael Chai.”

In fact, the Venezuelan community has conducted itself during these difficult times in the spirit of “the people of Israel live.” When Chavez demanded the Jewish community condemn Israel for the Gaza war, it adamantly refused.

“We are Zionists,” the leadership of CAIV proclaimed, “we stand and will always stand with Israel.”

This brief excerpt from the much larger article highlights just how ugly life gets under a left wing regime.

Meanwhile at Israpundit, Jeff Jacoby takes on the blindfold that Obama wants to stick on Lady Justice

When he voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005, Obama declared that the “truly difficult” cases that come before the Supreme Court can be decided only with reference to “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy,” and that “the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.”

But such cardiac justice is precisely what judges “do solemnly swear” to renounce. Sympathy for others is an admirable virtue, but a judge’s private commiserations are not relevant to the law he is expected to apply.

If Obama means what he says, he wants judges who can be counted on to violate their oath of office.

“We need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom,” he told a Planned Parenthood conference in 2007. “The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

With such criteria, what would remain of the rule of law? What would happen to “Equal Justice Under Law,” which is carved above the Supreme Court’s entrance? What would be left of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” to every citizen?

That amendment of course is in shoddy shape already, along with much of the Constitution. What’s left then is a Victim Value Index, and class and racial warfare, the key ingredients of the left’s current rise to power in America.

At Canada Free Press, Tony Magana suggests that Congress should investigate the McKiernan firing, and has a different take on it from that of the mainstream media.

Just this week, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said she “deeply, deeply” regretted the loss of civilians in Western Afghanistan which the Red Cross counted as 120 from American military actions. Afghan President Hamid Karzai had called the deaths “unacceptable ” which occurred while he was in Washington DC meeting with President Obama.

Gen. David McKiernan disagreed with President Karzai that these most recent deaths were the result of American military action. His staff said that American Marines were assisting Afghan forces who had been ambushed and blamed the civilian casualties on the Taliban. The Associated Press says two senior officials who wished to remain anonymous stated that a Taliban leader had ordered his men to use hand grenades on the civilians.

Nice Deb and Texas Darlin have their own updates and photo analysis of the New York Air Scare One flyover

Yoram Ettinger forwards a Haaretz article on the Demographic scare program panicking some Israeli leaders toward a Two State Solution, which was also behind the Gaza Disengagement. This may also have eventual implications for Muslim growth rates in Europe.

DragonDirt has the Obama card

At Family security Matters, the question is, Will Obama try to Force a Two State Solution on Israel?

At Right Side News, a warning that Obama is stacking his administration with Islamists.

On January 8th, the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association sent out an email announcing that they would be hosting an inaugural gala titled, “Muslim Inauguration Gala”. Guests included Congressman Keith Ellison, (D-MN), Cong. Andre Carson (D-IN), “Representatives of the Obama Administration”, Rev. Walter Fauntroy (DC-Delegate), Zaid Shakir and Hamza Yusef (of the Zaytuna Institute), Fmr. Capt. James Yee, Senegalese President Abduolaye Wade, CAIR Michigan Director, Dawud Walid, and Johari Abdul-Malik of the Muslim Alliance of North America. This list reads like a Who’s Who of leading Islamists in the United States, all of whom share the ideological framework of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now that anyone should be surprised after the Muslim Brotherhood, read Hamas and Al Queda, were represented at Obama’s Inauguration.

And Right Side News looks at more Obama generated layoffs

That’s all for the weekend