As part of the GOP Pledge to America in 2010, they made the following observation regarding suspension votes during the Pelosi Congress (page 34): The number of House legislative days devoted to action on noncontroversial and often insignificant “suspension” bills is up significantly in this Congress by comparison with the past several Congresses, wasting time and taxpayer resources. Of the bills considered under the suspension | Read More
SACRAMENTO — After the housing bubble burst a few years ago, sending real estate prices to the floor in many places, some influential academics and urban planners celebrated the supposed demise of something they had always hated: the suburbs. In their view, the kind of homes and neighborhoods we live in are tacky, ugly, unsustainable blights. “Suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about,” wrote James Howard Kunstler, a prominent New Urbanist writer who calls for the wholesale reordering of our built environment. New Urbanists such as Kunstler push for the recreation of the old city model — people living in high rises and apartment buildings, relying on mass transit to get around and shopping at local stores filled with goods produced in the surrounding area. While they make some good aesthetic points, they are elitists who believe we should all live in ways that they prefer. It’s easy to chuckle at them, as they seize on every crisis (housing bubbles, rising gas prices, etc.) to warn about the coming doom, much like those doomsday preachers who are sure that the latest event is a signal that the world is coming to an end. But while most of us think only about short-term real estate issues, these ideologues have been changing the laws and building codes to mandate their long-term vision. Given the enormity of suburbia, it’s hard to see the impact of this wide-ranging policy change. But pay attention to debates over new construction, and look at the requirements for higher densities, small or nonexistent yards, construction around transit and other common building mandates. They are designed to make the common form of suburbia obsolete. “I live where a majority of Americans live: a tract house on a block of other tract houses in a neighborhood of even more,” wrote D.J. Waldie in his 2005 book, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir . Waldie spoke two weeks ago at the “No Place Like Home” conference in Anaheim, where he described his spiritual connection to the modest Lakewood, California suburb where he has spent his life. Kunstler described Lakewood, where thousands of homes were built quickly across farm fields after World War II, as “the place where evil dwells,” Waldie said. But it is Waldie’s “beloved community,” a place mocked by snobs but where middle-class people raise their kids and share their lives. These days, the new residents often are immigrants who have come from Mexico or Korea, but they share the same aspirations as those who moved there from places such as Des Moines and Pittsburgh. The conference defended the ideal of home ownership —
Amid all the heated cross-currents of debate about the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program, there is a growing distrust of the Obama administration that makes weighing the costs and benefits of the NSA program itself hard to assess. The belated recognition of this administration’s contempt for the truth, for the American people, and for the Constitution of the United States has been long overdue. But what if the NSA program has in fact thwarted terrorists and saved many American lives in ways that cannot be revealed publicly? Nothing is easier than saying that you still don’t want your telephone records collected by the government. But the first time you have to collect the remains of your loved ones, after they have been killed by terrorists, telephone records can suddenly seem like a small price to pay to prevent such things. The millions of records of phone calls collected every day virtually guarantee that nobody has the time to listen to them all, even if NSA could get a judge to authorize listening to what is said in all these calls, instead of just keeping a record of who called whom. Moreover, Congressional oversight by members of both political parties limits what Barack Obama or any other president can get away with. Are these safeguards foolproof? No. Nothing is ever foolproof. As Edmund Burke said, more than two centuries ago: “Constitute government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state.” In other words, we do not have a choice whether to trust or not to trust government officials. Unless we are willing to risk anarchy or terrorism, the most we can do is set up checks and balances within government — and be a lot more careful in the future than we have been in the past when deciding whom to elect. Anyone old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when President John F. Kennedy took this country to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, may remember that there was nothing like the distrust and backlash against later presidents, whose controversial decisions risked nothing approaching the cataclysm that President Kennedy’s decision could have led to. Even those of us who were not John F. Kennedy supporters, and who were not dazzled by the glitter and glamour of the Kennedy aura, nevertheless felt that the President of the United States was someone who knew much more than we did about the realities on which all our lives depended. Whatever happened to that feeling? Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon happened — and both were shameless liars. They destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility of the office. Even when Lyndon Johnson told us the truth at a crucial juncture during the Vietnam war — that the Communist offensive of 1968 was a defeat for them, even as the media depicted it as a defeat for us — we didn’t believe him. In later years, Communist leaders themselves admitted that they had been devastated on the battlefield. But, by then it was too late. What the Communists lost militarily on the ground in Vietnam they won politically in the American media and in American public opinion. More than 50,000 Americans lost their lives winning battles on the ground in Vietnam, only to have the war lost politically back home. We seem to be having a similar scenario unfolding today in Iraq, where soldiers won the war, only to have politicians lose the peace, as Iraq now increasingly aligns itself with Iran. When Barack Obama squanders his own credibility with his glib lies, he is not just injuring himself during his time in office. He is inflicting a lasting wound on the country as a whole. But we the voters are not blameless. Having chosen an untested man to be president, on the basis of rhetoric, style, and symbolism, we have ourselves to blame if we now have only a choice between two potentially tragic fates — the loss of American lives to terrorism or a further dismantling of our freedoms that has already led many people to ask: “Is this still America?” COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
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The Loss of Trust
Our cognitive block here is the assumption that all people are equal, which means “identical” in the common parlance, and thus that we can just replace a whole bunch of our people with others and everything will be fine. Even more, however, I think our people want to be replaced. They want to die. Just not now, but they want to know they destroyed this society. Because they hate it. They hate it for being weak, for being in a state of dying, for being a hateful place that sucks them in and makes them whores to money with no greater purpose. (HT:Amerika.org) America has a significant and over-arching problem. A problem that explains the flaccid economy and the dystopic dysfunction that is Bulletmore, Murderland or Chicago, ILLinois. It’s a problem that a very smart and evil man-spider named Charles Schumer has figured out and that a very ambitious and amoral man name Marco Rubio suffers from as he seeks to acquire more power and dominance. It’s a problem that arises when a civilization spends itself out and doesn’t understand and believe that it has a purpose beyond being a giant pez-dispenser of goodies to a clamoring populace. We are a nation that no longer believes that it holds any particular special moral high ground and the immigration debate in Congress is just another attempt to either fix this problem or make it go away. Schumer, Rubio and the rest of the Gang of 8 seek to make the problem go away. If you have a population that you believe sucks and can’t cut it in the modern world, you can solve this problem two ways. You can upgrade this populace and seek to improve them as human beings, or you can hose them out the way Hercules cleaned the Augean Stables and replace them with harder workers. Senator Rubio explains below.
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Constance Cafavy And Comprehensive Amnesty Reform
I almost broke my computer screen watching John Conyers and Luis Gutierrez at the Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, but it was all worthwhile to see another smackdown from Trey Gowdy. The subject of yesterday’s hearing was the Safe Act (HR 2278), sponsored by Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the immigration subcommittee. This bill represents true immigration reform that protects America first. Among other things, this | Read More
