That was the week that was

Last week was truly remarkable. Republicans swept three state elections; then an Islamic extremist holding the position of an Army psychiatrist murdered 13 persons and wounded 31 others at Fort Hood, Texas; the House of Representatives defied the will of the American people by passing a comprehensive health insurance bill; and free people celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the demise of the Berlin Wall back in 1989. These events reveal the contrast that exists in this country and throughout the world between those who value freedom and those who do not. The most encouraging development is the growing awareness of our citizens that the future is won only by doing the right thing.

Reversing the results in last year’s elections, voters gave solid margins of victory to Chris Christie in New Jersey and Robert McDonnell in Virginia in their gubernatorial races, but also Republican candidates for the remaining statewide offices in those states and in Pennsylvania. President Obama campaigned in the first two states, despite the growing unpopularity of his administration.

Democrats have tried strenuously to spin the dismal results as merely local contests, irrelevant to the debate over their health insurance and environmental "cap and trade" proposals. But there is no doubt that it gave the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress incentive to resist party pressure to support these budget-busting and tax-increasing measures.

All good Americans are appalled and horrified at the shooting rampage of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who shouted "Allahu Akbar" before he opened fire on his fellow soldiers and civilians prior to his scheduled deployment to Afghanistan. The news coverage has been remarkably vapid. The same articles which make it perfectly clear that Hasan is an Islamic extremist who could not bring himself to make war on his "fellow Muslims" and regards himself as a soldier in the radical Islamic cause, describe the shooter’s motives as unclear.

Sorry to say, the President himself has set the tone for this mindless and irresponsible attitude, asking people not to rush to judgment about a man and an incident that are as transparent as anything can be. We are learning, too, that "political correctness" or the blind indifference to if not covert sympathy with those who reject Western civilization, has infected the highest ranks of the U.S. Army.

No religion per se makes anyone ineligible for American citizenship or for participation in any civil government, but if the believer’s highest loyalty is to a doctrine that calls for the destruction of constitutional safeguards for human rights, there should be little doubt that he cannot be trusted with any responsibilities or respecting the rights of other citizens.

Notwithstanding weeks of polling date that reveal a solid majority of Americans opposed to government health care (AKA socialized medicine) and Republican election victories in three states that voted Democrat in 2008, the House of Representatives approved a bill of nearly 2,000 pages that would micro manage existing health insurance coverage and impose massive costs on the American people.

Despite considerable rhetorical blather about bipartisanship, the Democrat leadership managed to win over only one Republican representing a traditionally Democrat district in Louisiana and lost 39 Democrats representing traditionally Republican districts, passing the bill by a narrow margin.

It is evident that Democrats are desperate to pass some form of health care legislation, even if they lose seats or lose House control in 2010. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was not deterred by the strong indications that her Senate counterparts lack the votes to pass the legislation, even if it followed her lead in dropping coverage for abortions. She is unmoved despite the fact that she is defying the consent of the governed.

Meanwhile, celebrations are in order on the anniversary of the removal of the infamous Berlin Wall, an event which President Obama either feels is beneath his notice or perhaps understands as an achievement for which he cannot claim credit. No greater contrast exists between Presidents who steadfastly supported the freedom of Berliners and of all Europeans during the Cold War years and the current President who feels more comfortable talking to Asian and Latin American despots than supporting leaders of free nations long allied with the West.

One cannot imagine a President Obama making the courageous decision of Harry Truman to supply Berlin during a long Russian blockade or the uplifting defiance of President Reagan in demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this wall!"

The future of freedom is best entrusted to its dedicated friends.

Americans don't need a shepherd

President Obama and his supporters see America in need of a Shepherd. Our nation is, in their mind, basically sheep. Some have coined the term “sheeple.” The mass herd that is the American population can be controlled by the barking dogs of Congress and government departments and regulators. Tax policy is used to bite the heels of different groups. Running from the left to right to left again, President Obama nips at the heels of stragglers and slow moving citizens. Even the President’s own words make clear he sees his role as Shepherd. President Obama has said the Constitution is a collection of “negative” powers. The Constitution is to liberals, a tool for herding the population into a protective pen, a pasture, where the elite will care for and protect (until sheared), the population. Recent major legislation reinforces this view.

Consider health care legislation. The 1900 pages just out from the House ignores real reform and establishes new taxes, regulations, fines and hundreds of managers and boards of review. The herd will be bitten, barked at and growled at until they comply and behave in a manner suited to liberal attitudes. Tax soda, tax fat, tax young people, tax small business and on and on. We are to be herded into compliance. No tort reform. No plan for purchase across state lines. No tax break for individual purchase of insurance.

The Cap and Tax plan promises a green energy future. How? Tax coal. Tax gas. Tax cars. Tax business as it uses energy and transfer that wealth into groups that suit the liberal view of the world. Where is innovation? Where is leadership? Where is trust in the American people? The debate is, we are told, over on climate change. Hiding from debate is not leadership. Hiding from debate is a barking dog at the heels of sheep.

President Obama sees as nearly divine his obligation as the great Shepherd of the people. His speeches reach out to groups, not individuals. His management style is one of listening, consideration then consensus. No where do we see leadership, individual excellence. The President seems to be a barking dog running behind the herd of shee-people, biting here and there, growling and stopping for a moment to rest then rushing off to bark again. The herd circles and moves around the pasture and spends some time grazing, some time drinking and then comes the culling of the herd. Just yesterday President Obama was holding another war group. He sits at the end of the table and listens to all the advisors and then he will bring everyone together. He will “Shepherd” the military into his vision and his plan.

May I be so bold, America does not want or need a Shepherd with sheep dogs. WE NEED AND WANT A LEADER. The problem for President Obama is free people won’t follow a Shepard. They will follow a leader and mostly they will make their world themselves. A very telling example from President Obama is his judgment of the capital gains tax cut put in place under President Bush. When Bill O’Reilly asked then candidate Obama about the increase in revenue the “tax cut” generated Obama disregarded the revenue and said it was just a matter of “fairness.” The President and Democrats in general have never understood that in America freedom equals discretion. The reason a lower capital gains tax rate increases revenue is simple, all first choices that may generate a capital gain are discretionary. No one has to invest or take a risk. When the tax rate gets too high, capital gain based choices will stop. Very simple.

We can apply the same truth to health care. Liberals simply cannot see choice as a good thing. Choice makes sheep herding more difficult. I believe health is the area of greatest personal discretion and when the free people of America feel the barking dogs and the bite of Congressional force upon their health care choices, the American people will revolt.

President Reagan was hated by the shepherds. The barking dogs hate freedom and they hate all things individual. President Reagan saw America as a nation of Eagles. I too believe we are Eagles. Some act as sheep, you can see them in their SEIU and ACCORN tee shirts. It is time for Eagles to fly again. Tell Obama we will not be herded into the pen and sent to slaughter. The United States Constitution leads America, leads the world to individual freedom and greatness. The liberal sees the Constitution as an obstacle to overcome. I see the Constitution as the gateway to freedom.

Kris Hager Gold Star Dad 941*587*9373

Window into mind of the left

"Help America survive Republicans"? An odd crusade for the left to launch, just when Dems control everything and the GOP is sidelined. On the other hand, financial derivatives for good or ill are big right now, so why not a fourth-order polemical derivative? The first order was Paul Simon's sardonic '70s ballad, "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover." The second, a humorless book by two Colorado lefties called "50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America." So I tagged along (your editor, John Andrews) with an Oct. 11 column in the Denver Post, "50 Ways to Help America Survive Obama." Now comes Post reader Kathy Graybill with her riff on my riff on their riff on Simon's overriffed original.

Give Kathy one thing: unlike many liberals with their handout mentality, this gal has a parodizing parasitic work ethic that won't quit. She labored away at countering my list of 50, to the full measure of her own two-score and ten, and only then did she put down her pen. Having no Nobel Prize to confer, I can at least reward her with publication here.

50 Ways You Can Help America Survive Republicans

By Kathy Graybill * kgraybill@frii.com

*Cleave to the Constitution (there’s nothing in it about capitalism being the economic system of America)

*Dust off the Declaration (“promote the general welfare” not promote only MY welfare).

*Work harder for social justice.

*Save more, borrow less.

*Pray.

*Be Jesus-like and help (financially, emotionally, etc.) those couples not as fortunate as you in order to help them to avoid the divorce epidemic.

*Read!

*Listen to NPR.

*Tithe to open, caring, affirming church groups and charities.

*Question authority in a critical, thoughtful manner – judges (Clarence Thomas as well as Sonia Sotomayor), lawyers (lawyers of mega-corporations as well as ACLU lawyers).

*Distrust the mean-spirited, entertainment news channels.

*Strive to show through our actions our country’s goodness, not by empty gestures and words.

*Gird against all types of radical, dogmatic beliefs that pose harm to others.

*Accept the unbelievably horrendous mistakes that were made by the Bush administration that have left us in Iraq and Afghanistan after so many years and start to pull out.

*Negotiate firmly with Iran while at the same time promote good will with the democracy-loving Iranian people.

*Militarily defend Israel like we would any other ally but don’t defend them if they present an obstacle to making a compromise with the Palestinians.

*Revive NATO.

*Suspect all dictatorial countries - Saudi Arabia as well as Russia.

*See the United Nations as an imperfect institution yet the best one we have to keep countries communicating.

*Secure the borders from companies outsourcing jobs to countries where they can pay workers less.

*Keep our country armed intelligently and geared to the 21st century problems.

*Work for a color-blind community.

*Reject the race card and strive to eradicate all racism.

*Boycott Wall Street.

*Support quality education for all students, not just the ones whose parents have the resources to get them into the schools of choice.

*Be mindful that non-parent taxpayers are paying for your children to be educated.

*Be thankful that we have a socialist public education system so your children can receive an education at a cheap price to you.

*Require that charter schools put ALL of the kids in the district into the enrollment lottery (or better yet, only the poor, disadvantaged, homeless, English language learners; only those with behavior problems, dysfunctional families, inattentive parents -the at risk students) to make our education system equal for all students.

*Be sure that colleges get the funding they require.

*Demand all types of diversity.

*Reject an exclusive society.

*Encourage the working and stay-at-home mom.

*Give to organizations that provide medical and counseling services to all pregnant women in all areas of the country.

*Support the criminalization and shaming of murderers of medical personnel who perform legal procedures.

*Get arrested protesting the war in Iraq that has caused an untold number of deaths and injuries and suffering, (how many abortions we have “performed” on women who didn’t want one is anybody’s guess; talk about death panels for the elderly!).

*Dare the rich CEOs of companies to put themselves on only Social Security for retirement and only Medicare for health care and forego any bonuses.

*Get arrested demonstrating for a timeline to pull troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

*Rally for the right of workers to get paid a decent salary.

*Organize for protecting the environment.

*Sit in for renewable energy research.

*Call for breaking our dependence on oil.

*Demand that quality health care is a right for everybody, not a privilege.

*Ridicule those who still believe that global warming is not a danger.

*Tell Cheney jokes.

*Circulate the rape exclusionary clause in the Halliburton employee contracts and demand that not one more cent of taxpayer money go to them.

*Start a Michael Moore club.

*Retire Boehner and Cantor.

*Draft somebody, anybody, that is mature, decent and thoughtful and who believes in the values of average Americans to run against Michele Bachmann in 2010.

*Get active as a Republican and elect at least a few responsible, critical thinking Republicans.

*Or get active as a Democrat – not because Democrats are so much better than Republicans, but because intelligent opposition is liberty’s lifeblood, not mean-spirited screaming.

GWB is gone and the U.S.A will survive in spite of his mean-spirited, ignorant, fascist regime. But at what cost? He ruined our economy (but, to be fair, only the little, regular people are suffering, not Bush’s friends and colleagues - see New Orleans) and killed tens of thousands of people in an unnecessary, poorly conducted war (but, to be fair, most of these people were poor, foreigners and not the God-sent people like Bush and his family and friends). As Bush revved the motor for change (huge tax cuts for the wealthy, non-regulation for Wall Street, two poorly-handled wars), somebody should have hit the brakes for thoughtful deliberation. I didn’t want our kids inheriting a country a rookie, shallow-thinking, uncompassionate rich kid wrecked. But they have.

Who in the media have ‘perspective’?

Among the remarks by spokesmen for the Obama administration in its war against Fox News was David Axelrod's observation that Fox was not a news organization because it had a "perspective" on the news.T hat deserves analysis on more than one level. First, there is the political angle. Obviously, Obama’s quarrel with Fox has everything to do with its "perspective." Unlike CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC and NPR, Fox is not in the tank for the current occupant of the White House. Nothing like Chris Matthew’s "tingling sensation" up his leg excites Fox journalists.

Second, there is a distinction to be made, of sorts, between straight news people and commentators at Fox, as White House press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged, when he subsequently singled out a couple of Fox time slots for the latter. Fox, like other media, distinguishes news from opinion.

Third, Fox’s slogans are not just marketing ploys. Compared to other media, Fox is "fair and balanced," as there are more presentations of opposing viewpoints there than in the "mainstream media." The other networks give little time to the conservative point of view.

At least one intrepid journalist at a Gibbs press conference did question the wisdom of the President singling out one television network for criticism. One is reminded of the famous quotation from Martin Niemoller, a victim of Nazi oppression, about how "they came for the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew, so I didn’t speak up." One hopes that lesson has been learned.

So, although it is thuggish from my "perspective" for a President to condemn one news organization and practically demand that others not follow its example of exposing, for example, ACORN’s corruption or the extremist views of a number of Obama’s "Czars," it looks like he made other journalists uncomfortable.

Although presidents have frequently been critical of media coverage for both good reasons and bad, nothing compares to the current situation so much as Vice President Spiro Agnew’s criticism of the major media in 1969. But then the obvious difference is that Agnew took on the entire New York-Washington media axis, rather than picking on only one network..

Yet there is a great similarity between the media’s hostility to the Nixon Administration 40 years ago and their opposition to George W. Bush up until less than a year ago, and that was both administrations’ prosecution of a war that most leading journalists were opposed to.

All this is interesting stuff, but let’s get back to "perspective." What’s wrong with it? More to the point, how does any journalistic organization succeed without it? Determining what is news is not merely record keeping. Each day someone must decide that some event or development is news, mindful of the fact that if it is determined to be news, it will be on the public agenda.

Years ago U.S. News did a lengthy piece on the New York Times. In their daily conferences, it was pointed out, Times editors, conscious that it was the nation’s leading newspaper which influences the television networks in their own selection of news, were very careful about what they printed, especially on the front page. They understood that more people read the front page more than the editorial page, and they were reluctant to give more publicity to an issue or cause than it deserved.

As shocking as this may sound, this is what all news organizations do, although the smaller the staff the less likely that long deliberations precede their news decisions. If politics, war, commerce, law and entertainment loom large in our media, it is not because of arbitrary editors but because these things matter to most people in a democratic republic.

No less shocking perhaps to many may be the fact that, because journalists are American citizens with opinions, some things are more important to them than others. Without that "perspective," there is no reason for anyone to be in journalism; it is part of politics even if journalists do not hold public office.

Thus, Fox was singled out not because it had a "perspective," but because its "perspective" differs from Obama’s and his friends’ in other media. We need a free media to enable us to know what our leaders are doing and to discuss the wisdom of their policies. Lacking such "perspective," self government is impossible.

No ruler of a free people should condemn any media because they have a "perspective." That is but the prelude to a controlled media and despotic government

Why Democrats call their critics liars

In their public statements on health insurance reform, Democratic spokesmen have consistently dismissed those with objections to government health care as liars. In emails from the Democratic National Committee (which I have been receiving regularly ever since I asked a question) Republicans such as Reps. John Boehner of Ohio and Michelle Bachman of Minnesota and others have been singled out for this charge. Yes, I know that Republican congressman Joe Wilson from South Carolina shouted "liar" at President Barack Obama in a speech to Congress when he denied that illegal aliens would receive medical care under the Democrats’ health reform bill. But several times during his speech Obama repeated the line that he and other members of his party have put forth that critics are lying.

This has gone so far as government agencies ordering health insurance companies to cease informing their clients that costs will go up under government health care, congressional committees demanding access to records of companies who are critical, and most recently Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi chastising those firms for their bad "behavior" that points up the need for a "public option."

So seldom do liberal Democrats make the case for their policies on the merits, I have concluded that they believe that no legitimate reason can justify opposition. Their longest-standing device has been to denounce their critics as "special interests" who are utterly indifferent or downright hostile to the common good or the rights of others.

Insurance and drug companies, doctors and hospitals may not be public office holders, but they have as much right to express their opinion on legislation as anyone else. They are involved in commerce, which is hardly a crime, and they represent thousands of employees and millions of consumers who depend on them for their efforts. All ad hominem attacks on opposing arguments are not only fallacious but a bad reflection on the perpetrators of them.

There is a fundamental reason why so-called progressives habitually dismiss their critics so summarily. It is, I believe, because the now one-century old progressive movement, led by such stalwarts and Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow, concluded that the U.S. Constitution was an antiquated document that stood in the way of regulation of the modern corporation and of the alleged ideal of equality of condition.

Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution can be honestly interpreted to support equality of condition. The former declares that we all possess the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by nature, and the latter only secures those rights. In the marketplace in which millions of Americans participate every day, government’s role is to make uniform rules to ensure fair treatment, not to redistribute income from one person or entity to another.

Roosevelt, Wilson and their followers over the years in both political parties believed that something they call an historical process or evolution is moving mankind toward greater and greater equality of condition, and their role as statesmen is to lead their fellow citizens (who don’t always share their enthusiasm) toward the "glorious future" awaiting them.

Not our human nature but history unbound by nature is the basis for human progress, a position with which Obama and his fellow Democrats are in full agreement. As avatars of benefits yet to come, progressives have little patience with those of a different mind.

If this weren’t enough, those who have attended colleges and universities have been taught by professors in the social sciences and humanities that human beings are not governed by reason but entirely by passions such as greed (economic) and lust (sexual). Of course, routinely teachers of this doctrine exempt themselves from it as they claim to possess "value free" objectivity. The practical effect of this teaching is to stigmatize those who disagree with it and to license "enlightened" people to indulge any desires they wish.

Republicans, businessmen, middle class homeowners, Caucasians, males and heterosexuals have all been stigmatized for years, and they are expected meekly to accept their reduction to second-class citizenship. That so many Americans have spoken up at tea parties, town hall meetings, in letters to the editor, on talk radio and the internet is extremely inconvenient for those who believe that growing government to seize incomes and manage our daily lives is inevitable.

As ever, we are free to chart our own future which, for a growing number of us, does not include unconstitutional government. That is the truth that progressives must continue to deny.