Tag: IBD

Amusing

Nukes Are OK For Iran, But Not For Us?

As usual, Liberal inconsistency reveals that their true motivation is the destruction America.

Nuclear Power: If Iran has “legitimate energy concerns” that make its nuclear plants OK, doesn’t the energy-starved U.S.? Why doesn’t Iran, with the second-largest proven oil reserves, just build some refineries?

Normally, a nation with significant oil resources that decides to develop nuclear power would and should be praised for its prudence. Nuclear power is an emission-free domestic form of energy that is good for the environment and the economy.

Except when it’s a country that builds missiles instead of refineries and pledges to wipe a neighbor off the face of the earth.

Iran says it’s developing nuclear power to generate electricity while it waits for the 12th Imam and the apocalypse to arrive. To hasten the process, however, it is using its nuclear knowledge to amass fissile material necessary to build a bomb. It’s developing missiles to deliver that bomb, presumably somewhere in the heart of downtown Tel Aviv.

Our new administration is trying to talk them out of it, and the Iranians are quite willing to drag out the conversation as long as it takes to develop their nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it.

“Although I don’t want to put artificial timetables on that process,” President Obama has said, “we do want to make sure that, by the end of this year, we’ve actually seen a serious process move forward. And I think that we can measure whether or not the Iranians are serious.”

Unfortunately, Iran by the end of the year should have enough weapons-grade material to make a bomb, if it doesn’t have enough already. One thing we can measure is the increasing number of centrifuges they have spinning. They are not designed to keep the lights on in Tehran.

It would seem to us that encouraging Iranian use of nuclear energy in any context is the last thing we should be doing. In a BBC interview broadcast on Tuesday, President Obama said:

“Without going into specifics, what I do believe is that Iran has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations. On the other hand, the international community has a very real interest in preventing a nuclear arms race in the region.”

This echoes remarks made in Prague last month, when the president said his administration would “support Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy with rigorous inspections” if Iran gives up its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

But it hasn’t, and the race is already on. Iran state television interpreted these remarks as recognizing “the rights of the Iranian nation,” by which it means its right to develop nuclear power unencumbered.

That Iran is not serious about peaceful nuclear energy is shown by its refusal to build the refinery capacity needed to eliminate its dependence on imported gasoline. That money instead has gone to buying more centrifuges and expanding nuclear facilities. If Iran’s energy aspirations were legitimate, it would be building refineries and not bombs.

The irony here is that at the same time we are encouraging Iran to exploit the peaceful uses of nuclear power, we are discouraging its use here at home. We have legitimate energy aspirations as well, and one of them is reducing our dependence on imported oil from countries that do not have our interests at heart.

We let billions flow overseas and domestic oil resources from the Chukchi Sea to ANWR to Western oil shale to the Gulf of Mexico go unexploited. We have one thing in common with Iran: We’re not pushing refinery construction here either.

We prattle on about nuclear power being costly and nuclear waste being a danger without a safe place to store it even as we shut down Yucca Mountain, a perfectly safe place to store it. We place all sorts of regulatory and environmental impediments in its way.

Why is nuclear power a viable energy source for Iran but not for America?

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Amusing

A Time For Choosing Again?

This is our must read of the day. Even though Reagan’s gave his speech in 1964, so much of it applies today. Truer words were never spoken and we need to heed them now more than ever.

Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” arguably, was the pivotal moment when Reagan became the Reagan America knows. He gave “the speech,” as he often referred to it, not long after switching from FDR’s Democratic Party to the Republican Party of Lincoln. The theme of Reagan’s speech was that Americans had to choose between up versus down, freedom versus servitude, self-government versus bureaucratic fiat.

“The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people,” Reagan explained, “and they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.” So, he concluded, “we have come to a time for choosing.”

Reagan became Reagan by studying the political science of the American founding, without which he could not have ushered into American politics a new kind of conservatism, Reagan conservatism. Reagan sought to reign in government by recovering the authority of the Founders’ Constitution and the principles that informed it. He believed nothing less would save freedom in America.

Reagan’s challenge was to remind Americans of the importance and goodness of constitutional government in a time of constitutional darkness, a time when virtually all the leading intellectual and political lights in America had come to ignore or twist beyond recognition the meaning of the Constitution.

In this way, Reagan’s statesmanship paralleled that of Lincoln, who tried to preserve the principled ground of constitutional self-government — the idea that each human being is endowed by the Creator with equal, unalienable, natural rights — at a time when that idea was denied and ridiculed by most prominent minds in America.

Today, the lights of the Constitution have again grown dim, as the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats unfold what is amounting to be the most massive government budgetary and regulatory expansions in American history.

Everyone seems fixated on the costs associated with Obama’s corporate bailouts, universal healthcare, environmental regulations, and other items on his liberal to-do list. But few people, in or out of government office, ask whether these policies are constitutional. The reason, sadly, is that few people care.

Our challenge today of recovering the authority of the Constitution is greater than Reagan’s and perhaps even greater than Lincoln’s was. Since Roosevelt launched the New Deal in the 1930s, several generations of Americans have grown up knowing nothing but big, paternalistic government.

The feisty independence and healthy suspicion of government power that characterized the founding generation of Americans — think of the people who defiantly flew the flag with the coiled-up snake announcing, “Don’t Tread on Me” — is now mainly the stuff of boring history textbooks.

It’s no exaggeration to suggest that the Constitution itself has become radical. Most Americans today probably cannot imagine what truly constitutional government might look like—virtually the entire federal bureaucracy, for example, would need to be eliminated. That’s why the Constitution cannot be used as a club to smash unconstitutional proposals and programs, because no one cares. If you doubt it, ask Ron Paul how much success he’s had waving his pocket Constitution at every unconstitutional policy.

Still, the extravagant spending and regulating and interfering with the private sector economy happening in Washington DC today forces upon us a choice: Either we allow it to continue, or not. Either we choose to remove all limits on government power and scope in exchange for promised socialized security, or we choose a government that operates within certain limits and we accept certain responsibilities for ourselves. This is again a time for choosing.

If we do the former, if we trade freedom and limited government in the hope that bureaucratic “experts” can govern and provide for us better than we can govern and provide for ourselves, then let us be honest about what we are choosing. And let us acknowledge openly what Reagan and Lincoln and the Founders understood, that a government of unlimited power is less likely to provide security for us, more likely to threaten us.

If, however, we choose to limit our government, we need not even agree right now on what the limits are. Reasonable minds can differ on where the line should be that separates government power from private freedom. But if we can agree in principle that limited government is the only kind befitting a free people, then we can begin asking how we might limit government’s power.

A constitution, if recognized and obeyed, is a useful means for limiting government. And if well designed, a constitution can also help us identify and enjoy the ends of political society—justice, domestic tranquility, security from foreign and domestic threats, prosperity, freedom, all within the framework of a more perfect union. Indeed, a constitution is what we need most today. The good news is that we already have one. Let us choose to understand and defend it.

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Amusing

Our Problem is Immorality

As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, on September 18, 1787, a certain Mrs. Powel shouted out to him: “Well, doctor, what have we got?,” and Franklin responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

Looks like we only managed to keep it for 222 years – just a stitch in time, really.

It’s all so terribly unnecessary… and so terribly sad… so much has been sacrificed… so much promise… shall we just allow them to throw it all away?

Do we not have a responsibility, a moral obligation, to do something about it, while there still is time?

This an excellent article by Walter E. Williams.

Most of our nation’s great problems, including our economic problems, have as their root decaying moral values. Whether we have the stomach to own up to it or not, we have become an immoral people left with little more than the pretense of morality. You say, “That’s a pretty heavy charge, Williams. You’d better be prepared to back it up with evidence!” I’ll try with a few questions for you to answer.

Do you believe that it is moral and just for one person to be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another? And, if that person does not peaceably submit to being so used, do you believe that there should be the initiation of some kind of force against him?

Neither question is complex and can be answered by either a yes or no. For me, the answer is no to both questions, but I bet that your average college professor, politician or minister would not give a simple yes or no response. They would be evasive and probably say that it all depends.

In thinking about questions of morality, my initial premise is that I am my private property, and you are your private property. That’s simple. What’s complex is what percentage of me belongs to someone else.

If we accept the idea of self-ownership, then certain acts are readily revealed as moral or immoral. Acts such as rape and murder are immoral because they violate one’s private property rights. Theft of the physical things that we own, such as cars, jewelry and money, also violates our ownership rights.

The reason why your college professor, politician or minister cannot give a simple yes or no answer to the question of whether one person should be used to serve the purposes of another is because they are sly enough to know that either answer would be troublesome for their agenda.

A yes answer would put them firmly in the position of supporting some of mankind’s most horrible injustices such as slavery. After all, what is slavery but the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another?

A no answer would put them on the spot as well because that would mean they would have to come out against taking the earnings of one American to give to another in the forms of farm and business handouts, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and thousands of similar programs that account for more than two-thirds of the federal budget.

There is neither moral justification nor constitutional authority for what amounts to legalized theft. This is not an argument against paying taxes. We all have a moral obligation to pay our share of the constitutionally mandated and enumerated functions of the federal government.

Unfortunately, there is no way out of our immoral quagmire. The reason is that now that the U.S. Congress has established the principle that one American has a right to live at the expense of another American, it no longer pays to be moral.

People who choose to be moral and refuse congressional handouts will find themselves losers. They’ll be paying higher and higher taxes to support increasing numbers of those paying lower and lower taxes.

As it stands now, close to 50% of income earners have no federal income tax liability and as such, what do they care about rising income taxes? In other words, once legalized theft begins, it becomes too costly to remain moral and self-sufficient. You might as well join in the looting, including the current looting in the name of stimulating the economy.

I am all too afraid that a historian, a hundred years from now, will footnote America as a historical curiosity where people once enjoyed private property rights and limited government, but it all returned to mankind’s normal state of affairs — arbitrary abuse and control by the powerful elite.

Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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Amusing

Let The Inquisition Start With Frank

Barney Frank needs to go to jail…now! I would keep him in solitary confinement though. If he was allowed to mingle with the prison population it wouldn’t be punishment. He would be like a kid in a candy store!

Let The Inquisition Start With Frank

Oversight: Congressman Barney Frank says he wants some of those responsible for our current financial meltdown to be prosecuted. And we couldn’t agree more. First up in the court dock: Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.

Even by the extraordinarily loose standards of Congress, it takes some chutzpah for someone such as Frank to suggest that he’ll seek prosecutions for those behind the housing and financial crunch and for what he called “a strongly empowered systemic risk regulator.”

For Frank, perhaps more than any single individual in private or public life, is responsible for both the housing market mess and subsequent bank disaster. And no, this isn’t partisan hyperbole or historical exaggeration.
But first, a little trip down memory lane.

It was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two so-called Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), that lay behind the crisis. After regulatory changes made to the Community Reinvestment Act by President Clinton in 1995, Fannie and Freddie went into hyper-drive, channeling literally trillions of dollars into the housing markets, using leverage and implicit taxpayers’ guarantees.

In November 2000, President Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development Department would trumpet “new regulations to provide $2.4 trillion in mortgages for affordable housing for 28.1 million families.” The vehicles for this were Fannie and Freddie. It was the largest expansion in housing aid ever.

Still, from the early 1990s on, many people both inside and outside Washington were alarmed by what they saw at Fannie and Freddie.

Not Barney Frank: Starting in the early 1990s, he (and other Democrats) stood athwart efforts by regulators, Congress and the White House to get the runaway housing market under control.

He opposed reform as early as 1992. And, in response to another attempt bring Fannie-Freddie to heel in 2000, Frank responded it wasn’t needed because there was “no federal liability there whatsoever.”

In 2002, Frank nixed reforms again. See a pattern here?

Even after federal regulators discovered in 2003 that Fannie and Freddie executives had overstated earnings by as much as $10.6 billion in order to boost bonuses, Frank didn’t miss a beat.

President Bush pushed for what the New York Times then called “the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.”

If it had passed, the housing crisis likely would have never boiled over, at least not the extent it did, taking the economy with it. Instead, led by Frank, Democrats stood as a bloc against any changes.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, said. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

It’s hard to say why Frank did all this. It could be his close ties to the Neighborhood Assistance Corp., a powerful housing activist group based in Boston, which controls billions in loans. Or that he received some $40,100 in campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie from 1989 to 2008. Or that he has been romantically linked to a one-time executive at Fannie during the 1990s.

Whatever the case, his conflicts are obvious and outrageous, and his refusal to countenance reforms of Fannie and Freddie contributed mightily to today’s meltdown. If you’re looking for a culprit in the meltdown to prosecute, no one fits the bill better than Frank.

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